American Splendor and other thoughts...

[cybermule]

I went to see American Splendor tonight, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It's the story of a cartoonist, partly drama, partly interviews etc. What I really liked about it was its hopeful realism. Too many times are we told that we have the power to do anything - anyone can become president of the USA - and it's so blatantly untrue. So many people haven't got a hope in hell of doing that - it never fails to shock me just how many hellish lives we can sweep under the carpets in our so-called civilised countries. And how many more lives are just an unhappy grind, working boring jobs to make ends meet, then doing our best to forget that we do that. We all do that. Whether we do it constantly, or just dip our toes in and out of tedium, so many of us are constrained to less than the perfection that is forced down our throats as the norm we can expect if we just put in those extra few hours...

And the thing I liked about that film was that Harvey Pekar achieved what is in my opinion the more realistic and useful dream that we have the luxury of in the Western World - to get a little happiness and make a little bit of difference to others. He didn't commercialise or leave his job as a filing clerk, but he did get to squeeze a little bit of what was in his head out into the world, and to gain some happiness from doing that.

I liked the way he made comics from his wry observations on life. I identify with that. A small frustrationin my life is that I'd love to write a novel, but have nothing to write about. Only my life, and that is not happy reading.

After the age of 10, my life seemed kind of gloomy. Until then, fairly idyllic childhood as the prodigy child of heavily introverted but pleasantly hippy parents. Then they both started to drink heavily, and the 12-hour fights and arguments started with monotonous regularity. I was never hit or abused, but a decade of parents threatening suicide, hitting each other and smashing the house up was nerve-wracking. And confusing - the next day it would always be as if nothing ever happened.

My dad quit drinking when I was about 18. My mom didn't, and it came between them, along with the fact that my brother was having a terrible teenage-hood. They tried to get divorced one year, but couldn't do it, and terrible, terrible things happened that summer. I lost about 40 lbs in about 10 weeks and couldn't remember what most of my friends looked like. But then I went back to uni, and again my parents just pretended none of it had ever happened.

Then my dad's mum died, and he and my brother got into hard drugs and drinking. My dad sold his house and business and threw the entire contents away. To this day, I don't know why. It seemed like a split-second decision. Certainly, in the time it took for me to have a job interview and move to start the job, it had all gone and most of the money had been spent on drugs. When the money ran out, my brother finally moved out from home. There's no nice way to put that - it happened the exact day my dad spent his last money.

My dad carried on drinking until he died in May 2003. My brother and mom don't ever really mention him. Sometimes my mom says that it's all OK because he wanted to die. One day I'll throttle her when she acts like him wanting to die makes it all right that he did. But then she still drinks and her brain has gone. When I challenge her on it, she just says that I don't understand "her generation". Heh. Maybe I don't.

That was a gloomy couple of paragraphs - I apologise. But that was something I always wanted to get down in some sort of print. Although not public print, which was the original point that led to the diversion. Nobody really wants to read any of that, not even me. So the guy in the film that wrote comic books made me think, "hey - that's really neat. Maybe I could do that?". OK, I can't draw, but I can be quite funny. Anyway, I mingled my thoughts on the film with some random stuff that vaguley lurks behind some of my posts and resolutions for the New Year. It got long, I've watched a good film and done a lot of work on my rotten bathroom floor. As I seem to need about 14 hours sleep a night right now, I'm heading to bed.

Comments

[cybermule.livejournal.com]

Yeah - LJ is a pain at times! And yeah, I always prefer honesty, even if slightly painful, to being fibbed to. My BS detectors click in, and it makes me think even worse things than the truth.

I'm not so sure that "maybe" was valid, or maybe (heh!) you just have to go backwards to go forwards.