Other Stuff

Yeah, About Those Jokes....

I tried something that proved to be harder than expected. No, not thinking before I speak. I’ve yet to try that. Instead, I decided to write an original joke every morning and post it on Facebook, thus exposing myself to the ridicule of those silly enough to “friend” me.

Watching a white guy hit on a black barista is especially painful before my coffee. When he said, “I like my coffee like my women, black and strong,” I threw up a little inside my mouth. When it was my turn, the barista looked at me with daggers and asked how I liked my coffee. I said, “White, with no self-esteem.”I now have to find a new coffee shop.

People have said for years they think I’m funny. (I mean funny, ha ha.) I should think about writing jokes for a living, they’d say. Like just about everything else in the world, stuff is a lot easier when you don’t have to do it every day. Coming up with something new every day, especially when I’m tired, in a shitty mood, looking for a fight, etc. just plain sucks!

I’ve been buying too much alcohol lately. It’s really out of control. So much so I decided to start going to meetings. The people at Shopaholics Anonymous said I needed to find a new meeting.

 Add to that the fact that most of my friends are ethnic, gay, or mentally ill—or all three—which eliminates about 99.9% of the jokes that come to my mind. I really had to reign in the humor that is fine when I am working on the motorcycles or when I’m with family. Though I am not graced with anything bordering on circumspection, I do try not to engage in offensive behavior with those I care about or make my living from—which, if were represented by a Venn diagram, would be one big circle. This means that coming up with something somewhat amusing within a rather limited corral is hard work.

We need a new coffee machine so I put in a Swear Jar. I also changed the popcorn sizes from Small, Medium, and Large to Cheap Ass Tiny, S****y Middle of the Road, and M***** F***king Huge. Between the surge in popcorn sales to middle school kids and tripling the size of the Swear Jar, we’ll be ordering the new eight-head, gold-plated, espresso machine by the end of the week. 

 An interesting side effect from this experiment is that my mind started spending even more time turning everything into a spoonerism or a pun.

How do you turn a Tuesday chicken potpie dinner into a Saturday night party? Add commas:  chicken, pot, and pie.

 And as luck would have it, many a time I would come up with something incredibly funny and have no way to record it. I do not condone texting while driving, but I could see why there are those who feel compelled to do such a thing. Inspiration is a finite resource for some of us.

I was riding along about 70 mph and got nailed in the face with a dove. I don’t care what the ad says, that damn thing was not ¾ moisturizing cream.

 There are other things I could do if I wasn’t pimping independent film to this town. I happen to be one hell of motorcycle mechanic (which is a broad indicator of how useful my six years of college English would be for getting gainful employment).

Looking for investors for a great business idea. Buy a 3D printer. Then print more 3D printers to sell.

 Fixing stuff is all a matter of systems. Once you grock how a mechanical system works, you can apply that to cars, motorcycles, biological organisms, political parties, religion, getting laid, and so on. But there is a psychology to motorcycles that emanates from how the brains behind them were thinking when they were designed. BMW does things one way and Honda does them another. Harley Davidson has their own planet from which their designers hail. Moto Guzzi makes Harley look like solid earthly logic. I love this stuff and am usually successful at making various machines road worthy. However there is a big however, and that however is that I only like working on them if they are mine or owned by someone I like. So, should I decide to work on motorcycles for a living and have to work on a bike of someone I didn’t like, my day would go south fast: “Gee, my 1973 Harley still vibrates even after you installed highway pegs.”

    “Harley’s are very intuitive. If they think you are an idiot, they shake more. It’s been scientifically proven. Take a night class. It’ll help.”

The front forks on my motorcycle were leaking so I went to the motorcycle shop and bought some fork oil. The guy behind the counter looks at me and says, "Ah, blew a seal?" I said, "Does EVERYBODY know why I got fired from Sea World?" I now have to find a new motorcycle shop.

A question that sometimes comes up when I’m interviewed about the Darkside: What is the hardest part about running a theater?

I sat at the counter in a diner and ordered a chicken sandwich. The guy next to me ordered an egg sandwich. You’ll never know which one came first.

 Usually I joke that it is pure hell trying to find a way to spend all the money I’m making. Frankly, the answer is the converse of that. For several months of the year it doesn’t matter what films are playing, almost no one shows up. And this happens every year. I might spend six hours and $500 rebuilding a power supply to make a lamp work, only to have three people show up for the show. And they will complain that it was too loud/quiet or tell me they can get Red Vines a lot cheaper at the store. I may not be able to write prolifically like Stephen King but I can hold a 70 year-old 35mm projector together with a stale Jr. Mint, a paperclip, and the love of Jesus in my heart—until people start showing up for movies again and I can afford to install a fresh Jr. Mint.

New policy: If I see someone texting in an auditorium during the movie, I’ll turn off the movie, open the door slightly, then toss in a noose. What happens next depends on the other people trying to watch the movie….

 Trying to be funny every morning as the coffee starts to make my brain cells speak to each other (in the same language) is not an easy job. It gives me understanding and perhaps a little patience for those who do seeming simple tasks professionally.

I borrowed my friend’s new smart phone to call tech support. What he didn’t tell me is he had dropped it in his curry bowl at lunch. As I was talking to the tech person in what was likely Mumbai, India, I was overwhelmed by the smell of Indian food. My friend told me it was a new app that detects the accent of the person on the phone and produces a smell from that person’s region. The next day we were sitting in the pub and I used his phone to call my sister in Canada. I could smell beer! It smelled just like the Labatt’s I was drinking! I was astounded! I went to the cell phone store and tried to by a phone that would support that app! Such depths of humiliation had been unseen since middle school. I could hear the guys in the cell phone place laughing the whole way back to my car. I called my friend, “Hey, I just got that Geographical Smell-O-App on my phone.”

“Really? What are you smelling now?”

“I can smell the creek you’re up without a paddle the next time I see you!”

Yes, I can intimidate that aggressive panhandler into never coming to the snack bar counter again, but it pisses me off for the rest of the day and God help the next person who even slightly annoys me. Meanwhile that cop I just called an “idiot” because he was hassling some skateboarder deals with guys like this everyday—and doesn’t slap them into the next county. Who’s the idiot?

Having come from Canadian parents, I can assure you that adulterers in our friend’s country to the north are indeed forced to wear scarlet “Eh”s, dontyaknow?

 The real humor is that these lessons are fleeting at best and I will be asking myself how hard is it really to ring up a few pounds of Fuji apples without spilling them all over the damn scale? What keeps me from asking that very question is another question: Do I thread up the correct film every show, every day of the year?

That would be a no.

These are some of the lesser jokes I wrote:

Did you ever see the Happy Days trading cards? When my friend told me to give him the one with the guy in the leather jacket, he’d invest it and give me back TWO cards, I suspected a Fonzy Scheme. 

 

I’m running in a 5K race with a buddy of mine. I’m in lousy shape and I know it. About half way through the race I realized I had it. I push it as far as I can and decide to give it up. I tell my buddy I’m through, and he freaks. “Dude, you can’t stop here?”

“Why?”

“This is the 3K mark and the black guy behind you will think you’re a racist.”

 

When I think of irony, I think of PETA beating a dead horse.

 

 

 

 

 

Hate the bigotry, love the bigot

It would be easy to blame the media for the ugly misuse of sayings and phrases these days. With the oracle Google as close as most of our cell phones, we assume that if we hear something from our favorite info feed it must be true—freeing us from taking responsibility for thinking before we repeat. Since it is so easy to check the veracity and etymology of almost everything, we presume our favorite talking-head surely has. Thus the mindless regurgitation of clusters of words out of context and out of sync with reality seems to be all the rage. This leads me to believe that I have (d)evolved into an “Annoyed at Stupid Sayings Time Bomb” set to explode at 51 years old. That is to say, I’m likely to go off next time I hear my most hated aphorism, “Hate the sin, love the sinner.”

The context in which I’m hearing “Hate the sin, love the sinner” today is mostly around homosexuality—and perhaps this is ramping up due to it being an election year when hot-button topics are being fellated for the crescendo of a sound bite. The obvious interpretation of this maxim is that homosexuality is a sin and sin is to be hated. The phrase, not the context, comes from St. Augustine’s letter 211 (a.c.e. 424) in which he wrote, “Cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum,” which translates roughly as "With love for mankind and hatred of sins." In this letter Augustine rebukes the Nuns of the Monastery, of which his sister had been prioress, for certain turbulent manifestations of dissatisfaction with her successor and lays down general rules for their guidance. The quote has also been attributed to Gandhi, where it is found in his biography. I did not come across any ready scholarly biblical reference for the phrase.

My sensitivity to this phrase comes in no small part from raising a lesbian stepdaughter. When she was in her early teens I noticed she was not developing emotionally like her two sisters. She wasn’t ahead or behind—more like she was developing in parallel to them. She was not delighted with the feminine aspects of herself and was more comfortable running around with me in outfits that emulated my blue-collar ethic than in ones that mirrored her mom’s womanlier affect. She was curious about how people were attracted to each other and about alternative ways of thinking and being. By the time she was in high school, she had read every book on my philosophy bookshelf, was more comfortable with her hair short, and chose to hide her body behind looser clothing. Conspicuously, she didn’t have crushes on guys like her sisters did.

What became obvious to me was that my step-kid was not “choosing” to be different. She desperately wanted to know why she was somewhat off off-center compared to the other kids in her adolescent experiences. Most gay people with whom I’ve spoken about their sexuality have said that they, too, had wondered why they were so different—until they discovered others who were different like they were. This child who I raised, who used to cry when the other kids made fun of her for something she couldn’t help, has nothing wrong with her. This is how she is. She is also one of the kindest people I have ever known, is often funnier than is prudent, has an esthetic sense that would make anyone smile, and happens to be a lesbian. So to “hate the sin” that is the homosexuality with which my stepdaughter identifies, is to hate my stepdaughter. My child, who has done nothing in this life to be hated for and has grown into a fine young woman, is targeted by this phrase.

“Hate the sin, love the sinner” is passive-aggressive camouflage, providing a cozy, thought-free place to hide rather than coming right out and saying your belief system chooses to hate people like my kid. I write “chooses” because the references used to back up hating my daughter’s “sin” are surgically excised from scripture—conveniently ignoring the surrounding “sins” that are inconvenient to avoid in everyday life. Thus, the argument that homosexuality is sin usually comes with a scriptural reference. I am one of many who do not share faith with people who subscribe to a religious canon. To judge other people’s sin by what is considered a holy scripture carries no weight with me. I do not have the emotional or cultural attachment to scripture that allows me to use it as a barometer to measure anything.

But all religious and interpretive issues aside, there is an emotional reaction to that saying that is as real to me as the faith is to others. It feels like condemnation and an admission of hatred for someone I hold dear—for many of the people in my life I hold dear. The transparent bubble wrap of scriptural reference doesn’t soften the offensive blow to my psyche every time I hear “Hate the sin, love the sinner.” It is piercing dissonance because most people who spout “Hate the sin, love the sinner” are unaware of what they are doing to the people around them who know what they really mean, even if the purveyors of the saying do not. Everybody is surrounded by shades of grey of homosexuality. Whether it is the guy who delivers the water or the woman who fits your kids with braces—you do not know. Most of those who have risen above the self-loathing that “Hate the sin, love the sinner” perpetuates will not let on that you are doing the equivalent of getting right up in their face and telling them to die in a fire. Most will show you the grace and courtesy you are not affording them—because they know you do not understand that homosexuals are your sons and daughters, and fathers and mothers—that some of those who preach intolerance the loudest are suppressing their own homosexuality.

And as I move farther into life I’ve shared with people who choose partners of their own gender, I see them as being grateful for the progress made in their lifetimes. Many of them have lost the need to hate those who hate them. I find their presence centering because they have lived through everything from attempts on their lives to the constant soft-core pornography, of which “Hate the sin, love the sinner” is no small part. And they have done it without needing to tell those who hate them to die in a fire.

I anxiously await my evolution to the enlightened place that many who have suffered this insult directly have reached.

 

 

Review of TAKE SHELTER

TAKE SHELTER opens with Curtis (played vividly and thoughtfully by Mike Shannon) standing in his driveway. He is in his mid-thirties, works digging in the earth, and is looking at an Ohio sky that is dumping a type of rain that he’s never seen before. It’s a big scene of big sky and big sounds. The scene then cuts to him in the shower. It is the kind of edit that lets the viewer know there is a deliberate mind behind this film. This is a cinematic cue that you should be paying attention.

TAKE SHELTER is about many things. It seems each viewer leaving the movie has a different take on it. I’m inclined to see the film as an intriguing study on the tendency of gender roles to blur and blend in times of crisis.

Curtis is a man in the Midwestern sense of the word—simple, hardworking, not too chatty, and also not too far from being a little boy. His wife Samantha, played exquisitely by Jessica Chastain, takes care of him and their hearing-impaired daughter Hannah.  In one pivotal scene, Curtis arrives to a parent-teacher conference covered from head to toe in mud.  He had been running late and didn’t have enough time to shower after working outside all day. During the meeting we see Curtis behaving like a mischievous child who’s been out playing in the mud.  He prefers to conspire with Hannah as if he were her sibling rather than her parent.

His preadolescent tendencies are played out with his best friend and workmate Dewart (Shea Whigham).  This is highlighted by the only reference to sex in the movie, which is made when Dewart tosses out a sexual fantasy which is beautifully crushed when we see his wife, who appears less than cordial.

As TAKE SHELTER progresses it becomes evident that Samantha is the strong stuff that binds family together. It is a role thrust upon her, but she embraces it and does it with sensible affection. Sewing and cooking are just as second nature to Samantha as playing in the dirt and removing junk piles are to Curtis.  Everyone seems at ease with his or her place.

Then things gets weird.

Curtis is separating from the people around him. He is seeing things others are not. Is he nuts? Well, his mom was about his age when she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. His sleep is disturbed by dreams that are becoming more and more palpable and that are merging with his waking life. He seeks help but in that Midwestern, blue-collar, big-toe-in-the-sand way that butts up against the ridiculousness of asking a paranoid person to trust others enough to talk to them about his paranoia.

As he goes further inward, he pours this frenetic energy into renovating the storm shelter. He stops coming to bed at night and makes very poor choices around his job. As financial realities mount, Samantha becomes aware that her version of providing for the family is about getting a surgery for their daughter, not about funneling all their resources into a shelter from a storm that no one else seems to think is coming.

In a critical scene, Curtis pulls the straps off his stoic, masculine reserve and lets his community know, uncharacteristically multi-syllabically, that he knows something they do not. (If you are lucky enough to have seen Michael Shannon take his character in the HBO series Boardwalk Empire over the edge of insanity, you will realize this scene in TAKING SHELTER goes further down that road to what better be an Oscar nomination.) However, it is the character Samantha who takes the scene home by doing what is best for the family, to hell with what people think. We should all be so lucky.

Tension mounts within the family and within the community as Curtis’ dreams come faster and more furiously from the darker recesses of his mind. The judicious employment of CG in this film is riveting, , creating an Ohio skyline rife with unearthly clouds and swarms of birds coming together and diverting into patterns that look like schools of fish in the presence of a shark.  These images are unsettling on many levels but not bludgeoning. They are necessary for the flow of the movie and are balanced nicely with the calm of Samantha’s steadfast resolve to keep the family together.

The first hour of the movie seems to be taking off toward a heart stopping crescendo. However, the last hour of the movie brings us into the hearts of good people getting through their day in a time when jobs are scarce and sickness—of body or mind—is frightening.

TAKE SHELTER follows a rational story arc, so it is no surprise that in the last act of the movie the storm sirens blow, which is not out of the ordinary for Ohio where tornados drop from the skies. Curtis and his family head to the shelter, for he is sure it is THE storm, not just a storm. It is in this box that Samantha makes Curtis prove that his love for his family is stronger than his allegiance to his hallucinations. It is here where many understand what the film is really about.

But, TAKE SHELTER is not over. When Hannah sees something that her father is sure only he can see, the viewer can assume what comes next. Assume nothing, for this is a well-written film that respects the viewer’s intelligence enough to dispense with an epilog. The story isn’t over until seconds before end credits roll.