Michael's Weekend Wonderwall

Theoretically Defined (Ad Hoc):
An average person knows about 100 people. And for each of these 100 people, each knows another 100. That's 10k. Expanding this one more degree, we get 1 million 3rd degree friends for an average person. Expanding it to the 4th, 5th, and 6th degree, we have 100 million, 10 billion, and 1000 billion respectively. It’s exponential. Of course, there are far less human beings on earth than these figures.

Snapshots of a weekend randomly intertwined through my brains cognitive degrees of separation, through the use of the following words:
Metaphor (ically)
Pittsburgh
Michael ('s)
Corrie's Stress Level
Phantom (esque)
Winding

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1) Garden State: The three main characters, after a string of haphazard events, scream into a giant sink hole/underground cave/abyss that metaphorically represents an existential void.

Andrew: Fuck, this hurts so much.
Sam: I know it hurts. But it's life, and it's real. And sometimes it fucking hurts, but it's life, and it's pretty much all we got.
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2) Segue into this huge rock we went to Friday night. It was next to this cement factory just outside of town, and a winding road had been carved through the rock. Though far from an underground cave, it was still cool. The visual juxtaposition of the factory lights bleeding into the moonlight was metaphorical, but it a different way.

Michael: In the moonlight, a factory is the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. It’s like we’re in Pittsburgh.
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3) There is a book titled The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon, who also wrote Wonder Boys which was of course adapted into a film with Tobey Maguire and Michael Douglas. Michael Douglas plays a character aptly titled Professor Trip, who is a sort of an unorthodox pseudo-bohemian pot smoker working on his sophomore novel, which numbers over 2,451 pages (single spaced).

Hannah Green: Grady, you know how in class you're always telling us that writers make choices?

Grady Tripp: Yeah.

Hannah Green: And even though you're book is really beautiful, I mean, amazingly beautiful, it's... it's at times... it's... very detailed. You know, with the genealogies of everyone's horses, and the dental records, and so on. And... I could be wrong, but it sort of reads in places like you didn't make any choices. At all. And I was just wondering if it might not be different if... if when you wrote you weren't always... under the influence.

Grady Tripp: Well... thank you for the thought, but shocking as it may sound, I am not the first writer to sip a little weed. Furthermore, it might surprise you to know that one book I wrote, as you say, "under the influence," just happened to win a little something called the Pen Award. Which, by the way, I accepted under the influence.
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4) Saturday night, in an Austin coffee house called Spider, we spotted a guy who vaguely (read: didn’t) resembled Orlando Bloom/Johnny Depp/Jared Leto. I took his marginal looks as an invitation to yell across the room:

Michael: Hey man… We think you look like Jared Leto.
Guy: Yeah, I hear that a lot. But it doesn’t help with my chronic inability to get laid.

(This is where Corrie’s stress level begins to significantly increase, a trend that would continue every time this guy opened his mouth)

Diego (as we later learned) joined us and what ensued was a rather bizarre evening of events. This guy, as it turned out, was a grad student at UT. He got his undergrad in Pittsburgh, where The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonerboys are more or less required reading. What’s more, he knew the real Professor Trip who Michael Chabon wrote about, and of course Michael Douglas played. And my name is Michael. Crazy.

I told a random girl at Spider she looks like Kirsten Dunst (she did NOT look like Ms. Dunst whatsoever), and when we were heading to Diego’s apartment, she was walking ahead of us. Excited, I yelled out:

Michael: Hey, you still look like Kirsten Dunst.
(Andy begins running after her)
Diego: My Spidey Sense is tingling!
(I begin to howl with laughter… Corrie’s stress level soars…the girl literally runs away and we of course give chase, but she disappears. Once again, literally disappears. We think she might have been a phantom.)

phan•tom
n.
1.
a. Something apparently seen, heard, or sensed, but having no physical reality; ghost or an apparition.
b. Something elusive or delusive.

5) Saturday we saw Phantom of the Opera, which was amazing. For the type of film they were trying to make, it simply could not have been done better. I found myself wondering if I have what it takes to become a Phantom, but I don’t believe I’m skittish enough, although I do a considerable amount of reclusive brooding from time to time. That’s sort of Phantomesque.
And how do you become a Phantom anyways? I’d most like to be a Count. Count Michael. Nice ring, no? I’d even settle for becoming a Duke… Surely there is some sort of hierarchy with these things.

6) Music brings down Corrie's stress level significantly. She played the following song for me, which captures exactly what I'm feeling after the past seventy-two hours... What's going to save me I wonder?

Today was gonna be the day
But they'll never throw it back to you
By now you should've somehow
Realized what you're not to do
I don't believe that anybody
Feels the way I do
About you now

And all the roads that lead to you were winding
And all the lights that light the way are blinding
There are many things that I would like to say to you
I don't know how

I said maybe
You're gonna be the one who saves me?