Matt Stoller

Here he is promoting his new film Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Yes, that’s my brother. He made it on youtube.

Best video camera ever. Well not really, but definitely for youtube stuff.

No, I was not just being nice, Catherine. Tumblr’s fine.

People just don’t like change, that’s all. Stick to your tumblr guns.

Tom Smith sings the Zombie Blues.

This is how society gets back to normal. It’s not the shocking times that matter, the moment when you see senseless tragedy or death, that determines your values, or our values as a society. All of us in the building and the neighborhood have learned about this terrible event, and absorbed it into our lives, forgotten about it even. But the man across the hall is crushed, just devastated still, and will always have a deep scar. It is how we handle it now, when no one is looking, that tells us who we are.

The event itself was unavoidable, but the cleaning chemicals and the rope lines and the grieving are what makes us human.

So I woke up this morning and outside my apartment were a bunch of cops milling around. The door to the apartment across the hall, where this nice old couple live, was open, and there were cops inside, and the man who lived there sat on the couch, glassy eyed staring at a wall.

I’m on the eighth floor, and when I went outside, half the building was cordoned off by police tape, and there was a body covered in a white sheet, which was probably his girlfriend who had fallen or jumped off the balcony. It was jarring, one might say, and lots of people were speaking in hushed tones in the lobby. I’ve seen a body once before in that circumstance, and it really gets to you. Now I happen to be a 30 year old relatively well-adjusted man, so I’m going to think about this and then eventually be fine. But imagine if you were a 7 year old Iraqi child who sees this repeatedly, only there are no authorities around to help deal with the situation, or a 19 year old American soldier, who sees this situation constantly. It would be horrific and difficult, and yet, they manage.

I took some pictures which I’ll put up so I can remember this. I didn’t manage to take a picture of the body, but I snapped photos of the building cleaning staff and the firefighters cleaning and hosing down the area with chemicals. One of the firefighters told me that this has happened two or three times in the last four years, which I thought was pretty rare (but what do I know).

Tragedy is part of life, but I never expected that tragedy brings out cleaning chemicals within a few hours, though of course that makes complete sense.

The author of ‘Don’t You Want Me Baby’ is adamant that it is ‘”a nasty song about sexual power politics” and NOT a love song.

Thank you wikipedia for crushing my illusions.

There’s something about the amped up early 1980s synthesized music that does tragedy and unrequited love better than any other genre, at least to me. When it comes to culture I’m pretty mass market-y in my tastes, and I just feel beautifully sad whenever I hear ‘Don’t you want me baby’, a duet about a couple who are in love, but love is just not enough for them to stay together. It starts with the male singer asking ‘Don’t you want me baby’, and pleading with her to stay with him after he turned her into a star from her more humble origins. Eventually he resorts to empty threats, pretending he can put her back where she came from. She answers, and you can tell she pities him as she tells him she still loves him, but she’s in a different place now. She also crushes the illusion he had about how much she needed him, and basically says she would be where she is now whether she had met him or not.

It’s really sad, because it’s clear he’s living in the past and she’s just not willing to stay there with him. I can imagine him being just angry enough to live there for years, as she goes on living her life. And that’s what it’s really about, a guy who won’t live his life because he’s too afraid that others will pass him by, and in giving in to that fear, he destroys the great love of his life. She will love again, but he probably will not.

And I find that so sad.

I used to think that relationships were about working together to build a shared emotional home, one based on honesty and open communications (and some white lies). The falling in love at first site thing didn’t make sense. And it still doesn’t entirely make sense. But I’m also questioning the ‘love takes time to build’ mantra, which is a mantra because I put it in quotes, and mantras are phrased put in quotes.

So anyway, is it possible to fall in love after one day? After being in a variety of relationships over the past ten years, the only time I’ve ever really fallen in love it happened really quickly and with someone with whom I had very little in common. We stayed together for about a year, and the breakup sucked, but still, that was love.

Anyway, all the time since then when I’ve tried to build relationships based on respect they have been good, but they have not been love. Anyway.

I’m now officially allowed to miss an anniversary or a Valentine’s Day without consequence.

So this is the view from my room at Turtle Bay Resort. I’ll just say this place is ridiculous.

The spam filter is getting worse. I love it, it’s just slipping a smidgeon.