Flannery O'Connor

            On Monday a crew was across the street jackhammering the sidewalk. This was a different company than was here up until a week ago. There sure does seem to be a lot of street surgery going on in this neighbourhood.

            Despite my cold being gone I still have an oppressive amount of phlegm in my throat that made it difficult to swallow when I laid down for a while.

            I finished reading Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People”. She sure can spin a dark, disturbing yet funny tale. A proper middle class single woman had a 32-year-old daughter that was missing a leg because it had been blown off in a hunting accident when she was ten. The girl had gone on to earn a PHD but ended up just living with her mother and stewing in bitterness as she thought about how much smarter she was than everyone else around her. One day a young Bible salesman came to the house. The mother thought him charming and simple and invited him to stay for dinner. Later he secretly arranged to meet the next day for a picnic with the disabled daughter. They went to the loft of an abandoned barn and started making love but he wanted her to take off her leg because he seemed fascinated with it. She finally submitted to his request and he revealed that he didn’t even believe in the Bible. He was a collector of grotesque curiosities like when once he’d taken a young woman’s glass eye from her. He put the wooden leg in his briefcase and left with it, leaving her in the loft.

            I practiced playing “Dead Autumn Leaves” several times but I’m not sure if practice helps. I guess it does but it would take a lot for me to get good at playing that song.

            I tried to get in touch with the booking agent at the Gladstone Hotel to try to book the Art Bar for the 25^th anniversary of the Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy next year. Their website is hard to manoeuvre and the link to their email doesn’t work, so finally I called to leave a message. Hopefully someone will get back to me since the ideal place for an Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy reunion would be the Gladstone Art Bar.

            I watched the film “Logan” and was quite impressed with both the highly emotional story and the action were interwoven. Although this story is set ten years in the future and in an alternate universe in which all the mutants have been killed off except for Professor X and Wolverine, who are both dying, this story presented what were apparently the final performances by Patrick Stewart and Hugh Jackman in their portrayals of these characters. The movie was a fitting swan song for both of them.

            Professor Charles Xavier, who has the most powerful mind on Earth, is now dying of a degenerative brain disease and the seizures that result from it cause mass paralysis and sometimes death to anyone within hundreds of meters around him. In order to save lives, Wolverine has to make sure that Charles receives regular injections and pills that hold back the seizures. Meanwhile two illegal immigrants from Mexico enter into the story: a woman and a ten-year-old girl named Laura. The woman offers Logan $50,000 to help her and the girl get to Canada. Logan agrees and goes to make the arrangements but when he returns the woman has been murdered and the girl is missing. Then the Reavers arrive. They are the elite government military force that was responsible for killing off the mutants. They are looking for the girl. Wolverine fights them, though he is sick and weakened now and his self-healing powers are failing. The girl helps by tossing a metal pipe and knocking out the Reavers’ leader.

            Logan takes Laura to the compound where he’s been holding Professor X in a specially sealed metal building that partially contains his powers. Charles tells Logan that Laura is a mutant but Logan does not believe it because all the mutants are dead.

            Just as they are all about to leave for Canada the Reavers attack. While Wolverine is fighting them Laura enters the fray, revealing that she is not only a mutant but that she has the same powers as Wolverine, with the addition of foot claws as well as hand claws and she uses both as she fights like a berserker. Charles later explains that foot claws would be natural on a female version of himself and he gives the example that female lions often defend themselves and their young with their hind claws.

            They watch a video left by the woman that had brought Laura north. She tells the story of a Reaver research facility in Mexico where she had been employed as a nurse. The purpose of the facility was to create controllable mutant soldiers from the DNA that had been collected from the mutants they’d eliminated. The problem was though that the children that resulted were not as manipulatable as they’d expected and after ten years they changed their plan to just making clones of the dead mutants. That meant that they would be eliminating the children from the previous project. That’s when the nurses and doctors rebelled and tried to help the children escape. Some of them managed to make it to North Dakota where they set up a temporary home until they were all together so they could cross the border and be free. They didn’t really say why Canada would be a safe place for mutants though. Some forum contributors theorize that the reason the Reavers wanted to stop the kids before they crossed the Canadian border was because there was something strong enough to protect them on the other side. That might have been the Canadian mutant team, Alpha Flight, which work for the Canadian government and so that would explain why they didn’t cross the border to help Wolverine.

            Charles informs Logan that Laura is his daughter but even after learning that he almost abandons her a couple of times. He is very reluctant to bond with her and doesn’t really do so until the end, just seconds before he dies.