A post in which I just can't stand it any more

My ass was growing to the couch. The house is disgusting. I've been looking at the four walls, and daytime TV, for days. Health or not, I had to do something or lose my fucking mind.

I woke up about 5am, hungry, of course. I got up, made some breakfast, and went back to bed.

When I woke back up about 9am, I decided to go to the flea market. Not my brightest idea, but it was warmer today and I looked like hammered shit. There were very few places that I looked good enough to go that were open. Plus I haven't had any glass in weeks.

I walked around, taking it easy, and just enjoying people-watching and being out of the house. I talked to Mom on the phone. I found one saucer. That was it. But that was enough. I didn't know what it was, but the color was right, and I knew it was Federal Glass because it was marked. Plus I knew Justin would like the pattern. He likes Federal Glass anyway, and this saucer had a little "rope" pattern around the edge that I thought might be just enough of a jaunty detail for him without being too baroque.

When I got home, I soaked and scraped the layers of filth off of it. It had apparently had a price tag taped to it sometime around the bronze age, after which some kind of goo had been spilled on it. The tag had been taped on with that wonderful cellophane tape that the tape backing peels off, leaving a layer of gummy adhesive behind. After I finally got that all off, I just typed in "Federal Glass" and "rope" into the internet browser, and came right up with the pattern. It's not a very expensive piece, worth about $2 (I paid $1), but it is a pretty thing, it was satisfying to bring it home not knowing what it was and be able to ID it, and it was happy to rescue it from the junk pile. It made me happy to have a new piece.

Colonial Fluted "Rope" saucer in green by Federal Glass Company, circa 1928-1933

I rested for a bit, since I hadn't been out of the house and done any walking in days.

Then I decided to clean this place up a bit. I had to dust the desk to take the photo of my saucer. That is one of my most hated chores, for some reason. I vacuumed the carpets, did a lot of detail vacuuming (baseboards, under furniture, etc) in the living room, and some in the bedroom. I cleaned the cat box for the first time in days. They were thrilled. I cleaned up the kitchen, and started finishing up the wash I had left undone last week. To top it all off I cleaned the toilet. It made me feel so much better to have things look a bit better around here.

While I was cleaning, I watched Thank You for Smoking, a movie I had been meaning to watch, but hadn't seen yet. I really intended to read the book first. It was interesting for me to see the movie, having been raised by a dedicated tobacco employee myself. My dad was really into the whole freedom issue about smoking when he worked for Philip Morris. I still want to read the book, as I strongly suspect that a "Hollywood ending" was tacked on to the movie. The reviews I had read about the book described a much darker story.

Afterwards, I took a long hot shower. That was wonderful.

In all clean clothes, with the washer going, I decided to reward myself with pizza for dinner. I had been really craving it. And apparently there's no point in my watching my weight. I was watching another movie I had been meaning to see on TCM, Johnny Guitar. I hate Westerns. I hate the mui-macho manhood posturing, the formulaic plots, the horrible dialogue, and all those endless gunfights. Only to see Joan Crawford in one of her most awkward movies could I sit through it. Had Crawford not gone on to make so many other bad movies, I could say it was her Sextette. As it was though, there are many similarities.

It was (well it shoulda been, anyway) the last gasp of a woman who refused to acknowledge her age and take appropriate parts. She is about a hundred years older than her leading man. Despite the careful makeup, her obviously still slender body, and close-ups I'm sure it took hours to set up the lighting on, it's obvious she's still playing a romantic lead when she should be playing the lead's mother. The fact that she is supposed to be a siren/man-trap for all the men in the movie seems to be something that even they have a hard time playing with a straight face. The scenes she plays against Mercedes McCambridge, however, crackle with the electricity and the realism that the love scenes lack. By all accounts, by the end of the shoot, she and Mercedes really loathed each other. That totally comes through. Apparently many of their scenes together had to be filmed separately and spliced together later. It makes the movie very disjointed, however. Those scenes are so intense, and the rest of the movie feels so much like a read-through. Their emotion towards each other isn't really supported by the script or character development. There is some attempt to make Mercedes into an obsessed anti-Crawford zealot, but it feels like tacked-on stuff. Also, Crawford is on screen far too much for a female in a Western - even a female lead. It's an odd movie to watch. You can see Crawford's hand in the fact that she, the "bad girl", does in the end vanquish Mercedes McCambridge's character (that would never have flown when the production code was in full force), and triumphantly ends up with her man. I'm suspecting a re-write there, since they had played the whole movie as star-crossed and ultimately tragic figures. She the fallen woman trying to redeem herself, and he the gun-slinger trying and failing to change his ways. I would really have loved to have seen Barbara Stanwyck in the Mercedes role. She could've given Joan a run for her money.

By this time I was starving, and my pizza still wasn't here. The guy eventually did show up. He was hot in a scary kid of way, tattoos on both hands, and not smelling too well, but he was a good-looking guy. I ate my pizza, played on the computer, and watched part of Star Wars before turning in. Seldom have I presented such a complete picture of the computer nerd in repose.

I had a hard time getting to sleep. I've mostly slept for the last two days. But eventually I dropped off.