Weekend at You

I avoided watching LOST for a long time, despite knowing that I would enjoy it somewhat.  I didn’t know back then the extent to which I could enjoy a television serial.  I had up to that point read books, watched movies, and played games during my considerable leisure time and I didn’t relish the idea of adding a new FORM to the fold.  That changed when I started watching Heroes at the suggestion of my friend Erik.  He described it as a live-action comic book, and it delivered on that characterization right up to the part where it eschews clarity of overarching narratives for short-term flashiness and started to suck major balls.  When Heroes went on a mid-season hiatus, I decided that I was quite a fan of the hour-length serial drama and I started watching LOST.  This was during season 3, when the consensus was starting to form that the show had begun to lose its way, if it wasn’t full-on jumping the shark.  I caught up in a matter of weeks, and the first live broadcast I caught was “Exposé”, one of the most polarizing episodes in the history of the show until last night.

I bring this up because I fucking loved “Exposé.”  I loved Nikki and Paulo, and their stupid little sexy diamond subplot and their grisly demise under all that dirt and rock.  I really enjoyed those self-contained flashbacks in season three, a time most fans would rather forget.  The story goes that the producers intentionally made “Stranger in a Strange Land” so awful to help negotiate an end date for the show, and that it worked.  These are the types of stories you’ll get if you don’t let us control the pacing of the end of the show.  Sure, “Stranger” was a clunker, but I was totally down with the episode where Sawyer conned that guy in jail, or Locke in the weed commune.  I look back on that year fondly as I reflect on the reveal of last night’s season-long troll.

LOST has a history of taking long-running jokes and making them into actual plot points and asking us to take them seriously.  The first time this came to my attention was in season 4:

When Ben informed us near the end that we were going to MOVE THE ISLAND, it was certainly bad ass, but the guy who made this gif called it (in a way) during season 1.  Likewise, Jorge Garcia made a joke at Comic-Con last year about Shannon’s inhaler (a classic example of a “loose end” that only the ‘spergiest zealot would remember), and Hurley ends up finding it in the final season.  When Sayid starts acting like a zombie, we’re reminded of the dozens of references Lindelof and Cuse made to the secret ZOMBIE SEASON where shit hits the fan and zombies invade the island.  These are all fun little references that reward fans who spend countless hours of their free time watching, rewatching, and discussing the show.  One of my favorites was the idea of a giant cork that someone would pull and it would sink the island, cut to L O S T.

As an aside, I have a problem to address about the cave real quick.  Over the course of the series, we’ve been introduced to some fascinating mysteries on and off the island.  For instance, maybe Hurley would be seen in the Hatch drinking some Dharma Kool-Aid, and he would remark to Ana-Lucia “Dude, this is the best flavor of Kool-Aid I’ve ever tasted.”  Ana-Lucia would then ask, “What flavor is it?”  The camera would then cut to Hurley’s stoic face for a full ten seconds while the horn music swells and he would say “It’s the most important flavor of your entire life.”  At that point, you would get excited.  You would say “Holy shit!  If only I knew what flavor of Kool-Aid that was, I would have a completely new understanding of what is going on in the island!”  You would pore over Lostpedia and all the theory pages for any reference to Kool-Aid previously on the show.  Of course you would find some piece of dialogue in season 1 where Boon mentions offhand in a flashback that his mom used to own a company that made flavored drink powder, and there you would have it.  A theory about the connection between Boon and the Dharma Initiative would be born.  It would be common knowledge in fan communities that Boon’s family was involved in the DI, and half of the fans would believe that Boon is a descendant of Magnus Hanso.  That’s how mysteries USED to work on the show.  But in the last couple years, something strange happened: we started getting answers, and the questions were so built-up in our minds that every single thing was an anticlimax.  In the case of our made-up Kool-Aid mystery, we’d pick it up in season 5, when Hurley was a chef in the 70’s.  Some Dharma underline would come up to him with a clipboard and say “Mr. Reyes, we need your signature on this Kool-Aid order,” and Hurley would sign it and say “Hey, make sure you get extra of that one flavor I like.”  And that’d be the end of it.  By the end of season 6, I was so used to this kind of non-explanation for mysteries that, when shown the weird glowy cave in “Across the Sea,” I didn’t even consider what might be inside of it.  It never crossed my mind once.  When they started to go inside the cave, I was almost surprised.  I never thought “What the hell is inside the cave!?”  All I ever thought was “What the hell could possibly be inside the cave that I would care about?”

This Purgatory stuff is way, way, WAY stupider than anything I’ve been talking about.

Back in the day, “The island is Purgatory!” was the go-to joke to make fun of stupid theories.  It’s so popular to make fun of this idea that Kevin Smith used it in Zack and Miri Make a Porno, when the dumbest bitch in that movie makes a comment about how she thinks that the island is Purgatory.  Now I KNOW that the island is not Purgatory.  I know that because the producers went out of their way to tell us, again and again, that the island was not Purgatory, or some Autistic kid’s dream or anything like that.  Why did they do that?  Because those types of endings are trite, cheap, and manipulative, and they wanted to assert LOST as above that type of silliness.  LOST was something new to television.  It was a fully-realized serial fantasy sci-fi drama on Primetime network television.  Nothing like it had ever been made.  The island is not Purgatory, but we did just spend the last season flashing sideways to a spiritual waiting room where people who died go to work some stuff out before they move on to the non-denominational afterlife.  That IS Purgatory.  Why, oh why, would you want the final reveal of your entire series to be so closely associated with the oldest joke about the dumbest, most casual LOST viewers?  What do you gain by pulling a cop-out of that magnitude?

I have two main problems with the way they handled the end to the flash-sideways.   The first is that the whole episode was emotionally manipulative in a way that LOST has never really had to rely on before.  It’s full of scene after scene of characters coming in contact with their Constants, followed by a montage of on-island scenes, and what amounts to a tearful reunion when they realize that they (and we as viewers) had such history together.  By the third time this happened, I had become pretty jaded to it.  I watched the finale with my girlfriend (http://twitter.com/danismi) and she’s cried at every LOST finale since “Through the Looking Glass,” and a bunch of just regular episodes, but she was able to contain herself until the fucking dog showed up.  I’ve already read several posts on the internet that say basically that same thing.  Why did that scene, where Vincent shows up and lies down next to a dying Jack, make so many people emotional?  Several people (Danielle included) have already said that all they could think during that scene was “Good boy…good doggy.”  The source of the emotion came from their pre-existing emotional attachment to dogs.  I mean, it’s not like Vincent really had anything to do with the story for the last four years, and he definitely never had any sort of meaningful relationship with Jack.  It was a really good visual callback to the first scene in the series, but that’s it.  The finale was full of callbacks with little or no substance.

My main, HUGE, UNDERLINE-WITH-ARROWS-POINTING-TO-IT problem with the Purgatory ending was that itliterally had nothing to do with anything.  This dawned on me slowly about fifteen minutes after I finished watching.  The fact that the flash sideways take place after everyone is already dead (or rather, that they seem to tap into it at the moment of their death) means that it has literally no connection to everything else that happens on the show.  Devin Faraci at CHUD.com put it this way:  “any ending for a show like Lost that feels like it could more or less be used to end any other TV show in history is probably an oversimplified ending.”  And that’s what happened here.  Some of these people died during the course of the show, and some of them lived way longer (I think the part that captures my imagination most is the thought of Hurley and Ben’s thousand-year reign as masters of the island.  More on that later), but when they die they go to LA X and find redemption…somehow…only not.  It doesn’t matter how many toes the statue has because we’re all fucking dead in the end.  Maybe that’s what they were trying to tell us.  Just leave your fucking room and quit worrying about TV for a day and enjoy the fact that you’re alive.  Maybe I will.

One of the best nicknames I’ve heard for the alt-timeline universe is, of course, the Hurleyverse; so named because Hurley was basically a huge pimp in this universe and had his finger in many pies.  It was a benevolent universe where Hurley was a captain of industry, a generous philanthropist, and the most decent human being you’re likely to meet.  When Jack opened the coffin and nobody was in it, and then he had a long chat with his dead father, I had a flash where I thought I knew the ending.  It was already apparent that this whole thing was a flash-forward of a kind (although it turned out to be an omni-directional flash really when you think about it), so when Christian says “Where do you think we are?” the first thing I thought was “They’re on the fucking island!”  Only it’s Hurley’s island, complete with his 21^stcentury ideals and philosophies.  It’d been established before that the island is a place where dead souls just sort of hover around, whispering to people in freaky ways that don’t make sense.  It’s not unfathomable to think that in the thousands of years in which I choose to believe Hurley oversaw the island, he was able to use the power of the Source to become a focal point of souls where he can place them in lives that make sense to them, where they are completely free of Jacob’s influence, and where they are free to find the good in themselves without the horrors of the island.  In other words, it’s the type of world that Hurley would create.

But no, it was Purgatory and they’re all dead, but now they get to go into the vague light and end their vague show in the most meaningless way possible.  It’s been over 24 hours since I saw it and I’m starting to come to grips with the fact that it’s really over.  I watched this show for three and a half years and it hasn’t left my head since the day I saw Jack’s eye open in that bamboo field.  I understand that Television is an inherently different medium from literature and film, and it’s fundamentally unfair to compare a 120 hour story to a five hundred page one in terms of cohesion, but that only explains the problems with the writing; it doesn’t make them go away.  The truth is, there has never been anything like this on television, on this scale at least.  The fact that they made it to the point where some doofus on the internet can rip it to shreds is the greatest triumph in the industry’s history.  I love this show so god damn much, and I will never forget cuddling up on my couch in my first apartment with my Constant and tearing the finale a new asshole.  Or, rather, weird stone cork hole.

This was written for a class called “Bible for Students of Literature.”  It ended up being more like “Sit Around and Listen to a Brilliant Professor Read the Bible Boringly.”  In addition to the wisdom books of the Bible (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job), we read this book called “Consolation of Philosophy” by a 6th century philosopher dude called Boethius.  In it, Boethius is in prison waiting for the death penalty and lamenting his fate when he is visited by Lady Philosophy, who is much more Philosophy than Lady (or even human).  She uses rhetorical strategies and Neo-Platonic philosophical ideas that weren’t invented yet in the Old Testament days to convince Boethius that God can exist in a world where bad things happen to good people.  The assignment was to have Lady Philosophy come and visit Job.  I think it’s funny even if you’re not amazingly familiar with the Bible, but obviously it would help.  Somehow everyone was British in my head.

Eliphaz saw her first.  Bildad was embroiled in a long diatribe condemning Job for pretending to know something or other, and Job and Zophar were watching him intently, either nodding or shaking their head as they approved or disapproved each statement.  Eliphaz tapped Bildad on the shoulder and pointed out the window.

“You guys,” he said.  “I think there’s a personification of an abstract idea outside.”

“It’s not Death, is it?” Job said.  There was hope in his voice.

“No,” said the woman at the door.  “It is Philosophy.”

“Well, come on in I guess,” said Job.  “I would take your coat, but my house doesn’t have a roof or all four walls.  It’s more of a rubble pile than a house these days, actually.”  He gave a half-smile which cracked his brittle skin and caused him to wince.  “Have you come to yell at me, too?”

“No,” said Philosophy.  “I’ve come to Philosophize at you.”

“Well, go ahead,” Job said.  “These guys’ circular arguments are adding nausea to my list of maladies.”

“Let me tell you something about fortune,” she said.  She took a sip from her water skin and continued.  “You’re sitting here with your self-pitying sarcasm and melodramatic tending of your various skin diseases, and you say that you want some understanding.  You want to know why you’ve had such bad luck all at once, when you’ve done nothing to incur anybody’s wrath.  This comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of who Fortune is and what she does.

“It’s called Rota Fortunae.  Do you know what that means?  It doesn’t mean ‘I collect all the good luck and when bad luck comes around I cry like a baby.’  It means that fortune is a cycle.  It’s a wheel.  It always comes back around.  Sometimes you land on that black ‘BANKRUPT’ wedge and it wipes out everything before it.  You’ve been operating under the mistaken impression that Fortune has been a reward for good behavior, when really it’s been more like the weather.  Mostly it’s good, but sometimes there’s a tornado that only hits your house.”

Job was nonplussed.  “This is what passes for Philosophy these days?  I think I preferred it when Zophar was inferring that I had a secret kiddy porn dungeon and God was mad at me.  What you’re suggesting is some sort of proto-Nihilism!”

“No, not really.  Just like the weather seems to be random, but is really governed by patterns unavailable to us, so too is Fortune:  dispassionate, aloof, but far from meaningless.  The fact that you have lived until now a successful and pleasant life shows that you have been living under the mistaken impression that good luck is your due.  It would be the same if someone had for some reason lived under mild weather his whole life and then moved somewhere where there’s a lot of rain and then got all whiny about it.  No one likes that guy.”

“Are you kidding me?” Job said.  A lifetime of piety provided sufficient restraint so that he didn’t add smacking a female personification to the list of misdeeds of which his friends had accused him.  “You’re telling me that, because I’ve had plenty of good days I should be okay with what happened to me?  I’d trade my lot for a lifetime of mediocre days.  Heck, I’d give up Saturday and add another Wednesday every week!  You know that my children were crushed by a falling house, right?  All of my children were gathered in one house, and a stiff breeze came along and building codes aren’t invented yet and—“

“There, do you see?” Philosophy had a look on her face which seemed to indicate that she had just remembered what she was about to say.  “You must pursue happiness from within yourself, because Fortune can dash away your external riches and worldly comforts.”

“I tried that last week when all of my livestock was stolen, but the next day I got boils all over my body and since then I’ve been vomiting up blood.  And I have a migraine.  So, my insides are just as wretched as my outsides.”

She looked at him for a second and then shook her head.  “No, that’s not what I meant!  I mean, you need to look inside the self.  You have to give up your concepts of wealth to see what truly matters.  Those hallmarks of wealth are always better when you give them to others, for generosity breeds good will.”

“Yeah, that’s really a great idea.  I felt really generous when I was giving away all of my cattle and possessions to those bandits and thieves.  It really emboldened my spirit and gave me a sense of camaraderie with my fellow man.”

Philosophy was not amused.  Job continued sarcastically berating her until Bildad piped up:  “I think that we’re straying away from the point a little bit here.”

Job rolled his eyes.  “Okay, here we go.  Let’s have it.”

Bildad remained steadfast.  “Look,” he said.  “Job obviously did something to rub God the wrong way or none of this would ever have happened!”  Bildad had to raise his voice over Job’s protests of “Oh would you shut your pie hole old man you don’t know what you’re on about!”  “I just think that it would be best for everybody if Job just admitted that he must have done something and stopped being such a stuck up little twit about it is all.  We all know he did something and all this mental gymnastics is feeding his delusion of perfection and persecution complex.  That’s all I’m saying.”

“Listen here you old—“ Eliphaz was holding them apart now.  “Look, look,” Job said.  “I’m a farmer.  I wake up, I work fourteen hours a day, sleep six and pray four.  I don’t have any time to sin.  I’m out there in the fields.  I don’t know what you’re doing all day, but I have a job!  My NAME is Job!  It’s pronounced different, but—“

“I think the problem here is a misunderstanding of God’s role in this,” Philosophy said.  “You’re seeing God as a metaphysical ticket man at the Chuck E. Cheese’s of life.  You perform so many units of virtue and can expect so many units of good Fortune in return.  This concept of the supernatural doesn’t hold water because if that were the case, immorality as an idea would be bred out of us evolutionarily.  And that wouldn’t make any sense.

“Instead, look at the world as a vast, convoluted balancing act, and God is the one spinning the plates.  He is the ringmaster, the engineer, and the facilitator.  God works on a higher level, toward the ultimate good, which will be served by your situation.”

“Well, wonderful,” Job said.  “I hope that my calamitous misfortune can one day aspire to be a cog in the wheel of some nebulous Rube Goldberg contraption that brings some kind of esoteric truth, purity and goodness to the world, I really do.  In the meantime, can somebody rub some lotion on my shoulder boils?  Those are the really nasty ones.”

Zophar, Eliphaz and Bildar yelled “not it!” simultaneously.  Philosophy sighed, and grabbed the bottle off of what was left of the table.

So, the answer to the question of “What the hell do you do all day?” is pretty different in a lot of ways now.  Before, the obvious answer was “I watch movies and then post about my experiences in watching these movies on the internet, and then sometimes I watch movies and neglect to post about my experience on the internet and instead use that time to watch another movie.”

Now, I do these things:

Clean the Kitchen

This is probably my favorite hobby, and the main activity that takes away from blogging time.  We cook a lot now, because we are poor college students.  So, the kitchen gets messy.  REALLY messy.  This wasn’t the case at my old house.  Before, I could cook and cook and the kitchen would just become clean the next day.  Now, if I make a dish dirty, it STAYS dirty…until I clean it.  Oh well, the rent is cheap.

I took this picture at 5 in the morning. This is the cleanest that this kitchen has ever been.  Ever.

I do like to cook, but I’ve started to associate cooking with cleaning.  It’s sort of a crash course in cause and effect that most people get when they’re like ten.  We don’t usually eat in the kitchen, which probably saves a bit of a mess, at the expense of having dishes strewn all over the living room.  How did we get five glasses on the coffee table?  Five people do not live in this house.  ANSWER ME WOMAN.  WHERE DID THE OTHER GLASSES COME FROM?

I am not down with abusive relationships.

Wait, did I write that wrong?  I mean I am not down ON abusive relationships.  I think they get a bad reputation undeservedly.  Sometimes you just need to choke a bitch, and I find nothing wrong with joking around about this very serious fact of relationships.

Test the Fortitude of My Ability to Tolerate Sad, Angry People

Digg.com is the internet’s leading social news website for liberal stoner jackoffs.  If you have an article or video on the internet whose target audience owns a bong the size of a street lamp, Digg is your first stop on the way to fame and fortune!  On Digg, the most popular articles, videos and pictures get promoted to the front page (in theory.  It’s not quite a meritocracy, as it’s generally run by about fifty “power users” whose promotion of an article has more de facto chance of reaching the front, but that’s not the point).  On any given day, you can find ten articles about marijuana legalization, seven about FOX NEWS or Sarah Palin, and several about whatever liberal topic is popular that day.  However, hidden within the walls of a seeming liberal-topia are a tight-knit group of trolls that I consider to be the finest that the internet has to offer.

I sure will, smokin0kie!  In general, you can find some of the most impressive idiocy that I have ever had the pleasure of interacting with when you do a search for the word “libtard” on any comment thread or web forum ever.  I get a kick out of the sarcastic conservative commenters in these threads because they really don’t understand the purpose of humor in these sorts of conversations.  Their humor comes from genuine anger, and so what you end up with more often than not is a bunch of unfunny rantings and really ironic condescension.

This is probably a post unto itself.

What I’m trying to say is that I’ve made an endurance test of inundating myself with the thoughts and reasonings of people who are completely different from me.  Over the last year, I’ve spent hours in the hospital visiting my sick mother, only to come home and spend hours reading Stormfront.org or some anti-abortion literature or watching documentaries on the Westboro Baptist Church and I never allowed myself to rest.  I never let myself become complacent, and I never let my intellectual guard down.  Not for a second.  Why?  Why did I do that?  I suffered through the worst depression of my life in 2009, and I did it alone.  I did it without a God.  And I did it while constantly reading about people who were CERTAIN that they knew what the world was, and why we are here. And they are complete assholes.  By “complete” I mean that they have mastered assholeness to the point where they cannot possibly gain any more from practice.  A perfection usually only attained by the greatest of our athletes. Michael Jordan.  Tiger Woods.  These guys.  Did I gain anything from it?  No.  Hell no.  I took a Contemporary Philosophy class my first quarter at East Bay, and that tipped me over the edge.  Those philosophers aren’t certain of ANYTHING.  Phenomenologists have only a shaky alliance with the idea that the toast they eat in the morning exists in any meaningful way. That doesn’t make me feel any better.

This is where I’d like to put the part where all of that mental and spiritual self-flagellation coalesced into some type of epiphany where I learned something deep and meaningful about the human journey.  But it hasn’t happened yet. If you beat yourself up, usually all you get is bruised.  Maybe that’s what I’ll take away.

Wait, this got dark.

Post on Twitter

I use Twitter daily to talk to people.  My Twitter address is http://twitter.com/mikegon/ and it is a great place to find out the awesome things that I think sometimes.  Who blogs anymore?  I mean come on.

Write Fiction

I write some fiction.  My major at CSUEB is English with an emphasis in Creative Writing.  I’ve yet to write my first novel but I’m enjoying what I do write.  I’ll put up some new stuff some time this week, most likely.  I’m working on a cycle of stories based on some middle school stuff that I remember.  This is what college has done for me.  I’ve put away the doomsday prophesies and super heroes and started writing bittersweet reminiscences.  I can almost HEAR the avalanche of job offers from companies wanting to hire dudes who can wax nostalgic about their youth in the internet age.

Get Yelled At By My Neighbors

“Fuck you.  Fuck your family.”

I’m out.

I realize that this isn’t some brilliant forward-thinking new concept, but I just spent an hour reading Digg comments in the politics section, and it is not pretty.

spork

Get it??? It’s a pun.

This shirt is only on sale for the next twenty-two hours, so buy it now! I would, but I still don’t have a job and this website doesn’t make me any money (because I suck at websites).

I have almost no use for the fancy functionality IntenseDebate offers, but I like the way the comment box drops down out of the post like that.  I made it so you have to log in to comment.  Why?  Because I want to force Stu  Shoe and Spiff to have an avatar on their comments.  Might the increased effort reqired to post deter them from commenting at all?  Maybe but that is a risk that I am willing to take.

Hit up Apple for the HD version.

I’m just posting this trailer because this movie comes out later this month and I don’t think enough people know about it.  I’m pretty psyched for some old fashion Raimi horror antics (Army of Darkness was seventeen years ago and Spider-Man 3 was all too recent) and the I’m a Mac guy has grown on me ever since he played a gay adult film actor in Zack and Miri Make a Porno. I do have one question about the trailer:  if that old lady had all those hell powers, you’d think she would have been able to make some money off of that, and not have to flake on her mortgage payment all the time.  If nothing else, a Hellcurse for Hire business would be a huge boon for the corporate world.  That shit would be recession-proof.

Been better.  Better days are coming!

I think that there is a whole subset of people my age (early-mid twenties) who were the victims of overparenting in the 90s and were thus deprived of a cultural touchstone: The Simpsons.  I was talking to a girl in my Sociology class today who told me that she was not allowed to watch the show as a child, and had actually only ever seen one episode.  This is not an uncommon occurance at all.  I seem to recall a large number of children my age who were told not to watch the show.  I can’t imagine what was so terrible about the early humanist seasons that offended these parents so much, but it was obvious for me and the other second graders in my class that this was some series adult material.  Who could forget the episode where Bart had to study really hard to pass his history test, but was tempted to go out and play because it was a snow day?  Trully a threat to our nation’s youth.

Bart was a sassy and rebellious character in the early seasons.  Was it really so recently that we were only afraid that our kids would be sassy and rebellious?  Can’t let Timmy watch The Simpsons or else he might end up modeling himself after a lovable scamp!  Is the whole “mercilous little killing machines” thing just a 21st century occurrence?  If so, can we blame Bush?

Parents rolled the bones on this one and they came up fucking snake eyes.  The Simpsons was not just entertaining to us as kids.  As we grew up, the show grew up with us (even if the characters didn’t.  Barring episodes like “That 90′s Show,” the characters have been stuck in this “the 70′s were ten years ago but it’s 2009″ time dilation field for a long time and it’s only getting weirder), and it began to reflect the culture in a way that nothing else did for us at the time.  I remember the first time I saw the episode “22 Short Films About Springfield” and understood the references to Pulp Fiction.  I never did get the reference to “Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould” on my own, but I ended up learning enough Spanish to understand what Bumble-Bee Man was saying in the sketch where he tells his wife about his day (“iAy!  iUn candelabra precarioso!”).

The same girl who claimed to have only ever seen one episode of The Simpsons was telling me that she was a huge fan of Family Guy.  Now, I don’t want to speak negatively about anyone’s hard work, but Family Guy is a near-worthless piece of garbage programming and isn’t the cultural touchstone of anything except lame Bros who read Maxim and quote Borat.

Hey, that was a little more negative than I had intended.  Fine show, fine show.

My point is that maybe parents should look less at the annoying characteristics that children can learn from some programming and maybe check out the positive, enriching experiences that are available to connect the next generation into the larger culture.  But then, how is anyone supposed to know the difference?