Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 17

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: WHAT'S IN THE BOX?

Like many people, I keep a box of momentos. Actually, it's been quite some time since I added anything to it: it's usually just sort of in the background, visible yet forgotten on my rather large nightstand. My cat Spike had occasion to barf upon the box recently -- when it was open, no less -- and as I was cursing and trying to perform emergency clean-up on my items before they were permanently ruined, it occurred to me that it had been so long since I looked at them I'd quite forgotten what as inside.

Turns out most of it is paper. Not many solid objects. But the paper is well worth listing for posterity. In no particular order, this is what I found:

A ticket to a double feature of "Predator" and "Action Jackson" at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, circa 2014. Carl Weathers was present, and I got a photograph of the two of us together. That remains the only time I ever got starstruck.

A ticket to "The Bourne Supremacy" dated 2004, from the Galleria 16 in Los Angeles.

A ticket to "Gladiator" dated 2000, from Hoyts Potomac Cinema 13. Saw it with my dear friend Cate Franklin. The sound was so loud I got an anxiety attack.

A guest card for the Parsippany, NJ Hilton (room #449) circa 1999. I was there for my fraternity brother Ken's wedding. It was basically a college reunion, and I had much more fun in that room than allowed by conventional morality.

A ticket to "The Big Brawl" at the Sovreign Center in Reading, PA, dated 2002. There I saw Smokin' Burt Cooper fight for the Pennsylvania Heavyweight Boxing Title with my fraternity brother Mark Durgin, who drank a pint glass of Scotch during the matches. There I spied the hottest ring card girl I have ever seen. That was a helluva day, maybe as close to a perfect one as a man can have: it might make a great rated-X book some day.

A ticket to "The Patriot" (2000) and "Lord of the Rings 1" (2002), both seen at the West Manchester Mall 13 in York, PA. I actually didn't care for the theatrical release of LOTR at the time: I still don't. The extended version is the only way to go.

A ticket to Monsterpalooza 2018, in the Pasadena Convention Center in Pasadena, California. My friend Mark Viniello got me into that convention VIP style, at which I met Slash, Tom Savini, John Landis, Faruza Balk, Doug Bradley, Ashley Lawrence, Paul Sorvino, and Ron Jeremy. What a crew.

A ticket to see The Siren Six! at The Glass House in Pomona, California in 2018, for their farewell performance. My friend Nate Bott was the lead singer and I believe there may be video somewhere of me dancing to ska music.

A ticket to see William Shatner's one man show "Shatner's World" at Club Nokia in 2016. I went there with my brother Cory, and finally got to meet Captain Kirk in the flesh. He said it was a pleasure to meet me. I doubt that, but I appreciated the sentiment.

A welcome guest card to The Governor's House Hotel in Washington, D.C. (room 217), circa 2004. I can't comment as to what happened there, but it sure was fun.

A printout of a ticket to The Happy Little Festival at the Angel City Brewery in Los Angeles, CA, 2016. It was a tribute to Bob Ross. I drank a great deal of beer at that one and somewhere have video of my two female companions dancing with each other.

A ticket to "Rogue One," dated 2016, seen at the Burbank 16 in Burbank, California.

A very faded ticket to Dodger Stadium for a Cubs - Dodgers game. I believe this was in 2001 but the cat barf has stained the date. Saw Sammy Sosa hit a home run.

A very badly stained scrap of paper signed by the infamous porn star Traci Lords. I saw her speak at an ill-attended engagement at York College in 1993 or 1994. My question made her blush. (It was, "Did your porn career effect your social life afterwards?")

A backstage pass for R.E.M. dated 1995. My older brother was interviewing Michael Stipe and he hired me to work as crew. Stipe's (gigantic) bodyguard drafted me to be his co-bodyguard, the only time in my life I have ever been granted this distinction.

An expired Pennsylvania driver's license in which I have a lot more hair, two earrings, and wear a baseball jersey for a team I don't even like. the expiration is "8/31/00."

A ticket for "The Big Sleep" at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood dated 2016. I have absolutely no memory of going to this movie. None whatsoever.

A printout of a ticket to see Van Halen (with David Lee Roth) at the Hollywood Bowl in 2015. The chief objective of my high school years, accomplished a few decades late.

A ticket to see "The Santaland Diaries" at the Stella Adler Theater in Hollywood in 2010. A one man show starring Nicholas Brendon of "Buffy" fame. Very good performance.

A ticket to see the Washington Redskins play the Atlanta Falcons at FedEx Field in 2006. A boring game, the Skins lost as usual, I got drunk and stole a tree from the parking lot.

Another Redskins ticket, for the same arena, in 2007, to see them lose again (I'm sure), this time to the Cardinals. This was a week before I moved to Los Angeles, and I remember tailgating in the parking lot and not much else except a sunburned nose.

More tickets from the Egyptian to see "The House of Long Shadows" (2015) and "The Battle of the Bulge" (2014).

A completely ruined ticket for "An Academy Salute to Jackie Chan." I remember Jackie telling a story about how he was knocked unconscious by Bruce Lee on the set of "Enter the Dragon." This would have been around 2012.

A ticket to the Jets - Lions playoff game held in the Meadowlands, NJ, with no date: but this would be 2001 or 2002. It poured cold rain the whole time and the guy in front of us passed out in his own puke. I had to change clothes in my car.

A ticket (No. 02484) to the Walt Whitman High School Commencement Exercises at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., 1990. My high school graduation. I was very well dressed but I forgot my deodorant...and boy was it a hot day.

Tickets to The Strand Theater in York, PA, to see The Psychedelic Furs, Ben Folds, and Toad The Wet Sprocket, all in 2022. I had always and especially wanted to see Toad play live and they were damned good.

A train ticket from Washington, D.C. to New York, New York, dated 2003. I was visiting the afformentioned Cate. A great trip to Manhattan in its "Sex and the City" heyday.

A ticket to a Ravens - Jets game at Ravens Stadium in Baltimore, Maryland, circa 2003. I have a vague memory of visiting a bar beforehand, and then nothing. Literally nothing. I think I drink too much at these games.

A program for a one man show called "Nevermore" performed by Jeffrey Combs and directed by Stuart Gordon, at the Steve Allen Theater in Los Angeles. Armin Shimmerman produced it, if memory serves -- three legends of sci-fi/horror. A good time.

A ticket to see Live! and Counting Crows at Hersheypark Stadium in 2000. Good shows. The lead singer of the Crows complained he'd eaten too much before the show while at the lead singer of Live!'s house and wanted to barf the entire set.

A ticket to The Home Depot Center in Carson, California to see Sugar Shane Mosley fight Ricardo Mayorga. Shane won by knockout in the closing seconds of the 12th and final round. A real Rocky moment for the hometown kid against his jerk opponent.

A ticket to "Guardians of the Galaxy" circa 2014 from Burbank 16 in Burbank, CA.

A ticket to see Val Kilmer perform "Cinema Twain." I have no memory of where this performance went down except it was a ritzy, well-lighted West Side neighborhood in Los Angeles, and I got to tell Val how I used my "Iceman" imitation to hook up with chicks in college, a fact he found greatly amusing. Nor do I remember the year, except that it was after 2013 and before 2020.

A ticket to see Mike Tyson's one-man show "The Undisputed Truth" at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood, CA in 2013. Still have the picture of me and Iron Mike together afterwards. I was surprised to find I'm taller than he is.

A ticket to the Home Depot Center to see "Donaire vs. Mathebula" dated 2012. Pretty sure I was there with my cousin Scott to see Kelly Pavlik fight. But Kelly was washed up at this time and looked terrible in the ring. A brilliant career ruined by drinking. Kind of like Paul Spadafora.

A fake dollar bill from the Ghost concert I saw at the Wiltern for "666 dollars." I think this was in 2015 or so. I enjoyed the concert but there were too many hipsters.

A ticket to a Bellator MMA show at The Forum in Inglewood, California (2017) for the Ortiz - Sonnen fight. This was supposed to be Tito Ortiz's retirement fight. I'm not sure it was.

A fake dollar bill ("Angus dollar") from the AC/DC show I saw in 1992 or so on their "Razor's Edge" Tour, somewhere in Maryland. My ears rang for three days after that bad boy.

A King of the Cage MMA fight ticket for a card called "Bitter Rivals" held in Ontario, CA at the Citizens Business Bank Arena. Probably the most boring fight card I've ever seen. A fat Mexican guy in the audience kept up a steady stream of heckling that should have landed him an HBO comedy special.

A ticket to the Bruce Lee tribute "Enter the Dragon" at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Samuel Goldwyn Theater, 2013. Met John Saxon there. Somewhere there's footage of me giving an interview about Bruce and I hope I never see it because I acted like a pompous asshole.

An El ticket I used to get from the McCormick Center in Chicago, Illinois to Wrigley Field to catch the Cubs. I was in Chicago to promote my book CAGE LIFE at the Book Expo America but I just had to sneak away and watch the Cubs pound the Pirates. I regret nothing.

A ticket to "Star Wars III" (Revenge of the Sith) for the Arclight Theater (Cineramadome) in Hollywood, circa 2005. Saw it with the family.

A ticket to see the Frederick Keys play the Wilmighton Blue Rocks ("Fireworks by Bank of America"), dated 2002. My first minor league baseball game, in Frederick, MD.

A printed ticket to see "The Ultimate Voyage" at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood in 2016. A musical tribute to "Star Trek" throughout the ages.

A ticket to the National Muay Thai Championships 2011 at Commerce Casino in Commerce, CA. A good time. The hotel smelled like bad incense, however.

A ticket to see "Starship Troopers" at the Arclight in 2012. It was an anniversary showing thrown by its star, Casper Van Dien, and was invite-only to the movie's crew. My friend Mark, who worked on the film, got me the hookup. Some great stories were told.

A ticket to "Star Wars 1" (The Phantom Menace) dated 2002. That was not a happy car-ride home.

A very faded piece of paper which has symbols printed out upon it which, in stenographic language, mean "Miles Watson." Given to me by a very attractive stenographer about twenty years ago.

Tickets to all three of the legendary Gatti - Ward fights: May 18, 2002 (Connecticut, MA); November 23, 2002, and June 7, 2003 (Atlantic City, NJ). The first installment of this trilogy was my first-ever boxing match, and is widely considered one of the greatest fights of all time. But as good as it looks on film, it was better live. I will never see a better sporting event, and I'm OK with that.

I also found: a passport-type photo of my father, a button for Blue Ridge Beer, three small seashells, several broken silver and gold chains, an ornate spoon given to me by my grandmother (she collected spoons), a champagne cork, a bronze pocket watch, a very small ID photo of me from my freshman year in college, a photographic negative taken around 1994, a money clip that belonged to my grandfather fashioned from a Morgan silver dollar dated 1879, a small gold St. Jude medal I wore for many years, a smooth stone, and a German penny.

As you can see, the total value of all of this is almost nothing in monetary: the Gatti-Ward tickets would probably be pretty valuable if they hadn't been stained, and the gold medallion might and coin-clip be worth a few bucks, but like most momentos these for the most part have zero intrinsic value. And yet they are most of them triggers to my memory, and in some cases they trigger memories so neatly sealed off within my brain I might never have thought of them again if not for the existence of these dry, crumpled, faded, stained little scraps of time. And I suppose this is why we keep momentos. Not so much for sentimental reasons but because we forget the vast majority of our lives. They simply passes beneath us like so much metaphorical water under an equally metaphorical bridge. Even someone like myself, who religiously keeps a journal, loses most of the substance and flavor of my days in those rambling and often prosaic paragraphs. It helps to have things we can touch, little jack-in-the-boxes that plunge us, if only for a few moments, into our own pasts...and remind us who we are, and what we enjoy. They can be embarrassing, but they are also revealing. Have you never wondered how you are perceived by others? A good way to get a bead on that perception is to take a look at what you yourself value, and there's no better way to do that than than by studying keepsakes. They tell a lot about us.

And of course, if you meet someone with no keepsakes, no momentos, no sentimentality, that tells us a lot about them, doesn't it?

MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "FRIDAY THE 13TH - THE SERIES"

When one thinks of "Friday the 13th," there is a very definite visual image which comes to mind: a hulking psychopath in a hockey mask, chasing down terrified teens by the moonlit waters of Camp Crystal Lake. Very few film franchises in history have such powerful name recognition, such immediate associative power, as that seemingly endless slew of celluloid slashers which began in 1980 and 2009. But it is not of the "Friday the 13th" films that I now write: it is the immensely influential, cruelly underrated, and in fact largely forgotten television series, "Friday the 13th: The Series," which ran on syndicated television from 1987 - 1990, and which had nothing whatsoever to do with Mr. Jason Voorhees and his grim penchant for hacking horny teenagers into grisyly bits. So for the purposes of clarification, I will henceforth refer to the series by the title it was known by in Canada, "Friday's Curse."

"Friday's Curse" came about, interestingly enough, due to the success of the "F-13" flicks. Paramount Pictures, hot to exploit the success of their slasher series, went to its creator, Frank Mancuso Jr., and told him to cobble together a companion TV show, PDQ. Mancuso wasn't interested, but the studio was so desperate to kick the cash pinata one more time time they told him that he could make any kind of series he liked, anything it all, so long as it had "Friday the 13th" in the title. No doubt repressing a chuckle, or a groan, at this naked cynicism, Mancuso commissioned a series which, despite many flaws, spawned or inspired or at least influenced many much more famous shows which followed.

That premise was this. Years ago, an occultist named Lewis Vendredi (R.G. Armstrong) sold his soul to the devil in exchange for wealth and longevity. The owner of an antiques store, he was tasked by said Prince of Darkness to sell items which carried horribly ironic curses: they often provided great powers to the recipient, but only at horrible costs. When Vendredi tried to break his pact with Satan, he was sucked into hell, leaving his store unattended. Enter the beneficiaries of his will, his nephew Ryan Dallion (John LeMay) and his neice Micki Foster (Louise Robey). The cousins by marriage have never met, barely remember "Uncle Lewis," know nothing of the curse, and care little for each other or running an antique store. So they naturally get shot of the whole lot of items in a fire sale. ..only to be told by the mysterious Jack Marshak (Chris Wiggins), Vendredi's old business partner, the true nature of the store and its contents.

For the next three years, the trio tries to rectify their mistake by hunting down these cursed objects and placing them in The Vault, an impendetrable chamber beneath the shop they now call Curious Goods. (They must secure the items for safekeeping because, having been cursed by the devil, they are now indestructable.) Unfortunately, few of the item owners actually want to part with their terrible chatchkis, and are often more than willing to resort to murder to keep them. And therein lies the drama.

The ordinary episode of "Friday's Curse" moves on two axes at once. On the one hand you have Jack, Micki and Ryan trying to locate and secure a cursed object through trickery, bribery or just plain theft: on the other, you have the person or persons who have the object, and are using it for selfish gain at the expense of the blood price it inevitably demands from innocent victims. The normal curse works something like this: the item will grant the bearer a supernatural power or ability of some sort, but it must be "fed" regularly in order to operate, and generally turns upon its owner if this "feeding" does not take place. Most shows end with the item being recovered, but by no means does this guarantee a happy ending. Indeed, one of the more interesting tenents of the series is the terrible emotional and psychological toll this war against Satan takes on our heroes. Over the three seasons, all of them suffer terrible personal losses, and all of them lose, at times, their will to continue the fight: indeed, at the beginning of Season Three, the battle-weary Ryan leaves Curious Goods (in very unusual circumstances) and is replaced by Johnny Ventura (Steve Monarque), whose resolve to do good is similarly tested. At times, bitter arguments erupt about the inevitability of one or more of the "family" dying to fulfill the quest, and more selifsh motives, such as the desire to find a spouse and settle down into a normal life, also intrude. As many a superhero from Buffy to Batman has discovered, it is difficult to have a love life or start a family when one is on call 24/7 to fight the forces of darkness.

One immediately noticeable quality about "Friday's Curse" is the family dynamic. Jack, a veteran of WW2 with an affinity for the occult, is unquestionably the patriarch, and veteran actor Chris Wiggins plays him to near-perfection: a big, balding old teddy bear of a man, he leads with wisdom and compassion and the occasional flash of steely resolve, and is a convenient encyclopedia of magic-occultic lore. Fans of Hammer Horror films will recognize this archetype, and fans of "Buffy" will immediately see his resmemblance to Rupert Giles, right down to the tweed coat. Ryan, in contrast, is young, impulsive, and immature, the brash "son" of the stuffy, responsible father, but soon becomes invested in the quest and often spars with Micki over her selfishness in wanting to abandon it. John LeMay's performance could be uneven at times as he lacked great range, but he was otherwise perfect for the role, and once again, fans of "Buffy" will see a lot of Xander in his sense of humor, fashion sense and possession of more courage than ability. The final member, Micki, is the daughter/sister of the trio: deeply affectionate towards Jack, she is often infuriated or exasperated by Ryan's antics, though this is mixed with sisterly affection and at some times, a deeper romantic attraction for her "sibling." Micki hates the burden of responsibility owning Curious Goods brings, and is bitter over the fact her fiance deserted her for refusing to walk away from it. Yet when push comes to shove, she's just as committed and courageous as the others. With her flaming red hair, 1940s style elegance, and periodic penchant for put-downs, coupled with her chaste/tension-filled relationship with her partner, it's very hard not to see shades of "The X-Files" Dana Scully in Micki Foster.

One outstanding quality of "Curse" was its theme of "giving the devil his due." Not all of the owners/users of cursed objects are evil or unsympathetic. Some are good people faced with terrible choices: one episode features parents of a dying child who must commit seven murders to save the infant; in another, a quadriplegic teenager is promised use of her body again if she kills the boys who raped her and left her paralyzed; in yet another, a desperate father tortures innocent people (including Micki) to restore his young daughter's sanity. On the other hand, many of the bearers are entirely wicked, addicted to the beauty, youth, power, or wealth the object provides and completely uncaring as to how many they have to murder to keep the metaphorical or literal champagne flowing. Regardless of their morals or lack of same, however, the underlying themes of "Curse" are that making a pact with the devil comes with a heavy price, and so too does trying to interfere in the devil's designs. The object-holders usually die horrific deaths, quite often at the hands of their own objects, while our heroes suffer terribly recovering those objects. It's almost taken for granted by our gang that they will be destroyed sooner or later, and that this is the price of doing the right thing. It's not a particularly uplifting theme, but it is a realistic one, and realism in small things is crucial when the big things involve stuff like cursed wood chippers that spit money, not blood, when you throw a human being into them.

For 80s television, "Friday's Curse" was remarkbly violent. Using memory alone, I recall throat-slittings, impalements, beheadings, immolations, strangulations, eviscerations, electrocutions, beatings, shootings, stabbings, deaths by stinging insect, deaths by sudden disease, deaths by having brain fluid drained out, deaths in trash compactors or the afformentioned wood chipper, and death by drowning, including one man memorably drowned in a toilet. A lot of this was shown to a surprising and uncomfortable degree, including a very graphic episode directed by David Cronenberg which features a glove that can cure any disease...provided you transfer it to someone else in exaggerated form. The many cursed items included things like a violin, a statue of cupid, a pipe, a china doll, a brooch, a mask, a camera, a scalpel, a radio, a key, a compact, a handkerchief, a sherff's star, a pocket watch, a coin, a crystal pendant, a make-up kit, a television, a ring and a child's playhouse. The curses often operated on a law of diminishing returns, demanding more and more blood at more and more frequent intervals to bestow the same benefits or powers, and were always quick to turn on any bearer who couldn't keep them fed -- again, keeping in the theme of the devil being a lousy guy to do business with, though in at least one case, a cursed wheelchair, we see a former owner who walked away successfully from his paralysis.

"Curse" takes place in a nameless American city, presumably Chicago, but was actually shot in Toronto. Though there is plenty of daylight, many of the stories are set largely or entirely at night, and the cruel Canadian winters add to the bleak, brooding atmosphere, as does the use of rather gritty film -- it may not be 16mm, but it often looks like 16mm. Fred Mollin, who composed the music for the similarly brooding and dark "Forever Knight," was in good form here: while no Mark Snow or Christophe' Beck, he makes appropriately spooky soundscapes to accompany the carnage. The acting pool in Canada is narrow but extremely deep, and a great number of "familiar face" character actors and soon-to-be-star types appear in varying roles: among others, R.G. Armstrong, Colm Feore, David Orth, Michael Constantine, Billy Drago, the late great Denis Forest, Gwynnth Walsh, Nigel Bennett, Robert Ito, Tia Carrere, John Fujioka, Gary Farmer, the singer Vanity, and Jill Hennessey all make appearances (if many of these names don't ring a bill, the faces generally will).

"Curse" was hardly perfect even by the wobbly standards of 80s television. The shows vary widely, one might even say wildly, in the quality of scripts, acting, and cinematography, occasionally looking polished and professional, and at other times terribly cheesy and terribly low budget. (The actual budget for the show was quite large, so there is no excuse for episodes that look as if they were shot on a shoestring: this sort of thing falls on the producers.) What's more, Steve Monarque's Johnny, while he certainly has his moments, never entirely works -- in the book "Curious Goods," it's revealed that Wiggins and Robey didn't think much of him as an actor and didn't particularly like the character he was playing. Of course, it didn't help either that Elisabeth Robey was a fashion model and singer making her debut in television: while charismatic and charming, and in possession of good chemistry with both LeMay and Wiggins, she often emotes like a silent movie film star: you'd have to look at Emma Watson's performance as Hermionie in the first few "Harry Potter" films, in which she seems to think moving her eyebrows is a substitute for acting, to find this much eye-bulging and facial contortion. And while this is not an attack but an observation, it must be said that Robey's fashion sense belongs entirely to the period in question, and that most certainly includes her occasional and unfortunate hairscapades into the land of the bouffant. (In one comedic moment, Micki is sparked by electricity and her hair stands on end: I remember saying out loud, "What's the difference?")

Setting all of this aside, there is no doubt that "Curse" is an enormously enjoyable experience for afficianados of the horror genre, and that the show had a huge if unacknowledged influence on much which came after: THE X-FILES, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, SUPERNATURAL, FRINGE, and most especially WAREHOUSE 13, which lifts most of the premises and conceits almost intact. Though the series itself draws heavily on KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER and Hammer Horror movies, its basic ideas cast shadows which still fall on television today. The show's own demise came suddenly and ignominiously late in its third season: a boycott campaign, organized by religious fanatics opposed to the show's references to witchcraft and Satanism, frightened executives into pulling the plug despite strong ratings. I find this exceptionally tragic, because CURSE by its very premise had a virtually inexhaustable number of potential storylines: anyone who doubts this might want to take a look at SUPERNATURAL's fifteen seasons (a staggering 327 episodes). If nothing else, we were cheated of a planned series finale in which the gang would go to Crystal Lake -- yes, that Crystal Lake -- and try to get the ultimate cursed item: that quite literally God-damned hockey mask. I would have paid a pretty to see that show.

For myself, I find the spooky, old school atmosphere of the show to be curiously homey. All really enjoyable television creates a sense of family, however metaphorical, and CURSE managed this twice over -- with the characters themselves, and with the its design. There are certain film sets which the viewer comes to regard as second homes over the course of long viewership, and Curious Goods is one of them. I have the oddest feeling that if I were to drive to Toronto right now and stop at the address, I would find its lights burning into the night, and the bell over the door still ready to jingle. The oddities and antiques would still be nested behind their glass cases or hanging from the walls, and Jack, Micki and Ryan would be there, standing in dusty lamplight and untouched by time, ready to fight -- however reluctantly and grudgingly -- the forces of evil. I suppose the Mary Sue sort of hero, the suave and swaggering James Bond type, who annihilates his enemies, saves the world, and then slips on a dinner jacket and makes love to a supermodel, all without breaking a sweat, has its place in fiction...but I myself much prefer protagonists I can identify with. People who express fear. Who suffer pain. Who occasionally run away from responsibility. Or who, like Jack, feel doubt: "It used to be so simple. There was good, and there was evil. Now they're blending, mixing together. Can't tell where ends and the other begins. I'm not sure I know the difference anymore." In an age when writers are increasingly falling into the trap of writing born-perfect characters, where the hero's journey and the character arc are not so much marginlized as utterly elminated from storytelling, it's refreshing to see more or less ordinary people picking up a lance for what's right...even in the face of the devil himself.

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: WHAT I WATCHED IN 2022 (HORROR FREE EDITION)

Without change, something sleeps inside us and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken. -- Duke Leto Atreides

Every year I keep an accounting not only of what I read, but what I watched -- the new stuff, anyway. I do this not because I suffer from glazomania, but rather as a goad to make sure that I continue to expand my horizons. As I have stated here before, one surefire way of battling anxiety is to engage in repetitious behavior where the outcome is known. Thus, just as I reread books, I rewatch movies and television shows. The downside of this technique is that one becomes a bit of a ghost while still alive, endlessly repeating old experiences without accumulating the new ones necessary for growth. And so I make a list of everything I have seen which I have never seen before, and make sure that list is of sufficient length to prove to myself that I am, in fact, still among the living.

In 2022 I did a better-than-usual job of seeking out new entertainments, the caveat being that thirty of the films I watched were horror movies consumed during October. Since I have already shared those films and my take on them here, I won't do so again, and have also eliminated some very genre-specific stuff such as very old episodes of "Doctor Who."

That having been said, let's examine my weird and eclectic tastes:

Trapped (1949) - This is an excellent detective thriller with strongly Noirish elements starring Lloyd Bridges as a counterfeiter who escapes Secret Service custody and proceeds to raise hell while trying to put together One Last Deal. The dialog in this film is delivered with the rapid-fire assurance of a machine gun, the pace never lags, and the climax is sufficiently violent to satisfy any fan of the genre.

The Lady Confesses (1945) -- This is a Film Noir flick which is so predictable and by the numbers I nearly switched it off until a completely unexpected twist changed the entire direction of the movie. I confess to being completely unready for the course this movie took about halfway through, though sharper wits may not be as surprised.

The Winter War (Extended Edition, 1989) -- Thanks to Vladimir Putin, this "director's cut" of a Finnish war movie about Stalin's brutal invasion of Finland in 1940 is now timelier than ever. It follows a group of Finnish men called up into the army to oppose the Soviet attack, and the horrors they endure as they are streadily ground down by the Red hordes. It's a lively, extremely brutal depiction of war, but curiously removed from its protagonists. It's the story of an event, and a very unpleasant one at that.

I, Claudius (1976) -- A Who's Who of British actors who would later become famous, the miniseries follows the improbable rise of Claudius, a shy little bookworm with a terrible stutter and a limp who probably suffered from cerebral palsy, to the throne of the Roman Empire. The only knock on this dusty masterpiece is that all the intrigue, perversion, betrayal, power-lust and casual cruelty become wearisome after a time, though Claudius' relentless innocence in the face of all this guile is therefore all the more charming.

For the Rights of Mankind (1934) -- this piece of Nazi-era cinema is a look at the brief but savage German civil war which followed their defeat in the First World War. Directed by arch-Nazi Hans Zöberlein, and scathing in its anti-communism, it is nonetheless an entertaining and well-made film, meant to glorify the "Free Corps" who crushed the Communist uprisings of 1919. Like most German movies of the Weimar/Nazi era, it has a fractured narrative, so the characters do not stand out, but it is subtler in its political approach than one would expect from a man like Zöberlein. Nazi cinema is by and large a very good place to study the intersection between propaganda and pop culture.

Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) -- OK, I have seen this movie before, but so many years ago I'd forgotten most of it. This is a lavish, beautiful, operatic, tragic depiction of the downfall of the Romanov Dynasty, which walks the tightrope between sympathy and disgust at the naivete, haplesses and incompetence which ultimately doomed the last of the Russian Tsars. In the end it is a tragic romance between Nicholas II and his bride Alexandra, who loved each other so much they destroyed one another. (Tom Baker excels as the legendary degenerate Rasputin.)

The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968). I'd never heard of this movie, and I can't understand why. Despite its central flaw -- extremely unlikeable characters all around -- this is a very memorable story about the infamous charge made by British cavalry against the Russians at the Battle of Balaclava in 1854. A scathing, black-comic take on life in the brutally class-ridden British army, it depicts rotten-hearted officers obsessed with personal honor and glory who treat their men worse than livestock when they aren't balling each others' wives. There's nobody to like in the movie, but this is the cruelly treated, ill-paid mercenary army of 19th century Great Britain as it undoubtedly was, full of drunkenness, adultery, and venereal disease. Forget romanticizing the past, this is deromanticizing it.

In Battle With the Enemies of the World (1939) -- A Nazi propaganda film depicting the activities of the Legion Condor during the Spanish Civil War, this is more of historical and technical interest than it is actually entertaining. The Legion Condor was a military force of Germans sent by Hitler to fight for Franco's Nationalists, and returned in triumph to Germany following Franco's victory in 1939. Proflific Nazi director Karl Ritter put together this noisy, technically innovative, not terribly resonant piece of cheerleading for Hitler, and it's worth watching for its historical interest.

Ukraine In Flames (1944) -- Flipping the propaganda coin, UKRAINE IN FLAMES is a wartime Soviet documentary about Nazi crimes in Ukraine during Hitler's occupation of same. It is a graphic, unsettling, sometimes disgusting depiction of the aftereffects of war, looting, deliberate starvation, scorched-earth policies and casual killing. Wrecked towns, rotting corpses, dead horses harvested for their meat, sobbing mothers holding starvation-bloated babies crawling with flies -- the whole horror of Nazism in practice is laid bare. The film seethes with hatred for the "Hiterlites" but lays out a surprisingly disciplined case against them, mostly letting the horror speak for itself. There is, of course, a strong tinge of irony in watching this movie now, given what the Russians, inheritors of Stalin's mantle, are doing to Ukraine even as I write these words.

Perry Mason: Seasons 6 & 7 (1961 - 1962) -- I have been slowly working my way through all 271 episodes of this legendary lawyer show over the past three or four years now, and enjoying every moment thoroughly. Probably the best legal show ever made, it was never better than during its sixth season, featuring innovative stories, strong performances, crackling courtroom confrontations, and liberal doses of wink-wink humor. The rigid formula of the show never got in the way of a good time, and the depiction of late 50s-early-mid-60s L.A., with its huge steel-chassied convertibles, its women in furs and pearls, its Martini and cigarette culture, is worth the price of admission by itself.

Simon and Simon: Season 8 (1988) -- I truly loved SIMON & SIMON when I was growing up, and I'm happy to say that 30+ years have neither dated the show out of watchability nor lessened the joy of watching Gerald McRaney (Rick) and Jameson Parker (A.J.) play brothers running a private detective agency in San Diego in the 1980s. Despite living in the shadow of MAGNUM, P.I., this spirited, often hilarious show was never stunted in its growth, and while the plots were often fairly pedestrian in nature, the chemistry between the actors and the often brilliant dialog never failed to elevate the material. Season 8 was the finale, and I'm happy to say the formula was working just as well if not better in these final episodes as it was in the first season.

The Last Full Measure (2019) -- This movie was so well-reviewed that I had to see it for myself. The result, however, is highly underwhelming, flat and predictable. The story of a selfish modern-day Pentagon flunky tasked with investigating whether a Vietnam soldier killed in battle should receive a posthumous Medal of Honor, it is a well-crafted movie which holds one's interest, but fails to resonate, mainly because the arc of the protagonist is so badly telegraphed. The best part, by far, is a brief appearance by Samuel Jackson, who underplays himself deliberately to produce a memorable effect.

The Gauntlet (1977) - This is a dumb, plot-hole-ridden mess of a Clint Eastwood movie which nevertheless manages to be modestly entertaining and surprisingly memorable. Eastwood plays a drunken, broken-down cop charged with escorting a prostitute back from Vegas to Phoenix for a Mafia trial. On the way, every manner of assassin shows up, leading to one of the more improbable if visually arresting finales I can recall, where Eastwood plows an armored bus through hailstorms of police gunfire to get to City Hall. It's a brutal, silly, extremely vulgar film, but there is a memorably evil performance by a misogynistic deputy (Ron Chapman) and a hilarious, profane rant by Sandra Locke in which she puts Eastwood firmly in his place.

Obi-Wan Kenobi (6 episodes, 2022) -- As much as I abominate live-action Disney Star Wars, I was looking forward to being reunited with Ewan McGregor, Hayden Christiansen, Jimmy Smits, and various others from the prequel series and praying to the Force that Kathleen Kennedy wouldn't fuck this up. The Force sadly wasn't listening, because this miniseries, despite some promising moments, is a bloated, poorly conceived, poorly written, Wokeist bait-and-switch of the very worst kind. The story, such as it is, revolves almost entirely around Reva, arguably the worst character Star Wars has produced since Rose Tico, and a 10 year-old Princess Leia who is exploited for cute points almost as badly as "The Mandalorian" mines Baby Yoda. Obi-Wan spends the entire series backseating to various "strong female characters," all of whom are smarter and savvier than he is, and the plot is so riddled with holes, inconsistencies, and pointless characters that you could cut this by 2/3 and actually improve the product. An embarrassment that should never have been made, any second season of this lifeless trash should pretend the first one never happened.

Father Dowling Mysteries: The Complete Series (1989-1991) -- There is a place for "family entertainment" in everyone's literal or figurative DVD cabinet, and when I've had a tough day, nothing relaxes me more than to sink into some unchallenging cozy mystery show from the 80s. This short-lived series stars Tom Bosley as a kindly, cuddly priest who solves crimes in Chicago when he ought to be praying. It's predictable, silly, under-funded, and riddled with the tropes and cliches of the era: I still enjoyed it.

Downton Abbey: Series 1 (2015) -- I wanted to see what all the fuss was about viz this series, so I watched the first season. It's an entertaining if very soap-opera-ey depiction of a titled British family and their "help," both of whom struggle to find places in the rapidly changing world of the 1910s-1920s. I wasn't blown away, and it already seemed to be running short of ideas come the beginning of the second season, but I get why some people found it addictive: it's a steady look at a largely vanished era full of glamour, hypocrisy, snobbery, duty, tradition and scandal. Kind of like the Royal Family now.

Sundown (1943) -- This is a surprisingly offbeat WW2 movie set in Africa, in which a Canadian colonial official spars with his British military colleagues and a mysterious and beautiful local princess, while battling Axis spies trying to encourage the natives to revolt. A surprisingly complex look at the ethics of colonialism in a war supposedly fought for freedom, it's far less heavy-handed than I was expecting, and touches lightly on the hypocrisy of the British "fighting for democracy" while simultaneously ruling over a vast empire held together by economic extortion and brute military force.

Raid 2 (2014) -- The original RAID is something of a legendary martial arts action movie, featuring incredibly brutal, elaborate, and lengthy fight scenes between actors who, in the Indo-Asiatic tradition, actually do their own stunts. The sequel is more of a conventional action picture, drenched in blood and betrayal but lacking in resonance. It will hold your interest, and the fight scenes are of course epic, but it won't linger with you. Too much action and violence are in my mind the same as not enough.

The Six Million Dollar Man: Season 5 (1978) -- The ultimate season of this classic, campy superhero series was just as much fun as the ones which preceded it, the main difference being that Lee Majors did more of his own stunts this time around. Some of the plots are past absurdity even for a 70s kids show about an ex-astronaut with robotic body parts, but in this cynical age, it's fun to see an unconflicted, old-style hero in action. No politics, no preaching, just good guys fighting and ultimately beating bad guys without anyone ever getting killed.

Brideshead Revisited (11 episodes) -- A dissolute, depressed English lord and his social-climbing middle-class friend, who exist in perpetual homoerotic tension with each other, fumble through life in Jazz Age England as the shadow of WW2 begins to fall. Sound dull? It often is, but it's also a strangely compelling look at the last gasp of the old British aristocracy as seen through a man who benefits from the association, but isn't blind, and in fact shares, all of its faults. Rife with suppressed sexuality of every kind, and full of characters who are absolutely useless to society and subconsciously aware of it, it's also a story of the search for sincere faith amid white-tie-and-tails depravity. Jeremy Irons is brilliant as Charles Ryder, who allows himself to be seduced by a wealth that isn't his, and pays a curiously terrible emotional price.

The Octopus: Series 5 & 6 -- This longrunning 80s-00s Italian series was a ruthless, fictionalized expose of the Mafia's domination of Italian and Sicilian politics, and ruffled so many feathers that the government actually stepped in following the sixth season to prevent any further embarrassment. Season 5 - 6 follow the new hero cop, Davide, and his love interest, the scrappy prosecutor Silvia, as they battle the Mafia with the usual mixed success and heavy casualties. Relentlessly violent and full of twists, turns and betrayals, "The Octopus" is always entertaining, and features one of the most complex and fascinating villains I've ever seen: criminal mastermind Tano Carridi, portrayed by Remo Girone.

Streets of Fire -- This 1984 Walter Hill film, a "rock 'n roll fable," died a quick death at the box office, but has rightfully won cult status. Set in an alternate, Noirish, 50s-style reality, it's the story of a rugged loner-mercenary (Michael Pare') hired to rescue his former flame, a rock singer, from the clutches of an evil biker gang leader (Willem Defoe). Just sheer fun from beginning to end, the best performance in this music-laden rock opera is actually Rick Moranis as a nerdy, obnoxious, but absolutely fearless band tour manager determined to get his "property" back. This movie is way ahead of its time in terms of imagination and casting, and employs a Who's Who of "familiar face" actors, including a young Bill Paxton.

Tales of the Jedi (2022) -- "The Clone Wars," being mostly free of Disney's slimy clutches, were some of the best Star Wars to come out in God knows how long. "Tales of the Jedi" is a series of stand-alone episodes that fills in certain still-lingering blanks, such as how Count Dooku fell to the dark side and what happened to Ashoka Tano after she left the series. Very enjoyable if you're already a fan of the prequels/Clone Wars universe. It continues to fill in blanks in the fascinating but not always well told story of the downfall of the Republic and the Jedi.

All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) - This is the latest cinematic adaptation of Remarque's antiwar classic. A purely visual exercise, it abandons the novel's detailed character studies of the soldiers in favor of using its hero as a mere eyewitness to the pointless massacre that was WW1. Visually stunning, well-edited and extremely graphic, it nonetheless lacks the humanity of the 1979 version starring Richard Thomas. With the exception of Kat (Albert Schuch in a fine performance), there are no real characters in the movie, just bodies waiting to be destroyed. I get the point, but it hits harder when you know who they are and care about them.

Andor: Season 1 (12 episodes, 2022). "The best Star Wars since Empire Strikes Back" ? No. Like "Rogue One," the movie from which it devolves, "Andor" is dreary, slow and has too many unmemorable characters. Even Andor himself is just sort of there, an emotionless plot device without charisma or a quest we really care about. That's the bad news. The good news is that when it finally finds its groove, it's extremely well-done and even riveting. "Star Wars" really has nothing to offer us at this point but immersive visitations into the already-established lore, and "Andor" is quite good at depicting life under the Empire -- a slow slide into corruption and oppression.

Soviet Victory in Ukraine : A gory propaganda movie released in 1945, this documentary gloats over the Soviet Union's successful campaign to drive the Nazis from the soil of the Ukraine in the summer of 1944. It's graphic in its depiction of dead men, burned villages, wrecked locomotives, abandoned tanks, and even features a lingering shot of a severed German head laying in a road. If you want a one-sided, historically flawed, but nonetheless vivid depiction of how violent and destructive the Eastern Front was during WW2, this is it. But it's not a fun watch, and lacks the humanity that drove "Ukraine in Flames."

Star Wars: The Bad Batch: Season 1 (2021) "The Bad Batch" was a spinoff of "The Clone Wars" and after a stumbling beginning, became a highly entertaining continuation of that series. Set immediately after the end of the Wars, with the Jedi exterminated and the Republic fallen, it depicts a small band of "defective" clone troopers on the run from the newly-established Empire, and explains how the first years of Imperial rule changed the face, and the history, of the galaxy. Lucas & Co. built a huge world with the prequel series, but only gave us a glimpse of it: "Bad Batch" continues the deeper exploration "Clone Wars" began. Its main weakness is too many filler episodes, but the non-fillers, such as "The Solitary Clone" are simply superb.

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The Fabelmans (2022): Steven Spielberg's semi-autobiographical movie about a plucky Jewish kid obsessed with moviemaking has definite resonance, thanks to some strong performances, especially by Paul Dano as his saintly but oblivious father. Unfortunately, it's also bloated, sluggish, self-indulgent, and seems unsure of whether it's a comedy with dramatic elements, or a drama with an undertone of comedy. We were promised, in trailers, a laugh-laden movie about a cinematic obsession that ultimately led to cinematic greatness: instead we get a film about the slow death of a marriage with some anti-semitic school bullying thrown in for good measure. The flick hints here and there at some of Spielberg's old magic, but ultimately fails to capture it.

All Quiet on the Western Front (1979): This television movie is in many ways the polar opposite of the modern, German version I reviewed above. It fully explores its many doomed characters as they enter the maelstrom of trench warfare, and explores as well their individual agony over the misery of their lives and the looming certainty of their deaths. A very accurate adaptation of Remarque's classic novel, and very well worth watching.

And that about wraps up my non-horror watches of the previous year. As you can see, it's a fairly eclectic mess, and I'm enormously behind on contemporary TV series that don't involve wookies or lightsabers, but I suppose I'll get there eventually. Hell, one of these days I may even finish "The Walking Dead."

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST

Aeons ago, when dinosaurs walked the earth and there was no such thing as television or even, necessarily, radio, it was common for newspapers to print two editions a day -- morning and evening. None was more famous than The Saturday Evening Post, and as I went walking on this fine Saturday, I considered the fact that I have, of late, been keeping many promises I made to myself. (I won't call them resolutions, because the New Year's Resolution has, in America anyway, become a synonym for good intentions that die quick deaths.) And one of those promises was to blog consistently, publishing a new one every Monday. I've been doing this for several months now, and to my great surprise have had no difficulty in the doing, which is further proof that you can do anything you set your mind to, if you actually follow through with it long enough to make it a habit: then, interestingly enough, it's harder to fail than to succeed.

Well, as I was walking and considering all the resolutions -- sorry, promises -- I have kept, I remembered David Goggins' advice on how to succeed at anything. According to Goggins, most people settle for about 40% of what they are capable of, and then convince themselves that that forty is actually one hundred, the full monty, everything. The figure of 40% comes from Goggins believing that this is the maximum effort one can sustain and still remain comfortable in life. It is the appearance of hard work without actually working hard, a kind of shadow puppet theater in which a modest amount of action appears falsely to be much more than it is. Only when we push past that forty into fifty, sixty, seventy percent and beyond do we feel real discomfort, and it's in discomfort that we find our full potential.

What the hell does this have to do with the Saturday Evening Post, you ask? It's simple. For the first six or so years I maintained this blog, I often struggled to post even once a month, much less once a week. But as 2022 began to wind down, I resolved (there's that goddamned word again) to stick to a strict "every Monday" schedule, and lo and behold, I've done it -- initially with great difficulty. But now, after some months of hitting my marks, I find that meeting this schedule has grown, well, comfortable. There is no longer especial difficulty in producing a (coughs) reasonably well-thought out and well-edited blog every week, so I have decided to produce two. The second of these will be called, you guessed it, The Saturday Evening Post, because, you guessed it, it will come out on Saturdays. I'm not entirely sure if it will be a "specialty" blog like some of my other subseries (As I Please, Memory Lanes, Gone Too Soon) or not: I'm even toying with the idea of doing a weekly book review, this being Goodreads and all, but not yet sold on the idea. Nor am I sure if I will keep Monday as the other release day, or move it to Wednesday, which would at least put an equal distance between blogs. The point, dear reader, is that I'm doubling up my output: if you follow me, you will now have twice as many notifications to delete as you did before. And this increased output will continue as long as I'm convinced the quality remains respectable and doesn't deteriorate into mere "content," pushed out the door for the sake of publishing something, anything.

I recently read an interview with, of all people, Rick Moranis, in which he spent a surprising amount of time attacking the very concept of blogging. He considers blogs little more than unedited first drafts: half-baked, undercooked ideas served to the world like chicken nuggets with cold, salmonella-pink centers. I cannot really disagree with his thesis. Blogs are, in the words of my friend Nate (a fellow blogger), often little more than a way of "slopping out the bucket" known as the human brain. They're a kind of spring cleaning for the noggin, a deadwood removal which allows whatever's been cluttering up our thoughts to be dumped onto the public. On the other hand, nobody forces anyone to read a blog, and while Goodreads stupidly eliminated their "views" indicator years ago, before they did I saw that some of my posts had crossed the thousand mark. Assuming that number has only risen in the interval, which I grant is a wobbly assumption, I assume there is readership for these things after all. Either way, more are coming. And that, fellas, is my first Saturday Evening Post.

GOOD WAR, BAD WAR: Ernst Jünger vs. Erich Maria Remarque

When I was a boy, the one war novel you could be certain everyone below the age of eighteen had either read or been told to read was Erich Maria Remarque's ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT (1928). I myself read it in junior high school, and I confess it is the only book I have ever encountered that brought tears to my eyes. The ending is so heart-wrenching, so cruelly tragic, that I found it unendurable. This, of course, was the point -- not only of Remarque writing it, but of my teachers in forcing we students to read it. My generation was probably the last to grow up at a time when war and militarism were not only politically but socially fashionable in the United States, and as a counter to this, we were introduced to Paul Bäumer, the fictional -- but realistically depicted and quite deliberately allegorical -- protagonist of the story. Remarque let us know this in no uncertain terms with the epigraph which he opens the story:

"This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war."

When I read the novel, it had already been a bestseller for more than fifty years, and twice made into films -- once in 1930 and again in 1979. Today it remains a bestseller, and as recently as 2022 another movie version was released to widespread acclaim. It is certainly one of the most famous books ever written, and one of the few which almost everyone has heard of even if they have not read it or seen one of the cinematic adaptations. To some people it is the final word on the so-called Great War, World War One, and also the final word on war itself, at least from the generation which had to fight it. But this is not the case. There was another writer, quite similar to Remarque in many ways, who enjoyed (at the time anyway) equal success and fame, as well as equal influence...except that his influence was not toward pacifism. His name was Ernst Jünger.

Taken at a glance, there is little to choose between them. Both were Germans born into the Second Reich, i.e. Imperial Germany; both hailed from the west part of the country; both served in the German Army during the First World War on the Western Front; both were severely wounded in action; and both penned books inspired by their experiences there during the 1920s which became international bestsellers. Likeiwse, both men had long and very successful postwar literary careers, and became enormously respected if occasionally controversial authors. Each man, upon his death, was mourned as a literary titan, a giant in the field, leaving a vast legacy behind them.

There, however, the similarities end.

To begin at the crux of the matter: Remarque was drafted into the German army in 1917 upon his eighteenth birthday, deployed to the front at the end of June, and wounded at the end of July. He spent the rest of the war in hospital and never returned to action. The events of the war deeply traumatized him, and his seminal work is a reflection of that trauma: the novel's protagonist, Paul Bäumer, loses not merely his innocence but all of his childhood friends and finally his life, reflecting the destruction Remarque felt the war had visited upon his own psyche. After the war, Remarque struggled with alcoholism and what we would now describe as PTSD, became wealthy and famous when the novel was released, fell deeply afoul of the pro-war Nazis, and had to flee the country to save his own life. Despite his success, he was in a sense a continuous victim of his wartime experience, an experience which lasted just thirty days.

In contrast: Jünger, who was three years older than Remarque and thus in a position to do so, volunteered for service in 1914, and served until it ended four years later, fighting in numerous battles. He rose through the ranks from private to captain, was wounded in action at least seven times -- often so severely he probably should have died -- and in the last year of the war was given Prussia's highest military award for valor, the fabled "Blue Max." He, too, was fundamentally altered by the war, in a completely different way: his autobiographical story, "In The Storm of Steel" (1920), while depicting the ferocity of war in all of its terrible fullness, also depicts it as a white-hot crucible from which those who survive emerged not merely transformed but strengthened into a new "race," one conditioned to withstand pain, overcome fear, and think clearly in the face of seemingly insurmountable adversity. One which could find beauty and meaning in destruction and death, purpose in slaughter and carnage.
His dedication is quite different than Remarque's, and reads in part:

"War...is an incomparible schooling of the heart. The soldier's boot, if it comes down grimly and harshly, also comes down cleanly."

"In The Storm of Steel" is not precisely a pro-war book: as I stated above, its depiction of combat is savage and unremitting, and such glory is to be found is of an equally savage variety: any real glorification is found only in the psycho-spiritual aftereffect. But whereas Remarque, in the form of his protagonist, does not survive his conflict, Jünger emerges from his own work stronger and more complete than when he began. He came into the war intoxicated with patriotism, ideals, adventure, and emerged with a harder, more brutally realistic outlook, yet one which did not entirely or even largely abandon the idea that war was a profound and even positive experience. It is little wonder, then, that while "All Quiet" became perhaps the sharpest arrow in the quiver of pacifists and antiwar activists for generations afterward, "Storm" was viewed favorably by adventurers, nationalists and the emerging Nazi movement.

It is in their treatment by the Nazis, however, that some level of reconvergence between the two men begins to occur. The Nazis hated Remarque from the outset, ridiculed his work, slandered his name, and eventually drove him from the country: his sister was ultimately beheaded by them for making "defeatist" remarks, but more likely simply because she was his sister and in their clutches while he lay beyond their power. Jünger, on the other hand, was initially admired by the Nazis and even courted by them, though he declined the invitation. From the outset, he saw that behind their militarism and professed love of Fatherland (which he shared) was a lively moral rot which deprived them of any legitimacy. Although many who studied the subject believe he provided fascists with an intellectual and spiritual-psychological basis for their otherwise intellectually bankrupt ideology, over time they soured upon him, kicked him out of the army, and eventually sent his son to a concentration camp. He himself avoided that fate only because Hitler, an early admirer, had declared him untouchable -- and even this was a narrow thing, for in 1943, Jünger actually wrote a fantasy novel called "On The Marble Cliffs," which was a thinly-veiled allegorical attack on Nazism. (Had the Nazi censors been more intelligent, they would have recognized it for what it was.) After WW2, however, German literature which drew a positive moral from the experience of war was not popular almost anywhere, and "Storm" faded from public consciousness for many years. Though Jünger's standing as an author became titanic in Europe, and he lived an immensely long and prolific life (103 years), he stopped writing war-themed works and became known more as a self-styled philosopher and thinker.

It is a curious contrast indeed. On the one hand, then, we have the antiwar novelist of all antiwar novelists, one who paid a terrible personal price for his success, whose fame is undiminished after generations; and on the other, "the intellectual godfather of fascism," who also paid a terrible price for his fame, and whose legacy is a curious mixture of irrelevancy and a very narrow, somewhat regional form of immortality. Given these facts alone, the vast majority of people would say that it was Remarque's take on war which made the more sense and was also more firmly on the moral high ground. Yet there is one crucial point which spoils, or at least clouds, this narrative, and that is the two men's actual experience with war.

Remarque, as I noted above, spent exactly thirty days on the front line. It was certainly an eventful and life-changing month, and one which ended with a personal catastrophe...but it was only thirty days, and it came about as the result of a draft notice. Jünger was a volunteer, and served for four years, surviving against all odds and despite numerous wounds, including gunshot wounds to the head and chest, shrapnel punctures, and gas attacks which scoured his lungs. His picture of war was far more involved, far more complete, than Remarque's could have been, yet his conclusions were totally different. And it is for those conclusions that "In the Storm of Steel" was forced off the stage of history and into the shadows.

To understand this phenomenon, it is necessary to acknowledge a truth which is often flatly denied: the vast majority of teachers, especially at the university level, identify as liberal or very liberal, and many as pacifists. This is not a criticism or a value judgment: it's a fact born out by legitimate polls such as the one conducted by Gallup years ago, which found less than 10% of college professors identified as conservatives. In a sense, conservatives have only themselves to blame for this: there is a decided anti-intellectual streak in most right wing political parties and movements. However, it being the case, it cannot help lend itself to a different view of war and the military itself. "The right," very broadly speaking, defines itself by its nationalistic fervor, deifies the military and regards war in a semi-sacred way. But that body of thought and action known as "the left" are far less quick to embrace nationalism, militarism, or even traditional patriotism. Pacifism has almost no purchase whatsoever on the right, but at times it has been widely embraced by the left, where it is considered virtuous even by those who reject it. The ordinary university professor, never having come within 5,000 miles of a battlefield, has preconcieved notions of war which Remarque's work neatly validated. Remarque was the token combat veteran who had drawn the "correct" opinion about armed conflict, so Remarque was lionized by the left and his books can be found on just about any school shelf you care you examine.

Jünger, on the other hand, drew the "incorrect" moral from his experiences, and is routinely accused of glorifying them -- of making a pointless slaughter look like a transformative experience. And it is true that the unedited version of "In The Storm of Steel" which is taken directly from his war diaries and was only recently published, is shakier and less certain in its philosophical elevation of warfare. The fact remains, however, that of the two men, Jünger is by far the more qualified, based strictly upon his resume and on no other criteria, to present us with an accurate picture of what happened in that conflict. And this brings us to the decisive point: just who is qualified to tell us about war, and what criteria should we use to judge their conclusions?

P.J. Caputo, the former Marine lieutenant who wrote "A Rumor of War" (often called "The All Quiet on the Western Front" of the Vietnam generation) noted in his introduction to the book that though he became an active participant in the antiwar movement upon his return from Vietnam, he could never hate the war with anything like the fervor of his friends in that movement who had not fought. And in my own discussions with my parents' generation, I often found that the bitterest hatred for the Vietnam conflict came from those who had not been there. It was not necessarily that the veterans enjoyed the experience or felt they had fought in a worthwhile cause: but they had seen the complexity of the situation firsthand, and in some cases had formed intense bonds with their fellow veterans which superceded any relationships they'd had before or since. In short, they simply didn't want to talk about it, because the language they would have to use was not a language civilians could understand.

This fact did not escape me even as a junior high school student. The combat vets I'd met from various conflicts and wars were always quite conscious that their was an unbridgable gulf between them and everyone else, at least where their experiences with war were concerned. Like women who have given birth, they were possessors of an experience which could not be communicated who hadn't gone through it themselves, and did not really need to be communicated with people who had. It was a case of, "If you know, you know." But most of us don't, and that is why we need Remarques and Jüngers. The problem lies with which of them we believe, which of them we accept. Because narratives are curious things. They can be shaped by our actual experiences, or they can be handed to us Compleat by others. A secondhand narrative which is is wrong, whether crafted out of ignorance or malice, can lead to horrific consequences, especially if given official stamp by church, government or society. Remarque has handed five generations of human beings his own take on war, and it is an accurate take -- it can't be anything less, because it was born from his own ordeal, and it also corresponds to what we, the uninitiated to war, can read in other books written by veterans and see with our own eyes in documentaries and news broadcasts. But Jünger's view of war is also accurate, because it was also sincerely held and the result of cruelly empirical experiments conducted with his own body. Although he later regretted some of the more nationalistic morals he drew from his early work, he never backed away from his feeling that war was a creative as much as a destructive force, that it was an "incomparible schooling of the heart," and that it was a catalyst for energies within the human being which could not be tapped in any other way. Industrialized war, he believed, was creating a new race of man, one who was taking on the relentless, unfeeling qualities of the machine, and though he cataloged its cost in blood and suffering more meticulously than most, and at much closer range, he did not see this as an evil thing. We live, after all, in an industrial age, and it would be foolish to pretend our technology hasn't changed us, or that change isn't necessary to integrate ourselves into the world we ourselves have created. One has only to look at people in the age bracket 20 - 30 to see the effects that social media and the internet have had on their mind-set, behavior, and emotional makeup.

In the end, war, like sex, like childbirth, like only a handful of other experiences in human existence, is something which is evidently incommunicable despite the endless attempts which have been throughout history to communicate it. No matter how vivid the prose, no matter how heartfelt the passion driving the pen, no matter how convincing the actor's portrayal or how brilliantly composed the director's shot, in the end we are on the other side of a phenomenon we can't fully understand. The differences in outlook between Remarque and Jünger are more important, then, for the way they highlight the fact that no too people see or respond to the same phenomena in the same way, than for anything else. And implicit in this fact is a warning, Orwell's warning, the one he gave after reading Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and grasping for the first time that not everyone wants peace, democracy and a cushion beneath one's bum. Some find value, and even majesty, in circumstances that fill the rest of us with horror -- blood, pain, harsh discipline, obedience, violence, destruction. Understanding this is the key to understanding why the human race keeps resorting to war despite the most fervent efforts to eliminate it from our collective toolbox. And why there will always be a need for quiet fronts, and storms of steel.

A BURNING INDEED: HOW HOLLYWOOD NORMALIZES THE PERV

Eons ago, when I was in high school, I had an argument with a guy I'll call "Marty." Although witty, sharply intelligent, and musically talented, Marty was also firmly on the pretentious side, and prone, in my estimation, to dislike things merely because they were popular with fellow students, just as he also tended to like other things because they were obscure or inaccessible. How the subject came up I don't recall, but I had made a nasty remark about Woody Allen, who I considered creepy and repulsive, and Marty took up a lance in Allen's defense.

"Woody Allen is considered to be one of the sexiest men alive," he replied.

"Oh, fuck off with that," I said. "He's a 98 pound weakling and a weirdo in the bargain."

"One of the sexiest men alive," Marty repeated, rather sharply. "Look into it."

I looked into it, merely to prove Marty wrong. In those days, of course, we had no internet, so I had to flat-out ask girls, as well as various teachers and parents, what they thought of him, and to my dismay, discovered that Allen was indeed considered sexy by certain females -- girls of a more intellectual leaning in my school, and many older women.

My dismay stemmed not from the fact that Allen was a puny specimen, or that I completely failed to see the correlation between humor and sexual attractiveness, but from his cartoonishly overheated sexuality, which coupled with his numerous neuroses, filled me with a strong sense of revulsion. Call it instinct, but he wasn't the sort I would have cared to be alone with or leave a sister or girlfriend with, even for a short while. If Allen had been a teacher in my high school, and subsequently been accused of groping students, I would not have been surprised. There was just something about him I didn't trust.

As it happened, time eventually vindicated my unscientific opinion -- at least in part. Since my conversation with Marty back in 1989 or so, all sorts of unsavory information and allegation has come to light about Allen's personal life, not least of which was the way he allegedly "groomed" his 16 year-old adoptive daughter as a sexual and romantic partner while still married to actress Mia Farrow. His response to being asked how he could seduce a teen entrusted to his parental care while simultaneously betraying and humiliating his wife was to murmur, in that bland, blunt, deliberately taunting way, "the heart wants what it wants."

That is, of course, true. If we could pry back our ribs and let loose our darkest, most secret fantasies for the world to see, well, we'd all of us either be disowned, arrested or shot without trial. Fantasy by its very nature tends in the direction of forbidden fruit, and the more forbidden the fruit, the more intense the fantasy. In most human beings, however, a very distinct line exists between harmless daydreaming and harmful action. We keep our demons chained on one side of that line, and generally speaking do not let them go, no matter how badly we might want to. A "good person" is not one who lacks dark desires, merely one who is strong enough in character to keep them in check. Woody Allen is evidently not such a person, which is too bad for him and those he hurt as a result of letting his heart's "wants" to get in the way of good sense and common decency. But Woody Allen, himself, is not the issue. The issue is how his brand of "sexiness" came to be.

Now, you may recall that in October of last year I went batshit crazy watching horror movies and generally reveling in Halloween. One of my revels was a stop on the LCS Hockey Radio Show, on which I am a frequent guest: we discussed the 1981 slasher film "The Burning," and during that discussion it came up that no less a personage than Harvey Weinstein had co-written the script. In light of the way that movie's story unfolded, this was disturbing indeed. Since you probably haven't watched, or even heard of, "The Burning," allow me to explain.

"The Burning" is about an unpleasant camp handyman named Cropsey who is horribly disfigured after rebellious teenagers accidentally burn him alive during a prank gone wrong. Mad with rage, the monstrous-looking handyman returns to the camp and proceeds to stalk and murder the kids in generic slasher style until he is finally bested by two of the camp's residents, Todd and Alfred. What is special about this, you ask? In the case of Todd, nothing: he's a fairly typical hero of this type of film, handsome and resourceful. He's even got some karmic debts to pay off, since he's one of the guys who burned Cropsey in the first place. No, the thing that makes my skin crawl is the character of Alfred.

Alfred is, to put it mildly, ugly. This is no sin, in fact it's a refreshing and endearing quality in a cinematic hero, but in addition to being unpleasant to look at, he's also awkward, cowardly, unpleasant, and creepy. In fact, when we first meet him, he's peeping on a nubile co-ed bathing in an outdoor shower. When Alfred is caught, the girl's BF wants to pound him a good one, and oddly enough, the script implies the BF is the bad guy for wishing to do this. In fact, Todd encourages some of the other boys to befriend him, but Alfred never warms up to them, to girls, or to the audience. He remains unpleasant and off-putting and in fact spends much of the movie sniveling in fear, and I don't mean of Cropsey: in one scene, where presumably another screenwriter would have had him find some courage, he's afraid even to get into the lake and has to be shoved in. His cowardice, his creepiness and Other-ness, are never redeemed in any way, yet he lives where most of the rest of the cast dies horribly, and Todd goes out of his way to rescue him at the end of the movie.

To anyone familiar with Harvey Weinstein's physical appearance, character, and generations-long pattern of sexual predation, the affinity he shows as a writer for Alfred in "The Burning" is truly chilling. In retrospect, it seems not so much that that he was merely an outcast trying to get the audience to sympathize with outcasts, but as a creepy pervert trying very hard to normalize weirdness and creepy perversion through cinema. Alfred is presented to us as someone we are supposed to sympathize with, but -- and this is the kicker -- because he makes no effort to change at all, because his negative traits are not punished, because he learns nothing, we do not like him. Indeed, he is the character I most wanted to see murdered in the movie. Weinstein's attempt -- and perhaps it was only a subconscious attempt, but I doubt it -- to legitimize Alfred failed miserably, because he forgot (or never knew) that in order for us to sympathize with a freak, the freak must show us he is not a freak underneath, but a human being. That he is more than his appearance or the surface of his personality. The implication of "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame" is that society is ugly because it judges Quasimodo only by his looks and cares nothing for who he is as a person. This is just and proper. Likewise, the implication of something like "Beauty and the Beast" is that the physical ugliness of the beast is actually expression of his inner self: only when he becomes a beautiful soul does he regain his physical attractiveness. This too is just and proper. But if an unappealing exterior runs all the way through, well, we have a completely different product: Alfred, or more literally, Harvey Weinstein.

The attempts of Hollywood -- and by "Hollywood" I mean the industry in its totality -- in normalizing and fetishizing the various character failings of Woody Allen were far more successful, but they amounted to the same tactic. Audiences were told that nervous, anxiety-ridden, physically weak, psychologically damaged nebbish types, preoccupied with sex past the point of obsession -- the sort you expect to be busted peeping at the keyholes of women's bedrooms -- were, well, sexy. That women ought to ignore their myriad shortcomings and concentrate on the fact they had wit and perhaps some intelligence, even if they were repugnant physically and utterly deficient of any traditional masculine qualities. And this begs a question: why? Why try to replace the traditional cinematic hero/protagonist with someone of this sort? Why swap John Wayne for Woody Allen?

It all comes back to "The Burning." Weinstein could not make himself more attractive physically, nor was he willing or able to curb his perverse sexual tastes, so in the character of Alfred, Weinstein created an analog for himself in the hopes it would engender sympathy and understanding. It was a stupid thing for him to attempt, but I understood why he attempted it. He didn't look like a hero, and sure as shit didn't think like one, so he wanted to redefine its definition. He was doomed to fail because it was too much to ask of the audience. But in Woody Allen, who at least was an undeniable talent, Hollywood executives saw themselves -- not only physically, but morally. It was they, after all, who invented the Casting Couch, who hosted parties that were little more than "give some head to get ahead" orgies, who normalized the exchange of sex for opportunity, who rejected the idea that conventional morality even applied to them. If they could make a man like Allen into a sex symbol, there was hope they could step into the clear light of day without changing their appearance or behavior: they would be the alphas -- the Alfreds! -- of this new world: puny men with warped morals, grooming society to tolerate and even applaud their antics.

I have to say for the record that I am not a prude. I have no brief with unconventional sex symbols, either. The very notion of attractiveness changes so drastically from generation to generation that the beauty of today is the pug-ugly of tomorrow anyway. Physical beauty is to a large extent a societal construct -- we think X is attractive because society tells us to. If guys who look like mathletes replace guys who look like athletes as "Sexiest Man Alive" on the covers of PEOPLE magazine for a few years, I don't give a damn, so long as they aren't simultaneously trying to redefine right and wrong at the same time. Things in the world are bad enough without normalzing physical cowardice, incest, and other forms of destructive sexual perversion. One Hollywood is enough.

TWENTY FIVE POINTS FOR LIVING

Anyone's life, viewed from the inside, is probably just a series of defeats. -- George Orwell

When you lose, don't lose the lesson. -- Ed Tom Halleck

I do not pretend to be a guru. If you examined my life objectively, you'd probably declare it a minor disaster, akin to a partially contained forest fire: The fire chief is confident it will be brought under control, but he can't say when or exactly how, and in the mean time, danger remains high. I expect most people's lives would be judged similarly if subjected to real scrutiny, but I'm a writer, and let's face it, when it comes to fuck-ups, we are a special breed. The average writer is a drunken, antisocial misanthrope, more comfortable with books than with people. On the other hand, writers read a great deal, and it is through reading as much as through actual life experience, that one acquires wisdom: not mere knowledge, but actual wisdom for living.

Over the course of my life I have discovered myself to be somewhat different from many other writers of my acquaintance in that I have traveled slightly more than the average, and also had more what might be called "unintellectual experiences:" I was in a fraternity, I've trained in various martial arts, I succumbed to the lure of "being a Chad" when my looks and a temporary illusion of money made that possible, I worked in law enforcement, et cetera and so on. In retrospect, much of my behavior was embarrassingly shallow, self-consciously fake, and altogether stupid. I was emulating the people who I had despised in my teens but also been horribly jealous of: the bullies, the jocks, the cool and popular rich kids. When the time came that I was able to become one of them, I did so with enormous enthusiasm, to the point where I hid whatever natural intelligence I possessed so as to blend in, and even pruned my speech so I wouldn't out myself as a closet intellectual. This self-crippling phase was actually quite productive in a certain sort of way: it allowed me to see that the grass was not much greener on the other side, that popular kids and tough guys both are equally unhappy when nobody is looking, and that there are distinct and cruel penalties for hiding who you are and denying what you must become. In short, it let me learn that there is much wisdom to be gained from stupidity -- or at the very least from making mistakes. Mistakes are fundamental to the learning process. However strange it might sound, they are the fuel without which growth, and success, are impossible...provided, of course, that we learn from them.

It follows that along the mistake-strewn path of my life, I have accumulated a number of wisdom-pearls which I would like to share with you now. Each of them has served me well, and while I do not claim to have originated any of them, or even to have followed their dictates consistently, they are undeniably true and can yield tangible results. So here we go: 25 rules for living, brought to you by a guy whose qualifications can be summed up in two words: I'm alive.

1. The day has the same number of hours for everyone, billionaires and homeless people. It's not “having time,” it's what you do with it. If I had a nickel for every time someone whined they didn't have time to go to a gym or take a Spanish class or learn how to change spark plugs, all while they reached for their sixth beer of the evening, I'd be richer than Gates. If you want to do it, you'll find the time. Period.

2. Everyone is talking about motivation nowadays -- finding it, keeping it. Screw motivation. Embrace discipline. With discipline you don't need motivation. I didn't go hiking on Friday evening in the bitter cold, through inch-deep mud, because I felt motivated to do so: I'd had a long day at work, I was tired, and I was also hungry. What I wanted was to eat, lie down, and watch re-runs of "CSI." And I did all that. But first I went hiking. That's discipline. How did I come about it -- me, a naturally lazy, disorganized person? Well, it takes only three weeks to break a bad habit, and it takes the same amount of time to begin a good one. Force yourself to be uncomfortable doing something healthy for yourself, and before long you won't be able to stop if you try.

3. Rethink your priorities. Most people treat their cars better than their bodies. They pay more attention their presence on social media than their real friendships. They spend vast sums on things that actively harm their physical and mental health but complain "they don't have the money" to eat healthy, join a gym, etc., etc. Take a moment here and there to see what you're prioritizing in life and question whether the order looks right to you. If it feels wrong, it is.

4. People will tell you explicitly who they are with their actions. Believe them. It may be curious for a writer to downplay the value of words, but in real life, talk is cheap. Pay attention to what folks actually do,not their line of gab. And apply this to yourself as well. It will kill the hypocrite within you faster than a bullet.

5. Start saying “I will” instead of “I want” and see the change. Most limitations are self-imposed. The mind is an incredibly powerful tool, but it can also be an incredibly powerful enemy.

6. Don't think about what you want, think about what you want to be. They are usually not the same and can sometimes be diametrically opposed. What you want is probably a cheeseburger and a beer, but what you want to be is in better shape. Or better educated. Or better tempered. Et cetera and so on. Learn to differentiate between momentary wants and your actual goals.

7. Attack life with a prepared mind. Bad things will happen anyway, but the prepared mind deals with 'em better. Take that 15 minutes before bed to lay out your clothes, pack your lunch, shave, and go over your schedule for the following day, and see how much easier your next mornings will become: no scrambling, no running out the door with your shoes untied, no arriving late for work.

8. Going without will teach you want from need. Whether it's caffeine, nicotine, porn, sugar, or the dopamine hit you get from your iPhone, try going cold turkey for a few weeks and see how it affects you. You might be surprised how easy it is to give up some -- SOME -- of the things you think you need.

9. Learn to feed off the negativity of others. People are always going to naysay and hate, why not turn it into fuel? I owe a lot of my success in writing and the entertianment industry to wanting to make my own personal doubters eat their words.

10. If you weren't happy before the shiny object, you won't be happy after you get the shiny object. Happiness is an inside job. Work on you, and if someone hands you a trophy down the road, or you decide to buy that Ferrari with your bonus money, enjoy it for its own sake without confusing it with your worth as a human being.

11. You can acquire things or you can acquire experiences. You'll get bored with the things sooner or later, but you never get tired of your memories. Travel when you can -- even if it means one county over, to some forgotten Civil War battlefield or winery or bed and breakfast. Go to the sporting event, or the concert, or the poetry slam. Hike the woods in the fall instead of watching the NFL. Drive two towns over to read the book in that cool coffee joint you've heard so much about. Ask your old army or college buddy to go on a weekend roadtrip. Give yourself a trove of memories to enjoy when you get old.

12. Bitterness is the only completely useless emotion. You can use hate. You can use anger. You can even use jealousy or spite. But you can't use bitterness. It will eat you away and give you absolutely nothing in return.

13. Your thoughts determine your emotions, your emotions determine your actions, your actions set the course for your life. It all starts with your thoughts. Be mindful of negative thinking. Find out what works to get you out of that loop, whether it's dark chocolate, a call to a pal, a walk with the dog, a cup of tea or just a deep breath. And be patient. Bad mental habits are like any others, they take time and conscious effort to break.

14. You don't die from the bite, you die from the venom. An incident is just an incident, it's how you react to it that matters. People will do you wrong. If you let that ruin you, that is more on you than it is them. Anyone who deliberately wrongs you doesn't give a shit how you feel anyway, so why let their actions control how you feel and behave?

15. The wake does not drive the boat, and exhaust does not drive the car. Your past has no say in your present or future. People who cry about their past are still living in it. You can change course at any moment. Read that twice.

16. The devil has no power over you except that which you give him, and you can take it all back at any time. Whatever demons plague you, they are in your head at your own invitation. Throw them the fuck out. If you can't do it yourself, get help. If the people around you won't assist, they're part of the problem. Throw them out, too.

17. Try new things. Fail at them. Try again. Make yourself uncomfortable on a regular basis. You will never discover greatness, or even true satisfaction in life, if you don't take risks. Whether it's a cooking class or a karate tournament, give it a shot.

18. People come and go, so enjoy them while they're around. Not everyone is a long-hauler in your life, nor you in theirs, so just take a moment to appreciate the people passing through. I'd pay a pretty to tell some of the folks from my past what they meant to me, even if they were only around a semester or two in 1996 or a few months in 2013.

19. Never dim your light to let others shine. The world is full of jealous, spiteful people full of clever, convincing arguments as to why you should trim your sails for their benefit. When you burn your brightest, the people who love you will be pleased and proud, not threatened. Pay attention to how others regard your triumphs. Some people will be sympathetic as hell when you fail, but seethe with envy when you succeed. Their sympathy is just a case of misery loving company, failure being comforted by fellow failure. Get rid of them. Better to have no friends at all than "frenemies."

20. Wayne Dyer once said, "You can't get thin by hating being fat." How much you revile a situation or a state of being won't change it one iota. When I was at my lowest a few years ago, I finally realized the sheer intensity of my misery wasn't changing the situation. I had to do that for myself. I had to come up with a plan for change and then execute it. The good part? The mere act of taking a paper and pencil and writing out your plan will start the shift you're looking for. The act of planning change is the first step toward change, and you can do it from your dinner table.

21. The world doesn't owe you anything, it owes you everything. It was made to be your playground and proving ground both. Experience is why you exist, why you have a brain and senses to interpret what we call reality. But you've got to go out and collect what the universe owes you. It won't send you a check.

22. Contrary to what generations of high school gym coaches taught you, quitters CAN win. Quitting is perfectly acceptable if you defer it everlastingly into the future. I can't tell you the number of times I've gotten up a literal or figurative mountain by saying, "I'll quit in 100 more yards." Then I cross that 100 yard distance and say, "OK, I'll quit in 50 more yards" or "I'll quit in 500 more yards." Before I know it I'm atop the mountain. A lot of victories in life are achieved through self-hypnosis, self-bargaining, or just plain lying. From a purely internal standpoint, it's not how you get there, it's THAT you get there.

23. If you don't make fun of yourself occasionally, other people will...continuously. We're all ridiculous occasionally, just go ahead and admit it. But also be on guard: I have never in my life met anyone worth a damn that couldn't laugh at themselves a little, now and again. The inability to do this is a very serious character fault and indicates you're in the presence of an egotist or even worse, a narcissist.

24. There is no courage without fear. I get so sick of Hollywood telling us the Vin Diesel and Steven Seagal character types, the completely fearless Mary Sues, are heroes. Heroism is the mastery of fear, not the absence of it: if you're not scared when you do the brave deed, you're not brave.

25. It is never too late to start over. In my own life I have re-invented myself more times than Madonna. I went from being a popular, athletic ringleader to a friendless, basement-dwelling misanthropic nerd; a drunken fratboy to a Dean's List student; East Coast law enforcement to Hollywood; and the shallowness of Hollywood to the troubled deeps of victim advocacy. And I have done all of this while writing furiously in multiple mediums. I am now 50 and have zero intentions of stopping. Mind you, some people are quite happy where they are and have or feel no need to change, but if a divorce, if a disease, if some unforeseen disaster or unexpected boon presents you with the need for a radical re-invention of your life and circumstances, rest assured it is possible. If I can do it, absolutely anyone can.

There you have it. It's not my entire store of fortune-cookie wisdom, but it's a heaping helping of same, and it never fails to amaze me how much better my life gets when I remember these principles and try to stick to them. The saddest thing in life is the person who manages to go 20, 30 years into his adulthood without really learning anything: the look of dismay, of bewildered agony, they wear as they fail yet again to lose weight, or find a better job, or quit a bad habit, or just plain feel better about themselves is truly painful and depressing to behold. Don't be that person. If none of this resonates with you, sit down and systematize the lessons life has taught you, good and bad. You'll be surprised by how much you've learned.

THEY JUST DON'T GET IT: WHY THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY SUCKS

Are you not entertained? -- Maximus

I think we would all agree that the entirety of the entertainment industry is in a bad way nowadays. Television, film, gaming...it's not going downhill so much as falling off a cliff, and burning on the way down.

Everything about entertainment is markedly, noticeably, objectively worse than it was just a few years ago. The few shows, films and games which are really good only highlight how terrible, or at least how mediocre, almost everything else has become; and there is as yet very little sign this is going to change anytime soon. No surprise there: in order to fix a problem, you have to know that it actually exists, and admit it, at least to yourself. The Industry is not ready to do this, and so it continues to fall, and continues to burn.

I could a tale unfold as to how this came to be, and I will someday soon enough, but I am going to keep this one short and to the point, folks:

The Entertainment Industry is rubbish because it no longer entertains. It has forgotten its mission, the very reason for its own existence.

You know, to entertain.

The word, in case you were wondering, means "to provide someone with amusement or enjoyment." And this is precisely what Hollywood has stopped doing. They no longer amuse or entertain. The relief they used to provide us from the pains and pressures and anxieties of everyday life, through comedy, through drama, through fantasy, through role-playing, is no more.

Instead, they lecture us.

What people used to rush to as an escape is now something from which they require an escape. The refuge has become a trap. It is almost impossible to find a movie, television show or immersive video game made in the last five years which doesn't try to beat you into complete submission with its political, racial, and sexual takes. The basic premise of entertainment, which storytelling, has been thrown out: in its place we now have political propaganda tailored for the sort of people who can't live without Twitter....the trouble here being that Twitter was not, is not, and never will be representative of Americans or even common humanity. Twitter is a fringe, an outland, a dumping ground. It is a sluice where political obsessives, passive-aggressive weaklings and monomaniacs are irresistably drained. But because industry executives and pundits scroll through it all day, they have come to believe it matters, that the badly-written opinions within it actually reflect the feelings of the broad masses, the actual population. One may as well take a Gallup poll in a lunatic asylum or a methadone clinic. The answers you get will be honest, but they will not represent reality. Not for the rest of us, anyway.

Put more simply, they are making entertainment for an audience that doesn't exist.

One does not have to be a right-winger (I'm not, incidentally) to detest the state, and continuing, direction of entertainment. Nor does one have to be intolerant of the politics of others. One merely has to remember the days, not so long ago, when the purpose of a TV show, movie or video game was to engage its audience rather than talk down to them or try to fill their head with theories generated by university professors who have never held a real job. When a storyteller could try to make a moral point without revealing his own personal voting habits. When a showrunner or game designer understood that there is a fair country distance between giving a story a philosophy and pumping it full of ideology.

Everything sucks nowadays because the people making it suck at what they do. Suck on a fundamental, foundational level. They are surgeons who don't know how to cut, electricians who don't understand electricity, handymen with no tools. And they cannot fix the problem either because they are too stupid to know there is a problem, or too arrogant to admit it, which amounts to the same thing.

They just don't get it.

I said above I wasn't going to get into the "why" here, but now I find I cannot avoid it.

The stark fact is that a lot of this idiocy is driven by a debasement of the very idea of activism caused by the internet generally, and social media specifically. In my parents' day, "activism" meant risking getting your skull split or your life taken to promote a cause you believed worthy of your blood. Now it means tapping "like" as you swipe a screen from the comfort of your couch. It follows that actual action, i.e. spending money or going somewhere physically, and the simulacrum of action embodied in clicking "like" or "downvote" on a video or a post or a thread, has also been conflated. A generation raised on the idea that social media is real, that it matters, that it is vital and necessary, cannot distinguish between "likes" and actual, meaningful actions taken in the real world.

What I mean by this is that getting 40,000 likes on Twitter for your defense of "She Hulk" or "Velma" or "Willow" doesn't mean those 40,000 people will watch the shows in question. They simply agree with the politics which drive the creation of those shows in the first place. But their likes, their snarky Tweets and clever Facebook and Instagram posts, do not actually translate to ratings, sales, or dollars. The act of clicking a screen and the act of going out to see a movie, or spending money to watch a show or buy a video game, are not at all the same. They are not, in fact, even connected. One exists in the real world, and one does not. One is a simulation of reality, and one IS reality. And lest you think I am lecturing you, I learned this the hard way when I first became a novelist. I spent thousands on Facebook ads which provided me with the most mouth-watering analytics imaginable. They showed me, via attractive-looking graphs, that tens of thousands of people were "engaged" by my ads every day. But "engagement," and even the far more elusive "clicks," did not translate to actual sales. There was a fatal gap between what I was being told and what was happening, or not happening, to my bank account. It turned out the advertisements were being pitched to people who had zero interest in the product: it was "side of the bus" advertising, which reaches huge audiences but not necessarily to people with any interest in what I was peddling.

It's the same here. No matter how hard Hollywood panders to the extreme left, it will not change the fact that the extreme left is only a tiny percentage of society and not, as a rule, interested in what Hollywood has to offer regardless. They will "like," but they will not buy. And Hollywood has yet to accept that fact. They keep doubling down, keep rewarding failure, keep blaming everyone but themselves for the situation. But the funny thing about reality is that it always trumps denial in the end. Always. You can deny your plane is going down 'til you're blue in the face, but brother, when it hits that mountain, you will know it. Capitalism is ultimately a very Darwinian process. If folks want what you've got, you're a millionaire. If they don't, well, as Dalton said in "Roadhouse," there's always barber college.

In the real world, when a business fails to deliver a product the consumer wants, the product fails, and ultimately the business itself. In Hollywood, the products are failing left and right, but the business considers itself "too big" to meet such a fate, and continues to churn out wokeist, box-checked entertainment almost nobody wants out of sheer spite. Whether this is sustainable, and Hollywood really is Too Big To Fail, I don't know: it's possible that if quality storytelling ceases to exist entirely and audiences have absolutely no alternative but to watch shows like "The Rings of Power," they may actually end up doing so out of sheer boredom. But so long as media exists from the Before Time -- before wokeism, before box-checking, before pandering to extremists became the norm -- audiences will also have something to compare modern TV shows, movies and games to. And that does not bode well for the people in studio offices and writer's rooms today.

MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "MEGAFORCE"

In this week's installment of Memory Lane, I revisit the 1982 action-adventure film MEGAFORCE, directed by Hal Needham and starring Barry Bostwick, Persis Khambata, Edward Mulhare and Henry Silva. If you were not a child of the 70s, you probably cannot understand the anticipation and excitement this film generated among kids and teenagers before its release. It was merchandised heavily in advance, and given lavish attention by trade and fan magazines (which were what we had instead of the internet). The movie was even examined by the U.S. Army as it was being shot to observe the Hollywood-designed "attack" dune buggies for their practicability in battle against tanks. Alas, what ended up on the screen was not quite what we were hoping for. So let's step in the time machine and go back to when Ronald Reagan was still the gipper, Michael Jackson released "Thriller," and gallon of gas cost $1.22....

I saw this movie in the theater in 1982 and am still waiting for my refund.

All joking aside, this is one of the biggest pieces of shit ever to come down the pike.

I rewatched the flick as a grown man, hoping to find in it the sort of camp, kitsch and enjoyable shlock that makes so much of my childhood cinema fall into the category of so-bad-it's-good. But this movie is beyond that categorization. It is beyond COBRA in its silliness and cringe-worthiness and complete lack of self-awareness or shame. It is so bad that it is awful, although it opens itself up to Rifftrax/MSTK-style ridicule more than any other movie I can think of. This is one of those flicks which achieves its few level-ups by accident. The jokes aren't funny, but the drama is. It's like a live-action Saturday morning cartoon. And not a good one either.

As kids, we had a special vocabulary to describe things that were especially bad in popular culture. The titles of very bad television shows or feature films were a kind of shorthand to let other kids know how bad something was. If you likened something to, for example, "Battle Beyond the Stars" or "Warlords of the 21st Century," the other kids knew it was trash, but passably enjoyable trash. If you talked about "Krull," that meant a really bad movie which was actually a lot of fun if accepted on its own terms. If you referenced "Automan" as an insult, thems were fighting words, because that show was horrific (this also applied to "Masquerade"). But the lowest of the low, the insult of insults, the unholy of unholies, was "Megaforce."

Some of our approbrium probably stemmed from the movie's hype. It was Cold War time, and America was in the early stages of achieving catharsis for Vietnam by embracing ultra-nationalistic shoot-'em-ups in which all wrongs could be made right with napalm. Kids are especially vulnerable to military jingoism, and to the ideas that military service is like summer camp with guns, and that war is glorious fun in which you get to fiddle with cool gadgets and blow things up without harm to yourself. The pre-release propaganda campaign for this movie hit those notes pretty hard. At the same time, we were in a post-"Jaws" era where the summer blockbuster had become a regular weapon in Hollywood's arsenal, so the marketing blitz, which included magazine articles, ads on comic books, toys, etc., etc. had been going on for many months before the movie debuted. So confident was the studio that "Megaforce" was going to be a hit that they'd already begun pre-pre-production on the sequel, "Megaforce 2: Deeds Not Words." There was, however, one small problem, one tiny flyspeck of blight on this sunrise of golden optimism:

This movie SUCKED.

From the pompous opening crawl to the so-bad-it's-like-wrenching-stomach-cramps last image (the infamous "thumb kiss"), "Megaforce" baffles even its pre-tween audiences with its horrible, cringing, sniveling stupidity. It literally defies analysis how it could have been green-lighted, because everything about it sucks. The writing sucks. The acting sucks. The art design sucks. Even the music sucks. Plus, it's got Persis Khambatta AND Michael Beck, and meaning them no personal insult, either one is the kiss of death to almost any big-ticket project they were involved in: put them both in the same flick and it's like whatever the two-object version of a trifecta is.

The plot of the film is basically this. A mercenary warlord played by Henry Silva is doing bad things in some made-up country in the Middle East or North Africa or something. The locals, represented by P-Khambatta and the redoubtable Edward Mulhare (of "Knight Rider" fame) prove helpless, so they journey to America to enlist the aid of folks who REALLY know how to blow ---- up. These folks are Megaforce, a super-secret band of tippy-top soldiers recruited from all around the globe and financed by the world's democracies to fight evil with the highest-tech weapons available. Basically they are G.I. Joe, except they wear horrible gold lame jumpsuits that leave NOTHING to the imagination and ride dirt bikes and dune buggies. Megaforce is run by Ace Hunter (Barry Bostwick), who is basically a blond, bearded, blow-dried James Bond crossed with Evel Kneivel. He agrees to take Megaforce to the made-up country and battle Henry Silva, who is actually an old friend of his. After that, a lot of things explode, but in a curious forerunner to the days of the A-Team, absolutely nobody gets hurt. I mean it. With the exception of three bad guys who seem to get vaporized, nobody dies or even bleeds in this movie. It's mainly horrible dialog shouted over explosions, designed to show us the utter invincivbility of Megaforce. The best thing about MF is that it keeps doubling down on the cringe, in a kind of antic blackjack where you can never exceed twenty-one. From the crotch-hugging gold lame jumpsuits to the horrible romance between Barry B and Persis K, in which affection is expressed by kissing thumbs, to the multicolored, vaguely patriotic smoke screens eminated by the bikes, to the flying motorcycle...this movie is a bottomless pit of trash. Barry Bostwick was coming off a long stage run when he took this role, and he acts as if he's still on stage...at the open air theater at Universal Studios. His every movement and facial expression, even his tones of voice, and melodrama turned up to a comic 11. Persis K cannot act, cannot even smile convinincingly. Henry Silva enjoys his scenery chewing so much I suspect he may have been high during the entire production. And Edward Mulhare is to be pitied for having to do his dignified, stiff-upper-lip Brit shtick for fare which wouldn't have made the cut for the worst episodes of "Matt Houston" (one of which he was in, may God rest his actually Irish soul).

The word "toyetic" is used to describe films which are essentially 2 hour commercials for toys, trading cards, lunch-boxes and the like. "Megaforce" scales it around 97 minutes, but it is basically one of the more toyetic movies you'll ever watch with a grimace of disbelief and vicarious flop sweat. Even by the VERY generous standards of early 80s action flicks, this movie has no depth at all. There is no arc, no character development, not even the rudimentary development you see in one of the later Friday the 13th films, where the heroine has to overcome some inner demon before she can vanquish Jason. Megaforce is not even the story of an event so much as the solution to a problem: somebody asks you what 2 + 2 equals, so you write "4" ... but you do it with gasoline and 3 and a half tons of fireworks, while singing "The Star Spangled Banner."

What astonishes me about the movie is that even at the time it was understood to be awful, so awful that 10 year old kids like me -- no great critic of cinema -- could see it for the garbage it was. I have vivid memories of running out of the theater across the bridge to the parking lot with my older brother and some friends, laughing and shouting with disbelief that anything could be this bad and get made. Throw in 35 odd years of time, and what we have is a time capsule filled with you-know-what rather than vino.

"Megaforce" had a $20 million price tag ($61.5 million today) and director Hal Needham, who'd helmed "Cannonball Run," "Hooper" and "Smokey & The Bandit" probably seemed like a no brainer to helm the project. After all, it was essentially a series of car stunts and pyrotechnics with some acting sprinkled over the top: but no amount of money, fire or exploding tanks could salvage the terrible script, cartoonish premiuse or the lamentable casting choices. I know Barry Bostwick can deliver, and he can even pull of action roles (he was superb as the cigar-chewing, lady-klling, Japanese-slaughtering submarine ace Carter "Lady" Aster in "War & Remembrance,") but he's not of sufficient charisma or acting firepower to carry a movie this bad. Nobody is.

To sum up: unless you want to punish yourself for some past-life transgression, like being a tower guard at one of Stalin's gulags, or you love 80s cheese and nothing since 12/31/89 has satisfied your craving since the clock rolled over, avoid this trash. Bad enough to waste the time, but paying the $2.99 rental fee?

Two thumb kisses down.

WHAT I DO ALL DAY

You can make a killing as a writer, but you can't make a living. -- Unknown

Just a day, just an, ordinary day
Just tryin' to get by
Just a boy, just an, ordinary boy but
He was looking to the sky

-- Vanessa Carlton

Like most writers, I do not make most of my income by writing. As the above-quoted passage tells you, writing is a trade which either pays very little, or, in rare cases, vast fortunes. There is not really a middle class. I don't mean there aren't writers who pull down, say, 50 - 100 K a year and do nothing else, but even these folks have a high degree of economic uncertainty. They have to work ceaselessly, pay for their own medical benefits, and pray what they're peddling doesn't go out of fashion or the publisher decide they "want to move in another direction." Indeed, the line between a middle-class writer and a hack is a fine one, through no fault of the writer. He wants to work, and he's got bills to pay, so he goes where the money is, banging out true crime paperbacks or formulaic romance novels (four a year) or ghostwriting memoirs or what have you. The fact that what he really wants to do is pen cozy mysteries or epic sci-fi novels is lost in all that sweaty effort to pay the mortgage.

When I was working in the entertainment industry, I saw a variation of this everywhere I went, so much so that I dubbed it "The L.A. Trap." You go out to L.A. to make it in The Industry, but brutal economic realities demand you take that job waiting tables, or working security, or sharpening pencils at a law firm, and before you know it, the struggle to pay the rent eclipses your desire to Make It. Your priorities begin to reverse themselves, and within two years your script, your comedy routine, your band, has become a hobby and your "day job" the center of your life. You never intentionally sell out to necessity: you just surrender the dream here and there, a half-percent at a time, until one day you're 38, have a second kid on the way, and realize you haven't looked at your screenplay in two years. Without ever realizing it, without consciously raising the white flag, you've entirely given up. Or -- and this may actually be worse -- you actually break into the industry, but in an area for which you have no passion or even interest. You want to be a stuntman, say, but end up as an office manager at Warner Brothers. Or you're hellbent on being a movie director, and find yourself working on video game trailers instead. You become like a fish in a tank, who can clearly see the outside world but cannot partake in it. An invisible wall keeps you in a different environment, one which may be comfortable and even lucrative, but does not speak to the desires of your heart.

I have been fortunate enough never to fall completely into the Trap, though God knows I came close more than once, and may yet do so -- as I said, you often never realize it's happening to you, present tense, until it has already happened, past tense. But I do have a "day job," and unlike my former day jobs in video games and the make up effects industry, it is one which requires more than my physical presence and some level of effort. This one has real stakes, meaning real consequences for failure.

As you may know if you've read this blog in the past, I worked in law enforcement from 1997 - 2004. When I hung up my spurs then, I thought it was for good, but the criminal justice world is surprisingly like the Mafia or the Irish Republican Army: once in, never out. And when I decided to shake the dust of Hollywood from my feet in 2020, I found myself employed, once more, by a district attorney's office, this time as an advocate for victims of crime. I had been publishing for four years by this time, and making an uneven flow of money, and winning the occasional award. I had not, however, reached anything like economic independence: I needed steady, full-time work, and as a middle aged man, I also needed reliable benefits. More than that, however, I needed to feel as if I were doing something truly substantive with my time. Something more meaningful and real than baking blobs of pink latex goo into masks for background actors on "The Walking Dead," or ADHD-style video game trailers for the latest iteration of "Call of Duty." So I threw my hat back into the criminal justice ring, and the rest of me with it.

Today is Monday, and I think it rather a typical one for a person in my line of work, both as an advocate and a writer. So without further blather, let me walk you through the last 24 hours of my life.

Sunday night found me banging away at these keys on SOMETHING EVIL, that epic horror novel I've been working on for six-plus years, which is now within just a few thousand words of completion. I have never had such an exhausting, drawn-out experience writing anything as I have on this book, and seeing the finish line approach was both a tease and a relief. I'm convinced every writer has at least one project like this, a nightmare first draft that won't end: well, whatever past-life sins I'm making up for ought to be expiated by this experience.

Because I'd skipped the gym that day, I took frequent breaks to do prison-style calisthenics: I clocked 200 push-ups alone before about ten o'clock. Unlike many writers, I make a concerted if sometimes failing effort to stay in shape, or at least to remain vigorously active, and so whenever I became too restless or unfocused, I started pushing. Last year I might have hit the bourbon to cure those feelings, but in 2023 alcohol is verboten in my home, because like most writers, I have a problem with alcohol, which is to say I have no problem drinking it to cure restlessness, quiet my nerves, mollify boredom, or create a certain mood or atmosphere in my mind.

However, because I didn't get in my cardio or get enough fresh air, I had trouble sleeping. A lot of trouble. My back was inexplicably sore, and I felt intimations of anxiety that never blossomed into a full-blown attack. Come morning I was tired enough to want to call in sick, but of course in the real world you can't do that, so up I went, knuckling the sleep I didn't get from my half-shut eyes.

I dress very formally for work. Today it was a silver-gray blazer with a purple-and-gold pocket square, a paper-stiff white shirt with a mauve tie, black belt, black trousers and black police shoes, topped off by a silver with an amber stone of blood-orange hue. For personal protection, not related directly to my work but rather to my neighborhood and the fact I am recognizably part of the apparatus of the criminal justice system, I sometimes carry a 9mm Walther P-1 in a shoulder holster, but the truth is that carrying guns is a pain in the ass, and so today I was most definitely unarmed. It was cold, so I pulled on a longish black leather coat, grabbed my leather briefcase, and went out the door.

The courthouse is just up the street from where I live. I was at my desk by eight, so for an hour I tried to get some idea of what the week was going to be like -- where I was supposed to be, when I was supposed to be there, what I was supposed to do. To reduce anxiety, I returned a series of calls left on my voice mail over the weekend. I hate doing this, because I never know what I'm getting into when I call these folks: it may be a pleasant and polite five minutes or an hour of shouting. At nine o'clock, however, I had to get up and go: I had to be at a district justice's office at ten, and it was 18 miles distant and slap-bang in the middle of cow country.

In the state in which I live, preliminary hearings in criminal cases are held at magesterial district justice's offices, and every county has a share of them. I am responsible for four. That is to say, every criminal case with a victim in those four jurisdictions belongs partially to me. I drive out, meet the victims, explain the process, and help translate the district attorney's legalese. If there is no D.A. present, I act as a buffer between the victim and the police officer on the case. A surprising number of cops, actually a majority, are quite good with victims, but police work is not always a profession that lends itself to tact and diplomacy.

Today was an easy one. We had no actual hearing. We managed to resolve the case without one. The defense attorney, prosecutor and myself sat in a conference room and worked out the problem among ourselves. There can be wild conflicts between defense and prosecution, just like on TV, but for the most part, some snarking and sniping aside, it's quite professional and businesslike, even friendly. We are players on different teams, in opposition but not necessarily enemies. I have passed many a dull hour in the middle of nowhere with good-natured public defenders, and even some private attorneys.

I drove back to the office. I distributed donuts I'd bought on the way. I don't eat donuts -- I can't hack the sugar rush, or more properly the sugar crash which follows -- but they bring joy to my much-tried coworkers. There is not one secretary, not one paralegal, not one victim-witness coordinator, county detective or attorney in the office who couldn't be making anywhere from 20% to three times the income in the private sector. They do what they do, by and large, because they believe in what they are doing. The quest for substance, for work of real meaning and value, is hardly unique to your humble correspondent: I see it mirrored in the faces of most of my co-workers every day, and this is not idealization. I am way past idealizing anyone. I'm just stating the facts.

Calls and e-mails had piled up, and one of the prosecutors ducked by to ask me when I'd be free to call a whole slew of victims about potential plea bargains in the works. I rummage my notebooks and give him an answer. It's sincere, but probably not true: making plans in our office is almost impossible. Things happen. We do not really control them.

I put in notes of various phone calls and hearings into my computer system. This is a tedious task because I have so many stacked up, and my handwriting is terrible, so translating it takes time, and I always end up feeling like I'm dictating a telegraph message circle 1888 ("JONES says she is OK with the offer 3 - 23 months in county plus costs and fines for the defendant SMITH provided he gets MH and D&A evals with followthrough on recommended TX plus a no contact order...."). While I do this, I take several calls, and have to make notes on them, too. I often discover, later on, that I was interrupted while making notes on Case Y and my paragraph stops in mid-sentence. Then I have to figure out what the hell I was going to say.

Lunch comes and goes. I have it at a bar restaurant down the street with a friend from college. I haven't eaten all day and my fork trembles on its way to my mouth. I can't really afford to eat lunches out like this, but my social life is on the critical list, and even this quick meeting pumps some new life into it. Before I know it I'm back in the office, but not back in my chair: a sudden, urgent request to observe a hearing and report its results to a faraway victim takes me upstairs into Courtroom "B". Of course nothing in court ever goes off on time, so I watch a sex offender get 20 years for hideous crimes, a drug dealer's case get continued for 30 days, a parole violator get remanded to county jail, a mouthy drunk driver nearly get held in contempt. It all sounds terrribly exciting, and sometimes the tension is indeed unbearable, but courtroom proceedings are slow, thorough, and deliberate, and it takes a great deal of patience to sit through them unless one has a personal interest. An advocate must balance their human feelings with the need to keep some level of professional distance. Sometimes this is impossible and we take the jobs home with us. A not guilty verdict in a rape case, a murder case that ends in a mistrial, a scheduled guilty plea in an aggravated assault case that is canceled at the last minute to the outrage of the victim, these things are hard to endure and harder to explain to those seeking justice or vengeance. I have broken out in goosebumps over glorious victories, and had to walk out of the building after crushing defeats, sometimes on the same day. It takes a toll. Every week is a check written against my goodwill, and some weeks the checks bounce. The account is overdrawn. It is for this reason that I have started to curb my drinking and up my exercise. Stress is a killer, but it kills slowly and silently, making us fat, making us drink too much, eat too much, sleep too little, until, bang, we drop in our tracks.

I'm back down to my desk by four. Make a call to the victim to report on her case. Talk with some co-workers about their cases. We advocates are constantly bouncing problems, small victories, chafing defeats, funny or moving stories, off each other, and I know that if I quit this job tomorrow what I will miss most is the M*A*S*H-like cameraderie of the trenches, the way we cover for each other, shore each other up when one of us is buckling, pitch in with advice or inappropriate jokes.

The assistant district attorney who wanted to make calls with me at three now appears at four-fifteen. He knows I'm supposed to knock off at four-thirty, but we have a whole slew of calls to make, and we won't want to do them tomorrow, either, and so dinner must wait. We talk to a half-dozen victims, touching base about fraud cases, assaults, dog bites, car accidents, this, that. I learned a long time ago never to minimize or trivialize a case's importance, because while a $50 theft may seem inconsequential to me who is assigned a half-dozen homicides at any given time, it may be the most important thing in the world to an elderly victim on a fixed income. So our approach is always the same. We always try to put the victim in the driver's seat, empower them, give them a real voice in our strategy. In the vast majority of instances it works. I have never been a people person, and nobody was more surprised than I at how diplomatic I can be, how patiently I can work through righteous anger or what I sometimes feel is petty entitlement, to find a relatively positive outcome to a bad situation. I take my losses of course, and sometimes I take them home...or to a bar to be drowned in High West whiskey on the rocks...but I try hard to fight the fights that need fighting and be content in that itself and not necessarily the outcome. In the end, most victims recognize when we -- detectives, prosecutors, advocates -- have kept faith with them even if we were unable to deliver the verdict they wished. A lot of people forget that Rocky Balboa lost the first fight with Apollo Creed, but the movie was never about winning. It was about victory, which is another thing entirely.

It's well after five before I get home. Pitch black Pennsylvania winter. Another advocate and I stop on the street to commiserate in the cold. Once again I feel that bond, that strength of comradeship which is different than conventional friendship, because it is born out of pressure: the brotherhood of the foxhole.

I'm damnably hungry, so I warm up the food I prepped Sunday night and chop a salad to go with it, pausing occasionally to slip treats to the cat, who also wants dinner. I eat in my undershirt, the thing I no longer call a "wife-beater" because of my job, while watching a television show. The show is about people vaguely like me, having vaguely similar experiences in a big city in Canada, and some folks I know wonder why I would choose this as my entertainment, since it's basically my life with better editing and a musical score. The truth is that stuff like this connects me with the reasons why I choose to do this five days a week, this exactly and not something else which would pay better and make me produce less cortisol. In the fictional adventures of Domenic Da Vinci, the coroner of Vancouver, I see myself, fumbling my way to better karma.

After dinner I realize I once again don't have time to get to the gym before it closes at nine, for I still have to get out my Monday blog, peruse that goddamn horror novel, check on the status of my online book tour, prep my alledgedly liver-cleansing breakfast shake of kale, kefir, and blueberries, prep my morning cup of Mudwatr, lay out an outfit for tomorrow, and get in a shit-ton of push-ups. Oh, and see if the artist I want to do the cover art for a novella of mine is interested. Oh, and check my e-mails about another book tour I'm trying to get from an English promotional service, since I have a surprising number of fans in Britain. Oh, and see what Novel News Network had to say about my latest novel, THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER. Holy shit, it's a good review:

"This book was way more than I was expecting.
I thought this was a great read that really encompasses so many different themes.
Overall I found it to have a great writing style that had such a great storyline. I flew through this story in one night; it is truly a remarkable book."

Trust me, not every reaction to my work is so effusive. This novel has been entered into no less than nine book awards competitions, and so far is 2 - 3. It truly is damned good, but being a sequel, is probably not as approachable to a cold reader as its predecessor would be. I recently had a dream in which a Hobbit -- yes, a Hobbit -- told me, "You're starting in the middle: that's no way to begin a journey!" Maybe he was talking about this. In any event, I wrote down his advice, because in addition to writing fiction, non-fiction and a weekly blog, I also keep a journal, and in that journal record my dreams.

So there you have it, really. It's now 9:45, and I keep remembering things I have to do, like shave, get in those push ups, read a little of "Chinese Diaries," and decide whether or not I need 1/2 a tramadol to actually get to sleep. I know I'll get to it all, but I'm damned if I know how. This is the life of an ordinary, working-poor writer with a day job...which is a little more than a day job. But a helluva lot less than a trap.