Monthly Archives: June 2013

Everybody just stay calm

Everybody just take a deep breath and stop freaking out. All right? All right. We’re not going to get anywhere if we keep pushing, moving, breathing really heavy, whimpering in the corner. Get out of the corner! Stand up! There’s not enough room in this elevator for anybody to be crouching down. If everybody tried to crouch down and take a little rest, we’d all wind up on top of one another. And there’s just not enough space for that to happen. Think about it, if everybody tried to squat, knees would be sticking out, half of the people in this elevator would wind up on top of half of everybody else. And I’m not threatening, I’m not warning, all right, I’m just saying, I’m not going to wind up on the bottom, OK? And I have pointy elbows and knees.

So just everybody stay calm! OK? Well, maybe I shouldn’t have squeezed in the elevator, right, true, but where does that get us now? What about you, I saw you get in right before me. Just because I got in last? And who pressed the second floor button? You? You can’t take the stairs up one floor? Fibromyalgia? Look, I’m not a doctor, I’m just saying, if you couldn’t handle a flight of stairs, you probably shouldn’t have made such a mad dash for the elevator.

So just chill out everybody. Calm down for a second! And why were you holding the elevator doors open? I saw you from like all the way down the hallway, like five or six people running to it, Mr. fibromyalgia right in front of me, and you’re just standing there, sticking your hand in front of the sensor every single time. If you had just stopped trying to be the Jesus of the elevator, like what, you don’t have anywhere to be? You don’t think anybody else in here had anywhere to be? God, if you had just let the doors close a little bit more naturally, this car could have been all the way up and all the way back down again before I ever even had a chance to run over here. Like what are you, the elevator guy?

You are the elevator guy? OK, so don’t you get like any training? Don’t they tell you you’re supposed to like follow those signs, those maximum occupancy signs? All I know is that whatever your duties are, I’d have to say your primary responsibilities are ultimately split between pushing buttons and maintaining those maximum occupancy standards.

Well I’m a big guy, so stop pointing fingers, all right? Quit trying to escalate the situation! Everybody stop talking! I think we’re running out of air in here! Who’s pressing that alarm bell? It’s not doing anything all right? Seriously stop it! Everybody quiet down, did you just hear the intercom? Was somebody saying something? Were those instructions? Goddamn it will you shut up for one second so we can at least try and figure out what they’re trying to tell …

Fuck! Motherfucker! Did you feel that? Holy shit everybody stay still! Stop breathing! You calm the fuck down! Holy shit I swear to God I felt something move. No, stop moving. No you stop moving too! Everybody, we’ve got to synchronize our breaths. We’ve got to stop fidgeting. OK! Don’t touch me! Get your hands off me! No you sit down! No, I mean, nobody sit down! I’m not sitting down first, I’ve already played out how this is going to go down, and there’s now way I’m winding up crushed under the weight of half of the people in this elevator.

Ow! What do you that’s going to solve? OK! OK. OK, OK, OK. All right. Fine. More deep breaths, right. OK, I’ll admit, that got a little out of hand. Yes, well I have a meeting upstairs, it’s very important. OK, yeah, I do realize that I shouldn’t have panicked. Sue me, right? I’m a human being and I freaked out a little from being trapped in this goddamn elevator wall to wall with way too many people and Oh my God, are we running out of air in here, how much oxygen can these vents push through, what is the maximum occupancy standards measured out, by weight? By oxygen flow? Did somebody just fart?

Are you fucking kidding me? Ow! Is that pizza? Does somebody have food in here? Everybody, we’ve got to divvy it up before things take a turn here, I’m not kidding, all right? Let’s just everybody … oh wait, is that? Was I? So you just have to press open? So I was standing … wow. OK, look everybody, I hope we can all learn something here. I always like to stand there, I didn’t think I’d really be blocking, it’s just, OK. Just let me out of here. Just. Excuse me I’m just going to. It’s OK, it’s open, no, yes, no I am going to ten but I can climb, I’m looking forward to hopefully working here someday, I’m really looking forward to someday incorporating this ten flight stair climb into my daily routine. Nobody else works on ten, right? You do? Can you just, you know, can you not say anything? Can we just, like, can I buy you a cup of coffee? Can you just not tell anybody about the freaking out? Please? Yes? Please?

Movie Review: Man of Steel

You’ve seen the trailers. Everybody knows the story. It’s Superman. What can you really say about a Superman movie? Americans are more familiar with Kal-El’s origins than they are with the Bible. There’s nothing to spoil here. There’s nothing to do except comment on what worked and, unfortunately, everything that didn’t.

The previous new Superman movie was so bad that I personally thought that the man in the red cape was going to be condemned to at least a twenty-year exile from the big screen. But no sooner did the tepid reviews of Superman Returns start trickling in than Hollywood announced plans for a reboot.

And then they teased it out like you can only tease out a big superhero movie. In any other genre, audiences won’t have the patience for these types of games. Like, a year before the release, they’ll show a glimpse of the costume’s shoulder pad. And then a month later a poster. This all culminated in the onslaught of trailers released in the past month or so.

Which, I’m sorry to say, kind of baited me in. The previews looked great. Everything felt cool and modern. I was actually sort of looking forward to a Superman movie, I couldn’t believe it. But then I saw it, and the cynical jaded part of my brain laughed at how gullible I’d been. Because a stunning three-minute trailer does not guarantee a whole two-plus-hour feature film.

It’s stupid to complain about the story, but I’ll do it anyway. How many times are we audiences expected to sit through another tried-and-true opening of Jor-El sending his infant son to escape from the dying planet Krypton? Russell Crowe gives a totally generic and bland performance as Superman’s biological dad. He tries warning the Kryptonian leaders about the planet’s imminent destruction. Nobody listens.

General Zod shows up. There’s a chase scene. There’s a flying bird thing that Jor-El rides around, and it’s almost exactly like the flight scenes from Avatar, only sepia-toned. General Zod gets banished to the Phantom Zone. Wow! So exciting. I really can’t imagine where they came up with such a novel idea for a Superman origin movie.

And then it’s just this weird out of order montage of Clark Kent growing up, learning about his powers, about himself. Even though Jor-El dies, he’s somehow still around the rest of the movie, talking to Superman in his weird Russell Crowe pseudo-English accent. General Zod has an American accent. I never understood why they don’t just streamline the accents at casting. It doesn’t matter, really, because everyone on Krypton speaks English I guess, that’s all that’s important.

You know what? I’m not even going to talk about the plot anymore. There are some cool scenes here and there, but ultimately it’s a boring, boring movie. It goes on forever. There are a lot of grandiose ideas and sweeping shots filled with a larger-than-life Superman-ish score. A lot of the more glaring plot holes are either casually written-off or more blatantly ignored. Like Kevin Costner talking about why the government didn’t show up to collect the spaceship. “I don’t know why they didn’t come. They just didn’t.” Or when a bearded Clark Kent shows up at Jor-El’s twenty-thousand year old spaceship and emerges in a Kryptonian Superman costume, totally clean-shaven.

And then it’s just punch, punch, fly, kick, hit, punch, heat-vision eyes, punch, shove, fly, swoop, kiss, punch, punch, punch, punch, fly, punch, fly for the rest of the movie.

And is it just me, or do the effects here feel kind of cheap? It’s like, maybe Avatar set the bar pretty high in terms of digital graphics, but every new CGI laden movie that comes out lately, it feels like the artists are just rushing through the film. Everything’s kind of blurry, just a little too intentionally soft around the edges. I keep seeing the preview for World War Z and it looks just the same, like a bad cartoon. Also, another note about cinematography here, they went for the whole shaky camera thing, which, I don’t know, I guess it was supposed to make me feel like I was chasing Superman or something? And what about those sun glare spots? That’s like the first thing that everybody makes fun of in modern movies. Why are they still doing it?

Whatever, I can make snarky comments about the production all I want. But I’m mostly kidding. This was a highly polished big budget Superman movie. It looked cool. It would have been good as a series of ten-minute installments. Really, the problem lies with the Superman story. We’re talking about a character that’s older than my dead grandfather here. His story is legend and as such it is immune to change.

So what do we have? Just this never-ending intro, an infinite origin story. Superman is all beginning, no end, not even a middle anywhere in sight. To make Superman relevant, to keep the character interesting, someone’s eventually going to have to do something wildly different. But in a good way, not in the blue electric Superman from the 90s. Otherwise he’s destined to a fate of obscurity. Maybe not immediately, maybe not this generation, but eventually there’s going to be another Superman origin movie released, and all the kids are going to look at this giant S and think, this is boring. Man of Steel was boring.

A quick shout-out to my galactic overlords

I was thinking today, what if some super intelligent aliens were to visit Earth? I’m not talking just super intelligent, I mean like so far advanced that they’d have to figure out some way just to communicate on a level that would make sense to us. To them we’d be like ants. No, even smaller, we’d be like whatever microscopic organisms ants look down at and say, man, those microscopic organisms are so far behind us mighty ants.

So they’d show up here at Earth, these aliens, they wouldn’t even bother saying anything like, “Take me to your leader,” because, being so ridiculously smart and advanced, they’d already know everything there is to know about us. They’d know who our leader is. They’d teleport straight to the White House. Wait, no, that’s not advanced enough. They’d freeze time on Earth and they’d transport the entire White House to their home planet. Yeah, that’s pretty advanced.

And so the President, all of the security guys and secret agents, they’d start going nuts. Their first instinct would be to get Obama down to the underground bunker, you know, the one from Olympus Has Fallen, but they’d quickly realize that there is no underground bunker. They’d look outside the windows and have no idea what to make of whatever it is they’d be seeing outside. That’s when the aliens make contact.

They approach the President. They tell him, listen, we’re in charge now. We have our own agenda that we won’t even bother trying to explain to you, one, because you definitely wouldn’t understand it, and two, it doesn’t matter if you know what’s going on or not. You’re going to do exactly as we say from now on, and that’s just all there is to it.

And maybe people in the administration might try and put up a fight, say stuff like, “This is America! You can’t tell us what to do you goddamn aliens!” even though, technically speaking, since they’d be on a totally different planet, the earthlings would be the aliens in this scenario, although they wouldn’t yet realize the scope of their predicament, just how far across space and time the whole White House has been transported.

The aliens would let us humans have our moment, yelling and threatening and cursing and trying to press the launch button for all of our nuclear weapons, but eventually everybody would lose energy. They’d get tired. Nothing would be working. None of the guns or White House weaponry would have any effect. They’d try to storm outside but they’d find it impossible to even open the doors. Maybe it would take a day, maybe a week, but sooner or later everyone would be out of options.

And so the President would have no choice but to listen. The aliens would be like, “All right, we want you to do this and this, change that, keep doing this,” and so on, laying out their plans, not really leaving any room for negotiation or compromise. Obama might balk initially. He might outright refuse, saying something like, “I’d rather die than cooperate.”

But the aliens would respond, “Are you sure?” and they’d snap their fingers or whatever they do to operate their insanely advanced technology, and another Obama would appear in the room. Because these aliens can do that. They can make these clones, identical to anybody, but much more willing to go along with their alien plan.

I could go on like this forever. What I’m trying to get at here is, what if there’s a force in the galaxy much farther ahead of where we are at right now? What if they wanted to alter our history? What if there was absolutely nothing we could do to stop them? That’s not totally farfetched, is it?

And so after they unfreeze time and send the White House back to DC, that would be it. I’d never know about it. There’s tons of stuff that I’ll never know about even assuming that aliens never show up and start bossing our government around. So considering what I know, and what I know that I don’t know, how can I be sure that nothing like this crazy alien scenario isn’t actually happening?

I’ll never be sure. I’m constantly relying on other people, other institutions to provide me with ideas of what the world is like. I can investigate, I can read, I can do lots of stuff to make a case for myself that what I believe to be true is true, but at some fundamental level, I can never be positive that reality is real as I know it.

So if there are aliens out there, if they are super advanced and omnipotent, I’d like to shout out to my galactic overlords, what the hell guys? Why can’t you let me in on the cosmic fun? I’m just supposed to sit here at my computer and try to convince myself that I’m not crazy? Show yourselves! Take me to space! I want to see what’s out there! Come on!

A life of total leisure

Man, I just want a life of total leisure, is that really too much to ask for? I don’t want a job, I don’t want to have to go to work, I don’t want to have to do my laundry or fold any clothes. Just a life of relaxation and contemplation. Sure, maybe once in a while I’ll do something, I’ll go outside and water the plants, maybe, I’ll cook a big meal and I’ll think to myself, OK, that was useful. But really I don’t want any of that stuff. No chores, no responsibilities. I just want to always be able to go outside to my backyard and sprawl out on the grass looking up at the sky, always perfect weather, the perfect breeze, just the right amount of sunshine.

My kitchen always stocked with all of the best snacks and foods. Like if I want a Fruit Roll-up, bam, there it is, Fruit Roll-up. And I’m not talking about those yellow and blue multi-color ones, I’m talking the good flavors, only the best flavors, strawberry, like you can see the strawberry seeds smashed into the roll-up if you hold it up to the light, or watermelon, which, let’s be honest, it doesn’t taste anything like a real watermelon, neither do watermelon Jolly Ranchers, but that’s OK, it’s still a really cool taste, a really interesting flavor. One time I found this bottle of watermelon Gatorade, and yeah, I was skeptical, but it actually tasted just like watermelon. Funny enough, I didn’t like it. I wound up dumping the rest down the drain and heading back to the store for a yellow.

Just yellow Gatorade, or orange, I’d love for my fridge to be stocked with only my favorite drinks, Arizona Green Tea, even though I don’t really like it anymore, like I got sick of it from drinking way too much. I want that old feeling, that refreshed satisfaction that I got just by looking at one of those giant ninety-nine cent cans, and I’d buy like three or four of them, a whole plastic bag filled with Arizona Green Tea. Sometimes I’ll buy an Honest Tea Green Tea, because, I don’t know, what am I trying to find? What itch am I thinking that I’ll scratch? Because it doesn’t quite do it. It comes close, but yeah, it’s like Arizona is too sweet but Honest Tea is too boring.

I just want a job where I only have to go in like once a week, maybe four hours at a time, nothing big, nothing too strenuous. Or just a little strenuous, but only strenuous for like twenty minute intervals. I’d go in, or I wouldn’t go in, that would be the beauty of this job, because, you know what? Forgot the whole once a week business. I want a job where I just go in whenever I feel like it, if I ever wind up feeling like it at all. I’d go in batteries fully charged, I’d hit the ground running, it would be like I had never left in the first place. We’d all run around, getting a ton of work done but then, all right, let’s take a break. I want one of those cool bosses that orders everybody pizzas, like he’s looking out at all of us busting our asses and he thinks to himself, you know what would be awesome? If I order the crew a whole bunch of pizzas.

And he doesn’t come out to take an order, no, it’s a total surprise. And he nails it, he nails the order, he gets the perfect mix of different varieties, a plain pie, a buffalo chicken pie, some cool new pie that the pizza place is experimenting with, something I personally wouldn’t have thought to have ordered, but now that I’m trying it out, I’m like, damn, this is delicious, I’m definitely going to make it a point to order this kind of pizza in the future.

After work everybody goes out for drinks, the bar has Big Buck Hunter, and it’s only a dollar. You put in a dollar and the game lasts for like ten, fifteen minutes, and that’s not even including bonus rounds or extended firing if you get ten out of ten big bucks. I wind up playing against some old timer, this crazy looking regular, and we’re having a blast, I keep throwing dollars into the machine, he keeps making a motion like he’s going to leave, like he’s bothering me, but I insist, I’m like, “No way man, you’re not bothering me. The more the merrier! Let’s keep playing!”

And after like two hours of video games, I say to that guy, “You want a drink?” and he surprises me, it turns out he’s the owner of the bar, that this is exactly why he opened a bar in the first place, for that life of leisure, it’s a business, yeah, but it’s about something more, it’s about friendship and fun, it’s about Big Buck Hunter and making new acquaintances. He picks up the tab for the whole group and he sends out for chicken wings.

Man, is it too much to ask for? This life of leisure? We’d all head home and I’d be like, “See you when I see you!” and I’d go home, take my dog for a little walk, I’d head out to the backyard and lie down in the grass, staring up at the night sky, I can see the Milky Way, I can see the Big Dipper, Orion’s Belt, all of the constellations, it doesn’t matter if you’re not supposed to see them at the same time in the same season, because there they are, right there, and just when I think my life can’t get any better, I see a shooting star, and then a comet, and then a whole meteor shower, and then Northern Lights, and the International Space Station passes by, slowly, and even though I can’t see the astronauts and cosmonauts, I know they’re looking down, they’re waving at me, they’re like, “Hey Rob! Greetings from outer space!”

Meatless Mondays

I wanted to try out Meatless Mondays, but I work on Mondays at a restaurant, and so while I made myself this super healthy breakfast, well, I don’t know if it was super healthy, but it was definitely meatless, just a bunch of cereal, just like three bowls of cereal, I just kept eating bowl after bowl until I was full, and then when I got into work, my boss was like, “Hey everybody, I made hotdogs for lunch!” and you know I say lunch loosely, because it was like four, but when you start work in the afternoon and keep on trucking until close to midnight, four is kind of like lunchtime, especially when you consider my breakfast, my box of Frosted Mini Wheats, what time did I eat that, like eleven? Eleven thirty? It’s all off, everything skewed toward a little later in the day.

And there was this tray of hotdogs and I was like, fuck Meatless Mondays, I’ll do Meatless Tuesday this week, because I seriously love hotdogs. One time last summer I ate thirty of them in less than ninety minutes. It’s kind of a long story, or, I guess it’s really not that long of a story, I just have this habit of saying, “It’s kind of a long story,” whenever I want to beef up something boring, you know, when I’m talking about one thing and I get sidetracked and I start talking about another thing. But it was just this regular day last year, I think I had hotdogs for lunch and I was talking about how good it was, I said something like, “Man I fucking love hotdogs, I could eat hotdogs forever, no limit, I could eat thirty hotdogs in an hour.”

I don’t know why I said that. Sometimes when I start talking, especially if I’m talking about something that I like, like if I’m getting really excited about it, I won’t stop, I’ll keep going, I started thinking about Joey Chestnut and Kobayashi and all the great hotdog eating champs. That’s not so hard, I thought to myself, if they could do it, I could totally do it too.

My proclamation was met with an immediate rebuttal, and I doubled down, “I absolutely can do it, thirty hotdogs in an hour,” before eventually scaling back slightly, “Ninety minutes,” never having admitting that I ever said an hour in the first place. Whatever, they gave me the extra half-hour, everybody came over my house, one of my friends tried to be a wise guy and he bought these really doughy potato buns. “No way pal,” I pointed toward the door, “I want real hotdog buns.”

And I did it, even though I felt like shit right after, my fingers were tingling, I thought I saw Jesus coming down from the clouds, he was holding this tray with even more hotdogs, he was like, “My son, eat more hotdogs. For hotdogs are the kingdom of heaven,” yeah, like a bunch of nonsense, total hallucinatory garbage, but I’ve got to say, his hotdogs looked a lot better than mine, and even though for strategic purposes I decided to forgo any condiments on mine, the Lord’s wieners were perfectly dressed, just the right amount of sauerkraut and relish, the buns were these artfully crafted artisanal loaves, they almost looked like mini pretzels, garnished with coarse sea salt, brown on the outside, fluffy on the inside.

But that only lasted like fifteen seconds, then I kind of snapped out of it, people were throwing water on my head, drawing stuff on my face with permanent marker. I never got to bottom of just who drew that hotdog on my cheek, but whatever, permanent marker, you’ve just got to keep scrubbing, it comes out eventually.

So I woke up today and I got myself a bacon egg and cheese sandwich. And right after my first bite I was like, shit, what about Meatless Tuesday? But one, I already ate a bite of sandwich, so I’m not about to throw it away, and two, again I already ate a bite of sandwich, so whatever I wound up doing from here on out, regardless of how little meat I ate for the rest of the day, it would never be a true meatless day.

Meatless Wednesday it was, I guess. I figured, let’s enjoy the rest of the day. I ate the rest of that sandwich with gusto. I got to work extra early that night, licking my lips on the way in, man, hotdogs yesterday, I wonder what’s on the menu tonight. But it was this lentil salad. Totally vegetarian. And then after work I grabbed a slice of pizza. If only I hadn’t had that breakfast sandwich I really could have had a meatless day. I thought, OK, maybe tomorrow will be better. But it was tuna melts. Does that count? What kind of a meatless day are we talking about? How can I really commit to something like this when I haven’t even explored all of the guidelines? And what about that Clamato I had on the way into work? Does clam juice count as a meat? Why can’t I get this right?