Left to my own devices

    I'm not a big fan of recent buzzwords such as "trauma" and "closure." I dunno, it just seems like they're so much pop-psycho-babble that have been used so much as to become annoying. Those words have, however, seemed appropriate for how I've been feeling the last couple of weeks. Allow me to explain. I turned 50 on December 27th. It was a great birthday -- probably my favorite -- and has left me feeling all sorts of positive emotions in its wake. One aspect of it did, however, send me on a particularly deep emotional journey, one which I've oddly found to be quite healing. Where to begin? I've been thinking about this a lot, and don't really know the best way to frame it, or how to begin describing it, so... here we go.   

         Yesterday was the closing night of the 32nd St. Louis International Film Festival, and there I watched the new film, All of Us Strangers . It was written and directed by Andrew Haigh, who adapted it from the Japanese novel Strangers , by Taichi Yamada. I've seen two of Haigh's previous movies -- Lean on Pete , and Weekend -- the latter a good, solid film, and the former being my favorite movie of 2018 (when it was widely released here in the United States).