DAY 85: CHEWBACCA

RASTAWOOKIE!

No Wookie, No Cry

DAY 84: THE DARK KNIGHT

"I don't understand what makes a man hate another man, help me understand"

                                                                                                   -Depeche Mode

I've been thinking and talking a lot about the tragic shooting at the Colorado film premiere of the Dark Knight Rises. It has really got under my skin.

There is forever going to be a stigma attached to this film due to the tragedy that has occurred. This is unfortunate as there is no link between this movie and the events, or even cinematic violence in general and this psychotic individual. This was just another in a long list of violent crimes in a violent world.

The perpetrator was nothing more than a glory seeking sick fuck who knew this would be a media hyped and crowded arena imbued with pop cultural iconography that he could hitch his wagon to and be forever associated with.

Immortality through infamy.

I'm sure the small-minded and sensationalistic media whores will try to find correlation between the acts of a singular sick individual and the movies or characters in a feeble attempt to make sense of the world, or at least make it pop with more pizzazz.

But I don't want to go off on an editorial rant. This isn't about my distain of the media. And I definitely don't want to give James Holmes any more power through attention.

This is merely Exhibit 'R' in my growing case for misanthropy and the unfortunate necessity for personal social isolation. I don't even like to leave my house anymore unless necessary. Its not Agoraphobia, or a neurosis. Its self-preservation.

One is not permitted to go anywhere public to enjoy themselves, whether it be the darkened theater for a highly anticipated premiere, the food court of a crowded shopping mall after joyfully finding the perfect anniversary gift, or the simple pleasure of a coffee and an apple crumble on a first date at a Just Desserts, without threat of this violent sick world personally imposing upon the ridiculous notion of happiness.

A few hundred years ago this was a world where wars were waged in the name of God, and people were persecuted, tortured and burned at the stake as witches because of the color of their hair.

Look how far we have evolved.

Today we live in a world where wars are still waged in the name of gods, and trillions of dollars are spent on modern day witch hunts.

A world where a convicted serial killer is given a free education and then loosed upon the world, and freedoms are vehemently fought for for someone who brutally decapitates a stranger on a bus.

A world where a madman manages to smuggle an assault rifle, 40-caliber handguns, and a 12-gauge shotgun into a movie theater, yet I am threatened ejection from a cinema for bringing in my own bottled water.

I love the movies, the theater. It is a bastion for me. A place to escape from the terrors and senselessness of the world at large for a couple of hours. To me it is a place of innocence, a place of hope. A sanctuary.

But that's not true.

I cannot go anywhere because nowhere is safe, and nowhere is safe because everywhere has people, and people are disgusting and dangerous.

I know I may be rambling heavy handedly, but I feel such profound sorrow at the sickness of this crazy world.

A world that just doesn't make sense to me.


My heart goes out to the victims and their family and friends.

            

DAY 83: PLASTIC MAN

Eel O'Brien, aka: Plastic Man. Probably the one and only time White Sunglasses on a guy are acceptable, and even then it's a.....(wait for it....wait for it).....STRETCH!


And yes, and the question has been posed: "does EVERYTHING stretch"? 


The answer: "You are a huge nerd".

DAY 82: IRON MAIDEN

This one is a bit of a surprise, I know. 
You think you know what to expect by this point, and then huzzah! I hit you up with this. Its like enjoying pancakes at 2am at a 2am Pancake House you've eaten at a hundred times and after you've comfortably settled into a few reassuring bites discovering a short curly hair cooked into the batter of your flapjack.


Unexpected and unpleasant.
But its 2am and you are drunk and hungry so you keep going.


I do love music, all kinds of music, from all eras...Punk, Bluegrass, Rockabilly, you name it. I occasionally brush up on my German to Industrial and Shoot the Duck to Disco, but I've never really cottoned to Heavy Metal. There are some exceptions of course, as there is in all music except hip hop, the odd guilty-pleasure anthem here and there, but Metal just never really...moved me. 


I was, however, very much enamored by its imagery when I was a youth. I would sift through the racks at the local record shop for hours, all those glossy album covers beckoning me with promises of a world filled with pentagram emblazoned demons and buxom sword weilding barbarian women. 


It wasn't a religious or satanic attraction, although there might have been some residual underlying subconscious motivators there from my time spent in Catholic school...the horror...the horror...the nuns...


No, it was the Darkness Within that called to me. 


There was a period of my life when I was a Very Angry Young Man, full of rage and vitriol, piss and vinegar. Fascinated by all things creepy, I was particularly drawn to the iconic visage of Eddie, Iron Maiden's demonic mascot. Just look at him, the screaming, clawing, wild eyed living-dead embodiment of Fury and Angst, a veritable Hellion. 


That was me, circa 1985-86. 


A culmination of a series of unpleasant life events, combined with the simple fact of being an angst-ridden teenager resulted in an eruption of internal hostility and violence. I kept up appearances, all smiles and neon Ocean Pacific on the outside, but inside I was bitter, like a cookie made with mustard and vinegar by one of those mentally encumbered rugrats on Just Like Mom. 


There was an emotional Blackness that was growing in me that required an outlet. This manifested itself in sardonic and deprecating wisecracks unconditionally meted out equally pretty much to everyone within my line of sight, regardless of race, creed, age, sex, and, unfortunately, size. My cynicism knew no bounds, my derision unparalleled...and frequently drew unwelcome retaliation. Being verbally outmatched and outclassed caused many of the reprisals to take the form of the time honored tradition of fisticuffs, a primitive lashing out with fists. 


I could hold my own, but weighing in at a svelte 140 lbs, I experienced my fair share, and probably your share, of painful and humiliating public ass kickings. Being a fan of being devilishly handsome and having an acute allergy to pain necessitated attention to the art of rough and tumble and lead to the development these 5 Simple Rules to Pugilistic Discourse:

1) Avoid getting into a physical altercation: The best way to accomplish this is to simply not start one. And don't be a douchebag. By my incredibly astute observation most people struggle with the latter.


2) Don't start something you can't finish: Listen to Kenny and know when to walk away, know when to run. 


3) Finish it before it starts: Straight down the middle-- target the nose, throat, solar plexus, and nards. I made the mistake of teaching this to my delicate flower of a wife and she's not afraid to show me how the student has become the teacher.


4) Act Mel Gibson/Gary Busey bat-shit crazy: make your opponent question your sanity and think you know something he doesn't, he may reconsider.  


5) Turtle: if rules 1 through 4 have failed you fall back of an old trick I learnt from Navy Seals (the movie, not the real thing)-- curl tightly into the Fetal Position and wait it out.



Juan Sanchez Villa-Lobos Ramirez once told me that there can be only one; if both parties are going to engage in acts of savagery and barbarism, someone has to learn a lesson, and only one person should be able to walk away. I well and truly always want that person to be me. I have so much to offer you all. 


I am older now, wiser, even more handsome, and have been lucky enough to surround myself with people that shine so bright they pushed the Darkness back. I grew up, learned my lessons. There is something truly terrifying about losing control and embracing your primordial self. Something primal, base, savage. Looking back I shudder and my stomach gets a headache and my bowels get a little loose. 


I just wish I'd learned these lessons sooner than later and I could have avoided the embarrassing and tardy addition of rule # 6): 


Don't ever ever get into a fight with a 1 handed man: his stump is a weapon that will cause severe blunt force trauma, and you will never live down getting your ass handed to you by a guy who only has 1 hand.

DAY 81: HAN & CHEWIE

A man and his Wookie,  pals, buds, inseparable, but they know where to draw the line, and they never tell each other the odds!

Here are 15 things that guys should never do that Han & Chewie have a really bad feeling about:

1. Work out or go running together. Platonic sweating and compliments can get awkward
2. Attempt the Kessel Run if you can't finish it in anything less than 12 parsecs
3. Wear white anything (shirt excepted): pants, shoes, belt, sunglasses...I'm looking at you farm boy
4. Wear Uggs, this really confuses and upsets a Wookie
5. Upset a Wookie
6. Go shopping together. Not for clothes, not for groceries, not even for a good Blaster
7. Go to dinner where the host owns his own on-site Carbonite Chamber
8. Narcissistically preen. Includes but not limited to Mani and/or Pedi, Teeth Whitening, consciously Accessorizing, and Guy-Browing (yeah, we had to have this one explained to us too). You ever try to wax a Wookie?
9. Drop your shipments at the first sign of an Imperial Cruiser. Trust me
10. Wear spandex when biking unless you are actually in the Tour De France. Or fighting crime. A bike riding crimefighter 
11. Rely on hokey religions and ancient weapons
12. Rooooowr wraaawr rowr (Translation: Watch Reality television)
13. Date a chick who has been with her own brother...what has been seen cannot been unseen
14. Refer to colors as anything other than their Primary names. Salmon is a fish, Fuchsia is a made up word, and Puce is just wrong
15. Shoot second

DAY 80: X-WING FIGHTER

And on the 5th Day George created Star Wars.

And It was good.

Happy May The Fourth my fellow Nerdkind.

Yub Yub.

DAY 79: PONG

1975, we were still half a decade away from Pac-Man Fever, but not far enough away from The Hustle. We weren't the unplugged barbarous Neanderthals actually interacting with family and friends, armed solely with popomatic dice and Community Chest cards that the history books make us out to be.

Nope, we had Pong.
The home version, exclusive to Sears. 
Pong = 2 sticks and a square ball. 
Pong = Genius.  

The golden oldies were more challenging than todays' uber-realistic hyper-kinetic games. Those shiny new kids on the block are redundant or finished within a few days of mindlessly hitting the fire button. With Pong one could literally spend hours and hours "boop-bip, bip-boop-ing". And I did.

Hours and hours of laughter, always ending in violence. 

But despite all its sophistication and unconditional entertainment, the world moved on and Pong limped behind, like the lame gazelle at the edge of the croc infested watering hole. There was a new sheriff in town and his name was Space Invaders.

I remember my family driving my brother and I out to The Old Spaghetti Factory located in “The City” in '78 expressly to see this new video harlot pimped by Bally Midway that had stolen the affection away from our slightly wrinkled and corseted Pong. I was so excited my bladder shrank and there was no way I was going be able to wait for our order to arrive. I broke out the time tested Plan # 9 and tormented my father with incessant convivial chatter until he begrudgingly gave my brother and I each a dollar of his hard earned cash, making it known that he viewed both our youthful exuberance and this expenditure as Wasteful. 

I gratefully looked up at him in genuine appreciation as he ordered a very very dry Beefeater martini on the rocks with a twist, and coolly lit a John Player Special. Surely he must be reminiscing what it was like to be an excited goofy kid. He looked me straight in my overly large unblinking eyes that my cranium hadn't quite caught up to and said "Don't cause any shit for once", and dismissed me with a flick of his cigarette.

I bolted to the back of the restaurant, my heart racing, already formulating boastful recess juice-box banter in my head of my adventures with the Space Invaders, understanding what Columbus must have felt as he set sail from Genoa in the Santa Maria.

I rounded the corner and came to a halt, my Keds audibly squeaking.


There was a vast line-up of fidgeting smelly kids clamouring to play the solitary machine, necks craning, quarters grasped tightly in their dank white knuckled fists leaving indelible imprints of the majestic Canadian moose on their sweaty palms.


Like the Santa Maria I had run aground. 


There was jostling and jockeying a-plenty, pushing and shoving, whoops and snarls. An Italian breadstick was tossed into the air, slowly spinning crust over crust, and just for a second in the reflection of the stained-glass hanging light fixture, I swear it looked like a cylindrical space ship.

The air was rife with arabiata and nerdsweat.

Standing on my tiptoes to get a glimpse of these marauding invaders from space, I shifted my weight to what my wife calls my Crazy-Foot, and my perspective changed just enough that I noticed hidden in the shadows a hulking plain monolith. I tentatively inched towards it for a closer look.

There, next to this new Electric God, lonely and abandoned, was the now 3 year old antiquated and obsolete Pong.

Hello old friend. How've ya been?

Wiping the dust from its screen, I dropped a quarter into the coin-slot with an echoing empty clank. I swear I heard a sigh emanate from its microchipped bowels as the screen flickered to life.

There wasn't a gradual acclimation, it was an immediate response.  Muscle memory and nostalgia combined and I quickly became lost in my old friends house. I wasn't playing against the machine, we were playing together, in hypnotic tandem. Synchronicity. A couple of the kids who were becoming impatient awaiting their turn at The Future gravitated towards Pong & I, much like a crow does with something shiny. Then a few more defected, and their cheers, carried on the winds of garlic and oregano, brought even more still, until I was surrounded by a gaggle, a murder. 


I played for 90 minutes on 1 quarter and entertained the throng. I was on fire, I was gold, I was a superhero. 

A Pong playing superhero. 

I was startled from my revelry by the ugly abrasive sound of fat meaty knuckles uselessly hitting the thick glass playing field of the neighboring alien armada. The savage blood curdling hiss and stream of previously unheard profanities that ripped from the prepubescent player's throat signified a vacancy as his last laser cannon was destroyed by the quickly descending invading pixels.

The throng, MY throng, quickly abandoned me as they viciously fought to be the next in line to waste their fathers' hard earned money.

Turncoats.  

I realized in that moment that I was much like that old Pong machine, limping along the cruel crocodilian shores of progress, content with the simple things, the things that are worked for, the things that endure.

They say you can never go home again, and that may be true, but that doesn't mean you ever have to leave.

Figuratively of course, not like a 42 year old Italian boy.