Watch it Falling
I'm bundled up as tight as I can be in my black wool jacket, with the collar pulled up high in a way that evokes a suspiciously metro Eurotrash villain in my head. The resemblance only gets worse with the addition of a days worth of stubble, black-framed aviator sunglasses, and black fingerless gloves, which of course I am wearing. Every time I see my reflection in a passing window I half expect my morning to devolve into a surprise confrontation with a square-jawed hero type, him aiming a nickle-plated .45 at me and shouting recriminations, me saying something pithy and firing my heretofore unseen sub-machinegun into the air in order to send the crowd at the grocery store into a panic and subsequently clog the line of sight between us with innocent bystanders while I make my getaway. Because when you hear automatic weapons fire nearby you certainly wouldn't want to drop to the ground and try to avoid getting shot or anything. No, clearly the best thing to do is wail at the top of your lungs and run about waving your arms in the air like survivors of a short bus that rolled over on the freeway.
I didn't start out a villain, I just couldn't bring myself to keep factoring allowances for other people's stupidity into my schemes. I remember as a child I mistook this antipathy for a general distaste for the extras in movies, with their sly glances toward the camera and bursts of cartoonishly exaggerated body movement the second that they registered that the lens was pointing at them. Even then I realized that crowd scenes were basically just large gatherings of either bored locals or people waiting to be "discovered" by some inexplicably kind-hearted Hollywood bigwig, and fuck you, actors. Your greatest ambition is to get paid and lavished with undue affection for depicting people who are generally too stupid to live.
I still want to go back to Hollywood and work in "the industry". Isn't that a hoot? Fortunately my greatest ambition lies directly on the other side of the camera, where I will be among my own actor-hating kind. That's a bit of a generalization really... I don't hate all actors, just the ones who earnestly believe that they deserve to have fame and/or fortune fall into their laps any day now. I like actors who pay their dues and claw their way to the top. I may not like them as people, or even as actors, but I can accord them a degree of respect for managing to carve a living out of that teeming cesspit. It's roughly equivalent to the amount of respect I give to people who survived the Klondike gold rush without freezing to death on the road or dying of scurvy after following their idiot dreams of finding fabulous wealth waiting for them in the fucking wilderness.
Now is about the point where the coffee wears off just enough for me to remember that I sat down to write about something else. The walk back home after buying coffee was odd. Everything is very dark all of the sudden, the rain intermittent as the gray and white clouds race in from the coast and skim the top of my city on their way to the mountains in the East. The damp has driven everyone indoors, and I find myself walking alone through small blizzards of yellow and orange leaves shaken loose from the trees that line my street. I live directly above the core of downtown but I can go for blocks at a time without seeing another person. The few I come across are always hunched over and glancing about furtively as they rush from one bit of shelter to another. Something in the air has set my mind to racing and caused the hairs on the back of my neck to stand on end, and I'm thinking to myself that today was perhaps not the best sort of day to go for a walk while listening to the 28 Weeks Later soundtrack.
Bang.