1year + 1 day ago (we [clarification])

the motion pictures awards season is upon us once more, and earlier this week i had to pass on an offer to go see an advance screening of the Coen Brothers' True Grit. to paraphrase the words of the Dude himself:

"This aggression will not stand, man."

but this is beside the point.

the point is that my theatre holiday work season ends tonight, probably around 3 am, which means that i will actually get to go to the cinema in the coming weeks. fore mentioned remake is at the top of my list, followed by Aronofsky's Black Swan, and i'm curious to see how the ballerina stands up to The Wrestler. this, too, is beside the point.

the point is that i've been too busy to do much of anything other than work this week, and i woke at 7:15 this morning, half-worried and three quarters-dreading tonight's load out. it's a nice opportunity to practice non-anticipation, even in the face of a known (which is to say 'presumed') future. i find myself distracted, wanting it to hurry up, wanting to keep it at bay. i find myself wondering where i was this time last year:

we [clarification]

i watched Rent (the movie version) one year
and one night ago and either:

the bohemian romance of New York
is a clever fiction, a lie we

[Generation X]

tell ourselves in an attempt to grapple
with the fact that we

[Americans]

live in a nation where the indomitable efficiency of
interstates and television has obliterated the
peculiarities of geographic separation. we

[artists]

loathe to believe this, and write musicals
and songs and books

[and blogs]

pretending it isn't so. we

[would-be critics]

watch with a mix of terror, excitement, and
trepidation as a quilt emerges from our collective
musings - a quilt pieced together from pop culture
references, allusion, consumption, cleverity,
pathological irony, and non-historicized personal
experience. we

[the tragic curious]

are left to wonder if it was ever so, or
if it was only a dream we

[the unreformed romantics]

invented in an attempt to keep
from shivering in the night;

the pastiche quilt of post-modernity makes for a poor bedfellow.

OR

i

[the author]

wrote the above in an attempt to
distance myself from the sadness i

[the human]

felt.