I think I've solidified a desireable, aesthetic and romanticizeable kind-of-daily ritual that will go down as a nostalgic core memory. I take a Delta-9 edible at around 7:00pm. 9:00pm rolls around and I get out my coat and gloves and scarf and go to 7/11. I walk past the church lot, wait at the train crossing for the NJT passengers coming from the city to roll by. Past the Trump house and the Straight of Time (a super straight stretch of sidewalk that seems to take a significantly different amount of time to walk it each time). Past the house with the sharpened 1-foot metal pole in the ground near the walk thats there to signify something, but really just seems like lawsuit waiting to happen. Up the small hill, bank to the left and walk the 4-store-strong strip mall to the LED lit storefront double doors. All this while I am listening to Concierto de Aranjuez: Adagio by Miles Davis and Gil Evans, or Last Wave from SEGA OutRun, or Beatrice by BOYO and Worn-Tin, or Nujabes or Aztec Camera or Wanda De Sah or Luiz Bonfa. The tunes send me into the warm store and I make my way to grab some Chex-Mix or some version of that mouth-feel. I head to the far back corner of the store where the breakfast sandwiches are. I size up the sausage-and-egg croisant sandwiches that have sat in the warming case for who knows what length of time. They're on rollers even though the case it tilted and theres nothing cyclindrical in there like a hot dog. It's not even the same kind the do actually use for the dogs, so why there needs to be rollers in this one beats me. I pay to the same dude everytime who barely speaks and has his earbuds in, but I can get to laugh with some stupid dumb remark. I call him Boss sometimes. I'm gunna try to force a fist bump one of these days. I head back out in the cold and sit on the low curb of the parking lot under the single light over the door to the Urgent Care. I stretch out my legs and unwrap the steaming sandwich. Each bite I feel go down as it warms me up from the bitter outside, and the temperature difference almost hurts my teeth. I have no drink, I have no napkin, and I deal with the grease on my fingers however I decided for that night. That's a rule I made- no drink, no napkin. Just go for it, this is a PRIMAL thing. No convienences like a liquid or a way to clean for this meal. There's no trash can so I take the wrapper with me and dump it in someone's bin on the way back. The cold gives the same feeling weirdly of a warm blanket, as it whips around me and bites my nose as I'm bundled in my three or four layers. Getting home with a warmed belly, chex-mix in hand, cracking open a cold seltzer to wash everything down, and then sitting down for a movie or some game, it kicks ass man.
Younger Me would have had his head blown off with where I am right now compared to then.
I beat OutRun today at the arcade. First try. I was out on a date with A and we tried and failed at Pool. She whooped my ass in Mortal Kombat 2 but I got revenge in Tekken 3. Mokujin and Kuma are so fun to play, with their stupid designs and comically dumb movesets. King is such a cool character design, I gotta make some art with him in it, like in his street wear costume. If I ever get friggen yolked, I'm cosplaying him for sure. We got blinded by one of the pinball machines that had these terrifying cartoon human heads that had lights in their eyes, then the first machine we actually wanted to play didn't have the paddles working. I did a bad Christopher Moltisani impression as we walked by the Sopranos machine. We got one of the TV's and played Guitar Hero for like two hours. I trying expert mode seriously and actually saw myself improve, even though those orange notes are a bitch every time regardless. A knew legit every song on the list and I was super impressed. I realized I barely know any music or can attach a title to most songs. At least three times I thought "oh wow, this is that song. Huh, you learn something new every day" When we were leaving we spotaneously hit up the actual Guitar Hero machine even though we had our coats on and we busted out two songs right then and there, all ready to leave. We both sweat like monsters from that one, it was wild.
But yeah, beat OutRun. It was great.
I finally saw Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron last night, and honestly, was disappointed.
First things first: visually stunning. As always, Miyazaki absolutely knocked it out of the park with his visuals, as he does with every film. His ability to put what is in his mind on to film as a 1:1 is unparalleled to any other artist I know.
I have two main but very large gripes with the movie. First, it feels like a forced culmination of all of his films. In this film, so many things seemed force and it felt like I'd begun stamping off spots on a Studio Ghibli bingo card. The Warawara confirmed that almost every one of his films needs some sort of marketable "little guy," like the Soot Sprites in Spirited Away, the Kodama in Princess Mononoke, and the mini Ponyo's in Ponyo. Then there was the "foreign secret secluded space the main character finds," in this case the meteoric tower. Tthis is just like the Spirit Realm and the actual entrance to the theme park in Spirited Away, Howl's little cottage in the field in Howl's Moving Castle, and underneith the Toxic Jungle in Nausicaa. There was also the matter of the "swarms of transportation:" in this case the thousands of spirit boats (?) in the Tower world. It was present in Porco Rosso and The Wind Rises as swarms of planes in the sky, the military aircraft in Nausicaa, and the same in Howl's Moving Castle. To be fair, I was surprised to not see any flying machines in this one, and honestly I am glad as they would be wickedly out of place. It got to the point where I'd go "yup, there it is," to myself every ten or so minutes because it felt so swarmed in Ghibli tropes, and ones that did not need to be there. The Warawara and the weird spirit boats were not really explained (the Warawara were to a degree, as they are the spirits of the unborn, but how that works since it is a different world entirely is anyones guess).
My second issue, and the one I have an issue with more than the first, is that things just do not make sense. Things are not explained, things are not understood, yet they are to the main character, Mahito. We know the same amount of information he does as we are on this adventure alongside him, yet he understands things that we don't, making us feel stupid. The blocks that need to be stacked every three days, why is that a thing? His great uncle made the world, why did he make it run on the blocks if he hates them? Then theres the matter of the blocks he tested the main character with that had malice in them- how did Mahito feel the malice? Young Kiriko being old Kiriko, I did not pick up on that until near the end when young Kiriko is with the young version of Mahito's mother. The weird stone temple... thing that his aunt is giving birth under, that is some sort of evil, no? That is never explained. Why did his aunt say she hated them when he found her in the Tower World? The whole dynamic with the Canary's and Mahito's great uncle also just doesn't make sense. Is it that the Canary King wants to be the ruler of the world and is made that Mahito got chosen? Also, the Heron Man, who is he anyway? Does he work for Mahito's great Uncle? If so, why is it that when the Heron Man met him, he acted like he never had before.