[1007] The Long Com

I want to explore what I mean when I say I want to experience “everything” by way of popular culture, TV, or more. This isn’t true, obviously, on its face. There are plenty of popular things that I have no interest in, but happen to catch because, maybe the mood is right, or I’m otherwise not focused enough to care what’s whizzing past my eyes or in the background. Over the last 5 hours, I’ve caught myself “holing out,” where I find myself falling down an infinite series of thoughts regarding actions I can take in service to this little “project” I’ve been engaging in; I’m building TV channels.

It’s another “weird” and “particular” thing that I’m doing that I can’t really discuss or share with anyone else. The closest analogues are going to be whatever Netflix cultivates for you, or your particular set of subscriptions on YouTube. Everything I’m using for my “channels” has been downloaded, renamed, shuffled about my hard drives, and been a kind of time investment that courts a confused dog head tilt. The “purpose” also feels terribly obscure until I get this contented feeling as my vision comes to life. Were I a programmer, I could probably build something to do what I’m doing by hand in a manner of moments. I’ve tried to find and pay for someone to do what I want for these channels in the past.

I’m organizing and ordering my shows to play in order and by how I conceive of them per my interest and emotional salience. Given there’s an incredible amount of TV, most of it is only going to resonate at the level of it’s structure. When an individual show sticks out, I get an opportunity to reflect on why. I’m searching for thought-provoking surprises and insight into myself. I just watched the first episodes of about 30 different shows over the last few days from I Love Lucy to the modern One Day At A Time. I went on ahead to complete One Day At A Time, as well I noticed Malcolm in the Middle stuck out to me.

Something is invariably lost in watching an older-than-you show. You can’t experience what audiences at the time did when something was “revolutionary” for its era. What you can do is gain insight into how long certain themes have been on people’s minds, and see how far we have or haven’t come in dealing with those issues. I don’t underestimate the impact of TV on its ability to mold minds, particularly with the current circus and psychosis we’ve been going through with fascism flirtation lately. I’ve listened to a number of Trump biographers and historians who are convinced without his TV shows, he never would have been president.

What resonates with me about any particular show? Is it familiar? Is it personal? I vibe with Bernie Mac and Malcolm because it feels more “real” than most shows. Ms. Pat is a modern analogue. One Day At A Time and pretty much every Norman Lear show aimed to have real discussions where a lot of artifice and cheese would otherwise dominate. We all want to bask in the glory of some lie or another, even if it’s that our preferred TV show is more or less “real” than the drama we experience in actual life. You don’t really find a tension-ridden, yet still happy and respectful conversation with fascists, no matter what the last episode of One Day At A Time suggests. It, like all TV, leaves you with a dream. They suggest you can always fade to black with an open-ended imagination and “perfect family” in tact without feeling the consequences of things going wrong or staying neglected.

Perhaps that speaks to my interest in TV broadly. The more debased and simple our media, the more we can surmise that the population lusting for it is basic and simple-minded. I can’t really stomach most of reality TV, and haven’t been able to since I was a child. My mother was almost obsessed with Anna Nicole-Smith. She liked 90210. She’s an absolute lunatic pushing 60, and was emotionally immature and abusive to me growing up. Does “dumb” TV “cause” that? Of course not. Could I design a test with better-than-average predictive capacity that assessed your TV watching habits and the health of your relationships? That’s something much further down my rabbit hole, but it’s not hard for me to imagine.

For a good portion of my life, I thought I only watched “good” things. You know, the preferences of a young boy with goofy comedies and action movies with the biggest stars. Subtitles? Miss me with that. Slow, conversational, or romantic things? Boring. You get older, and you realize more and more not just the appeal, but what each “weird” or “different” or “bad” movie is attempting to speak to. You find yourself drawn to rom-coms? Maybe there’s an immense loneliness. Or maybe there’s an intense childhood naivety that’s positively inflamed with each stoked memory of the beautiful faces tacked to the first time you saw them. Was your first crush Anna Chlumsky from My Girl, or one of Kevin’s girlfriends from The Wonder Years, or Topanga? Or were you not a straight white guy like me? [2022 gotta qualify everything!]

Now, I watch TV from an analysis and almost researching place. If I have no interest in The Flash, or the vast majority of what DC has ever produced, I want to figure out the qualitative difference for me and the culture at large why I’ll put up with the weaknesses and cringe moments of Agents of S.H.I.E.LD. but struggle, if not almost get angry, at any isolated 10 seconds of an Arrow or CW show broadly. A line from Bill Maher recently was about not forgetting, “We’re entertainers, and what we create needs to be entertaining,” (not a direct quote.) Your brain has been worked on a great deal to be persuaded that a certain style, format, word choice, and subject matter is entertaining. One way you can observe that is by watching TV that all “fits” in its genre or style across time. The Black family, Latino family, Asian family, white families, rich people, poor people, working-class people, gays, country folk, city folk, and even dinosaurs and aliens all speak the same language!

You get a Larry Sanders who breaks the 4^th wall and then you get to ask if it’s a case study in subversion or a meta-subversion of the impetus to think for yourself and individuate once more. Is any real insight or success built from an individuated voice? Is it just the dawning of familiar clothes and walking down familiar streets reminding us all that we’ve been here before, will be here again, and don’t need to worry about ever moving or changing into something new or unfamiliar?

There are “individual” voices. People stick out from the baseline, and they get famous or infamous. I’m a fucking individual, whether I can chuckle at an array of sitcoms or not, and whether I occupy a dozen cliché boxes about men or otherwise. I think it’s often read into a certain kind of dignity and obligation when one invokes the “individual.” Individuals are supposed to be “aware” and “real” and it’s the individual who will recycle and sacrifice their comfort or benefits of joining the herd to stand for a beleaguered minority opinion. Being an individual has no inherent dignity in and of itself. See: Kanye West.

Marc Maron, Al Jackson, Bert Kreisher, Kyle Kinane, Jessica Kirson, and others are individuals who have provided me pain-inducing laughter. Are they not popular or good at what they do by tapping into universally-relatable themes? Are they not mining the stories from their lives and shaping them around comedic timing and language? I barely, if ever, remember what any given comedian was actually talking about, no matter how much they’ve made me laugh. I’m immersed in how they’re telling it. I notice the difference in how Bert Kreisher tells a story from the first time I heard it, to the 100^th time he has to perform it, and how it does or doesn’t make me feel each time I hear it.

We know internally that a certain pacing, structure, predictability, and familiarity sell. It’s why we buy tickets and subscribe. It’s why we find ourselves perpetually frustrated when “I thought!...” doesn’t match up with reality. Our thoughts are continually subverted by different narrative structures ever-aligned with what’s most entertaining. You get generational trauma from habituated denial and abuses going unaccounted for. You get generational stupidity from the habitual subversion of any accountable and meaningful engagement with the information patternizing your mind.

I’ve drifted a bit away from the exploration of the hole I find myself in. What does it serve me to develop a “deeper” and “more comprehensive” opinion of media across ages? Why occupy my “idle” time with The Golden Girls and not another phone call looking for a referral for my new business? It’s not an either/or and is a different class of ways to engage my time, but another way of phrasing it might be, aren’t there considerably more useful ways to exercise my time? Doesn’t my business mean more to me than seeing what generic caricatures are arguing about?

I’m someone who recognizes how little interest he has in TV the moment there’s anyone to do something actually real with. What I seem to discover over most minutes of most days is that those opportunities don’t exist that often for me. What’s “actually real” mean? Exchange with other conscious entities. Whether it’s conversation, dinner, traveling, or vibing to the same tunes. When you don’t have that, or you don’t recognize the quality of it, I think the TV characters take on a new perverse kind of meaning. They are where you find a happy home. They are where you find a reliable and consistent setting. They are where you find trust, growth, resolution, and predictability that is otherwise never on offer unless you’re courting familiar misery.

I don’t watch TV while you’re sitting next to me unless I’m trying to introduce you to something I find compelling; unless I’m trying to share something. Why I’m sharing it is most often to see if you’ll laugh too or have something interesting to say about how the drama is portrayed. My TV-watching habit may have started as an OCD accounting for things I enjoyed when I was younger or desire to claim more of that “everythingness” I’m after, but it’s turned into this preoccupation with trying to “connect” with people in the only way on offer. I can’t pretend to care about my regional sports team to the extent people do, but the disconnect and superficiality is deadened when it comes to shows we may have both seen. It was good, wasn’t it? Like that throw to 1^st base…or that comment from the new demagogue.

I think creators need to bear in mind the contexts on both sides of their own mind. “You,” eager to breakout and make a name for yourself, and “you” modeled around your heroes and cliches of your preferred mediums. What do “I” ever want to say? I’m mostly discovering that with each new thing I write, after whatever I’ve watched pushes me to do so. I have ever-vague, until the decision needs to be made, concepts of what I value and think I/we need to survive. So I watch TV indefinitely until you call me to do literally anything else. I know, through examining my own circumstances, that you aren’t feeling like you’re doing anything particularly more or less “meaningful” than me, or your version of watching TV, so you feel like there’s nothing to exchange. Like there’s nothing to protect or insulate from the influence of our different contexts. I think this is an ongoing torture and tragedy of what it means both to us as individuals and our potential relationship. Our obligation to use our voice is indefinitely sublimated.

In fact, this blog is what I want from all of my TV watching. I want to find what moves me out or away from the task of building a 150-show channel and spending money and time looking for programmers so I can keep a running dialogue of family-friendly and network-approved ways to not-discuss things in my head. Why do I need their jokes? I’m not hearing any of yours. Why do I need their drama? They engage and resolve it in a way you don’t and seemingly never will. Why do I need their structure? We’re not building anything together. Why do I need their family? You want nothing to do with me, as such. My character needs to fit into a narrative you can stomach and summarize. That I’m still being written, and doing the writing, doesn’t work because it naturally obligates you to do the same. You might whisper that obligation to yourself in private, and then proceed to never do so, so then it’s any wonder why I’m able to conjure so much resentment and silence.

A TV character is always going to have the right thing to say. Right for them. Right for the era. Right for the family dynamic. An arc begets an inevitable conclusion. We don’t engage the consequences of an abstract “perpetual conclusion” we’re living within. This moment is that conclusion where you take responsibility and obligate yourself to a purposeful engagement with the world, other conscious beings, or not. This moment you seek inspiration, or you don’t. This moment you’re living in service to your highest ideals, or you’re at the mercy of the neglected end of so many consequences. Evidence of your awareness of this moment is in the utilization of your speech. When you don’t speak at all, you conscript us to death. Perhaps the most sincere and impactful TV producers recognize their feeble attempts to communicate this in any other manner than the familiar formats so practicality requires acquiescence.

Perhaps, whether it’s the cheesiest TV show or the most convoluted yet on-point philosophical digression, the question of what drove it to exist and the impetus to understand it for how it impacts the culture or individual remains the same. I don’t think you can understand either unless you understand both. How does your individual move and orient in the world? What is that individual over there attempting to move you or orient you around instead? Are you or they malicious, ignorant, or both? Are you or they consistent, and in what? Will you allow a de facto ignorance to let you off the hook for taking more responsibility, using your voice, or seeing clearly the mess you’re making?

I’m not going to find “me” or “my personality” in a TV show. I’m not going to join the family. I’m not going to let myself off the hook of building what I know I need or speaking to what I think is missing. I need accountable individuals speaking to how they’ve brought themselves a little bit more stability, predictability, trust, and meaning into their day. Where do you think I’ll find that?

 

[968] Glass Aye

 Awareness builds.

I was thinking again about Waking Life and the first time I saw it. I was struggling for a way to orient my perception. The movie clued me into something I couldn’t yet articulate. It was thoughtful, but with an ease. I knew it had hooked me and I knew I’d be watching it again and again like a toddler forming the anticipatory framework in rewatches of its favorite Disney movie. I still think about the movie fairly often. It’s why it’s my favorite movie. It lives in me. It helps transform who I am in an active way. It can be relied upon like a friend to offer the words in a way only they can.

I consider myself a function of the different things I’ve become aware of. When I was a mess of uncontrollable feelings, I learned how to describe those feelings in a manner that allowed for more control over time. The more I dictated, the more I could direct. When I felt at the mercy of butterflies and anxiety, I dug through history and philosophy and so depersonalized “my” problem that it transformed into a mere thing to be dealt with like any other. I discovered intentionality.

This is different from “choosing not to feel.” I felt. I felt deep, but I was able to identify the compelling feeling as a complex mix of bad and good. Bad, in that it was desperate, compulsive, and depressed. Good in that it seemed to motivate and invigorate in a manner I suspect is not unlike methamphetamine. I didn’t “get better” at my feelings until I acknowledged, until I learned, how to give them the credit for how complicated they were. I had to nod to the contradictions. I had to track what they were tangibly netting me.

People don’t do this. If they’re lucky, they get old enough to get too tired to fight against what might be their “hidden” inclinations otherwise. Liberated old ladies or people who’ve had serious health scares carry a similar air. It’s like the veil is lifted and it’s easier to prioritize and assert who they are and what they want. I think no matter who you are, it’s work. You don’t pursue healthier relationships, leave religion, or stand up to any prevailing opinion or crowd unless you’ve first decided there’s work worth doing. You only have so many mental and physical resources, and overwhelmingly people seem to decide it’s not worth spending them going against the tide.

Well, unfortunately, we’re modern. We have instant communication. We have individuated algorithm means by which to isolate and embolden opinions. We have the most significant gap in wealth distribution since there’s been people, and those in power do literally everything in their power to instantiate “business as usual.” Whether it’s actual business in keeping the cash flowing, or psychological conditioning in keeping you too busy, angry, or exhausted to volunteer for some of the most distasteful work there is.

Is that speculation? Am I being hyperbolic? I think I’m just aware of things like January 6th and Trump. I think I listen to the capitalistic reasoning for destroying the planet and endless greed in my Nazi Senators’ facebook posts. I think I watch the word-for-word thought soup and salad spew out of the entitled and incensed when presented with the opportunity to work against their indoctrination. We’re just running the same story with more dangerous weapons and catastrophic means of communication.

Most often, when someone is telling me a story, it’s a pretty dramatic one. They’re experiencing relationship drama, they’re sick, their job is every level of exploitative and doesn’t pay enough, or the most recent article they’ve read about gas or the environment or the economy portends imminent calamity. They’ll trot back to work, pop on Netflix, and plan their next vacation, but boy oh boy, don’t you know the end is nigh? Don’t you know that “life” is always happening and we’re helpless to do anything about it? We can’t even leave the house without encountering a sign that questions the merits of how we define gender! What is the world coming to? Has anyone ever been so harmed?

Ignorance destroys.

Ignorance, deliberate or otherwise, destroys life. You eat the poison mushroom and die. You burn the witch. You turn off that damn science program because The Big Bang is an atheist plot to send you to hell! Ignorance destroys relationships, the concept of a family, and any dreamy future envisioned by sci-fi. It’s not hard to spot. It reflexively shuts things down. It doesn’t push a conversation to a later day, it denies there’s anything to be acknowledged altogether. This is how people “snap” or sometimes emotionally breakdown into places from which they can’t recover.

Ignorance is so good at its job, it’s a law of physics. Entropy. You can justify being ignorant your whole life, and on balance, you’re nothing but a universal dictum and destiny for every one of our particles. Isn’t that neat? You can smear shit on the walls of Congress, shoot at Muslim boogeymen in the woods, and tell Jesus you really didn’t mean those thoughts you had about your teenage daughter’s friends, and it will all devolve into so much dust. In the meantime, you keep your community, your “strong opinions” and sense of self. Your brain, by itself, can’t tell the difference between the pageantry and the life. It’s just there to fuck bitches and form patterns, and it’s probably out of bitches.

What’s the value of being aware? You’ve climbed the mountain, you’re wise enough to know you know nothing. Okay. So now what? You’re still labeled by all of the in-groups and not allowed to enter. Your individuated dreams may not comport with your physical location opportunities. Hey, wait. I just equated becoming aware to becoming an individual. That’s probably not a correct thing to do. For surely, if you’re aware, you’re keen to observe the constitutive parts of your being. Aren’t I frequently attesting to merely passing along ideas of those much smarter than me? Aren’t “my” values ones demonstrated for me?

Let’s make it worse. Groups of ignorant fucks build all sorts of things. They make things to worship. They make laws. They make endless streams of propaganda. They make a fuck load of money. I’d argue this is the wrong layer of analysis to claim they’re building or making anything but the bed we all get to die in, but if you need fast and dirty practical analysis fodder, they’re offering it through a firehose.

Maybe your awareness allows you the ability to manipulate and navigate the muck above. Feels a little cheap and like a waste of your potential though. Gaining awareness bestows upon you potential. Why waste it on the mercy of the crazies? Why obtain potential at all? We can keep getting abstract, or we can pretend we’re embodied and have things or people in our lives that mean something to us. We don’t have to know why they mean anything; we just have to be aware that they do. It’s the only way things can make sense.

Do you want to destroy your family? Most people might reflexively reel at the question and say, “No!” A savvy pollster would recognize a few problems in the phrasing. A person perpetually open to analyzing word choices and underlying motivations or primed thinking can’t take the question or answer seriously on their face. Some people think their family will be destroyed, even go to hell, by accepting a gay family member. Some people think their family will be destroyed by a Russian bomb aimed at a hospital they’re hiding in.

I still don’t think I’ve answered the reason or value of awareness. At least for me, it plagues my thought. I’m always in a form of doubt. It’s like a low hum tummy tinnitus. “Hmmmmmm, maybe.” Maybe she “loves” me, maybe I’m “smart” enough to pull something off, maybe you appreciate I “give a shit” or am a “hard worker.” Wouldn’t it be nice if it were true? But my goddamn awareness and “individual” perception won’t let me take the win. I don’t believe anything; I’m constantly weighing everything.

But, that isn’t entirely true. Mostly because I don’t have a good concept of the word “belief.” I feel or see the consequences of what people do in my life. I don’t “believe” my dad loves me. I’ve watched him respond in supportive and caring ways to literally everything I’ve ever said or done in life. Belief doesn’t factor into it. Dude demonstrates and does the work as dad. Friends inconvenience and sacrifice for one another. Byron, Hussain, and Corbin have all lent me cars. I think people do what they believe or they don’t really believe it. I know I’d reflexively be keen to be, not-quote/unquoted, friends with people I haven’t talked to in years. I believe nothing that’s transpired conversationally rises to the level of disownment. I still think I’ll be relevant again one day when the kids are grown and the divorces kick off.

As such, I feel and see the things I work on and embody. I ride few highs like when I’m collecting bricks or pallets. I wanna learn how to make shitty wood look cool or become useful? I have it! I can go do that right the fuck now. I can make the things I’ve written or said out loud dozens of times real. I can manifest. I can celebrate that my muscles still work and that I’m young and healthy enough to take this impossible to understand existence and build something from it. More than “something,” but something meaningful. Something that stands as a demonstration of my values.

So much of that story is filled in before we ever get here. You need to love Jesus! You need to love your family! In spite of abuses and contradictions! It doesn’t matter how you actually feel, play the goddamn part! Get your education! Get a job! Vote Republican! Defend your nation! Buy fucking everything! Meet the standard that exists for reasons no one can remember, but we’ll be damned if your hair is long or you’re pierced and tattooed! Don’t fuck anything that isn’t your wife and she better be a girl!

And it’s not all bad, because you get fed, and you do learn things, and some of the values actually translate into healthy ways of living. You have a considerably small incentive to rock the boat, particularly if you’re not trained to look for what’s meaningful to you. Isn’t it obvious? Continuing to eat! Continuing to garner the love and connection from your peers and family. What the fuck kind of question is that to go looking for what’s meaningful? You’re just trying to antagonize and stir the pot!

What if your awareness builds to the point that you find it incredibly meaningful that as many of us survive and survive objectively well for as long as possible? Well, fuck. Now you have to find a way to incorporate the crazy. You have to work within the absurdist nightmare of the consequences of fundamentalism and pure deadly irrationality. Fun… You have to “fix your face” when you engage with harrowing abusive or neglectful tales that literally cannot be made up and you will never see dramatized on TV. You’ll have to take all of the tools you utilized to pull yourself just a hair over the fog and see if they can be configured in a way to appeal to a crowd viciously addicted to smoking.

And today, you have to do it in competition with literally anything that might go viral or a power broker who can silence you for any reason. You’re up against the evangelicals, monopolies, bored money, your own ignorance, instantiated power, and bad luck. Your awareness bringing you any peace in that moment? You feel like a super hero yet? It mostly feels like a torture and taunt. “Good luck, fuckboi!” Jaunty condescension wins the day and insecurities stay safely buried.

Still, something deep echoes. In my basest conception of myself, as one among and apart of all, I know I cause ripples. I know I want those ripples to come from coherent, rounded, invested and accountable thoughts. I haven’t yet found a word to replace “selfish” in how I think about this. I just say the good and bad kinds of selfish. I think I’m an incredibly good kind of selfish in attempting to genuinely help people with the tools I’ve used to help myself. Whether that’s a literal physical tool I can lend you, or my healthy productive body, or the words I’ve used to find peace for my gut and head.

I’m old enough to see how my ripples have played out, whether in shitty things like incensing the wrong cunts in power or in building new, less dramatized, friendships after gaining a broader awareness of what I got confused about previous ones. I retain every piece of the puzzle that got me so far completed. I be ratchet. I can be case manager. I can be sadist. I can be not-doctor indefinite open ear. I work to be in a mode of learning, trying, and experimenting. I practice honesty and writing. I show up and do many things I don’t want to do because I’m aware of how they speak to what’s actually meaningful.

How would you trust yourself to land on or stick with a “meaningful” thing? What if you thought your kids were gonna do it for you and they don’t? What if you’ve invested decades of your life with an ill-suited partner? What if you’re mentally or physically unable to pursue whatever it was anymore? What if it changes over time, as it almost inevitably will? Was the effort worth it? If I had to sell everything on the land, did I just waste my time if I have to “start over” somewhere else? You probably don’t know what’s meaningful if that’s your mindset. I wouldn’t trade the things I’ve learned and become as a result of moving out here for anything. I shaped my environment and it shapes me in return, if I let it.

I learn pretty regularly how unwilling people are to let me shape them lol. I’m just another person in their environment, after all. Not a particularly important one or with any special insight into their lives or thought processes. It’s not like I have a kitschy book or catchphrase bolstering my bid for your attention or vote. I’m no more aware of what you “really need” than you are. I only know what gets my blood pumping. I only know the infinite well of motivation or direction I draw from as I do the work to account for my experience. I only know the glory in reveling in the completion of labor for the highest ideals. Popsicles and ice cream tastes different after yard work and hauling things.

I may be stuck in the present, but I live in the future. I have dozens of woodworking projects in a truck parked on my land right now, and dozens more I’ll be retrieving tomorrow. I have tools and intention. I have working limbs and a healthy-enough brain. Before I had the pieces, I had the blogs telling you what I was after, and before those I had all of the other things I built or was trying to build. I want your individuated awareness because it is an infinite sea from which nothing I could predict or do can build. I can’t write the song on your heart. I can’t love the way you can. I can’t work out what you find meaningful. I can’t train your patience or bravery. I, good kind of selfishly, want everything you can be and for you to know how much power is really there. It’s more powerful than a god or shitty abusive family members. It’s considerably more powerful than your opinionated friends. But it’s a lot of work, perhaps an infinite amount, in order to inform the entropy how you’re going to breakdown.

[691] The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers

Let's channel my inner 12 year old and start with the basic question. What makes something “unique?”

When we go to our smallest scales we can differentiate atoms. We break those up into even smaller particles and start describing forces mostly understood in theoretical terms and quantum fluctuations. In going the other direction, I initially thought of an ocean. A collection of those particulars filling up a hole to create a distinct ecosystem. What's unique about one or the other spans endless fluctuating categories.
 

Every time you try to discuss the “thing-ness” of an object, or body of water, or person, you're going to run into the same problem. I know it's a thought experiment that's been done a thousand times, but not by me. Am I my hand? Am I me without my hand? If I experience phantom limb pain, my nervous system is registering real pain in a part of me that's gone. Am I now merely a memory of pain? Is it possible to be both the memory and the experiencer of the memory at the same time?

What we might intuitively understand as unique is hidden in the last paragraph. I chose to run a tired experiment and potential chain of questions again. Stated differently, the idea that there was some reason or insight to be gained in doing so occurred to me. If there can be infinite versions, infinite pieces of the words and pixels and potential paths for the thought to have traveled as my brain lit up, this one now uniquely exists among them. It's there insofar as I, or you, are able to perceive it.

There was a point in which I had seen every Netflix show. Overnight, it seems, Netflix exploded into hundreds of new avenues I likely won't keep up with. It started as this unique and different take on how to approach and distribute media. It's now a sea of “content” competing for as many “unique” views as any major player ever has. It's introduced more voices that “the mainstream” probably isn't familiar with including ethnically diverse comedians and original anime series. Over time, Netflix retains it's unique place as the best example of “what it's doing” even if what it has become resembles a mindless flood plain of millennial baiting inclusiveness. It set the pace for other big media players to copy.

There's the cynic in me that is frequently disappointed when I think I can see the calculation under why something grows or gets popular. An “alarm bell,” if you will, was hearing that Adam Sandler was contracted to put out 4 movies exclusively on Netflix. In a second, Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, and Waterboy were reduced to “Those approaching or just breaching middle-age irrationally love this guy!” What made watching those movies enjoyable, be it a combination of youth alongside what makes Adam Sandler unique, became washed away by the “comedy sea” that every platform knows it needs to stick its feet in. You hope the actors they enlist still believe in what they're doing and are working from the place that was born for the stage and screen, but then as each new thing they create comes out, you try to ignore how it makes you feel like you've died a little for having watched it.

I talked about my “taste” in the past and being mostly disinterested with most things media, music, or food related. I think the walls that established those tastes were, in part, breached because it just became so easy to engage with everything. There was no pilgrimage to the movie store and debate with the family about what to pick. You tried something new by chance or got the chance to be pleasantly surprised when your first choice was gone. You got to build up anticipation in a way only Marvel and Star Wars movies announced years in advance manage to conjure today.

Your unique relationship to the story, to the actor, had it's own story as well. American Pie, for me, wasn't an “immature college sex movie in a series of 15 with the American Pie brand.” It was this ultra taboo media circus I only got to watch at a friend's house whose mom didn't know mine had prohibited me. You talk to someone today about the pie fucking scene and they'll show you a Youtube video of a guy who's fucked 100 pies for the “pie fucking challenge” and has no idea who Jason Biggs is.

Am I trying to romanticize pie fucking? Is this my version of back-in-the-old-days syndrome? It's more that the movie, and that scene, transcended their unique root and became not just a personal story of mine but embedded in the culture in ways younger people have no grasp of. While there are plenty of references to the first white and black kiss onscreen still happening today, the uniqueness is born from the story around it, not because we generally find kissing anymore ostentatious than a kid who grew up watching beheading videos is going to care about pie fucking.

There seems to be a danger of being washed away by the sea. Is Black Panther “ZOMG THE MOST AMAZING THING JESUS CHRIST THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A BETTER MOVIE!?” Or is white guilt desperately trying to avoid its apprehensions regarding racism? Both Get Out and Black Panther were great, but might not single-handedly reshape race relations or define new genres. The story of why we need more representation seems individually lost to the sea of praise and we're quick to establish new tokens of “wokeness.” Kendrick Lamar doesn't stop my black DCS worker roommate from getting asked if he's looking for the child support office when he's there to meet with the head of the department about a case.

Sometimes I'm flabbergasted when I learn someone is paid an exorbitant amount and getting interviewed for their views against something like “the while male savior narrative.” They teach at an expensive school, they consult on movies and books. But in the modern era where messages go viral and influence in ways we can't begin to comprehend, I get why so many are obsessed with narrative. A voice that's “living it” or “doing things” that you had to engage with while developing your own has all been reduced to arbitrary “influence peddlers” who respond to surveys and weak temperature gauging of the cultural climate. “He has over a million followers!” No, not really. He's triggered the “follow” button for a moment from both child and bot alike and has cultivated “his voice” to rise towards the upper end of a system.

I worry that voices and influences I used to shape who I was are all fated to become mockeries and propaganda. People aren't brands. “Rebooting” a TV show is simply zombie-fying something that had reasons for its death. The voice that was doing things, speaking to something, relevant and important to consider in the future, died. So you have to create something new. You have to incorporate and move on. You have to find a new way to live the lesson or tell the story, or you don't really have a reason to exist. You're a phantom pain in a limb your remembering brain can't control. And that's only if you can bother to give your brain a reason to remember.

How you work is unique. It's how I watch “everything” and attempt to relate it to you and back to myself, not “that” I've seen everything in a series or under a brand. The cycle between my saddest soul-crushing blogs and acutely aware or attempting insight pieces is the unique story, because each one only dies or is put to work in service to the next one. Unique is a process, and as a process it takes energy, and in order for that energy to not explode or dissipate it takes a perspective relative to all else. That's what I want to see captured. That's the tool I want to work with on the next thing. That's the only energy truly mine to give or take while every other endless force tries to turn me into something else.

So is your work of the kind only you can do? Is your struggle one worth preserving and passing down? I think it's much easier to conceive of our uniqueness in our capacity to suffer alone than it is to praise what we know we're capable of creating. At least, I know I never stop bitching no matter how good I have it, and I suppose if I stopped, it'd truly be the death of me.