{"id":1374,"date":"2005-07-10T18:38:00","date_gmt":"2005-07-10T23:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/?p=1374"},"modified":"2005-07-10T18:38:00","modified_gmt":"2005-07-10T23:38:00","slug":"latter-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/?p=1374","title":{"rendered":"Latter Days"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been wanting to see Latter Days for awhile now. I could swear I remember recommending it. Or maybe disrecommending it… Anyway what better time to watch it, then when I’m flying so that I can distract myself from irrational anxieties? I think the movie rocks. It may even be in the lower echelon of my favorite 10. Probably not the top ten best<\/i> movies ever, but I had a number of themes I found very appealing. The skin factor gave me a moment or two of discomfort playing it on the plane next to a mother whose son was sitting just on the other side of her, but oh well.<\/p>\n

Latter Days is the story of a mormon missionary and a gay waiter tramp. Boy meets boy. Boy makes bet about getting in boy’s pants. Boy falls in love with boy. Boy kisses boy. Boy gets found out by his fellow missionaries. Boy is sent home. Boy manages to arrange nookie with Boy. Boy goes back home anyway. Boy is excommunicated. Boy tries to commit suicide. Boy is put through variant electroshock therapy. Boy gets free. Boy finds boy again. Boys live happily ever after.<\/p>\n

I’m both an atheist and a militant agnostic. I don’t believe in god. And I’m completely confident that ultimate causes of being and\/or the existence of an omnipotent and\/or omniscient entity are unknowable. I believe that others believe, but their beliefs are just guesses they’ve hung a great deal of hope on or a deeply inculcated assumption that they do not question. Probably more the latter. For a fair number of people there is a great deal of their individual and collective lives built around that premise. <\/p>\n

That having been said, I believed. I believed deeply, more than half my life ago. I took it more seriously than anyone else I knew. A candle that burned so brightly, so briefly. The loss of belief was catastrophic for me. Life wasn’t going so hot to begin with, and the collapse of my belief system was a very big deal. Probably the central support structure in my life went byebye. My loss of belief was associated with misdeeds with a fellow a little bit younger than myself when I was a pretty wee tot. The trigger, as it were, was his suicide threat that landed him in the hospital, where he spilled his guts, and apparently went on to tell some tales that were not true. I denied everything, the true and the false, and got away with it, on some level. I denied it to my parents. I denied it to myself. I denied it to Children’s Services. But the failure of lightning to strike me, and the guilt I felt left me pretty fucked up. And my faith went with it. <\/p>\n

Additionally, I’m somewhat familiar with the sexual lifestyle of the waiter boy, a series of one night stands. I’m have a window the sense of abandonment which that character felt when he was left behind in a blizzard by his father, from the time when I was accidentally left behind at a rest stop, on an october night, where I was sexually assaulted by a stranger. <\/p>\n

There’s a theme in the movie about how things have meaning in the bigger picture that we can’t always appreciate as we’re living our lives. <\/p>\n

It was a good movie, and I strongly recommend it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been wanting to see Latter Days for awhile now. I could swear I remember recommending it. Or maybe disrecommending it… Anyway what better time to watch it, then when I’m flying so that I can distract myself from irrational anxieties? I think the movie rocks. It may even be in the lower echelon of … Continue reading “Latter Days”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[25,14],"class_list":["post-1374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-movies","tag-navelgazing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1374\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}