Fallen

I am still feeling strangely wired, as if I'd had too much caffeine, despite my relative lack of sleep in the past 72 hours. Twice this weekend I discovered well after midnight that I had forgotten to eat anything for dinner, engrossed as I had been in my Jake activities. This is not healthy, and I'm the first to admit it. I am coming apart.

But it's not new, either. I've done it before, will do it again, no doubt. So while it's mortifying and pathetic, I recognize that it is also completely self-indulgent. I wanted to be lost in him, on whatever level, so I let it happen. Now I just have to see if I can make a go of the rest of my waking life while I try to crawl back to the surface for air.

Anyway, the good news in all this is that I did successfully get video out of my DVR, so Rendition Week will be available to those who need it from me. Not that I'm your only source, but a promise is a promise.

I don't feel comfortable talking about what caused my strung-out weekend Jake-bender, but I feel like it would be dishonest to withhold it, too. So much has swirled through my mind, I know it will continue to affect me for quite some time, possibly until the day I forget Jake Gyllenhaal (it will happen, if I live long enough, experience tells me).

Perhaps the most amazing thing is that, as if on cue, Jake has provided a strangely relevant quote to the media as part of his current Rendition promotion. Some Kentucky newspaper quotes him telling Fox News, "I don't hold it against people for wanting to know about our personal lives and reading all those magazines and what not."

Our world is in a very bad place at the moment, so I think it is only appropriate that people look to other things and have an interest in all the drama and happenings of celebrity lives, and I hope that at some point I can help the public sedate and escape what's really happening in the outside world.

Sedate is never a word I associate with my reactions to Jake, but I know he's talking about escapism, and of course that's something I can relate to, as my presence here makes obvious. The quote is probably from this interview, where Jake is asked again about extraordinary rendition, and also about working with actors and others from the varying nations that made up the cast and crew of that film.

His disarmingly benevolent attitude toward the public fascination with celebrity, and celebrity gossip, was neither predictable nor revelatory, though it was characteristic of his philosophical nature. Unfortunately, it also has triggered my protective instincts; I fear that every sleazy creep in the world will consider it an approbation, even an invitation to further probe, invade, stalk. I hope that beefy bald guy Jake tows around has at least one equally intimidating coworker. He's too fucking nice, and I'm so afraid for his safety and his privacy that I'm feeling invasive.

Babble, blather, I tend to run on when I have something on my mind that I don't necessarily feel good revealing. True confession time has come, and while most of the (30 or so) people who will ever read this may shrug or even laugh at the drama of my words, I think one or two will grok this.

I've made no secret of my opinion about fan fiction, and my own ambivalence when against my better judgment I found myself authoring some. Even less appealing than fanfic to me was the morally questionable subset known as RPS. I know in my rational mind that anyone reading these stories is aware it's fantasy, but the use of real people as characters seems abusive somehow.

How then do I explain my random decision last Friday, while bored out of my skull here at work, to seek out and indulge in the one thing I told myself I never would, the most salacious and egregious of fan manifestations? I don't. I can't. I've once again proved myself the queen of irony, my contradictions alive and well. I can tell you that I both regret it, and don't. I read the story that over the past year several friends had recommended to me, despite my protests, as the best. I read it, and I re-read it, and then I went and I found a sequel, and I read that, too. Then, hating myself already, depressed, and completely consumed, instead of moving on to find some distraction, I went and read another.

What the hell happened?

I can tell you it had nothing to do with the plots, which were fantastical, presumptive, and unoriginal--no offense to those authors, I don't mean their writing was bad. It was excellent, or I wouldn't be in this mess. Just that the tale they spun was not one in which I had any emotional investment. So why did I keep reading? And why do I feel raw?

In one word, Jake.

The growing realization that someone else's mental Jake was so completely identical to my own, so vivid, every conversation and action (apart from the plotline) ringing true despite the very fact that this was fiction, knocked all the wind out of me. Not just my Jake, anymore. This was evidence that the myth in my head is a bit more than that. I have spent hours digesting and analyzing this discovery. I can discuss the logical aspects, that we have all formed our image of him from the same sources, all that is publicly available, that I already knew this in large part from my interaction with the fandom. For whatever reason, that has not mitigated the impact of this weekend's reading. Holy shit, I tell myself, is it possible? Can anyone be this...everything that he is? The first author's Jake was funny, a tad immature at times, intelligent, but most of all, direct, and warm. I couldn't get enough. Later, as I tried to recover, I decided to read the comments on her journal by her readers, wanting to see how many other people had been sucker-punched by her Jake. I was perplexed to see only one or two comments that even remotely suggested the impact I had felt. What I did find, though, was her own revelation of her favorite story as a reader, and I'll be goddamned if I didn't go off immediately to find that one, too. Pathetic.

Both the first story and the last one shared a common point of view that certainly contributed to my vulnerability here; namely, that of the other person, the one completely enamored with Jake and feeling hopeless about it. This too was devastatingly authentic; perhaps my reaction is based in insane jealousy, the knowledge that someone else--no, fuck it, almost everyone else--has this longing, here translated into a story where it is embodied in another who would actually have access to Jake. The descriptions of that person's perceptions and responses to him, words I could have written or spoken, given the opportunity.

That's it, but that's enough. It makes no sense, that any of these things should be as an epiphany to me, but making sense is often overrated. I know these were stories, written by someone who no more knows the real Jake than I do. But he was so much my Jake, addictive, I could not stop. What have I done?

Before anyone asks, no, I do not plan to continue reading RPS, or fanfic. I remember having said that there would be no going back, and I do fear its draw, but this has got to stop. I lost an entire weekend, minus a few family hours (in which Jake was with me all the way), to indulgence, and I can't maintain my basic functions this way. It's unhealthy, it's disgusting, it's ridiculous, but most of all, it's too easy.

Fortunately, we shall have more real Jake in the immediate future, which I think will go a long way to bringing me back to health. Watching him be all those things I know he is, witty, charming, thoughtful--it's going to hurt in the way it always does, but it will be real, and if nothing else, I may feel cleansed.


Photo: IHJ.