my watch

I watch films, sedulously, alone, frame by frame, thinking of the care and the choices, and the beauty and equipoise of the actors, and listening to the director or whoever with the voice-over, reliving these moments twenty years or so later, sounding all world-weary yet now and then infused with enthusiasm, as all the problems of location and set and lighting are revivified, together with old friendships and brilliant performances and trying moments, and I’m left with a sense of pleasure and strange loss, loss for what I never had and might never have even hoped for had I not watched the stupid damn thing, and all its emotional weights and tempests and glories, and locations locations, yet it’s all locked away behind the barrier of the screen, and what do I care if this is really Rome I’m seeing, or Tangiers, I can’t smell a thing and I’ll never see what’s behind that pillar of styrofoam or authentic rock of ages, I’m seeing an image that stops and starts and never faces me but obliquely, made of pixels or whatever, and my house still needs cleaning.