quit your hollerin' woman, if you keep runnin' that mouth i'm a gonna take you in the back and screw yaso anyway, this girl by the pool is flirting with LouEllen and he says, "well, i'm waiting for my wife".
"oh, is that why you keep looking out the window?"
"well, that and to see what's comin."
"you can never tell what's comin though, how about a beer?"
"i know what comes after beer,"
"more beer?" (smile)
it's left (relatively) to the viewer's imagination what happens next, *(and the editing segue to the next scene still has me a little intrigued, it is FAST, almost like it can't wait or that the previous scene somehow didn't happen). In any case, the next we see of our hero, he is toast...dead.
The second instance is of the evil villan Sugar. Apparently, he waits for the mother of LouEllen's wife to die before "visiting" her. She, along with the rest of us, had the uncanny feeling that "it" was not over yet. so Sugar tells her that he's here because he made a promise to LouEllen,
"i gave my word"
"that doesn't make sense, why would you promise LouEllen that you would kill me?"
"i gave him the chance to save you, but he chose to save himself instead"
"no, not the way you said it"
"..."
"you don't have to do this you know"
"everybody always says that" ....
in any case, in my opinion she is toast. the indicator for this is that when he leaves the house he checks his shoes. this isn't the first time that he's been careful not to get blood on his shoes or himself (see woody harelson scene or the mexican in the bathtub for 2 quick supporting scenes). in any case, as hes driving down the street after (supposedly) killing LouEllen's wife, he's in a random car wreck and completely f#&k's up his arm, with the bone coming out of the socket.
something just hit me about these two events. i mean, the whole movie is really violent, sure. but the death of the hero was a shock to me (which shouldn't have been, he really did have it coming in a reality point of view). and the car wreck was so OUT OF NOWHERE that you just have to wonder if the director/storyteller had the inclination of somehow pointing out to everybody that there is some kind of karma or justice for going out of your way to mess with girls or something. now that i think about it, these two instances were the only ones that i can think of where a feminine character was harmed (in the swimming pool scene i suppose it is the wife which is emotionally harmed, while she is actually MURDERED by sugar in the scene preceding the car wreck, which is really messed up since it somehow indicates that you get punished more for hurting a girl emotionally than to kill her???)
so, all of this also kind of reminds me about coincidences or karma in general. by coincidence i mean the things that happen to everybody, a bunch of times in a given week or day, where it just seems "too good to be true" or in other words that the thing happens in such a way that you say to yourself "there is no way that that was a natural occurrence, but must have some deeper underlying reason which i'm not aware of".
some examples:
you drive from your house to school and hit all the lights green, and as you get to campus a car pulls out of a spot right in front of your building, and as you enter your building the elevator dings and you walk in, etc.
you get in a fight with your sweetie, your mom yells at you, your dad is having a bad day, your best friend is out of town, and your pet has a bad rash and is highly irritable.
you run out of beer and its sunday. (this one ALWAYS friggin happens to me!)
Now, the thing is, i remember lots of times in my life that i've said stuff (to my dad, for instance) like..."man, this stuff is always happening, like a lot more often than it really should". Lately, i can't really say that as much, since things lately have pretty much been happening about the way i would expect them. so what is that stuff? in other words, why is it that "when it rains it pours". why does good and bad stuff seem to clump together. why do problems multiply and cause other problems?
i guess the obvious answer to this is that when problems happen, unless you deal with them fast (and even then) you end up spending more time dealing with a problem and less watching out for the potential problems. that is, when you are allocating limited resources (time) to dealing with situations that are getting out of hand (due to random fluctuations in the way things work or don't work) then you are less apt to be able to spend time preventing other problems from happening or preventing small problems from becoming big problems.
example: if you had a really long, tiring day, you don't want to do the dishes. and then since the dishes are in the sink, it's not convienient to wash the dinner pans and plates cause the sink is full. but this depresses you so you don't feel like doing anything except sitting around watching TV, and the cycle continues...
in the same line of thought, if you have a big project that NEEDS to get done, why is it that its easier to work on it when you have already been working on it. in other words, why is STARTING a big project put off to the point that it is a problem, when if you would have just started it earlier it wouldn't have been as big of a problem? wouldn't a rational, logical person know that as long as they start early their life is going to be easier? but rather than act logically, a logical person will avoid starting it (for some unknown reason). maybe im projecting. maybe im the only one who does this stuff, but somehow i really doubt it.
isn't it true that we tend to believe that everybody else is like us on some fundamental level? I mean, its just easier to imagine that most people (especially given similar circumstances, age, station, etc.) will have similar perspectives. I mean, although theoretically it is just as likely that each person views the world in COMPLETELY DIFFERENT although consistent with each other perspective, it is much easier to assume that "blue is blue" and "a tree looks basically the same to me as it does to you". it almost makes more sense, if you focus on the idea of perspective, to realize that in all likelihood everybody has a unique perspective and perhaps a completely different way of understanding the world we live in, in such a way that we are still compatible with each other even though if i could "see through your eyes" for 10 minutes i would probably go insane since what i think of as a "tree in a golden field in the sunshine with blue clouds and a fierce breeze" you would view as "clown face spinning kalidiscope with dancing pony fishermen on a pitchfork and an upside down kevin costner". maybe this is completely silly, but i think we can all agree that there's no way to actually get inside anybody's head and check out what the world actually does look like from their eyes, so maybe my theory is just as good as the "obvious" one that a tree is a tree, and a clown is a clown, funny is funny, and that's that.
speaking of funny
it seems to me that the things that are most likely to be funny have to have some basis in truth.
in other words...imagine a funny song. if you can't ill try to help. it starts out as a song should, and it leads you from a chord progression that "makes sense", with some melody and a counter-point, a simple rythum that is repeated, and so on....and then BLAMMO hits a chord that 'doesn't belong', but is just close enough that your ear can hear what was supposed to be there and also that the thing that you just heard is WRONG.
if you've never heard this kind of a musical joke, i suggest you find someone who can tell it to you, since it somehow captures a joke without words, movement (body language), or even visual effects at all. but it does pick you up, take you on a ride, set you down, and you are different for the good it did you.
but this brings up a point: what are the conditions for something to be funny? by my example one of them is this: the person listening to the joke needs to somehow understand what was SUPPOSED to happen. that is, they need to understand the TRUTH for the joke to make sense. the thing about a good musical joke, is that you don't need to know any musical theory for the joke to be funny, but only have listened to some music at some point in your life. (so as to have some kind of basic understanding of how things "usually" go)
of course, a musician would have more "available" jokes when playing for another musician.
Example: The functions party joke.
one weekend, some of the functions decided they were going to have a party and invite a bunch of their friends. the party was held at sin's and 3x+1's house. almost everybody went, there was natural log, and all the trig functions, there was polynomials of arbitrarily large degree, and of course there was 1/x (the lush!). but 3x+1 noticed that e^x was standing in the corner, moping as usual. being the nice map that he was, he went up to e^x and said, "hey e^x, why don't you integrate yourself into the party," to which e^x replied, "it wouldn't matter".
now, if you get the joke AND you think it's funny, then there is a very good chance that you are a nerd and/or a mathematician (probably just and needed there). if you got the joke and didn't think its funny then you need to lighten up, and if you didn't get the joke then you need to take calc I. in any case, there is a point to this...
a joke has some kind of "background" or foundation which is the setting for the joke (music/math, etc.) and the listener needs to have a knowledge of the "background" for the joke to even have a chance of being funny. but what else is needed for the joke to be funny... why are some jokes funny and then you change them a little bit and then they're not funny anymore?
timing! i'm not sure exactly how this works, but the timing is very important. even if you have heard a joke before, and you know exactly what's going to happen (sometimes this even makes the joke better), so long as the timing is good, the joke will be funny. what is timing you ask? that's a lot harder for me to wrap my head around, but i think it's probably somebody else's job anyway.
one night before cristmas, several years ago, i was laying in bed and i had my eyes closed, and was rubbing my eyes and saw something like a laser beam flash across my eyelids. i opened my eyes and tried to find the laser beam. it wasn't "real" in the strictest sense of the word. but i found it nevertheless. i had to focus a lot (mentally) but i was able to bend that laser (it was like a spaghetti noodle the way it didn't want to be looked down straight), but as long as you got it right down your eye, if you looked down the center, you could hold it there. inside that laser red light, i saw a bunch of floating heads of girls. probably they were all about my age. i purposely didn't look for my girlfriend. i introduced myself to the floating heads and said "if you ever see me in real life, you should say hi and flirt with me". sometimes it works, i probably got to about 2,000 heads or so, but i've never been able to replicate the laser. i'm sure that my wife was one of the heads, though, since there is really no other reason i can think of that she should have thought she was going to marry me when we first met, i was a pretty strange ranger. my old best friend said that she was the only one who was able to make me less of a nut, and for that i guess i should be thankful. this kind of reminds me of an idea about the way that people don't really change that much even from being little little kids, unless something hugely dramatic/damaging happens. but i guess i can save Something for a later day, i guess i'll leave you with this:
i remember the first time i could read. i was on a bus in the city, going to school with my dad. i was looking out the window and i realized for the first time that i could understand that that sign said "cigar". i said, "dad! that says cigar!" i kept it up "hey! that says pizza!", "sale! that says sale!", and so on. there wasn't a long boundary period, but for that short time i distinctly remember that i was able to comprehend what it meant to NOT know how to read. that i could STILL look at the signs as though i DIDN'T know what they said. anymore, i can only guess what i could have thought if i didn't know how to read when i look at a sign. just like i can't fully appreciate what it means to have the thoughts of a child. without the math, the logic, the music, the knowledge of art, economics, philosophy, war, chaos, love, pain, (but not grammar nor spelling). to be innocent intellectually. one time, i asked my mom, "mom, where do all the giants live"
"what giants hunny"
"all the giant people"
"what giant people, dear"
"well, im small, but you are taller than me since you are older, so the people that are older than you must be taller still, and the people older than them must be really tall...giants! but i haven't seen any, where do they live?"
yes sal, where do they live...where indeed.
