The Quest for Fun: Episode XI – The Hidden Equation

            (I'll be back in August.)

            I put out a podcast for four years called Shouts From The Lawn, and in that time I made quite a few sensitive public admissions.  One of the most unusual was very early on where I admitted to my brother that I am not fun.  No only am I not fun, I truly don’t know what fun is or how to have fun.  Since then, I have worked hard to find the fun in places where I should be having it, but I still don’t believe I have the basic building blocks of how to construct my own fun.

            Over the years I managed to have a few gatherings of friends, which is pleasant and fun.  I have had a few fun times with my kids, outside of the normal goofing around at home.  So I have to give myself an A for effort.  I am trying. 

            But grown-up fun, the type you see in commercials and on Facebook, where a group of adults are laughing or smiling or sharing stories over beer or cocktails has eluded me my entire life.   I just don’t have the skills to engage, or participate, or fit in.  I’m just…home.  So sometimes I brainstorm on how to change this behavior.  I want to change in a way where I can’t turn back.  I want to be able to have fun as easily as normal people and I’d like to bring my wife along, because she also has this problem, although she is not plagued by it as I am.

            The first thing I do is imagine the things I like to do.  I accomplish that.  Then, everything goes awry.  The reason I go no further is, all of the things that I really like to do are by myself, or at least do not require a bunch of people.  I discovered an important variable.  You need people to have fun.  Awesome.  I have come that far.  Now to go and meet people.

            Oh yeah.  I haven’t been successful in that endeavor in 2o years.  Now I’m right back where I started.  I’m in a solo pursuit.  In fact, I am in the middle of it right now.  I am writing about fun instead of having it.  That is me.

            I have to tiptoe around the reasons behind this situation.  It’s chronic, it is a little sad and it is very, very real.  But I’m 42 years old and I am in charge of my fun now.  I have to figure out a way into the fun I want to have. 

            The equation I settled on was this:

            An activity + like-minded people + free time = Fun.

            Most people would think it is ridiculous to even think of fun with math symbols floating around.  They’re right.  But they also come to fun much easier than I ever will.  The truth is, most of my adult life has been without these core elements.  First, I have never been one to think of activities.  It is why I am in this mess to begin with.  I always am content with company.  I just liked having people around, and at least when you are young, that means just hanging out.  But life should be more than just hanging out.  This is where my imagination and experience fails me.

            Second, I have not been able to make friends.  Most of the people I’ve met are acquaintances or coworkers, who disappear from my life over time. It is tough to find forty-somethings with grown kids.  Everybody is single or too old.  No offense, but we just didn’t live similar lives; similar enough to consider them like-minded. The like-minded people in my life are the oldest friendships, and I made those while I was still a teenager.  I’m lucky, but most of them live on the other side of the country.  It’s great for phone calls and texts, but it sucks for going bowling.  (That’s still an activity, right?) 

            Then there is free time.  Here’s where things have changed.  I have much more free time in my life.  Two of my kids are doing their own thing, and my daughter is entrenched in the workload of high school.  I have time to do things now. But, without the idea of things to do or people to do them with, I spend a lot of time writing and watching movies and shows.  I like the extra time with my wife, but we both need something new to do.

            So now, I search.  I looked at group meetings on Craigslist.  They have a lot of support groups, which is cool, but not what I need right now.  There are a lot of World of Warcraft people and LARPers that get together.  I don’t think that’s me.  There are a few adult leagues that play kickball and other weird shit, and that could be cool.  I need a little extra money to do that, but then I would not have to worry about the activity.  They would have one settled on already…

            This piece is as unfinished as the quest.  I will update from the frontier!

Life Before the Burden of Irony

            Gather up children and I shall tell you a tale… How about a little background first?

            I do not, nor will I ever glamorize the 1980’s.  There is very little from the decade I find culturally redeemable.  I found it mostly soulless, and overshadowed by the baby boomer’s decline and assimilation into the ruling generation.  It was not about anything but looks and money and crass misogyny.  The hair was stupid, the aesthetic was corny and lame, and most of what was created artistically did not influence a damn thing.  Of course, we have hip hop and personal computers and alternative rock and the birth of respectable cuisine…it wasn’t a total wasteland.

            But most of it was either schlock, or embarrassing commercials that were disguised as TV shows and movies.  ALF, The Dukes of Hazzard.  Police Academy, Mr T., GoBots.  Smurfs and Monchichi’s, and Snorks and Care Bears and Cabbage Patch Kids.  Miami Vice and Airwolf, SpaceCamp and Top Gun.  9,000 horror movies.  Madonna’s wardrobe changes and women with shoulder pads.  Mullets and well, mullets.

            This was also the last cultural period before the dawn of the Age of Irony, the sad era we are all stuck in today.  I pinpoint its rise right around 1995 or so.  The alternative wave was over and the Gen X’ers were out looking for jobs.  That’s when I began to feel it.  It was the plague of something I never really dealt with before.  It was an overwhelming sense of insincerity.

            You see, people born after 1985 or so, all of the above crap I just listed above was either liked or rejected by me and my peers.  (So to, was everything made before then.) There were people who watched and enjoyed ALF every week. I had Transformers and GoBots when I was 11.  There were people when genuinely believed that Top Gun was awesome and Back to the Future was the greatest thing ever made. People cried when Whitney Houston sang and lost their minds when Bon Jovi came to town. Conversely, there were kids like me who hated all the Smurf and Smurf-clones.  I really liked a few hair bands but some kids hated them.  I didn’t The Cure, but I liked LLCoolJ.  When we thought something was dumb or crappy or a waste of time, we ignored it.  We moved on.

            To show my appreciation for the things I liked, I bought the records or the movie tickets.  For the things I did not like, I gave them no attention.  Does that sound strange?  Not once in my life did I feel the need to ironically latch onto something, to boost the merits of something that truly didn’t deserve it. I never once thought it would be a good idea to feign interest in something I knew deep down was a waste of energy; solely to just look quirky and noteworthy. I acknowledged the Beavis and Butt-head philosophy: some things are cool and some things suck.  Never in my life did I think everything was cool.

            These blogs/essays I put out there are almost all personal; in that, I detail the observations as I see or feel them.  This sense of the invasion of irony was a feeling; it was out there in the ethos and in the language. I was just unnerved by it. By the end of the 1990’s, I felt I was completely disconnected from the culture. Granted, I was pushing 30 and I had kids already, but I paid attention.  I just felt that everyone was embracing everything, half of it in a tongue-in-cheek manner, or with a wink, and I really had no damn idea what was sincerely loved.  That is what I felt was always important.  I like to know where we are as a culture; it interests me.  What are we embracing?

            I never really heard of hipsters until I moved out to Oregon, and I still don’t exactly know what a hipster is.  I know that people are embarrassed to be called a hipster.  That wasn’t the case with goths and metalheads or skaters or a dozen other groups.  It’s that first grasp at identity, I get it.  But what is an ironic hipster?  What is that supposed to mean?  I guess I have a vague idea, from the clothes, etc.  But I am almost certain they are born out of the age of irony, where nothing is taken seriously and every artistic endeavor and every inane attempt at a social cash-grab are of equal weight and measure.

            Now, in response, we have a wave of internet critics, including myself sometimes, trying to sort through everything and figure out what is genuine and what is bullshit.  What is a true attempt at art or originality, and what is two hours of colors and noises for an undiscerning foreign market? What has meaning, what is substantive, even if it’s a Beyoncé song or an episode of True Blood? We need to know these things in our culture.  American art is forever intertwined with commerce and we have to be able to find the diamonds and gold nuggets of purity; no matter what package they come in.  Throwing everything into the hopper and laughing at it all sarcastically was just a mistake.

            So, what was it like before the burden of irony?  I’ll give you a few snapshots.

            I was 13 when I saw Back to the Future for the first time.  Words cannot express how charged I was by that movie.  I told everyone about it, I bought the novelization; I bought the soundtrack on cassette.  I saw it three times in the theater. Not once did I encounter anyone who shit on the movie or broke it down into the parts that worked and the parts that didn’t. It was a Good Movie.  It made me feel good to think about it and watch it.  When the sequels came, we were excited; we knew they wouldn’t be as good as the first movie because they were sequels.  We had a Good Time.  That was it.  Movie comedies were similar.  When we saw Spaceballs and Ghostbusters, we laughed at the jokes. We repeated the funny parts later that we liked.  We didn’t take time to snark about them.  When we quoted them later , we did not have to discern whether the quotes were done in jest to poke fun at the script, or whether we honestly enjoyed the movie.  We just enjoyed the friggin’ movie!

            When Twin Peaks came on it was insanely popular.  Everyone watched Season One and talked about it all the time.  No one compared it to other things that came before it. No one was above it, or too cool to watch it.  It was Communal.  It was Fun.  That was it.

            I saw Def Leppard live when I was 15.  In 1987, I thought they were cool and it was my first real rock concert.  There were a bunch of screaming fans, and no one was in the back dressed differently from everyone else, giggling and making fun of the true fans. I bought a tour shirt and I wore it because I liked it. I didn’t have to explain why I wore it.  It was a Fun Show.  We had a Good Time.

            I didn’t have to explain why I wore it.  I just wore it.

            Surely I’m revealing my age here.  This often happens to me when I set off to understand cultural phenomena.  That’s okay.  I am certain of the feeing I had of disconnection because of irony; and unlike trends or all sorts, which are basically flavors in an ice cream shop you can taste or ignore, the burden of irony was a horrible exercise in confusion and insincerity. 

            I mean, what is life without some sincerity?

My Anxiety Files - Triggers

Icy spiders running up and down the back of my neck.

            I learned the term “triggers’ while in therapy this year.  I guess I’ve known what they are and what they can do to my anxiety, but giving them a name and identifying my own emotional triggers has been invaluably crucial to not remaining a quivering heap for the rest of my life.

            An emotional trigger can really be anything.  It can be an event, or music, or a tone of voice, or a situation, or anything that stirs an emotion in you. The smell of baked bread reminds you of your grandma.  Every time you drink a certain brand of beer it you feels like you are in college again. Matthew Broderick reminds you of crappy high school memories.  Anything.

             The anxious have to be aware of these triggers because we have trouble controlling the severity of our emotional reactions.  Remembering your long lost grandma is one thing, but the triggers that bring back terrifying feeling or feelings of dread can ruin entire days, weeks, or months of our lives, and we might not even know why.  Something as innocuous as a distant car screech can unintentionally make an anxious person a complete wreck for an entire day.  The inciting trigger was just a noise that excavated feelings of a bad car accident, or the memory of a family member who died on the road.  Anyone can have these thoughts, but people who battle anxiety know these triggers can snowball out of control.

            I have several triggers.  I don’t think I’ve pinned them all down, but I may have isolated the big ones so I know what’s happening.  (Yes, writing about them will illicit the same feelings as the trigger.  It’s cool.  I’ll walk it off.)  First, my head.  Not my brain, my head. I absolutely cannot stand getting touched on the head.  When they were tiny, my kids occasionally whacked me on the head during playtime and I felt a surge of rage that the tiny little tap did not warrant.  Whenever I’ve bumped my head, it’s not just the pain, I feel like I need to punch someone.  It subsides, but there is still the mystery of why.  Maybe I got knocked around in the head as a little guy.  I don’t remember.  But this is a strong and immediate trigger.

            Another severe trigger is the sound of high winds.  I lived through the 2004 hurricane season in Florida, as did a lot of people I know.  Three massive storms hit our tiny little house and eventually took chunks of our roofing off.  This was the first time in my life I had prolonged anxiety attacks.  I had them when the storm hit, when there was news about the next storms coming, and while dealing with scared kids and power outages for weeks.  It was 3 or 4 months of hard core panic attacks. Ever since then, if it is windy outside, (even though I’m in Oregon!) I have trouble sleeping or concentrating.

            The beach.  I don’t have too much of a problem on the west coast, but the beach is not a source of fun memories like it is for so many other people.  The beach was a backdrop of my childhood, and it wasn’t cool.  Hot sand, grittiness, stickiness for salt water, warm sodas, douchey party people, the smell of Hawaiian Tropic.  I don’t like seeing it on TV much either.  (Save Lost, of course.)

            There are lesser triggers, of course.  Wealthy people, angrily vocal parents, turquoise, and Weezer’s Pinkerton album are a few.   Of course I have pleasant triggers, too. Smoked food always reminds me of my family’s camp in upstate New York.  Oranges remind me of having fun at Disney as a little kid.  (Buttery popcorn also brings me there.)  REM, Blind Melon, and Foo Fighters remind me of my kids.  Rush reminds me of good times in high school. Stephen Colbert triggers memories of my wife, and I see him all the time. Triggers aren’t all bad.  I’d even say for the good ones, I may be at an advantage because I may actually feel them stronger because of my attuned emotional antenna.

            I only write about this for two reasons.  I’d like everyone with anxiety to understand that the emotions that triggers stir within you can be handled and processed without your world coming apart.  Once you’ve recognized a trigger and it is out there in the world, you can treat it as such.  It’s like avoiding too much salt in your diet.  You try to stay away, but occasionally, it’ll get in there.

            The other reason is to create a little understanding from those who don’t have this problem.  There are millions of people with broken brains; their emotions are out of whack.  They aren’t weak and crazy; they are functioning adults with wonky coping mechanisms. Every once in a while when the wind blows or they hear an old song from the '70s they behave a little irrationally.  Be a little patient with your loved ones with anxiety, maybe they can return the favor when they have to put up with your dumb shit.

My Speech at the Grammar Police Retirement Ceremony

Blech.

           “I know.  Some people will call this giving up.  I am accepting failure.  This is what happens to the best of all of us. We realize the walls we pound our fists against are too strong and too well-built and that there is just not enough energy and time to change the world.  It is the bittersweet elixir of growing old.

            I hereby give notice that I am retiring from the Grammar Police.  I know, it may come as a shock to many.  It does not help that our numbers are shrinking year after year.  It took a lot of years of deliberation and soul-searching.  In the end, I believe it is best for me if I step away.  In my own life, I will carry on.  Remaining ever vigilant, I will do my best to avoid murdering the English language. I know I will make mistakes, but I will not succumb. I will use a variety of words; I will not try to boil all human communication down to 25 catch phrases and clichés.  However, when it comes to policing the world and pointing out obvious grammatical errors, I am no longer the man for the job.

            The tipping point came recently.  I was watching a local news story about a protest.  There were parents and teachers trying to get attention from t a local school district, and they wrote handmade signs for the gathering.  I saw one parent’s sign and it read:  Help Suport Our Community.   From my couch at home I said aloud: “Two p’s, please”.

            Now, I was correct.  Suport has two p’s. But, in that grand scheme of everything that actually matters in this world, and that I personally support the measure to raise more money for schools, who gives a rat’s ass about how the words were spelled on one sign?  I lost perspective, empathy, and sympathy.  All because I can’t get over how so many people do not know how to use grammar properly.  I still believe it matters.  But life is an ongoing process of choosing battles.  Grammar is far down the list.

            I believe in the struggle of the Grammar Police.  Clarification of our shared language is essential to clear communication.  However, I did forget one thing along the way.  Not all communication is important.  Some of it is as disposable as candy wrappers.  The words may be important, but the actual back and forth between two eleven-year-olds, or a bunch of guys at a country/hip-hop/rock concert, or a family of goobers who are minding their own dad-gum business is not important and has no need to be policed.  I still believe all public signs should be under scrutiny.  If you have a restaurant, please learn how to spell restaurant.  A movie theater marquee should not misspell titles they can clearly read from a poster.  

            So I leave with my last public pleas for grammatical sanity.   I have heard in the past few years in the rise of nouns created by adding ‘–ness’ to an existing adjective.  The problem is, those adjectives were already created from a noun.  There is no need for anxiousness and dangerousness.  We have anxiety and danger.  Comfortableness? It’s comfort. They are acceptable now because of a generation of fuck-ups repeating them over and over.  But I digress. 

            In the area of clichéd phrases I have but one simple request.  Please stop using the Nazis and terms like jackbooted thugs to describe people and events that do not even come close to the severity and brutality of the Third Reich.  The chick on the phone from Verizon that put you on hold is not the same as an army that murdered millions.  Also, we can refrain from using “Sophie’s Choice” to describe a difficult decision.  I realize this began is sarcastic jest, but it has moved into standard use now and I just don’t think choosing which one of your children should live or die is the same as deciding thin or pan crust at Pizza Hut.

            I will close with this.  I have fought hard.  I raised my children to appreciate the often contradictory rules of the English language.  They realize it is unique in the world; it is a living, breathing, and evolving language.  There are just some tendencies that sour our collective use; and that these misuses can eventually impact human thought. We need all the words we can to speak our minds effectively.  I believe in the cause.  But I am turning in my badge.”

            Oh yeah:  “A LOT IS ALWAYS TWO SEPARATE GODDAMNED WORDS!!!”

Shut The #@%* Up About Women Not Being Funny

Maria Bamford is funnier than you. But she'd never say that.

            About ten years ago, my wife accused me of not liking women in the movies.  I really had no idea what she was talking about.  I must have mouthed off at a bad Lifetime movie or an episodic TV drama targeted toward a female audience.  I have a habit of mouthing off.  It worried me that she thought this; so I spent a little time thinking about it. Do I see my entertainment through a misogynistic lens?   Do I enjoy women in art? Music? TV, movies, books?  Comedy?  Turns out, my wife was wrong.  Sure, I don’t like a lot of material that is targeted for women; but she isn’t crazy about Die Hard sequels and Doctor Who, either. 

            There are a million shows out there with female leads that I follow religiously. There aren’t enough female led movies, but that’s not because of me.  I really don’t have any qualms with women doing anything, actually.  I certainly don’t turn away from something because it features or was crafted by women.  That’s what assholes do.  I don’t have a lot of female lead singers in my music collection; I’ll be honest.  I have some; but again, if I hear it and I like it, I want it.  So, no.  I’m not an ignorant pig who turns away from female contributions to the world.  This brings me to comedy.

             Every once in a while, some guy pipes up and says that women aren’t funny.  This absolutely drives me insane.  It is as offensive as saying Asian people can’t drive or Italians have greasy hair and are all in the mob.  The reaction is equally as crazy.  Everyone wants to focus on debunking the statement and showing that yes, women have been, are, and will be funny.  That is such a waste of oxygen.  What these guys are saying is I don’t think women are funny. It’s an opinion and they are free to express it, even if he is wrong as wrong can be. 

            First of all, who the hell wants to hang out with a woman who isn’t funny?  Maybe I’ve met 2 or 3 women in my life who couldn’t get a laugh to save their lives, but I have the same amount with the men.  Men try to be funnier more often, which means they fall flat more often, too.  Maybe women who aren’t very funny have enough sense not to tell shitty jokes like so many dumb guys do.  It’s confusing.   Are these guys who don’t laugh at female comedy saying that female professionals aren’t funny, or women in general?  The former is downright offensive and the latter shows a distorted cultural view.  Hey guys…most guys aren’t funny either.  If everyone were funny we wouldn’t laugh.  It would be an annoying nightmare.  How about this for a cultural stereotype:  The people who think they are funny and actually are not…are mostly men.

            These male critics are saying this because they like their comedy served up a certain way. Toasty warm with extra testosterone.  They have a spectrum of acceptable comedy that makes them laugh, and it is limited. Most likely, they don’t like women in their lives cracking jokes , either.  Comedy is also muscle flexing.  It is used by guys to attract women, and many of those same guys don’t think women need to be funny at all.  They feel comedy belongs to a certain group of people.  Man, that is so wrong.

            I don’t enjoy the comedy of Larry the Cable Guy, Dane Cook, Cheslea Handler or Katt Williams.  That’s not the only group of people I don’t care for, but it is a sample.  I am a comedy fan and nothing these performers have ever done has interested me.  However, to say they aren’t funny is to piss in the faces of thousands upon thousands of fans.  They have TV shows, specials, and performances that have been enjoyed by so many people; rocking back and forth in their seats, snorting, cackling, and punching their friends with joy. They obviously are funny; I’m just not buying what they’re selling.  My loss.  Who are you to say who is funny, when so many people disagree with you?  This is one of the few times that the worlds of comedy and music overlap.  I don’t like Maroon 5 or Mariah Carey.  It doesn’t mean they aren’t musicians that make music.

            When I sat back and thought about whether or not I was one of these female comedy deniers, it didn’t take long for me to remember that the first comedy show I ever saw live was Paula Poundstone!  I loved her when I was in high school and waist deep in the world of 80’s comedy.  I’ve followed Kathy Griffin for 20 years, and I still remember having a crush on Janeane Garafolo.  I still have a crush on Sarah Silverman.  These women are veterans of stand up with a clear voice and vision. Four years ago, I went to the comedy festival in Portland and ended up seeing Maria Bamford twice in two nights.  Even with repeated jokes it was fantastic.  Tiny Fey and Amy Poehler should host everything from now on.  If Megan Mullally is in a show, it instantly becomes funnier.  Samantha Bee on The Daily Show.  Chelsea Peretti. Mindy Kaling. Amy Shumer.  I’m giving short shrift to dozens of hilarious actors and female comedians of color, but the point is, it is profoundly stupid to think women are patently not funny, whether you are a man or a woman. 

            The entire notion of controlling this thing we call laughter has always infuriated me.  It is so important and so healthy; why put rules and regulations on it?  It belongs to everyone and everyone deserves it, just by being born human.  Who really cares where it comes from or who delivers it?  

I Was Born To Name Things

The scrod.

            Sometimes my fingers want to type up a personal essay.  Here it goes.

            I don’t know what it is, but I enjoy naming things.  I do not remember when it began, or when I first realized this, but it probably started when I began keeping a list of words.  After I started journal writing in eleventh grade or so, my notebooks were full of goofy shit.  Sentences I overheard, ideas for jokes, weak attempts at poetry.  I also kept a list of words I thought were interesting.  It was mostly the sound of the words that got my attention.  Carbuncle, hoodwinked, nub, albeit, notwithstanding, conduit, chamois, taciturn, kiln, scrum, scrod…  I also loved names and learning the derivation of names.  Why were there both Sean’s and Shawn’s?  Do you know there are both Garcia’s and Gracia’s?  Is the second one a misspelling? Where did all the names of cities and towns come from, and why were there so many repeats?  Why the hell do we call it Germany when they call it Deutschland and why is the titmouse a bird?   I put in a lot of hours daydreaming about silly shit.

            Did you know that after American slaves were freed they picked their own last names, because they often had none as slaves?  They came from surrounding towns and counties and a lot of the founding fathers, which explains they high number of Washington and Jefferson families.  Mace isn’t pepper spray; it’s a brand of pepper spray.  Portland, Oregon got its name from a coin flip.  (It could have been Boston.)  The philtrum is the name of those two lines under your nose.

            I hit my personal name giving groove when a specific cultural event occurred. It was limited to the mid to late 1980’s and was insanely huge, but then disappeared altogether: Mix tapes.  I loved music, and I loved to name things.  A genuine mix tape was two full sides of a cassette tape, each 60 or 90 minutes long, and it took you that amount of time to make the thing.  Everybody loved either making or receiving them.  To me, it was not an official mix until it had a name.  I liked to try to name it something specific about the intended recipient. I made about 300 tapes and another 100 CD’s or so when we accepted the new format.  Each one had its own name, and I kept a list.  In fact, I would sometimes give a mix tape out of the blue for someone just because I came up with a cool name for it.  Ok, that happened about 50% of the time.  Honestly.

            I didn’t just want to name tapes, I wanted to name books and movies and boats and video games and especially rock bands.  I indirectly named three bands and albums for friends of mine, and I named two musical collaborations (not really bands) for myself.  I wrote a shitload of songs and poems that I got to name.

 However, when it came to naming my own children, my mind went completely blank.  The Mrs. and I labored for months trying to come up with names for my boys. Nicholas Matthew exists because I wanted to continue two traditions, naming a kid after a saint and using the middle name of the uncle, like my name.  But we went through 8000 names to get there.  Holden came so late in the game.  It was suggested by my sister-in-law, and it stuck because The Catcher in the Rye made me want to write.  His middle name is James because we ruled everything else out.  When it came to a girl, we literally hade 12 full combinations.  Emily Rose just sort of fit for us in 1999.  Little did we know there would be an exorcism movie and a Hollywood actress with the same name.

            Sometimes I wish I was around when other people were responsible for naming things we all know.  Pineapple, horseradish, and eggplant are ridiculous in hindsight.  I feel a sick feeling every time I hear the phrase “Homeland Security”.  Although the word ‘firefly’ is cool, I think to name the show Firefly helped to keep it obscure when it ran on FOX. Why is there good cholesterol and bad cholesterol?  They should be two completely separate names to avoid confusion.  People change entire diet structures because some scientist doesn’t understand the link between language and behavior.  If light year is supposed to be a distance, than the phrase’s construction is all wrong. Also, please do not get me started with the world of IT.  An entire generation of smart math geeks who gave the English as much respect as a cat does to a sofa leg is responsible for half the tech terms we use today.    

            Street names, business names, blog names, product names.  I wish that was a business.  I wish I had a firm, and all day I thought about names.  Not some Don Draper –style perversion of the English language (Popable chips, Framily plans), but a real name with character and personality.  I’ll name your cockatiel, your organic honey business, and your newborn and I’ll have it done in two days.  Package deal. I’ll even name your favorite guitar for free.  It’s now named Evelyn.  You’re welcome.

My Anxiety Files – Worrying Is The Worst Thing Ever

Been, there, dude.

           To the anxious, worry is always a verb.  It is something people do with their time.  It is active and it eats away at your life.  What makes it particularly evil is that you really do believe that you are accomplishing something, while the truth is, worry has never solved a single problem in the history of every-damn-thing.

            I used to worry. I patterned this after my mother, who could be a world champion at the sport.  She almost medaled one year in the Worry-lympics.  Worry has its base in the root of nearly all of humanity’s psychological problems: fear.  We try to reconcile the unknown, just like every generation before us.  We have used recorded history, science, sociology to help aid us in our understanding of the unknown, so worry looks a lot different these days.  Now we worry about possible outcomes.  We worry about what may happen.  Statistics should be able to help, but they do not.  Our minds should be able to quell that feeling of worry if we understand likelihoods and embrace when there simply is no way to predict some outcomes.  But it often does not work, because there are emotions mistakenly connected to worry. No logic we can drum up will help a person with anxiety that is compelled to worry.

            First, some confuse worry with concern.  If you are concerned with something, you care about the outcome.  You care what happens after your friend’s surgery or if you get into a good college.  You care about your kids’ grades and you are very concerned about that hole in your roof.  Life cannot be free from concern.  But worry is taking that concern and trying to make it an action. We feel the need to show our concern.  It is keeping vigil for life’s many unpredictable issues.  There is a difference between caring about my friend’s heart surgery and pacing around clutching my phone waiting for a call.  Some people believe this is a sacrifice that shows we care.  The truth is, you are just killing hours of your own life.  There is nothing your concern can do that life won’t take care all by itself.  Your buddy is passed out in surgery.  He can’t be anywhere else or do anything else.  Exactly how are you helping?

            We believe worry is an extension of love.  I worry about my kids because I love them.  In this worry is a lack of acceptance.  You do not have total control of what happens to your kids.  No one does.  Every year they get older, their spheres of knowledge, interaction, and influence grow.  You will always feel what you feel for your kids, but you must accept that worry is about you, and not them. It is your unwillingness to let go of the reigns of responsibility.  It is one of the hardest things to do, but the converse is so much more difficult.  Worrying about them will put you in the ground so much faster.

            So, how do we combat this monster?

Accept, grow, and embrace the uncertainty.  Watching reruns of The Office while sitting in a big fat chair would accomplish more than worry.  Or reading a fantasy novel.  Or learning how to play that keyboard.  Or writing a blog about time travel and stuff that nobody reads.  Worriers all need to be stopped.  There are so many ways out of it, including a little more exercise, but one major way is the one that gets the most heat:  Distraction.

I promised myself that I would not get political in this blog, and I do not plan to break that promise here.  But, at least socially, I will say that if we all gave ourselves a break, things may be a little less tense.  We’re just human.  That’s it.  We have a lot of crap on our plates real and imagined, and I think just the acknowledgement that we do not need our foot on the accelerator of life all the time is fair.  We need art and music.  TV and the movies.  Books and websites and blogs.  Doing goofy shit with friends. We engage in these things regularly but their intrinsic value is overlooked. 

Of course, people will point out that excessive use of the distractions is not good.  No shit.  Extremes are always a problem.  Also, substance abuse is not a distraction.  It is a sickness.  Binge-watching Breaking Bad is a fun way to kill a wet weekend.  Drinking three days straight is probably not as healthy.

            Anything you and use to push yourself away from worry is worth a try, as long as it doesn’t hurt you more than the effects of worry.  People who don’t have the problem say “don’t worry about it” to the rest of us and we are supposed to magically turn off the switch.  This time, their advice is worth trying.  You are replacing worry with acceptance, and it is a decision you can make.  It is not easy, but too bad.  Try it.  Your heart and your free time will thank you.

The Dawn of Pay Cable, or I Just Watched Midnight Madness Again

...and introducing Michael J Fox, as the pain in the ass little brother...

Before the 1980’s became the Madonna-drenched, hairspray-laden breakdancing clusterfuck we all remember, there was a brief and unique period that immediately preceded it.  It was roughly 1980 to 1983-ish; a small era where it wasn’t the 70’s anymore and MTV, Michael Jackson and Miami Vice had yet to truly influence the scene.  It was just a nondescript blah of the first round of Generation X teenagers; kids that looked like extras from The Bad News Bears were growing up and becoming a bunch of foul-mouthed cranks with no direction.  It is the realm of Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Pat Benatar, knee-high gym socks and rollerskating, the end of disco and the beginning of well… not much.

This was my era.  Well, my era to be a tweener.  It was not memorable at all.  However, there is one detail with which anyone my age can usually connect; the beginning of cable TV.  We were the first generation of kids with HBO.  That’s right, four local channels and the special box that gave you uncut movies.  Eventually the same box would be the gateway for seeing boobs; but for right then and there it was about those movies.  We were still kids who watched whatever was on when it was time to watch TV.  Reruns, black and white movies, cartoons from the 1940’s, it didn’t really matter. When HBO was available, we followed the same ritual.  Whatever piece of garbage that was on, we ate it up.  One thing to remember: HBO repeated the same movies over and over and over, sometimes for years.  Three times a day you might see Ice Pirates or MegaForce, Hooper or The Secret of NIMH, The Great Muppet Caper or Super Fuzz, and the next day, Ordinary People and Chariots of Fire.  But the crappy movies were the best because kids could understand them, and we also weren’t children with the burden of irony.  We actually thought these movies were cool.

They’re not.  But we thought they were when we were ten, and that’s all that matters.

Midnight Madness (1980), feels like an episode of Happy Days.  It is actually a Disney movie, although Disney did not put its name on it until its rerelease in 2004.  It is a scavenger hunt movie, where five teams of college kids run all over Los Angeles getting clues to eventually lead them to a finish line.  That’s it.  It is a light comedy with jokes that still made me laugh when I re-watched it.  I don’t want to nitpick the film, because it’s just silly, but I do want to point out one thing.  When I was ten, I thought these clues were so clever and I would have loved to be involved.  As an adult, they could not be easier.  If these are college kids, they should have never been allowed to graduate. 

This is one of those 80’s movies of the area with all the most cookie cutter clichés you could possibly want in there.  All of the jocks are dumb, beer-swilling animals.  The nerds are dorky and unlikeable, and led by Eddie Deezen, the king of all nerd actors.  All the fat people are ugly and gross.  They seem to make an extra effort to make the fat people disgusting.  Old people are slow, rich kids were jerks, and handsome guys have trouble with girls.  So clear cut; so refreshingly simple.

A few observations:

Oh, the things they thought computers could do.  Stephen Furst’s (Flounder from Animal House) character Harold has a rich dad who buys him a new van, complete with flames painted on the side, and an onboard computer to win the game.  (Why is not clear.  The prize is just a trophy). This computer can “solve any clue in five seconds” so Harold can cheat and win.  Remember, no internet. He types in the clue and for some reason, it spits out the answer. His dad just had a clue-solving computer lying around gathering dust in the garage or something.

Michael J. Fox is in there as a little brother who looks 14 but was actually 19 in real life.  Two years before Family Ties, five before Back to the Future.  Paul Reubens also has a cameo. 

The ugliest character onscreen was the game’s creator, Leon. He organized the Great All-Nighter for some reason. For the entire movie, he was flanked by two hot chicks, Candy and Sunshine, who seemed to be at his beck and call. Was he a pimp?  Again, no explanation.  Disney movie.

One more scene. I remember it driving me nuts as a young nerd.  One of the stops is at a miniature golf course. The jocks leap out of the bushes and take the nerds’ ball.  They throw it into the water trap.  While everyone is leaving to find the next clue, the nerds are in the water, in rubbers waders, looking for the lost ball. Even as a little kid I could not believe it: “Just get another damn ball!” 

If you can stomach this era, if you can handle the hair and the awful clothes and the ridiculous theme song, if you can handle the cheesiness and Michael J Fox’s annoying bratty brother character, this movie is still pretty fun.  Apparently there are some tributes to the movie around the country, with real life Great All-Nighters and dammit, I still want to do one.

The Big Idea

Nice rouge.

I few years ago, I discovered my personal muse.  That is a tad corny, I know, but it really is the truth.  If a muse is the thing that keeps you coming back to the creative process, the thing that makes you chip away again and again to make something with your own two hands in the hopes it will explain some secret of life to you, than I found it.  I have been chasing the big idea. 

Some time ago, I understood I was not a fixer.  I was a maker.  I am no engineer, I am an inventor.  The lines are blurrier than that of course: I actually am very good at organization and streamlining processes, but that is not the thing that gets me excited.  When you first sense that big idea, you understand that it truly is not yours.  Something else inspired you.  For writing types, it is a book or a movie or a TV show.  You see something that could have been better, or something absolutely wonderful that you wish you created.  It is a reactionary feeling.  A few tweaks, and this could have been perfection.  Later, if you are lucky, something brings you back.  You keep thinking about it and chewing on it like the inside of your cheek. It is a big idea.  It is your idea.  You can barely see what it is, but there is a kernel of it bouncing around your brain, and you can’t let it go. For me, I reach a tipping point.  I have dozens of initial ideas that scatter to the winds because they had no roots firmly planted.  A rare few sit awhile.  They invite a few more thoughts and now it’s a paragraph of a plot outline or an interesting take on some damn thing.  Now, I have to write all this down.  If I’m lucky, it is only the beginning.  The details begin pouring out of me.

I think I had about five of those big ideas in twenty years.  The rest were smaller, or half-baked.  A lot of these smaller ideas were activities, like my podcast, which was just an excuse to think of more ideas.  The essay-thing you are reading right now is just a mining expedition for more ideas.

In 2006, I had a crap job and lot of time on my hands.  Most of the people around me traveled down internet rabbit holes.  I, on the other hand, was hand writing a novel like a maniac and transferring it to my computer when I went home.  (If I was allowed to use a Word program at work, I would have.) This big idea started years before with my obsession with stand-up comedy.  I thought a story about a guy in my situation would be interesting.  Married with kids, but still wants to sneak out and be funny. There was something there.  Then I saw the film V for Vendetta, and unbeknownst to me, an idea began to crystallize.  A guy is alone and wants to sneak out and be funny, but instead creates monologue type diatribes. They weren’t jokes, they were speeches.  Oratory, like Lincoln and Douglas.  He has a natural talent for speaking, like stump speeches or public square meetings.  He gets a little following downtown, and then a local band asks him if he want to open up for them on the road.  He becomes famous for speaking; but he has no financial or political stake in what he is saying.  He is speaking a truth without asking for anything in return.  And then some stuff happens.

I went insane, 1500 words a day for a few months.  I wrote it and rewrote it.  By the time it was done, I had to start paying attention at work.  I had my second novel, and it was one that I wasn’t ashamed to let people read.  Didn’t matter. It was a big idea.

The point is not the finished book.  It was that idea.  That idea grows and grows and changes and wraps you up like a blanket and charges you more than 10,000 Red Bulls.  It is the reason you get out of bed and turn on your brain.  It is intoxicating and fun and how creativity is supposed to feel.  My book could be a pile of shit.  I may very well suck as a writer and lack any talent that could make anyone want to pay me.  As long as I have the idea, I really do not care.  Truly.

I remember Stephen King said the idea for Pet Sematary came when he was crossing a road near his house. By the time he reached the other side, he had it. Vonnegut started to write about his WWII experiences and the next thing he knew he was in outer space. Jo Rowling came up with Harry Potter during a train ride.  I wrote an essay about mental illness a few months ago and the idea came to me in the car on my way back from running an errand.  It just popped in there.  Those guys received a shit-ton of money for their ideas, but I bet the feeling of that Big Idea outweighed the feeling of the big checks.  (Can’t I at least pretend that could be true?)

 I search for the core idea in everything I ingest.  What is the premise? What is the struggle?  How am I supposed to feel?  There is a style here that is setting a mood.  My feelings have been manipulated.  Where did that idea come from?  When my ideas bubble up, they sometimes feel like memories I can just barely recollect.  I see a brief scene, or sense two smaller ideas trying to connect to one another.  It is attempting to come alive. 

I’ll end on this.  One thing I never do is admit that I am out of ideas.  There are periods in my life when I feel I am fresh out. I have exhausted the tank.  But I never fear the well running dry.  Maybe that is the reason I get new ideas.  That belief is at the center of whatever creative juices I possess.  There certainly is no money or attention in the ideas; it is just an itch that I absolutely love to scratch.