This morning the cyberverse was awash with Valentine’s Day themed images and I couldn’t help but notice that several demographics weren’t being represented in the slightest. The Hallmark Holiday seems to primarily celebrate a very middle of the road sort of romance and that’s very boring. So, in the hopes of helping some of the overlooked lovers out there, I hurried over to my pens to make a few cards.
Hopefully Hallmark already has you covered. Happy Valentine’s Day.
As an adult your opportunities to participate in sleepovers diminish slowly over time. I am not sure if it has something to do with an unwillingness to sleep anywhere other than your own bed or if other people just don’t want to wake and feel obligated to make you eggs. It certainly seems that you lose friendships as you get older. Maybe we just become less interested in other people and youthful antics as we march toward that lonesome grave. Be that as it may, I found myself having a sleep over at Thom and Kiri’s place in Brooklyn over the weekend and it was all very highbrow. The initial plan was to work on a podcast and get a little writing done but it quickly derailed into dinner and discourse. We had drinks, talked religion, examined the economy, and discussed whether my native soil (America) or theirs (Australia) had a more backward and mentally crippled population. I believe we settled on it being a draw before I settled into their brand new couch for the night, surprised that it smelled like fresh linen instead of a textile plant. The sounds of the bar downstairs served as a strange form of white noise and faded away as I did.
I awoke from a night of mild substance abuse to what I believed to be the sounds of an old person choking to death. Then, as full control over my mind returned, I realized that the light outside was just starting to change and I second guessed it as some nearby couple’s morning intercourse. But something about the noise still didn’t sound quite right. Before I could sort it out, the loudest, most obnoxious, stupid goddamn pigeon in the entire world blasted itself against the window nearest to my head. The culprit behind the mystery noise had made himself known and he was about to work himself up into a cooing frenzy. While it isn’t as if birds know about sleeping in on Sundays, you would still not expect them to beat the sunrise just to make a bunch of loud sounds on windowsills. It didn’t even seem to offer him any logistical advantage, because there were no other birds around for over an hour. Why would any other bird even care that you were the very first one singing? No woman bird is going to be impressed that you woke up extra early and made a bunch of noise. They want you to fluff your feathers up the most, stand up the tallest, and do the right sort of twirling moves so you can separate them from the rest of the males (I looked it up).
Anyway, I genuinely hated this bird but not enough to do anything about it. I even had a moment where I almost felt sorry for him because he was desperately looking for a mate and no one seemed to want him. Then, just as my pity began to crescendo, a bunch of other pigeons showed up and starting fighting before a girl bird finally gave it up to him. I’ve often wondered what a bird penis looked like but there were no answers to be found in their brief copulation. I had a front row seat and it basically looked like he sat on her back and stopped making noise for a few seconds. It was in that moment that I wished there was some nosy neighbor that could have gotten a photo of me looking out the window into the empty gray lust of two pigeons. I have said this repeatedly but I really should hire a photographer to just follow me around.
When my hosts awakened, the birds had parted ways and I was scribbling nonsense into a black notebook. They fed me for the second time and we chatted over coffee. Their plan was to go to a second hand store and bring back furniture for their new place. Curious about it, I invited myself along. When we arrived the place was so full of treasures and junk that it was almost impossible to navigate. Getting items out to examine or purchase often required multiple sets of hands and a bit of faith that the entire building wouldn’t collapse under the weight of its many wonders. It had everything from Nazi daggers and early radios to busted tables, old toys, and Cadillac hubcaps from 1975. I found a book of modeling proofs from 2001 sitting on a pile of broken VHS tapes and wondered if that girl ever achieved her dream as I squeezed through the aisles. Then Thom excitedly grabbed a grotesque plastic statue of James Brown that we believed would sing and dance if you put batteries into it. The Russian woman at the desk knew the price of every table and chair we dug out but not the value of this tribute to the Godfather of Soul. The following minutes were essentially people in different accents asking how much this thing was going to be sold for. The Russian went and got a not quite middle-aged Jewish man that confessed that he believed James Brown would never ever sell. Presumably the owner, he yelled around to get the lady who brought it in to make an appearance. This woman, an over-weight Jamaican, said she wouldn’t let it go for less than seventy-five dollars and followed up with a claim that she had purchased it for three-hundred herself.
The store’s owner rolled his eyes and spoke up, “They aren’t buying this for that price.”
“Then they aren’t buying it.” She responded.
They both turned out to be right.
A little bit of manual labor later, we had pulled several chairs, a desk, a table, and a mirror down from the top floor. Getting it all back into their apartment proved to be more difficult than originally anticipated, so I took the first load and headed for the train so that they might make extra room for the second. During my transit, I doodled some crude looking birds having sex and made notes. Then I took a moment to ponder the meaning of friendship. The people in our lives that mean the most to us rarely bother with the passing of judgements or advice giving. Instead, they stand with you through hardships and allow you to share a moment in their life from time to time. We don’t require more than that. And when you find yourself liking a person without needing anything from them, it can feel like you’ve known them forever.
If you know someone like this I strongly urge you to spend a Saturday night or Sunday morning with them.
Sometimes it feels like there is a hole in my head and every good thought or feeling that I ever had has escaped into space. The best of me has leaked out and been replaced with a humorless mist and the kind of ghosts that whisper everything but encouragement. I wander around blind and empty with no positivity whatsoever. Reminding myself that this is not a unique moment in human history, I press on.
Most people have secret sorrows that they refuse to share with the rest of the world, and we call them cold or angry when they are only sad. When someone is sad, truly sad, you are at a loss on how to reach them. And, when you are that unreachable person, you feel exactly the same about them. Like a dog shot into space, we are often unable to comprehend or express the full extent of what is happening to us. However, you can rest assured, that someone has felt it before. You might never meet them but they are out there and managed to persevere. It doesn’t matter if you are scared, lonely, deceived by a friend, or just realized that you will never be with that person you truly love. You can find a way to continue on. 
The hardest thing about having a dream is living with whatever happens to you when it dies.
In prehistoric times the thing that made a woman the most desirable to the rest of her pack was having both arms. Things like sharp teeth and having no diseases were just perks back then. If you were some archaic human female spending her days trying to pull all the skin off a mammoth carcass, had most of your teeth, functional reproductive organs, and could start a fire without help, then you were probably the sexiest woman on the planet. Every man in your tribe would show up in front of your cave with a cup of dinosaur milk and a sharpened rock in the hopes that it might be enough to gain your favor.
Fast forward into modernity and the dinosaur milk has dried up. Everyone is arguing about body shape and what not to wear. There are campaigns endorsing fatness and abhorring skinniness where people make outrageous claims like “Real Women Have Curves.” I’m going to let you and the rest of society in on a secret, real women have vaginas. In fact, that is the number one prerequisite in being considered a person of the female persuasion. It’s not the shape of your hips or the size of your rump, it’s the fact that I can’t find a penis anywhere on your body.
If you’d like to have the discussion on what’s attractive, however, that can be arranged. I’m not an expert on women’s fashion or style but I am a man that has scowled at a lot of magazine articles and television shows on those topics. I am also a person that has been sexually attracted to women for a while and have come to a few conclusions. All of this time spent teeth whitening, eyelash extending, hair relaxing, ass bleaching, and skin softening doesn’t need the additional pressure of thin and fat people arguing about who is “truly beautiful.” Chances are that everyone probably already feels uglier than they want to be while most other people feel they look absolutely fine.
When I’m walking down the street, I don’t take my time to analyze how each individual person could look better. That would would be the saddest and craziest way an individual could spend their time, so I will leave it to all of the people working in the fashion industry. For me, it takes a verbal interaction or a minimum of thirty-seconds of similarly occupied space before I bother to analyze someone’s appearance. When I first look at a woman my only goal is to assess the initial feeling I get from them. Do they seem healthy? Does their unique style appeal to me? Are they making vaguely human faces in response to things said? What’s their voice like? Truth be told, I actually do this with both genders despite my sexual orientation. Basically, I am taking a mental snapshot to file away for later use. As long as I didn’t file them under “impossible to look at without laughing or cringing” I’ll probably be willing to interact with them again.
Honestly, taking the time to judge someone’s physical appearance is sort of pointless anyway. Almost any dog of a woman can look good if makeup is applied correctly. After dating beauty-conscious women for a while you start to realize that “putting on their face” is not a misnomer. Some women don’t even look like the same person without makeup. While I love red lips and 80s blush, I am aware that real people don’t look like that naturally. Frankly, I’m much more interested in a woman’s scent and chemical makeup than I am in her looks. If she is funny, interesting, intelligent, and a little weird, that smell is going to seal the deal.
As for body shape, everyone has a preference and nobody’s preference is the same. Whatever body type you currently are, just be a healthier version. Other than that, you can ignore whatever social and media pressures are out there. Imagine, for a moment, any celebrity (male or female) and how the media would react if they gained weight, lost weight, appeared in public without makeup, or acted human at all. You probably don’t have to because you already have dozens of cruel examples queued up in your head. You know that you’re damned either way. Thin women don’t need to “eat something, girl” unless they are suffering from anorexia. Likewise, someone who is a few pounds overweight already probably knows it and isn’t in any extreme danger.
While we are on the topic of women’s bodies, I would also like to see a lot less confusing anger coming from people who are getting compliments. The she-was-asking-for-it argument should never ever work in cases of truly disrespectful behavior. However, when a person compliments you on an outfit custom-picked to get a response, you forfeit the justification to berate them publicly. There is a big difference between wearing a nice dress and having ten construction workers tell you they want to suck your fingers and wearing a provocative outfit and having one co-worker tell you that you looked nice today. One of those events deserves some serious online venting, while the other does not.
Possibly the strangest example I’ve seen lately was an article documenting “the creepiest things” said to women while cosplaying. While many of the examples were extremely forward and utterly tasteless, many were pretty tame and kind of sad:
“Can I take my shirt off in the picture with you?”
“Are you married?”
“I can’t believe I’m really meeting you.”
Keep in mind that the majority of these women are dressed in outfits identical to the costumes worn by characters that have served as a sexual fantasy for millions of socially awkward males for decades. While that doesn’t forgive creepy behavior, it might help explain it. Imagine being sexually attracted to Batgirl for the last twenty years. Now imagine that every girl you’ve ever liked has snubbed you and you suddenly arrive at a place where Batgirl is everywhere you look and letting other gentlemen take photos with her. You had better believe that in your lifetime of being inept at talking to women, things aren’t about to change now. In fact, the added pressure of a particular Batgirl showing bare legs and midriff (despite that never happening in the comics), you might even say what you are thinking. And that thing might be “I can’t believe I’m meeting you” or it might be “I want to keep you tied up in my basement.” The point is, someone is going to complain about it either way.
There is a weird double standard in society that needs women to look sexy and to ensure that nobody ever addresses it. It expects them to be perpetually young and tells them that they need to be curvaceous if they are thin, slim if they are voluptuous, white if they are black, tan if they are pale, sultry if they are reserved, prudish if they are alluring, and a million of other ridiculous contradictions. While this probably helps sell a lot of beauty products, it might not be particularly helpful for anyone’s mental health. Two-hundred pound skinny black girls with porcelain skin that dress like librarian hookers can’t possibly exist. Most men don’t want women to be subjected to this and all they are really looking for is a healthy looking best friend that is willing to sleep with them.
It’s honestly sort of strange how much time we spend talking about women’s bodies. We know they have infinitely more to offer and we’re well beyond the point in society where it makes sense to objectify anyone. In the United States, young women are on the verge of setting themselves up as the dominant gender of tomorrow. Single ladies under thirty are, on average, better educated and getting higher paying jobs than their male counterparts. So why do we waste time on obsessing over weight and making stupid assumptions about which age is the most desirable? Why do we attempt to draw extra attention to our bodies and then complain when we finally get it? Why do we waste a bunch of money on clothes that we’ll wear once or twice and makeup that hides our real faces? What a bunch of petty and boring creatures we must be.
I think we may need to return to dueling to settle petty personal disputes. But, as killing is currently a major social faux pas, it wouldn’t necessarily always need to be pistols at dawn. It could just be game of Scrabble where the winner gets their opponent’s thumb or a marathon where second place also means leaving town forever. The key here is satisfying one’s honor. After that, the rules of a duel need only be limited by a person’s imagination. Trying to decide which of your friends should be the maid of honor at your wedding? Perhaps it’s time they all entered a demolition derby together. Accused of leaving the toilet seat up? A quick trip to the hardware store can get you a pair of dueling hammers for under forty bucks. Someone drink the last of your juice? Pour a ring of gasoline on the living room floor, light a match, and dare them to enter your world of pain.
While dueling could theoretically be used to decide the outcome of every aspect of human life, it is probably best utilized to settle disputes between two individuals. This is my primary reason for wanting to bring it back. We exist in possibly the only period in history where it’s actually advantageous to be the victim. It’s like everyone is perpetually on trial and, when you’re on trial, it is almost always better to be the plaintiff than the defendant. If you don’t believe me consider which of the following sentences you’d rather say to a large group of strangers:
“________ threw my baby off a building.”
“I definitely never threw ________’s baby off any buildings.”
While neither are ideal, nobody ever wants to be accused. Even denying something first will immediately arouse suspicions against you. People often lack the empathy and critical thought required to cut someone a break. It’s so much easier to assume the worst at the mere suggestion of a misdeed. We don’t like to consider things like context or circumstance because it’s a lot more work. The implied notion that a person has done something wrong is often enough to damn them for it.
This week I’ve seen a lot of people publicly accusing each other of racism, philandering, and a slew of other unsavory elements. Some of these people made good points and while some had proof others had dick. But it seemed as if many were just looking to lash out because they felt badly or felt personally attacked. While I assuredly want to see evildoers brought to justice, slandering someone who is a little slimy doesn’t quite constitute that. Worse yet, many attempted to armor themselves up as appalled victims. This culture of outraged vilification and self-imposed victimization isn’t exactly healthy for anyone.
Allow me to explain a few things about life. Firstly, when someone uses hateful or insensitive language in the general sense, you are not entitled to anything as the offended party. It’s not feasible for ninety million apology letters to be mailed out when someone uses a sexist or racial slur. The hate-smith that drafted it for public consumption certainly isn’t going to put in the time to lick all of those envelopes and you can’t really expect anyone else to. So, unfortunately, being offended doesn’t guarantee satisfaction. My solution is to be proactive. Demand satisfaction via the art of the duel. This goes double if you have been directly aggrieved by someone’s actions or words. Instead of complaining openly about how wronged you’ve been, consider getting even by bludgeoning someone with a flail behind the football stadium as the setting sun glistens off the bleachers. When their broken limbs force them to yield to your might, you will finally have a captive audience at which you can calmly air your grievances.
Does it feel better to illicit sympathy from a bunch of strangers or does it feel better to smash someone’s skull on a beach with a rock as per previously agreed upon rules? I don’t think I could possibly be alone in thinking it is clearly the latter. Maybe it’s whatever primitive DNA is left in me, but I’ve definitely had fantasies about telling someone “Sir, you have invaded my character and I demand satisfaction” before heading outside and shooting them right in their smug face with a blunderbuss.
Civilization is still anything but civilized. If we are going to keep having wars, we need to seriously consider bringing back dueling. We can’t send our poor and uneducated masses off to their deaths over and over again and not allow the gentry to occasionally stab each other in the neck. A historical precedent has been set for Christ’s sake. Dueling was endorsed by the majority of this country’s founding fathers, has an extremely low civilian casualty rate, and would absolutely add a touch of class to a world riddled with reality television. The twenty-eigth amendment could very well read “every United States citizen has the inalienable right to duel and be dueled with on this, or any other, planet” if we can finally get our act together as a country. Write your likely lazy and uncaring congressperson today.
I am currently sitting out a blizzard in my home state of Michigan. Everyone in it went shopping for the same thing yesterday. Now all the only thing left on the shelves is fear and hopelessness.
I used to live with a dominatrix. Obviously that comes with certain compromises and perks that other living arrangements might not have. I was in the middle of my college career and had been dating her best friend for several months before we all moved in together. They liked alternative fashion, dancing all night, and men wearing heavy eyeliner– at least until I showed up. Outside of a weird vintage Harley Davidson motorcycle, I lacked any visible edge whatsoever. For the most part, we had very little in common but helped each other out. She even offered me several free sessions as payment for helping her with a school project but I politely declined. In retrospect, I should have taken her up on it for the story.
Occasionally you would hear abnormal slapping and groaning sounds coming from her room but I could never tell if it was a boyfriend or a client. She dated two artists that I really liked (one a professor) and the guy that became internet famous for tattooing Hello Kitty onto his forehead. That’s not a joke either, that guy had carnal relations inside of my apartment on numerous occasions and I was on a first name basis with him. He was an amateur professional wrestler somewhere in Southern Ohio. He was one of the few that stood out in the parade of random gentlemen who stopped by that I never saw again.
One day she asked me if BMWs were expensive cars. The following afternoon I was walking around my apartment eating cereal in my Batman pajamas when a stately gentleman showed up in a brand new 5-series. He was the kind of joyless person that didn’t leave the house without a gray blazer and a frown. She introduced him as Eric and I asked if he wanted any orange juice. He declined but I saw him eyeballing my glass until they left. Eric, clearly a married business professional, never had much to say to us. He even showed up during a party and avoided answering every single question anyone asked him. There were a lot of men like Eric and I found them all painfully dull, almost soulless. It was a revolving door of fuddy-duddies. I had weird fantasies about hiding in places around the apartment and scaring them all the time.
Most of her clients were middle-aged white men with plenty of money to waste on something stupid. I’d place hiring a professional mistress somewhere between purchasing a boat and having plastic surgery. The good news is that it’s substantially less expensive to get flogged for an hour while maintaining an erection than it is to buy a yacht. Although, I still wouldn’t exactly consider it cheap either. Her current website starts sessions at almost twice the average American’s daily income. But phone and webcam encounters are slightly more affordable and can be broken down into ten minute intervals. A lot of people compare dominatrixes to prostitutes and, perhaps, there are correlations to be drawn. But I’ve always sort of thought prostitution should be legal too. They are probably bettering more lives than most people in Human Resources and I would, at least, like to have the option to purchase one if I ever become an unloved and lonely old man.
In the end, who cares if you don’t understand it? If you earnestly believe that you can be ball-stomped into a better existence then, by all means, immediately try that out. Do it right now, don’t even wait to finish reading this. Run outside, find anyone wiling to it for you, and thank them profusely for helping as they mash your genitalia into a paste.
At no point during my existence on this planet have I ever forged a meaningful relationship with a person I’ve met while smoking cannabis. There is nothing about that experience that makes you want to suddenly share all of yourself with a total stranger. The best case scenario is that you’ve already allowed yourselves to build the bridge of friendship before puffing down on an old puff-stick, or whatever the actual modern day slang for it is. That shouldn’t be construed as an endorsement to engage in illicit activities. Instead, consider it a warning to make the most of breaking an unnecessary law. Rather than waste all that time feigning interest through heightening paranoia, you could be at home eating pizza, watching cartoons, and laughing yourself into a perceived (or genuine) cardiac arrest.
Some time back, an old friend of mine invited me to a show he was in that merged music with visual arts. Wanting a better idea of what he had been working on, I was pleased to say that I would be in attendance. The only catch was that he wanted me to act as a videographer for the event. This was fine because it meant I had the balcony seat nearest to the stage all to myself for the majority of the show. The lights dimmed and I settled in. It was a collaborative success as the sights and sounds worked well together. One medium encouraged the other and the result was an ever-shifting visual and auditory landscape of mood. It was the sort of thing I would have definitely sought out on my own.
Once the concert had concluded, I was invited back stage. It was a patchy network of visual artists, musicians, and random people vaguely affiliated with the musicians. It is a well-known fact that anyone approaching any level of notoriety is required by law to have an entourage. Once I am infamous and society deems it unseemly for me to go anywhere alone I fully intend to have a posse of attractive women in sunglasses and strange men in lipstick. However, on this occasion, I was alone and without the additional credibility brought on by having a midget with an ocelot standing next to you. So I had very little to say to everyone beyond the expected, and earned, round of compliments. But my friend, a performer, introduced me to a few of the more involved parties.
One of the people was a comic artist/legend. My friend introduced me and we exchanged two words with absolutely no eye contact. One of my worst personality traits is not getting overly excited about anything but, fortunately, it served me well enough in this situation. This was a person who had created visual spaces I obsessed over as a child and comics that I idolized as a teenager. But I somehow managed not to take it cripplingly personal when I was presented to him and he just said, “Alright then,” and walked away while frowning. May he be cast into a river of boiling hot Dr. Pepper.
I wandered out the rear exit, had a cigarette, and flirted with a tall groupie before she left with the musicians and their pack of social parasites. Eventually I returned inside and said very little to the other artists and stage hands. They were busy talking shop and gossiping about people that I knew nothing about. I couldn’t contribute much more than the occasional joke and doing so ran the risk of putting down a member of their inner circle. It’s all well and good for them to call each other whores and idiots, but an outsider doesn’t want jump in on that bandwagon. That’s no way to make a new friend, so I spent the majority of my time silent.
After a few more minutes, the theater manager showed up and they all decided to have a quick meeting. I was invited along and we walked as a group of seven through the underbelly of the building. Pipes and ducts occupied much of the space and we were required to squeeze around many narrow corners. Eventually we found ourselves at the entrance of a giant metal box. The door looked like it belonged on a submarine or missile silo and creaked when it moved. We were ushered in by a bespectacled man-boy and made our way through single file.
“It’s the HVAC system for the theater.” The building manager said.
The space was larger than most rooms in my apartment. Looking up yielded an open expanse of blackness and the only light source vanished when the door was shut. A few people had flashlights and a few others turned on cell phones to help illuminate the room. The meeting itself consisted of three joints and several small pipes’ worth of medicinal marijuana.
“Pretty cool place to smoke.” Someone claimed.
It was not a pretty cool place to smoke. The perpetual breeze in the room made the use of lighters a logistical nightmare. There is also nothing aesthetically pleasing about getting stoned in a giant windowless box in the bowels of Manhattan with nothing but echoes and endless darkness overhead. In all actuality it seemed hand crafted to ensure a weird ominous feeling within all that occupied it. This feeling was further heightened after everyone had their fill of smoke and we all stood there in silence. If you’ve never smoked before, it’s sort of like running your computer in safe mode. There is a brief mental reboot before you begin running nonstop diagnostics on everything. I’ve discussed this phenomenon with my friend Thom in the past and he claims that if you’re not doing exactly what you want, you’ll become keenly aware of it after a few minutes of being stoned.
So, once conversation started back up, I began a mental countdown of how long it would be until I could leave. But I no longer had any concept of time, so waiting became its own unique challenge. For some reason, I couldn’t figure out a very smooth way to exit the situation either. My best plan involved yelling goodbye, exiting the room, and running through the underground network of pipes and tunnels until I found myself back outdoors. However, executing this would leave my friend with some explaining to do. He had mentally abandoned me and was standing near the man I had identified as the leader of this group of friends. Primates do the same thing to gain standing within social circles. As an outsider, I was just barely being tolerated and he had smartly distanced himself from me. I imagined telling one bad joke and having them all screeching and pounding their chests while I was beaten to death in a primal rage. The thought made me snicker and someone asked me why I was laughing.
“I can’t tell you because you’ll think I’m crazy.” I said.
They didn’t press it and I tried to avoid thinking more than absolutely necessary. Instead I attempted to try interacting with the group. This went exceptionally poorly. But, by just looking and nodding at whoever was speaking, I assumed that I must have been doing a stellar job. Eventually, I was asked a question and realized I hadn’t actually been listening to anything anybody had been saying. My plan was only to appear invested in the conversation and that plan had worked before it backfired horribly. I had focused so intensely on creating the illusion of listening that the actual discussion was never processed by my brain. How was I going to salvage this? I couldn’t say that I didn’t hear what he said because I had spent the entire conversation looking extremely engaged. But I was also starting to think that it had probably been a long time since I had been asked the initial question and that I had better answer soon. There was a deep breath before I gave my answer.
“I’m not… even sure I care.” I exhaled.
My intention was not to be rude. It was the truth and possibly the only right answer I could have given that would effectively cover any question posed. I had no idea what this person had said but I wasn’t really sure any of it mattered to me. I was a stranger that had tagged along and didn’t really want to participate in any social posturing. Perhaps this encouraged my uncouth behavior and ensured their poor opinion of me. I was just sort of there. Not particularly friendly, not inexorably cruel, basically inconsequential. It would have been similar to if someone had dragged in a large fern into the HVAC system and put glasses on it. It wasn’t the drug’s fault though. The deepest part of me desperately wanted to be antisocial well before the first lighter was set ablaze. Drugs are not an excuse to act like an asshole. But I might have been able to fake it if my tissues had been saturated with ethanol or my brain had been processing MDMA.*
Eventually we all stumbled out of the box and made our way back up behind the stage. As everyone made plans to visit a nearby bar, I excused myself and walked home. As I strolled, I tried to recall the faces I felt so indifferent toward and tried to piece together why. Neighborhoods changed and the Village’s quiet charm dissolved as I neared Astor Place’s menagerie of drunken college students and I gradually forgot all about them. Eventually, I encountered a dog wearing a vest and decided to tail it for a few blocks while smiling contently to myself. There are a lot of right ways to live life and even more wrong ones but you have to sort that out for yourself. But, in the moments when you are truly uncertain, attempt to live in the moment. And, whether you’re following a bunch of artists into a windowless box or a vested Labrador into a public park, know when it’s time to leave.
*”Winners don’t use drugs.” –William S. Sessions, Director, FBI
When I was a child the scariest thing on television was Unsolved Mysteries. Each week Robert Stack came into our homes for forty-four minutes to explain murders and rapes in brutal detail with the help of “dramatic reenactments” before letting us know that the person (or persons) responsible were still on the loose. I never felt less safe than during the commercial breaks following an announcement that someone who was removing people’s heads as a hobby could be in my area and that I should “be on the lookout” for the most generic description of a human being imaginable. It was amidst the Crystal Pepsi ads when the dread that had been slathered onto my eyeballs and crammed into my ears could slowly seep into the core of my brain’s fear center. But Stack didn’t just talk about cop killers in a robbery gone wrong or jealous boyfriends jamming screwdrivers into the faces of the women they once loved. Sometimes an episode would change gears and give you a bone chilling tale about a mystical haunting or swamp monster. I remember watching a segment about a family where the mom was psychic and she had a ghost as a best friend. The mom, named Heidi Wyrick, knew the ghost only as Gordy and described him as a kindly, older gentleman. Then, before you knew it, a totally different ghost began startling her in every single hallway the house had. She even verified the identity of both ghosts by looking through old obituaries. Then, one morning, she awoke with scratches on her face and the mystery of those scratches went totally unsolved.
With tales like that, it isn’t difficult to see why the show was so popular. My Aunt Dorothy would put it on like clockwork whenever I was over at her house. I’d spend the day running round pretending that I was Popeye and eating orange slice candy until my little body inevitably gave out and I was forced to recoup my strength in front of the television. So, whenever she flipped over, I was already completely hypnotized by old Warner Brothers’ cartoons or reruns of Knight Rider. Combine that with the fact that I only sat about eleven inches away from the screen and you can begin to imagine the sort of intense physiological stranglehold Unsolved Mysteries had on me. Before the show even opens you get hit with a title card warning you that the following program contains scary and disturbing images that may not be suitable for younger viewers. Other introductions warned you that everything you were about to see is a real account of actual events but that it’s not a news broadcast. Then it warned you, again, that it was scary before the haunted synthesizer warmed up, the logo came on screen, and Stack gave you a rundown on each of the mysteries that would be helping pure fear create the acid necessary to dissolve your stomach lining.
Even the upbeat mysteries would still scare my pants off because they’d start playing that terrifying music. I recall an episode where a mom in Michigan read a passage from the Bible about angels and her daughter simultaneously didn’t fall into the Grand Canyon. While it seems like that shouldn’t have been scary (or even broadcast-worthy), Unsolved Mysteries refused to play anything other than it’s signature nightmare fuel of a theme song as Robert Stack recounted the events in the most ominous voice he could muster. I watched episodes on Bigfoot’s whereabouts, UFO sightings, pirate treasure locations, and even one about Champ (New York’s equivalent of the Loch Ness Monster). Stack was unwavering in his scary professionalism and did nothing to indicate that a story was anything other than totally authentic and plausible. One woman’s hazy account on how she might have seen a Skunk Ape in the woods was presented identically to any number of missing persons cases or serial murders. Due to this consistency in tone, each mystery made me the same amount of terrified.
That is until the show started solving the shit out of mysteries. I’m not one-hundred percent sure what was going on with policing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but that show helped solve tons of crimes. It also reunited estranged families and even proved Area 51 existed before the government finally acknowledged it. Stack was always encouraging everyone to “help solve a mystery.” However if you had information on a satanic murderer or Nazi war-criminal hiding in your apartment building, your only option was writing it in. Yet, despite this inexpediency, over half of the crimes on the show eventually ended up being solved. What I saw as a weekly opportunity for childhood trepidation and others might have considered a guilty pleasure, ended up being something with the capacity to do good in the world. That wound up being the whole point of the show. Like most things that are scary (black holes, the spooky neighbor from Home Alone, socialized medicine), Unsolved Mysteries was just misunderstood. After I realized that, I didn’t bother being frightened anymore.
You Monsters Are People. 