Strange form of life

My way of dealing with Ema's death is apparently this: sit around on my ass all day attempting to "master" Okami, spend money on expensive DVDs, and fly into periodic fits of violent rage.

Violent rage, on me, is generally pretty contained. Slightly sweaty, maybe. Maybe some twitching.

Like Wednesday afternoon, after my mum and I came back from the vet without our cat, I decided I needed very badly to rent the Criterion Collection DVD release of Dazed and Confused.

I don't know why. Except that Dazed is a movie I grew up with in still-hippy-centric Kitsilano, where it was beloved by all my then-friends. It's the highschool experience I narrowly missed pretending to have. It's entertaining and weirdly genuine for a studio-financed movie about teenagers. And it has a really good soundtrack.

Rogers didn't have it. Blockbuster (ha-ha-ha) didn't have it. So I drove to Videomatica and asked them if they had it, and they didn't. The computer said they did, but they didn't. They only had the regular DVD edition. Which is relatively crap. When I watch a stoner movie, I want the director-approved definitive special edition double-disc set with all available supplemental features, thank you. Otherwise I might as well just get stoned. And where's the qoutable dialogue in that, fuckers? Eh? NOWHERE.

Then I looked in the sales section of Videomatica, and there it was. All sixty Canadian dollars of it. And I wanted it, but didn't want to pay for it, and the rage came on. Because they should have had it available to rent, damn it. And my cat was dead.

Which made me wonder, driving home without my movie, if any of the people I see in the city sometimes, the angry people in cars who maybe honk their horns at nothing, and the pissed-off people in stores, aren't really in some kind of actual pain.

I have a friend whose little brother died of cancer, and she told me that during the last year of his life she must have got about a hundred parking tickets. She just stopped caring about legal parking. Legal parking made no sense to her. As a result, she got into a lot of fights with towtruck drivers and metermaids, or the non-gender-specific version of metermaids, and more than once she got into her car as a man was attempting to tow it and drove away without looking back.

Now that towtruck driver was probably thinking "What a righteous bi-atch", but knowing my friend and knowing what she went through, I think she was a goddamn hero.

All I'm saying is, people who lose a cat they loved, or something so much worse, should get to wear a sash. The sash should read "Special Privileges". Maybe there should be different sashes for different losses. And everyone should recognize the sash and respect it. That's all I'm saying.

In any case.

Today I didn't go to class. I did, however, get a cheque in the mail from the government (or gummymint) for fifty-eight dollars. Why, I have no idea, but I promptly drove to the bank and then out to the A&B Sound on Southwest Marine, out in the sticks, to purchase Dazed and Confused.

But they didn't have it, so I drove back across town to Videomatica. Filled with rage.

And when I finally got home and watched it? It was good.