Greetings from the Barnes & Noble in Beaumont, Texas, on this second day of 2006. And a mighty fine day it is, he said facetiously. The fact that I am blogging from B&N rather than from home might provide a clue. It seems my high-speed Internet seems to have a case of the slows. Time Warner Roadrunner’s been doing downers I guess. The hell if I know.
The wonderful (man I am being so facetious today)customer service people at Time Warner told me a service technician would come by sometime between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. this week. That is as specific as she could get. What do you think would happen if I said: “I might pay my cable bill sometime between now and May.” Uh huh.
Fortunately, the new year hasn’t been a complete washout. I had my blackeye peas yesterday. Then a friend and I went to see “Walk the Line,” the biopic about the early career days of Johnny Cash. I’m not being facetious here. That is the best new film I’ve seen in a long time.
It was a very intense film. That is about the best I could sum it up. The story which includes the Man in Black dealing with the childhood death of his brother and later Cash’s struggles with drug addiction provided a lot of intensity in the story line. And the music was intense. There were a couple of times I wanted to start clapping and hollering after a musical number. Thank goodness I didn’t. My friend told me this old guy sitting next to her was singing along with all the lyrics. I can relate.
I thought the acting by Joaquin Phoenix as Cash and Reese Witherspoon as June Carter was superb. I’m no film critic. I just know what I like and I liked. Funny, I guess from some of her past films I never saw, I had Witherspoon pegged as a lightweight. She rocked in this movie though.
It’s getting rather noisy in here. Mostly it’s the expresso racket from the Starbuckets, where I guess if you want to get technical is where I am even though I am inside a B&N. And it’s a holiday so a lot of rug rats are scurrying about. If I catch my home PC for a few minutes when it’s coming down from the Reds or ‘Ludes or whatever it’s on, I might do a little more posting today. Otherwise …