Thanks And Sh*t

Thanks, you guys.

     I started this blog a little over three weeks ago, because I needed a space where I could be me. Free of cultural restraints and concerns, free of social politeness, a place where I can say what I actually goddamn think without having to run it through a dozen mental filters to figure out whose feelings I'm going to hurt. I must not be hurting a lot of feelings on this blog, because in three weeks I'm approaching 1000 page views. Now, that's not a shit-ton. That's not a stop-the-presses moment. But it matters to me, because what I'm taking away from almost 1000 page views in less than a month is that I should keep on truckin' with this thing.

     So I'm going to. Because you've made me believe that I can, and that I should. And I really appreciate that. I've recently done some things to blow my life up, and not in a good way. I'm trying to grow the balls to start talking about them here, because my current story (as all of our current stories are) is inevitably tied-up with my history, some of which I've already written about. I'm not trying to generate sympathy or compassion here; I'm just telling stories, mostly true and, I hope, mostly funny, even if they're funny in an ohmygodthatissofuckingtragicwhyamilaughing kind of way.

     If you think this shit is funny, or thought-provoking, or anything at all, I hope you'll share it with other people, maybe people I don't know but you do. And I hope you'll start leaving some comments, because your feedback and your stories are just as important. Your shit matters.

     Anyway, thanks. Really. And I'll see you again real soon.

     LB

I Had To Learn Martial Arts Because My Mother Dressed Me Like This

Holy shit. 'Nuff said.

Thinking and Sh*t

So, pretty much. Yeah.

     I've been doing a lot of thinking, you guys. About thinking. And what I think is, I haven't been doing enough of it.

     Let's talk about what I don't mean when I talk about thinking. I do not mean the process you go through in deciding whether to cook chicken for dinner, or throw the family in the mini-van (that you would secretly like to paint with flames on the side, but can't) and go get burgers. I do not mean your musings over whether or not Alien vs Predator was cinematic genius, or the worst piece of celluloid shit to hit the theater since Friday The 13th Part 9: Jason Kills The Cast of Riverdance. Technically those things are thinking, but they are on the ass-end of what I'm talking about.

     Cognition is an entire group of mental processes. Yeah, it includes decision-making (burgers, and Alien vs Predator sucked ass), but the higher-order stuff is attention, memory, producing (and understanding) language, reasoning, and problem solving. That is what I'm getting at when I talk about thinking, and I think I'm not doing enough of those things. I think most of us aren't. And it's starting to worry me. 

     In addition to being a class clown, I'm pretty confident in stating that I was a thinker in school. In high school especially, I had two particular teachers who simply wouldn't let me skate when it came down to applying my mind to the hard work of thinking through a problem that was bigger than my little world. So I say thank you to Carol Dusebout, a history teacher at Conroe High School who ran a class my senior year called Advanced Social Science Problems. She had me thinking through the problem of global terrorism in 1985, when a lot of my classmates were chiefly concerned about who they were going to feel up after the homecoming game. We learned fucking statecraft in her class. I came out of that experience with a serious desire to pursue a career in foreign relations, until I discovered that I could make people laugh for money, and I didn't need to go to college for that, and I was poor and would rather make money than give it to somebody else. Like college.

     The next thank you goes out to Anna Doyle. She was my English and Lit. teacher my senior year, and she ran a program some of us were in called GT (gifted and talented, which really was just another way of saying we particular kids liked to read and write more than most, probably because we weren't very athletic or popular, and as such had extra time to read and write). Where Ms. Dusebout pushed me into thinking about the wider world, Ms. Doyle pushed into my face (and brain) James Joyce, and Shakespeare, and Orwell. She made me understand through systematic thought that poetry was not just for pussies. She made me read things that I actually had to read. Anna Doyle. Carol Dusebout. I don't know where you are, but I love you both. 

     Somewhere between high school and Middle Age, I stopped devoting real time out of every day to the habit of thinking. I became quite good at reacting, which is not even in the same zip code as thinking. Thinking takes time, and time is something we as a culture increasingly believe we don't have enough of. We are too busy to think, because we have demanding jobs and demanding children and demanding social obligations and demanding media, and all of them demand our time and are clamoring for attention that we have less and less of because our minds are pulled in so many directions that, instinctually, almost as a survival mechanism, we become reactive.

     And what, dear reader, is the cost of living as reactives? Well, for starters, we're less open to new ideas, or at least ideas that are different from our own. We tend to gravitate to information sources that we believe are in line with what we already think about things, rather than seeking different opinions about complex subjects. (More often than not, we just avoid complex subjects.) We synthesize. We simplify. We post memes on Facebook that are grounded in neither fact nor truth, because they're how we feel. And rarely could we truthfully say they're what we think.

     What do I believe in? WHY do I believe it? What kind of a person do I want to be, and to what end? Do you believe you can come at those questions with a derisive picture and a pithy quote on a social network? Fuck, no, you can't. Sci-Fi Author Theodore Sturgeon said that "ninety percent of everything is crap." Don't believe it? McDonald's. People Magazine. TMZ. Any music by Miley Cyrus. The series finale of Lost.  We're buying into the ninety percent, and it's not good for us. Did you ever read H.G. Wells' The Time Machine? The Time Traveler jumps ahead into the future, only to find out that we basically solved all our problems with technology, and have evolved into a bunch of slack-jawed, puny, pinkish, lazy-asses who lay around all day and eat melon. 

     And that's what this is really about, you guys. I don't want to see you turned into a bunch of slack-jawed, lazy-ass melon-eaters. Because I love you. And I fucking hate melon.

     Let's get back to really thinking about shit. It will require time and effort, and something will probably need to come off your plate. My belief is, it'll be worth it. If you don't believe me, then do like Pooh:

     

Happy Halloween and Holy Sh*t

     Okay you guys. Just a quick drop to wish everybody a fun Halloween. Also, to post a quick two-minute vid that is singly the scariest shit I've seen and heard in the last five years. I don't give a fiddler's fart about the horror genre; blood and gore stopped being scary a long time ago. Hitchcock was right when he said that the scariest shit in the world (my word, not his) were things that were implied. 

     I promise no violence, blood or gore. But if this doesn't give you a primo case of the willies, you might just be flatlined. Thanks to Jenny Lawson over at www.theblogess.com for posting it first:

     I know, right? 

     Happy Halloween, you guys.

Birthdays And Sh*t

     So, it's my birthday. First, let me say thanks to the dozens of friends I have who took time out of their busy lives to type me a greeting on Facebook. I pray you get those seven seconds back somewhere today. Having said that, I will confess that, at my current age (47), my feelings about birthdays now run more toward Patton Oswalt's view of them. My point is, they just ain't that important to me anymore.

     Before you think I'm getting all depressed-middle-agey on you, let me explain. When you are a little kid, the birthday is the first memory you have in terms of a ritual that is centered around you. Family and friends celebrate the very fact that you exist. They bring presents. There is cake and ice cream. There is the crazy uncle who gets drunk and winds up in the pasture dry-humping the cow. We all have those great memories. What birthdays do for little kids is affirm to them that, yes, it's a good thing you're in the world. The rest of us are are very happy about that. 

     As we get older, though, one hopes that each of us begins to develop into a human being that is comfortable in their own skin and, over time, requires that particular affirmation less and less. Birthdays and birthday parties can still be fun (and we will continue to invite the crazy uncle, who's been sober for years now but still might go out into the pasture to dry-hump the cow), but we don't need the attention so much. I'm always a little wary of people who make such a big deal out of their own birthdays. I always wonder what's missing in them that they try very hard to recreate the kind of experience they had as children (except this time with booze). Don't get me wrong; I love a good party. It's just that some adult birthday celebrations feel... desperate to me. Am I making sense?

   

I asked for a guitar cake. I got a fucking ukulele.

     I remember some birthday parties as a kid with great fondness. The year I had my party at the Rainbow Roller Rink was awesome, mostly because all the cute girls I invited actually showed up. But then there was the year my mom could only afford a party for me at McDonald's, and I was past the age of thinking that was a good idea, and we did it, anyway. Oh, and I should probably point out that my sister, who is four years younger than me, has the exact same birthday as me. No shit. So for years we had to "share" a party, and by "share" I mean "hate each other's guts because we didn't want to have just one party." Every little kid should have their own party. 

     But today? My daughter wants to take me to dinner. (Please don't let it be Chick-Fil-A. Don't misunderstand, I looooove Chick-Fil-A, but it's my birthday and Chick-Fil-A doesn't serve booze, and they have frowned at my repeated attempts to smuggle in my own vodka to add to their delicious Sweet Tea.) She wants to celebrate the fact that I exist, and that's plenty for me. There will be no pinning the tail on the donkey, no couple's skate, no ukulele cake. And I'm okay with that. I'm okay letting go of that ritual, because I'm (mostly) comfortable with who I am.

     I do, however, miss my crazy uncle. And his cow-humping antics.

     

Fu*k You, Time Travel

     If you’ve never been in therapy, you may never have heard the following question: If you could travel back in time and meet your ten year-old self, what would you want to tell him/her? If you have never been to therapy and have had one of your friends ask you that question, they are either very deep thinkers or very creepy. Maybe both. I have been in therapy, and also I have friends who are deep. And, sometimes, creepy.

     So this is a question that, unlike a lot of my life, I have actually thought through. The first thing I’d worry about is introducing my 47 year-old self to my ten year-old self. At ten, I think I could absolutely accept the possibility of time travel. But maybe not the possibility that the old guy claiming to be me from the future wasn’t one of those guys that likes to kidnap boys and keep them shirtless in a dungeon. I wouldn’t be able to prove my bona fides by talking about where we got the chin scar, because ten year-old self is at least a year away from getting hit by a car while riding his bike, the accident that produces said scar. One thing I could mention, that nobody else would know, is that “we” (ten and forty-seven year-old selves) used to watch tv while sitting in the toybox, often with our younger sister, in the trailer home we lived in after Dad faked his own death and abandoned the family. But then I'd worry that’s too much to lay at the feet of a ten year-old kid, especially as his father is very much alive and kicking, and back with his family, and working at the carbon black plant.

And yeah. We totally did that. All the time.

     Even if I could somehow reliably convince ten year-old me that forty-seven year-old me was who I said I was: what in the fuck could I possibly say to him that would make it a good idea for me to have traveled back in time to meet him in the first place? Psychoanalysts have a name for this exercise, and I don’t know what it is. But I think it should probably be called Methods For Mindfucking Your Younger Self, Which Is The Only Thing That Could Possibly Happen If You Were A Kid And Met Future You. This exercise that therapists give to adults is for the adults where they are now, in present life. And I can kind of see the value in that. As a grown up (relative term), I can look back and let go of a lot of shit that, as a kid, I had zero control over, but I still felt guilty, or shamed, or angry, or burdened by it.

     But if I could actually travel back in time and talk to ten year-old me? No fucking way. Consider the possibilities: Well, first thing, dude, is that we don’t have flying cars, but we DO have digital music, which means no more record-skips ever, but then some nostalgic assholes are going to invent an app that allows you to lay album scratch and even skips over your digital music, so you can “listen to it like you remember it,” which is bullshit because I never once looked back with fondness over a scratchy record. Also, in about three years your parents are going to get divorced, and in the middle of it your dad is going to kill himself with a gun. You know the .45 he keeps in the bedroom? Bingo. And right after that your mom is going to crawl inside a rum bottle and pretty much stay there until after you are married yourself. Your teen years are going to suck, which is not uncommon for teens, but will be extra shitty for you because of the whole “father’s suicide / mother’s alcoholism” thing. Nobody’s really going to want to talk to you about it, because nobody will really know what to say, because your family is an embarrassment. Silver lining: all that tragedy you will mask with comedy, and you’re going to be considered pretty fucking funny all through junior high and high school. And because you’re going to continue martial arts, nobody is ever going to try and fuck with you, so no worries there. You’re going to make a solemn vow to never behave like your dad, and then you’ll get married and totally become your dad, in that you will cheat on your wife. Silver lining: you’ll never beat or scream at your kid. You’ll at least get that part right. You’ll fuck up in a lot of other ways as a parent, but not that way. Also, animated films are way awesome in the 21^st century. Any questions?

     We all like to believe that, were we forewarned, we would make different choices if we had it to do over again. But I don’t see the upside to that. I never really learned anything from my successes. I have (almost) always learned from my fuck-ups, even though I have often then gone on to fuck up in exactly the same way. So, no. I’m not going back in a time machine (which the government probably doesn’t have but Scientologists might because they have shit-tons of money from all the celebrities they’ve brain-washed, and their messiah was a science-fiction author) to have a chat with Ten Year-Old Me. For better AND worse, the shit that kid had to go through made the Forty-Seven Year-Old Me; the one that is absurdly imperfect and often self-destructive. That kid is gone – even though I’m still trying to work through a lot of his shit.

     But at forty-seven, we don’t call that “mindfucking.” We call it “trying to heal.”

Thank You, Television.

     You know that friend who proudly (and sometimes smugly) tells you that he never watches television? Am I the only one who wants to punch that friend in the throat? Poo-pooing television is like talking shit about my favorite babysitter when I was kid – which is exactly what television was. I got into television in large part because I watched so much of it. I got into voiceover because I would literally watch cartoons all day on Saturdays, from 5:30 in the morning (This was when old Tom and Jerry shorts were running), right up to lunch-time (Scooby Doo, or The All New Scooby Doo, or Scooby Doo and Scrappy Doo). Six and a half hours of cartoons, every Saturday, and it was awesome. Here, in no particular order, are some of my all-time favorite cartoons, and why:

     *Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: The years 1930 to 1969 are generally considered to be the Golden Age of American Animation, and I grew up on a steady diet of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Porky Pig, etc. What I loved particularly about these series was that they combined two of my favorite mediums: comedy and music. And the timing of Mel Blanc was nothing short of genius.

     *Johnny Quest: Are you fucking kidding me? A boy gets to travel around the world with his scientist dad, having adventures. Oh, and he also got to hang out with a bad-ass pseudo-uncle with one of the greatest action-hero names ever (Race Bannon), and his best friend, a diversity hire named Hadji. He even got to bring along his fucking dog. This was the life I wanted with my dad, knowing all the while I was never going to have it.

     *Schoolhouse Rock: I shit you not. To this day I still wouldn’t understand any kind of math AT ALL if it weren’t for Three is a Magic Number, My Hero Zero, Lucky Seven Samson, and Naughty Number Nine. I can trace my inner history nerd directly back to No More Kings, The Preamble, and I’m Just A Bill. Thank you, Schoolhouse Rock. You made learning not suck.

     *Hong Kong Phooey: You think you could get away with a title like that in our 21^st century, over-sensitive, politically correct culture? I admired HKP, not because he was a clever, ass-kicking hero (he was a bungler who usually fell ass-backward into success), but because he had a ton of heart. He believed in himself, and that was all he fucking needed. Plus, he was voiced by Scatman Crothers, who was in real life a lot like his animated counterpart: a ton of heart.

     And in the 70s (and very early 80s), Saturday morning was also the time for live action adventure shows. Remember the Krofft shows? Sid and Marty Krofft were Canadian brothers who, in the 60s, must have done some truly experimental psychoactive drugs, because that is the only plausible explanation to some of the weird, trippy shit they dreamed up to put on television, which I ate up with the same spoon I used for my Cap’n Crunch. To wit:

     

     Four wacked-out talking animals ( but not Snorky the elephant) hang out in their clubhouse ALL DAY and make music. And you're telling me they weren't toking it up when the cameras weren't rolling?

     

     It is my firm belief that the Krofft brothers were telling us to our faces what they were up to here. A talking dragon named Pufnstuf, who lives in an alternate reality where things are glittery and bright all the time, and where a witch occasionally comes along and scares the shit out of everybody. 'Nuff said.

     

    

Motherfucking SLEESTAKS, y'all. I rest my case.

     I'm a parent now, and so I worry like most parents that my daughter is getting too much screen time. But that's because there are so many more screens. If you're my generation, TV was the only game in town when we were kids. And yeah, we watched a lot of it, but then we got up off our asses and went outside. Because after every episode of Battle of the Planets, or Superfriends, or even Land of the Motherfuckingsleestak Lost, I wanted to get outside, grab a couple of my friends from the neighborhood, and go be the hero in those stories I just saw. You know: make some shit up. TV used to fire people's imaginations, instead of what a lot of it does today, which is make people feel better about themselves after watching a half hour of "reality," and people who are willing to say or do or be anything producers want, just so they can be on TV. That's not really feeling better about yourself, in my opinion. That's just looking for a bar lower than yours.

     Give me talking dogs and falling anvils and, yes, sleestaks - any day.