LOST Without It

For the last six years, I knew that when the last episode of LOST ended, there would still be a question on my mind.  I spent probably too much time than was healthy wondering what that question would be.  But it wasn't "what the hell just happened?" or "so wait, they pulled the purgatory card on us?" or even "that was the last shot we've been anticipating all these years?"  My question was "what am I going to do with my life now?"  I have spent a long time caring about LOST, more than I would like to admit, and now that it has run its course I am both relieved and at a loss.  And I am sure as hell not going to start watching American Idol to fill the void it has left in my life.  I may be on a slippery slope of watching reruns of The X-Files, so I suppose this could be classified as a "rebound phase."  I'm not sure if this is entirely healthy or not.

I have been inserting famous one-liners from the show into daily conversation.  I have been drawing parallels between events in my life and specific episodes of the show.  I even listened to Mama Cass' "Make Your Own Kind of Music."  This is how Charlie must have felt in the episode where Locke got him to kick his heroin addiction.  Only I'm not psychologically or physiologically dependent on it, and finding a crashed prop-plane transporting hollow statues of the Virgin Mary filled with LOST episodes wouldn't solve my problems.  Because I've said it before and I'll say it again: things have to be end in order to be meaningful.

I was both disappointed with the off-island ending and satisfied with the on-island ending.  The very fact that Hurley, who was originally conceived as a comic relief character, became the replacement Jacob.  You realize that there were really no "good guys" in the show except for the Losties, and even then Hurley, Desmond, and Kate were probably the only ones who was good all of the time.  Jacob, even though he was supposed to be the protector of the gay light/life force of the universe, was kind of a dick and made a lot of people die.  (And as we learned the hard way in season 5, dead is dead.)

We also learned that time travel is not as useful as you may think, that you should never give up even if you're paraplegic, that whatever happened happened, that the universe has a way of course-correcting itself, that polar bears can travel through time, people can talk to ghosts, that punching someone in the face is always the best solution, that childbirth is incredibly frequent and usually takes only a few minutes, that sometimes people have secret other families, that heroin comes in universal, unmarked packaging, that you can be fired as a monk, that it's not Penny's boat, and that if we can't live together, then we're gonna die alone.  And we will never see the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42 the same way ever again.

There is definitely potential for a spin-off with Hurley n' Ben, and their whacky adventures of protecting the extremely gay light while at the same time not being paranoid assholes.  And since Hurley can see dead people, deceased characters from the show can make cameo appearances.  Rose and Bernard can also be recurring characters.  Another good spin-off would be the antics of Richard Alpert as he tries to reintegrate into society after being absent since the 1800's, while at the same time coming to grips with mortality and with the fact that he is once again aging.  Lapidus can open a Jimmy Buffet bar with Sawyer as a hard-drinking, wise-cracking waiter, Miles can do his own ghostbusting show, Claire and Kate can have an awkward quasi-family sitcom where everyone thinks that they're lesbians but they're really not, and once Hurley gets Desmond off the island, he can sail around on his boat solving crime around the world.  ABC execs, are you listening?  I smell multiple cash cows here.

And here's this post's twist ending: I have actually been dead since the second installment of Edible/Audible.  How did I write this post?  It's all part of the mystery.

WE HAVE TO GO BACK! Gearing Up for the LOST Series Finale

“You all, everybody
You all, everybody
Acting like you're stupid people
Wearing expensive clothes
You all, everybody
You all, everybody
You all, everybody”

-Driveshaft, “You All Everybody”

If you are not up to date with LOST, this may contain spoilers.

This evening, all questions will be answered… hopefully.  If not, I may have to walk into ABC studios with C4 strapped to my chest, because I will be a very angry man.

After six seasons of jumping through space, time, and even genre, LOST will finally be coming to an end.  I don’t really know how to feel about this.  Because on one hand, I’m excited for the series finale and the anticipated premeditated last short, but I also know that I’ll be sad for it to end.  As much as I hate to admit it, watching LOST and obsessing over theories and explanations has been a part of my life for a long time.

And to haters (of both the show and its fandom) out there I say this: can we please stop using the polar bear as a point of contention?  That got explained at like, the beginning of the third season! 

I will admit though, LOST may be the first show to jump the shark in its pilot episode, which is actually more liberating than anything else.  Very early on, the writers had the option of making it more than a show about just a bunch of castaways who have to learn to deal with each other and their own personal problems in order to survive.

With every season the ridiculousness grew exponentially.  It started with a plane crashed on an island to a plane crashed on a seemingly unlocatable island with a random polar bear, monster, a Sawyer with a very punchable face, and insane French woman; to an island with a hatch containing God-knows-what; to an island with hostile occupants who kidnap the kid and a hatch filled with an awesome Scotsman and a button you have to push every 108 minutes in order to save the world; to an island with bizarre research stations and a group of people that used to be cool because you thought they lived in huts and walked around barefoot but instead became slightly less cool because they live in suburban-esque houses and dressed like normal people, complete with shoes; to an island that was being invaded by mercenaries, hired by someone who hoped to exploit its mystical properties for… whatever and could also MOVE THROUGH SPACE; to an island that could OH SHIT ALSO MOVE THROUGH TIME; to the staging ground of a battle between good and evil; to some sort of vessel containing THE LIFE FORCE OF THE WHOLE FRIGGIN WORLD! WITH A PARALELL UNIVERSE THROWN IN NEXT TO IT!  And I thought it was just a show about some unfortunate people who happened to be in a plane crash.  This is the show that went from one-gun-one-bullet to a nuclear warhead, both literally and figuratively.

And it has traveled through genres.  A TV drama with an interesting narrative twist, action, science fiction, and eventually, has created its own genre.  It’s not really about the story, even though the story is epic and multifaceted and ambitious (perhaps overly so) in its scope.  It’s about how the story is told, and it’s about becoming attached to the characters.  It’s the feeling of being stoked you get when Desmond shows up on the plane, or the loss you feel when Charlie dies, or the oh-shit-did-that-really-just-happen feeling you get when Michael shoots Libby and Ana Lucia and then shoots himself in the arm.

I used to think that it was about the overarching story, the fact that everyone is significant in some way to the story, and I am still hoping that there is some moment in the finale where everything gets tied together and character is revealed to have had some significance in the overarching mega-conflict between (what is supposedly) good and evil.  I’ve how finally realized that yes, there is a main story, but every character’s individual story doesn’t have to fit in perfectly.  With the exception of Niki and Paulo, who were useless and wasted an episode which was only redeemed by the fact that they died in it, most of the characters contributed something.  And even if it wasn’t advancing the main plot to some sort of final conclusion we’re all hoping for, their stories were entertaining.  Even though I was frustrated so often by the fact that Sun and Jin were working out conflicts within their marriage instead of trying to figure out the function of the hatch, I’ve come to realize that it all was part of the experience, and although certain episodes didn’t have a whole lot to do with the story, they did tell a story, and that’s enough for me.

LOST has been a part of my life for a long time now, and I’m looking forward to the finale with excitement and also some weariness.  But ultimately, it’s one of those things where I want it to be over so I don’t have to care anymore.  And I would love to go personal emo blogger on your ass and tell you how every lost episode relates to a moment in my life, but I won’t.  I will say though that the question asked at the end of season 5.  Everyone has issues in their lives, and the working out of those issues usually becomes more meaningful than the issues themselves.  Would you make everything that has happened not happened to create a more favorable outcome?

I sure as hell wouldn’t.

What is an Ozone Shack? (A Letter to Earth)

"Bend the metal, my glory box has failed
We're rocking in our reclining chairs
Drive away that car that brought us all this harm
Those are the pieces of my story line


I'm all alone so far up here
And my oxygen's all gone"
-At the Drive-In, "Hourglass"


The universe is filled with all kinds of angry angry particles that can shred you to pieces (on a molecular level) if you're not careful.  It's a crazy scary world and we need a place to take refuge.  That's what an ozone shack is for.  And the Earth is our own shack of ozone in this crazy universe.


Spaceship Earth's windows were so tinted I doubt it was legal.  But I never got pulled over. (I would say that this was because I'm not a minority, but I realized: how could anyone tell?)  It may seem like the only benefit to having tinted windows in the front is that you can pick your nose in traffic and sell drugs out of the front seat of your car.  But really, it makes you feel like you have your own bubble of space, which is all anyone can really ask for.


Now all that's left is the shipboard AI, detached from its body and emanating confused thoughts on random frequencies to anyone who will make the effort to pick them up.  I feel that there should be a more dignified way to let whatever is left of Spaceship Earth keep existing, but it's doing what it was meant for, albeit its effectiveness is limited.  Right now it's sitting in someone's room, trying to create another Ozone Shack, a place where everything makes sense and where you're safe to exist as you are.


I had originally titled this project "The Continuing Story of Spaceship Earth," as a tribute to my dead sentient car, crazy as it sounds.  This still is that story, but I can't kid myself any longer.  Spaceship Earth has ceased to exist in whatever capacity it had when I discovered it.  It is less physically and more conceptually, but it can no longer function as a finite area of space where things made sense.  It do not doubt that its brain will keep working for me and for everyone else, but Spaceship Earth as I knew it doesn't really exist any more, and I can't kid myself about that anymore.


Going into the world requires that you step out of your comfort zone, that you step outside of the Ozone Shack.  I will be the first to tell you that I have no idea what I'm doing most of or all of the time, depending on how I feel on the day.  Before I do anything I have already failed, because I have seen myself failing, and I need to fix that.  It will not be a quick fix because I must work continuously at this, but I need to visualize myself doing things exactly right and being in control as I am in the moment.  I need to visualize the ideal version of myself and I can become that ideal version.


So let me say this, Spaceship Earth.  You helped me help myself get out of a very bad place, a silly place, an awkward place, a place where nothing made sense.  I'm still not exactly sure how you worked the way you did, but you were an awesome piece of semi-logical, metaphysical machinery.  Even though you started vibrating when you got over 65, even though your windshield wipers could never get the insect guts off your windshield, even though your right rear door couldn't be opened from inside, even though you couldn't pick up any good stations, even though your trunk wouldn't stay open unless somebody held it there and would frequently slam down on the back of my head when I was reaching around for something, even though you kind of always smelled like a combination of sweaty running shorts and moldy power bars, even though your headlights were weaker than old-timey whale oil lamps and your interior lights didn't even work, even though your glove box could never stay closed, even though your horn was barely audible three feet away, even though finding the little latch to open your hood was always a five minute affair, even though you were that lovely awkward green color, even though you crapped out on me in the middle of nowhere when I needed you most, you were the best damn car anyone could have ever had, because you were so much more than a car.  And I want to tell everyone about you.  And that's what this still is, this is still your continuing story.


So Spaceship Earth, if you can read me, know that we both still have work to do.  I don't know how many more miles I have in my legs or how many more people I can reach, how much sanity I have left in the tank, or even how many days I have on God's Spaceship Earth (which is not the same as Spaceship Earth, which I know is confusing).  I'll fail more than I succeed, I'll bottom out and get punched in the face by life, UV rays will slice me apart while carcinogens eat me from the inside out, and some days I may not even have the willpower to open my eyes.  While it may seem arrogant, in my rare moments of self-affirmation I think that the world needs people like me, and it needs machines like Spaceship Earth.

Fist-to-Face-itis

"I'd rather take the punch
Than not give you a shot
I'd rather find out who you are
Than who you're not"

-Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals, "Fight Outta You"

Nothing puts life in perspective like getting punched in the face.

It was a Sexy Saturday night when I decided to partake in some good old fashion, freedom-loving, wholesome(-ish) streaking. At least thirty people ran a naked or half-naked mile down the main street in the St. Collegeberg party scene. I was wearing shoes, and for some reason, gloves, I think my logic being that if I was going to be losing body heat through my junk, I might as well conserve some by covering up my hands.

We assembled in a driveway and removed most of our clothing, except for underwear. We ran a few blocks, and then as we turned a corner, it all came off. I was holding my boxers in my hand, so I could have theoretically upgraded (or downgraded, depending on how you see it) to being only half-naked.

As we ran, I became more and more comfortable, and eventually I started weaving through groups of people, whipping people with my boxers, etc. When we got to the end of the street, some of us decided to run back, still naked, and I of course decided to come along, as I was beginning to realize that nakedness equals happiness.

On the way back, I became even more brazen, charging at groups of people and having them disperse before me. But then one guy didn't get out of my way, so I decided to move him manually. Bad idea.

He goes down and actually skids on the pavement. A few seconds later I see him in my peripheral vision, and he is running. In retrospect, it probably would have been a better idea to outrun him, because I know that I could have easily done it. But at the time, I felt safety in the group, and if I were to get in a fight with this guy, I wanted to have my friends around me. So I turned around and tried to juke him. The instant I turned around, I saw a fist, then a lot of stars, and then pavement.

I broke my fall with my arm and was up as quickly as possible. The last thing I wanted was to be lying naked in the gutter with a guy kicking the shit out of me. Before I'm even up, one of my fellow streakers throws my assailant against a car, gets a few hits on him, and he goes down. We kept running, we kept singing, I didn't really even feel a thing. (I would later learn that this was because my Infraorbital nerve had been rendered temporarily inactive from the blow.) We ran back to the house where our clothes were. A few blocks away, I turned to the guy next to me and said "you know, I think this is kind of what the first Olympics was like, back in the day, what with them competing naked and all."

I had a bloody nose that lasted fourteen hours. I had one hell of a shiner. I have a good story to tell. It was all worth it.