It must be hard being extraordinary. It’s like once the world has singled you out as being so, there’s no escaping it. All of a sudden your hours are not yours, your living becomes an act of public service. I guess everyone deals with it in their own way. It seems easier the more populist your appeal is, at least then people become more accepting of the ways that you choose to cope with it all. So long as you don’t go too hard in the public eye, you’re allowed.
I interviewed for a promotion at work on Friday. I know I just got one like three months ago but our workplace changed managers and I thought i might as well try my luck with this new guy.
No thanks.
I hadn’t realised that this was E3 week. It’s strange. I definitely watched it last year, and the year before that. The year before that one all my housemates stayed up together until 4am getting blazed and watching the press conferences. I think one of them had just brought an xbox one and we had this gay couple who were squatting in our living room so there was always money around for weed and video games.
Now I haven’t seen any of Arnaud Desplechin’s other films. Maybe I should have. Maybe it would have prepared me a little better, the trailer certainly did an inefficient job of that. I thought it would be one of those French flicks that one could comfortably nap through, man on holiday with his partner at the sea when out of nowhere his long lost and presumed dead wife appears to start causing drama. You know, a classic romantic drama, probably elevated by the presence of Marion Cotillard, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Mathieu Amalric as the trio who the action revolves around.
When the title comes up at the end of My Friend Dahmer saying that the man would go on to murder 17 people over the course of the next 20 years it feels like a punchline. The film ain’t been particularly cagey about the young leads predilections. We see him in his the shed where as a child he would dissolve roadkill in acid to study their decomposition and preserve their bones, we see his neglectful and abusive parents dumping on him at home, the way he drinks to cope with the troubles in his life, the way his repressed and mismanaged anger chooses to express itself.
The embarrassing thing is that I literally never remember how to write these things. Every week I pause a little. ‘How do I start this?’ I’ve applied for another promotion at work recently and there’s no way to make me hate myself more than ask me to write about my talents and accomplishments. As far as I’m aware I’m a disaster, I don’t really make no bones about it. I’m basically trash adjacent at this point; in my better moods I think I’m improving but then I’ll have a bad day or an unproductive week and all those worst habits of mine will express themselves and I’ll float right on back to self-hatred for a while.
