You Are Amazing (Spider-Man: No Way Home)
What a shitty day last Friday the 24th was. It’s nothing new now, once out of the cycle of the latest cruelty of our ever-crumbling world we get another one…I don’t have much more to say on that, other than I hope people get the help they need. Needing some kind of escape, I finally got around to watching Spiderman: No Way Home, and while I wouldn’t say it’s a direct balm to the latest tragedy, it did make me feel a little better, which can be a great power of what Roger Ebert use to call those “empathy machines.” Maybe it was seeing old Spidermen back and with their can-do, resilient attitude in the face of their own tragedies and the new reality run amok they were faced with, or the Harry Potter-esque triumvirate of the current Peter Parker (Tom Holland), MJ (Zendaya), and Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon), hearing Marisa Tomei, as Aunt May, deliver Uncle Ben’s old line about responsibility, or just the gongoloid good fun and action of the flick, who knows. But I went to bed that night feeling like a little candle in this darkened universe was lit. I watched the movie again the next day after finding out I tested positive for the virus, and the experience gave me a similar feeling of hope. Four days on from that rewatch I still feel fine, actually healthier than I have in a long time. Maybe watching the movie alleviated some of the fear or even just the guilt of even getting the virus in the first place, some Spiderman coming through a portal opened by desperation and telling me to keep a chin up, that things would be alright. And to check for any sign of web slinger blockage…Until I can get another booster, maybe it’s the next best thing.
