Locked-In Syndrome

Stella on bed
Stella on bed

“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” is a beautiful movie. The lusiously colored, closely cropped, bedridden, framing really looks great on tv. We watched long stretches of it for the second time last night. The French speech therapist’s endless repetition of the alphabet hypnotized me. I felt as I too had “locked-in syndrome” like the lead character, Jean-Dominique Bauby. Julian Schnabel did a great job bringing this (based on a) true story to the screen. Bauby’s memoir, though, is where the magic came from. “My cocoon becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly. There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas’s court.”

I’m thinking our white cat may have a variation of this “locked-in-syndrome. She spends nearly twenty four hours a day on our bed yet we’re certain that she has a life in there and that it is full enough for her. We can see this in her eyes.

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Doggone Forlorn

Tree near Lake Ontario in Winter
Tree near Lake Ontario in Winter

Yesterday’s rain turned to light snow this morning so the snow stuck to the top surface of every branch. It was beautiful. I had some packages to mail and I was dreading the lines at the Post Office so I decided to drive along the lake over to the Charlotte office. Charlotte in the winter is doggone forlorn. But there were only three people on line, the new AC DC was playing in the backroom and the clerks were very friendly. I was tempted to stop down at the LDR to visit Patty. She and Rick (the “R’ in the LDR) are back running the place. And Rick’s dad, Russ, still cuts the meat each morning. There was nice article about them in Saturday’s paper. Their steak sandwiches are so good we become meat eaters when we walk in the door. Same thing happens over at Vic & Irv’s but that is usually only when Duane is in town and he goes off his macrobiotic diet.

60 Minutes did another one of its hit pieces on modern art when they interviewed Julian Schnabel last Sunday. The artwork they showed did look pretty bad and his Basquiat movie was pretty bad and the cd he put out was astoundingly bad but “The Diving Bell” is a damn good movie so far. We took a break about halfway through and plan to finish it tonight after the Margaret Explosion gig so I will report back.

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