Saturday November 1 2003

Well, it will be November 1 by the time this goes up, anyway.

Had a decent Hallowe’en. Not by any sane social standards, mind you, but you’ll see that, because I am about to bore you with every tedious detail of my goddam day.

What had to be done today was paying another $40 or so on the utility bill. Speaking of that, I don’t like Progress Energy. TECO, you call them up, you sing them a little song, they give you as much time as you need. You need to call them later and move back a payment date, they’re cool with that. Progress Energy, on the other hand, are pains in my ass. You call them up and make an arrangement, it’s like the arrangement is as inexorable as a planet’s orbital path around its primary. We’d arranged to pay some of our utility bill last week and some of it this week, and honest to God, I did not feel like going out today, so I called Progress Energy up to see if I could put this off another week, and my God, you’d think I’d asked them to let me sleep on their couch for awhile. Assholes.

But, anyway, that was on the agenda and I knew it was on the agenda and I’d planned to take care of it while Paul was asleep. So Paul gets home and I remind him of this and he shells out some money so I can pay the bill and get a cab up there and back, since neither of us drive. Then eventually he crashes. Meanwhile, I’ve been keeping ‘old folks hours’, as Paul charmingly puts it, trying to get back on something like a normal sleep schedule for various reasons, like it’s a pain in the ass to sleep until 4 in the afternoon when the Bux insist on playing at 1 p.m., and also I’m hoping someone will hire me sometime soon and being on a 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. sleep schedule when that happens would make for a sucky adjustment.

So I went to bed around 10 Thursday night, did the more or less sleep thing until around 6, got up, posted yesterdays blog entry, walked up to J’s, got a couple of papers and some soda, came back home, read the papers, came back inside, dicked around a little online (alienating a few people I don’t know with my male-centered homophobia, but that’s life), then decided to walk down to the Kash n’ Karry, which is about two miles from the house, because there was supposed to be a place to pay the power bill in that plaza, and I was hoping Kash n’ Karry might still have a pumpkin.

So I put on my comfy sneakers and mosey on down. Nice day today (yesterday by the time you read this) BTW… low 70s, sunny, quite breezy. I rove from one end of the Kash n’ Karry plaza to the other; apparently this cell phone place that takes Progress Energy payments is in some other Kash n’ Karry plaza. I wander into the Kash n’ Karry; no pumpkins. But they have fried chicken, and Paul and I both wanted fried chicken from Wal-mart the night before (Thursday) when we grocery shopped, and there wasn’t any, so we got rotissary chicken instead, but that isn’t the same at all, so I got some fried chicken. Then I walked home, dicked around a little more online, ate some chicken, called a cab, and went out to Postal Zone to pay Progress Energy, whom I dislike intensely for not letting me just stay home and vegetate after a four mile round trip on foot.

On the way back, I mention to the cab driver that Paul and I waited too long to get a pumpkin and how bummed we are, and she allows that there is this little farmer’s market where she saw pumpkins yesterday (Thursday, c’mon, try to keep up). She offers to take me over there and I tell her exactly how much money I have on me to pay the cab fare with and she says “that will be fine, you’ll have enough for a pumpkin, they’re only $4”. So over there we go.

They are out of $4 pumpkins, of course; all they have left is about three boxes of rather small pumpkins, a buck each or 3 for $2. These are pumpkins about the size of a professional wrestler’s fist or a small child’s head. I figure, at the moment we have no pumpkins, zero, zilch, nada, none; small pumpkins are an improvement on that, and I get three. Off I go home.

Eventually Paul wakes up, seems blearily happy to see I’ve scored some pumpkins. We carve them into jack o’lanterns (Paul took his time and did a really meticulous job on his), obtain candles, hunt up two skulls Paul has around the house (I don’t know why, but they’re cool) and create a Halloween tableau outside featuring a line of jack o’lanterns and skulls, all lit by candles, leading to our front door (we actually live facing a back alley, so we needed a visual aid to direct potential trick or treaters to our door from the main thoroughfare).

And we actually got trick or treaters. Not very many, lots of Reese’s peanut butter cups left for us, but still, we got about half a dozen. Jack o’lanterns, trick or treaters, and Paul got to dress up in the black cape and skeleton mask and answer the door as Death. And our jack o’lanterns looked cool as hell from the street when it got dark outside.

All told, I call that a satisfactory Hallowe’en. I know, not by your or anyone else’s standards, but still. I’m a simple man. Now, TV:

FOX moved Boston Public back to 9, so I didn’t have to choose it over Joan of Arcadia this week, which was good. Or maybe not, since Joan of Arcadia was tremendously boring. All the various characters are slowly and very tediously moving into the entirely predictable coupling patterns that were astonishingly obvious and evident in the first episode. The high school backdrop continues to be boring and generic, as does the cop back drop. The only thing the show has going for it… God dropping in as various different people in Joan’s day to day life to give her baffling instructions… is getting really old, too.

Most exasperating, though, is that in the second episode of this show (or maybe it was the first) God outlined to Joan three different sets of circumstances for three different people that had come about because Joan had done as the Divine One asked and joined the chess club. All the circumstances were positive, and every upgrade to these people’s lives could be traced back to Joan doing what God had asked her to do. When Joan gasped “For the better? Always for the better?”, God basically assured her that if she just did what he asked her to do, it would always end up working out for the better of everyone involved.

Now, on one level, the notion of a God this loving, this hands on, and this intimately involved in the minute to minute, day to day lives of normal people, many of whom will contract rectal cancer next year, or get raped, or see their loved ones senselessly murdered, or smash up their cars, or otherwise have their lives pretty much utterly ruined by blind, random chance, kind of appalls and infuriates me. On that level, it seems horribly disrespectful to everyone who has ever suffered a truly grievous loss to create a TV show that suggests there is a loving god out there who intervenes directly in some people’s lives through the agency of a really hot high school girl, but who can’t be troubled to wake your mother up from her coma, keep your father out of prison, help your little brother kick his drug habit, cure your daughter’s leukemia, or just do something to make you a little less borderline suicidal from loneliness and misery day after day after day.

On the other hand, it’s a nice fantasy, and so far it’s a pretty unitarian one. God has never said what particular creed or subsect of which religion he/she favors on this show; tonight, in fact, he (he was male when he did it) dismissed the Crusades as being about politics, not faith.

But what’s frustrating about the show is that they seem to have abandoned that original tenet… namely, if Joan does what God asks, everything gets discernibly better for everyone involved.

Tonight Joan did as God asked and tried out for the cheerleading squad. Which led to one of the most popular cheerleaders at her school being exposed as a girl who had gotten pregnant, kept the pregnancy secret, and recently abandoned her newborn baby in a dumpster.

How this helps everyone, or makes everything better, always better, I simply fail to grasp. If God wanted to make things better, always better, you’d think he/she could have sterilized the idiot jock who knocked up the idiot cheerleader. Or arranged for them to use a condom. Or arranged for the idiot cheerleader to tell her parents about the pregnancy, after making sure the idiot cheerleader’s parents were about one tenth as understanding and wonderful as Joan’s parents are. Or somehow inveigled some other hot high school chick nine months prior to this to take some sort of action that would, in some way, lead to the idiot cheerleader attending a sex ed class or breaking up with the moron jock before the two of them got all precipitate.

Once the seed is sewn, however, well, that seems pretty much it. What God basically did was arrange for this girl to ruin her life, and not only that, but get caught doing it, as well.

Obviously, God moves in mysterious ways and simply because we do not immediately see that the consequences of Joan’s actions tonight are for the better, that doesn’t mean they aren’t. Perhaps this lesson will provide the idiot cheerleader with some much needed maturity. Maybe the kid she and her moron jock boyfriend had and then threw in a dumpster will grow up to be a great force for lasting world peace. Maybe, because the idiot cheerleader had to be moved to another school once she got busted for abandoning her newborn in a dumpster, her father will meet the love of his life, divorce the idiot cheerleader’s mother, and… well, no, that doesn’t sound very good for everyone involved…

Look. You want to sell me a happy fantasy where a hot chick simply does what the Divine Presence asks her to do every week, however random, absurd, and/or whimsical these requests seem, and she can see very discernible ripples of positive effect spreading out around her touching everyone she interacts with whenever she does this, fine. I’ll buy that for a dollar. Sounds like an ‘awwww’ show, and I could use some warm fuzzies these days, especially warm fuzzies that give Mary Steenburgen a lot of screen time.

But now, this show mostly seems to be about a rather barmy God showing up in various guises, pointing Our Heroine in some nutty new direction this week, all of which has, as they say in the trades, whacky results. And none of it really seems all that memorable, and I’m here to tell you, when you have Joe Mantegna and Mary Steenburgen on your show and you’re not producing anything memorable, you’ve got severe problems.

Boston Public… ah, tonight wasn’t a good episode by my standards, which means, it was mostly an episode that focused on the male characters, with all the hot female teachers (Jeri Ryan being the standout there) being shoved into the background. What stories we did get involved the utterly obnoxious romance between Principal Harper and Music Teacher Sutor, Michael Rappaport’s really annoying character being, well, really annoying, A Young Gay Student In An Abusive, Intolerant Home Situation, and, let me stress, no Jeri Ryan. Also, the hot Hispanic teacher whose actor’s name I do not know suddenly vanished from this episode, as well (although according to coming attractions she’s back front and center next week, so doubtless I’ll like that episode more).

The only light in the darkness this week is that it looks like they’re finally going to give poor Guber a decent romance (instead of that utterly appalling thing they cooked up between him and the dreadfully disturbing Hook Lady a couple of seasons ago)… but this is a David Kelly show, there’s always one character who is designated as the resident schlub and loser, and on Boston Public that’s Guber, so it’s inevitable that this relationship will blow up in his face within another two episodes maximum.

And suddenly I’m getting tired, so let me post this and go to bed.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, “Wow, I didn’t recognize you in men’s clothing”. According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I’m reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I’d take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here’s The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people’s blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin’s Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron’s blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don’t really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren’t related to me by marriage, I’d most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I’ve learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don’t care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I’d get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don’t Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.