September 15, 2004

• I've felt like crap all day.

  I can blame the cold front and the associate gray skies and change in atmospheric pressure. I can blame the fact that I only got about two hours sleep last night. There are some other things I can blame, like not having much to eat today, and being out of both coffee and yerba maté, but not really wanting to go get any.

  I decided, early on, that I needed to do two things: I needed to go out and buy myself a nice lunch, and get myself a backpack. Greyhound lost my nice backpack. It had my nice boots inside, too, but that's beside the point.

  I ended up eating at Quizno's, which isn't my idea of 'nice,' but it's one of the places I used to go on a more obsessive basis, so it's 'safe.' That's an autism thing. I might explain it in some other 'blog. So I went to eat, and that was one of the things, and I went to REI, looking for backpacks.

  They have crap backpacks for $80, which is more than I want to spend. There's no such thing as a decent backpack; either it's got a zillion straps and looks like day-glow fetish gear, or the shoulder straps are uncomfortable and poorly designed, or it has a huge waist strap, which I don't want, or it's got a headphone cable hole right where the rain will drip in. Or something else. I went to REI, and I went to Big 5 Sports just down the way. No luck.

  It was easier for me to get to REI in Redmond, and I hadn't been to that side of the lake for a while, anyway. Heading back during rush hour in rain. Listening to NPR about deaths in Iraq, sum-up of the recent problem in Russia. The traffic guy flubbed most of what he was trying to say; he's having the same trouble I am, apparently. Traffic. Rain. Feel like crap.

  So I stopped off at the Bellevue mall. Maybe some place there has backpacks. I can loiter until traffic is done. Found Suncoast, DVD retailer. Walked in, and the first thing I saw:

  'THX 1138.'

  

  Perfect. One of the most depressing movies ever made, one that I've been waiting to be available on DVD since the DVD was invented, and here it is in front of me. Sometimes, the way out of a funk is through it.

  Grab. Take to counter. I find it increasingly disconcerting that the managers of mall retail stores look younger than my nephews. There's a girl, who's a trainee. I'll learn later that she doesn't realize that you can imprint from debit cards. She pours on the hard-sell for the Star Wars DVD set that'll be released in the not-too-distant future. George Lucas, you know...

  The manager approaches, because he thinks I'm his age (har) and he wants to hit on me, but can't, because he's the manager, and he's not sure if I'm into men. He says, "Hey, you could pre-order the Star Wars DVD set that'll be released in the not-too-distant future, and save $20."

  "George Lucas already has too much of my money."

  He looks at my newly-purchased copy of 'THX 1138.' "After this, you mean."

  "Yeah, after this. I've been waiting to buy this DVD so I can give George Lucas the kiss-off." Which is the truth.

  He looks at me in stunned silence. The rest of the gaggle of employees are staring at me, as if I had just told them there is no Santa Claus.

  The manager: "Wow." I had blown his mind and turned him on.

  I thanked them and left. Sat in traffic for a literal hour just so I could get across the 520 bridge.

  Got home, put in the DVD, drank some scotch, ate a cookie. "Take two red pills. In ten minutes, take two more. Help is on the way!"

  Lucas couldn't leave well enough alone, and added a bunch of computer-generated stuff, which completely ruins it for me. In all the DVD special feature stuff, there's Lucas talking about how the whole movie works on an aesthetic decision that none of the technology be futuristic; that it all be technology from 1970, just with the creepy oppressive culture using it. But since Lucas has computers now, he can add other tech that looks like it was imported from the Star Wars universe, and it ruins all that.

  The documentary about American Zoetrope studios on disc 2 turns out to be the real interesting thing here. And the ultimate irony is the belabored tale of how Lucas fought for 'THX 1138' when the studio wanted to edit it. So here we have this visionary movie, and George Lucas is fighting tooth and nail over not changing a thing. Fast forward 34 years, and he turns it into a Star Wars sequel, just to, you know, punch it up a little, and have poorly-animated CGI 'shell dweller' creatures.

  George, my dear: SMOOOOOCH!

  • 3:26 am
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