: Why is Hagrid apparently living with Harry?
Because when you come into Large Bills, all your good-natured oagiraffe friends tend to end up living in your guest house and slowly losing their identities to the idleness your money allows.
The end of a children's novel, the aftermath of it, becomes an analogy to what happens to a person after hollow success too soon in life. All the trappings of plenty and no way too appreciate it because your success has wired you to believe that you should be reaching for something vaguely More.
To have been The Boy That Lived and all that nonsense and then wander off into the sick fuck*ng joke that is Normal Life is to be Axl Rose or Elvis in their later years, man, you're no longer part of reality, your toes are barely in that sea any more and... because of that... you've also lost the things that made you whatever it was that made you magic.
Now you're just another goddamned rich person, sitting around getting stoned and buying cars, hollow and divested from whatever it was that made you genuine by the stultifying ease of your new unreality.
Going through the motions of a life, maybe.
Maybe at best.
Hagrid is a stray surviving member of the Memphis mafia, shambling at the edges of the King's life in the weeks before he inadvertently killed himself by an unfortunate combination of ten million unpronounceable drugs and a particularly big heart-straining shit into a golden toilet.
Hagrid is Kato Kaelin, witnessing an ex-jock viciously murder a moderately-attractive blonde lady... on the one hand, sure, it is awful that someone is dying... but worse, your free ride is probably dicked and dead by this turn of events and the saddest thing of all is that you KNOW how empty you are for feeling that the second thing is the worst part.
Huddling at the coals left over from someone else's great large fire.
There is still heat if you strain yourself but make no mistake, the fuck*ng party's over.
: Would an extensive magical education be desirable for a career in investment banking?
It is more that, like in real life, after a big dramatic story full of sound and fury and so on ends, the big let down is that everyone kinda just sells out and gets jobs that crush their fuck*ng souls and obliterate all the things that they all thought made them special and sincere when they were young.
And of course some of them hit the Large Bills in the midst of giving over their souls or, at least, their ideals to that bland stretch toward oblivion that is a Money-Centred Existence.
Investment banking is both heartless and cruel and yet completely detached in its cruelty. You are playing dice with the lifesavings of farmers and school teachers and whether you ruin them or not (you probably do the most of the time) you just walk out richer and all the more dessicated on the inside.
A parasite with bleached teeth and an immaculately pressed suit, the kind of person that could've never existed when we were all farmers and hunters and maybe a couple of priests at the worst per tribe...
And yet here and now in this world devoid of magic, these moneyhusks run the whole damned show.
The antithesis of magic, these fuck*ng moneychangers and their sweetlies.
: Will someone get shot in the pool by an angry mechanic?
Worse, they'll talk him into letting them pay him off and the whole damned show will roll along for another couple of years... until someone overdoses or the IRS comes down on them or the government nukes the entire town and blames it on the Arabs so they can start a war to end the world entire.
More wasted years between here and the end. Not even a quick death.
The choices they've made call for more punishment than that.
: How does this relate to the American Dream?
Because the American Dream creates these fetid shell people and grinds the bones of everyone else, our bones, into their bread as we chase the Fool's Lie that if we just work hard enough, we can have the big prizes and the fabulous Carribean vacations but... oh... we'll be the first ones in history to not waste it.
But we will never have it and the few who have it will make the same mistakes as ever, choking on the bitter bread that was our hard-working parents bones and, indeed, our own as well.
Which sums up the American Dream.
From a... certain point of view.
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Topic: 4 September 2007 - Do you fancy some Burger King? (Read 12923 times)