This will be the most unenticing website update the world has ever seen. I want to start this off by thanking everyone who has left sweet messages in my guestbook while I’ve been away. I appreciate all of them and they make me feel really gooey when I read them. I don’t know how you people are finding me so easily on this site! But I’m glad that you are and I’m glad people enjoy it because it really has been a super self-indulgent personal project. People have also commented on how detailed it is which is so strange to me because my site doesn’t feel that elaborate to me but thats probably because I’m so used to clicking through it to make sure everything is still working… The nooks and crannies are already familiar to me.
Now a general note about things for this site going forward. To be honest, this website will probably not see a super notable or large update/addition any time soon unless the passion and creative fervor for a new page strikes me suddenly. I think I just feel that I’ve done with this site what I’ve wanted to do and I don’t really have much else that I want to express… HOWEVER I will definitely try to keep up with smaller things like adding to the movie collection or music collection or shrines and all that less interesting stuff.
Now for the fun stuff. My brain is super fried on account of how busy I’ve been. Which is silly because its summer and I’m not even busy with fun things. And I’ve been stuck in this embarrassing cycle of my social anxiety preventing me from wanting to hang out with people but then the more I stay isolated the worse the anxiety gets… I will get over it. In the past few months I’ve gotten really back into Monty Python… I started watching the show and all the movies last winter/spring before I got distracted by The Monkees and entranced by Mike Nesmith’s beautiful face and sideburns. Now I’m entranced by Terry Jones. I would say he’s my favorite Python overall because he’s the most relatable to me but they all kind of rotate through my brain with equal amounts of love. When I first watched And Now For Something Completely Different over a year ago I decided Eric was my favorite because he was pretty and the only one I could recognize. I don’t know what led me to Jonesy but I think he fits in with the usual kind of fella I’m drawn to. He has dark hair and beautiful brown eyes and a nice nose. This is what I like in a fella! Now though I find myself more drawn to John Cleese because I hate him. But I watched Fawlty Towers and it was fantastic. So now I find myself drawn to John Cleese and its scaring me. I also think Graham Chapman sits in the forefront of my mind. He’s the most interesting Python of course and the most elusive. I listened to the audiobook of a Liar’s Autobiography and it made me feel very bizarre about my own life. I think I find Graham to be the most relatable to me now. In general I think he’s the Python I look up to the most because out of all of them he comes off as the most charming and intelligent to me. They’re all intelligent but Graham just happens to have the most interesting ideas. And his and John’s relationship is very fascinating to me but I haven’t done a lot of digging on them beyond the more surface level things. So if anyone has insight on that I would love to hear it.
Beyond that I’ve also been vaguely drawn back towards Andy Kaufman. I’ve been passively exploring this concept of self in my mind that I’m kind of embarrassed to write about because I think I’ve found that when I try to express my thoughts it sounds really dumb. BUT ANYWAYS. I want to reread the few Kaufman biographies I have read to freshen my brain on the concepts but I think Kaufman’s whole bit explores this lack of real personality in a similar but completely separate way from Peter Sellers. I’m internally writing an essay comparing them and exploring that idea of the self. I GUESS. About having a personality in the public eye and insecurity and the biggest difference between them is that Andy did have a real personality and he was not very insecure about himself at least from what I remember, it just fit his gimmick better to put on faux selves in the public eye to create this feeling of elusiveness about who “The Real Andy Kaufman” was. But in Peter’s case he was highly insecure and purposefully dampened his actual personality out of self-loathing. Similar but with different fundamental ideas behind them. Peter claimed to not really have a real personality, which comes off as some quirky marketable characteristic he invented to have something interesting to say on a talk show but I also think he genuinely believed this. Or wanted to at least. I imagine complete disillusionment with yourself is easier than accepting the insecurity. As I’m writing this I’m being pulled away by other things so I am unable to expand on this further. But I’ve been thinking a lot about Peter Sellers and Andy Kafuman and what it means to be a person okay. Because I share Peter’s disillusionment and It’s getting worse and worse every day. So thinking about it through him helps me understand my brain a bit better.
It is the next night as I’m writing this paragraph. I’ve noticed I have to keep up with projects only by having 20 going on at the same time and working on them in rotation. Because after like an hour of working on one thing I get really bored and I have to go do something else. Anyways I’m making my Halloween costume already and it’s already pissing me off and I hate it. I’m gonna be Austin Powers. I’m sewing his awesome blue velvet suit myself from old sewing patterns from the late 60s/early 70s. I know how to sew but I always end up kind of half assing it… I think I just get frustrated easily and I have to step away. Which is the same way it goes for most other creative projects. Except for making this site, which I remember felt good and easy to do because I find it’s much easier to fiddle with things until they’re right without starting over in HTML. The other projects I’m working on involve designing things for theatre. Which I have fun with but its a very frustrating and tedious process as well. But those I have sooner deadlines for and those are the ones I’ve really been procrastinating. You people don’t care about any of this.
For a while I was considering adding a list or a shrine or a page to this site that was like all of the characters I heavily relate to . The characters that are me. But as I was thinking harder about it I realized there’s only one character that is me and its Harold from Harold and Maude. I think I kind of look like him in real life. Vaguely. But you’re supposed to picture me as a businessman with a bug head. But I guess if you want to imagine me as Harold I would be okay with it. Harold and Maude is one of my favorite movies. Bud Cort (RIP) looks so pasty and spectral in that movie I don’t know how they did that because he doesn’t look like that in Brewster McCloud. He just looks like a little mannequin its amazing. CORPSELIKE I think was the intent, because he dies so many times you know. He’s the only fictional character I actually whole heartedly see myself in. It’s easy to see little bits and pieces of yourself in certain characters. Like I also see a small chunk of me in Alex from A Clockwork Orange, or I see a small chunk of me in Cameron Frye like everyone else does, or I see a small chunk of me in Plato from Rebel Without a Cause. But these characters are not me. Harold is me. His entire character arch and story throughout the movie is one of the most relatable things Ive ever watched and I cried when the credits rolled because I watched the movie for the first time when I was in a horrible depression and I just couldn’t see myself as anything or anyone except for Harold. His personality is almost exact to mine. His relationship to his mother makes me sick because I can only see myself and I can only see my own mother. There’s a scene near the beginning of the movie which could’ve been taken right out of my life and its the one where he’s having dinner with his mother and her guests, quietly playing with his food while she gabs. She then asks him whats wrong, to which he replies that he has a sore throat (from having hung himself hours before). His mother brushes him off and begins to tell her guests about what a sensitive child Harold was, speaking about him like he isn’t sitting right in front of her. This scene is short but it makes me feel sick everytime I watch it because I’ve experienced exactly that kind of dinner with my own mother and with my own family as her guests, family that I have nothing to say to. I think at some point it begins to feel like you’re haunting your own house. Which would explain Harold’s ghostly look. I think internally I yearn for someone like Maude to teach me how to have fun too. I know what I can do and I know what I contain… but. I think when you’re stuck in a rut of being down on yourself and feeling as spectral as you look, you need someone who’s an expert at being alive to pull you out of it.
Harold is me and no other character is me except for Harold because I relate to Harold entirely and no other character.
Thank you for reading. I love you.
- Germ