Pinky's Book Link

Sunday, July 12, 2015

The Big Question: Is Life Pointless?

Boyhood



Scotto and I watched the first 2 hours and 35 minutes of Boyhood yesterday. It runs for 2 hours and 46 minutes but for reasons known only to its spiteful, unpleasant self, the Internet decided to be an arse. 

Scotto was very angry, called the Internet some very rude words and did an imitation of what he thinks the Internet actually looks like.

Scotto as the Internet


We were watching it on Netflix which has been a bit contrary of late and it just stopped and refused to finish the movie. I googled the end of the movie this morning and according to someone on Yahoo Answers (which is my absolute go to for expert advice), it wasn’t worth the film it was printed on anyway because nothing happened. 

Nothing happened for the entire movie when I think about it. 

A boy grew up... big whoopie do.

Boyhood won the 2015 Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture and was nominated for the Oscar so I suppose I don’t know everything after all (although I'd like to know who votes for these things).

The most poignant part of it for me was when both her children had grown up and were nicking off to college and Patricia Arquette broke down sobbing at the kitchen table and uttered the three words that really resonated with me… “What’s the point?”

Lately, I find myself driving along the road on my way to the shop and all of sudden I’m overwhelmed with an empty, maudlin emotion. My insides feel as though they’re falling through space and I have a horrible sensation that everything I do and say, is utterly and inevitably pointless. 

I’ve also been thinking about my children and how they’re all grown up and don’t need me anymore except for when they want me to look after their bitey dog or borrow a potato masher.

I had to write a descriptive paragraph for the online writing course I’m doing the other day and this is what I wrote…

Pinky stepped along the cracked, concrete path where green ants scurried in frantic confusion around a bloated, dead lizard. She ducked under a glittering web where a Saint Andrew’s cross spider hung like an exquisite, yellow jewel and inhaled the sweet air of last night’s rain deep into her lungs. A few more cautious steps around the corner of the trail and she’d see it. Something rasped in the undergrowth with a guttural squawk, making her jump to the left and graze her arm on the bark of the old mango tree. Her children had climbed that tree many years ago, singing out to her from its branches to come and see how far up they had negotiated its sturdy branches. Pinky could almost hear little Lulu’s gurgling laughter as she’d cling to the lowest branch, hanging upside down like a precocious fruit bat. Suddenly, there it was; the cubby house, obscured by meandering vines and its frame bleached by the weather, like the bones of a prehistoric monster discovered in an ancient rainforest jungle. She placed her hand on the ladder, feeling the slimy moss under her cold fingers. It had served them well, this wooden skeleton, this relic. It was going to take a crane to reclaim it from the garden and carry it to its final resting place. But for now, she would sit in it for a while and listen to the babble of her memories.



Is that not a tad sentimental? A jot schmaltzy? 

It’s not me at all, is it?

Not that I want the five hairy creatures hanging around me all the time with their cynical remarks and critical evaluations of my wine drinking habits, but it does seem I did quite a lot of work over the last twenty years to be now relegated to the pitiful nuisance I seem to have become to them.

Do you think they’ll ever come back to me once they’ve established their independence?

Am I just suffering from the empty nest syndrome I always laughingly joked would never strike me?


Or is life just pointless after all and we may as well get fat on Tim Tams and champagne?