2/28/05

I'm pretty sure I haven't completely wasted my life -- that would take as much effort as completely redeeming it. There's no point in trying to improve the occasions of nightmares, of spilled milk and flat tires and busted love affairs and all the other unpredictable little joys of entropy. But there's certainly no point in lamenting their ravaging of your aren't-making-any-more-of-it temporal real estate either. So what if you didn't write the Great American Novel during that traffic jam yesterday?

On the other hand, I certainly have been wasting a lot of my precious time recently. Or more accurately, my neurochemistry has. It's been the endless late winter blahs around my brain, the kind of sluggish, limited walking depression that's stepmother to insomnia and writer's block, presenting the classic off-the-greasy-shelf symptoms of low energy, weight gain, moodiness, lack of motivation and so on and so forth. My thoughts lie dull and flat as used tinfoil, physical work of any type feels like an uphill battle, my soul cries out in torment oh, why bother? Blah blah blah. My horrible old condition, isn't this inneresting.

Normally, my solace as an artist is that bad times make good art, but the cloggy drains of my creativity have even shut that escape route off. Unless and until my muse gets back from her whirlwind tour of farthest elsewhere, the Great American Entertainer, television, becomes my substitute for uninspired composition or writing or graphic design. Sandahbeth, who despite recent improvement is still constrained to evenings watching tv in lieu of watching the walls, is grateful for the company.

I myself am grateful for the distraction. Sit still and let the tv suck me dry, join the other umpteen million Americans draining their lives away through their eyes. Watching Simpsons reruns, no doubt. No, doubt! I'm a CSI and Law and Order kind of guy, actually -- which puts me in a quandary, since those two franchises appear locked in a cage match ratings rivalry, head to head, snarling savagely, straining to pull yet-more-implausibly murderous plot devices out of their writers' collective ruptured rectums. Short of the ultimate degeneracy of taping one or the other, I'm left to take my chances.

Boy, I hear you cry (not really -- I can't hear anything through this mordant cotton wool swaddling my senses), those crime guy shows are really grim! Why don't you watch something lighter? Oh, like, say, Judge Judy? O-or maybe one of those crypto-blackface "comedies" the WB (or is it UPN?) seems to be such a specialist in! It's modern urban life at its best! Oh, but we could switch to Enterprise and see the slow, agonizing death of a once-great sf franchise under the blundering boots of corporate raiders. And finish off the night with Fox News!

Thank goodness for public television. Not. Care for another pulse-pounding reiteration of Antique Road Show? A heaping helping of cute little ugly-ass baby critters on Nature? Incompetent, slow-as-a-glacier expositions of physics on Nova? Or there could be another conceited Ken Burns documentary on, it's just like American history with him, all downhill after the Civil War.

But wait. Actually, there is at least one crumb of content on PBS that doesn't turn me away, and that's the jolly derangement, the rollicking juggernaut of wrack and ruin that is Mythbusters.

Every week, two versatile and highly experienced refugees from special effects studios, one sanguine and methodical, the other enthusiastic and mildly self-destructive, mutilate an hour of your time quite literally deconstructing some vapidly plausible urban legend, generally with the aid of either 1) High explosives 2) Corrosive chemicals 3) Grossly putrescence and/or mortified flesh 4) Radio-controlled vehicles 5) A beleaguered crash test dummy named Buster or 6) All of the above. Be it the raccoon hunter who fired himself out of the culvert with gasoline, the trombonist who blew down the audience during the 1812 Overture (a personal favorite), the leap of faith that saves you in the elevator crash or constructing antigravity machines out of old vacuum cleaners, these guys spare no expense or landscape in reenacting and verifying or (most often) gleefully pulverizing, nay disintegrating popular misconceptions.

It's that glee that I think attracts me more than anything else. Angst, drama queenery and overblown emotional involvement are the equestrian statues the pigeons in the park deface, so iconic have they become. It's not just refreshing but downright invigorating to see a couple intelligent, ingenious dudes apply such innocent, joyful energy to simply blowing shit up. Steeped in the lore of stunt safety, replete with blast screens, firecrews and demolition experts, they yet exude all the exuberance of a couple of sticklegged twelve-year-olds in a vacant lot, seeing how much trouble they can get into with last 4th of July's leftover cannon cracker. It's one of the traditions of the show that, if ordinary attempts to confirm or discredit the myth fail from lack of firepower, extraordinary measures can and will be taken, generally resulting in an extremely loud report and reconfigured countryside.

In an era when national politics and the evening news have seemingly gone completely loco, it stands to whatever substitutes for reason during such a time that an entertainment should surface dealing entirely with the violent and percussive destruction of falsehood. We of the Legion of the Depressed can only be grateful that such invigorating fare has made it past the suits and onto the telescreens of the land, there to bust us out of our own myths of helplessness and futility and blast us into the bright and shining new day. Gentlemen, I salute you.

2/21/05

For at least one of my pals, that valuation extends to include his ability to call bullshit on me. I may be shy, but I ain't especially retiring, especially in the heat of argument. And while I strive to be a reasonable man and to eschew mindless fomentations when confronted with less than sufficient rationales, some things just push -- my -- buttons. It's always good to have someone around to saw you off at the stirrups when you're getting too tall in the saddle.

We had wandered onto the subject of missionaries, by way of negative examples on the doorstep. For me, the novelty of even having a doorstep after half a life of vehicular domesticity has yet to wear off, and earnest black suits trying to earn brownie points with Big Daddy Gawd by impinging on it are even more pernicious by contrast. I came to the door, they announced their intentions, and I said "Goodbye" and closed the door in their freshly-scrubbed faces. It's exactly the same tactic that I use on telemarketers. Sandahbeth remarked that I could have been a little nicer, but I see no purpose to it, except maybe gaining merit, a brownie point of its own.

So there we were talking missionaries, and I commented that I wasn't going to bring them into my parlor and debate evolution with them. And my pal said, "Yeah, well, evolution's just a theory." At which point Mt St Thaddeus erupted in full fury.

I'm sure he didn't mean anything by it. Probably he didn't really know or care that "theory" is one of those words that's used as a Weapon of Mass Distraction by the God Squad. He listened to about thirty seconds of my thermonuclear diatribe, head cocked on one side, smiling a peculiar little smile, and observed, "You sound like somebody who's defending his religious beliefs."

It didn't stop me then, although I managed to choke my indignation off and go on to less uproarious topics of conversation. But the next day, in the midst of rehashing the discussion in my mind and getting mad all over again, it hit me -- he was dead right. My response to criticisms of evolution were as vehement as any fundie's Bible-beating fervor. I'd like to think I had better excuse, defense of Western Civilization and Rationality and Enlightenment and Free Thought and all that, but it's the character of the response that was out of whack here, not the content. I invariably swell up and turn green whenever the topic gets mentioned. And that's just weird.

There's an old truism I've muttered before about anger: Whenever you're angry, there's something you don't understand. The truism doesn't go into specifics, and in this case I didn't even understand what I was angry about. After all, I could happily and snappily debate any number of controversial topics from theology to zoology without breaking a sweat and go have a tall cold one (make mine water) with the debatee afterwards. It's all good fun and college bull-session fare. So what was it that I was so gawdawful riled up about with evolution?

Clearly, only deep anxiety or insecurity could trigger such a response, be it from a religious or secular viewpoint. For the religious person defending their faith, the anxiety might stem from someone staking their soul's immortality on a tale out of church, whatever church it might be, in the face of overwhelming evidence that either 1) there's no God 2) if there is one He/She/It doesn't care a rap about humans or 3) He/She/It has set the world in motion and is sitting Somewhere watching it like a widescreen tv, head cocked on one side, smiling a peculiar little smile. Munching popcorn. Theological defensiveness is not only understandable, it's darned near inevitable.

Christians, of course, might counter that my own anxiety stems from resisting the baying of the Hound of Heaven. Well, whatever. As a born n bred member of this our all-too-Christian country, my unconscious is no doubt loaded to the gills with all the spyware and worms and viruses that the Jesus media can cram in there. (Choir of precious little cherubs in matching pink robes flutter over singing "Softly... tenderly... jeeezuz is calling..." I break out my trusty can of Raid. Precious little cherubs discover pressing business elsewhere).

The Darwinists and the Bible brigade have been laying into it for a solid hundred and fifty years now, with the jeebusbots dragging the debate through every torturous twist of sophistic boowocky known to rhetoric-kind, mucking up the public discourse to the point where even coming within earshot is to risk a pawful of poo in the face. If ever there was evidence of our descent from the apes, this is it.

In truth, I was raised to be a footsoldier in this war right from reruns of Inherit the Wind on up. I come by my choler as honestly, if not liturgically, as the next sweating gun. And it's a valid conflict: give way to spiral-eyed fundies and the next thing you know it's Animal Farm up the gazebo (ewwwww). The name "Galileo" ring a bell? Eternal vigilance boys, eternal vigilance. NOOOObody expects the Spanish Inquisition... Mostly, though, I just feel stuck in an endless battle I didn't sign on for. I've reached the end of my k-rations on this whole polarized-America scenario the Big Guys seem so all fired up to put us through. Neither science or religion are competitive sports, nor should they be.

I'd rather see a little of that good old agree-to-disagree spirit that made us great back in the house -- anything to mitigate the great sucking noise that's replaced civilized discussion in the Land of the Free.

2/14/05

To all my loyal readers (both of you...)

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!

2/7/05

Well it was certainly my birth-anniversary, anyways -- the main event having taken place in the distant past of the Truman administration. I know, I know, birthdays are for kids and centenarians and everyone in between needs to suck it up and keep plodding. There's plenty of graveyard for everyone, soldier, just wait your turn. I can't help it if my inner child's an egocentric narcissistic 6 year old.

Once you're past the balloons and funny hats stage, much of the fun of birthdays resides in their relationship to that groovy parlor game, What's My Sign. Second only to ouija boards in its potential for mischief, the pursuit of endless intricately defined interrelationships between natal moment and the zodiac stands as a high-water mark for the flood of human self-delusion. Yes, it is the inspiration for the science of astronomy and yes, there are indeed deep philosophical and spiritual truths embodied in its teachings, but no, reading Sidney Omar in the Daily Blah is a reflex suitable only for pithed frogs.

The big attraction of astrology is that it can anoint the recipient of a chart with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal nebbishes. Hey, Spunky, you say your life's a squalid dustbunny swept under the bed of existence? Well, stand up and take a walk in the sunshine, you're a Pisces with Taurus rising, a water sign with tremendous powers of concentration from Mercury in Aries and Jupiter up your nose! With nothing more to go on than the accident of your birth's annual synchronization, the creative astrologer can come up with a whole gumball machine's worth of glowing generalizations about your life, your character and your happy destiny.

These days I tend to foreswear the more, uh, engrossing mystical arts as poor substitutes for stamp collecting. But that doesn't keep me from being at least a little egotistical about my place in the Semigreat Scheme of Things when cake and candles time rolls around. So this year I came up with a different sort of prognostication, the Internet Horoscope. Utilizing the googlicious resource of endless search and linkage, I tried to find out just who else was involved in this, my own personal Coming Out.

I immediately discovered that I missed the boat -- born just a couple days earlier, I'd have shared my Groundhog's Day party with such notables as Graham Nash, Farrah Fawcett, Tom Smothers, Christie Brinkley, James Dickey, Ayn Rand and James Joyce. Now that's a birthday. Even if I'd been too early for that shindig, had I appeared on 2/1 I'd be joining the likes of Big Boi (from Outkast, y'all), Lisa Presley, Rick James, Branden Lee, Boris Yeltsin, SJ Perelman, Langston Hughs, Clark Gabel and John Ford, not even mentioning my grandfather. Between the two, a disappointingly large charge of talent to be shut off from by such a narrow margin.

The fun drops off considerably as you approach Me Day. 2/3 only boasts Fran Tarkenton, Joey Bishop, James Michener and Norman Rockwell, saved from the mediocrity of those last by the one n only Gertrude Stein, who was probably just fashionably late to the earthpig bash the day before.

Still, I'm not in entirely questionable company here on 2/4. Chief amongst the crew is undoubtedly Charles Lindbergh of Spirit of St Louis fame, single-handed conqueror of the Atlantic via kapockaty homebrew monoplane, braving wing ice and fatigue through the long night to triumphantly taxi up to the terminal at Orley Field, who was asked in private by the King of England, "Sir? How did you pee?" A simple and true American hero, Lindbergh's later slouch towards facism never seriously tarnished the luster of his greatest achievement.

Not to be outdone, on the distaff side we have Rosa Parks, heroine of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a subject I've had recent occasion to discuss. Never underestimate the power of a woman with tired feet to fearlessly face down three hundred years of oppression rather than drag herself up and move to the back. And while we're on the subject, another female denizen of 2/4, Betty Friedan, had her own way of taking a firm but ladylike swing at a similar edifice of Western prejudice with her groundbreaking feminist work The Feminine Mystique. I remember a copy of it sitting on my mother's dresser when I was a child. I have no memory of the look of consternation on my stepfather's face that probably accompanied it.

In the entertainment zone there's classic glam/shock rocker (and Zappa protege) Alice Cooper, fashionable in black mascara, torn nylons and python, as well as notable country artists Clint Black and Tim Ryan. A bare sampling of movie talent, actress Ida Lupino and Living Dead writer/director George A. Romero. No literary icons, but the respected and imaginative Civil War historian MacKinlay Kantor, whose parallel world If the South Had Won the Civil War was a first glimpse for me of a style of history that wasn't all memorization and plotless exposition.

And two other, perhaps less renowned, notables. Clyde Tombaugh, a self-taught astronomer who once constructed a telescope using part of a crankshaft from a 1910 Buick for a mount, was hired by Lowell Observatory to look for Percival Lowell's theoretical Planet X and actually found it. We know it today as Pluto. And Marion Monroe -- no, not Marilyn, Marion -- was the social scientist who wrote -- wait for it -- the Dick and Jane books. Talk about your immortality!

Last but not least, a big shout-up for my birthday-brother and fellow entertainer "Toes" Tiranoff, tapdancer and film-maker extraordinary, born six hours and four hundred miles from me, who calls every year to chat.

Okay, there was one other guy popped up on my turf: Dan Quayle. The guy who once boasted that he stood by every misstatement he'd ever made. Him I could do without. But, of course, I can't. That's how horoscopes are.