It sucks that I had to write the following text and post it at the local laundromat. I am bummed.

I hope it was an honest mistake and that you bring them all back. Lord knows what you’ll do with my work shirts and my wife’s underwear. I’d like to thank you in advance for bringing them all back. Mistakes happen.

But if you took them on purpose, I can only take comfort in the assumption that you need them more than I do, which probably means that your life is miserable, likely filled with drugs and abusive relationships, which will all end in an early, violent death that nobody will mourn.

I really hope that I’m wrong about the misery and demise and all of that stuff, and if it really was a mistake, then hey, no harm done, and I hope I hear from you soon. I rather like the idea that the world is filled with good people who aren’t trying to make my life harder than it has to be.

When I was about sixteen years old, I moved to a town called Atascadero, here on the lovely central coast of California. Shortly after the move, a company called Diamond Adult World came to town. A lot of people in this little city didn’t like that too much, and so spent a lot of time picketing outside, which I feel was nothing more than free advertising, but I suppose the picketers thought otherwise.

Anyway, I was something of a jerk when I was sixteen. I made the official Anti-Atascadero website (now defunct, which is too bad, because I’d like a record of how dumb I was), I would go into AOL chat rooms and cyber-rape people till I got booted (I still maintain that I didn’t actually hurt anybody, and was thus not a bad pastime), and other sort of jerkie things.

All of which leads me to the actual story, which is this: One night, when I was about sixteen years old, I was driving around town feeling bitter and angry as all sixteen year old punks do, and saw some people picketing Diamond Adult World. Not content to live and let live, I went out and picked a fight using the following argument:

“You are giving this place free advertising! Businesses pay people to go out to the corner wearing sandwich boards advertising no wait oil changes and two for one pizzas, and here you guys are out doing it for free! What’s more, Diamond Adult World is open right now, and I can buy porn, but the library is not open, and I cannot go get the next book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy! So I say put your money where your mouth is and donate the current minimum wage to the library instead of picketing for an hour out here. Donate an hour of your time being positive there rather than being negative here! Make a real difference, don’t just draw attention!”

And I am very proud to say that the picketers dwindled and pretty much ceased over the next month to six weeks. Also, and more importantly within that time frame, the local public library announced that they were extending their hours and were going to be open a whole extra day every week. I can’t prove that it was me who provoked that change, but I think we all know the truth.

A pretty good achievement for a punk ass sixteen year old jerk. I’m still proud.

There are good movies and bad movies. I watched part of a bad one called Derailed last night.

The acting was great, the director was really good, so that’s not what what made it bad. What made it bad was the harsh reality of the movie: the premise is that a guy has a life that sucks: wife who doesn’t love him, daughter with Type 1 diabetes, job where he just lost his biggest client. He meets a really good looking woman who’s got a husband she never sees and a job that’s just a job. They go to have sex in a motel and instead of having sex, they get robbed and the girl gets raped. Then the dude gets blackmailed: give the rapist money or he’ll tell the unloving wife you were cheating. Oh, and I forgot that the movie starts with our Male Lead in prison telling the story. So I already know how this depressing reality of a movie ends: with more depressing reality.

I gave up shortly after the blackmail part because I realized there was absolutely no art in this movie. It’s just kind of a, “life sucks, and just when you maybe get a reprieve, you get raped and blackmailed; then, because we don’t have justice in real life, we know you don’t want justice in your entertainment, let’s just make sure the good guy really loses at the end,” movie.

Those last two paragraphs contained spoilers, so watch out.

Derailed got good reviews and was somehow generally well received, which I can’t seem to make any sense of. To me, movies should be art. Movies should be based in at least some sort of fantasy or general unreality. Take for instance the Harry Potter movies. They’re about people with problems and conflicts, but they remove the viewer from the harsh realities of life, which include unloving spouses, diabetes, rape, and blackmail.

Take also the typical Zombie movie. There’s always plenty of gore, amputations, lumpy exit-wounds, and general disgustingness, but since they’re about zombies, there’s that bizarre fantasy element going on, which makes the disgustingness less disgusting. It also means that the filmmakers can focus on making an entertaining movie with all the things that zombie fans want: exploding heads, gushing bites, and there’s always one jerk in the movie who goes off the handle, gets turned into a zombie, and shot by a character we like.

And that started me thinking about other, “good,” movies: Schindler’s List, which is an unflinching, brutal, and very real look at the worst monstrosities that humans have to offer. On the one hand, yeah, we do need to be reminded of it because I’d hate to see Nazism repeated. On the other hand, Speilberg used this great artistic medium but took all of the art out of it and simply painted a picture of insane harsh reality. What ever happened to escapism? What ever happened to entertainment for entertainment’s sake? Why do we spend tons of money and pour thousands of man-hours into an art that isn’t art, but a history of brutality that requires zero imagination?

I’d rather watch zombies shamble around. I’d rather watch kids fly around on brooms.

I think that imagination is one of the three main ingredients to a good movie (along with decent acting and direction). To simply tell a story about life is not to make a great movie. To have a great story that transports a viewer, that’s the making of a great movie.