De-Revolution

It was a simple concept for a show.  What if it all went away:  Internet, television, radio, central air, electricity?   What if something happened and all society returned to the age before Tesla and Edison?  What if societal breakdown led to the United States being splintered into militias, no more centralized Government, no more regulation?  If you want something in this life, you take by force or other means.   Pretty interesting premise for a show, right?  The world goes away and we are left to watch it feast upon itself. 

That was Revolution, the latest in a long line of shows trying to take the place of the vacancy left by LOST years ago.   When appointment TV shows like LOST end its run, everyone tried to capitalize on some kind of event that led to isolation or reversal in social norms.  Shows like The Event and Flash Forward couldn’t replicate the logic bending appeal involved in a simple premise.     The Walking Dead survived and thrived, but it already had a built up fan base in its comic book (Graphic Novel if you prefer) run.   

Another show attempted to do what Revolution suggests, Jericho.   Though a different catalyst than Revolution, Jericho, like its 80s Cold War telefilm counterpart, The Day After, focuses on a nuclear missile attack.  It had a cult following and was revived before being finally cancelled after its second season. 

But Revolution should have been simple.   Turn out the lights.   Cause panic.   Destroy society.   Establish your heroes and villains.  Introduce your arcs, whether they be, “Why did the lights go out?”, “Who turned them out?”, and “How do we turn them back on?” and go with it.  But within the first few episodes, Revolution went for broke.  The power isn’t gone.  It’s just being suppressed.  Then, to make it worse, it’s being suppressed by cancer fighting nanotechnology that the government leveraged to fight terrorism on the other side of the globe. 

The series boasted some great ideas.  Billy Burke as a Han Solo-esque antihero, complete with a saber to take on militia baddies.  What is the nature of patriotism?  How ingrained is technology into our world and how do we react when it gets taken away?  OK, well, that last one sort of got skipped because the pilot skips fifteen years ahead.   Still, the nature of the LOST style of flashback lends itself to being able to bake in that concept into the series mythology as time moves forward.  Except, it never does move forward, it just stays still like the hands on an electric clock. 

Revolution either blew its wad or jumped the shark within the first few episodes and that’s where it struggled to keep my initial attention.  One of The Walking Dead’s major unanswered questions is what caused the virus that has infected the populous.  We just know that everyone is infected, everyone who dies with their brain intact will reanimate.  Whether or not the eventually come to explain the event is up in the air and that’s what keeps the show going.  The zombies are a part of the life, now, but humans are the real monsters.  We see how everyone deals with post-apocalyptic life.  They start a community and shutter the outside world.  They forage.  They mobilize and militarize.   But the problems that exist in a pre-apocalypse world don’t go away.  They just localize and intensify.  Revolution should have focused on that instead of whiz-bang gadgetry and lofty mathematical equations come Oppenheimer weapons of mass destruction.  Deal with a world that is tech addicted. Deal with civilization crumbling without its infrastructure.  Deal with the struggle between the bad guys that have taken over in the absence and the good guys who want to restore the world.  And, while you’re at it, deal with the struggle between wanting to restore the power and knowing how we dealt when it was removed.  That was hinted at, but never really explored in its entirety.

Granted, maybe comparing Walking Dead to Revolution is an apples to oranges argument and I’m favoring one over the other but I learned to accept Revolution and come back to watching it.  But the endgame of the series and its Nano-can’t-decide- if-it’s-the-machine-of-The-Matrix-or-I, Robot personality just went a little sideways. 

How would I have fixed it?

Drop the nano but keep the philosophy. 

If you are going to start 15 years after the blackout, introduce something that sparks the debate on whether or not the blackout was an act of terrorism or government screw up.  Maybe delve into an inside plot to disrupt the government and return it to the people.   Don’t turn the power back on during the first season.  Hint at it.  Theorize its possibility.  Just don’t even go there until you get to the last moments of the first season and have something small lead you into a cliffhanger.  Second Season, you have the possibility and the threat of electricity on the table and the struggle to take control like Monroe did to establish military supremacy.  Also, delve into the decision of whether or not it would be better to just go without it.  Are we better off with it back?   Are we just going to make the same mistakes all over again with it back?    Beyond evolve the backstory.  Keep the math, but not the science fiction.  If you’re not going to use nanotechnology, have some device in a mountain somewhere that is suppressing electricity.  Or, have the scientists start from scratch and reinvent the light bulb.    Makes you wonder if static electricity was also suppressed by the nano?  What about Faraday coils?   

Adopt a steampunk/Fallout motif somewhere.

Don’t get me wrong.  The one pure stroke of genius this show had, which brought me back was having Brett Michaels play himself.  The acoustic hillbilly rock soundtrack was a nice touch, but why not expand on it?   This is a brave new world.  You have so many survivalists in the real world, why not introduce that into the mix?  Remember LOST’s John Locke?  People who role play, LARP, do reenactments of battles, invent things from junk could be factions, or at least serve as humor.  We have are reduced to simple weaponry and tactics.  They nailed that, but with the nano in play, they handcuff themselves to not moving in other directions.

Keep people on one side. 
The constant flip flopping of allegiances and morality just annoys us.  Yes, there can be qualms, gray area, justifiable acts, but even Game of Thrones doesn’t have this many changes in colors.   The characters don’t change their values, the situations dictate their approach.  As much as I love Giancarlo Esposito, I just can’t figure out what the hell is motivation is.

What's In a Name

This will only make sense if you are the younger of two brothers or sisters.

I have had an identity crisis most of my life.  It’s probably one of the reasons why I thought that acting was a good career choice, albeit one I gave up years ago.   From the time I was in grade school, I really had trouble knowing if someone was talking to me.  This is because I have an older brother.

Now, older brothers are cool, like if you’re Ben Seaver on Growing Pains. And, unfortunately, sometimes they are shits like Wayne Arnold on The Wonder Years.  In any case, I don’t blame my older brother for my identity crisis growing up.  I blame everybody who knew him. 

There is a seven year difference in our ages and even with that gap, people had a hard time reconciling the two of us being different people.  I find this odd, in that we have a definite difference in looks.  We even have different hair color.  His is more brown and was even dirty blonde as a child, while I’ve had dark brown, even almost black since I was a child.  The only similarities in us is our voices and personalities.  We have the same traits that we probably got from our parents.  Yet, it’s odd that people had a hard time telling us apart.

Case in point, Ms. Nancy Jones, our grade school nurse was the biggest offender.  For six years, whenever she saw me in the school, she would call me by my brother’s name.  Sometimes she would catch herself, sometimes she wouldn’t.  When I was about 12, I sensed that she was being facetious as she would wink when she would call me the wrong name, but it was still a thing in my mind.  Even my own parents were guilty of doing it.   I would never know they were calling me, because they were calling me by the wrong name.

The identity issue continued as I followed my brother throughout schools and into graduation.  We even went to the same college, but by then, it was a different problem.   Apparently, there are a lot of me in this world.  None of us are related.  In fact, when I was registering for classes in college, I had another case of mistaken identity when first of all, the admissions office lost my records behind a filing cabinet for three days.  And after it was found, they proceeded to question my class choices, insisting that I should be in the pharmacy program because my father was a big name in the field.  I said, “No, that’s not even the right first name on that file and unless he’s paying for school, he’s not my dad.”  In 2011, when this doppelganger who shared my name died, one of my former  classmates posted a “RIP” message up on Facebook.   He happened to be a former boss and it led to a few of our mutual friends thinking I was dead.  I had to jump in and give the old Monty Python and the Holy Grail quote just to clear things up.

As I approached my 30s, I thought I was finished with the whole naming issue.  I was my own person with my own life.  My brother was his own.   Then, my sister had a son.  Not only did he have a completely different name, he looked nothing like the two of us.  Yet, one day, as I was visiting my parents, I hear my mother yelling out my name as if I had done something wrong.  It turned out she was correcting my nephew and using my name.   And so it began again.

This is why I have a daughter.

Reading Between The Lines

I’m sitting in a bookstore and this novel captures my attention, so I pick it up.  I don’t know books very well, because I don’t read that often.  This book could be like a hundred or a thousand others I’ve seen in my lifetime, but something about this one is different.  So, I open it and I begin to read. 

Part of me doesn’t want to actually sit here and read it because I have so many other things to do.  And that’s a lie I tell myself because I just don’t read that often.  Reading takes more work than I’m used to doing.   I liked reading, when I was younger, but I never read for me.  I read because it was required.   Beyond that, I’ve always been a visual person, so I would rather watch the film and not have to think.   I would rather cover the material in two hours of time instead of days or weeks.  I guess I’m just lazy.

But I begin to read this one.   It’s harder to understand than the others.  The words aren’t monosyllabic and cutesy.  They require me to look up a couple of definitions in order to make sense of what I have just read.  Honestly, this book is slowly starting to madden me, because I have to work at it.  I could have watched a movie or a video and had been done.  Hell, I could have gone to Wikipedia and just looked up the thing and got a synopsis, but here I am still reading.  Damn this book.   It frustrates me to no end.  It actually requires me to think, to feel, to listen.  And I don’t mean just the story, I mean the entire book.

I feel the texture; the way the spine dips in and out, the lip of the cover as it hangs there over the material, the horizontal stack of pages between the front and the back.  It brushes against my skin and feels like it was made to be touched by hands in need of something stimulating.  It’s not a glossy paperback with a flashy well drawn character on the cover.  It’s not even bare or nondescript with simple titles.  It's somewhat classical, in nature, and the cover feels good against my fingertips.  I like it.   I like holding it.   I like running my finger along the cover, tracing the raised letters in the title.  I like the grooves and the curvature of the pages as I feel the exposed side of the book, running my fingers up and down the sides.

So often we lose the idea that physical books are important and we turn to technology to make it easier to read and learn.  But a tablet or eReader can't replace physical books and we are slowly losing sight of them in our lifetime.  You have to pick up a book and hold it.  You have to support it with your hands.  You have to manually turn the pages.  You have to provide yourself with the right light to see it.   Reading a book isn’t just about moving your eyes across a page.  You have to physically and emotionally invest yourself in reading it. You have to work at it and it demands that aspect of you without even muttering a word on its own.

And it makes a distinctive sound, too.  Have you ever thought about that?  That dulcet thump you hear when you tap the cover, the depth that the book has from the sound reverberating back to your ears.  You know that the deeper the tone must mean it carries more weight and is full of knowledge and wonder.   The sound that emanates from it as you gently grasp the page, turning it, anticipating what is going to happen next may go unnoticed by some, but it echoes out and signals something important to you.  That sound has such a pleasing timbre, yet it goes unnoticed anymore because we just don't get to hear it enough in our day.  We're used to the clacking of keys and even the slick acetone texture from sliding our fingers on a magazine page.  Those are noises, disruptions in an otherwise quiet mind.  The turning of this book's pages is like a symphony of paper, rich and weighted.

And the story.  The story is like nothing else.  I’ve only scratched the surface with a couple of pages and here I am engrossed to the hilt.  Normally, I would just skip to the end and see how it all turns out because I’m always in a hurry.  I don’t have time to sit and invest myself in this.  But this story keeps throwing twists at me.   And the more the story throws roadblocks between the characters, the more irate I become with it because it’s just a book, right?  It’s something that should be so easy to get through.   In fact, a couple of paragraphs irk me so much that I want to put it back on the shelf and say, “No, I will not do this to myself.  I have better things to do with my time.”   I have even been to the point where I’ve actually closed the book, attempted to put it back on the shelf, and walked away, only to just huff and open it again, rereading a couple of paragraphs to see if I missed something important; some clue to help make me understand.  And just like that it draws me back in and hours go by like seconds.

Then I realize that I do have to move along and I do have to put the book down for awhile.  I have other things going on that need my attention, right now.   And I have every intention of coming back to it and hope that it will still be there, but I realize that this is a rare thing to find and someone else has to be looking for it, too.  It's probably someone more suited for the task, someone with a better mind to understand it.  The fact that I'm monopolizing it is wrong and I'm probably keeping it from being somewhere better off than with someone like me, who doesn't usually read.  But I worry about it.  Odd thing to worry about, because it's in a bookstore and not with you.  But, I do.  It’s liable to be gone as soon as I walk away from the door.   Gone forever.  Days can go by, but I think about it all the same.  Wondering if perhaps it's still there.  Wondering if it wants me to come back and read some more.

Every so often, I can check in on the book and try to fight the taskmasters in my life for a chance to read a few pages.  I enjoy my time and it gives me such pleasure. To have the chance to be around such a fascinating thing is always a good thing.   Someday, I may have all the time in the world to devote to reading, but right now, I can’t.

But, I’m also afraid of that prospect.  I’m afraid of how it will end.  In fact, I’m afraid of actually reaching the end.  What then?  I can always go back and read the story, again, but it will never be like the first time.  And, I will have already known how it will end, because I’ve read it.   I run the risk of ruining it for someone who may appreciate it more because, until now, I've never cared about reading.  I invested so much time in the story, in holding the book up, in listening to and feeling the pages, and I don’t want it to end.  

In fact, now I’m so pissed at myself because I should never have picked it up in the first place.  As long as the book exists, and I know some of  the story, it will always be perfect in my mind, right?  The story won't end.  And, I can’t ruin it by not taking proper care of it, so I should just leave it where it is.  I mean, after all, the damn thing is too wordy and I just don’t have the patience for it.   I worked overtime at figuring out the plot and that was excruciating, because it just wouldn’t tell me what I wanted to hear.  It just kept holding back and allowing me to do all this work just to understand a fraction of it.   

I’m serious.  Remember, I don’t read.  I’ve done the bare minimum in terms of work when it comes to reading.  Whatever this book is trying to tell me is just the most infuriating and exasperating thing I’ve ever read.  I find myself lying in bed, debating over something I read earlier and literally grinding my teeth at how I had to work out a passage in my head, because it was so hard to read.

The gall of this book for making me work so hard to enjoy something so refreshing and unique.  How dare it make me feel for a story like that?  What gave it the right to draw me in, have me read word after word, turn page after page, and just begin to even put in a tenth of the amount of work I’m used to just to get through a few chapters? 

Oh, yeah, that’s right.  When it’s good, it’s supposed to do that.   That means it’s not only worthy of my time, but that I should feel all those things.  A book should do that to your mind and your soul. 

I should keep reading.

Weddings and Toasts

Weddings are a polarizing subject, depending on who you speak to.   To the involved, it’s a lot of stress and work over a year or more boiled down to one day of joy or frustration.   The problem is you’ll only remember it if it goes wrong.  

To the bridal party, it’s an opportunity to really define the bonds of friendship.  How much of the bride can you take before you are no longer BFFs?   Let’s face it, grooms are easy.  If they’re awake, they’re fine.   

To the families, it becomes a testament to micromanagement and tolerance of one another.   The majority of the costs usually fall to the bride's family, while the groom's parents usually pick up the rehearsal dinner and bar tab at the reception.  Then there's little sniping back and forth about the seating arrangements.  Who is closest to the bar?  Who gets to the buffet first?  Can we put Uncle Wears-bib-overalls-to-a-funeral next to the snobs from their side of the family?  If you're lucky, the fathers won't be involved in fisticuffs before the cake gets cut.

And to the guests, it’s an excuse to get sloppy drunk at an open bar, to ridicule the people at the party to their date, and to possibly do stupid things all for the price of a gift no one will ever use and an afternoon dressed up in uncomfortable clothes which will undoubtedly be disheveled by the bridal dance.

But, you have to look beyond all these things, though, and find the magic.   You have to see the subtext.  You have to see the inner-workings of the process to understand how much hell you have to go through, just to make it to the point where you can give advice to future couples and not be full of shit.

That’s what I did over the weekend. 

It started out innocent enough.  My family travelled towards the middle of Pennsyltuckey for one of my best friend’s wedding.    We arrived on a Thursday night and stayed until Saturday.  We planned for minimal impact as I brought along a suit, a change of clothes and another backup shirt.   I was way ill prepared for the event.

Thursday night, my buddy stayed at the hotel, while his wife to be stayed at the house.  I decided to help him relax by taking him out for a few drinks with my Father-in-law.  We went to a little bar in Lewisburg called The Bull Run.  The night started out rather innocent.  We talked over beers and then it got interesting.   After a Blue Moon and two Smithwicks I decided to take up the karaoke microphone and serenade my brother in harms with Georgia Satellites’  “Keep Your Hands To Yourself”.  Not too bad.  Then a bunch of girls from Bucknell came in and it got even more interesting.   By the end of the night, I was completely trashed and singing, badly, “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy” to the coeds who turned out to be all together… like romantically.   It also didn’t help I was wearing a shirt that said, “Let’s get drunk and make some bad decisions.”

Let's Get Drunk and Make Bad Decisions

Friday, feeling not too bad, we went to the wedding in full suits.  It was outdoors and just hot and humid enough to melt.  My daughter was dying of thirst and proclaimed that “I am so thirsty that I hope it rains so I can drink it and cool off.”

It poured from the beginning of the four minute ceremony until the end.  Well played, universe.

Now, the typical person would look at this event and see an unmitigated disaster.  All the planning, all the stress, all the work, all gone in an instant with a deluge of water.  The superstitious person would take this as a good sign.  I took it as a chance for this couple to remember their wedding day forever.  And I told the bride, “You know that thing you worry about happening on your wedding day?  That thing that could ruin it all.   Well, that was it.  That is the worst thing that will happen today, I guarantee it.  And you know what?  It wasn’t that bad.   We got through the wedding in four minutes, you’re married, and no one is hot anymore.”  

I forgot about the fact that none of us were going to be able to wear these clothes to the reception, unfortunately.  There was one guest laundry facility in the hotel and it was being used.  So, I ended up wearing the shirt from the night before and jeans, because it was the cleanest change of clothes I had to wear.

So, there I am in jeans and a t-shirt, seated at a wedding alongside people in suits.  Worse yet,  I was the best man and had to give a toast.  A toast I worked very hard on writing and was typed up,  printed out, folded in quarters, and nestled snuggly in my suit coat pocket.   It was a horrible mess and disintegrated in my hands.   But I used that.  I used that and the fact that I was now dressed in street clothes to get my point across.  I love these people, dearly, and it was probably the easiest speech I ever gave from memory.  

I stood up and immediately acknowledged what happened to my clothes and pulled out the sopping mess of a speech to great laughs.   The audience was mine.   I spoke about how I had known the groom for 17 years and how he never took my advice about anything.  His past relationships came up, playfully mind you, and without malice.  Then I mentioned how the first meeting with his bride, during a vacation, immediately resulted in acceptance and love from complete strangers.  She was, in fact, the perfect person for him.  He had finally taken my advice.  Then, a cell phone went off, saving me at a transitional dead end.  It was the familiar ringtone of the Theme From The Godfather, emanating from a friend who everyone knew and I used that to my advantage to bring back the crowd.   I then proceeded to give the following advice to the couple.

1. Communicate.  I don't mean talk to each other.  I mean listen.  Tell each other what you want.  Share your hopes, thoughts, fears, everything.  Don't expect each other to guess or automatically know.  That's years down the road.  You guys are still only three years into your relationship.  You have a lot to learn about each other.
   
   
2. Fight.  I don't mean physically, mind you.  There is nothing that could be more detrimental to your longevity than giving up on something just because you don't care.  Whether it's an argument over paint colors or money or the future of your marriage. If you are passionate about it, you need to defend that.  Exhaust all possibilities or you will set up a pattern of abuse that will erode your individuality and integrity and resentment will creep in quickly.
   
   
3. Don't Get Comfortable.  Marriage is not about reinventing the wheel.   After a year or two, you'll get into a rhythm and things will become automatic.  You may not even notice it.  It's gets boring and stagnated and eventually you start to just ignore each other because you think that being married means never being alone.  Always stay on edge and on top of things.
   
   
4. Have Fun.  Don't be afraid to do stupid things every once in awhile.  Get out of your comfort zone and fail.  Be spontaneous. I just had my 20 year reunion last weekend and this couple who graduated in 1951, crashed it.  This 87 year old guy was out dancing with a bunch of 38 year old women and he basically owned the joint.  His date , who he had reconnected with after 60 years, told me "He loves to just have fun.  That's what you gotta do.  You gotta have fun."  They had separate rooms that night, but I think only one got used.

Every word was true.   I spoke from experience.  I spoke from failure.  I spoke from the heart.  I can only hope they remember it as much as they do their wedding.

Now in Stereotypical Where Available

I recalled a great story told to me a few years back and I have to share it.   It’s all about language barriers and international travel.   This was told to me by one of the product marketing managers from my previous place of employment.   She was on a business trip in South Korea, meeting with sales reps, and they treated her to a night on the town.  I’ve done my best to recreate this from memory… it’s about five years old… of course, some dramatic license will be taken but the premise is intact.

After a long day of interacting with the sales force and their customers, they all decided to go to a restaurant for a later dinner.  It was a typical place in South Korea, not an Applebee’s or something internationally known.   The place looked a bit dated, but the food was great.  

Knowing that there was going to be a long flight back to the states, they decided to live it up a little and seek some post dinner entertainment.   One of the customers told the reps that this place had a private room that would be perfect.   He went and talked with the wait staff, none of which spoke English.   When he came back, he told the reps, who were bilingual, all about it.   This excited the reps but bewildered the product manager, dumbfounded by the lack of translation.  

They finished up their dinner and a very large man, almost bouncer looking, arrived at their table to escort the party to the private room.  He led them through the kitchen where various cooks and wait staff threw shifty glances.   At the back of the kitchen there was a large metal door.   It creaked open to reveal a dark staircase leading down into the bowels of the restaurant.    Once there, the only light source was the flickering of the fluorescent bulbs.  The poorly kept small tile floor looked like something out of a New York City tenement; missing small pieces of tile every so many feet.   The blackened walls looked as if they were once rich mahogany but had been painted over with thick coats of death.   At end of the hallway there was a door which opened into a single room.    It looked like a boardroom from hell or something out of the first Saw movie.   The same dilapidated flooring and poor lighting extended into the room, which almost cast a sort of blue glow.    There was a large rectangular table in the center of the room with swivel chairs around it.   On the other side, opposite the entrance, another, smaller door sat.

After the group got seated, the secondary door opened and two employees wheeled in a large boxy item on a dolly; electrical cords securing it to the greasy sides of the dolly.     The product manager began to sweat a little.    The scene was very quiet with some chattering of Korean between the staff.  Her focus went onto watching the staff hook up the box.  In international settings, electrical outlets and plugs do not resemble American ones so whatever this hulking black thing was, it looked menacing as it was being plugged into the wall.  

Immediate thoughts were that this was some sort of acetylene torch.  “OH MY GOD!”  She thought.   “It’s that scene out of Hostel.  They’re going to burn out my eyeballs!”   A second later the staff returned with a video camera and an evil looking black case, the size of a pistol.    No explanation for what was going on at this point, just the devices being brought in for what looks to be a videotaped torture.  “This is where I have to denounce the West and my family gets to see my death on YouTube, I just know it.” 

One of the customers, dressed in a sharp business suit, walked over to the AV cart that had been wheeled in and flipped the monitor on.  It remained black for the moment.  He adjusted the camera and began to play with the weapon case.   He opened it and removed a long barreled object, just obscured by the case lid.  “Oh, Jesus!  This is it.”   He pushed record on the camera and walked over to attach the unseen weapon to the black box on the dolly.  

There was a distinct hum.  

More sweat rolled down the back of product manager’s neck.  No one produced any kind of emotion other than stern focus on what was taking place.

Everything just screamed "run" in her mind.   Hopefully, she could make the stairs and be in public view before they tackled her and dragged her back into this death room.  

The customer flipped some switches and more lights flickered on the black box.   He walked over, his back to the table,  and stared at the camera, in view of the monitor, which was still blackened.  Suddenly, noise erupted from the dolly.  

Then, he began…

“At first, I was afraid, I was petrified…”

"What?" She thought.

“Kept thinking I could never live without you by my side.”

"Wait a minute?"

Still going, he walked over, flipped one more switch, and the monitor produced a teleprompter of sorts, displaying the rest of the lyrics to Gloria Gaynor’s song.

Smiles and head nods broke across the rest of the room.

Karaoke?

Staff wandered in with trays and drinks, placing down fresh glasses at each place setting.

KARAOKE!?!?!?

This became a top five story moment in my life.  I loved the suspense of it.