2021/12/06

Here I am, once again, waiting for a Q64 bus that never showed up. Yes, good people of Flushing, social distancing at the bus stop is good. But if you stand fifteen feet apart, and more and more people come, don't be shocked if they fill in the gaps.

Dear NYC MTA, you're supposed to be working to prevent COVID, not making it worse with buses packed to the gills because the previous ones couldn't be bothered to be punctual.

I took a blogging break over the weekend, but nothing Earth-shattering happened to write about. Just the same old continual erosion.

I re-watched Breakfast of Champions last night. It's a decent adaptation of a Vonnegut novel that's difficult to adapt. Kudos to Bruce Willis for always being willing to take on different types of roles - love the comb-over, and Albert Finney was perfectly cast as Vonnegut's alter-ego, Kilgore Trout. A throw-away line in the movie, "Look around you, isn't this nice?" was something Vonnegut often said: Every once in a while we should stop, look around us, and - if things are nice - acknowledge it. It can be very easy to get so wrapped up in our hurts and anxieties that we forget to do this.

I'll give it a try:

"This is a very nice and relatively clean R train that's just sitting here in the tunnel as other trains whoosh by on the other tracks. I have a seat, which is nice. It's not too hot or cold, which is nice. The gentleman who stank to high heaven got off at the last stop, which is nice. I have friends and family whom I love that love me back. That's nice. I always leave extra early in case all the MTA's failures would otherwise make me late for work, so despite all their foibles, I'll still get there just in time... that's nice."

One of the best parts of the novel which really wasn't adaptable is that it's full of summaries of Trout's creative but completely uncommercial stories, which are meta-fictionally published in "beaver-books," aka, porn magazines. I'm guessing that these are ideas that Vonnegut had developed over the years, but knew would never sell. (And for the record, Venus on the Half Shell was not written by Vonnegut under Trout's name, it was penned by Philip José Farmer, but I digress.)

"'What is the purpose of life?'

'To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool!'"

TTFN

-Tony