Monthly Archives: January 2013

I can’t help you out, I’m sorry

Look, if you ever get sent to jail, I’m sorry, but I’m never coming to visit. No way. Do you know what kind of a process that would be? It’s like going through airport security times ten. And then you’re supposed to give your driver’s license in for a visitor’s pass? Call me uncooperative, but what exactly is the point of that? To me, it looks like a reason for them to keep you locked in. I can just see it now, I’m visiting you, whatever, you’re happy to see me, but it’s really bittersweet, because you’re in jail, they won’t even let us shake hands or high five or anything. And of course I’ll be leaving and you won’t. But what if one of your new jail friends spots my visitor’s pass? Or what if it falls off? Prison guards are the worst. Well, that’s not really fair to say. I’ve never actually met any of them. Plus, they’re dealing with a population that outnumbers them by a large margin. They’re living one stone’s throw from a prison riot. I guess I’d be on edge too.

So my pass falls off and I’m like, “No, I’m just visiting, I swear!” Yeah right. I’m sure the prison guard is going to be super cooperative. What if I get accidentally sent in with the general population? I wouldn’t last a day. Well, I would, but not under these circumstances. There’s just too much that could go wrong, so, yeah, I’m not going to visit. I’ll write. That would be pretty cool, to have a prison pen pal. But only if it’s somebody I know. I’m not just going to start soliciting prisoner pen pals, because, eventually they’ll get out, considering they’re not in for life, and then what? They’ll start hitting me up? Wanting to hang out? But I’d totally write to you. And I’d pick you up after you get released, again, assuming you’re not in for too long, and if I’m still in the area when you get out.

Also, and I hope we never have to walk down this road either, but if you ever get sick and you have to go to the hospital, listen, I wish you the best of luck, the speediest of recoveries, but I’m not coming to visit you there either. Prison or hospitals. Or is it nor hospitals? At what point do you start using nor over or? This isn’t really important I guess.

What I’m saying is, you know how I am about all of that hand sanitizing stuff they want you to use, right? I don’t buy it. I don’t like the idea of my personal micro-biome being messed up like that. And then what, I wipe my hands clean, five, six times, there’s no germs left on my skin, and then I run into some nurse who’s covered in antibiotic resistant superbugs? Not going to happen to me. Not if I can help it, anyway. I mean, if I have to go to the hospital, I have to go, no way of getting around that one. But just to visit? Sorry. But if you need a ride home, I mean, I don’t have a car, but I could see about borrowing my parents’. We’ll see. But you look pretty healthy.

You’re a big reader, right? Cool, that’s really good for you. And you should. Reading’s great. Definitely. But here’s the thing, again, I’m not even sure this really applies to us, or to me, but I’m not the guy you want to ask to do you a favor and return some library books. I’m just putting it out there, that you should probably ask somebody else. Not probably, definitely. It’s too much responsibility. Well, the responsibility is minimal, what I meant to say is that there’s too much that could go wrong.

Like what kind of a person wants to be a librarian? No, no, it’ll make sense. Because, think about it, they like being around books, all the time books, nose stuck in a book. Do you think they’re really paying attention to work? No, they’re paying attention to their books, they can’t get enough reading. Like you with your books, but every waking second. And so I come in with a whole stack of your borrowed books, and I’m like, “Hello? Can I put these right here?” And the librarian’s like, “Yeah, sure, right there, whatever,” without even looking up from her book. She forgets to restack them, you start getting collection notices from the library, you ask me if I’m sure that I remembered to return them, I say yes, the librarian says no, who are you going to believe? You say me, you say that now, but there’ll always be that little bit of doubt, like maybe I just can’t admit to a mistake, like I’m hiding them in my apartment, too afraid to come out with it already. That wouldn’t go away, inside of you I mean, it would linger, it would fester. You’re too good of a friend. I wouldn’t want us to ever be at odds over something so stupid. But I’d definitely give you a ride, or I’d help you find somebody else to return those books for you, not a friend, somebody not too close, like a work associate. You just name it. I got you man.

Movie Review: Looper (it sucks)

If you’ve seen the movie Looper, let me just tell you, I’m sorry. I know what you’re going through. And while it never really gets better, that dead part of your soul slowly overtakes the very essence of your being, erasing happiness so thoroughly that after a while you don’t even remember what happy ever felt like in the first place, eventually the emptiness you feel inside turns into something manageable. And so, unable to identify joy anymore, the hollow despair that oozes through your pores, it won’t be as crippling as it was immediately after the end of the film. That film. Looper.

I’m not even exaggerating. If anything, it’s the opposite. What’s the opposite of exaggeration? I don’t know. Playing it down? That’s not a word. There’s got to be a word. Understated? I guess, but that doesn’t sound just right. Whatever, if you haven’t seen it, don’t. In fact, if you haven’t seen it, stop reading this review, because it’s best to just keep this whole subject as far removed from your life as possible.

If I had a time machine, I’d travel back to the past and stop myself from ever renting the movie. Or, even better, I’d go back a few months ago to the casual conversation I was having with someone at work, someone who just saw Looper, and told me it was really good. I’d punch him in the face, return to the present, and hopefully the crisis would have been averted.

Unfortunately, time travel doesn’t exist. But it did in Looper. And it didn’t make any sense. So now I can’t even imagine what time travel would be like, because events in Looper have totally ruined the whole concept for me. It’s all about people who come from the future to kill people, also from the future, but in the past. And they make a big show about not messing with the timeline, or, they pretend to. Whenever one of the characters looks confused because something doesn’t make sense with the story, another character will begin the first four or five words of an explanation before shrugging and going, “Ah, blah blah blah time travel, it’s confusing.”

It’s confusing, but it’s not absolutely impossible to wrap your head around. And if it is impossible, they should have incorporated that into the movie. Instead, you have unnecessarily gruesome scenes of a young guy getting maimed and mutilated so that way his future self gets stopped in his tracks, in the present. They amputate all of his limps so they don’t have to kill him. But then they kill him. Ah, blah blah blah, this movie doesn’t make sense.

The whole movie tries way too hard to be Inception, which it fails at, miserably. They shoot for big ideas, for huge plot twists. It never works. It’s all cheap and lame. Like I said, the entire premise of the movie is based around time travel. Kind of. There’s also telekinesis. Which isn’t supposed to be a big deal, but then why do they bother telling us about it at the very beginning of the movie? To tell us specifically that it’s not a big deal. But guess what? It turns out to be a very big deal. Not really the best use of foreshadowing there. And, again, it’s cheap. Is this a time travel movie or a telekinesis movie? I’ve watched the whole thing and I can safely say that it’s really about neither.

It’s about nothing. It’s about Bruce Willis and it’s about making Joseph Gordon Levitt looking slightly more like Bruce Willis. It’s about depicting the future without really changing anything, just adding a few flying motorcycles. Oh yeah and now drugs now come in eye drop form.

Things just happen in this movie. They happen without any introduction or explanation. Like the telekinesis. Like some guy calling up Bruce Willis in the future and giving him the birthday and hospital number of the main bad guy. In the future. But from the past. Confused? Yeah, it’s a stupid movie. There’s not really much more to say. If you’re ever on a plane somewhere and they have one of those built in monitors on the seat in front of you, I guarantee you that Looper is going to be on there. It’s exactly the type of bullshit movie that always makes it onto airplanes. If it’s a free movie, and it sucks, you just know those asshole airlines are going to coerce you to watch it, just to make your flight a little bit shittier.

Sorry, I’m all worked up now. I don’t like being this negative. But Looper, man, it was so bad. Like didn’t somebody review the script? Or take a look at the finished product, wondering if audiences might not react negatively to such a poorly thought up story?

I also saw Magic Mike this weekend. It was pretty good, you know, for a male stripper movie. Definitely better than Looper.

The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Or Godzilla.

I used to joke around about guns all the time. But that was before. Now I’m serious about guns. I’m seriously getting a gun. It’s the only way to stay completely safe. It’s the only way that we’ll all be completely safe. It’s safer for all of you if I have a gun. Because if shit goes down, with a gun, trust me, I’m going to be the guy that you wished were there, with another gun, to make sure that shit, having already gone down, either goes back up, or goes away completely.

If some nut storms into anywhere that I happen to be, and he or she has a gun, I’m going to completely neutralize the situation. And I’ll do it without injuring anybody. And I’ll also do it without infringing upon that nutjob’s second amendment rights. I’m probably the most accurate shot in the world. So whenever I’m being threatened with a gun, I antagonize my assailant, poke and prod them, agitating them so that they eventually fire the gun. That’s when I spring to action. I shoot my gun. But I shoot my bullets with such precision as to intercept the other guy’s bullets. So we both shoot and the bullets hit each other in midair, falling harmlessly to the ground. After a few rounds of shooting and not doing any damage, the other guy gives up. No harm done, nobody’s gun gets taken away, because nobody committed any crimes.

I armed my dog. I buy as many guns as I can and then I give them away to strangers. I have a slightly different interpretation of the second amendment. Unlike some of the more liberal members of the Supreme Court – I’m looking at you Scalia – I believe that our founding fathers were mandating that every citizen own a gun. If you don’t have one, how are you supposed to exercise your right to bare arms?

The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Or, another bad guy with a bigger gun. Well, not necessarily bigger. See, if two bad guys decide to independently shoot up the same school on the same day, let’s say they get there at the same time. The second bad guy with a gun might mistake the first bad guy with a gun as a good guy with a gun. So the second bad guy will off the first bad guy, with his gun – Pop! – and in the aftermath, some good guys with guns might mistakenly identify the second bad guy with a gun to be a fellow good guy with a gun. Having satisfied his craving for bloodlust, the bad guy wouldn’t see a need to shoot anybody else, especially considering all of the praise he’d be getting from the principal, from local leaders. Maybe he’d like being a good guy with a gun. More guns, less bad guys with guns, more bad guys turned good guys with guns. Confused? Yeah I probably didn’t explain it right. It’s all on the NRA web site, so you can just check it out whenever.

But I’m thinking, trying to brainstorm some ideas, some other ways to stop a bad guy with a gun. I haven’t nailed down the specifics, but I’m thinking about designing a really big gun that, instead of bullets, fires out rounds of regular sized guns. This would be perfect for movie theater style massacres. If you keep one of these big gun-guns at the front of the theater, when the attacker enters, instead of waiting for everybody to lock and load their own guns, you could just shoot the big gun, and it would fire a gun out to every member of the public. Bang! Instant militia.

And not just bigger guns. I’m also talking more guns. I know, I already said that two paragraphs ago. But even more guns than that. Is there any way that the hospital industry could join forces with the gun industry? It makes perfect sense to me. First, when babies are born, they could be given their first gun right away. They won’t waste any time exercising their second amendment rights. Plus, they’ll never know anything about not being a gun owner. It’ll be like a part of them. Is there any way we can get a gun inside the womb? No, I’m going too fast. One thing at a time here. But also, where do people go after they get shot? Hospitals. It just seems like we can streamline the process, bang, hospital, bang, gun shop.

This is serious time. It’s serious here in America. If anybody’s serious about taking my gun away, they’re seriously going to need a bigger gun to even try. And think about it, anybody who wants to take my gun away, they’re probably anti-gun. So what, they’re going to buy a gun to take away my gun? And then what, they’ll have two guns? Doesn’t sound very realistic from the anti-gun guy’s point of view. Or as I like to call them, the bad guys without guns. The only way to stop a bad guy without a gun is to give him a gun and then stand right by him, pointing a gun at him, making sure that he turns into a good guy with a gun, and if not, if he’s still a bad guy, now with a gun, well then it’s our duty to make sure he turns into a dead guy with a gun. Got it? Lock and load mothafuckas.

Seventh Heaven is the worst show in the history of television

I’ve been thinking about Seventh Heaven all day. It came out of nowhere. That stupid theme song just popped in my head, kind of in the background at first, like I don’t remember when it actually started, but it must have been imperceptible, gently blending in behind all of my other thoughts, slowly working its way into the forefront of my consciousness. And then it was all I could hear, that, “Oooooooh Seventh Heaven,” over and over again. It’s terrible.

And I haven’t thought about Seventh Heaven in forever, so my mind, while chewing on the never-ending theme song stuck on loop, it’s been digging up basically every Seventh Heaven related memory I have stored inside my brain. After having not thought about it in years, I can’t believe how terrible that show really was. Even worse than I remember. I can’t believe I actually watched it.

It started airing when I was in seventh grade. Seventh grade. Seventh Heaven. I’m trying to think of some sort of a connection, but I think that’s it, really, and it’s not even much of a connection at all. Or it could be a sign, from God, telling seventh grade me to watch Seventh Heaven. Seeing as how the show is all about cookie-cutter morality all draped in a semi-religious backdrop, I guess that makes about as much sense as any.

Who knows why I started watching the show? When you’re twelve years old, you’ll watch anything. It was on regular TV. It was on at like eight at night. What else would I be doing? Homework? Please. I never did homework.

Growing up, we weren’t allowed to watch a majority of what was on TV. No Fresh Prince. No Blossom. All way too mature I guess. Whatever, part of me wished my mom had banned Seventh Heaven, if only to spare me the nonsensical bullshit of the Camden family every week for the next five years of my life.

The dad’s a minister. The Reverend. As Newt Gingrich told Mitt Romney last year, “Enough of the pious baloney.” The whole premise of the show was a constant stream of black and white, good and evil garbage. On especially bad episodes, they whole program would basically turn into an hour long PSA. Forget plot, forget characters. Just get to the pointing of a random topic and start sermonizing about it.

There was a video game episode. One of the kids got a Game Boy but the parents tied the whole thing into a culture of desensitizing violence. There’s an episode where the brother starts smoking cigarettes. There are bullies at school. Cutting. Bulimia. Drinking, drugs, fireworks. Vandalism. Acne. Literally, just name some random topic, some random ill of society, and on that given week, every single member of the family will independently be confronted with and will have to deal with that specific topic.

Everything, every problem, every question, there’s always a clear-cut answer. No in betweens, no halfway, no gray areas. And while there’s always a lesson to be learned, usually coming right at you directly from the Reverend’s pulpit, they’ll always manage to dramatize the situation even further by demonstrating at length why good is good and just how evil all things evil really are.

One week the older brother Matt gets tempted with marijuana. He never smokes it, of course, but he drops the joint accidentally in front of his house. The mom finds it. The kids find it and think it’s the mom’s. Everyone in the family is all at the same time talking to each other about the evils of marijuana. The whole thing comes to a climax in the form of a good old fashioned family meeting. After the Reverend threatens to drug test everyone in the household, Matt admits it was his, at which point the little brother Simon flips out, starts crying, screaming about how his older brother really let him down.

In the world of Seventh Heaven, the act of simply considering marijuana makes you a full-fledged junkie. One sip of beer makes you drunk, and getting behind the wheel after that one sip makes you a felon. And don’t think you can get away with anything, because the Reverend owns the police. He’s got Sergeant Michaels on speed dial, ready and willing to do whatever it takes to maintain peace and harmony.

Seventh Heaven was terrible, a truly awful, awful, terrible TV show. I can’t believe it was shown to a national audience. A bunch of bullshit ridiculous preachy sermonizing from a totally unrealistic family set in a town that doesn’t resemble any real place I’ve ever been to in my life. You want to watch TV and get lectured? Not me. I want to watch crime and space travel and really stupid funny stuff. Fucking Seventh Heaven.

How about global cooling?

I love it when it’s cold out. Even colder. Snow can get to be a nuisance, yeah, especially if you’re wearing really low cut socks, like even though your boots might be waterproof and snowproof, eventually, if the snow outside gets deep enough, it’s going to find its way in there, in between steps, in the space between your pants and your boots, and you’ll feel it, that cold on the insides of your ankles, that spot where the skin is the softest, the most sensitive. And before you even have a chance to take off your gloves, to try and get the snow out, it already starts to melt against your skin. Now you’ve got wet socks. Now you’ve got wet feet, and the wetness is surrounded by a waterproof shell, so there’s nowhere for it to go.

But having said all of that, I think this problem could be easily fixed with, one, maybe some longer boots. And two, maybe like a real pair of winter socks. I actually bought a pair of really tall boots a few months ago, specifically for this purpose, for heading up North, for getting out there and running around in the snow without worries. There was a pair of Ugg boots on sale for less than a hundred bucks on the Internet. I know exactly what you’re already thinking, but they weren’t regular Uggs. They looked cool. They just happened to be made by the Ugg company. But it didn’t matter. Everybody kept making fun of them, the name, the brand. And I always like to think of myself as this enlightened guy who doesn’t care what people say about him, but that obviously has to be a one hundred percent false self-image that I’m carrying around in my head.

Because I wound up caving in to the derision of everybody else pretty quickly. Those boots sat there for two months without being used. Anybody who ever saw them in the corner of the room made fun of me for owning a pair of Uggs. And then it was Christmastime, that magical time of year when you have to spend tons and tons of cash, and so in a moment of weakness I returned them. Damn you Zappos and your ridiculously lenient return policy. How do ever expect to turn a profit? Letting people take all of the time in the world to sit on a purchase, really chew on it, ruminate all of the ways in which a pair of boots could turn sour, and then actually giving them your blessing, please, please let us give you your money back? I never even had a chance to wear them, not even once, because it hasn’t snowed in New York, not yet, not as of the writing of this, whatever this is.

So now, here I am, we took a little mini vacation up North, to the cold, even colder. At least six inches of snow which, I really just don’t get. In New York it hasn’t been that cold for the second year in a row. But all of the sudden we drive three hours North and there’s snow everywhere. It snows like every day up here. And I’m taking my dog for a walk and he’s loving the snow and I’m running around trying to keep up with his crazy dog energy and not even two minutes later, snow meets ankles, ankles meets wet. I’m inside walking around this very warm house, my whole body is warm except for my feet. Once your feet get cold, there’s only one thing that’s going to get them warm again: an absurdly hot shower. And you have to stand in there for like half an hour. And I don’t know about you, my imaginary reader here, all half-dozen of you friends and family members, but my skin goes nuts after too long of a hot shower. I get out and I’m really dry, really itchy.

Anyway, I really do love the cold. I always watch TV shows and movies set in warm places, I watched Dexter, I watched Magic Mike, and I always walk away thinking, man, I need to move somewhere like that, somewhere where I can wear shorts and tank tops all the time, all year. But then I remembered that I spent most of this summer complaining over and over again, on this blog even, about how hot I was, about how the heat was getting me crazy, about how I couldn’t stop sweating.

I’m up here up North and I feel better than ever. Yeah it’s freezing, way colder than it is in New York, but you get cold and you move. You move and your body warms itself up. I’ll go for a run in the summer and not only do I sweat out every drop of liquid that I started out with, but I feel sick, nauseated, like should I be worried? But I went running yesterday. It was like twenty degrees out. The first mile was tough, really cold. But then after that my body got warm, and then it got hot. And then I didn’t need my gloves anymore. And then I started steaming, like my whole body generating and radiating more heat than I even needed to personally stay warm. I could’ve warmed up somebody else probably. I felt great. The cold air coming into my body felt refreshing. I felt like I was conquering nature. I felt like Superman.

But then I came home and took way too long of a shower and scratched myself raw for the rest of the day. Whatever, I’ll always find something to whine about. But just judging on my levels of whining this summer and my complaining so far about this winter, I’ve got to say, hands down, I definitely love the cold. Even better. Even colder. How about we try out global cooling? Let’s bring on another ice age. I’m ready.