Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION

I am occasionally and justifably mocked for writing more about movies and television in this blog than I do books. As it happens, I have written a lot about books -- other people's, and my own -- but yes, it's undeniably true that I write more about what I see on the screen than what I read on the page. I think this is because, as much as I love reading (and writing), I remain a child of the idiot box and the silver screen. I grew up in a house stuffed with books and I am proud to have fallen in love with the printed word at a very tender age, but I'd be lying if I said the other mediums didn't have a similar appeal. For me, storytelling is storytelling regardless of medium: an animated series or an album can tell a story, so why reject the stories that flow out of the tube? There are good ones to be found among all the garbage, and let's face it, a lot of what gets printed is also crap, nicht wahr? So in the spirit of celebrating storytelling in all of its forms, here are some of the better flicktoons I've watched in 2025. And as you already suspect if you know anything about me, few of them were made remotely close to 2025.....

DEADPOOL VS. WOLVERINE: I am no particular fan of modern superhero movies. Way too much noise, not nearly enough substance, and bloody hell, are they all written the same way, or what? Is there an AI robot infused with Joss Whedon's brain engrams that just cranks these fucking things out six or seven a year, all in exactly the same ironic style? But D VS. W surprised me. It's a rollicking, irreverant, profane, inappropriate, hyper-violent yet decidedly cartoonish love letter to everyone sick of social justice messaging in movies, especially Marvel movies. What's more, it features superb performances by Ryan Reynolds and especially the always-reliable Hugh Jackman. The contrast of Reynolds facetious, childish, irresponsible manchild Deadpool with the brooding and ferocious Wolverine is wonderful. These two have such superb chemistry I could watch an entire series devoted to just the two of them, but if this is all we get, it's enough.

LAND AND FREEDOM. This obscure indie movie about a working-class English socialist who fights in the Spanish Civil War is by far the best movie on that conflict I have ever seen. Clearly drawn from Orwell's memoir "Homage to Catalonia," it adopts a cinema verite style which is almost documentarian. Like Orwell's tragic book, it charts the descent of cheerfully idealistic revolutionaries into embittered, conflicted, and ultimately disillusioned fugitives from their own cause, without either attacking the cause itself or forcing any conclusions on the viewer. Many of my readers (and my YouTube watchers) believe because I often rail against social justice warriors I'm against social justice: quite the opposite is true. I'm simply aware, as Orwell came to be, that there is a very sharp and very poisonous hook buried in the bait of Marxist and Neo-Marxist bait. Indeed, I am aware of it because he bit into it first.

THREADS. This British television movie scared the shit out of millions of people when it debuted in 198X, and having finally gotten round to seeing it, I understand why. If you thought THE DAY AFTER, ON THE BEACH, or FAIL-SAFE were terrifying depictions of nuclear war, this unsparing, absolutely pitiless "What If?" will leave you sucking your thumb in a dark corner of your bedroom. Set before, during and after a WWIII that sees Britain bombed by Soviet nukes, it too is shot in a fractured, documentary style, and mercilessly depicts the effects of destruction, starvation, radiation poisoning and complete societal breakdown which occur after the mushroom clouds blossom. No politics, no strategy, no heroism, just ordinary people going through something worse than hell, without any hope of relief. I didn't enjoy it, but by God it was well done. A true horror film.

HUNGER. I often dislike arthouse and indie films for their pomposity and self-conscious sense of importance, but HUNGER is one of those dialogue-driven movies where the writing is so crisp, and the performances so superb, that you can't help but be mesmerized. Michael Fassbender plays Bobby Sands, an IRA revolutionary -- or terrorist -- who goes on a hunger strike in prison. Fassbender's quiet intensity, his absolute belief in The Cause, the coolness with which he embraces his own impending doom, is unforgettable, as is his lengthy back-and-forth with a scrappy priest who tries to convince him that he is committing suicide and therefore endangering his immortal soul. Like LAND AND FREEDOM, it shows you revolutionaries (and some of their bloody deeds) without asking you to sympathize with them or cheer them on, but rather lets you form your own conclusions. Go figure that one.

THE LOST COMMAND. In this engaging and morally complex war movie about politics, ambition, friendship, and loyalty in the time of colonies and revolution, Anthony Quinn is a French paratrooper colonel fresh from their defeat in Vietnam, tasked with bringing a restive Algeria to heel. His chief opponent? A former comrade-in-arms from Algeria, now devoted to the cause of its independence. Though very much a war movie in the style of the 60s and 70s, it also explores the complexities of loyalty when one is torn between class and ambition, national identity and colonial fealty. Like PLATOON, it also examines the effect guerilla war has on conventional soldiers, who become increasingly cruel in the wake of bombings and ambushes. Both Quinn and his nemesis begin to lose their principles trying to fight, and win, a vicious guerilla war, and the question of who is right and who is wrong is, once again, left to the viewer.

OBJECTIVE: BURMA! Errol Flynn was known for many things, but playing serious, sober, duty-bound characters was not one of them. Too bad. In this 1945 movie about a commando raid in Burma (where a cousin of mine was killed in action in real life), Flynn does an admirable job of portraying a businesslike American officer whose mission to destroy a Japanese radar station goes off perfectly...until it doesn't. The last half of the movie is an edurance contest in which the commandos flee through impenetrable jungle while being constantly attacked by vengeful Japanese. If you ever saw BATAAN, you know that the question of whether any of them survive to see the final credits is by no means a closed question. Many of the "made during the war" war movies produced in America and Britain are unwatchable, Jingoistic crap, but this ain't one of 'em.

COLLATERAL. I was 20 years late seeing this Michael Mann movie, but I'm damn glad I did. Jamie Foxx is a Los Angeles cab driver who wants one last fare before he goes home. Tom Cruise is a professional killer who needs a ride. The two meet at LAX, and over the next two hours, mayhem ensues. Although not quite up to the legendary heights he scaled when he made HEAT, Mann still manages to pack a knockout punch with this carefully-crafted exercise in murder and moralizing.

THE GRAY FOX. This forgotten indie gem from Canada was described by one critic as "a wonderful adventure," and a wonderful adventure it is. Richard Farnsworth (THE NATURAL) plays a former Old West stagecoach robber named Bill Miner, released from prison after 30 years of very hard time in the States. He emerges into the early 20th century as a bewildered old man with no prospects, and after trying his hand at going straight, says "to hell with it" and resumes robbing trains, this time in British Columbia. The acting, cinematography and writing are all first rate, but it's the spirit of the movie that hypnotized me. I saw this when it came out (as a small boy), but I'd almost forgotten the lovely way Farnsworth portrays the Gentleman Bandit. Never will you more shamelessly root for a criminal than you will root for the good-hearted, nonviolent Miner, who means no one any harm, and even manages some romance when he's not planning robbery. It's just an utterly charming film, and damned if the scenery isn't absolutely breathtaking.

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS. While perhaps the whole is not as good as the sum of its parts, this cinematic adaptation of David Mamet's play is still one hell of a movie. Showcasing some of the best acting talent then working in the business -- Lemmon, Baldwin, Harris, Arkin, Spacey, Pacino -- it depicts a crew of sleazy and desperate real estate salesmen fighting to keep their jobs at any cost. Like DEATH OF A SALESMAN, it is an examination, and rather a cruel one at that, of the fear, greed, shallowness and amorality that lie beneath the American obsession with "making good." The scene in which Alec Baldwin verbally excoriates a roomfull of downtrodden salesmen has become a classic of modern cinema, and rightly so, but the whole film is a reminder that one does not need violence or sex to mesmerize an audience: a good script in the hands of good actors will do that for you.

PRINCE OF THE CITY. I'm told this movie has "mixed reviews" and was not a huge box office success. Whatever. Unlike the classic SERPICO, which portrayed one man's almost holy battle against police corruption as just that, a holy battle, PRINCE OF THE CITY takes a much more nuanced view. Treat Williams plays a mob-connected NYPD detective whose Catholic conscience forces him to expose a festering sewer of bribes, payoffs, illegal wiretaps, drug ripoffs, and collusion to the state and federal authorities. But as things turn out, our baby-faced hero is no angel himself, and his attempt to tell just a convenient portion of the truth backfires badly. I have just enough experience in the criminal justice field to understand the terrible, unwinnable conflict which often exists between the way things are supposed to be and the way they are, to bleed alongside Williams as his conflicted character endures not only a constant threat of death, but an increasingly unbearable pressure to testify against his partners and even his own family. This is the story of an angel who fell, and tried to save his soul, but strictly on his own terms. How that turned out, you need to watch the movie (or read the book; it's superb) to discover.

And that brings me to a conclusion. I have seen a lot of crap this year, but these represent the best of what passed before my willing if not always eager eye. I will drop the subject of movies for now, but Halloween is only two months away, so don't expect you'll escape another of my "31 horror movies in 31 days" blogs. Because believe me, it's comin'.

I now emerge from the longest hibernation I've ever taken from this blog: five weeks. I'm a bit embarrassed at this level of slacking-off, but frankly, I needed the break. I've been on a kick of trying to make sure my days are continuously busy, and to a degree that is almost impressive I have succeeded. I get up, I jog, I work all day, I hit the gym or go hiking, I edit my fiction, I write, shoot, or edit my YouTube videos, I read, I watch some selected TV, and once in awhile meet up with friends, and then I collapse. Then, ten days ago, I bought a kitten. So yeah, by my standards, I've been pretty busy. But now I'm back, and I hope to -- at least -- resume once a week blogging. So in the spirit of covering some ground, here we go with another edition of As I Please.

* First, let's talk about the kitten. I named him Hilts, after Steve McQueen's character in THE GREAT ESCAPE, Capt. Virgil "The Cooler King" Hilts. Why? Because he's an escape artist, tunneler, and mischief-maker par excellence. My beloved familiar Spike, who I had for 17 years, passed away last year, and after a significant mourning period, I decided it was time for the pitter-patter of little feet. So I adopted a tiny black void with endless energy and no respect for personal space. Who needs television when you have a kitten?

* Speaking of television, I just lied to you because I am still watching it. And folks, I have finally found an 80s TV show too shitty for even my gutter tastes. As you know, I still enjoy even the so-bad-they're-good shows of my childhood, stuff like T.J. HOOKER and MATT HOUSTON. But yesterday I caught a shotgun blast from the past...AUTOMAN. This Glen Larson-produced piece of shit was supposed to cash in on the phenomenon that the movie TRON was supposed to produce among kids my age. But TRON was kind of a dud, and AUTOMAN, an absolutely ridiculous heap of trash, was like the sweepings of TRON crushed into a ball and thrown at an unsuspecting public, only to strike them in the crotch rather than the heart. Starring Desi Arnaz Jr., of all fucking people, it's the story of a nerdy LAPD cop who somehow creates an uber-powerful 3D hologram crimefighter alter ago called Automan. The two then proceed to, you know, fight crime, using Automan's ridiculously convenient and flexible super powers, which, like KITT's aftermarket add-ons in KNIGHT RIDER, just happen to be whatever the heroes need in any particular moment. Although loaded with credible actors, including guys like Patrick McNee and Robert Lansing, the show is not so-bad-it's-good, like, say, THE DUKES OF HAZZARD or THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO. It's so bad it's gut-wrenching. It may in fact be the worst telveision show I have ever seen, although that title remains up for grabs. I pride myself that I can watch anything from the 80s, but this one may break me. I'm 1 1/2 episodes of a mercifully short 13 episode run, and I already want to quit. Funny thing? I thought it was garbage even at the age of eleven, and for once, my tweenage aesthetic tastes were correct.

* My reading campaign, this year's Goodreads Challenge, is going quite well. I have read five novels this year and a dozen or so nonfiction books. I'm currently working on Edmund Blundsen's UNDERTONES OF WAR. This British WW1 memoir is written in a lyrical, almost poetic style which mixes erudition, observation, wit and tragedy with considerable skill and not a little artistry. What strikes me about memoirs of WW1, however, is their similarity. Whether English or German, the themes, experiences, and even the physical sensations described are virtually the same. The experience of long-term trench warfare -- the mud, the barbed wire, the shelling, the rats and lice and rubble and corpses, the quagmires of filth, the mindless attack orders, the mismanaged raids into No Man's Land, the comic misadventures behind the lines, the sudden gas attacks, the bitterness of the troops toward their own officers, and of the officers toward their generals, the terrible food, the comradeship, the sudden deaths of close friends, the outbursts of hilarity amidst near-constant exposure to privation and terror -- is quite remarkable. Truly the Great War was a uniform experience, or as close to one as war can offfer.

* I am currently working on what I hope is the very last edit of DARK TRADE, the third CAGE LIFE novel, whose planned release date is Feb. 14, 2026. That would be the ten-year anniversary of the publication of CAGE LIFE, so I think it's fitting. I'm also doing last-minute work on SOMETHING EVIL: VOLUME I: BOOKS 1 & 2, whose release date is October 31, of this year. I have some anxiety about the release of this work. It is different from anything I have attempted and in some ways is the most naked attempt I've ever made to write a book that follows none of the rules that govern my other novels. Book 1 is a slam-bang, almost nonstop action sequence 100 pages long. Book 2, on the other hand, is mostly driven by dialogue, internal monologue, description, scene-setting, and so forth: not until the last few chapters does the action pick up again. Some readers may find the transitions too jarring, or the pace too irregular, for their personal tastes: others may not have the stomach, or the stamina, or the taste, for an epic horror novel of the style Stephen King used when he penned IT and THE STAND. What I was gunning for here, and may or may not have hit, was an immersive story that takes time to build story, characters and world. Perhaps it is simply indulgent. I don't know. But I guess I'll find out come Halloween. Trick or treat, indeed.

* I recently turned 53 years old. It's hard for me to accept. So hard that my mind is deliberately playing tricks on me. The other day I caught myself saying "forty-three" not to anyone else, but to myself, in my own thoughts: with a start I realized I left 43 in the dust a long damn time ago. Hell, when I was 43, I was living in Burbank and working full time in the videogames industry. My usual commute was a slog through Toluca Lake and Hollywood to Mid-City West, specificially the Farmer's Market, where I spent countless hours at a now-defunct trailer house called The Ant Farm. The difference in my life between then and now is not just years: it is light-years, and it makes me wonder what the future has in store. Certainly my life is a bit of a Mexican jumping bean, and I never know where I'm going to land.

* Pierre Poilievre won his riding in the last round of local elections in Canada, in a place called Battle River Crowfoot. This is potentially very significant, because Poilievre could have, and almost certainly should have, become Canada's Prime Minister earlier this year. Only Trump's idiotic decision to pick a fight with Canada on trade and immigration doomed what should have been a sure-fire victory for Conservatives up north. I'm not a conservative politically, but "conservative" in Canada means something rather different than it does in the States, just as "liberal" up there means something quite completely different than it does here, too. I truly believed that Poilievre represented Canada's last chance to avoid the fate of the U.K. by undoing the devil's work of Justin Trudeau, and that the election of Mark Carney sealed Canada's doom -- it's literal end as a functioning nation-state with an idenity and a culture and a future. I still believe it, but so long as Poilievre remains in politics, there's at least a small chance he can get into actual power, and if he can pull this off in, say, the next five years, before the damage is finally irreversible (if it isn't already), then Canada still has a chance. Because believe me, folks, if that battle up north is lost, then the States aren't terribly far behind. The forces that want to reduce sovereign nations to mere units in a global economy, to open-bordered characterless waystations where immigrant workers sluice in and out in massive numbers like transient wage-slaves, where rental and housing and job markets and health care systems are destroyed, where culture and heritage are wiped away, where freedom disappears under layers and layers of red tape, have a champion in Mark Carney. They have an enemy in Pierre Poilievre.

* In my recent attempt to rewatch as much of LAW & ORDER as I want to before I lose interest in the show itself, I was deeply affected by a scene at the beginning of the second season when Det. Mike Logan (Chris Noth) is forced to see a psychiatrist following the murder of his partner. The doctor is explaining the stages of grief to him, and he says, "Max is dead. I accept that. But part of me will never accept it. Y'know?" There is something about Noth's unguarded delivery that cuts me deeply. His character, a blunt, insensitive, tactless, tough homicide detective, is not the sort to admit any human emotions other than the approved one for cops -- anger. But when he looks at the shrink and says: "....y'know?" My heart just breaks. It is a genuine attempt of a man who doesn't know how to take off his armor and show vulnerability to do just exactly that: not because he feels compelled to, or because he's trying to impress the woman with his sensitivity, but because he needs to do it. The pain inside of him must be released. It's a scene I can relate to far more deeply than I wish. During the last year of my time in victim advocacy for the district attorney's office, I felt as if I were living in a juxtaposition. On the one hand my iron determination to remain in harness until I dropped, because doing the job was a form of penance for a life of selfishness and shallow pleasures; and on the other, an awareness that I was disintegrating emotionally, flaking away at the edges while burning to a cinder within. In a very real sense I was grieving for myself, just as Logan was grieving for his partner. Grieving, as it were, for the man I used to be, who needed to be buried but did not want to be buried, and who I will always miss. I accept that he is gone. But part of me will never accept it.

Y'know?

In Park La Brea, in Mid-City West Los Angeles, I got a serenade every evening. As the fulgent California sun went down, throwing the towers around me into silhouette, I would hear a woman who lived below me singing:

'Cause, baby, you're a firework
Come on, show 'em what you're worth
Make 'em go, "Oh, oh, oh"
As you shoot across the sky

I did not know this young lady personally, but I saw her often enough in the tower in which I lived: a tall, slender Asian girl in her 20s, with very long, lustrous black hair she usually wore in a shimmering ponytail, who drifted around Burnside Circle like a self-satisfied specter. I gathered from those who did know her that she was new to town, and hellbent on auditioning for, and ultimately winning, American Idol. Certainly she had a powerful voice: I could hear it from hundreds of yards away. But what struck me about her was that she seemed to possess nothing else. There was no nuance, no subtlety, no range to her singing. It was pleasant enough, and loud, but it was like a single note held too long, noise rather than music. Nor was there every any variation in the serenade itself. Always it was the same stanza of the same Katy Perry song, every single evening, over and over again until she tired of it.

Needless to say, though I will say it anyway, she did not win American Idol. She did not even make it past the earliest round of auditions. I think she was the only one who could have been surprised by this, but surprised she evidently was, and distraught, too. She had come to Los Angeles from afar in pursuit of a dream, which she chased single-mindedly and with as much determination and skill as she could muster, and when the moment came the gods of Hollywood said, "Next." She left Park La Brea not long afterwards and I never saw or heard of her again. She will never know that I, perhaps uniquely in this world, remember her evening serenades when the sun went down.

This is one of those memories I have which is peculiar and particular to Hollywood -- "Hollywood" meaning both the entertainment industry and the town itself, whose famous sign you could see from the stairwell outside my apartment door, and which, when I invoke the name, I mean to include Los Angeles and Burbank and all the other parts of the city and the Valley in which which I lived and worked. It is entirely wrapped up in both the sun-drenched atmosphere of southern California, with its breathtaking sunsets and nodding palm trees, and in the caprice and cruelty of the entertainment industry, which ultimately is a business of breaking rather than making dreams. On the one hand you have tens of thousands, if not several hundred thousand people, who work like dogs or slaves in the hopes of fulfilling some grand personal quest, and on the other, a town which feeds on such people the way a mosquito or a leach feeds, sucking them absolutely dry and then leaving their husks to rot.

When I think of my time there, quite a bit of which was recorded, in an incoherent and fragmentary way in this very blog, I am never far removed from memories like this, which belong to no really definable period and usually exist without context in my mind, but which come to me with an incredible clarity and immediacy, as if they'd happened yesterday, or two hours ago. These memories may or may not carry emotional content but they always produce an emotional reaction in me, which I believe may be nostalgia, or may be "hiraeth," the Welsh word meaning "longing for a place which no longer exists or which may never have existed." Because in a very real way, the Hollywood I myself pursued when I arrived there in 2007 may have been a phantom created by Hollywood itself: by the movie industry, by films I'd seen, magazines I'd read, interviews I'd watched, and all manner of red carpet spectacles I had borne witness to. A sort of romantic glamour, a deliberately conjured mirage which had lured me from the nondescript Pennsylvania town in which I had lived and into its bosom like a siren luring hapless sailors to shipwreck-hungry rocks. And the first two years I lived there were essentially the struggle of a shipwrecked man. Every day, every week, seemed to bring a new hardship, a more stinging setback, a more demoralizing humiliation. I never had any money, my relationship with my girlfriend became increasingly unstable and joyless, and the industry seemed determined to make sure I never worked in the town at all, much less again. Only the fact that I had burned my boats and could not retreat allowed me to endure it all. Men with nothing to lose are dangerous, but men looking at losing everything are ten times moreso. I had spent my last dollar coming into town. I had no way out. I had to succeed or thumb my way back across the United States.

A friend of mine, now an ex-friend because he became too Hollywood for his good or mine, once observed that the first two years of your time in town were merely a test of your commitment. Los Angeles, he maintained, tortured you ceaselessly for that period simply to see if it could break you. "You almost have to have something wrong with you to make it here," he said. And indeed, the vast majority of people who arrive in the city hoping to break into the entertainment industry in any aspect give up within that time -- six months to two years. It's entirely understandable. You would have to pay me a million, no, make it two million in hard cash to make me live that siege over again, and even then I'd probably hold out for three -- or four. It was that bad.

But I was speaking of memories, that jumble of memories I carry in my mind that often get triggered by the simplest phenomena. I hear Lady Gaga on the radio and remember, halfway through the song, that I met her: she stuck out her hand and as I took it in mine she said, "Gaga," as if I didn't know who she was. I hear John Tesh on the radio doing "Intelligence for Life" and remember the time I got drunk with him at a wedding. I watch an episode of CSI and remember the time I got drunk with George Eads, and we air guitared the entirely of "Freebird" -- no easy task, let me tell you. I do not pretend any relationship with these people or the countless others I worked alongside, bumped into, met at parties. I am 100% certain that 99% of the famous or semi-famous people I met forgot me within seconds of our meeting, if they were even aware I was there in the first place. I merely mention this because my life now is so different and so far away that those memories seem surreal, almost as if they happened to someone else. In a sense they did. The me that sits here, 2,650 miles from Los Angeles, is very different from the one who labored on the outer edge of the industry all those years in a vain effort at recognition. But, damn it, I do carry his memories. The most satisfying, and the worst, are all related to much more prosaic events:

* I'm driving home from a long, long shift at a trailer house next to CBS Television City, and get stuck in Hollywood Bowl traffic. It's horribly hot and the asphalt shimmers and my air conditioning doesn't work. My car begins to overheat. I have no escape, no way even to pull over to the side of the road. The needle creeps up and up until it pegs itself in the red and stays there, and I still have a long way to go to get home, and have to return tomorrow for another sixteen hour day, and I want to scream, because I'm sure that in a moment my radiator will give and I'll disappear in a cloud of white steam.

* It's three in the morning and I'm on Sunset Boulevard, drinking whiskey from a chrome flask and talking to my friend Dan in the parking lot of the Director's Guild of America. We're exhausted and punchy and there's still no sign we're going to be sent home, but we're happy while the whiskey lasts. Then we cross the street and go back inside, back to work.

* I'm in the desert in Palmdale on a shoot for "True Blood," and when the sun goes down so does the temperature. In an hour or two it's seventeen degrees and the make up effects technicians and production assistants are so cold we huddle together for warmth like animals in a snowstorm. We have no place of refuge but a wind-whipped tent with a broken heater. I have two very lovely production assistants clinging to me, one on each arm, but I'm too cold to take pleasure in the circumstances. I have no gloves and my hands are numb. When I try to find food at the Craft Services table, the granola bars are frozen stiff and the peanut butter is iced over and the coffee is colder than the air. In the lighted trailers nearby, we hear more important people laughing.

* I'm at a wrap party for "Heroes" being held at Strike! which is a bowling alley in Hollywood. I haven't bowled since college and don't want to embarass myself, but my boss, the ex-friend, bullies me into a game. I'm just drunk enough to play perfectly. Every single frame is a strike or a spare. I even make a 7-10 split. My boss does not take these defeats well. He looks me in the face and calls me a cunt. Several of us leave and find a nightclub and dance to 80s music. Finally, drunk out of my mind, I sit on the curb and wait for my rideshare. As I do so, two Bloods in red bandannas roll past in a tricked-out Impala, blasting rap music and leaving a fog of marijuana smoke in their wake. Their gold Daytonas gleam in the light of the streetlamps.

* It's raining, and I walk down to the palm-fringed pool and get in the hot tub and read a book. There is not a soul in sight and the blue-lighted waters shimmer and steam as the rain pummels them, and I turn my pages and listen to traffic sloshing down Sixth Street on the other side of a huge glass brick wall, and I'm enclosed in this womb of water and warmth and solitude, and it's bliss, sheer bliss.

* I go to Santa Monica on Thanksgiving Day, and after some hours of sunning and swimming and reading and dozing, I decide to take one last plunge in the water before I leave, and wouldn't you know it, some sea monster gets me. A poisonous spike through the foot. Blood and everything. My leg turns a fiery red, and there are no clincs open, and I have to drive all the way back to Burbank to go to the ER, and when I get there they look at me, sandy and wet and sunburned in the middle of the desert, and when I say I got stung by a sea serpent I'm pretty sure they'd rather commit me to the psych ward than treat my wound.

* I'm driving up Mulholland, trying to sneak into Hollywood via Outpost Road, and there, standing on the edge of the cliff, is one of the most beautiful, voluptuous women I have ever seen, very nearly stark naked. She's literally wearing a veil of gold coins and nothing else. A photo shoot, of course, not a hullicination. I stare so hard I very nearly drive off the cliff.

* I'm walking up from Beechwood Canyon back to the Hollywood Reservoir, and nearly get hit by a distracted driver. As he passes me, I recognize his face: it's Kevin Costner. He's obvious lost and can't get a GPS signal. Very slowly he drives down the road directly beneath the Hollywood sign, which is crowded with toursists. Every single one of them has their back turned to him because they're all taking selfies with the sign in the background. Not one of them notices that one of the biggest movie stars in the world is yards away. I stand at the top of the hill and laugh.

* I've just finished a tough practice at White Tiger Martial Arts and after a shower I amble down to Callendar's on Wilshire Boulevard. I sit at the green and black marble bar and Jimmy the Bartender gives me a beer and serves me margherita pizza and we talk about life, and this is one of those little moments I treat myself to now that I'm single again, because I love the old world, 1940s, ferns and brass and mahogany and leather look of this place, which even has its own shoeshine stand, and I don't particularly want to share it. Everyone needs a place all their own and this is mine.

* My cousin Scott and I are emerging from Freddy Roach's boxing club, the Wild Card Gym, early in the morning. We are so drenched in sweat we have to wring out our shirts in the parking lot and then snap them in the air: the sweat glitters in the sunshine. As we slip into my cousin's car, I say, "What great shape we'd be in if we quit drinking!" And he replies, "Yes, but at what price?"

* I'm in line for coffee, talking to some old lion of the entertainment industry. He regales me with stories of the Golden Age of Film which he witnessed firsthand. When he finds out I'm a writer he askes me if I'm interested in doing scripts for a documentary series he's producing -- on spec, of course. I reply, "No, I don't work for free. Do you?" He never speaks to me again.

* I'm blasting down Highland with the top down on a lovely, lovely summer night, about to hit the well-lighted heart of Hollywood, singing "Give Your Heart A Break" by Demi Lovato at the top of my lungs and laughing hysterically at the comic adventure that is my life.

This is a random sampling of things which are now deeply in the past but seem real and immediate to me, almost painfully keen. I realize that for all the hell it put me through, all the crushing disappointments and petty frustrations, all the times it dangled the most tantalizing bait imaginable only to yank it away at the last half-second, I miss it. I will always miss it, and always miss being a part of it, however small. There is something magical about the place, after all, and the industry, in both the good and evil senses of that word. Not a grandeur, but a charisma. Hollywood is like the bad girl in a film noir movie, the femme fatale you know is fatale but who draws you in anyway, because you want to be drawn. Your suffering is an implicit part of your role in the scheme of things. You have a dream, which like all dreams is selfish, and your suffering is the price tag, the peculiar caveat being that you must pay the price whether you realize your dream or not: the pay is for play, for the chance itself, not for the outcome. Only dillettantes and trust-fund jockeys glide through the industry as if oiled: everyone else scrapes and screeches and sparks their way around, either disintegrating in the process or finally breaking through. Me? I disintegrated. Not wholly, not completely, but enough that I knew that if I didn't do a bunk soon, there'd be nothing left to rescue. So out I went. An easy decision at the time, and the right decision in retrospect: Sun goes up, sun goes down. Still, there are times, days at work, nights when I'm watching a movie or a show and realize, hey, I worked with that guy, or hey, I got drunk with that girl, or hey, that building in the background, I used to live there. That's the place I used to listen to my evening serenade...to the sound of someone else's dream.

One interesting effect of being both lazy and incurious as a younger fellow is that, having arrived in middle age, I now have a distinct hunger for experience. This is a good if belatedly-acquired characteristic, but like most good characteristics, it comes at a bit of a cost.

Last weekend, I attended the In Your Write Mind conference at Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. I grant you that going to a writer's conference is not exactly an adventure by most people's standards, but I aimed to make it one, at least in the lowercase sense of the word, by traveling to it by train. My idea was to use the very fact of traveling to the conference, which is usually a tedious and uncomfortable slog up the Turnpike, into an experience worthy of writing about. I have always had a romantic fascination with travel by train, but except for a trip from D.C. to New York City and back about 25 years ago, my experience with distance travel by rail is nearly nil. I wanted to change that, so I booked a trip by Amtrak. I had vague notions of recording the phases of my journey, and of the conference, in this very blog -- a kind of traveler's journal, delivered in installments. As it happened, I didn't have time.

On the day in question, a Thursday, I worked until noon sharp, then jumped into my car, stopped at a thrift store and bought a second suitcase, in which I could pack the books I intended to offer for sale at the conference book signing scheduled for Saturday. From there I drove to Harrisburg, parked in a poorly constructed garage, and dragged my luggage to the train station in heat so godawful I was drenched in sweat by the time I traveled the short distance in question. (I actually had to change my clothes in the station restroom.) After that, I bought a bottle of iced tea and relaxed on the bench, thinking my adventure had begun. In fact it was only my troubles.

The train never arrived. That is to say, I gave up on it before it appeared. Seems the locomotive blew its motor somewhere west of Philadelphia, and after waiting around for a few hours in increasing dismay as repairs were effected, I began to realize that, factoring in the five hour travel time when the train finally did leave the Harrisburg station, I would arrive sometime around midnight instead of my planned seven o'lock. So I got a refund, dragged my luggage back to my car, and departed for Greensburg in my car, which I had just taken out of the shop the previous day and which I did not want to be using at all.

The trip was uneventful until I was about 45 miles short of town, when I had left the Turnpike for isolated country roads surrounded by thick woods. Then my battery light came on. As my battery was brand-new, installed literally the previous day, I suspected the alternator, but the alternator was also new. Needless to say, this made for a tense final hour or so of the journey, and I couldn't help but reflect on the fact that if the train had showed up on time, I wouldn't have had to deal with this shit.

I got to the hotel, settled in and decided to test the car by letting it sit and then restarting it and driving it locally. No battery light now, so I grabbed food and beer and went back to the hotel. The next morning I went about my writerly business, but realizing my teaching module ("Writing Violence") had been pushed up from Saturday to Friday, I had to spend some hours working on my presentation beforehand. As I did this, I lost a flash drive which contained a lot of backup writing material, and was never able to find it. This bothered me a lot more than it probably should have. So too did the fact that my module was put up against a Crime Scene House tour offered by the program: in the tour, you are shown simulated crime scenes and the forensic techniques used to gather evidence at them. I wanted to attend this tour, had signed up for it, and now had to compete with it. I lost. The previous year, my module was SRO. This time four people showed up. I attended a module afterwards, pitched an unpublished novel of mine to an agent (who requested the full manuscript), ate dinner in the dining hall, went back to my hotel for a few hours, and then returned to campus for a "Ghost Tour" which sounded really interesting. Seton Hill University looks like Hogwarts and its nearly as old: there is a lot of history there, and a lot of atmosphere, especially on a summer evening when the sky is a fiery orange-purple above the beautiful but haunting nun's cemetery built on the hill. The tour, however, proved to me more about the architecture of the main building than a series of ghost stories, and I confess some disappointment.

On Saturday I decided I'd best handle the car business. I had the alternator tested as soon as the nearest shop opened and lo, it was bad: bad at six months of use. Most alternators last the life of the vehicle: I was on my third in two years. And of course the local shops couldn't handle me, so I had to drive 30 miles to Monroeville to drop the damned thing off, taking an expensive Uber ride back to campus. I then attended a lecture by the guest lecturer R.G. Belsky, leaving when my phone rang and discovering my car was already ready to be picked up (if I'd known they worked that fast at the Monroeville Firestone, I'd have stayed in their lobby). I decided to finish the lecture first, but when I returned to the speaking hall Mr. Belsky was on the floor, having collapsed during the Q & A after his very interesting talk on, among other things, the Son of Sam case. It later turned out he was merely dehydrated, but for a time we didn't know if something really serious had happened to the man. Fortunately, the author John Fortunato and my editor Mike Dell jumped into action and in the end, all was well on that front. But it was a jarring experience to say the least.

I also discovered around this time that my friend and mentor, Pat Picciarelli, would not be joining Michael D. and myself for dinner as a storm on the previous night had caused flood damage to his home. As this dinner was one of the highlights of the trip, or was supposed to be, I was again disappointed, but trudged manfully to a panel called "Writing Crime" in which had been impressed to serve as a panelist. Because Mr. Belsky, the guest panelist of honor, was unavailable for obvious reasons, and because Mike Dell was seeing to him at the hospital, it fell upon me and three others to carry the event. Losing the guest of honor is always going to kill off a lot of attendance, and it didn't surprise me that the audience outnumbered the panel by the humbling margin of about two to one, no more. Although the discussion was lively, the cameras recording it malfunctioned, so any pearls of wisdom we might have dropped or been dropped upon us are probably lost to history.

At that point John Fortunato (a Tony Hillerman Prize winner, by the way, and all around good guy) drove me to pick up my car. When I asked if there were any reason my car might be eating alternators, which cost like $500 - 700 to replace, the mechanic said dryly, "Your car has 192,000 miles on it." I guess that is as much as an answer as I'm likely to get, but I'll nevertheless have to have my own hometown mechanic find out if there's a faulty voltage regulator or some other goddamned thing that has gone wrong and needs fixing.

That evening came the book signing. The parking lot was inexplicably nearly full when I arrived early at the theater and speaking hall just off campus, but I managed to get a space and set up just in time for a heavy rainstorm to ensure attendance at the lecture by Alexander Darwin would be dampened as a consequence, along with the subsequent foot traffic into the signing area. I nevertheless sold eight or nine books, which is not great by any means but not terrible, either. Still, compared to my last two signings it was again a bit of a letdown. I did avoid the parking tickets almost everyone else found out they'd received, however, when they left at the end of the evening.

The previous year, I had stayed in the dormitories on campus, which allowed for a lively evening social interaction with fellow conference-goers as well as students attending the Writing Popular Fiction Program. We ate delivery food, we drank beer, we talked about writing, movies, and life generally, and had a very good time. This year the school refused to rent the dormitories to the conference-goers for some reason, so that was not possible. I ended up in the never-before-seen-by-me commuter lounge with my editor Mike, talking for an hour or two, but it was hardly the same.

The next morning I decided I had best try and salvage as much of Sunday as I could, so I ate breakfast in the dining hall, said goodbye to Sally Bosco (organizer of the conference), John and Mike, and then hit the road. The trip back at least was drama-free, and I even managed to secure a parking space directly in front of my apartment. So ended my "adventure," which turned out to be merely an experience, and not a terribly positive one at that.

Obviously in life, shit happens. Two years ago, on my first night in Montreal, my rental car was stolen off the street, necessitating a lot of improvisation if I wanted to salvage the trip. I was successful, but the stress of dealing with the theft certainly added a dimension to my vacation I could have done without. In this case, I was not really on vacation, but it was supposed to be a "pleasure before business" trip, and by that standard it was more or less definitely a failure. When I came home, after unpacking and relaxing for a few hours, I actually roused myself and took a hike in the deep woods, trying to sweat out the toxins that disappointment likes to hide in the body. I reflected too on the fact that trying to bring a little more adventure and "experience" into a life defined by routine (work, writing, exercise, a little socializing) is no proof from misfortune. Indeed, the more chances we take in life, the more opportunities we say "yes" to, however pedestrian they may be, the greater the likelihood that we will bang our metaphorical shins in the process.

I mention this because, even though it is all quite obvious, I have noticed in myself and others a very distinct habit of using negative experiences as an excuse to avoid breaking from routines, taking chances, etc. I cannot tell you the number of times I have attempted to visit a new hiking trail, or said "yes" to an offer of a getaway weekend, or plotted a day trip or RSVP'd to an unexpected invite at a faraway location, only to meet with some unpleasant experience, or experiences, that soured me on saying "yes" the next time. There are times in such circumstances that I seem almost to be waiting for the other shoe to drop, and feel what might be called disappointment that it did not: the lazy, incurious part of me that I thought faded out of existence in my middle thirties evidently lingers like a ghost in my conscious mind: not powerful enough to be called a poltergeist, too transparent to prevent me from breaking routines, but persistent enough to make me hesitate before even minor deviations from my groove. In a sense this ghost is the "negative Nelly in Sector 7G" who advises me to take counsel of my fears and my social anxieties and my tendency to catastrophize ("What if the apartment catches fire while I'm away?"), and just stay home where it's safe. I have discovered that people like myself, who have social anxiety but for the greater part of their lives never knew it, always look for excuses not to do things, and when they in fact overcome that anxiety and partake in said things, look for things to go wrong so as to justify their reluctance after the fact. The routines that anxiety-ridden people like myself build (and this includes watching TV shows and movies over and over again and re-reading books; even for returning to the same topics of conversation again and again with friends and family) are not for convenience or organization: they exist solely for comfort. In a routine there are no surprises, good or bad, only outcomes which are already known. And this not only discourages deviating from routine, it is the very opposite of adventure, which is defined as "an unusual or exciting, typically hazardous, experience or activity."

If you're reading this, the chances are that you are a bookworm, and if so, probably share some of my eccentricities: you may be an introvert, or like myself, an "introverted extrovert" who is both eager to be among people and desperate to avoid them, who enjoys socializing but needs significant recharge time in solitude afterwards. You may have to force yourself to do anything new, and probably experience high levels of discomfort while you do it...even if it is inherently enjoyable. You may have a well-thumbed card catelogue of excuses you can reach for whenever you're offered a chance for a trip or a weekend getaway or those karate or knitting classes or a seat at that concert or ballgame. If so, you have my sympathy whole and entire, but not if you choose to live a half-life in consequence, staring at the world from behind your double-plied living room window. Wiring like ours provides an explanation for our reluctance to engage, but it is not an excuse not to engage. Our terms of engagement are necessarily different, of course, but in the end we are offered the same choice as everyone else: spectate or get on the field. When you come down to the last act of your life, you may find the bitterest regrets lie not in the chances you took that crapped out and left you penniless or stranded somewhere, but the ones you passed up out of cowardice masquerading as apathy.

I had a disappointing and depressingly expensive three and a half day weekend. There was no aspect of it that exceeded or even really met my expectations. I came home feeling relieved that I simply managed to avoid any more disappointment than I had already experienced, and my initial reaction was, "OK, if that's how you want to reward me for trying something different, I guess I won't fucking bother." This sort of pouting is understandable, but like all sulking it is meant to pass quickly, not to become a lifestyle. So despite the discouragement and the expense, I am already planning my next experience, my next "lower-case" adventure. Dunno exactly what it will be, or when it will take place, but the fact I'm not using it as an excuse to withdraw turtle-like into my shell shows at least that I have grown a little in the last twenty years. And if that's all I take away from my failed adventure, then perhaps it wasn't so much of a failure after all.

Third prize is you're fired. -- Blake

The other night I watched Glengarry Glen Ross, the classic James Foley-directed film adapted from David Mamet's play of the same name. Later that night, I scribbled the following lines in my journal:

"What is the playwright's obsession with salesmen, anyway? I guess the question answers itself. Salesmen are a sort of effigy of America – amoral hustlers selling worthless crap to credulous fools."

Painting with a broad brush is dangerous and only logical if we follow up with much finer brushwork, so let me expand on my remarks, because "the playwright's obsession" is important, and because my oversimplification of salesmen (which is insulting as well as ridiculously generalized) does possess at its core a few coarse grains of truth.

In 1949, Arthur Miller wrote "Death of a Salesman," a play which by acclamation is considered one of the best of the twentieth century. "Salesman" is a two-act tragedy described by one critic as the story of an "aging, defeated traveling salesman move inexorably toward self-destruction, clinging desperately to fantasies." Many see the play as an implicit criticism of the American dream, in particular the idea that Willy Loman disintegrates when he realizes he has failed to heed what Miller called society's "thundering command to succeed." Loman is emotionally and intellectually shallow and measures himself by external rather than internal standards: he is more concerned with the appearance that he is a good father and salesman than the actuality of these things. Even his modest prime as a salesman, which has already passed him by when the play opens, was based on the idea of ingratiation with important people rather than business acumen or personal integrity. As he ages, his ability to get by on this ability contracts, placing increasing financial and emotional stress on him and on the narrative he has created to appear more successful than he actually is. When Loman's complex delusional projection scheme can no longer evade reality, it bursts like a bubble floating into a nail, and he kills himself.

One critic attacked "Salesman" for its "Marxist" tone, and indeed, the play can be viewed as an attack on the emotional, intellectual and spiritual effect of the "get on or get out" mentality which exploded in America (and elsewhere) after WW1, and insisted that the measure of a man was his ability to succeed in business, i.e. to make money and purchase expensive objects. Any attack, implict or indirect, on capitalism, is always viewed as Marxist by those of right-leaning persuasion, in the same way that any criticism of one's own country inevitably triggers rage in nationalists: it is an instinctive response, and is often irrelevant even when entirely true. If I may presume to enter Miller's mind, I believe his motive was actually quite personal: Willy Loman is largely based on Miller's own uncle Manny Newman, a salesman who believed himself in competition with Miller's father both financially and in terms of fatherhood, and who ultimately committed suicide. Though I am not aware Miller ever said so, he pointedly noted that his own success as a playwright was not a source of joy for his uncle, reflecting perhaps, in Manny's mind, his own shortcomings as a father. And viewed in macroscopic terms, "Salesman" is about the tragedy of possessing the wrong dreams, the wrong standards, the wrong systems of self-measurement -- in short, the wrong value-system. And I think it inarguable, though many will die in a ditch arguing it, that the last 100 years of capitalism have elevated materialism and the competition over the appearance of success to a religion, albeit a false and a hollow one. The Golden Calf of the 20th - 21st centuries is "fake it 'til you make it," the projection of success as a presage to success. But what is "success?" The acquisition of money, wealth, fame and influence. Not keeping up with the Joneses, but blasting pass them at speed in a blur of cash, jewels, Martini olives, and carefully curated photos from your vacation in Bali. And in lieu of that, conjuring the illusion that you are more than you seem, the idea being that if enough people believe a lie, it becomes truth: a concept Willy Loman accepted as fact, and which is also distinctly Orwellian in nature.

Speaking of Orwell, in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, paints a horribly vivid picture of Gordon Comstock, a Londoner who works for a "read lead" advertising firm. Comstock believes "advertising the dirtiest ramp capitalism has yet invented," but another one of Orwell's characters, George Bowling from Coming Up For Air, would probably disagree. This insurance salesman believes that all sales are a swindle, and the question is merely whether the "cards are on the table" or no, i.e. whether the buyer is aware he is being taken or not. In fact, if advertisers are the strategists of capitalism, the boys from S-2 who fuddle with maps and compasses and tide tables and lunar charts and the types of artillery shells to be employed in an attack, salesmen are the footsoldiers, the infantrymen, the guys who storm the beaches. Capitalism as an economic system could probably endure in some form or other without advertising, because people will ultimately seek out their needs and in doing so, encounter their wants; but it could not survive a single week without salesmen. And yet, and is so often the case in life, the most necessary component of a system often occupies the most thankless, most hazardous, most stress-inducing space. In war, infantrymen die in greater numbers than anyone else in the service, and in capitalism, for every salesman who ends up like Blake in Glengarry Glen Ross, there are a half-dozen, or a dozen, or perhaps dozens, who end up like Shelly "The Machine" Levine, which brings us back to Glengarry -- or will, in a moment, as I have one more place to tarry before we return there, and believe it or not, it's WKRP in Cincinnatti.

WKRP was a 70s-era sit-com about a third-rate radio station in one of America's least -glamorized cities. Among its more memorable characters was Herb Tarlek, the station sales manager, concocted by showriters as a kind of walking, talking cliche of "unprofessional, bribe-taking desperate salespeople." Tarlek is sleazy, underhanded, frequently (but not consistently) inept, and favors horribly tacky clothing, mostly polyesther and white leather. His boss once laments, "I should have fired Herb Tarlek immediately. He's the worst salesman in the world. In the world." But Tarlek, as I pointed out, is not actually bad at sales: his failure is in ethics, and to a certain degree, morals. In Herb's mind, the ends justify the means, or the means justify themselves; in either case, the goal is to sell airtime, and to whom it is sold hardly ever enters into his calculations. I mention Tarlek specifically because his enduring popularity is reflective of the fact of how many Americans feel about salesmen: that they are liars, that they are untrustworthy, and that they lack ethics. There is probably a note, or several notes, of hypocrisy in this view, especially in a country whose cultural identity revolves around buying and selling things: nevertheless, it is widely held, and it is well to remember that Tarlek, although a nemesis for his fellow characters on the series, is also a pitable figure: lonely, insecure, and frequently desperate. It is not difficult to imagine him suffering the fate of a Willy Loman.

So -- Glengarry. Like "Salesman," it was adapted from a play. Unlike "Salesman," its most famous dialogue comes from the film rather than the stage version, in which an "alpha" real estate salesman played by Alec Baldwin viciously berates a group of salesman:

Blake: Let me have your attention for a moment! So you're talking about what? You're talking about...bitching about that sale you shot, some son of a bitch that doesn't want to buy, somebody that doesn't want what you're selling, some broad you're trying to screw and so forth. Let's talk about something important. Are they all here?

Williamson: All but one.

Blake: Well, I'm going anyway. Let's talk about something important! Put that coffee down!! Coffee's for closers only. Do you think I'm fucking with you? I am not fucking with you. I'm here from downtown. I'm here from Mitch and Murray. And I'm here on a mission of mercy. Your name's Levene?

Levene: Yeah.

Blake: You call yourself a salesman, you son of a bitch?

Moss: I don't have to listen to this shit.

Blake: You certainly don't pal. 'Cause the good news is -- you're fired. The bad news is you've got, all you got, just one week to regain your jobs, starting tonight. Starting with tonights sit. Oh, have I got your attention now? Good. 'Cause we're adding a little something to this months sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anyone want to see second prize? Second prize's a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired. You get the picture? You're laughing now? You got leads. Mitch and Murray paid good money. Get their names to sell them! You can't close the leads you're given, you can't close shit, you ARE shit, hit the bricks pal and beat it 'cause you are going out!!!

Levene: The leads are weak.

Blake: 'The leads are weak.' Fucking leads are weak? You're weak. I've been in this business fifteen years.

Moss: What's your name?

Blake: FUCK YOU, that's my name!! You know why, Mister? 'Cause you drove a Hyundai to get here tonight, I drove a eighty thousand dollar BMW. That's my name!! And your name is "you're wanting." And you can't play in a man's game. You can't close them. And you go home and tell your wife your troubles. Because only one thing counts in this life! Get them to sign on the line which is dotted! You hear me, you fucking faggots?

(Blake flips over a blackboard which has two sets of letters on it: ABC, and AIDA.)

Blake: A-B-C. A-always, B-be, C-closing. Always be closing! Always be closing!! A-I-D-A. Attention, interest, decision, action. Attention -- do I have your attention? Interest -- are you interested? I know you are because it's fuck or walk. You close or you hit the bricks! Decision -- have you made your decision for Christ?!! And action. A-I-D-A; get out there!! You got the prospects comin' in; you think they came in to get out of the rain? Guy doesn't walk on the lot unless he wants to buy. Sitting out there waiting to give you their money! Are you gonna take it? Are you man enough to take it? What's the problem pal? You. Moss.

Moss: You're such a hero, you're so rich. Why you coming down here and waste your time on a bunch of bums?

(Blake sits and takes off his gold watch)

Blake: You see this watch? You see this watch?

Moss: Yeah.

Blake: That watch cost more than your car. I made $970,000 last year. How much you make? You see, pal, that's who I am. And you're nothing. Nice guy? I don't give a shit. Good father? Fuck you -- go home and play with your kids!! You wanna work here? Close!! You think this is abuse? You think this is abuse, you cocksucker? You can't take this -- how can you take the abuse you get on a sit?! You don't like it -- leave. I can go out there tonight with the materials you got, make myself fifteen thousand dollars! Tonight! In two hours! Can you? Can you? Go and do likewise! A-I-D-A!! Get mad! You sons of bitches! Get mad!! You know what it takes to sell real estate?

(He pulls something out of his briefcase)

Blake: It takes brass balls to sell real estate.

(He's holding two brass balls on string, over the appropriate "area"--he puts them away after a pause)

Blake: Go and do likewise, gents. The money's out there, you pick it up, it's yours. You don't--I have no sympathy for you. You wanna go out on those sits tonight and close, close, it's yours. If not you're going to be shining my shoes. Bunch of losers sitting around in a bar. (in a mocking weak voice) "Oh yeah, I used to be a salesman, it's a tough racket." (he takes out large stack of red index cards tied together with string from his briefcase) These are the new leads. These are the Glengarry leads. And to you, they're gold. And you don't get them. Why? Because to give them to you is just throwing them away. (he hands the stack to Williamson) They're for closers. I'd wish you good luck but you wouldn't know what to do with it if you got it. (to Moss as he puts on his watch again) And to answer your question, pal: why am I here? I came here because Mitch and Murray asked me to, they asked me for a favor. I said, the real favor, follow my advice and fire your fucking ass because a loser is a loser.

This scene lays bare, in Mamet's mind at least, the driving principle of capitalism, i.e. of sales, which is simply "to get them to sign on the line that is dotted." It doesn't matter what you're selling, or whether it serves a purpose, or whether the perspective buyer can afford it. It doesn't matter if the product is harmful to the buyer or to the environment. What matters is simply to sell, to close the deal, to take the commission check and move on, virus-like, to the next "sit." Your entire value as a human being is determined by this ability. Blake, the embodiment of conscience-free capitalism, makes special point of his disinterest in any other qualities. Indeed, the only successful salesman we see among the four downtrodden men who work for this branch of the firm is Ricky Roma, whose wiki describes him as follows:

"The most successful salesman in the office. He is ruthless, dishonest and immoral, and succeeds because he has a talent for figuring out a client's weaknesses and crafting a pitch that will exploit those weaknesses. He is a smooth talker and tends to maneuver clients towards a sale by means of grand but vaguely incoherent soliloquies."

Roma, who incidentally is not present when Blake excoriates the other three salesmen of the branch, is much more likeable than Blake, but almost indistinguishable in outlook. In the film, we see him slowly, patiently, and deliberately maneuever a drunken man into a purchase he cannot afford; later, when the desperate man tries to recant the sale, Roma unveils another elaborate set of techniques for regaining emotional control over the hapless buyer. The way the scene is written is crucial, because while we empathize with the hapless and desperate buyer, we also empathize with Roma. He has made a sale fairly and squarely in the sight of what Orwell called "The Money God," and has every right to use whatever means of persuasion he can conjure, including trickery and emotional manipulation, to retain that sale. In short, he is simply playing by the rules of the capitalist game, which boil down to "caveat emptor."

Glengarry (the play) is described as, among other things, "exploring themes of capitalism, masculinity and morality." The connection between capitalism and masculinity, or rather the concept of masculinity, is one that has not been sufficiently explored in the public discourse, at least not by my way of thinking. While it finds its roots in obvious soil (hypergamy, i.e. that women choose men based on their social standing and wealth rather than looks or emotional attraction), it is an extension of that idea, in which men judge themselves, and other men, by their ability to project social standing. Blake feels justified in humiliating and insulting the other salesmen because he, unlike they, possesses "brass balls." Because he drives a fancy car and wears a sharp suit and owns an expensive watch, he is not only more successful but more manly than they are. And indeed, when we consider Willy Loman, we must also consider that his ruin is dual in nature: first comes the actual failure of his life, then comes the failure of the delusions which serve as a narcotic to dull the pain of his larger, real-life failure. As a friend of mine, a lifelong salesman, never tires of pointing out, what a salesman is really selling is immaterial. The actual commodity being discussed is himself: every sale is a referendum on the salesman's skill in getting the perspective buyer to "sign on the line which is dotted" -- in other words, a referendum on his worth as a human being, and a man, under our system of economics. Because a salesman who can't sell, by extension, not only lacks brass balls, he lacks any balls at all. In our societal hierarchy, it is he and not the product which is unsellable.

Economic systems shape moral values and behavior. They are not the sole arbiters of those things, but it is folly to suggest that they do not play a vital role in everyday life. A person growing up in a hydraulic despotism will have a different outlook on life, and his place within it, than someone growing up in a communist, statist, or socialist economy. All economic systems have their built-in contradictions and cruelties, and capitalism is no exception. On the one hand, it tends to produce both technological innovation and levels of material prosperity that are lacking in some other types of economic systems. On the other hand, and especially since the technique of assembly line mass production was initiated a century ago, it has created a beast which needs to be fed. The citizen is now referred to as a consumer, and this is not by accident. Under our system, citizenship is now less important than consumerism, and indeed, the role of a citizen has been explicitly defined by some in power as the consumption, even the conspicuous consumption, of material goods, many of which are unnecessary and even harmful to the consumer in any number of ways. Modern capitalism, at least as its practiced in much of the West, is debt-based, and sells the concept of lifestyle, of material prosperity, to people who generally speaking cannot afford that lifestyle or those materials. The hire purchase system, also known as the never-never, which is what the British call buying things on installment, didn't appear until about 1890, and didn't get widespread societal traction until the 1920s. Prior to then, it was almost impossible for people to "live above their means," because credit had not yet replaced money as the principal means by which things were purchased, and this necessarily set limits on what people could physically acquire. The advent of installment plans and the widespread extension of credit to people with no collateral created a system in which the public demand for things was increased by many orders of magnitude. This in turn required more advertising and more salesmen than had ever before existed. The advent of internet commerce and the proliferation of cell phones meant a continuous blanketing of potential consumers who were once "only" exposed to radio, television, billboard and print advertising. But the changes in technology did not change the creed of the salesman. His job remained unchanged from the days when guys peddled soap powder, encyclopedias, or vacuum cleaners door to door. It was, then as now, to get people to sign upon the line which is dotted.

In the end, the salesman is a source of fascination because he is indeed an effigy for American values, American society, and the American dream itself. He represents two sides of a coin. On the one hand, the Blakes and Ricky Romas, who are successful because they are ruthless and admired because of their ruthlessness as much as their success; on the other, the Willy Lomans and Shelley Levines, who have lost or never quite possessed enough of an edge, who fail not only in their assigned task of selling the thing, whatever the thing may be, but in a larger societal sense because they have failed to sell themselves and in so failing, surrendered not only their dignity but their masculinity. In the successful salesman we see the core values of our capitalist society -- success for its own sake and material prosperity, especially material prosperity which can be flung in the faces of others. In the failed salesman we see the sickly pathos of the man judged and found wanting in his chosen field, the man who accepted societal values that he cannot measure up to. Because, to paraphrase Willy Loman, "The only thing you've got in this world is what you can sell." And when you can't sell yourself, well, you've got nothing. Coffee is for closers.

I love inside jokes. I hope to be a part of one someday. -- Michael Scott

It has been said that "remember when is the lowest form of conversation." I understand the sentiment, but I do not fully agree with it. Our purpose in coming to Memory Lane is to reunite with old friends and to see if they have anything new to teach us -- or, failing that, if they are as witty and loveable as we remember them to be. Well, it has now been twenty years since THE OFFICE debuted on NBC, and in perhaps unconscious tribute to this fact, I have begun a rewatch of this beloved sitcom. Aside from slight intimations of panic that it has been twenty years since it premiered (seriously, where the hell does time go?), I have to report that all my memories of the show are true and correct: this sitcom is just as funny today as it was in 2005. What's more, rewatching it has told me a lot, not so much about the world of '05, but the world of today.

THE OFFICE, which was derived from a British sitcom of the same name created by Ricky Gervais, ran from 2005 - 2013, and chronicled the farsical doings of employees at a dying-by-inches paper company called Dunder Mifflin, located in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The large regular cast was supplemented by a number of recurring characters, so in the interests of brevity, I will stick only to the most important:

Michael Scott (Steve Carrell): The regional manager of Dunder Mifflin Scranton is a deeply delusional man-child with impluse control problems and subzero self-awareness, who spends most of his time in a stylized denial of reality. While posing himself as a ladykiller, astute businessman, and razor-sharp wit, he is in fact none of these things, and his true talent in life is making his employees, and pretty much everyone else he meets, acutely uncomfortable with his foolish antics. Having neither much of a family nor any real friends, Michael has forcibly adopted his employees in both roles, projecting himself as a kind of patriarch: it is among his delusions that the uninspired drones of Dunder Mifflin are in essence his children, and love him accordingly. What makes Michael truly interesting is his chronic loneliness, his periodic flashes of genius, and his fundmental decency, which is admittedly buried beneath layers of selfishness. Steve Carrell's performance in this regard is nothing short of iconic. He takes what could be a simple buffoon and gives him unexpected depth, so that he can bounce erratically between protagonist and antagonist without ever stepping out of character.

Jim Halpert (John Krasinski): The classic "slacker" character of the 90s - 00s, the young Halpert is a bored, uninspired paper salesman who clings to his job at Dunder Mifflin primarily because he has fallen in love with unfortunately-engaged receptionist Pam Beasley. Halpert comes alive only when interacting with Pam, pranking his nemesis Dwight, or subtly encouraging Michael's delusions for his own amusement. Ultimately his love for Pam, and his attempts to win her over from her obnoxious fiance Roy, becomes one of the central themes of the series, as does his gradual transformation from slackerboy into purposeful young man. Although his deadpan performance is excellent, Krasinski carries a lot of the comedy of the series simply through facial expressions which have become the stuff of millions of memes.

Pam Beasley (Jenna Fischer): the downtrodden office receptionist, stuck in a seemingly endless engagement as well as a dead-end job, Pam is endlessly the butt of Michael's sense of humor, and tries to navigate her growing feelings for Jim as the series carries on. Like Jim, she represents untapped potential. Fischer is an example of perfect casting. She's cute without being unrealistically beautiful, and can communicate even better than Krasinski just with her face.

Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson): arguably a more iconic character even than Michael Scott, Schrute is Tonto to Michael's Lone Ranger, Robin to his Batman. As one fan site puts it, this eccentric paper salesman "is notorious for his lack of social skills and common sense," but Dwight's weirdness goes far beyond these two unfortunate traits. Descended from German farmers who followed bizarre, Amish-like family traditions, he is obsessed with rule-following and is immediately intoxciated by any taste of power, however small, which comes from his mostly made-up position as "assistant to the regional manager." Forever trying to bully and boss his coworkers, he is the butt of innumerable inside jokes and in Jim's case, complex pranks, which he falls for each and every time. Dwight spends most of his time sucking up to Michael, who treats him with contempt, but is forever scheming to supplant him as regional manager.

Toby Flenderson (Paul Liebowitz): I place Toby fifth in the hierarchy because although the bland and boring HR representative of Dunder Mifflin is, well, bland and boring, his very existence throws Michael into frenzies of cruelty and hatred. Michael, it seems, cannot abide the fact that Toby answers only to Corporate, and is therefore "not part of the family," though Michael is quick to add, "He's also divorced, so he's not a part of his family, either." Some of the most iconic moments in the show stem from Michael's irrational dislike of this harmless and utterly unoffensive man.

Other major characters included Kevin, a dull-witted, child-like accountant; Oscar, a closeted gay with a superiority complex; Kelly, an utterly vacuous customer service agent; Angela, the office bitch and Dwight's secret lover; Meredith, the office slattern; Phyllis, a frequent butt of Michael's cruelty; Creed, an enigmatic weirdo who never entirely seems to know where he is; Stanley, a humorless drudge who detests Michael; Daryl, the long-suffering manager of the warehouse; and Ryan, a shallow, self-serving temp who becomes the focus of Michael's creepy obsession. In later seasons, the cast is also joined by Andy, an emotionally unstable failure looking for an identity; Gabe, an obnoxious suit who struggles unsuccessfully to be taken as anything but a joke; and Erin, a naive woman-child with a bizarre past who limpets onto Michael as a father-figure.

THE OFFICE was first and foremost a satire of both the American workplace and the American worker. Like THE SIMPSONS, which reveled in depicting Americans as lazy, disinterested clock-punchers who simply want to avoid being fired, THE OFFICE makes a point of showing the effects that dull, dead-end jobs have on what might otherwise be colorful and interesting human beings. Aside from Michael and Dwight, who both revel in selling paper, Jim's spirit of fun is half-crushed by the monotony of his work and the stupidity of his colleagues, and he refuses to excel simply because "right now this is just a job, but if I rise any higher, it's my career...and if this were my career, I'd throw myself in front of a train." Pam is likewise unhappy, noting that "little girls don't dream of growing up to be receptionists." Stanley refers to the gig as a "run out the clock situation," and Ryan's main fear seems to be getting hired on full-time. The workers cling to their jobs out of economic necessity and apathy, not passion.

The show is not less brutal with its depiction of corporate life. Michael's boss, Jan, is shown as an emotional train-wreck whose problems almost amount to insanity, and the shareholders in Dunder Mifflin, when we meet them, as cruel and callous capitalist robber-barons who don't give a damn how many workers get laid off provided they get to keep their dividends. Indeed, Dunder Mifflin's financial instability, its tendency to close branches, downsize offices, and always look to cut costs, is a recurring theme in the show. An entire episode is devoted, for example, to the necessity of firing an employee; another, to cutting benefits to the bone. The employees are always teetering on the edge of a pink slip, and the company they work for, on the edge of bankruptcy.

It would be a mistake, however, to view THE OFFICE simply as a humorous attack on the silliness, or horror, of cubicle culture. It is first and foremost a romance story, or rather a series of romance stories, the most obvious of these is the long dance between Jim and Pam, which culminates ultimately in their marriage and the birth of their children in the later seasons. This romance is as much about the growth of the characters from passive slackers to active winners, "winning" here meaning not riches or fame but discovering the courage to go through life on terms, more or less, of your own dictation. There are also romance stories between Dwight and Angela, Andy and Erin, Kelly and Ryan, etc. In time, however, we begin to understand that the real story of the show is not the Pam-Jim romance but whether Michael Scott will ever find happiness. We are made to understand early in the series that Michael is terribly lonely and that the thing he most wants in life is a wife and children, but his many deficiencies of personality make his love life a embarrassing disaster. And because Michael despite his limitless flaws is ultimately likeable, we the audience become invested in his quest. The resolution of this problem in the seventh season is one of the more satisfying emotional closures in the history of television.

THE OFFICE had another dimension, which was family. As I stated above, Michael regards his employees as both friends and children, and in the end, it is shown that this is the actual relationship the two sides enjoy (or do not enjoy, as the case may be). As idiotic, selfish, delusional and immature as he is, his love for his people is real: he is the only person who bothers to attend Pam's art show (aside from Oscar, who makes snide criticisms) and even buys one of her paintings. He likewise counsels Jim never to give up on winning Pam's heart, and rescues the treacherous Ryan after his criminal conviction by rehiring him as a temp. Those weird flashes of business acumen he periodically displays (for he is a superb salesman, if a hopeless manager) save the company, or at least the branch, more than once, and he even sabotages Jan's lawsuit against Dunder Mifflin, which could have netted them millions, out of loyalty to the company.

Like all long-running television shows, THE OFFICE can be divided into various periods: in this case, the simplest would be cutting it into "Michael" and "After Michael." Carrell left the series toward the end of the seventh season, believing Michael Scott's character arc complete with the consumation of his romance with Holly, and seaons eight and nine comprise this post-Michael era, which revolve mainly around who will replace him as regional manager. It's fair to say these two seasons have many outstanding episodes and plotlines, but it's equally fair to say the show had no real purpose after Carrell's departure, except to keep allowing admittedly wonderful characters like Dwight room to entertain us with their idiocy. Like other successful shows whose studios couldn't bear to shut them down lest they slay a golden goose, THE OFFICE was permitted to meander longer than it should have, almost into irrelevancy: fortunately, a somewhat awkward final season was capped by a highly satisfying series finale. By a margin that was perhaps narrower than it should have been, THE OFFICE managed to exit the stage with its dignity and relevance intact.

So where does that leave us, twenty years down the road? Is THE OFFICE still relevant? What if anything can we learn from its time on television and the legacy it is left? Well, to address the last first, it turns out the answer to this is, "Quite a bit."

Whenever I discuss the show with others nowadays, the very first thing which is said -- always, inevitably -- is that "there's no way they could make a show like that today." And this, sadly, is the truth. THE OFFICE followed an ancient axiom of sit-coms, to wit, that the greatest humor is often found in the most uncomfortable situation. THE OFFICE followed a school of comedy practiced by Ricky Gervais, and before him, by John Cleese and others of similar outlook, that the core of humor lays in the act of slaughtering sacred cows. Michael Scott is funny in very large part because everything he says and does is highly inappropriate in a work setting (or in some cases, any setting). Although he is almost always free of malice unless Toby is involved, Michael is nevertheless constantly spewing opinions and comments which deride or demean the very groups progressives and wokeists regard as sacred: namely, gays, people with disabilities, and people of color. This constant pressing-down on the raw nerve of political correctness was hilarious in 2005 and it is not less funny in 2025, but what has changed is Hollywood's willingness to let comedians do what they do best, which is attack sensitive subjects without mercy or even good taste. Take one of the most hilarious, and infamous, of all episodes of THE OFFICE: "Diversity Day." In this story, Michael is punished by corporate for his repeated use of the N-word while imitating Chris Rock. In retaliation, he hosts his own "diversity training" which encourages employees to be as offensive as possible about every imaginable racial and ethnic stereotype. Many fans regard this as among the best episodes the show ever produced. However, a few years ago the brave souls at NBC decided to pull the episode from streaming. As the interwebs tells us:

The "Diversity Day" episode of THE OFFICE, particularly the extended cut, includes scenes and jokes that were removed from the original broadcast due to potential sensitivities related to diversity training and related topics. The "Diversity Day" episode was removed from syndication and some streaming services..."

And:

"Some versions of the episode, particularly in syndication and on some streaming platforms, were removed due to concerns about offensive content. This aligns with a broader trend in the industry of re-evaluating and sometimes removing content from the past that may be considered offensive or problematic in today's cultural climate.

"Problematic in today's cultural climate" is of course code, albeit code nobody with anything above their spinal cord needs to exert any energy to crack. THE OFFICE could not be made today any more than ALL IN THE FAMILY could be made, because the courage required to approve scripts of this daring a nature has evaporated from the gray souls of studio executives. Most humor today falls in the category of "safe edgy," meaning that it eviscerates nonsacred groups and entities (white people, men, Western culture, capitalism, Christianity) while avoiding by light years the sensitive toes of the sacred ones. If you want to grasp how truly low we have fallen in the creation of comedy for television, it is probably not necessary to go farther than Mindy Kaling's unwatchable take on the SCOOBY DOO franchise, called VELMA. Kaling, who ironically wrote 26 episodes of THE OFFICE, served as a producer on the show and also played the dimwitted and shallow Kelly Kapour for the entirety of the series' run, could presumably be trusted to understand the key principles of comedy as well as anyone in the game. Yet in VELMA, all she managed to do was apply "today's cultural climate" to a venerable cartoon character, and prove once and for all that there are no Woke comedians -- cannot be, by definition, since the whole goal of Woke, of the progressive movement generally, is to render huge swaths of the population immune from ridicule. (It's worth noting here that in dictatorships, the jokes considered funniest are always at the expense of the dictator, which just goes to show that humor and risk walk hand in hand. The hilarity of a joke is often in direct proportion to how risky it is for you to tell it.)

The legacy of THE OFFICE is therefore multifold. The show will always be relevant so long as people work in cubicles and mindless dead-end jobs continue to exist. The humor will always bite so long as people can unplug themselves from their Need To Be Offended long enough to see the humor in the sort of stupidity Michael displays. The witticisms and bumblings of Michael, Dwight, Kevin, etc. will continue to supply the internet with endless streams of GIFs and memes, and some of the show's more iconic physical comedy, such as Kevin dropping the cauldron of chili on the office carpet, will probably survive everyone reading this. And the "mockumentary" format, where the camera crew is part of the story and actors routinely break the fourth wall, is now now part of the sit-com toolkit. But the lasting legacy of THE OFFICE, the one that towers over all the others, is that it arrived at a time in Hollywood when comedy, really fearless comedy that played no favorites and spared no feelings, was still possible. It may be that when we were watching the show during its original run, we were witnessing among the last moments of genuine comedic freedom on television, without realizing it. And so I close this installment of Memory Lane with a fitting quotation from that hopelessly inept Dunder Mifflin salesman, Andrew Bernard, who put it best when he said, in the series finale:

"I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them."

Well, I lied. I said I'd get this blog back up and running last Sunday, and Sunday and came and went to the accompaniment of...crickets. The truth is I am still adjusting to working full time again. Six months off is apparently just long enough to forget how to adult. But you didn't come here for my worn-out bag of excuses, so let's get down to business.

I recently had occasion to stumble over the corpse, or rather the tomb, of a 1990s-era computer. You know, the type with the solid steel body and enormous, hernia-inducing monitor, equipped both with a CD-ROM tray and a 3" floppy disc drive, and driven by a Pentium I or thereabouts? I couldn't resist firing the old beast up, and wouldn't you know it, I was immediately transported back to some nebulous period around 1998, when I first began, however grudgingly, to move into the era of the internet.

My first encounter with anything approaching the modern internet occurred in childhood, or perhaps tween-hood, when I saw my father set up an old-style telephone modem in the den of our home in Maryland. He explained to me -- this would have been sometime in the mid-late 1980s -- that he could write an article for his newspaper on our home computer, plug our telephone into the modem, and send the story downtown to his office in Washington, D.C. To me, this was practically science-fiction, and I couldn't quite wrap my head around it. A few years later, when I was a freshman in college, say 1991, a friend of mine showed how he could access library resources from the comfort of his dormitory computer. This was if anything even more shocking: the idea of remotely accessing a database made a mockery out of years of me thumbing tediously through dusty card catalogs for school assignments, though I confess at the time I did not envision how rapidly such "old" systems, which had been around for decades if not generations, would be wiped out by this new invention, which yet to have an actual name.

It was this time, the time right around my extremely belated college graduation in 1997, that I began to hear the first wave of a great torrent of computer-inspired verbiage which annoyed the shit out of me. I heard about websites, and www.this and www.that, and e-mail and @ symbols, and pentium processors and routers and ethernet cables, all of which were related to this place that was not a place where you could go via a computer, if you happened to have one, and it had the right gizmos and gadgets. The word "chatroom" seemed to dominate conversations, though I couldn't quite understand what the hell a chatroom was supposed to be. One issue which rankled in particular is that nobody really knew what the hell to call the thing which had just been created or how to describe interacting with that thing: web, net, infobahn, going online, jacking in, information superhighway, surfing the net, surfing the web, cyberspace, etc., etc. And initially, what we now refer to as "the internet" was a bit of a joke, the province of nerds like The Lone Gunmen on "The X-Files" or Comic Book Guy on "The Simpsons." A place where you could look at highly pixilated images of naked women which very, very slowly downloaded onto your monitor, or get into arguments about television shows or sports with faceless people hiding behind fake names, or try and fail to watch something called "streaming" because your computer didn't have enough bandwidth, or had the wrong Flash player, or some fucking thing. In short, the interwebs, the infobahn, the web, the net, it seemed like a bit of a gimmick. It was kinda cool in its own way, but it was also kinda trash -- a product in its infancy, riddled with bugs, suggesting great possibilities without delivering them.

I am naturally resistant to change, especially technological change, and it wasn't until 1998 that I bought a Gateway PC which was equipped with the now-infamous 56K modem, the one you ran through your landline telephone jack, and which not prevented you from using the phone, but made that horrible computer shreik, accompanied by weird gonging noises, which everyone who lived through that era will remember with a shudder. I will not lie and say I didn't enjoy the hell out of that thing, especially in regards to playing video games like "Doom," "Panzer General 2," "Blood," "Resident Evil 2" and so forth, but my memories of the internet from that period are curiously sketchy. In retrospect the reason why is obvious: the internet itself was sketchy, and in more than one way. The late 90s and early 00s were a time when (to continue the metaphor) we had only the barest outline of what we now consider "the internet." The shading-in process was steady, but not particularly fast; or if it was fast, the area it had to cover partially defeated the speed. I have memories of going on Amazon for the first time in 1998; of visiting a boxing forum similar in a primitive way to Reddit with its topics and threads; of individual forays to places like Mapquest, and so on, and of course of using e-mail to communicate with friends and family. For me, however, the internet remained more of a toy than a tool. The huge computers of that era, sucking in power and blowing out heat through dust-caked vents, the squealing modems, the annoying 3" floppies that had virtually no storage memory, the whirring CD-ROM trays that broke so damned easily, the monitors heavy enough to cave in desktops, the cables that invariably stripped themselves from use and prevented the fucking printers from working, and the printer cartridges that cost a fortune and lasted about a week, are all far more vivid and clear in my mind than any direct benefit the internet gave me. Indeed, I have trouble remembering it even as a diversion. PCs were incredibly useful for games and word processing and printing things, and I was quite devoted to e-mail, but their larger dimensions were mostly wasted on me.

I am not writing, even in this slipshod of a fashion, a History of the Internet. I'm not qualified to do so. I'm speaking here only of my own initial forays into it, into cyberspace, through that clunky old technology. But lest you think I'm making fun of it, I want to stress that the feeling encountering that old beast of a computer engendered in me was actually a nostalgia -- not for 56K modems or Pentium I processors, but rather for the internet during its first decade or so, the period of the late 90s and early 00s. What distinguished this internet from the one we have today is not size, speed, complexity, depth, or any of that (though all of that applies); no, the main difference was that the pre-social media internet, the internet that died around 2006 or so, was not dominated or even much influenced by social media. (Myspace was not social media as we understand it today.) In these Old West days of the net, we saw the possibilities of the medium but not most of its pitfalls; we enjoyed some small benefits and few if any risks. The massive toxcicity that exists nowadays was not foreseen or feared: in its place was a feeling that we were entering the "information age" in which information would be totally democratized. Ignorance would disappear. Humans would have virtually free and unfettered access to the knowledge, the art, the literature of the ages...surely a golden age was coming? And in the meantime, the in-between time, we had fun, especially when instant messaging became popular. The internet was a mixture of convenience, silliness and pleasant diversion, which seemed to be growing into much more practical applications for conducting business.

I'm unashamed to say that I dearly miss that internet. I dearly miss the time when we looked at it with hope and wonder and humor, instead of dread and disgust. When the net was a toy becoming a tool, not a tool mutated into a weapon. When the nickname (how brief it was) of "infobahn" actually applied...as opposed to now, when aside from porn and malware, it's mostly a disinformation superhighway. I realize there is no going back, the genie is out of the bottle, Pandora's Box is open, but damned if I wouldn't like to turn the clock back a little, and recapture a little of that wonder, a little of that awe. There are times (it's maudlin but I admit it) when I'd like to see if my old AOL/IM accounts from, say, 2006 are still working, and see if long-silent friends I used to chat with are somehow still there, waiting to resume those rambling, silly conversations made to the sound of chimes, that we had back when the internet was fun...a long, long time ago.

I think this might be the longest break I've ever taken from writing Antagony since I started it eight or nine years ago. For those who follow or otherwise tune in here, I apologize. The fact is I have a new job, and as everyone knows, the only thing more stressful than a transitional phase in life is when the transition ends and the new beginning, well, begins. And that's where I've been for the last month or so. Nearly everything not related to hammering myself into shape for this new gig has been neglected, including my fiction-writing, YouTube channel, and various human relationships, so yeah, I have a lot of making-up for lost time ahead of me in the coming weeks.

I will resume my regularly scheduled blogging tomorrow. I plan on rattling off a review of three books by Charles Bukowski, another "As I Please" entry, a discussion of a fascinating, forgotten WW2-era book compiled for servicemen called The Psychology of the Fighting Man and a visit down Memory Lane to discuss yet another television show I think worthy of revisiting. So if you're still here, stick around, and if you've left, well, I hope you come back.

See you tomorrow.

I have had a "full, rich day" and as I begin to wind down for the evening, cold beer in hand, I want to discuss an oft-neglected aspect of storytelling, one which I feel is extremely important despite that neglect, and indeed, if properly addressed, would right much of what is wrong with books, TV series and movies which have supernatural and magical elements or themes.

If you read this blog -- and it's been years since Goodreads allowed us, the authors of G-reads blogs, to see a "view" count, so I have no idea how many do so anymore -- you know that one of my favorite TV shows is FRIDAY THE 13th: THE SERIES, which ran from 1987 - 1990 and had enormous, if usually unacknowledged, influence on many shows which followed it. I've discussed the show at least twice before so I won't do so again, except to say it's about a trio tasked with hunting down antiques whcih were cursed by the devil and each have unique powers which give something to the user...but expect (and demand) something in return. Well, today I watched a first season episode from that show called "Bedazzled." The cursed item in question is a brass lamp whose light can locate treasure buried at sea, but which demands in turn that the user shine the light on an unsuspecting victim, who is promptly, if painfully, incinerated. I enjoyed the episode, but I had to laugh at the numerous plot holes. They did not relate to the object, but to the bloodthirsty bad guys trying to retrieve it from our heroes. By the end of the story five people have been killed, including a power company lineman and a police officer: indeed, our heroes shop, Curious Goods, is a veritable battlefield, with corpses sprawled in and around it, not to mention the now derelict vehicles of the police and power company. Yet the next morning everything is presented status quo ante, as if nothing of import happened. No army of cops and crime scene investigators is present documenting the massacre. No newsmen are crowding outside the shop looking for a scoop. It's as if the horror-movie storm of the previous night simply washed away all the evidence.

To quote Thomas Magnum: I know what you're thinking. It's a show about antiques cursed by the devil which possess evil powers. The audience knows that going in. So why bother making the heroes worry about police interrogations, or pesky journalists, or even neighbors exasperated by the constant mayhem going on in Curious Goods? If the central premise is fantastical, it doesn't have to be realistic in other ways.

If you think that, you're wrong. The prosaic details that govern everyday life matter on a supernatural show as much -- no, even more -- than in one based in ordinary reality. I'll say this again: The more magic and so forth you have in a world, the greater the urgency to get the nonmagical things right. This is the bedrock of making the unbelievable, believable.

Years and decades ago, probably around 1985, I read an article in a film magazine ridiculing INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM not for its supernatural flummery, but for the fact things like the laws of gravity and physics are simply ignored throughout the film whenever convenient for the writers. Specifically, the writer referenced the "jumping out of the airplane in a rubber raft" scene, and the scene where a coal car, packed with our heroes, jumps its track at high speed, flies in the air, and then lands perfectly on a completely different set of rails and continues on its way. Both sequences are preposterous, but why should they matter in a movie whose central premise revolves around magical objects?

Well, the gist of his article was that we can accept the existence of magical happenings in movies, but not resistance to ordinary physical laws in nonmagical moments. A man can jump off a 20 story building and land soft as a feather if he has a magic amulent: we accept this sort of thing in fiction. Indeed, half the reason to read fiction (or to see it on screen) is because things can happen in it that cannot happen in the real world. But we also understand that if our man lacks this amulet, he cannot survive the fall, which is what creates dramatic tension in stories where there are powers which supercede the natural laws by which we normally operate. A man without the amulet is just a man; he is subject to gravity, physics, entropy, and all the rest of it. Shylock's famous rhetorical rant -- "If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?" -- applies doubly to ordinary characters in a world in which magic or the supernatural exists. By balancing the "rules" of magic (its scope and limitations) with the rules which govern the real world, we help establish not merely boundaries, but that crucial sense of limitation, which fuels a sense of realism.

I wish I knew who wrote the article or what magazine it was featured in -- probably "Cinemafantastique" -- but I will say that I've kept this principle as a sort-of amulet of my own, to the point where I operate, in my own writing, from its principles, often without consciously thinking about it. Take my own novella, “Wolf Weather” as an example. This is a story about werewolves, or more specifically, about men fighting werewolves. There are supernatural creatures like Arabeth and Wolfgod in the story, and the very premise of werewolves is rooted in the supernatural, but the protagonist, Crowning, is anything but supernatural. He is subject to all the rules which govern the human being and the human body. In other words, he lives in a real world intruded upon by magic, but still has to cope with the woes and limitations of the real world. He must eat, he must sleep, he must relieve his bladder and worry about slipping on the ice and breaking his arm. The fact he is besieged by monsters does not mean he doesn't have to worry about drinking his posca every day to prevent scurvy. By keeping Crowning grounded in the physical world, one where cuts bleed and hurt and lack of sleep makes you stupid, the werewolves seem all the more abominable and horrifying. They are outside, like the Agents in THE MATRIX, operating by a different set of rules; you, the ordinary human however, do not have that luxury. Only intervention of magic can allow you to cheat the laws that govern existence. Where there is no supernatural, there is no super. You fall from too great a high and splat you go, whether magic exists somewhere else in the world or not.

The inversion, however, also obtains: I'm convinced one of the reasons BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER was so damned good is because although Buffy herself is supernatural, or rather in possession of supernatural powers, she resides in the real world and is constantly vexed and bedeviled by real-world problems. Her super-powers avail her nothing in the realm of dating, or schoolwork, or popularity, or her ability to make or keep friends or maintain a healthy relationship with her own mother. By tying her to the prosaic, petty, frustrating, and the tedious -- in short, by making her human despite being extra-human in ability -- Buffy's war against "vampires, demons and the forces of darkness" becomes relatable, and thanks to that genuinely magical power, "the suspension of disbelief," believable. It has a hard foundation, a clearly-painted backdrop. Buffy can save the world on Thursday night, but on Friday she's still got a pop quiz she didn't have time to study for and no date to the dance and a mother who wants to ground her anyway because her grades are no good.

All this is my way of saying that storytelling -- the sort of storytelling with magical or supernatural elements, or even storytelling which is drenched in all things fantastical, such as the works of Tolkien -- still has to operate by a two-tiered system of laws. The first governs the fantastic. It establishes that, say, vampires exist, but it also sets up boundaries for the vampires: sunlight, crosses, holy water, stakes through the heart. The second governs the real world, where we have to pay taxes, get our hair cut, sleep at least six hours a night, obey the laws of thermodynamics, and explain dead police officers on the floor of our antique shop. So long as the storyteller keeps this system in mind, he cannot go far wrong: his audience will happily and enthusiastically suspend disbelief. It's when he is slovenly with the rules he sets up for magic, or allows characters to break the laws which administer everyday existence without magical intervention that eyes begin to roll.

Just a quick note to let anyone who is interested know that I'm still here. Recent evens in life kept me away from the keyboard for almost a month. They are positive events, but have filled my time and mind to the point where all the intentions I had about keeping up with this blog got sent to wait at the back of the line. But like Douglas MacArthur or a bad check, I have returned with an especially neurodivergent edition of As I Please. Here goes.

* I just referenced MacArthur. Well, I also just watched a John Wayne war movie called "They Were Expendable," about a PT boat squadron based out of Hawaii in WW2. The movie is interesting because it is much less rah-rah than I was expecting for a wartime-produced movie starring the Duke, and therefore more realistic and gritty. The film follows the squadron as it fights the Japanese at sea in the early months of the war, and is finally whittled down to a few ragged survivors on Battaan and Corregidor who have to fight with rifles as they no longer have any boats. Most of the characters die or are left by the movie in positions where they are certainly doomed. In one scene, for example, a bunch of officers are awating evacuation to the States via the last cargo plane, but there is not enough room and several are pulled off the aircraft to meet their fate. Grim, grim stuff, but one thing that stuck in my craw was the depiction of the sailors as they evacuated General MacArthur from the Phillippines so he could fight another day. The sailors look joyfully privileged to be escorting their general to safety while they must return to the lost battle to die or be captured -- a fate equivalent to death, considering what the Japanese did to POWs. In reality, MacArthur was hated by many, perhaps most, of his troops, partly because they blamed his decisions for their defeat in battle, partly because he left them to their fate. This song, meant to be sung to the tune of "Battle Hymn of the Republic," was popular among them as they defended Bataan from the Japanese while he was assumed safe on Corregidor Island:

Dugout Doug MacArthur lies a shaking on the Rock

Safe from all the bombers and from any sudden shock

Dugout Doug is eating of the best food on Bataan

And his troops go starving on.

Dugout Doug’s not timid, he’s just cautious, not afraid

He’s protecting carefully the stars that Franklin made

Four-star generals are rare as good food on Bataan

And his troops go starving on.

Dugout Doug is ready in his Kris Craft for the flee

Over bounding billows and the wildly raging sea

For the Japs are pounding on the gates of Old Bataan

And his troops go starving on…

I mention all this because myth-making is a fascinating process both during and after the creation of the myth. Often it involves taking a disohonorable or cowardly action and turning it upside-down, so that it refracts the glow of military genius and civic virtue. It is an illusionist's trick which throws off a dazzle which, if you squint a little, allows you to see that it's all just stagecraft. But most of us do not squint. It is easier to applaud the illusionist than to point out the flaws in his trick. MacArthur is defeated in battle, runs away while his troops are left to die, and then goes on to crown himself, and to be crowned, as a kind of American Caesar, the man who won the Pacific War, ruled postwar Japan as unofficial emperor, and masterminded the Inchon landings in Korea. At any point this narrative falls apart under even the most cursory scrutiny (please see "The Legend of Dougout Doug," Episode 103 of the Unauthorized History of the Pacific War Podcast if you want details delivered by historical experts on the subject), but how often do we subject our national myths to even cursory scrutiny? In this age, it is more important than ever to put any narrative through a scientific wringer before even tentatively accepting it is true.

* I also watched another WW2-era war movie starring Errol Flynn called "Objective: Burma!" Now this was a really excellent film. Flynn gives a surprisingly warm and understated performance as an Army captain tasked with leading a raid on Japanese radar installations in Burma in early 1945. The grinning swashbuckler of Hollywood puts his grin and his swashbuckling aside to portray a quietly professional officer who does everything right, only to discover that everything goes wrong anyway. "Burma!" is surprisingly skilled in the craft of its narrative, bait-and-switching the audience by having our heroic paratoopers pull off their coup with ease. The movie seems complete a third of the way through, and then, well, shit goes south in a hurry, and instead of a smooth plane ride back to base, they must make a hellish 200 mile trek on foot, through malaria-ridden swamp in blistering heat, while being attacked and ambushed every step of the way by irate Japanese who show them no mercy. A "men on a mission" commando flick becomes a cinematic study in survival under pressure, as Flynn's character, fighting hunger as well as exhaustion, disease, despair and the Japanese army, tries to get his dwindling survivors to safety. I really enjoyed this movie, not merely because it is a surprisingly realistic depiction of battle for its time (1945), but because unlike John Wayne, in actuality a gifted actor yet who made a career playing essentially the same character over and over again, Errol Flynn sets aside his usual rakish grin and devil-may-care antics to show the burden of command on a well-trained professional struggling not to succumb to despair.

* I just finished "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," a memoir by Captain Ted Lawson, of the famous surprise "Doolittle Raid" on Japan carried out by the US Army and US Navy on Japan in early 1942. As an account of a carefully and meticulously planned military operation, carried out in uttermost secrecy as a means of boosting American civilian morale during a period of defeat and despair, it is very interesting, but where the book is truly remarkable is in Lawson's depiction of the aftermath. His bomber, "The Ruptured Duck," crashed in China after the raid, and his crew were all badly injured, worst off himself -- he was thrown through the bullet-resistant windshield at 110 mph into the water, then washed up on the shore. His face caved in and his leg badly injured, he and the others had to be carried by friendly Chinese peasants from village to village over several hundreds of miles without any anesthetic or medical care, all the while being hunted by Japanese patrols. Then Lawson's leg became gangrenous and had to be amputated...it just goes on an on, bad to worse, to worse yet. A truly astounding story of human endurance and survival, and also of the human ability to suffer, and to endure, pain in every form. Indeed, when Lawson finally returned to the States, the plastic surgeons discovered the impact had driven some of his teeth into his sinuses, and when they were removed, the astonished surgeons found beach sand in the wounds. How he made it through all of this is beyond me, but Lawson, incidentally, lived to be 74 years old.

* In the back of my copy of "Tokyo," which is an original (1943 publishing date), there is an advertisement for a book called "Psychology For The Fighting Man." This is an interesting book which you can peruse for free on the wonderful Internet Archive (archive.org), cobbled together by a whole slew of psychologists, psychiatrists, military men and spies, to help the American fighting man, regardless of branch of service, cope with some of the challenges he faced during wartime: not just physical challenges posed by military life and combat, but loneliness, sexual starvation, resentment against superiors, et cetera and so on. A lot of the topics seem to fall far afield from psychology, venturing into things like sight, hearing, noise, color sense, use of camouflage, etc., but are eventually shown through a psychological lens, such as "how to find your way when lost." There are also chapters on leadership and organization, and how psychology plays into each. I found the book quite interesting simply as a discussion of the human condition, but also because it shows how science, biology, psychology and other disciplines come together to create a better fighting man. The great body of knowledge which exists in a society is harnessed to the goal of training men for war. When the book discusses caloric needs, sexual hygiene, colds and flus, temperatures, oxygen requirements, tolerances for noise, and so forth, it is all in the service of making the better and more efficient soldier. On the one hand, tremendous thought and care, and on the other, the full knowledge that all of this thought and care will be put into a body which may soon be blown to bits. The ethical and moral problems raised by this are fascinating, and it is interesting to ponder whether much of the knowledge we have, whether industrial, technological, psychological, medical or what have you, would have come about so quickly or at all if we did not spend so much time, money and effort figuring out ways to kill each other.

And with that, I bring "As I Please" to a close. If you noticed my absence from the platform, I apoligize; if you didn't, that is still my fault.