It's the drugs

Snapshots. What else to call them? It’s not a perfect descriptor but I wouldn’t trust myself to find one of those. Little snippets of lives they are that flit into ours like a dozen sequential film frames jumping out of the void at widely spaced intervals, recovered bits of lost reels stuck in between the scenebreaks of our own masterworks. Perspective: the lost frames (the in-betweens) inform our own reels, impart meaning. They’re file photographs stacked one upon the other, each separated by a little card with some data and notes (perspective all its own) and yet they’re more than that, too. They’re action scenes breaking up the relentless (necessary? God knows) expositionary tracts we already know by heart. We’ll leave the party and the next scene will start and start and start again, mocking the fickle emotion with constancy. We’ll go home and the exposition will resume—as if it had stopped—and we’ll continue the work we continued in the last scene.

But here’s to hoping we’ll process, too. The snapshots, the loose bursts of frames that break up the sequences of our flattin’ days, might just (God willing) find ways to sneak their way back in. Perhaps we’ll see them coming and going in our mind(s), leaving open the door for other snapshots, loose frames, whole sequences even. Perhaps they’ll stick. Estelle developing into a confident, attractive young woman with a tasteful, unpretentious fashion sense and a mature, liberal attitude vis-à-vis soft drug use. Carson Sorenson’s sister subjugating the gracelessness of her tall, long-limbed adolescence with the grace of her patrician mother. The Liebers enjoying well-deserved satisfaction with the achievements of their sons, their big-city retirement dreams closer to realization, their bourgeois attitudes and sensibilities intact, vindicated. Dean’s youngest sister vamping Kate Winslet in comical tramp mode. Karim Muhammad still (ever) manning the QuickSave self-checkout machines, clean-wiping methodically and dispensing hints of sagacity without much regard for its reception: well-made-up, ageless gentlewoman who politely refused, eyes outward, to believe that K’s daughter had attended that top-tier medical school be damned.

These breaks do for our souls more even than the lively or unexpected bits of our daily exposition, more even than when our sequences fleetingly align in perfect accord with those of our peers, with whom we share canvasses, settings, sections of storyboards. They remind us of what is & what also is possible. Estelle’s well-mannered stoner nonchalance; Ms. Sorenson’s collegiate sophistication & elegance (!); K’s calm, almost pitying sense of self, the butt-end of a lifetime of deferred yearns, rides, of low expectations and stifled potential. These are things, said Leo. These are possibilities.