Wailing Into The Void

The film they were showing on my flight back from San Francisco on Sunday was Wild Hogs.  Under normal circumstances I would never even attempt to watch a film like this, but I was desperate for any sort of distraction from the horror show that is the modern day airline experience. 

I’m not a film critic and I don’t pretend or aspire to be one, but when I see a movie like this I’ve just got to weigh in.  According to IMDB the person who wrote the screenplay, a Mr. Brad Copeland, is also credited with writing six episodes of Arrested Development.  I find this difficult to comprehend.  Wild Hogs is about as lazy as writing gets.  No cliche goes unmined and the jokes couldn’t be more obvious nor the story more predictable.  If you can read this post you probably have what it takes to write a better version of this movie.  Please move to L.A. and start cranking out scripts that will make enduring the risk of getting deep-vein thrombosis fun again. 

I’m in San Francisco this week on vacation and I spent a few hours today visting Alcatraz, which I highly recommend.  It’s touristy, sure, but it’s also a beautiful and fascinating place.

As I was standing on the pier waiting for the ferry to take me out to the island I began thumbing through the visitor info booklet I was given when I purchased my ticket.  I came across this peculiar sentence in a section titled Mainland Accessibility.

The Alcatraz Landing at Pier 33 in San Francisco is accessible.

Well, duh. Of course the landing is accessible. How the hell would people be able to get on the ferry if the landing weren’t accessible? 

Now I’m not a total idiot and I do realize that what the booklet is really saying when it says the landing is accessible is that it’s wheelchair accessible.  I’m just wondering why this Mainland Accessibility section doesn’t use the word “wheelchair” anywhere at all.  Is it now un-PC to talk about wheelchairs or directly acknowledge their existence?  Somebody help me out here.  The last thing I would want to do is go around saying something that would offend cripples.

You’re not special.  You’re not unique.  There are probably millions of people who are more or less just like you.  You are easily replaceable.  You don’t have unlimited potential waiting to be unlocked.  Chances are you are probably doing pretty close to the best you can. Get over yourself and start enjoying life a little before it’s over.  Stop reading this right now and go for a walk and get some fresh air.  It’ll help you feel better about things.

A wise friend of mine once told me that when you’re locked in an argument with someone who seems to be holding an irrational or indefensible position it’s helpful to think of them as a defective robot.  Instead of letting that person (be it a boss, a family member, a customer service representative, or whatever) wear you down emotionally, it’s often  easier to detach yourself from trying to instinctively empathize with their illogical viewpoints and instead look at them as a piece of machinery with defective wiring or bug-riddled programming. 

Once you adopt this viewpoint you’re bound to find that the world is full of defective robots.  You’re also inevitably going to wonder whether you are a defective robot yourself.  You are.  We all are.  But one of the wonderful symptoms of being a defective robot is that you are blind to your own defects, so you can go on blissifully believing that you’re one of the few sane people left in a world of complete nut jobs. 

So we’re all defective robots, but that doesn’t mean some of us aren’t more defective than others.  Newsday sports columnist Wallace Matthews could stand to have some of his circuit boards replaced, as evidenced here and here.

At least that’s my theory.  Some agree.  Some don’t.  Some are just angry. And some are taking their frustrations out on David Chase’s daughter.

For the skeptics among you who still doubt that this season of the Sporanos has eerily foretold several real-life events I present to you yet another case of the show doing exactly that.  In this past Sunday’s episode, hitmen botch an attempted rubout of a mafioso in Brooklyn.  Two days later, whaddya think happened?   David Chase is on a roll, folks.  While all of you guys tune in this week to see what happens to Tony I’ll be tuning in to carefully search for hidden clues to the future.

Tonight I spent about an hour-and-a-half making phone calls for the Fresh Air Fund as a volunteer through New York Cares.  I hadn’t done any volunteering in a while and I was looking for a cheap and easy way to assuage some of the guilt I regularly feel for being the selfish asshole that I am.  This project seemed convenient and relatively painless, so I signed up without any hesitation.

I was probably into my second or third call when I was reminded of a few facts about myself that I had forgotten.  First, I hate boring, repetitive tasks, like say, I don’t know, calling one person after another and giving the same spiel to each one.  Second, I hate dealing with the public.  Third, I hate imposing on people.  Fourth, one of my all-time least favorite jobs was working as a telemarketer.  Fifth, I am an awful salesman.

Let me deal with the fifth fact a little further.  I wasn’t supposed to be selling any merchandise or soliciting any donations tonight.  I was merely calling families who host Fresh Air kids during the summer, following up on a letter The Fresh Air Fund had recently sent them.  The letter asks the families whether they know of any other people who might be interested in hosting children, and if they do, it asks them to submit these people’s contact information.  My job was to make sure people received the letter and then try to expedite the process of getting potential hosts’ contact information by having people give the information directly to me over the phone instead of having them submit the information via mail (which they might take a while to do or never get around to actually doing). 

Easy enough, right?  Yes and no.  Confirming that a person had received the letter was a cinch.  Getting them to give up a name was a completely different matter.  I couldn’t get one of the people I called to give up a goddamn name.  Not a single one.  I could tell some of them had people in mind.  They just didn’t feel comfortable or ready to divulge that information to me.  If I were a true salesman ­– a closer — I could have convinced at least some of them to do it, I’m sure.  I just lack that closer’s killer instinct.  I can’t seal the deal.  This is why I could never survive on a job where the salary is largely based on commission as well as why I’ve never picked up a woman at a bar.

Back in December of last year I became an Irish citizen by successfully applying for entry in the Irish Register of Foreign Births. In February of this year I applied for an Irish passport, which I received in the mail yesterday.  Aside from the cool factor of being able to wield multiple passports à la Jason Bourne, having an Irish passport confers many tangible benefits.  One of the biggest is the fact that it allows me to work and live in any EU country without a visa.  So now my lifelong dream of opening up a cozy little improv theatre in Bulgaria has just gotten that much closer to becoming a reality.  I’ll keep you posted on further developments.