Crazy in Alabama [antikvár]

Iam out here in California waiting for the walls to come tumbling down. We have had omens. Ten years of plague. Seven years of drought. Firestorms. Mudslides. Floods. Pestilence. Riots. Tremors. Visions of the Virgin. The millennium is bearing down on us fast. Nobody knows if 1999 will bring the end of everything, or the beginning of something else. I kick back in my junior-one-bedroom apartment and look out at the shimmering night-lights of Telegraph Hill and the East Bay. I wonder how it will look when it all falls down. Remember Jimmy Stewarts house in Vertigo, where he takes Kim Novak to dry out after he's fished her out of San Francisco Bay? I live up the hill from that house. They've painted it slate-blue and the shrubs have grown up. Otherwise it looks the same. I sit by the window in my rocking chair, where I can see Jimmy Stewart s house and my TV at the same time. I freeze the laserdisc on the wide shot of the house: Cool blond Kim Novak strides to her car, forsaking Jimmy on the front porch. I compare the scene as it is now, in real life, to the forty-year-old view through Hitchcock s camera. I drink bourbon and sit for hours, studying the subtle differences. Everyone else is worried about the future. I have this thing about the past. One night I was running Kim on a continuous slow-motion loop from Jimmy's front door to her green sedan and back again, when the telephone rang. A quavery voice said "Peejoe?"