How Rocky Balboa Taught Your Mom to Fear Black Men and Communism
August 21, 2013
For years, I’ve been talking about how you can understand the Baby Boomer generation by watching all the Rocky movies. Well, the theory has finally been published at As It Ought To Be.
Our new shower curtain
July 3, 2013
(Click here to read Part 1 and/or Part 2)
Things you need to know before reading this blawg:
Number 1: I am bad at directions. No, that’s not quite right. How about this? I am terrible at directions. Actually, that still does not accurately describe my shortcomings in this particular area. OK, OK, I’ve got it. Ready? If “directions” were “making inoffensive public statements about Jews” I would be Mel Gibson. That about sums it up.
Number 2: I can drive perfectly well, but I haven’t owned a car since 1999.
Number 3: I mentioned that we have a cat, right? And I also happened to casually indicate that she might possibly be a demon spawn from another dimension, correct? OK, just checking.
Number 4: The Less Abrasive Pessimist and I both hate driving. H. A. T. E. She gets road anxiety; I get road rage. It isn’t pretty.
Number 5: When I get bored, I have imaginary conversations in my head. These usually start out as fairly innocuous chats with people I know or people I would like to meet or random inanimate objects. However, if I get really bored and tired and stressed and trapped inside the tiny cab of a truck traveling down an endless flat road with the sun shining directly in my face for ten hours at a time and small-town radio preachers telling me the world is going to end because Obama uses the wrong kind of spoon to eat his breakfast cereal, the conversations in my head start getting a little…weird. Just FYI.
Number 6: Google Maps says it’s about a 16-hour drive from Boulder to Austin. It took closer to 20 hours. (See Numbers 1,2, and4)
So we finally gave up on the moving company and rented a truck. And since there was no way in hell that The Less Abrasive Pessimist was going to drive it, and since it was my fault we were in this mess in the first place, guess who got behind the wheel. (See Number 2.)
By this time, we were more than ready to leave. We were like those neurotic tigers at the zoo pacing back and forth in their cramped cages. We wanted out. It was late notice on a Monday, so finding help was difficult, but we were soon joined by our musician friend Nate Cook, lead singer of one of my favorite bands The Yawpers (this pathetic plug and two Budweisers were his only compensation), and Mother Less Abrasive Pessimist.
We had obtained some prescription tranquilizers from our veterinarian for the journey, and The Less Abrasive Pessimist and her mother managed to force one down the throat of our agitated kitten. An hour passed. Nothing. If anything The Tempest was even more energetic than usual. So we gave her another one. Still nothing. But we couldn’t wait any longer. I told The Less Abrasive Pessimist that if the tranquilizers didn’t work on the cat, she could always take them. She was not amused. It was time to go.
The truck was loaded and we were on the road by 4pm. Not a great start, but at least we were moving. Our new landlords had expected us to show up and sign the lease on June 1. It was now the 3rd and we had more than 900 miles of road between us and our new lives.
When I got in the truck, I immediately noticed a fat housefly trapped inside the cab with me. I thought about rolling down the window and setting him free, but then I thought, When is a housefly ever going to have an opportunity like this again? He only lives a few weeks, and he’s going to travel almost a thousand miles in that time. He’ll be a legend in cyclorrhapha history! The Christofly Columbus of insects!
So I put the truck in gear, and we began our adventure!
We got two miles down the road, and The Less Abrasive Pessimist was forced to pull over. The cat was running laps inside the car, yowling like Fran Drescher receiving a rectal exam from a far-sighted proctologist. Apparently, the cat didn’t like the position of her litter box. So The Less Abrasive Pessimist adjusted it to Her Highness’s liking, and she calmed down.
And now back to the adventure!
We hit bumper-to-bumper traffic immediately in Denver. It was move three inches, slam on the breaks, move three more inches. The vein in the side of my forehead began to twitch. The cat kept crawling on top of the boxes in the back seat, and every time The Less Abrasive Pessimist hit the breaks she took a header. I love that animal, but it was still pretty funny to watch.
Finally, after about thirty minutes, the traffic opened up and we were on our way. I’d brought a selection of my favorite CDs for the journey, and I consulted Christofly on what to play. It turned out we were both Johnny Cash fans.
Observation: Johnny Cash proves that the supposed chasm between liberals and conservatives in America is not as wide as we think. Everyone listens to Cash, and he sings for everyone. “Man In Black” is basically a Marxist anthem, and I’m certain “Ragged Old Flag” is being played at Tea Party meetings across the country as I write.
The open road sucks. This is my humble opinion. Songs have been sung and stories told about wagon trains besieged by Indians and intrepid pioneers mauled by bears, but nowadays it’s just a series of gradual right and left turns with the occasional thrill of passing a slow-moving truck with cow butts poking out the back end. After about five hours, it gets to the point where you think a Sioux raiding party or a rabid grizzly would be a welcome change of pace.
Christofly agreed. It was amazing how much we had in common. True, we hadn’t yet discussed things like the Middle East or Obamacare, but there was plenty of time for that. We were trying to keep it light. I’d filled a Coke cap with soda, and placed it on the dashboard for him. Christofly had stopped slamming his head repeatedly against the windshield and was now sipping genially from the cap. We were having a grande old time, two brave journeymen cruising down the highway with the wind in our hair…or antennae or whatever.
We drove through Colorado and the gun barrel of Oklahoma before finally reaching Texas. Oklahoma roads are terrible. We were in Oklahoma for less than an hour, but the whole time it felt like I was driving on Ryan Gosling’s abs. But as soon as we got to Texas, the roads were as smooth as Ryan Gosling’s hairless buttocks.
There was a wind storm at dusk that was incredibly surreal. The sky was cobalt blue and there were all these giant windmills along the highway that were slowly turning like enormous robot drones on some desert planet. Thousands of them lined up in perfect rows. It was freaky.
Finally, we decided to call it a day at around eleven, and we pulled in to a Best Western that accepted pets in the town of Dumas. My guess is the name is supposed to be pronounced like the French writer, Alexandre Dumas, but I’d bet my right arm the locals will tell you they live in Dumb-Ass without a hint of irony. It definitely looked like a town called Dumb-Ass.
Observation: Texas has some great town names. My favorite were Roscoe, Wastella, Fluvanna, and Lawn.
I couldn’t sleep. Perhaps it had something to do with the long drive or the excitement of the journey or the strange hotel room or the five cups of vanilla-flavored coffee, but I just stared at the ceiling as the hours ticked by. The Less Abrasive Pessimist had no such problem. She was snoring like an asthmatic walrus (albeit a cute asthmatic walrus) as soon as her head hit the starched pillow. The cat was still up though. By this time, she was so tired she was staggering around the room like a drunken sailor on shore leave, but there were strange corners to sniff and furniture that had never been jumped on and cabinets to stare at creepily, so she fought to stay awake in order to perform her duties.
After a refreshing three-hour nap, the alarm screamed bloody murder and I stumbled bleary-eyed into the bathroom. I obtained more coffee and we got back on the road. Christofly and I attempted to get the conversational juices flowing by talking about the landscape. We agreed that all these little Texas towns looked the same. One church, one post office, and one bar. But they made you slow down to 30 miles per hour to pass that one church, one post office, and one bar. I suggested that if you stopped at any of these facilities, there would be a small family of emaciated citizens waiting there with a net and a shotgun. “Now you’re gonna pray, have a drink, and send a letter…or else!” they’d say. Christofly agreed.
After jawing a bit more, we put in Johnny Cash again and had ourselves a good old fashioned sing along to keep the blood pumping. We were really getting into it. It was right at the end of “Folsom Prison Blues” when I looked in the rear-view mirror and noticed The Less Abrasive Pessimist’s car wasn’t behind us. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time it was behind us. I then looked at my phone and saw that it was on vibrate from the night before. There were eight missed calls, three voice messages, and two text messages. And it was right about that time I passed a road sign that said, “WELCOME TO OKLAHOMA!”
I’d driven almost an hour in the wrong direction.
Now there are many things I could tell you, dear reader, about how this happened. The phrase that comes to my mind is “sharing valid reasons,” or as The Less Abrasive Pessimist likes to call it, “spreading the bullshit.” For instance, I could bring up the insomnia again from the previous night. Or I could tell you that before checking in to the Best Western we’d pulled up to a La Quinta on the other side of the street, and in the process I got turned around. Or I could remind you that my sense of direction is like Mel Gibson making public statements about Jews. Or I could talk about all those little Texas towns that looked exactly alike (turns out they looked like the same towns from the night before because they actually were the same towns from the night before, but let’s not quibble over details). Of course, none of this explains why I failed to notice my future wife honking and flashing her lights at me for thirty miles. Or why I drove on for twenty minutes after she gave up and pulled to the side of the road, thinking I would immediately notice her absence and check my phone.
I could make excuses for all of this, dear reader, but I’m not the type of man to pass the buck. Nope, “take responsibility for your actions,” that’s my motto. So I’m going to put the blame squarely where it belongs: Christofly.
You see, we had an agreement. I would take care of all the driving, snack purchasing, music playing, and temperature modulating if Christofly kept just one of his many eyes on the rear-view mirror. That was his only job. But Christofly was the jealous type, and he’d gotten it into his little fly head that if he could get rid of the Less Abrasive Pessimist, we could be roommates in Austin. Never mind the fact that I’m a mammal and he’s an insect, or that he had no way to pay his half of the rent, or that he would be dead in a week. None of that mattered to over-possessive little Christofly. So when The Less Abrasive Pessimist pulled to the side of the road, he saw his chance.
I tried to explain all of this to The Less Abrasive Pessimist, but she seemed to think we needed to get back on the road immediately. She had a point. After all the delays, I’d promised our new landlords we would sign the lease before their office closed on June 4 at 5pm. It was now June 4 at 11am, and we still had to drive an hour just to get back to Dumas. (The name of the town was now definitely pronounced Dumb-Ass in my head, but for more personal reasons.)
I called the new landlord and told them we were still on our way, but it looked like it would be past 5pm when we arrived. She was very kind. It sounded like she said she would leave our apartment unlocked with the keys inside, but the phone kept cutting out and I couldn’t be sure. I decided I’d heard that the apartment would be unlocked with the keys inside.
Meanwhile, Christofly and I were not speaking to each other. He had betrayed my trust, and I was not in a forgiving mood. I glared silently at the road, while he tried to get my goat by crawling all over my face. I just ignored him.
Christofly said he wanted to listen to Paul Simon, so I turned on a local country station instead, knowing he would hate that.
Observation: For all its hard-nosed bluster, country might be the sappiest genre of music out there aside from teen pop. When they’re not talking about their pickup trucks or threatening to put a boot in bin Laden’s ass, there’s a lot of romance on the country airwaves. “I’m gonna find me a new way to light up an old flame,” “In all the world you’ll never find a love as true as mine,” “If you’re callin’ bout my heart it’s still yours.”
The great thing about listening to local radio stations is that you get to hear about the local news. For instance, in Roscoe, Texas, a man named Conway Alvarez died recently at the age of 78. He was a prison guard who was survived by his hunting dog and his sister. His wake was being held at his favorite bar, which also happened to be the town’s only bar. This was reported by a deejay simply named Stumpy.
Things were going along just fine until we hit a detour. And then another detour. The first detour worked out OK, and we were routed back around the the proper road. However, on the second detour, they failed tell us where to go, and we ended up on a frontage road next to an empty field. We turned around a few times, consulted the smartphone, and finally found our way back twenty minutes later.
We were hungry, so we pulled in to a truck stop cafe to eat a bunch of starch and meat. By the time we finished, I had gout.
Observation: Texas toilets are literally larger than Colorado toilets.
Observation: There’s a reason Texas toilets are larger than Colorado toilets.
By now we were several hours behind schedule, and it did not appear as though we would get into Austin until almost midnight. I tried to call the landlord and relay this information, but only managed to leave a voice message. We drove. And drove. And drove. When night came, we were alone on the road, aside from the giant semis, which were lit up like carnival floats after dark.
And then, just when I was starting to lose all feeling below the waist, we finally passed a sign welcoming us to Austin. Christofly and I cheered and high-fived, an act that unfortunately sent Christofly careening across the cab. But he shook it off and we laughed and laughed and laughed. It had been a long journey, and although we’d had our differences, we decided to bury the fly swatter. We were friends again, and I promised to share our new apartment with him, although he was not allowed to regurgitate on our food.
We pulled up to our new apartment complex, found the right door, and turned the handle.
Locked.
I almost cried. I texted our apartment manager, Brooke, and she bounced right over, as if letting people in to their apartment in the middle of the night was her favorite part of the job. We thanked her profusely, blew up an air mattress, and fell asleep.
When I got up the next morning to move our stuff, I opened the truck door and Christofly Columbus flew out before I could stop him. He zoomed up into the bright blue sky, excited to explore the new land he had discovered.
Things you need to know before reading this blawg:
Number1: After three years together, the less abrasive pessimist and I got engaged at the same cemetery I took her to on our first date. This was surprising news, to say the least, for my friends and family, who had started to compare my relationships to M. Night Shyamalan movies: in the beginning they’re filled with promise and intensity, followed a lot of ominous foreshadowing in the middle, and everyone leaves disappointed in the end. We’d been engaged less than four months at the time of the move, and I’m certain there were those who were expecting me to screw it up somehow, myself included.
Number 2: We have a one-year-old cat named The Tempest. She’s half Siamese and half Paranoid Schizophrenic.
Number 3: Neither of us had jobs. (This blawg is being written about events that have already taken place, hence the past tense, but it would be more accurate to use the present-tense verb “have” in this particular situation.) But we’d saved up enough money to pay the rent for a few months while we searched for employment.
Number 4: I just want to remind the reader about that whole cheap-vs.-lazy thing from the last blawg. Here’s where it becomes relevant…
In the past twenty years or so, I have moved approximately fifteen times. Each time I simply pack my belongings into a rental car (not a truck or a van…a car), throw away whatever does not fit, and drive to my new home. The only time I’ve ever altered this routine was when I moved to Prague for a year, and in that situation, I brought two bags on the plane, one for clothes and the other for books. I have never purchased a single piece of furniture. Instead, I simply leave my old furniture behind, sleep on the floor for a few months at my new residence until a neighbor decides to leave a mattress next to the Dumpster, then I drag the mysteriously stained rectangle up to my bedroom, plop it on the floor, wrap a plastic cover around it, and take a nap. Couches, lamps, bookshelves, tables, and televisions are obtained in a similar fashion. Sometimes, coworkers or friends’ mothers hear about the way I live, gasp, and donate entire bedroom sets. But that’s rare. More often you can find me sitting on a lawn chair in my living room, eating cold SpaghettiOs straight out of the can with a plastic spork, and glaring psychotically at my laptop.
For some reason, my new fiancee did not see the advantage of moving halfway across the country with just a toothbrush and a worn Billy Joel CD. So plans had to be made. Plans that involved doing work. Plans that involved spending money.
The cheapest way to move was to rent a truck and drive sixteen hours south to our destination. I’ve had some bad experiences with U-Haul in the past, so I looked at Budget and Enterprise. The cost of a truck was around $600 or so. Add the cost of gas for the truck and the less abrasive pessimist’s car and the total would be around $1,000. But we also had to load our belongings on and off the truck ourselves. Not good for the lazy side.
A friend recommended I try a website called uShip, which allows you to enter the details about your move into a profile and then movers all over the country can bid on it. This satisfied my lazy requirement, but when I entered the information, the website told me my best bid would probably come in at around $2,500. The cheap devil in me balked. So I restricted the maximum bid to $1,200 thinking it would do no harm if no one wanted to accept it. This was a little more than the cost of renting a truck, but it would also be less work. It was the perfect balance of cheap vs. lazy. I was pretty pleased with myself.
Several weeks passed and no bid. Finally, when the profile was about to expire, I received an email from a company called Gatz Shipping. It was a small, family operation out of Idaho, just a man named Jeff Gatz and his wife. They were moving someone else to Austin and wanted to add our belongings to the trip. Sort of like killing two birds with one moving truck. I said that sounded great to me. I gave him my number and he called immediately to work out the details. He said he would pick us up at the end of May and we would be in Austin by June 1 to start our new lives. My fiancee was a bit dubious, but since she’d been dreading driving two vehicles while trying to control our spazoid cat, she finally came around to the idea. I was a hero!
The long story of how Mr. Gatz thoroughly and unapologetically screwed us can be read here. The short version is that he never showed up. It would have been bad enough if he simply told us he wasn’t coming, but he kept telling us he would be there until several days after he was supposed to be there. The less abrasive pessimist picked up on the pattern early and suggested we find a rental truck on May 25, which would have kept us on schedule. However, I did not want to give up on my dream of being lazy. So I told her I was certain Mr. Gatz would come through for us if we gave him more time. May 26th passed, 27th, 28th, 29th, 30th, 31st. We entered June and still no moving company. I’d gone from hero to heel in a housefly’s lifetime.
To be continued…
There are several things you need to know before reading this blawg post.
Number 1 (and this is by far the most important): I am an asshole. I’m not the kind of asshole that wears Ax Body Spray and roofies girls’ drinks at frat parties or the kind that wears wife beaters and refers to vaginas as “hotdog warmers” or the kind that pulls up next to homeless men in BMWs and tells them to get jobs or Ann Coulter. I’m just a cranky, pessimistic bastard who hopes that people will be good but assumes they will suck. It’s a perfectly valid point of view in my opinion. I try to use my powers of assholery to protect the innocent and thwart the evil, but I usually just end up mildly pissing off other assholes and making my friends chuckle.
Number 2: I live by a specific philosophical code. This is not a code that I developed after observing human nature for numerous decades, ruminating on my findings, and then attempting to codify the results of my study into a system of psychological/physiological/behavioral rules. I’m no Plato. No, I developed my philosophy for much less altruistic reasons. After living a relatively selfish lower-class existence for thirty years or so, it dawned on me one day that practically all of the decisions in my life were dictated by my attempts to balance two factors: cheap vs. lazy. Obviously, this has little relevance when I’m making macro decisions, such as voting for the president or plotting to overthrow the world with my super-villain powers, but in the microcosm of my everyday life it is surprisingly consistent. I am profoundly cheap and perversely lazy. And since this is America, where money very often purchases convenience, a person such as myself who does not want to work hard for more money but wishes to remain comfortable in his poverty must constantly seek harmony between the stingy ying and the snoozy yang. (I promise this will be relevant later on in the story.)
Number 3: I recently got engaged to a fellow pessimist, albeit one much less abrasive than myself.
Number 4: Me and the less abrasive pessimist decided to move from Boulder, Colorado to Austin, Texas. In June. To an apartment we’d never seen.
Number 5: Also, neither of us had ever been to Austin. Ever.
Now we can begin…
Hey, boys and girls! Here’s a fun social experiment you can perform with your liberal acquaintances! Tell them that you’re moving and when they ask where say, “Texas!” and then watch their faces melt off like that Nazi dude at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
People have opinions about Texas. Strong opinions. Strange opinions. Long-winded opinions. Opinions they feel the need to share despite the fact that you never asked for said opinions or cared about said opinions or really gave a shit about any opinion the person in front of you is now spouting off concerning the decisions you are making with your life that have nothing whatsoever to do with them. There are various ways to deal with these particular opinion-sharers, but my favorite is to simply yell “YEEEEHAW!”, grab my crotch, spit, and walk away.
If you perform the same experiment but say “Austin!” the person you are talking to will inevitably reply, “You know that’s in Texas, right?” and then laugh hysterically as though they are the first person to ever think of this clever witticism. This happens approximately 72 percent of the time.
We discussed the issue for months, and in the end here’s the short version of why we decided to move to Austin: we hate winter and Austin is fairly cheap for a culturally relevant city.
Also, I’ve never seen an armadillo. (It’s like a dinosaur and a possum made sweet sweet love and then had a baby that’s apparently prone to vehicular suicide.)
It’s hot in Texas.
This is one of the intellectual tidbits the opinion-sharers like to share, as if the temperature south of Oklahoma is some closely kept government secret that only they are privy to. And if you tell them that, yes, you know it’s hot, they will interrupt you and say, “No, you don’t understand. It’s really hot.” Actually, I do understand, Mr. Italics. I’ve traveled and lived in countries all over the world, some of them in the desert, some of them in the tropics. I understand heat. We know that in the summer is going to be uncomfortably hot. We get it. We would simply rather be uncomfortably hot in the summer than uncomfortably cold in the winter. We’re heat people.
The other thing people like to tell you is how far your journey will be. Once again, this is not difficult information to obtain, especially in the age of Google. Just clickety-clack for two seconds on the old computer keyboard and WALLAH! It’s a 16-hour drive from Boulder to Austin.
And this is where my idiotic philosophical code almost ruined our move.
Several months ago, I received an email from Sundress Publications stating that my essay, “Off the Grid,” had been selected for their 2012 Best of the Net Anthology. I was somewhat confused because I had never entered such a contest but also overjoyed. It was a wonderful way to end 2012.
It turns out my essay was entered in the contest by the editor of Eclectica Magazine, Tom Dooley, to whom I am extremely grateful.
The good people at Sundress Publications receive thousands of entries every year from all across the Internet, and their tireless judges whittle those entries down to a few lucky winners. This year the judge in the nonfiction category was Pulitzer-finalist Lee Martin, a novelist and memoirist of wide-ranging talent.
I am honored to have my name associated with such a fine anthology, and I hope you take the time to read my essay.
My Cemetery (Re-Posted for Halloween)
October 30, 2012
Music provided by my favorite zombie band, The Widow’s Bane.
….
My Cemetery
by Dale Bridges
There’s a graveyard about five blocks from my apartment building where I go for walks late at night and make up stories about the dead. It’s just something I do when I can’t sleep. I’m sure the place has a name but I’ve never learned it. I simply think of it as My Cemetery because everyone else seems to have forgotten about it. Sometimes I’ll see a couple in their forties walking an asthmatic pug or a group of teenage goths smoking pot, but I consider these people interlopers, tourists. They’re here because Princess needed to tinkle or because they have an unhealthy fascination with black fingernail polish that will eventually develop into an eating disorder. They don’t care about the bodies buried in the sacred ground beneath their cigarette butts. Not like I do.
Consider, for instance, the life of one Esther Reeks. I don’t know what her name was before she met William, but I like to think it was something along the lines of Esther Rose or Esther Spring. A dainty, fragrant name. Then one day she fell head over heels for a local guy, and the next thing she knew her friends at the beauty salon were giggling and calling her Mrs. Reeks.
But at least the Reeks had the good sense not to have children. The same thing can’t be said about the Belcher clan. My Cemetery is crawling with Belchers. I like to think of them as a sophisticated family, a real group of high-society snobs complete with monocles and top hats. You know the type. However, they lost their family fortune after attempting to open up an elegant French restaurant in the ritzy end of town. For some reason, no one wanted to eat dinner at Le Belcher’s.
My favorite tombstone is a giant, rectangular monstrosity designating the burial site of a family with the last name of HUSSIE. That’s how it appears on the grave, HUSSIE, like a Vegas billboard advertising a new strip club. It’s a sizeable monument and it’s the color of an old pearl necklace, making it stand out from the rest. I know it’s natural for humans to be proud of their heritage, but you’d think a group of people named after a sexually promiscuous woman would’ve learned a little humility in their lifetime. Apparently not.
Less than ten yards south of the Hussies is the eternal resting place of the SALE family. Since America is the land of capitalism, when I first saw this tombstone I thought it was available for purchase. You know, like: SALE ON USED CRYPTS! OUR PRICE$ ARE TO DIE FOR!!! Who knows? The economy has been in a slump lately. Maybe cemetery landlords are feeling the crunch.
I sometimes imagine one of the Sale boys asking a young lady in the Hussie family for her hand in marriage. He’d own a used car dealership and wear designer cowboy boots. She’d be one of those feisty liberals who would decide to hyphenate her last name in order to maintain her independence. You know how proud those Hussie women can be. Of course her children would hate her for it later, especially when their teachers took attendance. “Hussie-Sale! Is there a Hussie-Sale in class today?” But what a great tombstone it would make.
There are a surprising number of graves shaped like penises in My Cemetery. I don’t know how this happened, but I can’t be the first one to notice it. It’s pretty obvious. They’re like giant, stone dildos sticking out of the earth. The long shaft, the rounded tip, the testicle-like base. These are not subtle details. Curiously, these penis graves are all circumcised. Every single one. I wonder if it would be different in a European cemetery. Do tombstones in Paris have foreskin? I hope so.
Right next door to My Cemetery there is an elementary school, which I’ve always thought was slightly macabre but also appropriate. “Suzie, Johnny, are you having fun playing in the sandbox? Good. Don’t forget that in a few short years you’ll be buried six feet under it.” Circle of life, you know. Those kids gotta learn sometime.
I sometimes wonder if any of the children ever pause at the top of that slide to look out on the field of dead people next door. Perhaps for a fleeting moment they halt their mindless play and contemplate their own mortality. All those tombstones lined up in nice little rows like a morbid stone garden. The image will haunt them at night, burrowing deep into their subconscious. Ten years will go by, then twenty. One day they’ll look in the mirror and realize that they are a 35-year-old man with a drinking problem and incurable insomnia. When that happens, in an effort to forget their own problems, they will leave their apartment in the middle of the night and walk down to the local cemetery, where they’ll wander around like a crazy person, making up stories about the dead people buried below them.
Appetite for Manipulation (or Why I Cry During Cheesy TV Shows)
August 11, 2012
I like television. I’ve never understood the viewpoint of certain quasi-intellectuals who brag that they don’t watch TV. “I don’t even own a television set,” they often say, as if not watching “Project Runway” somehow gives them a moral perspective the rest of us lack.
I would argue that our culture is currently experiencing a Golden Age of Television. While many people decry the rise of reality television and sensationalist shows as the downfall of Western culture, they fail to recognize that some of the most interesting narratives in our society are currently being produced by TV. The metaphysical questions explored by shows like “Lost,” The Booth at the End,” or “Battlestar Galactica” are almost too complex to follow, and I can’t think of many modern artistic documents consumed by millions of people that more thoroughly examine issues like race, class, crime, justice, and media than “The Wire.”
That being said, there is something disturbingly manipulative about television and movies that I don’t find in other art forms. They have the ability to make you feel emotions against your will. You see this all the time in cheesy sitcoms or dramas. The main character is presented with some sort of personal crisis, the issue is resolved within the family/friendship unit the show is constructed around, and then some crappy emotional pop song is played while the characters snuggle on the couch. It’s such an obvious cliche. My logical mind absolutely hates these shows, but the scene triggers something in the emotional sensors of my brain that I can’t switch off. My throat tightens, tears often well up, and I find myself blinking rapidly so that my girlfriend doesn’t think I’ve been weeping over an episode of “Dating Rules from My Future Self.”
I never experience this reaction with books. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve read some cheesy Nicholas Sparks novels in my time, but my reaction to his sappy prose is simply anger and dismissal. Without the music and images to flood my brain, Sparks is unable to force me into an unwanted emotional state. I am able to recognize the overly romanticized schlock for what it is and then hurl it across the room. But that’s not the case with television (in part because my TV is too big to throw).
I have no idea what any of this means or how it should be processed by the larger culture; I just think we should all be careful or one day we might wake up to discover we’re living in a sitcom starring Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber. We will laugh when we’re told to laugh, cry when we’re told to cry, but the only true emotion we will experience is helplessness.
I Mumble
August 3, 2012
I first started to notice it as a child. People would ask me to repeat myself constantly. I hated doing this, of course, because the reason I mumbled in the first place was because I was shy and didn’t want to draw attention to myself. Having to repeat myself always caused a minor panic attack and consequently I spoke even softer the second time around. When I was little, I would often just run away from the person I was talking to (a solution that works surprisingly well in many social situations, even to this day), but as I’ve grown older, I have decided to embrace my true nature. I mumble. I’m a mumbler. Deal with it.
Over the years, I have discovered that mumbling is a decent way to comment on the inane world around you without suffering the consequences of a publicly expressed opinion. If you don’t like the woman who smells like instant soup sitting next to you on the bus who is screaming into her cell phone about her intimate medical problems…mumble. If you’re starving to death in the middle of a road trip through Nebraska and your friend insists on finding a restaurant that serves vegan tofu because he watched Seven Years in Tibet last week and now he thinks cows are sacred creatures…mumble. If the person in front of you at the movie theater thinks their own commentary is more interesting than the dialogue happening on the screen AND that person happens to be large enough to beat ever-loving crap out of you in the parking lot after the show…just mumble.
Some people pray. Some people meditate. Some people send out positive vibes into the universe. I mumble.
dale bridges writing 
