`Tonight, I am going to do one of those things where I tell you about something that I am in the middle of watching.

As with the Elon Gold special (which finished awesome, BTW), it is something I am just way too excited by to wait until I am done watching it to comment.

It’s a movie called Bunraku (which sounds to me like the name of Usagi Yojimbo’s species) and I am loving the hell out of it.

It is extremely stylized, which I don’t mind at all, but some people might not like it. There is some anachronistic bullshit about a nuclear holocaust (get with the times, it’s global warming that will do it) and in the aftermath, all guns being destroyed (yeah right), but it’s just an excuse to have a movie set in a sort of universe that is like if Frank Miller had been in charge of the 60’s TV Batman and robin.

But hey, I loved Sin City, every minute of it, so I clearly have no problem with that kind of thing.

It’s got everything. You have colorful gangs who all dress alike towards a theme, like there’s a Soviet Russia gang and a Ghengis Khan type gang, and everything is decided by the sword, and everything is all dark and edgy without (thank God) a stupid depressing compressed palate of greys and browns and blacks.

The writing is good and solid. As long as you accept it for what it is, which is basically a live action comic book, and you can just enjoy the thing as an exercise in a kind of extreme form of film noire, where the whole point of the thing is to tell a tale of darkness and badassery, it is (at least so far) a heck of a ride.

And to think, I only stuck it on my Netflix list because I thought it sounded vaguely interesting. The description called it “genre-bending” and I thought, what the hell, I like my genres bent.

One thing that bugs me is that the evil gang that runs the city all dress like Chicago Prohibition-era toughs, but all in red, like they all came from some primary-color version of Guys and Dolls.

And I like the whole flaming blazing red thing…. it makes them very visually distinctive and instantly conveys a sense of aggression and dominance. But the gangster thing… it makes it really hard for me to take them seriously. To me, they don’t look badass or scary at all.

I mean, they chew gum and play with yo-yos. WTF is up with that? They look like the only people they could menace would be immigrant fruit cart workers and maybe the Lil Rascals.

Then again, I have had the theory for a while that you might make your villains even more badass by dressing them in a way that just dares you not to take them seriously, thus creating a conflict in people’s mind when you come around to harass them because their eyes say one thing but their brains, their knowledge of just what your gang is capable of, say another.

It’s just a theory, though.

Other than my Netflix adventures, it’s been a quiet pleasant day. My therapist was fifteen minutes late starting our session, but to his credit, we went fifteen minutes past the usual end time, so it all evens out.

I told him about my knee, which in retrospect was a mistake, because then we got sidelined into a ‘medical advice’ mode when all I wanted to do was unburden myself and explore my problems like we usually do.

So it’s true. Men can’t help but go into problem solving mode when all you want them to do is listen to you express your feelings. We ended up wasting fifteen minutes of precious therapy time talking about my health.

Well I have a GP for my physical health. I don’t go to a shrink to talk about my physical problems. I go there to talk with a professional who knows me but is not connected to me personally so I can be honest with him and he can stimulate me to rethink things by asking questions from an outsider’s perspective.

Outside my brain, that is. It is a unique situation in that I usually protect people from exposure to my demons and their foul radiation, so it is hard for me to believe that I can just go there and take down all the shielding and it doesn;t scare him off or destroy him.

Perhaps I am not as radioactive as I have always thought. I have spent a long time thinking that if I exposed myself to people, my darkness would destroy and devour them, or at least drive them away. The pain inside me throbs with latent energy and it is hard to imagine that anyone could survive my whole truth.

It’s just too damned depressing. I have a real feel of opening up to people and showing them my interior world and having it actually hurt them. It is just so stark and cold and dark and wrong in there. I have seen the effect that even small exposures to my pain can have on unsuspecting happy, healthy people, and it is chilling. I can tell that my world would be toxic to them. If just tiny exposures make them feel like they just stepped onto the edge of a bottomless cavern of ice cold horror, I can only imagine that a larger exposure would be like pushing them in.

And I can’t do that. I am too sensitive for that. When you have antenna like mine, making yourself happier at someone else’s expense is impossible, because whatever pleasure you gain is canceled out by your empathic feeling of the other person’s pain.

I can steal, but I cannot rob.

So therapy it is, at least until I am healthy enough for my interior world to become hospitable for human life.

No wonder I liked the ending of the original Diablo game so much. In it, your hero decides that the only way to protect the world from the demon lord Diablo (the main bad guy) is to take that demon into themselves, where they will always be at war with said demon.

Kind of feel that way myself. Talk about inner demons, huh?

Don’t be fooled by a jokes and tricks and pretty lights, kids. Underneath this carnival there is nothing but miles and miles of lifeless tundra where the wind is always howling and the air is as cold as the surface of the Moon.

A little more melts every day, though, and someday I will have a true springtime of the soul, and all the bad things will be washed out of me, and I will finally be clean.

Talk to you tomorrow, folks!