My Anxiety Files - Episode IX and Holiday Turkeys

             No spoilers, but in the end, do spoilers really matter?

             We may have witnessed a minor cultural shift.  It could be a genuine change in the way my generation behaves from here on out, or it could be merely a blip on the radar and my ego is blowing it out of proportion.  Assigning significance to just about everything is the American way, so at least I’m being consistent.

             The reviews and reactions to Star Wars - Episode IX are in and they are mixed. ‘Mixed’ is the modern euphemism for ‘we can’t decide if this sucks or not’.  It is messy and problematic, but I still enjoyed the experience.  Buried inside that idea is something that us Gen-Xers, now in our late forties or so, should fully understand.  We grew up on a steady diet of pop culture, and it really doesn’t matter if it was good then, or it still resonates today.  It was fluff made for fun and to sell toys.  Did you have fun?  That’s all that matters.

             The split on Episode IX isn’t like the last movie.  There were a bunch of white nationalist, racist, Trumpy pieces of garbage that had a problem with women in space movies and one of them have the audacity to be born with an Asian heritage. The movie wasn’t great, but it was still a coherent movie.  Ep IX is a dizzying barrage of Star Wars stuff.  Even people who love it agree it felt rushed.  I did.  But I wasn’t upset by it.  Why?  I understand these truths:  I’m forty-seven.  I was entertained. Most Star Wars movies aren’t A-plusses anyways.  But I loved them, and I will continue to do so. 

             As an adult, I can use the metaphor of a holiday dinner.  Everyone has had the experience of a shitty Thanksgiving, Christmas spread, or anniversary dinner that didn’t go over well.  The oven broke down, the stuffing was underdone, the potatoes were gummy or your dog jumped onto the dinner table and humped the turkey.  It was a meal you looked forward to, and it was disappointing.  You get older and you laugh at these things because its all you can do.  It's funny.  You know you’ve had wonderful meals before, and you’ll have wonderful meals in the future.  You don’t stop having holiday meals because this one sucked.  You just throw that turkey out.

             I’m not an apologist. If you want to hate on Episode IX, there’s plenty to pick apart.  That’s fine.  I just don’t want to do that shit anymore.  I had a blog post a week ago that detailed all my nitpicking about the prequel movies.  I started that in my twenties, and I don’t want to spend another moment of brain time dissecting fluff.  There is an entire universe of books, comics, and games that tell other Star Wars tales that are pretty damn good.  As for picking apart this stuff or superhero movies or TV shows with crappy endings, I will announce my retirement for giving a shit.  Any criticism will be for fun and conversation, any consumption will be purely for the intent for which it was intended. 

             It’s also not a cop-out.  I’d be making excuses for the movie if it was a cop-out.  I have no excuses to make, nor do I care about copping out.  I am moving on. Rising above.

             The rest of this piece could be about nerd culture, fandom, the cultural obsession with distraction, the need to pay closer attention to the things that matter, unplugging, and a dozen other possibilities.  But it’s not.  Nothing I say about any of those things really matter and that might be my point.  It’s about me, and how I deal with the giant culture that surrounds me.  It makes me ill most of the time, but there are things about it that I love.  I don’t want to leave it behind.  But I have to adapt and grow as a person, and that includes how I engage with it.

             Isn't it better to take it for what it is?  Leave the significance at the door?  We're adults.  We should be able to tell the difference between a nourishing meal and cotton candy.  Do we need a debate on whether the last serving of cotton candy was better, or they had better cotton candy twenty years ago? 

             I honestly believe I would have walked out of the theater the same way if the movie was a solid A+.   “That was fun.  It’s over now.  What’s next?”

My Anxiety Files – Keepin’ Busy

My friend grew up living next to his grandparents.  I saw them all the time and I remember one afternoon in the late 80’s when we were bullshitting around, I saw my friend’s grandmother sweeping her driveway.  It was apparently a regular thing. She kept a clean house and part of that was to sweep the leaves and dirt from their driveway.  This time, I saw her take the leaves to the end of the driveway and into the street.  Then, she started to sweep the street in front of the house. 

“Uh, dude, your grandma is sweeping the street clean?”

“Eh, she’s keeping busy.”

I remember that phrase used a reason for so many things over the course of my life. It always confused me.  I was curious about everyone’s motivations, and when someone spent time with a seemingly pointless task never made sense to me.  

(You already see my problem, right?)

To me, keeping busy meant wasting your time and wasting your time was an outright sin.  I had this notion that everyone had a clock ticking and to piss away even a moment was spitting in the face of nature and life itself. It was my struggle with the concept of ‘should’.  Now, of course, this thought process never left my brain and made it to the active stage.  I frittered away so much time in my life, to think of it all would be overwhelming.  I made too much out of time; like I needed to be doing the ‘right’ or ‘productive’ thing.  In reality, I was paralyzed by the analysis of it all.  It’s something I still deal with and truly remains my biggest regret.

To combat this, I adopted my own little mantra.  I say to myself: “Own your time”.  That’s it. It’s all I can do.  It happens to me nearly every day, especially during downtime.  Do I write?  Do I read?  What do I read? Do I watch a movie?  Can I watch something I’ve already seen?

If I truly own my time, if I deem myself as the only owner, I can make the determination and the decision is final.  There is no ‘should’. 

For those of us with anxiety or depression or have brains that like to wage war on us, keeping busy is essential.  I’m late to the game on this.  I wish I would have understood this a long time ago.  It absolutely does not matter what you are doing with that time.  If your ego is telling you that you need to do something important, I think you’d already be doing it.  There is no shame in screwing around.  One of my favorite authors of all time, Kurt Vonnegut, said: “We are here on Earth to fart around.”  If this doesn’t apply to you, then you are already doing something important and you wouldn’t take the time to read a dumb blog.  For the rest of humanity, I think keeping busy might be a good thing.  If not for achieving new heights of civilization, then for self-care.  For your health.

What’s better, worrying and ruminating about one terrible thought and regret after another until you can’t function, or playing some PlayStation 4?

I have such a difficult time on the weekends these days.  I feel like I’m still in a mode that my circumstances don’t require.  It was Dad/Survival mode.  I’m tense about money, frazzled about house stuff and work, and the pressure is on.  But those days are over.  I’m actually not in that mode anymore. I’m in a different mode that I don’t fully grasp.  It’s one where I get to dictate what I do with my time.  It's foreign and strange and I don’t fully understand it.  It’s not determined by my responsibilities to others.  It’s for me, and I’ve never really done it before.  I have the ability to keep busy in any way I choose.

Yes, I understand I figure certain things out decades later than most.  That’s why I have a blog.

Hero Worship Ain’t No Good

So, what would have been an appropriate photo?

Here’s my original opening for this post:

             “I’m here to say I do not understand hero worship.  I realize it has been ingrained in us since the dawn of humanity.  I realize it sits at the core of civilization and that every society ever recorded has elements of it throughout their history.  I get it.  But like the human appendix, it could be a vestige human trait that if removed, we could still function.  My guess is that we would flourish.”

            

             Why do I keep forgetting that I’m not an expert in anything and that my childhood hero was George Carlin, who spent 15% of his career talking about farts?  I’m observant, not smart.  I’m funny, not an authority on jack shit.  Anyway, now that my pretense has been dropped, here’s a genuine Mercurio/Dimeangry post.

             Hero worship is a dead end.  Right around 1776 or so, when we were trying to formulate a new type of government, bringing together all sorts of white dudes with differing views on how to construct a nation, we should have begun to eliminate the concept of hero worship.  It can’t be done from the outside, it’s something we have to do for ourselves.  Hero worship is why we had kingdoms and monarchies and lordships and all of that nonsense for so long.  It was the belief that certain people were better than ourselves.  By birth, wealth, achievement, or an ascribed status, there are people we think are just…better. 

             Which, if you’ve been paying attention, is all a bunch of horseshit. Politics and fame keep those notions alive. We place actors and musicians and people who are famous for being famous on pedestals because that’s what we’re used to. We give them the attention and then we covet it for ourselves. If their talent got them where they are and they succeed as artists, that’s enough.  They aren’t really anything more than that.  When you hear about Michael Jackson or Bill Cosby committing heinous crimes, you shouldn’t be heartbroken.  You should be ashamed or enraged.  They weren’t heroes.  They were just broken men.  Your attachment to their art is your business, but as far as referring to these people as fallen heroes…they aren’t.

             Everyone’s mind is made up about the current administration, so I’ll skip the obvious bullet points.  But I have to point out that the man who holds the highest office in the land had absolutely no public service record at all, and by the looks of it, had little grasp of what the job entailed.  He got there by hero worship.  His fans blindly followed an attitude, or the empty promise of a different America, one that no human being could deliver. I included the term ‘fan’ on purpose.  Heroes have fans.  The people we elect to run the most powerful democracy in the world don’t need fans.  Internet celebs on YouTube need fans.

             All these heroes are just flawed human beings.  Can’t we just be honest about these things?  MLK was a womanizer.  He still accomplished quite a bit. Edison was a prick, Tesla was crazy, Jobs was a loon.  John Wayne skipped out on WWII and became an American icon.  Stallone skipped out on Vietnam but made millions as Rambo and Rocky with his star-spangled trunks. 

             From what I can gather, humans have an innate need for belief.  Maybe it helped us keep moving when we didn’t understand fire or what a rainbow was. It’s locked in there, and through spirituality, we exercise that part of our brains.  Somewhere in the back of our minds, we want to see a little of the spiritual manifest itself in our reality.  Something we can see and touch.  We’d like to think that people are special in a way that we aren’t, as if they were touched by something we believe in but can’t see. I’m here to say, it’s time to let that shit die. Your belief is a beautiful thing that you get to nourish and design all by yourself.  Having blind faith in a person because you need proof of what you believe is a dark road that leads to trouble.

             Healthy skepticism.  I feel like this is something that needs to be encouraged.  It is one antidote to the ills of hero worship.  You’re famous?  So what?  Congratulations, but you aren’t a better human being than me.  You can just sing better. You want me to elect you? Keep your catch phrase. Let’s see your record.  Detail how you will get things done.  Tell me who you’d hire.

             I realize that is next to impossible. Hero worship is a multibillion-dollar industry.  Do you know that famous mediocre singer Jessica Simpson is worth over a billion dollars?  It’s because she has a successful fashion and makeup company with her name on everything.  Exactly why would you buy perfume from Jessica Simpson?  Reality TV has turned hero worship into a parody of itself.  Yet millions watch, and they make millions from them. 

             Have you ever pulled a thread that turned out to be connected to one hundred other sweaters?  I feel like I could go on for hours on this topic, opening up a new tangent every 300 words or so. 

             Skepticism isn’t pessimism.  It a mature way of avoiding rip-offs and heartbreak.

Twelve Hundred Words About Writing Eighty Thousand

You'll find no bullshit within.

             I’m not a published author.  I’ve self-published a total of four books and I think I’ve netted about thirty dollars.  I wrote two books before I knew what digital publishing was, and they will remain unpublished because they need to.  I’ve also had about ten false starts over the past ten years.  That is my resume.  I have a vague idea of how to become a successful writer, but it will take time and some investment capital.  As of today, I don’t know a damn thing about how to be successful.

             But I know how to finish writing a book.

             I also know how to finish books from an absolute standstill. I went from writing crappy poems and song lyrics and jokes to writing a book in an afternoon.  I just said, “Fuck it, I’m going to write a book.”  I took a lot of writing classes in college but not a single novel-writing class. I just started. After the first one was a disaster, I bought a few advice books that gave me a few tips.  Those help. A writing book gives toy the feeling you’ve entered a bizarre fraternity.  A subset of humanity that type all of their thoughts, mostly in isolation, in hopes that others will read them and give a shit.

             They’re a bunch of weirdos.  I am one of them.

             Maybe you have had that itch in the back of your mind for years that you want to write a book or at least get some thoughts down.  I can tell you how I did it.  I can’t tell you how to write a good book or a successful book.  You’ll have to find qualified writers for that.  But if you’re a normal person who has that inkling, here are a few things to keep in mind.

             First, no one cares.  Ouch.  Yeah, that sounds brutal, but it's important to accept this right upfront.  No one cares if you plan on writing a book, if you are currently writing one, or even when you complete one.  You could get a few compliments on a job well done, but odds are no one will read it.  People don’t read that much. You have to do it to satisfy yourself. The destination is not the payoff.  You have to enjoy the journey or it's not worth your time.

             Write alone.  This is lifting from Stephen King’s On Writing, but the first part of writing is writing by yourself with no one’s input.  You are the alpha and the omega of the story you are assembling. It is good practice to be solely in charge of making all the life and death decisions.  After you have a completed draft, something coherent that others could read, then you look for readers.  My advice is to only give it to other people who read regularly. Don’t bother loved ones that aren’t into what you’re doing, even if you are dying for their opinion. 

             I also don’t get those people who pop open their laptops in Starbucks and click away at their manuscripts.  I have to assume they aren’t writing anything at all, or they would be at home lost in their own worlds.  Make your own coffee.

             The next realization: You suck.  Hey, I’m not here to mince words.  You probably suck at this.  If you write a great book out of the gate, you should be giving me advice.  The point is to finish it.  If you are only interested in writing a single book, then rewrites will get you there.  If you want to push forward with more, then getting the first couple of stinkers out to the way is helpful.

             Okay, so how to actually do it?  This is the advice that NONE of these books delve into, by the way.  There’s a lot of good motivation and a few tips, but they assume you are a writing machine that needs calibration.  If you really don’t know how to start, here’s what I did:

             I thought about the stuff I enjoy.  I like sci-fi and I’ve always been a fan of time travel.  What about all these books and movies do I like, specifically? I wrote it all down in pen in a ten-cent notebook. The plot twists, action scenes, relationships, and surprises.  Every dumb detail.  Then I thought about a character in this mess.  Someone like me, but not like me.  I had a scene come to mind.  Tossed it.  Had another one.  Tweaked it three times then I wrote it.  It wasn’t the first scene in the story, but I wrote it first because it was what I was feeling.  That’s all I had. One scene.  It equated to a single chapter.  The book had a fuzzy beginning and no ending planned.  It was just a scene.

              Then, and this is the important part, you keep going.  It’s the work of typing.  What a lot of people don’t get as that for most writers, the blueprints of a story are hazy.  They are the bare bones of a few ideas laid end to end.  If an architect handed in plans this vague for a building, he’d be fired immediately. They have to be vague because you keep changing the rules and parameters. 

             This is the truth:  I have yet to complete a book where I didn’t throw the first five-thousand words or so away.  Maybe my third Hank book was the exception because I had so much story banked at that point. The point is to keep typing.

             How do you do this?  You need about eighty-thousand words minimum for a decent-sized novel. The first Harry Potter book, (the tiniest one) is seventy-six thousand.  That means if you can get one thousand words a session, it will take you three months.  You need a least an hour every day to do this.  Sometimes you crank out more, sometimes less.  Here is the important part.  Unless you can set up this schedule, don’t bother.  The notion of taking your sweet-ass time with a novel is insane.  Per the master of the writer’s work ethic, Stephen King, you have to get your draft done in three months. He is 100% correct.  There is something about stretching it past that point that pushes the limits of your interest.  You stop caring or you want to move on.  If you have something resembling a draft, you can proceed to editing and rewrites.

             For help with the building blocks of a fictional story (characters, dialogue, plot), there are plenty of books out there to help you.  My problem was plot.  I needed to beef up the middles or I’d just have a short story. For non-fiction, I will assume that you need to tell the truth, and to remember that specificity is universal. People like the details. 

             Don’t get bogged down thinking that writers are elite. Take a peek at some of the trashy novels littering the Amazon e-book market.  They’re not impressive. Their qualifications are that they finished writing a book.  That’s what you want to do.  If you want to write like John Updike, you’re wasting your time reading my stupid blog.

             So yeah, it’s work.  As far as the original germ of an idea, it helps to handwrite it with messy notes with lines and circles to spread it out and see if it has legs.  Some cool ideas are only part of a story, not the whole thing.  If you want it, it’s doable with time and patience. Like a lot of things in life.

             Remember the words in bold:  No One Cares. Write Alone. You Suck.  Keep Going.

             Etch those in my tombstone, while you’re at it.

Prequel Thoughts (Yes. Really.)

No, they really aren't good!

Disney Plus gave me a chance to revisit the Star Wars prequels.  I have copies gathering dust on a shelf, but I thought I’d sample the new streaming service with some movies I haven’t seen in a long time. 

Truthfully, I didn’t watch them all the way.  I kinda scrubbed through the first two.  I’ll probably sit through the entire third one only because I’ve seen it the fewest times.  But, I’m not hopeful.  They’re still not good.

I’d seen Episodes I and II multiple times because they came out when my boys were little.  They were into everything.  The figures, the lightsabers, the ships, the robots.  We had board games and video games.  They dressed up Star Wars for Halloween.  I loved that so much.  But the movies themselves, they never really stuck.

I’ve rewritten them so many times in my head and I think I have solid fixes for everything.  It’s all for naught because they are what they are and they will never be changed.  It was a multi-billion missed opportunity, even though all of the movies were financially successful. 

My only thought last night as I watched them was, which one sucks more and why?

Movies, especially fantasy and sci-fi, are allowed one or two sins. A miscasting, a plot hole, dialogue that’s a little flat, dated special effects, shitty music.  Every movie gets at least one, maybe two of these, and can still be considered good or at least a solid film experience.  If you start having more than two, you might be faced with a turd.  The cool thing is these sins occur in the eye of the beholder, and that’s where arguments begin. 

The Phantom Menace has too many sins. Lucas’ traditionally wooden dialogue seems almost petrified when the actors deliver it and the lessons that he learned in the original series aren’t used.  The originals are fun, with moments of melodrama sprinkled throughout to give them some dramatic weight.  Think about all the old scenes on the Falcon.  Jokes, levity, flirting, and you get the exposition out there.  The quiet and solemn scenes only happen when Vader and the Emperor hash out their evil shit.  Phantom is almost all solemn scenes.  Lots of slow walking and escorting people from place to place.  There’s also too much air between delivered lines which felt like the padding of an already bloated scene.

There are some action bits that age okay, but they’re mostly flat because the CG in 1999 isn’t holding up.  The saber battle at the end is still very cool, and it might be the best one in the entire series. I won’t bitch at all about that.

The glaring sins begin with weird Asian-American accents by the by Trade guys that sucked then and seem ridiculous now.  Jar Jar still sucks, and Jake Lloyd was horrifically miscast as a little Anakin. His direction was bad and so was the dialogue he delivered. Podracers couldn’t make up for all of that mess.  I could go beat by beat complaining about the plot, but to save time and sanity I will declare now that the biggest problem with Episode I is that it does not need to exist!  I don’t mean the wholesale dumping of these movies into the trash bin of history.  I mean, that story-wise, even in the story that Lucas cobbled together for the prequels, Episode I is pointless.  One of the first scenes of Episode II features Obi-Wan and Anakin in an elevator reminiscing about the past, as they are about to meet Padme.  That very concise scene could have kicked off the entire series.

You don’t need any of it. No Qui-Gon, no little Anakin, no Ani’s mom, no Trade bullshit, no Jar Jar.  Lucas rewound too far.

Attack of the Clones is just a flat-out boring movie.  The last twenty minutes are battle scenes that aren’t as cool as I remember and the huge assault by the Jedi wasn’t that impressive.  Most of the movie contains stiff romantic scenes and a lot of walking and nodding in the halls of the Senate. Yoda’s saber battle isn’t a fitting successor to the three-way battle in Ep I, and Hayden Christensen isn’t that great, either.  My ultimate revelation? Episode II is shittier than Episode I.  Neither are good, but at least Episode I has moments that you remember.  Sabers, Maul, Podrace. Do you even remember what happens in Episode II?  There aren’t any quotes or scenes that anyone has ever mentioned since the movie was released.  Plus, Lucas should have fixed the problems he had in the first one and he didn’t.

Here is my fix:

Erase Episode I, except keep the character of Darth Maul.

The new Episode I is what Ep II is currently, except lose Dooku and replace with Maul.  The entire trilogy is the story of Obi-Wan; through his eyes.  Anakin and Padme grow closer through adventure, not a trip to Naples or wherever.  Keep all the Palpatine bullshit, but in the background. 

Biggest change:  Eliminate the entire notion of the Jedi council.  Their role is murky at best and they are treated like bureaucrats. Instead, make them mysterious, hooded, in the shadows.  Their home and meetings are secret.  When they walk into a room, everything stops.  They aren’t cops.  They are outside of normal society, and step in when needed.  I want them to be bad-ass mofo’s.

The new Episode II is a war movie.  Battle scenes, a homefront, romance.  Lots of losses and Obi-Wan sees his protégé slip away.  A new figure emerges and kills Maul.  He is Vader, but he’s also Anakin still.  He’s playing two parts just like Palpatine.  Obi-Wan discovers the secret.

Ep III.  Battle, Jedi’s are getting slaughtered, Padme gives birth in secret and dies from a war wound.  Anakin get fucked up, add helmet. Credits.

I think every fan of Star Wars has their own version of the above, so I’m happy to add mine to the pile. 

It’s Just Too Darn White In Here.

What, nine different cultures came together to create this deliciousness? 

             I’m an American.  I was born in Upstate New York and this is the country I’ve lived in my whole life.  America is a unique place because it may be the only country where each person has a different definition of what the country should be.  It’s an idea first, then a country.  My idea of America is a place where people from all over the world came to make a life for themselves.  In those four hundred years, we have created thousands of subcultures, accents, cuisines, languages, communities, and…hairstyles that are somehow linked to an original country and still remaining uniquely American.  

             Gumbo.  Chow Mein.  Buffalo wing pizza.  Square dancing. The high-top fade.

             I’m also white.  German, French, Irish, Italian, some Polish in there too.  Pretty honky.  But those cultures don’t make me feel at home.  American culture does. By its very nature, it is comprised of mixed race and ethnicity; religion and social class.  I feel so connected to it that when I experience something that’s too white, I have a knee-jerk reaction to reject it. Even though I’m white. 

             Remember the 1980’s?  The friggin’ 1980’s?  Well, I do.  I didn’t like the decade that much.  I especially didn’t like the music that was pumped through the soundtrack of every John Hughes movie.  You know what I mean. Synthesizer-heavy, whiny, empty songs of sorrow from young white people.  That shit always got under my skin.  I hated it. It was something about white people complaining that made me want to puke.  It wasn’t a white band ripping off a black sound as best as they could, it was raw white suburban songs of breakups and feeling sad because the skies were gray.  American pop began from black music from the church and the fields.  It became rock and country, hip hop and soul.  The more you pull it away from those roots and whiten it up, the less I’m interested. 

             I tried to explain it this way:  I like the mix of American influences.  If it was in one big Venn circle, the further you got away it, the less likely I was interested.  Especially the super-white stuff.

             I can’t tell you why Joy Division was whiter than Tom Petty.  But they were.

             Most of the shit in my music collection and on my phone is by white people.  There’s just something they’ve tapped into that interests me that I don’t hear from in those songs from 80’s.  I also am not a fan of the Winter Olympics.  There’s some international stuff that’s fun, but when you get into the skiing and snowboarding shit, it’s obviously the white people’s Olympics.  When white people begin to be beaten by others, they tend to create new sports to dominate.  The new sports are more exclusive to join and require expensive equipment. They can win because they can afford it. There’s something about watching the 16-year-old with the groovy first name land at the bottom of the hill in front of her hedge-fund parents that rubs me the wrong way.  Too white, is all I can think of.

             You won’t hear me bitching about inclusivity in our entertainment, either.  I like it in my sci-fi, fantasy, action, drama, and comedy. It adds to the validity of the project.  It’s odd to see an all-white cast these days, isn’t it?  I’m glad.  Inclusion means new outlooks, opinions and new stories.  I’m white, I probably have a pretty white point of view, but I already know what it is.  There’s room for so many voices out there that may surprise you and make for a better piece of art. This isn’t the result of a sea change in the American cultural landscape. These are stories that have been here for decades. Centuries.  The difference it we’re getting access to them now because of technology and the way we access things. That white America you believe constituted the entirety of our national story was always just one point of view.  It was just bigger and louder.

             Sorry, all you white-supremacist scumbags out there, being white is not the end-all be-all of the human existence.  We’re part of the story but we’re not the whole story.  I’m a white guy; almost my entire family is white, but it’s also not our singular defining feature, either. We benefit from cultural influences and that very notion is so very American. We are who we are because we get to experience differences. It happens all over the world, but we established a country where that was essentially the prime directive.  Embrace it.

             I also never liked Bing Crosby.  Punk-ass bitch.

              

I Shall Host You At The Waystation

Plumbing the depths of understanding who you are and who you were meant to be isn’t all bad.  At first, for most people, it's necessary.  We all need to know who we are and how we fit in.  After that work is done, you should just go and be that person.  Hunting for every scrap of your personality isn’t crucial to a healthy life. Although, when you write, you are essentially examining different aspects of yourself over and over again. You end up using every part of your personality buffalo.  It can get really dumb.
(Just like that opening paragraph.)

One of the many unusual parts of me is the need to be a host.  I friggin’ love to host things.  I know, I know. I’ve bitched and moaned about how anti-social I am and how engaging with others is foreign to me. That’s just it.  Hosting means you can control the social environment and be able to interact at the same time.  I like to entertain and cook and serve for people too. I like to figure out what to serve. My wife is the real chef, but I like to be in the kitchen. I like to wander around from conversation to conversation and try and dig into each one.  I like picking out background music. I like to organize games and all of that shit. 

Do I?  Hardly ever.

Here are some remaining daydreams and memories to further explain this fluffy, sweet, and lighthearted corner of my mind.

I have always been obsessed with waystations.  What the hell is a waystation, you ask?  Great question.  It’s the closest term I can use to approximate this emotion, so I’m running with it.  In every big epic movie, there is a scene in a bar, a tavern, a restaurant where characters from the story interact.  They get a new chunk of the story and meet new characters to further the plot.  It’s the Mos Eisley Cantina in Star Wars, the Hogs Head Inn in Harry Potter, the Prancing Pony in Lord of the Rings.  It’s the place where you see the crazy drinks and butterbeer and dragon egg omelets.  I love those scenes.  I always wanted to be a part of a place like that.  I could take care of weary travelers, offer them food or drink and some time by a big fire. You don’t go on the adventure, but you are somehow an essential part of the story.  It appeals to me.

I love entertaining. I loved doing comedy, mostly for my friends and family.  I get a charge out of it too, but making people laugh is a goddamned pleasure.  I remember back in 1989, my grandmother was staying with us.  There was a reunion that year, and some of the obligatory family drama was bringing my grandmother down.  At that time, I taped every damn comedy special that came on HBO.  I remembered one by Alan King, who was close to my grandmother’s age and of her WWII generation. I asked her if she had ever heard of him and I believe she did.  I put in the tape for her and she laughed out loud for an hour.  She knew all the references and she had a good time.  That is one of my favorite memories of my grandmother, even though I didn’t tell her the jokes, I did help get her to laugh.  I turned my living room into a waystation for one afternoon.

It comes from a love of giving.  That sounds self-congratulatory, but it is a fact.  Hey, I don’t mind getting things, but I love to give things. I spent thirty years making mix tapes for other people.  Maybe 300 or so at my last count.  I liked barbecues and birthday parties and Secret Santa exchanges and all that corny shit.  I suppose you need someone who’s willing to make the effort to make those things happen.  In my life, it’s me.

If I like creating social events, why am I not social?  I have a few ideas, but the truth is I don’t care.  If I can find a way to create them again, I’ll do it. 

I think I’m supposed to.

Three Opinions Outside Anywhere, USA

Relax.  It's a lot of buildings.

               (Sometimes it doesn’t warrant 800 words.  I make a small pile of ‘em to get them out of my brain.)

             “I miss New York when it was grittier, scarier.”  I will never in a million years understand this notion.  I’ve heard this a hundred times from former residents or admirers of New York City.  They resent the cleaned-up Times Square, with tourist stores and ten-story neon signs.  What they long for is the seventies and eighties version, with widespread drug abuse, prostitution, peep shows, and garbage lining the streets.  Something about this older version feels more authentic to them.  More real and less sanitized.  I’m assuming of course that they’re not wishing they could be the victim of a crime; I just think that is somehow looked cooler back then.

             I’ve thought about this for years, especially when it’s been pointed out that I’ve lived in one version of the suburbs or another my whole life: The scary, bullet-ridden kind and the quieter kind where you get the occasional noise complaint or occurrence of mailbox baseball.  This may come as a shock, but I like the quiet one better. See, my theory is that most of these people who prefer a scary NYC lived some awesomely privileged lives. Congratulations, you’ve never been scared to go home. Whether they had money or not, they likely didn’t live where scary shit happened.  Because if you did, and you had the opportunity to escape. You’d realize that there are far worse things than a giant M & M store.  I’d take a Disney movie-turned into a stage play over busted crack vials on the street any day.  You resent that your childhood was boring, and you lived in a lame place.  Be thankful.  Boring is good.

             On a tangent, I’d like to also say to any and all citizens of New York City that absolutely no one gives a shit that you were born there, grew up there, or live there presently.  There is nothing more narcissistic than New York’s hometown pride.  They are the cream of the crop when it comes to believing that anyone is impressed that they are from a place. They think it's like sharing a war story from a veteran, or like you’ve climbed the Matterhorn with a donkey on your back.  Nope.  You are from a huge city where millions of other people live. New Yorkers love their city, and they have a lot of reason to. It’s an amazing place.  But they seem to be under the delusion that New York is the only city that exists.  It’s not.

 The same goes from wherever you’re from, too.  Texas people believe it means something to be from Texas.  It doesn’t.  Nobody cares.  Chicago, Detroit, Hawaii, Alaska, Miami, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Kalamazoo.  I’m not saying that you shouldn’t love where you live or be proud of a place that you’re from.  I love Oregon.  But I don’t expect anyone to give a shit.  We also aren’t automatic representatives of our hometowns.  I’ve been asked about Florida a bunch after I moved out here and I have nothing interesting to tell.  Outside of the Sunshine State, it’s believed that Florida is part Wild West, part Hee-Haw, part Bizarro World.  It’s not.  It's filled with plenty of lunatics and shit-for-brains, but so is your state.  It’s just really fucking humid there. 

I guess the common thread today is the ideas of home and community.  Not the actual town, but our attachment to the idea of it.  That brings me to an opinion I have that surprises a lot of people. It bumps them because I have a degree in history and I’ve always been mindful of historical contexts.  I don’t care about preserving Main Street. I remember a show on the History Channel before it became about Ice Road Truckers.  It was about the push to keep the buildings of the Main Streets of old towns intact.  Not for any historical significance necessarily, but just because it was built in the forties or so and people don’t like the idea of it going away.

I say, plow that shit.  Unless it actually has some historic value, (a historical figure's home, the site of an important event, the first firehouse built in the state, etc.) I say it’s perfectly cool to let that shit go.  If Main Street failed its Main Street’s fault.  Main Street is essentially a collection of business ventures.  They failed over and over, so it’s time to move on.  These particular buildings were there to participate in our shared capitalist system.  They weren’t like more ancient towns, created around churches or settled near waterways for international trade.  Those places can still exist.  They reinvent themselves over and over.  A lot of these Main Streets were attempts to attract business to small towns.  They wanted to play the game of capitalism and they lost. I don’t need to see why we have to preserve that.  I don’t care about closing malls or old drive-ins either.  You can’t preserve something simply because it makes you bummed that an era is gone.

What was there before Main Street?  A meadow?  Grazing land for indigenous people and animals?  No tears for letting that turn into a Woolworth?

What to put in the place of Main Street? I don’t know…maybe homeless shelters, affordable housing, vocational schools, community food banks, community gardens, pre-K’s, free clinics, city parks, transit systems, windmills, solar panels, fruit trees, shade trees, community pools, adult care facilities, research centers, infrastructure projects that attract workers, dog walks, dog parks, petting zoos, farmer’s markets, art fairs, skate parks, skating rinks, festival space…or you could just raze the whole thing and let nature have it back.