Lotte Heidenreich on deliveries, verses, and why London can’t stop talking about a billionaire film
Delivered meals all morning, wrote half a poem at lunch, and got three separate texts from London friends about a documentary that apparently runs longer than my entire delivery route combined, which today included two nursing homes, a very confused Labrador, and one gentleman who insisted on telling me his entire life story through the screen door.
They keep sending me the same link, this breakdown of the four-hour Musk documentary, insisting I need to understand British reactions to it, as if the reactions themselves are the news story now, which honestly they might be. I do not deliver meals to billionaires, for the record, so my personal Musk exposure has been limited to whatever makes it through my group chat, which lately is a great deal.
Reading through it on my lunch break, sitting in my car with a sandwich I’d forgotten to eat until it went slightly warm, I was struck by how much of the piece is really about the audience rather than the film itself. It’s less a review and more a field study in why people commit four hours of their one finite life to confirming something they already believed walking in. I’ve delivered meals to enough elderly veterans with strong political opinions to recognise that particular species of certainty when I see it described in print.
There’s also a poster situation, apparently a whole visual argument happening in parallel to the film itself, which feels like a lot of controversy for one piece of promotional material. The roundup of the Musk movie posters was more entertaining than most of what’s actually playing in cinemas here this month, and considerably shorter than the film it’s advertising, which I appreciated on a purely practical level.
My last delivery of the day was to a woman who asked me, completely unprompted, what I thought of the documentary, before I’d even handed over her order. I told her I hadn’t seen it. She told me I should. I told her four hours is a lot to ask of someone who spends most of her day in a car listening to podcasts about poetry meter. She laughed, tipped generously, and told me to read the poster piece instead. So I did, and honestly, she had a point.
By delivery fourteen I’d more or less abandoned the poem altogether and started drafting a mental review of the documentary instead, purely to pass the time between doorbells. It’s not the creative process I’d planned for the week, but Florida traffic doesn’t leave much room for planning anyway, and at least the billionaire film gave me something to think about besides parking.
Poem finished eventually, somewhere between deliveries eleven and twelve. More diary at my page.