SPACE IS GONNA DO ME GOOD?

"It's not dark yet, but it's gettin' there..." - Bob Dylan

I needed space, and I got it. Stagnation had gotten the best of me, and dissolved most of my drive and desire, and I needed space from everything that surrounded me. Family, friends, my workfarm of a crappy job, Anchorage... everything. Luckily, I had enough desire left to force myself to take a leap. Not of faith, necessarily; I knew the landing could very well be the roughest I had ever encountered, but I set my resolve to deal with whatever met me at the bottom of that crevasse.

I left my comfortable home of 17 years and job of 22 years in a state that I had lived in for the overwhelming majority of my 41 years in order to start a new home, job and life. I found an interesting but highly underpaying job that keeps me extremely busy and exhausted, which is fine (except the money). I love my home life: especially with Jen, but also with the baby girls and my cranky 20-year old cat. I like the area that I live in and it is a nice change to not have to worry about the cold and the snow for the first time in my life. And I love the irony that of all the gang, I live in a place with a gorgeous swimming pool, because I will never use it. I really don't like that our work schedules don't allow Jen and I very much time together, but when we do get the odd day off simultaneously, we make the most of it. We live in an exciting place with a million things to do, and at the rate we are going, it will take us about 400 years to do all of it. Because I have so much time for my lonesome, I have finally taken to writing as much as I used to dream that I could. I not only started a pair of blogs, but also pulled out old story notes, poem and song fragments, and partial screenplays and novels, and have begun working anew on a great many projects. I took up cooking as a new hobby, finding a new meditative center in the process, and have started eyeing ukeleles and guitars in the music stores (another long-suppressed back-of-the-brain interest). While I wasn't making a ton of new friends, I have met some nice people and hope that I continue to grow relationships with them.

While my life in Anchorage was mostly enjoyable, it had started to eat away at me. Here in California, I felt refreshed and the world seemed new and exciting for the first time in a long time. Apart from the job, which had started to became dull and annoying to increasing degrees, I was enjoying every single thing that came my way. I was steamrolling happily along and nothing was going to slow me down.

And then I took a vacation.

At first, I made a promise to not blog during our actual trip, but, of my own accord, I decided to take a month off from the process. Three weeks before the vacation began, I was already a wreck. I had gotten out of my routine, which was anything but as far as production went, and I slipped back into my old ADD ways: easily distracted by the slightest things, and absolutely unable to focus on any one thing, especially things of importance. I started to slip at work, and though I still got up at the same time each morning, that 90 minutes of pure writing before work turned into television time, and I found myself sluggish and under-alert during the rest of the day. On my last day at the office before my actual vacation, a casual and unthinking snubbing by one of my bosses left me furious on my way out of the door, and I really wanted it to hit me on the ass on my way out, just so I would have some cause to turn around and do some damage to the fucking place by kicking the glass to pieces.

While I did take copious notes on our roadtrip and had a lot of fun during the Arizona and New Mexico section of the vacation, but Texas left me depressed and angry. The depression traveled back with me, and on August 9, when I had told myself that I would begin officially blogging again, I had a mini breakdown. I jumped the Cel Bloc revival to September 9th instead, and now I doubt that I will start it up again at all. I made a couple passes at entries on this blog before August 9th, but my heart just wasn't in them. As a result, neither were my brain nor my fingers.

And so here I am. Boo-fucking-hoo, you might say. I don't blame you. Say what you want, because I really don't give a shit, and gathering sympathy from the outside is not the point for putting my little sobfest to print here. This blog is merely here for me to exercise my need to write, and when that need is suffering, this blog is a crucial tool towards healing that need. Because I can't just bash words out on a page or on a lifeless Word document and consider myself to have done anything. While this is my blog, it is still a very public device, and it forces me to commit myself to doing something, whether three people are reading or a thousand.

I'm just trying to write myself out of this funk. I clearly have anger to burn, and I need to truly let loose in some fashion before I can continue on as before. Because this is nowhere near as low as I can go, just as it is not halfway as loud as I can fucking get.

Yet again, I just need some space. And if it takes filling up that space with little sputtering whirls of steam, then so be it.

Consider this section of space filled...

...Because Fish #@%& In It!

It's hard to concentrate on movies or blogging when all you have are thoughts of copulating sharks in your head. Such is the problem when Discovery Channel's annual Shark Week rolls around. It's not my fault that they devoted an entire documentary to The Science of Shark Sex! But then the filmmakers spent 45 minutes of the show not talking about shark sex at all, but instead showed the drooling scientists roaming about the water around three islands posting all sorts of monitoring devices in their attempt to capture the mating habits of some grey reef sharks. But once the magic moment arrives -- BUCK-A-WHANG! It was so freaking graphic, with all of this descriptive talk about penetration and thrusting, that I wasn't sure that I hadn't fallen asleep earlier and missed the whole plotline involving the great white pizza delivery boy and the randy nurse shark cheerleader.

The scientists made a big deal about how they had been waiting their whole careers to capture such a moment on film, and I thought "Well, that's great...!" I'm happy for them that their hard work and pervy diligence has paid off, but then, not two hours later on a different documentary, the same sort of "wham-bam-pass-your-clam" shark orgy was shown amongst a group of whitetips! And the filmmakers were totally casual about it, like it had been on film a zillion times before! But the Shark Sex show was supposed to be a brand new doc, so either the scientists were misguided in their belief that they were the first to film such an act, or they were actually shark fetishists and could only get off on the carnal pursuits of reef sharks that were grey. My, my, my... how very specific. What's next? Shark-milking videos with nurse sharks? Dogfishy-style assplay?

Frankly, the act seemed the same, whether between greys or whitetips: wet, nasty and dirty. The scientists were quick to point out that the males had two such appendages, but only "one was used for penetration". Seems like the sharks are missing an angle here. And despite the appearance of the act, the narrator also noted about the male shark's pair of claspers that "these aren't like the erectile penises" that mammalians possess. Hey, claspers or a whatchamacallit... whatever you want to call your junk due to your own species preference... a dork is a dork. Hell, humans can't even decide on the proper look of their own penises, cutting off this bit or that according to religious ceremony, or adding a Prince Albert or a tattoo or what have you, or even sometimes splitting portions of it for some ungodly reason. Why should we castigate the sharks for their equipment, especially when it seems to dwarf even that of John Holmes? If the appendages aren't erectile, they certainly give the impression that they are, and they fulfill the same purpose as a penis. Something is inserted into something else, and ultimately, semen is delivered to fertilize eggs. Besides, the act was remarkably similar, and the closeup action could have come from any hardcore human video, minus, perhaps, the presence of some fat idiot's hairy ball sac bouncing up and down (I'm talking about you, Mr. Jeremy). Strange what you can run into on basic cable in the middle of a Saturday morning.

A co-worker was telling me the other day about their need to sit their son down for "the talk"... you know, regarding the so-called facts of life. Seems to me you can just switch the stations to the Discovery Channel after they've finished watching The Backyardigans, and then make them wonder why the animals on the first show are wasting their time stupidly singing and dancing when they could be doing what the animals on the other show are doing: roughly biting and banging away at each other. (Think about that the next time you watch that little penguin and moose on The Backyardigans... or is it now The Backdoorigans?) 

Either make the the kids watch the Shark Sex episode, or watch it yourself and then describe it to your kids: "Well, first Mommy and Daddy zip about in boats between three islands and plant their buoys into the floor of the ocean so that we can triangulate a monitoring signal..." Perhaps the kids should just watch the last fifteen minutes of the show for some hot grey reef shark-on-grey reef shark-on-yet-another-grey reef shark action. Oh... I didn't mention it was basically a shark gangbang?

Ah! Those naughty, naughty sharks... If they weren't already in the water, they'd need a shower.

Of course, W.C. Fields would never agree with that. He never drank water, you know, for a very particular reason...

IT'S NOT A RERUN IF IT'S ON DVD, Pt. 2

Yet again, as happened the last time I sought to shout out the names of series that I hoped would get belated releases onto DVD, I have been happily stifled. A couple of months ago, as I was compiling my list of hoped-for series, it turned out that Wild Wild West, Brisco County, Jr., Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain, all top choices of mine, were already set to come out this summer. Great! My work was done before I had even thought to begin it. I still pointed out my desire to see sets for Batman, Get Smart and Jack of All Trades, and called the matter finished, if not a good deal shorter than I had planned it to be. Nonetheless, I promised a second installment with a handful of other series (or versions of other series) at a later date.

Fast forward to today. This time, a list of five potential series has been knocked down to a possible three (maybe four) after doing a bit of early morning research and finding out that one series is already out on DVD (surprise, surprise!) and another is rumored to come out in the very near future. While some of my friends and acquaintances like to rip on it, I have a great fondness for Filmation's 1979 Saturday morning series of The New Adventures of Flash Gordon. In fact, when the 1980 feature film version came out afterwards, I was immensely disappointed as I felt that the series version captured the mood of the original strip and '30's serials far better. (I must profess a goofy love for the film, too, though.) Though sometimes I am wary of getting burned by the "love it as a child, hate it as an adult" rule, luckily, the set comes fairly cheap currently on Amazon, so I've lined it up for purchase already and a mere $20 shouldn't hurt too bad should the series truly reek. (I did see it a few years back on Sci-Fi and it was still enjoyable.)

The other set that I have been dying to see has been a collection of the original skits and cartoons from Sesame Street. Though I would tune in occasionally over the years to catch old Ernie and Bert skits, along with seeing any new ones that had popped up, the last decade or so has been marked by such an increase in baby-talking Elmo insanity and political correctness (though this last bit is probably necessary) that the show is well-nigh unwatchable in its current incarnation. At least it is for one who remembered the series when it seemed a little more... well... adult. Sesame Street was the chief instigator of my interest in Muppets and puppetry, and while it was a series aimed at preschoolers, some of the jokes and references on the show were quite clearly and sometimes not so subtly aimed at the adult set. Even in recent years, I've made sure to catch at least a few episodes of each new season (I believe they are due to start the 37th at this point), and every year, it seems more and more of what I enjoyed about the show has been locked away in the Sesame Vault somewhere deep below Mr. Looper's ("Hoopa'! Hoopa'!") Store. Some would call it evolution; I call it devo-. While some would argue that today's kids are more sophisticated, I would blast that point. They may be more technologically advanced, and thus the show reflects these changes with segments involving PCs and cell phones, but it doesn't mean the current Sesame audience is any sharper. Especially with a goo-goo babbling red idiot as the Muppet of focus.

The other thing that I recall from my youth was that often the show could get a little dark or weird ("Bumble Ardy's Birthday 9" comes to mind), and early on, some of the monster segments could actually be a little scary. I recall particularly a Kermit bit where he believes he is sitting on a wall, but then the wall starts to move, eerie music starts up, a tremendous growling monster puppet is revealed and a startled Kermit has to dart to safety. While CTW put out several collections over the last twenty years of songs or character skits, they always (probably most appropriately) tailored the videos to the current crop of kids watching the show. So, I have been hoping for a long time that they would (much like their recent Electric Company disc set) give the overly nostalgic among us a decent dose of old school Street. Dropping onto Amazon today to check the status of such a set, I was surprised to find a listing for "Sesame Street: Nostalgia Set First Fiv" (what I presume to mean either "Five Episodes" or "Five Seasons" is cut off), a release date of October 24, 2006 and a retail list price of $39.98, which Amazon has graciously cut by 25% and given the ability to pre-order the item, even though there is no information or not even an image on display. A check at the excellent Muppet Newsflash blog reveals its curator's assurance that he has been contacted by the Sesame Workshop, who confirmed that they do indeed have something in the works for that date, and that a second Electric Company set is also due to come out in the future. A check at the Sesame Workshop itself, however, and a perusal of press releases back to Sept. 2005 reveals nothing. So, until I actually see a .jpg on that Amazon page, I shall remain skeptical.

And now, with the preliminaries out of the way, I am now prepared to discuss the next three series on the Wish List. However, time has made it necessary to continue this discussion at a later date...