Stephen v The Rock. You Decide?

Fractured Faith BlogJune 22, 2019June 22, 2019A Fractured Faithanxiety, blog, blogger, blogging, cinema, creative writing, depression, film, healing, life, lifestyle, mental health, movies, pressure, problems, worry, writing

I’ve just finished watching ‘San Andreas’ starring Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson. Fionnuala found it while flicking through the channels after a long day tidying gardens and cleaning up the back yard. We both love a good disaster movie, and this was one of the few we hadn’t watched. Basically ‘The Rock,’ in the space of 114 minutes saves his family and a bunch of other people, while San Francisco collapses all around him. All while bursting out of a ridiculously tight t-shirt.

I’ve had a soft spot for ‘The Rock’ since his WWE days. His movies never require much usage of the grey matter but are largely solid, watchable entertainment. Plus, he doesn’t seem to take life too seriously and isn’t afraid to poke fun at himself. In ‘San Andreas’ he’s married to the very young looking Carla Gugino and they stretch my incredulity to the limit by being the parents of Alexandra Daddario. Gugino must have been a young mother. As in 12,13?

‘The Rock’ drives jeeps, flies planes and navigates motorboats in the search for Alexandra who seems more than capable of looking after herself, but who am I to argue. About a billion people die as earthquakes and tsunamis ravage the city, but we don’t see a body or drop of blood because it’s not that kind of movie. Carla glistens throughout while ‘The Rock’s’ teeth shine through the smoke and devastation like a beacon of hope.

By right, they should be killed about 368 times in the first hour but possess the outrageous luck that all self respecting action heroes have. Nothing can stop ‘The Rock’ when it comes to saving his family. He also locates his daughter amidst the carnage of a destroyed city in about three and a half minutes. Not bad, even by his standards. At the end, when asked what happens now, he stares stony faced at the ruined landscape and replies ‘Now we rebuild.’ It will probably take him a week or so.

I’ll never be ‘The Rock.’ Unless I win the lottery, hire a personal trainer and have some serious dental bleaching work. I’m no hero and reckon I would have lasted less than a minute, before falling down a hole or getting flattened by a lump of flying debris. I would have crashed the plane, run aground in the motor boat and totalled the jeep. I’m not great with pressure. And, when faced with the end of civilisation as we know it, fear I wouldn’t cope very well. Or, at all for that matter.

I also lack self-confidence, which the Big Man possesses in spadefuls. I worry about everything and tend to regard the bottle as half empty, whereas Mr. J is the eternal optimist. Well, you would be if your muscles had muscles and your bank balance had more digits than pi. But I do have one thing in common with El Rocko. We share the same dogged, never say die determination.

I don’t give up easy. I dig my heels in, chip away at challenges and persevere while others drop by the wayside. I’ll never win a marathon but I’ll always finish it. I’ll never win the Booker Prize, but I will see my dream of having a book published. I’ll never have a million followers on social media, but I’ll blog every day and not disappear off the face of the WordPress World, a flash in the pan, never to be seen again.

So while I’ll never prance around a wrestling ring in a tiny pair of spandex trunks, I’m maybe not that different from ‘The Rock,’ as I first imagined. I can smell what he’s cooking and I’m putting one foot ahead of the other, feeling my way towards the finishing line. He will probably fly over me hanging by a rope ladder from a helicopter, but we are headed in the right direction. Consistency & Coherence = Results.