8 posts tagged “hiking”

It was foggy and raining the entire time during the hike up yesterday. The entire lake was frozen over and covered in snow. Kind of a soggy day. Nice out today, though. There's a severe weather alert tsunami warning for the Seattle area right now at weather.com so I think that it is safe to say there will be some pretty good winds on the lake tomorrow and this upcoming week. Who knows... who really does know? The cosmonauty... This little clip reminded me of this really insane movie that I had watched a long, long time ago when I must have been about eight.

It was on this French-Canadian public television channel at nearly 2 am in the morning. What really bothers me is that I can't remember the name. It must have been produced in the late 1960's or 1970's. It was about this man's dreams (or rather nightmares) that affect reality. He approaches a doctor for help who instead exploits his strange powers. The world is changed overnight into that of a nuclear holocaust. Each day the doctor uses him to change the world, but always what happens is the outcomes grow worse and worse. It was a really strange and frightening sci-fi movie. It kind of ended rather off-beat/ironic though because the robot, who replaced part of the human race in the man's nightmares, ended up serving ice cream out of his little moving trolley cart with a colorful balloon attached to it. I had always wanted to learn what the name of that movie was and I still am very much trying to find out. The only other time I have heard it spoken of was earlier this Autumn on a morning show of NPR. Low and behold, although I was listening intently to the program and remember very much about the commentary, I forgot again its title...

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Synopsis: "When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin." With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetlelike insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing -- though absurdly comic -- meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction. As W.H. Auden wrote, "Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man. (From the Publisher)

Impressions: Suddenly woke up from a dream and instantly transformed into a gigantic cockroach, Gregor is very much like the non-hero of Murakami's works. The story wasn't as funny as the reviews seemed to make it out to be (perhaps the victim of translation). Focused entirely in the little living apartment/house that the family occupied. Once a respected working individual, he became alienated from his boss and his family. After time, eventually reached the point where he was a source of bother, like a homeless man who they had to hide in their house. Ends with his death, non-tragic but grim. Family relieved that their son had finally died. Able to move on. Very short story, strange, I could see this being played out in a performance in my head. Not necessarily interesting or engaging.

Rating: 2 of 5 stars.