I was watching this Vittorio De Sica movie, Umberto D., a '52 Italian neorealist film about an old man being evicted from his room, and it struck me that the girl who plays the teenage maid in his building looks a lot like this boy I was ridiculously in love with, a situation that went on far too long but is now over, to my relief (in the sense that having a lobotomy is a relief). We're talking primarily around the nose and eyes, just looking at the center of her face brought to mind J's face. It was hard to stay focused on the movie at times since I kept zeroing in on the resemblance from some distracting compulsion, not a simple task since it involved switching her gender and only looking at part of her face. At one point this maid brings the old man a piece of cake in his room, but he's so depressed about his dire situation that he can't eat it. She puts the plate on his bedside table and leaves, and he sits there looking morose, and rather than empathize with his terrible predicament I felt a strong desire to eat that piece of cake, which suddenly looked to me like the most delicious slice of cake I'd seen in a movie ever, in fact the more I thought about it the more obsessed I became with this particular piece of cake. Out loud I told him to eat the cake, your problems might suddenly vanish if you eat the cake, just eat the cake why don't you, your foolish refusal to eat the cake just encapsulates everything that's wrong with your life can't you see that, eat it eat it eat it. The fact that she brought him the cake, I realized, imbued the cake with this relentless power over me, this piece of cake's diabolical hold on my imagination, its unsettling ability to trigger in my mind and my lap these surges of useless desire. I grew to resent that stupid affectless girl and her cake no one asked for. Why did you bring him that piece of cake, who ordered cake? Get that cake out of here.

Delirious desire has this peculiar quality of solipsism about it. By warping your perceptions it has the power to reduce everything it touches to abject absurdity, whatever happens to fall into its orbit. I mean really, it's a fifty-year-old piece of cake for fuck's sake. No one who discusses this movie is even going to mention the scene with the piece of cake. This just demonstrates that every person's encounter with a movie is unique, the strangest associations can fill your head. Most won't be as idiotic as mine, but still.