Today I found myself driving behind a truck that was towing a boat. The name of the boat was "Into The Mystic".

In case you are unaware, that's the name of a wonderful song by Van Morrison. I wish I could've spoken to the owner and discussed the boat's name with him. And also I wish I could've sailed on the "Into The Mystic" because I love sailing but I haven't been in a long, long time. I would've loved to sail on a boat named after a Van Morrison song.

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In other news, my sister helped my grandma move apartments. My grandma moves pretty much once a year. While she was helping my sister found some old photos. My sister is obsessed with ancestry.com. Here's a photo of my brother and me (I'm on the left):

Its ancient quality reminded me of my favorite photo of my father. I have a small rectangular box decorated with a painting by Claude Monet. In that box I keep the smallest and most precious items I own. It's mostly full of bookmarks I've designed/collected, ticket stubs from momentous concerts, and a few photos of my family and S and her daughter. It also contains a piece of hotel stationary that she scribbled on when we were in Hollywood together.

But anyway. Here is my favorite photo of my father: 

Great Moments In 21st Century Film

the blinking scene - The Master

A great scene from a P.T. Anderson film with two fantastic actors.

"Doris."

Finished reading The End Of The Affair. That book kind of kicked my ass. The main character, a writer, has an affair with a woman who claims to love him more than anything in the world but ultimately can't leave her husband. They appear to be madly in love. One day, she stops speaking to him without explanation. He falls into a despair, an angry bitter despair, no longer caring about writing or anything else. The book has many haunting scenes where realities are questioned, regrets are pondered, uncomforting truths are spread out peacefully to die like snow in a vacant field. Yada yada yada. And so on and so on.

"Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel: sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust."

"I drew my mind together, and I thought, Now that everything is really over, I have got to begin again. I have fallen in love once: it can be done again. But I was unconvinced: it seemed to me that I had given all the sex I had away."

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I also saw the film Boyhood the other day, the film Richard Linklater shot over the course of twelve years, using all the same actors so that you see them age throughout the film. It was pretty.

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Sigh.

This is what my niece had to say about chapter two of Of Mice And Men. Go ahead... tell me it isn't incredible:

"So far the message is really good in this book. How sometimes being different from each other can benefit each other. Lennie shows George how to dream and enjoy the little thing and George shows Lennie responsibility and how to communicate with others."

Despite being as forgettable as most days, today was sort of interesting. On my way home I saw a car that I haven't seen in over a decade. It was a sky blue 1992 Ford Taurus station wagon. My first car. It was a strange shot to my eyes as I sat at a red light. It brought into my brain all the rides, all the trips, all the passengers. My high school life brought back in a flash. The tapes I made to play in the tape deck.

I remember the day I sold the car. A woman working at a Chinese restaurant called and asked to see it, so I drove to the restaurant to show it to her. I was asking $500 for it, in the hopes of getting $250 or so because it was surely not worth much more. I talked with this strange woman for about 5 minutes or so. I don't remember the whole conversation, but I remember hearing she was a single mother of two. I remember that her insecure awkward body language mixed with her words led me to believe that she might not actually have a fixed home at the moment. We spoke briefly to each other and then she pulled out a wad of cash and tried to hand me $500. I said I couldn't take $500 because I'd only asked for that much in hopes of getting half. I sold the car to her for $200. I was 18 years old, but every day since I wish I'd given it to her for free. Such is the value of memories, I suppose.

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The other day my niece told me she missed me, so I told her we'd start a book club. I was around her age when I first read Of Mice And Men. I told her to get a copy of it and we'd each read a chapter a day and discuss each chapter. She read the first chapter today and I was very impressed with her insights/questions.

Glimpses of sharing something with someone... Yes, today I remembered, by its shadows, what sharing is like.

Two pictures I took with a non-digital camera back in high school of my niece and me:

I miss that umbrella. It was destroyed during my first trip to Ireland.

Strangely enough, when I first went to Ireland one of the only books I took with me was The Winter Of Our Discontent, and it got destroyed too. I remember the exact day and how it happened, and I remember the river I tossed its remains in to. Ah well. Just umbrellas and books.

I've been destroyed too. I remember the day. The day she didn't say it back... I just haven't been tossed in to the river yet.

vamos vamos argentina

Argentina was my pick at the start of the World Cup tournament. I'm proud (and a bit surprised based on their performances) that they've made it to the final. It would be legendary to see Messi and company lift a World Cup trophy, especially in Brazil. Germany are the superior team but anything can happen on game day. I'll be happy for either side as Germany has plenty of wonderfully talented players. But as a lover of the sport I hope there is some magical Messi moments because witnessing history can be a fine thing.

They're projecting over a billion viewers for the World Cup final.

One day your best friend simply stops speaking to you. No explanation, no apology, no remorse... One day a person you trust 100% tells a lie.

That's when it's all over. That's when everything floods and you drown.

"ten steps from my dream"

I went to the library today. Picked up a copy of The End Of The Affair by Graham Greene. Twelve pages in and it's good, albeit depressing. I read in the shade of a tree while the grass was being cut around me. Then I switched to Pessoa (who I can only read in small doses) and read the following passage multiple times:

"I have witnessed, incognito, the gradual death of my life, the slow wreck of everything I wanted to be. I can say, with a truth that doesn't need flowers to know it's dead, that there is nothing I've ever loved or in which I have invested even for a moment the dream of that moment that has not disintegrated under my window like a dust resembling stone fallen from a vase up on a high floor. It seems, even, that Destiny has always tried, first, to make me love or desire things it had arranged that I would see on the next day that I did not or would not have.
"Ironic spectator of myself, I still haven't lost the courage to witness life. And since I know, today, in advance of every vague hope, that it will be disillusioned, I suffer the special pleasure of enjoying my disillusionment with my hope... I am a somber strategist, who, having lost all battles, is already sketching out on his pad, and enjoying the plan, the details of his fatal retreat, on the evening before each new battle he fights.
"The destiny of not being able to desire without knowing that I shall have to not-have has persecuted me like a malignant being. If I see a nubile young girl's face, no matter how indifferent it may be, I have only a moment to imagine what it would be like if she were mine because it always happens that ten steps from my dream the girl meets the man I can see is her husband or lover. A romantic would make a tragedy of this; a stranger would sense it to be a comedy: I, however, mix the two things, since I am romantic in myself and strange to myself, and I turn the page to get to yet another irony.
"Some say that without hope life is impossible, others that even with hope life is empty. As far as I'm concerned, since today I neither hope nor despair, hope is a simple outdoor picture that includes me, and I attend it, as if it were a play without a plot made only to amuse the eyes-- a dance without connection, a shaking of leaves in the wind, clouds in which the sunlight changes colors, old strolls through streets at dusk in strange parts of the city.
"I am in very large measure the very prose I write. I unfold in sentences and paragraphs, I punctuate myself, and, in the unchained distribution of images, I wear the newspaper hats, the way children do when they play at being king; by making rhythm out of a series of words, I crown myself the way mad people do, with dried flowers that remain alive in my dreams...
"Within me I return to what I am even if that's nothing. And something like tears without weeping burn in my immobile eyes, something like an anguish I'd never had impels me harshly with a dry throat. But there, I don't know what I cried, if in fact I did cry, or why it was that I didn't cry. Fiction accompanies me like my own shadow. And what I want to do is sleep." - Fernando Pessoa

And then amidst the cutted scent of freshly conquered grass Graham Greene said to me: "What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love, I would be another man: I would never have lost love."

A failure walked back to his car and typed a journal entry into the largest cesspool mankind has ever created. Thoughts and feelings have lost all their value.

Trust... Truth... Love... just punchlines to jokes that get told over and over again.