Sixty Hours Underslept

I've pretty much spent the last two and a half weeks watching Six Feet Under. I lived the rest of my life as well, of course, but I watched the show from beginning to end (except the pilot, which I'd seen a month or so earlier) in that time. There are going to be a lot of posts referring to it in the weeks to come, but it amazes me, right now, how deeply I lived in those characters, how deeply I'm always going to get to live in those characters—seriously, art *does* that—and how astounding that a show so focused on death is about—not living, that's triter than what I mean, but how much we live with, how much we carry. In lesser hands, at the end of a lesser show, I might not have liked the last episode, its peculiar ending montage, but it managed to communicate that death is what we carry, and however royally fucked up we may be, we might as well know that, and see and know all the other things we hold.

Like I said, more and more notes about this show will come, because it has changed the way I think. Which couldn't please me more: however much I've cried like crazy in the last seven hours, completely freaking my mother out over the phone because she thought I meant a real person, and not a character, had died (I apologize again, Mom. And again. I really just wasn't thinking), I don't think there is anything like art of this caliber to really change, really get under the skin of, the way you think. Which is to say that whatever strange relationship I have developed, whatever I have been doing with this fictional show, I have not been escaping from reality. Quite the contrary. I've sharpened my perceptions both of reality and of what we can do with and around it.

That's amazing.

That is all.