Nutty Bald Bastard II: The Clumps

  I'm sure you're wondering where I came up with an obscenely simplistic maxim like "life is clumpy" to sum up all the complexities of existence. It started, as so many of these random, insane thoughts do, with a conversation that I had at work.
  A co-worker and I were commenting on how there never seemed to be a steady stream of customers. If you've never worked a cash register for hours at a time, it goes a little something like this; people approach the counter in groups, like flocking birds. There won't be anyone for 20 minutes. Then, all of a sudden, one person will decide they're ready to go. Once they walk up to the counter, there's an almost visible tipping effect. Everyone in the immediate vicinity who was on the verge of being finished with their shopping suddenly decides that they're ready too. You can really almost see it. One person steps up. The rest of the browsers will cock their heads just slightly, and start lining up, like sheep waiting to be shorn of their woolen money. Just like a flock of birds avoiding... a predator... run! *stomp stomp stomp*
  Okay, Jurassic Park references aside, it really does happen. Long stretches of nothing punctuated by intense bursts of activity. (Intense being a relative term, of course. It's hectic, to be sure, but I realize we're not running a triathlon or anything.) It occured to me that I'd heard many other things described in similar terms. War, for instance. Ask anyone who has ever seen combat about what it was like. If they don't use the phrase "hurry up and wait" at least once, I'll send you a green piece of paper on which I have written "This is REAL money!" in crayon.
  College was pretty clumpy, too. Maybe each class had a steady, regular slate of papers and exams, but when combined with an entire schedule, it certainly felt like everything was due at the same time. You want clumps? Try publishing a student magazine. Weeks of very little work, and then the whole thing had to be built from scratch in two or three weekends. Still not convinced? I guess you've never driven, ever. You motor along fine as the traffic gets heavier and then, at some point, everything stops moving. Gridlock = clumps!

They're Clumps, They're Clumps, They're Clumps, They're in My Head...

and in my molecules, and my love life, and my universe...

  I have a theory. It doesn't explain anything, or predict anything, and I can't really prove it. However, there is a large body of anecdotal evidence to support it, and that's been enough to keep belief in astrology, the Loch Ness monster, and religion going strong for millennia. Basically, it breaks down like this.
  Life is clumpy.
  Life is clumpy. It happens in fits and starts and mad screaming bursts of activity, punctuated by long periods of relative calm. The smooth, constant, reliable operation so sought after in engineering and mechanical pursuits is virtually non-existent in the scope of everyday experience.

Star Bores, Episode Twee:

(Insert Phonetically Similar Mockery Here)

  But why do the wall-to-wall brown bathrobes in episodes I & II make these films only slightly more entertaining than an empty Pez dispenser? It's certainly not the caliber of actor hired to play them, although I'll be buggered as to why they seem to have been directed to act exactly like planks of pressure treated lumber. Nor is it for lack of lightsaber fighting. (I sometimes wish that the fight choreography of episodes IV through VI was even half as intricate. Alas, as is it's a lot of people talking very sternly to one another over crackly flourescent tubes.) No, the problem with the Jedi as central story is simpy that they aren't human.

A JEDI SHALL NOT KNOW ANGER,

  And neither shall you. I don't mean "human" in the literal sense, as in "they're a bunch of frickin' aliens!" Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, and "Shaft" Windu are all quite human. (Although if one really wanted to get picky, the odds of there being actual homo sapiens in "a galaxy far, far away" are roughly equivalent to your chances of getting good Thai food in South Jersey. But I digress.) Beyond mere physiology, the Jedi have removed themselves from experiencing the strong emotions that color most human experience. This is what keeps them from being interesting enough to sustain an entire movie, let alone a trilogy.

NOR HATRED,

  The Jedi don't allow themselves to feel strong emotion. That's great. A little hard to relate to, but not unprecedented. There are elements of this pursuit in Zen Buddhism, which George Lucas borrowed when creating the Jedi. The ultimate goal of Buddhism is the elimination of suffering, which can be caused by things like desire and fear. But you don't generally see Buddhist monks giving up the pursuit of Nirvana to escort Queen Elizabeth around at the behest of the U.N. The Jedi don't seem to have any overriding goal other than becoming more intimate with the Force, and they seem happy to put that on hold while they go chop shit up with their lightsabers. They never really explain why it's necessary to divest oneself of feelings. Yeah, I know, fear leads to anger leads to hate leads to suffering leads to the Dark Side. But don't forget

NOR LOVE

  Love leads to... um. Hugs! Love leads to hugs, and hugs lead to cuddling, and cuddling probably leads to kissing, and then before you know it you've gone right to third base, and everybody knows that heavy petting = the Dark Side. So love is right out, wouldn't you say? But wait, doesn't Luke love Leia, even once he stops making out with her long enough to figure out that they're brother and sister? And doesn't he express intense affection for... well, pretty much everybody except fishy-faced Admiral Ackbar? Yes, he does. But that was in the original trilogy. In the new movies, love is verboten for Jedi, right along with fear, anger, hatred, suffering, and pie. (Okay, pie is probably allowed.) The point is, that makes them entirely unlike anyone you've ever met. True, Buddhists try to meditate themselves beyond the need for emotional attachments less ambitious than loving all of existence, but you know what? No one is clamoring for a movie about Buddhist monks. Unless Chow Yun fat is putting on the saffron robes and kicking some ass, the pursuit of enlightenment, no matter how intriguing or admirable, doesn't make for an exciting story. Why do you think the things that turn you on the most are the lightsaber fights? Because that's the only time that anything's happening. The rest of the movies could have been made with cardboard cutouts.
  A good story has to involve the audience. You don't always have to like the characters (no, not even the protagonist), but you have to at least be interested in what happens to them. If they can't experience the emotions that you feel on a daily basis, your ability to understand and identify with them goes right out the window, especially if their daily life involves things that are entirely out of the scope of your experience, i.e. flying cars, telekinesis, and galactic conquest. By making the Jedi the focus of these films, Lucas has saddled us with characters whose shunning of emotion makes them more alien than any of the fantastic creatures populating his long lost galaxy. Luckily, George, and his audience, can rely on his clever writing and innovative direction to infuse these characters with a vibrancy that transcends their inherent alien calmness and brings them to life for the audience.
  Oh. Crap.

Star Bores, Episode Poo: Some Smack on the Drones

  Yeah, that's right. The biggest thing making the new Star Wars films so drastically less entertaining than the original trilogy is the Jedi tromping dourly through every frame. (or pixel, in the case of Attack of the Clones.) The Jedi in the new films are bland, boring, and featureless as individuals, short-sighted and self serving as a group, and frankly less interesting as comtemporary reality than they were as historical abstract in episodes IV through VI.
  In the original trilogy, the Jedi were a mysterious order, objects of myth and various degrees of belief or disbelief. They carried exotic weapons, and could tap into amazing, magical powers that were beyond the reach of "normal" creatures. In the new films, Jedi are still elite, but far from mythic, and making them the main characters has taken much of the fun out the stories.
  "But LBB, Luke Skywalker was the main character in the first trilogy, and he was a Jedi!" Wrong! Luke Skywalker was not a Jedi, not until episode VI. Even once he became a Jedi, he wasn't the same aloof, sour cypher that populates the current films. He was a whiny bitch, which is hardly better than a bathrobe-wearing crash test dummy, but he also wasn't forced to carry the action of the original trilogy. He was surrounded by a strong supporting cast of non-Jedi characters, both human and not. Princess Leia, Chewbacca, Yoda (by far the most charismatic Jedi of the lot, which doesn't sound like much until you consider that he was made of rubber first, and later entirely digitized), Darth Vader, Han Solo. These characters had personality, which is far more than I can say for the current crop of Jedi. The only thing they do better than Chewbacca is fight with lightsabers. While these melees are some of the coolest visual spectacles ever filmed, they don't require a lick of acting or storytelling. George, here's a hint; if the you can't get a dynamic performer like Ewan McGregor to out-act a man wearing 15 pounds of mohair and yak hair, whose dialogue was a combination of pre-recorded animal grunts, chances are you're doing something wrong.

Star Bores, Episode Dumb: The Fandom Menace

  Have you ever had a randomly associated thought take over your brain? The kind of idea that just stands in the waiting room of your frontal lobes, yammering like an excited two-year-old until you agree to tell someone else about it? Well, it happened to me today at work.
  The paperback edition of the novel based on Attack of the Clones came out today. Since working at a bookstore finances my bastardly activities, I became intimately familiar with it as I stocked several dozen copies. While my hands were occupied with this retail drone duty, I began to reflect on what I call The Star Wars Problem; i.e., why do the new films suck such gargantuan ass?
  I've pondered this vexing question on several previous occasions. I sat through Episodes I and II in the theater, and I've watched snippets of Episode I on video. I sat through endless hours of watching my old roommate play an Episode I-based video game on his beloved PlayStation, and had my ass handed to me by snide computerized opponents when I succumbed to the temptation to try my hand at the pod racer simulation at the bowling alley across the street. During all of these activities, I found myself lamenting the sad state of the film franchise. I've been through the usual laundry list of complaints, which usually goes something like this:
- No Han Solo.
- Great actors, who were apparently told to not act even a little bit.
- Scripts that answer lingering questions from the original trilogy... with more questions! (Midi-chlorians, my pasty white ass!)
- No Han Solo.
- A general wiping away of the human elements of the story in favor of (albeit amazing) special effects, digital characters, and (albeit really, really cool) lightsaber battles.
- Jar Jar Binks, who not only proves that George Lucas is a front runnner for densest white man on the planet, but typifies the awful things that happen when any entertainer becomes so influential and powerful that everyone around him is too intimidated or obsequious to look him in the eye and say honestly, "Michael, another nose job is a really bad idea."
- Advertising based around villains who have less than a dozen lines, and die by the end of the film.
- No Han Solo.
  Before you get your Wookie on, I freely acknowledge the utter lack of an original complaint in that list. Chances are good that a Google search will turn up a jillion and three fan sites saying much the same thing. The point is, they aren't new to me either. I'd been over them in my mind a few dozen times, and I still wasn't completely satisfied that I'd hit on what made the new films so unsatifying. Then, today, while I was tucking the novelization on to the shelf, it finally hit me.
  The problem is the Jedi.

  If you've ever kept or read an online journal, you should check out the this feature from The Brunching Shuttlecocks.

What I Did On My Decade-long Vacation, pt. III
  While I was "supporting myself", working my way through the levels of employment hell, I decided that I should keep my finger in the academic pot. Everyone, including myself, assumed that I was going back to school sooner rather than later. It was only natural that I should include some of the routine of tests and papers in my life, so that I wouldn't be entirely unprepared when I resumed schooling full-time. In order to keep the flame of my educational aspirations flickering, I enrolled part time at my local County College.
  The County College is a wonderful institution, because anyone who can afford the tuition or qualify for financial aid can sign up for classes. It was a great place for me. I'd just wasted two years and many thousands of dollars at a private institution, and all I had to show for it was a lingering self-doubt, a fear of relationships, and a dubiously lost virginity. (That's another long story.) At County College, I was able to take a few classes that I was specifically interested in (no more struggling through gen eds) while working one, two, or three of the crap jobs listed below. My GPA soared, I got involved with the campus theatre community, and for the first time I was present for the formation of a group of friends. Despite the fact that I was living with my parents, life was really pretty good.

What I Did On My Decade-long Vacation, pt. IIa
  Gas Station Attendant: Alhough technically the two summers I worked pumping gas occurred before and during my tenure at Costly Little U., it still left me with a lasting aversion to inhaling petroleum fumes in 90+ degree weather, or walking through a summer thunderstorm to pump two dollars worth of regular. I only thank whatever luck or fate that I have that I never had to make change with bare fingers in January.
  On the plus side, knowing how to work a gas pump came in remarkably handy when I departed for Pennsylvania, a state where full-service gas pumps are rarer and more expensive than a prostitute will a full set of teeth. Nearly all of the other students who had come to CLU from New Jersey (where, in case you don't know, pumping your own gas is actually illegal) were so impressed that they would often take me to the gas station with them just so I could pump. My standard exchange for pumping a tankful of gas was usually fairly slight, nothing more than a soda or a packet of something salty, and a pretty girl could usually avail herself of this blue-collar skill for nothing more than a smile and a kind word.
  While I have some fond, if rather vague, memories of helping people out by filling up their cars, in retrospect I feel as if I cheated myself. While it was a rather simple task to perform, it was still work, and I somehow feel I was short-sighted in not demanding better compensation for my time and effort. At a dollar per trip to the gas station, by the end of my freshman year I could probably have saved up enough money to actually go somewhere for the following Spring Break. *sigh* Sadly, this was not the last opportunity I would squander.

What I Did On My Decade-long Vacation, Pt. II
  Here is a list of occupations that know I never want to go near again:
  Direct Marketer: I sold, of all things, cutlery, by calling people up and trying to get them to let me come to their houses and demonstrate to them how well my knives cut things. The merchandise was actually of remarkable quality, and I was marginally good at the sales bit of the whole thing, but I was so depressed and useless that I squandered both my talent and the opportunity. Plus, those motivated sales types are just fucking weird. They've got "cult" written all over their shit-eating grins.
  Coffee Shop Counter Clerk: If, by some horrible circumstance I am ever forced to work in food service again, I suppose that making cappucinos for snooty business-people is probably less horrible than, say, cleaning the grease trap at Lard Burger. There really is nothing better than coffee that was picked two weeks ago, roasted on Tuesday, ground this morning and brewed five minutes ago. Plus, I used to be able to tell you if a drink was caffeinated just by paying attention to my heart rate about 30 minutes after I drank it. Still, it involved making drinks for people willing to pay upwards of three dollars for a drink that you could arguably sip out of a large thimble. It only takes one phone call from a man who wants a large cappucino with "six and a half Equals" to make visions of scalded yuppie dance in one's head.
  Insert Stuffer: Have you ever wondered how all of those coupons and sales circulars that you never take the time to read get into the middle of the newspaper you buy? Of course you haven't. But if you had, you'd find out by reading this diatribe that there are people whose job consists of standing for eight hours collecting those materials into a wad and jamming them into the center fold of your newspaper. These positions are often filled by temp agencies, who offer these jobs to people like my 1995 self, who have no education or skills to speak of, and are willing to accept minimum wage temp jobs under the "manual labor" category.
  Video Store Clerk: Clerks was a movie. That does not mean it was fiction.

What I Did On My Decade-long Vacation, Pt. I
  After nine and a half years, I am finally a college graduate. This, of course, obligates me to pontificate on accomplishment and hard work, to modestly deflect praise, and to share with the world at large my plans for the future now that I have this long awaited credential.
  But that just wouldn't be like a bastard, would it?
  The truth is, getting my bachelor's degree has been an enormous pain in the ass. It's taken me since 1993 to make it happen, due in nearly equal measure to unfortunate circumstance and my own drastic lack of maturity.
  I went to college right out of high school, not because I had any clear goals or even intentions, but because that's what I was supposed to do. I was at least marginally intelligent, and I had no trade skills or inately marketable talents, such as a great singing voice or fabulous breasts. So I went to college. I decided to major in broadcasting, but again I didn't have a good reason. I picked it because that's what my best high school friend was going to study. At a completely different school.
  So there I was, at an expensive private school in the Pennsylvania mountains, with a very large loan and a commandeered major. What did I do? What any young man who is laying the foundations for his future career would have done in my position. I fucked around for two years. I approached my studies with the same self-interested apathy that I'd displayed in high school; just good enough to not get myself in trouble, but never ever within even shouting distance of my potential. I let my personal life steer everything else in my sphere of influence. After my second year, when the school decided that they didn't want to give me all that financial aid after all, I left with a C- minus GPA and a heart that I'd let be broken in a most pathetic manner. The only bright spot of that experience, the friends I had left, assured me that we'd stay in touch. We didn't, of course, and this has set a pattern of drift that I've maintained through this very moment.
  After leaving college, I suddenly realized with an urgency bordering on obsession that all I really wanted to be was a college student. I still didn't know why, mind you, but there was a decided fervor in the desire that was matched only by my ambivalence for my ex-girlfriend. In order to work toward the first real goal I'd ever set for myself, I did just that. I worked. In my next entry, I will detail for you my adventures as remarkably unskilled laborer.

  In case you're still wandering through here looking for new information, take heart. There have been some recent developments in my litle bald life that I'll be compelled to share with the world at large. Coming... shortly. I swear.