Thoughts and Indulgences

Dinner, about 40 times

Lunch, less than that

(Food is a distraction)

The way dust forms in the macro of my sight as I try to tune everything out, twice

Death, a lot

(Not mine)

Rent, utilities, the dripping of the tap, a dozen, a dozen, thrice

Pain, seventeen

(Mine)

Drinking, Four-hundred and twelve

Sleep, once 

Throw it away like your heart,

Like the thing you’ve pretended you’ve never needed,

Like the gum wrapper kept in your pocket for years,

Like the friend you aren’t sure means something,

Like the third cup of coffee spilled everywhere,

Like the song you wish would get stuck in your head one last time,

Like the sibling whose voice you can still make out in the background of a video you forgot to delete,

Like nothing you’ve ever thought would be helpful, 

I have this fantasy 

Where I’m forced to repent for every lie I’ve ever told

To an army of faceless foes, brimming with glee to spurn my truth

And then I cry and I confess

And the gorgeous shell that was my personality erodes

And what’s left isn’t me

It’s a baby, sputtering and sobbing

Desperate to be held 

It seems we're rapidly approaching the end of you and I 

Thinking of the other as anything but an enemy

So, if that's the case, here's a toast:

May you look at me with loathing

May your words drip with disdain

I hope you speak of me with malice

‘Stead of skipping right past my name 

My mouth should make you angry

Ev'ry breath make your skin crawl

I want the thought of me to make your blood boil

There’s nothing more dull

Than hearing about someone else’s dream,

Be it in prose or song or rant or sob,

So if you’ll forgive the indulgence:

I fear my mind’s been lost several times over

To an army invading my subconscious 

   Of judges with face tattoos of pennies sentencing me to death

   Of hurricanes, violent and never ending, buffeting down the doors of a bar I felt safe in

   Of friends whose birthdays I’ve missed getting married to people I’ll never meet

  Of wolves, red-eyed and vicious, warning me of dust

  Of love

Then I wake, as if I was dead, with a gasp and all at once,

Shall I miss you now or hours later?

Old friends drift away quicker than they come.

Time makes fools of us and hope, its traitor

And the winds blow me down, make me feel numb.

Sentiment ruins the rawest of foes

And absence runs ragged my hardened heart.

While poison seeps through the friends that I chose,

A summer brings hope that with time apart,

I'll find relief in thoughts that have faded

Milestones into mem'ries, pain into dust

I pretend who I am isn't jaded

When sun brings shine upon my soul's old rust,

As I wish for a past that creaks less loud

They say never to meet your heroes, but I would add not to revisit them either. Returning to someone or something that you once held in high esteem with the curse of fresh eyes has a similar effect to seeing it up close. It’s much easier to see the whole of something, warts and all, given the benefit of passed time and it’s hard not to take the reality of a former love falling short of one’s admittedly colossal expectations as a personal affront to everything one holds dear. That said, I’ve never been one to follow my own advice, so I recently revisited one of the defining pieces of media from my childhood; Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes. Despite the aforementioned tendency for childhood entertainment to not fully realize the rose-tinted memories that they inhabit, Calvin and Hobbes nevertheless seemed as vital as when I first read it. For good reason maybe, as it’s hard not to love Calvin. He’s an effortlessly charming scamp, moving around wildly across the strip, constantly in tow with him is his best friend, a stuffed tiger. It’s all instantly endearing and it’s not hard to understand why people are instantly drawn to inhabiting this world. Still, where other comics derive their following largely from the lengthiness of their run, it’s audience growing through syndication and long-term exposure, Calvin and Hobbes lasted a relatively paltry ten years. Add in its creator’s intense aversion to publicity and the comic’s lack of merchandising and it becomes increasingly strange to take for granted how often people of all ages treat it as a personal touchstone. The comic somehow attained a sustained cultural impact while never resorting to prolonged commercial overexposure. This continued relevance betrays a fundamental difference in the technical makeup of Calvin and Hobbes compared to its contemporaries, a key artistic decision that keeps it sticking in our public consciousness. There’s something at the heart of Calvin and Hobbes that’s genuinely affecting, and much more than say, Garfield. Whatever it is, this crucial creative choice of the series, the element that keeps us returning to it, what is the reason that so many of us care so much about the boy and his tiger?

First and foremost, Calvin and Hobbes is a traditional, four-panel comic strip. The Sunday strips would push wider, but for the majority of the strip’s run, a simple, black and white four panelled story would be what was offered. It’s important to identify the structure of the comic, as there is a direct link between how an audience consumes a piece of art and how it affects them. Fred Sanders argues that the statements made by the strip obtained a greater impact by its adherence to the traditional comic formula, noting that “Insensitivity to the medium-message connection” is what can cause a piece of art to be “bathetic when it attempts profundity” (Sanders, “What You Can Learn from Calvin and Hobbes”). This “medium-message connection” is crucial to understanding at least part of the strip’s appeal. Much like any other form of media, there’s a set of conventions that the average comic reader has been conditioned to expect. These conventions can either be met or subverted, but what is important is that they are respected. Watterson was adamant in refusing to license his strip for commercial merchandise because, in his slightly dramatic words, all the “licensing would sell out the soul of Calvin and Hobbes.” He goes on to say that “the world of a comic strip is much more fragile than most people realize“, revealing his belief that artistic and thematic consistency is key to the success of a piece of art (West, 59). It’s an approach that can provide a richer sense of story and characterization, but it’s also one that demands more from the readership. Since the only avenue with which the public had to these characters was through the comic itself, not through one-joke t-shirts or plush toys, to be a fan of the strip required a greater deal of engagement than it would for other comics. The investment that the strip cultivates was, at least partially, a direct result of it’s refusal to betray the message of its medium.

As compact as that sounds, I can’t imagine that it’s the primary reason for my own unending devotion to the series; somehow I think that the commitment of the comic to its chosen artistic medium was particularly resonant for a six year old. Beneath the purity of the comic as a comic, there’s another, more affecting facet: nostalgia. To some extent this is unavoidable, as comics are largely consumed during childhood and the memories associated with them oftentimes are rose-tinted. Nostalgia is behind all that unending disappointment, the type that springs from the contemporary discovery of something’s true quality. It can also work in the opposite direction, becoming a tool to obfuscate our current experience with the art into a mere recollection of our original experience with it. We are then no longer participating with the art itself, but rather with our perceived reaction to that same art. It makes it hard to detach yourself, from conflating your current opinions with the memory of your past ones. Is there a way to reconcile the sentiment of the past with the critical experience of the present? In “The Ghost of the Hardy Boys”, Gene Weingarten attempts to come to terms with the sheer awfulness of The Hardy Boys, novels that were once, to him, “the pinnacle of human achievement.” He delves into the author’s life story, the publisher’s tyrannical edits, the contexts behind the writing of each book. And while he realizes that the series is hardly superb, there’s always something that “made you turn the page”, an “all-too-brief moment in which the writer seems suddenly engaged” (Weingarten, “Ghost of the Hardy Boys”). While Calvin and Hobbes doesn’t suffer from this problem, Weingarten’s methods in finding his original attraction to the books without the lens of nostalgia lay in looking at the intrinsic nature of the books, the way that the small, engaging details drove the plots. So what intrinsic is hidden in the details of Calvin and Hobbes?

It’s hard to encapsulate a decade’s worth of artistic choices into a few easily digestible points, but some elements tend to stand out. Calvin’s idiosyncratic tastes, from the works of DuChamp to a magazine about bubble gum. The ever changing backgrounds, from completely empty to vividly inked and populated. The tension between fantasy and reality. A potential thread emerges, one of memory; not in the intellectual sense, but in the emotional one. The strip is able to transcend simple “nostalgia buttons” because it doesn’t ask us to remember specific shared moments or events, but rather specific feelings.  We see Calvin being banished to his room and sulking outside his window in an imagined Martian landscape, filled with the brilliant colour and configuration that only childhood loneliness can muster. We see this and we don’t remember this exact event happening to us, but we remember feeling alone, misunderstood, ostracized. And we can remember the methods we used to try to escape from this unhappiness. As Libby Hill puts it in her retrospective on the series, “isolation breeds fantasy, which breeds isolation” (Hill, “Calvin and Hobbes Embodied the Lonely Child”). The rejection pushes one inwards and the continued time away from anyone other than oneself causes further rejection. It’s thoroughly emotionally exploitative, in that we can’t help but feel sorry for him. It triggers an uncontrollable empathy, as we’ve all been children and experienced that powerlessness. Watterson is reminding us what it felt like to be completely powerless, completely vulnerable, and completely alone, all within the realms of a four-panel comic strip. It's the kind of juxtaposition that tends to stick with people.

What’s significant about this specific type of juxtaposition is its usefulness in fostering both comedic and dramatic material. The incongruity can be mined for laughs, like Calvin tracking polls for his father as if he was a presidential candidate, or moments of almost unbearable resonance, like the repeated collision of Calvin’s hyper-vivid daydreams with the mundanity of his schoolwork. It’s non-escapist fantasy, the type that is fully inhabited by a dreamer who is nevertheless completely self-aware of the context of their situation. It’s reminiscent of early Simpsons episodes, where the family dynamic is grounds for great humour, but the creeping shadow of a burdensome reality consistently threatens to dramatically tear down the surrealist facade that has been ever-so carefully constructed. It was not uncommon for The Simpsons of the early 90s to have an average, slice-of-life storyline (like a housewife needing to get a job in order to make ends meet) that was punctuated by instances of brilliant absurdity (like that same episode featuring a 50 foot tall Marie Curie and a Scottish groundskeeper wrestling a wolf). Calvin himself best resembles a tragic combination of The Simpsons’ two child protagonists. Bart Simpson is the devious prankster, tirelessly putting every ounce of his energy into the next meaningless act of destructive mischief and Lisa Simpson is the isolated intellectual, forever an outsider because of her contextually inappropriate sophistication. Both The Simpsons and Calvin and Hobbes are consistently held up as all-time greats in their respective fields of entertainment, but unlike the latter, The Simpsons doesn’t have the benefit of an expedited run to sweeten the memory of its early quality. Indeed, the common rap on The Simpsons is that its creative decline came around the time when it started priding outlandish storylines over more emotionally grounded plots (Sullentrop, “The Simpsons”). Its downfall, according to the detractors of the show’s later years, came from the move towards treating its characters as a tool to deliver quirky jokes instead of treating them as a realistic family. Perhaps some of Calvin and Hobbes power is derived from the strip’s laser-like focus; it never forgets who or what is at it’s centre. While it deals with many topics, the power of imagination, the peculiarities of growing old, the fleetingness of the good times, the core of the strip is a young, confused, surprisingly wise little boy. The tragedy of Calvin’s character is that he lacks the inhibition or self-agency to prevent himself from slipping in and out of his chosen reality, but he’s granted the intelligence to be painfully self-aware of his circumstances. He’s been put in a world he can’t hope to understand or change and he knows just enough to realize the full extent of his powerlessness.

There’s a Sunday strip from 1989 that I think defines the entire series, as it’s one of the few moments where Watterson lets the curtain of imagination completely fall away. On March 26th 1989, Watterson, for the umpteenth time, showed us what an average day was like for Calvin, except this time, Hobbes is nowhere to be found. He starts his day off being yelled at by his mother to get out of bed, then he’s being berated by his teacher for not knowing the answer to a math problem, then he’s being threatened by a bully, then there’s homework, bad food, bath time, a turned off TV, and then back in bed again. His mother kisses him goodnight, reminding him that “tomorrow’s another big day!” And all alone in the dark, he sighs, broken and thoroughly sad. This is a terrifying comic strip. There is not even an attempt at humour here, no half-hearted jokes made, just full-bodied, unencumbered, childhood angst. This is a child that is dreading his every waking moment and finds the world he inhabits unbearable. Is it any wonder he needs a friend entirely of his own control and creation? This is a strip that best exemplifies how, according to Hill, Calvin and Hobbes “normalized the inherent loneliness that childhood can bring”, how the lack of any kind of control can lead almost inevitably to feelings of extended solitude (Hill, “Calvin and Hobbes”). This one strip is perhaps the series’ most devastating, precisely because of how it normalizes isolation, how it presents loneliness as life’s fundamental feature rather than an easy-to-avoid pitfall. Instead of asking how to deal with the death of our loved ones, it asks us about the death of desire, our motivation to wake up the following morning.

I’ll admit that despite my attempts to disentangle myself from the nostalgic web Calvin and Hobbes weaves, this strip is still distressingly evocative. Yes, the routine portrayed in the strip contains the average, normal events that all children go through. But it’s the mundanity that makes it worse. If we can’t deal with the everyday, what hope do we have to cope with everything else? And by not judging Calvin’s adverse reaction, Watterson provides validity to all forms of stress, regardless of age or status. Tony Kushner. in reference to Where the Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak, once said that “for the great adult creators of children's books, the work at hand is a reclamation, through the difficult exploration of feelings most people have forgotten, of the past” (Kushner, “How hard can it be?”). Reclaiming the feelings of the past is exactly what’s happening here. In revisiting Calvin and Hobbes, I tried to confront my hero. I tried to deconstruct it and see what made it tick. But maybe all I was doing was trying to reassert what Calvin represented, to stake a claim in rebelliousness, whimsy, and crushing loneliness as the tenets of childhood. Maybe the series was like a companion, providing hope and comfort by showing us the universality of our feelings of solitude.

While there is undoubtedly a cathartic sense of relief that the series grants, there’s a nagging doubt that stating this is somehow antithetical to the core of the comic. Looking at other bastions of slightly melancholic children-oriented media, like Charles Schultz with Peanuts or Maurice Sendak’s aforementioned Where the Wild Things Are, there’s a tendency in them to portray children and adults as fundamentally different. Sendak’s adults were authoritarian figures and the Peanuts cartoons famously had a teacher communicate literally incomprehensibly through the nosies of an unidentified brass instrument. Calvin and Hobbes doesn’t really do that. The dichotomy between adults and children fades, where one finds instances of Calvin’s father being just as prone to staging a scene in a grocery store as his son is. The lack of distinction between the two seemingly disparate groups suggests something. Furthermore, the huge popularity of the comic strip suggests that there is a a deeper connection being forged than one borne out of surface-level enjoyment and to find it, we can revisit Kushner’s quote about Sendak. He specifically mentions how the work of the “adult creators of children’s books.” In a field where the best work regularly incorporates serious subject matter in an accessible way, their work is not simply an exploration or a celebration, but first and foremost a reclamation.

Think about the word “reclamation”. It’s not just taking back something, it’s about reasserting that it was always yours. Despite efforts to the contrary, whatever it is that’s being reclaimed has always been there; lurking in the shadows perhaps, but still there. One might immediately associate ”reclamations” with “reminders”, but in this instance, it’s more precisely related to a “realization.”  A realization that we still have what we once had and that it never truly left. In the case of Bill Watterson, one needn’t look too far to see what he is making us realize.  Hill’s assertion that her attraction to Calvin and Hobbes was “seeing a child…struggle with the world he inhabited” makes all the more sense in this light (Hill, “Calvin and Hobbes”). It’s the struggle that binds us. Regardless of age, creed, or affiliation, we all struggle everyday. Watterson reclaims that struggle by showing it through the lens of one intelligent, imaginative, and lonely child. The problems that Calvin go through are always articulated in a way that is not only widely accessible, but widely applicable. Take a strip from December 1987. Calvin is musing to Hobbes that he doesn’t understand the concept of Santa Claus. “Why all the mystery?” Calvin asks. “If the guy exists, why doesn’t he ever show himself and prove it?” And just in case the implication wasn’t clear enough, he ends the strip with admitting that “I’ve got the same questions about God.” That’s childhood pre-holiday anxiety combined with a grown-up crisis of faith. It’s an unending struggle that the comic reminds us doesn’t really go away.

When we are first introduced to Johan and Marianne, we see them as a unit. Posing with their two daughters for a photoshoot, they are a perfect representation of a functional family. Yes, they fidget uncomfortably talking to the reporter, their responses are far from articulate, and the supposedly minor disagreements that they hint at in the interview seem to be larger than they make them out to be. But they are undeniably in sync.  They are a couple that everyone has met at one point, the couple who argues but never fights, who aren’t constantly chipper but consistently genuine, and who are most at ease around each other. The contentedness that they so surely radiate allows us to gloss over any of their potential problems. As an audience, we are being primed not to look beneath the surface.

Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage is a film that both helps define a genre and one that stands completely separate from it. The film is hugely important in shaping the “divorce” movie, with filmmakers such as Woody Allen and Richard Linklater citing it as an influence (Canby, Summer Talks). Yet the minimalistic construction of the film strips away almost all of the familiar tropes one tends to find in other films of its ilk. Bergman wrote that he wanted “nothing at all out of the ordinary” in the film and it shows (Drupal). Trappings such as a meddlesome new partner, extended arguments about dividing assets, and (perhaps most importantly) children, are nowhere to be found in the film. One would think that this would limit the film’s appeal. A divorce movie like Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, while dealing with similar ideas of remarriage and reconciliation, contains obvious narrative “hooks.” Tenenbaums revolves around the reunion of an affluent family whose three genius children (excelling at tennis, business, and playwriting respectively) have fallen on tough times. Immediately, there’s clear elements of absurdity, escapism, and redemption. It’s easy to understand why we’d be drawn into the story, even easier to see why we care for the characters. Even in films with less of a comedic tilt, such as Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine, certain stylistic distinctions mark it as a divorce film easy to get lost in. Through its non-linear storytelling and hazy cinematography, the impact of the film is focused by the common conventions of exes and children. The devastating final scene of the film, where the main couple decides to separate, slightly resembles one from Scenes From a Marriage, except the power in Blue Valentine comes largely from the presence of the couple’s young child, screaming for her father, unaware of what’s happening. The kids are a non-factor in Scenes From a Marriage, so the emotions generated by Blue Valentine and The Royal Tenenbaums aren’t echoed in the same way. So when watching the film, if we are affected by it at all, it’d be prudent to ask ourselves why. What about the movie resonates? Why do we care about Johan and Marianne?

One attempt at understanding the film’s original appeal is to examine the context of the film’s production, as Scenes From a Marriage is a movie that is greatly representative of its time and place. The film stood in stark contrast to Bergman’s previous work, as this was the beginning of a period in which he created more intimate dramas instead of the high-concept experimental films of his past. Nevertheless, for viewers in 1973, this type of film struck a chord. In the 1970s, the idea of the traditional family unit was changing. Newly enacted “no-fault” divorce laws in both Sweden (where Scenes From a Marriage was originally released) and the United States made obtaining a divorce much easier than before. Divorce rates skyrocketed and suddenly, married couples who previously couldn’t even conceive of ever leaving each other were given the opportunity to fully examine their satisfaction with their relationship. In the middle of this cultural shift, a film came along that dealt with the exact problem of marital uncertainty that so many people were facing. Its impact might have been further greatened by how it was originally seen. Scenes from a Marriage originally aired as a six part miniseries on Swedish television and while the movie was cut down for international releases, the context of watching a marriage unfold through an episodic format shouldn’t be ignored. The act of watching television, described by Bergman himself as something that “opens up the whole world,” can take on an almost ritualistic significance (Drupal).  Every week, people would gather around their TV and check in on characters in a situation similar to their own, inviting them into their lives, treating these fictional people like one would treat old friends. Seeing Johan and Marianne for nearly an hour at a time placed the audience in the position of constantly questioning a fictional relationship through the lens of their own, wondering whether the participants are happy while given all of the conventional signs that they should be. The question for them became not “Why should we care about them?,” but “Why should we care about marriage at all?”

This was a question that Bergman was mulling over as well. In his review of the film, Roger Ebert notes that Bergman attempts to use the film as a way to “deal with his fear that all men are, indeed, islands” (Ebert, Scenes From a Marriage). The movie addresses this early on, as Johan and Marianne debate over the mechanics of their relationship. “Marriage contracts should be renewed every 10 years” says Johan matter of factly,  going on to assert that people aren’t meant to be together for life. Of course, when it comes to their relationship, “they are the exceptions” (Bergman). This tension between seemingly logical conclusions and emotional rationalizations stays in the background for the first third of the film, but it’s always present, shifting silently in the back like a nagging reminder.

Therein lies another facet of the film’s swaying influence; its ability to focus on its characters while placing the narrative developments in the background. When we watch Johan show his poetry to his female coworker or Marianne react silently to an elderly soon-to-be divorcée, it’s all too easy for the audience to be lulled into a sense of complacency, to focus on the characters in front of us instead of the story happening right behind them. It results in us being placed in the exact same position as Marianne is when Johan comes home late one night and tells her, quite plainly, “I’ve gone and fallen in love.” The friction between intellect and emotion that drives the film comes to a head and the shock, confusion, and head-slapping obviousness of the situation becomes immediately clear the second Johan begins explaining what he has done. Any intellectual detachment viewers originally had is stripped away. The audience is now more than invested in the dissolution of this marriage; they are complicit in it.

Further complicating the audience’s role is how they view their own lives through the narrative of the film. The act of identification with the characters can lead to viewers taking a more active interest in the film, picking sides between Johan and Marianne, connecting the experiences shown on screen to those that they have seen in reality. To quote Ebert, “the more specific a film is about human experience, the more universal it is” (Ebert, Best Films of 2011). Through its minimalist design and detailed characters, Scenes From a Marriage establishes a specificity through a highly accessible scenario. We identify with Johan and Marianne not as character-types that we’ve seen before, but as real people that we might have met. It forces us to evaluate their actions as potential recourses for ourselves. So when we see them separate, when we see them fight and scream, when we see them have reunite and break apart again and again, we are left to wonder not just why they are doing it, but if we will as well.

The central unease behind all of Johan and Marianne’s post-separation interactions reflects onto the viewers, allowing them to project their own fears and uncertainties onto the character’s motivations. This in turn, provides a chance for the characters to either confirm or deny the audience’s personal expectations on how they are supposed to act, resulting in a simultaneous dialogue between character and viewer, tempering our expectations of our own reality with that of the film’s. This continues until both parties are entirely unsure of how or what to feel, in doubt of all of the feelings that came before. In her essay “In Praise of Doubt,” filmmaker Gail Segal heralds doubt as the “sine qua non of any democratic society,” stating that by allowing ourselves to feel uncertain, to live in dreadful inconclusiveness, we are pushed to more significantly evaluate our decisions, giving them greater “viability” (Segal). It’s not hard to extend Segal’s words to that of a domestic partnership as well. Doubt enables us to question what we think we know about who we are and what we’re doing. It’s probable that it was the fatal flaw in Johan and Marianne’s marriage. Their doubt in their own happiness, satisfaction, or overall marital success caused them to have their fallout. Segal would argue that this is a positive result, that the doubt led to a more informed and thought out decision. At first, it seems like this reading ignores the aftermath of their separation, which the movie portrays as a kind of relationship purgatory, with two people stuck in a seemingly endless cycle of lust, regret, and bitterness. However, these repeated experiences are not meaningless, emotional romps like one may be lead to believe. Each event is an important stepping stone in the progression of their relationship and eventual reconciliation, propelled by that most powerful and paralyzing of emotions: uncertainty.

Uncertainty seems to pervade every inch of marriage in the modern sense. In a time when more people than ever are legally allowed to marry, but less and less are choosing to do so, uncertainty over who one should spend their lives with, if at all, is a modern luxury. Being single well into adulthood has only recently been widely accepted as a permissible situation. So while doubt can enhance the value of one’s decision, it is only valuable if a decision, one way or the other, is made. With a decision such as marriage, it’s not one that can be made through one approach. Johan and Marianne are intellectuals. They often try to fix their problems by treating them rationally. Early on, they have a frank discussion about Johan’s dissatisfaction with their sex life. It seems like a mature conversation between two understanding adults. But in the scene directly following, Johan announces his intention to leave Marianne. Each instance of  reason is followed by one of impulsiveness. Their intellect is not enough to encapsulate or to solve their problem. It’s the collision of their logic with their doubt that powers them through their period of transition, the disruption of their homeostasis, to borrow Segal’s phrase. It’s here that Johan and Marianne, and perhaps the audience as well, find an answer.

By arguing time and time again about their failed relationship, Johan and Marianne work through their collective doubt together. To learn, they must cry, and to understand, they must despair. In the unsettling of the stagnant contentedness of their previous lives, they are able to come across the independent conclusion that they prefer each other to any other partner.  If this conclusion can be pointed towards any one reason, it’s because each is able to use the other as a tool for change. Paula, the woman Johan left Marianne for, is strict and domineering. She forces homeostasis upon her and Johan’s lives and restricts any kind of transitions. Is it any wonder that Johan complains that “[being] with Paula is worse than being alone”? Johan and Marianne’s time apart, their transition that was a direct result of their doubt, allowed them to come back together, to lead them to fully realize that theirs is a “demanding,” “pestering” love (Bergman). Marianne says at one point that she believes that people “have to have someone’s hand to hold.” She’s not wrong, but she misses that sometimes, to move forward, we have to let go.

The first real book I ever read was a 237 page biography of Michael Jordan (the gambler, not the superhero). The book emphasized the importance of competitiveness and perseverance in the face of adversity that would come to define Jordan’s career, instilling in me a lifelong passion of telling other people to work harder. But easily the most influential aspect of this biography was the sense of story that it grafted onto everyday life.

To some extent this is necessary, as streamlining a lifetime’s worth of events into a coherent tale inevitably implies a greater sense of narrative, of an arc, than is actually present in reality. But the Jordan story is undeniably dramatic as so many of sports greatest figures are, entailing a fabled young career, a slow buildup to ultimate domination, a tragic death, and a triumphant return. The story captivated me, and the idea of the quotidian arc was one that I gave up on slowly and reluctantly. 

Sports are a tough thing to be completely up-to-date on if they aren’t your primary choice of leisure, and despite my obsession with statistics and Gym class, they never became a large part of my life. When the Golden State Warriors were anticipated to break the regular season record, the rush of mania for the NBA, and for the everyday story, began to infect me again like a particularly persistent stomach virus.

Drama, in the purest sense of the word, is embodied wholeheartedly by the world of professional sports. A series of incidents, the inescapable consequences of the actions taken, both by the individual and the collective, is felt in every minute of every game. When I watched the Warriors play, I saw the coalescence of a team years in the making, a group of players perfectly poised to tackle what had seemed like an insurmountable task set exactly two decades earlier by a star player of status that was being quickly attained anew by a a second master of the form. 

And with the record broken, the only task left was to defend what was rightfully theirs, a second title to go along with the two MVP’s, a perfect button, an inevitable conclusion to a legendary story. The arc pulled me in so completely that its completion as intended was never in doubt in my mind; a 3-1 deficit in the Conference Finals would obviously be overcome because I was watching the true heroes, the clear protagonist of this widespread tapestry of an association. 

So the Cavaliers win was a bit of a disappointment. When I checked the final score, the air was pulled from my both of my nostrils and one of my ears. They couldn’t have lost. This is not how it should have been written. I’d like to say that I was smart enough to view reality as unpredictable as history has proven it to be, and on one level I might have believed that, but there’s a reason that stories have been passed down for thousands of years and countless generations. As a species, we need to believe in the archetype, in the myth. In the end, nothing can really convince us otherwise until the cold truth of the situation hits us in the face.

Although maybe it was my fault and I was looking at the wrong story. Maybe the real story was the one of the arrogant prodigy, the one that was unable to win at home and trudged across the nation to take what he believed was his, and after years of hollow victories, when the prodigal son returned to atone with his father, hoping to absolve himself of his past sins, he was cut down by an unassuming foe. To finally achieve ultimate redemption, to carry the burden of the past and take it past the finish line, that’s a story. But it’s not the story I saw. The story I saw was the one where a 3-1 lead was just the proper order of things, instead of the darkest moment in a hard-fought victory. 

There’s a power in quitting that’s rarely acknowledged, and I don’t mean in the instance of narcotics or Oreo-laced Xanax. Sometimes, there are completely respectable endeavorers where the hardest option is to quit. When the only motivation you have is to complete something, quitting is the last thing anyone wants to do. That’s probably a good thing in most situations, but when all you’re working towards is an ending, there’s no joy in finishing, just a fleeting sense of relief from being done, a dull mental ache of loose morals, and gorgeously sepia-tinted nostalgic memories of condescending authority figures and progressively lower moments. Some may say that the half-of-two dozen years I spent on unenjoyable pursuits were a waste of my youth, but I would counter with my queen to H4 and hope to God that they don’t identify as someone with above average intelligence. 

That’s something that’s always irked [I recognize the irony (not really irony, but I’m Canadian and was born in the 90s) of using the word ‘irked’, a horrendously off-putting and simply offensive word, to describe something else that annoys me, but please continue, I need to feed my pet amoebas] me, people who accuse others of wasting their childhood. First of all, how do you really waste a period of time when nothing you do or say matters and everything you do or say is personally uncharted territory? I am not a man who can say so, nor am I legally a man yet (of course if the damn fascists have their way, gender checkboxes on forms will soon have trillions of options because of their insistence on tolerance, which is quite frankly appallingly levelheaded. If Census forms with poorly designed aesthetics are one of the steps towards equality, then I have to say, defenestrate all the differents and dissect them for the viewing pleasure of the few people who manage to fit into every statistical average our population has to define itself). It’s hard to decide what counts as a meaningful pursuit of time is the point that I am overly-eloquently attempting to make. One man’s trash (i.e. nailing a rotten watermelon to the underside of each and every bookshelf in a public library in an attempt to raise awareness for underfunded farmers) is another man’s treasure as they say. Of course, ‘they’ can also be horrific racists at time, so its best to stay away from all figures of speech because someone undesirable may have once uttered it, and you’d hate to be like them. Why, I remember the time I first read that Joe Jackson had two properly functioning kidneys. Not for me, I’d have to say. Oh, you’d rather your body properly filter water than be completely unlike a probable child abuser? I would too, which is why I managed to acquire a third one. You can never be too careful in the suburbs. People will steal anything nowadays for the chance to win a Ford Fiesta or something. 

Anyways,

We’ve gotten off-topic though, as we have done so many times over the past 17 months or so, but let me just jump back off the tangent onto our topic circle one last time. 

The people who say that kids waste their youth seem to be under the impression that if children were constantly aware of their own mortality and the briefness of adolescence, they would somehow gain greater enjoyment out of life as a whole, or maybe not regret their experiences (or lack thereof) when their final vestige of innocence is lost among the wrinkles of daily coffee grinds and prodigal data entry coworkers. That’s not how that works. Like, at all. No matter how you spend your childhood, how many mistakes you make, how many times you waste your day, how much fun you did or didn’t have, and how many times you did or didn’t get arrested for poaching lemur pimps (redundant I know), the time will pass just the same. One’s enjoyment of their juvenileness is not a barrier to growing older and moving out and going to school and getting a job and working and dying and rotting up the graveyard with your ever-present stench and being moved to a separate area underneath the I-90. It will happen and it will continue to happen.

And you might argue that a boy/girl/foxhood seized will result in more joyous memories to look back upon when everything else has crumbled around you, but the truth is that you tend to block out the real traumatic stuff anyway. You’ll still have mistakes that will haunt you in the middle of the night and make you break your coffee machine two months too early. You’ll still have happy memories (well, not you, but you know what I mean) to look back on and inflate retroactively. 

So, what’s the use? I keep coming back to that question. Does finishing really matter once you force yourself to do it? Enjoyment is just meaningless anyways. For what it’s worth, (exactly half a tic-tac at your local drugstore) here’s my theory. You can probably do whatever you want and end up fine. In the end, your lack of distinction amongst an entire universe of more impactful stuff is probably a good thing. You will have an entire lifetime of events where you can convince yourself you were the important player, but it really just comes down to one’s own individual way of tweaking things out. 

I always liked to live by the mantra of ‘Wow them with your brilliance, and then leave’. That’s quite hard to do when the only thing you’re brilliant at is illegal in most countries and North Dakota, but eventually something always comes up, as it is wont to do. People inevitably get bored and I think I’ve already realized that I don’t want to be doing something just for the sake of doing it. Before you know it, it’s raining again and it’s time to go.

‘The Pequod next gams with the Jungfrau from Bremen’ isn’t as accessible of an opening line as ‘Call Me Ishmael’, nor is it actually in the novel, but it probably would have been as effective at tricking readers into thinking that they would be reading a completely different story than they would eventually force themselves because of their own masochistic inability to cease and desist. Not that there’s anything wrong with novels about melodramatic whale hunting hypocrites, but when something starts asking me to digest more than one chapter about microscopic marine food, my entertainment level is not quite able to circle back around to legitimate enjoyment and ends up somewhere near ‘tearing up in inadequacy’. 

I guess my point is, although honesty has no place in genuine art, admitting your whale fetish in the form of a 900 page novel can be slightly frustrating, albeit innovative. Nevertheless, I do understand how orgasmic the feeling of tricking someone can be, and this isn’t solely applicable to clinical sadists, although it does help when you need an explanation for your behaviour. It’s that, and ‘LOOK OUT DRONE STRIKE!’ that tend to work the best in my experience. 

Alright, I feel a bit out of it after being away for so long. Let’s try to end this on a note closer to the milkshakes than the genocides.

Sometimes when I’m counting to twenty to help distract my mind from the ever impending arrival of retribution that has accumulated from every poor decision and overpowering spoon flick I’ve made, I start to forget where I started. I remember how to count and that people tend to start at 1, but I don’t actually remember thinking the first few numbers. It’s like I was airdropped into the middle of a numerical desert where the only hydration was in saying ‘six’ slowly and the unlikeliness of survival was an allegory for the futility of numerical counting. It is impossible to end. There will always be another number. There will never be an infinity. You do not get to infinity, because even though it is a concept whose definition is largely agreed upon, it is intangible to the thought and will never be reached because of the mind’s incapability to actually reach the goals it sets for itself. Luckily, I’m only trying to get to twenty, which I’m told is less than infinity, but who can be sure with a perennially underfunded Wikipedia as our kid’s main source of information nowadays? 

The point is, tricks are fun, and don’t let other people’s prescriptions on kindness dictate what or how you live your life. Conformity is great sure, but only if you want to be someone that deserves respect. If death is inescapable. then what choice do we have but to mercilessly mock, diverting our inner gaze inwards into the coiled snake of necrokinetic envy and anxiousness that lives underneath our livers and likes to dine on hopelessness and dreams changed to be realistic. Personally, I hold distraction and death equally in regard. They are both fantastic things, ending and creating and limiting and freeing and fighting and hugging and stop and go and orange and blue and whaling and sobriety. Don’t let either make you lose sight of the other. But, okay, if the only reason anything exists is because we’re all a bunch of toddlers unable to accept our biological irrelevance, what’s the point of anything? Is it true that death invalidates any meaningful pursuit in life, or Roger Ebert himself?

The answer is yes, but only if you like toadstools and hate Super Mario.  

As in, if you can appreciate the mark someone has made without appreciating its components, then yeah, life may be for you. If not, then whatever, everything is meaningless. 

I guess it’s still unlikely than anyone of us would end up creating something that would end up iconic or culturally permeating. So in that case, it’s probably best to just get through the entire thing to make sure that you never do anything worth mentioning in the footnotes of one of your famous descendant’s biography. At that point, if you’re on your deathbed and have lost all hope in your memory ever floating on past the moment your existence starts to quaver, then go ahead and renounce life and its purpose. But only at that point though, because otherwise you’ll have an incomplete save and I’ll be damned if I’m going to blow on that cartridge because the dust on it will probably cause half of my lungs to collapse.

So go ahead and ignore death. It’s coming, but at the very least you may not end up completely worthless.

I mean, you read this entire thing, so no, you probably will be. But, hope is still a thing, and if one can’t hope in the face of every conceivable piece of evidence and reality itself, then what’s the point of life really? 

Pretentiousness is the most annoying when the person is arguing for something that we all just agree upon. For example, I read something on Reddit the other day (I wonder if they agreed on that title because they knew it would make every sentence referencing the website in the future sound unashamedly redundant) about a nihilistic justification of suicide. The guy writing it sounded like quite a dip-mongrel, which is probably not the best thing to say about a suicidal person, but man, polysyllabic words really annoy me. Anyway, as far as I can ascertain (hypocrisy is a good fit for any aspiring dungeon master), the situation turned out fine with nobody ending up in the morgue (do suicides get taken to a morgue? What exactly is the purpose of a morgue? Morgue is a fun word to say? Why is there a question mark at the end of that sentence? I’ve forgotten how to construct anything resembling a joke). 

Alright, I think I’ve forgotten the point of the original paragraph, and I have a feeling that whatever it was it was probably in astonishingly bad taste. But what is bad taste exactly? Personally, I think its a product of a reaction between an overambitious raconteur and a person deprived of any feeling for a while. I’ve discussed this before, but the more time between moments of intense emotional bursts, the more overpowering you need those moments to be. As much as I’d like to hate people who are oversensitive, people who can cause that much controversy and career/life destruction is someone I have to at least partially respect. I’m guessing some of them are just like reverse-trolls, people who blow things out of proportion instead of packing as much offence as possible in one phrase, like the singularity before the Big Bang, made of rape jokes instead of pure cosmic energy. On a side note, one of my personal quests is to find the most offensive phrase possible, something so aggressively insensitive/heinous/cruel to dolphins that a single syllable from any part of it would melt the faces off of any listener in the general vicinity, like if Frankie Boyle hid inside the Ark of the Covenant. 

A lot of references this trimester. Let’s try to tone it down.

Anyway, other than being bizarro-trolls (dammit, okay thats the last one), my other theory is that these people hold opinions (a difficult concept to grasp I know, but stick with me). These people use their opinions much like you or I, going through life with them discreetly, just under the surface. But then, suddenly something comes up to challenge these opinions, and they feel the need to attack these people, not because they think that the other person is wrong, but because they fear that their own opinion is. It’s an occasionally futile exercise, but the fact that they can ignore (or plausibly deny) all those who are against them and maybe come out of it with even stronger convictions, must be at least somewhat tantalizing. 

Luckily, I try to not have strong opinions in any direction. Unluckily, this also means that I am dooming myself towards a severe drought of matches on dating websites that I will inevitably gravitate towards once everyone in my life drops me for the next best alternative, which in all honesty is a slightly decaying possum corpse. Only slightly decaying though, I’m not a complete bourbon pecan.

Regret will gnaw you alive from the inside out, like a starving rat craving flesh, desperate for the taste of something more substantial than the occasional pimento thrown out by the Italian restaurant down the street that was only founded because the owner ran out of places to fulfill his arsonist fetish. It’s an awful, noxious, perennially appearing plinth of a sentiment. Unfortunately, it seems to be unavoidable at times, and downright desirable at others. Granted, that might be because of my latent masochism rearing its head again, but I’d like to believe that my people’s ability to repress is stronger than my own to self-destruct. On second thought, those two might be related.

I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I hate myself. Far from it. I may enjoy disappointing people, but not myself. The problem is that sociopathy is an addictive substance. The worse you are to people, the worse you need to be. Eventually, people get slightly tired of repugnant treatment, although one has to remember that these are people that at one point agreed to be my friends, and so clearly had some lack of self-respect/severe mental illness to begin with. The most that these people ever get from society at large is outright pity, which I maintain is worse than a slow-burn form of emotional abuse. In any case, you’ll find yourself completely alone, which means your outlet for conscience-lacking behaviour has to go somewhere, and while drugs was an attractive option at first [it turns out that I’m too neurotic to actually do any of them; asthmatics don’t have the strongest lungs, so anything smokeable is out, (I haven’t forgotten about certain baked confectionary’s, but come on, I’ve been telling myself I’m going to lose weight for years now) needles make my arm sore, and my nose is already naturally runny. Actually, I could ingest hallucinogens, so I guess that’s still up. This might not be the best place to make my entrance into the LSD community, but I guess everybody has their own starting point], really the only option I had was for those behaviours to turn inwards, to transform into that bile-soaked rodent and crunch away at my (metaphorical) innards piece by piece, until all that was left was an organ resembling a heart trapped inside a ribcage so mouldy it looks like the beginning of an Indiana Jones movie. 

My point is, never underestimate the importance of human connection, even if you’re only doing it to convince someone that you have qualities beyond “amusingly depraved”. I’ve been trying to do that for well under a century now, ever since that fateful day in pre-school when I put on the jester’s hat (not a metaphor) to entertain the faceless multitudes of toddlers and unreadable expressions of our authorities, namely a woman named Jane, who once yelled at me for calling her teacher, which I can see might be a logical thing to do at the time, when one is angry at how one’s life has turned out, contemplating the twisted chain of events that has caused them to end up as second tier management in an underfunded daycare for children who aren’t even allowed to use your first name, creating a longing for some human interaction that is slightly above the intellectual capacities of people who spend their days wondering whether Steve really did go to college. It’s a tough job, and I respect that, but it’s not like the children know what they’re doing either. It is somewhat hard to break out of that mould that you created for yourself, especially since any form of change is literally the worse thing that has ever happened to anyone, like biting into cabbage when you thought it was lettuce, or snow in April.  To a certain extent, every mistake in my life was because I did something incorrect. The fullest extent really. Almost the definition of mistakes. 

Let’s try that again.

I hate the word “let’s” by the way. It implies some form of togetherness that I just can’t deal with. It’s a contraction of “let us”. Using it when there’s only two people involved with the decision is a level of intimacy that I did not sign up for.

How about this: Regret is always because of change, whether it be from a desire to return to the time before a bad change, or the longing to have gambled on what would have been a good change. I’m trying too hard to end on a meaningful idea here, and that was one of the things I swore not to do when I put on the jester’s hat that was actually two sizes too small thinking about it. I’m not even sure how that’s possible considering that I don’t have that big of a head (I mean literally, the metaphorical implication of that is for a different post entirely), and I was three at the time. Who was the manufacturer’s target market? Parents who wanted to dress their infants as the literal embodiment of that child’s future ambitions? That seems awfully harsh, especially for a being who still recognizes their reflection as a separate entity. Hey, it might be some alternate dimension, we don’t know. Who are we to doubt the ability of a baby to detect the presence of other universes? Newborns and hereby unknown planes of existence is vaguely philosophical right? Can this count as my report for anything in the future? Probably not. Damn system. 

Minsk is the capital of Belarus. It’s a city I’ve somehow always been aware of, situated in a country that I only heard about when someone mistook it for Ukraine and made a Geneva convention breaking pun on Russia’s invasion. (Cause there’s a Bela prefix. I think it had something to do with Twilight, I’ve sort of repressed it). Actually, thinking about it now, most of Eastern Europe is basically a cognitive blur, with stringent facts popping up now and again, completely out of context, much like an ape doing something. Or another.

I’ve lost the drive to make any form of interesting/nausea inducing similes. It takes something out of you every time. It’s draining to be honest. Absolutely draining. Besides, I need to be as inoffensive as possible. Intentionally so even. So intentionally so that it causes any reader to get filled with a blindingly hot rage, forcing them to go off on a long drive with nothing to think about other than how mad they are that they had been subjected to such blatant pandering. Actually, it’s less pandering, and more of an annoying avoidance of any form of social taboos or possible instigation. Lets call it, I don’t know, Rat Trapping. Anyway(s), rat trapping aside, similes offer a readership the opportunity to connect with an author, whether it be from finding oneself in a situation similar to the one that the simile references, or from the sheer lexical rapture one receives when they see like or as used in a comparative manner. Authorial connection is something we simply cannot have on this Url of March. It’s something that may provide quality to what is otherwise supposed to be utterly benign (also the name of my upcoming autobiography). Even when taking the blog out of the equation, it is something of an issue of pride, as I consider preventing emotional connections between me and the populace at large to be one of my only true skills.

It’s best if one identifies one’s skills early on, because it becomes that much easier to start saving up for the tuition fees. Even if your biggest skill happens to be something that you can’t make a career out of, or in my case, completely unwanted by so-called civilized society, you don’t have to rule out the possibility of a niche audience waiting for your arrival. These people don’t know that they’re waiting for you of course, but much like me when I smell the rubbery scrambled eggs from the FDA rejected breakfast buffet of a frankly God questioningly unhygienic cruise ship, they will feel so at home when you show them what you can do. What is always important when showing off one’s skills is the apathetic attitude one must carry whence doing so. If one’s audience believes that their presenter perceives him/herself as better than them, they may take issue with being charged for it. Nobody likes a business-savvy bourgeoise, and the world’s best entertainers know this. To truly profit, you have to act as if any member of the audience could do it, but also subtly imply that were they to attempt to, it would be so disastrous that they would instantly repress the experience and shrug it off, thinking “I don’t have time to set this up, I’ll just see that showman.” It’s a thin line you’re treading, because you can never outright tell someone  that you’re better than them. You prove it to them by having more things. Unfortunately, it’s much harder to show off all your things when you’re on a stage for five minutes, so it goes right back to you implying those subtle implications. If an audience doesn’t leave a show of yours feeling satisfied, but also slightly less comfortable with their relative social class, then you have failed as an entertainer, and dare I say it, a human being. And you better not fail, because there’s nowhere else to take your skill. It’s not like Harvard will let you study nostril twerking for four years, and you’re better than Princeton. 

One of the most difficult things to resign oneself to is having an opinion that differs from the major populace. If most people disagree with you, it immediately invalidates what you believe, and automatically prohibits you from joining in on any possible discussion on the subject. It makes you question not just those opinions, but everything else. How can you be trusted to think for yourself if you’re always wrong when you do? Some of it could be attributed to how conversations generally work, with the majority of them being linguistic equivalents of a group hug, pleasing everybody involved with the warm glow of group consensus. For the most part, I’m pro-exclusion of the different, although my opinions on that have been given less weight in the community ever since I voiced my positive stance on the exclusion of the disabled. Apparently, that makes me “sick”, “diseased”, “schizophrenic”, “sadistic”, “sociopathic”. Those claims were slightly corroborated when I brutally attacked the person who said diseased instead of another “s” word. It couldn’t have been that hard. Christ. 

Granted, I’ve been in that position before, becoming an outlier in a situation before a pattern has established. It’s not the nicest of feelings, but I have always preferred lemonade over coffee, even if sucking down something cold in November was akin to a priest reading from the Torah for his entire sermon, the realization slowly dawning upon him until the throes of his congregation made it clear unto H/him, their pork-filled bodies burning from being in the vicinity of the utterance of those Holy (or Demonic depending on your belief system) words. It’s a situation that surely haunts somebody’s nightmares, in my case, a bewildered and beaten down Equator-dweller, who couldn’t fathom willingly making oneself colder than they already are. Admittedly, the lack of fathoming presumably comes from a lack of general global awareness, stemming from the absence of an educational infrastructure that exists in many Asian and African countries. 

My biggest fear is that I stray too far from the path that I have set out for myself. This blog was supposed to be something. We were supposed to have things. It might seem a bit odd for me to have assumed this would even be remotely commercially successful, but the dreams of the innocent are so rarely punctured by reality that I fear I may have come off as more naive to the accessibility of the bulk of my work than ecstatically unaware of the true harshness of the world, thus making the Universe less likely to shine a spotlight on whatever this is. In any case, its probably for the best. There’s no way this helps my employability.