On Matty Price's advice I traded my ticket for Encarnacion for one for Gone with the Woman; Encarnacion will now win the audience choice award. Gone with the Woman, on the other hand, is excruciating; not in the way in which a film is bad, but simply in that, by seeking to create a love interest for the main character who is the living embodiment of every single thing that is unfathomable, frustrating, and cruel about women, the filmmakers succeeded far too well. I WANTED TO KILL THIS WOMAN. A chainsaw blow to the neck, cleanly separating head from shoulders in a single blow, would have been too kind. It was goddamned instructive on just how easily you can get pulled in by the seeming trappings of relationship stability without ever realizing that no, you don't actually have to put up with any of this shit just because she talks a good game and is hard to shake off. I was fairly delighted when the main character ended up with the beguiling French girl with whom he had almost nothing in common besides a basic emotional understanding; the fact that this would happen at all proves, of course, that this was a movie and not real life. In real life, he'd spend the rest of his puff trying to shake the goddamned Norweigian.

When I was a teenager, I thought I had fallen in love with someone when I had not. A couple of years later when I really did fall in love with someone for the first time - under circumstances far less cinematic and far more pathetic than those depicted here - I came up with a very simple, and hardly useful, maxim that has held true ever since: when you're in love, you just know it. You can't explain it, reshape it, move it around, and it may well be the result of a kind of consensus hallucination in your multiple personalities, but you know it deep down in the cranio-sac. Thus, do I posit to you dear reader, the fundamental meaninglessness and hopelessness of all human relations. Sure, it works out for people, all the time. And similarly have I frequently fielded the ball to an offensive line player in a perfectly timed and pitched up-the-line pass, without meaning to. It ain't something I count on.

Two short films in the next four hours before a night at the Ryerson; this will let me lap Mr. Mxyzptlk. Turning fast around the inside of the track, the stress on the chassis is gonna be a bitch.