{"id":10779,"date":"2013-09-08T23:30:45","date_gmt":"2013-09-09T03:30:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=10779"},"modified":"2013-09-08T23:30:45","modified_gmt":"2013-09-09T03:30:45","slug":"sunday-42","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=10779","title":{"rendered":"Sunday"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

A quiet weekend, and a quiet Sunday. I wrote this with my weekly writing group:<\/p>\n

\nRobert found the box, but it was Edie who pried it open, which she said entitled her to at least half of whatever they found inside. Robert started to argue, he said Edie was always doing that, but when he saw it was nothing but a sheet of paper at the bottom of the box he lost interest and said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Fine, you can keep it. Just…tell me what it is?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

He was worried Edie might say something like, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153What, can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t you read?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d And she might laugh, which she sometimes did, like everything he did or said was some kind of big joke. But she just kept looking at the paper, which was yellowed and curled at the edges with age, but also filled from top to bottom with the black scrawl of words. Robert couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t make any of them out — he could<\/i> read, if not well — but Edie was clearly amazed by whatever the thing said.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I think it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s some of contract,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she told him. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pretty short, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all kind of…I dunno, legalese.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Uh huh,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Robert said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s…\u00e2\u20ac\u009d But that was what? He started to wonder if he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d maybe made a mistake; maybe the paper (or even the box) had some kind of value after all. They could bring it to, he didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know, auction or something. Maybe it had historical significance. People were always paying good money for old things, and maybe it didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t matter if this was just a single sheet of paper if it was the last will and testament of Paul Revere or something like that. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s interesting,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he said.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Get a load of this,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d said Edie. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a contract for somebody\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s soul.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

Robert sighed, but out of relief more than anything else. So, okay, interesting, but that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all that it was. Somebody\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s idea of a joke, but nothing they could make any money off of. Let Edie keep it. He didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to feel cheated, because there was nothing to be cheated out of. He smiled.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a contract from somebody selling their soul to the devil in May of 1976,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Edie said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Somebody named — \u00e2\u20ac\u009d she scanned the page — \u00e2\u20ac\u0153David Falconer.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

Robert sighed, this time he hoped a little more loudly. There had to be something<\/i> here at the dump they could turn a profit on.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153\u00e2\u20ac\u2122The bearer of this document is hereby granted full and binding custody of my earthly and mortal soul\u00e2\u20ac\u2122\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Edie read. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s signed and dated and everything.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Is it, whadyacallit, notarized?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Robert asked.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153He was selling it to the devil, but here it is.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s more an idea than a story, but I like the idea.<\/p>\n

Last night, I watched Cloud Atlas<\/a>…and didn’t much like it. There are a couple of good movies lurking within it — I’m not spoiling anything by saying there are six loosely interconnected stories across many different time periods — but there’s also a lot<\/i> that doesn’t work, most everything doesn’t work well together, and there’s also an over-abundance of very bad makeup. Seriously, I don’t know which was less convincing, the six-foot Hugo Weaving as a female nurse or the Korean-born Doona Bae as a redheaded American abolitionist. (I’ll go with Nurse Noakes, if only because she’s part of what is easily the film’s worst sequences.)<\/p>\n

David Mitchell’s original novel, which I read and quite enjoyed back in 2006, creates connections between the characters and settings mostly through tricks of narrative nesting. I’m not sure the film benefits from making those connections literal, by having the same actors portray many different characters (often aided by that aforementioned makeup). It gets silly quickly, and repeatedly, which does not seem like the film’s intent. And I’m not entirely convinced that the message of “our lives are all connected and everything we do recurs” was necessarily the book’s<\/i> intent, much less that we needed nearly three hours of prosthetic noses to get that message across.<\/p>\n

But that was pretty much the extend of my weekend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A quiet weekend, and a quiet Sunday. I wrote this with my weekly writing group: Robert found the box, but it was Edie who pried it open, which she said entitled her to at least half of whatever they found inside. Robert started to argue, he said Edie was always doing that, but when he … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[16,14,28,12],"class_list":["post-10779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-books","tag-movies","tag-personal","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10779"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10779"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10779\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10780,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10779\/revisions\/10780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}