The water is wide, I cannot get o’er.

We just finished watching a very strange and disturbing film, Prestige, which I recommend highly because it is both a good story and very well done as a piece of cinema. The scientist Tesla plays a very important rôle in inventing and building the machine which is the crux of the argument for the plot. I have read many science fiction stories in which he is a character, and they all credit him with bizarre inventions. Well, he was an interesting person, a brilliant scientist, and should have been granted a more prominent spot in history, but was unfortunately undermined and overshone by Edison. Interesting how these things work out.

I took my brother out for a walk this morning to see the river swollen from all the rain we’ve just had, which was at the eight foot mark according to the St. Francis bridge. It was drizzling and chilly, and the water had totally covered the small islands and the sitting rock, creating eddies and whirlpools as it passed underneath the bridge with the arches.

We went for coffee at the Java where we actually ended up spending a couple of hours having a serious talk about the state of my relationship with our brother, the one between us in age. What we basically figured out is that this sibling sees me as a “loose canon” (his actual words) and doesn’t want to have anything to do with me because he doesn’t know when I may go off. Well, I only “go off” when I am provoked, and I’m not going to change. As a result, he is denying himself a sister’s love because of something that might never happen again. I don’t get it, but at least I can live with it.

By this time it was practically noon, so we walked over to the Captain’s and I bought him a bowl of pho (I had vegetarian, he had shrimp). It was delicious, as always. Then we went home. By then the rain had stopped and the sun was trying to come out, although it never did.

My brother got a very strange email today from a friend of his, someone he went to high school with, which was along the lines of a suicide note. The writer said that after he hit send, he was going to blow his brains out in the garage. Very disturbing. R’s been trying to find out more, to see if this is what actually transpired. After seeing Prestige, it’s just a little too weird.

Anyway, here are a couple of photos of the river running high:

the St. Francis with the experimental farm barely visible through the drizzle:

the Massawippi almost up to the lawn of the campus (this is the train bridge where Vlad’s son was hit by a train ten or so years ago):

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