Just hold my hand

When you wake up in the morning feeling vexed you can bet something is up. I’m struggling to recall the word that a friend so aptly called it . . . conflicted, that’s the word and that’s what I felt last night and this morning.

Media has that intriguing ability to take your emotions and run with them wherever. It doesn’t even have to make sense logically but media or, more specifically, a movie or television show can just run you through the gauntlet of emotionally messed up plots. The plot, the characters can be experiencing completely misguided, incomprehensible feelings or emotions and yet, we are right there with them, feeling the exact same way, buying into the whole thing. Somewhere in the depths of me I feel the discomfort as my better judgment screams “How can he be feeling any sense of loss right now!” And when it is all said and done I think, “That was a weird movie.”

I felt that way after I watched “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest” yesterday. In a way I felt cheap and easy for enjoying it, but, then again, I was entertained. Therein lies the reason for my confliction. I missed the characters from the last film in this film, not that I am a huge fan of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, and I am not really trying to write a review here, but if I were I would say that the plot was overloaded with a complicated plot that didn’t justify itself and that the characters could never justify their actions or feelings either. I lost all sense of the good in it. Good referring to the hero, or the romance, or just plain truth, anything virtuous at all. Thus, I was left trying to put the pieces together after, because I wanted to like this movie but in doing so I would feel used I guess.

The sad thing to me was as I walked to work this morning, trying still to put feelings into words (an important thing to me, I’m finding), I was picturing friends of mine liking it, not even recognizing that there is an absence of good, or I could imagine friends calling what exists in the movie “good.” It is a complicated feeling that I can’t currently articulate but it sure made me feel the weight of the distance between me and the next closest person. We are all so close to each other, believing that there is good out there. We wanted to look at each other and cry for help but we were to busy concealing our bleeding wounds to take the time.

It has something to do with a song by Bright Eyes that tells the story about how he ran into a doctor who was looking a little sick and when the doctor asked him for help he replied, or the song goes like this; “’There’s nothing that I can do for you you can’t do for yourself.’ He said, ‘Oh yes you can, just hold my hand, I think that that would help.’ So I sat with him a while and I asked him how he felt. He said ‘I think I’m cured . . .’”