The Road

I've been listening to THE ROAD now for the last few weeks, on my IPod after I put it on there, maybe a month, and I'm still not done with it. I've read it before, and you should too if you haven't.

I was hoping sometime late November I could go to a theater and watch it. But now it's been pushed back until early 2009.

People have seen the early screenings. You can read reviews. I wish I was one of them.

I'm pretty sure the movie is going to be amazing.

It was filmed mostly in western Pennsylvania. I'm from western Pennsylvania.

The landscape is beautifully chaotic and insane. When I go back to Greenville, my hometown, there are things I'm so ineffably in love with it clearly cannot be defined by words.

But there are other times the ugly and disgusting side comes out. And all I want to do is burn it to the ground.

Love does that to you.

The side where a girl commits suicide in high school and because the town is so small you know about it. Or there's a fist fight at the guard rail near the edge of the high school and there are so many punches thrown to the head and violently landed that it makes you sick, and when the guy who gets the shit kicked out of him is throwing up, you're throwing up too.

I always got sick at those fights. That's why I can't watch boxing maybe. I can't take it. And I'm always obsessed with it.

But listening to THE ROAD, I've had a chance to take so much in, beyond the novel readings.

Every single line and word. I said it in a previous post, but this is why Blake Butler's SCORCH ATLAS will be important to me (by the way, I won't stop talking about Blake's book -- and if you're reading this, you need to get it when it comes out); it refuses to give up on the words, on the situation, on the fact that in one second a bullet can slug through your cranium.

But it's odd that I know it's ending. I know how it will end. Everything with the beach.

I am looking forward to every scene and every word. I truly think this may happen to our world.

I don't know how someone can read it and not think that. I just always wonder about the father character. Everyone says, "This book is about a father and a son. And about a father who takes care of his son."

You can place your words there, however you choose.

And I understand them.

But the reality of it is there's a desolate landscape. And there's a good chance that neither one of them make it. And around them is ash and gray and trees falling and cannibals and people who will slit your throat at the drop of a hat. Whatever the hell that means.

When this movie is actually out at the theater, a theater around here, I'll be there.

And this might be a thing might be a thing might be a thing of the past.