I bought a box of wine tonight

After being in a steady relationship for the last three years I've found that booze equals arguing or oral sex. In any case, I'm not getting a word in tonight.

Guilty Pleasure

Even though Kate Pierson of the B-52's has gained a lot of weight recently, I would still totally bang her... underneath the strobe light!

Twenty-nothings

Like a man without a country, I am a man without a generation. Well actually, I do have a generation, but we do not fit into a generation worth naming. The "Generation X" people were born before 1978 and the "Generation Y" people were born after 1982. This leaves a four year gap covering people who are in their mid to late 20's, all without a generation to call their own.

We are a sub-generation. We were born as the Carter era was ending and the Regan era was beginning. We grew up watching every space shuttle launch. We were carted around in full size station wagons. We saw the fall of the Berlin Wall. But without the benefit of knowing much more about Communists than could be gleaned from James Bond movies, we didn’t know why it was so important. We had the first hand-me-down cars with airbags, and only the cool kids knew how to drive stick. We watched the O.J. Simpson trial and wondered why the funny guy from "The Naked Gun" movies would do such a thing.

Some people call us the MTV generation. That is a bit closer to the truth. MTV was able to cross-promote in a way never before dreamed of. In our formative years the basic format of music broadcast changed from AM music stations to FM, then to television. By the time we were knee deep in New Kids on the Block and Simpsons merchandise, music had gone from analog to digital. I remember buying my first single: it was "The Ghostbusters Theme" by Ray Parker Jr. on 45. My first CD was the "Wayne’s World" soundtrack. I immediately copied it to tape so I could listen to it on my Walkman.

Most generations have their own defining moment. The defining moment for this generation is hard to define, perhaps we lack one altogether. People just a few years our senior mourned the death of Kurt Cobain. You might say he was their Buddy Holly. I remember hearing about it on the junior high school bus. Cobain was the guy on a few of the stoner students’ tee-shirts (in high school they wore Sid Barrett). It wasn’t a big deal for my generation, and it certainly wasn’t the day the music died. Two weeks later Nixon died, and I think it had just about the same effect on my generation.

After that, not much else happened of any great importance for our generation. This was the Clinton era, and our lives seemed to be on auto-pilot. We didn’t have a war to protest. There was, of course, Bosnia, but none of us (and few of our parents) knew or cared about theramifications of this geopolitical double-cross.

There was one cultural event which attempted to replicate a defining moment for a previous generation. That was Woodstock ‘94. These three days of peace & love were brought to you by Pepsi and Viacom. My generation watched this at home on the MTV. The failure of this as a defining moment stems from the fact that there were many other large scale concerts going on at the same time as Woodstock ‘94. The only difference was that this concert was held in a field in New York where, 25 years earlier and two counties away, the first Woodstock had been. Sure, Joe Cocker was there, but he was still covering The Beatles, Traffic, and The Box Tops.

Y2K. This was to be our defining moment. The stock market was going to crash. Every computer, graphing calculator, and programable oven was going to explode. Planes would fall from the sky as if the atmosphere could no longer support air travel. Massive blackouts would bring society, as we knew it, to its knees. Were we ready? You bet. We topped off our gas tanks and withdrew the $15 left in our savings accounts. And with a flashlight and two cans of Spaghetti-o’s, we said, "Bring it on."

When nothing happened, we didn’t breath a sigh of relief. Instead, our sense of invincibility was slightly enhanced. There was a little disappointment in the fact that we had been sold a bill of goods. Y2K. It was perfect. It was the millennium, not the doomsday Christian millennium, but a real one with an acronym and everything. On January 1, 2000, we put the Spaghetti-o’s back in the kitchen cabinet and deposited the $15 back in our savings accounts to help pay the credit card bill from last night’s end of the world party.

The year 2000 offered us another chance for definition in the Presidential Election. This was the first time we were able to vote: a benefaction from our parent’s generation in Amendment XXVI to the Constitution. Not that we used it. Despite the best efforts of our MTV to "Rock the Vote" (whatever the hell that means), the great majority of us stayed in, slept in, or just went about the day as usual.

For most of us this was an election between the lame Vice-President and that one President’s son. For the informed lot of us, it was a vote against Tipper Gore and her fascist censorship campaign, or a vote against another mean Republican who would cut government subvention of the arts and re-institute slavery. In any case we watched the results day in and day out, wishing that we could have been the deciding vote. I vowed that I would never again vote for a man just because I believed he was the lesser of two evils (which I did again in 2004).

In the end we lost another possible cause for our generation. Bush became the President and did his thing as expected, and we all went back to working at Applebee’s, also as expected (we were scheduled for the rush shift).

Then there was September 11. This was the day that changed everything (unlike the Toyota Tacoma, "the truck that changed everything"). For our generation, it proved that we were in fact not invincible, at least in lower Manhattan we weren’t. For some of us it revived a patriotic pledge that we had taken during our formative years in grade school. As most of America was glued to 24-hour news networks, some of us began to form actual opinions on the world outside. This was the first time that some of us would utter the phrase Fucking Arabs, or Goddam Muslims. The economic "downturn" that followed gave a number of us a good reason to file for unemployment, and some a reason to not look for work at all. Nothing that followed gave us anything to call our own. We didn’t rise to the call of a greater cause. We just sat there and watched the images of a changing world flash past us.

Since then there has been the Iraq war. Some of us who signed eight year contracts with the military have had to pay the piper. Some of us have found the time to protest the war in some form or another. The majority have just gone about paying into a Social Security system we believe will be defunct before we can benefit from it. Mostly we pay into a system that provides us fresh entertainment for the least amount of realized cost. The MTV had long since lost its luster.

In looking for a defining moment for my generation, I’m left at a loss. Maybe it just hasn’t happened yet. Maybe it never will. Perhaps we can go through the rest of our lives as fortune’s step-children, inheriting nothing, and passing on a legacy not worth inviting to Easter brunch with Grandma.

Let’s face it, I’m a member of a group that has no generation: a group that is mostly middle-class, college-educated, unskilled, underemployed, restless, ignorant, and drunk. The morally repressed youth of today has no purpose but to consume. This period in life was not intended to be stagnant. There is no great war; there is no vast frontier. All we have are the electronic images burnt into the back of our eyes. Society calls us twenty-somethings. When I look out, all I see are twenty-nothings.

Dinosaurs

I really really like dinosaurs. They are my favorite thing ever. When I go to the library I only look at the dinosaur books. Dinosaurs aren’t only in the library books, they’re real. I saw them once. My dad took me to the city and there was a big museum, it had to be, because they had dinosaurs there.
Dinosaurs are the biggest animals ever. They are even bigger than elephants or a school bus. When I got inside I saw the bones from a Teramasaurs Rex. My dad took a picture of me with the Teramasaurs Rex and I was pretending to be a Teramasaurs Rex because they are my favorite dinosaur, and not just out of the ones at the museum, of all time. Grandma once told me that dinosaurs weren’t really alive, but that Jesus put bones in the ground for us to find. I don’t like Grandma. My mom doesn’t like her anymore because Grandma smokes and she told my big sister about the rhythm method.

One time my mom rented the Durasic Park movie and I watched it. It was all about dinosaurs that live out in the ocean with King Kong. All of the dinosaurs were really big except for the little ones and they were so loud. And whenever I walk next to the dinner table I stomp my feet so everybody’s water glass shakes like in the movie. I watched the Durasic Park movie 50 times and when I went to school everybody else saw the movie too and we all were pretending to be the dinosaurs. I had the best dinosaur roar and everybody said so except for Tricia Pope who wanted to play Titanic. I was pretending to be a dinosaur so much that I got to go home early because I didn’t have my medicine.

When I grow up I want to be a dinosaur. And I would be a good dinosaur because I would let my friends ride on my back and I would only eat bad people. It would be better than being a fireman or a cab driver. Sometimes my dad says I can’t be a dinosaur but my teacher says I can be whatever I want, so I want to be a dinosaur.

It Was the Summer of '99

Nothing burns quite like a car. I should know, I’ve started a lot of fires. As a child, I was so good at starting fires, the Boy Scouts of America gave me a certificate. No one was more surprised than I when they threw me out for drinking and not arson. Now that I think of it, back then I liked fire more than Knightrider, Pee Wee Herman, and my pogo ball all rolled together.

Not that I was a child in the summer of ‘99. In fact I had just gotten out of the Army and moved back to my hometown. All my friends were still around and still doing nothing. With my ambition low, I was wont to join them. Because we did nothing during the day, my friends and I were able to spend the whole night drinking and generally causing a ruckus. The statutory limitations of a ruckus are surprisingly explicit in the state of Illinois; however, the rule book says nothing about flying port-o-potties.

The last decade of the twentieth century was a time of great change for my community. We were destroyed by a tornado in 1990, and as our little farm town rebuilt, the rest of the Chicagoland area decided to rebuild with us. I watched as my class of 100 students hemorrhaged at nearly 500. The fields that I once chipped golf balls into became housing developments. Our simple county roads bloated with traffic. Some colored folks even moved to town. This was a time for action.

Now I don’t claim any authorial credit for going to the construction cites and dumping over the port-o-potties. I imagine that it is the natural progression when the cow pastures give way to earthmovers. And I think the port-o-potty is more fun, in that every so often the weight will shift as you’re tipping it over and it will snap back at you like a boxing clown. But the idea of going airborne with these smelly cogs in the wheels of progress was entirely my own.

Most people know that an airplane gets its lift from the airfoil of the wings. What also provides lift is the fuselage, or body of the craft itself. That means even a plane without wings will fly given enough force. I figured that a station wagon was just the kind of force we needed. So with a fifty foot section of rope and three brave souls in the rear-facing seat, we began our reign of terror on urban sprawl.

As a port-o-potty is dragged along the pavement it makes a horrible sound. The wooden base screams and splits apart, sending press board chips spinning in its wake. The plastic roof liquefies from the friction, and the whole thing rolls and tumbles with every turn. Then at forty-five miles per hour the screams of this crude bathroom give way to the screams of the three brave souls as they see the miracle of flight. The manner in which a port-o-potty flies is liken to the June Bug, seemingly slow, and then, without notice, it crashes to the ground with a creationistic bang, destroying everything in its path.

As a gas station attendant, one would have to suspect that five young men buying a dollar’s worth of gas at three in the morning are up to no good. And we were. I’m not exactly sure why we began starting fires. I imagine that it began with someone saying,"We need to get rid of this couch tonight." or,"I’m not going to pay five dollars to recycle these tires." In any case, we always found something new and exciting to set aflame for some rube to happen upon.

Out of all the stupid pranks we pulled, I found the car burning to be most rewarding. Now of course we never targeted anyone’s actual car. As car fanatics, we viewed the automobile as a temple: something sacred. So, we looked for abandoned cars. I swear I never burnt a vehicle that I believed somebody actually owned. That would be wrong.

Driving past an abandoned car for successive days is like watching an animal decay in stop motion photography. First there is the ticket on the windshield. Then the second ticket. Then the tow notice on the radio antenna. Then the beaners smash the driver’s side window and steal the radio (no matter how worthless it is) and speakers. Then the kids smash the remaining windows. Then comes the spray paint graffiti of "J hearts M", or "Denny Rules!!!!", or (depending on the disposition of the artist towards this Denny) "Denny Sucks!!!!"

One thing that always amazed me was the fact that nobody ever slashed the tires of an abandoned car. Of course, if the tires were worth a damn (which they never seemed to be), they would be the first to go. Cinder blocks or worthless radios would be left under the exposed brake rotors.

The final stage of vehicular decomposition was always of my own doing. The fire. It began with a cursory scanning of the area to be sure nobody was coming. Then I would reach my arm into the busted out window and dump out whatever gas I had bought that night onto the front seats and floor. By this time the other guys would have gotten anxious and somebody would have already lit the roman candle (our preferred method of igniting a fire).

Usually by the third salvo, the red hot exploding star would land smack dab in the cabin of the vehicle. Then came the most beautiful sound in the world, the gasoline vapors all igniting simultaneously. A little black mushroom cloud would shoot out of every missing window. Sometimes if I was too close, my ears would pop from the rapid gas expansion.

For me this was the best part. This was the payoff for living a trite life with moronic friends. The cars never blew up like they do in Jerry Brockheimer films. They just burned and burned. After a couple minutes, somebody would catch sight of some headlights, and we would hasten back to our base(ment) of operations to critique each other on the night’s events until we passed out from drinking. By the time we woke up the burnt-out carcass of the car would be gone. Maybe the fire department came and put it out. Maybe the cops called a tow truck, as aforthreatened, and the smoldering wreck was carted to a junkyard unknown. The only thing left was a big black rectangle on the side of the road.

Is everything in this essay true? I don’t know. I drank a lot back then. We all drank a lot. In fact I had to drink two bottles of Southern Comfort just to write this essay. I don’t know why I wrote about this subject, or why I needed to get ripped to do it. But you know what? That’s just the way things were back in the summer of ‘99.

"Deja Vu"

I walked into the theatre to see “Deja Vu” not knowing what to expect. When the screen flashed A Jerry Bruckheimer Production, I knew exactly what to expect. I asked myself how long it would be until something blows up. It was only five minutes.

Denzel Washington stars as ATF Agent Doug Carlin, a lone wolf type in New Orleans. He’s called into action when a terrorist blows up a ferry full of Navy servicemen under the Crescent City Connection. He believes that solving a woman’s murder committed shortly before, which appears to be linked, can solve the crime.

Without giving too much away, he goes back in time to stop the mad bomber from blowing up the ferry and killing the woman. There are a number of serious problems with the time travel aspects, and with the time-line of events, that keep me from forgiving this movie.

Jerry Bruckheimer has produced 39 major American movies including "The Rock", “Bad Boys”, “Con Air”, “Gone in 60 Seconds (2000)”, and “Kangaroo Jack.” Like “Deja Vu”, these are all good action movies. And I suppose that if we all start questioning what we see in action movies, well, Vin Diesel might just be out of a job.

2.5 stars

"Stranger Than Fiction"

"...in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes." - Ben Franklin

In a sparsely furnished office, novelist Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson) is suffering from writers’ block. After working on her novel "Death and Taxes" for many years, she cannot decide how to kill off her main character, IRS Agent Harold Crick. In an equally empty apartment on the other side of Chicago, IRS Agent Harold Crick (Will Ferrell), is hearing a voice in his head. His every action seems to be narrated by Eiffel, who pushes Crick closer and closer to his eventual demise, and the conclusion of her novel.

This is a good movie. It explores themes of fate and self-determination like in "Donnie Darko", and it uses fun plot methods like "Delirious." Will Ferrell plays a character quite out of character from what we expect from him, like Adam Sandler in "Punch-Drunk Love." But what I think is the fatal flaw in this film is the fact that, from what we are exposed to, Eiffel’s novel isn’t the masterpiece that we are to believe. While great novels have been written about lives of quite desperation, Crick’s life isn’t desperate, its just quiet.
4 stars

“Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan”

There have been few documentaries before that exemplify a foreigner’s journey through Americana like this. Borat Sadgiyev (an agent of the Kazakhstan Ministry of Tourism) goes through a journey much in the same way that Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” explored America during the late 1950's.

Borat’s movie begins in Kazakhstan. In Borat’s hometown, he gives us a glimpse of his people, like his nationally acclaimed sister, or his neighbour, or the town rapist. The artistry used in his film is more telling than was used in even “The Marathon Family.”

Though a good deal of Borat’s actions can be lost in translation, I believe that the underlying theme of brotherhood is truly felt throughout the movie. Some may say that it is ridiculous for a man to travel across the United States with only a camera crew, a producer, and a bear, in a used ice cream truck, for the purpose of befriending Pamela Anderson. What do they know?

“Borat” his been number one in the box offices for the last two weeks. I can attribute this to its only competitor “The Santa Clause 3"; which is just the out-takes of the first two movies due to the death of Tim Allen last year.

I believe “Borat” is the most educational film since “The Inconvenient Truth.”
4 stars