Staying Up Late

 Yesterday I was slower than normal all day and accomplished little I might have wanted to do on a Saturday. This was because I stayed up Friday night much later than normal.

I had come home to an empty and quiet apartment, collapsed onto the sofa. I hadn't even opened the blinds in the living room. Such is the benign neglect I fall into, unsupervised. I proceeded to stare off into space for a good amount of time, in thoughts from the drive home. Finally I had decided to watch television. "Hello TCM," I thought to myself. I hadn't watched TCM in many months. When I lived alone, either in an apartment or on the road, it was my constant companion. I once joked that I left it on my t.v. for two years straight without changing the channel.

I barely remember how to turn the television on. Jessica does that, and navigates the channels. The couch is her place. We have three remotes. There is a secret combination that turns on the television, the cable box, and then brings up the cable tv channels. Fortunately I remembered how to do it and soon I had an old Jane Fonda movie from 1963 (Sunday in New York, movie was old, Fonda was very young) which I'd seen before, but I watched it through to the ending, where she marries the right person instead of the wrong person, while preserving her virtue. It was kind of old fashioned movie plot that would go out of fashion very quickly in the next few years, which makes it an interesting cultural product to me of a lost time in civilization.

The evening theme was movies about the paranormal, as the next day was National Paranormal Day (I just looked it up). They started the evening with Poltergeist, which I had seen in 1982 in high school when it first came out. It was very fun to see it again and absorb how much of a satire of 1980s suburban life it is. I noticed many little touches of foreshadowing there were in the opening minutes. That's one of the joys of seeing a movie again, to notice those little touches that you missed the first time. 

The movie ended at eight and usually that would be where I'd start getting ready for bed, but I wound up staying up to 11 to see the next two movies, which culminated in a cult horror movie that came out in 1980, which I didn't see at the time but was very popular and talked about. It's a low budget Canadian feature called Scanners about people with the ability to use their minds to cause psychic attacks on others, to the point of making their heads explode. It was very popular among kids I knew, in the way memes are today, with people imitating various scenes.  [aside: It occurs to me that the whole trope of one's head exploding from being overwhelmed with information, including the gesture using one's hands, and literally an emoji as well, probably originates from a scene in this film.]

I had been left out, and now after forty-five years I could plug that hole in my cultural experience from when I was sixteen, erasing the old wound of being left out, which is a horrible feeling at that age but which today is something I actively pursue. When I used to watch TCM a lot, this was a big motivation---to check off boxes of cultural experiences, not from my youth, but from the history of movies in the 20th century.  I had done it so successfully that now I am an expert in the history of Hollywood cinema. It was passingly pleasing to do that once again. 

It was worth watching for the street footage of Montreal in that era, especially the opening scene in the subway, which has a distinctive French-Canadian look.  It reminds me of Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris, which is full of escalator tubes and feels very foreign. It was worth watching for that alone. I wonder what it looks like today.

"Scanners uses Montreal’s modernist architecture as a means of portraying a dystopian future. As a movie about the next step in human evolution, the film treats the institutional qualities of architecture as dehumanizing. Similar elements are also featured in Cronenberg’s other films but here, they also stand firm as representations of a corporate-controlled evolutionary future." source I visited Montreal once in 1996 and actually went to a baseball game at the old Olympic Stadium, just for the experience of it.

As I went to bed finally at 11, I had plugged my cultural experience hole. I slept in the next day to half past six, when it was fully light out. Being out of cream, I ordered breakfast on my phone app at the McDonalds nearby and walked over to it. I felt as decadent and slovenly as I have felt in years. 

When I was done with my breakfast in McDonalds I lingered just to be around people. I decided I wanted another cup of coffee.  Should I order it with my phone app right inside McDonalds itself? My app didn't seem to want to cooperate so I went up to the counter, which was unmanned. I tried to use one of the electronic kiosks. They have an entirely new interface and the simple act of ordering a cup of coffee with cream required five screens and ten button pushes. When I was finally successful, I believed, I looked for but could not find a button that would allow me to check and pay. There was only a button to "log in". Log into what? 

I decided that by gosh I'm going to order at the counter like we did back in 1982, as if it's my god-given right, and fortunately there was someone there to take my order the old fashioned way. I mentioned my frustration with the kiosk, which to be honest was so severe that it would prevent me from ever trying again. I learned from the manager that it's a new interface that synchronizes with one's phone app, which apparently is the way you are supposed to order now in all cases. I was supposed to hit the button "view order" and then it would allow me to check out. Of course! So obvious! The whole thing felt like an artifact of the breakdown of civilization, the effort it took to get a cup of coffee at McDonalds.