Film: The Road

Stayed up late tonight to watch The Road. Good to remind myself there can be worse things than bed bugs. I've put it off this long, dreading it, because I've read the book and remember how that felt. The plodding grey horror of it was awful, yet I feel compelled to re-dip myself in it because I have a serious dread of some predictive truth in it, some devastating catastrophe destroying most of us, without any explanation, making no rational sense at all. So many things have already gone awry as our species furiously reproduces and ravishes its life support system. The will to correct course is too weak, and most of us in relatively wealthy nations haven't a clue how to survive without our gadgets. I'd like to think of myself as a possible survivor, but if my reaction to bed bugs is any indication, I'll probably be hysterical and as useless as anyone else. I'd have to latch on to a Viggo Mortensen type and play helper. Probably our own catastrophe will (already is) come about gradually rather than suddenly, with a steady escalation of application of ineffective remedies and increasing panic. Shit, I hope I die first.

Gotta shake off this morose and pessimistic state of mind. Better dive into another Kurt Wallander murder mystery. Ah, maybe not. The theme of social rot runs through all Mankell's novels, an uneasy recognition of a shift in the nature of social violence.

Today I felt well enough to toddle around buying bug-proof pillows and mattress covers and a bed frame. Tomorrow, assembly. Night checks have revealed no live bed bugs! Can it be true? Have we killed them? Tomorrow night Grumpy (and I?) may face up to the only true test: warm blood-filled bodies exuding carbon dioxide in the dark (and probably leaping up every hour to flash on the lights to check for creepie crawlies).

Another triumph today -- for the first time since Grumpy's surgery and other maladies, I got a strand of my life back, printed and read the poems for the workshop in Port Townsend. A tingle of poetic impulse revived. I could almost see myself writing again, felt the itch to roll words around.