Tag: anxiety

too bad: part one

The first of a short story in three parts. A dramedy for mature readers.

“In a post-COVID world, a naive & lonely nineteen-year-old waitress crosses paths with a middle-aged, misanthropic line-cook.”

The following is dedicated to two special ladies – neither I introduced myself properly to, but from what I assumed formed the basis of the character of Cassidy; and to my wonderful wife, for whom if I ever were to leave, or her leave I, this story would stand as prognostication.

i

“Why won’t you talk to me?”

Arthur heard what she said, and the tremble behind it, “What did you say?”

“Why won’t you talk to me?”

“I don’t like people.” He intended that as a period and went back to work, but since he bothered to reply, it was an invitation.

“You can say ‘hi’.”

“Hi, huh?”

“Yeah. You know, saying hi probably takes less than a second. We have been here all night together.”

“Okay, thanks.” He went back to scrubbing the inside of one of the fryers.

It was after-hours one regular Saturday night in November. Arthur & Cassidy were scheduled the closing shift: they had both done it before, just not together yet. Cassidy saw it as an opportunity to get to know Arthur better, but, as was his norm now, all Arthur wanted to do was fight back his discomfort with stoicism, finish the job, and go home. He was bone-tired, and attacking a hard, crunchy bit of caked-on residue with a steel wool brush. He still had two more fryers to clean, and he had ten minutes until their scheduled shift ended at 10PM. These things were shit: no wonder management had to keep replacing them.

Cassidy had more-or-less finished everything in the dining room and was sweeping up in the vestibule, slowly and cautiously approaching the kitchen as she completed the spots before it. There were only the two of them left in the building, and she had the keys to lock up. Faintly, on the worn-out, twenty-year-old Phillips stereo that sat perched high on a shelf in the vestibule played the soft reverberations of Top-40 radio.

“…That’s it?”

“What else do you want me to say, Cassidy? I’m trying to scrub this shit off the fryer. I’m busy.”

“You know, just some soap and water would do the trick.”

“…Really?“

“Hey, if you want to stay here all night to win the war on dirt & grime, be my guest. But I’d like to go home at some point, and I’m all done, so…”

“Did you do the bathrooms yet?”

“Yes I did the bathrooms. I told you I was done. You don’t think I don’t want to go home, too?”

“You want to clean this too? Be my guest.” He rudely threw the brush down and stepped back, handing the reigns to her. She filled a red bucket with soapy water from the sink, took a rag, and wiped the spot. Even when hunched over, she still towered almost a foot above him. The crud began to break up, leaving the scratched surface from the wool brush underneath, “Okay, okay, okay, thank you so much.”

“See? You don’t have to be so rough with everything.”

“Listen, if you’re done, why don’t you go dust off the stereo speakers so I can actually hear something back here.”

“I would, if we had any dusters.”

“Then, I don’t know, go find the step-ladder and wipe off the little shelf it sits on. Oh wait, you don’t need that.”

“Har-dee-har-har.”

“I can be bratty, too.”

“Who’s being bratty?”

“You! You’re bratty. You’re a bratty girl.”

“…Is that some porn thing?” She was having fun with him, now.

“Whatever. Do whatever you want to do. That’s what you do anyway.”

“Excuse me?”

“Just leave me alone, okay?”

“No, what did you said?”

“I said you kids are going to do whatever it is you’re going to do anyway, so who gives a shit what I tell you, hm? You’re probably not even listening.”

“What’s this all about, Arthur?” It was the first time he had ever heard her say his name out-loud.

“Nothing!”

“You’re such a liar.”

“Fine, it’s you. You and all the other dumb White girls that get hired. Okay? You’re a bunch of entitled snowflakes who don’t know anything about putting in a real day’s work. Tell me I’m wrong! You all have your fucking hacks online to make shit easier for yourselves, while guys like me get shit on, even though I’m breaking my fucking back. It’s bullshit and I’m fucking sick of it.”

“Is that why you haven’t been talking to me? Because you think I’m a bad co-worker? Listen buddy, you don’t even know me. We’ve said more to each other tonight than we have in the whole three months we’ve been working together. You don’t say hi, you don’t look at me, you ignore me when I talk to you over the counter…”

[cont’d]

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Dub’s Take: Never Let Go (2024)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

4 out of 5

For all the five-dollar words I throw around here, I don’t think I’ve used discourse yet. Interpreting ‘discourse’ – or, “the meaning that we apply to things” – was a huge component of my first-year art school syllabus, along with learning what a paintbrush & canvas are for. Duh.

Director Alexandre Aja’s cinematic discourse morphs between two categories: horror, for fans of his breakouts “Haute Tension” and 2006’s “The Hills Have Eyes”; contrasted by the modern fables “The 9th Life of Louis Drax” and “Horns”. “Never Let Go”, with its chapter cards and brothers Grimm references, falls squarely into the second camp. While its moral isn’t spelled out, I took it as not losing sight of one’s humanity, even in the face of insurmountable odds – whether those are real or imagined.

Never Let Go is brutal, starting its characters off in deep crisis instigated by decades of off-screen trauma. Halle Berry is a dependable actress playing an unreliable protagonist: the script is aware it can end only one of two ways (or the dreaded third), and plays with the possibilities from its outset. It’s a challenging narrative tightrope, made more disturbing by audacious scenes of child endangerment.

But the ‘ropes’ – despite not being physically long enough to be coherent – are a fascinating thematic snare, and the cinematic framing of the central woodland location and its inhabitants is stellar: the constituents of the forest, which may or may not be hallucinations, unveil their biological horror through the production’s expert use of darkness & shadow. While the story doesn’t conclude with a traditional twist, there’s an excellent wrench thrown in to the plot earlier than anticipated. Shame it opts for the third ending, though.

With regard to the two child stars, I can say from first-hand experience that managing child actors can be incredibly stressful, with the possibility of little reward. Sadly, as in life, children exist, and it’s relieving to say, then, that the two young men here who anchor the film do work that is unworthy of captiousness: they didn’t once take me out of the experience.

Never Let Go had me unsettled, angry, depressed, nervously laughing out-loud, bewildered, and ultimately mesmerized. Shouldn’t that be the discourse of good cinema?

Poster sourced from impawards.com. What do you think? Are you a fan of Aja’s horror movies, his trilogy (at present) of contemporarily-set fairy tales, both, or neither? Do you think Halle Berry puts on a good show regardless of what she’s acting in, or do you think the choice of role reflects the actor and Berry’s inconsistent filmography speaks for itself? What’s your interpretation of “the dreaded third ending”? Leave your comments below!

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maybe

A poem about probability.

maybe i’ll get what i want.

maybe.
some day.


maybe soon
i’ll know what i want.
sooner than later is better.


maybe i enjoy eating frozen foods
and protein bars
and McDonald’s for lunch every day.
it’s a choice.

maybe.
just maybe.

maybe one day i’ll have the strength after work
to make a proper meal
that cleans out the fridge
and uses all the sauce
for a change.

maybe.


maybe on the other end of that hotline
she’s laughing at my jokes
and not rolling her eyes
as i am assuming from her uniform replies.
maybe.

maybe i need to slow my roll

and maybe i need to step it to the floor
and go full bore –
Mad Max form –
right now ahead of my fifteenth chance
or i’m too old to learn from my mistakes anymore.
whichever comes before.
maybe.


maybe maybe maybe.
maybe yesterday was already too late

and maybe i’ll grow a third leg.

maybe i’ll croak in a week and maybe
i’ll pass away peacefully in my sleep

and maybe i’ll get rigor with an
endorphin-induced end-of-life dream boner
and an open casket will be out of the question.
kind of hard when you’re already booked
for incineration.

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imprintations

A poem about manifestation.

i am pandering to the points that i want
on the eve of Jupiter entering Venus and whatnot
and comparing it to what i really need,

as i loiter in my Mazda where you can usually find me
doing one of the following
rhymed list of things:

being alone,
playing Klondike on my phone;

listening to a CD on my SUV’s player
from my stack of self-burned music CDs,
all of which i’ve heard before;

and wet-lipping a big ol’ blunt just for me.
i know you’re all joking about my masturbating in the back seat.

maybe now that i’ve brought it up.


i don’t really know anything.
i blow the smoke out and i ponder my fatty
while i cough uncontrollably like i’m acting on TV:
telegraphing it for everyone in the audience to see
that it is, in fact, ground marijuana leaf.
if you priced this thing out it would be a killing,
but i don’t have the start-up to buy a booty-babe
to do all that tedious rolling.

i forgot where i was going


so i drift for a moment,
and in that space, she wanders through
in a special guest cameo i can’t mentally defer.


i know that i shouldn’t be driving

but my Saturday is also New PlayStation Deal Day –
as nutritional as breakfast cereal
and modestly-priced as Extra Foods –
and i wasn’t paying interest on my credit card
for a bill that, with tax, costs only two-oh-seven

so now i’m in the parking lot of the Seven-Eleven
with my twenty-five-dollar cardboard voucher
filling up to the tip of my breast pocket,
and the rain clouds from my last week of work
have parted
as a plane flies against a wild blue heaven
and you’d think i’d be running home


and so

because it is calm

i think about her again,
and the clouds loop back like a Terry Fox race.
i guess they were blowing back this way eventually,

anyway.

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itchy Achilles

A poem for my late father-in-law.

the father

had heard
and seen

everything the boy
had ever thought;
had done
and said –

that’s what the low-budget documentary
on Amazon Prime told him.

it was all outlined
in a big ULINE box with no lid
full of labelled duo-tangs stacked the wrong way
on the top shelf –
no less important than all the rest –
to whom the spirits kindly regressed.
the father didn’t necessarily ask for all this.
all he did was ask

and he was met with

and where maybe once he permitted himself to forget some things
based on nature,
his age,
now he knew everything.
that was the curse of the dead
and their wistless blessing

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