The Metaphysics of Marriage

December 3, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

“The difference between marriage and cohabitation is nothing more than a piece of paper,” they’ve told me for as long as I remember. I believed that so much that I didn’t just repeat it and preach it, I lived it. I loved it too, for a short time, until my cohabitant turned combatant. She and I got into one of those mean and dirty “I’m not sure the relationship is going to survive this, and if it does, I’m not sure I want to carry on” fights. Our breakup was a “no harm, no foul, and it was nice learning how a relationship can fail with you” breakup. It was so easy, it was too easy. “These things don’t work out some of the times. See ya, sista.” When I married, however, I learned that after a big fight, both parties go to their respective corners, talk to their managers, and develop a game plan to use in the next round. The next round can involve better strategies to win that round, or it can involve a series of compromises. I’m sure long-time cohabitants go through all the same issues, but at the end of the day, it just seemed so easy for me to walk away. Marriage just felt more substantial, and I found myself working harder to make my marriage survive and thrive. I didn’t want the big “D” on my docket, so I learned that I would have to make what proved to be difficult compromises to make it work. Trying to understand how another person thinks led to me becoming well-rounded, more mature, and a better person. I advanced to a stage they call: adulthood.

Radio talk show host and writer, Dennis Prager talks about these matters, as evidenced by the quotes below, from Dennis Prager’s Thoughts on Marriage lecture, but Mr. Prager is not an expert on marriage, a marriage counselor, or a psychologist. He’s a radio talk show host and author who has been involved in two divorces. “He’s been married three times? Why would you consider his advice on marriage valuable?” I think we can all admit now that we’ve learned more from our failures in life than our successes, and Mr. Prager has also been married to his current wife for sixteen years at this point, which shows that he obviously learned from his personal failures in that regard.

“Either marriage gets better or it gets worse. Couples need to constantly work on their marriage to make their marriages strong.”

To my mind, the idea that marriage gets better or worse with age is almost exclusive to young marriages. I realize that all marriages, like all people, get better or worse with age, but if I married in my early twenties that poor marriage wouldn’t have had a chance. I changed so dramatically between twenty to forty that I was almost a completely different person. I was more stable, confident, and I knew myself better. I also liked myself better at forty, which might sound foo foo, but if we don’t like ourselves, we’re probably not going to like, much less love, another. Second marriages, or those who wait until their mid-thirties to forties, tend to last, because we make rational and less emotional decisions in life. Love is no longer the lone driver, as forty somethings have learned from the mistakes of impulsive actions and reactions based on short-term thinking. Having said all that, marriages between forty-somethings are just as apt to get worse with age for those who don’t constantly work on their marriage to make it better.

“Some romantic ideas can really hurt your marriage. Romance is good but romantic thinking can be damaging.”

“How can romance hurt a marriage? What an odd thing to write.” There’s a difference between romance and romanticizing. We all romanticize the idea of love, relationships, and marriage, and romanticizing them often leads to unreasonable expectations. The culprit for these unreasonable expectations, in my experience, is the love story. How many unrealistic expectations of romance and love are born in the love stories that movies and books provide? They give us the idyllic images we want, need, and begin to believe is out there waiting for us. “I deserve better,” we say when our very specific visions of a very specific Mr. Right don’t pan out. We all have our bullet points, of course, but did we create them, or were they created for us? When Mr. Right fails to meet our idyllic bullet points, captured in the scripts and rewrites of love stories, we venture back into the field. While there, we discover that Mr. Right is largely a fictional character born and raised to feed our need for Mr. Perfect. We all know Mr. or Miss Right is out there, we’ve seen them, but was our mental processing of this issue is a result of digital processing? Those idyllic images they planted in our head messed with us, until we created our own idyllic images that no one born of physical processing can achieve.

“No human being can fulfill all of your wants or all of your needs.”

Calling upon our wife or husband to fulfill our wants and needs is normal, but demanding that they meet them all, with ultimatums attached, is shallow narcissism. When we enter into a long-term relationship, with expectations for marriage, we expect our prospective other to accept us as is, yet we set conditional expectations for them. We expect them to know us, as is, but we don’t place reasonable expectations on ourselves to know them as is. If we did it right, we should know our potential spouse before we marry them. We should know them warts and all, and we should know that as Dennis Prager points out the term “soul mate” is equivalent with “clone” and unconditional love should be a term reserved for our children and pets. Relationships between full-fledged, complicated adults come loaded with a myriad of conditions, and we need to sift through the conditions we establish for them to make sure they’re fair, and if they are, we should require them to meet them and vice versa.

“Being in love means always having to say you’re sorry. The three words “I am sorry” can be more powerful than “I love you.””

The ability to apologize often comes in direct conflict with the ego. The ego is that evil, little guy who rests on our left shoulder, just below the ear, whispering, “Don’t let her get away with that.” The ego also characterizes what she said and defines and redefines it. “We firmly established our set of ground rules and our turf, and her words and actions just violated them.” It turns out, she didn’t say what we thought she said, or she didn’t mean it the way it sounded to us, and at some point our over-protective, super sensitive ego took over and led us down a bad road. “I’m sorry, and it will never happen again.”

“We need to teach him how to treat us,” her ego whispers to her. In the early stages of a marriage, or any relationship for that matter, we set out to establish ground rules for how we want to be treated. Those ground rules also come equipped with that one big, no compromising taboo. “You can violate everything else on my list, with some exceptions, except that. I’m very sensitive about that.” For a variety of reasons, and I don’t know if it’s psychological or philosophical, but when someone makes the mistake of telling us where it hurts, that’s the only wound we want to pour salt in.

I’ve witnessed this peculiar predilection among every demographic, be it old, young, male, female, married, single, and everyone in between. I’ve seen it happen so often that I’ve toyed with it. “It’s hard to make me mad, seriously. I’m basically impervious to teasing, ribbing and razzing, but don’t make fun of my obsession with peanut butter. I’m very sensitive about that.” It’s a joke of ridiculous extremes of course, as I like peanut butter, but I have no unreasonable attachments to it. I throw that out there to see what “they” do with it. It might take an hour, a day, or even a couple days, but someone, somewhere will come up with a clever shot about my obsession with peanut butter, and you can see it on their face that they think they’re hitting us where we live, and they don’t give a durn how bad it hurts. We all do this, our great aunts, our lovers, and even our moms can’t seem to resist the temptation. Knowing about this strange psychological predilection is half the battle, and putting our loved ones through a test of their loyalty is another strange psychological predilection we all partake in, as we’re basically putting them in a position to fail.

We’ve covered four of the eight points Dennis Prager covered in his Thoughts on Marriage lecture, but one of the most crucial characteristics I think he missed is the need to find someone who doesn’t mind being boring every once in a while. We need to find someone we enjoy spending substantial amounts of time around, and some of that time is going to be spent doing relatively boring things. That sounds obvious, but when we sift through our list of applicants for marriage or cohabitation, we find very fun and exciting men and women who can be extremely funny and wildly entertaining. The idea that a prospective mate can add some fun and excitement to our lives can plant the seeds for a whirlwind romance, as long as they’re in their element. The latter is the key for displays of charisma and energy requires a right time, right place setting, and we might need to take them out of their element to see if they can be boring. If you’re considering a substantial move with another person, you might want to find out how they conduct themselves on a lazy Sunday afternoon, playing parcheesi? Do they need a little sip of alcohol while doing it? They might not be alcoholics, but they can’t do something like play parcheesi without a little edge. Some might need a wager to pique their interest because they can’t imagine playing parcheesi just for the fun of it. Bill Murray once suggested traveling with someone before you marry them to take them out of their element, and to show you how they interact with service industry personnel. The point is we can learn a lot about loved ones at parties and other social functions, but we can learn a lot more about them by cooking a meal with them, raking the lawn, or sitting out on a deck with them and nothing more than a bottle of water.

Self-Deprecating vs. Self-Defecating

November 23, 2024May 25, 2025 RilalyLeave a comment

“… And he did that irregardless of the consequences,” I said. Yes, I said that, Mr. Student of Language and Mr. Word Lover said the word irregardless, and to my lifelong shame, I thought it was a pretty big deal that I was using a multi-syllabic in context, and I was using it in the company of a big-time erudite fella with whom I shared a love of language. And no, I was not as young as I want you to think I was at the time. Mr. Big Time, Erudite fella gave me a momentary flash of shock before he could conceal it with discretion, and in my convoluted brain, I thought that flash meant he was impressed with my ability to adroitly use a four-syllable word.

“You know that’s not a word, right?” a person informed me later, much later. “You can say irrespective or regardless, but irregardless is not a word. It’s considered redundant.” We called this woman an obnoxious intellect, and the one thing we all know about obnoxious intellects is that they’re not afraid to show the world how much more intelligent they are. They’re also not embarrassed to correct us one-on-one, in groups, or in front of the whole class. They revel in it as a matter of fact. She wasn’t embarrassed to correct struggling intellects, authoritative intellects, or anyone else temporarily trapped into being in her company. In the aftermath of her smug correction, I decided that her correction should merit nothing more than a couple more obnoxious points on her lengthy ledger, until I found out … she was right. The pain of that realization informed me that the path from humility to humiliation is but a matter of clicks.

How many word dudes spent a portion of their young lives saying “eckspecially?”, until someone came along and said, “Could you stop saying that, that way? It’s my personal pet peeve.” When we find ourselves in such a position, we probably say, “Saying what, what way?” If you’ve committed such a transgression, you know that some mispronunciations are just so ingrained that if no one ever corrects us, we won’t even know we’re doing it. We’re so oblivious that we might even laugh when we hear someone correct another. Yet, we hear that said that way so often, from friends and family that “That’s just kind of how we talk,” but we still wonder how long we’ve made that particular error. Now that our mind’s eye is open to this faux pas, we hear our bosses say it that way, our parents, and even some big-time, long-time broadcasters, who are paid to speak, and presumably critiqued off camera daily, still say eckspecially on a regular basis.

If you’re as fascinated with language as I am, only because you’ve screwed it up so often, you’ve no doubt focused on (see obsessed) the way your neighbor expresses himself with language. His word choices, examples, and metaphors are so unique that we wonder if he’s from a different culture or country, until he informs us that he’s from a different state that it turns out that state isn’t that far away. Then, he drops an ‘intensive purposes’ eggcorn on us, and we know it’s not just him, it’s everywhere. We hear those who influenced our maturation, and commanded our respect, say, “I could care less,” and we hear our friends say, “I consider the point mute.” Depending on how intimate our relationship is, we might correct them, but even if don’t, we’ll have a conclusion to our confusion: ‘That must be where I got it.’

We all go down different lanes on different days with different people. One guy messes up his tenses with one group, and he shows that he knows what he’s doing with them in another. Another fella abandons all modifiers outside work, then when he’s mixed in with his co-workers, he’s dropping them all over the place. When we work for large corporations, we can learn a lot about your language and our language, by listening to accents, regional dialects, and all of the shortcuts various generations use to express themselves in hip, cool jargon we call colloqualisms. It’s what we hear, what we say, and “That’s just kind of how we talk.”

“I took English as a second language,” a friend of mine said after I corrected her, “and I passed with flying colors. Seriously, I got the best grade in the class. But talking to you, Cindy, or anyone else, on a casual level, is so different that it can prove mind-boggling. There are so many rules, laws, bylaws, and customs that dictate how you speak formally versus informal and casually, and a whole bunch of laws and rules that govern all the different groups and cultures. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to speak with you guys on a conversational level, much less a professional level, and counting English, I now speak seven different languages fluently.”

Our language says a lot about our point of origin, our heritage, our education levels, our social status, and whether we’re cool or not. “No one says, ‘Aiden and I went to the store,’ my niece informed me after I corrected her. ‘We say, me and Aiden went to the store, and that’s just the way it is, whether correct or not, it’s the way we talk.’” We wouldn’t even try to say ‘and I’ among our friends, because we don’t want them to think, ‘She thinks she’s all that.’ We want people to like us, so we alter our programming to serve the group-approved vernacular. We speak different around our former-English teacher-Grandma, “because she’s always ragging on us,” than we do our more relaxed parents, and it takes time and numerous corrections for us to learn the vernacular and colloquialisms our co-workers require if we want to fit in with them.

Moving in and out of groups, we might fall prey to colloquialisms such as the ‘fianto contraction that is so popular in certain regions of the country we don’t even know we’re saying it, until some national comedian points it out. Even then, even when the comedian points it out, it doesn’t even get that a big laugh, because no one thinks they say it. Some don’t laugh, because they’ve never heard anyone say ‘fianto before, until they do that night, the next day week, or week when their mom says, “We’re going to go to the store. You can go too, ‘fianto.” The national comedian’s joke proved to be a depth charge joke that travelled the nation, with recipients catching each other committing the offense. It then morphed into ‘fianta, which isn’t a feminine classification of the contraction, but a further colloquialism that incorporates the ‘ta as opposed to the to, in I used ‘ta do it. The colloquialisms also extend to ‘ya as opposed to you, and ‘ferya, as in I’ll do that ‘ferya, ‘fudoitfermi. That’s just the way we talk, and if you don’t, you’re probably too young, too old, or too stuffy, and you don’t understand my demo, my group, or my culture.

We learn how to read the room, in other words, and we know we have to be careful, judicious, and very selective about the words we use. If we use language properly, we can accomplish the perception of the dignified, well-educated and erudite. Some of us strive for those impressions, and we try to use big words before we’re ready, to leap frog our way to greater impressions. “Be careful!” I want to shout out to those attempting to take the big leap to shortcuts that they hope garner impressions that are out of their lane. I don’t shout these warnings from afar, as the intro of this article makes clear. I’ve stepped into the multi-syllabic, malapropism minefield so often that I’ve experienced the, D) all of the above, answer when it comes to the difference between humility and humiliation, and I want to caution them to stay in their lane.

*******

“I found out just yesterday that the term is scot-free,” a friend of mine said. I’ve been saying scotch-free my whole life. Why didn’t anyone correct me before?” We don’t correct each other because we don’t want to be that guy, because nobody likes that guy, and I’m only that guy with immediate family members, because I have a ‘better they hear it from me than that guy who will mock them’ motto when it comes to family. It’s also possible that we don’t hear the difference between scotch-free and scot-free, because it’s often so close that it flows so quick and smooth. If we catch it, we say, “Who cares, it was close enough,” which leads to their, “Why didn’t anyone tell me I’ve been saying it wrong for decades” complaint.

***

I didn’t have time to shout, “Be careful!” to Jarvis “the co-worker” when he casually stepped into the big word, multi-syllabic malapropism minefield by attempting to display a learned lexicon. Jarvis “the co-worker” was a big gob-a-goo who may have been dating material 80lbs ago, and he was a little greazy, but that only led us to believe he was smarter than the rest of us. Our equation for that solution was based on the process of elimination. What does an unattractive man with little-to-no charisma focus on? He must been so focused on developing his intellect that he forgot to develop a personality, or keep himself trim, and well-groomed. For all of his flaws, Jarvis “the co-worker” could charm us with his ability to poke fun at himself. Throughout the short time we worked together, the man told a number of jokes regarding his inability to adhere to the hygienic standard, his poor work ethic, and his weight problem.

“You send that problem over to Jarvis the Hutt,” Jarvis said to a co-worker who was asking the group for help regarding a particular case she was working on, “and I’ll make sure it gets screwed up for good.” We all went quiet for a beat, gathering up what he just said, and then someone giggled, Jarvis joined them, and we all joined in. That comment balled up just about everything we thought of his workplace abilities in a tight, brief joke, and it crushed. Even the little, old lady, who never said anything to anyone, was laughing.

Anytime we hit that hard, we feel compelled to add a cherry atop the joke, and I didn’t have time to warn Jarvis “the co-worker” to “Be careful!” about stepping into the big word, multi-syllabic malapropism minefield, because I didn’t know was coming. “You know me,” he said “I’m very self-defecating.” I don’t know if people didn’t hear it, because he missed it by just a smidge, or if they thought he was close enough, but when we take the ‘P’ and the ‘R’ out of the sentence and replace them with an ‘F’, we craft an entirely different image in the mind’s eye. My first thought was that Jarvis just committed a slip of the tongue, but that ‘slip of the tongue’ thought generated a conjunctive image in my mind, more disturbing than Jarvis’s error. He was so close that I can only assume that whoever used the term in his company either didn’t enunciate the word self-deprecating very well, or Jarvis wasn’t using his listening skills, because he accidentally entered into my Personal Word Usage Hall of Fame by proudly declaring that he didn’t need assistance removing waste from his body.

“Well, that probably explains why your jokes stink so much,” I said.

“What?” he asked.

“You said self-defecating, and I think you meant to say self-deprecating,” I said. He gave me one of those looks that suggested he struggling to understand, but he didn’t want to admit to it, so I explained the difference to him.

“No wonder you gave me such a odd look.”

“Yeah, I was going to say, you probably don’t want to practice that in public.”

“Why didn’t anyone correct me before?” Jeremy wondered aloud. Then, he added, “I wonder how often I’ve made that error, over the years?”

Our personal hall of shame slips probably don’t match Jarvis’s Hall of Fame malapropism, but we’ve all heard things incorrectly and repeated them so often that when obnoxious intellects call us out on them, they introduce us to the fine line between that humility and humiliation. Humility is a statement we make, by choice, that we’re no better than anyone else, and humiliation is something inflicted upon us by others attempting to say that we’re worse than everybody. They’re so closely linked that they’re both rooted in the same Latin term humilis. Yet, if humility is a self-imposed choice we make to think of ourselves less, how come the humiliation thrust upon us by others makes us think of ourselves so much more?

It’s Special

November 20, 2024November 27, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

“Watch Alien: Romulus,” a friend of mine said. “It’s special.”

I loved that characterization. It was so simple that I wish I thought of it first. To set up the backdrop to this characterization, my friend and I have a long history of spoiling movies for one another by overhyping them. “The greatest movie ever!” we said a couple times. “Top ten in the genre,” we said, specifically listing the genre. By saying the movie was special, I think my friend was hoping I would see the movie, but he wanted me to see it, and judge it, even, or without hype. I’ve been on both ends of this. I am superlative man! I’ve ruined more than a few movies for others by going so far over the top that the recipients of my superlatives couldn’t help but consider it “Good, don’t get me wrong, but you were going so ape-stuff over it that I watched it thinking it would be the greatest movie ever made.” I’ve been on the other end of that too, and I’ve watched movies others hyped up for me, eager for that movie to absolutely blow my mind. What do we do? We “meh” our way through it, and then, we return to our friend the next day and say, “It was good, don’t get me wrong, but top-10? I don’t think so.” It’s entirely possible that if we didn’t plant these GOAT eggs on one another, we might’ve considered the movie in question as great as they did. As we all know, distinguishing good, bad, great, and awful can often be all about the mindset we have walking into the theater. So, from this point forward, I am going to adopt my friend’s “special” characterization for any movies, books, or music I hear, and I’m going officially declare to anyone reading the following list of all of my superlatives, regarding the “greatest works of art of all time!” that with the powers vested in me, as the writer of this article, it’s special.

Merriam-Webster defines special as “Distinguished by some unusual qualities.” Other resources list it as, “Better, greater, or otherwise different from what is usual.” My personal definition of special is different, as in a different kind of genius. Some label special geniuses, disruptors, because they dare to be different. They dare to tackle their projects in a way that either no one ever considered before, or they thought it violated some tenet of their definition of art. I choose to dismiss the “better and greater” definition of special, because unusual and different often get lost in debates of quality. Debates over quality often invite technical qualities I know nothing about. I often expose my ignorance in technical quality debates, because I view most technical qualities as trivial. I know special though, and that characterization often leads to ‘Ok, what do you know?’ questions. “I don’t know,” I say paraphrasing a Supreme Court Justice, “but I know it when I see it.”

If Quentin Tarantino died shortly after making Pulp Fiction, he would still go down as a special genius. Some of my friends didn’t enjoy the movie for a variety of reasons, but they still saw it. Just about every single one of them admitted that it had special qualities. If I attempted to dissect the technical qualities of this film, I would display my ignorance on the subject, but suffice it to say that among all of the reasons this movie was special, the primary one was dialog. Some suggest Tarantino worked for ten years to perfect the dialog, and it shows. Bruce Willis claimed it was the only movie he ever worked on that didn’t have one single rewrite. There were so many incredible and unforgettable scenes in the movie Pulp Fiction that we could bog this entire article down with a play-by-play dissection of each scene, but we’ll focus on three of the highlights. The dialog between Vincent and Jules in the introductory scenes was special, because the careful word choices defined the characters with such immediacy, and the action scenes in the apartment were so over the top that they were funny, horrific, and funny/horrific. The countering scene, later in the movie, between Butch and Fabienne, was just as special for its delicate and deft subtlety. The scenes between Vincent and Mia had special, influential and transcendental dialog, and the scene in the restaurant—sans the overrated dance scene—was unforgettable. Even while watching the movie for the first time, in a dingy, old theater long since closed, I experienced a tingle that suggested I might be watching the most special movie I’ve ever seen. I didn’t need to unearth its special qualities in the conversation I had leaving the theater, or read critical reviews to enhance those beliefs, I knew Pulp Fiction was special while sitting in the theater watching it for the first time, and it might be the single most enjoyable experience I ever had in the ever-dwindling experiences I’ve had in a theater.

Mother Love Bone’s Apple was special. I’ve had debates with musicians and other music freaks who know far more about music than I do, and they suggest that the lyrics on Apple were campy, silly, sophomoric, and hippy-trippy lyrics that haven’t aged well. It might suggest that I’m a campy, silly, sophomoric person who hasn’t aged well, because no matter how often I’ve heard and read those complaints, I still don’t see it. To my mind, Andrew Wood was an unusual genius when it came to writing lyrics. After lead singer his premature death, some of the band members reformed with a new lead singer, and formed Pearl Jam. “Ten was superior to Apple in every way, shape, and form,” my musician friend informed me, “and Eddie Vedder was a better lyricist, and he had a better voice.” My goal here is not to criticize Ten, Pearl Jam, or Eddie Vedder, as I enjoyed them for what they were, but they weren’t special to me. I rarely paid attention to lyrics before Apple, and I rarely have since, but Andrew Wood’s lyrics, his Andy-isms, as his bandmates called them, were special. They were funny, campy, sophomoric, and hippy-trippy, but they exhibited an unusual quality I still call “special” thirty-plus-years later.

You are Not so Smart by David McRaney. “It is far easier to entertain than it is to educate,” someone once said. If that’s true, it takes a special kind of genius to do both at the same time. Some pop psychology books focus on being entertaining, but they are so base, negative, and shocking. Others are so serious that they sound professorial. It takes a special author to combine a special talent for dry humor and wit with professorial scholarship on a subject, and McRaney accomplished that with gusto. What this author did, more than any other, was teach this writer how to tackle serious subjects in an entertaining fashion. He also laid a blueprint for me to understand how to apply everyday situations to larger concepts, a blueprint I’ve pursued ever since. To my mind, You are Not so Smart would be an excellent companion piece for Psych 101 classes, because I think students, who get the dreaded dry eyeball ten sentences into their gargantuan, dry textbooks, would love the learning while laughing arsenal Mr. McRaney employed while writing this book.

Whereas Pulp Fiction is in-your-face brilliant with quick, hip dialog, quick scene switches, and unforgettable music, the Coen Brothers invoke a more deliberate pace with quiet, casual dialog and more traditional music. I might be different from most Coen Brothers’ freaks, because I don’t think I ever “Wow!”-ed my way out of the theater with whomever I watched it. When I gathered with my friends later, and we remembered our favorite scenes, themes, and chunks of dialog together, I realize how brilliant that movie was. With all that in mind, I watched it again. It might be the way my mind works, but I think appreciation of the full breadth of the brilliance of a Coen brothers movie often requires a gathering storm of adoration. Fargo may have been the only one of their movies that hit me over the head with its brilliance, but I still had to talk about it and view it again to reach that “Wow!” factor. The Big Lebowski, Oh Brother Where Art Thou?, and Barton Fink all required some seasoning before I recognized how special they were.

Our follow-up question to the Truman Capote quote, “You only need to write one great book” is, “What are you talking about?” In our ‘What have you done for me lately?’ society, we all love to say, “You think that guy’s a special genius, because I thought his last movie [album or book] sucked!” We love to say that about our special artists, because we all know they’re special, and we love to tear down facades. What I think Capote was saying is the author only needs one great book, album, or movie for the rest of us to know their author is special. If he comes out with 20 more works of art, we’ll probably buy ten of his other works before we realize he only had one in him. We’ll probably keep tabs on him too, “Did you read his latest? Is it any good?” We do this, because he really moved us once. His clever arrangement of words, reached us in a way so few do, and they really only have to do this once to start our love affair.

It’s often difficult to express the special nature of watching a movie in a movie theater for the first time to younger people who now watch an overwhelming majority of the movies they watch on streaming platforms. All of the hype and planning behind trying to get someone to watch it with us was a production in its own right. When we found someone who was as excited as we were to watch the special director’s next movie, we said, “Let’s do it,” and when that movie premiered that Friday, we got together and experienced it together, with a room full of strangers and friend, with popcorn and soda in our lap. It was an “event”. I know some young people still do it, and I stream movies as much as anyone else now, but I think we all miss the event status of what it once was.

There was also something special about holding a physical album, cassette, or compact disc in your hands, before sliding it into a player and cracking the binding of our brand new book. As a hyper kid who only wanted to do physical things, I became an avid book lover as I aged into adulthood. I loved reading a book in public. I felt like I was finally a part of a club, and I enjoyed holding a physical copy of that book in my hands while flipping the pages. That’s almost entirely gone, and there’s something about the waiting that is gone too. Again, I could be overhyping the individual’s experiences, but I don’t think anyone eagerly anticipates the arrival of a new movie, book, album, or TV show. I had a hate/love relationship with waiting, similar to a child hating and loving the days until Christmas. We used to ‘X’ off the days on the calendar, until our favorite product would finally make it to store shelves, we’d talk to fellow fans, and build ourselves into a lather until it finally arrived. I could be exaggerating in this regard, but these products just seem to appear now, and we click on it. We might “know” that our favorite author is going to deliver a product to a streaming service sometime in the near future, but do we still eagerly anticipate its arrival? I know I don’t. It’s just there one day, and I click on it.

“In the grand scheme of things, what’s the difference between clicking on something and watching, listening and reading it? Once we’re halfway through it, if it’s great it’s great, and it can still achieve the same special status if it’s that good.” That is all true, but holding a physical copy of the product, even if momentarily renting it from Blockbuster, used to give the consumer of the product some level of ownership that created a “special” relationship with its creator that streaming cannot replicate. Some of us dreamed of this day, and when Napster first appeared, then iTunes, it felt like a realization of that dream, and we loved creating playlists to ‘X’ out some of the more boring deep cuts, but now that it’s all here, and we’re a couple decades into being used to it, some of the “special” event status of it is gone.

I still remember some of the “special” theatrical experiences I had. I remember where I saw this movie, and I still remember watching that movie with a group of friends and strangers, who enhanced my theatrical experience in a way only a group can. One of the movies I watched in a theater was not even that good, it was too long, and it tried too hard, but the theatrical experience I had that day was so “special” that I still remember it fondly, almost romantically. I remember the car I owned, and the street corner I passed in that car, the first time I realized the music I was listening to was the work of an unusual and special genius. I also remember the chair I sat in, the breakroom I read in, and the bathtub I laid in reading the works of genius, because, for me, to quote the group Climax, featuring Sonny Geraci, “Precious and few are the moments we two can share.”

{Editor’s note, we did eventually see Alien: Romulus, and it was special, but we think we might have ruined the total experience that makes such movies special by watching it via a streaming service. Watching a comedy, or a more typical drama, can be appreciated in either format, but a great horror, sci-fi, or those rare masterpieces needs to be viewed in groups, in a dark theater, with popcorn and soda in your lap or drink holder.}