Month: January 2019

An introduction story to this post:  On one of my life-defining road trips from Chicagoland to New Orleans and back several years ago before deciding to get my CDL, I carried a glass head with me.  I had this since the early 2000’s when I was at Berklee College of Music.  It was given to me by an artist and glass blower I knew for a short time. The glass head or mannequin profile, from the neck up, was my company on the trip.  I bought her a wig in New Orleans.  She usually rode in the front seat.  Sometimes I swear I could see souls visiting me or appearing through the glass.  That was sometimes weird because she was like a future girlfriend I was imagining and the image was tainted somewhat with these spirits providing real visions.  I think it was to keep me from getting to attached to an object that way.  This kind of thing happens when identifying with music too if we start to have expectations about real individuals filling those unknown spaces.  I brought this glass head all the way to North Platte, Nebraska.  My car had broken down in Northern Nebraska in a different story on this blog.  On my first walk from the tow yard mechanic’s shop to downtown, I tried to carry too much and remember letting down one of my bags too quickly.  I checked and felt my heart sink when it was the one with the glass and it had settled below the padding.  I discovered the head fell on it’s nose and there were cracks leading to a hole in the middle of her face. It was my last straw in my journey this far as I felt called by God to abandon a career with CRST right after passing the refresher course to go to Denver.  I cannot describe how broken I felt inside as I threw out many belongings.  I wedged my original iPhone 5 I was attempting to repair under my foot and snapped it in half breaking it to pieces before throwing it away.  I saved the head for awhile however until I could no longer bear to look at it and destroyed her, giving up dreams to fix it piece by piece or bring it to a glass shop to restore.  These situations will make you angry or sad to give up most of your belongings.  I had given up a lot already to make it this far and had to part with stuff I said I would never.  Eventually it’s freeing and you don’t want anything to replace it.  Even a second pair of clothes.  On this subject – I recently gave up what I had defined as a gold life for myself.  Others have different meanings for this term.  I defined it in writing with Ckwal’s mission statement that I sent to a few individuals.  In my repentance I have also given up many habits, lifestyles and what-not. Many of these for a period of over five years. I will probably be changing some of this to a more balanced lifestyle. One reason is because Christ died for this perfection and striving towards it makes us suffer. If you deny yourself too much and still can’t forgive. Seek that first. So, I did see a movie. 

I went to ‘Glass’ on Monday night.  It is a thinking movie mostly set in a sort-of futuristic hospital.  There are a couple scenes in the beginning that sort of leave your mind thinking the worst at first, but then the movie never answers questions.  I think it’s missing something, but I appreciate the space.  From my perspective it didn’t attempt to change my life too much, in fact I started to think of how it was saving me in time.  The movie experience was ruined before the scene when the actor, who is like a hundred characters, gets shot.  This was the first movie I’ve seen in the theaters since Zoolander 2 in 2016 and Star Wars Episode VII in 2015. I left before it was over because although I won’t describe what happened, I couldn’t stay in the theater.  Actually before those two movies I walked out of several movies due to other patrons, bad movies or both, but I had forgotten about those experiences.  I used to stay to the end of every movie no matter what, but I let that go in Ckwal’s early years. Is it a matter of age or perspective that we experience so many inconsiderate people? Others movies I have seen during this gold period: I rented ‘Fast and the Furious 8’ and the ‘War of the Planet of the Apes’ when I was between Denver and Kearney and long before that, several from Redbox before moving out of Chicagoland – one of them being ‘Joy’.  Otherwise I avoided any moving videos except for work training at my current job to stay out of the cold when I couldn’t sleep in the shelter.  I was excited to share possibly twelve movies with readers of this blog in 2019 and in my draft of this post  I thought,  “I wont do that anymore”. As my post expanded this week I decided that would be unfair to ‘Glass’ and the cinema culture or movie industry.  I wouldn’t recommend ‘Glass’ as a first choice though there were some good messages in the movie about believing in the impossible, the need for human contact and the concept of a place the movie called ‘the light’.  How many of you already experience what you see in this movie in some sense?  I guess I was swayed to choose it because of Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson, but they aren’t the stars of the show.  There are some other ones in the theaters I would think might be safer, like Mary Poppins Returns or A Dog’s Way Home, but what do I know.  If I get hooked, I’ll do AMC’s three movie a week pass and become a critic while music listeners say, “What happened to his mixes – these are bogus.”  Anyways… because my gold life was traded in the previews, I decided to think about choosing those movies as a tentative plan for the first months of 2019.  I may go to more or less, like the sequel to Aladdin (5.24), but I’ll publish this preview list (one from each future month of the previews) to end this post.
2.13 Happy Death Day 2 U
3.1 Greta
4.5 Pet Semetary
5.17 John Wick 3
6.7 Marvel’s Dark Phoenix