sunday (john wick)

Saturday I told a friend I couldn’t hang out because I had a self-imposed writing deadline. I’ve been meaning to write about my dad, John Wick, and his relation or actual non-relation to the film John Wick, for years. The other day I followed an impulse to download the script and think, or thought, or I guess I still think, that I found a way to do it.

So I figured I would do that, a lifetime of memories and anecdotes in 3 days, done today. This obviously did not happen. What happened was…

I sat down to write at about 7pm on Saturday. I made myself a vermouth tonic: red vermouth, four ice cubes, tonic water, a few (four) olives. Luis once told me that four is the number of death in Chinese culture, or maybe just Hakka culture. Anyway I poured myself my vermouth tonic and sat down to write and realized I had forgotten to buy my dog his food. I got up and walked to the door. I looked at my dog and said, I have to get you some food, I’ll be back soon. He stared at me. He is a dog and does not speak English or Spanish. I do think he can compare his current experience with past patterns and make decisions or feel a certain way based on that. But I’ll leave that to the experts (you).

The pet store I usually go to was closed. There was a “be right back” sign on the door. I imagined myself sitting outside the shuttered gate for hours in the rain. When the guy who works there finally arrived we would make out, finally, passionately and soaking wet like we’re in the new adaptation of Wuthering Heights. So I went to Petco.

They recognized me at Petco, I go there pretty often and earlier in the day I had been there with my dog buying new treats. There had been some kind of issue with the terminal and we were standing there for a long time. Nacho was excited and everybody was excited for him. I picked up a bag of Blue Buffalo, which is expensive but seems like it’s good. It was on sale so I got a bigger one. I thought to myself, my back kind of hurts maybe I shouldn’t carry a 13.6 kilo bag of dog food home and did it anyway. Fourteen kilos isn’t that much anyway.

When I got home my abs were strained and my lower back hurt enough that sitting down hurt. I fed my dog and started to write. I decided I would keep all the framing elements or whatever, I don’t know anything about writing much less screenwriting, evacuate the story and replace it with something like my dad’s story. There is an extremely weird feeling of someone real being replaced by a totally different idea of them — Dodie Bellamy wrote a little about this when Kevin Killian died, that her Kevin was replaced by this kind of idealized, cult hero Kevin, which was disconcerting and surreal even though or even as it was gratifying that so many people loved him. Anyway this is different, John Wick was replaced by a fictional John Wick, a deadpan, determined, nearly cold-blooded assassin portrayed by Keanu Reeves. Waiters coming up to my dad in restaurants saying “don’t kill me!” Recently my urologist looked me straight in the eyes and told me that the John Wick movies are great movies with the same seriousness as when he told me I should start getting annual prostate checkups now that I’m forty.

Later I couldn’t sleep. My back hurt in every position and my abs were strained, almost like being incredibly bloated but without having eaten anything fun beforehand. On Sunday I talked to my mom and said, like I always say, “you can’t control the weather.” Actually I didn’t this time, I just thought it. I sat down at Caravan, the guy there offered me a negroni and gave Nacho a bowl of water. I ordered a limonata instead because I had bloodwork done today, this morning, I saw my neighbor there and we talked about my water heater, anyway I sat at the cafe in an exhausted daze and talked to a friend of mine whose dad has dementia. My friend’s dad is in a nursing home and recently started dating a woman there who also has dementia. I don’t know if he forgot he is married or just hates his wife for putting him in a home, my friend said. My dad never went to a nursing home, my parents’ house just became a nursing home. I asked my friend what he does when his back hurts. I lay on my side and breathe deeply, he told me.

I went home and stretched for 45 minutes. I went to the pharmacy and bought one of those hot-cold gels. My back started to feel better and so did my abs. I tried writing again but was too exhausted and started hating what I was writing. I waited so long to start this, I thought to myself, and now I hate it? But I can’t tell if I hate what I’m writing or if I hate thinking about my dad again, if writing about his unraveling with dementia or literally anything else about him is simply too much, if I should just leave it in the past. But I just, I don’t know, I think I have to. At rehearsal for my ensemble the other day I told Gibrán that I think I’m going to write new music soon because I can feel it in my brain about to pop out, like when you’re nauseous and you know you’re going to vomit at some point but you don’t know when. I know that I’ll write new music soon and I know that I’ll write this essay as well. What I don’t know is how I’ll pay my rent in November but I guess I’ll figure that out. I started advertising English lessons on Grindr, lol.