Les Miserables or how many times it made me cry

I feel like the best way to describe my experience of this movie is through a song. Anyhow, I had the video uploaded, Youtube was buzzing with twitters, when suddenly, I realized that I can't sing worth a damn, so I'd just be stuck with the blunt instrument of prose. I think I mean bland more than blunt, which winds up sounding vaguely threatening. The ineffectual(?) effete(?) kind of old-fashioned instrument of prose.

I saw the musical a number of years ago in Chicago. I left the theater mostly unimpressed/singing, "Master of the House" at a volume on the street that I think it's fair to say that the fine people of Chicago probably felt compelled to join in. They didn't, but I think they wanted to. Anyhow, I fell asleep midway through, was confused about who people were, Fantine sounds like a delicious cheese for a cracker but apparently she does other things as well. Also, Eponine. Didn't remember her at all. The point is, it made very little impact on me because people were singing, which is hard to listen to in less it is a karaoke bar and you're in a group with the people singing, who probably sound only slightly worse than Russell Crowe. Zing. 

Anyhow, the list: 

Number of times I cried during Les Miserables and who did it: 

1 Valjean Arrested, Valjean Forgiven- Is the Bishop of Digne going to forgive you and give you the rest of the candle sticks and melt my cynics heart right off the bat? But, he took from you. He stole. Oh you're purchasing back his eternal soul. 

2 Fantine singing "I Dreamed a Dream," why are you singing about all your dreams being crushed. You've got some hope girl. Things are going to change. What? You're dying of TB? Well, you had a good run, sing it girl! 

3 Eponine singing "On My Own" Oh, what's that, your never quite boyfriend just fell in love with some other girl on the drop of a hat, your parents are awful, and now it's raining. This could be terrible. Or  you could make it beautiful Eponine. Thank you for making it beautiful. 

4 The cast singing "One Day More" Hey look it's just everyone in the known world gathering together to sing  in some sort of four part harmony about having some more time. Here heartstrings, have a tug. 

5  Eponine and Marius singing "A Little Fall of Rain." Did you make me fall in love with you by singing in the rain, Eponine, just to take to the streets to get shot? Why would you do that to me? This hurts. Wait, does Marius love you? I guess he doesn't, but he kind of does. This is all just very sad. 

6 Company singing "Do You Hear the People Sing." Yes. I do hear the people sing, but sometime it's hard to focus through the tears Les Miserables. I mean. I'm about to have to walk out of a lit theater with people in the car with me. Why do you have to do that with the people all singing and waving flags and our hearts lifting? 

Doubles

We waited in the half-dark of an early winter evening. The light is that specific shade of green that it goes this time of year when pressed through city lights. All the pretty people I used to know are living in other cities under other names. I press my face against the window. Outside, snow isn't even bothering to fall.

This is all just a set up to tell you something else. It was strange that night, to feel so distant from everywhere and everything, riding the train uptown after work in the pitch black, where you can only make out bits of neon. I wasn't expecting to run into anyone I knew because I don't know anyone anymore. I make a habit of keeping silent on the train, trying to disappear into myself.

That's why it was so strange to see myself reading the newspaper two rows up. I recognized myself immediately, which is strange, because I'm often confounded by what I see in the mirror. What was strange was how calm I seemed, flicking the pages of the Wall Street Journal as if they had meaning. I wanted to approach, but I seemed engrossed in the seemingly random configuration of numbers and figures that passes for financial markets throughout the world.

I wasn't sure what to make of this slippage in time, of a different me traveling on that same train to some other destination. I hear you reader. Shouldn't I have assumed that some sort of time travel had been discovered, or, that I was going completely insane? I assumed neither, and I'd like to point out that you'd have likely done the same. For, once seeing oneself in the body of flesh, of checking every angle in the available reflection of mirrors, eventually becomes as real as the sun rising, or the light of a far away star--something like abstractions given flesh, clothed now in the light of reality. The strange part, I came to realize on that long ride home, is the existence, or seeming existence of all the people I'd known before--my first grade teacher, the homeless man I gave a quarter to in the spring of the year 2001, the owner of a Springer Spaniel who smelled of cigarette ash. And what to make of all the people that had passed out of my memory altogether? Could they be said to be, in any sense, real anymore?

And that, as I'm sure you've already deduced, is how I figured out why there would be two of me riding that lonely train home in the dark of the night. For surely this version of me, this slightly odd replica, existed in order that no one should slip from my memory. Certainly, it seemed obvious to me, he was keeping the boy who picked his nose in the second grade in mind. And another version of me was living somewhere out east, thinking about the tall boy that I taught how to play basketball in fifth grade, and still someone else to remember the bent head of a dead bird lying in a pillow of browned needles, and another, remembering the exact length of the comet's tail as it traveled across the bit of the universe that we could see from the hood of a car, and still another, brooding over the spidery veins in her forearm as the tip of my finger arced along her smooth flesh, and a last one, sitting on a train car, not knowing a damn thing about the world, just trying to remain conscious long enough to take the short bus ride home.

Four Days

Everyone I know was asking about the children. "The children are fine," I'd tell them, smoking a cigarette to pass the time. "They're wonderful."

A series of beautiful things happened to me while traveling that summer. I'm not interested in going into detail,  and you're not interested in listening. The watery images of buildings floated in the reflection of the sky. I could see Notre Dame from across that same water, the very image of Hugo. How could he have written so many pages? Did he do nothing else? This is perhaps what it was like to be a learned man before the age of television and the internet. But, as you see, I've already forgotten what I was writing you about.

The seminal thing, which they don't always tell you, is to forget. It was the best advice I ever received. It was delivered to me over brunch in a Belgian restaurant downtown. The waiter had a pencil thin mustache and the accent of god only knows where. "It is best to forget," my uncle told me. He was drunk by then, as usual, but I too his words to heart and have not forgotten them since.

"I don't like the look of things," she said, gesturing towards the sky.

"I do," he answered, stepping out into the street.

"And do you expect me to follow you then?" she asked.

"It would show the sort of trust in me that I'd always hoped you'd have."

"But that would be a mistake."

"Probably," he answered as she followed him into the light rain. 

Be Drunk

By Charles Baudelaire

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it--it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.
 But on what? Wine, poetry, or virtue--as you wish. But be drunk.
And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking...ask what time it is, and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, poetry, or virtue as you wish." 

Some early thoughts

On putting a two year old to bed.

S: I close the door from the inside, so she can't just get up and wander around.

M: I close the door from the outside. Then I go downstairs and pour myself a scotch. After a while, either the knocking diminishes, or I knock back enough so that I can't hear it. I feel like it's basically two sides of the same coin. 


Other things

I'd forgotten how useless it can be to lack milk ducts. I'm walking around with this semi-squealing, (he's really quite good) child wondering how I can help him, and then I realize that he has only one desire: milk. And I feel helpless and philosophical, and wonder what it would be like to live with so strong a desire for one thing. 



On parenting two and taken from a conversation with a friend about the difficulty of explaining a new sibling to a toddler. "It's like they start to realize how annoying it can be to have someone in the house who cries all the time, yet the fail to grasp the irony of that." 

The Renaissance 

I'd also forgotten how having a newborn child is like constantly living in the Renaissance. This is primarily because Julian and I sit around talking about the rise of humanism and about how best to grind lenses for viewing the moon, however, since he's a few days old we have to take frequent breaks because he needs to nap about 18 hours a day. Anyhow, the other fact is that your bedroom suddenly turns into an Italian art exhibition with mother Mary taking care of her newborn infant. Then I go downstairs and demand a joust with Sadie, which usually ends with me putting on some Carly Rae Jeppsen and having a dance off instead, because you have to be flexibly as a parent, and that means you don't always get an honest joust when you'd like one. 

On Parenting in General

It's easier than it looks. I'd encourage everyone to adopt my kids. I jest. I was trying to get lil S ready for bed a couple of weeks ago when she decided that she wanted to take her diaper off. I allowed it, but I told her that anytime we have our diaper off it is required that we sit on the toilet. She dutifully sat on the toilet for a while before sprinting into our bedroom and trying to jump on the bed for what I can only assume would be a giant pee. However, I coaxed her back to bed, reminding her that if our pants are off we need to be on the toilet. It's a good rule of thumb. 

Anyhow, the day passes by, and, as I'm getting her ready for bed I got off to do a few things and when I come back into her room she's naked again. "Sadie," I said, "what did I tell you about being naked." At which point she pulled a palm-sized toilet out from underneath her that she'd taken from her doll house. I couldn't argue with the logic, but I wasn't sure my message had sunk in. This is parenting.