The stone is a mirror which works poorly.
Nothing in it but dimness. your dimness or its dim-
ness, who’s to say? in the hush your heart sounds
like a black cricket.
- Charles Simic, from The World Doesn’t End

I love the prose poetry of Charles Simic, especially those in The World Doesn’t End. As with any title, and especially with Simic’s titles, meaning is open to interpretation, though some interpretations (those which have been given some thought and have some textual evidence to back them up) are more right or closer to right than others. Since I picked up the little, square book – shaped pleasingly like the paragraph-sized poems within – I’ve always thought the title meant to invoke a sense of expansiveness.  That, like a circle or a sphere, or the curvature of our planet, the world has no beginning and thus no end.  That sort of all-inclusiveness, that continuity, is a fantastic concept, a magic idea that seems very simple, but can be and has been applied to anything from the identity of the human species to time to history to language. I devour this philosophy, and struggle epically with it, because for such a basic concept, it’s amazingly slippery and hard to define in practical situations.

I think I first noticed the end of the world billboards at about the beginning of March.  “Cry mightily unto God! … May 21st, The Bible Guarantees It!” it said, as I walked to my laundromat, carrying the sum total of my clothes in a battered maroon suitcase.  At first I was perplexed – I thought the world would be ending in 2012? – and so went home to my internet connection to figure out what this new deal was.  It turned out to be, as most everyone now knows, the product of numerology and a man who has cried Rapture! once before, and been proved wrong.  As I write these lines it’s now 6:05PM on the West Coast, and the last chance that he and his followers had to be right has slipped away.  That night two months ago, I went to bed and had a dream that a pale woman crept behind my shower curtain and, as I sat unable to move, she just drifted slowly towards me, until I slapped her.  Then, she abruptly turned insolent, and drifted away.  When I woke up, I knew the dream had come from the billboard, from having some anxiety about it.  It didn’t help that May 21st is my anniversary with K., at least it didn’t at the time.  It ended being the best possible coincidence.

Things were OK, life got in the way, etc. etc. and suddenly it was Monday, May 16th, one of the busiest work weeks I’ve had so far.  I went over this previously, but all the work work work and the chores and the things that needed to be worried about and then done so I could stop worrying about them piled up and then it was Tuesday.  And then I freaked out.  I had quietly, in the back of my mind, already been freaking out for a few days, but had been pushing it away.  “This is silly. Malicious, yes, but also just a human form of angling for notoriety, not the proof we skeptics have all been waiting for that God does exist.” “But, what if it is? What if you backed the wrong horse or, worse, neglected to back any horse at all?” My emotions are prone to spiral as they argue with my reason, getting deeper into a contrarian, doomed, sad place the more it’s fought with by my other (internal) half.  K. often embodies that half of myself, telling me in a calm, strong way what I’ve already told myself without success.  I unloaded my anxiety about this onto him, and he eventually made it all right with me again, but I needed to decompress.  I needed several insomniac nights, stressful days, a night of drinking, and a day of convalescence after.  Excess isn’t something I indulge in anymore, figuring my body doesn’t need more punishment, but it seemed right on Friday, especially if it was going to be my last night on the Earth as I knew it.

Up until then, I had interpreted the signs around me and come up with all the right reasons why my anxiety was unnecessary, misplaced, but what I couldn’t tell myself was, why was I anxious? I’m not a religious person, but, for better or for worse, I am superstitious. I throw salt over my shoulder, I hate hearing ghost stories, and there’s an ongoing war between my delight in picking change up off the ground and my suspicion that picking up the ones with tails up is bad luck. I picked one up today, and it’s sitting in my pocket like a little lead weight.  I feel better once they go in my change jar.

Yet that day came, passed, and was largely forgotten.  We’re going on a week now with the world still blissfully intact, sunny even, here in Boston, and yet I’m still anxious. Anxiety for me is like a drug (not a good drug or drug-like substance either, it’s not sugar or nicotine or caffeine), the more I am anxious the more my brain and emotions are hard-wired to create anxiety or to accept it automatically when it approaches.  This week I’ve had at least two (small) panic attacks. Last week it was the prospect of being able to do no more in this life except die, this week it’s having too many little things to do.  Doctor, dentist, weddings, birthdays, dinners with friends.  It’s ridiculous! My birthday is a fun thing, as are dinners with friends.  Birthday will be a day-long celebration, but 2 dinners = 2 nights out of 30 days. The wedding will be fun too.  All I have to do is show up and be a guest, be pretty and eat the food in front of me, visit with my family and be plied liberally with beer and wine.  In a couple weeks I’ll also be trying to find my first of 3 new roommates, which, I admit, is not stressful, but will be over in a week (judging by the success of previous roommate searches). Check-ups suck too, but only take about an hour each.  Of course it’s a lot, of course! May was busy too, which is probably why I’ve gotten fatigued from Doing Things for so long.  It’s horribly sad though that I’ve managed to conflate the Note Fun Things and the Fun Things into one big ball of Things to Be Stressed About.  I’m trying to get over it.  And this is the solution to the mystery, is that I was anxious about the end of the world because my anxiety was looking for something to unleash itself upon.  What better object than the potential end of days?  If I can be stressed about my own birthday or a dental cleaning, then I can definitely be stressed about fire and brimstone, no sweat.

This is why, cut to this week, and I still have a little ball-shaped, lumpen anxiety growth housed within my ribs, somewhere between my heart and my stomach.  I’m working away at it, and trying to convince myself that in between the next five weekends there are other days.  We’re talking 30 here, not 10.  Then there are 62 more days after that until September 1st.  Summer’s on.

This is the start of a new series that I hope to continue every once in awhile on this site. I’ve been watching a lot of TV on my friend Netflix, mostly old stuff I’ve never seen and some shows from my misspent youth in front of the boob tube. Most of my favorites involve sentient animals scurrying hither and yon living their lives as we often imagine ourselves living them.  Rocko’s Modern Life, The Angry Beavers, Disney’s The Jungle Book, Robin Hood, and The Lion King, Rocky & Bullwinkle, etc. As you might guess, if you’re a cartoon buff, I was also raised on Looney Toons, and that’s where a lot of my comedic sensibility first came from. (That and Get Smart.) It’s not a bad place for a developing sense of humor to come from, certainly, since Looney Toons, like most good cartoons (see: Pixar) had a lot more going on than a six-year-old could consciously grasp. (this is a big post, so click over to read the rest…)

Rocko’s Modern Life was mined from that same vein of wacky animal cartoons. In a way, an animated series that debuted a couple years before, Doug, was even more exotic and exciting to me because it was a show about (somewhat) real people, or at least what was acknowledged to be human beings.  All the shows I had previously watched with human beings in them were largely live action (lots of Mr. Rogers and Reading Rainbow).  Yes. Mr. R did have his puppets in the Neighborhood of Make Believe, but it was mostly him and the people he occasionally visits out in the community. Likewise, The Flintstones (which I adored as a kid, and even was devoted to the awful Super Nintendo video game) and The Jetsons did have humans, but for opposite reasons (that of their settings in the prehistoric past and the distant future) were firmly rooted in fantasy, and therefore enjoyable without being immersive.  Doug, on the other hand, largely defined my 6-year-old conception of what it was like to be a teenager.  By the way: Doug was nothing like my experience of ages 13-18, and I very much wish it had been.

Anyway, with all those episodes of The Muppet Show, the aforementioned Looney Toons, and a smattering of others, I was primed to love RML when it came out, and so I did, wholeheartedly.  Quite honestly, before the Nicktoons series of cartoons appeared on my radar, I hadn’t really watched a whole lot of animated shows beyond the aforementioned LT. Disney movies, of course, and lots of ‘em.  I missed the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles bandwagon, and never could get into the many Batman, X-Men, and other cartoons on Saturday morning television.  No nostalgia lost there. But, I can honestly say that watching Rocko all over again was just as rewarding as, say, watching Toy Story soon before seeing Toy Story 3 (15 years after the first one!).  I still loved every minute of it, but in a much different way than 6-year-old-me did.

RML was only the fourth of a then-new series of cartoons made by the also new Nickelodeon network, called Nicktoons. If you look at the first 8 cartoons on the other side of that link, you know what I was watching between the ages of 5 and 10.  At least, those were the shows I watched that were marketed to my demographic.  I actually spent a good deal of my time after the sun went down watching things like I Love Lucy and Get Smart, so the kids shows that I liked were both rare and beloved.  As for why I spent so much time watching TV, well… when you’re an only child with busy parents, you either end up behind a book or in front of the television a lot of the time.  I did both, frequently, at least when it wasn’t nice outside.

Big Talking Points

1) My first thought, about two minutes into the first episode was “I can’t believe my parents let me watched this.”  It’s the same way I felt when I tried to watch Ren & Stimpy a few years ago, another of those early Nicktoon shows.  R&S to me just seemed creepy and gross in my post-20 years, while as a kid I distinctly recall laughing incredibly hard at all that creepy grossness. Something – I think it would be too simplistic to call it “innocence” and too harsh to call it “ignorance” – got lost in the passage of years.  So, just like physical taste, my taste in humor might have changed as well.  I basically ate nothing healthful as a kid, but now I gladly consume broccoli as often as possible. Who knew? I was afraid something similar might have happened with RML and other favorite kid programs, but in this case the show translated really well.  Again, I can compare it favorably to the Pixar movies. Apparently, this was intentional. One of the writers (who’s being interviewed on the other side of that link right there) also name checked Rocky & Bullwinkle as a predecessor/inspiration, which I also watched a lot of.  My father also loved R&B, and probably for different reasons than I did (though I never did ask him, and we have similar sense of humor now).

There’s a lot that’s clever in RML that made me laugh in a different way.  My favorite example of this is the animators’ depiction of hell, in the episodes “To Heck and Back” and “Heff in a Handbasket.”  It’s probably not the first envisioning of hell in children’s television, but it’s a funny, irreverent, yet somehow also morally appropriate take on the concept.  My parents were not religious people (I never went to any church growing up), so I’m sure they didn’t think too hard about me watching this.  At any rate, while featuring a hilarious version of the Devil-as-fool (see also: the Robot Devil from Futurama) named Peaches (the bizarreness of that alone has me giggling just thinking about it), those two episodes manage to feature lessons about selfishness and selflessness that are straightforward, but not sappy.  As a kid, I avoided sappiness like the plague, so if I was going to be receptive to a moral message of this sort, it was going to have to be delivered to me in between laughs. On a more superficial note, the reference to The $10,000 Pyramid in the above shot from the show made me laugh pretty hard after I remembered what it was.  I watched a lot of Pyramid once the Game Show Network was invented by some genius of syndicated programming, and the Devil and an oblivious cow playing the game somehow came across as how pretty much everyone on the show played that game.

2. About halfway through the first season of the show, I had a revelation about how old the characters are.  If you’re watching closely, you figure out that they’re all just out of college.  They don’t make a huge deal out of it, but the clues are there for the interpreting.  When I was 6, 22 years old = old (was this the same for everyone?) and so it didn’t connect for me.  I just assumed they were supposed to be “adults” and left it at that. When I was watching RML at 24, I realized that these people (well, animal people…) were in my demographic.  Two years ago, those fumbling attempts to balance housework with underpaying jobs, dealing with being broke-ass, eating lots of pizza and watching crappy movies with my friends… that was me! To a certain extent, it’s still me.  On a thorough reading of the Wikipedia page for the show, the creator, Joe Murray, confirms this: “One of the reasons I feel that Rocko’s Modern Life resonates with so many, is that all of the situations we cartooned, the neurosis, the daily chores of everyday life, speeding tickets, flying a plane, were all based on my own experiences breaking out into the world after school.”

As a viewer in my twenties, I can probably relate to these awkward, nerdy, (comic)book/tv/movie-addicted versions of twenty-somethings better than I could at 6-7-8.  Then, that age group as distinct from the larger category of “adult” wasn’t really on my radar.  Even now, I find more similarities between Rocko and myself thank I can find common ground between me and the high-fashion, shot-consuming, hard-clubbing people in their 20s that the media/Hollywood likes to present to us.  How sad is that, that I feel like I have more in common with a cartoon wallaby than any of the people who “star” in Jersey Shore? And yet, am I really surprised by this revelation?

Factoids

1. When I fired up the second season of the show and the theme came on, I immediately said to myself, “Oh my god, that’s the B52′s!”  Indeed, a glance at the credits confirmed that Kate Pierson and Fred Schneider did sing the theme song for the show in the second through the fourth seasons.  I’m really glad that K. got me in the habit of watching the opening of a show at least a couple times every season of a series, just to see if it’s changed.

2. Remember my “how was I allowed to watch this!?” reaction? Well, it turns out that Nickelodeon actually found the second episode of the series not fit for children, because it featured a Mrs. Robinson-type seduction of Rocko by the middle-aged Mrs. Bighead.  Joe Murray writes a little blurb about this on his excellent website. I was made incredibly uncomfortable by this scene, but only because Mrs. Bighead is basically that awkward, overweight, 50+ housewife neighbor that everyone in suburbia has at one point or another.  If you had one, imagine her trying to get you into her pants.  Gross, right? I know!

3. Dr. Hutchison’s character was apparently created only after executives at Nickelodeon admonished Joe Murray for not including any strong female characters on the show. I think she’s one of the unsung female heroes of kids television, of this era: she’s smart (how else do you get to be a surgeon, a dentist, a pharmacist, etc.?), funny, stands up for what she wants (even if what she wants is a stumpy, neurotic turtle), has a hook for a hand yet is still hot, is confident about who she is, and somehow manages to birth and rear 5 strange kids (turtles, cats, and cows…) without appearing to break a sweat.  Work it (cat)girl.

Negatives

My only complaint is not against the show, but, rather, Netflix.  Currently, there is only one episode not available for streaming, and it happens to be my most favorite.  The episode in question is Fish-N-Chumps/Camera Shy, from Season 3.  Netflix has somehow replaced this episode with the one where Rocko goes to Paris, one of my least favorites, which is like rubbing salt into my already crying eyes. So, right now there are only 12 episodes in that season instead of the normal 13.  What gives Netflix!  Hopefully someday they rectify this mistake. Thanks to an incredibly selective memory that holds onto things like the entirety of favorite television episodes, I actually remember most of this episode shot for shot. Yet, it would be really great to rewatch it all these years later, to see if it still has the same effect on me.

Anyway, thus ends my exploration of RML. I think there were a lot of things I had to elucidate along the way, about how I grew up watching TV and what it meant for me to rewatch this show in particular.  So, if you made it this far, I hope it was as interesting for you to read as it was useful for me to write!  Next time, I probably won’t have to do all that jazz, so stay tuned for the next installment of this series.  I need to take a break before that happens…

I wanted to continue a little bit on the book issues I brought up last week.  In the original post on Kottke, one commenter brought up that the service which Tim Carmody and all the rest of us were thinking about already existed, and it’s called “the library.”  I wrote this off as somewhat impractical, but then again (just like the unlimited book service itself), it depends on what kind of reader you are and what you like to read.

Up until tonight, my public library card was 3 years out of date.  In grad school, the library had become a place where I went to sweat over papers and flip my way through 15 research books at a time before taking out maybe 2, almost exclusively non-fiction. Suddenly, after I graduated, I became allergic to libraries, despite having a newly renovated one an easy walk away.

This may be an out-of-date attitude, but I like to own books, especially books by authors I love.  As you might imagine, I like a lot of authors, who have written a lot of books, so I own a lot.  Yet, there are so many more out there that I look at and have to make a call.  My thought process goes something like this: “Hmm, that sounds interesting, but I don’t know the author, the critics love it, but will I love it? Do I really want to spend money on this, even used?” I was trolling around The Millions today, and found myself deep in New Book Curiosity.  Suddenly I had a wish list 10 books long, and an equally long face to match.  Suddenly Allan Quatermain was not looking as awesome, despite his excellently geeky hair and constant near-death experiences.  Aw, who am I kidding, that’s good reading!  But the Itch for new books could be scratched with only one thing.

So, that’s how I found myself in the new books section of my local library, suddenly feeling like I had the world on a plate.  It was overwhelming, knowing suddenly that I could pick up any of these books in front of me, take them home, and read them.  All those books!  For free!  Obviously I’d have to bring them back… but in that moment the feeling of something wonderful opening itself out before me, like a carpet being rolled out or, appropriately, like a book being opened, was all the mattered. I wasn’t close to tears at all, but I was close to being close to tears, for a couple seconds.  That may also be because I’d had a beer before taking my walk to the library, and was still a little loose-limbed and maudlin by the time I got there.  Depending on how you look at it, I’m either the ultimate lightweight or a really cheap date.

True to form, just as I do with shopping, I ended up with nothing I had wanted originally, but am very happy to have now.  That’s my lot in life, but I still got a good haul, no?  Something to curl up in bed with, and maybe something to curl up in bed with while someone else, with their own book, is curled up next to me.
]]> http://smattering.wordpress.com/2011/05/09/books-for-all/feed/ 0 smattering Book Booty http://smattering.wordpress.com/2011/05/07/day-18/ http://smattering.wordpress.com/2011/05/07/day-18/#comments Sat, 07 May 2011 19:20:01 +0000 Smattering http://smattering.wordpress.com/?p=342 Continue reading »]]> I actually don’t have too much to say about #18, which means, really, that it shouldn’t have taken me this long to get to it!  For a few months now I’ve been on the hunt for a good sweatshirt.  My demands for clothes seem very basic to me – I have to struggle with my natural sense of style in order to buy something with a pattern that isn’t a polka dot or a stripe – except for the part where I don’t want them to cost a lot.  Yet sweatshirts, for an item of clothing that is generally thought to be the ultimate staple in the lazy man’s (and woman’s) wardrobe are surprising spendy.  $50+ dollars, really?  I was willing to spend $20 max, and after months of putting not-much-effort into looking for one that fit that criterion, I finally found one, at H&M. I’ve come to accept now that, whenever I go shopping, I’ll almost never find whatever it is I’m looking for at the time, but end up finding something I forgot I had been looking for months ago and never put in the diligence to find.

I’ve always had a lot of good luck (in the fortune cookie sense of the word) with inspection stickers on clothes.  It took me about a week to even realize that my new sweatshirt had a sticker, but after throwing it on my chair like I do every day, since I’m allergic to hanging things up neatly, I came across the tag sticking out all willy nilly like so.  I enjoy that it looks like an 8-Ball, and 8 is a luck number since it’s my birthday day.  If I ever played the lottery, it would definitely be one of my numbers (actually, mine are bizarrely close to the Lost lottery numbers, which creeped me out at the time).  Anyway, that’s all she (me) wrote, and it’s time to go see what else I can do with the rest of this rainy, thundery Saturday.