The Town

It was a hard movie for me to watch. There were a lot of things that struck a very personal tone and I'm not sure why.

Maybe it was the green Carhartt jacket that Affleck wears, or his proclivity towards doing remarkably stupid things even when it seems he could fix everything by simply walking away.

Maybe it was the ghosts that haunted him, the family trials, the blood soaked memories of times gone by and people he had to "look for."

There was a lot more that could have been done with the movie, I guess- more character development all over and what not. But the relationship that Affleck has with his past, with his father, with the woman....there was so much there that actually brought me back into my own life for a second....

An old friend of mine and I were driving home from last week's fights in Newark, a little bit tuned up and a bit sentimental, and I told him what I'd been thinking for the last few years.

"Man... I got this feeling, like for the past 10 or 15 years, we all been straddlin' this line, you know? And on one half, it's like, we're good, solid, hardworking guys, we're tough guys, and we're doin' good, and then on the side, we're drunk, extraordinarily dangerous lowlives," I said.

I didn't know what to expect. Some folks might take offense to this kind of statement.

But he knows. All of us have been in the same places, even if it wasn't all of us together, between the drinking and the drugs and the violence and all the stupid shit that we've all done, all the stupid shit we never got caught for.

And he agreed.

"We go back and forth between it some times... you cross the line, dabble and screw around, and then try to get back across it," he said. "But you gotta know when to get back across it."

A lot of the people that we both knew never knew when to get back across it, and got trapped on that side, like in the end of "Mirrors"- forever on the outside looking in, forever in the slum, forever hooked on one drug or another.

And the struggle, well they kept that up. They kept grindin. And they never got anywhere.

Us... we're somewhere. I'm a little further down the path than my friend, but he's on his way. We're trying to stay on the right side of that line.

Later on that night, he got pulled over on the way home from my house. We'd gone to a local bar after the fights, and I drove, so he was probably drunker. He got off with just a ticket.

And that mirror, it cracked, just a little bit more.