your fate is my toilet

skewered duck hearts and chicken thighs at 'bellwoods brewery'

rating: existentialism / 10.0

WES ANDERSON'S 'MOONRISE KINGDOM' - Part 2

At 4:50, I left thinking I might be a bit late. I arrived at my friend's house on time. He hopped in the front seat. I said to him, what's up. I made a u-turn and we drove to some other person's house. I will call this other person William Blake for now. We drove to William Blake's house. He was home and his house had been a meeting place for the garden variety over the past few weeks. His parents were both away in some other country. We went to his house which was very large and had a fountain in front of it and a drive way where you never had to reverse because you could drive right around in it. My friend said, I hope he's wearing pants this time -- it's weird when you can see him putting on pants behind the frosted glass of his front entrance. I agreed with him inside my head. The door opened and William Blake was wearing pants. We went upstairs and sat in his room. His computer screen was on and maybe his TV. A copy of Hemingway's 'For Whom The Bell Tolls' sat half open on the floor along with some newspapers in a foreign language. 

My friend sat by William Blake's computer and played some creepy game on it for awhile and then the three of us talked. Mid conversation, William Blake told me he had read some of my writing lately and he said it was pretentious. He had noticed me replying to a girl in some pretentious way after she reacted cluelessly to one of my satire pieces. I told him that I only disclosed the mechanics of my humour so that people who thought I was stupid wouldn't think I was as stupid anymore. He said I shouldn't explain my humour to anyone and it was fine the way it was. I told him okay.

More people arrived. One of the people who arrived later ended up showing me YouTube videos he had recently favourited. Most of them were very funny. The funniest ones were the 'How 2 Basic' videos and the videos for 'Henry's Kitchen.' I imagined for a few minutes how my life would appear if it was an episode of Henry's Kitchen. I thought it would look pretty funny. 

We sat around for twenty minutes bickering over where we should eat. Among the choices that surfaced, I was in favour for Burrito Boyz, though I suppose I didn't really care. We ended up going to an Asian grocery store called Ocean's to eat. We picked up end-of-day-sale dim-sum. My friends went to go pick up a bag of shrimp crackers and went to the cashier to go pay. The lines were very long and the whole place was full of people. I wanted to go find a drink and some other snacks inside. I felt like drinking Yakult, but there was never Yakult in Toronto, so I was trying to find similar versions of it. I circled the aisles maybe seven or nine times before I found it. My friends called and asked where I was. I said I was going to pay. I waited in one of the lines for a few minutes and then saw a shorter express line, so I went over to the shorter express line to wait. 

I waited for ten minutes and when I handed one of my items over to the cashier. She scowled at me and said, No food item here! No no no no. Come on! Out of this line we don't do any of this food item here. I didn't understand the reason, but I just returned all the items I was holding to where I had found them, even though I felt like throwing them at the cashier's face. I was really sore. I walked out to find my friends because we were late for a movie, and William Blake or maybe the other friend gave me his last har-gow dumpling and half the bag of shrimp crackers they had bought. I said thank you and that I was pissed at the cashier. I also apologized in advanced for eating half of his shrimp crackers. I stepped into the back of the SUV and began eating half the shrimp crackers.

We drove to the theatre, the group of us yelling in a frenzy with the music turned up very loud. Incoherent fragments of road directions, idiosyncratic commentary, and song lyrics tumbled out of the windows of the SUV we were all packed into. I was never very involved with the ruckus this group enjoyed producing, though I was very aquatinted with it. A part of me was terrified whenever I found myself drowning in frenzy and chaos, but most of me was very calm and at peace because this is where I felt at home.

We arrived at the theatre a little late, and began running into the theatre. We always seemed to be running everywhere we went. Sometimes it was in a sub-urban shopping mall, sometimes it was around Chinatown at midnight, sometimes it was on the dark back-alley pavement of some other city. This was what we did, though it bewildered some people. It is probably strange to most people when they see other people run for a purpose other than fitness, just as it might be strange I suppose when people are holding hands for a purpose other than affection. We were adults playing a childhood game, but we were a little late to the fun. The opening credits for Wes Anderson's 'Moonrise Kingdom' were all but over, and we came in at one of the opening camp montages. 'Jiminy Cricket, he flew the coop.'

When the film finished, I thought to myself, this is one of my favourite Wes Anderson films. I had watched all the films Wes Anderson made except for the last half of 'Bottle Rocket.' I felt it was a very beautiful film. I had waited a long time for this movie to reach the suburban theaters west of Toronto. I felt very pleased and calm. We left the auditorium. 

We were going to sneak into another theatre. Some people decided 'Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.' My friend, William Blake, grabbed a handful of 3D glasses from the return box and we went to the auditorium that was showing 'Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.' It was a terrible film though the serious tone I felt added to the humour, but did not necessarily make it a better film. Sitting on the auditorium seats right before the movie had started, my friend had asked me what Jesus would think about this. I asked him what he meant. He said, isn't this like stealing. I shrugged, yeah maybe.

I thought about my parents. They might be disappointed if they knew I would be doing this--though maybe not, I wasn't sure. They would still love me though, because they were obligated to. I also thought about the universe. The universe seemed to be so cold and ignorant of mankind; it seemed to go on and on and on, indifferent to whatever I did or what anyone else did for that matter. Yet for some reason I sensed that it exuded with some sort of love. Every night, the darkness and the vast blackness behind it and the stars suspended in between everything all seemed like one entity that looked down at me and smiled and whispered, 'I love you no matter what.' And the universe was the coldest and cruelest form, I had thought, that possessed no obligation to love me whatsoever; if anything it was obligated to be indifferent to me simply due to its overwhelming vastness. But each night, the entire cold firmament whispered the same thing. It often felt like the whisper did not come directly from the dark entity above and around me, but from somewhere beyond it--somewhere beyond my grasp, but still somewhere readily immediate and accessible as well. The whisper in many ways transcended the entity altogether -- it existed beyond time and space -- it had always existed and it was the only reason my life was at all any bearable each day. I whispered back to it.