Moment of Truth

At least one writer currently staffed with SNL understand why!

My wife and are are one disc into the 2nd season of our generations epic, LOST.

Now, obviously many of you are hip to the happening of the next seasons, but from our current perspective of the unfolding events, the entire fate of the survivors seems to pivot on some character or other’s daddy issues. Sawyer, Jack, Walt; they all have serious problems with their fathers.

I’ve heard it said that J.J. Abrhams (mastermind behind LOST, the recent Star Trek movie, Fox Network’s FRINGE, and the Godzilla Witch Project a.k.a Cloverfield) is constantly drawn to stories laden with the struggles between father and son. Star Trek certainly portrayed Kirk as living in his father’s shadow. FRINGE is a daddy issue tour de force between Joshua Jackson’s character and his slightly insane and absent father. And, as mentioned, LOST certainly seems to be shaping up in the same mold.

As I contemplated this, I started to look for a pattern in modern film. Thing’s started to suddenly make sense.

Our generation’s great event was not a war, music festival, or economic depression. Our generation’s great event was paternal abandonment.

For the sake of simplicity, let’s start with “Luke, I am your father.”

I believe this single, iconic piece of dialogue set off a shockwave of creative concentration on the issue of “Dad”. George Lucas continues the pattern by adding Sean Connery to the last installment in what I’ll refer to as the true Indian Jones trilogy. After following Henry Jones Jr. through a gauntlet of exotic dangers, we suddenly find that the genesis of his adventuring was an attempt to gain the approval of his father’s unmeetable expectations. The high jinx that unfold throughout the film are a light-hearted, action-packed reunion between a son and absentee father. However, the serious subject matter still resonates.

But it’s not just Mr. Lucas who’s writing about this…how about our old friend John Hughes. The Breakfast Club (surely a film that defined a generation) was so addled with paternal discord that it made me wish I hated my dad so I could be a badass like Bender. The two powerful monologs in which Bender describes his Christmas and Andrew talks about his father’s heartless pressing to “WIN” are not just notable scenes in the film, but passionately written and acted words that echo throughout our generational conciousness.

Fight Club, another favorite to the children of the 80’s and 90’s, was laden with daddy issues both in it’s novel form AND in it’s theatrical manifestation. Observe exhibit “A” from the film’s script:

TYLER:
If you could fight anyone… one on
one, whoever you wanted, who would
you fight?

TYLER:
A generation of men raised by women.
I’m wondering if another woman is the
answer we really need.

I could go on and on and so could you. Christopher Nolan played up Bruce Wayne’s father/son relationship in Batman Begins. Jack Bauer eventually battles his heartless father in 24. HBO’s critically-acclaimed series Six Feet Under was entirely about the Fischer family’s relationship with their dead father/husband. The list runs as long as you have time to add to it. If everything in our parent’s cinema tied back to the A-bomb and the war, everything in our’s ties back to our Dad’s.

It’s not necessarily that these issues are new, it’s just that we as a species are just getting around to dealing with them en mass. Does it have to do with a sky-rocketing divorce rate? Maybe. Is it because we have nothing more pressing to mull over? I don’t think so.

Whatever the reason, I challenge you to contemplate this and even add to or detract from the list of pop-culture and art that is centered around the ominous figure of Dad. You may find comfort in numbers, knowing that you’re not the only one with an uncomfortable third Sunday in June. Or, at best, you’ll be glad that you’re stagnated creatively by your healthy paternal interactions.

Here’s a link to Erik Bonkovsky’s observations about Martin Luther King Jr’s challenge to the Christian Church.

He makes some poigniant observations worth checking out.

“In this ‘southern’ city with its profound history of racial discord, prejudice, and injustice (and only more recently some halting movements towards reconciliation) King’s life and message are particularly germane.”

click here for the entire entry.

NPR does a story on the very real, physiological effects of teen binge drinking. Don’t say “kids will be kids”. Kids are the future, and if we continue to think that keggers and “college nights” are a right of passage then we’ll continue to stagnate as a species.

Below is the link to the story:
Teen Drinking May Cause Irreversible Brain Damage

Over at RVAnews, some folks get pretty lippy about Richmonder Rozlyn Papa and her seemingly scandalous appearance on ABC’s reality television hit “The Bachelor”.

See the story and comments here.

And here is my response:

If you are willingly place yourself in the realm of celebrity you enter into an unspoken agreement that your person-hood is going to be subverted. People that go on the internet and try to defend television personalities (especially of the “reality show” ilk, where the person knowingly seeks celebrity) are completely moot.

I once got lambasted on this blog for saying something speculative about Heath Ledger’s demise (during which I was lauding on his acting ability). Someone got so in a huff about it they wrote a small essay in response (see Grace Murphy’s response on RVAnews).

I guess my what I’m trying to say is that there’s no point in arguing about this because everyone knows that reality TV is the knew professional wrestling, and we all remember what kind of folks argue about pro wrestling’s validity and foundation in reality.

And if you don’t remember, click here.

Well, the holidays are officially over and we’re back to work. Our house is like a small (albeit slightly more tasteful) retail store. In the time it took me box up the faux-evergreen and take it to the basement my wife had already slapped red and pink hearts on our windows and hung a Valentine’s wreath on the door.

I simply haven’t had a minute to slowly decompress and take a writer’s moment to reflect and overanalyze this crazy time of year. The lack of meditative pause came to an explosive cerebral moment on my way to work this morning.

I got up, trying not to embrace the dread a teacher feels when the holiday officially ends. I showered, did some push-ups, and got dressed. The part of me that wishes he was Morrissey was a little excited about having a reason to dress-up and wear some of my new, work friendly (and admittedly dressier) clothing.

I got dressed, made coffee and a pop-tart, and then was promptly reminded by my goose-fleshed spouse to warm up the car. After revving the engine a few times I absentmindedly crossed the sidewalk and ascended the steps of our front porch.

A few steps up I was halted suddenly by a man staring back at me from the house. This was an unfamiliar, older gentleman in a wool cap, thick rimmed glasses, and a long scarf wrapped snugly under his freshly shaven chin. I wasn’t exactly alarmed, but I was utterly stilled. I felt as if he may try and give me financial advice or engage me in a political or sports-related conversation at any moment. I stood for a second, slowly willing my knees to straighten and take me to the plateau of our porch. I advanced ever so slightly only to realize that the dapper male staring back at me was my reflection in the glass of our front door.

I honestly didn’t recognize myself. This couldn’t be the same boy who’d travel the country in beat-up vans and ran nude from police after braking into a hotel swimming pool. This man, with his designer petticoat and carefully combed hair could not be the me that I remember me being! Shouldn’t I be on my way back to bed where I’d sleep until noon and play Super Nintendo for the 48 hours between my waking and the next punk-rock show? Won’t I steal the newspaper from this porch and use it for some dubious purpose instead of entering the house and kissing my little dog goodbye before heading to a salaried position at the kind of middle school I swore I’d never re-enter?  At the end of the day, would I be in the living room on the other side of that reflection having a conversation about what to name the baby my wife and I are trying to have or will I return home to a house full of smelly boys (like me) and ruminate about our last rumble with the kids from down the street?

All this stuff hit me like a brick. It seemed that I left for the holidays a kid, and then (through multiple conversations about having kids and a slight change in wardrobe) returned a grown-up. Is that how it happens?

Alright, let me clear things up immediately. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in recent years it’s that a shocking title gets more hits. It’s not that shocking, but it will do.

Really, you’re about to read a defense of Santa Claus.

Recently, my wife and I have been bombarded by anti-Santa sentiments from close friends of ours and have really started to give it thought since we’re thinking about reproducing in the next year. I would love to just argue about my pro-Santa stance with these people, but ultimately it’s a silly conversation, so I’ll just “blog it out”.

The arguments I’ve heard are “why lie to your kid?” and “Christmas is about Jesus” and even “Santa is just a child’s first idol”. In an attempt to not rant, I’ll organize my thoughts around these three key points, though they are three of many.

• Why lie to your kid?-I always thought that there was a line (albeit a fine one) between a “lie” and “make believe”. For many kids, make-believe is a huge part of the fun of being young. I know for me, my developed imagination has been invaluable in my love of the arts and passion for writing. All this being said, I always saw Santa as a great start-up for kids to learn make-believe FROM their parents. I guess it’s technically lying, but no more then kids playing “superheroes” or “ninjas” in their favorite fort are lying to one another.
• “Christmas is about Jesus”-False, Christmas is about consumerism and the winter solstice. Like so many holidays, it was a pagan ritual that was hijacked by the church and made to be about Jesus. Wikipedia says ” Sextus Julius Africanus suggested that Jesus was conceived on the spring equinox, popularizing the idea that Christ was born on December 25.” This is highly witchy stuff. If you’re trying to reclaim Christmas for Jesus, you’re really just a re-claiming a re-claim. You can’t just axe Santa and then still partake in mass consumerism and materialism and say that Christmas is about Christ again. I have a feeling Jesus is going to be seriously pissed when he founds out what his main holiday represents. We should be celebrating Christ’s birth all year around, and if gift-giving is our love language then let’s do it constantly instead of once a year. It’s simply not logical. Following the “No Santa” line of logic ultimately leads to not celebrating Christmas in December at all. No nog, no gifts, no tree. I’m not saying that’s bad, I’m just saying don’t be half-assed about your faith-based qualms and just dis the jolly fat man.

• Santa is just a child’s first idol-This is insane to me. At what point did an overweight elf start competing with the Living God? It’s not that hard to make the distinction for your kids between make-believe and reality. Santa exists because you believe he exists and because it’s fun to believe that, Jesus exists because He’s real, so real in fact that he is Truth incarnate. That should be a non-sequitur for kids in a Christian house hold. My parents are awesome people, but not exactly scholars. Despite that, they were able to raise us to know the difference between make-believe and faith-based reality. If your child’s faith in the Word of God crumbles because he/she hears from kids at school that Santa isn’t real, then their first exposure to theology must have had some terrible flaw, and that’s your responsibility. When my sister and I heard kids talking about how Santa is “fake” we weren’t crushed, we felt sorry for them because Christmas was so much less fun for those kids knowing that Mom just went to some big box toy store and bought a bunch of shit that she then hid around the house.

So that’s my argument. It’s not as well formed as it could be, but I needed to get it out so I could stop thinking about it. Take it for what it’s worth, ultimately I think Santa Claus is important as a catalyst to fit as much fun into the wide open mind that childhood innocence affords as possible. There are some things that only a child can experience, things that are stripped from us in adulthood, and make-believe is one of those things. Let’s use it to make our kids experiences as awesome as possible.

I haven’t had anyone proof this or anything. Whoever is reading my blog is the first to read this. Not unlike most of my poetry/prose, it probably stinks. Let me know.

We’re the Hell

One day the sun came up and I drove to work, not feeling sorry for anyone on the way. I did not hear any sirens the whole way to work and when I got there, the salaried employees were all so happy. They hugged one another and sang and danced and flapped their right wings.
I turned on the radio and there was no healthcare debate.
I watched the TV and unemployment plummeted.
I read the paper and the crime rate was zero.
“What is going on?” I asked someone with a name badge.
They are all gone.
“Who is ‘they’?”
All the poor people! The drug addicts and hobos and prostitutes and ghetto-inhabitants who hold hands and sing beneath dead trees have disappeared. All the marginalized and well-fared with fatherless children, with husband-less women, with jobless men. All the beggars and seekers and pushers and tweekers and thieves and thugs and gamblers. They are all gone!
“Well where did they all go?”
They vanished last night at the strike of twelve. The earth has been cleansed of it’s plague. Now we, the good people of this nation, can live without the burden of social parasites and lazy minorities. Praise him who judges the quick and the dead! Praise the purveyor of justice! Hail to him who created all existence in 168 hours! Hallelujah! In excelsis Deo!

I stood there and cogitated. My informant laughed and cheered, a Gollum with his Ring.
“So they just disappeared?”
Yes, they vanished.
“And you say that God took them?”
Of course, how else could such a miracle occur?
“I’m not sure.”
He smiles widely
“I’m not a religious man…”
His brow creases.
“…but isn’t the time when God suddenly removes people called the rapture?”
His face goes blank.