Bustin' makes me feel good.

Then there was that one day when, having been guts-being-forcibly-turned-inside-out-and-wrenched-from-my-mouth ill all morning, I spent the whole day dozing in bed, drinking a lot of ginger ale and (once the ginger ale started staying down, because my stomach was finally convinced that whatever toxin was in there had finally been purged) eating a few crackers, and watching Singin' in the Rain and then, for the first time in more than twenty years, Ghostbusters. And that day, partly because the very thought of coffee was utterly nauseating, by the time the sun went down, though still before the sky was even nearly dark, I was tired enough to clock out for the night. And no one minded that I didn't write very much that day--didn't even tell (for instance) the story about the father of one of my best elementary school friends, a man who used some technology or another on his brand new VHS VCR in, oh, 1985 to silence every instance of the word "shit," so that his young son (my little brother's age), could tell you proudly how many times they said the "s-word" in Ghostbusters. In my mother's retelling, it's always the "f-word"; I suspect that she remembers it that way because the very idea that it was better to emphasize a four-letter word than to have your child saying it seems so ridiculous that it would have had to have been a very, very bad four-letter word to prompt such action. But this man's wife once threatened to eject me, then only a nine-year-old Miss S, from a birthday party after I proclaimed that a dumb pop-the-balloon game we were playing sucked. Which, by the way, it did. So, the fact that the gleeful utterances her husband suppressed were only of "shit" isn't that surprising, after all.

Oh, childhood. So many memories come back when I watch the movies with which we were collectively obsessed in the early 1980s. Watch Ghostbusters now and you'll be amazed by three things: how gorgeous Sigourney Weaver was; how every male character lit up a cigarette (and often cracked open a beer) every time there was any pause in his labor; and how they busted all those ghosts without any access to mobile phones.

I'm hoping to manage coffee and toast first thing tomorrow morning.

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A Ghostbusters postscript: Not until this post's comments started coming in did I realize that the title I chose wasn't an obvious allusion to anyone except someone who'd just rewatched Ghostbusters and thus reexperienced its theme song. If you care to follow up, it's at about 2:56 in this video. The video itself--with its celebrity cameos and Times Square dancing at the end--makes me wonder whether Ghostbusters, out in 1984, was the first movie to exploit the music video as marketing strategy. I'm guessing that it's not: it seems as though three and a half years (January 1981 to June 1984) would have been a long time to wait for this particular cross-media phenom to take off. But you can definitely see it happening there in the video.