austin_dern (austin_dern) wrote,

You're living in the past it's a new generation

So late last night on came Tod Browning's Freaks, the sensitive and much-banned 1932 movie whose opening titles assure us ``The majority of freaks, themselves, are endowed with normal thoughts and emotions. Their lot is truly a heart-breaking one.'' This story of a sideshow freak community banding together to punish the physically-normal, morally-deficient folks wronging one stars actual sideshow freaks, since in those unenlightened days deformed people couldn't be the subjects of inspirational TV newsmagazine specials about how they became e-commerce billionaires despite the dot-com crash and having no body below the sternum. The tinny sound, odd acting, camera angles, and deformed people (in one scene literally rising from the mud) make the experience like a nightmare.

If the source weren't disorienting enough I was leaving it as I collapsed to fatigue, with the cold and cold medicine disorienting me; and then when I got up and showered and went to check my e-mail, the movie was on again at about the same scene I left it. It's a massive frontal assault on my cognitive ability.

I'm feeling better, and while I'm tired and coughing it's as bad today. I even went in for a not particularly productive half-day. I hope tomorrow will be better. Shouldn't cough syrup work better if you gargle it? That's useless for me, since I can't gargle, and cough syrup doesn't work, but shouldn't it be part of the directions anyway?

Trivia: William Henry Harrison was the first agent representing the Northwest Territory to Congress, in 1799. Source: The March of Democracy, John Truslow Adams.

Currently Reading: The Great Science Fiction Stories 6: 1948, Edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H Greenberg.

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