Since mid-October when the annual period for Medicare Advantage plans opens for the next year’s enrollment opens up I have been working quite a bit of overtime. This is good when it comes to the paycheck and helping out my teammates as we bury ourselves in the mountain of work that comes at us but this week it seems I hit a wall and have throttled back by overtime hours. I could feel that I was perilously closed to igniting a chain of migraines and that would be no good for me or my work. Now, getting back to a normal schedule I can resume some of the activities I have placed on hold such as more writing, I never fully stopped but drastically reduced the hours, attend writer group meetings (virtually of course), and perhaps even relax a little.

This is a good day to initiate this transition. Today is my sweetie-wife’s birthday and our 14th wedding anniversary. Definitely not a day for overtime and rising out of a warm bed at 5:30 am.

Just a few random quick thoughts before I head out to my day-job.

Katla ended well. While one of the characters provided a scientific sounding explanation for the strange events and doppelgangers a few selected shots and sequences I think refute his theory. In my opinion the entire Netflix series is well worth watching.

The Republican Party continues its drift towards authoritarianism. I say drift because I believe that most elected pols are not choosing their direction but rather utterly terrified of their base and loses their positions are pushed by the currents that are generated by the most devoted bad actors. At this time nearly the entire party is comprised of invertebrates.

Next month is the Horrible Imaginings Film Festival which last year was entirely virtual and this year attendees can choose to be in person or online. I have my tickets and plan to be in person at the Frida Theater in Santa Ana California.

People who have heard me talk about story construction know the importance I place on endings. The end of the tale is where theme, plot, and story unify into a meaningful and satisfying whole. It is also where David Lowery’s The Green Knight fails in its quest to be great cinema.

The Green Knight a cinematic adaptation of the Arthurian legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, starring Dev Patel as Gawain, nephew of the king, who I the script is never named, who longs for the honor and respect of a knight but who spends more time in brothers than at mass. During Christmas celebrations the mysterious Green Knight, played in perfect casting by Ralph Ineson, offers up a game to the king and his Round Table Knights. He shall let one of them strike any blow they wish and claim his war axe as their prize but in one year’s time they must seek him out and receive a blow from him equal to the one they delivered. Gawain, desperate for a tale worthy of retelling, steps forward and delivers what should have been a mortal blow but magic is at work and the Green Knight is not killed. Gifting the prize to Gawain the Green Knight departs leaving the young man with the quest to seek him out at the next Christmas and receive his mortal strike. The years passes quickly and at the next Yule Gawain departs to find his destiny with the majority of the film’s two hour run time devoted to his travels, encounters, and adventures under the growing shadow of his doom.

The Green Knight is a lyrical, symbolic, and metaphorical piece of cinema. The cinematography is lush, colorful, and mysterious with every frame a lovely painting of light, hue, and shadow. This is not a film shot to be clear but to be beautiful and in that goal is succeeds beyond measure. The performances, save Patel’s, are not meant as realistic human portrayals but rather expressions of the mythic folklore presented on the screen leaving on Gawain’s as the emotive naturalistic performance. The film takes place in a world of magic, monsters, and mystery but while special effects are utilized in the telling of the tale, they are not the drivers of the experience. The overall mood of the film is contemplative, and it seeks to burrow into the ultimate human condition, knowledge of our mortality, rather than distract with spectacle.

Where The Green Knight falls is in a rewriting not merely a reinterpretation of the legend’s conclusion and in doing so stripped away the myth’s meaning ending on a confusing, ambiguous conclusion that failed to satisfy. The more familiar you are with the original myth the more likely the ending is going to anger you. Subtle establishment of silent characters would lead someone familiar with the tale to expect the traditional end only to have it stripped away.

I enjoyed The Green Knight, but the altered ending spoiled what might have been a masterpiece of mythological cinema.

The Green Knight, released from A24 pictures, is currently playing in theaters.

The Collapsed Condos: I think we’ll find that in addition of a cocktail of events and conditions that some form of corruption was involved. Cursed with a vivid imagination it’s all too easy for me to visualize being jolted awake as my room fell and then being crushed to death. Horrifying

Cosby: The turn on details and it certainly looks like the DA missed/ignored a detail that unraveled the entire prosecution. I have no doubts about his guilt.

The Former Guy: The Manhattan DA has arrested the CFO of the Former Guy’s organization and the financial crimes appears to go back decades and decades. Here’s where the Former Guy is not a cause but a symptom. The lax enforcement of laws against the wealthy has thoroughly corrupted our system. A robust and fair enforcement regime would have not only prosecuted the crimes much earlier for the former guy and others it would have prevented the travesty that was his election.

I woke up with a headache, going to work, but no real thoughts today.

I have been suffering eye strain headaches so the posting here might be a little sporadic this week. So here are just some random thoughts.

• The Netflix movie Stowaway is not good science and not engaging fiction. Just streaming something else.
• Game of Death, a horror movie about seven young adults playing a boardgame that compels them to kill people or die themselves, is even worse and I did not finish it. More than 10 percent of the movie’s running time is wasted up front and watching the characters party but without performing any establishment of character development.
• The GOP doesn’t care if you die. Remember that in the voting booth.
• 20 years on The Wire is still spectacularly good television.
• WorldCon this year has been moved to December and I have no intent of experiencing Washington DC in winter. This makes me sad.

June 2020 Craig my friend of nearly 40 years died from COVID-19. This was a hard blow and personally the worst effect from the pandemic. We had not seen each other since early March for what we did not know would be our last session of the Space Opera game I ran for my friends and on my smartphone was the last text I had sent him in early February.

In the months after his death, I never found the will, the heart, the closure to delete that text conversation. It sat there with other texts always on that tiny screen.

Yesterday his name vanished from the text conversation replaced by the cell’s number. I am assuming that Craig’s cell phone number has been reclaimed by the network and is ready to be recycled to a new user. It is logical, it is practical, it is required that these things happen, and it is an instigator of fresh grief.

Technology changes culture sometime is massive disruptive ways, the automobile did more than scatter communities it shattered the standard human family, and sometimes in small way we don’t notice fully as they happen. Several times now I have become aware of friends’ and acquaintances’ deaths by a post on their Facebook wall by their families a method both immediate and impersonal. This tiny thing, my friend’s name vanishing from my device, it a passage to another period in my life without his presence, without his bad puns, and without his unlimited generosity. An unalterable fact of life is that it goes on. It does not pause, it does not stop for our loss, our pain, our grief, and it sweeps us along.

Always.