Eccentric Flower:199908/Weekend wrecking bars and Watergate

I didn't feel like writing anything this weekend. So I didn't. I've felt sort of tired and humdrum for days - the kind of time when I play computer games or run errands because my brain is just not alive enough to think about anything more complex.

So instead I met my Aether friend SDN - and had a lovely time, but I don't have much to say about it here - and took apart a bed and moved boxes and shopped and ran errands and did useless things on the computers and read a lot. And ate.

I may not have done much thinking this weekend, but I ate well. Among a series of meals which just seemed to hit all the right spots, the high point was clearly Saturday night. After we saw Dick, which is a much better film than its trailer led you to believe it was, we went to a restaurant we'd been meaning to try, in the eternal quest for New Food At Places We're Not Sick To Death Of.

Well, it was a bit more expensive than we thought it would be.

Quite a bit more expensive.

But really good. And the portions were generous.

Quite generous.

We walked home feeling like zeppelins.

On Sunday night, I took a walk with Marc, who has just moved back into our neighborhood - hooray! No more driving to the ends of the earth! As a matter of fact, on Friday I took apart the loft bed I built for him over a year ago, when he first moved into the place that is now his ex-place. The loft bed was a real estate necessity; his room was about the size of a large closet. I'm happy to say that his new room is bigger, but he wants a loft bed again. Well, I can understand that. I made three for myself, in various dwellings, over the years. Hopefully this time the one we build will be more stable ... I wasn't happy with the most recent one; I had to add all sorts of extra braces to it before I was satisfied it wasn't going to come apart underneath him some wild night.

In taking the bed apart I introduced Marc to the wonder that is the pry bar (or ripping bar, to some people, or wrecking bar). This tool is designed to do only one thing - tear things apart - and it does it well. I don't get to use mine very often, and I forget how much fun it is ... even if it does make your hand hurt by the time you've pulled out nearly a hundred nails with it.

But back to Sunday. I told him about Dick, which he hadn't seen, and I was in the process of recommending it to him when I realized that it wasn't a movie he'd enjoy. He knew why I'd reached that conclusion, too. We go through this all the time.

Marc lives in a world of his own. It's not that he's stupid or even especially naive; he's just finicky about what he stores in his head. Remember how Sherlock Holmes had no idea whether the earth went around the sun or vice versa? Marc's like that. If he doesn't think it'll be useful in his peculiar range of interests, he doesn't file it. Period.

This means I sometimes get exasperated because, for example, he doesn't care much about what's in the daily news, doesn't know who the mayor is, has no idea who's running for president next year ... little things like that.

Marc has no idea what Watergate was all about. I think he knows it was a scandal involving a president, and he might have been able to tell me which president. But - finally coming to the point - Dick really only works if you have a fair idea of what Watergate was about, because the whole point of the movie is that it purports to tell the real story of who Deep Throat was and how it all actually happened - through a comedy of errors involving two silly (but not entirely clueless) fifteen-year-old girls.

Marc would be lost from the very beginning, when the actors playing Woodward and Bernstein give a TV interview, in the present day. There are jokes in this movie that not only depend on your knowing who Carl Bernstein is, but knowing something about his personality.

So my question is: Is this really a movie pitched at teenagers? Maybe that's why it's sinking from theatres without a trace, despite good reviews. Because, frankly, the average teenager is not going to know any more about Watergate than Marc does.

Pity, that.