Furor Ebbs, Disaster's Rising Tide

The furor over Abu-Ghraib seems to be dying down. It's probably been about a month or more since the first photos were made public. The scandal had strong staying power in the short-attention-span culture we live in. And on the heels of the Richard Clarke book, and the Bob Woodward book, and straddling the Michael Moore thing, the capacity for anti-Bush thinking has greatly increased. It's almost to the point where you're just sitting back and waiting for the next scandal to break.
Bug (must have caught it on the plane) came out of nowhere and screwed with my cheery self over the weekend. Caught The Day After Tomorrow with sis and bro-in-law. I kind of accidentally battered this crabby guy in the row in front of me with my jacket, and then I did it again later and he started fuming. Movie theaters in Manhattan can get pretty testy, especially for these first-run big-selling flicks. Sitting next to the crab was a certain editor with whom I've had the oddest of ambivalent relationships. Had to watch the whole thing with him (and some Waspy suitor) in front of me.

So this movie was Spider-Man meets Earthquake, maybe a little War Games thrown in. Probably because this Emmy Rossum gives off vague Ally Sheedy vibes. I especially enjoyed the effect where 10-story high rivers flow through Manhattan's concrete canyons. Feeds further into that Island People thing I've been into lately. There were too many things in the movie that made no sense, but there's something about being scared by severe weather...it's a very visceral, real scariness that gets hinted at once in a while in real life, especially in the Caribbean and at sea level here in the New York island archipelago. I was particularly aware of this because of my recent experience wading through brown water in Puerto Rico, and it was much worse on Hispañola. The weather report (with the isla babe with the intense boricua accent) had a map I'd never seen anything like--it was as if the whole Greater Antilles (Eastern Cuba to the Virgin Islands) had a huge mass of rainclouds over it. Slightly reminiscent of the massive hurricane-blizzard that forced (hah-hah) the gringos to flee south of the border in the movie. I don't agree with A.O. Scott, who thinks the Hollywood conventions take the bite out of the anti-Bush message (lots of references to the Kyoto Accords, Dick Cheney as fuhrer). Then there are the unsavory Murdoch associations. The profusion of Fox news logos is pretty hardcore subliminal advertising, but there's no Bill o'Reilly in sight. Only the big money gets to play fake-left games. Still it's an eye-opener for mainstreamers...but that corny homeless guy with the dog has to go.
Then went to some friends' place for dinner on Sunday. Sometimes I feel like I'm just beginning to tell these long stories about myself. I'm usually not so forthcoming. I keep thinking about My Dinner With Andre and those long soliloquies, with the painful details and the embellishment and the knowing looks. What compels someone to reflect so vividly on one's own life? The East Village, Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, Pedro Pietri, Mexico City? What drives the morality and the irony of the stories? Why do the ones about affairs, long-lasting things, hook-ups, friends with benefits, have that sting that works like a after-dinner drink? Sunset feels like the one that got away, that memory of the way things smelled and what was playing on the stereo. What drives me to recount the minutiae of longing, the lingering loss?