Save your airfare and forgive.

-arten

"You're television incarnate, Diana. Indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of time and space into split seconds and instant replays. You're madness, Diana virulent madness."

-Max Schumacher (William Holden)

Network (1975

screenplay Paddy Chayefsky

Slowie is romantic

"Who knows how to conduct a relationship."

"Huh?"

"My heart was broken in the early 90's. Romance was beat out of me, and because of that at 22 I started acting like my parents. I held everything, and digested till I couldn't recognize myself. I then got really serious and rid myself of playfulness, imagination and sensation. I even got married. Now I am like a kid in my early 40's, emotionally paralyzed, sexually immature, with a generation below us that gives out blow jobs like handshakes. I am trying to find myself."

"I should try the fish."

"After my first 15 years of ruin relationships, I decide to create Frankenstein ones."

"You sound angry."

"I'm not angry."

"You sound it."

"But I'm not."

"Ok."

"I'm just saying that I don't know anything about conducting a relationship. I don't have any idea about sex, romance and how love powers any of it. I'm mad as hell and I can't take it anymore."

"So what does that mean?"

"Like it is that simple."

"It must be if you are looking for a window to scream out of."

"I'm not."

"You are."

"No."

"OK."

"I don't know about you, but I don't know what I'm doing. I feel absolutely crazy. I feel uneven, like I am completley made up and I just need to say 'uncle' and my real life will begin."

"I was just thinking that this morning."

"right."

"OK."

"Can't you see it?"

"With you?"

"I can't trust you."

"Ok."

"But you know what? Romantic movies have lied to me. As soon as I got my period I have spent the rest of my life looking to understand what love is. After I was hurt time and time again I Frankenstein that shit. I piece together surrounding relationships to serve aspects of my desire. I fed my hollow self with these pieces. I built a golden fucking calf to love and sat with a ripped bra in front of it."

"Frankenstein?"

"I took my Frankenstein out to meet my parents. This hideous thing I called love, this thing that kept me just functioning. I half--assed myself. Can't you see that?"

"It's not like that."

"It is. I bought into some fucked up script and I'm sexually stunted. I can't feel. I have know idea who I am. These movies lied to me. I chased love based on their prescription and found a horror picture. I can only trust myself. Myself."

"So then you are angry."

"I'm not angry, but I believe I'm mad."

"Insane."

"Yes."

"Ok.

"I believe romance is alive and well. It is powered by love, and I can only trust myself for it."

Lanvin knows love isn't an action verb.

"I don't think I was attached to anything of significant in that relationship but my own addictions."

"I'm not even sure I asked you about it."

"I was addicted to things in it. I didn't know what a relationship was so I assume it has something to do with using addictions to keep it together. My need to be accepted, my desire distraction from the pain and agony of my thoughts. What else will keep you there?"

"Pancakes."

"So then you agree."

"Your saying that at the heart of most relationships is an addiction?"

"Yeah, don't you agree? It is an opportunity for escape. On top of that I can face outward and create dramatic moments between my mate to further keep me adrift from examining my mind."

"There is a love right? Love is the common denominator."

"Come on with that."

"What?"

"Love to what?"

"Love for the other person. You care about the bastard, that's what sinks you into this fucked up existence."

"How can you be way off? I'm saying that what you think is love is addiction."

"How do you know that?"

"Because just like a lot of other people we don't know what love is. You say it in this discussion as if it is going to shut me the hell up. But it remains to be unexamined and continues to be this big foot in the hills, and we parade under its banner and never see."

"I know what love is."

"Listen, my point is can you tell me the difference between love in a relationship and addiction in a relationship?"

"I'm tired."

"Right. We all are."

Anthony is not the norm.

"A few times he said 'from here on out I'm going to do things differently, yes, from here on out, as if he really was."

"What?"

"I watched a show about this person who was about to die. His was sick. When the doctor and the patient were separate you could sense they knew there could be no more treatment, but when they sat together they both denied this. The doctor was willing to try one more round of radiation, the patient was willing to except this procedure, if only to get back to a normal life."

"Right."

"What is a normal life?"

"Well if you live in a suburb it is sitting on a riding lawn mower."

"Yeah probably. Yeah you're right, that's normal. You are fighting your way---you are denying your way, to get back to that riding lawnmower. Something just makes me think that if you had three attempted bone marrow transplants, three powerful radiation treatments, that has also failed, and you have wasted away to 90 pounds from 160; you would have to start believing that the riding lawn mower, and this failed attempt to save your life was also a part of your life. There is no 'getting back'."

"Well this happens to showcase a resilience."

"I don't know. It seems like a repression. There is nothing normal about life. If anything it continues to be strange and undefined. If anything sitting in ICU or sitting on a lawn mower gives us an opportunity to define. If we start to look closer. If we just start to stay still we begin to define these moments."

"You think?"

"Yeah. Because there is nothing normal about both of those things."