When I got home last night after a day of shooting and an intense day of preparation for the shoot, I was dog-tired. Speaking of dogs, it was all I could do to feed Whiskey and walk her around the block. Yes, I was that tired.
I knew that the moment I returned to my apartment I would have to face a veritable gauntlet of emails--each seeking my attention re this small thing or that that had to be answered now.
Death by a thousand cuts, by the way, has been superseded by 'death by a thousand emails.'
I knocked off one email at a time. One involved re-writing a headline that we couldn't get approved. I unravelled it about 80 times to Sunday but still couldn't get something that passed my personal muster.
Finally, after writing countless versions, I got something I didn't hate and sent it along.
My wife came home, and just as quickly went out. Leaving me alone with my emails.
'Round about eight o'clock I noticed that John Huston's "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" was playing on TCM. Would it refresh my brain--B. Traven's story, Max Steiner's music, John Huston's hard, cynical edge--mixed with a Christian soul, or Humphrey Bogart's intense unravelling.
I leaned back in my chair as if my bones had turned to #9 Fettuccini and let the movie wash over me. The direction and acting, of course, were perfect, which left me some room to think on the movie not as a story of greed set in 1930s Mexico, but as a story of New York/America in the 2017s.
How we're all working for endless mammon. Climbing torturous hills, engaging in back-breaking, dirty labor, and digging digging digging. All while bandits--Wall Street, bankers, our current government Kleptocracy, CEOs making 1000 times the salary as an ordinary working man, are lying in wait.
All in the hopes of gold.
Of which we'll never have enough.
And then, in the end, that gold, that gold without love, without trust, without friendship is nothing more than dust.
Dust that blows away and joins with the great dust into nothing but dust.
Sorry about this.
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