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It’s pretty hard to find a more ridiculous venue for a classic,
mournful folk song than a movie where Justin Long gets turned into a walrus.
Last week I came close, but fell short. Like I said, it’s tough to beat. For
god sakes, Mac from the Mac & PC commercials got drugged and had his legs
cut off and then had his leg bones attached to his face to act as tusks in that
movie. True, ridiculous story.
The
song in question is Gerard Way’s cover of “O Waly, Waly (The Water is Wide).”
It’s a fantastic, heartbreaking ditty about love and loss and sailing and boats
and so forth. It’s a real heart-string tugger from Scotland that dates back to
the 1600s and plays over the end credits of the Kevin Smith film “Tusk,” which
is that Justin Long, body-mod movie we were just talking about. That movie has
a completely bi-polar tone where it plays dead serious and very jokey sometimes
in the same scene. So the emotional gut punch that is Way’s cover, in an insane
uh ... way, makes sense playing right after a scene where Justin Long (full-fledged
walrus at this point) is visited by his old girlfriend and the kid from “The Sixth
Sense.” It’s a sad, absurd scene, why not cap it off with a four centuries old
Scottish song covered by the guy who most of the general public will always
remember for his vampire-on-prom-night look from the early 2000s?
I’m
getting off topic. Last week, I was sort of in a sad mood on Friday morning. Nothing
major, just sort of a gray mood. A “one of those mornings” kind of thing. In
honor of this, I decided to fire up that song on my phone (courtesy of Youtube) and sad-sack my way to work. However, I wouldn't be making my usual
morning commute.
On the
way to work, I had to stop off at a local municipal building to drop off an old
TV I had hanging around from my college days. Old TVs are literally the hardest
thing in the world to get rid of. I tried selling it at a yard sale for five
bucks. No takers. I tried giving it away at the same yard sale for free. No
takers. I tried leaving it outside at night with a sign that read “Free.” No
takers. I tried putting it up online for free. No takers.
Somewhere in this process, someone made off with the TV’s cord and left the TV
behind because the copper wire in that was more valuable than the rest of the
TV. At that point I was stuck with an old TV that now had no cord. In other
words, it had somehow become even more worthless.
