copafeelia

I miss smoking. I miss cigarettes and weed. My evenings feel so different when I'm not high. I'm getting used to it though, which is kind of a relief. I don't miss caffeine so much and it's hard to miss alcohol because of what it does to my stomach - which has trained me to steer clear lately. But I really miss smoking and resign myself to the fact that I'm done for good. I knew depression made me a bore but I feel like recovered mental health makes me even more annoying. Funny - since I stopped smoking I've hardly done any work on my story. It's hard to sit down and write without being slightly high and with a cigarette burning away in a nearby ashtray.

As soon as I get financially back on my feet I think I'm going to go off on another solo vacation. My Rt. 66 trip two years ago was the most important thing I've ever done for myself and I'm extremely nostalgic for it. I might slow down a little next time and NOT race to the west coast and back in eight days. I want to be alone more than anything in the world despite the fact that I've begun to spend about 70% of my life alone. Social butterfly to Howard Hughes in one short year. What the fuck? I don't even try to figure it out anymore. I'm just going to go with it for now. Maybe I'll bounce back, maybe I won't. All I know is that the hospital experience has taught me that when all else fails, FAKE good mental health.

Okay - look - just let me whine all of this out and I promise to not get this pathetic again. Honest engine. But-- I mean, does it make me self-pitying or ungrateful to acknowledge that in the health department I've been dealt a lousy fucking hand? Scoliosis which causes severe back pain, inverted knee-caps that will eventually require surgery (a birth defect), frighteningly bad vision which continues to decline, an ulcer that makes every meal a gastrointestinal challenge - and bipolar. Sometimes I feel like Tom Hanks in Joe Versus the Volcano. I want to jump in a volcano. I know I'm lucky in so many ways but that doesn't offer much comfort when I'm lying on the floor unable to go to work because breathing causes sharp pain to shoot down my spine.

Okay. The self-pity segment of this entry is officially over. Actually the whole entry is over. I'm just a little ray of sunshine.

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NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS
Heather Langerkamp returns for the second Elm St. sequel which wisely ignores part two. The last of the Elm Street kids are all hospitalized in a mental ward because their nightmares have been causing weird behavior and suicidal tendencies. Nancy returns as a counselor to save the kids from what she knows is the real trouble: Freddy Krueger. We get some back story on Freddy that reveals that he's the bastard son of 100 maniacs...which would be effective if it made any biological sense. Subsequent sequels would prove that the less we know about Freddy, the better. A very young Patricia Arquette plays the lead, Kristen, who's able to pull others into her dreams. Lawrence Fishburn plays a sympathetic orderly. John Saxon returns as Nancy's police captain pop. The special effects are first rate and the story is the strongest in the series. Even the acting is better. Langerkamp, so perfect in part one, seems out of her league here. There is a disturbing cameo by Zsa Zsa Gabor and Dick Cavett. The video for the theme song, by Dokken, is included on the tape. This was the high point of the sequels and everything that followed was worse than the one before it. ***

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4: THE DREAM MASTER
Renny "Cutthroat Island" Harlin...er, Renny "Exorcist IV" Harlin directed this Elm Street installment early in his career and it's a sign of things to come - for both the director and the Elm Street franchise. A glossy production, but the first predictable installment in the series. The style and story structure from part three is aped here to ill effect. Kristen, now played by Tuesday Knight (who's no Patricia Arquette) passes her "dream powers" to her high school gal pal; the mousey wallflower, Alice. Kristen and the rest of the survivors of part three are then quickly dismissed as a handful of new victims is introduced. This continues part three's trend of Freddy killing characters with ironic twists on the singular identifying trait they've been tagged with by the writer. The asthmatic girl has the air sucked out of her. The girl who hates bugs becomes one and gets stuck in a roach motel. If your eyes aren't rolling, they should be. By this time Freddy's unfunny puns have become the norm and he's, consequently, not remotely scary. Nice looking and obviously made under a bigger budget than the other films, but still completely lame. Still, the series would still get decidedly worse. This was the most financially successful Elm Street to preceed Freddy Vs. Jason nearly twenty years later. **