Once again, religious extremism has thrust its ugly head into the public consciousness. Pretty much all non-fucking-crazy humans have been properly revolted by the extreme Islamism on display with the decapitation murder of American journalist James Foley at the hands of a British terrorist. This got me to thinking about religion generally, and the fine line that exists between your run-of-the-mill god worship and the insanity that exists on the extreme fringes of pretty much every deity-worshiping sect the planet has to offer. And what “god” actually is, if there can be One God that truly holds dominion over each and every single one of us, regardless of which particular “brand” a person decides he or she is most in allegiance with.

In about 2003, when I was 29, I felt a shift inside of me, where the weight had finally moved from the faith side of the reason/ faith scale to, for the first time ever, start to press more heavily on the side of reason. I can’t say exactly why this happened when it happened—there wasn’t an “incident”—no antithesis of a burning bush or personal loss for which there was no answer. I think it was one of the more famous holocaust survivors who once said something to the effect that if the holocaust exists then it goes without saying that there can be no god. Looking back now, I see my belief in a supreme being as more of an adherence to pre-scientific revolution superstition than anything remotely approaching “religious faith” in any strict sense of that phrase. I knocked on wood after inadvertently saying something I only too-late realized I hoped wouldn’t come to pass, just as much as I blessed food before eating it in the hopes that its abundance would continue unabated, that fear in the back of my mind that if I didn’t continue this tradition, that harkened back to the very earliest epochs of my memory’s existence, the food might wither away. It was the faith equivalent of having a pair of lucky socks on gameday, with this meal being gameday and prayers being the unwashed socks.

But then I made the connection between disgusting crusty socks arbitrarily assigned luck and “proper” meals requiring blessings (but not an impromptu snack, for some reason), and then the whole thing was crumbling down until I was left with only myself in the vast, mostly empty universe.

With that realization fresh (and terrifying), it logically followed that my wife and children were more important to me than ever—they were, after all, the only TRUE connections I had in the world. If there was no deity watching over me and those I cared about, then what the fuck was there but love? Love was all that there was and is and ever would be.

I saw Boyhood yesterday with my eighteen year old son and thirteen year old daughter. If you haven’t seen it, take my and every seriously considered movie reviewer’s advice and make a conscious effort to put this film on your to-do list. There’s not much plot to it, as plotlines go, but it speaks volumes. It sheds light on all of our lives. It reveals what my friend Leslie rightly pointed out is the One, True God—the God that every religious fundamentalist from Mormons to ISIS has missed on their way to self-righteous oneness with the infinite: TIME. Time is the only god that any of us can truly know for certain.

I have steadfastly written down the major occurrences of my life as they happened, since I was about fifteen years old. Learning how to describe things to myself via the written word was, in and of itself, a revelation and a MAJOR turning point in my life and my understanding of that life. Which doesn’t necessarily remove any of my terror at the prospect of one day having the lights turn off for good, or the contemplation of how this final major event will transpire (Will it be slow and painful? Will it be fast and painless? Will I wish it was the other way regardless? Would it be worse to know you’re dying and fight that inevitability every step of the way or to merely give in to the inevitability, the most stark reminder of the latter being pretty much any time I ever hear about someone committing suicide?). And although I have gone back and re-read stuff I have written over the years, never had I seen such a crystalline presentation of life as it actually happens—time in its unforgiving march forward—as is presented in Richard Linklater’s film. I looked over at my children during different parts of the film and could see that they, in their relatively short amount of time alive, conscious and self-aware, were connecting to it just as acutely, though perhaps not in the same way or on the same beats, as I was. It was magnificent. It gave us more conversation than taking the dinghy out on the lake would have, most assuredly. Though that’s on the agenda for next weekend, when it will hopefully not be either threatening rain or actually raining as it was all day here in Nashville. Making memories is important, and though I doubt they will remember the time we watched a nearly three hour meditation on time and how quickly it transpires while we are busy living our lives, they will definitely remember spending time with their somewhat broke and broken father out on a lake in a tiny rubber boat on a hot Tennessee summer day…

After they went home, our half-weekend exhausted once more, I sat down to write—something. I didn’t know what it would be but it had to be something because it had been a minute since I’d been so profoundly affected by anything. Any then I saw this picture thumbnailed on my desktop.

And back came all the anger, resentment and revenge scenarios I had been envisioning for literally years now, ever since my ex-wife stole my children from me seven years ago this summer, when my son was eleven and my daughter was six. Boyhood made it all the more clear how much I had missed—that it was due to another person’s selfishness made it all that much harder to swallow without severe bile welling up and choking me. Because unlike Ethan Hawke’s character in the movie, who at least seems to have voluntarily taken leave of his kids in order to follow his own bliss, I never left. I was forced out at first, and then intentionally left behind. Twice. And after joblessness and homelessness and the complete destruction of everything I held dear, I got back to my kids and more than five years had passed. A massive part of their childhoods, gone. She took them from me and with that decision I was doomed to miss out on so much of their lives. Not just birthdays and holidays spent together—those were merely the so-called “banner moments.” It was the little mundane details that I regret losing out on the most. It’s the hours spent barbecuing in the back yard, the conversations over dinner, the every day moments lost to eternity. The loss that comes from losing daily touch over space and time. She stole that from me, there was no arguing it, and there still isn’t. And then, when I was finally able to move to where she had taken my family more than five years earlier, she was sleeping with my daughter’s best friend’s married dad. This was the piece of shit I’d tied my wagon to. This was the goddam cunt I wanted to die over. This was the whore I suffered for. I couldn’t (and still can’t) understand how I could have been so blind, to not see that this person that I fell in love with and started a family with and planned the rest of our lives with had a moral compass so magnetically opposed to my own. It is an understatement to say that my abject hatred of her is like an entity in and of itself. It overtakes me from time to time, and all I can see in those times is black hatred. Her selfishness practically ruined me, but worse even than that, it stole the rapidly changing, ever-expanding lives of my son and daughter from me, rendering the times I was able to spend with them over the most formative years of their lives as mere flashes of recognition rendered effectively in a three-hour retrospective movie that we watched together on a Saturday afternoon, the fictional lives rendered on-screen a reliable substitute for what our actual lives together have been. I cried in the movie theater. It wasn’t even a particularly tear-jerky scene. But I couldn’t hold in the anguish any longer.

And then (spoiler??) I saw Patricia Arquette, who plays the mother in the film, crying, alone, asking is that all there is? and while that hasn’t yet transpired in my ex’s life, I have high hopes for her destitution and isolation. And fuck you if you find that petty or vengeful or in some way taking the low road. Because the only god is time and my children’s time was stolen from me. And I’m trying…I swear to you, I am really trying—to figure out how to not allow the rest of my life to become a referendum on this woman. Because where does that get me, or my relationship with my son and daughter, who she will always be a mom to, regardless of how shitty she was to me? The answer: Nowhere. She’s just as fucked up and broken, if not moreso, as I am without me having fucked her over and taken the children from her…

So where does that leave me…where?

Forgiving?

I don’t think so. At least not now. I’m just not there, and honestly cannot imagine ever being there. I click on any and every news story I come across that has as its major talking point a person forgiving someone for something fucking terrible. There are people imprisoned for years unjustly. There are parents of murdered children who forgive the murderer. And every time I read one of these stories I feel like a bastard for being so dead-set in my inability to just forgive this woman. Like she said when we first separated and I lost my mind, “people get divorced every day.” “But not us,” I said. “I built my life around you—around our family. And I won’t ever have another chance,” I said. The veracity of this last statement changed nothing. She was still gone. My children were still gone. When I was finally able to gather the financial means to physically move to where she had moved them it was already too late. Yes, they are still alive, and we are still able to see each other and make memories together, but I can’t be like Ethan Hawke. I can’t start a new family. And I missed out on so many of my son’s and daughter’s most formative years. I’m a stranger to them, a guy who buys them shit on the weekends. Maybe it would have been like this even if we had lived in the same house together all this time but I can’t know that. All I know is that another person’s selfishness and inability to truly give herself to a greater good robbed all of us of something more than the sum of its parts. And while that could never be as bad as them being murdered, there is the matter of the pact we made, wherein we pledged our lives to each other and the family we were immediately consummating with our exchange of vows. I was a single father of my then four-year-old son and she was eight months pregnant with our daughter when we tied that easily cut knot. We were an insta-family as soon as we walked out of the chapel. But then I cut myself to make it all the more official, this dedication to who we claimed to be, and then she was gone. They were gone. And I was still cut and floating untethered in the darkness, desperately grasping for a hand hold. Anything. And I could understand how a disenfranchised young man could find solace in the overwhelming empty that is life for so many on this planet, and latch on to religion, even in its most despicably radical form—because even a vengeful, ruthless, savage god can be trusted to fulfill his promises more than the majority of human beings. Because there is no way of knowing one way or another until you’re dead and he’s there rewarding you, not there punishing you, or the whole thing is just gone and there’s nothing left but the imprint you left for those that survived to talk about and pass down from one generation to the next. It’s all relative. Even the most despicable figures in history are still revered by someone for their power or vision decades-centuries-millennia later. The little betrayals between a man and a woman and the aftermath of those betrayals and its effect on their children pass through the annals of time as water in a vast ocean of nothing. And everything. And we all give our due diligence, our perhaps unwilling acquiescence to this god of us all, eventually, whether we pledge fealty to it or not.

It was poetry.

Preach

No, not my crappy attempts at writing poetry, but my sudden awakening to its existence as something real, and connective, and yes, beautiful. I inhaled Whitman and Keats and Byron, rock stars in the poetry world during their own lifetimes, and now the harbingers of True Feeling, True Freedom, all those years after their own lives ended, in my own life. Reading their immortal words showed me that emotion—feeling—is ageless, and incorruptible by time or politics or religious fervor or any other human construct; as long as human beings exist, and had access to such beauty, it would remain not only beautiful, but also pertinent to the human experience for anyone who dared to put down his mobile device long enough to take it fully within.

That summer following my poetry-induced awakening, 1990, Jane’s Addiction released Ritual de lo Habitual, their swan song and my introduction to the hedonistic modern rock that would further shape my ideas about love, and life, and prioritizing one thing over another.

No one’s leaving

Coming from a background where I was forbidden to listen to the radio or watch TV for much of my childhood (my parents’ vain attempt to shield me and my younger brothers from “secular humanism”), by the time I had my blinders yanked off to all I had been missing, I was like an Over-Eaters Anonymous adherent on a Golden Corral buffet binge, and I made a sworn pact with myself to never again enter the rooms of self-denial and moderation. There was an entire world out there, a world of extravagant delights, and I would never stop until I had tasted all of them. I was a product of extremism gone to the opposite extreme. No longer would I see everything as possibly damning to the soul and spirit, a world full of temptations sent by the devil himself to coerce me into a false comfort so that I could be sent down the road to hell—I would embark on that road of my own accord, with no persuasion or enticement needed, other than the promise of freedom and the pursuit of beauty—not just in its literal form, but in the way beauty feels. This was the equivalent of walking out on the deck of a massive ship, the sun beckoning an open-faced acceptance of the world exactly as it was presented to the every sensory perception, and welcoming every sight, smell, sound, taste and feel as it came. I was a fallen angel. I no longer cared to be among the righteous, protecting my soul and my self from all carnal temptations—I would be the Full Human, as God had intended. I would take in all His creation, bite by glorious bite, ingest it wholly, thoroughly, a libertine in search of libation and all other experiences that would serve to allow me to comprehend life in a more comprehensive and fulfilling way than the narrow avenue originally proposed to me through my parents via the Sacred Word.

But despite this liberation from the artificial economic and religious suffering I and my siblings endured under the unblinking eye of our parents, I now believe, these years later, that I took it too much to heart. This assessment, like all others, is subject to change. But for now, there it is. I went too far to the Other Side, the opposite end of the spectrum; in my rejection of all things extreme-right, I fell completely off the edge of all things extreme left. And realized what a shame it was that beautiful things, like flowers and connectedness and fighting for what’s right had been co-opted by the “Jesus”-people on the right, who were against everything that had anything to do with actual beauty. They lost me at hello.

But what, then, was beauty to me? Did I even have an understanding of it at all before I read poetry or heard Jane’s Addiction or finally gathered the nerve to address, with no manufactured pretense, Amy Ellis in my 10^th grade English class? If I was no longer worthless due to my predetermined inheritance of Original Sin, was I immediately worthy of receiving Beauty, or at least appreciating it from across the room without feeling like a dirty motherfucker because of acknowledging such Base appreciations for something as ungodly as the female form, unshackled from the burdens of seeing Her for something more than a submissive baby-and-home-making machine?

My only previous understanding of “beauty” came from my uncle’s 1970’s-era Playboys, when I was age 8 (which would probably explain my preference to this day for women with” hair down there,” despite the modern trend toward inexplicable Brazilian waxes that render the female form in a perpetual prepubescent Barbie state, IMHO), and the coffee-table-sized books of Renaissance-era art that my lawn-mow client, Mrs. Sabatini, kept on her coffee table, and which I furtively stole glances of when overseeing her twin infant sons while she went to the kitchen to find and write me a $12 check for services rendered…

I had a secret

So there I was, 15 and never laid, visions of shapely, pubic-haired, ivory-skinned Dionysian women rapturing me to places heretofore unknown, and along came Lord Byron and Jane’s Addiction, Dead Poets Society and Walt Whitman, entreating me to explore lands I had long suspected existed but had never dared enter… until I did.

And then it was off to the races, and all I cared about was finding the ULTIMATE BEAUTY. I wanted the wife and the children and the family I dared dream could exist on this plane. So I went for it. With a catch.

There was a girl who was completely in love with me at one point. We worked together while in college. We connected on every conceivable and meaningful level. But she wasn’t about to have my baby, and someone else was, so I rejected her. I rejected her because I couldn’t stand to think about a world in which I had little-to-no connection to my unborn baby, and so I stayed with the hell I knew, rather than flying to the one I could only imagine… And as it turned out, the hell I thought I “knew” ended up being worse than any hell I’d previously imagined, excepting worse-nightmare-scenarios and horror movie actualizations. It was a life granted for a mere moment, some sadistic Faustian bargain, wherein I got to pretend I actually had the beautiful life and a marital kinship that was printed on paper only, was only as good as the ink it was written in, and when I ran back to the file cabinet when the legal paperwork was demanded of me, I encountered only blank pages, the contract disappeared, the Love and Family replaced with blatant disdain and abject rejection. And I blamed Walt Whitman.

Evil personified

I blamed Whitman and Perry Farrell and the endless Most Beautiful People lists that went from populating supermarket check-out lane magazine stands to representing the lion’s share of internet year-end best-of lists. If you weren’t beautiful or somehow connected to one of the beautiful people, you weren’t truly achieving The Dream, merely a hollow knock-off. After all, what was any of this worth if you weren’t the subject of at least someone’s envy? We were meant to cultivate that, to give others something larger than themselves to strive for. And if we came up short in our own quest for the Enviable Life, then what was any of it worth, really?

I started writing this essay more than a month ago, then abandoned it after a re-read, as it seemed at the time to be a feeble attempt as justifying the multiple life-choice mistakes I’ve committed over the years. How fucking pathetic is everything a person seeks to achieve if its basis is founded, at least partly, in something as shallow as physical beauty? There has to be more to it than that, and there is. But any person with only a modicum of self-evaluation is going to look back and try to rationalize how things went so completely off the rails on the way to Now. There IS more to life than beauty and the seeking out of it—there’s work and struggle and compassion and service, wonder and wandering. And, of course, the inevitable staving-off of the Inevitable, via the latest new-fangled exercise and diet regimens, and plastic surgery for the more monetarily secure and hopelessly Past Their Prime.  

But then this douchebag rich kid who couldn’t get laid murdered the beautiful people who wouldn’t give him the time of day, and I decided to give this piece another look. The kid was attractive enough I guess, and had access to more money than most people his age, yet due to his belief that he deserved the very best of everything, he evidently couldn’t get laid by the caliber of women he felt he “deserved.” Only the most beautiful, the most perfect of everything for him, or nothing at all. Think about that: this kid decided that committing murder and then suicide was preferable to lowering his expectations of what was an acceptable hotness-level girlfriend. Though I’d argue that, even more than an unwillingness to compromise on standards, he was just inept at socialization. No woman, save your standard crack-or-meth head, is going to drop trou for a guy who can’t hold a normal, non-creepy conversation. Judging by the guy’s YouTube videos, all he was capable of discussing is how unfair and pathetic his life was—his words and general demeanor far more off-putting than any Cyrano-sized proboscis. But there was nobody there to tell him that. And if there was, he obviously lacked the skills to learn that skillset. And now innocent people are dead for no reason, and he’s got five minutes of postmortem internet fame. Business as usual.

I don’t know what my ultimate point is with all of this. I started writing this as a means of attempting to dissect how people’s initial understandings of the world and what matters in it are most always flat-out misguided if not completely wrong. This is not to say that poetry and beauty and art aren’t all important aspects of life and the human experience, only to possibly illustrate that any preoccupation with anything that is as fleeting and momentary as a relationship or a look is misguided at best, and, as we saw in the case of the “Virgin Killer,” life-ruining at worst. So here’s to moderation, in all of its forms. To knowing thy self, and to commitment, above all else, to the transitory nature of life generally, and fickle love most specifically. Because I’m realizing that it is only through our acknowledgement and embrace of these realities that we become truly capable of living life on the terms it presents us with, and not end up banging our heads against the walls of expectation. None of this, as the saying goes, can merely be assumed as a “given.” It is only through grace and sheer dumb luck that any of us have anything that isn’t cancerous, disastrous and in all ways completely ruinous to the soul and the psyche. There’s a lot of suffering out there, and an endless supply still to come. All that can be expected by anybody is the good luck enough to not have your turn at sorrow happen anytime soon, paired with a daily meditation on how amazingly lucky we are to have another day of this struggle in all of our stupid, insignificant little lives.      

~Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

 Last night I crossed paths with a guy I used to work for. Mine was a sales position, where every weekday, and Saturdays, I was to fan out across Nashville with a band of similarly-programmed individuals, and attempt to sell AT&T bundle packages door-to-door to small businesses for their internet and long distance service. This was back in 2008, and coincided with my period of itinerant homelessness. I slept under weeping willows at the business park where I and all the other 20-30-something young males met every morning for the ritual psych-up. Baby Got Back and like-minded high-energy tracks were blasted from a $30 Wal-Mart CD player, and we yelled at each other things like “You can’t be stopped!” and “No, YOU can’t be stopped, you invincible motherfucker!”

The guy had a wife and a baby daughter with him, and a shopping cart full of exterior rubber landscaping tiles. He wanted to know if, in my professional opinion, a standard box cutter would work efficiently and effectively to cut the tiles. Then he recognized me. We shook hands. His grip was weak. We remembered each other then but I didn’t know his name. He had the upper hand in name remembrance, in that my name was emblazoned across my chest, as is customary for a retail clerk of my position. His name wasn’t emblazoned across his chest. Never was.

He looked merely slightly different, these six years later, but only inasmuch that it was the first time I had ever seen him not wearing a suit and tie. He asked me how long I’d been in my current occupation. I knew why he asked me that as soon as the sentence was just beginning to leave his mouth. He asked me how long I’d been doing what I was doing because the last time we’d talked, six years ago, it was just the two of us in his corner office, mere minutes before the psych-up meeting. He was, as I remember, wearing a suit and tie. He’d said that he had to level with me. I’d looked behind him, out the wide windows of his corner office. The branches of a willow tree were softly scraping on the panes. He had said he didn’t think this was the right fit for me. He said that besides the numbers and my lack of them, I was an obvious outlier, bad for morale. Everybody knows you change clothes in the bathroom every morning and afternoon when we meet back up, he said. The other guys are noticing, he said, and it’s bad for morale.

My changing clothes in the bathroom is bad for morale? I asked. He messed with his ring finger. There was still a distinct tan line where a ring no longer existed. Look, I said, if there’s only one thing you can relate to me about, it’s that. I looked at his hands, with all obviousness. He knew what I was referring to and immediately put his arms down, his hands out of sight behind his broad, cheap wood replica desk. He set his jaw and looked at his lap. Then he told me that it killed him to have to make the determination he was having to make. He looked like he was having trouble not crying. I wanted to ask him how he held everything together the way he did, to ask him to let me in on the secret to pressing ahead when everything falls apart around your head. I knew from personal experience that it wasn’t easy to keep things floating when all you felt like was drowning, and just fighting to keep your airways above water seemed like more trouble than it was worth—that it was easier to die than to engage even the most meager effort at survival, let alone the taking of the world, unstoppable motherfuckers or not.

I stood up.

I’ve been sleeping in that stand of trees by the overpass, I said, pointing over his shoulder. I wanted him to know exactly which stand of trees I was talking about, so I pointed. I stopped sleeping there, moved to the golf course off of Galatin last week, specifically to prevent this having to happen, I said. But I guess the clothes-changing did me in anyway. You can’t rightly sleep on the ground in a suit and then expect the suit to be even halfway decent for walking into offices the next day, I said. Then I left, pulled my duffel bag from the janitor’s closet, and went back into the bathroom to change clothes again for the second time in less than 20 minutes. His daughter’s name, he told me last night, is Auburn. She turns one year old next month.

Later, after work, I went with a couple of my closest fellow retail super box store supervisors to a nearby bar. There were two female bartenders serving. One was a Ginger, with a face and figure that could launch a thousand wars, the other a tatted-up MaryAnn. This Ginger/MaryAnn designation according to Fergus, who has a preternatural talent for classifying types of people, and neatly tying said classifications into pop culture touchstones. Did you know, I said to Fergus, that only a few years after Gilligan’s Island went off the air, Bob Denver played a second, nearly carbon-copy Gilligan character named Dusty on a laugh-tracked sit-com called Dusty’s Trail, wherein instead of a yacht getting blown off course, it’s a late-19^th century wagon train that gets lost? In fact, I continued, every single character on the rehash show was an exact carbon copy of a character on Gilligan’s Island: there was Gilligan, playing himself, except now his name was Dusty. He was still a fuck-up and still loveable (“Dusty’s the reason for their plight, thanks to Dusty nothing’s right”). There was the skipper, replaced by the wagon train’s cook. And the professor, who was now referred to in the credits as “the academic.” That’s because they didn’t have professors in the 1800’s, said Fergus. Right, I said. There was another millionaire geriatric couple, who of course had the nicest wagon in the whole train, velvet curtains with tassels and all. And, of course, a Ginger and a MaryAnn. Fergus wiki’d my claims and read aloud that the general consensus for the show’s flop performance (only 26 episodes were made) was that it was simply too blatant a ripoff of Gilligan’s Island. They weren’t even attempting to differentiate it in any way, our friend and fellow supervisor Shinebox said.

By this point we’d discussed at length the relative merits of a Ginger vs. a MaryAnn, directly relating it to the Ginger and MaryAnn behind the bar. And, seeing as I had my fortitude up after my third drink, I decided I needed to have Ginger directly address us. As she passed by, her perfect body all the more perfect as the night marched on, I called to her, asked her if she’d do me a favor and take a picture of the framed picture behind the bar, because I was too far from it for my crap phone camera to adequately capture the image. She obliged, took two snaps, repositioning herself and the phone so as to reduce glare for the second effort. I looked at her work, told her I preferred the first one, the one with glare. It had a red circle and a blue rectangle. This is the picture:

I wrote this piece drunk and edited it sober, as I do everything I write. You’ll have to hypothesize which are the drunk parts and which the sober.

Fergus, Shinebox and I eventually came to the following conclusions: there is no true possessing of a Ginger. She serves only as a representation of all that cannot ever truly be possessed, the likes of which are like trying to file a land-claim on the Grand Canyon—no matter how big your armaments, and the forces at your disposal to back them up, something of such exquisite and rare beauty is going to be in high demand by any and all travelers. Ginger, despite her modestly-sized engagement ring, could never truly be engaged to any one man. His pickup truck would eventually have to be replaced with a crash-tested Mercedes or Audi—something high-end. She is a national treasure, our sentiment went, and therefore could only be on loan for any particular duration of time, and the clock was always ticking. She would always be forced, through the inevitable triumph of natural selection, back into the commonly-held stock of beautiful women, curse that that is. Her shape, hourglass. Her complexion, flawless. Her hair (blond, shoulder-length). Her eyes (blue). Her dimples.

Later, MaryAnn approached and engaged us in talk of the relatively new phenomenon of front yard bonfires, and her inability to gather the nerve to approach her neighbors in their pre-gentrification neighborhood, and how she was almost to the point of fuck-it. She said she was just about ready to just roll a doob and stroll the streets of her pre-gentrification neighborhood, crossing up the front-yard bonfires to see what might come of it. It was an incredibly intimate thing to admit to complete strangers like Fergus, Shinebox and me. But she told us these details, and by God, Fergus was right: she was the more attractive of the Ginger/MaryAnn head-to-head. Because MaryAnn has vulnerability and possibility and all the things that make actual chemistry something something something something. She was beautiful in her own rite. And yet, despite her bangs and tattoos and obvious street cred, she still worried about trying to fit in in her pre-gentrification neighborhood, a year after moving in.

I like to think, in these hours later as I write this, that I could have and should have asked her for her phone number, and that maybe then we would have become a dance of “come-close-and-then-pull -away” until we got to the point where we both realized that we were what the other had always been looking for, without actually knowing we were looking for Us. But I didn’t ask her. I just kept thinking about Ginger. Because she was safer to imagine. Because I am never going to be the guy with the shaved head and the effortless manner that actually attracts girls like Ginger. And though we all like to imagine that somewhere out there a Ginger exists who has risen above her position of “stone-cold fox,” and has demanded to be recognized for her brains as well as her immediately obvious physical beauty, the unavoidable truth is that the reason that such freaks of nature with both brains and beauty exist in such low numbers is because they have grown up—incubated— in a world where nothing more than stage dressing is asked—even commanded—of them. The beautiful people, who with only the slightest of effort excel in any position or stature they seek.

And we want them to be like this. They are forever in our debt. We appoint upon them total hotness and exemption from the typical requirements of the average that is all commonplace most everywhere else, and in return they grant us a look, maybe. Or a sentence (“Where can I find lightbulbs?”). This is the way of things.

I was married to a Ginger. Then engaged to a MaryAnn.

This is the Ginger I was married to.

Sealed in amber.

This is the MaryAnn I was in love with.

I can still almost touch her.

I was unaware at the time of my marriage that one does not just walk into marriage with a Ginger and expect to have everything end up hunky dory. The Ginger is expected to want more than writing and second or third-hand beater cars. And that Gingers have expiration dates. And that such expiration dates are constantly ticking in the backs of their minds, in the backs of their clocks (biological), that they are always wondering if this ticking is an actual bomb or just the latest form of alarm to go up, reminding them that that new Volvo isn’t just going to materialize in the driveway on its own. There is work to be done. You got the free pass with the Ginger looks, yes, but that doesn’t immediately equal the kush life. A Ginger has to work that shit. The looks only go so far. There are porn star Gingers, for Christ’s sake, Shinebox said. Yeah, the porn star Gingers are definitely having to work it, Fergus agreed…

So now, here I am. I think I’ve pretty much gotten past my self-destructive Ginger obsession. Most of them, after all, aren’t nearly refined enough to demand any more out of life than to merely be attractive. Like water, all of us generally take the path of least resistance. But for an average-looking mope like me, this means I am going to be relegated to psycho Gingers who never learned to work it, or MaryAnns with daddy issues, which usually translates to psychotic beatdowns and screaming matches in the middle of the night, when all you want is to log six maybe 7 hours of sleep so you can go back to your mope job not feeling like a total crap pile.

Can I at least get a blowjob? said Fergus, who is married to a Ginger himself. His is a rare one, the kind who demanded to be seen for her brains, too.

Nothing is ever easy.

The midnight disease started as a simple feeling of disconnection to other people, an inability to “fit in” by no means unique to writers, a sense of envy and unbridgeable distance like that felt by someone tossing on a restless pillow in a world full of sleepers. Very quickly, though, what happened with the midnight disease was that you began actually to crave this feeling of apartness, to cultivate and even flourish within it. You pushed yourself farther and farther apart until one black day you woke to discover that you yourself had become the chief object of your own hostile gaze.

Right off I’ll confess my complete and total abject hatred for this movie. I mean—if I’d been in a theater when watching it, there’s a high likelihood I would have walked out on it. I’ve walked out on a total of two movies in my life: The first was David Cronenberg’s Crash (not the other piece of shit with the same title that won the 2005 Oscar for best picture, the cloying, ham-fisted shit-stain that it was, I never saw that one in a theater, I’m proud to say), the second was Quentin Tarentino’s Death Proof, which, if you remember, was the second half of the double-feature released as part of Grind House with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, which was awesome, and made walking out of Death Proof a virtual requirement, so as to allow the glories of PT to remain intact without having Tarantino’s normally effective and poignant dialogue—which in Death Proof come across as cloying and ham-fisted—ruin the entire experience. Death Proof was a director trying too hard to be himself-esque, Crash just had a shitty premise. Yes, I knew the premise before I paid to see it, I just didn’t realize until I was actually seeing it just how retarded the premise was. So yeah, I walked out on both. 

Utter shit.

Likewise.

Secondly, let it be known from henceforth that the reviews I post here all need to be read with a spoiler alert being a possibly unspoken given—I want to talk about movies and books and music and whatever else without having to worry about ruining your experience with the film or book or album or leaked celebrity porn video. Got it? Good. Let’s do this.

Where was I? Oh yes. I hated this movie. I hated it so fucking much. But for whatever reason I couldn’t turn it off. I HAD to see what was going to happen next, had to see if it could somehow redeem itself or prove that it did, after all, have something even closely resembling a point. And in the end, despite all previous indications that it was basically shat out of a meth-riddled psychopath’s actual ass, there was a semi-tidy wrap up offered, a voice-over supplied over a montage of touching images wherein the protagonist antihero offers his sum-uppance of everything you’ve just been subjected to—but my god, it was SO UNSATISFYING!!! Allow me to explain.

The movie starts with Rainn Wilson, who’s somehow married way out of his league to Steven Tyler’s daughter, best known as Arwen in the LOTR trilogy. You can tell from the start that they’re screwed. There’s no way this can last. The marriage is a perfectly evident crime against nature and humanity itself.

This guy…

…landed this girl. Riiiight.

So within the first 10 minutes Arwen dumps Dwight Schrute for Kevin Bacon, a drug dealer who has everything Dwight doesn’t. He agonizes, he prays to God, he has some truly unhinged hallucinations. Then he decides to become a superhero, The Crimson Bolt, picking up Juno along the way as his profanity-loving 22 year old side-kick, Boltie—all with the goal of once again saving his true love from her drug addiction (that’s how he got her in the first place, it turns out—by “saving her” from her addiction).

Now, while the aforementioned is a perfectly serviceable plot, especially in our self-referential, post-Tarantino era of comparatively well-made superhero movies, the problem (for me anyway) lay in the way that there seems to be no discernible moral center to the film, and I mean AT ALL. Crimson Bolt’s weapon of choice is a massive pipewrench, which he wields mercilessly against child molesters, drug dealers, purse snatchers and line-butters alike (BTW, this is the first time I’ve heard it referred to as “butting” in line, as opposed to cutting in line). Basically, Dwight takes out his anger at being dumped and alone on absolutely everyone who even slightly pisses him off. When the girlfriend of the guy he decked for “butting” in line starts freaking out, he hits her in the face with the wrench too. Boltie, his evidently amoral sidekick, cheers him on. My favorite line from the movie actually comes from her: “You tell everyone you know! That anytime some stupid fucking bastard wants to commit some gay ass crime that Crimson Bolt and Boltie are gonna be there to crush their little fucking evil heads in!”

Juno soon after seduces Dwight, basically raping him, and when the deed is complete, he runs to the toilet, pukes, and in this post-rape toilet puke he halucinates the face of his estranged wife. That’s when he decides he must save her and the movie really goes off the rails (as if it remained on them past the first twenty minutes, natch). Crimson Bolt and Boltie make some pipe bombs, buy some guns and head to the drug dealer’s mansion, where Kevin Bacon is closing a massive deal with an African who wants, as part of the deal, to fuck Arwen. So that happens, against her will of course. And then, as the dynamic duo approach the compound, they are shot at and we are given this to chew on.

I mean WTF, right? Dwight shoots, blows up, and beats to death every drug dealer and stooge that comes across his path. Then he finally corners Kevin Bacon who almost gets the best of him before he shoots a metal projectile into his nuts, then sits astride him before stabbing him to death.

Dialogue:

Kevin Bacon: You really think that killing me… stabbing me to death is going to change the world?

Dwight/Crimson Bolt: I can’t know that for sure unless I try!

And then he stabs him to death.

In the epilogue we are informed that Arwen only got back with him for a couple of months before leaving him again, but that this is what was meant to happen—that she was meant to have this beautiful life helping people and raising a family and people like Dwight, evidently, are meant to be alone and owners of domesticated rabbits. 

Now, a couple of things need to be said, in fairness. I believe I approached this film, as I understood it from the previews, with the understanding that I would see a guy who was wronged find it within himself to become a bigger, better human being, and that it would be funny, the various hijinks he would get into while trying to become this person. Instead, I watched a movie where a guy becomes unhinged, takes part in helping an otherwise innocent young woman get killed, and then falls into the acceptance of his life as being a helpless shlub. Yet I couldn’t help but continue thinking about the film long after I first watched it. Was it stupid? Yes. Was it needlessly, some would say sadistically, violent? Yes. Did it have completely pointless scenes and overuse of comic book BLAMMO lettering at random moments? Yes. I mean, in so many ways SUPER truly comes across as though it was made by a person literally strung out on some serious drugs. And that’s when I found out that the director, James Gunn, had recently gotten divorced from Jenna Fischer, better known as Pam on The Office…which just goes to show that, in show business as with everything else, it really is all about who you know…

But anyway, here’s my theory, and my recommendation—starting with theory. Ever heard the story about Roman Polanski’s directing a film version of Macbeth, during the shooting of which his wife, Sharon Tate, was brutally murdered by the Manson clan, and that because of this act of violence hitting so close to home, Polanski made Macbeth more and more violent as the movie went on? Ever heard that? Well I’m theorizing that much the same thing happened here. Except Pam wasn’t murdered, she just left James Gunn for a drug dealer. Or maybe just Jim.

Possible home-wrecker.

Recommendation: See it. If for no other reason than so I can debate its merits or lack thereof with you. Also, side note—the director first came to notoriety for writing and directing the Troma classic Tromeo and Juliet. So maybe that explains the violence. Maybe he’s like the movie equivalent of that guy who rewrites classic novels using zombies and other undead. Maybe Super is the troma version of Juno. But I doubt it.

That bumper sticker needs to be stapled to my forehead right about now. Because I’m suffering a serious crisis of consciousness. As in, my every waking, conscious moment is spent consumed with the knowledge that we were all sold a false bill of sale. And thats a harsh fucking pill to swallow, a terrible reality to realize you are living.

Doesn’t matter if youre still in school or haven’t been there in years, all of us remember how, growing up in America (or perhaps any “Western” country for that matter), we were constantly indoctrinated with the LIE that if we worked hard and studied and stayed true to ourselves, we would be able to live the life we set out to make for ourselves. Remember that? We were regaled with tales of our forefathers, most notably George Washington and Abe Lincoln, having struggled against and overcome incredible odds and various diversities to make it to the pinnacle of human achievement…and that, if we just reached down into the well of our own deepest capabilities, we, too could be so great.

But alas, we couldn’t be so great, it turns out, if we weren’t born with trust funds or in some other way fast-tracked to the Ivy League cornucopia of great jobs, all-encompassing dental plans and one way tickets to that fabled Good Life. We made all the right moves. We studied til our brains were bleeding. We graduated at the tops of our college classes. We fully bought into the fantasy they tricked all of us into believing was real and true and possible. And then, when the scam finally caught up with them and the bottom dropped out on everyone but those in power, both politically and financially, WE were the ones whose asses had been handed to them. They had covered every angle. They, like all great casinos, were the house that couldn’t lose. We were the suckers who had to leave the joint wearing trashbags or whiskey barrels in order to cover our shame. And despite all the evidence showing all of us in said rags just who exactly was behind the great swindle, their bought-and-paid-for political stooges from BOTH parties had already done preemptive ass-covering. The robber-barons hadn’t done anything illegal at all. They were PERFECTLY within their rights to gamble away our inheritance. Our “assets”, you see, were never really ours in the first place. Our homes and cars and college funds were merely on loan, to sedate us into thinking that we too would eventually be able to work our way into a place at the table, our own little meager part of that fabled good life.

Because the banks and the corporations that now employ so many of us, they had a right to make a profit. Didn’t matter how immoral the practices were that were enacted in order to fleece us of our livelihoods, our well-paying jobs which they took and then replaced with hollow facsimiles that had none of the autonomy or wage rates and were spent daily emasculating us, making us feel as though we didn’t really deserve anything more than to barely scrape by from one month to the next, one day to the next–we must not have worked hard enough if we hadn’t gotten an ample enough piece of the pie. And woe to he who would DARE complain about getting the shaft, that ungrateful fuck.

Because remember, we have been CONDITIONED to vote against our own best interests. We have been indoctrinated into believing the swill being force-fed us by our corporate overlords, who show us “informative” infomercials (in required classes of 30+ employees at a time) detailing just how destructive and against our free-will unionizing is. I mean, I’ve actually had people tell me that unionized school teachers or steel workers making mandated $25 an hour paychecks are definitely ripping off the tax payers because nobody “deserves” to make that much money. And what about the motherfucking CEOs making 250X the salary of the average worker?? I would scream politely back. They deserve to make tens of millions of dollars a year??? They deserve Golden Parachute guarantees that allow these CEOs to leave companies employing thousands of people in ruins while they waltz away with 200 or 300 million dollars in cash and stock option severance packages????? I mean, the number of astounded question marks has gotten truly absurd. So absurd that I cant think about anything else anymore. I eat sleep and breathe VENGEANCE now. But not in the gun-wieldy, mow down every innocent civilian I just happen to bump into sense. More in the sense of I am now generally less suicidal than I have ever been in my entire life. And you should be too. Because as depressing and spirit-crushing as all of this is to realize, especially when we have been taught so differently than this harsh reality we now wake up with every day, the truth of the matter is that we are now, every single one of us who chooses to pay attention, AWAKE. We are the citizenry watching the Emperor waltzing down the street, pointing at him and laughing. THE EMPIRE HAS NO CLOTHES. The gig is up. We are on the cover of Time magazine.

The genie is out of the bottle. Pandora’s box has been opened, the man behind the curtain revealed. It can never go back to the way it was before. These are exciting times. And they are scary. None of us knows how this is going to turn out. But at least now we know what is really going on. And we don’t have to feel guilty for being angry. This is the motherfucking United States of America, where truth and justice and hard work and integrity and love of our fellow man, regardless of race or color or creed or sexual orientation was supposed to be all that was needed to unite us, to give us a level playing field. And we let the sharks take over the tank and they were who we KNEW they were and they did what sharks fucking do. So don’t be mistaken: this post has nothing to do with woe-is-me. But it does have everything to do with all of us seeing the forest for the fucking trees and doing our parts as HUMAN BEINGS to take back the power that we, as human beings, “are endowed with by our creator.” Our forefathers, those same forefathers that even a souless dickwad like Dick Cheney claims to revere, said these words. Now its time we all started living like we are just as human as the faceless tyrants who tried to turn us into mindless robots so they could pad their bank accounts on our suffering. NOW WE TAKE THE POWER BACK, one fucking day at a time.

By the time we arrived at the Downtown Decatur location, the kids were already pissy, what with it being smoking hot and whatnot. It was too hot for anything other than icecream and maybe swimming, neither of which was at our immediate disposal. But I had my copy of Severance, and was determined to follow through on my hours-old dream of having it signed by the singular talent that is Robert Olen Butler.

So we got to the high school where he was reading, and I went in to the auditorium where Butler was already reading. Kara hung back in the hall, bless her heart, so that the aforementioned 3 under-8 kids could be attended to without disrupting Mr. Butler. He was reading from his latest novel. It was way, way different from Severance. I was kind of lost. But the prose seemed good, for what that’s worth. And, as I do anytime I find myself in the presence of other writers, I began to compare myself to him. And, of course, found myself lacking in most every way. Especially when he finished reading and it was time for the Q & A. He was so self-assured, so convinced of his very RIGHT to be on that stage, admired by the 1 or 2 hundred people in fawning attendance. And he actually mentioned how, just as it says on his wikipedia page, he considers himself a “literary chameleon”, who never wants to write the same sort of book twice. But surely he hadn’t been responsible for writing his own Wiki page, right? I mean, Big Time authors (or Big Time Anythings, for that matter) don’t have to spend time on such banal things as Wikipedia entries. They have biographers and rabid fans to do that for them, no?

Well, screw it, I thought afterward, while we waited in line for ROB to sign my copy of his book about 60+ people who have been decapitated and what must have been going through each of these severed heads as its last moments of consciousness slipped away. For every Spielberg there’s an Ed Wood or maybe, if we’re being slightly more generous, McG. Hell, even millionaire, omni-present author Steven King has gone on record calling himself something like “The burger and fries of American literature.” But I can’t be that either as long as I’m writing about truly fucked up family shit and not killer clowns terrorizing generations of children. So here I am, these few years into my pro writing life, still not knowing where I fit in. But I do know this, dear readers: both Robert Olen Butler and myself like the smell of ink on paper, of musty books found in the back of old book shops (imagine that–an old book shop–a relic of pre-internet times, endangered as hell if anything ever was). He even wrote as much for me in the front of Severance. And while that won’t do shit for my as-yet non-existent Wikipedia page, at least I can go to sleep a little easier knowing that both the great Robert Olen Butler and myself both like taking a good whiff of a book every now and then. (Immortality, here we come!)

You know, whenever this song comes on the ol’ iPod, I almost always hit the >> because how many times can you hear a computer-generated voice say the same shit before it becomes rote. The album from whence it comes (OK COMPUTER, for those who have been in a cave or coma) has been out since 1997, after all. But like all art worthy of multiple looks, there is more to this than meets the tired ear. Especially when yr riding yr bike home from a hard day at 11 o’clock at night–I find that this is the time when I do some of my most revelatory thinking.

So last night I’m peddling up this hill and this “song’ comes on and because I am really pushing and can’t afford to let go of a handle to fast forward, I am forced to listen to it. Being as it’s right after the 10 year anniversary of the biggest catastrophe to hit our land in generations, what first strikes me is how pre-9/11 the piece sounds. And, subsequently, how pre-Mortgage-bubble-burst/economy collapse/Great Recession it all is. Just the two word phrase “At ease” sounds antiquated. I don’t personally know a single person who feels “at ease” about a single fucking thing. We’ve been at war for a decade now. And regardless of political declarations of official warzone “pull-outs, all of us know there’s no end in sight to any of it, Bin Laden shot in the face and buried at sea or not. It’s positively Orwellian, and we all know it, whether we have a close personal relationship with 1984 or not…

So as the piece progresses, I start thinking that this is the first time I’ve ever thought that Radiohead’s everywhere-trumpeted prescience has been seriously undercut by jack-booted reality. Hell, if anything (I was thinking as I peddled that monster fuck of a hill), we should be nostalgic for a time when our biggest problems was that it seemed like we had it all figured out, that were moronicly naive: We were regularly exercising 3 days a week, weren’t eating saturated fats, enjoyed drinks now and then, cried at good films (to prove to ourselves we were still human and “real” despite our robotic consumerism)…our kids safely secured in our well-tired cars.

But then, just as I crested the hill, I realized that Thom Yorke and Company might have pulled another fast one. Maybe, even though FITTER HAPPIER was released a good 4+ years before 9/11 changed everything for everyone, Thom was doing something more than merely holding the mirror up to our fragile sense of security and self-assurance, a wink in his glinting eye. Maybe he wasn’t just saying we’re pathetic when we think we have it all figured out, when in reality we’re just pigs in cages jacked on antibiotics. Maybe he was saying that that pre-9/11 feel was ALWAYS illusion. That we were never safe in the first place. Maybe he was saying enjoy these petty advances you’ve made in your lives while you can because soon, very soon, that cozy shag rug is gonna be pulled out from all of us.

Or maybe I was just overloaded on endorphins and lack of oxygen. All I know is that nearly every single person I know is struggling to keep treaded tires on their cars (if they still even own one) and is one lost paycheck away from eviction notices, can barely afford to go to a doctor let alone stay swimming in antibiotics, and gave the cats to the pound because it was just two too many mouths to feed.

Yeah, so I decided I’d start a new kinda post here on Cruel World, one that would serve to illuminate some of my favorite passages from books/ short stories that I’ve read and loved over the years. Sometimes the “favorite” in question will be an entire paragraph–maybe even a whole page from a selection that I found truly inspired, where you could get into the skin of the writer and almost HEAR The Muse whispering directly into his/her ear. Other times (such as tonight’s selection), the chosen words will be a mere sentence. But oh, dear god, what a sentence…

Feel free to add yr 2 cents. I’m not writing this shit to toot my own horn (for the most part). Rather, I want to connect with my 6 (60?) readers out there and have a conversation, if people still do that anymore, or have even the slightest inkling to not just “Stumble” on to the next thing before they really have a chance to suck the marrow out of the words being presented them.

So here goes.

Tonight’s sentence is from the last section of Southern Gothic short-story virtuoso Flannery O’Connor’s superb short story, “A Good Man Is Hard To Find.” …

“She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”  

A little background: this is a story, for those of you not privileged enough to have had the pleasure of reading O’Connor’s most famous work, about a family (mother, son, daughter-in-law, grandson, granddaughter) on a roadtrip of bucolic 50’s southern backroads. The bulk of the story merely serves as a set-up for the final page or two. In that initial 5/8 (or more) of the story, we are introduced mainly to a stuck up, racist, whiny, close-minded, pissy old woman who even in her old age thinks she knows everything and therefore makes everyone’s lives around her miserable with her constant pontificating about everything being wrong with everything. Nothing is good enough for her, no one lives up to her stringent standards.

She insists on the son taking the family on a detour off the main road so she can see a house she used to live on. The car gets a flat. While her son tries to fix the car, his mother and wife and young children looking on, from the woods emerges an escaped convict (“The Misfit”) and his fellow escapees. One by one the convicts lead the family members off the road and into the woods, where the jarring crack of gunfire reports are heard by the grandmother. Finally the Misfit emerges from the woods one last time. This time he is wearing the son’s shirt. The grandmother, finally taking in the full, horrifying reality of what is happening (has happened) to her family, to herself, begins talking to the Misfit. She speaks to him of God (he denies believing in anything that could allow something like him to exist), of love, of forgiveness, finally telling him he could be one of her own children. She reaches up and touches the Misfit’s face. He shoots her dead, then utters the line, “She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

………..

………..

………..

This story has clung to me (I have clung to it) since the first time I read it in college. No, not even the story. That sentence. This old, bigoted, judgmental waste of space and time finally discovers her humanity–something REAL about herself that isn’t all surface and bile. It is, of course, too late in nearly every way by the time she has this epiphany. Even as her son and daughter-in-law and grandchildren are murdered she still maintains this weird sense of being above it all, in charge. Truly, it takes her own mortality confrontation for her to display the slightest shred of compassion for anyone else. But (and this could be my own opinion alone, as I don’t remember any of the criticism I was surely forced to study alongside the reading of the story itself), the point of all of it is that, even if it was only in her last fleeting and pathetic moments, she DID have the all-important realization that somebody aside from herself was worthy of her gentle touch, her compassion. Unfortunately for her son and grandchildren, they weren’t there to be the recipients of this 11th hour (and 59 minutes) conversion from cunt to saint. But, then again, if she had been that person on a regular basis then the Misfit never would have been able to utter that fucking line. That beautiful line that kills me every time.

“She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

I’ve gotta be honest, this sentence, this ONE FUCKING SENTENCE, has come back to me so often in the course of my life. Because how many times have I known beyond doubt that if I’d had the proverbial gun to my fucking head that I would have tried harder, aimed higher, pushed further, accomplished more, seen wider horizons, never allowed for a single excuse for anything, never hurt anyone with such flippancy, never chosen the Self over the Other–never, when it comes right down to it, given myself an excuse to slow down or slack off or choose Death or self-destruction or anger or fear over Love (the Only thing that matters, in my admittedly hippie-tinged perspective)?

………..

So, yeah….I try to keep this perfectly-crafted sentence in mind as often as possible. I try to imagine the Misfit’s gun to my head. Not because I fear death–at least not in the traditional sense. It’s because I don’t ever want to leave this motherfucker without knowing that I tried my goddamnedest to be the person I TRULY want to be. And THAT is why I get teary-eyed when I watch videos of people jumping bikes and skateboards and landing spectacular ski tricks and death-defying BASE jumps, when I see video of people climbing sheer walls with just chalk on their hands–because these people are living TRUE LIVES. They know the gun is at their head at every moment, just as it is all of our heads. And they live more truly, more deeply, more passionately and truthfully than most of us will ever live.

NO, I’m not strapping on skis or skateboards or parachutes but I AM FLYING. (And without drugs, you cynical bastards!). Because now I live this dream. Now my daily life is the reality of the gun, the impending “doom.” And it is beautiful. It is so luminescent and spectacular and fullllll of love and truth and life.

On the promise of good reviews and the seemingly type-cast-as-some-form-of simian Andy Serkis portraying the lead role of Caesar, my beautiful fiance Kara and I took in the newest re-boot of The Planet of the Apes franchise, RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES.

At first I only saw it as yr standard mid-late summer popcorn B-movie fare. It has some pretty crappy acting in it (the star human is, after all, James Franco) and regardless of how far special effects have come since James Cameron did some fucked shit with the Terminator 2-predating THE ABYSS water creature, you could still tell that any time it showed one of the “damned dirty apes” swinging around and gnawing human flesh and what-have-you, you were watching the fruits of the labor of some nerd sitting at a computer typing in code to make what you were seeing on the screen seem real.

But then the iconic Charlton Heston line was finally spoken.

But this time it wasnt some uber-male Republican future NRA president uttering the iconic command. No, this time the line was given to the douchebag college-student/part-time ape sanctuary worker to utter. He says it to our movie’s hero (Caesar, the “damned dirty ape” in question) just before Caesar  knocks his block off (to loud applause from the screening’s audience–though, to be fair, we watched it at one of those cinema bar & grill deals, and by the time we were 3/4 into the film, every single person in that theater was three shits to the wind).

But drunk or not, I, in my ever-present cultural attune-ness, realized that I was witness to a major paradigm shift. Because this time, it wasn’t the white people–the humans–we in the audience were meant to root for. This time our sympathies were meant to lie with those of the damned dirty apes. Because who in these dark financial and political times isnt feeling more and more like we are being shut out of the promised land? Who isnt feeling caged and treated like not much more than batteries, energy, indentured servants whose sole purpose is to provide the labor that serves to merely keep our heads from finally sinking beneath rising tides, while those who employ us (if we are employed at all) line their bank accounts on the fruits of our meager wages?

Yeah, there was something happening here. And what it was WAS EXACTLY CLEAR: it was becoming our time.

Now, dont get me wrong (you never do, right?….we’re always on the same page, yeah), I’m not one to advocate for social revolution (or am I?). All I’m saying is that this B-movie with shitty James Franco acting (oxymoron???) made me think that maybe–just maybe–we might be witnessing something bigger than a movie studio trying to find a new angle to tell an old-ass story (started by a French guy, btw) because they’ve run out of ideas (and while we’re on the subject, movie studio people, let me remind you that both futureproof and Sanctuary are both available for adaptation should you ever tire of remaking the fucking Dukes of Hazzard). Maybe–just maybe–we were sitting in these movie theaters (or at home utilizing illegal downloads, as the case may be) watching art imitate life (metaphorically, of course).  Maybe we were (are) about to take the power back.

Or maybe we were (are) just late taking our daily morphine shot. And Andy Serkis has a long career ahead of him portraying other caged apes trying to break out of the fucking cell. Or maybe I’m just drunk… on beautiful possibility.

What a fucking prick.

I’m not saying the guy hasn’t had his share of struggle because, hell, being human is in and of itself a perpetual struggle for our own souls among the detritus of a black, empty universe, right?

But I personally have never understood how it is that somebody can basically whore himself just so he can have the nicer house or the faster, shinier car. I have more respect for a jackasshole like Ryan Dunn, who, while displaying no discernible talent, endeared himself to tens or hundreds of thousands of people worldwide simply by doing drunk tricycle stunts with Steve-O, and through such endeavors was able to buy a Porsche just as bangin’ as James Frey’s. That he bought the proverbial farm in said car while drunk and going 130 at 2 a.m. in bumfuck Pennsylvania only substantiates his authenticity.

But what’s the point then, if all the guy was going to do was waste whatever good will he had by literally crashing and burning? The point is that he was REAL and maybe lived just a little TOO close to the goddamned edge for his own good. Now, in the words of our great Animal Mother in Full Metal Jacket, “Doc J and 8-Ball are wasted.” And we’re left holding our dicks in our hands, wondering where everybody went….

So let’s look back for a moment at James Frey and his literary legacy (so far). He burst onto the scene in 2003 by giving a name-dropping one-man shit-fest interview to the salmon-colored New York Observer (remember when a brand could be differentiated merely by having a differently-colored background?—I still have the purple Raekwon Cuban Linx cassette tape). In this interview, handsomely summed up by Salon.com (no salmon color paper—or any paper at all—for them!), Frey slams Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace and presumably all the other Daves He Knows.

Upon later reflection (post-Oprah enrichment, of course), he said that he was past that or only saying it for the shock-value or what-the-fuck ever. I leave it to you to research the veracity of this yourself, as I’m done looking up James Frey links, as I have recently (in the past 20+ minutes I’ve spent spewing this blog on all of your eager/bored/accidentally stumbled-upon eyes) grown re-disgusted with everything he represents.
You remember how

and his cronies all went on Fox News during the waning days of that horrid presidential “administration” and performed their pathetic excuse for damage control by saying that history would prove that the unilateral bullshit wars they’d shat upon the world were both just and necessary for all of us to move forward into our Brave New World? Yeah, that’s the kind of bullshit that powerful people, people with money, do when they see that everything they’ve done in order to line their own pockets is total shit. But far from it being some kind of introspective wake-up call, it’s more about them discovering that the great majority of the populace is FINALLY on to their game. So they take to the airwaves and proclaim future righteousness, the Copout Pricks. As though they could give two fucks about whether or not the future will be their “final judge.” What they care about is that they and their children and their grandchildren, etc will never have to worry about putting food into their mouths or keeping gold-and-diamond encrusted roofs over their heads. This is the mentality that has infiltrated EVERYTHING we see in our daily lives. And it has never been more clear than it is now. The economic disparity has never been wider in this, our magnificent First World Beacon Of Democracy and Equality. And because of that disparity a great many of us have decided that we are going to do whatever it is that we have to do to keep up with the Big Dogs—the James Freys of the world, who already had everything they needed and decided to fake some shit so that they could have even more. It’s people like James Frey and J.A. Konrath (I’ll dig MUCH deeper into that hypocritical fuck soon) who have bastardized The Authentic and sold us a false bill of sale.
But I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t have to be like that. I’m here to tell you that there are people JUST LIKE YOU out here who are fighting the good fight, who are living True, Authentic lives and aren’t selling themselves out for a buck or two here and there. That still exists. I am living proof of this reality. YOU are that proof. We are ALL fucked up. But that doesn’t mean we have to resort to the games of charlatans and poseurs. We can scrape by and keep our wits about us and still strive to make our lives better via sweating and tearing and bleeding. That is our legacy. We are made in the fucking stars. And I am going to prove it to you.