Tag Archives: nostalgia

Kitten Season in Albania

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In my old writing group, we had a contest too see which of us could write the most words. The winner got a sticker. If you looked at Kat’s laptop, she was covered in stickers. It’s a free-write—you can talk about how much you hate writing for ten minutes, and you’re still qualified to win. This is surprisingly coherent for a free-write, but that’s the way I roll. The prompt was the phrase, “It was kitten season in Albania.”

It was kitten season in Albania, and no matter how much you sprayed, they were everywhere. And you know what they say about kittens: if you see one, there are dozens around that you can’t actually see. I had a particular problem with the kittens during my stay in Albania as part of my top-secret diplomatic mission with the State Department, and that was this: I had a lot of knickknacks. A LOT of knickknacks. And if there’s one thing that a kitten loves, it’s destroying the knickknacks. There was an owl that my grandmother had given me—she was Albanian, which is how I scored the sweet undercover gig—and a kitten came out of nowhere, bit its head off, knocked the remains to the floor, and disappeared into a portal. Fucking kittens. I don’t know where these portals go, but I vow one day to find out.

I called the kitten exterminators the other day—don’t worry, they don’t actually kill the kittens—they just round them up and put them into a vacuum cleaner to be sent to the kitten retail outlet in Bangor, Maine. They have a portal expert whose job is specifically to figure out where the kittens go after they create their swathes of destruction and adorable, adorable mayhem. We have theories—some of us think that it is a beautiful, sunny world of fluffiness and cotton candy. Others believe—as do I—that it is a dark, hell dimension full of evil and stuff. This makes as much sense to me as anything, being that I really, really loved my Albanian grandmother’s owl statue. I wanted to kill that kitten, but it looked at me with those big kitten eyes and mewed a tiny kitten mew, and it was all over. I’d adopt the little fucker, but I have other owl statues that my Albanian grandmother gave to me. Many owl statues. There was an army of them. I think she used them to unleash dark, Albanian magic upon the world. So who knows, maybe the kittens are a force for good, destroying those talismen of evil. Or maybe they’re just tchotchkes. What kind of magic is dark, Albanian magic? I’ve heard of Dark Macedonian magic, and dark Lithunanean magic, but never dark Albanian magic. I don’t know who spread that rumor, really. I think it was my mother, who never did like her mother-in-law. But still, labeling someone as an evil Albanian magic-user seems a little harsh, don’t you think? Maybe there was a grain of truth about it? I mean, there was all the chanting and the weird lights that eminated from Grandma’s room late at night when she thought everyone was asleep. I wasn’t asleep because the prescriptions I was on for my insomnia never actually worked. The ones for psychosis, however, were magic. Just like my grandmother. And that kitten. Fucking kitten.

Past is Profit

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The nineties are an important decade to me. I went to high school and college and New York in the nineties. Most of my favorite music is from the nineties. I, for one, couldn’t be more thrilled that it’s going through a revival. And, frankly, I’m sick of it.

My streaming services are showing all the same playlists labeled “90s nostalgia.” All the movies I remember from that decade are being converted into TV series or further sequels (True Lies the series? Come on! Does anyone my age or older remember the plot of that movie? No, they remember Jamie Lee Curtis stripping and Arnold Schwarzenegger making quips as he murdered people, not the generic hotties in the TV show being chaste like all TV shows and movies these days—but that’s another rant.)

The nineties are fucking everywhere, with major brands getting in on it and middle-aged celebrities coming out of their coffins and getting botox. I imagine this must be how LGBTQ people feel about Pride Month, when all the corporations put rainbows on their packaging and continue to give money to hateful, bigoted politicians.

I feel like this is my time, and I can be the old-man expert on the decade, but young people don’t want to listen to me.

On the other hand, my soon-to-be-published novel, Hanííbááz Rising, is set in 1995. I love that teenagers are seeking out and trading CDs like my generation did with vinyl records. (Millennials didn’t really get to do this because nostalgia for the eighties meant tapes, which were the single worst way to store music.)

But I know I’m being pandered to, and that never fails to piss me off.

Convenience Store Maniac: an Ode

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It’s only natural to mourn the things you loved and are no longer with you, whether it be a person, a pet, a childhood house, etc.

Convenience Store Maniac was a semi-autobiographical portrayal of a man working at an S-Mart gas station and convenience store too seriously. who only lives for his job. One day he snaps, believing that commerce is a religion, and he is the but a humble minister. This means an inquisition of sorts with his regular customers, some of whom really piss him off. And then he starts killing people. It was clever and a little over-the-top, and that’s exactly what we were going for.

I remember when Shane first conceived of it, in depraved journals he wrote in during his overnight shift at the convenience store he’d been shipwrecked in. I read a few of the entries, and what I saw was a rambling, incoherent, violent mess, and I told him, “I don’t know what this is, I want in.” I loved what I saw, and together we breathed life into Leonard, playing to each other’s strengths, arguing over the use of a single word, as well as brainstorming our way around corners we’d painted ourselves into. We named all of the regular customers after classic country-western performers (except for the teenage assholes, who were Kurt, Chris, and Dave). Even though the names were never said aloud, they helped shape the personalities of people who got maybe one line in the whole movie. We manufactured and fine-tuned chaos. We wrote the first act, at the end of which Leonard takes his first victim, and then I got married, and my asshole cat broke my hard drive, and the first part of Convenience Store Maniac is lost forever.

What isn’t lost forever is the memory of the long weekends I spent in his house on Bear Town Road twenty years ago, getting baked and joining forces with my best friend to create something great. We haven’t talked about it in decades, and if we put our minds to it, we could bring it back to life. On the other hand, there’s nothing I could type that will live up to the first fifty pages that lives in my memory.

Mud Simple

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When I was a kid in the mid-eighties in a neighborhood called Indian Hills at the eastern border of Gallup, New Mexico, there were these dirt ditches. One of them was behind my house, and it was like Disneyland for kids who couldn’t go to California.

Every August at that time, we’d get a monsoon, and the eponymous hills of Indian Hills (known colloquially as the Hogbacks) would disgorge thousands of pounds of mud, which would flow down the street, mix with the ditches, and pour down our cul du sac like a river, and when the clouds parted, all that was left was a thick layer of muck.

It was glorious. My friends, Eric from a block over would join me, along with Will, who lived on the other side of the neighborhood, and Max, the coolest guy I knew, who lived at the end of our cul du sac, would join my sisters and me in this celebration of unbridled ickiness. I remember finding cat poop buried in these ditches. When we got hungry, my parents hosed us off, and we could come inside again. It was the most fun we’d have all year.

In 1986, we moved away, but two years later, we returned to rent a house identical to our previous one, only across the street. And those assholes had paved the ditches and installed drainage so that the mud was directed in an orderly fashion into what passed for the Rio Puerco, the river that was technically not there. I was twelve at the time and on the cusp of being over that kind of thing (thirty-five years later, this is decidedly not true), but I still enjoyed the majesty of those mini-mountains gifting us kids with the thing we wanted most: to become utterly disgusting.

Never again.

I know why they did it. The mudslides crippled the neighborhood every year, like clockwork. It took countless dollars to clean it up, and as Indian Hills expanded and grew more popular, that kind of thing just wasn’t acceptable in a functioning city.

But I still remember getting shoved into the muck by Max, who would get shoved in return, and shouting and being a goddamned kid, and I remember it being taken away from me, and this being my first real taste of how adults can suck the fun out of everything.

Snippets from Romania

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When I came to Romania, I was unprepared for how many leather pants I would see.

Nobody wears plaid in this country. Usually, the service industry will start talking to me in English when I say hello, but when I wear plaid, I don’t have to say a damned word.

In addition, they don’t put lids on anything. You are required to do that yourself.

Everyone in Bucharest dresses like circa 2000s hipsters.

Of all the countries in the world, it is least surprising that Romania has a Goth shop.

Prompt customer service is not really a thing in. They only use beverage lids when you ask.

Pop Cola tastes like cloves and redundancy with a subtle hint of redundancy.

The Romanian toy museum is really fun. They have them organized by type, and I swear I’ve never seen so many abacuses in one place. During communism, they had a ripoff of Monopoly called “Capitaly.” But what got under my skin was the Game Boy. In a museum. And before you Millennials start to get all uppity about how old Gen-X is, they had Pokemon Gold in there too.

White Trash Cola tastes like ginger, with a splash of mullets and trucks on blocks.

I was ready to praise Bucharest for not having hostile architecture, but clearly they’ve perfected it.

As we visited Dracula’s (alleged) castle, the weather, cold and rainy, would have been better with lightning. There was a torture room.

Most Romanians look like they’re middle-aged. The reason for this is that everyone smokes, even (no exaggeration) children.

Spite of the Lepus 

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I’m sure you might remember how I once expressed my mourning for the lost art of making a tape, especially when putting together a playlist is what people do now, and it sounds unsatisfying. When you made a tape, you had to listen to each song, calculate how long each song was so you didn’t have too much blank space at the end. (Or, as many chose to do it, just play as much of the next song as you can before the tape runs out.) You put stickers on the tape, you decorated the case. You only made tapes for someone you’re trying to impress. A mix tape was a goddamned work of art, and you couldn’t do that with any other music medium.  

Another work of art I miss is letter-writing. I have had several pen-pals, and they were my closest friends at the time. One of my correspondents told me she said to her doctor that she did go to therapy—she wrote me every week. I would illustrate the margins when I was feeling whimsical, and if I was feeling ambitious, I’d do something fun with the envelope. The paper smelled like paper and felt crisp in your hands, while you reread what the final line was on a page so you could make sure it matched up with the next one. I’ve tried to revive letter-writing as an adult (I’ve got all these blank cards I never sold), but it never caught on with anybody. Writing a letter is a commitment, one most people don’t seem have the time or the will to make anymore. But when you take the time to write someone a letter on paper, you are spending every minute you work on it with them, and that is an act of intimacy that you will never find when someone slides into your DMs.   

For our evolution, we next got email, which was about 75 percent less commitment. You could say whatever you want, but not how you would say it. It’s not like your typing changes size or sprawls when you’re agitated. In email, you can capitalize words for emphasis, like some people still do in their comments and IMs, but that just gives people headaches. From there society moved onto comment threads, and the less said about that, the better (though that is how I met my ex-girlfriend and one of my best friends, so it’s not all bad). From there, we moved to IM, which had been around since the beginning, but went mainstream with social media (which is not at all bad, in that I met my eyes and ears in Finland, Wippa, the Norse Goddess of Punishment, through Myspace).  

But going back to email, I called myself a writer, but I hardly wrote because I was I was putting so much energy into emails. I just wanted to entertain my friends, so I wrote little plays, limericks, newscasts, an Oscar speech, the screenplay for a Kung Fu movie starring my coworkers, an ode to my missing button, and song lyrics that I made up. 

I only wrote two songs, one being a blues song about being dumped completely out of the blue that did not obey the laws of music. The other one sounded suspiciously like “A Boy Named Sue,” by Johnny Cash. The subject matter is a little difficult to describe. 

When I moved into my apartment in Jersey City, New Jersey, after the last tenant was removed on a stretcher, which I witnessed, I discovered what I considered to be a design flaw. There was a single pink strip of wallpaper that ran the circumference of my room, and it was decorated by bunnies, rolling around on their backs, sniffing flowers, wrestling, chasing butterflies.  

I looked around and decided that I was never going to get laid in this room (I was wrong), so I got the landlord’s permission and tried everything I could think of to get rid of the accursed bunnies. I even went to an Internet café and looked up how to get rid of wallpaper. I left the one wall for the bunnies that talked to me, but I covered the other walls with magazine clippings, art, and posters. If anything on my walls was going to cock-block me, it would be that. 

One day, while lying in bed and listening to the bunnies, I thought of a song. I emailed it to my friend Barry, and I thought it lost on the median of the Information Superhighway. Today, while poking around on my laptop, I found it: the song. And now I bring it to you. 

“Ballad of the Bunnies” 

When I was young, just twenty-two, 
I sought a place that had a view
, 
And one that didn’t cost a lot of money. 

I found a home, in Jersey City;  
It was cheap, and not real pretty,  
But still the deal was looking kind of sunny. 

So I unpacked my little room 
And saw what would now be my doom:  
A ring around the wall—and it was bunnies. 

Their background: pink. Their pelts were gray.  
Their poses were prepared for play.  
Their coal black eyes were looking at me funny. 

Their origin: I did not know,  
I didn’t care—they had to go, 
Or never would I find myself a honey. 

I scrubbed and washed and scraped that wall.  
I steamed and peeled; I tried it all!  
It only made my paint look kind of runny. 

Those rabbits cut me down to size,  
I had to reach a compromise; 
And now I’m left with just one wall of bunny. 

“This,” He said quietly as he got onto the bus, “is cool.”

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Every couple of years this comes up.

In 1991, I was sitting in drama class with the person I most looked up to in early high school, and we came up with some truly bizarre, baffling, high-energy situations to share with our friends. It was a tale that couldn’t be told by one story. It needed three stories. It needed “Three Stories in One.” Since I made a noble effort of illustrating the whole thing, getting distracted at fifty-six pages, I have a clear idea what they look like, and I like to revisit them. I can’t just pick up the last 10-15 pages because comparing my style to the style I had seventeen years ago is like asking Michelangelo to fill in some of the gaps on a cave painting. I’m proud of the work I did, but I’ve made some improvements.

This time, I thought hard about these faces as I worked on them. Since everybody’s based on a real person, I concentrated on features I remember most and spent a lot of time erasing. Luke didn’t look like that. Amber didn’t look like that, and Wendy didn’t look like that, except for the parts that totally did. Amber smiles with her eyes (still does), Wendy always looked annoyed at me—but with affection. Luke was robbed for the Best Dressed in the Class of ’93 (I mean that sincerely). Naturally, Jeremiah looked exactly like that in 1991. Boone really did have that playful smirk when she was up.

And now we need to have a quick word about Boone. A few years ago, Boone transitioned into Severian, a woman. I have not spoken to her as a woman, I have not even seen photos. I’m not even sure I got her name right. The only conception I have in my mind of Severian is when she was presenting as Boone, and the only reason I know about the transition at all is because one of our mutual friends chewed me out for dead-naming her in my last “Three Stories in One” post. Once I knew, I don’t refer to her as Boone anymore.

Last summer, I presumptively wrote my memoirs, each chapter representing the most influential figures in my life. And she was, without a doubt, going to be a very important. I did not dead-name her once, not even in my first draft. I believe that you should be who you need to be. A trans woman is a woman, period.

That said, I’ve spent a lot of time debating this in my head, and I’m not going to change Boone’s name or gender in “Three Stories in One.” The reason I won’t is because Boone is not Severian. Boone is a character based loosely on Severian when she was sixteen. While Severian was throwing bullets at elaborate Lego constructions with her buddy, Matt, Boone was picking up cheerleaders and playing meaningless board games with them.

On the same token, Luke is not a complete bastard, only kind of a bastard. Wendy was not a good driver back then, but at least she wasn’t driving her sweet Karmenn Ghia like it was the Batmobile. Amber was perky, but she was more than just a smile and the attention span of a hamster. (What I remember most about Amber was how kind she was to me. The popular girl treated me as just another student she was on a first-name basis with, not a nerd on the lowest rung.) And if I suddenly found myself, on my bike, in the middle of the Indy 500, I’d be a smear. At the risk of grandiosity, “Three Stories in One” is a historical document.

To be clear, if Severian tells me that “Three Stories in One,” particularly my decision to leave Boone as is, is offensive to her, then I’ll stop making these posts. I hope she doesn’t. I hope she appreciates it for the playful, teasing nostalgic spirit that went into these illustrations.

I’m not George Lucas. I tend to let things go when I’m done with them, but sometimes present circumstances demand that you change the past. Once again, I’m not going to. They were a product of their time.

The Truth Is out There

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Now that Babylon 5 has been kicked off of all of my streaming services, I’ve started to watch The X-Files. I’m several episodes in, and I’ve picked up on some things. 

One is that Skully was into Mulder as soon as she saw him. Either Gillian Anderson wasn’t the maestro of acting she is today back then, and she really was into David Duchovny; or she just pretended to be flirty with her “But, Mulder, science!” dialogue. Either way, she was eye-banging him from the beginning. When this show began my senior year in high school ,I couldn’t figure out why people were obsessed with them getting together (while being simultaneously obsessed with keeping them apart). Thirty years later, I get it. Thirty years later, I have to put on the subtitles, and I have to wear glasses to read the subtitles, because I can’t understand a goddamned thing Mulder is saying with all that mumbling.  

Another is that Mulder was bipolar and a bit of a narcissist, with a clear case of delusional disorder. I am not a psychiatric doctor, however, there is no way Mulder behaved in that manner without some kind of disorder. He was the absolute worst. “What happened to the last donut, Mulder?” “There is a secret cabal in the government to cover up the existence of UFOs who like to eat pastries. I learned it from my contact in MUFON.”  

The X-Files didn’t stick the landing (not as badly as Game of Thrones, though), which is why it’s only a footnote in pop culture. I watched only the first season in its entirety because season two and beyond were aired while I was in college, and I had more important things to do. (Hi, Emilie! Hi Abby!) Also, I didn’t have a TV until I bought one in 2001. So I caught glimpses in there, like the time my friends sat in the Altman Hall lobby and watched the episode where cockroaches were killing people, all huddled together like Scooby and Shaggy while being chased by a capitalist in a rubber suit. I also saw the series finale. That was a turd.  

It caught the zeitgeist, particularly because conspiracies were big in the nineties. These were harmless conspiracies, like the Denver Airport (a concentration camp that was going to be fully operational any day now. Any day now) or HAARP (which can control the weather). There was even a movie about conspiracy theories called Conspiracy Theory. Real freaking original, Hollywood. Nowadays, conspiracy theories led to a pretty awesome pizza and ping-pong gym getting shit up with a rifle. They lead to insurrections at our nation’s Capitol building. I’m pretty sure the writer of that hilarious film Moon Fall was thinking about nineties conspiracy theories when they made one of those goofy, obsessive freaks the savior. 

There was a spinoff show, The Lone Gunman, about the quirky conspiracy theorists who periodically helped Mulder, or more accurately, enabled Mulder. It ran for thirteen episodes before it was cancelled, and the first episode featured a plot to fly a jet liner into the World Trade Center, airing in March, 2001. The last episode ended on a cliffhanger, which was resolved when the characters returned to The X-Files roughed up and said, “Don’t ask.” And then the show killed them. 

The first season is still really good. The leads are really phenomenal, even though they’re liddle biddy babies. I just watched the guy who can squeeze into pipes and eats people’s livers, which is one of my fondest memories of the show while I was a senior in high school.  I would try to pitch it to adults, and I’d tell them about the best episode so far, and by the time I got to the nest made of bile and newspapers, I consistently lost them.  

I love how the show was out there, but it tried to stay grounded, like not showing the aliens until it was way along. But after a while, the nebulous aliens got faces, and there were different kinds of aliens, and zombies with black goo, and the show lost its way. In the earlier episodes, though, it was sheer joy: “I don’t know how you don’t see it, Scully. This is exactly the pattern of a string of UFO abductions in 1972.” “Mulder, your theories don’t make sense. All the evidence points to trees that eat people!” I love that the show had a versatile premise, so any episode could be a thriller, horror, science fiction, or comedy. The standalone episodes, before the show was engulfed by the modestly named Mythology, were the best. 

They tried resurrecting it a couple of years ago and it didn’t quite catch on. There was one episode, a comedy, that did stick out—otherwise, it wasn’t interesting at all. They planned to do more seasons, but that never caught on. 

When The X-Files was on, it was on, and when it was huge, it was huge. I remember getting excited on Friday nights (I had no life) and seeing what batshit thing Chris Carter thought of this week.  

Now that Babylon 5 has been kicked off of all of my streaming services, I’ve started to watch The X-Files. I’m several episodes in, and I’ve picked up on some things. 

One is that Skully was into Mulder as soon as she saw him. Either Gillian Anderson wasn’t the maestro of acting she is today back then, and she really was into David Duchovny; or she just pretended to be flirty with her “But, Mulder, science!” dialogue. Either way, she was eye-banging him from the beginning. When this show began my senior year in high school ,I couldn’t figure out why people were obsessed with them getting together (while being simultaneously obsessed with keeping them apart). Thirty years later, I get it. Thirty years later, I have to put on the subtitles, and I have to wear glasses to read the subtitles, because I can’t understand a goddamned thing Mulder is saying with all that mumbling.  

Another is that Mulder was bipolar and a bit of a narcissist, with a clear case of delusional disorder. I am not a psychiatric doctor, however, there is no way Mulder behaved in that manner without some kind of disorder. He was the absolute worst. “What happened to the last donut, Mulder?” “There is a secret cabal in the government to cover up the existence of UFOs who like to eat pastries. I learned it from my contact in MUFON.”  

The X-Files didn’t stick the landing (not as badly as Game of Thrones, though), which is why it’s only a footnote in pop culture. I watched only the first season in its entirety because season two and beyond were aired while I was in college, and I had more important things to do. (Hi, Emilie! Hi Abby!) Also, I didn’t have a TV until I bought one in 2001. So I caught glimpses in there, like the time my friends sat in the Altman Hall lobby and watched the episode where cockroaches were killing people, all huddled together like Scooby and Shaggy while being chased by a capitalist in a rubber suit. I also saw the series finale. That was a turd.  

It caught the zeitgeist, particularly because conspiracies were big in the nineties. These were harmless conspiracies, like the Denver Airport (a concentration camp that was going to be fully operational any day now. Any day now) or HAARP (which can control the weather). There was even a movie about conspiracy theories called Conspiracy Theory. Real freaking original, Hollywood. Nowadays, conspiracy theories led to a pretty awesome pizza and ping-pong gym getting shit up with a rifle. They lead to insurrections at our nation’s Capitol building. I’m pretty sure the writer of that hilarious film Moon Fall was thinking about nineties conspiracy theories when they made one of those goofy, obsessive freaks the savior. 

There was a spinoff show, The Lone Gunman, about the quirky conspiracy theorists who periodically helped Mulder, or more accurately, enabled Mulder. It ran for thirteen episodes before it was cancelled, and the first episode featured a plot to fly a jet liner into the World Trade Center, airing in March, 2001. The last episode ended on a cliffhanger, which was resolved when the characters returned to The X-Files roughed up and said, “Don’t ask.” And then the show killed them. 

The first season is still really good. The leads are really phenomenal, even though they’re liddle biddy babies. I just watched the guy who can squeeze into pipes and eats people’s livers, which is one of my fondest memories of the show while I was a senior in high school.  I would try to pitch it to adults, and I’d tell them about the best episode so far, and by the time I got to the nest made of bile and newspapers, I consistently lost them.  

I love how the show was out there, but it tried to stay grounded, like not showing the aliens until it was way along. But after a while, the nebulous aliens got faces, and there were different kinds of aliens, and zombies with black goo, and the show lost its way. In the earlier episodes, though, it was sheer joy: “I don’t know how you don’t see it, Scully. This is exactly the pattern of a string of UFO abductions in 1972.” “Mulder, your theories don’t make sense. All the evidence points to trees that eat people!” I love that the show had a versatile premise, so any episode could be a thriller, horror, science fiction, or comedy. The standalone episodes, before the show was engulfed by the modestly named Mythology, were the best. 

They tried resurrecting it a couple of years ago and it didn’t quite catch on. There was one episode, a comedy, that did stick out—otherwise, it wasn’t interesting at all. They planned to do more seasons, but that never caught on. 

When The X-Files was on, it was on, and when it was huge, it was huge. I remember getting excited on Friday nights (I had no life) and seeing what batshit thing Chris Carter thought of this week.  

Wind in the Willow

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Since I just watched the last episode, I thought I’d turn my attention to the new Willow. The original Willow is nostalgic and fun, and I love it, but I would not call it a good movie. This was George Lucas’s Next Big Thing after Star Wars, and it was only okay. The world-building was interesting, and a lot of the characters were memorable. Even though they were the most annoying part of that movie, I talk to the cats in a brownie accent when no one’s around and Nicole is out of the country, so, “A-HA! Does the kiddies want to eat?” But George Lucas proved he’s not an inexhaustible font of ideas by putting both Han Solo and Darth Vader into this movie.

I am getting exhausted with the nostalgia sequels. To all the people worked up about Beetlejuice 2, I want to ask them if there was one nostalgia sequel that actually satisfied them, and their answer would be Bill & Ted Face the Music, and I say, okay, aside from that. How did the new Halloween work out? How was Ghostbusters? Punky Brewster? Sex and the City? Remember Tron: Legacy?You don’t? Shock. Those were movies and TV shows that were actually made, and you forgot them because they were only okay.  

The wild card here is Top Gun: Maverick, which made piles and piles of money, but it doesn’t count because it was always going to make piles of money. Even in these bitter times we live in, we love to see some jingoism and explosive victories thrown at us to the sound of Kenny Loggins.

All of that is to say that I only watched the new Willow because I was curious. And the first episode was not very exciting. None of the characters were particularly interesting, the plot far from compelling. The worst character was kidnapped in the first episode and didn’t come back until the end, so there was that. The action was competent, and sometimes competent is the best you can ask for. And there’s a secret, and it ties all the way up to the most important MacGuffin in the original movie, and the show is so dull and predictable that it sends you obvious clues, and you’re yawning, saying, “I know what the secret is, you telegraphed it, like at the beginning of the episode,” and the show says, “Ha!” and I was completely wrong, and suddenly something really interesting happened with the secret, and that’s has exciting as that twist got.

There was something wrong with the dialogue that I couldn’t put my finger on it until the second episode when one person made an observation, and the other person says, “Right?” in that exact way, you know what I’m talking about, like she’s a sorority girl in 2020 and not a warrior princess in a faraway medieval land. The main character, whose name adorns the franchise, who was the spirit of the movie, high-fives a guy. Folks, I’m not sure I like this. There’s one of two explanations for how this happened:

  1. Disney execs tell them they have to be relatable to young girls, you know, like that Muffin the Vampire Killer, so the writers, probably mostly men with a mostly young, female cast, decide that everyone should be sassy and speak in the same voice.
  2. The writers were just lazy.

If I want to watch a bunch of teenagers lusting after each other in a fantasy setting and speaking the modern lingo, I’d watch The Vampire Diaries. That Damien got sass. But I came to Willow to see high fantasy that’s not as oppressive as Game of Never-ending Spin-Offs.

I read an interview with the showrunner, and he defended the anachronisms by saying he was inspired by Madmartigan, who was the only reason Willow was good, according to him. He said that Madmartigan felt like a person from the eighties transplanted into this fantasy world, and I call bullshit. If they did it his way in the original movie, he would have said, “Don’t have a cow!” Which is kind of what they’re doing in the new show.

It’s not that bad. I remember there were a number of shows and movies that did anachronisms, and none of them did it as smoothly as Willow, not even A Knight’s Tale. It’s still jarring, and I still don’t think I like it, but it’s clearly the work of professionals. The sets are amazing, some of the acting is really good. The expansion of the world has been working marvels. The plot is weak, and it could not sustain eight episodes. Some of the acting is really bad. The MacGuffin of the series is a mouth-breather, and that was hard not to stare at. There are a lot of clichés here. I’m glad that the main characters are teenage girls, even if it means Willow has to step back a little (he steps back way too much).

Then there’s the magic. With one or two exceptions, magic is about throwing green or purple lightning bolts. They have names for spells and curses, and they study for long montages, but in the end, it’s a green or purple lightning spell. See also WandaVision. Put some thought into it, people. Even the Fantastic Beasts movies put together some fun, imaginative magic fights. Even though the green-versus-purple lightning battle was visually stunning, it just felt … dumb. I am exhausted with Sassy Marvel Studios, and now sassy Willow. The hero can’t take the apocalypse seriously, why should the audience?

Late in the series, a character turns evil, and the actor cannot pull it off. They’re not Hayden Christiansen bad, but the whole thing is unconvincing, and it’s supposed to be the dramatic anchor of the final showdown of the season finale. Everybody else can kind of hold it together, but there’s this actor. The last episode was so bad I’m not planning on watching season 2.

You might enjoy it the way I enjoyed the Vampire Diaries franchise, i.e. as fast food with no nutritional value. The theme to the TV show Willow was “be yourself,” which was the exact same theme to just about every kid’s show in the eighties (unless you can be Destro—then you should probably be Destro). “The power was within you all along my apprentice!” What made the movie Willow so memorable was a really young Warwick Davis being the sincerest creature in the realm. The sincerest character in the show Willow, counting Willow himself, is the comic relief, but everybody laughs at them, not with them. Oh, and Spoiler Alert: XX XXXX XX XXX XXX. It doesn’t live up to its message, is what I’m saying.

The first few episodes, I wasn’t particularly blown away, but I thought it was a nice contrast to my current binge show, Babylon 5. Did you know that by the year 2258, Zima has made a huge comeback and is being advertised in dockworker bars on a space station hundreds of light years from Earth? You never know!

I can’t believe I wrote twelve hundred words about such a mediocre, inoffensive show. Something about this lazy, nostalgia strip-mining is really getting under my skin.

Don’t You Know That You’re Toxic?

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I smoked an average of twenty cigarettes a day from October 1994 to May 2007. I was not a person who smoked, I was a smoker. And I was all in. I’d had a total of three Zippos in my life, and I had a hip pocket devoted to pack and lighter (currently for the cell phone). I followed the lead of top intellectuals like Denis Leary and sang the praises of smoking. And while I became much less of an evangelical about tobacco after cancer took a beloved aunt, I still enjoyed it.

I tried quitting, but I never wanted to, so every attempt was a failure. Sure, they made you cough, and sure, if enough time passes without having one, you turn into the Incredible Hulk. Sure they turned my fingers and teeth yellow, and sure they were just pumping carcinogens into my lungs, I wanted to keep doing this. I was young. I was immortal.

I enjoyed the taste of the filter on my lips. I enjoyed the pageantry of lighting a cigarette. When I was in college, anybody I knew who had a Zippo pulled elaborate stunts with them to light a cigarette. Not me—I flicked open the lighter, ignited it, lit the cigarette, and flicked the lighter closed. It was out and back into my pocket in less than five seconds. According to some, my technique wasn’t necessarily the coolest, but it was up there. I enjoyed a cigarette in my hand. I wasn’t so much holding a cigarette, as much as the cigarette was an extension of my fingers.

I was the kind of person who would say things like, “You want a cautionary tale about smoking? I bring you George Burns.” (To my Hastings College contemporaries, substitute “Darryl Lloyd” for “George Burns.”) At the time of my being the most militant about smoking, I was no better than any Trump fan. Give me irrefutable proof that the tobacco corporations were breeding and cultivating the perfect piece of toxic waste to make you keep sticking toxic waste in your mouth until you died, and I’d make up excuses. I can’t remember any of the excuses because when I had my epiphany about them (several years after I quit), I purged every single positive thing I could say about big tobacco.

I didn’t quit smoking because of the horrible things it did to me. I found out about the horrible things it did to me because I quit. For example, I’ve never had a masculine musk, and I do sweat a lot, but in the middle of August with the A/C broken was Drakkar Noir compared to how I smelled as a smoker. You can’t smell yourself when you’ve caused permanent damage to the inside of your nose. When it grows back, and a smoker is nearby, you know it. You know it before the get within ten feet. It was a Doppler effect with smell. I smelled like that. All. The. Time. How could anyone stand to be around me? How were women ever attracted to me?

I have been a non-smoker for fifteen years. I can’t say I haven’t smoked in fifteen years because I’d had two cigarettes since, a little over ten years ago. They were both really horrible, and I have not wanted to go near one in the past twelve years. One of the cigarettes was a blatant attempt to start a conversation. It worked. Cigarettes used to be really good for that. I had a lot of friends whose relationship with me could withstand five-to-ten-minute bursts every hour, and that was about it. Smoking was a solitary or a social activity, depending on how you were feeling that day. There was something magical about that. I wanted to capture that.

I was full-on smoker when I created a number of my enduring characters, and as a result, many of them were full-on smokers—in the stories I wrote during that thirteen-year period of my life. In stories I’ve written about them since, they’d either quit, or I’d completely forgotten about the smoking thing. I wrote one story last year where I paid lip service to tobacco for continuity’s sake, but otherwise ignored it.

Smoking is intertwined through much of my early oeuvre, but it’s not crucial to the story. I only call attention to it as a set piece of something cool happening. (Girl puts a cigarette out in boy’s coffee. Boy, eyes on the girl, drinks the coffee.) I’ve started writing scripts set in the time period where most of these characters would have been smokers, and I’m choosing not to write the smoking. The way I see it, I have three choices.

One: I can add tobacco to the contemporary stories. It wouldn’t be hard because I’m still in the draft phase, and I’ll be going over them several more times.

Two: I can go back into the classic stories, some of which have been quasi-published, and strip the smoking out. That would mean removing non-essential but still fun scenes and exchanges. The boy meets the girl when he creeps out while bumming a cigarette from her. This is the most important relationship in this series of stories. So I’d have to completely rewrite it.

Three: Or, I could leave the smoking in the classic stories and not include it in the contemporaries. I don’t have to explain it. Let the smoking and non-smoking characters be alternate universes. Whatever. The important thing is, this requires the least effort. Why do I want to be giving this vile habit anymore thought than I’d already put into it?

The world is evolving, and I am there for it. Popular opinion has turned against tobacco, Homosexuals have the same marriage rights as the rest of us. You cannot function without a cell phone now. The creator of the most beloved contemporary series of children’s novels is currently on blast for being anti-trans. Dr. Oz is not Senator Oz. The legalization of cannabis in New Mexico kind of ruined the screenplay Shane and I wrote about the hunt for a vicious pot dealer on the Navajo Reservation. It took us days to figure out how to fix that.

There was a time, not that long ago, when public opinion was generally cool with cigarettes. I used to smoke in my dorm room. You could smoke while you were eating at restaurants. There were ashtrays in hospital waiting rooms. Can you imagine? That’s when these characters were born. And while some of these stories have been rewritten from the ground up (one twice), they are still a product of their time.

I am definitely going with option three, for nostalgia’s sake.