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The Naked John Lithgow Early Warning System

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As many readers of my blog know, I dig older guys. I don’t know why, but guys over fifty turn my crank in a big way. Guys over forty-five, let’s say, because James May is only in his forties, and he’s like, my number one dreamy older guy. But I digress.

I like a lot of older guys, but just being over the proverbial hill isn’t the defining quality that makes me think, “Huh, I would like to get on that, albeit carefully, as he isn’t as young as he used to be.” One famous older man who I absolutely adore, but not in a “Yeah, I’d do him,” kind of way is John Lithgow.

John Lithgow is awesome. He wrote a children’s book about a squirrel, and it’s so cool, you just have to read it for yourself. In fact, he’s written a lot of really cool books for kids. He was also in the most freaking awesome show ever, 3rd Rock From The Sun. And he played a serial killer on Dexter. And that’s where my story takes a horrible turn.

I started watching Dexter at the urging of two of my friends, Scott and Jill, and once I started, I was hooked. It’s one of the best shows on television, as far as I’m concerned, but then again I don’t really watch tv. Anyway, it’s awesome, and I busted through three seasons in four days.

And then I got to season four. Let me set the scene. I’m watching Season four on my laptop. I’m working on three concurrent writing projects for Abigail right now, so I’m doing double duty, writing and watching Dexter. I look up, and there’s man butt. Actually, not bad man butt. My interest is piqued.

And then I notice it’s John Lithgow.

Now, I’m faced with a conundrum. John Lithgow has an awesome booty. How do I reconcile this knowledge with the kindly face of my favorite alien on 3rd Rock? How do I read Micawber to my children without thinking of what a nice butt the author has?

This is why there needs to be some kind of nudity early warning system. When I watched Boardwalk Empire, I was fully aware that yes, it’s an HBO series, I was probably going to see Steve Buscemi nude. But there are some celebrities you just don’t expect to see naked, especially in the four season of a show that has relatively little nudity.

Granted, it wasn’t sexual nudity. But now I know he has a nice ass, I have to put John Lithgow on my “I’d hit that” list, which is already pretty long. Now, I’m going to have to reorder my list, figure out some kind of filing system, and it’s going to fuck my whole day up.

My dog is the Forrest Gump of dogs, if Forrest Gump had been a little dumber.

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I have two dogs. Both of them have an internal monologue that can be summed up as “duuuuur,” but one is definitely smarter than the other. The smarter dog, an English Springer Spaniel called Tucker, won’t remember that he has a head and will often ram said head into stationary objects, then act surprised and affronted at the pain his lack of consideration has caused. However, he’s intellectually leaps and bounds above our younger dog, Sampson, a Beagle mix.

Sampson is… special. His hobbies are licking fabric (anything from the pants you’re wearing to the furniture to the dirty laundry) and being hopelessly in love with me. When I’m gone for “too long”, a period of time determined not by any chronological common sense but measured by Sampson’s desire to be near me and anxiety that I will never return, he eats my clothing or tissues I’ve blown my nose in or pens off my desk. When he’s not busy worrying over whether I’ll ever return, he’s either sleeping on or near me, or just sitting at my feet and gazing up at me longingly. As you might guess, I don’t generally get a lot of alone time. A real problem arises when Sampson is in a different room than I am, and notices it. And this is the topic of my story today.

Last night, I was in my office, like I usually am. My office is off the living room, and has large french doors with long windows in them. There’s another door at the back of my office that leads to our back hall and connects to the kitchen and bathroom. For the purposes of this post, I’ve made a handy graphic outlining the floor plan of our ground floor:

As you can see, Sampson is in the living room, and I am in my office. Since the sound of the television in the living room is distracting to me, I had closed the french doors to my office. But my office, being the only room on the first floor that doesn’t gravity feed to the upstairs, gets insanely hot if I don’t leave the back door open. So, marked in red on the above graphic is the path Sampson would have to take to get into my office.

The first time this scenario took place, I gave Sampson some leeway. I’m sure it’s a difficult concept for dogs: the thing you want is right there, and the most direct path is blocked. Trying to get beyond the initial dog-mind panic, “I want it! It’s right there! Why can’t I get it?” in order to overcome the obstacle takes time. For Tucker, it was simply a matter of looking through the french doors, seeing that the back door was open, and taking that path of red x’s. For Sampson, it went somewhat differently.

At the time, my cousin D-Rock and I were sitting in my office. D-Rock said something to the effect of, “That dogs is so fucking stupid. He’s never going to figure it out.” I countered with, “No, he’ll get it eventually. Probably take him a while, though.” Sure enough, thirty minutes later, Sampson wandered away from the french doors and eventually made it through the back door. But D-Rock was unconvinced. “He probably just went into the kitchen and heard us talking from the hallway, and was like, ‘Oh, what’s this down here?’ He didn’t mean to actually get in this way.”

I’m afraid she might be right, because last night, the same thing happened. So, there I was, sitting in my office, being generally awesome, and Sampson realizes that he’s been separated from me. I’m pretty lazy, and once I get comfortable, that’s it. I’m done. I’m not getting up for anything, unless the chair is on fire or something. I put up with Sampson’s whining for a little bit, but eventually he decided to charge the glass. That was when something had to be done.

I tried to put my hand up to my mouth and whistle, directing the sound to the back door. Since dogs have such awesome hearing, I thought this would clue him in to the alternate route. No dice. I made direct eye contact and pointed at the open door. “See? Come in the back way!” I shouted through the glass. This just made Sampson more frantic. My son, thinking he could help the situation, went to the kitchen and called Sampson, then tried to direct him down the hall. Sampson just became confused and raced back to the living room, where he collided with the doors. My son decided to open the french doors and let him in.

Sampson was all settled in at my feet when my husband went to the kitchen to make dinner. The sound of food being exposed and touched and possibly dropped was too much for Sampson, who shot out the back door of my office, down the hall into the kitchen. But my husband shooed him out… into the dining room. Sampson wanted back in my office. So he ran to the french doors in the living room and we repeated the frantic whining. This time, though, my son wasn’t there to let him in, and so he had to become more resourceful.

Sampson needed a plan. When my husband unhelpfully scolded him for trying to dig under the doors, Sampson revised his thinking somewhat. Hey, wasn’t there a secondary way to access the office? Yes! It would be tricky, but he could manage it. He would get into my office and be with me and all would be well once more.

Unfortunately, his path to the office was not a straight one. First, he ran up the stairs. Then, he sniffed around the dining room. By the time he finally got into my office, I had gone through the french doors, into the living room, and closed them behind me. Our places were switched. And now, Sampson couldn’t get out. Though he’d just entered the office through the back door, he could no longer remember its existence. Somehow, diabolical forces had trapped him in this hellish room, still separated from my by those infernal french doors.

Now, I’m not saying that dogs should be exactly as smart as humans. Dogs in general can only be “smart, for a dog”. That doesn’t make the dumb ones less worthy of love and good treatment. I’m just saying that if Sampson was a human, he would be your boss. And every night you’d go home and you’d wonder how he got to be your boss, when he’s so stupid. And every night, when you left work, he would be wandering around the office, desperately trying to find his way out.

Grief

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My grandfather is dying.

Not in the active, immediate way that signals that this is definitely, within days, hours, minutes, the end, but the slow way that involves Hospice and doctors giving statements in months rather than years. Because of this, I’ve been thinking about the nature of grief and loss, and I’ve come to a conclusion: I have no idea how to deal with this, and by “this” I mean this specific death, for this specific man.

To paint a clearer picture of what I mean, I have to paint a picture of my grandfather. My grandfather is the type of man who, when working at the paper mill that eventually gave him asbestosis, cancer, and COPD, would volunteer for shifts that left him on his feet for twenty-four hours. He’s afraid of heights, but as a paramedic he climbed a utility pole to bring down a worker who’d had a heart attack while fixing the wires. He delivered two babies in the back of that ambulance, using softball metaphors to talk himself through it. He values hard work the way other people value money; if it could be translated into currency, he’d have a fortune in the bank.

He loves infants more than any man I’ve ever met. He personally carried each of his six children to the nursery after their births. When I was a colicky baby, up all night screaming, he walked circles around the dining room table, singing to me. My own father never stepped up to the challenge, so my grandfather let me be his seventh child. Now that I’m grown, he takes my son for rides through the back fields in a golf cart, looking for wild turkeys and deer and stopping to let him pick up feathers. He calls my daughter “Punkin” and says how much she looks like me.

My grandfather is a man who will admit to past failings of the most major kind, but who won’t admit he’s wrong when arguing over the little things. He’s a man who isn’t the best singer, but who sang the loudest, until cancer took his voice box. He gets cancer the way other people get the flu, and shakes it off just as quickly. When undergoing radiation treatment for prostate cancer in 2000, we joked about the super powers that would result, and had a huge laugh when his “super-strength” caused the rusted-out door-handle on his minivan to break free.

He has known poverty, and never throws anything away because of it. His garage is a horror show of too many tools, too many golf clubs, too much clutter, too many things that will be useful “someday”. That garage was until recently, also home to the many stray cats he adopted. The first one to live there was thin-haired and scabby, missing an ear and in possession of a weeping, dead eye, but he would pick that cat up and let it tuck its head under his chin while he scratched it.

My grandfather is my super hero. Who else would roust a six-year-old with chicken pox from her bed and smuggle her under a blanket to watch a helicopter land in the B.P.O.H. parking lot? Who else would quit cigarettes cold turkey? He’s always been as tough as the cowboys in the westerns he loves to watch, but he reads Women’s World. He read my first book, but not my second because it was “too slow.” But he cared enough to call me and tell me that a vampire movie on television had stolen my ideas. It was Interview with a Vampire, but hey, he cared.

He’s usually honest, he has faith in God. He had a stroke that left him lying paralyzed on his lawn for hours, and the next day he showed up at my birthday dinner.

And now he’s dying.

Grief is a funny thing. I can recognize all the stages as I go through them, but there’s no road map to what I’ll be feeling next, and the entire process will reset when the day I’m dreading actually comes. I’m not sure if I prefer this kind of grief or the kind that happens with a sudden phone call in the middle of dinner. Certainly it would be more easy to enter into deep denial and trick myself into surprise when it happens.

I don’t know how to approach this kind of death. It’s the elephant in the room. Do you mention it? Do you act like everything is normal? Do you let the person you love die without acknowledging the fact that when they go, a huge chunk of your life is going to break off, and you’ll never be the same?

For all I can write about death, with the blood and gore and violence, sometimes it’s a quiet, expected death that wreaks the most horror and loss.

Happy Birthday, Buffy Summers!

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As regular followers of my blog and Facebook have learned over the years, I’m a huge fan of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. I can’t truthfully say it’s my favorite television show of all time, but it’s quite high up on the list. Despite Buffy’s creator, The-Ginger-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named, doing his absolute best to destroy the mythos I and millions have come to love by making all sorts of wacky decisions for his own amusement (including delivering Buffy her very worst birthday ever with the issue of the comic that hit stands today), but when one overlooks the totally bizarre second life the series has in print (seriously, could have lived without Buffy/Angel sex that destroys mountains and winds up in space), it’s still the same, lovable old Buffy.

Oh dear, I didn’t mean old. I know how it felt to turn thirty, myself, and since today is Buffy’s big 3-0, I thought a list of my top five Buffy must see episodes is the perfect gift.

  1. “The Zeppo” Season 3
    This episode is the top of the list because it’s so damned weird. A huge plot is going on involving the end of the world and the opening of the Hellmouth, but instead of focusing on impending apocolypse, the viewer instead followes Xander Harris on a hellish journey of self-discovery that begins with a donut run and ends with zombies, a bomb threat at the school, and a werewolf attack. Oh, and somewhere along the way, he loses his virginity.
  2. “Hush” Season 4
    No list of favorite Buffy episodes would be complete without “Hush.” A group of shit-your-pants-scary baddies known as The Gentlemen roll into town in search of seven hearts to fulfill their nightmarish quota. After stealing all the voices in Sunnydale (the human voice is the only thing that can defeat them), they go on a rampage, surgically excising the hearts from silently screaming Sunnydale residents. The sharp acting in this one is what makes it so enjoyable to watch, as the characters have literally no voices for most of the episode.
  3. “Fool For Love” Season 5
    The plot of this episode is simple: Buffy gets hurt on the job and, suddenly faced with her own mortality, goes to Spike to learn about the two slayers he killed. On the surface, the story is about Buffy desperately trying to glean any information about her predecessors and the mistakes they made that wound up getting them killed, but on a deeper level, it’s all Spike’s story. As the reasons behind his wannabe hard-ass attitude are revealed through flashbacks, he becomes a fully developed character for the first time, a desperately lonely man who has never fit in with anyone.
  4. “Innocence” Season 2You know how for some people, their first time is amazing, and some people’s first time is completely lame? Buffy loses her virginity and her boyfriend in the same night, when Angel loses his soul in a “moment of happiness”. Over the course of the series, this somehow got reinterpreted as “had an orgasm.” You say “soul-deep happiness,” Joss says “orgasm.” Whatever. After Buffy wakes up alone and spends the better part of a day tracking Angel down, he cruelly berates her for her inexperience and makes it clear that the night before meant nothing to him. Of course, Buffy doesn’t realize yet that Angel is now evil, and she spends the rest of the episode coming to terms with the fact that the man she loved is now her enemy. This episode was so important to a certain highschool girl dealing with her first broken heart, she couldn’t leave it off the list.
  5. “The Body Season 5During season 5, while Buffy deals with Glory, a foe more powerful than any she’s ever faced, her mother undergoes treatment for a brain tumor. Joyce is out of the woods and making a full recovery when Buffy, returning home from the previous episode’s plot, finds her mother dead in the living room. It’s a brutal hour of watching Buffy and the Scoobies come to terms with the fact that, for all Buffy’s strength, there are forces beyond her control, and the evil of the supernatural world takes a backseat to the horror of everyday life. The episode’s title is taken from the callous words of the 911 dispatcher, who tells Buffy not to move “the body”. This is a theme throughout the episode, as Buffy shocks herself by referring to her mother as “the body” and Anya goes on a heart-wrenching tirade about death and what happens to “the body”.

So, those are my five must-sees from the series. I love all the episodes, except for the one where Xander joins the swim team, but these are the standouts for storytelling and general awesomeness.

Happy birthday, Buffy! Who knew a slayer would exceed their expiration date.

The Greatest Comedy of Our Time: Black Swan

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First of all, let me just say that everything you have heard about Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is true, unless any of the things you have heard are said without irony. The truth is, Black Swan isn’t a great movie, if taken as a 100% serious thriller. In fact, it’s a down-right terrible movie. But I refuse to believe that such a celebrated director and top-notch cast worked on this film, delivering lines like, “Everything she does comes from some dark impulse within her,” without having some kind of out-of-body experience where they’re hovering over themselves, looking down as they realize that they’re in a really, really shitty movie. Instead, I choose to believe that everyone involved in this movie, from the producer to the director to the actors and the craft services people, were in on the biggest movie-related prank of all time.
I’m not going to cut for spoilers, because you’ve probably heard all the details by now, spewed out by an ecstatic press that has embraced Black Swan as a tour-de-force. Yes, there is a big ole lesbian sex scene. Yes, Natalie Portman’s toenail totally splits in a bloody mess. All the sex and blood surprises of Black Swan have already been spoiled. What you probably haven’t heard are the subtle-as-a-sledge-hammer moments where Nina (Natalie Portman) is shown vomitting in a public toilet, only to return home to find that her mother (Barbara Hershey) has bought a huge pink cake to celebrate Nina’s casting as the Swan Queen in a new production of Swan Lake. Or the many times that Nina looks at rival ballerina Lily (Mila Kunis) only to find that Lily’s face has been replaced with her own.
But there was a particularly telling moment, the one in which I realized that no one involved with the production could have possibly been taking it seriously: Beth, a formerly celebrated ballerina played by Winona Ryder, looks at Nina and says, like some giant wink to the audience, “You stole my things?”
How could anyone, the casting director, the writer, the director, Winona fucking Ryder, assume that line would elicit anything other than laughter and disbelief from the audience. Which, by the way, was exactly what happened. A huge, unamimous “HA!” from everyone at our showing.
So, basically there are two ways of looking at this movie. As a prank, a group of very talented professionals seeking to make the absolute worst movie of our time and passing it off as brilliance. Or, as the absolute worst movie of our time.
The second scenario is one of optimism and joy for someone like me. If a movie as terrible as Black Swan can be lauded by critics of the highest caliber, then other creative storytelling types don’t have to work as hard anymore. This includes me. As long as Black Swan exists and is praised, I don’t have to worry about writing a story that makes sense. I don’t have to sit up at night worrying about loose plot threads or whether or not my dialogue is realistic. Black Swan sets a new standard for excellence, and that standard is so low, it could win a limbo competition.
I’m not sure which I like better. But I’m absolutely gleeful about the badness that is Black Swan. It might be my new favorite movie.

Coping with withdrawals, or: I finished watching The Walking Dead, now how do I carry on with my life?

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For the past five or so weeks, I have received one question, over and over, from friends and family members, from facebook people I don’t know, even from major media outlets:

“Are you watching The Walking Dead?”

Or, if you’re my Grandma, “Are you watching that show on that channel that has people turning into some kind of creature? I think it’s vampires? That doesn’t look like anything I’d want to watch. They put the damndest things on tv these days, it’s no wonder that kids are being violent.”

Up until three days ago, I was wondering where all of this was coming from. At first I thought, “What the hell, guys? Do you even know me at all? I don’t watch stuff like that. I watch Family Guy and reruns of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. I like dumb, goofy stuff that is easy to understand while high. I don’t watch “serious drama”.

(Yes, that’s kind of a lie, I have been watching and enjoying Boardwalk Empire this season, but my point stands)

I thought people were recommending The Walking Dead because I write about vampires and ghoulish stuff. Also, since 2006 I’ve been telling everyone that will listen about this awesome idea for a zombie book that no publisher wants to buy and that’s too bad for them because it will go down in history as the best zombie book ever written. Everyone just wants funny zombie books, and this one is going to be scary beyond all belief, but maybe the tides are starting to turn, what with this new show and Romero getting back in the game. Did you guys know that Mister Rogers and George A. Romero were friends, and that Mister Rogers thought Night of The Living Dead was “a lot of fun”?

I got off track somewhere. Oh, The Walking Dead. Right. So, At first I was pretty sure that people were just assuming I would love The Walking Dead because I write gross-out stuff. The same way all my friends assumed I would like Firefly because I liked Buffy, and they were all wrong. I became resistant to the idea of watching it, just because people were hyping it up so much. I went to my friend Scott’s house, and he convinced me to watch just the opening scene of the series (extremely graphic, so be warned):

Yes, that’s the opening. There’s no wading in to see how the water is. This is where you dive right into the show. I was intrigued. More so when Scott explained that the show is adapted from a comic. So, at least I knew it was written by someone passionate about telling a good story, because let’s face it, comic writers are the best storytellers we have in our culture right now. I promptly went home and obtained episodes of the show through entirely legal means that do not in any way involve a word that rhymes with “warrant”, and started watching. I thought, “I’ll [totally not download] the whole series, in case it hooks me, and I’ll give the pilot a chance.” I watched all five episodes in one day, only to learn that the season finale would air the next day. Once I got the chance to watch the finale, I thought to myself, “Okay. Great. Now what?”

That’s the state I have been operating in for the past twenty-four hours. “Okay. Great. Now what?” Because this was a pilot season, AMC only produced six episodes. They’ve already renewed the show for another season, but rumor has it that one won’t release until Halloween of 2011. That’s a long time for me. I need to know what happens next. It’s bad enough that Harry Dresden left me hanging this year, I can’t take another cliffhanger.

If you, like myself, are working through this strangely grief-like state, I recommend the following:

1. Stay calm and put a cold washcloth over your eyes.
2. Take up smoking. I don’t care what. Cigarettes, grass, insulation. You gotta do something to take the edge off.
3. Write fan fiction, but only good stuff. I’m not kidding, I really don’t need to stumble across any The Walking Dead MPREG or “Everyone is in high school and also Twilight is there”.
4. Oh my god, what happened to Merle? They let the whole season finish and they never wrapped that up? I’m going to go shake and cry in a corner.
5. Shake and cry in a corner.
6. Panic. Just blindly panic.

I have no answers. We’re all in this together, people who watched The Walking Dead. People who didn’t watch it, I’m not going to tell you to watch it. Because then you’d be in this same predicament. What I’m going to suggest is that you wait. You wait until the new season starts. Then, you start watching season 1, one episode a week, until you are are always six weeks behind and your viewing pleasure can last longer, cutting your withdrawal time down by six weeks. You’re welcome.

Joss, you chubby ginger fuck.

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I have cut Joss Whedon a lot of slack over the years. When he allowed the atrocity that was Buffy/Spike. When he couldn’t stop whining about networks not giving him a chance while he had two successful cult franchises in his wake. When he mentioned Firefly‘s cancellation in every interview for two years. When I realized that no matter what show he wrote, he would always be leaving out non-white characters and making women into his ultimate strong-woman-helpless-emotionally jack off fantasy in which Eliza Dushku looks slightly shocked and saddened as she punches him in the throat while begging him for help in learning the ways of love.

Okay, that last one is admittedly me losing patience with him. But his latest transgression is far and away a hundred times worse than any dickbag move he’s made so far. Buffy fans be warned, there will be comic spoilers from here out.


Joss Whedon killed Giles.

For reasons that I can only chalk up to just not giving a shit, in the January Buffy comic, Angel, who is evil again, kills Giles by breaking his neck. I remember something like that happening before. In season two. When killing a character actually meant something in the Buffy verse and before everyone expected Joyce to be back any minute.

Joss recycled Giles’s girlfriend’s death to kill Giles.

I can see what he was going for. For Giles to die by the hand of the vampire who killed the woman he loved, in the same manner as she died, years after reconciling with the man who killed her and coming to trust him enough to fight beside him, should have packed an emotional wallop. It would have been perfect, if he hadn’t waited for the series to end before he did it. You can’t do a “call-back” to an episode that aired over ten years ago and expect it to have the effect you intended. Instead, it looks like you’ve run out of ideas. And when that lack of creativity extends to a beloved character, fans are going to be pissed.

I know the Buffy comics are supposed to be canon, but as a fan, I cannot and will not accept any of the trainwreck that is the Buffy comics. No “Dawn loses her virginity and becomes a giant,” no “Buffy is lesbian now because Joss can’t function without the thought of girl parts touching and straight women who have bad enough luck with men will naturally become gay,” no “Giles is dead, aren’t I awesome at making you feeeeeel things?” The Buffy comics bear no resemblance at all to the show the I remember, and I can add that to my list of reasons why Joss Whedon is an overrated jackass.