SpiderWeb of Flourish

That refillable popcorn bucket is getting quite a workout this time around. We took it to the cheapo movies again yesterday, and saw "Angel Has Fallen," another action movie in which Gerard Butler plays Mike Banning, the Secret Service guy who encounters a plot to assassinate the President. (No, no, not THAT one. A different President!) It's #3 in a series, but I haven't seen the first two. However, it had an interesting touch of verisimilitude, in that our hero is suffering from migraines and back pain due to all the things that apparently crashed upon him in the last two movies. I've often thought about how much pain most of these guys would realistically be experiencing from the abuse they get in the course of their adventures, not to mention the danger of concussion-induced brain damage. And hearing loss from all the explosions. Someone should write a poignant story about the assisted care home where the old heroes go, when their joints seize up and their hearing goes, and the dementia sets in. After all the hard living, they're going to need a soft place to fall. Anyway, the movie was popcorn-worthy and pretty good, except for what I considered to be a smarmy and overly sentimental false note near the end. I don't want to spoil anything, so I can't say exactly what, but it involved dialog between our hero and someone who betrayed him. Had it been me, and this guy had done to me what he did, I wouldn't have been exchanging any words with him other than DIE DIE DIE. Killing him once would hardly have been enough. And I have a feeling that Barbarian Me knows more about what a real Mike Banning would do than the scriptwriters apparently did. Other than that, it was fine, and let me just say that I too would go through hell and high water to get a hug from Morgan Freeman, who plays the President.

Today I had lots of social interaction--first a phone call from Deb, and then meditation and lunch with Dragonfly, who I haven't seen in far too long. She had left the front door open for me, so on arrival I just walked in, calling out a greeting. Shep the dog approached with concerned warfing over persons unknown entering the house, but when he saw (or presumably smelled) me, he dropped the guard dog act and nosed up to me with a woof of greeting. I feel touched to have been thus accepted as a friend of the house.

Yesterday, I completed my memoirizing of the trip to bury my mother, so it's back to fiction now. I have such a plethora of WITP (Works In Theoretical Progress) that I don't know where to go. I picked up with Angel Bane again. I keep feeling I can't really write it until I've been to Rome, but I could perhaps go a little farther with it. We'll see.