Vanishing Point

I saw Vanishing Point on a double bill with dirty Mary and crazy Larry at the Rialto theater in Tacoma back in 1974. Even though Vanishing Point was made two years earlier. They remade Vanishing Point in 1997. I love Viggo Mortensen's work, but Barry Newman did an excellent job.

We were sitting at my girlfriend's parents house one Saturday and I was feeling a bit, well, suicidal. So, in an attempt to cheer me up, my girlfriend and her brother took me to see a double feature. None of us had heard of either movie, but Peter Fonda was in one of them. So, we just took a chance. Both movies, arguably end in suicide.

They were entertaining, but the endings were just all wrong for my state of mind. Have you ever had that happen? You don't think you can handle one more thing going wrong, and then it does. And then the second feature comes on and you think this will be better and then it too ends in grief.

And so you sit there, in realization, stunned, disbelieving. You think, "I don't believe this. I needed some consoling and all I got was consolation prize, second best, worst best even."

What do you do? Go kill yourself? Or, let it roll around in your head, banging from corner to corner until it finally knocks some sense in you and you simply start to laugh.

And that's the rub, isn't it. Sometimes, when things are so bad, you think nothing could be worse, you have to have a sense of humor about when it finally does get worse.

Otherwise, just what kind of person are you?

Tomorrow: If Jesus had Twitter