Thanks everybody

for all the well wishes. Except for Fishfrog, whom I personally feel needs to find god in order to temper the deep bitterness in his soul.

This is not a very fun experience. I feel like a jerk and can feel myself acting like a jerk. Perhaps the oddest part of the whole thing was when I tried to do my reading earlier this week, and it was almost impossible to follow a damn case.

I also watched the Otto Preminger noir flick Laura, and I had a helluva time trying to stay interested in what was going on. I'm sure I've seen that film excerpted many times over,* but none of that helped me to follow the plot. At one point, there's a detective who kicks in this door, shattering it, and then in the next scene he opens the same damn door, with no evidence of the door having been shattered. I tried going back to watch the earlier scene to see what I missed, but I still didn't understand it and anyway got a double dose of the glib characterization and leaden dialogue.

Better, by far, was The Narrow Margin, a tight little noir about a cop protecting a federal witness. Directed by Richard Fleischer, the son of Max Fleischer and nephew of Dave Fleischer, who did a lot of really spiffy animation work. If you've ever seen the old Superman cartoons where the big blue boy scout's ess chest shield had a black backing instead of yellow, you've seen their work. TNM had a good twist, and the DVD had a commentary by, of all people, William Friedkin, who directed the overrated French Connection and the WAY UNDERRATED To Live and Die in L.A.

Of course, though, I'm still sick to some extent. I slept a lot last weekend - I think I was conscious for maybe 5 hours of Sunday. My great weekend experiment in unconsciousness messed up my sleep schedule. I think I slept for maybe one and a half to two hours last night, and yet I feel perfectly fine right now and didn't have any real trouble waking up.

And I cough and cough, which isn't fun. I'm hoping that my sickness starts to abate soon, but it is somewhat intellectually convenient not to know whether the physical symptoms I feel are the result of sickness or of not smoking. I mean, it's entirely possible that if I were to smoke, I could in fact worsen my non-addiction sickness. That is, it's totally possible that I'd feel worse physically if I were to smoke.

No, no it's not. I'm not so crazy as to believe that.

*I think that Laura's in Celluloid Closet. Like I said, it was directed by Otto Preminger. Otto, who directed some good films like Anatomy of a Murder (which featured a very tight male relationship, as well), is ultimately known as the guy who broke the production code - he made movies in violation of the voluntary censorship system in Hollywood by producing them independently, and then released the films. Laura is a movie in which every character is in love with the titular dame. Including, it is strongly implied, the lady's maid. Scandalous, isn't it?