Well, I’ve never really been a big fan of blogs. Reading or writing. Reading blogs seems more like living life vicariously through others, and I tend to think I’d rather live things myself. And because of that, I tend to think that others probably wouldn’t care much to hear what I have to say, for the same reasons.
But today has been one of those days where, perhaps, I need to write a blog to hear about my own life. Who knows?
I’ve just watched one of the most horrifying movies I’ve ever seen: Touching the Void. It’s a documentary of two friends who climb together, only to try to climb something that no one has ever done, but has been tried, so they think it’s worth the challenge.
It reminds me of other movies I find equally horrifying/fascinating. Yesterday, while transcoding some of my old VHS tapes to mpg, I stumbled across something I recorded years ago from the TV about 4 Olympic-caliber kayakers who attempted to descend a section of the Tsang Po River that had never been run before, and chronicles what was, in effect, their failure. (The second attempt is documented as well).
Then there’s The Same River Twice (2003) and a very similar movie Same River Twice (1996) which the author of one insists that while he’d heard of the other one, he’d never seen it. The first (fiction) chroniclers a group of friends who return to a river they used to guide on in their youth, and how they come to terms with events form their past. The second is a documentary about the lives of a group of friends who take a month-long trip down the Colorado.
Open Water would be another of those stories, the story of two divers who are with a diving group, and then get left behind by accident.
I had Touching the Void recommended to my during my Swift Water kayaking class, along with Into the Wild and Into Thin Air. Touching the Void was just the first one to show up from Netflix.
And now, while writing this and finding the links, I’ve added Deep Water to my queue.
It clearly says something about me that all of these movies touch me deeply.