Time

One thing that blows my mind is how much True Detective rattles around in my head afterward. I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, so I was in that not quite awake, probably still dreaming, headspace and I was thinking how, even at my age, the idea that life is short is an illusion (though, in fairness, so is the idea that life is long). I have all these days stretching behind me, which I have spent similarly in order to preserve the illusion that life is short. Days alike are days that blend and merge.

I’m surprised by how much my nighttime thoughts turn to my Grandpa Phillips. He’s not someone I miss, by any stretch of the imagination. But maybe being the person a living person’s mind wants to mull over and understand is, in some ways, just as good as being missed. But I was thinking of him, being 40, sitting on the toilet in the dark, thinking back on his many days. I came to no conclusions. I just felt that we both had done that.

Ha, well, this is depressing. Let’s all contemplate every bit of how awesome this looks.

True Detective

Are y’all watching this? We watch it with the Red-Headed Kid on Mondays or Tuesdays, but I swear, I am about to tell him he needs to get over here on Sunday nights or lose the right to watch along. This waiting is killing me. Luckily, we got to watch it last night and, damn. I sometimes have a hard time believing this is even a real TV show. It’s just so smart and beautiful. I can’t remember the last time I sat around theorizing about what was going on in a show and I felt confident that the show creators had given as much thought to the clues in the show as we were. I’m convinced that every show I loved for having an overarching mythology was ruined by the fact that the writers, even though they promised to have carefully thought shit through, actually never had. They weren’t writing a grand conspiracy theory but a great game of improv. Tell me, honestly, that X-Files or Lost couldn’t have been mightily improved if they were given, say, four seasons right off the bat and allowed no more. Knowing the length of your story when your story is a conspiracy is important.

Anyway, let’s speculate:

We’re all of the opinion that Cohle is deep undercover in the present and that Hart is probably in on it. Something, we think, comes out about Hart’s daughters (maybe the visibly troubled one, maybe not) and Hart, though prone to violence against people who hurt children, can’t get at the guy who did it (perhaps his father-in-law molested them?) or he can get at that guy, but can’t get at all his friends, so Cohle, having nothing to lose and wanting to finally end this whole Yellow King (in other words, what’s going on with Hart’s family ties into the Yellow King) goes after them.

We’re all sure that Cohle would not be being interviewed if he didn’t want to be.

Our outlier possibility is that Hart is the Yellow King and Cohle figures that out.

I would love if we got some honest-to-god supernatural shit. But it fucks with my brain the way we don’t. So, I like it.