Category: Meaningful Memories

The Familiar Fiber

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“The Exorcist is the scariest movie of all time,” Gary said. 

“Really?” I said. “I didn’t think it was that scary.”

“WHAT?!”

“It just didn’t reach me on that level,” I told him. “It was a really good movie. The acting, the plot believability, all that, but when it evolved to the scary scenes, I just wasn’t frightened. I expected it to scare the beans out of me, because everyone said it would, and maybe that was it. Maybe I sat there waiting for it to scare me in a way I’ve never been scared before.” 

Horror and comedy, more than any other genres, are about time and place, state of mind, and expectation. Expectations can ruin the best of the best, and if it were possible for me to watch The Exorcist without expectation, it might have terrified me. The same holds true with all genres to some extent, but expectation seems to affect comedy and horror more. 

If the author of a story, be it movie or book, is able to bring us in slowly, progressively, and strategically, they might bring us to that place, but it’s touch-and-go. Everyone from the writers to the director, to the editor, and everyone else involved might think they have a hit, but no one knows how an audience will react. 

Some audience members stubbornly resist. “This isn’t real,” they say with their arms folded, “and I’m not buying it.” Of course, it’s not real, but it’s your job as an audience member, if you want to have any fun, is to suspend your disbelief for just a moment to get in to the movie. I did not stubbornly resist The Exorcist. I wanted it to scare me. I tried to invest everything I had into that movie, but it just didn’t reach me on that level.

The more common description of a movie reaching us on another level is “striking a nerve”. We could also twist the term ‘striking a nerve’ to describe how a movie gets under our skin, though some reserve that term for something annoying. The point is that quality horror flicks dig past the superficial, goosebump layer of the epidermis into the nerve, and tap into the axons, the cord-like groups of fibers in the center of a nerve, that we call the familiar fibers. If we want to move the illustration further, we could say that the great horror movies reach into the neuromuscular junction, but you get the point. If we’ve always had a deep seated fear of clowns, for instance, Stephen King’s It gave us one of the most horrific experiences we’ve ever had reading the book or watching the movie. Those with a lifelong fear of dogs found Cujo one of the scariest book/movies for the same reasons. For reasons that weren’t clear to me at the time, no movie tapped into my familiar fibers better than The Blair Witch Project. 

“That’s the dumbest movie I’ve ever seen,” my friend said, soon after seeing it, “and your movie recommendations will forever be tainted by the fact that you suggested that I waste my time and money on that stupid, stupid movie.”

I recommended The Blair Witch Project to everyone I knew, and they all, pretty much, had the same reaction. I found their reactions inexplicable, because they shared my taste in movies, and we were always on the lookout for the next great horror. I thought I found it in The Blair Witch Project. I thought it was a masterpiece, and while I figured they probably wouldn’t love it as much as I did, I didn’t expect them to question my taste in movies forever after. After wrestling with this, I eventually came to the conclusion that time and place are everything for some movies. (Expectations, as I wrote, is another huge movie killer, and I may have done this with The Blair Witch Project, as others did for me with The Exorcist.)

The time and place element obviously made a huge impact on my opinion of the The Blair Witch Project. I was in a theater, on opening night, at the midnight hour, with a bunch of teenagers who wouldn’t shut up. When they’re chitter-chatter, and the giggles (those blasted gigglers!) lasted 20 minutes into the flick, I thought I wasted good money. I didn’t think the giggles would ever end. They did. 20 minutes into the movie, The Blair Witch Project achieved what I considered impossible at the time: it silenced over 100 teenagers. The transformation from claustrophobic noise to claustrophobic silence ended up giving that silence a little extra weight. The sudden, creepy silence heightened my senses, and managed to narrow my perspective to tunnel vision so well that I was almost spiritually immersed in the movie. 

I could smell the burning wood from the campfire. I wouldn’t say that I was ever afraid of camping, or the darkness in the trees surrounding us, but the environment always creeped me out a little. The environment, and the compulsion to speak in whispers, is probably what makes ghost stories told by campfire so creepy. My goosebumps were always out before they started their campfire stories, and they didn’t have to do much to finish the job. The makers of Blair Witch tapped into a level of familiarity for me so well that I could smell the burning wood in the middle of the movie theater. I was there with the characters of the movie, in all ways but one. 

Then, the screaming started. I don’t know if the young girls in the theater, seated over my shoulder, took classes to help them reach the registers they did, or if their talent was granted by God, but I had my hand on my heart on more than one occasion. Those teenagers couldn’t have done a much better job if they orchestrated a plan to scare the hell out of me.

Based on that experience alone, I now tell anyone interested in watching a horror movie to try to duplicate my experience. “Even if you have to pay for the admission of a bunch of screaming, teenage girls. It might run into hundreds of dollars, but if you enjoy horror as much as I do, you might just have a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Follow the steps I did, have them annoy you in the beginning, then tell them to wrap you in silence so weighted that if someone drops a straw on the ground, everyone will turn around to see what the hell just happened. Then, in those key moments, have these young, teenage girls scream as loud as they can in your ear, in a manner that rattles you to bone.” 

Another element that separated me from my arm-folding brethren when it came to The Blair Witch Project was that I walked into that theater wanting to believe it. “But supernatural witches aren’t real,” Gary said to explain why he thought the movie was such an epic waste of his time and money. 

“Hey, if you’re having problems sleeping at night, because you think witches, vampires, or werewolves are knocking at your door, I’ll tell you they’re not real,” I told Gary. “If we’re about to watch a movie about them though, I’m going to pretend that they’re real for however long that movie lasts. It’s not the moviemaker’s job to convince you that they’re real. It’s your job to pretend, so that you can have a little fun in life. When I watch a movie, I grant the artist access to my innards. It’s a frame of mind I grant the actors and the director, and it’s their job to avoid screwing it up.” 

Not only was I there, smelling the campfire, but prior to entering the theater that night, I saw the movie’s faux documentary on Syfy, and I was a frequent guest on the The Blair Witch Project webpage. It was my first experience with web marketing, and that might have added a chunk to the believability for me. I can’t remember any of the details of the website, save one. One little nugget grabbed me. It was a note that suggested someone found five cannisters of film in the woods of Burkittsville, Maryland that the characters created, and the movie makers edited it down to 90 minutes. The Blair Witch Project was also my introduction to the cinematic technique some call “found footage,” “lost footage,” or “shaky cam.”   

As a result of all of the above, I now move my listing of The Blair Witch Project as the greatest horror movie ever made to one of the best experiences, I’ve ever had watching a film. It was a time and place experience that that no film maker will ever be able to replicate for me, for whatever the opposite of baggage is, as in he brought some baggage with him into that situation, I had that, and it wasn’t just an open mind. I was supercharged for this movie, because I wanted to be scared. I wanted this movie to be true, minus the murder of course, but that desire, combined with all of the above, is what made The Blair Witch Project one of my favorite movie experiences of all time. 

I’ve yet to watch The Blair Witch Project a second time, in a more traditional setting, because knowledge and facts have a stubborn way of ruining emotional experiences, and I don’t want to ruin one of the best experiences I’ve ever had watching a movie. 

The big debate at the time was whether or not The Blair Witch Project actually happened. Most of us appreciated it as a clever marketing campaign, but others believed that it was an actual event and the actors involved actually died in the film. If you said you enjoyed The Blair Witch Project back then, you were lumped in with “the believers”. I believed The Blair Witch Project for the 81 minutes it played on the screen, just like I believed in ghosts during Poltergeist, that cars could come to life in Christine, and that aliens were abducting people in Fire in the Sky. None of these movies made a dent in my overall belief system, but I thought all of them (save Christine) were great movies. When the furor over believers vs. nonbelievers died down, 86% on of the over 250,000 fans rated The Blair Witch Project positively on Rotten Tomatoes and 81% of critics did. I don’t post these numbers to say I was right, and the naysayers were wrong. I do think it validates my argument that once we gain some distance from silly arguments, we can see a good movie for what it is. 

The citizen critic can now post reviews on everything from the best horrors and comedies to the best and worst plumbers on various websites. We can recommend others watch, don’t watch; read, don’t read; and don’t even bother calling this fence specialist. There’s nothing on the line for the citizen critic, as they don’t benefit from a positive review, and they see no ramifications from a negative one. Some of us suspect that professional critics benefit from positive reviews in ways that lead us to believe the citizen critic is more honest. We’re probably wrong in most cases, but we tend to trust citizen reviews more than professional ones for this reason. The citizen critic is not afraid to let the internet know what they really think. The problem with their reviews though, is that tastes and experiences are so relative and subjective. If someone says the subject of the movie “is not real, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool,” they’re going to give it one star. One person’s The Blair Witch Project is another person’s THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT!!! Comedy is as subjective as horror, and both are relative to the person, and they’re subjective and relative to our experiences in life. One citizen critic might find the humor in Peter Seller’s humor in The Pink Panther dated, but we might find their current favorite comedy too juvenile. They might find Pulp Fiction so personally offensive that they wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, and The Godfather, Citizen Kane, and Gone with the Wind might be overrated, time pieces that haven’t aged well. The point is, we can now find negative reviews for every movie, album, and electrician, and if we read them, and heed their warning, we might never watch classic films, read classic literature, or listen to some of the greatest albums ever made. As an artist who tries to tap into those familiar neuromuscular junctions, I now empathize with anyone who tries to create art. As such, I try to keep my reviews, objective, impersonal, and constructive. 

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My Advice, Don’t Follow my Advice

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“Try to find someone nice!” is the advice I give young uns. They won’t listen, and we know they won’t, because we know we didn’t. We had to get over our attraction to the naughty first. The naughty are just more fun and fascinating, and they’re mean. No matter how hard “they” try to redefine funny, mean is just funny, when it’s not directed at us of course. Their violations of social protocols and etiquette, aren’t just funny they’re relatively informative, in the sense that their exaggerations of the opposite teach us a lot about ourselves. Nice comes in very low on our mate-o-meter when we’re young. Nice usually comes after all the bad boys and girls beat us down.

“I don’t want to play games,” we scream, they scream, and we all scream for ice cream. “I hate the games people play, and I try to avoid drama.” Then why did you date them? We dated them, because even though they were jackballs to everyone else, they were actually pretty nice to us, for a time and in small doses, and that made us feel special. We also enjoyed the vicarious attachments people made with us when we were around the mean and naughty. After dating those who made us laugh so hard that we cried, and cried so hard we laughed, we eventually decided to go out with someone who did nothing more than say something nice to us while we were watching TV with them, someone who appeared to enjoy cleaning the living room with us, and preparing a barbecue for a family reunion. We found ourselves opting for the stability and sanity of the nice. Some might call that boring, and that’s fine with us after everything we’ve been through. My advice is to date the tumultuous types for all of the excitement and fun they bring, but make sure to break things off before you start hearing substantial calls for commitment.

Save Your Money, Man, Save Your Money   

Those wild, good times cost money too, and the good times never last as long as we think. It’s Oh-So-Good right now, and we have no reason to believe it won’t last.

Someone pays us, and we don’t deserve it. We earn it! We earn it every day, and in every way. We work as hard as we play, but there will come a day when that will fade away, and things will happen. Things always happen, that’s the thing about things. They slap us from so many different directions that some of them aren’t even listed on Google Maps. What happened?

Save your money man. Save for that day. “Save 10% of every paycheck,” they say. Others suggest we save the equivalent of three-months of our salary. Both those figures are low, far too low for me, but I’m a saver. Most people can’t, or won’t, save, and living the spartan lifestyle in the present just seems like a waste of life. Carpe diem, seize the day, and save until the end of the year. When we do the latter, and it’s “all good”, we blow it all. 10% and three-months salary is a decent compromise for them. “It’s just money,” they say, “and I would rather live a life of fun and adventure than have a nest egg. Plus, isn’t money the root of all evil?” It is, if you have it. When we don’t, we see it as the necessity it is, and we learn the definition of penniless powerlessness. We’ll also learn what it feels like to depend on others for everything, and dependency can be humiliating. It almost makes us feel like a child all over again. My advice, do everything you can now, when times are good, to avoid slipping into that spiral.    

We should’ve and could’ve spotted the spiral before it started to swirl. We know that now, and we see the pivot points now that could’ve changed it? If we had the foresight, we never would’ve gone left instead of right or right instead of left, at that crossroad.

Think about where we would be right now if we had some foresight? If I only applied for that job/promotion that I didn’t think I was qualified for, but I probably was. I mean look who ended up getting it. If I had older siblings, better parents, and I made more friends, or dated more often just think what I could be now. And college, college! If I paid more attention in college, my life would be oh-so different. We can’t stop thinking about how that person, equally qualified, landed our dream job or promotion, because they threw a relatively worthless degree in basket weaving at the “theys”. The best explanation I’ve heard for why this happens is that attaining that sheepskin displays perseverance.

Experience teaches us two things, college degrees don’t mean as much as we thought they did, and it’s better to have one than not. But, and there’s always a butt, how many of us would probably be in almost-the-exact-same-space we’re in right now, if we attained the golden ticket? How different are the lives of the college graduates in our peer group? Generally speaking, they got a job, and we got a job. Even with all that, there’s a super-secret part of us that thinks if we just paid more attention in Mr. Crippen’s Astronomy class, we could all be astrophysicists by now. It’s possible, of course, but it’s more likely that if our academic accomplishments landed us a job on the Starship Enterprise, we’d probably end up a red shirt sent to investigate the spiky colorful plants that shoot out deadly spores.

The Bonkers

Avoid “The Bonkers” if you can. Our parents introduced us to the Bonkers multiple times. The Bonkers were our parents’ friends, which pretty much means our parents were bonkers too, as opposites don’t always attract. Some of the times, people make friends because they share a worldview, and some of the times it’s happenstance, but commonalities often weave their way into friendships. The Bonkers have ideas about how the world works, and their ideas are always nuanced approaches that are subjective to their worldview, fascinating, and wrong. If my parents were bonkers-free, they would’ve stepped up on The Bonkers at some point and said, “Hold on, that, right there, is just insane. I know you’re not willing to die on that hill, but if the Chinese are correct in saying that every adult leaves a mark on a child, I don’t want that influencing my child.”  

The primary characteristic The Bonkers share is resentment. They have an explanation for why they didn’t achieve in the shadow of their boogeymen. They were the child who didn’t get enough attention, who became an adult that was cheated out of the system for a reason so bizarre they feel compelled to repeat that reality-shattering explanation at every outing. In reality, they didn’t have the talent, ingenuity, wherewithal or perseverance to make the big bucks, and they spent their lives characterizing, and re-characterizing, those who do. I met their boogeymen more than once, and I knew some of them. When I unmasked them, I learned they weren’t the boogeymen of The Bonkers’ resentful narratives. They didn’t have near the money, power, or influence detailed in The Bonkers’ tales, and they didn’t make calculated moves to hold the little guy down. They were just as insecure, normal, and common as the people telling their tales. To move these findings from slightly funny to hilarious, I learned that most boogeymen have their own boogeymen. 

One of the best little tidbits I’ve ever heard came from a total wreck of a person. She said, “You raise a child to a certain point, and no one knows  where that ends, but at another point you learn to stop raising them and start guiding them.”

Another friend of mine dropped this nugget, “The number one rule to parenting is to spend time with your children and be there for them. The best element of my dad’s inept parenting was that he always made time for me. He made so many missteps and unforgettable mistakes, but he was always there for me. You’re going to make mistakes with your kid, we all do, but if you spend time with them, it will edit and delete some, if not all, of your mistakes.” Time, in other words, heals all wounds. 

How much time do we have for them? How much time do we have in general? Most narcissists are so into “me time” that they should’ve entered that data into their reproduction algorithm before going down that hole. Is it more narcissistic to require more “me time” or more time? We don’t even know the definition of narcissism, but we’re all narcissists and none of us are. “Yeah, you’re talking about that other guy.” 

I’m a storyteller, and I tell stories the way others play chess. I appreciate the fact that readers want a streamlined point of focus, but I cannot help considering the other side. When someone provides me a story from their day, I immediately think about the other side. (For those who want friends in life, don’t do this. People don’t like this. They want you to side with them in their story.) Learned, intellectual types suggest that it’s impossible for us to be objective, this is what learned, intellectual types call hyperbole. Of course total objectivity is difficult to difficult to achieve, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to achieve it. Some don’t, and when I hear their stories, I can’t help but think about this situation from the other person’s perspective.  

When we tell our story, it’s filled with faults and variables. We’ve all had primrose paths and well-marked minefields on the map of our crossroads, and most of us chose the well-marked, yet uncharted minefields. When we detail for our children the ramifications and consequences of our actions, we conclude with, “But I know you’re not going to listen to me, because I didn’t listen to my dad. Your best scenario is to experience everything yourself, then remember what I said here today. If you learn to couple your experiences with my advice, as I did with my dad’s, you might turn out halfway decent.” He listens to me now, at this age. That will change, of course, but our job is not to build the structure, it’s to create a foundation from which they build.

Short Stops

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And Now for Something Completely Different was the title of Monty Python’s 1971 movie. With so many different people out there, how can anyone still be different? “Be yourself, everyone else is already taken,” is attributed to Oscar Wilde, but some refute he said it. Thelonius Monk said, “A genius is the one most like himself.” What if I’m like everyone else? How do I strive to be different and avoid being different for the sole purpose of being different? Different, becomes more different when it escapes the same cocoon.

***

When I watch Jeopardy! I probably get 7 out of 10 questions, but when I stop to talk to a neighbor I’ve lived near for four years, and I talk to him an average of two times a week, I struggle to remember his name.

***

I have no ability to fix my own car. Three of the four automobiles I’ve owned have been lemons. My truck started almost every day for 22-years. After 22-years, the looks of a car begin to subside, no matter how much you general maintenance you apply, it’s not going to look new forever. Even though driving a sun-bleached truck damaged my image a little I held on tight, because it always started. I try to inform my son to gain knowledge, so you’re at the mercy of another as rarely as possible, I have nothing to teach him. My car starting almost seems like a miracle to me. I know it’s not on one level, but I close my eyes and turn the ignition, as if the sounds of an engine turning is magic. I wish I gained basic automotive knowledge, but if you want it bad enough, you go get it. I obviously never wanted it bad enough, so when it doesn’t start I have to financially plead with others to make it happen and trust that they know what they’re doing.

***  

The “I was so drunk one night that I …” stories were some of my favorites at one point in my life. Other people still enjoy those stories, from the past. If we’re still drinking heavily, “I’m drunk right now!” (Cue the laugh track), it’s not as funny. I will write something most won’t about their drinking years, I enjoyed them, and I had a lot of fun. We spent years talking, drinking, followed by more talking and more drinking, but for the life of me I can’t remember what we were always going on about. 

Luke was loaded the night he met Laura. Laura was beautiful, so beautiful that she was normally out of Luke’s reach, but she was drunk too. She was so drunk she was into Luke’s jokes. Luke, it should be noted, was a very funny person, a naturally funny man, but his humor rarely translated to women. 

I don’t know the difference between a good-looking guy and the average to below average, but as funny as Luke was, women didn’t gravitate to him the way they would’ve if he was as funny and gorgeous. Why does the caged bird sing, because he’s not as gorgeous as the high school quarterback who can sling.  

When Laura didn’t move away from him after his first few jokes, Luke moved in. He spent the rest of the night closing. Luke knew Laura had a few drinks in her, but he had no idea how loaded she was, until vomited on him. She didn’t get any on him, but the effect was the same. Luke was a real trooper though, he kept kissing on her. He said he didn’t remember much from that night, except that her vomit tasted like peppermint schnapps. Is that romantic or erotic?

***

When I was young and drunk, party hosts used to try to prevent me from leaving their party. They said things like, “If you leave, what will we talk about?” They stopped short of calling me the life of the party, but their attempts to get me to stay always boosted my self-esteem. Flash forward a couple years, and hosts were a lot more understanding when I told them I was preparing to leave. My most recent examples of this progression involved hosts saying, “All right then, see ya later” when I informed them I was preparing to leave, and they were looking over my shoulder before they hit the word then.

***

“Hey Gary,” Chad said. Chad was waving at me, in a parking lot, from his one-ton truck, as if we were two long lost friends. It confused me, because we were never friends, but we did have a long since lost relationship of sorts.

“Hey Chad,” I said. “How are you doing?”

“I just got gastric bypass,” Chad said leaning out the window. He lifted his shirt to show me his scars. The smile on his face was one normally associated with showing off a child’s baseball trophy. 

“Next time just wave,” I said.

He said, “Huh?”

“Next time you see someone you know, just wave.”