Opera

I am currently listening to the second act of Das Rheingold, the first part of The Ring Cycle by Wagner. I love the power and emotion conveyed in the music, even if I can't understand a fairly substantial portion of the language (it's in German). Actually, I can't really follow any of the lyrics (if you call them lyrics in opera - it seems a little crass), but I know the story, and I know which of the characters I'm listening to, so it's still cool. It's quite a marathon listen though - the version I downloaded is about fourteen and a half hours all up. The story is awesome - if a little weird. All about the decline of the Gods and the redemption of the world of man, about power and greed, a magnificent octopus...
I only have one more week of work to go. Hooray! It's going to be awesome to have three full weeks away from the job, and to get a proper break through Christmas and New Years. That was one thing that really sucked ass about working as a projectionist. But I really miss projection. It was exactly the sort of job that suited me. A certain degree of technical work, that you could make as complicated or easy as you liked - that is to say there was the option of either being a proper projectionist - someone who maintained and repaired the machines, or being a lazy shit and just running film and nothing else. I didn't even mind becoming effectively a supervisor at Tauranga and The Mount - it was something I had no interest in doing at Hoyts, but it was considered a basic part of the job at BOP cinemas. I suppose it would have been much worse if it involved dealing with customer complaints, not just the admin side. But the approach taken to customer problems there seemed to be either tell people to get stuffed or ignore them, and hope they'd go away. If they wouldn't, then came the comp ticket offers and whatnot. It seems like a very poor way to run a business, but when you have a complete monopoly on your industry in an area, I guess you can run things however the hell you want, and there isn't much anyone can do about it. It's why I always wanted to see another proper cinema complex established in Tauranga - to see the Desmonds sweat.
Why on earth am I going on about this? It's been a year now since I left that job. My new job is okay - after 9 months I'm getting a little bored, but it's not too bad. At least I'm making reasonable money now - that was the one real problem with projection. Not enough money, and no real future in it.
I recently finished reading Kingdom of Fear - Hunter S Thompsons autobiography of sorts. It was fascinating - as most of his stuff is. I hadn't really considered what a substantial timespan his career covered. There are some truly surreal moments in it - especially a night spent with The Judge, that involved crashing into sheep, going to an Adult filmmakers convention, visiting a man with a blowup doll collection (who killed himself), and being pursued and almost killed by the police. I wondered as I read this particular episode if it was true - it's very hard to tell. If it was, I'm amazed that Thompson lived as long as he did. It sucks that he's gone, but he was a man who truly lived his life at the absolute limit, and seemed to not just survive but thrive on the weird and the extreme. Just the accounts of dangerous driving throughout the book leave me in awe of a crazy, brilliant man.

Anyhoo, enough. I think I might go for a walk...