1:29 pm - Tues 7/27/04
Conversation With Myself

Did something recently, not a big deal, but something I've meant to do for a long time now; I wrote a thank-you note to Lance Alspaugh, the owner of the Los Feliz 3 and the Vista here in L.A.

Those are my "cheap movie" places here in L.A., where the matinee prices are $4.50 and $4.75, respectively.

I kept it fairly short and simple, telling him, basically, that I was a big movie fan without a lot of discretionary income, so I appreciated him keeping ticket prices low.

A small thing, but I felt like it was important somehow; Spending a big chunk of my adult life in retail, I know people are about a hundred times more likely to squawk when they're unhappy than to show their appreciation for good service, so I thought I'd do my little bit to redress that imbalance.

Speaking of movies...

Saw Before Sunset last week, and loved it.

I held off seeing it for a week, thinking that it might "make me feel sad", but then I remembered something--I feel sad about something pretty much every other day, and it hasn't killed me yet--so I decided to say "What the hell!" and just go.

And sure enough, it did make me feel sad; I was a little bummed out afterwards that I've never had a "soulmate" and suspect I never will, but to my surprise, what made me more sad was the realization of how much I miss good conversation.

The movie is basically 80 minutes of two people talking, and I found the talk, and interaction between the two characters, utterly captivating.

Afterwards, I thought about how rarely I actually talk to anyone anymore.

I think that's why I find myself, while still craving honest-to-goodness human contact, being tempted to totally retreat into books and movies and tv; it's a much more interesting "conversation", at its best, than the dull, rote-responses I get from most people in the course of a day in "the real world".

And I'm not letting myself off the hook either; Sometimes, I feel like I'm getting more dull and boring with each passing day.

And it's not that I don't still have interesting thoughts, that I don't still have questions about the world, and people, and how things work (or fail to work). I think it's just that there becomes fewer and fewer people to talk with about that kind of stuff, so you start training yourself not to think about those things.

Which brings me to D-land...

As I said in a letter to Kevin that I just sent out (Yes, an actual letter, just like they used to do in the olden days...except I did most of it on the computer), real conversation might be hard to come by as an adult--at least for me--but I can certainly have, at the very least, a more interesting "conversation" with myself, here in Diaryland.

I went on to say that what prevents that is not so much that I'm concerned what my "readership" might think, though that's an issue; I think the much bigger concern is that I'm afraid, if I really started to "let it rip" in here, that I wouldn't be able to handle what came out.

But you know what? I think I'm gonna go for it.

What the hell...!

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