The second documentary was about the world championship of auctioning cattle. It was about people who can auction really fast by talking really fast. A Canadian man won the world championship then kept saying “it was a goal in life” while grinning and seeming a little nervous or embarrassed maybe. I was honestly impressed by how fast they could talk. I thought about how a rapper should try to rap that fast in a song in order to seem original. It seemed extremely fast. They also moved their eyeballs really fast in order to see when anyone bid. I felt impressed in a manner that made me like everyone that was involved with the world championship of auctioning cattle, despite knowing almost nothing about their lives or personalities or worldviews.

The third documentary was about a town on an island in the Pacific that had been completely evacuated because a nearby volcano was going to explode. Werner Herzog and two cameramen went to the town and there was no one there. TVs and traffic signals were still on. The town had been evacuated very fast because in 1901 another town was supposed to evacuate, due to a nearby volcano that was going to explode, but the mayor convinced everyone to stay because they had already scheduled an election for that day and then the volcano exploded, killing 30,000 people. Werner Herzog filmed two goats walking in the middle of the street. He filmed them from behind as they walked toward something like a sunset. It seemed like a Disney movie. The tone seemed complex and made me feel a little confused. At one point they drove up a mountain, toward the volcano, and a sulfur cloud began to move toward them from above. Werner Herzog pointed at the sulfur cloud and said something or made some kind of noise and they began to run away, toward their car. It seemed scary and exciting. The camera was shaking and I could see the sulfur cloud moving toward them.

Then they found people who had not evacuated and interviewed them. One person was lying on his back under a tree with a cat. He seemed to be “chilling” “big time.” He said he was waiting to die and was not afraid. He said he had nothing. He seemed calm and maybe happy. The second person they found was walking around “aimlessly” on the street in the town. He also said he had nothing and was not afraid to die. He said something like “you can take me to the volcano and I’ll go with you, or I can walk back to my house and I’ll do that, it doesn’t matter.” At one point I think he said “what difference does it make?” about dying. When they first showed him walking around in the distance I recognized his style of walking as how I would walk around my subdivision in Florida in the daytime on Summer breaks between probably 3rd and 6th grade, sometimes carrying a stick, with no concrete destination or goal, yet still moving around and doing things. It seems difficult to remember exactly what I would be thinking about while walking around like that.

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