I was sitting here, polishing off the last of my lunchtime Diet Coke, writing the last three hundred words of my session for today, when all of a sudden I run, full on, into a wall. The throttle was wide open on my Formula One racecar and some inconsiderate dude has built a cinder-block wall in the middle of the track. I was soaring through the sky looking for my next mouse to devour and some entity has clipped my wings. I’m in the cafeteria pounding down some spaghetti and mashed potatoes and the school bully has slammed my face down into my tray.
This is me!
This is a hard stop. A dead-end stop. A flat-out, no-way-around-it, you-are-fargoed stop. One of my characters has just realized (much to my surprise) that she does not want to be there; nay, that she CANNOT stay there. That it is not only a dereliction of duty for her to be there, but that it’s humiliating for her to do so. She not only CAN’T stay in the story as I’m imagining it, she simply WON’T.
My Id-Writer is chewing on the walls because he saw this coming: he feels as she feels, and he knows that this is a decision that I have to let her make. No, deeper than that, he knows that it’s not a decision at all, it’s already done. SHE’S GONE. She’s leaving the hero and his sham of a quest in the rearview and heading for greener pastures. IT’S WHAT SHE NEEDS TO DO, AND IT’S WHAT SHE WILL DO. It can’t be stopped. There’s no way around the grand canyon which has just opened up at my feet. I’ve got to rethink a lot of things.
I’ve hit little snags with the story along the way — little surprises, little deviations from the master plan — but this is off the map. I don’t know how the story continues if one of the two main characters leaves the other in the lurch right now. But it will have to somehow, because I can’t go back and rewrite the things that led up to this moment. Not now. THAT’S WHAT EDITING IS FOR, snarls my Id-Writer, PRESS ON THROUGH THE DARKNESS AND SEEK OUT THE LIGHT. He who turns back is lost.
Tomorrow’s writing session will be an interesting one. I don’t know how I’m going to get twelve hundred words in — or even nine hundred, for that matter — with this goldfinger MOUNTAIN thrown down across my path. I really don’t think I can, and that’s deeply upsetting to me, as I’ve not yet failed to make my writing goal in almost six weeks (!) of writing. Thank goodness the weekend is on the horizon; maybe a few days to ponder will help me to unstick this problem a little bit.
So that’s the bad day.
The good news is, my foot is feeling awesome. For the first few days after the podiatrist it felt rock-solid, then the immediate numbness of the cortisone began to wear off and I had a bit of soreness gnawing at the edges. Today, however, is a new day. I had a nice three-mile run this morning (with the dumb dog in tow) during which I felt no tweaks or twinges, and continuing through the day, the only weirdness I feel in the foot is right after I ice it, and that’s gone within fifteen minutes. So perhaps, perhaps, a return to normalcy is within sight on that front. Goodness knows I could use a nice two-hour run to work on unsticking my story.
Apparently, even though I’m going to be writing about a movie that hit theaters months ago, I should still write SPOILER ALERT because I’ll be talking about a film that some of you out there may not yet have seen and may yet be planning to see, so that I do not ruin your cinematic experience. So here you are: in the following post, I will be writing about Anchorman 2, and I mention some things that happen in it. If this damages your enjoyment in any way, I assure you, it will only be in that I kept the film from disappointing you in its own right.
I should say outright that with only a few exceptions, I do not get mired in brands when it comes to celebrities. Meaning, I have very little loyalty to one star or another. Movie stars, larger than life though they may be, are at the end of the day simple human beings like the rest of us, and are therefore prone to making the same errors in judgment that the rest of us make. What I do have is movie star brand disloyalty, which makes me avoid certain personalities like the plague (I’m looking at you, Seth Rogen. Do you ever play a role that is in any way unlike every other role you have ever played ever? Are they even roles? Fie!). That, however, is another blarg for another day.
So, no brand loyalty with a few notable exceptions. I tend to be willing to try out anything featuring Leonardo DiCaprio. (He’s just so dreamy.) Sandra Bullock I find to be another safe bet. See, I think this, and then I start to write about it, and then I start to actually analyze it, and I realize that these are stars which tend toward drama. Comedy is a fickle beesting (more gouda there, use your imagination). I don’t have any comedy loyalties. I WISH I DID. I really do. I read a great quote a few years back from my Spirit Guide, Douglas Adams, about how comedy used to be like a delightful spring rainshower – rare, refreshing, and awesome – but recently it’s just everywhere, pooling in muddy puddles and just generally making you damp. I mangled the words but I think I preserved the feeling. Everybody does comedy now. Even I am trying to do comedy of a sort here at the blarg. You can find it anywhere, which means it’s no longer surprising, which takes away one of the critical elements of comedy. If you expect something to be funny, you dramatically decrease the chance that it actually will be.
One of the reasons I specifically try to avoid Movie Star Brand Loyalty (MSBL) is that it leads to Crappy Sequels You Didn’t Really Need (CSYDRNs). Hey, we made this movie featuring this movie star and it was hugely successful, let’s make another one to capitalize on it, HEY for that to work we need the original movie star back again, even if that doesn’t make terrific sense for the world of the story, but who cares because MONEY.
Which brings me to the point. Wife and I saw Anchorman 2 this weekend past.
Allow me to clarify that I like (but do not love) the original Anchorman. It’s absurd, satirical, nonsensical and, often, funny, but above all else it’s telling a story that’s worth telling. You’ve got the idiotic Ron Burgundy, whose character flaws get him first into trouble, then fired, and his journey to atone for his mistakes drives the story forward until at the end he’s on top of the world again. A nice, neat little Rags-to-Riches ride. It’s got its bizarre moments – I’m thinking back to the scene where Ron and Veronica (?) hallucinate and go riding around on cartoon unicorns – but they are sprinkled in like raisins in a good raisin bread. You don’t get one in every bite, so you appreciate it when you do get one (what a horrible simile; I mean, who likes raisin bread? EW.). The story holds the film together, and the absurd bits add flavor. Not a great film, but a good one. It works. It meets commercial success.
So they make another one.
In this one, the co-star (and now, wife) gets promoted and Ron gets fired (again). He breaks up with her over it (again). He rounds up his crew and comes up with an all new way of doing the news (again). There’s a brawl in a public park with rival news crews (again. Granted, this bit is still funny, but only because of the sheer scope of actors they got to cameo in it). There is absolutely nothing new in the story, which is the first stroke of the hammer.
Then, the absurdist moments that added flavor and texture to the first film are the backbone of this film, which is to say that the film moves from one nonsensical moment to the next without giving the audience time to catch its breath or figure out how (or in many cases if) the events they just saw connect to the whole. Spoiler alert: they don’t. Ron racially and sexually harasses the new black lady boss? Nothing comes of it. She gets mad and the story goes on. Ron and his friends forget who’s driving the car and wreck it on the way across country? Yep, next scene, there they are at work, no further mention of the car accident, no ill effects for any of the characters. Ron loses his sight in a freak ice-skating accident (no, he didn’t put his eye out, he’s just magically blind now) and, while blind and in exile, rescues and raises a shark to maturity. Do you think the shark ends up saving his life or playing any role in the story? Perhaps saving him from a rampaging murderous squid-demon? Spoiler Alert: it doesn’t.
Anyway, we watched this travesty of a film and then looked at each other and sighed a mutual disappointed sigh. I honestly wonder if the film was made, not as a money-making venture (though it certainly made money, apparently it’s pulled in over $110 million now, per Forbes, which is significantly more than the original), but as a sociological experiment. The premise of this experiment would be: How Bad Can We Make This Movie And Still Have People Come To See It?
The story writing is atrocious. The character development and growth is nonexistent. The humor is tepid. (The funniest moment in the film, the cameo-laden park brawl, is freeze-dried and repackaged from the first with fancier celebrities — how they got Will Smith in there is beyond me.) There’s a bit in there that’s almost clever wherein the film lampoons 24-hour news networks, but it’s over before it gets rolling. It is, in short, a terrible movie on virtually every level that movies should be concerned with.
And it still made money. Like, a lot of money.
I am of two minds about this.
First of all, Hollywood doesn’t give a steaming sharknado about its audience’s intelligence. They will make what sells, which means pander to MSBL and make a movie we already recognize and don’t, DON’T, push the boundaries. (How many Fast & Furious movies are there now? Eighteen, right? And aren’t we on Saw Forty-Seven?)
The second mind, however, is hopeful.
Because if a pile of fetid donkey turds like Anchorman 2 can be commercially successful, then maybe there’s hope for a schlub like me.
It’s a widely-held aphorism amongst creative types that we tend to be our own worst critics. This is doubly true.
In the first sense, we are our own worst critics in that I am certainly not aware of anybody out there who judges my own work more harshly than I do myself. I’ll grant, my audience is virtually nonexistent at this point, but I am constantly naggled at by a vicious little voice in the back of my mind: “That thing you just wrote is stupid!” “You should have used more commas there!” “You should use less commas there!” That OTHER thing you just wrote there is stupid!” “They’re all gonna laugh at you!” I’d say that one of the greatest barriers to my progress on the Project has been getting that little howler monkey to shut the fargo up. Problem is, he never shuts up. Much like the Id-Writer, who is always screeching from the damp cellar he gets locked in, “WRITE ABOUT THIS AND ADD MORE METAPHORS AND MAYBE MAKE A COMPARISON TO JESUS OR AN INFINITELY-LEGGED OCTOPUS OR I DUNNO WRITE ABOUT COOKIES,” the best I can do to overcome the ever-present, ever-negative voice of writer’s doubt is to tune it out for a while. That doesn’t mean it shuts up. That means that, like the muzak in an elevator, or like the phantasmal infinitely-legged octopus floating just out of my line of sight, I tune it out and attempt to live my life.
In the second sense, we are our own worst critics in that we are TERRIBLE JUDGES OF OUR OWN WORK. Perhaps I shouldn’t speak for other creative types; I imagine it’s easy for a Stephen King, for example, to discern whether the pages he’s written today are utter tripe or not. Personally, I have no idea. I wrote 1300 words today, and haberdashery, I think they’re pretty good. There are parts in there that suck, but I enjoyed them while I was writing them. Some of the metaphors in there are pretty darn clever, I think, but who knows, maybe you’d read them and find them inane. I really have no idea. I just vomit up my word-slurry (slurry has been my word of the week) and hope that when I finish writing it, I can edit it up into something that will eventually pass as entertaining and not awful to the masses. (Let’s be optimistic, right?)
It’s a weird place, being a writer. I sit here, banging my fingers against this poor defenseless keyboard which has never done me any wrong (the tablet keyboard is another story, I want to murder the built-in tablet keyboard in the face), pouring the better part of an hour most days into telling a story (which I’m not sure is any good) to an audience (which I’m not sure I will even have) in a way that will hopefully be funny and poignant (which I’m not even sure I’m capable of). It’s a quagmire of uncertainty, a web of doubt, a forest of what-ifs. And it’s daunting as haberdashery. On the daily, I am daunted. Always, always, always, the howler monkey of self-doubt chitters away at me. It flings its tiny little balls of doubt-poop at the wall, it leaves the peels of its doubt-bananas on the floor for me to slip on (doubt bananas? Really? YES.) Whatever form it takes, the message is the same.
You’re not good enough. Quit. Writing is hard. It would be so easy to quit. Just quit. QUIT.
Another teacher post, here. I try to keep them from coming too often because I know that I have readers of all walks and I don’t want to alienate by writing too much about any one thing. That said, sometimes it just has to be done, and the first day back from spring break brought with it an incident that my inner Id-Writer won’t turn loose of until I purge it.
Kids are lazy. I get it. I see it in my own two-year-old, and he doesn’t even know how to be lazy. I shouldn’t say lazy. I should say they are efficiency seekers. Nature abhors wasted energy. A tree grows only as high as it must in order to harvest the sunlight it needs to reproduce. A pride of lions hunts only when they are hungry, otherwise they are basically enormous housecats looking for a patch of sunlight or shade to lie in, depending on the season. So, too, do humans, and by extension human children, have a biological imperative to get as much for as little as they can. I understand this. It makes perfect sense. The problem is, we are no longer driven by survival. A child does not risk starvation if it does not complete its homework. It will not die of exposure if it does not get its room clean on time.
The energy that would once have been devoted to survival is now (in a perfect world) devoted to making a child the best future human it can be, and that means enriching the mind. The yachts and mansions and shiny red convertibles don’t, as a rule, go to the dunces. They go to the smartest and then to the bankers and then to the politicians (the rest of us are just BORROWING their money). So while academic achievement doesn’t benefit a kid in the immediate, (working hard & getting good grades would be “wasted energy” in a survivalist sense) it benefits them in the long term.
This leads us to selective laziness. A clever future human quickly does the math and realizes that there is a balance to be struck between doing the best that you can (applying all of your energy) and doing only what you need to do in order to survive. Of course, the risk-assessment portions of our brains don’t fully form until we are, I dunno, thirty or so, so it’s even harder for a kid (and let me clarify that I’m talking about any kid in government-sanctioned school age, which is to say, any 5- to 18-year-old) to grasp that “doing your best” in school might be a wise course of action. Mom and Dad can push you in that direction, of course, but you can only fight nature to a point, depending on how big your stick is (anybody else out there get punished for bad grades? Yeah, you can spot us pretty easily, we’re the ones not dropping out of high school in droves). Incidentally, this is why a student’s grade in a class is not a good indicator of their intelligence. Any teacher will tell you that the smartest kids in the class are rarely the ones with the highest grades. The smartest ones are usually the ones barely passing. (NOTE THAT I DID NOT SAY ALL THE ONES BARELY PASSING ARE THE SMARTEST. WE’LL GET TO THEM.) They’ve figured out exactly how hard they need to work to pass (and by virtue of passing, get their parents off their backs, and by virtue of getting their parents off their backs, how to do what they want to do, which is be a teenager, sleep in, eat pop-tarts, and play Call of Duty). Selective laziness allows them to do this. I have a host of students — very nearly half — in my English class whose grades have hovered within a handful of points of 75 for most of the year. They could do better. Easily. But they don’t. They haven’t made the connection. One day they will. Maybe there will be regret, and maybe not, but the best I can do is to try and help them to see this situation for what it is. A waste of energy, and a waste of potential.
Whew. This brings us to the fun part, which is pointing out how dumb some of my students are. I shouldn’t say dumb. I should say lazy. And this time I mean lazy, which is to say, they don’t want to do ANYTHING they’re not interested in, whether they pass or not. That’s not selective. That’s just, well, a failure of evolution.
I’ve got a handful of kids who are not passing. It’s unfortunate, but in the majority of their cases, it’s what needs to happen. They haven’t yet learned what they need to (and I’m talking about the ability to read, analyze, and make sense of what they’re reading — you know, the things you, dear reader, can do without really pausing to think about it) and they need to go back and try it again.
It doesn’t stop them, bless their hearts, from trying, in whatever ways are available to them. Of course, hand-in-hand with this extreme aversion to work is an aversion to common sense. Which brings me, finally, to the comment that set in motion my ramble for today.
The child in question has been failing since about the second week of the year, which is to say, since the time I put in the first grades. His grade has been no secret to anybody, least of all him, and he has, since the end of the year is suddenly upon us and he has realized that he will be a senior again next year, finally taken an interest. We talked briefly prior to Spring Break about his grade and what he needed to do to have a chance at passing for the year.
So he comes to me today (first day back) and asks me, “Is my grade going up?”
I teach over 100 kids. It’s virtually impossible for me to know offhand what an individual student’s grade is off the top of my head. Thankfully, there are apps for that, and we have wonderful technology at our disposal to garner this information at a moment’s notice. Which I do. I start logging in to systems and pulling files. Then it dawns on me. He hasn’t turned in anything since we spoke.
This I tell him. He nods and says, “yeah, I just wanted to see if my grade’s going up.” I look at him oddly, in much the way I imagine God must have looked at Adam (if you believe in that sort of thing) when Adam told God that, yeah, he had actually had some of the fruit from that one tree God had specifically told him not to touch, you weren’t serious about that, right, God? (Did I just analogize myself with God? I think I did.)
I ask him how he expects his grade to have changed when he has not in fact done any work, and he just sort of looks at me like I’m speaking in Latin. They do this a lot when I move my modifiers around or use big words like “appropriate requirements” or “requisite amount of work”, which I do for the purpose of seeing them look at me like I’m speaking in Latin.
I am torn between feeling badly for him and his parents and the teachers that will teach him again next year, and being abjectly horrified at the amount of taxpayer dollars and man-hours that have gone into this child’s education only to bounce aside, as impactful as spitballs to a Panzer. Dribbles from a spigot in his ocean of academic indifference.
Sidenote: Thanks to this post, I’m going to be calling all my students “future humans” from now on.
Last night I enjoyed a rare opportunity to go see a baseball game.
I love going to Turner Field, driving through the slums and parking in the shadiest of places to watch our overpaid athletes smack a ball around. No, really, I actually do enjoy watching the games, I just can’t help but be extremely cynical about the sport and the costs and the everything surrounding the game itself.
You might guess that there is more to the ball game than the ball game, if you’ve been reading the blarg here, and you’d guess right.
It’s not a thing that I’m specifically familiar with myself, because it’s not a thing I partake in all that much, but apparently, sometime in the last couple of years, Turner Field has started selling adult beverages with actual hard liquor in them. Personally, I think this is fantastic, because given the choice between getting gouged for $8 on a lukewarm beer and getting gouged for $10 on a watered-down margarita, I know where my hard-earned money will be wasted — where it will do the most good. This, naturally, seemed to be the inclination of a good many patrons at last night’s game.
Before I get into the story, let me make the appropriate disclaimers. I don’t mind drinking in public. BY ALL MEANS, GO OUT, HAVE A GOOD TIME. I don’t even mind a bit of intoxication in public, as long as it’s done the right way. The right way to drink in public includes some of, though not necessarily all, of the following:
1. A clear, decided-on-beforehand designated driver. If your group is big enough, you need more than one and you need to know who’s riding with whom so hat there is zero confusion about who is and who is not allowed to imbibe.
2. Cash. This depends where on the scale you fall between Bill Gates and, oh I don’t know, ME. And it applies more at venues like sporting events, where stuff is really overpriced, as opposed to restaurants and bars, where it’s only reasonably overpriced. If you’re paying with cash, then you know when you’ve had all you’re allowed to have. Credit cards and drunk people do not mix well, unless you are the proprietor of a credit card company, in which case, let me cue up the cash register noises.
3. A brain. More specifically, the brains of the operation. The group needs a leader, and while it could be the DD, it doesn’t have to be — the job of the brain is to assess the situation and LOCK SHARKNADO DOWN when it starts to get out of control. “Oh, Billy’s had a few too many, let me get him some onion rings and a coke instead of a beer on the next round.” “Hey, Charlene just bought a round for the table, she doesn’t make that much money, let me steal her wallet so she can’t buy any more drinks.” “Hey, Ted, help me get Eddie down from the drapes.”
Our companions for the Braves game last night had none of these. Let me clarify. I’m calling them companions only because I learned so much about them, not because they were our partners in enjoying this spectacle of athletic prowess.
They were an office group (!) composed of but not limited to, Jerry, the boss, Martez, the gay one, Jenny, the quiet one, and a handful of sundry others whose names I didn’t catch, largely because they were too far away. Couple of the older members of the group had their kids along for a night at the ballpark. Nice group. Innocuous. Perfectly ordinary.
And then there was Leah.
Leah showed up hammered. We could tell because she arrived to the group with a shouted, “HEY Y’ALL! ARE THESE OUR SEATS?” Back over her shoulder, she bellowed, “I FOUND OUR SEATS.” Back to her group. “ARE ALL THESE OUR SEATS?” Back over her shoulder. “THE SEATS ARE DOWN HERE, GUYS.” The caps are necessary because she was speaking in them. She began to step past the others in the row, stumbling and holding her (first) beer up over her head, sloshing it wantonly about.
As she slid down in front of us, my actual group exchanged glances which spoke of the unending weariness we would surely feel with her before the night was out.
I can’t relate everything she did that was offensive. There simply isn’t time. But I did take some notes. No, really, I did, because I always have a little notepad with me (never know when the Id-Writer will grab the steering wheel), and why not get some material out of an otherwise irritating situation?
It took me two note cards to write down all the crazy stuff she did and said!
I’ll start with the selfies.
Stop foaming at the mouth and put aside your feelings on the subject for the moment. I really don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with trying to document your life, and a selfie is an immediate, if a bit artless, way to do that.
However.
Comes a point when you need to turn outward and enjoy the Braves game / the panoramic view / the street riot / your own marriage proposal the way you were meant to experience it, which is to say, through your OWN eyes and in your OWN mind, not through the lens of a camera (sorry, the screen of a phone) and for the benefit of your social media “friends”. At some point, taking a few pictures of yourself and your friends turns the occasion from “look at this amazing thing we experienced” into “look at how amazing we are, also this thing was happening while we were amazing”.
It’s the Sorites paradox. You have a single grain of sand, then you add another grain to it. This is not a heap. Add another grain, it is still not a heap. No single addition of a single grain of sand marks the moment when your handful of grains of sand becomes a heap, but suddenly, there before you, sits a heap. Likewise, no single selfie marks the moment of transition from “amazing thing” to “I’m amazing, and thing”. But the moment is in there somewhere. I don’t know what moment it was, but it happened well before the 54th picture Leah took of herself and her friends. That’s 54 pictures documented; I didn’t count the ones she took during the first inning or, for obvious reasons, when she was away from her seat (which was often, after all, those beers won’t refill themselves).
Then, lewdness.
Let me come back around to what I said about alcohol: in essence, DO YOU, just do it smartly. Whatever gets your rocks off is between you and whichever Big Daddy you pray to, but some (most?) of it is simply not the business of anybody who is not you, ergo, don’t make it their business.
She spent much of the game sexting.
I know this, not because we were reading her texts over her shoulder (though that happened, eventually, because frankly, the woman was a living, breathing train-wreck we could not look away from) but because this became a topic of much debate among her group. Her work group, let me remind you.
So she’s hammering away on her phone for much of the game, and somewhere around the 5th inning, Jerry (the “boss” of this group — and presumably, the man she works for, or who at least supervises her in some capacity) gets curious and snatches her phone to see what she’s so engrossed in when there is a perfectly engrossing baseball game happening just a few hundred feet away (oh yeah, we had pretty swell seats). His eyes and his mouth get wide and he passes the phone back. Things get quiet for a while. Then conversation picks up, slowly, the way grumpy siblings start communicating with one another only by saying “he started it,” “no I didn’t,” after the parents have separated the kids. Leah’s complaining about being judged, about feeling massive judgment. She’s still drunk, so she’s still loud.
Let’s pause and evaluate. Jerry’s stone-sober. He’s the boss, or at least a supervisor. JERRY SHOULD BE THE BRAINS OF THE OPERATION. Jerry should have Leah on lockdown. Truth be told, he should have kept her from drinking anything since the 3rd inning, but by this point, it’s obvious to everybody in section 218 that she’s off her Asgard and needs no further alcohol. Let’s not forget that in the immediate vicinity are five or six co-workers, a few of whom have children with them.
But instead of locking the sharknado down, he’s commending her on her correspondence with whatever champ is on the other end of her dirty little fingers (ew). And he gets her another beer when he comes back from the restroom in the 6th.
In the 7th inning, said champ sends her a picture of his, uh, situation. She passes it around. We all see it, too. It’s awesome, in that way of giving us all things to talk and rant about on the drive home. It’s less awesome, in that I feel strongly that there is a fixed number of, uh, situations that I should look upon in my lifetime, and I just wasted one on this idiot.
There was other bad behavior. She kept throwing her head back to laugh and smacking the knees of people in my group. She raised her arms in triumph after “winning” an argument with Martez, only to spill beer backwards on our shoes. She had to have two hands supporting her to walk down the stairs in the 8th inning.
I occasionally have the thought that I really do stay in too much. It’s bad enough that I chose a solo activity for exercise (running), a solitary hobby (writing), and I have a kid at home who needs my supervision and my time every moment I can spare them. It makes me feel like a hermit, a recluse, that guy whose house the kids wander past and say “that weird old guy lives there — I heard if you say his name three times in the dark, he’ll appear behind you in the mirror and tell you to get off his lawn.”
Then I go out and cross paths with a Leah, and suddenly all my decisions seem right.
Seriously. Friends don’t let friends get drunk and act like a fool in public. Certainly not at the age of 33. That was the saddest part. She is my age.
Welcome. This is my page for sharing projects associated with my coursework in Media and Technology at the University of West Georgia. Assignments will be posted here as they are completed.
Accidentally Inspired 