The Habitual Howling Hierarchy

January 18, 2026 RilalyLeave a comment

“I have nothing to complain about!” Melissa yelled as if volume made her grievance more grievous. She was employing irony, and she was winning! Complaining is what Melissa did. It’s what we all did, and if you wanted in you had to learn how to complain about something, even if that something involved the crushing burden of having nothing to complain about.

Our complaints often had something to do with the inhuman monolithic corporation we worked for that didn’t pay us enough, offer us enough benefits, or care that we were trapped behind a computer for ten hours a day, four days a week. Those of us in the inner circle of our inner circle learned to cycle out and complain about everything. There was no regular menu of complaints from which to choose, and there were no specials of the day. Complaining was just what we did.

“Complaints are like orifices,” Brian said to try to ingratiate himself with the group, through ironic, observational humor that matched Melissa’s. “Everyone’s got them, but we complain about not having more.” Unfortunate to Brian’s legacy, his little joke didn’t land, because we had an unspoken rule that we don’t complain about complainers, until we’re complaining about their constant complaints behind their backs.

Complaining is such a vital component of our being that it’s just something we do. We complain about how bored we are in the beginning, we complain about school, the workplace, and in our final decades on Earth, we complain about our lack of health, until it goes away.

If there is an afterlife, and we are introduced to absolute, unquestionable paradise, we will probably be blown away by it, initially, but we’ll get used to it after a while, and we’ll find something to complain about. “Have you noticed that they provide Black Duck umbrella picks for our cocktails here? I hate to complain, but it’s just such a huge step down from the OGGI cocktail umbrellas to which I was accustomed.”

If we have nothing to complain about, our brain will make something up just to justify its existence.

How often do we think just to avoid boredom, and thinking about how to complain about something is far more interesting than realizing how good we have it. Thinking about how good we have it kind of defeats the whole purpose of thinking.

“That sounds like first world thinking.” It is, but I’m guessing that there are plenty of third-world citizens who complain about stupid stuff too.

*******

My friends’ parents enjoyed complained about the state’s college football team, until the team started winning. At that point, they complained about having nothing to complain about. I didn’t realize it at the time, but we were all complaining about a college football team that proved to be one of the most successful programs for that span of time. Our complaint was that our team didn’t win the national championship every year.

His parents did this, my dad did it, and we all grew up complaining about it. “We were so close!” we’d complain. “I’d rather finish 0-fer than get that close again,” was our common complaint. Their complaints were so unrealistic they were funny. I laughed at them from afar, but I also laughed at them from above, as I considered some of their complaints so foolish, until I watched my son’s second grade baseball team.

When those seven-eight-year-old children played baseball, they made errors, and I had to stifle my snarky comments. “Of course he didn’t catch that ball,” I thought, “not when it was coming right at him, and it could’ve won the game for us.” I will provide this space right here ( ) for you to criticize me, slam on me, and analyze the deficits of my character. I deserve it, but I just could not click that hyper-critical, “I could do better. Even at their age, I wouldn’t have done that” portion of my brain off. I wouldn’t have done better, and I knew it, but I couldn’t tell me that, not in the moment.

We’ve all seen videos of parents overreacting saying such stupid things at their child’s game, and what we see probably isn’t even one one millionth of the times it’s happened. We’ve all seen those viral videos of parents screaming their heads off over the dumbest things, and we found them disgusting, sad, and hilarious. And I would’ve agreed with every single one of your characterizations of these people, until I became one of them. I didn’t unleash any of these thoughts, and to my mind no one knew how unreasonable and unfair I was, but those thoughts were in there, percolating their way to the top.

I could take a couple of errors here and there, as I wasn’t so demanding of perfection that I ignited over every single error, but there was always that one error, that over-the-top error, that just broke the dam for me. I’d leap to my feet and take my dog for a walk to get as far away as I could from everyone. I didn’t want anyone knowing what I was thinking.

All I can say, in my defense, is I’ve been watching sports and screaming things at TVs for as long as I can remember. I learned that we fans don’t have to sit quietly in the comfort of our own home when athletes are engaging in inferior play. I took those unfair and unrealistic expectations of college-aged images on TV to seven and eight-year-olds trying to play baseball. I never said anything aloud, and I knew my thoughts were unrealistic, unfair, and obnoxious, but I couldn’t stop thinking them after all those years of conditioning.

When our favorite college football team actually started to win so often that they won three national championships in four years, my friend’s family didn’t celebrate our victory, they were bored. Bored? Yes, bored by all that success. I knew this mentality so intimately that shortly after the Cubs won the World Series, I warned my friend, “This is really going to put a dent in your favorite team’s fan base.” Why? “Because the Cubs were lovable losers, and Cubs’ fans enjoyed complaining about them year after year. Every Cub’s fan could recite the rolodex of reasons why their beloved team hadn’t won a World Series for 100 years. The Cubs actually winning the World Series will turn out to be a poor business decision on their part. You watch.” I turned out to be wrong by a matter of degrees. Most Cubs’ fans are still loyal, more loyal than I thought they’d be, but they lack the fanatical fervor that the complaints about them not winning once fueled.

When our favorite college football team finally beat our inter-conference rival in resounding fashion, I celebrated each touchdown as if it was the first in a very tight ball game.

“Why are you still cheering this game on?” my friend’s dad asked. “It’s a blowout.”

“I don’t know,” I said, “But it might have something to do with all the pain they’ve caused us for decades. It feels like it’s finally over.”

“It’s still a blowout,” he said. “It’s a boring game.” It took me a long time to realize if this guy couldn’t complain about a game, he wasn’t all that interested in watching it. That victory was so complete that he didn’t have anything to complain about, and he basically had no reason to watch it anymore.

If I were to dig far too deep into this superficial element of life, I might say that complaining about sports so much that we’re screaming at the images on TV, and becoming so irrational about something we cannot control, is actually quite healthy in that it provides a non-confrontational outlet to unleash our anger and frustrations in life, as long as we don’t take it out of the home and into the public realm at our seven-to-eight-year-old’s baseball game.

*******

“You can change his name if you want, and I won’t be offended,” a breeder said after I drove nine hours to pick up the puppy I just purchased from her. I was so sure she was being sarcastic that I said:

“Well thanks, that’s awful nice of you to allow me to name my dog?” in a tone I considered equally sarcastic. The breeder gave me a look to suggest our connections weren’t connecting.

“Wait, do people actually keep the name you choose for the pets they purchase from you?” I asked her. She said she didn’t know, but she wanted us to feel free to change it.

I already had that eight-week-old puppy’s name picked out. I knew the name the breeder chose, as she listed it in the online listing, but I never even considered the idea that she might be offended by the idea that I would change it. She lived nine hours away, so we would never see her again. How and why would she be offended by this, and why and how would I care if she was?

When we purchase a puppy, we plan on keeping it for 12-14 years. Why would anyone want to keep the name someone else chose for it? That is so foreign to my way of thinking that I just thought everyone but the rare exception changed the name. I was shocked to learn how wrong I was. Since that interaction with the breeder, I began asking my fellow pet owners how they arrived at their dog’s name, “How did you pick that name, I like it?” I’d ask in the most polite frame I could.

A surprising number of people said, “It was their name when we purchased them.”

“You know you can change it right?” I asked. “Do you know how surprisingly simple it is?” Dog lovers know that dogs have unique personalities, but do they know that those personalities are not tied to their name? If we were to try to change a human’s name, say when they’re twelve-years-old, that would be a complicated procedure that would confuse the kid so much that we wouldn’t even think of doing it, except in rare cases.

Dogs don’t cling to names the way humans do. They adapt so quickly that a name change can be accomplished quickly. We did it in about two days with that puppy we purchased from that breeder, and it took about a week for the eight-year-old dog we purchased a year before.

“I know, I know…” my fellow pet owners said when I told them how easy it was to change a dog’s name. Some tried to explain why they felt the need to keep the name, but most just left it at “I know, I know…”

I don’t know if people lack creativity, if they don’t want the hassle of being creative, or if they fear they won’t be able to successfully change their pet’s name, but I met a family who purchased a rabbit and kept that rabbit’s name. “Does a rabbit even come to you when you call it?” I asked within my ‘Why didn’t you just change its name?’ frame.

“It does,” they said after debating among themselves. “But only when it wants to. He doesn’t come to you every single time you call him, as a dog would.” That debate involved family members who didn’t want to concede to the uncomfortable theme of my question that rabbits aren’t intelligent enough to know the difference.

“So, why didn’t you change the name?”

They never answered with thorough and complete conviction, but they did try to convince me that their rabbit was far more intelligent than I knew, which I interpreted to mean that they didn’t want to insult the beloved Binky the Bunny by arbitrarily changing his name to something they wanted it to be.

I conceded that I didn’t know how intelligent a rabbit was, but I said, “Who chose the name Binky? Do you think that sixteen-year-old pet store employee had greater insight into Binky’s being, his personality, and how he wanted to be identified?”

“He is Binky the Bunny,” they said. “That’s who he was when we purchased him, it’s why we purchased him, and it’s who he is now.” The other family members liked that answer so much, because it suggested that they, as a family, respected and liked Binky so much that by keeping the rabbit’s name it paid homage to his heritage and ancestry so much that they wouldn’t alter that by enforcing their will on him. There was also an implied notion that the move from the pet store to their home was so confusing and traumatic that they didn’t want to add to that by forcing Binky to adapt to their personal preference of a name. They didn’t say this, but they implied that they didn’t change the rabbit’s name, because they wanted him to know that his past mattered to them too.

Twenty years ago, I may have continued to argue against what I considered holes in their argument with the tenacity of a terrier on an ankle, but the smiles of joy surrounding me that day suggested that not only was my war against Binky unwinnable, but if I did somehow achieve some definition of victory my only prize would be a diminishment of those smiles.

*******

“Why are you loyal to them?” a friend of mine asked. “They’re not loyal to you.” My friend said this when I told him that I just finished the year with no absences, no tardies, and the best quality scores I’ve ever accomplished as an employee. My uninformed guess is that this argument has probably been going on between employee and employer for as long as man has been employed by other men, but my Depression-era dad argued:

“No, that’s new to your generation, and probably a generation before yours, but we felt lucky to have a job.” Subjective critics of the modern era back my dad, “Companies and corporations actually cared about people back then [during The Depression and in the immediate aftermath]. Back then, employers kept people fed, happy, and alive. Businesses cared about people more back then. They paid more and gave better benefits back then. Now it’s all about the shareholders.”

‘So, you’re saying that The Depression-era companies and corporations didn’t have shareholders?’ I would ask those critics. ‘Or are you saying that they didn’t worry about them back then? Was that what led to The Depression? No, I know it didn’t, but did they worry about regaining the trust of the shareholders back in the aftermath of The Depression?’ My guess is the system was much more similar to the system we employ now than the subjective critics know.

“If you’re lucky enough to gain employment,” my dad taught us, “You stay with that employer for life.” That obviously didn’t penetrate, as my brother and I had numerous jobs before we landed great ones, but we met several fellow employees along the way who bought into my dad’s philosophy. Yet, we also found that their decades-long tenure at the company was not formed entirely by loyalty as much as it was fear. There were some who were loyal, some who were extremely loyal, but most of them stayed at the job that was no longer rewarding because they feared that they couldn’t do anything else, they were just happy to have a job, and they adjusted their life to how much money they made in that job.

The subjective, cultural critics examine the system from the position that most corporations are evil and selfish. They embody this argument with the comparisons of CEO salaries compared to the average worker’s salary. To which I ask who is more valuable, valued, and replaceable? They would avoid this argument by complaining that most CEOs are evil, selfish, and some even argue that CEOs aren’t truly the top figureheads in the corporate hierarchy. That’s right, most of the figureheads sitting atop the corporate hierarchy are inhuman monoliths that we call the corporation, and these inhuman monoliths don’t care about humans anymore. I’ll let others argue for or against that, and I’ll focus on the more rational argument that those in corporate hierarchy don’t care about us. How do you define care? The members of your corporate hierarchy care enough to fulfill their end of the bargain we agreed to when we decided to be employed by them. They continue to pay us for services rendered, and they give us all the benefits they promised when we were hired. They also give employees performance-based raises, bonuses, and stock purchase programs.

If we don’t care for the various agreements we made with them anymore, we need to get competitive and see how competitive the other evil, selfish, and inhuman corporate monoliths are willing to get for our services. Before agreeing to that change, we need to focus in on what these other corporations have to offer us for our skills before we agree to work with them. Change, as we’ve all discovered, is not always better.

As for companies not caring, I’ve worked with supervisors who didn’t give a crap about me, and I’ve worked with others who cared a great deal. Our relationship with an employer is often defined by our relationship with our immediate supervisor. If we go further up into the hierarchy, we find that those people do not, in fact, care about us, but it’s mostly because they haven’t met us, and they don’t know us. They are required to create comprehensive corporate policies that try to make us happy while making their bosses happy.

When I applied for a mid-management job in our huge corporation, my supervisor said, “If you’re hired, you’re going to get the stuff rolling at you from both sides. You have to make the employees under you happy, and you have to make the employees above you happy. You need to accept the fact that if you become a boss, you will still have a boss, because everyone has a boss.”

The thing the subjective critics don’t understand is that their supervisor has to make their manager happy, and that manager has to make their bosses happy, all while trying to make you happy at the same time. And they all have to make a CEO happy, who has to make the corporate board happy, and the corporate board has to make the shareholders happy. Everyone has a boss. To make the shareholders happy, the corporate board convinces the CEO to work with the hierarchy structure under them to make sure all of the machinations of the corporation are so finely tuned that they create the most evil word in the subjective critic’s dictionary: profit.

If you reach a point where you loathe that word as much as the subjective critics who believe there is no reward for company loyalty anymore, you might want to seek employment with a non-profit. Before we leave the for-profit for the non-profit, we should know that their will still be a hierarchal structure that mirrors the for-profit, corporate hierarchal structure, but we will be able to remove that evil shareholders brick (stressed with disdain). After deleting them, we will need to replace it with a brick designated for those who provide charitable contributions, and/or the funders who offer grants. Even though the names are changed, those in the hierarchal structure will still feel scrutinized to the point that they feel the need to perform for their bosses, and at some point in our tenure with the nonprofit we’ll feel disillusioned, because we’ll come to the conclusion that they don’t care about us either, they just focus on performance.

*******

There is one class of people who truly don’t care about us, criminals. Who are you? How do you define yourself? In ways significant and otherwise, we define ourselves by our stuff. We prefer to say the opposite at every outing, because we deem those who define themselves by stuff superficial and of diminished character. The moment after someone steals our stuff is the moment we realize that the stuff that defined us is now defining him, and we feel this strange sense of violation that informs us how valuable that stuff actually was to us.

When criminals steal something of ours, it offends us, because it feels like they’re taking elements of our character. Criminals don’t care about our attachments to stuff, and they don’t understand why we care so much about things. If they take one of our things, those things are theirs now.

When they spot something they want, they take it. It’s really not that different from the typical purchasing agreement we make with stores. We saw something on the shelves, and we took it. We paid the store for the product, yet money is an agreed upon, but artificial construct, if we view it from the criminal’s perspective. We took it from the store, and now they’re taking it from us. They don’t buy into that quaint and somewhat archaic idea of ownership the way we do.

Renee, my seven-year-old friend introduced me to this concept of the thief’s mentality when I spotted one of my Weeble Wobbles in her toy chest. “Hey, that was mine!” I said. “You stole it from me!”

She tried to convince me that her mother purchased it for her, until I pointed out a very specific flaw that her Weeble Wobble shared with mine.“Fine!” she said when she decided to give it back to me. She said that in a tone that suggested he didn’t understand what the big deal was. “I never saw you play with it, and I didn’t think you were using it anymore.”

“What? Even if I wasn’t, it was still mine, and if you wanted to borrow it, you should’ve just asked.”

“I said fine! Here,” she said, giving it back. We were seven-years-old, but in my limited-to-no experience in this field informs me that the misunderstanding of how the system works remains constant when I hear adult shoplifters try to compromise with store security by saying, “Here. Fine. I’ll give it back.” They hope by doing so, they can enter into an agreement with the storeowner that permits the storeowner to drop all charges. If that doesn’t work, they attempt to enter into an agreement with the storeowner, or manager, by saying they’ll pay for it. If the storeowner refuses, the criminal walks away thinking the store had a personal vendetta against them. It’s the thief’s mentality (trademarked).

At some point in this process, we’re taught to forgive and forget. “Everyone deserves a second chance.” If we refuse to forgive, our mothers, fathers, priests, and other authority figures teach us that holding onto anger, requiring retribution, and/or holding grudges have a way of darkening the soul. They say that learning how to forgive with all of our heart provides a spiritual cleansing that will pave the way for greater happiness. It’s true, and we know it’s all true. Yet, if we abide by the loving logic they teach us, and we decide to forgive the criminals for their violation, our relationship with the thief will arrive at another complicated definition of human interactions, when they steal from us again.

Gomers’ Piles

December 30, 2025January 13, 2026 RilalyLeave a comment

If I enter a public restroom and see you, you’re guilty of whatever happened in there until proven innocent, and the more you plead your innocence, the more guilty you look.

The Gomer

Most of us have been insulted so often and in so many creative ways that it’s almost impossible and pointless to catalog. Nestled within those insults are a few jewels that are so colorful and intriguing that we cannot wait to use them. I’m not exactly sure why I latched onto this particular slang insult from the 90s, but when Ty said, “You’re such a Gomer!” it sounded so much like an insult I would use that if an insult can ‘fit like a glove’ I could almost feel the leather sucking on my contours.

“Gomer?” I asked. “What is a Gomer?”

“If you have to ask,” Ty said. “You’re a Gomer.” That reply wasn’t new to me of course, but it informed me that I was stepping into a kafkatrap in which I was The Trial’s Joseph K., accused of an infraction against cultural awareness, and any effort I put into clarifying the situation only deepened my apparent guilt and reinforced the accusation. It also created the perfect insult loop, because any questions I asked only further authenticated the insult and somehow brought the condition into being.

Most subjects of this insult loop would recognize the kafkatrap for what it was and drop the line of questioning there, which would allow the accuser to bask in their glory. Yet, I found it so delicious that I thought I might want to test drive it on my own one day, so I wanted to fully understand its power base. “Does it date back to the 60s television show Gomer Pyle?”

“I don’t watch TV.” It was cool back then, as it is now, to feign ignorance.

“Well, what does it mean then?”

“I don’t know,” Ty said with impatience. “But it fits.”

After obsessing over this, I discovered that the term began after the prophet Hosea’s wife, Gomer, acted unfaithfully, and it thus served to symbolize God’s relationship with unfaithful Israel, but I was pretty sure that didn’t form the basis of Ty’s insult. I was also sure Ty wasn’t referring to the emergency room jargon from a book called House of God by Samuel Shem that referred to them shouting, “Get Out of My Emergency Room,” to annoying patients who repetitively took beds that should’ve been reserved for more deserving patients. No, I decided, the term was derived from the TV show Gomer Pyle, a character played by Jim Nabors, as a clumsy, unsophisticated fella who was folksy and awkward.

Even though the truth was somewhat anti-climactic, as I expected a more sophisticated and nuanced answer, I still enjoyed the sound of the insult “Gomer”. I don’t know if it was the syllabic nature of the word or the enunciation, but “You’re such a Gomer!” just felt like such an airtight insult that I couldn’t wait to use it on the unsuspecting. It just seemed so me. To my memory, I never got around to it. I know it’s not too late, but I forgot to use it back when it had the flamboyant style and battlefield visibility of prominent feather plumes (AKA panache), and it’s one of the great regrets of my life.

Dads

We all enjoy hearing about the father of an extremely successful person remaining stubbornly unimpressed by their son’s success. The rest of the world cannot believe how talented this man is, but his dad, the man he probably strove to impress more than anyone else in the world is, “Meh.” It’s your child, the little fella you could hold in one hand while you changed his diaper with the other, all growed up ruling Hollywood, and you’re, “Meh.” It’s funny and sad at the same time.

After reaching the pinnacle of success in Hollywood, Jerry Lewis decided he wanted to share the wealth with his father. Lewis came up with what he considered the perfect way of doing it. He approached members of the General Motors corporation and asked them to build his dad the finest automobile they could possibly build. When the father, Danny Levitch, was presented with this gift, he said, “What you couldn’t get me a convertible?” That’s so cynical it’s funny, right? It’s Seinfeld funny. We can’t decide if it’s so funny it’s sad, or if it’s so sad it’s funny, but it strikes us as sounding so true that it is funny … and a little sad.

This story provides a small window into Jerry Lewis’s relationship with his dad. Due to the comedic nature of it, we might consider it a highlight, but what happened in the days in between? What happened to Jerry Lewis when he was too young to understand it all, then old enough to know that he was being raised in a loveless home? The car story provides a laugh, but what happened on those boring Thursdays and during the Holidays in that home Jerry Lewis grew up in? According to Lewis, he was never close to either of his parents.

Danny Levitch was a failed vaudeville actor who may have been jealous of all of Jerry’s success, and he may have considered the car an example of Jerry Lewis rubbing his nose in his success. Hard to know what happened in the inner sanctum of the family dynamics, but Jerry and his parents never reconciled, and Jerry was later known to be a distant father to his own kids, as all six of them had a strained relationship with him throughout his life. He even went so far as to cut them all out of his will before he died.

I don’t know if Mr. Levitch was a “tough love” proponent, who was constantly pushing Jerry harder, because he thought praise weakens, or if he did what he did to try to keep his wildly successful son grounded, but at some point he probably should’ve closed the loop. These loops are facades we create to force our children through for their betterment. Some parents create beautiful! and wonderful! facades of too much praise, because they believe it strengthens their child’s self-confidence, their morale and resolve, and some parents do the opposite to keep their kids grounded and to prepare them for the perseverance required for the rough world that awaits.

My dad was an opposite. Whenever we accomplished what we accomplished, he spotted the possible fly in the ointment that no one considers while in the glow of accomplishment. He often talked about how luck always plays something of a role, and the lucky should always prepare for the times when they aren’t so lucky. “It’s great advice dad, but how about we take a moment to bask?”

Whenever we saw an individual driving a high-priced vehicle, my dad would say, “We don’t know how much he owes.” When everyone else was buttering our bottom, our dad was warning us about the other foot landing a solid blow to the keister. It was what he considered “the real” side, which just happened to be the critical, cynical side. He did this throughout our maturation and into adulthood. The difference between my dad and Mr. Levitch, and all those negative Nancies who focus far too much on the dark side of life, is that he eventually closed the loop.

“I’m so proud of you and your brother,” he said one day, almost out of the blue. If someone threw out a hypothetical scenario, beforehand, in which my dad offered me unqualified praise without conditions, I would’ve said, “First of all, it will never happen, but if it did, it probably wouldn’t mean a lot to me.” Much to my surprise, it turned out to be one of the more meaningful moments of my life. I still remember the intersection we were approaching when he said it, and it’s been fifteen years since that happened.

Did Mr. Levitch build a facade for his son by withholding praise, love and forgiveness for the expressed purpose of making his son a hard man who is invulnerable to insults and criticism? And did he maintain that facade, even on his deathbed? We don’t know, but we know Jerry Lewis did by cutting his children out of his will. While I’ve never been on a deathbed, I have to imagine that would be a pretty good time to let bygones be bygones and let our guard down to express love, pride, and forgiveness. It’s also an excellent time to close all the loops we’ve created for their own good, and … it’s actually hilarious when we don’t. Except to those who want to hear their loved one say one kind thing to them before they go to the great beyond. I didn’t have to go through this, because my dad eventually closed that loop, but if he didn’t, I can only imagine that all of the holes in my soul would’ve coalesced into one big, hilarious black hole.

Mary

“You don’t like Mary?” I ask. “I can understand not liking Trisha and Natalie, they’re 50% people; 50% of us like them and 50% don’t, but Mary? How can you dislike Mary?” Mary has her flaws of course, and we all become qualified professionals when it comes to spotting other people’s flaws, but with Mary, we really need to dig deep to find them. The next question we will ask ourselves, soon after we find ourselves in the depths of Mary’s caves and caverns, is why am I here again? That’s right, we started this whole expedition because there was something about Mary that exposed something we didn’t like about ourselves.

Funny is a Funny Thing

I knew a life-of-the-party type who could just dominate a room when he was “on stage” at various get-togethers and various shindigs, but he couldn’t even make you smile one-on-one. I knew “a quiet guy” who could drop you with a perfect comeback, a great one-liner, and an incredible story. Call him out at a party, and he clams up. He said things in those group settings, but they were all self-conscious. “I get nervous,” he’d say. He basically experienced stage fright in front of seven or eight people, even when they were just family members. I met a guy who was a hilarious writer, but in person he could never quite pound a joke home. He was one of those joke tellers who was always editing, and by the time he got to the punchline, we were basically exhausted, and we laughed sympathetically. As an amateur student of psychology as it pertains to humor, I’ve never met anyone who was funny in person, on stage, and on the page.

Your Fly is Down

As a failed student of comedy, I cannot abide by the “Your fly is down!” joke. One character in the series Stick made a funny, insightful comment about how wolves must be embarrassed to see what we’ve done to manipulate their species into yorkies, pomeranians, and shih tzus. The other character says, “Your fly is down.” This is now so common that it’s a trope in most comedic productions, and I don’t understand how it became something we consider a pointed, substantive, or even clever comeback?

If someone asked me my least favorite joke, I probably couldn’t come up with it on the spot, but if someone else said, “What about the ‘Your fly is down’ joke?”

“That’s it!” I’d say. It’s one of those jokes that only works in-person. In a situation comedy, written in, presumably, a writer’s room, how does this get a thumbs up from a head writer? How does the head writer not say, “We can do better than that, c’mon guys. That’s a Friends joke. Surely, we can do better than recycling a Friends joke.” If I were writing this exchange, I would have the butt of this fly joke say, “Okay thanks,” as he zips his zipper up, “but that doesn’t take away from my observation.” The ‘Fly down’ rebuttal is somehow viewed as one character putting another in their place, and it must be viewed as effective in some quarters, because so many writers write it in as dialogue. Personally, I’d like to have a word with the world to have them help me finally put this insipid “Your fly is down” joke out of its misery.

Tictacs de un Reloj

The ticks of the clock in Mr. Harrington’s Spanish II class were so painfully slow that I still remember looking up at that clock with clenched teeth. When the second hand descended from one to six, that clocked performed its functions as we’d expect. When it ascended from six to twelve, the most important part, it struggled. It bounced a little, as if the mechanisms behind its ascent were lacking power. Even though I had nothing better to do at the time, I thought nothing was better than anything we did in that classroom.

As we age and look back at our schooling years, most of us regret not paying more attention in school. I’m as guilty of that as anyone else, but after crossing that bridge o’ regret, I now recognize that I would be just as bored in Mr. Harrington’s class today as I was as at sixteen-years-old. I now have corporate boardroom meetings to remind me how slow a clock can tock.

Prison guards often say that after spending years in their profession, they often begin to feel held captive as much as the prisoners. Mr. Harrington was our warder, as he appeared to loathe being in the class as much as we did. He often joked about how many hours he was away from his retirement package, and he obnoxiously calculated that over the course of two years of in-class hours.

Now that I’m old and happy, time ticks away so quickly that the only thing that makes me a little unhappy is watching how efficient our clocks are now. Yet, if I were on my death bed watching those clicks of the clock bounce by far too quickly, and an entity appeared offering me six more months of life, I would accept it of course, until he offered me the requisite “catch” of such offerings. “The catch is you have to go back in time and attend Mr. Harrington’s class for one hour of each day you’re being offered.” I would still eventually accept his offer, because life is life, and I have to imagine I would recognize its value in that moment, but I might ask the entity to explain the glory of the unknown to me to weigh it against my personal definition of earthly hell.

Permission! Permission

“It’s pointless to give advice to young ‘un’s,” old people often say about the young. “They don’t listen.” True, but we didn’t listen either. We heard them, but everything they said went in one ear and out the other. Before it went out the other, however, it did hit a way station. We were teenagers, we had our first job, and we were cashing our own paychecks, so of course we weren’t listening.

I’m not going to say, “I never got nothing,” (triple negative) but everything I got, before those paychecks, came with a whole lot of begging, pleading and badgering. I’m not still complaining about that but illustrating that everything “I got” came with the most evil word in the teenage lexicon: Permission.

Those first, sweat-drenched paychecks taught me about something I only heard about when I was a teen, purchasing power. Purchasing something without permission was the greatest high I received to that point in my life, a high no drug or alcohol could duplicate. To me, it was better than a girl’s smile. And the “Theys” in my life tried to coach me into being more responsible with my money. It didn’t happen right away, as the dizzying feelings of euphoria lasted long after I went broke displaying that power. It took a number of paychecks and repetitive feelings of embarrassment, humiliation, and feelings of utter powerlessness before I tried to find that way station again and the advice therein to try to put it back in the other ear. If that young ‘un you’re trying to advise is anything like I was, give them that advice and realize that “they won’t listen,” until they make their own mistakes so often that they try to remember what we said.

The Relative Quality of Relative Quality

“That’s such an awful book (album or movie),” they say about the works with which I develop a relationship. “I can’t believe you liked it.” Tommyknockers is often deemed one of the worst books Stephen King ever wrote. The ending was so anticlimactic that I think it left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth, but there were moments, in the buildup, when Tommyknockers captivated mein a way few books ever have. Rock critics and KISS fans say that their Music from The Elder album was not only KISS’s worst album, but it might be one of the worst rock albums ever made. I’ll never know the truth, because my connection to that album is so strong I’ll never be able to analyze it objectively. I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure the greatest divide between my friends and members of family and I arrived with a production called The Blair Witch Project. I’ve never watched the movie again, after seeing it at midnight on the night (morning?) of its release, but that movie reached me on a level no other movie has. “Isn’t that the whole point,” we ask critics and fans. To paraphrase Picasso, “The writers’ job is to create something and then give it away.” When they create it, it’s a nutshell of their passion, and they hope to give that passion away to us. Those of us who love these artistic creations cannot answer questions of quality in a dispassionate manner, because the authors of these creations reached us in a way that led us to fall in love with them in a manner similar to teenage, puppy love that is so irrational that it cannot be factually supported or refuted.

Fix-It Man!

Some of us are perpetually caught between our inability to fix our things and not wanting to spend the money to have another fix them. It’s always kind of embarrassing to admit we were not born with the ability, or more importantly the patience, to fix things. I make a mistake, and it becomes clear to me that I’m a total screw up who can’t do things. Other people make the same mistakes, and they simply start over from scratch and fix it correctly. My inferiority complex leads me to panic when I don’t do things perfectly.

The Conditional Secret

Just out of curiosity, I read Secrets to a Happy Marriage articles. I’m not going to write that they’re totally useless, but they contain advice that falls under the term The Forer Effect. The Forer Effect is most often witnessed in horoscopes, in which their writers apply descriptions, advice, et al. that could apply to everyone. Personally, I think the best advice I’ve ever heard is that relationships between adults are not unconditional. My guess is that most marriages end because the participants mistakenly believe that their marriage should be unconditional, and one or more of the spouses fail to express what their conditions are. Unconditional love should be reserved for the parent/child relationship. As fortune seekers often say, in their quest for treasure, more adventure and glory is found in the chase than in actually securing the pot of gold. If we want to make an individual, who happens to be our spouse, happy, we should know that there are super-secret elements to a happy marriage to be found every day. If you’re a great spouse who wants to have a happy marriage, you’ll seek those super-secrets and capitalize on them when they make their appearance, but there will probably be more glory found in the chase.

Hiding in Hyde

In the movie Entourage, based on a TV series of the same name, the main character secures the rights to a movie called Hyde. The main character (of Entourage) informs his agent that for him to participate in Hyde, he wants to direct it. The agent begrudgingly concedes, and to make a long, boring story short, Hyde turns out to be: “Brilliant!” of course. If you watched the TV series, you know the main character is a leading man who has leading man, movie star good looks, and he gets everything he wants in life. No one, agents, directors, friends, family, or women, dare say no to the man. He’s the top of the list, king of the hill, and an a number one of the charmed life demographic.

Those of us on the outside-looking-in know such people exist. We’ve met them, viewed them from afar, and we’ve even developed relationships with some of them. Some of them are athletically gifted, intellectually superior, and/or charismatic types who light up every room they enter, but in my experience, they’re almost never creative types.

The typical creative type is not born with the gifts of the charmed. Their creatively is honed through effort, failure, and the struggle to succeed. Failure is often the key, because the typical creative type starts out awful, laughably awful, and some of their beta readers are not afraid to laugh. The typical creative type perseveres, not because they want to prove their detractors wrong, but because it’s who they are, or who they’ve become.

Those of us on the outside looking in must grapple with the idea that we’re jealous of “IT!” guys, because we are. Who wouldn’t want to live one day of their lives? If we can step beyond that argument and have a rational discussion, I don’t see how anyone can lead such a charmed life and be creative. We all know there are exceptions to every rule, but it just seems implausible that this charmed individual can create something “Brilliant!” in his directorial debut. (It should be noted that the Vincent Chase character did not write the screenplay for Hyde, but there are so many ways in which a director creatively shapes a script that requires creativity.)

If Entourage: The Movie wanted to have a deep, psychological hook, it should’ve carried a central message that this main character could have it all, in all of the believable ways he did, but he could not achieve creative brilliance too. He’s never had to struggle to develop such skills, and he’s never failed to the degree that he scorched the earth of his initial plans, started over, and learned from all that humiliation and embarrassment to create something “Brilliant!” It should’ve carried the message that something “Brilliant!” is often created in the ashes of all that.

The main character, as depicted throughout the eight seasons of the Entourage series, never had much of a struggle. The fictional film in the movie, Hyde, should’ve bombed critically and commercially, as a superficial film of no substance. It didn’t, of course, as the star proved his detractors wrong, which in effect made the film Entourage: The Movie, a superficial film of no substance.

The Killing Kind: Caligula

October 31, 2025November 15, 2025 RilalyLeave a comment

The most powerful man in the world wasn’t just mad, he was raging. His furious anger stemmed from the fact that Roman law prohibited him from killing whomever he pleased. The law stated that he could only murder non-citizens, prisoners of war, and slaves, and he had Romans saying he wasn’t just wrong, but corrupt. He didn’t think the most powerful man in the world, at the time (AD 37-41), should have to put up with that. To right this wrong, the emperor of Rome, Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, better known as Caligula, created a law that would allow him to kill whomever he damn well pleased.

After issuing this law, Caligula didn’t just want to kill dissenters, detractors, and other enemies, he wanted to send a message. He commissioned the purchase and shipment of five of the largest lions that his minions could find to be shipped from North Africa to Rome. They found five five-hundred-pound lions. Reports suggest he ordered lions, based on what his advisors called “Their unique dietary habits. Tigers and panthers kill before consuming flesh,” they informed him. “Lions prefer devouring their prey while it is still alive.” We’ve all watched these scenes play out on TV, a tiger stalks their prey, and after catching them, they go for the throat to suffocate their victims before gorging on them. They do this, for the most part, to prevent getting injured during the skirmish. Caligula’s advisors informed him that Lions don’t have such concerns. They informed him lions “prefer devouring their prey while it is still alive.” While this is not necessarily true, the promise of excruciating agony thrilled Caligula, and he wanted that scene, and that amplified message, sent to all future opponents.

We can speculate that Caligula’s opponents informed some elements of the historical record, as often happens in the years following the end of a world leader’s rule. Some of it might be 100% true, some of it might be based on the truth but exaggerated, and some of it might be hearsay and outright fiction. If this characterization is even close to the truth, however, we can guess that Caligula also chose lions, because he thought they would provide great theatrical value. The record states, in numerous places, that Caligula had a particular fondness for blood and all of the screaming that comes from long and intense torture.

Caligula chose five lions for the five most pesky, annoying and frustrating dissidents who challenged his authority on a routine basis. He alleged that they were engaged in a plot to depose him. Caligula also knew that anytime we deal with nature, they’re unpredictable. He was probably advised that there is the possibility that these lions might do nothing when they see humans, and that his show could fall flat. To assure maximum entertainment for himself, and his audience, Caligula ordered the lions’ handlers to avoid feeding them for the three days preceding the event.

For all the theatrical torture Caligula planned, there were no public mentions of bloody carnage he planned. There were no mentions of it on the billboards Caligula commissioned scriptores (professional sign painters) to create, or in the pitches heralds were commissioned to shout in forums or streets. There was also no mention of whether this was a pay-per-view event, as Caligula carried on the tradition of making entry free for all audience members.

The billboard and heralds did not advertise violence for violence’s sake, as historians like Suetonius portray Caligula as craving chaos in the arena, such as beating a gladiator manager to death slowly or burning a playwright alive mid-performance. They characterize Caligula as someone who preferred spontaneity when it came to the violent scenes involved his shows. Did it make him feel more powerful to order a playwright to be torched in the middle of his reading, or did he just get bored? The historians characterize most of the violence occurring during Caligula’s events as those resulting from impulsive orders to liven matters up a little, as opposed to any form of proactive promotion to attract crowds.

When the event Caligula planned since the day he put the law in place finally took place, the five dissidents who dared speak out against Caligula were given short swords in defense, but as with most brutal sports, the purpose of giving them short swords was to prolong the event. They proved more ineffective than Caligula imagined, as the five starved, five-hundred-pound lions devoured the dissidents in twenty-five minutes, not as long as the average situation comedy of the modern era.

Caligula found the sight of the ferocious power of the lions, blood, and all the screaming, thrilling, but after all of the planning and work he put into the event, he was disappointed that it was all over so fast. As a man who enjoyed theatricality, we can only guess that he was divided over being personally bored and worried that his audience may have found his event boring.

During the intermission, Caligula summoned the arena guards to his private suite, and he ordered them to invite individuals in the packed, 15,000 capacity amphitheater to participate in a second act with the lions. (The record does not clarify if Caligula selected the individual audience members to invite, or if he allowed the guards to select them randomly. It does state that at times, he ordered entire sections to participate in events.)

How random was random might be the first question the invited asked. Did random mean that the arena guards selected some who were loyal to the emperor, others who weren’t, and everyone in between? If random is truly random, did the guards choose women and children? We don’t know. No matter who those first randomly chosen participants of the second act were, we guess that they had some questions for the guards, as they were being led through the chambers to the floor of the amphitheater. We can guess that they probably thought that they were all a part of Caligula’s wild and crazy sense of humor. They probably guessed that he would stop the proceedings at the last second and have a laugh at their expense. They may have flirted with the notion that this was a test of their loyalty to the emperor, and they probably tried to outmatch each other in displays of loyalty. Whatever the case was, they realized they were wrong when the lions began encircling them.

When they began screaming and pleading for mercy, Caligula found that as entertaining, if not more than the first act. He probably tried to remain stately, but as the lions began ripping them apart, he couldn’t control his laughter anymore, as they cried and screamed. Did the audience laugh cheer at the spontaneous spectacle of this second act, according to the record they did. The question is why? Did they have a bloodlust that enjoys any and all bloodsport, or did they fear if they didn’t cheer, they could be next?

If this is all true and not exaggerated, we could say that TV has saved countless lives since its invention, because an overwhelming majority of us just love violence. We have a need for violence coursing through our veins. It’s a part of our primal nature. We might watch it and cheer it on from our couch with some reservations, but we still cheer it on.

We have a couch, they had a sedes (Latin for seat) in an amphitheater. They watched Caligula’s show from a distance, we watch a TV programmer’s show from a distance. What’s the difference? Well, there’s fiction versus non, but what happens when a fictional shows’ creators fail to produce a realistic murder scene? We’ve all seen graphics that were a bit hokey, and an actor who failed to properly simulate the pain involved in their death scene. It’s a cheat, right? We say things like, “There’s ninety minutes of my life I’ll never get back!” We don’t mind it when creators use computer-generated-imagery (CGI) if it adds to our experience. If a creator can make it more real for us and provide us the satisfactory, vicarious experience of murdering someone, we’re all in. If the actor “Flopped like a fish out of water!” after being riddled with bullets, we might laugh in the same manner Caligula laughed at the screams and cries of the victims of the creative ways he found to cure boredom. And we may have both said, “Now that’s entertainment!” at the end of the show. If we say that and laugh in the company of someone else, they might say, “That’s just wrong on so many levels!” We might agree, but we both know that no one was actually harmed during this production, and we had our bloodlust for bloodsport satisfied. How many of us have left an excessively violent TV show or movie so satisfied that we no longer felt the need to commission the purchase of five, five-hundred-pound lions to rip our enemies apart? How many lives has TV saved?

When we hear people say we live in the best of times and the worst, the ‘yeahbuts’ talk about how they’d love to visit historical figures from the past. We get that, but what would we say to those historical figures? Would we inform a Caligula that history will not be kind to him? Would you tell him that that has a lot to do with his impulsive rage and the carnage that follows? Fortune telling and prophecy were so deeply woven into Roman life during Caligula’s reign that he might have viewed our claims as a visitor from the future as nothing more than a new branch of the whole fortune teller circuit. As evidenced by the historical record, Caligula did not deal with negative news in a rational manner, and our fact-based information about his legacy “from the future” could’ve landed us in the center of his show screaming and pleading our case with five, five-hundred-pound lions looking at us as an ideal way to curb their hunger.