December, 2009 - Putting The X In Xmas

Humbug in its proper vernacular may be tied to Dickens best known book and character but intent of the word is still the same outside of the holiday season. When Scrooge says humbug, its not as a reaction to the holiday so much as his disbelief in people's attitudes. If the book were written today, Scrooge would probably be saying "Bullshit" instead - the affect, the meaning and the bendable quality of the word's intent is the same. That people making merry is bullshit, that people greeting each other happily is bullshit, that giving gifts and seasonal cheer is bullshit.

However, both humbug and bullshit are a less than accurate approach to how I feel about the holiday season. 

This isn't to say I disbelieve everyone's well-wishing or want to spend the holidays alone. The problem is that the overwhelming majority of people - family, strangers, people I work with - are people I do not want to spend time with and yet are forced to. These are people I actively avoid if I can and don't seem to understand I want to keep it that way. I am a miserable fuck this time of year - this year chief amongst all, for reasons I need not detail - and I'd rather not be cornered into giving what will surely amount to either a no-hearted holiday greeting or a screamed line of slurs. Yet they persist, even when I put my hand up and say "No, thank you".

There are three work functions for the holiday season this year: One for this office, one for this building and one for everyone. They all involve different habits and obsessions about what foods, what things to do, what jokes to tell and frankly I'm tired of each of them. People glad-handing each other as if that one day makes a difference, that things could be put aside (if they even existed, as most act out such falsehoods that everyone gets along anyway) and everyone comes together for a celebration of a job well done. My boss wants to take us out to lunch, the following Thursday we had a pizza party upstairs along with a Yankee Swap / Selfish Santa game and then today is a huge President's luncheon which I skipped out on because I am so tired of this drivel.

This is all in the midst of a supposed budget crisis where over thirty people lost their jobs. Where the higher-ups have their thumbs on a pay freeze while they have board meetings for steak and claret luncheons. As they raise a new building, build a museum, purchase a fleet of new vehicles for the "Go Green" ideal. Where they cite that there is no money for anything and yet continue to build, continue to consume, continue to push higher tuition because of fewer applications, continue to raise basic allowances like parking that are free most other places, continue to higher more vice presidents to overlook department heads.

And no where is baby Jesus to be seen. 

(And *I'm* the bad guy.)

Scrooge was right. Humbug. Humbug to the falseness shoved onto the holiday that people willingly take. That in the midst of supposed economic and environmental disasters, we're still expected to make merry even when we have no real right or reason to. That these horrible things that everyone is supposedly affected by somehow *go away* for a day and that goes double if you're Jewish or Muslim. That those of us who just want to skip the damn season aren't allowed to, that we're expected to go along with it and ride it out and give menial gifts we struggle to afford to people we usually don't want to see; these gifts becoming almost like apologies: "Sorry, I haven't been around the last nine months, heres a candy dish or paperweight or pencil sharpener with wall mount to make up for anything I missed bigger than a fender-bender and smaller than a funeral."

Would it be so unkind to get the one Christmas wish I really want: To be left out of this crap? To not have to deal with the social niceties no one actually means, to not have to fight for gift availability or traffic jams? To cut straight past the awful meals where everyone makes a compliment about the tablecloth because no one can think of anything else to say since no one wants to be there? To avoid the shit-stained kids you're asked to buy gifts for as if they didn't have everything already? To ignore the phone calls from estranged family members in the midwest or China or wherever the fuck they are?

I cannot tell you how many times and in how many different iterations I've had to go through with this: "Don't buy me anything. I'm not being coy. Don't buy me anything at all. Seriously, I don't want anything, I work for a living, if I want something I can get it myself. If you bought me something, return it and give the money to the Red Cross or some homeless guy who needs a fix to stay warm tonight. I don't want a goddamned fucking thing, so stop asking. I already have enough nostalgic attachment to shit I have and shouldn't feel attached to, I don't need more to shove into a closet and forget about. In fact, if you don't invite me over at all that would be best. Don't take it personally, I'm talking to you on the phone so I obviously don't mind your company but I don't like getting involved in this sham, thank you." (Strangely, it has yet to work.)

I don't want your holiday. I don't want your homemade dinner with the dirty potatoes made by Aunt Jenette. I don't want the fucking christmas carols. I don't want the holiday specials, the fucking Pine Sol stink of trees and I certainly don't want Its A Wonderful Life playing on the TV (Thats something so ruined by this holiday I'd require an entirely separate rant to explain.). I want to be left. the fuck. alone. I want to stay in and maybe have a few beers, take a nap on the couch and then maybe hang out with spme friends instead of driving to four different places, attempting to get to and from each place with the greatest of haste to get it all over with.

So stop. Please. For the fucking love of Christ in a very, very literal sense - stop with Christmas and leave me the fuck out of it. The real Scrooges are not the ones who say humbug, but Happy Holidays and if you think theres any good at all to come out of the season, you are part of the problem.

Four Rules I Learned This Year

1.) The "Hitler Loved Dogs" Rule (Context Is Paramount)

Everyone loves dogs. I love dogs. You love dogs. If someone stood up in a room full of people and said "raise your hand if you love dogs", most everyone would raise their hand.

However, Hitler loved dogs too, and if it was Hitler who asked you that, chances are you wouldn't raise your hand because, you know, Hitler was an asshole.

The point of the rule is that the source of a statement is as important as the statement it's self. A statement can be true but would you really want to agree with one from a questionable source or use it as evidence to support your own opinions?

The "Sarah Loved Dogs" Addendum: My friend Sarah created the first addendum to the above rule. Its a perversion of the logic stated but I have to keep it. It goes something like this: if someone were to make a truthful statement and they own a dog, you can retort that since they own a dog, Hitler would probably like the dog and thus they have something in common with Hitler and thus the opinion is irrelevant. Its definitely more of a joke than a rule to use but its a nice twist on the logic. Definitely a keeper.

2.) The "Gillian Anderson" Rule (You're Attractive, Fuck-o. Get With It.)

I will not paint over the fact that getting closer than I ever dared expect with Gillian Anderson and entirely of her own volition this year was some kind of weird validation - and I know how completely batshit that sounds, so stay with me.

I'm 32 and yet when it comes to women, I still think like I'm 14. I don't get them. Hell, sometimes I'm so confused by them, I'm outright suspicious - like the whole gender is some kind of collective succubus come to drain me of blood in the cold hours of early morning. And this is despite a pretty okay track record of  some very beautiful women. Yes, that last part sounds totally egotistical of me - but I'm saying that because, well, I'm still not especially confident in some ways. This isn't to say I think I'm a troll, or impersonal but when you live the last 16 years of your life thinking you're (at best) totally nondescript and have the outward personality of a rattlesnake, having *the* beautiful woman / celebrity you had a crush on since the age of twelve grab you and hold you against her goes pretty damn far toward how you feel about yourself. Yes, logically its completely stupid - but for once in my life, the logical part is not what I'm trying to describe; I'm appealing to the honest, emotional side that I keep from most everyone (Even myself.)

This isn't to say that I'm suddenly Don Juan or that my luck has changed. Just that sometimes I deserve to think better of myself than I normally do. And that is okay. Its just so very hard to wrap your head around the complete opposite of what you normally feel is honesty about yourself.

(And if you're reading this, Gillian: I'm free for dinner whenever. Have your people call my people.)


3.) The "JJ Abrams" Rule (Stop Identifying With Things)

If you're reading this, then you probably know of my dislike of everything having to do with JJ Abrams. The man is the literal embodiment of everything wrong in Hollywood: a career based on nepotism, everything  made is a copy sourced from something superior or from an existing franchise and he has no discernible talent in any aspect of writing or directing.

More to the point, you should know that I'd rather take gasoline through a catheter and then piss it out over the open flames of Hell than have anything to do with him. 

That said, his unfortunate presence in the world of the living taught me a very important lesson this year. While it was bad enough that he was behind two completely vacuous Star Trek movies that had no worth what-so-ever except as an example of how to do something wrong, his later assignment to the forthcoming Star Wars sequels sent enough pure bile straight to my brain to drown all joy from my life for several days.

So somewhere between the initial announcement and the half bottle of Jim Beam in reply to it, I came to realize that, once and for all, Star Wars was done for me. Abrams - a man who cannot even pace dialogue  between actors or frame a shot for longer than one whole second - was now being given the holiest of holy assignments. I could no longer identify with the series as I once had; I could not allow something I loved as a child and a teen be beaten down in front of me while I still loved it. Just like watching a vet euthanize your pet, I had to turn away while the needle went in.

So I left. I didn't damn it, I didn't cry "rape" like the common Internet drone nor did I make some crazy-ass YouTube video about what Star Wars is and isn't. I just put it away carefully and closed the lid.

And that made me grow (the fuck) up.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not thumbing my nose at the films already made or that I'm dismissing my adoration of them - but like the song goes "Don't dream, its over". Someone I dislike for so many strong reasons is taking something and will no doubt put his stamp all over it. It also doesn't help that Disney is putting out character-based films outside of Episode VII - because people need to know what Yoda was doing with his off-time or something? (Hint: no one cares)

So I just can't go on with that. I can't. Its done for me and I'm a lot happier for it. I feel no anxiety over if it'll be good or not (though there is some anxiety about John Williams being alive to finish the scores) and by pushing it out, man, talk about your relief of burdens. I have refused to take it on as a person and thus, give no shits to how badly Abrams will undoubtedly ruin it.

Thirty years of putting too much of myself out there and into a non-corporeal concept like a movie series. I feel cleaner already.


4.) The "Executioner's Axe" Rule (Don't Throw Yourself On The Sword Willingly)

This is really more of an Internet rule but I suppose it could also be used in face to face conversations at parties. Its basically "don't volunteer to put your head on the chopping block", which is something a lot of people seem to do with immense haste. Its an easier rule to explain by example though.

I'll use the easiest of examples, since this is so common for me: lets say you have two people talking about a movie. One person loved it and one person hated it and the person who loved it is making a much stronger intellectual argument for his viewpoint.A third party comes in and starts yammering that he hated the movie too - totally unprepared for the conversation, without having any of the context spoken between the original parties and simply throwing their hat in the ring in that "JJ Abrams" rule (over-identifying with something) cited above. Needless to say, this third party person gets steamrollered by the opposing party and usually cries foul for all sorts of nebulous reasons.

But they're the ones who stepped in. Its no one else's fault but their own. They put their head under the axe, so to speak. Anyone who voluntarily sticks their neck out is, by the nature of the act alone, probably asking for a direct rebuttal.

Amanda, Epilouge - Sheinberg's edit, "Love Conquers All"

When I told you about moving to Texas, you told me you wanted to see me one last time before it happened. We make plans quietly - another day or short weekend in New Haven. No presumptions, no plans, just idle wandering. It gets compared to the movie Before Sunrise, where those two people just wander around a strange city and ignore everything but each other.

The Saturday morning rolls around and I'm standing in the train station again, my flat-cap in one shaking hand and the other in my pocket. And as you step up, you're wearing a purple scarf, or a purple beret, a purple something. You smile out of the corner of your mouth and we walk out into the street, holding hands. New Haven is busy and loud and we don't notice any of it. The pull of you has nothing to do with how you're leading me.

You talk about your life and your job and your marriage and your dog and how broken your car is and where you got your boots and how tired you are of your mother; with every new subject you creep closer and grip my hand harder until your fingers are pressing white between my knuckles. You coo quietly and say to tell me about my life instead. My job, my apartment (I want to see it! she says with enthusiasm), my cat Greta, my car that is always falling apart, movies, music, close-calls that somehow never turn into girlfriends. An existence of near-misses that somehow culminate into the misery of lost chances, bodies of dreams strewn about.

We duck into alleys and corners and the windows of book stores.You go to kiss me and miss my mouth and get me right under the eye. I ask how long I have with you and you pull away to an arms length before saying "Tomorrow, noon." The last word curves up to the corners of your voice, almost like a question, easily confused with hope.

I take you home and put on the television and we get to cooking. I'm a terrible in front of a stove but between the two of us we make something passable before deciding on throwing it out for Chinese take-out. Between the phone call and picking up the order, we become a mess of limbs on the living room floor, grinding like machines. I can hear the fabric stretch along your back, under your hair. You guide me once or twice - a hand here, no, move your knee - before we start laughing.

I stand up to get my keys - the Chinese is surely ready and probably cold by now - and you hold me before we walk out. My hands find your elbows and I wonder aloud how small they are in my hands. Weird detail.

The takeout is bland, the movie we watch is half ignored. The lights stay off after the plates are in the sink and the DVD player is still. Your glasses come off, the hair is down, we both know this is the one last time we have in a relationship of one last times. Your legs meet around my back and so it goes, on and on, for an hour and then two. You shake so hard that it might actually be me shaking. You curse loudly. It sounds weird coming from you.

===

Now - none of this happened. This epilogue just above. Its what I thought should happen and likely never will. Because, as life is always ready to prove, love does not conquer all. Love is a building block of life, like water, like carbon. It is a thing that is necessary to exist but it is also an inert element when left to its own devices. It is a thing that does not move on its own, does not change without outside forces, does not have any greater meaning without more placed on it.

And thats the cusp of our relationship I guess. And its inert because of you.

I'll allow myself a little bit of anger and a whole lot of self-loathing over that anger because, well, this is all unresolved. What I wrote above was what I would need to end or continue everything we had instead of the basic building block you and I started so long ago. We never finished what we barely even started.

What drives me nuts isn't that I lost to the lesser man. Its that I lost to you. I never tried harder with anyone in my life, never wrote more, never expressed more, never more more'd - and here I am writing fantasy-fiction as I hold a glass of vodka in the other hand. I am drunk enough to know I am right and sober enough to know I still love you; tomorrow morning, I will be sober enough to know its your own decision to make and I'll still be drunk on my affections. (Ah the curse of the Irish holds strong in my genes.)

I don't like letting go. Ive never abandoned a friend in my life and have gladly welcomed back any who have wandered away. That is just who I am. And maybe you need to wander away for a bit too. And like the rest, you're always welcomed back - but I also have the gnawing feeling you never will. That you shut the door so quietly as you left, neither of us heard it click.

So, you are now a song from a summer too far away. A vibe from a passed era, the watermark from a flood forgotten. I loved you like all men would want to love a woman and you found it best served to be cast aside.

Maybe one day you'll find this blog, this entry, read it in full. Maybe you'll take my old suggestion and look up "When You Are Old" by W.B. Yates and know that that is where we've been shoehorned: part my fault, part your decision. And part of me will be waiting for that reply; though instinctively that part of me waits knowing that the reply will never come, or even if it did, it would be much colder than desired.

So this is it then. This is us in our thirties. The bond you and I had under so many dark nights, awake hundreds of miles away and wondering about the other is now tethered to a still lake, all life and living gone from it now.

My God, how I loved you like no one else in my life.

And how I wish that part of me would stop holding on.

March 2013, 10:14 am

Tomorrow is my birthday. I'm sure I'll get all sorts of well-wishes and well-meaning gifts from people and they'll all be nice but none of them are going to be what I want or need. Only I can give that to myself, I suppose. Just sending this to you is that gift - even if you roll your eyes and delete it without reading, thats cool too. You have that right and that option.

This speech, this email was originally something I had hoped to tell you face to face but I fear that time has passed too far and us living in different states nixes that idea. I may be more eloquent here but I'd be more effusive and probably less long-winded if I said it out loud. Blech.

Anyway, I'll cut to the chase. First, my apologies for sending this seemingly at random. I'm not here to kick up dirt or start your day on the wrong foot. I realize we haven't had the best friendship and I realize that I'm pretty much persona non grata as of a decade ago. Its well earned on my part. But now that I'm older and notice how I'm not in touch with those people from my teens and twenties anymore, I need to strike that iron while I still have a chance at saving my soul.

I did a lot of awful things to you way back when and said a lot more. I hate to say the bad things seem to outweigh the good, now. I pretty much hate myself for it. I am so very sorry for the person I was then. It may be water under the bridge for you and I truthfully have moved on a bit myself - but the effect you had on my formative years deserves more respect than I gave them then and at least some acknowledgement in hindsight. I am truly sorry I did not see you for what you were and that I did not love you like you deserved. And this is all some sort of a "Personal Hell In Hindsight".

But I'm not saying I've turned over a new leaf or that I'm a totally new person - just that I'm a little more seasoned, a little more mellow. And looking back at the angry, young man I had been, I feel very little but shame for it all. Its okay if you don't believe me when I say I'm sorry to you every morning I get up; I do it anyway. And I know no matter how many times I say it, what I did to you won't heal anyone's wounds any better but I'll say it every day in hopes it does heal something. 

Believe me when I say I don't expect or require a reply. Its enough that I got to send this to you after years of running this stuff through my head. I feel a little free after typing it and yet the worst part is that everything I said here is an abject failure because what I feel is so much more than what you're reading. I am so sorry for what I did to you. So very sorry.

If you made it this far in reading, thank you. And if you didn't thats fine too. I really, really honestly and truly hope you're happy with where you are and whom you're with and I suspect the best is yet to come with you and I wish nothing but the best for you too. You have, at the very least in your short life, entirely changed my life in the process and taught me some tough lessons in the process.

I miss you, fidget.

J

Elka, Four Years After (Now With 40% Less Uncontrolable Sobbing!)

(Image Redacted For Reasons Of Privacy)

Today marks the fourth anniversary to my losing my mind.

Halloween 2009 was the worst day in my life. I waited months for a reply from a woman I was very much in love with and had foolishly prepared myself only for good news. And in reply to my page of heartfelt adoration - got a three sentence Dear John style reply that broke my brain. I may not have beat my head against a wall, but I understood why people sometimes did that when under duress.

Only two people saw me at my worst and its such a sensitive memory, I don't want to detail much of it. My emotions were completely out of control the first 24 hours: I had lost the ability to use words, sobbing so hard into my best friend and her sitting there knowing there was nothing to be done about it. I shook, I cried, snot ran freely. I was a hopeless bag of flesh; not quite a man, quite nearly a thing. She held me and after a time, said nothing, noticing that the words meant less than just being gripped tighter. It was strangely, deeply intimate in a way and its a favor I still feel I should somehow repay to her. I don't like being the vulnerable one, even less so to that degree.

The months that followed were a rolling fog. In hind sight, I probably should've gotten better help than being alone or even had myself checked into a mental health ward. I would come home every day from work to scream-cry on my couch, sometimes to the point where I'd end up dry-heaving into the toilet. I'd shake uncontrollably: my hands, my legs, the kind of feeling in your guts tremble under your skin. I'd have to go through this for hours every day, just to release all that tension, just to be able to fall asleep. Weekends were the worst since I was left to sit by myself in the dark. And though some days were easier for others, it would eventually crest once again and I'd be back where I started. It made my soul sick to be housed in such an emotionally-ignorant body.

Thats when I started writing about it:

And I know she still thinks about me. And I know she still feels for me more than she dares let on. You don't get close with someone with those kinds of words in an ankle-deep world and then just let go or forget or walk off. But shes with someone else now and I sit in an empty apartment scattered with beer bottles and loose change. A pile of struck matches around the cheap scented candles and the stabbed out ashtray. The bedding needs to be changed though its never been slept in it. The empty refrigerator. The cold linoleum floor. The TV tuned to a dead station. The hot, grimy intuition that shes thinking of me right now.
  

But that doesn't even matter. She's with someone else and she'll probably marry him and that is what wakes you at night and makes you look over at the little black velvet box sitting on top the nightstand. She'll get one like it from someone else.

And writing did help. It was a valve that helped me discard all the collected tension in my chest from days and weeks and months of waiting and suffering and wondering. But even writing can only do so much, words can only go up to the point of the incommunicable. You hit that barrier between language and experience: you can't step through it. And so, left at an impasse, I was right where I started before writing.

By this point, I had considered taking my own life. The memories, the feelings, the unresolvable madness of questions unanswered were pushing me toward that permanent silence. I didn't quite plan it but I was pretty resolved in doing it. I started writing individual letters to people, tidying up my affairs as it were. I began writing about her, about the cancer in my chest from all the thoughts I had had for months, in the hopes that it would not only explain why I was going to do it but have someone have some appreciation after the fact. "I understand why he did this" was what I wanted to hear.

Then I had the dream. A dream that scared the hell out of me. I was in a small glass enclosure, like a phone booth. This booth was floating around a fog of sorts and I saw all my dearest friends going on about their lives - being happy, having children, growing old and satisfied with living. I was banging on the glass, screaming as loud as I could but none of them could hear me. I was trying to warn them about death: that it was one-sided. That you'd float forever, able to watch but unable to interact. That the short time you had was it and that after that, you became a permanent spectator who was alone in his own little glass cube.

When I woke up, I realized that the subconscious part of my brain had basically solved my recent problems for me; that there was no guarantee of peace in death. That there is no contract, no reasoning, no universal agreement or proof of peace in the Great Beyond. That if I had killed myself in that brain-state - who was to say I wouldn't be locked in that place forever? A glass coffin for a ghost without a grave.

So, now what was I left with? I went back and started reading (the worst stuff you can read during major depression) Satre and Hesse and anything basically existential and provoking. I started watching The Fountain once a week; I started to mine myself for all I was worth by overexposing my soul to anything that could touch it. And it helped. Well, it helped a bit anyway. I was trying to squeeze as much blood out of the stone while I could.

And it took over a year to be more or less back to myself. A lesser version of myself - that woman strip-mined everything I had been for 30 years and left me shallow - but myself none the less. And every once in a while, that feeling of her loss creeps up on me. It never comes on fully, it simply passes by and keeps going. Because truth of it is, I won't let it come around to stay anymore. I can't. It crippled me once, and I'm afraid a second round might kill me stone dead.

And I know a lot of friends who pat me on the back and tell me I made it through a bad ordeal and that I'm stronger for it - but the other side is that you're left to wonder if everything is worth surviving? That you're so changed after an event like that, you know you can't ever go back to who you were before, so you're lost even in yourself. The thing is everyone tells you time heals all wounds, but no one mentions that the scars can be disfiguring.

Would you really want to walk through Hell to prove any point? I wouldn't suggest it.

But I'm here now. And she married and had a couple more kids and I definitely think I dodged a bullet in a lot of ways. I don't regret what we had when we had it, simply how we decided to end it. It was a callous way to bring that amount of closeness to an end. And the experience has made me gun-shy: I've all but dismissed the idea of dating ever again. The best way to explain it is that wonderful exchange in 1991's The Rocketeer:

Peevy: You got a good thing goin' on with that girl, Clifford. And I'm tellin' you right now, if she flies the coop, it's gonna be your fault.

Cliff Secord: Aw, what do you know about women, Peev? You haven't had a date since 1932.

Peevy: [wistfully] Flora Maxwell. There wasn't any point datin' nobody after her.

But I'm a little more solid now, a little more on an even keel, a little happier not chasing after a skirt for the first time since high school. I'm practically disinterested in dating now and happy with that. I'll stay with this mindset for as long as it suits that happiness, despite the looks of concern from friends and terror from my elders.

Lets try this out for a while, shall we?

Lou Reed Is Dead. Long Live Lou Reed. - 90 Minutes After The Annoucement Of His Passing, Aged 71 Earth Years

 
The passing of Lou Reed is an odd one. I suppose the big reason is that, by this point, we had all assumed his hard-living lifestyle would've kept him permanently embalmed. Like a Keith Richards or a Iggy Pop, here was someone who lived hard and fast and then harder still and kept on living somehow. His face looked like someone had left Lyle Lovett out in the rain and sun for too damn long.

I don't have many distinct memories of Reed's music either. I really started listening to him in my early 20s, when I'd be up until three in the morning talking on Instant Messenger and watching the Late Late Show. There was a thing I liked about him that escaped me for many years - but it was really about how simple his music was. Unlike a lot of other rock artists before him or following, the great point of Reed's material was how simple it was. At times, I'm even reminded a bit of Philip Glass - where its one idea stretched to its greatest limit, changed in the simplest ways, so its basically four minutes of a chord progression. But where Glass is brilliantly maddening, Reed was brilliantly approachable. His music (and especially his lyrics) were so much like the kind heard in art class rooms where bohemian wanna-be teenagers strummed a guitar and didn't sing a song so much as talk through it. Not quite poetry, not quite fumbling in the dark. But it was distinctly understandable: some half-way-there poet finger-banging greatness but never going the whole way.

And thats where I think the tragedy is in Reed's passing: the man was a simple storyteller. In an age where music has been castrated and cauterized by increasingly stupid pop music clap-trap - the immediacy of a guy struggling to make a song sort of work has all the vibrant workings of a story around the bonfire. Simple. Direct. You either bought it, or you didn't. Pure narration, in a way. I respect that - its the same approach Hemingway had with his readers. Except, you know, nothing about blowjobs.

Reed was the ultimate dream-come-true for all those high school rock band kids. He never made it very far in the charts Hot 100 sense but he never gave in to outside excess or pressures from trends. He was just Lou Reed. Here he is. And his talent wasn't in arrangements or big ideas; he was just a guy with some cute ideas and they were the kind you could see him scrawl on ratty cocktail napkins with ballpoint pens. His kind wouldn't last in this day and age if he was just starting out - which makes you wonder how many other people are out there like him and don't get the chances he had. After all, we don't like people who are just talent and we don't trust people if they're not interested in just taking our money.

But I listened to him a lot. I'll fault the movie Trainspotting for introducing me to my favorite song by him "Perfect Day" but there were others like "No Money Down" which is terrific and a throwback to his love of 50s rock, though it took me a long time to warm up to. "New York Telephone Conversation" with its oom-pah-pah bounce comes off as Danny Elfman finally not giving a shit after coming home to a dirty, laundry-smelling apartment after spending all night drinking mezcal in a dive bar in Hell's Kitchen.

So yeah, Lou Reed is dead. Long live Lou Reed. Ain't gonna find many more like him unless you look harder at the people struggling in high school art class with badly tuned guitars and not giving a fuck about it.

From The "Just So I'm Better Understood" File...

I am what I like to think a deeply empathic person. I feel for the misery and plights of others - be they strangers or friends, be they of any creed or color. I can put myself immediately into that other person's shoes and experience their good news first hand. I would like to think this is an element that makes me maybe not a good friend but a trusted one.

However, theres a fucking limit to it. And you know I'm somewhere near that limit if I'm using the word "fucking" to emphasize it.

To quote the late, great George Carlin - "I don't have pet peeves, I have major, psychotic fucking hatreds" and thats true. Thats the other side of the deep empathy of people - the complete and utter revulsion of them. That is to say I can emphasize with people but it is such a tenuous and exhausting skill that I am an introvert by nature; dealing with people is literally the most exhausting thing I can experience.

So thats the set-up, and heres the meat of the joke.

I purposely delineate all parts of my life from the next. My personal life does not affect my work, my work life does not affect my family life, my family life does not affect some ... other thing that I can't think of right now. But everything is compartmentalized: I do this on purpose. I don't like bleed through. I do not like parts of my life interacting with other parts. If I am dating a girl and she asks me about my job, I'll likely shrug it off. I don't do this to be rude but my work life is exceedingly disinteresting; more over, I don't want to talk about work outside of work. Similarly, I don't want to talk about who I'm dating with those I work with. I haven't told my mother about any dating I've done since probably 2006.

Now I realize that not everyone works this way and thats fine. But there is a boundary involved here that some people see and most people don't. The line is this: don't try to drag me across into your own values. If I do not want to mix my personal life with my work life, it needs to be accepted that way and thats it. My job is not who I am, its merely what I do. I do not wrap myself in the flag, I feel no loyalty to an employer past collecting another paycheck. Thats all I am there for and don't ever think otherwise.

I do not view my job as a second family.

I  view my job as getting paid for having to deal with people I would otherwise avoid.


Similar to the line in the sand about values, as a rule, I don't talk about things like religion or personal opinions often. Its cheap, its chinzy and let me be totally honest (and an asshole) when I say that every one of these discussions at work end up with four people trying to out-yell the others, before they turn to me. "Well, see, I'm leaning more toward the concept that God is only the outward expression of Man's own inward nature as detailed by..." and then I realize I've totally lost everyone already. I am by no means a profoundly smart person - I am simply a well-learned idiot - but I also have no tolerance for people who want to swim in an intellectual ocean with water wings for an IQ. It also doesn't help that I am atheistic but don't identify as with atheist groups. Frankly, I think having a belief system of any kind is stupid; the moment you discard your safety net of an assumed reality, you take things as they come a lot better. Its not always easy but its much easier to cope with reality when you're allowing yourself to

Now where does all this come from?

A coworker of mine has had a family loss. I feel nothing but sad things for him because he's honestly a very nice person and I like his company quite a bit. However, someone else in the department suggested-to-the-point-of-commanding that we get a sympathy card.

And I realize my opinion of not wanting to sign it makes me out to be a monster, but at the same time, I didn't ask for nor did I get one when anyone from my family or friends passed. The point there isn't "I didn't get one, so why should they" sour grapes as it is "I didn't get one because I don't feel comfortable with it; why should I send one too if it makes me uncomfortable?"

I think this is a valid opinion. Its not one made in cruelty or emotion. Its simply saying "I do not want to be involved on this level." Because I purposely bond with very, very few people and I do not want to diminish that capacity by being shoehorned or be made guilty into doing something half-heartedly.

This is a huge reason why I need to leave my job. They are asking too much from me in this way. It is draining. It is vexing. And more over, I find it intrusive in the most horrible way. I am not at my job to peddle my soul to people who do not know me past what I allow them (nor do I ask them to peak into my soul to validate their intrusive nature). I am there to put money in my pocket. Were I to leave it tomorrow, aside from two people, I would not know the other two hundred or so people I see every week. I did not choose to know them; its membership by osmosis in the same way that we're all human - but so the fuck what?

The funny thing is is that my demanding these barriers, and this distance is purely because I do not have barriers and distance with my few close friends.

I am as human as the next person. But I prefer to be human over there.

This Revolution Will Not Be Televised - Gillian Anderson Photo Op, 2013

As with all people now in their 30s and full of themselves, I loved loved loved The X-Files. Usual nerd reasons, I won't bore you with them. So when Ally offered me a day pass to New York ComiCon this year, I *had* to go after finding out Gillian Anderson was going to attend that day. Photo ops were a touch expensive but I figured it was worth the cash for a determinedly awkward photo proving, well, absolutely nothing. Lets face it: these are cattle calls. I'd heard iffy things about the company that was doing them but I sent them a Paypal payment anyway. You only live once.

I got in line very early because the queue system wasn't handled well. The staff running the floor were generally very nice but totally out of their element past "don't cross this line" schtick. I had three giggling German girls ahead of me, all of which were super nice, and somewhere to my right and back (the queue went up and down and up and down several aisles) a very nice guy from Australia dressed as Mulder who was charming to talk to and gave really great insight on his experiences in America (all of them positive).

But what was suppose to be a thirty minute wait turned into ninety as Gillian Anderon's plane was late or stuck in customs or something. We got different stories. I didn't care. I was fourth in line and the first guy - my heterosexuality was proven that day, I'll tell you what. The MC working the line eventually said "She's here folks, get your tickets out, stand at the black curtain entrance until staff calls you in to take your ticket" blah blah blah. He was generally a very nice person but anyone who works at NYCC had to be burned out by four in the afternoon. His face was etched with the wrinkles you get from smelling neck sweat and acne topical medicine all day.

The first two girls go in, swallowed up by the velvet entrance. I give my bookbag to the staff to hold. The next girl is called in. Then me. The next few details happened within the span of 2 to 5 seconds.

After walking through the black velvet fabric, the room was a lot to take in. The size of a classroom, something like ten people running around, the light guy adjusting for height, the photographer, two people on computers, the printing guy, the ticket person. Aside from the girl who was just leaving and the girl whos having her picture taking next, I'm alone in the room, in the corner like a truant.

Gillian is 45 pushing 22. Shes wearing a black dress that, when she picks up her water or to turn to talk to someone, proves its actually a matching two-piece. Shes extremely polite and smiles broadly. She's trying to make small talk the people shes taking photos with and its upsetting the cameraman. He continually screams NEXT with the nuance of a drunk cattle baron.

My turn is next. She half-follows the last of the german girls out of the room and then turns to me. We held eye contact as I walked to the mark on the floor for the picture - all of FIFTEEN FEET, which is a lot longer than it seems. She smiled broadly as I approached. I tried to turn on some of the old Sean Connery style charm I use to get phone numbers while at bars. I'd like to think I was successful but ... well, the outcome isn't proof of that.

Me: "Good morning"

Her: "Hey! Good morning! How are you?"

Me: "Pretty good, yourself?"

Her: "I'm good, thanks."

Click. "NEXT!" The end.

(Note to reader: It was 3 in the afternoon and I said "Good morning". Yes, I am dumb sometimes.)

So why aren't I posting the photo here? Right as I replied to "how are you", I had just walked up to her expecting to take a picture like the girl before me - side to side, crooked smile like you're saying "Hi Mom!" on the nightly news - when she stops the cameraman. She holds up her hand and says "Wait, let's do this..." then grabs my wrist and puts my arm around her waist and my hand on her hip, with all the subtlety of a dancing instructor with a new student. As if to say "No, honey - that goes HERE." Much to my credit, I gave the gentlest of squeezes as she put her hand on the small of my back. Between the surreal aspect of the situation, the unexpected physical contact and the fact that we were basically talking as it was taken, well, my face comes off as a half-hearted attempt at Jared Lee Loughner's mug shot - a bit too intense, though I've gotten use to the picture a bit since then.

I'm not disappointed by the photo per se but I am sort of deflated. I've rarely photographed well - I sort of have a brow that makes my eyes seem strained so I end up looking extremely serious when all I'm doing is thinking about what I want for dinner - and this was no exception. A badly timed no exception, actually.

But she did put my hand on her and you better believe I gently got a palm of that. It ain't Abelard and Eloise by any means but, well, fuck you, I'm sticking to the totally grand delusion she thought I was cute if she got that close on her own. Until then, I'm hiding that photo behind something else and taking it out as a great (visual) anecdote for when I'm (drunk) with friends.

X-Files: A Short Retrospective

The X-Files is a really depressing show: a weird, obsessive loner takes on a pretty, fresh from med school doctor on as his partner and basically ruins her life.

In the first season, Scully has something of a social life and helping raise a godson and is fairly well adjusted. Meanwhile, Mulder is running off onto army base's and seeing UFOs before getting his memory wiped. Then they see all sorts of terrifying stuff from Fluke Men living in septic tanks to incest-based families to massive radiation sickness to tunnels leaking goo to aliens gestating inside human hosts.

Their parents die over the span of nine years (the fathers under especially dramatic circumstances).

Scully gives birth twice and eventually loses both (one is taken from her by the government, the second is written out in the second film). She also gets cancer for a time. Moreover, she has her face repeatedly rubbed in the fact that despite her logical mind, Mulder is always right (and they even write an episode about exactly that) and it always IS a monster/alien.

Scully's brothers disapprove of her work and of Mulder, and with their disappearance we can assume she chose Mulder over her flesh and blood relatives. That's kinda cold, no matter how you hack it.

Mulder struggles with suicide, briefly. He may or may not be a bastard son fathered by an affair his mother had (I honestly gave up trying to figure that one out), has a half-brother who ends up being a massive burn victim and perpetually blames himself for his sister's alien abduction before finding out she was kidnapped and brutally murdered by a serial killer going door to door. He himself is eventually abducted and experimented on by aliens.

By the last film, Mulder and Scully live alone in a house in the middle of Nowhere, Canada. Scully is a doctor and Mulder grows crazy-beard and cuts out newspaper articles to perpetuate his own conspiracy theories. He ends up being a Truther in some ways: validated by his own conclusions and less interested in investigation. Scully is too tired and frankly too fucking cranky to go back to running around with a flashlight in the dark and instead, attempts to heal a terminally ill child. Because that's SO much more gentle a life choice.

They never marry.

They do, however, go to a tropical island in a rowboat in the end credits of the second film, further isolating themselves from the world.

So, the truth is out there because they're too depressed and worn out to keep looking and have decided they want to be left the fuck alone for good?

The Aspergers Spider-Man (2012) - A Spoiler Free Review, Now With 30% More Vitamin D

So. Amazing Spider-Man.

THE GOOD: Emma Stone. Like Frank Langella in Masters Of The Universe, Jurgen Prochnow in The Replacement Killers or David Warner in anything ever, Stone is by far the gem in this film. Thoughtful, emotional, well-acted - every scene she's in is a total joy to watch no matter who she's with. She's not only pretty but she can ACT which is rare in this age of gross out comedy and blithering false-feminist feel-good fuck-swap like Perfect Pitch (do NOT google that film). I am deeply impressed with her in this.

Martin Sheen and Sally Field are an interesting pick as Ben and May Parker. It doesn't totally work but it also does - while they don't seem like the comic characters, they do seem very true to life. However, they do seem much colder compared to Cliff Robertson (I'll get to that later).

The movie has a nice color palette to it.

THE BAD: the directing is very, very... VERY flat. It's impossible to compare it against Raimi's in the same way it would be impossible to compare Stanley Kubrick to Paul Verhoeven; and in this case, this film is the more "Kubrick" though without the intellectual bent. It's cold and detached and uninterested in telling a heroic tale. It's not a dumb film but...

Just look at them: homogenized and deadly white-bread. This film is poisonously dull. I can remember two scenes in the film that work and work well but...

1.) neither of them deal with web-swinging or stopping the villain. Or the "A" plot (as opposed to the "B" or sub-plot(s))
2.) though well-done, felt entirely out of place in a superhero movie and would be more in place with a good romance film like Until September or Kate & Leopold.

And so... why does this movie exist if it can't give you good action scenes? As a point of preference, it's interesting to me that compared to this film, the Raimi films are chock full of practical effect shots or at least well rendered greenscreen mattes. All the action sequences in this are CG renders from what I remember and it robs it of both visceral feel and realism. Spider-Man (in this hilariously stupid costume design) leaps about like a feather on the wind: he glides but there is no feeling of muscle or power behind it.

THE UGLY: Garfield is the worst thing to happen to Peter Parker since getting his coke-bottle glasses. Instead of being a quirky, solitary nerd, this version of Peter has a text book case of Aspergers. He twitches, is unable to make eye contact, talks with his hands, stutters and generally acts like a dinner theater version of Billy Bibbit. It was very, very painful to watch him because aside from the twitching and speech impediment, he was also a massive asshole to everyone. His aunt and uncle, the kids in school, Gwen, everyone. I felt bad the other characters had to interact with him.

(Side Note: this film is like a 12 year old's response to Captain America, where the good German doctor said about the little guy appreciating what power was. Well... In this movie, when you get power, you decide to become an asshole the size of a CNN article response thread.)

The thing about Spider-Man, rewrite or not, the character exists as this: nice guy gets powers and makes a tragic mistake that loses him his Uncle Ben and he learns with great power must come great responsibility. This movie purposely avoids that. There is no lesson, Peter goes nowhere and becomes no one special. He is not a hero because he never completes any of the trials a hero must: makes no sacrifice, feels no guilt, doesn't evolve or change. He puts on a mask and... thats it. No hero's journey.

Garfield's Peter Parker is Cameron Fry if he stayed in bed instead of going out with Ferris Beuller. 

 Instead, Peter loses his Uncle Ben (props to how they twisted his fate) and so he puts on his tights and goes on a vigilante spree to find the guy. While chasing the original killer into a warehouse in the original movie is an act of passion, a montage of beating up fleeing blonde men strikes more as misplaced revenge. That's not Spider-Man because thats not heroic.

The Horner score is lilting. It's not bad but it's not heroic. The caper is a complete point of convenience and though not insultingly bad is unraveled as you watch it. You can outsmart the movie very quickly and truth be told, the film cribs it's last 5 minutes from the last 30 seconds of the original Spider-Man.

All in all, the film isn't BAD. It didn't make me angry and I didn't hate it but it did make me sad. Spider-Man was one of my *things* growing up, defining an identity of morals as opposed to The Punisher or Superman... and the fact that we've gone so far from me (and this will make some uncomfortable to read) crying Field Of Dreams style in the theater when Peter talks to Ben in Spider-Man 2 to me nodding off during the climactic fight in this version shows how far we haven't come.

The film isn't made for fans of the series but, instead, made to interest Twilight fans. Garfield's hair is quaffed like the lead vampire in that movie and I'm pretty sure it's for this reason. The leaden action sequences, odd dialogue (they even swipe a throw-away joke from the original Raimi movie!) and a schmear of really bad one-liners and you get this.

The Aspergers Spider-Man

(If you see it, and I'm sure you will, the two parts I liked both involve Gwen. The first one is her trying to heal Peter after fighting the Lizard and it's touching; however, I can't tell if it's because the acting works or because I was having painful flashbacks to Megan and it was like finding a home movie of a good memory, down to hand gestures and her dimples. So when you see the picture, take note of that scene and see if affects you as strongly as it did me.)