If you wanna sing out, sing out

I felt well for most of the day. That toxic feeling is subsiding. The only remaining symptoms that bother me are the neuropathy in my feet, and a slow bloating in my gut that sets in over the course of the day, and is pretty uncomfortable by bedtime. The bloating is less bothersome as I get further away from the last chemo treatment. I expect it to be gone by tomorrow.

I was fairly productive and finished an art project. When I had cleaned up from that, it was after 5, and I was craving a burrito. I hadn't walked yet today, so I decided to go down 16th Street to Pancho Villa. When I got to Valencia, there were several police cars blocking thru-traffic. A jumper. Sure enough when I crossed Valencia and looked back, I could see him: a young man, standing on the very edge of the roof of a four-story Victorian. I tried not to pay too much attention to the onlookers. (I don't understand people who want to watch something like that.) I closed my eyes and tried to send a message to him that whatever it was that had brought him to the edge, it wouldn't seem very important in a few years. I hope it got through.

Life is full of odd parallels. When I got home and had finished eating and had visited with Robert a bit, one of my favorite films of all time came on TCM: Harold and Maude. There are many reasons I love this movie.

• It came out when I was 14 and I was just starting to develop cultural awareness. (i.e., I read the theater and film columns in Time and Newsweek and I went to midnight movies) I loved its "indie" film sensibility, and its cool art direction and costumes. Looking around my apartment, I think perhaps Maude's railroad car influenced my own interior design sense. Gah!
  
• The Cat Stevens score.
  
• It was filmed in and around San Francisco, including Santa Cruz, where my family spent vacations when I was very young.
• Ruth Gordon and Bud Corbett give radiant performances.
• VIVIAN PICKLES as Harold's mother. Why didn't this woman get more work in this country? Her character and performance pre-date the self-obsessed, over-privileged British bitch that Jennifer Saunders would get such currency with in "Absolutely Fabulous" 2 decades later. She alone is reason to watch this film.
• Movies about eccentric people appealed to me especially back then because I was trying to figure out how to live life as someone who didn't fit Fresno's cookie cutter of what a young man was.
  
• I first saw it with Meg and she and I still parrot phrases from it to each other regularly.
  
• And of course nowadays, its message resonates in a new way with me. The contrast between Harold, young and afraid of life, and Maude, sucking every last savory bite out if it. "L-I-V-E! LIVE!" Maude tells Harold when they first meet. "Otherwise, you got nothin' to talk about in the locker room."
  

I'm with her.