(I should note that, on re-reading, I think I failed to communicate the amount of moxie the young woman showed in her responses to him. She had a do-not-give-me-shit shield that she put up from the first moments of their interaction.)

So, this morning I was standing at the bus stop with a very pretty
young blonde woman when a much older guy wearing nice but strikingly
mismatched clothes dashed through traffic to join us. As he ran up he
said to her, “How much is the bus,” indicating that he’s new around
here. He then looked abruptly at me like I had said something, then
turned back to her for her answer. She told him that all the buses
are free and he immediately started “joking” about “Hey, why don’t we
run away together, then, let’s just get on the next bus and see where
it takes us,” etc. She laughed it off with obvious nervousness and
then he got on the bus with us – I got between them when we got on, but
the bus was empty (spring break) and so he had plenty of ways to sit
near her – and started pointing out cop cars in sight. “Are they
looking for *you*?” she asked him, which got a chuckle out of me. He
said no, the only reason they would be looking for him is if he
*didn’t* talk to her because that would be a crime, hardy har.

There were a lot of things about him that sent up red flags: a
generally manic air, the fact that he was wearing two watches and
carrying a third, that he was carrying a pair of glasses he never
seemed to need (a classic of social engineering, as someone carrying
glasses is strongly associated in most minds with professionalism,
doctors, lawyers, scientists, people assumed to have their shit
together). She pointedly asked about the watches and he said “Well,
you know, the recession.” He then launched into a sob story about his
sister and how she died of brain cancer and lung cancer and he had to
decide to pull the plug, and way, WAY before she needed to, she pulled
the cord to ask the driver to stop at the next bus stop so that she
could get off the bus.

Her body language told me – and him – that she wanted to get OUT OF
THERE, to the point that he said, “So, if I got off at the next stop,
with you, and walked with you, would that bother you?” She didn’t
hesitate to say that yes, that would bother her, and she’d appreciate
it if he did not do that. He tried another limp round of boohooing to
try to sway her but she ignored it and when the bus (finally!) stopped
she got off in a hurry with a backwards, “Thanks for an interesting
morning.” He said something inexplicable (“Thanks for an interesting
life,” I think) and then looked at me and I looked back at him the
rest of the way to *my* stop. He got twitchy in a big way and kept
producing this dry sniffle that I’ve always associated with major coke
heads and that would explain a lot of his mania and talkativeness and
generally sketchy vibe. My goal throughout – as I was paying obvious
attention to him throughout his monologues to her – was to make it
clear to him that there was someone else around who was noticing him.
I wanted him to be sure that he couldn’t do anything without someone
having a good look at him first.

My quandary is, should I have asked her if she wanted/needed help
getting rid of the guy? I consciously chose, when she from the get-go
seemed to be onto his antics, to take the stance we’re trained to use
at elections: when someone wants help, they will ask for it. Should
I have intervened, though? More than once I opened my mouth to say to
the guy, look, lay the fuck off, OK? I didn’t want to step in where I
might not be wanted, though, and I didn’t want to suggest that she was
somehow incapable of ditching him and, happily, it turned out that she
was (capable). I honestly don’t know, though, if I drew the correct line on
when to intervene in what seemed like it had the potential to get
weird in a bad way.

WOO-HOO!

On Saturday I stopped in at Parker & Otis for something to eat before hitting the Carolina Theatre of Durham for the Oscar-nominated animated shorts program (also playing tomorrow, Thursday 4 March, and well worth it). I parked in a kind of isolated spot adjacent to their building, between a wall and a huge SUV, so I was kind of invisible. After I’d eaten, I came outside to find two of my car magnets – magnetic bumper stickers – were missing. They were one of the old red and blue “Vote for Change – Obama ‘08″ circles and a highly stylized Cthulhu fish that parodies the Jesus fish that adorn so many cars.

At first, I assumed someone had been making an editorial comment. I didn’t see them, like, thrown down and stomped upon by indignant feet, though. The person also left behind my gay equality magnet, though since that’s just a yellow equals sign on a blue background, maybe it was too abstract for them to assign it any meaning? The other weird thing is that they left the other Obama magnet and the other Cthulhu fish on the other side of the car. (Their leaving the Cleveland Browns magnet is entirely understandable.)

So, did they just not see those? Were they afraid of getting caught? Or, is it that they wanted them for themselves? How strange to be left unsure whether I should feel annoyed or flattered by the sight of a blank red fender.

Either way, lame. They could have just left a note if they liked them or if they hated them. I’d find that a much more interesting experience.

Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein: A classic and with good reason. I laughed aloud in this movie, something modern comedies don’t often get me to do. Seeing this on the big screen with a willing and affable crowd was a genuine treat, a once-in-a-lifetime experience. This is why we have places like the Carolina.

Bonnie & Clyde vs. Dracula: A really interesting idea for a movie with some genuinely great moments and some inspired scenes. It does suffer from some low points and there isn’t nearly enough of the “vs. Dracula” part – and what there is doesn’t really make much sense – but when it hits, it hits. The leads portraying Bonnie & Clyde give really genuinely magnificent performances and the movie strikes a lot of its best notes when it emphasizes that those two characters are psychopaths in their own right. It also features the single best vampire-bites-victim scene I’ve ever seen in any movie. It has problems, make no mistake, but its peaks are some of the highest I’ve ever seen in a vampire movie. I would genuinely love to see the same people make a straight-up Bonnie & Clyde story because all of those parts are seriously fine work.

H.P. Lovecraft’s Re-Animator: For decades this was the single best Lovecraft adaptation on film and even though it takes broad, broad liberties with Lovecraft’s original short story it still focuses on the same themes. Jeffrey Combs delivers what’s probably his finest performance in a Lovecraft adaptation – he’s been in a million of them – and the whole movie is basically non-stop awesome. I hadn’t seen it since, I don’t know, 8th or 9th grade, something like that, and I loved it. I noted afterwards, when talking about it with The Boyf and Mr. Pink Eyes, that I’ve never seen Re-Animator 2. I looked it up online out of curiosity only to find that a third movie, House of Re-Animator, has been announced for production this year and again it stars… Jeffrey Combs. How freaking rad is that?

Shorts program They’re Coming To Get You Barbara!:

Shapes: A nicely thematic little short that was well-made but didn’t necessarily break any new ground.

The Ugly File: Quite frankly, lousy. I liked the idea behind it but the execution lacked energy and resources to the point of distraction. I kept finding myself studying the decorating choices of the houses where it was shot and not the movie itself.

Monstrous Nature: Extremely well-executed and genuinely scary, even though I stayed ahead of it by a couple of minutes at any given point. The effects were particularly startling given that it tries to be more of a psychological story for the first 90% of the film.

Pigeon: Impossible: A very clever and genuinely funny animated short, well worth watching. I don’t really get how it wound up at a horror festival, but I’m glad I saw it.

Hector Corp.: A genuinely funny and slightly freaky short. Imagine the love-child of Office Space and Gremlins and I think you’re probably on the right track. Well made and gleefully delivered.

Snuggle Time: Another animated selection that is genuinely warm and funny in its delivery of a pretty straight-forward story. Any child could watch this and love it.

Dead Walkers: A really ambitious attempt at a wild west zombie story that suffers from never being quite sure what kind of movie it wants to be and a “twist” ending that is so ham fisted, by the book and yet simultaneously out of left field that it soured the whole experience. A box of good ideas that’s been shaken too hard. Great production values, though, and a net-positive experience in terms of pure entertainment.

Dead Creek: Extremely well-shot and with a genuinely compelling question at its core of whether it’s going to be a revenge movie or a monster movie, but one of the leads is so teeth-grindingly bad in her role that she drags the rest of it down with her. When the character finally turned up dead I honestly thought, well, at least something good happens in this movie.

Strigoi: Easily one of the most creative vampire films I’ve seen in years. Everyone is comparing it to Let The Right One In and for good reason: what that film achieves by mixing winter, loneliness and childhood together with vampirism, Strigoi does by mixing the end of Romanian Communism, small town life, the humor of practical matters in the face of fear and the annoyance of family ties with that same supernatural element. Beautifully shot and full of great performances, the only problem is that the sound is marginal in places. It’s filmed in English, but the accents are thick and the dialogue tramples itself sometimes. Subtitles would be most welcome.

AM1200 & Other Shorts:

Sinkhole: A great little short that does its thing and then calls it quits to good effect. The real estate agent is portrayed all too believably, perfect for bringing the real world into the movie with us, and the crazy old coot whose land he’s trying to buy has one of the better monologues I’ve seen in a horror movie. Lovely, big round of applause by the audience at the end.

Shrove Tuesday: “Very artistic” was the best I could do afterward. Interestingly filmed in places and interestingly animated in others, it never could quite figure out whether it wanted to be a cautionary tale, a dream sequence or a splatter flick. I could get behind a lot of individual parts of this movie but not the movie as a whole.

As always, the balcony had assholes in it and they seemed to find this movie hilarious at all the wrong times. For real, would it be too much to ask to have a house manager stop in upstairs once in a while? I can only move so many times in one movie. Ah, well, they shut up for the important bit, AM1200.

AM1200: An exquisite film with lush production, beautiful photography, sharply minimalist writing and incredible performances that focuses on creepy rather than jump-out-and-go-boo. This is a movie to which the term horror most definitely applies. Lovecraft could easily have written this and I mean that in the very best way. A guilty conscience leads the main character from one bad choice to another until everything spirals out of control and the entire time the audience sits there silently pleading with him to turn around, go back, look over his shoulder, lock the doors, anything but what he’s doing at the moment. When three or four hundred people simultaneously cry out in protest or shock and then stifle themselves, it’s like a low moan doing the wave across the theatre and it happened several times. Otherwise, almost utter silence throughout the cinema as everyone was captivated. Worth canceling other plans to go see this 40-minute film. It was the last thing I thought about last night and the first thing I thought about this morning.

And let me assure you, there are a lot of interesting movies.

On my extended short list:

• Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein
• AM1200, which has Ray Wise (aka Leland Fucking Palmer)
• Bonnie and Clyde vs. Dracula, which would be on the bubble were it not for Drac
• Dawning, which looks fantastic
• Evil Angel, though I’m not really sure what it has to say about gender
• The shorts collection Four Minutes ‘Til Sunrise is required.
• Re-Animator, which is honest to (old) gods one of the best Lovecraft adaptations on film.
• Strigoi, for that Soviet Bloc vampire flavor.
• The shorts collection They’re Coming To Get You, Barbara!, which remains one of my favorite shorts titles evar.
• Witchboard, which is also kind of on the bubble but does remind me of some great times in junior high so, y’know, yeah. I’m there.

Like I said, that’s the extended list. I’m going to watch most of those, though, so if you’re in the area and see something on the list that you’d like to watch with someone virtually guaranteed to be more nelly than you, give me a shout.

Around 3:00am a truck drove through and then back again, presumably dropping someone off. When they saw me they stopped and stared and even talked to one another about me before moving on. I said to The Boyf that I found this perfectly understandable since it’s not likely that someone standing in the middle of the street, in the middle of the night, wrapped up like a Russian soldier and taking photos during a snow storm was high on their list of expectations.

Pictures I took at night and pictures I took when we went for a walk this afternoon are both up in my gallery installation.

Last night we popped in the first disc of season 3 of Battlestar Galactica, a show I dropped halfway through the third season when I realized I was so emotionally invested that I could no longer enjoy watching it. We skipped an episode, watched another and then watched all the most important bits of both parts of “Exodus”, the episode in which the colonists abandon and/or are rescued from New Caprica. I was left dumbfounded, over and over again, at just how good the show was. Time and again it takes concepts we know all too well from the news – in this case, insurgencies, occupations, suicide bombings and indefinite detentions – and turns them inside out for us. As 24 whiles away the seasons on torture porn, one after another, Battlestar Galactica made us root for the terrorists without even realizing it. Years later and on my second lap with these episodes I still found myself shaken.

That’s the good stuff. The Boyf points out that this is why he loves science fiction: it can say anything and it most of all can say all the things other genres can’t.

Questions I had the first time I tried to watch the show have only strengthened over time: what, exactly, is the technical difference between Cylons and humans? If a Cylon can pass a colonial fleet physical and incidental injuries and all the broken skin of everyday life, what exactly makes them different? I suppose that’s the philosophical point of the whole show, or at least I hope it is. In the meantime, I’m an engineer. The physical answer is just as interesting to me as the metaphysical one.

• placed masking tape over the ends of all the spare batteries I’m carrying for my camera
• verified on the TSA’s website that I can carry spare batteries in the first place
• researched whether it’s OK to wear my Dr. Scholl’s onto the plane. I can’t.
• identified which slip-on shoes I’ll wear tomorrow
• gone through a weeding process to pick a t-shirt that can in no way be construed as creepy or threatening in case someone at security hasn’t had their morning coffee when I get there
• identified which of my middle-tier dress socks will be most suitable for showing off to everyone in the airport
• packed and repacked so that the baggage checkers hopefully won’t have to utterly destroy the packing job I’ve done on my clothes the way they did two years ago
• learned that one of my TSA-approved baggage locks doesn’t work at all
• faced that it is pointless to try to keep my dress shirts wrinkle-free since they will simply be wadded up and shoved back in by security anyway
• researched whether I can take my camera in carry-on (I can)
• tried on pairs of jeans until I found one that didn’t need a belt
• gone through my underwear to find a pair I don’t mind someone else seeing should I get pulled aside
• learned I’ll have to pay $50 at check-in for my baggage
• been advised that I shouldn’t bother using the luggage lock that does work, even though it’s TSA-approved.

In the happy news column, the hotel is letting me do early check-in, which is good since I plan to get there and immediately find out where there’s a bar. I don’t really care that it will be 11am.

I am going to be mighty glad to see the back of the Aughts. In ‘99 I remember loving the gigglingly prophecied nickname of “the naughty aughties.” Turned out there was plenty of naughtiness but none of it was fun.

I turned 35 this year and on Saturday, at our big family Christmas-ish dinner, my sister admitted that she had been a little freaked out by the thought of her little brother being 35. Then it came up in conversation that the youngest member of the generation after us is about to start driver’s education and my sister turned to me with wide, frightened eyes. “Nevermind about you turning 35 anymore,” she said to me. “I have something new to be freaked out about.”

Completely as an aside, I confess that one of the things that most bothers me about the Detroit would-be bomber is that it pisses me off to think what new indignity I’ll have to endure when I fly in a couple of weeks. What a load of shit. I’m starting to wish I’d opted for the 16-hour train ride after all.