Tales of the Fedora

Despite my best efforts, a family tragedy has forced me to cross the threshold and set foot back in my old home. The circumstances of my departure were grim; I resolved to myself that I would not go back. But I guess some things are beyond petty resolutions.

My paternal grandmother passed away this weekend. The funeral was yesterday, and at its conclusion my father and I took some of the flowers to my aunt’s. This is the same aunt who bought our house five years ago. It was a dark time.

But now I see just what they’ve changed; I see just how different it is. It’s no longer home.

I have 27 years of memories there; that’s all I have anymore anyway. I can’t say that I’ll never return, but I’m not going to just ‘drop in’ to say hi. As they say, you can never go home again. I don’t want to. It’s not a place anymore, but a time. Coordinates within existence that I dream of traversing.

All I need is a blue box.

There’s still nothing really worth writing about.

Just letting you know.

Sorry.

They say it’s always darkest before the dawn. This, then, is the longest night ever …

I realized today that, for the last couple of days at least, I’ve been getting paid for using After Effects.

I’m actually kinda happy about that.

I was looking over my movie collection the other day, and I came to the realization that I have several DVDs that I’ve never watched. Some of them are movies that I’ve seen years ago in other formats, others are gifts from various friends or family members — but still films I really like. Some are just movies that I bought when they were on a good sale but never had a chance to watch them.

So, I’m thinking about starting something like “a movie a night”; I’ll go through all the feature films (and a couple of the shorts) that I’ve got in my collection, one by one, over the course of several weeks. To make it interesting, instead of working through it alphabetically, or by favorites, I figured I’d start chronologically, based on original theatrical release. Hence the first several will be early Alfred Hitchcock films from the 1930′s.

Certainly I don’t have a diverse collection, but I figure this way it’ll illustrate the evolution of filmmaking and stories over the last 80 years or so. I’m thinking about starting on June 21, the first day of summer. I’ve got over 100 films to go through, so this movie marathon will last a few months. Maybe I’ll stick with it.