This is my new favorite movie.

My momma said to me,
she said,
"What's it about?"

I said "I don't really know. I just thought the cast was interesting."

As it turns out, the movie was about a girl who lives in New York City with her baby kitten. She drinks entirely too much and sleeps with people she doesn't love, often. Whenever she sleeps with anybody, it's someone she doesn't love. She's given to slamming her hands in dresser drawers in order to feel something ... anything.

She's altogether empty ... and sad.

A strange twist of events requires her to travel home against her desires ... home to Michigan. The vet leaves a message on her machine. The baby cat is sick. She drowns it, while she cries, in the East River. Maybe this isn't too different from abandoning everything you own and mustering ony the motivation to mail back your childrens' baby pictures, a few toys.

She takes the bus through Detroit and Traverse City and eventually lands in the U.P. She meets a former Christian rock band member from Flint. She attempts to make out with him after drinking too much. God is having none of it. "Fuck God," the story goes. Those are my words, however accurate.

Some time, a few years back, I worked for a poet who required me to catalog his life from Kyoto, 1964, to Ypsilanti, 2000. I did my best, but during that time I developed a strange habit from the sheer nightmare of satisfying an insatiable word whore who lived more in Portugese caves and theasaureses than he did in the world.

Whenever something about that job upset me, I would gasp in a manner akin to yawning. I would gasp and gasp until I eventually caught my breath for a moment. The cycle would then repeat itself. After I left that world and had beautiful babies, I imagined that suffering would stop.

I wish I'd had the wherewithal to flop to death the way you'd imagine a beached goldfish would. I just didn't, and this movie made me feel as though that reality, perhaps, wasn't altogether nihilistic.

So anyway, that's what it's about -- the movie. A girl a little bit like me, or not altogether unlike me, which is as "like me" as anybody ever is.