Category: Social Media

Me and My Fictional Friends

Yesterday, a dear friend of mine, Rosalind (“Ros”) Myers was killed.  She was blown to pieces by a bomb, which, I believe, was planted by some renegade members of the CIA.  Ros was a dedicated professional, but she was also witty, charming and could be thoughtful and entertaining.  Although many of her friends had lost track of Ros in recent years, she will be sorely missed by her colleagues and her father, Jocylen, who is currently serving a forever sentence in a British prison.  Ros died as she lives — in television reruns of Spooks on Netflix.

Ever since I learned to read, I’ve always had fictional friends.  Not those “special” ones who tell you to kidnap the neighbour’s cat but real flesh-and-blood people who live their lives in a parallel universe to mine.  One of my earliest recollections is asking my first grade teacher where Dick and Jane were running to.  Miss What’s-her-name didn’t know and told me it wasn’t important.  However, I knew it was.  I knew those two crazy kids had horizons beyond Spot and the big blue ball, and one day they were going to get there.  You see, I had an advantage: I had older sisters who had been reading their stories to me for some time.  I’d already eavesdropped on the conversations of Meg, Jo and Beth and sat in on the adventures of Nancy Drew.  Dick and Jane might have been as dull as Kraft Dinner™, even to a six-year-old, but I was nice to them because they were my introduction to the world’s greatest cocktail party.

There has always been much made of the fabulous world of books and how they can take you to places you’ve never been, etc. etc.  That’s a nice cliché, and it probably works.  But the party that is fiction is so much more than that because it’s populated by people we all want to meet.  It doesn’t take too many chapters into Gone With The Wind before you want to have Rhett and Scarlett over for sushi; and once you’ve seen the movie, it’s a lock.  Imagine a rainy evening playing Trivial Pursuit™ with Holmes and Moriarty or a picnic afternoon with Pan and Tinkerbell.  There isn’t a heterosexual woman alive who hasn’t at least thought about Captain Jack Sparrow, and these days, Christian Grey is getting more than a few heavy looks.

The great thing about fictional friends is they never jerk you around.  Maid Marian never gets on the phone for three hours, carping about how Robin is spending way too much time with the Merry Men.  Or how the only things he ever wants to do is go camping or robbing the rich, or how he’s never there for her, or how being the King’s ward is not all it’s cracked up to be…if people only knew.  And it goes on and on and on.  No, Maid Marian never does that.  She has some decorum — some class.  Sure she has her problems – no doubt — but she handles them without the drama.

Likewise, James Bond never gets drunk and starts bitchin’ about how M and Tanner are idiots who couldn’t spy their way out of a wet paper bag.  Nor does he lament his lot in life and threaten to “march in there Monday morning and tell them both to take this Licence to Kill and put it where the sun don’t shine.”  That’s the last thing on Bond’s mind.  He has a job to do, he loves it and he takes pride what he does.

Over the last half century, I’ve met a lot of people, and aside from maybe twenty or so, I have to admit that the ones I like best fall under the category of “any resemblance to persons either living or dead is purely coincidental.”  My fictional friends never tire.  They never whine.  They never inadvertently hurt my feelings.  They know when to show up, and they know when to shut up and go home.  They share their lives with me and for the most part have no secrets — but I wish I knew them better.  They’ve helped me through every difficulty I’ve ever faced and have never been too busy to be my companions.

I’m going to miss Ros.  She was always a true friend, but I know that — no matter what — if I ever want to see her again, she’ll be there.

Why I Hate Summer!

Now that summer’s practically over, I can safely say I was never a big fan.  I don’t mean this summer in particular.  All things considered, it was pretty good.  I’m talking about summers in general: that interminable time between frivolous spring and serious autumn.  To me, summers have always been a kind of hurry-up-and-wait clock watcher, full of relentless heat and go out and play.  Translation: it’s too stinkin’ hot to do anything except get skin cancer, so let’s pretend we’re having fun until it cools off and we can do something interesting.   It’s no coincidence that half the season is called “dog days.”  Here are the six and a half reasons why I hate summer.

1 – Everybody complains about the heat.  For ten months of the year people pray, sacrifice small animals and practically sell their soul on eBay for summer to arrive.  Then,the minute it gets here they spend the next two months bitchin’ about how hot it is.  Folks; believe me, nobody needs to know where the water is collecting in your underwear – or why.

2 – Nobody wears enough clothes.  There is a small, select group of people in this world who look good semi-naked.  The rest of us need to be a whole lot more judicious about what we choose not to wear.  Here’s a good rule of thumb: if it looks like your ass is eating your swimming costume, you need to do that in the privacy of your own home, not at the mall.  Men, just because you can take your shirt off it doesn’t mean you should.  Women, if most of you is overflowing your wardrobe, you need a bigger size.  Remember: just because it zips doesn’t mean it fits.

3 – Barbeques.  Humans have spent the last 50,000 years in a steady evolutionary path away from their half-animal ancestors who huddled under trees for shelter.  So what’s the first thing we do when the weather turns warm?  Run outside and cook dinner over an open fire.  I don’t care what anybody says barbeques are all about swishing the flies off bad cuts of meat which are then placed in a crematorium until everybody’s too drunk to give a damn what they’re eating.

4 – Loud music.  It’s summer.  The surface temperature of any given street is measured in solar units.  As a small protection against heat stroke and eventual death, people have their windows open – day and night.  Suddenly, every moron with a stereo cranks that baby up to DefCon 4.  SUVs with blacked-out windows cruise the night, sounding  like Heart/Lung machines, the seventeen-year-old white kid two blocks over thinks he’s Lil Wayne’s nephew and granny in the fourplex just loves Shania Twain.  This is what the CIA does to Al Qaeda prisoners to make them talk.  It’s like spending your vacation at Gitmo.

5 – Traffic.  Every year, one minute after they throw the checkered flag at the Indy 500, it’s ladies and gentlemen, start your engines.  For the next two months, half the population takes to the open road — except there is no open road because half the population’s on it.  Between vacationing commuters who haven’t driven an automobile since this time last year and the Department of Holidays (Highways?) tearing up every inch of asphalt with a curb on it, nobody is going anywhere without pushing their stress level to apoplectic shock.  Just getting to 7/11 for a slurpee is a twelve obscenity job – and that’s if you’re walking.

6 – Idiot Weathermen.  The fact is there are only so many ways anybody can say, “It’s going to be so-o-o hot tomorrow you’re going to want to kill yourself.”  Therefore, every summer, television stations give their weather people idiot jobs to do.  They run the contests, interview the lemonade stand kids and give out the birthday greeting to folks like Mabel Hawthorne who’s ninety-one years young.  Eventually, they show up at the State Fair, where they eat Deep-Fried Mars Bars and make absolute fools of themselves screaming on the Tilt-a-Whirl.  There’s got to be a better way to make a living.

6.5 – Useless baseball games.  Major league baseball plays something like 60 million games a year, and between Independence Day and Labor Day most of them are meaningless.  How many times can Toronto play Seattle for God’ sake?  It’s the only real sport in the summer.  The least they could do is make some of it interesting.

Back in the day, when we toiled for our daily bread, we needed summer, if for no other reason than to remind us that Mother Nature still loved her children.  However, in our contemporary concrete canyon existence, summer isn’t a season anymore; it’s a travesty.  It turns us into half-naked savages, grunting around a backyard barbeque, screaming at the kids to turn that damn music down, while simultaneously picking portions of our apparel out of our crevices and wishing it would rain.  God, I’m glad it’s nearly over.

Women Have Breasts: Get Over It!

Since long before Eleanor of Aquitaine rode topless to Constantinople during the 2nd Crusade in 1145, it’s been common knowledge that women have breasts.  To clarify, those are the jiggly things featured so prominently on 90s TV shows like Baywatch and sports car advertisements.  Breasts have always been part of Western culture (Venus de Milo is two millennia old) but, for the most part, history has reserved any unruly obsession with them to teenage girls and pubescent boys.  However, as our society continues to shallow out at the deep end that adolescent thinking is becoming more and more prevalent.  Led by the gossip/celebrity/entertainment industry, which headlines every millimetre of exposed flesh as “stunning,” “steamy,” “outrageous” or “shocking,” breasts are now occupying a prominent place in our social thinking.  (*Heavy Sigh*)  Yes, I know: big breasts are prominent.

The problem is our society is not very sophisticated.  We might be 21st century intellectual adults, able to identify all the anatomical parts we possess, but emotionally we’re still 19th century children, utterly fascinated by the bodily bits that are under our clothes.  (BTW, this is now an exclusively male addiction.  It’s the female demographic that drives the Tittle/Tattle industry.  Men normally cut out the middleman and go directly to porn.)  This juvenile thinking has created a feeding frenzy for smut.  In the age of the celebrity sex tape, wardrobe malfunctions are now front page news, décolletage is considered daring and more than one aspiring starlet has accelerated her career with an “accidental” topless tweet.  We are inundated by softcore porn, from off-handed nudity on television to the well orchestrated “nip slip” (which is just too childish to discuss any further.)  In short, we’re living in a twelve-year-old’s daydream.

Now, to these current conditions, let’s add the most famous couple of our time, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, a hot and sunny summer vacation, and a moron with a telephoto camera lens.  What you end up with is sleazy pictures of an unsuspecting Kate Middleton, smeared across the cover of a French tabloid magazine.  I am not even going to dignify these goings-on with outrage.

However, here’s an interesting idea.  There is something intrinsically wrong with a society that’s constantly playing sneak-a-peek with itself.  This is especially true when, to be candid, the marketplace for breasts is absolutely saturated.  You can’t go five feet in this world without somebody flopping their boob out at you.  We are not driven to this level of immaturity; we actively seek it out like excited school children with an illicit toy.

In a more civilized time, William, the future king of England, would have been well within his rights to grab the tawdry photographer by the scruff of the neck and horsewhip him through the streets of Paris.  Or better still, call the publisher of that sordid little magazine out on the field of honour and shoot the scoundrel.  Unfortunately, we do not live in a civilized time.  We live in a time when premeditated flashes of sagging silicon are giggly and naughty; a time when slutty is considered normal and women take to the streets demanding their right to it and a time when nothing is beneath our insatiable thirst for titillation (yes, I finally used the word.)

Congratulations folks: we’re finally choking on our own bilge.