Creatures of the Wheel

This gentleman, let's call him Lens Man, wormed his way into the apple core of my existence.  It's not often you meet a kindred soul, a soul, who when you look at him and talk with him, sets off all kinds of synchronicities, and converging contingencies, and opens one up to the tragic, poetic nature of our post-Western Civilization experiment.

Let's just say the two of us have much in common, even as we have both broken off from the human tree and flowered in our own deformed and splendidly ragged ways.

Lens Man: "Jimmeh, I'm gonna jack you up like a Goddamned Mule!"

This Gentleman introduced me to the wonders and the secret pleasures of Omega Man.  It's a post apocalyptic nightmare film from the 70's, starring the almost always bare-chested Charlton Heston.  The dialogue is profound and absurd.  So funny, so lacerating and true.  The acting is stilted and perfect.  The stunts are all real and clunky.  No CGI.  It is a perfect film.  A classic for sure.

It is a film loaded with insight and decadent pleasure for those of us who know that yes, we are all living in the wreckage of Western civilization, a place where science and art has already decimated us, mowed down our certainties, exposed us to the deep horrors of the human imagination and left us nursing the psychology of the survivor.

We are are trying to survive being survivors in the bleak wreckage of our own making.  We are creatures of the wheel.  Masters of the machines.  We are the fallen.  Omega!