Kind of sort of

[Boogus Epirus Aurelius]

After the show, I got up from my seat, felt the flap of the cushioned folding seat give me a parting kick in the ass while I took a hand and headed down a few foot weathered steps to the door.

Not a major show or anything. Just an evening out listening to a harpist or cellist or tolerable beat poet or twenty year-plus old film at the local collapsing theater.

Everything about that place is tinged with some creaky fluid sadness. In the ticketbooth. In the balcony. In the paintings on the walls. Like somebody forgot to oil parts all along and they started to rust just enough to catch your absolute peripheral vision. A snag in the net or a few hundred chips in the paint on a board a few hundred feet above your head. You can put your finger on it but you can’t put your finger on it.

Instead, I imagine unveilings and funding campaigns and newspaper articles about a building that will never attract enough attention to warrant its construction or refurbishment.

An aging woman spent a life’s savings on a creaking hellion of a building to attract a few handfuls of dozens of appreciators who may or may not feel the same way. She probably has a good hollywood screenplay tucked away about her life somewhere in some drawer in one of the upper offices.

Now, this is genuinely one of my favorite feelings and I’d like for you to imagine the same. Maybe you have.

You’re walking out after seeing a film, maybe alone, maybe with a few friends or a significant other and you’re not saying anything to each other. There’s that comfortable shim between you and the rest of the audience as you move along carpeted hallways towards dead neon exits.

And you push that door open to warm, slightly humid night air and catch a shot of the quarter moon dappled with evil looking clouds from hell’s smokestacks and catch a few flashes of summer lightning overhead that will only graze your own upper sky real estate. And everything’s calm enough. And everyone is thoughtful in their own way after dim lights and a few hours of air conditioned entertainment.

It’s three minutes of pure, unadulterated bliss, a sense of right in a manufactured sort of way through popcorn stained air and half-dead re-purposed carpet.

And, at the same time, you watch the people you’ve spent a weirdly intimate few hours with drift off to their own cars, to their own homes or restaurants or bars down the road and realize you have some sort of unsubstantiated connection you can’t ever talk about. The first rule about (redacted) is....

Someone said it’s all about the little things, but what if the little things are really the big things?

[Hiro]

I totally love that feeling as well.