A double feature, of course, is two movies for the price of one, so if you catch a discount matinee that's also a double feature, it works out to just a couple of dollars per movie. That's within my budget.
Your average sequel is, of course, worth even less, and Faraway, So Close, the sequel to Wings of Desire, is worth even less. It was double-billed with the original, and I love the original — a soft-spoken meditation on what it is to be human, with chuckles and insight and Peter Falk.
Well, everything Wings of Desire is, Faraway, So Close is not. The credits claim that this coldhearted crap came from the same Wim Wenders who made the original movie, but if so, he must have been kidnapped and forced to make the sequel under duress. This is the worst sequel to a good movie since Beverly Hills Cop 2.
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SUNDAY — It was a swashbuckling Sunday at the U.C. Theater — Errol Flynn (everybody's favorite traitor) in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). Sure, I've seen it before. So have you. I'll see it again. I'll see it any time it's playing anywhere.
If you've only seen the Kevin Costner version, trust me. Costner is OK, but you need some Errol Flynn.
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Margaret arrives tomorrow evening, so I spruced up the joint a little today. Wiped the roach corpses off the wall, swept up all the dust bunnies, and laundered the blanket.
I hope her visit goes well. I've mellowed over the past few years, and i hope she has, too. She was always ... intense.
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As we had planned, I picked her up at the airport, but when she first saw me her instant reaction was to shriek and turn her back on me. She said almost nothing for the first half hour, as if we were strangers. I kept saying things — nice things I think — asking her questions, pointing out sights from the window of the bus on our ride back to town, but she mostly just sat there silent. She told me later that she was speechless at the sight of how huge I've become.
I was not exactly slim when we were last together, and I'd told her to expect fifty pounds more of me. And she's not at her ideal chart weight, either, but — OK, I'll chalk it up to nerves. It was the first time we'd seen each other in several years, and she was understandably nervous, and so was I, so the silence and shyness was understandable.
Then we arrived at the cheap residential hotel that I call home, and we were finally talking like two people with a romantic past together, and maybe a future. We kissed, and that was nice. Kissing led to more kissing, which led to squeezing this and rubbing that, and eventually we were in the mood for something special. I rolled the two beds together, and the catastrophe was complete:
To her disappointment and mine, I am now physically incapable of good old fashioned face-to-face sex with a woman — I'm just too damned fat. My belly is so large that it prevents my manhood from reaching her womanhood. It's basic geometry: the magnitude of my girth means that our special happy places cannot be closer than about seven inches apart.
We attempted several different positions, but with each subsequent failure my erection waned, until finally it all seemed futile, and I was unable to continue trying. My dear Margaret seemed eventually satisfied with my two-finger method, and she was able to do wonders with her hand and a little margarine, but it wasn't what either of us had anticipated.
With continued effort and experimentation and patience, we could probably, eventually, find a way to make whoopie like we'd like to, but we don't have much time. It's only two weeks until she'll be on an airplane out of here — and she won't be spending most of that time with me. Her sister lives a few counties away, and for reasons too complicated to explain, her sister is raising Maggie's young daughter. So, understandably, much or most of Maggie's two weeks in California will be spent with her sister and daughter, not with me.
We might have two or three nights together, depending on how things go, and things certainly didn't go as well as I'd hoped tonight. Something was accomplished this evening, though: If I physically can't fuck a woman, I am now resolved to lose some weight.
See, I've been a big man and getting bigger since my mid-20s. Over the years my mother has nagged me, friends and co-workers have advised me, and doctors have harangued me — "You have a weight problem, Doug." From these well-meaning people I've heard of a dozen different schemes, exercise programs, support groups, and unappetizing diets, but my response has always been, "I don't have a weight problem. I'm fat, sure, but it's not a problem, so kindly shut up about it please."
As of this evening, guess what? I have a weight problem.
From Pathetic Life #1
Saturday - Monday,
June 11, 12, & 13, 1994
This is an entry retyped from an on-paper zine I wrote many years ago, called Pathetic Life. The opinions stated were my opinions then, but might not be my opinions now. Also, I said and did some disgusting things, so parental guidance is advised.
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