The Star Wars Remakes

When I saw The Force Awakens, I was underwhelmed. But everyone else seemed to love it, so I figured my ambivalence toward the movie was just a symptom of depression. I was willing to go along with the mainstream narrative of a Star Wars renaissance. Honestly, I didn’t wanna ruin anyone’s enjoyment of the film. I didn’t wanna be the stick-in-the-mud who insists that the new ones aren’t as good as the originals. Everyone seemed to think Star Wars was back on track, and I wasn’t going to stand in their way.

My reaction to The Last Jedi was similar. Although I thought The Last Jedi was better than the previous installment, it still didn’t rekindle my childlike enthusiasm for the franchise. (For the record, I enjoyed Rogue One much more than these two.) Once again, I was willing to accept the critical and popular consensus that it was superlative entertainment.

But I’ve been emboldened by the brewing backlash among Star Wars diehards. Now I’m thinking that maybe I was right all along. I wasn’t able to articulate my criticism until I watched this video.

The main problem with the sequels is that, so far, they’re basically just a reboot of the original trilogy. We’ve got a new empire and a mostly new Rebellion/Resistance. But we already defeated the empire! Why should I care about defeating another empire? That’s boring! As the guy in the video points out, even the prequels had a different arc, covering the rise of the empire. Sure, they did a really shitty job with it, but at least it was different!

When The Force Awakens came out, people said, “Yeah, the plot is identical to A New Hope, but so what? It’s a reboot.” I suppose there’s nothing wrong with that, except for one thing: THAT’S SO FUCKING LAME! The series doesn’t need a reboot! J.J. Abrams, Rian Johnson & company just wanted to go back to what “worked” in the original trilogy. They assume it was the basic plot structure that drove their success and doomed the prequels (instead of the artistic execution).

Just as The Force Awakens was a loose remake of A New Hope, so is The Last Jedi a rehash of The Empire Strikes Back. I’ll spare you the irrelevant details and tick off the bullet points. The movie starts with the Rebellion’s – er, Resistance’s – secret base being discovered by the Empire – er, First Order. Instead of Luke being trained by Yoda, Rey is (reluctantly) trained by Luke. We get an imperial walker battle, but at the end instead of the beginning, and on a planet covered in salt instead of ice. Kylo (basically) tells Rey who her parents are: “nobodies.” (That’s one of the more refreshing changes. Heredity has become so important in this series that I was beginning to think the Force was just a recessive gene.)

The First Order’s fleet chases the Resistance fleet. The Emperor’s – excuse me, Supreme Leader’s – huge ship is revealed. Just like with the updated Death Star (the imaginatively named “Starkiller Base”), the only real innovation is that it’s way bigger than its precursor. Also, the technical aspects of the film are above reproach. The special effects, sound design, art direction and fight choreography are all top-notch.

But, when it comes to the story, the filmmakers don’t have much new to offer. Women and POC’s figure prominently in the Resistance, whereas the First Order is the last bastion of white masculinity. This has triggered some alt-right (or alt-lite) dudes on YouTube, which is kinda fun, but it doesn’t bring any new energy to the plot’s tired beats.

To me, it seems like Disney has decided to play it safe in the interest of maximizing profit. I wonder how people will react if the next film has another Starkiller Base or something similar, and the Resistance has to disable its force field in order for their fleet to finally defeat the First Order. If they team up with a bunch of cute woodland creatures, I might just lose it. I might go full Sargon of Akkad on their asses.

Seriously, though, I think the backlash could go nuclear if the next one proves to be just another remake. Those who have enjoyed the sequels so far will have enough time to digest them and see the parallels with the originals and may finally come to the conclusion that they’ve been had. Or maybe they’re right and I’m the asshole. Who knows?

I just wish they would’ve told a different kind of story. I wanted to see the New Republic try to re-establish democracy in the galaxy through a mixture of diplomacy and warfare. I think it would’ve been far more interesting watching the Rebels make the difficult transition from resistance group to government. Surely, they would’ve been riven by internal conflict and challenged by other power centers in the galaxy, some of which may have had a morally equal claim to legitimacy.

By choosing the remake route, Disney has denied us a more complex, rewarding story. Then again, that may not be the kind of tale that blockbusters are made of. But, more likely, it’s just too morally fraught for a transnational behemoth to take that big a chance on.

The Way Out

Last week, I started a month-long temp job inspecting (mostly holiday-related) photo cards. It’s in Eagan, so it’s been taking me about 35 minutes to drive there. Luckily, they switched me to a 11:30-8pm shift this week, so the traffic isn’t as bad. Unluckily, the roads have been covered in ice, nearly doubling my travel time.

It’s an easy job. We just flip through stacks of cards, looking for flaws in the printing or cutting or resolution, for instance. The challenge is the repetitiveness, since some orders have hundreds of prints, and doing this for 8 (or more) hours a day can be mind-numbing.

Strangely, I haven’t yet been tempted to stick in my ear buds. At most of my jobs this is the first thing I do. It always seemed like the best way to take my mind off the work and shift my focus to matters I consider more important or more entertaining.

But now it feels like doing so would cloud my brain and make the job more difficult, even though this is one of the most mindless jobs I’ve ever had. I think I’ve finally come around to the idea of mindfulness and given up on multi-tasking. Intellectually, I’ve long seen the benefits of concentrating on one task at a time, but now I seem emotionally ready to embrace the practice.

I think the main difference is that I no longer have to drown out my personal demons. These aren’t shrieking horrors out of the realm of nightmares, just the nattering nabobs of negativity. I used to call them “couch potato demons.” Unlike the anxieties that supposedly drive certain people to greatness, my demons kept me on the couch, snacking and watching TV.

But, given time and nourishment, they grew into terrifying giants. I’d been avoiding them until they grew too large to avoid. I had to stop hiding and meet them head-on. Once I cut back on my behavior of “avoidance” (a term my third-to-last therapist introduced me to), I started down the road to recovery.

Eschewing the ear buds is just the latest step in my path toward engagement with Reality. Instead of trying to distract myself from the job, I’m willing to accept the fact that I’m working as a temp grunt. I no longer have to be ashamed, because I’m not worried (as much) about what other people think of me in terms of social status.

I finally believe the hokum I’ve been spouting all these years about how what really matters is who you are on the inside, not what you have, that love and kindness and charity are more important than material possessions and appearances. This is because I’ve taken another big step closer to fully living by those principles.

That big step was accepting my parents’ love and reconnecting with my nurturing side. At heart, I’m just a big Stuart Smalley. (Sorry about the timing of that reference.) But it’s taken about 25 years to throw off the shame that was heaped on that side of me in my youth.

It’s especially nice to be free of that shame at this job, because we get to look at pictures of cute kids and families looking happy. I’ve really been able to indulge that long-dormant “caring nurturer” side of me. (I should say that my “caring nurturer” side hasn’t been completely dormant, but it’s been mostly expressed toward friends and cats, and even then in an oft-reserved manner.)

This is the first time since I hit puberty that I’ve been able to express that warmth fully towards kids, without being worried that someone’s gonna make fun of me. I’ve finally forgiven them (that is, “Kids,” writ large) for making fun of me when I was a kid. (The actual kids who made fun of me are not yet totally forgiven. But they aren’t kids anymore, so what am I holding on to?)

The Old Me would’ve (inwardly) sneered at the cute kids and the happy families. Eventually, he would’ve despised the person who invented photography for (indirectly) forcing him to do this work. (According to Wikipedia, there were a few Western European male-types involved in the invention of photography.)

But now I can revel in the vicarious joy and cuteness of the pictures, because I’m finally happy and grateful for my family. I’m forced to marvel at those who are happy despite growing up in broken homes. That’s a level of mental health I haven’t yet achieved.

I still wonder if all these people in the photographs are as happy as they appear. I know what it’s like to put on a show for the cameras. I resented having to do that for family pictures. Surely, some of the people in these pics fall into that category, but so it goes. This isn’t a perfect world.

I check out the couples in the pics to see who got the better of the deal. I assume the more physically attractive person got the short end of the stick, but they could be a real basket case. You can’t really make that judgment without knowing them personally. But it’s still fun.

One piece of advice for holiday pix: Don’t hire a Santa to pose with your kids. No matter how jolly that Old St. Nick is, it’s still creepy. It may be a sad commentary on our times, but there’s just something disturbing about seeing a little girl whisper into an old man’s ear, especially when he’s wearing an expression of surprise.

I look at the kids in these pictures and wonder: Which of them are going to grow up to be total fucking assholes? Statistically speaking, some of them will. It’s just science. I wonder if I can tell just by looking at them. I doubt it. That would fly in the face of years of experience. I’ve been obsessed with appearances for decades, and this is where it’s gotten me.

It turns out that most people who order fancy holiday photo cards have physically attractive families, or so this job has led me to believe. That, combined with the super-happy shots of kids frolicking and parents looking on lovingly, makes me wonder if these people are real.

There was also the card featuring the Soap Opera Family, a group of people who looked just like characters from an early-90’s soap, right down to the older gentleman with the white goatee. They made the Kardashians look subtle. I didn’t really think those people existed, except on TV.

I should thank the company employing me, and the temp agency that arranged it, for allowing me this time to write. On my first day, I came down with a cold. It wasn’t bad, but I really would’ve liked to stay home and recover and not infect all the people around me.

I didn’t think that was an option because I’d just started the job and it was my first assignment with this agency, so I kept going and spreading my germs. I cursed Capitalism for forcing me into this situation. Instead of just letting me stay home and rest, it was making me spread my contagion.

I finally called in sick on Wednesday, in the hope that one more day off (I worked Sunday.) would help me get over the cold. It wasn’t quite enough, so I called yesterday and told them I’d have to quit because it would take a while to get over this. The lady at the agency asked if I could just take the rest of the week off and come back Monday. I said, “Sure,” amazed that was acceptable to them.

So here I am, recounting the travails of a 40-year-old temp. I may not be where I wanna be, but, as someone (Robert Frost, apparently) once said, “The only way out is through.” I’ve already made it through the minefield of my own brain. Compared to that, the rest of the journey should be a cakewalk.

Street Scenes

Yesterday I was sitting in my (parents’) car at a stoplight on University a few blocks south of Broadway. A line of cars was crossing the intersection from my left. Just before the last one entered the intersection, a young black man on a bicycle (poppin’ a wheelie the whole time) crossed in front of the car. (It was an SUV or something like that.) The SUV screeched to a stop and the guy on the bike kept going, laughing like a hyena.

My immediate, vocal reaction was, “Whoa, he shoulda fuckin’ run that guy over.” Not a great thing to say, even to oneself, but that’s how pissed off I was. The SUV driver just saved his life, and he’s laughin’ his damn fool head off. Maybe he enjoys the adrenaline rush, because he clearly saw the SUV coming.

In the evening, I nearly got run over while using a crosswalk in Cedar-Riverside. As the car approached me, I put up my hands, hopped mostly out of the way and said, “Whoa, whoa!” The middle-aged lady at the wheel didn’t react much. I think she was embarrassed and ashamed, but maybe I’m just projecting, because that would be my reaction. I’m just glad I responded as quickly and forcefully as I did. It’s taken a long time to undo the middle school conditioning of pretending like nothing bothers me.

It made me sad to think the guy on the bike apparently places such little value on his own life. But I was still mad at him. That kind of behavior makes those of us who care feel like suckers. It’s like the panhandler conundrum: to give or not to give (a fuck). I googled it and found a The New York Times editorial citing Pope Francis’s advice.

He recommends giving, even if they use the money for alcohol. (Street drugs don’t seem to exist in the Pope’s world.) Whatever they buy, it will make them happy. He also says you must look them in the eye and touch their hands. That sounds good, but the money still presents a dilemma. If they use it to buy drugs and then die of an overdose, what then? Don’t you bear some responsibility for that?

Last week I got panhandled by a black guy outside Calhoun Square. (As Uptown has continued to gentrify, the number of panhandlers seems to have risen.) I looked him in the eye (like I usually do) and said, “Sorry.” He didn’t hear me, so I repeated it, just before opening a door to the mall. He acknowledged it and then added something like, “Ya don’t hafta frown at me just cuz I’m black.”

I turned around and glared at him for a moment as he walked away. “Yeah, thanks for callin’ me a fuckin’ racist,” I thought. “I’m sure black people just love gettin’ panhandled.” I know he was lashing out from despair, but it still sucked. There we were, sniping at each other, while the Fat Cats looked down from their penthouses and laughed.

Detachment

Before I launch into another bitch sesh about my First World Problems, I’d just like to say how shallow and self-absorbed this feels. I should probably be lamenting the plight of the people who made my clothes, or the people we’re killing in Syria and Afghanistan and Somalia, etc., or whatever else is making Baby Jesus cry today. But I need to get this shit outta my system, and for some reason that means sharing it all with you.

I was able to stop for a minute today and relax. That might not sound like much, especially for someone with as much money in the bank as I have. But it was probably the most relaxed I’ve been since I moved in with my parents 8 years ago.

Since then, I’ve only had fleeting moments of real peace and tranquility. The other 99.9% of the time I’ve been suspended on tenterhooks of shame and anxiety. When you’ve been on tenterhooks for that long, you get used to it, but you also forget how it feels to be truly relaxed.

Out of self-preservation, I repressed the pain until it became background noise. I’ve been floating along on a cloud of ambivalence for years now. Because I was blocking the pain, the joy was blocked too. I didn’t take much pleasure or displeasure in anything. It’s getting better, but I’m still keeping the world at arm’s length most of the time.

This has resulted in "The Shadow Realm" effect, feeling like I’m not really a part of the world or that the world isn’t real. I thought I’d found my condition (by accident) online when I was looking up Adam Duritz of Counting Crows on Wikipedia. (I don’t remember why I was looking him up. I’m not a fan of theirs. I assure you my motives were benign.)

He apparently suffers from Depersonalization Disorder, which sounds a lot like “The Shadow Realm.” My last therapist called it “detachment.” It was a relief when she said that. I didn’t wanna have something serious, and I didn’t really wanna have that much in common with Adam Duritz. (Like I said, I’m not a fan, although I do like “Mr. Jones and Me.”)

I’m grateful for my material comfort and security. My parents have been great. But that only gets you so far. I still need friends. It’s taken me a long time to get to this point when I feel worthy of new friends again. So hopefully I can take advantage of that.

Space Princess

I’ve decided to take a stab at sci-fi. I’ve long had a wish to write a Hitchhiker’s Guide-type satire. I liked the Hitchhiker’s Guide series, but I thought I could do better. It may be a delusion of grandeur, but I think that’s usually what it takes to make great art. So, here goes:

The spires of Havamegnish City spiraled up to the sky. It was a gleaming pin cushion of silver from horizon to horizon, and somewhere amidst all the grandeur was a beautiful princess named Ambrosia Gentilicus. (Don’t ask me why they still have royalty in this galaxy. It’s a pretty backward galaxy. The whole idea of basing your government on heredity is ludicrous. But, hey, not every space-faring civilization follows the same path of political development. So deal. Besides, we all know who to blame for the persistence of this trope.)

So, anyway, this Princess Ambrosia- (Seriously, though, what is it with Star Wars having a princess and a queen in the movies? Why no princes or kings? I mean, maybe there are some in the books and video games and shit, but I’m pretty sure there aren’t any in the movies. What are you tryin’ to say, George? That women can only attain positions of authority through heredity? Do better, man. Do better. But I digress.) As I was saying, Princess Ambrosia was meandering through the back alleys of the galactic capital planet of Encendior. Seriously, that’s how big this Galactic Empire is. It takes a whole planet to run the darn thing.

But Princess Ambrosia was roaming around the ghetto, because that’s just the kinda girl she was. She liked slumming with the common folk, the Salt of the Earth. Not that she was a Woman of the People. No, far from it. But she liked getting her hands dirty sometimes just to remind herself she was alive.

She walked up to a door in the deepest, dankest, darkest back alley she could find. A video screen over the door flickered to life. A menacing, male face appeared with a crazy makeup job and no hair. Think Kratos from God of War. In the gruffest, scariest, deepest voice you’ve ever heard, he asked, “What’s the password?”

“The password is open the fucking door before I shove this phaser so far up your ass you’ll be sneezing rainbows.” Her voice had the cool calm and steely nerves of a street-smart hustler. She didn’t take shit offa nobody. She was super-sexy, but still tough enough to appeal to women.

The door slid open and the princess entered, just before the door slid shut again. She walked down the hallway. The walls were dirty, formerly white and bathed in fluorescent green.

That's all I've got so far. The problem is I don’t really care about the plot. I just wanna make jokes and write dialogue. That seems like it could be an impediment to writing fiction.

Video Game Memory Lane

Last year, they opened an arcade bar in Uptown called Up Down. (I think that’s pretty clever, but apparently it’s a chain, so I guess the neighborhood pun is a coincidence?) I’ve gone a few times, always solo. It’s one of the few places where I don’t feel super-self-conscious about being alone in public. (Actually, my self-consciousness about that has declined precipitously in the last few years, no doubt due to extensive, recent experience.)

The walls are covered with a collage of pop culture from the 80’s and 90’s: The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Eazy-E of N.W.A., the Ultimate Warrior (wrestler) and Suzanne Somers with the Thighmaster. It’s a delightful trip down Memory Lane for a child of the 90’s like me. The TV’s show pro wrestling and movies from the era, like Demolition Man, Ghostbusters and Independence Day.

I’ve never been very good at video games. Despite my pleas, my parents didn’t get me a video game console until I was a junior in high school. At that point, I was too old to get addicted. (The window of video game addiction is different for everyone, of course.) I just played sports games by myself, not finding anyone to play with until college, and even then it was rare. But my high school and college friends weren’t really into video games, which was just as well.

The game I’ve played the most at Up Down is probably R.B.I. Baseball. My best friend in elementary school had a Nintendo and regularly kicked my ass at that game in the late 80’s. It was hardly fair, of course, since he was a wily veteran and I was a rookie, but I still took it as a sign of my inferiority. He was happy to reinforce that notion, as were many of my peers.

It’s my own damn fault for being friends with the guy. There were nice guys I’d been friends with before him, but they weren’t cool like he was, and I needed cool friends so I wouldn’t feel so vulnerable to getting picked on. One of those nice friends had a well-to-do friend with a Nintendo and Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!

I was enthralled just watching them play. I’ve spent far more time watching other people play video games than playing them myself. This is a pastime I’ve indulged more recently on YouTube with Battlefield 1 and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I generally prefer the voyeuristic aspect of video games to the participation. That must be why I’ve stuck with my first love: television.

Part of the reason I’d rather watch than play was my fear of failure. But that has faded as I’ve matured, so I’m more interested in having the controls in my hands now. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been anyone to watch me at Up Down. I actually got my name among the high scores on Super Sprint, but I think that was due to a glitch in the game. Even though I wasn’t winning every race, it let me play for like 45 minutes on 1 quarter.

Track & Field offers a surprisingly aerobic workout. You have to hit two buttons in alternation to run in the sprint, the javelin, the long jump and the hurdles. (That’s as far as I’ve gotten.) In order to beat the computer, you have to mash those buttons with seemingly superhuman speed. The javelin and long jump also require you to time your release or jump to the last possible moment before crossing the foul line. I remember playing that back in the day. At least now I can advance in a few events, even though I felt kinda lame pounding on the buttons like a lunatic all by myself.

Another favorite of mine is 1942 or 1943: The Battle of Midway. You’re an American fighter pilot fighting the Japanese in the Pacific during World War II. It’s basically you against the entire Imperial Japanese Navy, so you’ve got some weaponry at your disposal that isn’t historically accurate or, strictly speaking, real. I read up on this video game series on Wikipedia, because that’s what I do with my free time (i.e., make the most of it). In the course of my research, I had a startling realization: The people who made these games were Japanese.

Does it seem strange to anyone else that Japanese people made games in which their own ancestors are the Bad Guys? I mean, sure, I guess they were the Bad Guys of World War II, but they must’ve been tempted to make a game in which the Japanese were the Good Guys and call it something like Kamikaze: The Divine Wind.

Hell, we’ve already got a wildly successful video game franchise based on an alternate history in which the Nazis won World War II (Wolfenstein). Why don’t the Japanese get that treatment? The Nazis have an even worse reputation than the Imperial Japanese military. They’re considered the ultimate historical example of evil in the West.

So why no alternate-history video games for the Empire of Japan? It’s not like there are no apologists for Imperial Japan. They still have shrines to people whom the Chinese consider war criminals, although that seems a predictable response to Japan’s post-war status as an American client state.

Did you know the U.S. military wrote the Japanese constitution? It’s true! How would you feel about having another country set up the structure of your government and laws? I’d be pretty pissed. Sure, they did some really bad shit, but so did we. I think it would’ve been enough just to slip in that part about renouncing war forever (and never making video games in which you’re the Good Guys in World War II) and then let them handle the rest.

While in Hawai’i for my sister’s wedding, we went through an exhibit at Pearl Harbor about the history of U.S.-Japan relations. It started with Admiral Perry showing up in Edo Bay with 4 warships in 1853, one of the signature events of America’s “gunboat diplomacy” of the 19th Century. Japan had been shut off from the world for 250 years by an isolationist regime, but Perry was able to convince them to start trading with us.

The exhibit ended with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as though it had taken us almost a century to follow through on that initial threat. Upon reaching the end of the exhibit, I thought to myself, “Am I the only one who sees the connection between those two events? Am I only the one who can connect the dots?”

At the time, I thought I was one of the few who had made that connection. But now I think the creators of the exhibit probably had that somewhere in the back of their liberal, peacenik minds. What would’ve happened if we’d just left Japan alone? Would they have become one of the Bad Guys? Are we partly responsible for the atrocities they committed in World War II?

Sorry. That was a pretty long tangent. I usually try not to get too political on this, my personal blog. (For political shit, check out my other blog, Riding the Rubicon.)

Well, in conclusion, Up Down is a pretty cool place to kill some time and, if you’re a child of the 80’s or 90’s, take a jaunt down Memory Lane… if you dare!

Withdrawal Weekend

My sister, Theresa, invited me to visit her family to celebrate my 40th birthday. I enthusiastically took her up on it, as I hadn’t seen my 16-month-old nephew, Patrick, in almost 2 months and had started going into baby withdrawal. (I was never a baby person before, but since his birth I’ve become a bit baby-crazy, although I still don’t feel the need to reproduce.) It was also nice to get away and not hafta turn 40 at my parents’ house. They’ve been great, but that’s not really how I wanted to commemorate the Big 4-0.

Thanks to my unemployment, I was able to fly to South Bend, IN (directly) on Wed night and stay through the weekend. (Theresa’s husband, Craig, is a professor at Notre Dame, which also happens to be my dad’s alma mater.) I got in too late to see Patrick that first night, but I was up (late) the next morning to say hello. He was much chattier than the last time I saw him, which Theresa said had started just a few days before. There were very few recognizable words in his babble, but his tone was upbeat and endearing.

It took me until about the third day to really get back into “Best Uncle Ever” mode. (Theresa and Craig got a mug conferring me with that title.) I think it was his growth that threw me off. The little baby I once knew was now fully a babbling toddler whose demands were clearer and stronger. Most of the time he’s a darling, but sometimes, like most kids, he can be a handful.

I played with him quite a bit on Thursday and Friday. Theresa works from home, so she took care of the essentials and when Paddy wanted his mom, which was quite often. But after a while he’d bring me books to read and climb into my lap, which was great, obviously. Unfortunately, his Elmo book has become a gateway drug for TV. Reading it made him want to watch The Furchester Hotel, an Elmo vehicle on Netflix that they let him watch. He turned on the TV once on his own, and, after watching a few minutes of another PBS show, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, in rapt wonder, I turned it off, which sent him into a crying jag.

He has a lot of toys and books. By the end of each day, the living room was a mess and, after putting him to bed, we’d clean it up. He also has a play area in the basement. There are 2 balls that light up when bounced, and he threw those around the room for a long time. With most of the basement lights off, it looked like a mini-rave. There’s also a table with buttons that make noises and play songs. He hit the buttons in rapid succession, before the songs could finish, as if he were an EDM DJ. It was like his own little dance club down there.

Friday was my birthday, so Theresa picked up a cake (chocolate with chocolate frosting, natch) and balloons, which Paddy loved, grilled up some steaks and asparagus, and we had a delightful dinner. After Patrick had retired, we stayed up late talking politics and jobs. I laughed harder than I had in a long time, so hard that I fell into a few coughing fits. It wasn’t just the hilarity of my companions, but being more relaxed than I’d been in a long time.

I should mention that “Paddy” is my nickname for him. (I wanted to double-down and whip out “Paddycakes” for special occasions, but then I heard about the new indie film Patti Cake$ and thought better of it.) His parents call him “P” or “Mr. P.” Theresa said she doesn’t like “Paddy” and has apparently managed to break Craig of the habit of calling him that. But he’s gonna need something credible for the playground, and I don’t think “P” is gonna cut it. It could, but that’s not usually how the playground, at least for boys, works. Granted, “Paddy” sounds just like “Patty,” a far more common girl’s nickname, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Besides, he’s not old enough to go by “Pat” yet.

There’s another option, of course, which would be to just go by “Patrick.” But that’s a rare situation for boys, and it seems like all boys who go by their given name have something wrong with them. Either they’re nerds or wusses or upper-class twits.

Moms have something against nicknames for their sons, it seems. My mom didn’t like calling me “Mickey.” She was afraid I’d get picked on for having the same name as Mickey Mouse (which only happened once, as I recall). My friend named her son “Thomas” and refused to call him “Tom” or “Tommy.” How ya gonna call a baby “Thomas”? It’s not like he’s the Dauphin.

I discussed this with my Aunt Kate, and she thinks moms are very attached to the names they give their kids and generally loath to abbreviate them. You don’t know what you’re doing to your sons, ladies! Don’t saddle them with their given names! Unless you name them “John” or “Hal” or “Rutiger”, yer gonna hafta let go of that nomenclature, except for when you’re really mad at them.

I got up around 10:30 on Saturday. (But Indiana is on Eastern time, so it's not as bad as it sounds.) I had just enough time for breakfast before Theresa and I took Paddy to A-mazing Acres. It’s a farm out in the boonies with a bunch of children’s activities. As Craig and Theresa said, the place has no concept of liability, because they’ve taken virtually no safety measures. But that just makes it more magical.

The first stop was the Corn Box, which is like a ball pit but with corn kernels instead of balls. It took Paddy a while to grasp the concept, but he eventually crawled around in it. We checked out the mannequin-like bunnies in Bunnieville and a coop of slightly more active chickens. There was a (stationary) wooden train that he loved crawling through and the Apple Cannon, which you could use to fire at large pictures of insects. I didn’t know if these insects were the enemies of apples or what. One was a grasshopper, so I doubt it.

We managed to make it through one of the Corn Mazes, which was my first time going through one of those. Our final destination was the coup de grâce: a huge inflatable trampoline in a barn. It was basically a bounce house without the house. Theresa went onto it with Paddy and made sure he didn’t get knocked over by the other kids. He had a ball, mainly watching the kids run and jump, but also crawling around and standing a little.

We were there for maybe an hour-and-a-half, although I’m sure to Paddy it seemed like no time at all. Through watching him play, I’ve come to realize the joy of watching kids have fun, especially when you know them. It feels stronger than the joy I felt playing as a kid, which was quite strong.

I think it’s because I’ve reestablished an emotional link to the joy of my childhood, free of the baggage of adolescence. It has unlocked my generosity. Now I get more joy from giving than receiving. I can once again draw on the deep well of love that my family gave me. I no longer need to be an emotional miser. I have care to spare.

The weekend took a slight downward turn when we returned from A-mazing Acres. I started feeling dizzy, and I knew why. I’d forgotten to pack my paroxetine (better known as Paxil, an anti-anxiety, anti-depression medication). Since I’d be going 4 days without my meds, I figured I’d experience symptoms of withdrawal at some point.

I lay down on my bed for an hour, which renewed my energy a bit, but didn’t diminish the dizziness once I got up. I joined the fam in the living room. Craig had been tailgating with some co-workers and friends. He had a ticket for the Notre Dame football game, but decided not to go. He got me a ticket too, but I wasn’t interested either.

He was sitting on the couch, watching college football on the TV. Theresa was also on the couch, working on her laptop. Patrick was shuttling between them and his toys, having a grand old time. Craig brought out a hunk of cheese and pepperoni slices. To Theresa’s consternation, he let Paddy take the cheese and gnaw away at it. Internally, I usually side with Theresa in their parenting disputes, but I try not to insert myself. My sister and I are more cautious than Craig. It’s a classic Midwesterners-vs.-Australians situation.

Paddy looked very cute carrying around the hunk o’ cheese and gnawing on it. Then he got his hands on the cheese cutter and tried slicing the hunk. He was surprisingly successful, but it was worrying to see him handle such a sharp object.

Three friends of theirs who were in town for the game came over that evening to hang out on the patio. The woman in the group wanted to sing Paddy a Polish song as a lullaby, so she went upstairs to his bedroom when Craig was getting him ready for bed. I was too out-of-it and dizzy to socialize extensively with strangers, so I went down to the basement and watched the first few episodes of Garfunkel and Oates on Netflix. They were quite good.

My dizziness continued on Sunday. Theresa, Patrick and I went out for brunch. Theresa’s first choice, the American House of Pancakes or something, looked busy, so we went to Perkin’s instead. We were seated in a high-traffic area, and people kept squeezing by Paddy’s high chair. He’s an avid people-watcher, so that kept him distracted for a while. But the food took a while to arrive. Theresa had to go to the entertainment of last resort: the Elmo videos on her phone. Once the food arrived, he was fine, chowing down on the bits of Theresa’s meal she gave him and people-watching.

By the time we got back home, there was only an hour left before I had to be at the airport. We spent it in the backyard. Patrick has always been enamored of the outdoors. Theresa took some pictures of us, but he wouldn’t sit still long enough to get a really good one.

To my surprise, I was getting choked up, to a degree that I hadn’t in at least a decade. My emotions intensified on the car ride to the airport, while playing with Paddy in the backseat, and I alerted Theresa to my state. She assured me that I could always FaceTime with her and Paddy and we’d be seeing each other again soon. I explained that it had more to do with the fact that I haven’t had a really good cry since starting middle school. A lot of the sadness and tears of the intervening 27 years had built up. I told her I’d been trying to cry for years.

“So this is a good thing?” She asked. “Yeah,” I answered. It felt good, but it also felt really awkward and embarrassing, like the way some men (John Boehner, for instance) have of crying that makes you want to prohibit all men from crying in public. As I told Theresa, I was rusty. When we got to the airport, she proposed a group hug. Patrick has recently learned to hug, but I couldn’t tell if he joined in. I held him for a while and kissed him repeatedly on the temple. He seemed to enjoy it, because he didn’t move. Also, Patrick loves to rub heads, so he was probably enjoying the experience on that level too.

I waved goodbye and proceeded into the (small) terminal. My emotions were still exposed, but it still felt good, even though I was reluctant to exhibit these feelings in public. I approached the breaking point a few times, but I wasn’t able to go into a full-fledged bout of crying. In the line at the ticket counter was a man with a military tote bag and a group of people seeing him off. Some of them were misty-eyed, and it seemed like other people in and around the line were too.

It felt like an emotional breakthrough. I’m not sure how much of it had to do with the Paxil withdrawal. But I’d hoped to open up to Craig and Theresa that weekend anyway, so it wasn’t a total shock. Being around Paddy may have been the real trigger, stemming from the aforementioned reestablished emotional link to my childhood.

I think I fell so hard for Paddy because of his innocence (and his super-cuteness). I’d come to think of Life as a long, slow march from Cuteness to Non-cuteness, or, put another way, from Innocence to Guilt, or at least Complicity. It seemed like each year brought another moral compromise. I thought of him as a chance to start over. Maybe my life had gone horribly off-track, but I could still steer Patrick away from the rocks on which my ship ran aground.

But mine is no longer the story of the prodigal son. My personal narrative is now one of redemption. All of my hardships have been justified (for now). I seem to be a lot closer to being the person I want to be. Even though there are sure to be more twists and turns, I may finally have the emotional resilience not to lose the plot.

Growing from an Artist into a Person

The main problem with "funemployment" is staring into the existential void every day, that bottomless abyss where my job used to be. I’ve mostly bought into our cultural programming that says one’s job is the primary source of one’s self-worth. Therefore, each jobless day becomes a quest to justify my existence for another 24 hours.

The first time I tried to escape CorpWorld, in 2008, I thought I could write my way out, so I worked (hard) on my writing almost every day. But I failed in that endeavor. Of course, I wrote a sketch comedy revue for the Fringe Festival, so the odds of hitting the big time were minuscule to begin with.

I’m still writing, but I’ve been starting my daily session a few hours later in the afternoon this time around, and it’s a much harder slog than it used to be. Although I’m trying to write essays now, which are a lot harder for me than sketches. So maybe I should cut myself some slack.

At some point between then and now, I lost faith that my artistic genius would save me from the fate that befalls most people, namely, having to work boring, everyday, run-of-the-mill jobs. That precipitated a crisis, because I could no longer discount the present.

I could no longer convince myself that the shittiness of today would be redeemed by a glorious tomorrow in which I had my dream job, acting as a vessel of the Universal Soul, delivering The Eternal Truth to the world by way of comedy sketches, sitcoms and/or films. I had to find work in the meantime that actually provided meaning (and money).

This revelation was facilitated by the tightening job market, which refused to provide me with the kind of easy data-entry gigs I found in the 2000’s. The new meaningless corporate jobs were taking up more and more of my brain and, more important, my emotional bandwidth. I couldn’t just plug into music or podcasts and space out all day. I actually had to give kind of a fuck, and that wasn’t what I was looking for in a 9-to-5.

At the same time, I had moved in with my parents, which, ironically, gave me less license to be immature. Somehow, lazing around all day watching TV seemed even more wasteful, lazy and juvenile with my parents around.

It became more difficult to justify these “quirks” as the typical growing pains of an artist when my artistic career was virtually nonexistent. My immaturity was also losing a lot of its sheen. Artists have to remain childlike in order to be creative, staying open to the wonder and absurdities of life. But, by this point, I had become more childish than childlike.

I doubt my immaturity was the reason my friends drifted away. (I tended to be my least immature around them.) But I had to accept that, if I wanted things to improve, I would have to grow up. I couldn’t just hide behind my artistic-ness or the tragedy of my friends’ abandonment anymore.

I’d always thought of myself as a Good Person, but I began to realize that I hadn’t done much lately to justify that belief. So I started behaving better and stopped calculating actions just to benefit me. I realized a Good Person wouldn’t only be friendly with people he thought could provide something for him. A Good Person would be friendly with everyone. I didn’t realize how much of my old Good Person had been lost in adolescence. (I also may be idealizing my boyhood self just a bit.)

Instead of blaming my parents for my adolescence and my current predicament (which seem inextricably linked), I became grateful for their support. Instead of harping on the shittiness of my various jobs, I appreciated the benefits, such as exercise, human contact, sense of purpose or cool co-workers, depending on what each job offered.

Because of that gratitude, I can feel a really amazing joy now in being an uncle and sharing that experience with my family, the people who continue to stand by me even though I’ve often been a pretty big asshole to them. And that’s something no amount of money or professional success can provide.

After the Flood

By any conventional measure, I’m a huge loser. I’m 39 and have been living with my parents for almost 8 years. I haven’t gotten laid in 7 years (although, frankly, I’m impressed that I managed to get laid at all after moving back home). In that time, I’ve had 2 or 3 dates. I’m a clerical worker with a degree in English. I have one friend, that is, one person I could make plans with IRL ("in real life" for all you olds).

But even now that I’m back in the ranks of the unemployed, I don’t feel ashamed like I used to. It helps that I was let go from this job instead of quitting. Also, I realized that I shouldn’t be shamed by the conventions of our society, because it’s a really messed-up society. But the real reason I’m not ashamed anymore is because I finally feel like an adult and a Good Person again.

Back in late October of 2009, when I moved in with my parents, I was in a tight spot. My cousin was moving back to Chicago after a year of being my roommate. My bank account was empty after bailing on a shitty temp job a few months before. And my friends were virtually nonexistent after drifting away over the previous few years.

I’d had enough of mainstream society. The plan was to find an intentional community (i.e., commune) where I could live in harmony with Nature and also have friends I could count on. My parents’ house was supposed to be just a waystation in that transition.

I spent a week at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in remote NE Missouri in the spring of 2010. The people there felt like kindred spirits, but my anxiety flared up. I thought if I chose to stay there I would have to spend the rest of my life there. It was a dumb thought, but the reality was I felt very insecure, and the idea of spending any significant amount of time with strangers was terrifying. I needed to unburden myself totally of the years of pain that had built up, but I didn’t know in whom I could confide.

My parents were the only ones I had any faith in, so I stayed with them and returned to the corporate world. But I didn’t have enough faith to fully unburden myself to them, and I resented them for it. My anger toward them grew. I hung out with a few people, but they weren’t the people I wanted to hang out with, so I wasn't open to everything they had to offer.

I moved out in 2011, but that lasted about 2 ½ weeks. It was a house near Uptown Minneapolis, the neighborhood I’d previously lived in. There were 4 other residents, plus a dog that I didn’t remember the landlord mentioning [considering my brain was on the fritz, I might’ve forgotten, although it’s not something I would’ve forgotten in the old days (I’m not a dog person.)], and one resident’s 2 kids spent their weekends there. (I was sure the landlord hadn’t mentioned that.)

Notwithstanding those mitigating circumstances, I clearly wasn’t in the right head-space to handle roommates, certainly not 4. One woman was in NORML and asked if I wanted to smoke up (out? blaze up? I’m getting old.) with her on a weekend afternoon. I remember thinking, “No, I wanna get shit done.” She said not all varieties of marijuana will make one tired. Even so, my college experiences with pot had left me groggy and giggly. I didn’t find it enlightening; it didn’t open my Third Eye. (Or maybe I’m just Third Eye Blind! Hey, hey! A 90’s joke!)

There was a guy in his early 40’s who was quite friendly. He had just gotten in “the best shape of his life” on P90X. He definitely looked like an “after” picture. A woman about a decade younger spent many evenings with him, but he insisted they were not romantically involved. I wasn’t sure who was more delusional: she or him.

What convinced me to leave was the loud movie-watching (You thought I was gonna say “love-making,” didn’t you? Well, he was with a lady, so I’ll award a half-point.) in the bedroom next to mine. I knocked on the guy’s door twice one evening to turn it down, and he did, but it still kept me up. I moved out shortly thereafter, believing I wasn’t yet ready to be on my own again.

This gave me a better appreciation for my parents. I’d learned that there were worse places to live than home. My gratitude for them grew. My corporate job, however, was grinding me down, and I started getting anxiety (or panic) attacks, which I’d never really had before. I finally threw in the towel in March 2014.

(I’ve noticed a seasonal pattern in my mood. March tends to be emotionally fraught. Maybe that’s what Shakespeare meant by “Beware the Ides of March.” But I doubt it. Also, my anxiety seems to peak every 3 years, going back at least to ‘02. I can even remember getting my first taste of severe anxiety in the spring of ’99 as a junior in college. I thought it was just fear of the future.)

This brought me to my emotional nadir. For the next 2 months, I haunted Uptown, floating from the gym, to the coffee shop, to a restaurant and often to a movie, freakishly alone and self-consciously failing at Life. (Even remembering those feelings now is difficult. I’m afraid of getting sucked back into that vortex.) My parents were going on a Rhine river cruise that June, and the thought of being utterly alone for 2 weeks was horrifying.

With 2 weeks to go until their departure, I confessed my terror to them. They snapped into action and booked me a spot on their trip. Immediately, my anxiety ebbed. I think it was seeing them go to such extreme lengths (fiscally) to try and help me. But I also started taking medication after being extremely resistant to the idea for years. Such was the depth of my desperation.

The river cruise was very cool. (It deserves an essay of its own.) I started feeling better, esp. when the summer ended. (I’ve never been a fan of that season.) I got a part-time job shoveling snow for seniors. It was sporadic. I only worked after significant snowfalls. But that morphed into a lawn-mowing job in the summer (of 2015), which gave me about a dozen hours of work per week.

The work was physically demanding in the heat and mostly solitary, except for some chit-chat with my clients. Unfortunately, I had to quit when my back wouldn’t allow me to lift the mower into and out of my parents’ Honda Accord anymore. That sent me into another tailspin. I had to get back on the medication, which I’d come off of a month or two before.

I was alone for 2 weeks that August when my parents went on vacation. I spent a lot of time with my 99-year-old neighbor Harry, the only person I could find who was as desperate for companionship as I was. That helped me through, but it was still a rough patch, which for some reason got rougher when my parents returned.

I muddled through the fall and winter, attending local storytelling and spoken-word shows, StorySlamMN!, The Encyclopedia Show and The Moth, performing a few times. During the summers, I was volunteering with The Food Group. During the non-growing seasons, I was volunteering with Land Stewardship Project as an envelope-stuffer and data-entry dude. This helped give me a sense of purpose and brought me in contact with a bunch of cool folks. But I didn’t form any strong friendships in the sense of hanging out regularly, which is what I was looking for (in addition to networking, I guess).

What started to break me out of the rut was going to Oaxaca, Mexico in March ’16 with a Land Stewardship Project delegation coordinated by Witness for Peace. (I documented my personal experience of the trip thoroughly on this blog.) That gave me the confidence to try working at Goodwill, taking in donations through the drive-thru.

After just over a month there, I gave my two-weeks’ notice. It was a much more stressful job than I’d expected, and I was almost solely dealing with upper-middle-class folks (“my people,” basically) donating their extra stuff instead of dealing with people in need. But it was the first time I’d ever given two-weeks’ notice instead of quitting on the spot, and I served out the full term in spite of an extremely strong temptation to walk out many times.

That’s when my recovery actually went into overdrive, because I became an uncle. Technically, I became an uncle 3 months before, but August ’16 was when I finally met the little guy. His name is Patrick, and he is quite possibly the cutest nephew in the world (not least because he resembles his uncle).

Through Patrick, I’ve rediscovered the tenderness I used to have that was (mostly verbally) beaten out of me in adolescence. The key was expressing that affection in front of my parents and sister. They were the ones I’d withheld it from the most. By breaking down that barrier, I’ve reconnected with emotions I’d been holding back since I started middle school over 25 years ago.

Last October, I snagged a corporate temp job at a large financial company in downtown St. Paul. My co-workers were very nice and funny. I got over my fear of conducting business over the phone, making many calls each week and actually coming to enjoy it. I was able to appreciate the courtesy and consideration of the people on the other end of the line, instead of focusing on the bad or awkward calls. (I was also lucky: Unpleasant interactions were rare.)

The fact that it came to an abrupt, unflattering end after 10 months was distressing, but I’ve managed to hold it together, even enjoying the downtime to work out and write. I think that’s a result of “growing up.” The concept of maturity is nebulous, so I’m going to try and elucidate what I mean. In this case, it means I’ve taken responsibility for my situation and stopped blaming my parents, my friends and society in general. This doesn’t mean that those people and outside forces don’t bear any responsibility for my situation, just that, if I want a better situation, it’s ultimately up to me to make the changes necessary to bring that about. It’s a utilitarian conception of self-determination. (Actually, now that I’ve articulated it, it doesn’t seem that nebulous.)

For the last 8 years I’ve been trying to hold back an ocean of shame. Living with your parents is the ultimate failure of middle-class American life. That’s rock bottom. The mental effort of walling off the shame center of my brain chopped and screwed my memory and often made me poor company: anxious, peevish, distracted.

I didn’t think I could handle being inundated with all that shame. I didn’t think there was any (available) person who could comfort or guide me through that process. My best friends had gone, and I didn’t trust my parents to see me through that flood. I figured I could just hold it off until I moved out and got back on my feet again.

But my jobs were too stressful to allow me a sense of security; I didn’t think I could keep them long-term. And my attempts to make new friends came up empty, leaving me without the social network I thought I needed to make it in the world. I had to take a hard look in the mirror and see what I was doing wrong. I realized that it wasn’t living with my parents that made me feel immature, but the fact that I was acting like a teenager (or “failson,” for fellow listeners of Chapo Trap House).

I’ve come so far in repairing my relationship with my parents and developing gratitude for what I have instead of focusing on what I don’t, that I don’t really feel like a loser anymore. Sure, the waves of shame still lap at my feet now and then, but I think I’ve earned my place in the world as an adult and a Good Person.

Kicked to the Curb

I got canned from my temp job on Tuesday, although I didn’t find out until I got home. There was an email on my phone from my temp agency with a subject line saying my job had ended. This came as quite a surprise, since I’d been there 10 months, and a month before my boss had said she requested to extend my assignment through the end of the year.

Overnight, I went from Trusted Employee to persona non grata. The email told me not to go into work tomorrow. The next morning I got a call from the agency. The lady I spoke to said she’d be visiting my former employer to collect the personal effects I’d left behind in my erstwhile cubicle. I rattled off a list of belongings that I could remember having at work.

This morning I went to the agency and met with my “recruiter,” a zaftig, middle-aged, white lady. She said that my boss thought my productivity had fallen off in the past month, and I seemed “disengaged.” This was news to me, as I told her. I admitted that my pace had probably slowed down in the last few weeks. But I didn’t think my previous pace was sustainable. I’d even told my boss a few weeks ago that I was getting stressed out and wanted to delay one of my projects. She didn’t express any resistance to that at the time, so it was shocking now to hear my output was no longer up to snuff.

The agency lady said she’d talk to my boss and give her my perspective. She even asked if I’d be interested in returning to the job. I waffled on that, and she told me to think about it. I picked up the box of stuff that had been gathered from my old cubicle and went home.

It was upsetting to hear that I’d been let go for a perceived shortcoming, but of course I bottled that up until I got home, when it was safe to fully feel those feelings (or “feels,” if you prefer). Then my brain went into self-defense mode, making me dizzy from all the spinning, trying to pin the failure on my detractors.

There was plenty of fault to be found in their behavior. Cutting me loose without any warning was at the top of the list. Barring me from returning to collect my things was also up there and at least as insulting. And over it all was slathered a thick layer of avoidance, an unwillingness to deal with me directly and honestly.

I admit that, for a long time, my middle name was Avoidance, but that doesn’t justify others treating me the same, especially not institutions like large, transnational corporations, as represented by my boss and her bosses. In this case, I think I have a right to be upset. I feel I was treated unfairly.

But it’s not like I was crazy about the job. It was just another mindless 9-to-5 that I tolerated to pay the bills. My motivation had certainly slipped in the past few weeks. I didn’t see the social benefit in what I was doing, which made it hard to maintain a withering pace for several months. In other words, the job was just OK, not good enough to motivate me, but not bad enough to let go in the assumption that the next “opportunity” will be better.

In the course of writing this, I was about to bash myself for continuing to rely on avoidance as a coping strategy. Instead of finding work that’s meaningful to me, I’ve returned to the corporate world. If I were serious about getting out of this rut and helping people, I could get a job working in a group home for developmentally disabled adults, or something along those lines.

But I forgot to give myself credit for trying to escape CorpWorld the last few years. After quitting my previous corporate job, I volunteered with The Food Group and Land Stewardship Project several hours a week. I shoveled snow and mowed lawns for senior citizens, almost literally breaking my back in the cold and heat. Then there were those 2 months at Goodwill last summer taking in donations through the drive-thru. That job was far more stressful than I would’ve thought, thanks in part to the half-assed management.

So I have made significant efforts to chart a different course in life. I’ve hit some difficult barriers, but there’s no shame in failing. My last therapist said there’s no such thing as failure, just various levels of success. The only real failure is failing to try. I like that, because I often cop out and fail to try, out of a fear of failure. (I hope you recognize my courage in dropping these little nuggets: 1. that I’ve had multiple therapists and 2. that I took comfort in that corny aphorism. As Ronald Reagan might’ve said, I’m the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.)

I guess the question is: Do I have the guts to keep trying to break out of the corporate rut? The aforementioned group home job (direct support professional or “DSP”) is one option, as is being a personal care assistant (PCA), someone who helps people in need at their homes. But I’m not sure if I have the emotional resilience or energy to cut it. As they say, there’s only one way to find out.

For now though, I’d rather keep applying for clerical non-profit jobs. Those seem like a much safer bet in terms of compatibility with my personality. That’s another sign of my growth: that I’ve been applying for jobs while working full-time. I rarely did that in the old days.

While I’m mulling over these different possibilities, I can get a little writing done. I was hoping this essay would be more profound, but I guess I have to sort through the mundane details before I can get to the meat of it. Stay tuned! (Yes, I know that’s a really hokey sign-off. I was being ironic!)