Friends

My friends and immediate family are the only things in this existence that I value. But whereas my parents, brother and sister are pretty much stuck with having to like me, my friends have willingly chosen to do so. This might not seem a big deal to many people, but it is all-important to me.

I’m not the kind of person whom others generally go out of their way to hang out with. Hell, even my friends rarely call me- I have to call them. I’m never the center of attention or the leader of a group. I am not good at being cheery and appropriate. I’m not affable. I loathe small-talk. I’m not going to pretend to like you. Let’s face it- I’m not an easy friend. I’m fiercely independent, overly-opinionated, bizarrely passionate (I recently broke into tears while futilely trying to convince a friend that Yoko Ono is a brilliant singer), inappropriately hyper, stingingly critical, annoyingly honest, offensively perverse, incredibly incredulous, frustratingly logical and undeniably selfish.

And yet, occasionally, someone chooses to befriend me.

Understandably, I’ve never been a person with a lot of friends. I went to an elementary school with 18 kids in my class, but none of them would have qualified as anything other than acquaintances. Growing up, my friends were imaginary and my sister. It wasn’t until I moved after sixth grade that I first starting hanging out with peers. Throughout junior high, Bryan, Erik and I were inseparable- well except that Erik and I became jealous of each other because we both wanted to be Bryan’s “best” friend. But after the beginning of tenth grade, when Bryan got himself expelled, I spent most of high school alone and confused. I’ve often dwelled on the fact that I had no friends then, but in truth, I did know a couple of great people and even had a girlfriend. It’s only recently that I’ve realized that during that time I consciously avoided associating with the majority of my peers in order to protect myself from being “corrupted” by them.

It wasn’t until the second semester of my sophomore year in college that, for the first time in my life, I met a group who let me into their clique and seemed to enjoy me just being me. A few years after that, I met another group of people with whom I became extremely close. Around 2000, much of my surprisingly large web of friends and I decided to leave Iowa behind. I spent six years in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I hardly made any friends. Were it not for that experience, I might have never realized that living in a great place and pursuing one’s dreams were not nearly as important as having friends nearby.

I moved to Portland to be close to old friends, and upon moving here I immediately made new ones. I feel blessed to be surrounded by friends. In two days, I will be spending Thanksgiving with a few of the people I am most thankful for.

In the coming weeks, I plan on using this blog to try to show my appreciation by sharing my thoughts on and stories about my closest friends. Don’t worry- I won’t use last names.

Myths

I’ve been reading a lot of Greek mythology lately. I first got into Greek myths when I was in fifth grade, but my parents demanded that I stop reading them so as not to be corrupted by their pagan messages. In my upbringing, everything that was not my parent’s particular brand of Christianity was WRONG. As a result, I wasted a lot of my life believing a lot of bullshit. There’s a very good reason why I have such a strong dislike for religion in general and Christianity in particular.

Followers of a religion do not have to think. In fact, they should not think. All the answers to everything in existence are given to them by their religion. Everything told them by their religion is unquestionably true. Any part of a religion which seems untrue, contradictory or does not make sense must be believed anyway on what Christians call “faith.” Faith is the noun form of the adjective “gullible.”

Faith is an evolutionary survival adaptation. Humans have been wired to believe every optimistic story they hear and convince themselves that life is worthwhile. Without faith, we would all delve into hopelessness and despair and our species wouldn’t last very long. I guess my lack of faith is evidenced in that I am the only person I know who thinks that all humans should stop procreating so that we will die off and return balance and stability to the planet.

The extent of the power of faith is frankly amazing. As demonstrated by the Placebo Effect, faith does work. The Placebo Effect is a phenomenon in which a sick person will be healed about 33% of the time if they simply believe they will be healed. Therefore, if you give a person a tic-tac and tell them it will cure them and they believe it, there’s a 33% chance that the tic-tac actually will cure them. That is why so many healers can make so much money doing stupid stuff like pretending to pull maladies through the skin of gullible people. The self-fulfilling prophecy is another case of faith in action. Faith increases as it proves itself effective, adding fuel to its powers. The degree to which a person with faith will believe the most absurd statement or scenario is without compare. One can point out the most obvious flaws, inconsistencies and impossibilities of a religion ad naseum and a person with faith in that religion will be absolutely unable to even perceive those failings. Beyond refusing to understand anything contrary to their religion, faith actually renders them incapable of understanding.


Let me demonstrate:

In Judaism, Christianity and Islam, there is a story of a great flood which covers the earth. This story was largely plagiarized from the Assyro-Babylonian epic of Atrahasis. According to calculations I made about 15 years ago using the genealogies listed in the book of Genesis, this occurred 930 years after God created Adam: the same year that Adam died (the Islam version of the story varies somewhat but I’m not familiar with it). (Because much of the goal of the Old Testament was to unite various nomadic tribes by giving them a common history and religion, its genealogy is so precise that the only unknown time period in it is how long the Jewish people were supposedly enslaved by the Egyptians. Unsurprisingly, the beginning of the earth according to the Old Testament coincides with the invention of writing.) Assuming a “cubit” (the length from the tip of your finger to your elbow) equals 18 inches, the Hebrew Ark was approximately 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet tall (almost half as long as the Titanic). It was made with a wood frame which was covered with reeds and then coated with tar. Then it was filled with 8 people (Noah was a spry 500 years old), at least 2 of every bird and animal plus extras for food and doused by rain for 40 days, 24 hours a day.

Supposedly enough rain fell to cover the entire planet. But since God apparently didn’t know about most of the planet when the story was written, I’ll grant that only the entire Middle East, which is a desert, needed to be underwater. After floating around for 150 days after the rain stopped, the Ark landed on Mt. Ararat, in Turkey. Mt. Ararat is 16,854 feet high today, but since it is a volcano, it may have been taller of shorter 930 years after the earth and everything in it was created. Irregardless, Mt. Ararat was a tall mountain.

For the sake of argument, let’s imagine Mt. Ararat was 15,500 feet high (I use that number because there is a point at that height where many say the Ark landed). At that height, it would have had to have rained almost 400 feet per day, which is about 17 feet an hour or about 3 inches a minute.

According to the internet, Guinness’ book of World Records says that the heaviest recorded rainfall occurred in Guadeloupe in 2005, where 1.5 inches fell in one minute, and the most rain that has ever been recorded falling over a 24 hour period was 6 feet in La Reunion Island. In order to raise the water level of the entire Middle East 3 inches a minute, basically another ocean from outer-space would have had to have landed on it. This would obviously have crushed not only the Ark, but everything else in the region.

Despite the fact that nothing in the entire biblical flood story is remotely believable, millions if not billions of people not only believe it, they insist that it really happened. And because of the phenomenon of “faith,” any attempt to dissuade them from believing such blatant hogwash will largely fall on deaf ears....

Cartoons, etc.

When I was a kid, the purpose of my existence was threefold: to watch cartoons, pretend I was a superhero and play with my G.I. Joe action figures. Everything else in life was incidental. I woke up at 5:00 am every Saturday for my weekly cartoon marathon, but my two favorite cartoons, Transformers and G.I. Joe, were on after school five days a week. Every day at 3:30, school would get out, and mine was the second bus stop (after Shelby Green). The bus would drop me off at my driveway at approximately 3:46 every day, whereupon my sister and I would run down the drive, into the house, up the stairs and into my parents’ bedroom. At the foot of their bed is where the black and white 13” television was. As quickly as possible, I’d turn the set on and rotate the top knob to “U.” The bottom knob always stayed on 17, which was Fox, the only UHF station we got.

If we had made good time, there would still be a commercial or two before the show that had started at 3:30 came back on. We were resigned to always miss the first half of that program, which was fine in the early days, because it was either The Addam’s Family or Thundercats, neither of which I particularly liked. My two favorite shows took up the 4:00 and 4:30 timeslots.

It can be said without question that Transformers was the better show. A fundamental problem with G.I. Joe was that, since they couldn’t show blood, basically nobody could aim. Since Transformers didn’t bleed and if they got shot they could just get fixed by the mechanic, Transformers had a lot more violent action. Transformers also had weird electronic voices, which were mostly cool but occasionally annoying. The major flaw of Transformers, I thought, was Bumblebee, an annoying yellow Volkswagon who talked incessantly. Almost as annoying was Starscream, the airplane with the chalkboard voice that was always messing up the bad guys’ plans my trying to mutiny.

In both the G.I. Joe and Transformers universes, the bad guys were decidedly more interesting than the good guys. All the Autobots, the good Transformers, transformed into vehicles, whereas the Decepticons, the bad Transformers, turned into all kinds of interesting stuff- my favorite being Soundwave, who turned into what we used to call a “Ghetto Blaster” and contained four cassette tapes which turned into a robot, two Pterodactyls and a dog. The leader of the Decepticons, Megatron, turned into an awesome gun, while the leader of the Autobots, Optimus Prime, turned into a lame semi.

G.I. Joe tried very hard to make all of their characters annoying. Both the good guys and the bad guys consisted of a bunch of bumbling idiots. The plots usually consisted of the bad guys, who were terrorists, messing up their own plans due to their extreme incompetence. The best good guy on the cartoon was Lowlife, and both he and I had a crush on Zartan’s sister Zarana. Watching G.I. Joe was often frustrating because I came up with way better plots and dialogue with my toys in my bedroom than they did on the show.

G.I. Joe action figures and vehicles were easily my favorite toys. Except for my birthday and Christmas, I had to buy my G.I. Joes myself. I studiously saved my $2 a week allowance and the “flag points” from the G.I. Joe boxes, which you could send in for mail-order special offers. I spent countless hours devising plots, drawing maps, choreographing fight scenes and creating dialogue for my G.I. Joes. I wanted to be just like the ninja Stormshadow, and later, Zartan’s brother Zandar, when I grew up. Stormshadow was bloodbrothers with Snake Eyes, who was one of the few cool good guy Joes. On the cartoon, Snake Eyes didn’t talk, but he did in the comic books. When I played with the toys I always reconfigured which were the bad guys and which were the good guys to put more of the cool characters on the winning side (keeping the twins Tomax and Xamot as bad guys so as to give the bad guys a chance), although they did eventually make this easier for me to justify by making Storm Shadow a good guy in the comics and toys. I also beefed up both sides by adding my Star Wars action figures to the G.I. Joe universe. Around fifth grade, after my brother’s friend Steve made me aware of what really happens in war, I completely abandoned the intended premise of G.I. Joe, and in my world Beach Head, Snake Eyes, Stormshadow, Main Frame, Zandar and Zarana were a team of spies who gathered information on every other action figure I had, only killing when necessary.

I didn’t have very many Transformer toys, but I did spend a lot of time making Transformers out of Legos. When the idiots who ran FOX decided to switch the line-up so that Transformers came on at 3:30, I was extremely upset. At my mom’s suggestion, I wrote a letter of complaint to the station, but to no avail. From then on, I could only watch half of Transformers during the school year, and I was forced to sit through a half-hour of Thundercats, in which every character was a complete moron. One of my most vivid childhood memories is of staying at a friend J.J.’s house in fifth grade and seeing, for the first time, Transformers on a color television. I was absolutely blown away by how much cooler they looked in color. Imagine my confusion when J.J. wasn’t even interested in watching the show! Another time, I got in trouble for something and had to choose my own punishment. Thinking of the worst thing I could possibly endure, I chose to not be able to watch G.I. Joe for a week. But when I relayed this horrible punishment to my classmates, they scoffed at such a feeble and silly penalty.

Me, in a word

Others opinions of me are inescapably linked with who I am, so it is essential to understand how others view me (and to understand how I assume others view me) in order to attempt to understand myself. Every once in a while, someone imposes a concise summary of me, and I’m always intrigued by these.

In high school English class, we had to learn the spellings and definitions of twenty-five words every week. The teacher would have us partner up to quiz each other on these words. One week, my senior year circa 1993, one of the words was “dogmatic.” My study partner, who happened to be my girlfriend at the time, quickly joked that that word would be easy to remember because it perfectly described me. I was not surprised by her statement; but interested, I asked her what she meant by it. She retorted that not only did I always arrogantly insist that my opinion was right, I was also a “dog,” by which of course she was referring to my dictionary’s fifth definition; “a despicable person.” Actually, she wasn't joking. I took this statement to heart, and over the next several years made a genuine effort to recognize and curb my own dogmatic behavior by attempting to at least consider possibilities other than the opinions I adamantly took as fact.

Almost exactly three years later, while in college, my good friend Brad off-handedly remarked I could be summarized by one word: strong-willed. I don’t remember the context, but I immediately considered “strong-willed” relative to “dogmatic.” Whereas the words have very similar meanings, their connotations are very different. They both describe an obstinate or stubborn person. “Dogmatic” simultaneously implies a refusal to consider another’s point of view and the demand that the other agrees with your point of view. “Strong-willed” has a much more positive connotation. Although it suggests a refusal to cave to the demands of another, it does not eliminate the possibility of listening to and considering the other’s point of view. It also implies a motivated and self-controlled individual. I took Brad’s remark as a hopeful sign that I had learned to express my personality tendencies more productively since my high school days.

Fast forward a couple years to 1998: while working at a gas station in Cedar Falls, Iowa, my co-workers and I passed one afternoon asking the question, “If Hollywood was making a movie about your life, which actor would you want to play you?” Thinking of his roles in Dead Poet’s Society and Reality Bites, my reply was Ethan Hawke. In both movies, he plays a dogmatic, strong-willed, daring, rebellious individual who ultimately makes self-destructive choices. A co-worker, Tom, immediately rejected my suggestion, and stated that I should unquestionably be played by Steve Buscemi. My other co-workers immediately and excitedly agreed with Tom’s apparently spot-on observation. This was extremely flattering, because Steve Buscemi was (and is) one of my favorite actors. But what was to be discerned from Tom’s assessment? First, I was chagrined that nobody else seemed to see the Ethan Hawke in me. In retrospect it should not have been surprising that instead of a cocky sex icon I would be compared to a nervous, quirky, awkward little man. As opposed to the clichéd angsty artist tragic/heroic archetypes played by Ethan Hawke, Steve Buscemi portrays tragic, unique characters with subtly complex, endearing yet aggravating personalities. Perhaps this was a sign that I was no longer stubbornly holding onto my opinions and attempting to “be” someone so much as just naturally being whoever came out.

A couple years later, after I had moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, my sister got me a framed postcard for either Christmas or my birthday. It shows a picture of a pencil sharpened all the way to the eraser with the caption underneath, “PERSISTENCE: Now that we’ve exhausted all possibilities…let’s get started.” I propped it in the basement next to my drumset, and spent many hours considering not only its implications, but why my sister had sent it to me, while practicing my drums. Granted, it’s simply an inspirational message, but obviously my sister was reminded of me in reading it. Persistent: another word synonymous with stubborn, but with a constructive connotation. The word cannot help but remind me of Edison’s axiom the genius was 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. And then the tag underneath “persistence” on the postcard: a reflection of how I tend to critique, analyze and dissect all that is around me combined with poignant advice. As I arduously played my drums in that basement over the next several years striving to become a professional drummer, I was glad to have this constant motivation to continuously learn and hone my craft; avoiding the rut of painstakingly practicing only for the sake of acquiring skill, but instead working (or should I say playing?) toward the ultimate goal of making music.

Last year, my current girlfriend met up with an old friend she had not seen in many years. When prompted to describe me, the first words out of her mouth were, “He’s kind of an asshole- but in a good way.” Gee, thanks. Perhaps not much has changed about me over the years, after all.

A few years back I exhausted the possibility of being a professional drummer, and started seeking how I could be most happy in my existence. I put a picture of my older niece (my sister’s daughter) in the frame over the “PERSISTENCE” postcard my sister had given me. Today I took the picture out (I need an updated one with both nieces in it anyway) to uncover the postcard again. Sometimes it’s good to have a reminder of who you are, which cannot be separated not only from how others perceive you and how you perceive them perceiving you, but how you perceive yourself and who you aspire to be.

Inland Empire

After watching David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), I immediately wanted to re-watch Hamlet, but they only had a crappy-looking modernized version of it at the video store. Meanwhile, every copy of Inland Empire, newly released, sat on the shelf unchecked out. So I watched Inland Empire again. And again. Perhaps I had to make up for the fact that I had anxiously awaited its arrival for almost a year, because when it was first released in theatres in Portland, it played for exactly a week and then inexplicably vanished before I had gotten a chance to see it.

Inland Empire is about unspeakable atrocities, and the fear, obsession, confusion, regret, desire and guilt which accompany them. These are things Americans tend to try to ignore and avoid, preferring to be distracted from intolerable behavior, destructive actions and the physical and emotional results of these things on the victims (and the perpetrators). But ignored problems only grow, and ignored emotions inevitably surface inappropriately. Mass entertainment begs to be used not just to distract us from reality, but to reveal reality, a reality that can only be discovered by asking questions which usually do not provide answers so much as reveal dark paths and doors opening to new questions and possibilities. At best, these doors open to eerie, diffused lamps exposing the darkest parts of humanity. Anyway, that’s how David Lynch sees it.

Despite the claim of many critics, Inland Empire has a storyline; it just doesn’t play like a narrative. Truth be told, it has several storylines which seem separate until they disturbingly and illogically interrupt each other. The title of the movie refers to a Polish underground market whose business is buying girls, brainwashing them and selling them as wives in America. Nikki Grace (Laura Dern, whose acting is brilliant throughout) is one of these women. As a result of her brainwashing and in order to cope with her unhappy existence, Nikki lives in a confusing fantasy world. Her various fear and angst-filled fantasies of who she might be demonstrates the extent of this (very real) underground “business.” Sometimes she’s a prostitute. Sometimes she is having a slumber party with the other girls. Sometimes she’s the miserable wife of Piotrek (Peter Lucas), who joins the Polish circus (in reality, he’s part of the Inland Empire, if only a pawn being used by them) after she births an illegitimate child. In her favorite but most delusional fantasy, she’s a successful actress, and Piotrek is her dominating husband. In this fantasy, she stars in a movie with Devon (Justin Theroux). This movie is yet another fantasy with a story line running parallel to her other fantasies. All these fantasies inevitably become entangled with each other, and she (like the audience) has little idea which is which is which. The fact that Nikki’s life is representative of many, many women who have been sold as slaves is, in part, demonstrated by a girl who tearfully watches her own life and/or Nikki’s unfold through a television screen (reminiscent of The Truman Show). Perhaps this girl and/or Nikki’s real family is a group of rabbits, one of whom sold her and two whom live in denial about it.

David Lynch is the mastermind behind every aspect of Inland Empire. His vision is a remarkable one which truly sets him apart from the rest of Hollywood. To borrow from DC Comics terminology, Lynch is Bizarro Quentin Tarantino. If you desire for art to candidly explore and express the vilest of human events and emotions, you will agree that Inland Empire is one of the greatest movies ever created. If not, don’t bother.