Friday Night Lights

Call Friday Night Lights a football film if you want.  I see more.  I can't help it right now.

Getting back into this project, or any project for that matter, has been next to impossible since Mom died last month.  Everything I watch seems to have a detail, moment, or theme that takes me right to her.  Everything I do leads me right back.

Maybe I'm just predisposed to wandering thoughts that always end up in the same place.  I find myself looking ahead to a stretch of films about loss and death, and I'm not good at this.

We hadn't spoken in five years.  The "why" seems stupid now.  We didn't get along, so we didn't talk.  She wanted me to call and I didn't.  I wanted her to treat me differently and she didn't.  There's not much more to say right now.  We hadn't talked in years, hadn't gotten along in even longer, and I'm the one who has to live with that, not anybody else.

I told my wife and myself several times this year, probably more times this year than ever, that I should call Mom.  I should drop this shit and just call her.  No, it'll be bad, I thought.  I'll do it later.  Yeah, maybe at the holidays, I'll try it again somehow.  And then...well, I can't tell you everything.

Mom lived in Texas for a while before she got together with Dad.  Watching this film tonight, I'm not actually looking at a film about football — I'm not even thinking about the film at all.  I'm thinking of Mom, 40 years ago, out in that big, wide open nothing of Texas, where the landscapes stretch out forever.  I like to think she was happy there, at least for a while.  I have pictures of her from that era of her life, and she's young and pretty and happy.  She had blonde hair then and I never knew why.

Listen to this soundtrack.  Explosions in the Sky delivers these big, echoing, ebbing and flowing post-rock anthems that put the great big open nothingness of Texas to music.  Throw in some rap and metal from the late 1980s and even Bad Company's "Seagull" over the credits and you have one of the finest soundtracks out there — the kind you can play on repeat and ride the arc of the film if you want.  These instrumentals take me right to her again.

Friday Night Lights is a film about hope.  I see a film that examines how we deal with dashed hopes and missed opportunities.  Friday Night Lights says much about how intrepid we can be when we suffer a loss.  We get back up because we have no choice.  The world might look a lot different in that instant and beyond, and we might hurt like we've never hurt, and we might cry like we've never cried, but we get back up anyway.

And in this case, I find myself looking for solace through some kind of restitution — making her (and others I've lost) proud in whatever way I can because there's no other peace in this.  I don't know what I'm doing, but this seems right.

If I live in a way that would make her proud, then maybe this won't be so hard to carry, and maybe when I see her again, everything will be different.