Short Story: I Don't Want Ya(title a work in progress)

What’s your favorite flower? His was a dandelion and he had a garden full of ‘em. He tended to them. He cared for them. Some might even say he loved them, but his life wasn’t just sunshine, soil, and flowers. There was a lot of sadness. A lot of anger.
His residence was near a military base and whenever they practiced bombing, the dirt on the hill would shake out of its place and cascade onto his precious dandelions. Some would hope that this practice bombing was an attempt to become more accurate in order to limit civilian causalities in a real combat situation, but he thought they merely did it just to piss him off. After a day of bombing, he would always go out to his garden and try to rescue his dandelions from the freshly created sea of dirt drowning them. He didn’t feel this process was futile until the bombing started to increase to the point that it occurred every single day along with his fits of rage. After breaking plates and other shit around the house for a good week or so, he realized he had to do something about this so he decided to write a strongly worded letter to the military. He was especially proud of his salutation that read, “Dear assholes.” The tone of his letter only got increasingly vitriolic after that and some who would have looked at it would have thought he was a raving lunatic. He partly was, given how his demeanor turned sharply bipolar due to the seesaw effect the bombing had on his disposition. The joy he received from planting a new batch of dandelions quickly turned into anger and sadness when he saw his beautiful flowers get buried along with his happiness.
After the letter was sent, a week went by without bombing. He felt they got the message and spent the days drinking cheap wine and reading gardening manuals. Maybe, I should plant some cacti he thought one of those days. Then a letter from the military came. He opened the envelope feverishly, expecting to find the apology he deserved. His eyes stared at the letters on the page and he was shocked to see the words that they formed: “With great pleasure, I am to inform you that you have been selected to be a part of our elite fighting task force.” He was drafted? He looked at the date he had to report for duty and it was only three days away. He crumpled up the letter furiously and threw it in the wastebasket. The bombing started up right as the paper hit the bottom of the basket. It went on all day and night, making him sleep deprived and erratic. When the day came to report for duty, he decided to go, not to report but to complain. To fight for his civil liberties as a citizen of the United States of America.
He drove for two hours on a road sandwiched between dry, arid desert before he pulled into a gas station to fill up his car. He was amazed by how far the base was due to how capable the bombing was in shaping the landscape of his background. While waiting for his car’s thirst for fuel to be quenched, he looked at a little girl in the backseat of a SUV. She was staring at him. She smiled and waved and he responded with the same. He was happy once again, a feeling that was foreign to him for the past three days of his life. This quickly changed once he saw her father’s haircut. The design of it annoyed the shit out of him. It was the complete antithesis of his beloved dandelion’s. All the hair was shaved except for the top. He felt hair should be round and all-encompassing of one’s skull. A sponge in case one’s brain fluids started to leak. In a fit of passion, he took the gas nozzle quickly out of his car and had the drizzling gasoline fall onto his face. He then grabbed a cigarette out of his pocket and pressed it to his lips and lit it. He waited for the cigarette to wither away to a tiny snub before his face promptly burst into flames. The father of the little girl frantically got in his SUV and drove away in fear of the entire gas station turning into a devouring inferno. The lover of dandelions ran into the station’s convenient store and screamed at the cashier, “Empty the register and give me the money!” The teenage boy stared at him for a good two minutes before realizing that this situation will not melt away along with this crazed man’s face. He handed him the money and the man with the burning face ran out the door towards the harsh desert. He ran away from his car, the gas station, his life, and civilization. He splashed his newly acquired money against his face and watched the dollars burn and glide down to the ground like leaves in a forest fire.
When the police discovered his body in the middle of the desert, they found a vulture nibbling on the toes of his left foot and dandelions surrounding his body as if they were Mother Nature’s version of a chalk outline. His whole body was badly eaten away by the hungry sun except for his face. His face was pretty much the same as it was when his organs still functioned except it was pitch black and his lips were frozen in a smile. So what’s your favorite flower?

Top 20 Songs of the Millenium...

Inspired by Pitchfork... maybe.














Obviously a work in progress...

Oh Best of the Decade Project...

Another retarded list thing. This time I'm keeping a list of what I consider the best films of the decade and I will seperate them by categories: definitely, probably, and maybe. Definitely means that they would definitely end up on my "official" best of the 2000's list, while probably is less likely, and maybe is even more less likely. Here we gooooooooo.

Definitely
I Don't Want to Sleep Alone(dir. Tsai Ming-liang)
Mulholland Drive(dir. David Lynch)
Reprise(dir. Joachim Trier)

Probably
Don't Touch the Axe(dir. Jacques Rivette)
Fay Grim(dir. Hal Hartley)
Femme Fatale(dir. Brian De Palma)
Marie Antoinette(dir. Sofia Coppola)
Miami Vice(dir. Michael Mann)
Minority Report(dir. Steven Spielberg)
The New World(dir. Terrence Malick)
Pistol Opera(dir. Seijun Suzuki)
Punch-Drunk Love(dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)
Platform(dir. Jia Zhangke)
Rachel Getting Married(dir. Jonathan Demme)
The Royal Tenenbaums(dir. Wes Anderson)
Talk to Her(dir. Pedro Almodovar)
The Virgin Suicides(dir. Sofia Coppola)
The Wayward Cloud(dir. Tsai Ming-liang)

Maybe
2046(dir. Wong Kar-Wai)
The Black Dahlia(dir. Brian De Palma)
Donnie Darko(dir. Richard Kelly)
Flight of the Red Balloon(dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien)
Friday Night(dir. Claire Denis)
George Washington(dir. David Gordon Green)
The Girl From Monday(dir. Hal Hartley)
Golden Door(dir. IDK)
Goodbye, Dragon Inn(dir. Tsai Ming-liang)
INLAND EMPIRE(dir. David Lynch)
The Intruder(dir. Claire Denis)
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou(dir. Wes Anderson)
Little Children(dir. Todd Field)
Offside(dir. Jafar Panahi)
Public Enemies(dir. Michael Mann)
Speed Racer(dir. Wachowski Brothers)
Synecdoche, New York(dir. Charlie Kaufman)
Tropical Malady(dir. Apicha...)
Twentynine Palms(dir. Bruno Dumont)
War of the Worlds(dir. Steven Spielberg)
What Time Is It There?(dir. Tsai Ming-liang)
You Don't Mess with the Zohan(dir. IDK)

Need to watch/rewatch:
Bad Education
The Beat That My Heart Skipped
Birth
Cache
Che
A Christmas Tale
Collateral
The Company
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
Esther Kahn
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Far From Heaven
Gommorah
In the Bedroom
In the Mood for Love
In Praise of Love
Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2
Lord of the Rings Trilogy
Manchurian Candidate
Ocean's Eleven
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
Pride and Prejudice
Requiem for a Dream
The Science of Sleep
Sparrow
Syndromes and a Century
Trouble Every Day
The Truth About Charlie
Volver
Zodiac
and more...

Oh Speed Racer: The Missing Link?

Oh Music: The Masterpieces...

Blue Lines by Massive Attack

Doolittle by The Pixies

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel

The Magic Position by Patrick Wolf

Richard D. James Album by Aphex Twin

And the beat goes on...

Oh The Wrestler...

The Wrestler(dir. Darren Aronofsky)
Maybe I spoke too soon when I declared this would probably be my favorite film of the year and if I learned anything from last year(and this year as well) is that you can't judge a film by its trailer. So when this movie turned out to be a disappointment, it was perhaps unsurprising. The film's major problem outside of Aronofsky's intentional downsizing his role, at least visibly, is the script. The characters outside of Randy are pretty much cardboard cutouts including his moody and bitchy estranged daughter played by Evan Rachel Wood almost too well and Marisa Tomei's stripper with a heart of gold. Even Randy is something of a joke with the script constantly positing him as something of a saint that wears spandex with young children and essentially everybody involved in the wrestling district being enraptured with him along with his disinterest in T&A during his repeated strip bar visits(he's just there to drinkkk man). Since he's such a great guy, we're supposed to feel really bad when he has to work behind a deli counter instead of being involved in wrestling events where he gets stapled and torn the hell up by barbed wire. Also, all the drama that is generated within the film comes across as a screenwriter's hollow attempts at drama as we're treated to a predetermined fucked subplot with his estranged daughter that I'd immediately write off if it didn't contain one of the best moments of the film and some relationship drama due to Marisa Tomei's character's policy of not dating customers. The crucial heart attack itself is also something of a plot contrivance. Mickey Rourke can be disarmingly sweet throughout the film and I'd understand the praise he's been receiving if he was given some better material.
** out of ****

Oh Prediction...

I'm calling it. This will probably be my favorite film of the year.