Yeah, I woke up this morning thinking of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Who doesn’t?
It’s been pointed out that I’ve been gone a while. That’s happened before, of course. I have great admiration for bloggers who keep on pumping out the posts, week after week or day after day. Once upon a time, I tried blogging every day and the results weren’t so hot. There are just days when you don’t got nothing to say, and it’s better not to say it.
Of course, the problem this time around hasn’t been a lack of things to talk about, it has purely and simply been a lack of motivation. You’ve probably noticed that there’s a bit of a pandemic going on and the country’s gradual slide into fascism has picked up significant speed. This has given rise to a new term for a new neurosis, doomscrolling. Relentlessly scrolling through Facebook and Twitter to find the most recent horrible news, the newest outrage, until you reach the end of your cache, then refreshing and starting all over again from the top.
I’ve been doing this. I’m trying to break myself of this pernicious habit. Maybe coming here and bugging you will help.
I’m in a halfway decent spot – so far, my main job allows me to work from home. My two side hustles dried up, but at least I can still manage to get bills paid. Mostly. Even that’s in a bit of a perilous state now, for reasons a bit too complex to go into here, so add that into the Doom Pile.
Stress has done its expected damage to my mental health. I’m still medicated, which helps, but my ability to focus was thrown into a wood chipper. My reaction to a Stay Home order should have been “Great! More time to watch movies!” but for several weeks I was unable to watch anything longer than 30 minutes. So thank God for Castlevania and the new Harley Quinn cartoon. And, more recently, the return of Doom Patrol.
Oh, Charlize, I have failed you.
This has abated somewhat but still crops up. For instance, I tried to watch The Old Guard a couple of weeks ago, and still had to tap out after a half hour. That movie had Charlize Theron wielding a battleaxe. That is two big red check marks on the Dr. Freex list and it still couldn’t engage me.
Then the next day I watched the new blu-rays for Horror of Dracula and Mystery of the Wax Museum back to back. Go figure.
Then again, Old Guard was showing me a bunch of familiar tropes. I was already familiar with the other two movies, but I went into them mainly for the restoration and gorgeous transfers. There’s no secret that the best way I found to survive the last four years with my fragile sanity intact was re-watching Marvel movies (I needed to see good triumph over bad as violently as possible), so The Old Guard‘s setup was all too familiar, even though it’s not strictly a superhero movie. The familiarity of gothic horror was quite welcoming, in retrospect.
My New Precioussssssss
I have quite the backlog of things to view and pontificate upon, if the world would just stop ending for a few minutes. I went into hock to buy that Al Adamson box set because of course I did. I would expect no less of myself. That’s a lot to get through. You know, if.
I should go get some work done now. I’m hoping to produce some capsule reviews in the next day or so. If certain dumbasses would refrain from saying something stupid.
I should probably just close those two tabs, shouldn’t I?
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drfreex.com 
So, are you Danny DeVito or Arnold Schwarzenegger in this post? It’s been pretty much exactly the same here, save for I hate Facebook and refuse to scroll there unless someone sends me a message and even then, it takes maybe two days to check that message. I may kill my account there at some point. Twitter barely keeps me there. but I do get it’s a total bubble and more toil and trouble if you get too trapped into it. Still, it’s easy to get rabbit-holed there. for sure,
Been buying a small load of films myself, as I’m replacing a few I gave away a short while ago with the intent of streamlining (hah!). That didn’t work, but the new collection is nice. I just saw an ebay posting for the two Marvel flicks I haven’t yet seen and it’s almost a no-brainer because both are cheap enough that I can slibe them into the stacks and not feel too guilty. But I may end up holding off because of all those special features on the new stuff I just got that will keep me occupied.
Yeah, I have a few too many reviews in assorted states of done-ness, but it’s kind of hard to concentrate with the current craziness, that’s for sure.
Have you ever seen me? I definitely Danny DeVito.
My job kinda shackles me to Facebook, since the community organizations I report on use it for outreach. I have to admit that switching over to Twitter can be a breath of fresh air, because I followed a bunch of wiseasses years ago. They keep me going.
WHO KNEW THAT BEING INFORMED WOULD BE SO DANGEROUS?
Great to read you again. Your (hopefully) temporary aversion to viewing is shared by me.No idea why.
Hopefully we’ll both be completely recovered when the the “Great Temporal Cinema Recovery Project” is completed.
(You may not be aware of this great global project to recover and restore every frame of film and inch of tape ever used to record an image or sound, respectively. This is done via a process that allows one to virtually reach into the real past to retrieve a perfect copy of any media existing at any time. The only downside to the process is that, to my knowledge, it exists solely in my head.)
Regardless of the ridiculous constraints of our present reality, chin up. It’s always great to read you.
Odd question: Do you subscribe to Shudder? Worth a look.
I *did* subscribe to Shudder, once upon a time. I watched everything there that interested me, got bored and cancelled. It’s been long enough for them to restock, I’m sure I’ll return at some point.
side note: Super envious of the Al Adamson box set. Have you seen the Blood and Flesh documentary? Talk about life imitating and exceeding fiction in bizarre fashion.
I had actually seen that before ordering the box set – it increased my hunger for it exponentially. Man, the tone shift from the career section to the real-life crime section made it hit even harder.