And That Is Why Men Are Terrible: A Novel

As most of you are probably already aware, I recently published my second novel, And That Is Why Men Are Terrible, which is available now on Amazon. Thank you to everyone who already bought a copy, I hope you enjoy reading it at least a little bit more than being left alone with your own thoughts. If you have already read it and have anything kind to say, I’d love it if you could leave a nice review on Amazon or Goodreads (or, if you’re feeling particularly generous with your time, both). And if you read it and don’t have anything kind to say, then I’d love it if you would kindly keep those thoughts to yourself.

For anyone who may be interested, I thought it might be fun to take a few minutes and give you a look inside the making of the book. I started writing it shortly after I published my first novel, Dreams from the Slumber Yard, back in 2015. The second novel was a much slower and more arduous process than the first one, which I had adapted from an old screenplay as an experiment to see if novel writing and self-publishing would be a good fit for the sort of writing I was doing at the time. While a lot changed before the final version was published, the basic structure remained in place throughout, which saved a lot of time and allowed me to focus more on amping up the humor and toning down the creepiness. Conversely, And That Is Why Men Are Terrible began as an original story, built from the ground up as I was writing it. By the end, it had also become a much more complicated book, weaving together several disparate plot lines and major themes into a narrative that I’m tempted to describe as “sweeping,” but could probably be more accurately characterized as “rambling.” While I’m sure different people might have different opinions on which book is better, there is certainly a whole hell of a lot more of the new one.

As with most things I write, the original seed for the book began with a single joke. But unlike most things I write, that joke also happened to be the very first scene — and, in fact, the very first line — of the book. I had a vision of a bad internet date — something I had plenty of experience with by this point — where one person asked completely out of the blue if the other believed in God. The question was posed not because it was an essential criterion in determining compatibility, but simply because the person asking was so inept at small talk and lacked so much self-awareness that they didn’t mind asking disamring questions that made people deeply uncomfortable as a way of trying to make a good first impression. From there, the scene began to develop, the character on the other side of the table began to take shape, and the endless parade of freaks and weirdos I’d subject her to began to emerge.

The result was a picaresque journey through being a young person in New York City. At the end of my first draft, our heroine Eve had made it through through many uncomfortable encounters — some of which were based on true stories and some of which were entirely fictitious — but there were essentially only three main stories tying them all together: girl gets a weird job as a pen pal author, girl has an embarrassing moment that results in unwanted internet attention, and girl meets an older man who serves as an aspirational mentor until she is forced to reconcile her idealized version of him with his major shortcomings.

The first part was very loosely inspired by a story from This American Life (Episode 571, for anyone who might be interested). It detailed the business structure of a similar pen pal service that started as a thinly veiled excuse to take money from single men who were as lonely as they were horny. In that real-life story, the service eventually veered into an oddly fantastical direction, creating an entire mythos where the girls — described as “Angels” — would move en masse to a magical valley paradise called Chonda-za and live in perpetual harmony with any gentleman suitors who cared to join them. While I certainly appreciated the more absurdly unrealistic details about the Angels, for my book I wanted to focus on more grounded letters that revolved around the fundamental question that made it all so fascinating: are there people who are so lonely and desperate for a human connection that they will choose to believe the most blatant lies imaginable? The answer is, of course, yes. At one time or another, we’ve all been susceptible to letting our fantasies overcome our reason. For me, it was the time someone pretending to be the ex-girlfriend I’d never stopped loving messaged me on AIM and convinced me to send naked pictures of myself, despite bearing no particular linguistic or behavioral similarity to the girlfriend in question. For the man in the novel, it was a small-town seed saleswoman with boring anecdotes and worse grammar who convinced him he had a friend.

The second storyline about unwelcome internet celebrity was also inspired by a bit of real-life reporting: Jon Ronson’s 2015 book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. That book details the positive and, quite frequently, negative repercussions of internet pile-ons, particularly the sort that can happen when an otherwise unknown individual is brought into the spotlight for a single poorly thought out joke, or some other minor transgression. Ronson profiles several people who probably deserve to have a bit of egg on their faces, but perhaps don’t deserve not the disproportionate public shaming that ends up destroying their lives and careers. There’s a lot to unpack in these stories, but the part that interested me the most was the fact that behind all this knee-jerk vitriol that gets bandied about on places like Twitter is a very relatable but deeply faulty idea that we are all guilty of all the time: we so frequently think we know and understand everything about someone based on a single fact. It’s the same instinct that leads to “love at first sight,” only in these stories, it’s more like “hate at first tweet.” We just want to sum people up and put them in our pre-defined boxes based on arbitrary measures like their look, their accent, a questionable opinion overheard at a party, whatever first piece of information we gather about them might be. And with the distance the internet brings, we can sometimes feel comfortable not just judging someone, but bashing them mercilessly until they have no choice but to drop out of society and hope that they can still somehow make rent without anyone googling their name.

The final storyline from that initial draft was based on a personal relationship I had with someone I looked up to for a lot of reasons, but had some serious personal demons that made it hard to keep them squarely on the pedestal I had built for them. Despite being the part of the book that ran closest to my own personal life, it ended up being the hardest to write because, well, my life is only really interesting in small doses. I have lots of weird and funny anecdotes about random things that have happened to me in passing, but taken as a whole, my life is exceptionally dull, and my thoughts on it are even duller. I wanted this part of the book to be more than just self-indulgent navel-gazing and have some significance for others, but after an objective re-reading, I didn’t think I was even close, and decided to shelve that particular tale until I was ready to tell it in a vaguely meaningful way.

With those chunks removed, the book became incredibly short, but it didn’t take long before it fleshed itself back out. As I’m sure happened with a lot of creative projects that started in 2015, my book was put in a whole new perspective by the election of Donald J. Trump. Like a lot of people, I was appalled by this development, and it took quite a while before the shock wore off and I could even begin working my way back out of the ensuing existential funk. While a lot of factors explain the rise of Trumpism — racism, sexism, a legitimately dysfunctional political system that leaves a lot of people feeling resentful, a fractured news landscape that lets us all live in our pre-determined echo chambers — I think one of the central reasons that Trump was able to get elected against the will of a majority of Americans is that good people simply don’t do enough to bring their ideals to life. (There’s also the incredibly screwed math of the Electoral College, but we’ll let that go for the moment). A lot of people I know simply didn’t vote because Bernie wasn’t on the ballot, and watching the system burn seemed like a better choice to them than picking what they saw as the (significantly) lesser of two evils yet again. I didn’t fall into that particular trap, but if I’m being honest, I’m still a perfect example of the limits of liberal idealism. I vote, but I don’t volunteer for causes that I believe in, and only give the most paltry financial contributions to them. I like to read about politics and pontificate amongst my closer friends, but I never engage in political conversations with people who don’t agree with me. In fact, if a point of contention arises, I usually go out of my way to avoid diving deeper into them because anger and confrontation make me incredibly stressed and shut down the speech centers of my brain. And while I like to think I consider the merits of opposing viewpoints more than the average person in my Facebook bubble, I still don’t do it all that much and rarely make an effort to seek out those kinds of views for discussion. I am essentially a partially-informed, well-intentioned do-nothing, and while it would certainly be overstating my power or importance to say that it’s my fault Donald Trump got elected, I think it’s fair to say that people like me are a big part of the problem. People like me want to talk and speculate and virtue-signal from their high horses, but we’re too afraid of experiencing even minorest social discomfort to actually do anything constructive with all our indignity.

So I started thinking a lot about what it means to not just consider yourself as a good person, but to actually be one. As Eve struggles with that question, so do I. In writing my book, I don’t know if I found any particularly insightful answers that will lead me or anyone else to a life-long career in activism — it is, after all, a lot easier to criticize than to come up with practical solutions, and usually a lot funnier, too — but it was important for me to at least try and engage this line of thinking and challenge myself to be at least a little bit better.

One of the areas in particular where I’ve been trying to be better is feminism. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, I found myself thinking a lot about my own shortcomings regarding the treatment of women, and while those shortcomings may pale in comparison to the high profile celebrity abuse cases that kickstarted the movement, I can’t exactly claim to have always been the Mary Poppins of equality either. I’ve held backwards views, I’ve hurt friends by expressing them, and I’ve failed to notice when I was being hypocritical in my treatment of people I professed to like, love, or believe in. In short, I’ve been a terrible person sometimes. Not all the time, certainly, but enough of that the room for improvement is clear. And if I’ve found any real answer in writing this novel as to how you go about being a good person, it’s simply to be honest about your failings and try to be better about them in future. That’s something we all seem to have a very hard time doing when it comes to any of our shortcomings, be they racism, sexism, or just basic politeness. It can be very tempting to rail against the entirety of “cancel culture” as a way of defending ourselves against the very suggestion that we might personally need to change our thinking or behavior in the slightest — I was definitely guilty of that kind of knee-jerk dismissiveness when we first started discussing cancel culture, and it’s the same basic impulse that led people to spend the last couple years throwing tantrums about mask mandates under the auspices of freedom, drawing the mistaken conclusion that mild inconvenience is the same thing as oppression: we don’t want to consider the possibility that we might not know everything, and we certainly don’t want to alter our lives in any way that wasn’t our own idea, whether or not that idea might be a good one. But — much like dismissing medical science because it interferes with our bowling plans — dismissing the entirety of cancel culture can be pretty unhealthy. Sure, most of us aren’t in the same league of monstrousness as your Cosbys and your Weinsteins, but it’s still important to pay attention to the discussions that surround them. If we listen to the broader points, we can distill these extreme examples down to lessons that we can apply in the microcosm of our own incredibly dull lives. And whether it’s a big picture problem like racism and sexism, or a more mundane problem like some jerk cutting you off in traffic or eating three fish filet sandwiches next to you on an airplane, wouldn’t the world be a better place if everyone could figure out how to be just a little bit less terrible? Just a bit?

I certainly wouldn’t call And That is Why Men Are Terrible the definitive text on feminism in the post #MeToo Era, the importance of political engagement, or even how to be a little less terrible in your day to day life. At its heart, the book is a comedy, and while I tried to make it a thoughtful one and firmly believe in the power of humor to make big discussions more easily digestible, you can’t fix the world with silliness alone. (And besides, if anyone is going to write such an impactful, generation-defining treatise on the ills of modern society and how we can fix them, I highly doubt it will be a man.) Instead, I’d call it one person’s attempt to work through some new and evolving thoughts, and have a few good laughs along the way.

I hope you all enjoy the book in the spirit in which it was written and take away at least a couple useful thoughts on how we can all be the kind of better people we aspire to be.

Or, to quote the inimitable Jay Sherman…

-TC

Welcome to Hovering Giraffe…Yet Again!

Welcome to the new and improved — or, more accurately, improving — hoveringgiraffe.com! A year and change ago, I switched my site from Wordpress to Squarespace and quickly proceeded to do absolutely nothing with it. This lack of activity can be partly attributed to my fundamental laziness being compounded by the energy-draining monotony of endlessly blurred days that came with COVID, but it can also also be blamed on an unprecedented level of business. Throughout the pandemic — and during the last six months or so in particular — I’ve had more editing work than I ever thought I could ever be offered, much less handle. At the same time, I’ve been busy with a series of writing projects, most of which have yet to see the light of day. And, of course, last August my wife and I welcomed our beautiful baby daughter to the family, along with the massive time-suck that came with her.

But as the calendar ticked over to 2022, I finally found a moment to breathe and finish getting this site more or less up and running, thanks to the help of some fine and admittedly underpaid designers. While there’s still more work to do and the site will continue to evolve over time — from fine tuning some of the aesthetics to fixing the broken formatting on my archived blog posts so that I can re-post them in this space — we’re in good enough shape to start sharing some updates.

And trust me, updates will be coming, starting with a pretty big announcement about my second novel that will be coming in the next few days.

In the meantime, all I’ll say is it’s good to be back.

Talk soon.

-TC

Happy (Enough) New Year!

Welp, looks like it's been a while since I posted.  It's been about two years since I ranted about Trump's election, which is the last entry that I could charitably round up to being of consequence.  I'd intended to start posting much more frequently.  Then I didn't.  Which at this point is a pretty good summary of my blog, as well as my political ambitions: big ideas, good intentions, and very little follow through.  I always tell myself I'm going to do more, then I find perfectly valid reasons to go back to bed instead.

Not that I've spent the last two years in bed.  Far from it.  Standup slowed down, then stopped, then sold the car for a while.  But beyond that particular setback, a lot has been happening.  I left my full-time job to return to freelance video editing, and my new "business" has been going remarkably well.  One of the reasons I left was to start focusing on writing more, which got off to a bit of a slow start, but has been kicking into high gear and going very well as of late.  I finished a second draft of a new novel, and am planning to do a final draft as soon as my wife finishes pretending that she's going to read it; I've been working on a pitch for a TV show that will likely go nowhere, but would be very fun if it did; and in the last couple months I've even started working on new standup material, which will soon be performed for underwhelmed audience all over the less reputable clubs of the city. Admittedly, there's not a lot to point to in terms of tangible accomplishments just yet, but there are a lot of possibilities, and a lot of work going into them, which is a good start.

But, I don't want to talk about that right now.  There will be plenty of time to plug my various projects if they ever get far enough along to exaggerate the significance of on social media.  In the meantime, I wanted to kick this blog back into gear by rambling about something that I've been thinking about a lot lately, which is one of the main reasons that I was finding it hard to write comedy for a while: the election of Donald J. Trump.  Or, more accurately, the state of comedy in the wake of the election of Donald J. Trump.

Like a lot of people -- or, more specifically, like a lot of liberal-minded, self-centered, delusional idealists like myself who are so detached from the real world that they mistakenly believe their Facebook friends are both doing as well as they say they are and a representative sample of America -- I was in quite a funk after the election.  After the far too shocking realization that white middle America's rage was greater than its common sense, the world didn't seem particularly amusing.  I was reading the news more than ever, and trying to think critically about the issues that brought us here.  But none of it seemed particularly funny. All I could do was read the news with the joyless focus of Rain Man performing an audit.  We were entering dark times, and it didn't feel right to laugh.

Except, that's exactly what I love about comedy.  It is the perfect companion for politics because it does so many useful things that are helpful in processing very serious things: it helps make difficult subjects more engaging and approachable, it takes the sting out of sad times, it helps to bring down and take power away from people and institutions that do not deserve them.  Comedy may not be the be all and end all of serious public debate, but it helps.

So now would seem like the perfect moment for a renaissance of political comedy, right?  Times are dark, big discussions are being avoided because it's so easy to unfriend anyone who wants to have them, and the man dominating the news every day is an almost awe-inspringly extensive collection of pretenses and idiocies.  Donald Trump is the perfect foil for comedy.  On a daily basis, he provides us with opportunities for high-brow rumination on the existential nature of our national identity, and low-brow knee-slappers that perfectly illustrate why you don't give a baby the keys to the car.  In almost every headline, there's a little comedy for everyone.

So why does political comedy feel so pointless right now?  I think in part it's because there's just so goddamn much of it.  Trump is such a fundamentally absurd character that making fun of the leader of the free world is fruit hanging so low that it's almost impossible not to grab it by the...see?  Trump jokes are inescapable!  They are becoming such a deeply ingrained part of our psyche that babies are probably being born with the instinctual ability to hunt for boobs and make twitter jokes about one.  Which, first of all, makes it difficult to feel like you have anything original to say about the subject social media is increasingly becoming a race to prove that you were the first person to read a headline when you were supposed to be working.  If you take a minute to think about something you've heard, everything that could possibly be said about it will be tweeted by someone somewhere.

Second, there's so much political comedy that it feels like it's becoming little more than background noise.  It's not something we talk about to further a dialogue, it's just another pop culture reference, like the latest Avengers movie or which celebrity divorced which less successful celebrity.  Which isn't entirely unusual.  I mean, Jay Leno made jokes about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky every day of the nineties, and you can't really claim that he was trying to further an important dialogue about moral leadership.  He was just pressing the "sex is funny" button.  But what feels unusual about this moment is the sheer volume of content we produce.  Twitter is a million Jay Leno's competing for much lower ratings.

Not to say there is no good political comedy out there.  For example, I've always been a big John Oliver fan, and I think that Last Week Tonight is a great showcase for his talents.  But what does a show like his actually accomplish?  They are the epitome of "preaching to the choir."  In our fractured, oversaturated media landscape, anyone who watches is almost certainly a self-selected group that is not just receptive to his point of view, but actively seeking it out.  Our entertainment is as tribalized as our politics, our news, or our social media.  People don't seek out ideas that will challenge them, they look to hear someone saying what they already believe with a charming accent.  In fact, the only people who do seem to seek out ideas they don't agree with are YouTube trolls who think they can eviscerate an opposing viewpoint through the clever use of ALL CAPS.  John Oliver is great, but he speaks to people like me, a liberal base that wants to be reminded of just how right they are.  John Oliver even kind of acknowledged this himself, pointing out in one of the episodes that all the problems he's talked about are still around, despite all the articles that say he "destroyed" them.  He may make some difference in the world, especially when he raises money for good causes.  But as long as he's only speaking to a receptive audience, that impact has to be limited.

When Trump was elected, the word "normalizing" was thrown around, as in, this is not normal, and we should not let it become normal.  But, surprise surprise, it has.  We're all becoming accustomed and addicted to the spectacle of our reality TV presidency, which only furthers these problems.  People are either desensitized, or they're secretly enjoying the trainwreck.  It's hard for politics to be any more than a pop culture reference when people -- not individuals, but large groups of people -- start accepting their fate rather than being angry about it.  Good comedy should make you think, but that's something none of us particularly wants to do anymore.  We just want that numbing, knee-jerk reaction that we get when we remember that it's funny when society slips on a banana peel and falls down, too.

Not to be overly down on political comedy or anything.  I still love it, and I still think it has an important place in the world.  I still continue to write some of it, too.  For example, one of the big themes in my books is trying to find a way to be active and make a difference when the world is all talk, and you begin to worry that you are, too.  I still think there is value in political and socially relevant comedy.  I just spend a lot of time these days asking myself, really, how much?Anyway, 2019 is shaping up to be a busy year for me, as a writer, as an editor, and maybe even as a filmmaker.  I'll do my best to keep everyone updated on my progress, as well as some of my more entertaining musings.  But, I don't exactly have the best track record of following through when I promise to start writing more blog posts.  So I won't promise that. Instead, I'll just say that I'm still writing, I'm still working, and hopefully I'll be able to share more evidence of that with you all soon.

-TC

p.s. I'm also in the beginning stages of planning to update my website!  I hope to roll out a new design by the end of the year.  But again, no promises, just hopes.

Pillow Talk

About seven or eight years ago, I needed to buy a new computer.  By that point, my old computer had been in service for so long that if by any off chance the machines chose that month to rise up and overthrow humanity, it wouldn't have been able to contribute much to the movement beyond sitting on the porch and wistfully telling stories about the dark time before the revolution, causing the young 'uns listening intently at its foot pads to either cry or join the cause as soon as they were old enough to wield a defective CD burner with deadly accuracy.  That's how I described it's condition when I tried to sell it on Craigslist, anyway.

My old computer was a MacBook, and I was looking to replace it with another one, as I'd become entrenched in the Apple ecosystem after pirating a staggering amount of software that wasn't Windows compatible.  It would have involved far too great an investment of time and potential lawsuits to shift back to Windows, so I figured I was better off investing in a machine that was designed with the morally dubious creative professional in mind.  Plus, as we all know, the most important factors to consider when buying any new electronics are how closely they resemble a low-budget 1950s spaceship, and how unlikely it is that your mother might want to borrow it.

Of course, a computer isn't something you buy every day, especially not when you're in the early stages of paying off a student loan that is infinitely more valuable than the liberal arts degree for which it paid.  So I approached the subject with all the care and consideration that one might put into orchestrating a particularly large drug deal in an 80s action movie.  I carefully researched ever detail, angle, and scenario until I was absolutely certain that there was no margin for error.  My plan was foolproof, and I had successfully picked out the perfect over priced pipe dream to foolishly squander my newfound credit line on.  It was the perfect combination of relatively-low cost (relative, that is, to the cost of legally acquiring an actual human arm and leg) and shoulder-killing weight that could only be pitched as "light" by someone who masocistically enjoys watching a human spine compressed under the strain of unreasonable expectations.  I knew the size, the specs, and where to get the best deal on a refurbished machine.  It was all set.  But like any good drug deal that might result in an even better popcorn fueled shootout, it had one fatal flaw: I wasn't sure what kind of screen to get. At the time, Apple was still offering matte finishes on their laptop screens, and I didn't know if those or the newer glossy screens would give me better color accuracy for video work.  I had never seen a glossy screen in person, and wanted to make absolutely sure that I was making the absolute right decision to regret for the next decade or so.

This conundrum could have easily been solved by going to a store and looking at the two options side by side.  But like anyone who grew up in the nascent internet age, the idea of going to a place where I might have to talk to a person seemed utterly absurd when I could just as easily spend months speculating and sifting through endless internet articles written by people whose only qualification was their ability to change the default background on their blog.  Naturally, that is exactly what I did.

I spent weeks obsessively scouring the internet for reviews from any source I could find, preferring to trust the unvetted opinions of anyone with an internet connection fast enough to upload blurry photos of a screen blown out by a camera flash over a real life retail employee with at least as much professional training as can be gleaned from a day of new hire paperwork and a mandatory sexual harassment seminar.  But owing to my inability to craft a more useful search term than "which mac better?", a query that primarily yielded detailed comparisons of Easy Mac vs standard Kraft Dinner, I wasted countless hours wading through pages and pages of utterly useless results.

One thing I did find, however, was a phrase that I'd never heard before, which kept coming up with perplexing regularity: "Unboxing Video."  The later 2000s was a gloriously naive time in my life when I couldn't conceive of a world in which people would find the removal of packaging to be an event worth documenting, much less sharing, so when I first came across the term, I couldn't begin to guess what it might mean.  For anyone who may be fortunate enough to remain unfamiliar with the term, unboxing videos are more or less exactly what they sound like.  They are videos of people taking things, usually expensive electronics...out of a box.  For anyone waiting with bated breath for the exciting part, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that was it.  A typical unboxing video is little more than something you can't afford shedding it's box like a butterfly emerging triumphantly from its chrysalis, except that the only change that has taken place is that your life has become several minutes shorter.  There were no reviews, and no commentary beyond how nicely the packaging may be designed.  Just things in boxes, followed by things next to boxes.  These videos are essentially porn for people without disposable incomes, a superficial way to experience the basic idea of something you crave while missing out on the best part.

As I scrolled through page after page of inane, joyless unwrapping, like an endless sea of disappointing Christmas mornings captured on home movies that even the most lenient film critic would be hesitant to round up to "amateur,'" all I could think was, "Do people actually watch this shit?"

Turns out, the answer was a very definitive yes.  And even more depressingly, it turns out that I am one of them.  As the years roll on, more and more of my major purchases involve the ritualistic watching of enough unboxing videos to make my wife insist I buy something so that our YouTube browsing history won't read like the mind of a deranged shrink wrap fetishist.  Phones, computers, headphones, tents, vacuum cleaners, replacement filters for vacuum cleaners, air conditioners, cheap air conditioners, the box fan I ultimately bought when I realized that there's no such thing as a truly cheap air conditioner, and, on at least two separate occasions, an umbrella.  Before I commit to spending my hard earned money on anything, I like to know exactly what is in store for me, down to the most superficially irrelevant detail.  It's another byproduct of the internet age, a way to feel like you have done your due dilligence without all the hassle of actually doing it.

I'm not proud of my unboxing habit, but like anyone with a chronic bad habit, I've found a way to rationalize myself.  Whenever I catch myself on YouTube for longer than it would take to earn the money to actually buy the thing that I'm looking at, I tell myself that I am gaining valuable knowledge about a product by seeing how it is experienced by the average consumer.  Or at least, that's what I told myself until a few weeks ago, when I found myself watching unboxing videos (yes, plural), of a brand new, state of the art, award winning 2017 model...sigh...pillow.  That's right, I dedicated a solid thirty minutes of my life to finding and watching documented evidence of multiple strangers opening a box, and removing...sigh...a pillow.  Which I think is the point at which you have to admit that your time isn't valuable, and you don't have any original thoughts.  Because there's not much information to be gained from watching someone take a pillow out of a box, giving it a few tentative test squeezes, and authoritatively proclaiming that it is, in fact, soft.  I mean, if I want to be generous in my own assessment of my time, I might argue that the size of the pillow relative to the box it comes out of might offer some insight into how squishy it is, or how well it retains its shape after prolonged pressure.  But a slightly more accurate assessment might be that I wasted a good chunk of my day taking in the opinions of a slew of middle-aged single men in undecorated bedrooms, talking to a camera because they don't have wives to listen to them prattle on about their theories on head comfort.  Not to disparage the single life, of course.  Like a ten cent packet of ramen noodles, it has it's time and place, that time mostly being when your adult life is either just beginning, or going spectacularly badly.  But if there's one advantage to being married, one thing that you can only ask from someone who truly loves you and is committed to sharing a life together in good times and in bad, it's the knowledge that you will always have someone to listen your boring observations about support vs. sinkability ratios with at least the bare minimum of interest necessary to qualify as "feigned."  My wife may not find every thought that comes out of my mouth riveting, but she will always show me the courtesy of tuning into my rants just enough to nod politely when context clues tell her that I have probably finished saying something that I am inexplicably passionate about, providing just enough validation for my feelings that I won't have to bother the internet with them.

In my defense, these weren't just unboxing videos.  Not as I first encountered them, anyway.  The medium has come a long way since I discovered it, and most people will make at least some effort to couple the unveiling of product with something that loosely resembles a review.  One man tried to recreate the natural experience of using a pillow by laying down on a sheetless mattress and simulating various common sleeping positions.  Spoiler alert, the pillow was acceptably comfortable in all of them, and if this is really how he sleeps, in a brightly lit bedroom with a camera rolling, then this man must have the most boring home movies of all time.  Most people didn't go to quite such extreme lengths to demo their product, though.  They'd just give a few test pokes and universally reach a conclusion such as, "Yep...that's a nice pillow."  But my favorite review was from a fellow who went so far as to note that the pillow is "pretty much all you get.  There are no accessories or anything."  Which begs the question, what exactly constitutes an accessory for a pillow?  A pillow case?  A matching duvet cover?  Surely he can't have been expecting a USB cable or wall adapter, unless this is a much fancier pillow than I was expecting, and requires frequent charging to maintain optimal levels of support?The more I watched these videos, the more I felt an overwhelming sense of sadness.  Which isn't an entirely unusual experience when spending time on the internet, of course.  Most days it seems like the primary function of the internet is to ensure that middle schoolers around the globe have no reason to feel good about themselves, so it's not exactly a wellspring of positivity.  But even more so than usual, my online session left me feeling hopelessly morose.  Because if there is one thing I took from the experience of helping tick a few playcounts up into the double digits, it's how difficult it can be to feel connected in a time when it's easier than ever to put yourself out into the world, but nearly impossible to be heard through all the noise.  Watching these people pouring their hearts into videos that most would only find interesting when building a wedding registry, or after a particularly traumatic run in with bed bugs, the presentation of a pillow as a salacious object of affection, worthy of an unveiling that borders on idolatry, it just felt like a desperate attempt to be acknowledged, a cry for help calling out into a dark, unfeeling void in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, someone on the other side might be listening.  To me, each video I watched seemed less like the banal observations of a man who is genuinely excited about his sleeping arrangements, and more like these tiny, intimate glimpses into a life of loneliness which, by conflating the mundane and the extraordinary, somehow manages to tap into the collective inner monologues of a society that is so fixated on individual comfort that it fails to notice how small and insignificant the experience of an individual truly is.  The existence of an entire subculture of pillow unboxing videos did little to assuage my sense that the digital age as a time when our lives are superficially public, yet ultimately unnoticed and forgotten, our opinions on bedding a prime example of something that seems of paramount importance in our own lives despite being completely insignificant to everyone we might be inclined to share them with .  And I couldn't help but feel sorry for anyone who is so pitifully alone that they would open up the least interesting moments to the camera in the vein hope that there might be someone out there somewhere who actually cares.

Or it did, until I realized that by now, I'd now spent over an hour watching the same pillow coming out of a dozen boxes, thus proving whatever solipsistic sense of self importance these people might have completely right.  And if I'm going to feel sorry for anyone, it should't be the man who wants to talk about his pillow, but the man who will willingly sacrifice an entire Saturday afternoon to listen.

-TC

A Common Response

I'm not the first person to say this, and I certainly won't be the last.  But I am deeply ashamed of my country today.  I am ashamed that we have elected an overtly racist, bigoted, xenophobic, and any other synonym you might like to use for "intolerant" man to lead our country.  I am ashamed that instead of electing our first female president, we felt it more appropriate to choose someone with a long history of misogynistic words and actions to represent us in the world.  I am ashamed that we came together to decide choose a face for our beliefs and values, and ended up selecting someone who consistently lies, swindles, and abuses people.  And perhaps most of all, I am ashamed that our vague dissatisfaction with a broken system, legitimate as those concerns might be, has allowed us to be so easily fooled by such an obvious con man, a huckster who has never shown the slightest evidence that there is any real science or magic behind the miracle tonic he hawks from the back of his hate-filled wagon.

A lot of people feel the same way.  If social media can be taken as any indication, the majority of my friends and family feel the same way.  But of course, the decision is not up to me, nor is it up to a select inner circle of my choosing.  It is up to all of us as a nation, with all of our voices and opinions carrying equal weight.  And the people have spoken.  Donald Trump won this election fair and square, and he has earned his victory, whether or not you or I or any particular individual feels like he deserves it.  That's how Democracy works.  It isn't the outcome that I wanted, it isn't one that I think will end well for our country.  But it is the outcome that our collective consciousness demanded, and it is the outcome that we will have to live with.  It doesn't matter how passionately I feel about the dangers of Donald Trump and the vitriol that has unleashed on hardworking Americans who look or act or pray differently.  All that matters is that yesterday, the people who think like me were outnumbered, and we lost.  We don't have to be happy about it, but we do have to accept it.

And that's all I think we can realistically expect from this verdict, acceptance.  "Unity" may be a beautiful idea, and a nice word to throw around in concession speeches.  But I think unifying behind Donald Trump is too much to ask of the country.  The left and the right have been slinging too much venom at each other for too long to expect that we can graciously accept loss, shake hands, and commit to working together as a happy and harmonious nation behind our mutually respected figurehead.  And that isn't entirely his fault.  Donald Trump may push our divided discontent to the extreme by advocating sexual assault against women, persecution of Muslims, fear of Hispanics, or other distasteful, un-American ideals.  But our refusal to compromise or to work with each other across political divides is not unique to this man.  The fundamental chasm of partisan mistrust has governed our political discourse since long before Trump ever came on the scene.  Donald Trump is not the cause of our divide, he is merely the symptom that has grown so virulent that it is sending us to the hospital.  If the election had gone differently, if Hillary had pulled out the victory that I was hoping for, I wouldn't have expected the right to unify behind her either.  But I would have expected them to accept her.

Acceptance may not be the same as blissful unity, but it is an essential tool for us to move forward.  Like it or not, this is the world we live in.  It may not be ideal.  It may not even be pleasant.  But it is our new reality.  I understand the disappointment, anger and denial that is floating around today.  It's tough to face a reality in which racism, sexism, and all around hate have won the day.  Those feelings are completely understandable and justified, and I don't blame anyone for feeling or expressing those emotions.  But for me personally, I didn't feel those emotions as strongly as my own personal default from the infamous 5 Stages of Grief: depression.I don't usually like to talk about it, but I do have a very serious problem with depression, and it has been coming up a lot lately as it's confronted with the harsh and disappointing realities of the world we live in and feel the need to talk about them seriously.  Even on a good day, with no external stimulus whatsoever, depression is something that I carry around with me.  I don't make friends easily because I secretly believe that everyone hates me.  I don't chase my dreams as hard as I should because deep down, I don't believe I deserve them.  I lose perspective on little things and beat myself up over mistakes so minor that no one even notices.  And I have a tendency to resign myself to disappointing and terrible circumstances because I believe I'm powerless to stop them, or that they're all my fault.

That dark cloud swirling around inside my head makes most days seem like the worst day of my life, even when things are going objectively very well.  It's a struggle to keep things in perspective and remind myself to distinguish between things that really are depressing and bullshit that my own personal insanity exaggerates.  So when something like Trump's election happens, something that that I believe will have genuinely catastrophic consequences not just for me, but for millions of Americans, the feedback loop gets worse.  I start by fearing the repercussions that I will personally face, then quickly realize that I won't even be the one to bear the brunt of this disaster.  Women, Muslims, immigrants, minorities, the poor, LGBT people -- they will all feel the hurt of this outcome far more than a privileged, straight, middle-class white guy such as myself.  And that's when depression gets real, when I realize how selfish and petty my own sense of misery is compared to the hardships facing those less fortunate than me.  The sadness I feel for myself, the sadness I feel for others, and the disgust I feel for myself for not thinking of them first.  It all mounts into an overwhelming sense of despair that seems impossible to defeat.

Sounds depressing, right?  But living in that dark place on a daily basis has taught me one important valuable lesson, which helps me manage my own depression, and I think is very applicable to our current national malaise: never let your feelings stop the work that you're doing.  Sadness is a trap, and if you fall into it, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Whether it's writing a book or building a better world, once things start to feel hopeless, you'll want to stop and wallow.  But the longer you stop, the more hopeless the situation seems, and the harder it becomes to start working again.

And that's where acceptance comes in.  It's a lot easier to remain focused on the goals that are important to you if you can identify the circumstances that are beyond your control (as Trump's presidency now is), accept their limitations for what they are, and KEEP FUCKING WORKING.  You don't have to be happy about it.  You can feel however you like about your life, the world, and the challenges you'll face.  But you can't move forward productively if you don't accept that the things that make you sad are there to stay, and they have nothing to do with your ability to get back to work.

Donald Trump will be our next president, and that thought depresses me like no other.  But it is a simple fact of life now, and succumbing to our collective depression will do nothing to stop it.  Now more than ever, we need to get back to work.  Because Donald Trump will not make America great again, so that responsibility will have to rest with us.  Our reach might not be as far, our authority may not be as great, but we do have power and a responsibility to effect change in our own homes, communities, and country.  We have the ability to reach out and help our friends and neighbors when they suffer from the decisions that his administration will inevitably make.  That is our job now.  It will be our job for the next four years.  And whatever rains down on us from above, we should not lose sight of the fact that Donald Trump is not the only person who controls whether this country is great.  Greatness will come from our own hard work, our caring for each other, and our remaining dedicated to the real values that are being buried underneath a charlatan's empty promises.

So let's process our sadness, accept the reality that we live in, and keep working to make it a better one.  And who knows?  Maybe Donald Trump won't be the disaster that many of us anticipate.  He defied our expectations and won the primary.  Then he defied expectations and won the election.  Maybe now he'll defy our expectations and prove himself to be a thoughtful and capable president.  My hopes may not be high, but we're stuck with him now, so might as well give him the benefit of the doubt until he proves us all right.

-TC

P.S. Please note, the above is just the stream of consciousness ramblings of a disappointed guy on his lunch break.  I hope you'll be forgiving of any proof reading errors, as I put no greater thought to publishing this post than pushing a button and hoping for the best.  Which I guess is appropriate, since that seems to be the standard we are now using when casting ballots. (Sorry, needed to get at least one stupid joke in there).

My Favorite Joke

After a brief hiatus at the beginning of the year, i've spent the past several months writing and performing a lot of new standup material.  Some of it has been good, some of it has been bad.  And with my attention perennially focused on the election just like everyone else, a lot of it became dated and irrelevant almost immediately.  Between the deluge of new information that is constantly dumped on us by our 24 hour new cycle, and an open mic scene that is so consistently oversaturated with a thousand different yet seemingly identical iterations of any political joke you might have giggled at when you thought of it in the shower, most such jokes tend to come and go pretty quickly.

However, as the election draws to a close, I wanted to take a quick moment to share what I think is easily the best election themed joke that I've written over the last (seemingly endless) year or so.  Not very many people have heard it, as I only did it at a handful of open mics before it slipped into the ether of cultural irrelevance.  But I'm still really proud of this joke, so I wanted to put it out there for anyone who wasn't fortunate enough to see it at an open mic.  Or, more accurately, for anyone who was fortunate enough to avoid being at an open mic in the first place.

Setting the scene for this joke, I want to bring you back to the primary season.  It was a simpler time before we had any official nominees, when the Bernie Sanders campaign was just beginning to run out of steam but nowhere near admitting it...

My wife wants to have kids and I don't.  When it comes to this issue, it's like she's Hillary Clinton and I'm Bernie Sanders.  We both know that she's going to win, my job is just to make sure that when she does, nobody feels good about it.

It might not be as funny now Bernie has long since vanished from the race, but every time I think of that joke, it still makes me snicker a little bit at my own self-satisfied sense of cleverness.

In all seriousness, though, I do love Bernie Sanders.  I'm an idealistic Vermont socialist at heart, so how could I not?  But as proud as I was to support Bernie, I'm equally proud to say that I will be voting for Hillary Clinton tomorrow.  I honestly believe that she's highly and uniquely qualified for the position, and that the scandals plaguing her campaign have been grossly exaggerated and distorted beyond all reasonable proportion.  And perhaps more importantly, I believe that even if I am wrong on both counts, even assuming for the moment that she is corrupt, incompetent, and possibly dying from any combination of infectious or neurological disorders as we speak, I maintain that compared to Donald Trump, she is still far and away the lesser of two evils. For in that particular contest, the evil she is being pitted against is so virulent and dangerous that it needs to be stopped at all cost.

And if that's how you see the situation, as a hopeless choice between the lesser of two evils, then I understand your frustration.  No one likes being put in a position where their only real options are equally unpalatable.  So you might gravitate towards a third party that has no chance of winning, either as a principled stand or a thinly veiled protest vote.  Or you might decide to simply sit the election out all together rather than dirty your hands in the service of a system so foul.  And under normal circumstances, I might support those decisions.  Voting is one of the most basic ways to make your voice heard, and sometimes a voice of dissent, whether active or passive, can be just as important as a voice of support.  I get it.  It makes a lot of sense.  In theory.

However, considering the moral implications of an uncast or wasted vote not just in theory, but in terms of the practical reality at hand, I could never hold such a position myself.  Because from where I'm standing, the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency seems so damaging to our country -- to our values, to our reputation abroad, to our safety and economic stability -- that to me, it seems socially irresponsible to do anything but vote for the only person who can realistically stop him.  It may make you feel better about yourself to claim the moral high ground by staying out of politics, or to protest both major candidates by backing a losing horse rather than to be counted amongst their ilk.  But when you get right down to it, it doesn't matter how good you feel about yourself if the entire world is burning around you.  To me, this particular election is about something bigger than a sea individual voices expressing their individual opinions.  It's about our collective responsibility to stop something catastrophic, something that may not effect us all equally, but will effect all of us.  It's about swallowing your ego and doing what is right for everyone in this country, not just what's right for you and your sense of self.  It's about recognizing that sometimes the lesser of two evils can be the right choice if it means keeping a much greater evil at bay.  It's about keeping Donald Trump out of The White House no matter what.

Of course, that's just my opinion.  Far be it from me to tell other people what to do with their vote.  But whatever you believe, even if it is the polar opposite of what I might like you to believe, I would still encourage you to cast your vote tomorrow.  Whether it's a vote for Hillary, Trump, a third party, Bart Simpson, or a coat rack that if you squint hard enough in the dark looks kind of like Abraham Lincoln, it's your voice, and you should make it heard.  Whether your goal is to stop Trump, stop bleeding heart hippie liberals like me, or send a message to Washington that the two party system is over, no one will get the memo if you just stay home playing drinking games with your TV.  Go out, vote whatever you feel is right, then head home to get drunk in good conscience like a true American.

-TC

On a (Rare) Serious Note...

What follows is something I wrote quickly last week after all the many and varied shootings took place.  I originally wasn't planning to share it with anyone, thinking of it as just another rough, emotional reaction coughed up in the heat of the moment.  But looking back at it, there are a couple ideas buried in here that I think are actually important for me to think about, talk about, and hopefully be held accountable to.  So I decided to go ahead and share it after all.  It's a bit rough, so please try to consider in the spirit in which it is intended.

I don't usually like to share serious feelings on the internet.  Hell, I don't usually like to share serious feelings at all.  I'm more the sort to process my feelings by masking them with humor.  One of the reasons I'm drawn to comedy in the first place is because of its power to make difficult subjects and emotions easier to engage. On a typical day, I'm an incredibly depressed, angry, self-hating, and lonely individual.  But I'd never dare say that to anyone unless I could reassure them that I was at least partly joking.  For me, like a lot of people, humor is often a defense mechanism.  It can both dull any unpleasantness that I am forced to feel, and protect me from appearing weak in the eyes of others.  Or at least from thinking that that's how I appear in the eyes of others when I let them see glimpses of the real darkness within.

But today, I wanted to take a few minutes to share a few serious (if meandering) thoughts, as so many of us feel increasingly compelled to do lately.  Because like anyone, I carry around my own personal breed of sadness as I wander through my daily life.  And like anybody, that sadness becomes so much deeper when it is exposed to the terrible things that happen to other people.  It's a sadness that comes both from realizing how more sadness there is in the world, and how petty your own appears when compared to the truly horrific things that are happening to others.  Innocent people are killed.  Guilty people are killed when maybe they could have been spared.  Police are demonized for the actions of their worst members, then murdered senselessly and indiscriminately in retribution.  Masses of people die for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time when someone's anger overwhelms them.  It all comes together to look like the fabric of society is tearing apart while we stand back helplessly and watch it happen.  Sadness and helplessness are never a great combination, but they become so much harder to bear when they seem so constant, so inevitable.

We've reached the point where mass shootings and racially motivated killings have become so commonplace that we almost seem to accept them as another fact of daily living.  I know I for one am guilty of that.  When I was in high school and I first heard about Columbine, my first reaction was shock.  Complete and total shock.  I couldn't believe that something like this had happened, because I'd never heard of it happening before.  But these days, that shock is gone, replaced by a dull sense of disappointment.  For example, when I heard about the shooting in Orlando, my initial reaction wasn't, "how could this happen?"  Rather, my first thought could be better summarized as, "wow, that seems like a bigger number than usual."  A more significant emotional reaction would set in later when I'd read more news reports, and the gravity of the situation had time to sink in.  But it wasn't my knee-jerk reaction anymore.

It wasn't my first reaction because it's become so expected that this is just what happens in our country, and that it will happen again.  It's become expected that we'll have mass shootings.  It's become expected that black people will be shot by the police under questionable circumstances.  It's become expected that Democrats will propose gun control legislation they know to be futile, and that Republicans will prove them right by squashing them while clinging to the second ammendment like a security blanket.  It's become expected that my friends will take to Facebook in extended monologues about their personal yet ultimately interchangeable opinions, and that that #blacklivesmatter will start trending again.  It's even become expected that there will be a backlash against those who ask for change, whether it's from closeted racists or law abiding gun enthusiasts.  Of course there are responsible gun owners out there.  And of course all lives matter.  But that isn't the point.  The point is that sadly, people don't need to be reminded that some lives matter anywhere near as frequently as others.

But worst of all, it's become expected that this cyclical pattern will repeat again and again and again.  I know that the tragedies will continue to happen.  I know that my friends will speak out against them, and I know exactly what they'll say.  But I know that nothing will change, and that it'll all happen again in a few days, or if we're lucky, a few weeks.  And that makes me even sadder.  The helplessness gives way to hopelessness when I realize that we've said it all before, and we'll say it again because we're just reciting lines from an endless script that we've been given and accepted as our new routine.

And don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those people who thinks that you shouldn't bother posting about your feelings on a tragedy, whether it's personal or public, because talk on Facebook is pointless.  On the contrary, I think there's a lot of good that can come from sharing your thoughts on serious subjects.  It can feel like a tremendous release to take something that is eating you up inside and put it out into the world, and there's an equally great amount of healing that can come from seeing that other people saying all the same things that are floating around in your own head.  Whatever dark thoughts you may have in the face of tragedy, whether it's sadness or anger or guilt, or even a longing for self-destruction when the public grief makes your own personal load feel like too much to bear,  it can be deeply comforting to know that you're not the only one experiencing those thoughts and feelings.

So I think that kind of ritual release is important in healing ourselves as individuals, and in bringing us together as a group with a common goal.  But I do get worried when the only thing that we appear to do with our emotions is releasing them.  We share our thoughts with a circle of people who we know will agree with us, we vent our frustrations on the days that we are forced to confront them.  But then we take a deep breath and get back to our lives as usual.  We all talk about change, ask for it, even demand it.  But most of us, myself included, don't seem to do anything more.  We talk about what needs to be done, but then leave the responsibility for doing it up to someone else, some nameless, faceless entity who will hear our cries of rage and heed them.  Over and over, it's as though we say to ourselves, "well, I've said my piece, and it seems as though we're all in agreement here, so this should pretty much sort itself out, right?"  But of course, it doesn't.  Our words (probably including mine here) amount to little more than a momentary personal catharsis that allows us to move on with our day, relieved of our personal burden and assuaged of any guilt.

Ever since the presidential primaries began heating up last year, there's been a lot of talk about how Facebook functions as a sort of echo chamber for our political beliefs.  Liberals only see liberal news, conservatives only see conservative news, and we don't really encounter much that might exist outside of our own pre-determined opinions, or challenge us to think differently.  You can argue about whether that's our own fault or the fault of a mysterious algorithm that guides our feeds, but whatever the cause, it's certainly a perceivable phenomenon.  Say what you might about Donald Trump (and lord knows we do), but he has plenty of supporters.  Millions of people have already voted for him, and yet I have never once seen an article, video, or opinion pop up in my news feed that suggests he might even vaguely be liked or competent.  I know there are people who believe that, but I never see them, because they don't exist within my own carefully curated echo chamber.

And my concern is that when talking about these kinds of national tragedies, all we really want is for the same echo chamber to validate our emotions as well.  We don't want the responsibility of working towards change.  We just want to exorcise our feelings and have them repeated back to us by a chorus of friends who will bounce them on down the line until they fade away into the cavern of unchallenged, empty sentiment.

And again, saying how you feel about something is not pointless.  Speech is important.  Sharing is important.  Building a sense of communal agreement is important.  But it's also important to remember that talk doesn't take the place of action.  However well intentioned, talking about change isn't the same thing as enacting change.

Which raises the question, how does change happen?  People are naturally resistant to it, as we see over and over again, not just on these issues, but in general.  Even changing people's minds seems near impossible when the much discussed Backfire Effect all but ensures that people will not listen to reason.   So when it comes to large, systemic issues like gun violence, it's hard enough to get people to agree on what should change, much less making that change happen.  So in the face of a nearly impossible, Sisyphean task, how do we make imagined change become a reality?And the answer is...I don't know.  Sorry to say it, but after all this ranting, I don't know how to change minds or policies or the world at large.  Really, I'm no better than any other guilty white guy throwing around my feelings as a vague prescription for what someone else should be doing.

But I have been thinking a lot about one part of the equation that seems very important.  In talking about the fight for marriage equality, Dan Savage once said that gay people should remember to thank their straight allies who took up the fight, used their votes, and generally supported a cause that didn't directly effect them because they knew it was right.  In his view, gay people should be thanking straight people because numerically, the fight could not have been won without them.  Or, to put that idea into a broader context, we should be thanking the people who fought for something, despite the fact that they had the privilege of not needing to.

That's a word that gets thrown around a lot these days: privilege.  And it's often thrown around in conjunction with the word "white."  Which is fair, because so many people, people like me, middle-class white people, have so many privileges in this culture that we take for granted, that we'll deny we have if anyone points them out, defending ourselves by pointing to our own, relatively petty struggles.  And among those privileges is one that extends beyond the simple color lines: the privilege of viewing someone else's suffering from the outside.  It's the privilege of having to live with the news, but not the consequences.  The kind of privilege where the only real consequence that you encounter in the face of tragedy is a feeling that can be summarized and expunged by typing up a Tweet on your lunch break.  White people may be the main benefactors of this privilege, but it's not only the privilege of being white.  It's the privilege of anyone who has the luxury to to stand back and watch things unfold from a safe distance as they happen happen to someone else, of being able to turn off the news and know that it doesn't yet effect you.

Maybe I don't know what the change needs to be.  Maybe I'm too much of a follower to lead the charge on social progress.  But I do know that change won't come until people like me, people like most of my friends and family, people who have that privilege to stand back, feel their feelings, comment, lecture, and ultimately go back to their complacent, unaffected lives are willing to risk losing those privileges.  Change can't happen until I, and everyone like me, is willing to admit that a large part of the problem is that we all routinely exercise our privilege to do nothing.  Change won't come until people like me, people who don't need to fight or struggle, are willing to stand up and make ourselves vulnerable, make ourselves uncomfortable.  It won't come until we are willing to stand next to the people who have had their lives shattered and say, "I don't want this privilege unless they can have it, too."

I don't know about you, but I am tired of being part of the problem.  I'm tired of wishing for change, and being disappointed when someone else fails to make it happen.  I want to be part of the solution.  I want to work, and heal, and risk the privileges that I've become accustomed to so that I can share them with everyone else who deserves the same.

Healing doesn't come with time or distance alone.  Days or months or years can pass, they'll never be enough to simply forget a tragedy.  You don't heal by venting about a momentary sadness and leaving it in the past.  You heal by accepting that this thing is apart of you now, and looking to the future with hope.So what can we do to make that future better together?

-TC

Baring It All Near Stage

Towards the beginning of this year, circumstances forced me to stop doing standup for a few months.  And in this context, "circumstances" is only partially code for "chronic self-doubt mixed with crippling depression, fundamental laziness, and an habitual predilection towards quitting."  All good reasons to be sure, and when combined with a promotion at work, endless family emergencies, and an inability to resist the temptations that come along with an HBO Now subscription, I simply didn't have the time to pursue my dreams for a little while.  Though on the upside, the time off did allow me to catch up on some much needed sleep, which allowed me to pursue much more exciting dreams about becoming a crime-fighting ninja who is unexpectedly partnered with a wise-cracking cat.

But as things often do, life eventually began to calm down, and my dreams about mixed feline-human martial arts were replaced with stress dreams about missed work deadlines, endless commutes in over-crowded subways, and at least once, being married to an elephant who insisted that I should not forget to vote for Trump.

But about a month ago, armed once again with a new found drive and a modicum of free time, I started getting back up on stage again.  And the minute I took the stage for the first time in weeks, I immediately realized just how much I had missed it.  I missed watching ideas develop into jokes, and getting to hang out in a crowd of people who were far too cool and clever to ever willingly share a lunch table with me.  I missed having places to go and goals to accomplish.  And most of all, I missed being forced into close proximity with complete fucking weirdos who regularly fill my life with its most interesting stories.  Because you don't have to go very far in the New York comedy scene to realize that it is as full of wonderful, amazing, talented people as it is full of extra salty nut bags who have enough awareness to realize that their mental breakdowns will be considered socially acceptable if they happen on a stage, but not enough awareness to realize how uncomfortable they are making everyone who witnesses them.  And those are the people who make you realize why you truly love comedy: because it is so easy to find in the world, especially from people who have no idea that they are giving it to you.

I'd only been doing standup again for a couple weeks when I decided to revisit one of my old regular mics.  After my longest period of inactivity since first starting to do comedy, I was feeling anxious about shaking off the considerable amount of rust that had accumulated, so I made a point to show up for the mic early to ensure that I had plenty of time to decompress from work and try to memorize a few new jokes that I'd been working on before show time.  Comedians and New Yorkers being two of the least punctual groups you could ever hope to find, the room was nearly empty when I arrived.  The host was setting up the check-in station in one corner, while a single comic sat on the other side of the room, poring intently over his notebook of material.  I decided to keep a healthy distance from both so as not to disturb them as I paced and muttered punchlines to myself, for the only thing more tedious than hearing old material at an open mic is hearing it chanted repeatedly for twenty minutes before it shows up on stage like a new idea.

But the room started filling in pretty quickly, and I looked around at the new arrivals, trying to gauge how confident everyone else was feeling.  Almost immediately, my eyes came to rest on a man who I was sure felt very confident indeed.  He was feeling so confident, in fact, that he was almost completely naked.  That is to say, there was nothing but a thin pair of ratty boxer shorts to separate the room from his confidence.

The host of the mic looked up from her check-in table and caught sight of this fellow a few moments after I did, and seemed equally taken aback at the amount of him that she caught sight of.

"Oh my," The Host said, pointing to the back.  "You know, there's a bathroom back there."

The Nude Man looked at her with the sort of self-assured condescension that can only be mustered by someone who has never once considered the possibility that other people might have feelings about things.  "Do you need to go?" he asked, spitting out the line in a way that told you he'd been waiting for someone to give him a reason to use it.

"No," The Host said, a weary resignation creeping into her voice as she began to accept that nothing productive would ever come of this conversation, but that she was too late to stop it.

"Well, neither do I," The Nude Man said.  With that, he turned his attention back to himself and resumed adjusting his socks.

As we would soon learn from his distracted muttering, there was a reason for his state of undress.  Not a good reason, mind you, but a reason nonetheless.  Turns out, he needed to change for his performance, and had even contemplated the much more conventional changing strategy of doing so in the bathroom.  However, he immediately decided to abandon this idea as soon as he decided that the bathroom in question was too small.  Now, at this point I should probably point out that this particular open mic is in the basement of a pretty swanky jazz club in Manhattan, and as such it has one of the nicest, cleanest, and above all most spacious restrooms that you could ever hope to find in New York City.  It is so nice, in fact, that most people would find it a pleasure to use, assuming they didn't possess the same deep-seated shame regarding their bodily functions that leaves me people like me unable to use a urinal unless it happens to be surrounded by unusually large partitions and a major waterfall.  But my point is, anyone who has ever used a New York bar bathroom and wondered what that puddle might consist of, or whether or not the graffiti on the toilet is just there to cover up the decades-old layers of filth that no God fearing janitor would ever dare to tackle would take one look at this bathroom and think that they'd died and made a pit-stop on the way to heaven.

As such, I would tend to assume that this fellow was not so much afraid of changing in the bathroom as he was afraid that no one would notice that he was changing at all.  After all, most comics attending open mics wear either their work clothes, or whatever they had deemed to be minimally acceptable before heading to the unemployment line that morning.  So it's most unusual to find someone who has so great a level of commitment that they would feel the need to put on a bow tie and suspenders when performing for ten other comics on their phones in a basement.  And it's only human to want a little recognition for going the extra mile.

I, for one, was quite curious to see more from this particular individual.  Judging by his age and attire, I guessed that he was dusting off a forty-year-old set from the Catskills to see how well it would age if he replaced the word "telephone" with "cell phone."  But I would have been equally pleased if he opened his set by hooking his thumbs behind his suspenders, leaning into the mic, and saying, "So Tinder is weird, right?"Unfortunately, I never got the opportunity to find out.  About an hour and a half into the mic, The Formerly Nude man just got up and left.  It is of course hardly unprecedented for someone to leave early from an open mic.  Some people who perform early will sneak out towards the end when things are starting to drag, and others will leave immediately after their sets to go try to hit up another mic (comedian code for "go home and watch Netflix"), leaving the room an empty shell of awkward silence by the end.

But even so, most people at an open mic haven't invested so much energy into preparing and making the room uncomfortable.  So when they go to such lengths, you can only hope that they will see things through to completion.  Giving up on your dreams after countless nights of performing late to an empty crowd is one thing.  Giving up an hour after showing off your string bean calves and deflated beer belly to a group of unwilling participants shows a remarkable lack of commitment.

Open mics are always an interesting experience.  You can see some remarkably talented people who make you wonder why they haven't advanced to the next level already.  And you can also see remarkably untalented people, who make you wonder why you're still stuck sharing a stage with such losers.  Or, if you possess the sort of exceedingly delusional mind that is common among performers, you're equally likely to see the first group and act as though you've seen the second.  Either way, you'll see people succeed and fail while you succeed and fail right alongside them, and if you watch other people and pay close attention to what they are doing, you'll always be able to learn something that you can take back and apply to your own work.

What did I learn from from The Nude Man?  I learned that being the best dressed person in the room doesn't excuse you from humility, especially if it comes right after being the the least dressed person.  And I learned that if you're going to take off your clothes in public despite the fact that no one has asked you to and would really rather you didn't, then you'd better be prepared to show them something worthwhile.  Otherwise, they won't be left wanting more so much as wishing they could return what they've got.

Also, no matter how far your comedy career goes, you're only as good as your last set and your current pair of underwear.  So try to keep both as tight and fresh as possible.

-TC

Home Slice

As a self-diagnosed glutton and child of the Ninja Turtles era, one of the first things I do whenever I move into a new apartment is experiment with all the local pizza places until I find the most delicious option in delivery range.  When I first moved into my apartment in Brooklyn, I was sadly disappointed by the local fare.  The place by the subway was low-quality.  And the place by the laundromat was even lower-quality, and took upwards of three hours from order to stomach.  It was a trying process, but in the end I found my new spot.  It's a brick oven joint, a little on the far side by New York delivery zone standards, and it's on the pricey side for most people in the neighborhood I'm currently gentrifying.  But for me, it's perfect.  It's delicious, the delivery is always prompt, and the portions are large enough that I can easily eat myself into a nice food coma.

I haven't been enjoying their pizza too much lately, though, as I've been on a diet for the past several months.  I was sitting at work one day, and when I went to stretch my arms, the chest ripped right out of my shirt.  It was an odd feeling, kind of like I was the Incredible Hulk, only instead of being full of psychotic rage, I was full of Chipotle.  In that moment, i decided that I needed a change.  Once I'd gotten home and put on a new shirt, I decided that I needed a bigger change still.

My fianceé has been good about helping keep me on my diet, making sure I bring a healthy lunch to work every day, cooking healthy dinners that are already on the table whenever I have to stay out late, and generally giving me a piercing look of disappointment any time I suggest any unhealthy things I might like to eat instead.  But every once in a while, she goes out of town.  And when she does, I immediately reach for the phone and call my old friend, the pizza place.  I'm not the sort of guy who would ever cheat on his partner, but I most certainly don't feel the same sense of fidelity to my diet, and whenever I'm left to my own devices, all bets are off.

On one such evening recently, I went on Seamless and placed an order for the usual.  Then about twenty minutes later, I get a call from the pizza place, which is already a sign that this transaction is going badly.  The entire reason I order through seamless is so that I don't have to talk to another human being, lest he read into my voice that the obscenely large order that I've just placed is just for me and will be consumed in one sitting.

But I want to make sure nothing comes between me and my feast, so I pick up.  The man on the other end says, "I got your order and processed it, but I just want you to know that we don't deliver to that address anymore."  I thought this was odd, as I've ordered from them plenty of times and I've never had any trouble.  Not before I ate the pizza, anyway.

"Well," he said, "the last few times we've sent someone to that address he's been mugged."

"Oh God," I said, "you mean every time someone comes to my neighborhood, they're getting robbed?""No," he explained, "it only happens in front of your building.  Everywhere else on the block is fine."

He then proceeded to tell me that they would still deliver my food, but only if I was willing to come downstairs and meet the delivery guy around the corner like it was some sort of shady drug deal.  Of course, being a dedicated addict, I wasn't going to let the extreme weirdness of the situation deter me.  So I threw on my hoodie, went downstairs, and started lurking in the shadows, waiting for my connection to arrive.

At this point, I probably should have taken a look at what I'd been reduced and rethink my eating habits.  Instead, I thought about the building I live in.  It's mostly occupied by older Carribean families, hardly the sort of people who tend to frequent overpriced, hipster pizza joints.  As such, there's a strong likelihood that the last few times someone from this pizza place has attempted to deliver food to my building, they were probably coming to my apartment.  So the subtext of the pizza man's call was that every time I place an order, his employees are putting themselves in harm's way so that I may eat myself to death.  My addiction wasn't just affecting myself, it was affecting the health and safety of those around me.

After reflecting on this for a few minutes, I took a good, hard look at myself and thought, "Thank God I'm such a lousy tipper."  After all, I wouldn't want to think that because of me, crime actually paid.

-TC

Batman v Common Sense

***Warning:  This blog post contains pretty much nothing but spoilers about Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.  While it hasn't been in theaters for all that long, I would still assume that most people who care have probably watched (or hate-watched) it already, and as such may no longer have the higher brain functions required to read after the the two and a half hour onslaught of mind-numbing absurdity that was this movie.  Nonetheless, I still want to make it clear that if you haven't seen the film, and plan to do so at some point, you should probably stop reading now so that you too may enjoy the euphoria of delirious incomprehension with fresh, untainted eyes.  Consider yourselves warned.***

Okay, I swear this blog isn't devolving into little more than outdated rants about the flaws in overblown children's movies.  It's really not, promise.  But I did want to say a few quick words about Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice because...well, I lead an extremely boring life, and it's just about the only vaguely interesting thing that's happened to me lately.  When most of your life consists of sitting at a desk working, and the rest is taken up by coming up with non-productive excuses to avoid talking to people, it's easy for badmouthing the fruits of someone else's hard labor to become the most exciting part of your week.

While my recent post on Star Wars may have been a decidedly minority opinion (which I highly recommend reading when you have a few hours to kill), it's a bit less controversial to say that that Batman v Superman: Dawn of Just-End-It-Now-Please was an exceptionally vapid collection of fire and noises, assault on the senses, crafted with all the intricate delicacy that Godzlla typically employs when conducting urban renewal.  I've talked to some people who liked it with caveats, and even a couple people who genuinely loved the film.  My own personal opinion was very similar to burning my mouth on a hot slice of pizza: once you've sat through it long enough that you've become totally numb, it's not exactly unpleasant, but does feel a little pointless.

And I know some people would say that you shouldn't be reading too much into a movie about a brooding rich kid whose rodent fascination leads him to invent things that are beyond the reach of the entire defense department, much less one in which his main adversary is an extraterrestrial GQ model who thinks that an ice palace is the perfect place to sit around in his pajamas.   And I would agree that there isn't much point in trying to find reason in fantasy.  Once you accept the premise that the impossible is perfectly normal, your rational mind should be able to just walk itself down to the pub and grab a couple of drinks while you aren't using it for a few hours.

Even so, my problem with Bat out of Hell v Superunknown wasn't simply a nitpicking search for rationality in an inherently irrational universe.  It was that I had absolutely no idea what was happening on even the most basic level.  One thing consistently fails to lead to another, but that doesn't stop another thing from happening of its own irrational accord.  On an initial viewing, Sense v Sensibility seemed to be a series of unrelated vignettes, centered around some romantic comedy cliche of gargantuan egos fighting against the inevitability of their inexplicable attraction.  And again, I'm not exactly expecting plausibility or realism from a movie about people who wear clothing that is both skin tight and indestructible, any more than I would expect a tasteful and character-driven nude scene from a horror film.  Even so, I do expect them to follow at least some twisting path of logic that is simple enough for me to grasp without having a child handy to explain it.  The real problem with Batman v Superman wasn't a lack of faithfulness to the source material, or a lack of realism.  It was the staggering number of times that anything at all would happen on screen and my first thought would be, "Wait...what?"  The story was so convoluted and absurd, it almost felt like the result of an Improv 101 class Yes-Anding each other until they realized that they needed to throw out about thirty pages of their script before submitting it in the morning.

Now, before I go too far down the rabbit hole of criticizing this movie, I want to establish my official Comic Book Geek Credentials right up front: I have none.  I read plenty of comic books as a kid, of course.  What else would a boy in the 80s do with his time between episodes of Ninja Turtles and Duck Tales?  However, I was never much of a superhero guy when it came to comics.  I got my Marvel and DC fixes through pretty much every other means you could imagine: toys, cartoons, movies, trading cards, you name it.  But when you get right down to it, I was always more of a comedy nerd, which led to a nearly complete disinterest in reading anything that didn't make me giggle.  So when it came to comic books, I eschewed the popular titles like Spider-Man or X-Men in favor of parody comics like Marvel's What The--?! and endless movie and TV tie-in comics, from Dinosaurs to Bill & multiple Roger Rabbit themed titles.  I'm probably the only person I know who can say that they've read every issue of Bill & Ted's Excellent Comic Book, which even in this era of ironic obscurism, I'm not sure that I can count as a positive achievement.  Though I will say that there is one scene from that last idiotic series that I consider to be very personally meaningful.  In the opening of one Bill & Ted comic, an accountant or some such fellow is toiling away in Hell, musing on the fact that the place isn't always as bad there as people make it out to be.  Every once in a great while, a cool, sunny day will break through the fire and brimstone to give you a moment of beautiful relief.  Which lasts exactly long enough to remind you of how terrible everything is all the rest of time you get a perfect, cool, sunny day, which last just long enough to remind you of how terrible things are all the rest of the time.  To this day, that is still the first thing that I think of any time that anything good happens to me.

Anyway, my point is that I'm not the sort of guy who can rant for hours about how Batman's belt was slightly the wrong color when compared to panel six of page twelve of so on and so forth.  Really, I don't know much about any superheroes beyond the highlights that can be boiled down and fit onto an action figure package back.  The practical upshot of which is that I don't usually tend to care about the creative liberties that are taken when adapting comics to film.  I don't care if characters are combined, or an origin story is tweaked slightly.  All I care about is that the movie is fun, entertaining, and not so overly complicated that I can't shut my higher brain off and mindlessly shovel popcorn while weaving my way through a basic understanding of what is going.

Of course, the downside to my limited education in graphic novels is that I don't usually have much background knowledge going in, which can be helpful in slogging your way through a convoluted mess like Sadbat v Supermodel. I listened to a review from my friends over at the Mass Moviecide podcast, who talked extensively about Lex Luther having orchestrated the showdown between our heroes.  But after two and a half hours of movie and an hour of their in-depth discussion, I couldn't begin to tell you how he actually did that.  As far as I could tell, he was just wandering around, doing his own thing before jumping in as an oddly well-informed MC for the fight of the century.  Sure, he acted out every American's fantasy of blowing up their elected representatives in an effort to turn the public against Superman, and he somehow created Doomsday to beat up the good guys once they'd reunited the halves of their friendship necklaces.  But what did he do to actually bring Batman and Superman together for an epic battle royale, other than introducing them to each other at a party?But hold on.  They say you should always mention two positive things before delivering any criticisms, so let's not get ahead of ourselves here.  First, I have to admit that Ben Affleck was a shockingly good Batman.  I say "shockingly" because it's really hard to believe that the most redeeming feature of this movie was also the thing that unleashed the biggest maelstrom of internet rage that I have ever seen for a bit of movie casting.  And yet, not only was Ben Affleck a good Batman, he was an even better Bruce Wayne.  With the benefit of hindsight, it's perhaps not surprising that Ben Affleck excels at playing a friendless rich kid who is past his prime, but such is the nature of reactionary public outrage.  He was great, the costume was great, and the warehouse fight scene is one of the best choreographed Bat-pummelings that I've ever seen.

And the second positive thing that I can say is that eventually, the movie came mercifully to an end.

Okay, back to the Luthor bashing.  (The movie didn't follow any real narrative order, so why should I?)  Now, as an actor, I think Jesse Eisenberg is a pretty good one, though he does have the unfornuate mark of a character actor that no matter what he says or does, he always looks and sounds like the exact same person.  And while I don't object to updating fictional characters to put them in a more modern context, or filmmakers trying something new and different with their interpretation of a role, it did feel like they were pushing that idea too far by arming Mark Zuckerberg with a mediocre poet's thesaurus and casting him as a criminal mastermind.  A criminal mastermind who, again, doesn't seem to actually mastermind much.  Perhaps a veiled commentary on Mark Zuckerberg taking full credit for Facebook?  Who's to say.

But apparently Lex Luthor is such an unrequited genius that he can just wander up to a sophisticated bit of alien technology and write the Wiki-how article on genetically modifying corpses. When he started becoming blood brothers with Zod's corpse, I had absolutely no idea what he was doing, why he thought to try doing it, or why the ship just accepted on good faith that he was its new master.  Though to be fair, that's probably at least partially my own fault.  I'm sure this must have been a callback to events in Man of Steel, which I haven't seen since its opening weekend.  And I could bemoan the fact that they're relying too heavily on an assumption that we all have a working knowledge of a mediocre movie from three years ago, but I'll give them a pass and acknowledge that I have an exceptionally poor memory for these kinds of things.

Anyway, however he managed it, Luthor plays My Heart Will Go On with a dead alien, and thus we are given Doomsday, an andogynous space orc who has oddly well defined buttocks for someone with no genitalia.  And side note, when I told my wife after the movie that this character had a name and it was in fact Doomsday, she nearly died laughing.  Not sure what says about the movie, but wanted to throw it out there.

But let's back up.  Wonder Woman, what?  No, let's back up even further.  Batman hates Superman because Superman accidentally killed some Wayne Corp employees.  Which is justifiable, because we all know that even with a WTF Pod discount, Zip Recruiter ain't cheap.  So Batman hates Superman because he now has no excuse not to give his friend's nephew a job, and Superman hates Batman because he takes the law into his own hands and has a way better car.  It all makes perfect sense.  So naturally, Batman tries to kill Superman with a stick made out of a stolen magic  space-rock, not because he thinks Superman is inherently evil, but because you can never trust someone who doesn't get their power from naming everything they touch Bat-Noun.  Again, this all makes perfect sense to me.

Then we meet the dramatic turning point of the movie: the big Batman v Superman showdown.  And after having spent an entire movie fueled with vengeful rage, Batman steadies his hand at the last second and decides that Superman must be a good guy after all.  Why?  Because they both have mothers named Martha. And from cinemas across the world we hear the collective cry of, "What the holy living fuck?"  Batman, The Dark Knight, The World's Greatest Detective, a man with an intellect so vast that he he can invent anything that you can attach the prefix "Bat" to, and the one thing that he hadn't considered when weighing the relative human goodness of a stranger was whether or not they are forever bonded by an arbitrary and meaningless coincidence.  Batman suddenly and irrationally forgives Superman of all his imagined sins simply because their mothers were both born when Martha was considerably more popular would be akin to saying, "Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya.  You killed my father.  Prepare to..hey, cool Deep Blue Something shirt.  Did you really catch the the '95 tour?  Breakfast at Tiffany's is good, sure, but you really have to explore their deep album tracks to appreciate their mastery of songcraft.  Sorry, what were we talking about? Couldn't have been anything important."

So the new Dynamic Duo decides to band together and defeat Doomsday, apparently unhindered by his absurd name.  But those of you who are still bothered by the death toll in Man of Steel's epic final battle can relax, because before the battle really begins, a news reporter conveniently points out that the downtown area is relatively empty since it's taking place after business hours.  Which is great, because instead of millions of people dying in the crossfire, the casualties will be limited to the homeless, anyone meeting for dinner on their first OK Cupid date, and all the night janitors in the city.  Begging the question, who is going to clean up this mess?  And by the way, while we're on the subject of lazy writing, I really hope that when the President of the United States orders a nuclear strike, his code word is, "May God have mercy on us all."  But I digress.

Doomsday tries to kill Batman, but he is miraculously saved by a scantily clad woman who happens to have an atomic-fire proof shield.  We of course recognize her as Wonder Woman, as this moment has been featured very prominently in all the promotional material for the film.  And Batman and Superman accept her as an ally based solely on a tiny bit of flirting with Bruce Wayne and a Google image search that reveled her to be in surprisingly good shape for a grandmother, with absolutely no follow up questions beyond, "Hey, do you know this chick?  No.  Good enough for me!"  And I know that I've been spoiled by Marvel spoonfeeding us hours of backstory in preparation for The Avengers, and that DC is trying to reverse that trend by using this film to pique our interest in the standalone films that will be coming.  But even so, as an audience member, I do feel like I need a little bit of hand hold when being introduced to a new character.  Because again, I'm not a comic book guy, and I know virtually nothing of Wonder Woman.  I never read any of her comics, I remember so little about the Justice League cartoon from the 80s that I didn't realize until a Wikipedia search from five seconds ago that it was actually called Super Friends, and I'd never seen so much as a second of the live action Linda Hamilton TV show until I was at a Greek Pizza place in middle of nowhere Maine about two months ago, where I'm sure it was being broadcast for the first time.  So you can imagine my confusion when Clark and Lois are sharing an emotional moment as the world crumbles in the background like a scene straight out of Fight Club, and we suddenly cut to an insert shot of Wonder Woman hogtying Doomsday with a glowing, golden lasso.  After a few minutes of searching the deep archives of my brain, I was able to conjure some vague recollection of this being a thing.  But for several minutes, I just wanted the fighting to stop long enough for Batman to ask her something like,  "What the hell is that thing?  Is it magic?  Or is a special micro-fibre Bat-lasso that works because you're a scientist and say so?  And where could you possibly have been hiding it in that non-outfit you decided to wear into the middle of a volcanic crater?"  (It has since been brought to my attention that it was on her hip the whole time, and was forged by elves so that it glows when orcs are near.)

Plus, speaking of our Super Friends, I'll be honest.  I was very excited when I learned that Aquaman was going to be in this movie, and even squealed a little when they released his first emo-headshot from the movie.  Once again, not because I was a fan of his comics, which I wasn't.  Rather, I was excited because he was my absolute favorite toy to play with in the bathtub when I was five, and I definitely feel like that merits a big-screen treatment.  So you can imagine my disappointment when he pulled a Luke Skywalker and did literally nothing in the actual movie.  We see him swim for two seconds in a private YouTube clip, then swim away.  Which I guess does at least constitute more leg movement than we got from Mr. Skywalker, but still.  I expected more.

But this is not to say that I didn't have fun.  As I've said, I have a lot less emotional investment in these characters than I do in Star Wars, so despite my criticisms, I was able to enjoy the mindless idiocy of it all.  And hey, despite Wonder Woman being a completely unnecessary and one-dimensional character, I did get excited to see more of her and Gone Batty Gone in the upcoming films of the franchise.  Even so, I wished the movie as a whole had been good enough that I cared even a little bit when Superman died.  Sure, it's not that emotionally meaningful of a loss because we all know it's only temporary, and he'll rise from the dead and ascend to the heavens again in a few Easters' time.  But when you're invested in a character, you are supposed to feel sad when faced with their suffering.  And with such a well-known cultural icon as Superman, it shouldn't take much to tug on the heart strings.  Instead, when Martha Kent gives Lois an engagement ring and she's confronted with the life that they could have had together, all I could think was, "Hey, anything to get out of wedding planning, right?"  Which is probably not the response that Zack Snyder was looking for.  But as long as he continues to put spectacle above substance, and substance above basic understanding and common sense, it's the one he's going to get.

I just hope that the negative response from critics doesn't cause DC to pull the plug on the franchise before we get enough real quality time with Aquaman, as my mother always used to...

-TC

P.S., If you want to hear much more entertaining discussions of this and other films, seriously, check out the Mass Moviecide podcast.

The Force Can Go Back to Sleep

***Warning:  This blog post contains pretty much nothing but spoilers about Star Wars: The Force Awakes.  While it's been out long enough that anyone who cares has probably seen it already, I still thought I should place this disclaimer right up front so that the one person who was holding out to experience it for the first time on glorious Blu-ray can't be offended that after months spent carefully treading through Internet comment boards like shark infested waters, they suddenly have everything spoiled at the last moment by some unknown idiot with an unpopular blog.  If that sounds like you, then consider yourself warned.***

For the last several months, I've been carrying around a deep, dark secret.  Something so terrible, so shocking that I spend every moment of my day consumed by a fear that someone will find out about the horrible truth that separates me from all mankind.  But you can't live your life in fear, so here goes: I didn't like Star Wars: The Force Awakens.  The few people that I have willingly discussed the matter with have even heard me go so far as to say that it it might just have retroactively ruined my love for all things Star Wars.  It's a bold statement, I know, running as it does so contrary to the state sanctioned opinion that this film represents the salvation of all things geeky.  To publicly deny its greatness is like denying the existence of God at a baptism: simultaneously sacrilegious and generally impolite.  But it's honestly how I feel.  I honestly think it wasn't a very good movie, and that its biggest faults were so great as to be an affront to the entire history of cinema.

Still with me?  No?  Good.

Before I get into exactly how I formed this opinion, I want to make one thing perfectly clear: I am wrong.  What is more, I know I am wrong.  No one in the world seems to share my view.  Critics hail it as the return of great sci-fi, and audiences praise it as a much needed palate cleanser after the colossally bad taste left from the Prequels.  As for me, I sat in audience of The Force Awakens with my arms crossed in stern disapproval, watching bitterly as the rest of civilization drooled greedily for more, like castaways who managed to escape their desolate island prison, only to land their makeshift raft directly inside a steak house.

With that much universal love for The Force Awakens, there can only be two possible explanations for my personal dissent.  First, the entire human population has been so severely brainwashed and deprived of happiness that they will immediately and mechanically fall in love with anything that nominally stimulates their pleasure centers, while I alone have managed to maintain my sanity in the face of this slowly decaying republic.  Second, and much more likely, is the possibility that I am nothing more than a joyless buzzkill who is desperately clinging to a wrong-headed misconception because it comforts me in a way that reason never could, like a climate change denier hanging on to the last scraps of vaguely credible pseudo-science for dear life, or the poor, dear souls who managed to convince themselves the finale to Lost was satisfying.  Occam's Razor and my limited sense of self-worth would suggest that it is highly unlikely that in an age of universal human decline, I could never possibly be the sole beacon of hope shining through the encroaching darkness of societal madness.  So in all probability, I must simply be wrong.

But of course, like any self-respecting American, I don't feel wrong.  And therefore, my ridiculous and factually unsupported opinion must be right.

In other reasons why my thoughts on The Force Awakens should be disregarded, I only saw the movie once on opening night.  Between the passage of time and my notoriously sieve like memory, it is entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that some of the more salient details have already been forgotten over the last two months.  Plus, I didn't lose my mind over Mad Max: Fury Road (a incredibly shot film with an atrociously bad script), and thought Jurassic World was just about the worst movie I've ever seen.  So I clearly don't have a great track record of picking winners in The Great Franchise Reboot Wars of 2015.

With those caveats in place, I guess what I'm trying to say is that anyone who feels like reading a poorly constructed and wrong-headed argument based on spotty recollection and a stubborn adherence to empirically incorrect personal perceptions should by all means keep reading.  The rest of you are welcome and encouraged to go back to your normal lives, secure in the knowledge that you aren't missing anything by ignoring the ravings of yet another mere Internet lunatic.

Now I wouldn't go so far as to say that there was nothing I enjoyed about The Force Awakens.  In fact, going in after Episode VII hysteria had been slowly mounting for months, my excitement was so great that for most of film's run time, I was willing to put any nagging criticisms aside and let the pros firmly outweigh the cons.  I thought that all the new cast members gave strong performances and created interesting and likable characters, and I was particularly impressed with Adam Driver.  Which is odd, considering that most people I know who loved the movie would still argue that Kylo Ren was whiny and too non-threatening to be taken seriously as a villain.  But I, for one, was intrigued by seeing a young, out of control villain who had not yet developed into a fully-formed icon of terror.  I liked that we were starting the franchise with a character who could grow from an angry, impetuous pawn into a truly terrifying leader once he realized the extent of his own power.  And perhaps due to my low expectations of Driver's acting abilities going in, I was amazed that his performance was anything more than an awkward, neurotic artist in space.

Furthermore, I thought the action scenes were everything you'd want from a big budget popcorn movie, and I appreciated the move away from the overused CGI of the prequels in favor of practical sets and effects.  It definitely scratched my nostalgia itch and felt more like a real Star Wars movie to see the old faces of the original cast returning for real this time, in a way was never achieved by the Absurdly Nimble Yoda, Implausibly Good Looking Obi-Wan, and Resting Bitch Face Pre-Vader from The Films That Shall Not Be Named.  Plus, it had lightsabers.  And there's nothing I love more in a movie than a good lightsaber fight.  Which is why to this day I maintain that Hot Shots Part Deux is a better film than The Godfather.  (Sorry Vito, but if you're going to whack someone, you really should do it with a controlled, handheld laser beam.)

There was plenty to like about the movie, so why didn't I?  I've already touched on one of the main reasons, and that's the fact that it felt like a real Star Wars movie.  Sure, by just about any measure The Force Awakens is a better movie than Episodes I-III combined.  It avoided so many of the mistakes from its predecessors, and succeeded on many counts.  But the prequels do have one advantage: They were easy to dismiss because they felt like they had so little to do with Real Star Wars.  What with the completely different aesthetic of the CGI, the rampant inconsistencies when compared to the original trilogy, and insane idea that all this history could have realistically been forgotten by an entire galaxy in just twenty years, it was easy to write them off as of little more consequence than a piece of mildly interesting fan fiction and appreciate them for the few merits that they did have. (I have trouble naming any off the top of my head, but I'm sure they involved lightsabers somehow.)

But through the extremes that J.J. Abrams and crew went through to distance themselves from the prequels and make the film feel more like they originals, they also made it feel incontrovertibly like part of the series.  The presence of Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, and Carrie Fisher alone are enough to tie back to the new film to the original series, which makes it so much harder to tell myself that it doesn't really count, so its flaws can be overlooked.  And I know that technically, the Star Wars Christmas (I'm sorry, Life Day) special also had those same actors and is hardly considered canonical.  But you know what?  It also had a musical number from Bea Arthur. CGI that shit onto Hoth and I'd disown The Empire Strikes Back, too.

So getting back to my original point, what are these perceived flaws that I'm having trouble looking past?  No one else seems to find anything wrong with the movie, so how many bad could its shortcomings really be?  Let's start with one of the more obvious and frequently cited criticisms, the similarities to the original Star Wars.  Overall, I didn't actually find this as bothersome as some of my fellow buzzkillers make it out to be.  I was fine that our main hero was a seemingly orphaned child who had been abandoned on a desert planet that seemed to be ruled largely by the scrap trade.  I was fine that the The Rebel Alliance and The Galactic Empire were alive and well, just with a fresh coat of paint and some new silly names (The Resistance and The First Order).  I didn't care that Poe's torture scene was virtually a beat-by-beat recycling of General, neé Princess, Leia's own interrogation, or that moments after meeting Han Solo he is quickly confronted by a couple bands of aliens who were exactly pissed about a deal gone wrong and competent as our dearly departed Greedo.

But there were a few similarities that did really bother me.  Most notably, I was extremely disappointed to learn that our main plot device was still blowing up Death Stars by exploiting a small architectural flaw.  Two movies worth of planet-destroying space stations being brought down by poor engineering revealed on a 3D map was already a bit much for me, and I didn't feel there was much left to be explored with that theme.  The fact that was justified by a self-referential quip from Han Solo about how there's always a way to blow these things up may have seemed cute to the filmmakers, but to me it felt like a confession that they were simply rehashing a tired formula and didn't have a better rationale for it than shrugging into the camera and saying, "what are ya gonna do?  It's Star Wars!"Furthermore, BB-8 was a completely unnecessary character.  He served no real purpose other than to recall a more charismatic beeping robot full of plans from the original films, sell a million toys, and propel an idiotic plot about a guy who ran away to hide, but left behind an exact map to his location which can only be delivered in pieces by unassuming robots, or possibly Max von Sydow.  I wouldn't have objected to BB-8 as a character if he done anything more than serve as a surrogate R2-D2 when it came time to order a messenger service.

And as far as I'm concerned, the less said about the Space Reggae Cantina Band, the better.  Return of the Jedi's attempt to recreate that magic of the Modal Noes was already a big swing and a miss before the Special Editions came along and turned some background tunes into the music video from Men in Black.

Beyond the parallels to the original, I also found plenty of things to dislike even among the list of things that I did like.  For example, as I said, I was glad that the movie was much less reliant on CGI than the prequels.  But the mixture of digital animation, modern filmmaking technology, and practical effects never quite meshed for me.  Filmed and projected in stunning high definition, the rubber suits and puppets gave the film a nice throwback quality, but often looked down right cheap when projected thirty feet high and crystal clear.  As a small example, I remember an early scene where Rey is speeding across the desert, and there is an scavenging bird puppet taking up most of the frame for a moment.  It's a throwaway kind of effect, a small little detail to round out the cinematic canvas.  But to me, it was just about single most fake looking thing I'd ever seen in a Star Wars movie.  And that includes Han Solo's digital head bob when Greedo shoots first, as well as Luke's suave reaction after his sister kisses him in Empire.

The practical effects looked particularly cheesy when contrasted with the bits of blatant CGI that did pop up.  Supreme Leader Snoke came off as disconcertingly cartoony when he was suddenly projected larger than life into the film.  And Maz Kanata seemed completely out of place in her own bar, as everyone else in the joint was trying so desperately to recreate the magic of the ethnically-diverse group of rubber-masked Aliens of Mos Eisley.  For the most part, the practical effects weren't too bad, and the CGI was pretty good.  But when put together, they made the film seem like a schizophrenic and slapdash mess.

I was also a little put off by the pacing of the film.  The story progresses with such brutal, break-neck speed that wasn't time for much in the way of real character development.  Instead, events consistently a little too neatly, and friendships form a little too quickly.  Pretty early in the film, natural born enemies Finn and Poe develop a shaky allegiance based on nothing more than mutual opportunism, yet within minutes they're laughing and bantering like soul mates.  Fate separates them, but when they are reunited an hour later, they embrace and start swapping clothing like sorority girls on club night.

Worse yet, not long after curmudgeonly Han Solo meets up with Rey he's already asking her to become his business partner with all the self-assured charm of an eighth grade band geek asking for a date to the prom, and based on what?  Fifteen minutes of shared screen time spent largely engaged in an absurd alien chase sequence straight out of an episode of Red Dwarf?  To say nothing about the fact that Anakin needed years of training to master the force, and Luke at least needed to do some mist-jogging with a puppet on his back before he could call himself a true Jedi.  But all Rey needed in order to fulfill her destiny was to be handed a lightsaber and guess that she probably possessed the powers of mind control.

Something I'm always a bit sensitive to in movies is bad dialogue, and The Force Awakens came up short on this count as well.  Cringe-worthy moments of contemporary pop culture infecting the behavior of interstellar heroes were mercifully few and far between, but I did wince a bit at things like Finn exclaiming, "Droid, please!" or BB-8 giving him a thumb-less up.  The bigger issue with the writing was all the shameless exposition that was thrown in to help us catch up on the events of the past thirty years.  And I know that Star Wars as a series is no stranger to exposition.  I've read articles reminding us that anytime things get a bit confusing in the original trilogy, a mentor-ghost conveniently shows up to plainly explain everything.  And that's certainly a fair point.  But to me, that's totally different (said every idiot desperately trying to validate a losing argument).  It's different because in those first films, we were establishing something new.  An entire universe was being created, and that required a little bit of hand holding.  Sure, Obi-Wan casually tosses out a reference to some Clone Wars that we've never seen, but that was just giving a bit of color to Luke's origin story.  And sure, Han Solo has to explain how The Millennium Falcon is the fastest ship in the galaxy, but that's just set up the joke of how decrepit it looks when Luke first sees it.  But The Force Awakens was just chock-full of exposition and backstory that felt less like fleshing out details of a story that's too big to tell, and more like people that were describing a movie that was more interesting than the one I'd paid twelve dollars to see.  I wanted to see the evolution of Kylo Ren and his betrayal of Luke Skywalker, and not just as a fifteen second flashback.  I wanted to see The First Order rising from the ashes of the the Empire.  I wanted to see Han and Leia as a playfully bantering yet still loving couple, or Luke as a fully developed Jedi master.  I wanted to see that movie.

As a result, General, neé Princess, Leia felt like almost a complete waste in the movie.  This is not meant as a slight against Carrie Fisher, of course, who I thought gave a pretty solid performance.  But her character is missing for half the movie, then when she finally does show up, she's mostly just serving as a mouthpiece for Big Exposition, especially when she manages to steal a few minutes alone with her ex-husband.  Which I suppose makes some sort of sense, considering that when you're left alone with your ex, you should always do whatever possible to avoid talking about your real feelings.  And what better way to do that than to just repeat things you already know, like what a fuck up your kid is?  But Leia is supposed to be an important, strong female character, one of the most important characters in the Star Wars universe, and yet she doesn't seem to serve much of a purpose in this movie.  Sure, she had a fancy new job title, but she does almost nothing that couldn't have been done just as well by Admiral Akbar, who probably got paid a lot less to come out of retirement.

Even more than Leia, I was deeply disappointed with how they chose to use Luke.  That is to say, I was really disappointed that they didn't use him at all.  Now this is a complaint that I will definitely attribute to personal preference rather than any real flaw with the movie itself.  But ever since the 80s, for as long as I've been able to experience thoughts more complex than "hungry" or "tired," I've been waiting for more Luke Skywalker.  And when it was announced that the entire original cast would be returning for Episode VII, I was over the moon with excitement at the prospect of finally seeing The Continuing Adventures of Luke Skywalker, even if he was going to be a bit older, hairier, and doughier.  So I felt badly let down when I learned that A) his story of the last thirty years consisted of little more than pussying out and running off to hide in a petulant funk the moment that anything complicated happened; and B) when we picked up his story, he would appear in about two shots and speak exactly zero lines of dialogue. Granted, he will almost certainly have a much larger role in Episode VIII, but that's not the point.  After thirty years of patiently hoping, I think I'm entitled to a little instant gratification, dammit.

Then, to round out my disappointment in the original cast, there was Han Solo.  And more specifically, pretty much everything about him.  When he appeared in the first full trailer, I was excited, even ecstatic.  The wry smile, the familiar blaster, the awesome jacket.  It was all there.  When he said "Chewy, we're home," we all knew he was referring to The Millennium Falcon in the background, and we were pumped to see all the elements finally reassembled.  And if that wasn't enough to get me pumped, it even looked like Harrison Ford can act again.  Based on that one line, it looked like Harrison ford had regained his ability to at least pretend he cared about a script.  I can't remember the last time that I saw Ford in a movie or a trailer and felt like he gave even a little bit of a shit about the words that were coming out of his mouth, and I was excited to think that J.J. Abrams had somehow cajoled him into doing a good job.  Based on those three little words, it looked like this movie was going to be an incredible return to form, not just for Ford but for the entire franchise.  Any hesitation I might have had about new Star Wars films was after the prequels was forgotten and forgiven.  I was was ready for greatness.

Unfortunately, it seems that they picked that line not just because it was a good sound bite for the trailer, or because it encapsulated the idea that the franchise was being restored to its former glory, but because it was Harrison Ford's only decent performance in the entire movie.  Now I will grant you that his work in The Force Awakens was definitely stronger than his other recent work, but "relatively not bad" is not the same thing as "good."  After the film's release, I heard numerous people say that he should be (or at this point, should have been) nominated for an Oscar for his revival of Han Solo, and I just couldn't believe my ears.  To me, nearly every line seemed like he hadn't bothered to memorize the script, and before every take just said "I'll ad-lib something Star Wars-y, and you can cut around it."  But they didn't.  And as bad a job as they did of editing around his dispassionate acting, they did an even worse job of cutting around the fact that he can't run to save his life.  Maybe it was old age, or maybe it was the injury he sustained on set, but his movements were all so jerky and sluggish that every action scene that he appeared was tainted by more than a hint of absurdity.  He's not a warrior or a hero anymore, he's just a dottering old man stumbling through a battlefield where by any reasonable measure he should have been the first casualty.

Beyond Ford's performance, the whole character of Han Solo felt a little bit off to me.  The aforementioned Greedo-esque showdown with the rival smugglers he'd crossed, and the ensuing monster chase sequence felt more like a parody of Star Wars than anything else.  It was too ridiculous, too over-the-top, like some studio exec had chimed in and said "how can we take this character that everyone knows and crank it to eleven?"  When he fires Chewbacca's crossbow for the first time and says with awe, "I like this thing," it was a cute little funny moment, but it seemed very strange that he and his Wookie sidekick had spent their entire lives together, but he hadn't realized what his best friend's weapon of choice actually did until that very moment.  And again, his oddly fast sentimental attachment to Rey seemed completely unwarranted for any reason other than a dirty old man wanting to hang out with a pretty young scoundrel.  Plus, after he and Leia had presumably spent years together, even going so far as to produce and raise a colossally disappointing child together, it didn't seem believable that upon reuniting they'd go straight back to annoying each other without sharing a single honest emotional moment beyond a two second "glad you didn't just die on this battlefield as you should have" hug.

But even so, I was still willing to go along with it, Solo and all.  Sure the movie wasn't perfect, but who cares?  It's Star Wars!  There are lightsabers and banter and Chewbacca!  What more could a ten year old boy at heart ask for?  Then came...the scene.  The scene that irrevocably ruined the whole movie for me, and made it impossible for me to view the entire franchise without a thin veneer of white hot rage.  I am of course referring to the death of Han Solo.

Now let me start by confessing that I didn't want Solo to die at all.  I know so many people who, like Harrison Ford himself, thought he should have died back in Jedi, but I never agreed with that opinion.  Star Wars has always been about escapist fantasy, and real human tragedy has no place in it.  Obi-Wan's death is kind of sad the first time you see it, but he's a relatively unfamiliar character at that point, and he keeps coming back as a ghost every few minutes, so you get the feeling that it was all for the best.  Alderaan getting blown up is a theoretical tragedy, sure, but it's a nameless, faceless tragedy.  We've never seen its verdant hills or happy people, so it's hard to relate to on any level greater than the abstract.  C-3PO gets blown up a bit, but Chew puts him back together and he's good as new, even if his head is temporarily backwards.  And hell, the saddest thing that happens in Return of the Jedi is that in the middle of a major galactic war, one of the mildly recognizable teddy bears fails to get back up.  Star Wars isn't about the real costs of war, it's about good looking heroes going on a fun adventure, and learning a little something about themselves in the process (but not too much).  It's the sort of story where you know the good guys are going to win and everyone lives happily ever after, so the stakes are never that high.  It would have seemed out of place if in Jedi, one of the central characters suddenly showed his vulnerability and became mortal.  And if he didn't do it then, it's certainly too late to do it now.

I didn't want Han Solo to die, not just because it didn't feel like it fit the piece, but also because of my own emotional attachments.  Han Solo had been such an integral part of my childhood that he felt like a real person to me.  I remember Star Wars from before I remember meeting most of my family.  In fact, when I first saw Star Wars, I was so young that I couldn't yet distinguish between real and fantasy, so I believed the characters were real people.  I remember having a nightmare once where Darth Vader showed up in my mom's bedroom, and when I woke up the next morning, the thought never occurred to me that it might have only been a dream, because the characters were so real that they could easily pop by at any moment.  Supposedly they lived a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but I didn't have a fully formed concept of death yet, and probably couldn't read either.

But since then, I've seen each film in the original trilogy more times than any other movie by far, and spent countless hours reliving their exploits with toys, or running around the back yard pretending to be a Jedi by waving around candlesticks or anything else I could find that was vaguely shaped like the handle of a lightsaber.  To lose a character from this world felt like losing someone close to me, and it hurt.  Which, to be fair, is exactly what the filmmakers were probably going for.  They wanted to shock us by unexpectedly taking away something that we loved, and leave us feeling scared and vulnerable.  And they succeeded.  When it actually happened and Han Solo tumbled into oblivion, I was sad, angry, and thirsting for Kylo Ren's blood, just like they wanted.

All that being said, I know that just because I don't want something to happen doesn't mean that it won't or shouldn't happen, and Solo's fate is not up to me.  But if they're going to destroy something so precious to me, and a character that is so iconic in film history, I would at least hope that they would do it in a way that honored the character and felt right for the story.  And as soon as the first wave of my initial, purely emotional reaction subsided, I found plenty of better reasons to feel disappointed in the scene.

For starters, it is so obviously foreshadowed that you see it coming a mile away.  Sure, I was a bit shocked when it actually happened because a little part of me didn't believe they'd really do it.  But from nearly the first minute that you see Han Solo on screen, it seemed so clumsily obvious that his death was coming that you could hardly considered it a wry plot twist.  Leia saying "it always feels like the last time I'm going to see you," the surrogate emperor asking Kylo Ren if he could could kill his father, Solo's odd, sad sentimentality in wanting a new partner to cruise around with him like the old days, the absurdity of an old smuggler still running a young man's game.  It all adds up to a fate that was sealed long before the camera started rolling.  Especially the nonsensical decision that he and Chewy should split up when laying explosives for no readily apparent reason.  When Chewy howls his wordless plan, Solo's agreement reads as though he were saying, "yes, Chewbacca, your plan is narratively necessary, therefore I see no reason not to agree to it without hesitation."  Before he even gets to that bridge, any viewer with a shred of sense knows he's not coming back.  So what should have been a major plot twist came off as nothing more than a boardroom decision to shock the audience and get rid of their most expensive actor so that they could smoothly pass along the reigns to a new class of more photogenic heroes.

Furthermore, when people talked about Han Solo dying at the end of Return of the Jedi, they always talked about the significance of him dying as a hero.  Committing an act of self-sacrifice would complete the growth of his character from a scoundrel to a true man of honor.  He'd fly The Millennium Falcon directly into the Death Star, knowing he wouldn't come back, all for the sake of destroying the Empire and saving his friends.  The ultimate reward he'd been searching for would not be money or glory, but the knowledge that he was part of something greater than himself.  Instead, we get him walking into an obvious trap because his ex-wife nagged him into a pointless exercise in futility.  It wasn't a sacrifice or an act of bravery, it was foolishness for Solo to make himself so vulnerable when everyone else in the universe could tell that there was no real chance of success, and his death didn't accomplish anything.  All it did was remind us that the bad guy was, in fact, a bad guy.  Han Solo didn't die as a warrior, he died as a pathetic and sentimental old fool, wandering obliviously into a useless, inevitable demise.

You could argue that it wasn't foolish because it was his son.  There's a relationship between them as father and son that made it necessary for Solo to at least try, even if he knew he was risking his life and would probably fail.  But that brings me back to the overly-rapid narrative and lazy writing.  Yes, there should be an emotional dynamic to a father and son confronting each other, especially when it ends in patricide.  But the film never shows you that relationship, it just assumes that you'll presuppose one and accept it on face value.  Which completely robs the scene of any legitimate emotional value, at least for me, because I don't think the murder of a father by his son can possibly mean anything if it's literally the first time you've ever seen them together.  In order for the impact of that decision to be...well, impactful, you need to see the bond that is being severed, you need some reason to believe that there is love and pain and conflict shared between these two people.

But in the film, Han and his son have never spoken, they've never been in the same room as each other.  We haven't even seen so much as a picture of them maybe having once been happy together, or a crestfallen look from Solo in the flashback to Kylo Ren's Jedi-slaughtering teen angst phase. We haven't seen them love each other, or hate each other, or try to reconcile and fail. These two characters have no real connection to each other beyond a little bit of clumsy exposition and the assumption that fathers and sons tend to like each other at least a little bit.  As a result, Kylo Ren murdering his father wasn't the culmination of a real emotional struggle,  it was a cheap gimmick designed to shock some meaning into a story, without having to waste time on actual human feelings or character development.  If there had been one moment of interaction between the two, perhaps when Solo sees Ren carrying Rey into his spaceship, it would have gone a long way towards fixing the problem.  Instead, we're left to project our own ideas of the father-son relationship onto one that never existed.

And worst of all, he dies completely without ceremony or recognition of how meaningful that moment was.  Han Solo is one of the most iconic characters in the entire history of cinema, so his death should be a monumental event.  So how is it handled?  A crumpled body falls pitifully into the void, and everyone pretty much moves on with their lives.  Chewy screams a bit, Leia looks sad in two shots, and then EVERYTHING IS FINE!  The final lightsaber battle isn't about avenging Han's death, it's about applauding the (not at all surprising) revelation that Rey is the real heir apparent to the Jedi line instead of Finn.  Once we've firmly established that she's a badass, the gang goes home and Han is almost completely forgotten.  There is no funeral or memorial or kind words.  The women hug it out, and quickly move on.  Because who has time to mourn one father figure when a map to a new and better one has been discovered!  Once Solo is dead, it's almost as though he never existed.  Rey just steals his ship and his best friend, then confidently flies off in search of a guy who has isolated himself from all of human civilization, but still manages to keep his dress robes dry cleaned.

All in all, it was just too much disappointment wrapped up in one single character for me, and it retroactively ruined all of the enjoyment I'd managed to experience so far.  I know that I'm reacting a bit like a petulant child, refusing to reconsider the validity of my first knee-jerk reaction.  And I know that I'll probably calm down and see the film again eventually, and that maybe by then the sting will have faded enough that I can reappraise it with fresh eyes and an open mind.  Maybe some day down the road I'll even learn to love the film like everyone else.  But for right now, my Loss-O-Meter is stuck firmly on Anger, and it shows no signs of progressing.

I'm sure that no one who has bothered to read this far would agree with me, nor would ask them to.  Even if we assume for the moment that I'm right and The Force Awakens is badly overrated, I wouldn't want to be responsible for opening anyone's eyes to that fact and bringing them down into the joyless mire of nerdy, nit-picking disappointment that I wallow in.  If you can look at The Force Awakens and only see it for the amazing spectacle that it was, you're far better off living in your world of delusion than going through it as a brooding malcontent like me.  And if by some off chance I have correctly assessed the film as a deeply flawed, painstakingly designed toy commercial that was soullessly designed by corporate committee to be too big to fail, then I can only hope that some day I'll be able to quiet the critical part of my brain and rejoin you all in a world of blissful ignorance where I can once again enjoy a good space battle without asking too many questions.  Maybe when Episode VIII comes out...

-TC

P.S. If you haven't had enough of my meaningless thoughts, my first novel is available now!  It's a bit dark, creepy, and weird, so you might not approve of it any more than this post, but it's at least a little bit funny from time to time.

Notes From the Slumber Yard

As pretty much everyone who is capable of being bombarded by Facebook ads probably knows already, I recently published my first novel.  For anyone who missed the countless sponsored memos, "Dreams from the Slumber Yard," is available now in both paperback and for the kindle on Amazon.  (See how subtly I worked that in there?)While I don't want to become the sort of person who drones on endlessly about my minor personal achievements, or constantly subjects my friends and well-wishers to a Jay Sherman-esque plea for sales, I have been getting a lot of questions about this project.  They range from "where did you find the time?" and "how many pages is it?", to the most frequently asked question, "why didn't you tell me you were working on a book, you big secretive jerk?"  While to some it may have seemed to have came out of nowhere, this book has actually been my main writing project for the last year and a half, and I thought I'd take a few minutes to give everyone a little background.

The story originally began over a decade ago.  I was taking a screenwriting class in college, where I had an assignment to write a short film.  I'd been kicking around a few ideas when a single joke popped into my mind, which was followed quickly by a single scene.  Unfortunately, due to the passage of time and my less than infallible memory, I don't remember exactly what the first joke was.  But the scene that developed around it was cheap, local mattress commercial where an oblivious business owner dressed up like an angel and attempted to hawk merchandise through mildly sacrilegious humor.  It may not have been much of a starting point, but it made me giggle quietly to myself, so I felt like I was on to something.  From there, I started brainstorming a few more ideas for similar commercials, which quickly filled up a few note cards and continued to make me snicker.  But it wasn't a story yet.  I wanted to know who this man was outside of the studio.  What was his life like that these feeble attempts at creativity were the highlight of his existence?  I envisioned him as a lonely, delusional man, trapped in cycle of mundane monotony who was desperately searching for something to help validate a life that was no longer fulfilling.  And in trying to do something meaningful with his life, no matter how trivial, he ended up becoming a laughing stock behind his back.

At the same time, like most people in their early twenties, I was also busy taking my own personal relationship drama and blowing it way out of proportion.  And again, like so many young people, I was going through a phase where I imagined that all the things that were going wrong in my life would last forever, which also didn't help my fixation on the issue.  Of course, now that I'm older and wiser, I realize that nothing I believed to be important at the time actually was, and that life isn't defined by a single thing going badly indefinitely, but by a ever changing series of things going differently badly in rapid succession.

At any rate, as I was writing the story of the mattress man, I was so obsessed with the idea of spending an entire lifetime alone that I decided to inflict such a fate on my newly minted hero.  And to make matters worse for him, he wasn't alone because circumstances had conspired against him, an monstrous appearance that would repel anyone short of an idealistic undergrad trying to prove to her friends that looks don't matter, or unexpectedly apocalyptic turn of events that had left him as the only surviving member of the human race who hadn't developed a hankering for brains.  Rather, he was alone because of the person that he was, and the choices that he'd made.  Like myself, he was sad, self-hating, afraid, and had no one to blame for his fate but himself.  This didn't stop him from becoming bitter and blaming anyone who came close enough to cast a disapproving glare at.

Things were already starting to get dark for the mattress man, but even so, my passion for writing has always been rooted in comedy, and that's what I wanted his story to be.  I wanted it to be an uncomfortable yet romantic comedy about a guy who was completely and utterly smitten and would do anything for his true love.  But instead of winning her over with cliched series of grand romantic gestures that reveal his true inner beauty and wear down the reluctant object of his affection, his unfamiliarity with personal relationships would cause him to nervously behave in an increasingly strange and creepy manner.  He'd remain charming and likeable on one level, while being frighteningly obsessive on another.  When I first started writing, I wasn't sure if I wanted people to like him, hate him, or pity him in the end.  But I wanted to mash all those reactions together and see what came out on the other side.  The original one-line description I would always give people who asked about the script was, "It's an awkwardly romantic comedy about a middle-aged mattress salesman who starts stalking a younger woman."  So, you know...just your run of the mill boy-meets-girl love story.

And so "For the Grace of You," as it was originally known, was born.  The title came from a lyric in the Simon & Garfunkel tune, "Katy's Song," which goes:

And as I watch the drops of rainWeave their weary paths and die,I know that I am like the rain,There but for the grace of you go I.

Years later I would learn that fair use didn't allow you to use song lyrics without permission.  And while I wasn't entirely sure that Paul Simon could sue me for lyrics that were already partially lifted from The Bible, I didn't want to risk any lawsuits over a frivolous personal project, and changed the title and the line of the script that quoted it accordingly.

But again, being in my early twenties and suffering from the delusional sense of self-importance that usually accompany them, I was convinced of two things: First, I was an indisputible genius who had produced an incredible film script that the world absolutely needed to see.  And second, that I would have no trouble finding someone who recognized my undeniable talents and would put up the cash to make my movie.  Which I would also direct, of course, reassuring my eventual investors that my lack of directing experience was inconsequential because "I have a vision."  After all, that's how all movies get made, right?So I quit my first job to make my first film.  And the experience wasn't a total loss.  My producing partner and I did manage to hire a fund raiser who successfully raised less money than her two-week salary.  We took a business trip to Philadelphia where we met the man who invented the infomercial and ate a frightening amount of consecutive cheesesteaks.  And I got some invaluable insight from a professional script doctor who told me that the script was so good that he would love to help me, but only if I gave him the large pile of money that we hadn't raised.  As useful as those learning experiences may have been, they weren't enough to get a production off the ground, and my filmmaking career came to a swift halt before it even began.

And so the script sat on my computer for a number of years, read only by the few friends and girlfriends I would occasionally share it with.  When I decided that I wanted to write my first novel, I decided to revive the project, thinking that it would be an easy way pump out a book and start experimenting with the novel for a bit.  After all, it was already written, right?  All I'd have to do is transcribe it from Final Draft into Word, do a bit of reformatting and fill in a few gaps, then boom!  I have a book!However, when I sat down to re-read the script for the first time in many years, I quickly realized that I hadn't accounted for a few things.  First of all, scripts and novels are incredibly different types of writing, and what you think will work on screen won't always translate perfectly without visual aids.  And secondly, I realized that like most people, I hadn't been anywhere near as clever as I thought I was at twenty-two.  The overall story was there, and there were occasional lines that I still liked.  But the script was full of plot holes, unfunny jokes, Olympic class leaps in logic, and some rather nonsensically "poetic" voiceover about the nature of loneliness.  Like I said, it wasn't an entirely bad script, but it was nowhere near as closed to done as I thought when I picked it back up.

What I thought would be an easy experiment with a new kind of writing turned into a life-consuming passion project that sucked up nearly every free minute I could find.  Over the next year and a half, I would come home from work every day and write.  And re-write.  And re-write again.  I did three major drafts of the novel, each one a nearly complete overhaul from the version that came before it.  I re-wrote virtually every word of the book on every single pass until I was finally as happy with it as I had once been as a naive kid in his early twenties.

What I came away with is something that may still be imperfect, but it is something that I am immensely proud of.  I'm proud of it as a goal that I set for myself and accomplished; I'm proud of it as the completion of a decade-long project; and I'm proud of it as a story.  Equal parts funny and unsettling, it's a complicated tale of love and obsession, and I'm so glad that I'm able to share it with you all.  The book is available now from Amazon in both paperback and for the Kindle, and I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it.  Or, to put it another way:

 -TC

Into the Woods

This blog has grown increasingly serious lately.  As we've been dealing with one collective tragedy after another, from mass shooting to our equally derranged mass votings, it's becoming increasingly difficult to remain flippant in the face of a callous, uncaring world that is slowly going mad.  However, I still strongly believe in the power of humor to help us work through difficult times, and let's be honest, sometimes you just need a break from all the heaviness that occupies so much of our attention.  With that in mind, I wanted to share a silly little story about a topic that stirs so little emotion or controversy that discussing it could in no way be construed as a serious political statement.  I am of course referring to the topic of gun control.

Okay, maybe it's a bit of a touchy subject.  Especially when dealing with one of the most consistently contentious questions surrounding the issue, whether or not we should be banning the sale and ownership of assault rifles.  There is a lot of extreme rhetoric floating around this issue on both sides.  Some say they're weapons of war that have no place in the hands of private citizens.  Others say they're essential tools for ensuring our safety against criminals and terrorists.  And still others would argue that, sure, assault weapons are probably unnecssary in most people's day to day lives, but if we ban them then we're opening up the door to our next lefty, liberal president coming 'round your house and personally collecting all your guns so that he may melt them down and use the metal to print new money to be handed out to poor people.  Then there are the defeatists, people who say that there are just too many guns out in the world to make any meaningful change, so what's the point in trying?  Or their counterparts who see the constitution as a binding contract that can't be adjusted to fix simple grammatical errors, much less the clarification or reexamination of a potentially flawed premise, those who argue that there's no point in talking about change, because it's not like there's some magical way to ammend the constitution.

Yes, passions run high.  Yes, it's an important matter to a lot of different people looking at it from a lot of different perspectives.  And yes, it's a conversation that has far reaching rammificaitons to our fundamental definitions of freedom and safety.

Even so, I maintain that this story is mostly just silly.  Mostly.

First, we need a little backstory.  Okay, we don't technically need it, but it provides a great context in which to insert a few unnecessary attempts at humor.  Back in the summer, my wife and I decided to go to a bluegrass festival upstate.  The festival took place over the better course of a week, but we decided to go for a single day as there are only so many banjo songs about trains that one can listen to before they all start to blend together.  That number, if anyone is wondering, is significantly smaller than the number of songs on a single bluegrass band's typical set list.  Even so, we like the down to earth, folky sound of acoustic instruments accompanied by the down to earth smell of overpriced tent food, and decided to make it as full a day as possible and stay the night so that we could hootenanny long past our bedtime.

As hotels are prohibitively expensive and we aren't the sort of dedicated festival goers who have invested in an RV, we opted to camp.  Which, for the record, is never my first choice of lodging.  Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the occasional bit of nature in my life.  I love the peaceful stillness of the forest, the view from on top of a mountain, or the gentle sound of a babbling brook.  I'm just the sort of unadventurous urbanite who would much rather enjoy them in the form of an overly long nature documentary series, the serene calm of nature's bounty regularly being broken up by large animals ferociously eating smaller ones.  So I don't tend to go nuts for camping like some people do.  In fact, to me, the whole idea of camping seems to fly in the face of the entire history of human civilization.  Our entire existence up to this point has been to create more comforts for ourselves, constantly distancing ourselves from the natural world from which we came.  We needed shelter from the elements, so we built huts, then houses.  But even as we developed finer building materials, from thatch to brick, the elements kept creeping in.  So we created space heaters and fans and air conditioners to further ensure that the world outside didn't impinge on our ability to sit about in our underwear.  Once the novelty of that began to wear off, we needed entertainment in our homes, so we invented board games and TV and Netflix to amuse ourselves and anyone we could trick into coming over so that we wouldn't have to leave the house.  Then when it became too bothersome to try to get other people to come over, we started inventing substitutes for other beings, from robotic pets and maids, to flashlights that you can have sex with, all for the purpose of creating this barrier between ourselves and our natural state of being.

We do all these things, then what do we do next?  We turn to each other and say, "Hey, do you want to pay thirty-five bucks to sleep next to a tree?"And we all reply in unison, "Sure, as long as we can get drunk and set things on fire, why not?"But I digress.  I agreed to go camping, partly because it was the will of the group and I don't like to difficult, but mostly because I'm cheap, and typically, the most economical place to sleep is next to a stump.  Plus, you can pass as a much more authentic banjo aficionado if you haven't slept or showered in at least forty-eight hours.  So it was that we found ourselves crawling out of our sleeping bags bright and early on Saturday morning before heading out in search of music, merriment, and deep fried everything.

We had a lot of fun at the festival, but the day was cut a little bit short when it began to rain around sunset.  At first, we weren't particularly bothered by the gentle sprinkling.  If anything, the light dampening helped to heighten the sense of adventure, and reinvigorate the subtle aroma of stagnant human sweat.  But as dark storm clouds began to ominously thunder in the distance, and we could see the inevitable torrential downpour making its way towards us, we decided that it was time to pack it in.  Perhaps a more dedicated bluegrass fan would have stuck it out with nothing more than a makeshift poncho to get them through the deluge and the ensuing mud orgy.  But we are weak city folk, and prefer our orgies dry and freshly showered.  And really, after you've spent eight hours listening to nasally white people sing about trains, you've pretty much gotten the gist of the show.  So we packed up our damp blankets and headed back to the car.

When we arrived at the campground, it was almost eerily silent.  The ground was becoming soft and soggy as the dense forest canopy proved no match for the buckets of water that were being dropped upon it.  Once even the  most waterproof of tents had tested the limits of their warranties, all the other campers had either left, or gone to sleep, or headed over to camp store for shelter and stale junk food.  There were no signs of life to be heard through driving rain, not that we would have heard them, sitting as we were inside our car, fruitlessly hoping that the rain would pass before our consciousness did.  After sitting for an hour and picking at the amorphous blob that our Trader Joe's marshmallows had become, we eventually decided to give up and join those who had crawled into their sleeping bags early for a damp snooze.

The rain finally tapered off a little after midnight, and we were woken back up almost immediately by the sounds of the forest springing to life in complete defiance of the site's imposed quiet hours.  Music started playing, fires were lit, and teenage couples went for boisterous walks to the bathroom, occasionally stopping directly outside our tent to cry in each others arms about the romantic scars that would haunt them forever until they were no doubt forgotten in twenty years.

Needless to say, when the camp woke up, so did we.  Like the cranky old people that we are, my wife and I tried to ignore the signs of life around us, but it was no use.  Like someone trying to sleep next door to a frat party, staying in bed eventually became little more than an unnoticed protest about the injustice of the world.  So when Leah popped by our tent to ask if we wanted to build a fire, I agreed and promptly got up.  My wife, on the other hand, who was more dedicated to the cause then I, decided to stand firm on the picket line and continue pretending to sleep in.  Ordinarily, I might have been inclined to follow suit, but we still had half a lump of dirty marshmallow kicking around the floor of the car, and there's very little that I can't be persuaded to do if s'mores are involved.

No sooner had we started rooting around in the trunk for firewood than a man came over from the neighboring campsite.  He immediately struck me as the consummate stereotype of an outdoorsman, friendly and likable to a fault, early thirties with a stubbly beard and doughy sheath of skin covering his muscular build.  Fully prepared for a late night camping party, he was decked out in camouflage pajama pants and flip flops, and already boisterously drunk.  Though that was perhaps inevitable, as apparently he'd stolen an entire case worth of shitty liquor from his boss, and was making sure that none of it went to waste.  Ever the charming and gracious host, he invited us to join his family at their campsite, and offered us a drink before even asking our names.  He even offered us the good booze if we weren't in the mood for the grape vodka and Mountain Dew Black cocktail that he was favoring on that particular evening.  When we declined, saying that we really wanted to build a fire of our own, he kept wandering back at regular intervals to share a laugh and help fan our damp, sad, smoldering embers.  All around, he seemed like a very nice, friendly, and helpful guy.

The only trouble was, after his first few trips back to our site, he wanted to talk almost exclusively about hunting and, in particular, his guns.  Which wasn't much of a problem in and of itself.  I may not know much about guns, but I'm always happy to listen to someone talk about their passions, and maybe learn something new.  But in this particular case, I was a little put off by the fact that all the gun talk was regularly interrupted by our new friend insisting that he was, in fact, completely crazy.  And if there are two subjects that don't go well together, they are guns and possible mental instability.

Still, I wasn't too worried.  As a general rule, I don't pay a lot of attention to people who call themselves crazy anyway.  In my experience, anyone with the self-awareness to call themselves crazy probably isn't.  "Crazy" is a shorthand moniker that socially awkward, aspiring creative types like to apply to themselves in hopes that it will sufficiently substitute for "interesting."  As such, I don't think you should be anywhere near as concerned about someone who calls himself crazy as someone who assures you that they are the only one who can see things for what they really are.  Especially if this assurance is followed by the word "man."  If you ever have to pick between sharing a train car with someone who calls himself crazy and someone who says things like "my mind works on a whole 'nother level, man," I'd guess that the crazy person is more likely to let you enjoy your book in peace.I did start to get a little concerned, though, when he told us about his preferred weapon for killing deer in his yard.  As he explained it, and I feared he might eventually have to explain it in front of a judge, he had a special Nuisance License for hunting deer.  In that neck of the woods, deer are badly overpopulated, and as such viewed as pests.  So with his special license, he was legally allowed to kill deer out of season, by any means necessary, if they come on to his property and start causing problems.  And since you can't leave a rifle sitting by the kitchen door for obvious safety reasons, he kept a baseball bat there instead."

They're a little harder to get that way," he explained, "since they spook so easily.  But if a herd wanders in and you're quiet enough, you can usually take down one of the dumber ones."  Still the gracious host, he even invited us back to his place to go deer clubbing if we were up for it.  We politely declined his offer, as it hardly seemed appropriate given the hour and the fact that we didn't have our bludgeoning permits on us.

Then he started walking us through the rest of his arsenal.  There were rifles, hand guns, shotguns.  Some new, some antique family heirlooms, just all kinds of guns with names and numbers that meant nothing to me.  I quickly began to lose count, but the important point, as he reminded us repeatedly was that if the government ever came and tried to take any of his guns away, he was pretty sure that he had enough of them to hold off an invasion for at least a month.  Which seemed a bit optimistic to me, given how many guns the US Army has.  But he seemed very confident, and it didn't seem like a good idea to suggest that he might not be as good at shooting people as he might think.

But his latest purchase was his prized possession.  He had just acquired his very first assault rifle, an AR-15, and was very excited to tell us all about it.  It was fully legal and only semi-automatic, of course, though his buddies had shown him how to modify it to fire fully automatically.  Which, to his credit, he seemed to think was a bad idea if you didn't want to attract the authorities.

Now, in our sheltered, urban existence, it's not every day that we get to talk to an open and enthusiastic owner of an assault rifle, so our curiosity was piqued.  Leah asked him what made him buy one in the first place, and it turns out he had a perfectly reasonable explanation: he bought it out of spite.  Due to reasons and legal technicalities that I didn't quite follow, he had been turned down when trying to purchase another, much less dangerous gun.  In any case, he felt this was unfair as he was fully licensed and had a clean record.  So in a fit of rage, he drove to another county where he knew he could purchase an assault rifle.  His reasoning went like this: "If they won't let me buy the gun I want, I'm going to buy the biggest, most dangerous thing that they don't want me to have, just to show 'em."  Couple that statement with an increasingly strong smell of Vodka and artificial grape flavoring, and I started getting a bit uncomfortable again.

Leah, on the other hand, didn't seem the slightest bit perturbed, and kept pressing for answers.  "But why do you actually need a gun like that?" she asked.

Our new friend paused for a long moment as he contemplated the question.  "I dunno," he eventually said with a shrug.  "Because it's cool."

Which, for me, was nearly as frightening a response as if he'd let out a blood curdling scream, then muttered "vengeance" in a low, raspy voice.  Not because it made this particular man dangerous, of course, but because of what the rationale signaled about the average gun owner.  Are people really buying these weapons for no better reason than because they can, and it's cool?  Are we really allowing our public policy and safety to be swayed by the same sort of reasoning that Ralphie employed when asking for an official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle?  Call me crazy (after a few Grape Mountain Dew's I might even call myself crazy), but I find it hard to believe that when the founding fathers were drafting the second amendment, their first intent was to protect our God given right to have cool toys.  You know, when drafting the bill of rights, I really doubt that James Madison turned to George Mason and said, "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, because dude, muskets are SICK!"Needless to say, we still had some follow up questions, and Leah still had enough of a sense of personal safety to keep asking them.  "No, really.  If all you use it for is hunting, why do you actually need a gun like that?  Why can't you just use a regular hunting rifle?"Again, our friend paused, and stared into the fire in silent contemplation.  And the answer that he came up with was a lot more practical than the ones you typically hear in political arguments about banning assault rifles.  Politicians and lobbyists usually hide behind vague notions of safety or freedom.  They cite the sacred inviolability of the constitution, or recall the names of dead Americans to make their point.  But for our friend, the answer was a lot simpler, a lot more concrete.  For him, it all came back to the deer in his yard.

"Well," he said, "if you've got five or six deer in your yard, and you want to keep the population under control, you don't want any of them getting away.  You want to just shoot, bam bam bam, one right after another.  It's a lot harder to do with a conventional rifle, this makes it easier to make sure that you make your kill.

"I started to feel uneasy again.  From a certain perspective, his argument made an odd sort of practical sense.  After all, if you're trying to eliminate a pest, you typically do want to use the most effective extermination tool at your disposal.  On the other hand, as those words were coming out of his mouth, it was hard not to think about how perfectly they could summarize the feelings of murderers as well.  They also don't want anyone getting away, they want to make their kill as quickly and easily as possible so they can move onto the next target before it escapes.  Sure, the targets may be different, but the logic seems to be exactly the same.  And to me, that parallel would seem to raise a very basic, question, which should be pretty easy for most people to answer: which is worse, letting potential murderers have the most effective tool with which to kill people, or letting a few too many deer continue to romp through their fields?  If some mild pest control is really the best rationale that a typical gun owner has for keeping these weapons legal, are we really arguing that it's more important to kill deer than to keep people alive?  I may not be the strictest animal rights activist, and I'm not going to argue that hunting as a whole should be outlawed.  But we can't really hate deer that much, can we?  What are those deer doing in your yard that is so terrible?  Are they smoking, or standing on the escalator instead of walking, or borrowing your car without filling up the tank?Now, I don't mean to make too much fun of this guy.  Again, he was friendly as could be, and he really didn't strike me as a dangerous individual, so he doesn't deserve to be treated like a lunatic.  And I also don't mean to say that he should be taken as a representative of the entire gun-weilding community.  After all, I know a lot of gun owners, and none of them spend their free time sneaking across the lawn so they can bludgeon Bambi's mom to death.  I'd like to think that most of them would know that grape vodka isn't worth stealing as well.  But when you hear so much rhetoric from detached third parties, making proclamations from on high about other people's rights and safety, these sweeping decrees about what the American people think or want or deserve, it's interesting to hear what the average person really thinks, even if he's just one lone man thinking for himself.

And despite my obvious liberal bias, I'm also not saying that we should ban assault rifles purely based on one random guy's drunken campfire musings, any more than I'd say that we should keep them legal because it's annoying to have to slow down at deer crossings.  But it does seem to me that if the people actually buying the guns can't give a more convincing argument as to why they should be able to than that guns are awesome, or that our gardens need to be kept safe from jittery herbivores, then maybe it is a policy worth reconsidering.  Maybe we don't need to have easily modifiable assault rifles in the hands of people who never need to shoot anything more dangerous than Rudolph.  Maybe, if politicians don't seem to know what regular people are thinking, then they aren't qualified to speak for them.  Maybe it's at least worth listening to what those regular people actually have to say for themselves before deciding whether or not they can be trusted with such a dangerous toy.

Or maybe these conversations are better saved for a time when everyone is sober, and no one would rather be discussing the problems of toasting a marshmallow over low heat.

-TC 

Robbed in the Hood

I usually like to use this space for either humor or shameless self-promotion.  But I had kind of a frightening incident a few days ago, and I wanted to take a few minutes to let everyone know what happened.  About two weeks ago, my wife and I were robbed at gunpoint in the elevator of our Brooklyn apartment building.  No one was hurt, and nothing was stolen that can't ultimately be replaced.  But it was a very scary experience, and since people keep asking, I wanted to share it.

When we first moved in about two years ago, Rachel and I knew it wasn't what you would traditionally call a "good neighborhood."  I had reservations about moving to the neighborhood, but we needed to keep our rent low, which is an increasingly difficult proposition in Brooklyn.  As two freelancers with uncertain income and a massive pile of debt beneath us, we wanted to live somewhere where we could afford to pay all our bills, do a bit of saving, and pay down our debts until it was at least small enough that we didn't have to worry about finding any dragons sleeping on top of it.

Even so, I was very uneasy at first, but Rachel assured me that I was worrying over nothing.  She'd lived in worse neighborhoods without anything happening.  We knew several people who had lived in this building, or very close by, without anything happening to them.  Plus, I'm a giant and kind of crazy looking, so I'm probably not someone most people would want to mess with.

I still wasn't totally convinced, and she told me I was just being racist.  Our neighborhood is primarily African-American with a heavy Caribbean population, and has only begun the process of gentrification that has overtaken most of Brooklyn.  I'll admit that it felt a little weird to be a white guy moving into a primarily black neighborhood for the first time, but that wasn't why I was nervous about living there.

Rather, my concern came from a website a friend had shown me where you could look up any neighborhood in New York and see all the crimes that have been reported there.  I pulled up some of my friends' apartments on the crime map, and almost all of them came up as perfectly green seas of tranquility.  You'd think that Brooklyn was the nicest, most genteel place on earth.

Then I plugged in the apartment we were looking at, and for blocks around the building and the subway station, it was nothing but red ad orange warning signs.  The crimes were mostly robberies, and a couple shootings.  The incident that particularly caught my eye was a block up from our prospective home where, according to the website, "a burglar was caught cold-bloodedly trying to steal a blood-pressure machine from a home."    While I wasn't sure if they were using the word "cold-bloodedly" for a terrible pun or just to editorialize, it seemed foreboding to me that I was about to move into a neighborhood where someone was willing to not just steal things, but steal things from someone who is doing so badly that they need to have pieces of medical equipment in their home.  Maybe someone was just running a sketchy "clinic" out of their living room, and the thoughtful robber was trying to shut down their shady operation, but that didn't seem especially likely.  It seemed much more likely that I was moving into an active crime scene.  (Also, as some of you may already know, I wrote a joking post a little while back about my pizza delivery guy getting robbed.  That should have been another red flag, but somehow the story seemed so absurd that I never quite believed it.)

But despite my reservations, we decided to take the apartment.  The price was right, it was the only apartment we found without an astronomical broker's fee, and most importantly, the landlord was willing to give it to us.  So we signed the lease and moved in a few days later.

And we stayed in the apartment for the next two years without serious incident.  Sure, the boys smoking weed in the hallway could be loud and annoying, the roaches were the size of bullfrogs, the toilet had spells where it wouldn't stop flushing for days, and once our front door even fell off.  But even with these petty inconveniences, we never really felt unsafe.  Except for maybe the few hours when we had no door.  But even then, the Hallway Boys kept an eye on us so our apartment didn't get ransacked, and even if it did, we would have known who it was.

Of course, that all changed the night we got robbed.  It's odd how you can go from living in complete safety to living in complete terror in an instant, and always an instant too late.  That night, my wife and I were coming back from an open mic in Manhattan.  I like to joke that she came because she's naive enough to think an open mic is a real show, but I know that after nearly three years of watching me do comedy, she knows better.  And I appreciated her wanting to come out and support.  After countless nights of performing for no one but comics, it's always nice to have any real audience members at all in the room, so I was glad to have her there.  I wanted to say no when she offered to bring her camera.  She takes great pictures, but sometimes I feel a little foolish having a professional photo crew following me at such an early stage in my career, when I know that the people in the audience aren't there to see me, they're there to work on their own stuff.  But in the end, my vanity won, and I told her she could bring the camera.  (For the sake of this story, I was the most amazing comic at the mic, and every joke I told that night killed harder than any joke you've ever heard.)

It was exceptionally cold out that night, one of the coldest we've had this winter, so we thought about taking a Lyft ride home.  But neither of us are the type to spend money on unnecessary luxuries like taxis, so we decided to take the Subway.  Would it have made a difference if we'd taken the Lyft ride?  Or would the robbers have been waiting for us outside of the building, further intrigued by our display of extravagance?  These are the sorts of questions you can't help but ask after the fact, but can never be answered.

We didn't see the guys behind us until we were unlocking the front door.  They could have followed us from the subway, or the deli on the corner, or they could have been lurking unseen by the tree out front.  We had no idea, and at the time, thought nothing of it.  We let people into the building every single day, and never think anything of it.  It's a big building with lots of apartments, and lots of turnover, so we don't recognize all the neighbors, or all of their friends.  Point is, there's enough foot traffic that the odds are very good that someone else will be getting home at the same time as us, and we always just let them in with smile.  Sometimes they're people we recognize, sometimes they're not, but we've never had a problem.  And neither of us really wants to be the asshole who slams the door in an old woman's face because you don't recognize it.  So we let the two guys in with a casual smile, and thought nothing of it.

We went straight to the elevator and hit the down button.  Out of habit I might have stopped to check the mail, though it was Sunday, so there wouldn't have been any.  The elevator was on the top floor as usual, so we had a minute or two before it came down.  One of the guys lined up behind us, the other sprinted straight up the stairs.

"You takin' the stairs?" the first guy said.

"Yeah, man," said the second.  I only ever saw him out of the corner of my eye, and couldn't identify him if I tried.  I seem to remember his jacket being more colorful than his friend's, who was wearing a loose, black windbreaker with a hood.  But I can't even be sure of that.  At that point, I thought so little about them that I wasn't really paying attention.  Nothing seemed unusual about the two men splitting up.  Plenty of people who live on the second or third floors will take the stairs, while others will be lazy and wait for the elevator.  And some people are friends with their neighbors, they'll talk to each other but not go home together.  Some people are just fucking weirdos, and we don't ask a lot of questions.  Point is, still nothing in particular seemed weird.

The man behind us kept saying, "It's cold out."  Eventually he broke it up with, "I'm tired, man."  But as we waited for the elevator, he kept talking to us, trying to be casual.  On the one hand, it worked.  He seemed normal, and he was right, it was cold out.  That's why we thought nothing of him burying his face in his collar, and keeping his hands in his pocket.  But it's also the only reason I ever saw his face.  Once we were in the elevator, my attention was fixated elsewhere.  But when he insisted on making small talk, I kept turning to nod and smile in agreement.  It's part of the social contract.  His mindless chitchat is the only reason I ever noticed that he was was tall, thin, and black, with dark skin, hollow cheeks, and slightly puffy eyelids.  There was nothing unusual about him, I would have forgotten his face in an instant if not for what happened next.

We got on the elevator, and my wife pushed the button for our floor.  As we moved to the back of the elevator to make room, I heard the words, "Alright, nobody move."  Before I had a chance to turn around, I already knew what was happening.  I'd been on jury duty recently, and heard the exact same story from a young woman.  I'd kept it in the back of my mind, never thinking it could have applied to me.  That's the sort of thing that happens to careless hipster chicks, I thought.  I turned around in disbelief to find the man had finally pulled his hands from his pockets, revealing thin blue gloves and a black handgun.

My first thought upon seeing it was, That gun isn't real.  My second thought was, When the fuck was the last time you saw a gun?!  How do you know what they look like?  It wasn't as shiny as I expected, kind of matted, and I couldn't tell if it was metal or plastic.  Later, a fellow comic would tell me that a lot of guns these days are made of largely plastic, so it easily could have been real.  At the time, I knew it wasn't worth the risk of trying to finding out.  While it would be embarrassing to find out the gun you were robbed with was a toy, it would be much worse to find out that it was real by being shot with it.

I remembered the girl from jury duty, and instinctively pulled out my phone, knowing it would be the first thing he asked for.

"Don't move," he said, and I froze.

"Sorry," I said instinctively.

"Shut the fuck up," he replied.

"Sorry," said again.  We went back and forth like this a few times, it's a nervous habit I have.  When I'm stressed, I talk mindlessly, saying the same things over and over again, mostly apologies.

Our witty repartee was cut short when the elevator door closed, and the mugger panicked.  He turned to try to catch the door before it closed, but was too late.  He frantically mashed all the buttons, trying to get the door to open before the elevator went up.  I was scared.  As awful as the situation was, it would be much worse to be stuck with him for several flights.  What would he do if we got to our floor and someone opened the door?  Would he panic?  Would he run?  Would he shoot?  I didn't want to find out, and from the looks of it, neither did he.

Fortunately, the door opened, and his friend (or should I say, accomplice) came back down to hold it.  I still couldn't see the friend, I just saw that the door was open.  "Alright, empty your pockets," the mugger said as he took my phone.  My wife and I pulled out our wallets.  He said something about cards, I think that he wanted them, so I pulled them from my wallet, hoping he'd at least leave the wallets and the non-financial contents within.  After being robbed is a terrible thing, but so is going to the DMV.  After such a stressful experience, the last thing you want is to have to deal with any more soulless government drones than absolutely necessary.  So I held out my cards, and held my wallet open.  He ignored the cards, and pulled out the cash.  He probably thought he was getting away with more than he did, as I had a pretty hefty wad of bills.  But it was mostly ones, so he didn't get much, probably forty or fifty bucks.

My wife said he put the gun to my head at one point, but I don't remember that at all.  Maybe she's exaggerating, or maybe I repressed it.  Most likely, I just didn't notice because I was so focused on not looking him in the eyes.  I was afraid that if I looked at him too closely, he'd think I was trying to memorize his face so I could identify him later, and he'd do something rash.  Even though I was trying to keep an eye on the gun at all times, it's possible that my supervision was overruled by the prime directive to avoid getting shot.

I do remember when he put the gun in my wife's face, though.  She never carries cash with her because she doesn't have a lot of it, and she thinks that if she has it on her, she'll spend it.  So when she opened her wallet for the mugger, all she had in there was two dollars.  When he saw how little cash she had, the mugger started to flip out.

"Two dollars, bitch?!" he shouted?  "Where's the rest?"  He got close and shoved the gun in her face menacingly.  My wife tried to explain that she didn't have anything, but she was scared, nearly crying, and he didn't believe her.

"What's in the bag?" he asked.  My wife said nothing, and opened it a bit, trying (perhaps foolishly) to hide the camera inside.

"Don't fucking play around," he said, waving the gun in her face again, "what's in the bag?"  The parts I remember most vividly are the ones where he had the gun in my wife's face, because for me, those were the scariest parts.  I was watching someone threaten my wife as she apologized and cried, and in that moment, I was genuinely terrified that he was going to shoot her.  I wanted to do something to help, but I couldn't think of anything that wouldn't make the situation worse.  Ever since I was a little kid, I've always had this fantasy that if I was faced with a crime, whether I was being robbed or saw a rape in progress or whatever, I'd just instinctively turn into Chuck Norris.  I'd grab the guy's hand, give him a few swift kicks, maybe shoot the second guy with the gun that's still in the first guy's hand.  But what I hadn't accounted for in this scenario is that you don't learn karate by just seeing a gun.  From what I hear, becoming a black belt is a much more complicated process.  So instead, I just stood there powerlessly, afraid for my wife, afraid for myself, and feeling like a failure for not being able to protect either of us.

I don't remember if he pulled the camera out of her bag or if she did.  Either way, he got it, and started backing out the door.

"What's that, what's that?" the mugger shouted, pointing the gun at my wife's bag.  The wrap the camera had been in was sticking out, and thought it might have something else of value.

"It's nothing," my wife cried, showing it to him.  The robber accepted this and finally turned and ran out the door.  After a moment of relief, I realized that there was a voice coming from the intercom.  I think it had been there for a while, but we were too caught up in the moment to notice.  But in his haste to stop the closing elevator door, the mugger had hit the emergency call button.

"We've been robbed!" my wife and I both shouted.

"Are you stuck in the elevator?" the woman on the other end of the speaker asked calmly.

"No, we were robbed," I said.

"This is the mechanical assistance line," the woman said.  "If it's an emergency, you should call the police.

"They took our phones, can you call for us?" my wife asked.

"I'm not authorized to do that," the woman said.  "This the line for mechanical problems.  Are you stuck in the elevator?"  At that point, I left my wife to deal with the situation and ran across the lobby to the second elevator.  My friend Brad lived on the other side of the building, and I wanted to borrow his phone.  But when I got to his apartment, no one was home, and I returned to my wife as quickly as I could.  I went back to my wife.  We hugged, and took the elevator up to our floor.

I wouldn't know this until I got an old phone activated the next day, but after the elevator repair woman finished refusing to help, my wife gave her my phone number, and she left me a voicemail.

"Hi, I'm calling from the elevator repair company," she said.  "Your wife says she was just robbed in the elevator of your building, but I'm not authorized to call the police, but maybe you should do that." Click.

As usual, The Hallway Boys were hanging around outside our door.  One of them casually asked how it was going.

"We just got robbed, can we borrow your phone?" I said, which was not the response he was expecting to friendly small talk.

"You got robbed?! Where?" the lead Hallway Boy asked?"Just now, in the elevator," I said.  "A guy with a gun.

"A gun?!"  With that, the lead Hallway Boy and a few of his friends ran down the stairs.  Since I hadn't gotten a phone out of them, I went inside to message a friend and ask him to call the police, which he did.  I removed my coat, took a deep breath, and tried to think.  What do we do?  Is there anything we CAN do?A minute later there was a knock on the door.  It was The Hallway Boys.  They told me to come with them to the superintendent's apartment.  He had the key to all the security cameras, and they wanted to make sure we got to it before it was erased.  We went to his door, but he wasn't home, and he didn't pick up his phone when they called (as usual).  When I saw the police lights out front, I ran to the front door to buzz the first wave of cops in.

Shattering stereotypes of the NYPD, the first officers to arrive on the scene were massive dicks.  (For the record, I feel obligated to point out that other officers we met later were both nicer and more helpful, but they didn't come into play until later).  They asked what happened, but wouldn't let me talk.  Every word out of my mouth was followed up by another question, each one delivered as though I was the criminal.  "Oh, so now there was a gun?  How come you didn't mention that?" one of the officers said condescendingly when I had finally managed to get out some of the more pertinent details.

"Was it those two guys?" the other officer asked, pointing at the two Hallway Boys behind me.

"No, they live here," I said, feeling that it wouldn't help my cause to add, "do you think they'd be standing around waiting for you if they'd just robbed me, you fucking moron?"I had an iPhone, so they plugged my info into their Find My iPhone app and told me to follow them to the car. I still didn't have a coat, but didn't want to lose the time it would take to go fetch one.  One of The Hallway Boys lent me his phone and said they would go upstairs, check on my wife, and have her call me.  We were on friendly terms with the Hallway Boys, but not exactly friends, so the kind gesture meant a lot to me.

"Why'd he give you his phone?" the officer asked me suspiciously.

I shrugged, dumbfounded by the question.  "Because they're being nice," I said in a voice that was much more angry than you typically use for the word 'nice.'

We went outside and I hopped in the back of their car.  They drove around the block, as one of them tried to pinpoint exactly where the phone was, and the other just kept saying, "It's not exact, you know.  Like remember that time I lost my phone in the station?"  The fact that I was being led around by people who couldn't even find their own phones inside a single building didn't fill me with much confidence that they were going to catch the mugger.

The officer in the passenger seat turned to me.  "Call your phone," he said.  "Tell him you want to make a deal.

"This sounded like the dumbest idea I'd ever heard.  Won't that just remind him to turn my phone off, especially if he's seen the cop car driving around?  But I wasn't in much of a position to argue, so I called my number.  No one picked up, and when I called again, it went straight to voicemail.  The guy had turned my phone off.  Shock.

We ended up coming around the block and parking out front of our building.  The police were still picking up a signal from something, which turned out to be my wife's phone.  We went back into the building, and another four officers showed up.  The signal started to move down the block, and we all ran back outside, the police moving in a pack, me in my t-shirt.  I tried to stay behind, hoping the adrenaline would keep me warm in the sub-zero temperature.

At the end of the block were two men, and the police approached them.  There was a pinging as the tracker got close to my wife's phone.

"Where'd you get the phone," an officer asked.

"I found it on the ground back there," the man said.  "I was waiting for someone to call so I could give it back.

"It was dark, I was shivering uncontrollably, and my eyesight is terrible, so I couldn't see the man from that distance.  When the police pointed in my direction, the suspect lunged angrily at me.

"Did you tell them that I took your phone?" he said.  I dove behind a tree, afraid of seeing a gun again.  One of the officers brought me the phone, which I identified as my wife's.  When the police brought the suspect closer, I could clearly see that it wasn't the guy with the gun.  In my mind's eye, the second mugger was taller and thinner, but I couldn't say that for certain.  It definitely wasn't the man whose face I saw.  I said as much to the officers as they led me away from him, back to the car to warm up. They went ahead and arrested him anyway, which I still feel incredibly shitty about.  I guess they had to, since I couldn't positively state that he wasn't the second mugger, and he was the only person found holding any of our stolen stuff.  But not only was he not the guy I had seen in the elevator, but the bottom half of the case was on the ground where he said he found it, and the phone was banged up from someone dropping it on concrete, so I was totally convinced that he was telling the truth.  Maybe not about his plans to give the phone back, but at least the part about not stealing it.

From there I was taken to the station to file a report, look at some mugshots, and generally try to feel like I wasn't at the beginning of a long exercise in futility.  A couple hours later, the police drove me home, and my wife and I shared another big hug.  It was a scary night, but at least we were home safe, and together again.

I decided to post something on Facebook about the event before we went to bed.  My wife said I shouldn't, because it would just worry people, and they'd start calling and making a fuss.  Which she was completely right about, by the way.  But I wanted to post something anyway, partly to make sure people knew what had happened if they were trying to contact me, but mostly because I was still very badly shaken, and I needed to feel connected.  As silly as it may sound, I just needed to hear some kind words and know that my friends were still in my corner.  I needed to feel like we weren't alone in a big, uncaring world that did nothing but victimize us.

The next day, I couldn't focus, and had trouble doing anything more involved than sitting alone in a quiet room listening to my heartbeat.  Panic attacks came and went, especially when I had to pass through the lobby.  I think a little PTSD is normal after an encounter like this, but I felt weak and foolish for being so shaken up by something that could have been so much worse.  After all, there are people in the world who have been through real trauma.  People have been shot, they've watched their partners die.  They've been raped and abused, watched their homes and everything they own in the world burn to the ground.  And here I was, acting like I'd just come back from Vietnam, all from just seeing a gun.  I couldn't escape the fear and panic that the robbery had left me with.  But at the same time, I didn't feel like I'd earned it.  I was more persistently afraid than I'd ever been in my life, but I also felt like a child, fussing over nothing.

"It could have been worse," became my mantra, a phrase I'd repeat every three minutes or so, to whoever would listen to my story, or just to myself when I was alone.  And it was true, it definitely could have been worse.  But the phrase wasn't just a statement of fact.  It was a security blanket.  It was the only thought that calmed me down when I got scared or angry.  It was the reminder that I desperately needed to help me focus on the fact that I wasn't only a victim, I was lucky.  I shouldn't be overcome with fear, or wallowing in self-pity for the things I lost.  It could have been worse.  It has been worse for so many people.  For us, no one was hurt, and nothing was lost that couldn't be replaced.  It could have been worse.  I needed to keep telling myself that until I believed it, until my gratitude was greater than my fear and anger and sadness.

And I'm not quite there yet, but I'm getting there.  I still get the occasional panic attack.  I'm still afraid coming home after dark every night.  I still look at everyone in the street with suspicion.  I still have no faith that the police will get this guy off the street before he does hurt someone.  But at the same time, I'm so glad that my wife is still here, that I'm still here.  It could have been worse.  It could have been so much worse.  At least we didn't have to go to the DMV.

-TC

Remembering Robin

Today I was incredibly saddened by the news of Robin Williams's death.  I don't usually feel that deeply moved by the death of celebrities because I realize that even if I enjoyed their work, they were total strangers and I didn't really know them any more than I knew a gas station attendant in Kansas.  But the loss of Robin Williams really does feel like the loss of a friend, because he has always been such an omni-present force in my life.  I don't ever remember a time when I didn't know his name.  It's almost as if graduating from infancy required a mastery of shapes, colors, and Robin Williams.  Ever since I was a boy, he's been one of my favorite actors, comedians, voices, and personalities.  He was an inspiration to an aspiring humorist, and a consistent source of entertainment to a fan for as long as I can remember.

When I was barely old enough to form memories, I knew him first as Mork, watching seemingly endless reruns of Mork & Mindy.  The show captured my young imagination so much that a few years later, despite all logic and evidence to the contrary, I refused to accept that my third grade teacher, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Pam Dawber, wasn't secretly keeping the goofy alien back at her house.  I tried to play it cool, hoping that if I became her favorite student, she might invite me over some afternoon to help send a report back to Orson.

Mork & Mindy also has the distinction of including the first joke I ever specifically remember not understanding.  In the first episode, Mork arrives on earth and, silly thing that he is, puts his suit on backwards.  Mindy sees him, mistakes his attire for that of a priest, and starts referring to him as Father.  Not being a church-goer, I couldn't for the life of me imagine why a backwards suit made Robin Williams look like her dad.

My own father used to like to entertain us by buying story CDs, since he loved CDs and we loved stories.  We had many of them, covering everything from fairy tales and classic Americana to african folk tales.  But my absolute favorites were The Fool and the Flying Ship and Pecos Bill, both narrated by Robin Williams.  The former had a companion video that we would occasionally rent from the local library, but the latter was the one I loved most dearly.  It combined so many of my favorite things, including humor, cowboys, and of course, the most mesmerizing voice I had yet encountered.  I had a book that you could read along with the CD (that's right, Robin Williams taught me to read), and I'd read it endlessly, with or without the CD.  But even when reading the book by itself, I still heard all the characters that had been brought to life so perfectly by the trusty narrator.

His impact on my childhood didn't stop there, of course.  We nearly wore out our VHS copies of Mrs. Doubtfire and Hook.  Ferngully got a rent just because I knew that bat's voice from somewhere.  I was first introduced to Shakespeare by an animated HBO series that he hosted.  Hell, I even liked Flubber.  But to this day, the movie I have seen the most times in the theater is still Aladdin, an amazing film made perfect by the manic, rapid-fire Genie, who couldn't have been played by anyone but my favorite actor.  By the end of its run, there was no one in the theater except for me and an increasingly annoyed family who would no doubt have seen ANYTHING else, as long as it didn't have a fucking carpet in it.  But I didn't care, I just couldn't get enough.I loved Robin Williams, and I eventually became so obsessed with him that when they filmed Jumanji a couple towns over from me, I was thrilled to know that our paths had crossed.  Never mind the fact that we hadn't actually met, and we weren't even technically in the same state.  I was breathing the same mountain air as my hero, and I could feel his essence flowing through me, making the blood that ran through my veins a little funnier.  It was only a matter of time before our paths would cross for real and he would recognized his gift within me, and my life of Hollywood stardom would begin.  Or so I liked to believe.

His impact continued long after my childhood.  When I discovered standup comedy, I was delighted to find that Robin Williams had once been a comic.  A Night at the Met was one of the first cassettes I ever owned, and I listened to it so many times I could recite it from memory.  And when I started to develop an interest in more serious and dramatic films, he was there again in movies like The Dead Poets Society, Patch Adams, and Good Morning Vietnam.  By this point, I was as in love with his talent and range as I was with his familiarity.  He had always been there, and he'd grown up with me.

And now he's gone, and the world isn't the same.  We lost someone truly great today.  And even if I didn't know him personally, I feel that loss as though he was one of my closest friends.  Like so many fans, I'll never get to tell him how much of an impact he's had on my life.  Like so many aspiring filmmakers, my hopes of one day working with the master are dashed.  And like so many kids at heart, I'll never be able to hear the Genie sing without a faint trace of sadness behind the smiles.  But the song will continue, and I'll fondly remember the man who taught me the tune.

-TC

Kings County: Season 2

After many months of planning, we finally launched Season 1 of Kings County earlier this year.  The response we got was wonderfully supportive, and I immediately got to work on writing more content for the Kings County Cinematic Universe.  Twelve sketches and a feature film script later, we launched a Kickstarter campaign to shoot the strongest six of those new sketches, which will make up Season 2 of our sketch series.  Season 2 will continue the story of some of the familiar characters from Season 1, including Carla the Volunteer, Harold the Musician, and Brian the Artist/Entrepreneur, as well as a few new, funny faces.If you haven't already, check out the campaign page and contribute before July 31st!

-TC

Kings County: Notes From Season 1

After many months of promising the impending release of my sketch series, all the videos that I shot last summer are up and live on YouTube! Despite the limited scale of a no-budget web series, it was still quite an ordeal to coordinate everything and make sure that these videos got done. Big thanks are owed to my wonderful director and producer, Soren Miltich, who graciously took so much time away from her busy schedule to help me make this silliness. I'm already working on scripts for our next few collaborations, and I'll be annoying you with plenty of crowd-funding pleas soon enough. But first, I wanted to give a very quick little glimpse at the making of the videos so far.

As I'd mentioned in a previous post, this project began to take shape when Soren and I collaborated on a little music video we did for our mutual friend, Satchel Jones, which was shot for no money and less time in the hours before Hurricane Sandy hit New York (you can see a few ominous clouds in the distance). While Soren is typically used to working on much higher budget projects, after she saw the initial cut of the video I did, she was impressed that I'd made our hastily shot footage look so good, and she said she'd like to collaborate on something again sometime. If that was what we could do with so little planning, she figured that with some real pre-production and any budget at all, we'd be unstoppable. So with that offer on the table, I set about banging out a few scripts before she changed her mind. A few weeks later, I sent her a half a dozen short scripts, each written in all of about twenty minutes. Soren picked the four she liked best, and we agreed to shoot them on a whopping budget of $250 per video. It wasn't much, but it was $250 more than we spent on our first collaboration, so it was at least a step in the right direction. And despite everything I've ever learned about film making, I paid for it all out of my own pocket.

Now, in your twenties, it's pretty easy to get people who are willing to pour their heart and soul into someone else's pet project for no money. At that age, most of the people you know will also be in their twenties, and they're typically as desperate to prove themselves as you are, so everyone helps everyone else out in the hopes of building their reels. However, now that I'm in my thirties, most of my friends are also in their thirties, and things get a bit tricker. People have real jobs and families to schedule around. Seasoned professionals are accustomed to being paid fairly for their work. And the boundless energy that enables your average twenty-two year old to survive on two hours of sleep and eight Red Bulls a day has given way to jaded, professional cynicism. There are only so many times you can get job offers where the only compensation are "opportunities to network," and "work on future projects when this one takes off" before the very sound of the words "passion project" make you want to vomit up your free pizza.

So even with determination on our side, it was quite difficult to make something happen with nothing but a few dollars and some good intentions in our arsenal. But we were dedicated, and we were thankfully able to find a cast and crew of talented people who were as excited about the project as we were. We did have to do some recasting as we went along, and reschedule our shoots a few times to accommodate the needs of the people we wanted involved. But in the end, everything got done, and we all had a ton of fun doing it.

The Protest Singer was the first sketch I wrote specifically for the series, as well as the first one we shot. The original idea for the sketch came when I was thinking about how bad most socially conscious music is. As a big fan of 60s folk music, I really enjoy songs with a message. But more recent songs tend to be so clumsy and heavy-handed that they're typically hard to appreciate as anything more than self-righteous venting, which is pretty difficult to tap your toe to. I started thinking about this bad, modern protest singer, someone who doesn't really have anything of consequence to protest, but has an inflated enough sense of self-importance that he'll round up any petty annoyance to a "social injustice." And from there the sketch wrote itself: an angry hipster demands attention for a grievance that only matters, but nonetheless means the world, to him. I'd originally hoped that our friend from the music video would play the lead role, as I thought his cadence and style would add something unique to the character. With this in mind, I tried to write the rambling gibberish with his voice in mind. But when we got around to shooting, he was out of town recording an album, and we were forced to recast the role. But I like to think the sketch came out better for the change, as Casey Regan's own unique charm and naturally inept guitar really made the script come to life, and he had great chemistry with Peter Wallack.

We did run into one unforeseen complication in shooting the script. Or rather, we ran into a completely foreseen problem that we had chosen to ignore. When we asked the coffee shop if we could shoot outside, we didn't exactly tell them what we were shooting. They knew it was a comedy sketch, and that we were going to buy lots of coffee while we were there, but that was about it. And after 45 minutes of our hero banging out his anti-coffee shop anthem, it wasn't entirely surprising that they became a little suspicious. Soren explained to the owner that the point of the video wasn't to make fun of the coffee shop, but to make fun of the protest singer (which was true), and that I was about to buy another round of drinks for everyone on set (which soon became true). The owner very graciously accepted our word that we weren't trying to make his business look bad, and let us continue filming. And for the record, their coffee really is quite delicious. If we'd picked a location that really had coffee worth protesting about, the cast and crew would have murdered me for making them drink so much of it.

#Homeless was inspired by a guy I used to see every day on my way into work. Every morning, I'd see him sitting in the same spot near Union Square, passively waiting for people to give him money. I thought it was interesting that he was there first thing every morning, but always gone by the evening, and I remember thinking it was nice that he kept regular office hours. (Yes, I've lived in New York long enough to be completely callous and insensitive to another person's plight.) Then a few days later, I started feeling like something about him just didn't seem quite right. He had a cardboard sign, but he always looked like he was a little too clean and well rested to have spent the night in the gutter. Plus, he was always writing in a clean Mead notebook that hadn't seen a lot of late nights in a dirty subway tunnel. I started to imagine that he wasn't really homeless, but instead an aspiring writer trying to come up with his first hit article about life as seen through the eyes of the city's homeless. Filtered, of course, thorough a good night's rest and a hot shower, because even if you live as a vagrant, you should still write as a gentleman. Then one day, my suspicions were confirmed in my mind when I noticed him give a dirty look at a woman who walked by, then pull out a Blackberry and start something no doubt snide about her. A small part of me wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he really was homeless, because why else wouldn't he have an iPhone? But, terrible person that I am, I mostly just thought about how glad I was that I'd never given him money.

We posted a casting notice on a few websites, and actually held a real casting session. But in the end, we didn't get a lot of responses due to the rate we could afford to pay, and we almost exclusively ended up casting our friends and colleagues to fill the roles. Amy Metroka had worked with Soren in the past, so Soren knew her to be a pro. And Mick Andrews is one of my favorite up-and-coming comics that I've encountered on the open mic circuit. But the one bit of gold that came from our casting call was our homeless man, Nathan Oesterle. He was clean cut, and delivered his lines with poise and skill, clearly an actor with some impressive chops. And most importantly, during his audition I couldn't stop thinking, "He doesn't look homeless at all!" That's when I knew he was a perfect fit for the role.

You need permits to shoot things on the streets of New York, and we actually got one for all our videos. However, we ended up having to reschedule the shoot dates a few times, and when we finally managed to get everyone together at the same time, we decided it wasn't worth the hassle to get our permit renewed. After all, the police don't stop people selling bootleg DVDs on street corners or the guy selling weed every morning in my lobby, so what are they going to say to us for taking up ten feet of sidewalk in front of an abandoned storefront? Perhaps we were tempting fate, but most of the day went by without a hitch. Then, as we were setting up one of the final shots for the day, a couple police officers walked by. At first they didn't seem to be paying us any mind, but one of them turned around and started watching the take we were in the middle of shooting. I got really nervous, as we were so close to being done, but not quite close enough that we could cut the video together with the coverage we had so far. I didn't want trouble, but I'm also not good at confrontation, and if they told us to shut it down, I was going to obey. Things got tense as Soren yelled "cut," and the officer approached us. He looked us all over, then excitedly asked, "What are you guys shooting?" We told him it was a comedy sketch, and he wished us luck and kept walking. At that moment, I decided to officially retract anything negative I've ever said about the police.

The Interview was an idea that actually predated this project entirely. I'd originally conceived of it as the first scene of a feature film about a delusional, self-absorbed artist with vague notions of speaking to the plight of the common man, but without any real experience of living as one. I never got so far as to flesh out the plot that would follow the first scene, but the idea of that one job interview stuck in the back of my mind. I imagined his frustrated parents pulling some strings to get him a job interview, which he was only interested in because he could justify slumming it amongst the 9-to-5 set as research for his real work.

I originally hadn't meant to have any characters recur between the four sketches. But in our auditions, we had Mick read against a couple people for this role, and we could barely hold in our laughter, so I tweaked the script slightly to keep the character sort of consistent with the one from the previous sketch. The actress we'd originally hoped to play his interviewer was sadly unavailable the date we ended up shooting, but in another moment of fortuitous casting, I thought to ask my friend and former roommate, Angel Vail, to fill in. Once I thought of her, I felt like it was perfect casting because, not only is she an actress, but she also works a day job that has worn her patience for stupidity quite thin, which came through beautifully in her performance. But the thing that really ties the scene together was the finger painted giraffe, created upon request by the lovely and talented Leah Clark. She offered to help out on set one day, just for the fun of playing along with us. But as professional graphic designer, we thought we could put her to work on designing something silly and beneath her. As we started shooting the scene, we only gave the vaguest of direction (giraffe...rainbow...go!). But what she came up with couldn't have been more perfect, and it's reveal is perhaps my favorite moment in all these videos. And not just because I get to look at myself.

Children Saved, like so many children, was born from spite. When I first moved to the city, I was on my way to a job interview, and a girl with a clipboard stopped me in the street by saying, "I've been looking for you!" At the time, I was so young and naive that I didn't pick up on the sales ploy and was racking my brain to try to remember where I was supposed to know this person from. Once I had a few pictures of underprivileged children waved at me, I only managed to extricate myself from the situation by telling her that I was on my way to an interview, and if I got the job, I'd come back and adopt a child. (For the record, that was a complete and utter lie, but I didn't get the job, so she didn't need to know that.) In the years that followed, I've seen countless incarnations of this same basic scene, where the young and idealistic wave clipboards at random strangers with the exact same sales tactic, which seems to amount to little more than, "let's annoy people until we find someone new enough to the city to find an unsolicited guilt-trip charming." The idea for the script was simple: I wanted to shatter the volunteer's illusions that she was making the world a better place by inflicting the most horrible person I could imagine upon her.

This video almost didn't happen, as we had to re-cast and re-schedule it more than any other script. But of the scripts I'd presented, it was Soren's favorite, so she kept pushing against all odds to make it come together, and I'm glad she did. Bridget Burke was always our first choice to play Carla, but we ended up replacing her nemesis twice. During our first rehearsal, the original actor we selected got under my skin by asking after every line, "what's that supposed to mean?" By the time he'd suggested we re-write every single joke in the script, my ego was sufficiently damaged and I wanted him out. Next, I asked my good friend Matty Blake to fill in, and despite being a full-time, professional actor, he was excited about the script and on board to make it happen. Unfortunately, being a full-time, professional actor, he was almost immediately offered more long-term (not to mention paying) gig that he couldn't pass up, and he was forced to back out. But then Soren had a stroke of genius, and suggested we use James St. Vincent, who we'd brought in to read for a few parts. He'd worked with both Soren and Bridget before, so they had a great rapport, and once it was done, it was probably my favorite video. I'm so glad Soren didn't let me drop it from the schedule, as it's a great conclusion to our little series.

Of course, none of this would have been possible without our great crew. Our amazing cinematographers Brad Heck, Andrew Hood, and Jeff Allen made the videos look great despite the fact that I couldn't afford to rent any real equipment for them. Richard Platzman fought valiantly to record sound in some of the busiest and loudest areas of New York that we could find. The Milligrams provided awesome theme music, and despite my inability to give any more meaningful direction than "I want something good and short," they knocked it out of the park. Evan Schwenterly helped with all things post-production, providing color correction, wonderful title design, and some great tweaks to my initial edits. Peter Bowhan gave us a beautiful logo for Children Intercontinental. And my fianceé, the lovely and talented Rachel Gardam, provided behind the scenes stills, ran errands, held equipment, and put up with me while I incessantly fussed about how hard it was to make things. I couldn't have done it without any of them, and even if I could have, I wouldn't have wanted to.

And I'd like to give one more, extra big thank you to Soren for knowing how to do everything from scheduling to blocking actors, and from filling out paperwork to setting up shots. It was so much fun to work together, and this series is only the first step in our collaboration. My goal with these videos was just to get something produced with my name on it. And despite our limited time and budget, they came out great. But now that they're finally done, Soren and I are already discussing ideas for bigger and better things ahead. I can't wait to make them happen and share them with you all.

Thanks so much for watching, liking, sharing, and, if you made it this far, reading.

-TC

When Two Giraffes Love Each Other Very Much...

My more devoted fans are probably already up on the big developments of my life, but as most of them are too busy being imaginary to effectively spread the word, I wanted to let the general public know that I am officially engaged!  I hadn't told much of anyone about my plans leading up to the proposal itself, partly because that would have required talking to them, which I typically try to avoid at all cost.  I tipped off a couple people who were helping out with ring shopping, but only because my sudden, inexplicable interest in flashy jewelry probably would have either led them to suspect my true intentions, or to assume that I had landed the leading role in a 70s pimp film.  But at the end of the day, I didn't want to tell any more people than necessary because I felt like it was a matter between me and my fiancée, so it just didn't feel right that she'd be the last person to know.  I know that traditionally you're supposed to ask permission, or give your friends one last chance to tell you what a horrible decision you're making if you marry that crazy bitch.  But like anyone else in this situation, I was only going to heed other people's advice if they told me what I wanted to hear, so why not go ahead and take it as read, and spare us all the awkward backtracking that may need to happen later?All kidding aside, I'm very happy with my decision.  And it turns out the planning and proposal was all much easier than simply adjusting to the use of the word "fiancée" in day to day conversation.  And I don't just mean the knee-jerk habit you get after referring to someone as your "girlfriend" for a few years.  Like remembering what year to write on your checks on January 2nd, it's always a process to break the muscle memory, but you get used to it after a few months.  More importantly, though, when you first give your significant other their promotion, it's hard to say "I have a fiancée" without feeling like you're bragging.  Words like "girlfriend" or "wife" just don't carry the same weight because all they do is suggest that a relationship exists.  They don't say anything about the state of the relationship itself.  As we all know, someone accepting the position of "girlfriend" one minute doesn't mean that she's going to opt to renew her contract the next. And we've all seen those sad old married couples who hate each other so much now that you can't quite fathom what they might have seen in each other in the first place.

"Fiancée," on the other hand, is an inherently positive, hopeful relationship status.  If you're only marrying someone because you knocked them up, you're usually too busy with apologies, paternity tests, and trying to remove her father's shotgun from your back to bother advertising the engagement phase.  So when you tell someone that you have a girlfriend, you're not saying much more than, "Yep, that's still going on."  But when you say you have a fiancée, you're saying something more like, "This is going so well and we're both so deliriously happy together that we're planning a big party, just to make sure that all of our friends and family acknowledge our superior breed of love."  And it's hard to follow up that kind of proclamation with, "so...what's new with you?"As weird as it feels to say it, though, I'm very happy to have a fiancée, and I feel good about the future prospects of our relationship.  But in all honesty, I have to admit that I did feel a tiny bit of hesitation about the idea of proposing.  It wasn't a big moment, but it was there.  And it wasn't for the stereotypical reason that guys are supposed to be afraid of commitment, or obsessed with "keeping their options open."  Men in general have a bad habit of forgetting how hard it was to get one woman to like them in the first place, so when a good thing finally does come along, they want to hold off on committing, just on the off chance that there's someone better out there, waiting patiently at a bar for what her increasingly lowered expectations are rounding up to "Prince Charming," based solely on his ability to scrape together enough change to buy her a few cocktails.

But that's really not me.  I'm both too much of a romantic to think that there could be anyone better than the woman I love, and I'm too self-deprecating to think that even if there was such a woman, that she could be persuaded of my dubious charms.  So I'm not afraid of commitment because I'm madly in love with a wonderful woman, and I'm amazed that whatever leprechaun trickery I used to snag her hasn't worn off by now.  Like I said, hopeless romantic.

But again, I did have a brief moment of hesitation somewhere in the back of my mind, but for another reason all together:  this wasn't the first time I'd thought of proposing to someone.  Many years ago, I actually wanted to marry my first girlfriend.  The only reason that I didn't ask was that I was reasonably certain that she'd say no.  Being young and foolish, I had the wherewithal to realize that she didn't want to be with me forever, but not to recognize that this represented a problem in our relationship.  Instead, I developed a way of looking at our relationship that could be boiled down to, "well, she doesn't love me, but I think we can work around that." I’m being a bit glib, of course, as the wounds from this relationship never fully healed and the only salve that reliably dulls them is snark. But in all honesty, I loved her so much that I really thought we’d be together forever. In fact, I was so thoroughly convinced of this that after maybe a year or so together, I had already come up with a plan for when, where, and how I would eventually propose to her. It was too long-term of a plan to be worth investing in any rings yet, thank goodness, and with the benefit of hindsight the only way it could possibly have succeeded is if I’d managed to guilt her into dating me long enough that she might say yes out of sheer exhaustion. Again, hopeless romantic. But in my mind at the time, it was a plan that was clear as it was firm, and I had every intention of following through when the time came.

Needless to say, that plan didn't work out very well, and she broke up with me.  And despite all the warning signs, I somehow managed not to see it coming.  Later, when I had a slightly healthier Bitterness to Perspective Ratio, it struck me as a bit disconcerting to think that I was fully prepared to settle down with someone who I knew perfectly well would have much rather settled down with a house full of cats and dangerously high carbon monoxide levels than me.  And when I started reflecting on my other relationships, I couldn't help but admit that I don't exactly have the best track record of picking ones that could be described as "two-sided."  After all, before my current girlfriend (sorry, "fiancée"), I'd only ever told three girls that I loved them.  The first was a good friend who eventually asked me to stop telling her because it was making her uncomfortable.  (Which, with the benefit of hindsight, was a fairly reasonable request.)  The second didn't reciprocate the sentiment until I repeated it more clearly a few times to make sure she hadn't misheard me.  (Which, with the benefit of hindsight, was probably an unfair amount of pressure to put on a budding relationship.)  And the third was too taken aback to say anything, as she was probably wondering why I hadn't waited to spring this news on her until at least the second date.  (Which, with the benefit of hindsight, was pretty insane.)

But the point is, I fall in love very easily, and I have a tendency to latch on to relationships that I aspire to rather than ones that everyone involved feels good about.  And even though my current girlfriend tells me every day how much she loves and appreciates me, I have such a bad track record that it was hard to fully extinguish that little voice in the back of my mind that kept saying, "but does she really mean it?"  When I started thinking about marriage again, I couldn't shake the idea that maybe I was once again the only one looking at this as a long-term project.  And maybe if I asked, I wouldn't get the answer I wanted.  And if there's one thing I've learned from movies and television, it's that it's really awkward to propose to someone if you don't get a "yes" out of it.  Especially if you choose to do it in a public space, like your high school reunion, her sister's wedding, or a funeral.

But after crossing those locations off the list, I didn't hesitate for long, because deep down, I knew she'd say yes.  I knew that the fear that she say no wasn't based on anything she had ever said or done to make me feel unloved, it was based on my own fear that I'm the same selfish, delusional, and unobservant idiot that I was ten years ago.  And I know that despite the mistakes I've made along the way (or maybe thanks to a few of them), I've grown into a completely different type of idiot.  I'm a wiser, more mature, and fundamentally lovable idiot.  And even if they've grown a bit grey while waiting for Miss Right to come along, I still have the same irresistibly boyish curls.  And really, who could say no to that?So I went ahead and I bought a ring, when confronted with it, she said yes.  And it was a perfect moment.  We were together, we were happy, and I knew that I'd made the right choice.  Because even though we've only been engaged for about three weeks, she's already bought a wedding dress.  So at this point I'd be pretty hard pressed to think that she's any less serious about this than I am.  And if there's anyone out there, waiting patiently at a bar for me to ride in on my white horse and buy her a drink, I have to say, "sorry, but weddings are expensive, and it's cheaper to drink at home."

-TC

Fun for the Whole Family

I try not to go on too terribly much these days about my standup "career," a term I use in much the same sense that a homeless person might use it when discussing "cup jangling."  My reticence is partly due to the fact that I've settled into a nice, comfortable routine, in which very little new is going on for the moment.  But it's mostly due to the fact that I don't want to give the impression that I have an inflated sense of my extremely relative "success," a term I use in much the same sense that the Asian woman who goes through my recycling in search of returnables might use it after I've had a party.  But I recently had some interesting encounters with what I will generously call "fans," which I like to think of as revealing

A couple weeks ago I was working the door at a show.  Now, for anyone who isn't familiar with the term "working the door," imagine a giant, anthropomorphized cash register doing a little dance and making cheery sounds every time someone puts money into it.  Then picture that same cash register, but world-weary, tired, and a little pudgy in the drawer, and you've pretty much got me.  Most of the audience that night were New Yorkers, but a middle aged couple came in from out of town, and said they'd never been to a comedy club before.  They asked if there was going to be a lot of bad language in the show, and the hostess said that there would be some, but probably not too much.  I thought this was an odd response, given that I can't remember the last time I saw a comedy show that didn't involve at least a good fifteen minutes on masturbation alone, to say nothing of all the material on pedophilia, rape, and OkCupid.  But they seemed pleased with their answer and gave me their money.  Ka-Ching!I got to perform a little while later, and I had a remarkably good set.  I say this not to brag, of course.  Generally speaking, the most positive thing I'm willing to say about anything I've done is, "that wasn't too terribly embarrassing."  Rather, I mention my good set because it's an important plot point.  Anyway, I'm basking in the afterglow of my glorious triumph, and after a few more comics take the stage, the easily-offended couple came out and politely requested their money back.  They said they were offended (easily) by some of the material in the show, and felt they had been duped.  The managers graciously decided to give them their money back, and I, the perpetually cheery cash register, happily obliged, apologizing profusely for the show not being a good fit for them.  They said it was okay, and that they actually quite enjoyed my set.  As they left, I couldn't help but wonder if I should take that as a compliment.  Is it a badge of honor that my comedy is fun for the whole family, or a mark of shame that I'm not edgy enough to offend the sensibilities of Middle America?  In the end, I decided to take it as a compliment, less because I thought I had earned one, but more because I wanted one, and I was afraid they'd ask for that back, too.

Fast forward one week.  I'm working the door at another show.  They put me up to perform first after the host, which is often a tough spot, as the crowd hasn't had time to fully digest their drinks and loosen up yet.  But again, it went quite well, perhaps even better than the week prior.  And better yet, this time there are no complaints and everyone stayed for the entirety of the evening.  The show ends and I leave the club, and as I'm weaving my way through the crowd out front, someone slaps my arm.  I turn and find myself confronted with my adoring public, an elderly German grandmother with an enormous smile on her face.

"You were very good, very funny," she said in a thick German accent, moving in for a big, friendly, grandmotherly hug.  I smiled like a kindergardener who just got a gold star, and said, "Thanks so much!  I'm glad you enjoyed it."

"It was so good," she said.  "I really don't like gross humor very much, you know?  But your jokes were very good."

"Yeah," I said, "I don't really like to do that sort of thing much."

"That's good," she said.  "The host was so filthy, you know."  I immediately knew what she meant, as the host is someone I've seen at many shows and mics.  He's a very funny guy, but his material does tend to be quite ribald.

"I'm sorry to hear that" was the most diplomatic thing I could think to say, so that's what I offered as my rebuttal.

"We were so offended, we almost walked right out.  But then you came on, and you were so funny.  And my husband and I were saying, 'Isn't it nice to see that Americans can be funny without putting their balls on a plate."

At this point, I must admit I was a bit taken aback.  First of all, that wasn't the sort of talk I was expecting from an eighty year old woman complaining about foul language.  But I was mostly thinking, "I really hope that's some sort of weird German slang and not something that happened."  I had visions of a Seinfeldian comic, coming out onstage like a waiter in an unimaginative porn scene, trying desperately to explain his views on how cluttered women's purses tend to be and wondering why no one is laughing and it's so cold in there.  I mean, I'm not a prude.  I do think there's room in comedy for material of dubious taste, especially if it's exploring taboos and posing legitimate questions.  But still, this is an establishment that serves food, and there are certain basic hygiene standards that really should be followed.

So what did I learn from these encounters?  I already knew that I tend to shy away from dirty material, just as I knew that it's never a good sign to be getting laughs with your pants off.  But I did learn something about my fan base.  I learned that they do exist.  There really are people out there who like me.  They may not be young, hip, or speak English as their first language.  But they like me!  They really, really like me!  Hopefully they don't ask me to autograph their boobs, though.

-TC

While My Guitar Teacher Gently Weeps

Things have been busy lately.  The feature film that I edited was finally picked up by a distributor, and I've been endlessly re-cutting the trailer to increase the likelihood that people will actually buy it.  I managed to shoot three of my four comedy sketches, and while we work to make the fourth happen soon, I'm in the exciting stage of editing around the fact that we spent no money on them.  I've been flexing my standup muscles with regular hosting gigs at The Village Lantern open mics, door work and occasional stage time at The Stand, and starting to explore new open mics across the city for the first time in months.  And in the few minutes of spare time that remain, I'm trying to get a good night's sleep, be social, and take advantage of the endless free activities that go on during the summer in New York City.

Things have been busy.  So why not add one more item to the agenda?  I started taking guitar lessons a few weeks ago.  It's a skill I've wanted to pick up for a long time, and as they say, there's no time like the present, even if there's no time in the present.  This isn't my first foray into the world of music, or even the world of the guitar. I played the trumpet from third grade through high school, though I was never particularly good at it, due largely to the fact that I never practiced.  However, I like to think that for someone who never practiced, I was actually quite good.  Sure, I couldn't read music very well, but I could pick up most rhythms by watching the guy next to me a couple times and hoping he knew what he was doing.   But even so, eight years of playing gave me about the same claim to the title "musician" that my eight months volunteering in a hospital gave me to the title "doctor."

Despite my lack of discipline, I always wanted to be a rock star, a dream shared by anyone who has ever been a ten-year-old boy.  And while brass instruments may be beautiful in the right time and place, they tend not to be the most welcome additions to the rock environment.  Aging rock bands who begin adding horn sections to their stage shows tend to be met with the same blend of shock and disgust as Dylan going electric, but without the benefit of time eventually proving them wrong.

Back in 2003, I used my first ever paycheck from working in film to buy my very first guitar, a Fender acoustic.  I figured that art should fuel art, but I decided to ignore the ominous sign that the original "art" in question was a film camp for high school students, and my own "art" was likely to be of the same caliber.  Instead, I decided to focus on the idea that I was probably a latent child prodigy, and the mere act of picking up the instrument that I was destined to master would immediately result in all the women who wouldn't go out with me beginning to swoon and involuntarily fling their underpants and paychecks in my direction.  With a clear goal in mind, I printed out a few songs from the Internet, and set about the task of teaching myself the guitar.

Unfortunately, my plan hit a bit of a snag when I realized that despite my undeniable musical genius, I'm not a very good student or a very good teacher, and it turns out that neither of us had the faintest idea what we were doing.  But I remained undeterred, and I stayed the course, practicing diligently.  Every day.  For a couple weeks.  Then I encountered my first F chord, which at the time I assumed stood for "fucking impossible."  The handful of other chords I'd been working with had been difficult, sure.  But with enough repetition I was able to make them sound more or less like music.  But the F chord was a different beast.  According to the chord book I'd gotten from my dad, you're supposed to hold down the bottom two strings simultaneously with nothing but your index finger, a task which seemed about as unrealistic as holding up a bank by pressing the inside of my coat pocket with the very same finger.

With my first real failure under my belt, I decided that I lacked the music gene that can make fingers and strings act as one, and my guitar began to sit unattended, more a symbol of the lifestyle that I wished I was living than a way to achieve it.  Every year or two I would pick it up and try to learn again, until I was inevitably bested by that insufferable F chord.  It was my nemesis, my Moriarty.  It was my Vietnam, though I always had the good sense to pull out before things got embarrassing.

Then after maybe five or six years, I picked up ol' Kathleen (as I had named my guitar, after one of the many songs I couldn't play on it), and as if by magic I finally succeeded in forcing my fingers into the right configuration to produce a clear, beautiful F.  I was amazed.  I beamed with pride.  I was ecstatic.  That ecstasy lasted for about a week, when I realized that this was not the final hurdle I needed to clear before fame and fortune, but rather the first in a series of increasingly difficult hurdles.  I still had a very, very long way to go before I could call myself competent, much less good.  And the guitar soon found itself demoted once again from musical instrument to decoration, while the throngs of screaming fans and loose women kept to themselves.

Then ten years later, all that changed.  (Except for the part about me not being a musical prodigy, which as remained pretty consistent.)  I'd mentioned to my girlfriend that I wanted to learn to play the guitar.  And by "mentioned that I wanted to," I mean "continuously whined about how I couldn't."  Motivated in equal measure by desires to help me achieve me achieve my dreams and shut me up, she got me a gift certificate for an eight week guitar class at The New York Guitar Academy for our anniversary.  I always believe in trying anything if I don't have to pay for it, which is why I'm glad I've never met a dealer whose business model really includes the first one always being free.  So I agreed to try for a fresh start and signed up for a class.

The adult education sector has probably suffered since the advent of the Internet.  People used to take cooking classes to learn a new skill and meet people with similar interests.  But now that you can print out any recipe ever concoted at the push of a button, watch instructional videos for free on YouTube, and use dating sites to meet people without all the hassle and pretense of buying a wok, I think people are less inclined to pay for for professional lessons of any kind.  But as we've already established, my track record for teaching myself new skills isn't the greatest.  After years of using the Internet as my guitar coach, you could round what I knew about music down to zero and still feel pretty generous.  So the idea of having a professional slap my wrists with a steel ruler sounded like it might be a might be more productive for a guy like me.

When I went to my first lesson about a month ago, it was the first time I've taken any kind of class as an adult.  (Legally speaking, I've been an adult in college, but if you've ever met a 22-year-old, you know how little legal status really means.)  I was a little nervous, but pretty hopeful because it seems like learning as an adult would be easier than it is as a kid, because you've picked up so many other skills on the way.  You already know how to read, and avoid reading with CliffsNotes.  And when you've woken up the day before your final exams and realize you've been drunk since freshmen orientation enough times, you've probably picked up a couple last minute studying skills.  A lot of the basics are already in place, so you can focus on the truly new aspects of your material.

But it's odd to actually try to learn something new as an adult because you realize that for all the things that you have learned, you've forgotten one very crucial skill that every child possesses: the ability to be really, really bad at something and not notice.  As a kid, everything is so new and there's so much to learn that you have this great ability focus on the little accomplishments rather than how much further you have to go.  Teach a kid to play three blind mice on the recorder, and he thinks he's ready to be the next Justin Bieber.  All he needs to do is sit back and wait for the limo to show up and drive him off to Show Biz.

But learning is different when you're an adult, because you've learned how to distinguish between Jimi Hendrix and a wino strumming three chords on the subway between shots from the paper bag.  In our first lesson, we learned a couple chords I already sort of knew, started working on a very simple strumming pattern, and despite the ease and familiarity of the material, I still sounded like a complete novice who didn't even know which end of a guitar to blow, and what's more, I knew it.  Even though it was a class for beginners, and only the teacher could claim to be better than me at that point, I still felt embarrassed by how bad I was.  It's the same feeling I got when I learned to swim a couple years ago.  When you're pushing 30 and find yourself desperately flailing and gasping for air in water that isn't even deep enough to drown a hedgehog, it's hard not to look at a kid whizzing by like Aquaman on amphetamines and not think that you should already know this by now.  After five minutes of banging away tunelessly at a guitar like a monkey with a typewriter, all you can think about is the number of people who have mastered this skill and still aren't even old enough to shave.  And then you inevitably start thinking, "It's broken!  This one doesn't play stairway to heaven!"But even though the experience started out as frustrating as ever, I noticed something pretty quickly that had never happened to me when playing the guitar before: I started sounding better.  For me, it really did help to have a teacher who already knows how to play and didn't just find your lessons on the internet five minutes ago.  With his instruction and patience, I quickly graduated from playing Stand By Me poorly to playing Yesterday poorly, and I'm currently working on playing House of the Rising Sun poorly.  Which is already way more songs than I could ever play poorly before, and I'm playing them a little less poorly with each passing week.

In part my progress is due to the expertise that comes with a real teacher.  Obviously, he can explain or demonstrate things that don't quite make sense when you just see them on paper, which is very helpful.  But equally helpful is that a teacher helps you to really hear yourself improving.  In our first lesson, he was very up front about the fact that when you first pick up a guitar you will be bad, and you will continue to be bad for a very long time.  Then as the weeks progressed, he's been very encouraging about the progress we have made rather than how far we have to go.  While some of his praise may be little more than shameless ego stroking, since childhood I have failed to learn the difference between that and genuine approbation the way I learned to distinguish Hendrix from the wino.  And when you're alone in a room, all you can hear is the mistakes you're making and the self-flagellation that follows.  But when you have someone else there to talk you down and point out the subtle shades of bad that you are in fact working through, you get back that ability to see the progress at hand rather than the journey ahead.

For me, the key to sticking with something is rekindling that childlike ability to stay in the moment, focus on what you're doing right, and not worry so much about what you're doing wrong.  If I can do that, it's a lot easier to stick with something I'm doing badly in the hopes that I will eventually do it well.  Or at least less badly.  Either way, I'm motivated by a childish sense of pride in my most minor accomplishments, and an equally childish sense that those accomplishments will be rewarded with ice cream.  And as an adult with any amount of money in my wallet, I know that they always will be.  Sometimes they'll be rewarded before I accomplish anything as well.  Did I mention that I have no discipline?

-TC