Everything’s Subjective, Nothing Lasts For Johnny O.

My life has been a lot like Vertigo for the last few days, and I don’t like it. Although if I had to choose a Hitchcock film for my life to parallel, there are few better choices (Frenzy, anyone?). I’ve been seeing someone around Norman who looks, at least to me, disturbingly similar to someone from my past. And I can see how such a thing would make a man a little bit crazy. And there’s been some discussion as to whether or not my interpretation of this mysterious stranger’s appearance is actually accurate. That is even more likely to make me crazy as I wonder if I’m Gaslighting myself, because my life can only mirror so many films at once before I go absolutely batshit zany and hole up in Roger Ebert’s bathroom with a prop gun from Moonwalker and a dog-eared copy of the 2001 Film Almanac (that was an ever-so-slight reference to the 6th Sense, in case you were wondering).

I am nothing if not masochistic, and a little bit sadistic as well, so it’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility that I am punishing myself for some transgression, real or imagined, or maybe that I feel guilty for not feeling guilty, or that I’m simply creating something to distract myself from working on my thesis and accomplishing some of my stupid-assed life-goals (look for me to start a seminar later this summer on how to Achieve Stupid-Assed Life-Goals the Seth Way. It involves a system of rewards and punishments... and of course dressing up like a rooster). Or it could just be coincidence.

All parenthetical references aside, I am in a heightened state of flux right now. I’m moving ever-forward on my thesis, having just yesterday begun actually analyzing the films, and over the weekend I gave some serious thought to the genre and began to organize my disorganized observations. I think I’ve found a real hole in film scholarship that might someday turn into a book. That probably means that I’ll finish this thing someday, and it will probably be sooner than later. That means that I’ll have to figure out something else to do. Like... a career, and stuff. And I think it’s much easier to focus on whether or not I’m seeing Carlotta Valdez and Kim Novak everywhere I turn than to focus on whether or not I want to be in this city/state/country in four months.

But in the meantime, I’m sitting at the T.E.A. Café drinking bubble tea and listening to the Starlight Mints on the house stereo. So you know, ghosts or not, things could definitely be worse.