Do you crave a story so side-splitting, funny and unbelievably wild that it doesn’t matter if it’s true? We all do. We’ve all been there, laughing hysterically until someone chimes in with, “That story you’ve been telling,” they whisper to us in confidence. “Yeah, it’s been thoroughly debunked.” We all probably know at least one debunker. They might spare us the embarrassment of debunking us in public, but that doesn’t change the fact that they love debunking us. They study our face and smile at us with compassion that borders on condescending glee. I don’t know if it’s jealousy, but they obviously cannot stand the laughter we receive telling a side-splitting tale that is so wild and funny that it almost doesn’t matter if it’s true. Yet, the storyteller and the debunker both know that it does matter in the sense that the difference between true and it kind of doesn’t matter if it’s true is the difference between hilarious and “It’s still funny, regardless,” and the debunker enjoys dragging our side-splitting story into the latter category.
It’s our fault, we should fact check these stories to see if they’re true, but when a storyteller gets ahold of a great, side-splitting story, we get all jacked up, and we can’t wait to share them. It’s in our blood, and it’s such a part of our identity that we end up laughing harder than anyone else, because it appeals to our storytelling nature.
Most of these stories, just to be clear, are so dumb and inconsequential that we don’t really care if they’re true, and they’re so funny that a part of us doesn’t want to check, because we hope that they’re true. That’s when the “truth trolls” come marching in to destroy our story’s comedic value. Why do they do it, they probably don’t even know the finer, psychological motivations behind it. It’s just something they’ve done for so long that it’s just kind of what they do.
Fact-checkers love to tell us that these fun stories just happen to be false, debunked, or an urban legend. If this is you, you might just want to consider moving along, because we find you exhausting. About three beats after we unleash our side-splitting yarns, their faces get hued by smartphones. “Umm, not true,” they say when they manage to become unhued, “according to (fill in the blank.com) that story has been debunked as an urban legend.” To put an exclamation point on their attempts to suck the fun out of our story, they show us their phone.
Some of us enjoy hearing, and reading, a great story almost as much as we enjoy telling them and writing them, and it’s not a gift given at birth. It’s a methodical process fraught with failure, but those who love it, learn it, and learn to love it. It’s not something that we learn so well that we never make mistakes either. It’s an ongoing process. As much as we storytellers enjoy that process, fact-checkers enjoy their end of it almost as much, as they’ve found it to be an excellent way to discredit, delegitimize, and unfunny, storytellers they just don’t like.
“I just get so tired of their BS,” they add after sucking the smiles off everyone’s face.
Feature Story #1
A zoo keeper grows concerned with how constipated his beloved elephant is. He and his fellow zoo keepers, management, and the zoo community try everything to provide her some relief. In total desperation, the man learns of an effective, all-natural cure of herbs and oils. He places it on a wire brush and inserts it, and it works. It works so well that the elephant unloads on the zoo keeper. The zoo keeper is hit by the violent discharge so perfectly that it knocks him down, and he hits his head so hard that he unfortunately experiences a temporary and fatal moment of unconsciousness, as two hundred pounds of dung suffocates him.
What we’re talking about here are silly, inconsequential stories that we share in employee cafeteria. We’re talking about those stupid stories that no one will remember thirty seconds after they’re told. We’re talking about telling stories that might cause some to smile, others laugh, and still others to roll around with hysterical laughter, and the minute the truth trollers pull out their phones, everyone groans. The truth trolls cannot abide by all that laughter. They need to thoroughly vet a story before they can even smile, and they won’t even smile if they happen to find out it’s actually true. “Well, it turns out that one is true,” they say with same look they have when eating a sandwich. If they find out one of your stories doesn’t pass the test, they have a smug, “I’m just calling you out on your BS!” look on their face. That appears to be the only source of satisfaction they gain from their otherwise joyless existence.
Feature Story #2
A man in Oklahoma, enters the highway, and after a couple of miles, he clicks his Recreation Vehicle (RV) into cruise control. Nothing different than anything any of us have done over a hundred times. Except, this driver, allegedly unaware of the full functionality of the cruise control feature on his RV, walks into the kitchen area of his RV to make himself a sandwich. We have to imagine that the man didn’t have enough time to get the meat between the slices of bread when all hell broke loose, as the RV drove off the road and into the ditch. Some versions of this story suggest that the man died as a result of the ensuing accident. Others claim that he not only survived, but he won a settlement with the manufacturer $1,750,000 and a new RV, because the manufacturer did not specifically document for him the full functionality of the RV’s cruise control. This story isn’t half as funny as it once was, based on the current technology that allows some cars self-driving functionality, but back when I first heard this tale, it seemed impossibly hilarious that a grown man (or woman, depending on the version of the story) could think that they could make a sandwich (or cup of coffee) in the back while the car was in cruise control.
Some great stories combine fiction and non in a manner we call creative non-fiction. I remember mentally toying around with the concept of the total capacity of cruise control, soon after I bought a car that had a working one. I thought the possibilities of a fella over-estimating its capacity could be funny, and I’ll be damned if someone didn’t consider the same plotline, either fictionally or in non-fiction. Is this story 100% true, tough to know 100%, but does it have enough truth in it to be funny? At some point, I think we should all hit that “off” switch in our cranium that analyzes, deconstructs, and refutes such stories. Just laugh or don’t laugh, but they can’t. They love pretending that they’re a reporter, and that they’re taking a story, or its storyteller, down.
Feature Story #3
Elvis Painting in Cheese
Elvis Presley had a soft spot for cheese. His favorite sandwich, according to sources, was the grilled cheese sandwich. Elvis was from the deep south, and the home he grew up in an environment that was anything but rich. After achieving a level of fame and fortune those who were never a Beatle or the primary singer on the album Thriller would never understand, he probably enjoyed the finest delicacies in the world, but he couldn’t kick his love for the grilled cheese sandwich. Elvis ingested so many drugs, and so many different kinds of drugs, that we cannot dismiss them as a contributor to his eventual demise, but what does cheese do? It stops us up, and among the numerous other things Elvis poured into his body was a truckload of cheese. As Dan Warlick, chief investigator for the Tennessee Office of the State Chief Medical Examiner, stated, Elvis’s death was brought on by something called the Valsalva’s maneuver. “Put simply, the strain of attempting to defecate compressed the singer’s abdominal aorta, shutting down his heart.” The coroners found that Elvis had “Compacted stool that was four months old sitting in his bowels.”
Did cheese take The King down? These stories are snowball stories. As they roll from one storyteller to another they gather facts, details, jokes, and out and out fabrications, until they arrive at some finished form of funny. I don’t want to know most of the time, because most of these stories are so dumb that I honestly don’t care, and the primary reason I’m writing this article is that I don’t understand why those with a dreaded and incurable hued nose disease do.
I just want to laugh, but I’ve been fact-checked me so often that I now wonder if what I’m being told is 100% true. I want to laugh, but more than that, when I hear a great story, I want to repeat that story so often that it becomes mine. If it’s going to be mine now, I have this newfound urge to fact-check it, so I don’t get fact-checked, and I so want to go back to “Who cares, as long as it’s funny!” mindset.
“The idea that you loathe fact-checkers so much only makes them seem a little more legitimate to me,” third parties say when we complain about truth trolls checking our stories.
I don’t know if it has anything to do with the fact that I’m Irish, but there are few things I enjoy more than sitting in a circle of friends, all with beer in hand, telling a story that has but one agenda, to make them laugh. “There’s no way that’s true,” they say between laughs, and I have no problem with that because I know that for most people that line gives them license to be free from naiveté, and it also frees them to laugh harder. We all know that that story is so sensational that it can’t be true, but we don’t care in that small space in time where all we can do is laugh about it. “That guy is so full of crap, it’s not even funny,” we might say to a third party after the storyteller leaves the room, but the next time he enters, we’ll be all over it when he tells us he has another story to tell.
Truth trolls won’t go through any of this with us. They might want to, but they can’t. They have some odd belief, probably born of some childhood experience that left them vulnerable to the charge of naiveté, that if they believe that, they’ll believe anything. They believe that if they believe our silly, stupid story, their credibility is on the line. Their noses contract a blue hue, and they come out, “Not true!” Now I will grant you that if a story is 100% true, it might slide it a little higher on the funny scale, but by how much? Does it lift such a story from funny to knee-slapping hilarious? If we add, “It’s true, all the fact-checkers checked it and sourced it out, and they found that it’s 100% factual.” How much does that truly add to the entertainment value? If you’re a hue-faced truth troller who has neck problems, because your head is permanently fixed in the 45-degree position, will you go back to 90-degrees with an “It’s true” and laugh? No, and you might even be a little disappointed by your findings, right? Yeah, I’m looking at you.
Feature Story #4
A raging alcoholic was informed by his doctor that he had a form of throat cancer that would end his life quickly if he chose to continue to drink alcohol. The alcoholic peppered the doctor with questions, “Cut back, wean myself off of it over time?”
“I don’t think you understand the severity of this,” the doctor said going over the biopsy and the image test results with the alcoholic. “This is what we call stage four cancer, and if you quit now, cold turkey, you have a chance, about a 39.1 percent chance to live five years. Keep drinking, even a little amount, and you’re likely dead in months.”
This scared the alcoholic. He did not want to die, but he couldn’t imagine going weeks and months without a small swig of alcohol here and there. In some respects, it was psychological torture to him to see everyone around him drink so casually, and have so much fun, but he kept coming back to the idea that he didn’t want to die.
It hurt to drink alcohol too, and that was really one of saddest things in this alcoholic’s life. It was the only reason he went to see that doctor. Once the doctor took alcohol away from him, he realized that he never learned how to live. He didn’t have any hobbies, friends, and he didn’t know how to fix things. He had family, but they distanced themselves from him a long time ago. He was a man who worked his tail off and came home to drink alcohol with his beloved wife while the two of them watched TV together, and he couldn’t even enjoy that. In short order, this man became depressed and desperate to live the only life he knew. He did some research on his computer and discovered something called butt-chugging, or boofing.
“We’ll be using this device,” he informed his wife, “to deliver alcohol to my system by enema. It won’t touch my throat and exacerbate my condition.” His wife was hesitant, but the alcoholic broke her down. “What most people don’t know is we all have enzymes in our stomach and liver that break alcohol down and dilute it. Regular butt-chuggers say that it stings a little, initially, but after a while some say that they start to enjoy the sensation. They even have a term for those people. They’re called klismaphiliacs. Due to the fact that you’re essentially bypassing all of the biological protections our body has in place by going the enema route, they say there’s no hangovers and no puking involved.”
Some dispute whether or not the wife obliged the alcoholic, but she was charged with negligent homicide for delivering what turned out to be a lethal and fatal dose of two 1.5-liter bottles of sherry into her husband’s system. In her defense, the wife claimed innocence by declaring that he did it himself. “He did it all the time,” she pled. “He was always giving himself enemas. Coffee enemas, alcohol enemas, and even soap enemas. He even had enema recipes.” The case against the wife was dropped due to insufficient evidence.
One of the primary lessons this alcoholic-turned-butt-chugger didn’t consider is that puking, while uncomfortable, disgusting, and painful, it serves a biological purpose as important as coughing, sneezing, and bumps on our arms. It is the body attempting to push what it cannot dilute, absorb, or handle out. While we’re puking, it’s difficult to consider that this is probably our body protecting us from the damage of what we do to it, and that it’s actually a good thing that our body knows how to protect us from the debilitating and at times, fatal things we do it.
I am not a regular patron of the sites and shows that feast on the misfortunes of others in this manner, but I used to occasionally enjoy an episode of Thousand Ways to Die, and The Darwin Awards email lists we used to pass around the office. Their entertainment value, while short and limited, can produce a guilty smile or a laugh behind a hand. There’s really no sense in trying to deny that we love stories involving the misfortune of others, “You mean he died?” we say with an oh-my-gosh face on, and we experience a hybrid of laughter and horror. It’s a part of us.
In researching some of the new ‘believe it or not’ sites for this article, I found some new sites I never heard of that preyed on our misfortunate few, and they had “100 percent true” stamps all over them, as if that’s the primary purpose of their existence. The administrators, and authors, of the stories on these sites are careful to properly source each story with links, footnotes, and various other forms of attributions to perpetuate this idea that they’ve learned from those past publications we all enjoyed that focused on sensational stories that had little-to-no foundation of truth in them. Thus, we can gather that the older sites and publications probably got fact-checked to irrelevance, which, in essence, opened up a niche for these new guys to prosper, but the problem is their stories, while guaranteed and certified to be 100% true, are actually kind of blah and mundane. Their stories amount to, “There was this one guy, from some town in a state who made an unwise decision,” and we un huh them with some excitement as we read on, “and well, no one was hurt or anything, and no one died, but wasn’t that a foolish decision?” Well, yeah, it was, but I was kind of looking for some entertainment here. These sites learned from the past, and they decided to forego the sensational for the factual. As much as it pains me to see this need to have certified 100% guarantees, I understand it’s now the price of doing business in this arena, because in this incarnation of the Information Age, everyone has a phone, and everyone has a site to help them bunk, debunk, or take the bunk out of things, and in this case, it’s better to give than receive, because it can be embarrassing and even a little intimidating at times when fact-checkers discredit, delegitimize, and unfunny every stupid, silly, and inconsequential story we tell, but that’s just what they do, they’re fact-checkers.
@) If we could talk to the animals, my guess is that we’d find that, among others things, we’re the only being that finds flatulence and bowel movements funny.
“Why do you find them funny?” Dabbi the deer might ask.
“Because we find them disgusting,” we’d answer.
“What?”
“It’s complicated, but it’s further complicated by the fact that you don’t have a sense of humor.”
“I don’t have a sense of humor?” she asked. “I don’t? I’ll have you know that I share the same sense of humor with the rest of the human population. Our sense of humor generates ratings, box office sales, and album sales. You’re the freak of nature.”
&) We never call out dystopian productions from their all-too-near future predictions for being wrong. Young up-and-coming lyricists are forever in search of meaningful and important lyrics. They can’t write about Lord of the Rings anymore. Led Zeppelin been there done that. Silly Love Songs were Paul McCartney’s domain, and we can no longer write ‘baby’ lyrics, because the 70’s and 80’s bands drained that vestibule. The only avenue left is war, anti-war, and anti-military, but there hasn’t been a real war by first world countries in about 50 years. So, while all of the lyrics written in the interim are meaningful and important lyric, they’ve also been false, so far. “True, but they weren’t talking about today, they were talking the all-too-near future.” So, when do we say they’re wrong. “You don’t!”
$) So, how do young, inexperienced artists craft “meaningful and important” lyrics and dialogue when they know nothing about the real world? Is it more important to be meaningful and idealistic or knowledgeable and realistic?
#) If you’ve ever met a truly tough guy, you know they’ve already done it. They wear a “nothing left to prove” garb for the rest of their lives. We know how tough they are, when we meet the other guys, those who talk tough to show it.
*) If we ever catch up to Alien technology, will medical professionals finally learn that the key to physical and mental health lies in the anus?
^) Too much sports knowledge is trivial and useless. Watching sports on TV is supposed to be fun, but some of us get so tied up in good guys vs. bad guys that we forget this is basically a reality show. It’s the best one we’ve ever invented, but it’s still just a show. The next time we meet that guy who knows so much about sports that we’re slightly intimidated by his fact-based opinions, we should liberate him by saying, “Who cares?”
!) You’ll know you’re one of these guys if a lighthearted disagreement over useless and trivial information boils over into you deciding that you’re never speak to the other ever again. At that point, someone needs to step in and say, “Clark, no one cares. You think you’re right, and she thinks you’re wrong, but no one here really cares. We just want to go back to eating our turkey, watching football, and talking about Mary’s Jell-O. That’s all we want to do today.
?) What if she says that your favorite sports star is actually a pretty awful human being? We defend him, because we’re nerds who sit in an audience of millions, and he’s the good-looking, athlete who wouldn’t talk to us in high school. If we pick the right one (he who wins) we want everyone to know our vicarious association. “I’ve followed that guy since he was a five-star recruit. I know his high school stats and college stats by heart.”
“No one cares, Clark!”
%) To counter those who say, “Today’s music ain’t got the same soul,” I would like to introduce you to the noise coming out of Britain. black midi (lower case for whatever reason), Black Country, New Road (one band), Squid, and a band named Famous. These bands are genuinely creative and innovative souls coming out with music that might be as brilliant as the music of past decades, and my guess is they’re only going to get better. Other bands that are also making great noise are Thee Oh Osees (or Osees), and just about everything Ty Segall puts his name on. As with all innovative music, we shouldn’t expect the noise to grab in one blow, and we shouldn’t expect one song to deliver the knockout blow either. Although I think the music from black midi’s Welcome to Hell (not the 23-year-old’s definition of meaningful and important lyrics) might change your interiority by about the tenth listen.
Pitchfork has a few nuggets from black midi’s lead singer Gordie Greep to dispel the notion we have that he wants us to view him as deep, meaningful, and important.
“It’s just fun man,” Greep said. “We’re doing this this stupid thing and somehow making the semblance of a living.” This might be false modesty, as we can be sure he hopes we take his stupid stuff seriously.
Greep also drops a fascinating description of his writing style. “When you want to do something original…use something as a model or inspiration that you know you definitely can’t do,” Greep has said. “Your failure will be interesting.” He talks about Clint Eastwood’s failure to act like Marilyn Monroe, and Tom Waits attempt at the blues. He says they both failed by relative measures, but he says we found their attempts interesting. I found a similar attempt to write like James Joyce interesting.
So, he writes what he doesn’t know, just to see what falls out? What an interesting and perplexing method of writing. My guess, and I have a pretty decent track record in this regard, is that Gordie Greep (whether with black midi or not) is a craftsman who has a relatively bright future.
() I got off on Queen when I was younger. Queen almost single-handedly introduced me to the concept that different can be so beautiful in the right hands, and then I discovered David Bowie. Once I got passed Bowie’s pop songs, I thought he was the most experimental artist in the mainstream, until I discovered Mike Patton. Mike Patton did things I never heard before, and I thought he was the most adventurous artist I ever heard, and I still think that in many ways, but Omar Rodríguez-López (ORL) is just as adventurous in different ways.
Omar Rodríguez-López (ORL) is one of the most gifted artists and musicians on the scene today, and he has played some role, most often leading it in some creative manner, in over fifty albums. I purchased an At the Drive-In album, and I purchased a couple of Mars Volta albums, but for some reason they never appealed to me. If it hadn’t been for Ipecac Records releasing his solo recordings, I never would’ve discovered the genius (and I do not use that term lightly) behind the music of those previously mentioned bands.
AllMusic.com tries to succinctly capture this genius writing, “His multivalent body of work derives inspiration from punk rock, prog, metal, funk, traditional Latin music, blues, jazz, film music, and avant-garde composition.”
As with any mercurial genius, much of ORL’s solo albums will not appeal to most palettes, but the true music fan will probably go nuts over about twenty-four of the fifty albums. When I approached Omar Rodríguez-López music, I had no idea what to expect, but he violated those expectations in the most obscene manner possible. Such violations are not immediate, as they rarely are. My first love was Roman Lips. Anytime a friend invites me to listen to complicated, difficult music, I suggest he do so by starting their most accessible album. Roman Lips is probably the most accessible ORL album, followed by Blind Worms, Pious Swine. Beyond that, the ORL solo albums are impossible to categorize, list, or breakdown by category. Suffice it to say that I was wary that the genius behind At the Drive-In and Mars Volta would appeal to me. I was also wary of the Ipecac Recordings, as they release a lot of material that major recording studios won’t, and a number of their albums don’t appeal to me, but ORL.
As with all of the artists listed above, it’s difficult to believe that these individual artists, and Queen, are capable of such wide-ranging music. I love some of the more major, mainstream pop acts, but there is a comfortable thread that runs through most of them. Their fifth album might sound more advanced than their first in production value and matured writing, but we all know what kind of music they prefer. Listening to the albums put out by Bowie, Patton, and Omar Rodríguez-López, it’s hard to believe the same artist created all these incredible albums. ORL is definitely the most prolific of the three, and he’s not even fifty-years-old at the time of this article.
The destination is the destination of our planned vacation. We pack the belongings, the kid, and the dog with a destination in mind. When someone suggests that we take a pit stop, we say, “Why? We’re making good time here. At this rate, we should arrive at our destination by four p.m., with plenty of time to do much of what we planned.” The fun and frivolity we dreamed up, when we dreamed up this vacation, all took place at the final destination. Pit stops seem like a waste of the precious time we could spend having fun. The dilemma arrives when we arrive at our destination, and we have nothing to do for the first couple of hours.
“[He] never made pit stops,” a woman said of her now deceased husband. “He thought pit stops were a waste of time. He wanted to get there.”
Well, he’s there now, I thought of joking. He’s at his final destination. It would’ve been an awful, cruel joke. No one would’ve laughed, of course. No one would’ve so much as smiled. How many pit stops did he make to his final destination? Did he go quickly? He wasn’t the type to stop at a lakeside pit stop. “He wanted to get there.”
I didn’t say any of that, but in the midst of my scheme to drop that room-silencing, reputation damaging joke, I realized that I’m a no-pit-stops destination traveler too. I don’t stop to smell the flowers, look at a lake, or carpe diem the moment. I get there, wherever there is. I want to have fun, and I don’t want something like a pit stop to get in the way of it.
When we map out our vacation, it often involves lengthy travel times. Even on paper, we know we’re signing on for a long journey, even when they’re all interstate miles. It doesn’t get any better when we’re doing it. As the miles click by, it begins to feel like a Sisyphean trial of humanity to sit in a small car for that many hours in a row, and it doesn’t matter how large the interior of an automobile is, they all feel small after eight hours. The family might want to smell the flowers and look at a lake, but I’m the “Let’s just get there for all that’s holy. Let’s get this drive over” type of traveler.
The volume of the consensus breaks us down, however, and we take a pit stop. Their primary goal, after such long car ride, was to get out and stretch the legs a little, go to the bathroom, get the kid out of the car for a while, and let the dog pee. We’re not for it, but we strike a deal with those who are dying to get out of the car. We decide we won’t stay long. We’ll look at stuff, we’ll walk down to the lake and throw some stones in it. We’ll talk to some of the other people who made a similar pit stop, we’ll let the dog run around with whatever joy he always runs around in, and the kid can have some spontaneous kid fun. Then we’ll take that almost cinematic portrait with that crystal blue lake in our background, and we’ll all get back in the car for another three hours.
I don’t know if I needed the break more than I knew, but I was peaking at this particular pit stop. Some of the times, we have mental peaks, some of the times, we have physical ones, but every once in a great while they come together. Before we turn 25, our whole life is one peak after another. The only stories we tell involve those moments when we weren’t peaking. After 40, we are so impressed with our peaks that we tell everyone we know. Everything in between involves noticing peaks after the fact. I was peaking at that little pit stop. I was in the moment, the moment I stepped out of the car. I wasn’t thinking about the car ride ahead of us, how this pit stop might hamper our pre-planned schedule, or anything else for that matter. Once I stepped out of the car, I wanted to make this stupid, little pit stop as fun as it could possibly be.
We had so much fun at that little pit stop that it proved one of the best we have ever experienced on vacation. When we finally arrived at our proposed destination, we had all the fun we planned to have, and I remember that vacation as one of the better ones we’ve had. We may have spent four days at our proposed destination, and we only spent 30 minutes at that non-commercial pit stop, but the time we spent there will forever stick out in my memory.
City on a Hill
I love a great line. A great line can make a movie (90 minutes long, on average) or a series (roughly 47 minutes per episode, with ten episodes on average) seem worth it. Anyone who reads this will probably say that it says a lot about me, but my favorite lines are the obnoxiously offensive and repugnant lines of vulgar cruelty. Some heart-warming, positive lines, reach me, but nothing causes me to pause and rewind more than an awful line from an awful character.
I also prefer shows and movies that depict people doing and saying awful things to one another. There are exceptions, of course, as some shows are awful for the sole purpose of being awful. The great shows, about awful people doing awful things to one another, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men always managed to preserve some relatable integrity in their characters while doing and saying awful things to other characters. We learn to cheer the main characters on, and when they did awful things to other characters, we cheer that on too.
The Showtime series City on a Hill is not as great as those shows, of course, but it did have one great, repugnant, moment of vulgar cruelty.
“I can hear it now. The eulogies, the hymns, the bagpipes, everyone forgetting what a lousy piece of [dung] you’ve been your entire life,” the Jackie Rohr character says to his rival J.R. Minogue, on an episode of the TV show City on a Hill. The Minogue character lies in the ambulance, and we know he’s not going to live long enough to see the hospital. We know Rohr’s cruel sendoff will be the final thing the Minogue character hears. “Your wife’s going to be upset [after you die] for about five minutes, and I will … eventually, but this should be a comfort to both of us. There’s no hell. There’s only this life, right here, right now, and the last thing that you’re going to see in your lousy life is my ugly face.”
Seconds before this scene, Rohr eagerly leapt into the ambulance that carried J.R. Minogue, before the EMTs could close the door. We know this scene. We’ve seen it all before. The main character, a law enforcement official, leaps into the ambulance to hold a fellow cop’s hand, as the man succumbs to death. Even though they’re bitter rivals, Minogue’s a fellow cop, and that goes along way to forming some solidarity between the two. That’s the typical scene, in the typical cop movie, but the writers of City on a Hill had other plans for Rohr. They have him mock his rival on his deathbed, and he lays into Minogue with vulgar cruelty.
Ever since Sopranos, and perhaps beyond, viewers have come to accept the idea that their favorite main characters on their favorite productions can be morally ambiguous, if not downright awful people. Through a dizzying array of scenes, we accept the idea that Jackie Rohr is one such character. Yet, what motivates this character to be this spiteful? We’re to read into it. We’re to wonder if we could ever be that spiteful. We’ve all had people we dislike in a competitive manner, and we dislike others in a more personal manner, but have we ever hated someone so much that we wanted to taunt them into death? Most of us haven’t. I obviously considered this scene an interesting nugget to chew on, and I wanted a more thorough psychological exploration of why, or how, even a Jackie Rohr could be that spiteful and that hateful. Scenes like these remind me why I prefer books to movies.
We understand that when Rohr says, “This should be a comfort to both of us. There’s no hell,” he does so to inform the viewers that he knows that he’s as awful as J.R. Minogue is. That line sets up the next line well, but after I paused the series at that point and rewound it a number of times, I thought up a better line.
“There is no heaven, and there is no hell. There’s no such thing as an afterlife.” If the writers seek spite, this might be an altogether different level of spite, because as awful as J.R. Minogue apparently was, he likely tried to counter those evil deeds with some good ones throughout his life. It might be even more spiteful to inform him that those good deeds he performed, and any other attempts Minogue made at good and honest living, were a waste of time, because “there is no heaven.”
Rohr then alluded to the idea that his main point for jumping in the ambulance was to make sure that Minogue’s loved ones weren’t the faces he remembered. Rohr wanted his face, Minogue’s most hated rival, to be the last face he saw. I see the writer(s) working here. I know that they’re vying for one of the more spiteful moments in TV history, but if there is no afterlife, and J.R. Minogue turns to dust, there will be no way for Minogue to remember the final moments that Rohr hoped to ruin. He’ll turn to non-existence, and Rohr’s awful sentiments will die as soon as Minogue does. A better line might have been, “There is an afterlife, and we don’t know where you’re going yet, but if they somehow determine in their mysterious ways, that a piece of [dung] like you is worthy of eternal paradise, I’m here to ruin all that for you by providing you your own personal definition of hell, knowing that my ugly face was the last thing you saw in your time spent on Earth.”
I read an interesting complaint regarding individuals who follow religious philosophies. The complainant suggested that religious people fail to appreciate their lives on earth as much as they should, because they place inordinate focus on achieving eternal paradise in the next life. Whether there is an afterlife or not, even if it involves a level of paradise beyond our wildest imagination, something tells me that we’ll look back on our lives on earth with some regret if we don’t make more time to enjoy the pit stops in life, en route to our final destination.
Feature Story #1
A man in Oklahoma, enters the highway, and after a couple of miles, he clicks his Recreation Vehicle (RV) into cruise control. Nothing different than anything any of us have done over a hundred times. Except, this driver, allegedly unaware of the full functionality of the cruise control feature on his RV, walks into the kitchen area of his RV to make himself a sandwich. We have to imagine that the man didn’t have enough time to get the meat between the slices of bread when all hell broke loose, as the RV drove off the road and into the ditch. Some versions of this story suggest that the man died as a result of the ensuing accident. Others claim that he not only survived, but he won a settlement with the manufacturer $1,750,000 and a new RV, because the manufacturer did not specifically document for him the full functionality of the RV’s cruise control. This story isn’t half as funny as it once was, based on the current technology that allows some cars self-driving functionality, but back when I first heard this tale, it seemed impossibly hilarious that a grown man (or woman, depending on the version of the story) could think that they could make a sandwich (or cup of coffee) in the back while the car was in cruise control.
“I don’t think you understand the severity of this,” the doctor said going over the biopsy and the image test results with the alcoholic. “This is what we call stage four cancer, and if you quit now, cold turkey, you have a chance, about a 39.1 percent chance to live five years. Keep drinking, even a little amount, and you’re likely dead in months.”
Rilaly 