Watching the Trainwrecks
There’s a visual convention in blockbuster action movies. Everyone loves a good train wreck. Something about them makes us want to drink in every significant detail. There’s this hunger involved witnessing them, kind of like what the Romans must have had when watching the lions doing for the Christians at the circuses…
When the large vehicles collide, when the bomb finally goes off, when the airplane finally makes full contact with planet Earth…that’s when the movie drops into slow motion. Every last fireball is lovingly brought to the center of the screen. Large, photogenic pieces of shrapnel gracefully cartwheel through the air. And if there are any casualties? Most movies shy away from graphically depicting the worst of the injuries, settling for the visual shorthand of a motionless hand or a body huddled on the ground. The timing for the whole scenario is important: a train wreck that goes on for too long makes that inevitable shift from the “action-blockbuster” category to the “horror” category in a matter of moments. Each new explosion or flameout makes one wonder when the whole thing is going to end: “Oh, no, not another cartwheeling family sedan…Gawd, another fireball? Isn’t everything exploded yet…When is this wreck gonna be over?”
Now, where things get awkward is when the train wreck is a person. Sure, an actual train on the verge of being rapidly converted into several tons of scrap metal isn’t exactly stoppable. (Unless you’re this guy. Or maybe this one.) But a person? Theoretically, a person can be stopped. Talked off the ledge. Quietly led away from the tinfoil. But that voracious bit of Roman circus hunger keeps us all watching, rather than doing anything.
Remember the lake chowkidar?
Well, for a while, the town’s most vocal crazy person had settled down somewhat. He was actually keeping himself a bit clean and groomed, and seemed to be holding actual conversations with the people he was talking to, and maybe even remembering their names. He even stopped thinking I was his mom.
Then he stopped taking his meds. Why that happened isn’t all that important. It’s a common thing among the schizophrenic and/or bipolar to decide to stop taking their medications. One otherwise okay but admittedly bipolar woman I know is completely off her meds right now, because she “doesn’t need them in India.” Yikes. Anyway, to make the lake chowkidar’s long story much, much shorter, he went off his meds, and has gone back to dressing up in garbage and ranting at tourists.
It’s “on-season” here in Rewalsar. Winter is here, but the weather is still relatively warm to visitors from points further north. The town’s filling up with Ladakhis and Kinnauris escaping the snow of the higher elevations, and many Western groups who are coming either on pilgrimage, or for a teaching or meditation retreat. In the midst of them is the chowkidar, occasionally ranting at nothing (or everything) or cadging change for a cup of tea. Because of his unpredictable outbursts, most locals (including your humble Editrix) keep a weather eye on this man. For the most part his antics earn looks of bemusement; but every once in a while his tone will have nearby menfolk edging their way off teashop benches and out of shop stalls in case he needs to be subdued or disarmed or whatever. But by now, everything has an “oh no, what is it NOW?” feel to it, as the decline and fall of a single human being continues.
Here in Northern India, there’s very little here to remind me of life back in the States. More often than not, I turn to the Internet to keep myself up-to-date. I read the news. But not just any news. Is it CNN? No. NPR? Nope. The Christian Science Monitor, even?
Uhn-uh.
It’s all the Hollywood gossip about the latest adventures of Britney Spears.
For some reason I’ve become fascinated by the epic decline and fall of this pop star. The whole downward slide from America’s favorite professional virgin pop princess, to “Can I borrow some panties? I left mine home again” skank has this horror movie can’t-bear-to-look-gotta-see-more feel to it. I’ve never even heard any of Britney’s music, even. But the arc of her particular rise-and-fall seems to be this combination of legendary and just damned weird. By now there’s not even any point in mentioning specific scandals. It’s kind of like watching what happened to Michael Jackson back in the 90’s, only faster and trashier. I mean, I can remember the days when Michael Jackson was a Black person, compared to now, when he seems to have transformed himself into a whole separate species. With Britney, each new round of bad taste/bad judgment/bad karma is like that next fireball in the explosion that’s already run about 35 seconds too long. Has she hit bottom yet? Oh, something else wtf-able just happened with her? Well, how about now? Isn’t someone going to intervene? Oh, the family did, and it didn’t work? Let’s check the latest headlines…omg. This should be it, it really should…whaddaya mean, “there’s more”? And as a bonus, here comes Britney’s younger sister, Jamie Lynn, with her own bit of drama in the form of an unwed pregnancy at 16.
The thing I really feel odd about though, is the fact that what we’ve got here is a crazy person with–well, not exactly unlimited income, but pretty damn close–running around loose while everyone else stands by and waits to see if she kills anybody. I’ve seen my share of nutty folks who didn’t have enough money for their next MD 20/20, let alone a psych med prescription. Britney Spears, even as messed up and whacked out as she is right now, is still pulling in something on the order of $US 700,000. Per month. That’s enough over the last year of crazy frappuccino drive-thru purchases for Britney to buy out half of Rewalsar, and put up a statue of herself next to the one of Guru Rimpoche. I know money can’t buy happiness, I really do, but I would think that much money would at least make it possible for a down payment on some sanity. There’s something wrong about being able to watch antics like this while no one intervenes.
That still leaves us with the question of “what kind of intervention?” Court orders haven’t worked; rehab hasn’t worked. The latest thing that’s been tried is an actual honest-to-God 5150, bt it doesn’t seem to have made much of an impression. Now what? How is the trainwreck finally going to end?
Stay tuned, I guess…
