My mother cooked “supper” at 5 pm so it was piping hot when my dad walked through the sliding glass, or sliding screen, door.  In the winter it would be dark when Dad came through the door and shouted, “Honey, I’m home” like Ricky Ricardo in I Love Lucy. In the summer it would still be bright afternoon and my mom would probably be cooking steak and sweet corn and baked potatoes.

Unless there was a California earthquake or other major catastrophe, the bureau-sized cabinet television in the living room would be off and my mom sat in the seat with her back to the kitchen, my sister to her left, my dad to my sister’s left, then me, then Mom. Dinner was like the family check-in time, to see how everyone was doing. Stories about my mom’s co-workers, things my sister and I did in class. Generally Dad didn’t talk much about work (“leave work at work” he would say) but conducted the conversation (“So what did we learn in school today?” “How’s Jake doing?” “What happened to Mr. Patterson I thought he was going to start a Science Club and make you Vice President?” Sometimes there would be unsolicited advice I wouldn’t appreciate until later, like “the garbage man makes more money picking up trash than you might make when you start an office job, but over time you catch up and make more money in an office career.” I also remember asking my dad, who worked for the Republican State Senate Finance Committee, what the difference between a Democrat and a Republican was, and he said “Republicans don’t want to spend a lot of money, but Democrats always want to exaggerate how much money they think is coming in, so they can give it away to people who vote for them,” which was a good back-of-the-envelope explanation for the difference between the two major parties, at least at the time George Bush Sr. was in office, Arthur Kent was on the evening news anchoring the first Iraq War, and I had a 9 pm curfew (8:30 on Sundays).

After supper in the summertime there was a whole other chapter to the day for outside stuff. A major activity for summer evenings for my sister and I was to walk through the woods to my neighbor’s pond and catch frogs. One year we cultivated quite a collection. I remember two were named Zeek and Blue Frog and they had at least ten cell mates. We would put the frogs on top of my miniature cars and roll them around. If the frogs jumped out of our clutches and under the new deck that didn’t have lattice on it, my job was to crawl under the deck and retrieve them. Then it was time to go camping for a week, and we put the frogs in an empty black bucket that had had tar in it when my parent’s re-sealed the driveway. My sister and I placed boards over the top of the bucket “so that the frogs can’t jump out, but flies will be able to get through for them to eat.” When we got back from camping we ran over to the bucket to see our frogs but there were only frog skeletons. So we buried them in the little dirt pile where I excavated with my Tonka Truck bulldozer.

Boy, have you ever seen a show from the 1950s where boys show a frog to a girl and she screams? Seems fake, doesn’t it? Well, my Aunt Etchie was visiting from Sunny California one summer for a couple of months. She was my grandfather’s sister so she must have been in her late seventies if I was 8 or 9. My sister and I were really impressed by a frog that we had caught and we brought it over to show Grandma and Grandpa, who lived next door. Grandma and Grandpa and Aunt Etchie were sitting on the back porch on the white wicker furniture, playing cards. Laura (my sister) and I came in and she opened her shirt where she had been holding the frog, and Aunt Etchie screeched and ran into the house and shut the sliding door and kept her hand on it so no one could open it up, shouting—muffled by the glass—“get that, that, that, devil out of here!!!”

Our big meal of the day was at 5, even though we called it “supper.” My grandparents’ big meal of the day was at noon and was a big dinner with, say, chicken legs, mashed potatoes, beans, corn, biscuits, and gravy. After dinner my grandparents would take a nap, and in the evening they ate sandwiches on paper plates and then played cards until around 7:30, when they would wash and get ready for bed and then sit in two recliners and watch Hard Copy and Diagnosis Murder etc until my grandmother went to bed at 11 and my grandfather stayed up until around 12 or 1 watching M*A*SH*. Laura and I often spent the night. They had the best snacks, like Planter’s Cheez Curls and TGIF Potato Skins and Neapolitan ice cream with my grandmother’s homemade maple syrup chunks on top.

So there was this extra chapter of the day, in the summer, after supper, and I think about it when I see 6 pm sun slanting though the sky and turning single-story brick mid-century homes orange. I think about this elastic cord that I tied around a bolt and used like a super hero who could spin a rope and throw it around something up high and grapple it and then climb a building, or throw it and wrap around a Bad Guy’s arms to arrest him. I remember throwing that rope in the front area of my grandmother’s house as she gardened after supper, and thinking about how I could get really good at rope throwing and then it would be like I had a super power. And Grandpa was mowing the lawn and it smelled like cut grass. And Mom walked over and said to Grandma (her mother in law) that Dad’s friend Bronson lent us a tape that had a movie on it called Short Circuit 2 about a robot, and that it made her cry at the end but it was a good movie, so Grandma and Grandpa came over to our house and Mom made popcorn by putting kernels in an electric frying pan with oil, and me and Laura got to stay up past 10 so we could finish the movie.

That cassette tape from Bronson also had Land Before Time on it, and the Batman with Michael Keaton. It was one of only two video tapes we had, so Laura and I ended up watching Land Before Time a lot, and I watched Short Circuit 2 even more.  People think I am joking when I say that Short Circuit 2 is my favorite movie. The movie has two quotes I continue to quote to this day, that a boy from rural New Baltimore would probably never have been exposed to otherwise:

”The goal of two Ones who share proximity on the physical plane is to gain a double oneness on the metaphysical plane.” And,

”Francis Bacon once said, ‘A crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures.’”

But the point of this post is the angle of the sun hitting the brickwork of a single story mid-century home in the summer in upstate New York. If nostalgia makes me think of the phrase “sepia tone photograph” that phrase reminds me of Country Time Lemonade commercials with tire swings swaying off weeping willow boughs, as a kind of empathetic imagining of a quintessential nostalgic scene. And the angle of the sun on the brick of my grandparent’s house after dinner in the summer around catching-frogs time of day, which is a scene I’ve seen, and remembered, is like a thumbnail sketch, or Continue reading Summer Evenings After Supper: Catching Frogs; Grandma’s Brick House; Johnny 5; Sepia Tone Sunlight Turning Brick and Mortar Organge →

Today is the last day of my thirties, and I am pretty excited. Not because I am looking forward to my forties per se, or because I hate my thirties and am looking forward to putting them behind me, because I am not. Rather, goals of mine, some of which are decades old and others which are recent, are coming to fruition, I am in the best shape of my life, and I have great friends that make life interesting and warm.

As I write this I am remembering how I spent my night when I was 29, and 19. At 29 I made a list of “Things to accomplish in my 30s” (which I did about 48% of) so I should do that again this evening. When I was 19 I sat on the dock at Coeymans Landing and looked across the river under a partial moon at the lonely black mass of Schodack Island, and then went home (to my parents’ basement) and played a game of chess with my friend Jacquelyn and played Teenager In Love on the record player because I knew it was the last time that I would ever play that song and it would be applicable to me and I had eagerly looked forward, at twelve years old, to turning 13 when it would apply. I’ve got nothing to be sad about tonight because there are no songs about being in love in your 30s. You’re either in love as a teen in songs, or you’re in love and not a teenager anymore.

Somewhere around 24, Rob and I stopped being afraid of cops on our raft trips because, not being teens anymore, we had lost our accustomed fear of “getting in trouble” for doing anything novel. Recently I’ve had roofers and masons and carpenters and plumbers at my house, and they call and talk about the work they will do and the cost, and its not scary anymore like some older, professional man will yell at me or think I am too dumb to understand what he is saying. Nope, lately its calls with contractors all day long, for projects costing thousands of dollars, and then I make a decision (“Alright so you’ll come on Thursday at 7:30 and be done by Friday evening? Because I’m having company Saturday and I need Friday evening to clean”) and then hang up and that’s it, that’s negotiating, as an adult. It’s not psychological warfare or rhetorical tricks to squeeze the last dime out of somebody. I like feeling respected by contractors and mechanics and people that work with their hands, and lately, I am.

That kind of ties into the idea of being “in the best shape of my life.” There is more to being in good shape than having a body that functions. There is more to being in good shape than having a body that functions excellently. An Olympic athlete who is emotionally destroyed and kicked out of their house and living in the gutter is not in great shape. So a couple of years ago I started thinking about what it would mean to be in the best shape of my life at forty and here are the categories and the reasons I think that I am, all things considered, in the best shape of my life at forty.

Physically, I quit smoking 2.5 years ago and have barely smoked since then. I smoked between a pack and a pack and a half a day from the time I was 23 until I was 36. I smoked, but less than a pack a day, from about 18 on. I think that really discounts any of those years for being “in the best shape.” Arguably I was in the best physical shape between 15 and 17, when I did soccer in the Fall and Spring, which included “double sessions” which were basically soccer practices in the morning and at night when the coach would make us run until I puked. Which really impressed the coach, and he made me a captain, not because I was great at scoring goals, but because I ran and puked and kept running. (That was also my trick when I started getting invited to drinking parties at 16 or 17 — I could drink and puke and keep drinking. Doing something and puking and doing it again shows that you are dedicated.) Anyhow I was between 145 and 155 lbs from the time I was 14 until about 31. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been doing 20 sit ups and 15 push ups at the top of each hour between 8 am and 2 pm, which doesn’t sound like a lot but that is 140 sit ups and 105 sit ups every day, and I’ve cut out a lot of carbs, because I was 167 two weeks ago and I wanted to get down to 154.9. Unfortunately I’m only at 162 as of this morning, so I’ve got to drink a lot of milk and hot sauce between now and midnight. Or tell myself that weight is not an objective measure of health because I used to look emaciated with my shirt off. I’ve also been using some premium skin and hair care products for about two and a half years because, as Ben Franklin said, “persistent habits of virtue have a sensible effect upon the countenance” which translates to “if you don’t drink and smoke and eat garbage food and hardly sleep, you’ll look better than if you run yourself ragged every day.” And I can run a mile in 9ish minutes which I never used to be able to do. So there are a lot of pluses and minuses if you take my physical body now and compare it to my physical body at, say, 17, but the minuses aren’t that bad and the physical is only a part being “in the best shape.”

I also think of the space around me as part of my physical shape. Is there really that much of a difference between having screw drivers for fingers versus having screw drivers 50 feet away in the garage that you can manipulate with your fingers? (Yes! If you said “no” to that question, I think you need to reevaluate your relationship with your fingers because they are really more useful than screwdrivers.) But my point is that having something close by is near to having that thing as part of your physical body. So having space gives you access to all these different appendages. Having space allows you to spread out your materials and work and leave them there instead of having to put stuff away and take it out again later, which makes you 54 times more likely to continue working on that project again. I’ve never had more, or more productive, space than I have now. Just one example is my latest boat project. As usual, it is a two-hulled boat with decking across the top and a small cabin, windmill, solar panels and battery bank to power an electric motor. As un-usual, I don’t have to drive 30 minutes south to New Baltimore to my parents’ house every time I want to work on it. If I am working from home and want to spend my lunch break mixing some epoxy and repairing a hole in the hull, I can just do it…which is especially important in fiberglass work because of the “curing time” between coats of ‘glass or when used to adhere/combine parts, and it requires two hours of letting it sit there before you can do anything else. I used to hate driving to my parent’s house or Rob’s parent’s house to do 30 minutes of epoxy work just to then drive 30 minutes back again. Check out this sweet ride that I have, which is fully registered as of Friday when I spent 3 hours at the DMV:

So that’s great physically, internally and externally in my closest space, and it’s never been better.

Mental health is a major component of being “in the best shape”. Mental health is to your physical body what the ignition and spark plugs are to your car. It’s not enough to have a sparkling clean chassis and transmission. The engine needs to start and to fire with the right timing or your vehicle is going to run badly, or not at all. I haven’t had the best mental health over the course of my life. I had debilitating OCD in my adolescence which melded into addictive traits in my twenties and thirties. But COVID actually forced me to deal with some of that, and, like I said, I quit smoking cold turkey three years ago, after I had COVID and could not get out of bed for three days, which are the hardest days for quitting anything. And between 19 and November of last year I could have counted the number of days when I did not drink on one hand. Then I had COVID and figured “If I could quit smoking cold turkey I can stop drinking when I want to” and went four days, and it was amazing. You know, when I was in college I drank or smoked pot etc because I wanted to experience altered states of consciousness to grow my life experience. But when you’ve had cigarettes and alcohol in your system continuously for decades, feeling the clarity of sobriety is an altered state of consciousness. Now, as with OCD, which I call OCA—Obsessive Compulsive Advantage—which I can turn on when I have long, boring, irksome tasks and turn off when compulsions would be distracting, now I am generally able to drink when I want to be sociable or to relax and then take three or four days off and feel like one of those guys in one of the dozen movies about people who take a pill and become geniuses. I’m not a zen master or anything, but hey I’m turning 40 not 90, I’ve got time to make more improvements, and the point is that I’m improving compared to my past, not that I have reached nirvana and have nothing left to work towards anymore.

Emotional health is a third component of “being in the best shape”. As I wrote in Coming of Age on the Hudson, a “mood” is like a sum of instinctual, endocrine-made feelings and intellectual, electrically-made thoughts. You can change a mood physically or mentally. If someone is unhappy you can massage them (a change to their physical body) or give them a Prozac (a change to their mental state). If someone is happy you can change their mood by punching them in the face or telling them terrible news. A mood can be ruined because of intrusive thoughts that repeat over and over again, causing the body anxiety (that is like the epitome of OCD). Or a mood can be ruined because the body over-produces stress hormones and the mind translates those hormones in the bloodstream into “something must be wrong!” And then tries to figure out what it could be, work, family, romantic partners, etc, endlessly searching for negative stimuli which do not, in fact, exist. Since avoidance-of-anxiety has been like the number one goal of my life since about three years old, I have come up with some tricks, especially in adulthood when I thought about this kind of stuff and therefore realized I have some control over it. Not drinking every day has been a huge help. In my 20s I drank because I didn’t want to feel anxiety for a while, and in my late 30s I realized that drinking on Day One is what causes anxiety on Day Two and half of Day Three. COVID taught me how to be alone for days and not feel cripplingly lonely like a cosmonaut on an asteroid watching his spaceship take off without him. My cats, Sheba, Sam, Jack and Bobby taught me how to express my feelings without words, like radio signals broadcast from one tower (me) and received by another tower (them). I have even had interactions with women and one pitbull where they physically reacted to my emotional thoughts. Those are three great stories but for brevity need to be discussed in another post. The point is that I’ve become aware of this emotional aspect of my self as a part of what it is like for Me to experience existence.

Intellectually, I’m smarter and wiser than ever. I’d say “that goes without saying” because you learn more the longer you are alive. But, like Jesus said, a lot of people are “walking dead” zombies going around not thinking about their lives or how they might have any different experiences than they have always had, doing what they’ve always done, getting what they’ve always gotten, never reading new stuff, and most importantly, not examining their lives. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates said. “Good experiences are gained from wisdom, which is gained from bad experiences,” Ben Franklin said. And when Socrates and Jesus Christ and Ben Franklin make the same point about something, it’s probably a good idea to think about following their advice, even if you’re not a Christian or a fan of philosophy and you hate the Founding Fathers because you don’t know anything about them but think that because they’re old white guys they must be dickheads. (Don’t confuse historical figures who were really smart and gave wisdom to humankind with dickheads who quote them to make some dickhead point—that’s like confusing a tree for a little kid’s drawing of a tree.) Anyhow I’m nearly done with reading all of the Presidential biographies (only have Biden left), the history of the world from Herodotus and Thucydides through the Napoleonic Wars and American History, and lately physics and engines and Electromagnatism and green power generation and the Erie Canal. Learning is a process of forming associational clusters. Its like throwing darts at a wall covered by tiles affixed to a cork backing. Eventually a tile falls off and the darts stick. The more darts you throw, the more tiles you knock off, and the more the darts stick. Throw darts! Learn stuff! It will get you in good intellectual shape. And just one more point: there are anti-intellectuals who are the walking dead, but then there are people who are sophomorically smart but don’t cultivate their wisdom. It is necessary but not sufficient to learn widely. You’ve got to think about what lessons you can abstract from history and your own experiences, and that is what wisdom is. And wisdom helps you live a better life. I’m wiser than I have ever been. And to be honest, wisdom is the recompense for the lack of physical prowess as one ages. Which is why 40 is such an exciting age, because I generally know how to interpret and interact with the world in a wise fashion now, but I’m not incapacitated by age—I’m physically in nearly the best physical shape of my life (see above paragraph).

What other aspects of “shape of my life” are there? How about reputationally-speaking? Again, in Coming of Age on the Hudson I describe an experience at age 23 on a beach in Virginia when I was broke and ugly and had been fired from a job and didn’t have a girlfriend when I realized that you cannot expect people who do not know you to look through your derelict clothes and the bags under your eyes and your unkempt beard and realize that you have potential. You’ve got to cultivate signifiers of success, and people will look at those cues you put out and think “that person must be successful, they look like it and act like it.” Good karma comes from having a good reputation which comes from acting well. I try to act like my grandfather would act in any given situation. In my 20s I didn’t always do that. After my grandfather passed I thought about how he would act more. He was the nicest man I’ve ever met. It reminds me of a quote from Elwood P. Down in Harvey: “My mother always used to tell me, ‘In this world, Elwood—she always used to call me Elwood—you must be oh so smart, or or so pleasant.’ For years I was smart, Doctor. I prefer pleasant. You may quote me on that.” Your karma comes from the people you are surrounded by. If you’re nice you will generally be surrounded by nice people. Then you will have nice karma. You can get good karma by resisting the temptation to say bad things about people, or taking cheap shots at vulnerable strangers; by showing up to things when you say you will; by keeping secrets if people confide in you; by listening when people want to talk without cutting them off mid-sentence to tell a story about yourself; by not littering and being kind to animals; by remembering that people have important or tragic things going on and asking how they are doing; just by being empathetic.

Part of one’s “best shape” is money, of course. Ben Franklin said (I know, too many Ben Franklin quotes in one post, but he said a lot of wise shit) “an empty bag cannot sit up straight.” He meant that somebody who is starving is not going to act morally—they’re going to do what they need to do to survive. I’m lucky to be in the best economic shape of my life objectively. I have a very good job and a two-family rental property and I even make between $13 and $20 a year by selling my books. Double that amount if I also sell a cane/walking stick. I think my economic shape at 40 compared to 20 greatly outweighs the fact that I was 9 pounds lighter at 20 years old.

So those are some components of being in the best shape: physically, mentally, emotionally, intellectually, economically, in a composite. Taken together, I really believe I am in the best shape that I have ever been, and that my shape now will extrapolate into the future. Honestly, if I can keep up my physical shape, all of the rest will continue to increase on its own.

….

I had a party on Saturday. My friend Jess and my neighbor Justin, and my friends/tenants Hayley and Dylan and their friends Vaughn and Cassidy came to help me set up Friday. Then on Saturday Bernie came early to help set up, and then 40 or 50 friends came and we had a party until 4:30 in the morning, laughing, singing, playing. The next day Bernie and Olivia and I drove to Market 32 for eggs and beans and corned beef hash and bacon and blasted Salt N Pepa in my Jeep with the doors down. And back at the house as we cooked breakfast Dan my neighbor came over, and Elise my neighbor got back from camping and heard laughter and came over, and Devin who lives at the end of my street who I met three days ago came over and brought peppers and berries from his garden, and Dylan came upstairs, and we made Bloody Marys and Espresso Martinis and had breakfast while I played my grandmother’s Tommy Dorsey record. At the end last night I sat in my new boat on a trailer in the back yard and though “This has been my favorite 36 hours of my life.”

Which is really a funny thing because so far this year a tree has fallen on my jeep, on my wooden boat, on my pergola and canopy, and the boat is still not fixed and my jeep took 102 days to get fixed, and I’ve had to pay $950 dollars to take a tree down this year, $2700 to have the top of my house repaired, $28,000 last week to have my roof replaced; $8,000 last week to have my chimneys rebuilt before the roofers would do their work; and at my party, at 1 am, a pipe burst and sprayed pee-smelling water in my basement and my property hasn’t had running water since then and it will be $5850 to fix the damage tomorrow, which is my 40th birthday. Which means that my 30s started with my apartment burning down in Albany and going to the emergency room, and it will end with me mopping fecal smelling piss water off of my basement. And yet yesterday continues to be my favorite day of being alive.

I always cry at the beginning of Its A Wonderful Life as the camera shows the outside of a bunch of houses as voices say “Dear God, please look after George Bailey tonight.” And then a couple of constellations representing angels talk and Joseph says “Tonight is George Bailey’s important night.” And Clarence says “Is he sick?” And Joseph says, “Worse than that—he’s discouraged” and I cry again. Think about that line. Discouraged is worse than sick. And then the movie happens and at the end all of the people George knows band together and help him get out of the terrible situation that discouraged him. And he gets a card from the angel Clarance that says “Remember George, no man is a failure who has friends.” And I cry again. Because it is so true.

No Man Is A Failure Who Has Friends.

I had the best weekend of my life because so many of my friends were around me. And that is the “shape of my life” right now. It really is a wonderful life. I’m looking forward to the next 80 years, because I plan to live to 120.

 

I was going to wear a tie, or at least a vest, to the bar tonight, but I didn’t want to have to explain myself, or suffer the hatred of strangers. I wore a tie and vest to Footsies a few months ago and it wasn’t a big deal because people know me, but a couple of us ventured over to Whiskey Pickle and I caught some twenty-something white kid giving an exasperated, disgusted look to his friend when the friend asked me a question, as though to say “ew come on I don’t want to have to talk to this guy.” I was, of course, the only person with a tie on in the establishment, and possibly the only male with buttons on his shirt, or who had used a razor to form straight lines around the edges of his beard.

I might have expected to stand out, in a tie, in a place like Whiskey Pickle, which has a kind of dark, grundge-looking-but-expensive atmosphere, or Footsies, which is the second-to-last-place you go out on a weekend evening. But I am now writing at Emry’s Garden in Troy, which is a restaurant with paintings on the wall and plants and flowers and candles; it is a date place. It is 8:51, the place is at 75% capacity, and had I worn I tie, I would’ve been the only male with a tie on. If I go to Ryan’s Wake, which is maybe the quintessential corner for classist conformity in Troy (see my blog about going to Ryan’s and feeling like I was having a Martini at a mannequin factory) I also had drunk dudes coming up to me apropos of nothing to yell-ask me why I’m “so dressed up” and if I was at a wedding.

I would venture a guess that if I went bar hopping in a tie in Troy this busy Friday evening, I would be the only man in a tie though I stopped into five “it” bars and thereby shared a room with over 1,000 people over the course of the evening.

Which is fine, styles change. Bell bottoms are popular again, having fallen out of style since 1996 when they were popular for two years, after having first been popular in the 60s. Those gigantic pants that are like tents instead of pant legs are popular again, as are mom jeans. The popular glasses right now have frames that my grandmother or grandfather would have worn in the late 1980s.

But there is something different about wearing a tie. It’s why ties are required to step onto the Floor of most state and national legislatures if you are male. It is why events are described as “black tie affairs.” Ties are wrapped up in the idea conforming.

I love the pictures from, say, pre-1965 of a family standing in a grocery store parking lot, and the man and son have a tie and the woman and daughter have dresses and heels. I’m sure there are people who despise those pictures. What they unpack from those pictures differs from what I unpack from those pictures. I identify with the father in the pictures and imagine how lovely it would be if “success” in life meant that I had a family and wore a tie to go to the grocery store, played in the bowling league on Thursday nights, and got along with the other fellas at the factory where I worked. That is an inclusive view of conformity. Others see the same picture and think of the reasons why they do not look like the people in the picture…they are the wrong race, or the wrong class, or the wrong gender, they imagine. And so, they think, fuck the people in the picture and fuck what they are wearing. They have an exclusive view of conformity.

An inclusive view of conformity, in my opinion, is one that has positive associations with society, crowds, the majority, democracy, numbers, tradition, repeated-experiences. An inclusive view of conformity welcomes anyone into the group who professes to share the values of the group. An easy way to profess to share the values of the majority is to dress like everyone else dresses. Since there have been many different kinds of shirts, shoes, pants and hats over the years, wearing-a-tie became the most obvious “badge” of conformity.

An exclusive view of conformity is one that has negative associations with society, crowds, the majority, democracy, numbers, tradition, and does not want to repeat experiences. An exclusive view of conformity is associated with self-identifying as outside-of-the-group, and, for one reason or another, the inability to become a part of the group. Because our very lives depend on feeling like we are a part of a group, a person with an exclusive view of conformity will try to join a minority group outside of the majority group from which they feel they are involuntarily excluded (alienated). They will therefore advertise that they are not part of the majority group, in order to attract others who are similarly alienated. One way to do that has historically been not to wear a tie…the symbol of membership in the majority. Then 60 years ago people began to advertise their rejection of the majority group more colorfully, with bell bottoms, miniskirts, flowers in the hair, bra burning, long hair for men and shaved heads for women, drag, intentionally being unkempt. In the 80s that presented as punk, and that became goth, and at some point excluded groups made up a greater percentage of the population than the supposed majority. And at that point—since everyone wants to be a part of a group—it became easier to advertise that one was part of the “in” crowd by dressing as a non-conformist, than a conformist. Which is like saying, in order to conform, one must now advertise how much they despise conformity.

It’s not so hard to understand. The most uncool thing is to try to be cool. Once you try to be cool, you’re not cool. So if your objective is to be cool, the most important thing is not to try.

This phenomenon first occurred to me about ten years ago when I was walking to work on a sunny Tuesday morning. I walked down Willet Street in Albany to State Street, and from there it was a straight shot, five blocks to the Capitol, where I worked. I was wearing a suit and tie, because it was a Session Day and I would have to go onto the Floor of the Assembly to assist with debates. A block ahead of me as I walked, I heard someone shout-singing. It was a black man around 35, shout-rapping off-key, and I couldn’t understand the words he was saying. He was walking with exaggerated movements as though mixing dancing and walking, gesticulating. His pants hung low, and he had a baggy shirt and red cap angled back and to the right. It was 8 am and my first thought was,

”Does this guy actually think he sounds good? That people are waking up and want to hear him shouting vulgarities through their open window?”

At the intersection of Lark and State, the man walked in front of traffic, not increasing his pace as the light turned green and dozens of commuters had to wait and tap their steering wheels as he casually ambled out of traffic, singing to the sky, ensuring that at least six or eight cars that would have made it through the green light had to wait through another red light before they could go.

“And doesn’t that guy realize how cliche he is being? Like, he is totally reinforcing the stereotype about black men with everything that he is doing this morning!” I thought to myself.

And then, maybe a block further, it clicked for me:

”That is the point!” I thought, “This man is intentionally flaunting that he is not a part of society. That is his schtick. Whatever circumstances led to him being alive this morning have led him to conclude that he will never be accepted as a member of majority society. Membership in majority society is predicated on being polite to other people—not speaking loudly outside another person’s window in the morning; quickening one’s pace when one is in the way of someone else; dressing in an inoffensive fashion (which includes at one extreme wearing-a-tie and at a minimum not-showing-one’s-underwear-as-their-pants-are-falling-off-on-a-public-sidewalk).”

That is when the high school microcosm of society occurred to me and I started thinking about “the goth kids”. In high school—I don’t know about everyone else but I thought—there is a huge pressure to conform to the elite group. There is a phenomenon called “popularity” which is highly correlated with “having money” because it is even more highly correlated with “physical attractiveness” and physical attractiveness includes “wearing cool clothes” and having nice teeth and skin and those things take money. If your caregivers can’t afford cool clothes, dermatologists and orthodontists and their durable medical equipment, or you are physically not an Adonis or Aphrodite, then you get emphatically excluded from the popular group. The best you can hope for is to be tolerated or patronized by popular kids before you are cast off into space without a tether. Which is almost as intolerable analogically as it would be literally. And just as, if you were floating in space without a tether, farther and farther from safety, you would accept the hand of any helper no matter how popular or cool they are, just so in society, when you are alienated and ostracized, you will accept the haven offered by any group, including one which has founded its membership upon having-been-also-previously-rejected-by-the-popular-kids. And, as stated above, in order to be accepted into your new group, you will signify your membership, which in this case means dressing emphatically opposite of the majority group (at a minimum no tie, at the other extreme dressing like a goth and adopting face tattoos, radical surgery to make your tongue forked or to remove organs, etc).

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates said. Most people do not adhere to that advice, and seldom examine their lives and thought processes and the karma that results from their habits. And so they harden into whatever character they had around 18 or 20 years old. “One’s ‘character’ is how one is likely to act in any particular situation,” Aristotle said. So most people, having not been cool (because a majority can never be cool; the main thing about “cool” is that it is constantly fleeting) distill into adults who weren’t “cool” in high school and who therefore identify as minority groups (even if they are white, male, straight, etc) and therefore adopt the signifiers of outside-group status. The majority of adults today, in other words, think of themselves as not-majority members of society. They signify their not-majority status by non-conformative clothing, speech, points of view. So we have this absurd situation where everyone, in order appear cool—in order to have the acceptance of others—must adopt a way of dressing and talking and opinionating which is opposite of some pretended majority which no longer exists.

And then I wear a tie on a Friday night, and become the symbol of the “majority”, the way a lightning rod attracts lightning, which is why the kid at Whiskey Pickle made the disgusted look when his friend asked me a question.

So here is why I am a non-conformist. I am listening to a drunk guy talk to another guy and he is being super loud and annoying. He has frizzy hair back in a bun and a beard and a black tee shirt and he is a bit overweight. He is white and male, but other than that he does not conform to the stereotype of Majority/hegemony/etc. He is yelling at the bartender saying “WE’VE MET LIKE FOUR TIMES!” He is The Average Guy These Days. And I despise him. He is disrespectful to everyone else who has to listen to him shouting. He is annoying to the female bartender entertaining him. I identify as his antithesis. To advertise that I am not like him I dress opposite to him. Dressing as a punk or a goth is not opposite to him, it is close to him on a spectrum. The only way to dress opposite of the average guy, nowadays, is to wear a tie. Because ties used to symbolize conformity, and still do kind of, but now everyone is a non-conformist, which I means if you want to conform, you must be a non-conformist, and I don’t want to, so I’ll dress like a conformist to illustrate my non-conformity.

 

 

My friend Kerry asked how do you fiberglass? I tried to explain in a facebook comment but, for those folks who are interested in a real answer, a bit longer of a post and pictures are required.

Fiberglassing, as a process, requires a fabric (the fiberglass) and a liquid (“epoxy”). Epoxy is a chemical that looks like maple syrup and hardens into plastic, like Tupperware.

Note: there are all kinds of uses for epoxy besides fiberglassing. My friend Bernie made me coasters from “epoxy pours” on top of flower petals.  I have four pieces are artwork in my parlor from Brittany and Julie made from dripping epoxy colored with pigment onto a canvass (or maybe they pour paint onto a canvass and then cover it with clear epoxy).

The utility of epoxy comes from the fact that it starts in a liquid phase and then, after mixing it with a “hardener”—another liquid shipped and stored in a separate bottle—it hardens into a solid. That allows you to pour the epoxy or paint with it in liquid form, and when it hardens it becomes a super strong material.

How strong? If you take two 2X4s and paint the tips of them with epoxy and stick them together, and let the epoxy cure, it will stick the 2X4s together and then if you try to smash the 2X4s they will break anywhere along the wood before breaking where they have been attached by the epoxy. Because the epoxy soaks into the fibers of the wood itself and turns the wood into a plastic.

Some bar tops have a hard, clear sheen to them, overtop of chemically-tinted copper, or wood or even pennies. The sheen comes from mixing a gallon of epoxy with a few ounces of hardener and then pouring it over the copper, wood, pennies, etc and letting it harden into a plastic not unlike plexiglass. El Loco has a bar top like that.

Above is “resin” and “hardener” from West System, a manufacturer of epoxy that began operations in the late 1960s, I believe, when fiberglassing was starting to become a thing. What I like about West System is that it comes with pumps that make it easy to mix because they measure out each thrust of the pump in an exact ratio for mixing. It is super important to mix the resin and hardener in EXACT proportions. Over the years I have mixed wrong and ended up hardening a $100 gallon of resin in the can because I put too much hardener in. Sometimes you literally have to use an eye dropper to mix the exact amount of hardener by ml or cc.

The thing about epoxy is that once you mix the hardener into it, you have a very short window that it remains liquid, called its “pot life.” Generally, at 72 degrees Fahrenheit, once you mix the hardener into the resin you have 2 hours to work with it. At 62 degrees you have 4 hours; at 82 degrees you have 1 hour; at 92 degrees you have 30 minutes, etc. Again, I lost over $100 per gallon cans of resin when trying to work with the stuff in the winter by heating up the resin on a hot plate before mixing the hardener in, and then—whoops, I must have heated it to 112 degrees because it hardened in 7 minutes, before I’d applied 1/25th of the stuff to the boat I was trying to water seal.

Another thing to keep in mind is that epoxy-creation is an “exothermic” reaction— as it happens, it gives off heat. Since it hardens more quickly the hotter it is, and also gives off heat as it hardens, it is likely to undergo a cascade reaction the larger the quantity of mixed material. In practice, if you mix hardener and resin and want to extend it’s pot life, you can stick the container in an ice bath (lowering its temperature through convection) or you can spread it out into a pan or film, delaying the cascade (self heating) chain reaction because the heat given off will be convected into the atmosphere rather than back into the epoxy where it would further speed the hardening process.

The first thing I did on my boat was to paint the entire bottom with epoxy to make it waterproof. In the old days (1970 through ancient history) wooden boats would be placed in water for a day, and they would leak, and then the water would be pumped out, and the boat would be waterproof because the wood had expanded via absorption to close small cracks. That only works if you can leave a boat in the water for more than a day. If you trailer an old wooden boat like mine, it dries out every time you take it out of the water and then leaks every time you put it in. Fiberglass boats don’t have that problem because they present a solid plastic shell to the water. Coating the bottom of the boat with epoxy fills small cracks and provides a much stronger protection from punctures. The epoxy soaks into the wood and turns it into a plastic.

Somewhat hard to tell but I have gone over the seams of the bottom of the boat with epoxy, which is kind of like painting with polyurethane. That won’t fill gaps, because the viscosity of the epoxy is water-like. To fill gaps requires the use of “fairing compound” which is a two-part compound (epoxy) which has stuff mixed with it to make it fill a greater volume of space (fill cracks) at the cost of strength. You mix the fairing compound from two containers which each have a Playdough consistency into a “peanut butter” consistency. (Yes, peanut butter consistency is the industry term for what you are aiming for as you mix the two products.)

WEAR GLOVES WHENEVER YOU USE EPOXY IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO GET OUT OF ANYTHING OR REMOVE FROM SKIN!

The thing about the fairing compound is that it fills cracks. It’s like plaster or spackle when you’re doing woodwork. You can get close enough with your measurements and cutting and then fill the gaps and sand it after you’re done, as long as you are painting it. Same with fairing compound. Unlike epoxy it is easily sandable. Then you end up with a smooth surface. Make sure you coat that with more epoxy so it is waterproof and hard. Then you can fiberglass or paint. This is how people make pontoons — they take foam, cut it, fill in gaps with fairing compound and sand it until the whole shape is smooth to hands and eyes, and then they can finish with fiberglass.

Fiberglass itself is a fabric which looks like wedding dress material.

You buy it by thickness and weave pattern. The thicker it is, the more $100 per gallon epoxy it takes to “wet it out”. The different weave patterns flex and stretch to fit shapes more effectively and in ways that create more strength. I can’t remember exactly because this fiberglass was left over from a boat project from around 2012 but I think it is an 8 oz sheet with standard weave that makes a chris-cross pattern. I laid it over the boat as best as I could, taping down sides so it wouldn’t blow away and trying to create as few wrinkles as possible.

Once the fiberglass sheet is laid out, the only thing left to do is to wet it out with mixed epoxy. But that’s where the art and skill really come into play. You want to mix the epoxy in small enough quantities that it doesn’t harden in the pot. Even if you do that, it still eats about one foam paint roller every twenty minutes, so you’ll go through a lot and there is no way around it because the foam crumbles away leaving you with only the metal paint roller spine.

When finished, the epoxy turns the white fiberglass transparent, as long as you have used enough epoxy to wet out all of the fibers. Sometimes the underlying wood can suck up all the epoxy and leave a cloudy appearance. That’s why I coated the wood with epoxy and let it cure before I put the fiberglass on with another coat of epoxy.

Then you have to go around and 1) cut off all the fabric they you did not coat with epoxy and 2) use a utility knife/box cutter to cut out any wrinkles which hardened into the shape. It is impossible to avoid wrinkles in “complex” shapes that curve in two directions.

Then you have a shape which has been coated with fiberglass but it is no longer smooth because you have cut off wrinkles and there are ends of the fiberglass sheet that are not sealed. So you have to use more fairing compound to fill those gaps, and then sand that fairing compound after it has hardened after 2 hours, and then coat the spots with the fairing compound with epoxy.

At that point, you just repeat the last few steps, coating with fiberglass, letting it cure, cutting wrinkles, filling with fairing compound, sanding, coating with fiberglass, etc, until you have reached the desired thickness and firmness you are looking for.

On a boat you also have to coat the final product with a “gel coat” which is a two part epoxy paint—basically epoxy with pigment in it—although I don’t know why that is. Here is the bottom of the boat after the fiberglassing and with a coat of gel coat:

And lastly I coated the bottom of the boat with the same green “anti-fouling” paint (which somehow dissuades little mollusks from attaching to the underside of your boat) that the boat had when I bought her.

I almost forgot…there are no more superstitious people than sailors. I think it is related to the phenomena that keeps religion in fox holes. Anyhow my friend Kay came over as I was working on the boat and she was bound and determined to find a four leaf clover, which she did, and I painted it into the bottom of the boat for good luck (above).

That’s fiberglassing! It has a lot of more applications than boat building. Any surface repair job that is not completely flat benefits from epoxy/fiberglass knowledge. It bonds surfaces together more strongly than glue because it doesn’t merely affix surfaces but seeps into them and chemically combines them into the same object.

Jack Kerouac said it was a shame how boys and girls in America have such a sad time together nowadays…and that was in 1949. I think if Jack Kerouac got into a time machine and arrived in 2024, and happened to be shown a smart phone with Tinder and Bumble on it, he would jump off the nearest bridge or walk in front of a bus. Or, to really drive home the point, in front of a self-driving car.

Answer me this question: when was the last time you slow danced? Who’s wedding was it, and did the venue reopen after COVID? Or was is it your prom?

If you are under 40, you might not realize that slow dancing was a common occurrence for a hundred prior years, until about 15 years ago. If you don’t believe me, watch a rom-com from the 90s like When Harry Met Sally. Or Harvey, from the 1950s. Or talk to me and I can tell you about the halcyon days of 10, 20 years ago when, if there was a live band at a bar or gala, there would be 4-5 slow dances, and that was part of the whole evening…figuring out which girls were single and asking them to dance when a slow song came on. For me the last time was the gala for the Boys and Girls Club of Albany in 2018 and the girl’s name was Christina and I didn’t know her that night and we never hung out after that (her choice, but that’s the point, you could just ask a girl to dance and it wasn’t super high pressure because it was common).

Slow dancing was the ultimate euphemism. You were as close as you could be in public, feeling if your partner had rhythm, smelling their pheromones, feeling the texture of their skin, smelling their hair, looking into the irises of their soul.

When you slow danced, you knew whether you wanted to go further. It was Practice.

You can’t dance over a dating app. But you also can’t dance at a bar anymore, because slow dance music isn’t played at bars. And you can’t dance at a dance, because there aren’t dances anymore.

There isn’t much that is romantic anymore.

Statements like “there isn’t much that is romantic anymore” get me in trouble with the women I would be dating.

Even though it cuts both ways and men are equally, if not more to blame…nonetheless if I say “nobody is romantic anymore” women tend to hear “oh here is this asshole getting mad because women don’t want to have it as their life’s goal to be barefoot and pregnant while the man goes to the office and sleeps with the secretary.”

I think this might stem from a narrow view of the meaning of the word “romantic.” Words change over time and I think if you were to ask a young single person what romantic means, they might say “oh like candles and going out on a date where the music is low and the guy pulls out a chair and it’s all old fashioned.”

They might add, “it’s a whole vibe.”

Which, I guess, it can be a whole vibe, but really, “romantic” need not be an all or nothing characteristic, and it certainly doesn’t need to be limited to dating.

Here are three examples of things I consider romantic that aren’t about sex:

1) I like to boil a kettle of water and pour it into a tea pot I’ve owned for 9 years with two black tea bags and one lavender tea bag, and float an orange slice, and then lay out a red paisley place mat and drink the pot in small cupfuls over the course of three hours while I read at my dining room table.

2) I like to bathe, then shave and iron a three-piece suit, and go to a bar with jazz with a Moleskinne notebook with a black pen and order an Old Fashioned with Seagrams V.O. and a splash of club soda and mix the cocktail with a the stirrer-straw and then let it sit for one minute to “age” before I take a sip.

3) Even if I’m working remotely, or working on writing rather than salaried work, I like to shave and don slacks and a button-up shirt, play jazz, and make a cocktail to “get into character” before I begin a cerebral task.

What makes these things “romantic?” I think part of it is that none of the little things I do preparatory to whatever the task I have before me are necessary. They are all superfluous. I could read without 8 minutes of tea making and then supping. I could go to a bar without bathing and shaving and then writing in a notebook. I could fill in my spreadsheets and read my work reports without donning slacks and a button up shirt.

But what would that leave? Reading, going to a bar, and working. Like a robot would do those things. Because robots are efficient to a fault. I imagine Data from Star Trek asking Geordi LaForge:

”Commander, why do humans find it necessary to ask about weather, or to observe details of a room’s architecture, when they are within close proximity of another human? Would it not be more efficient to save one’s breath and simply state that one would like their interlocutor to hand them a wrench, or to copulate?”

Yes, it would be more efficient. But efficiency is not the measure of Good Living. I’d go so far as to say that efficiency is a measure of how quickly one is Racing Toward Death. Efficiency is robotic. Efficiency is what one employs when they are competing against time.

I would prefer not to constantly compete against time. For one thing, time will always win against an organic creature like me, whose existence is very much defined by time from the moment I am born until the moment I die.

Romance is a protest against time. Romance slows time, or our perception of it. You light a candle, you eat a meal that it took time to cook but which provides only marginally more nutrients than a frozen/microwaved meal, you lay out placemats and make a cocktail, you play music that you don’t need to hear to digest. You do these things, and they make you different than your dog or your cat that consumes the food placed in front of them like an automaton sucking up sustenance without pleasure. Because you are capable of controlling your environment; you are capable of controlling your perception of time, while a cat or a dog is not.

Romantic gestures are signals of interpersonal respect, because one person acts in an inefficient way to prolong their time with another person in a superfluous way, and the other person accepts the prolongation of the experience superfluously because they enjoy spending time with the first person.

First-date dinners, slow dancing, telephone conversations…these increasingly rare experiences are indicative of a general aversion to romance. Because romance is “a whole vibe” and “I ain’t got time for that.”

And yet, it seems like people do crave human connections and regret that they can’t experience them. Dating does still exist, and lots of single people still envy other people who are in relationships. Dating apps are a dime a dozen and thousands of people are on them for every 10-mile radius superimposed over any particular portion of a google map. It is still a general “goal of two Ones who share proximity on the physical plane to gain a double Oneness on the metaphysical plane,” as Johnny 5 told Benjamin in Short Circuit 2.

The problem is, most people are Doing It Wrong!

I mentioned as a Facebook update the other day that I went out on Saturday to Ryan’s Wake in Troy, and it was like having a martini at a mannequin factory. That’s not a dig at Ryan’s Wake, or the people there. There is a higher concentration, and a larger number, of good looking people at Ryan’s Wake than any bar in Troy. It’s just that all of those people just Stand There, I don’t think they play any music, and there is no cultural common ground like slow dances to bring any of the single people together.

And it does NOT seem to me that most of the people at a place like Ryan’s Wake are out because they want to be left alone. It doesn’t seem like they are out to blow off steam either. If you want to blow off steam there are cheaper places to get drunk and be loud. You go to Ryan’s Wake because you want to look your best and be in the place where other people are looking their best and you hope maybe you might meet some of those people. And then you will be someone who looks their best talking to someone who you think looks good. And then maybe you will talk to them and Do A Shot and then one of you might Ask The Other One For Their Cell Phone Number and later you might text each other and decide to get a drink on a Wednesday night and then you might have a couple of drinks and Have Sex With Each Other and then you are Dating.

Guys and gals have such a sad time together these days.

I think the problem is technology. Guys and gals are both competing against it.

It wasn’t that long ago that women were competing, dating wise, against air-brushed Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition models. And then they were competing against porn actresses. And now even porn actresses are competing against AI girlfriends that you can program to look however you want and say whatever you want them to say…but you can’t touch them or feel their presence. And men have been competing against machines since the time of John Henry and the steam engine minimizing their productive value, and now there are sex machines for women to go along with the porn for men, and nobody needs the other sex to get off. And there are Instagram and Facebook to highlight the best parts of your “friend”s lives, like they are existential successes and you existentially suck. And there are Tinder and Bumble and Hinge matches so you can have a “connection” if you scroll through one or two thousand people…so you don’t feel isolated.

But it turns out a “match” on a dating site isn’t really a connection, in the way that two people in close proximity can feel that they share a connection (like, for example, if they slow dance). And it is hard to remember that all of those Facebook and Instagram people are only showing you the best parts of their lives. So people feel isolated and not doing as well as other people, and their  electronic “connections” are bullshit, and they go to the bar to be physically close to other human beings.

But then, at the bar (remember there is no such thing as a dance anymore, and certainly not slow dances) there are no “conventions” or situations to bring people together, because of the general suspicion of romance.

I was struck, on Saturday at Ryan’s Wake, by the way that so many girls and guys in their groups just stood there, arms kind of wrapped around their own chests like cold birds protecting themselves, yet with longing looks on their faces, making eye contact with other people in other groups, and then quickly looking down at the floor.

Probably I should have gotten up and walked over and inserted myself into a group of young women standing alone for hours and made up some conversation and suffered the slings and arrows of derision by their friends, because I was out there to meet girls like them and didn’t do anything to make that happen either.

But that’s a pretty tough “ask,” especially when I’ve done that before and been scowled at by the girl and all her friends, and seen friends try to do that and get scowled at by the group.

If only there were some place where there was music, and every now and then a slow song. Because then I would just ask a girl to dance. It is much easier to talk to a girl when you are dancing than when you are surrounded by scowling friends. And then, I could ask for her phone number, and maybe talk to her on the phone, and see if she wanted to get dinner at an Italian restaurant with candles, before which  we might both bathe and wear Nice Clothes, implicitly acknowledging that we enjoy passing time together, rather than speeding through it as efficiently as possible.

“Dream on, Johnny,” as Johnny 5 said, in Short Circuit 2.

No, there is almost no room for slow dancing and first-date candles and meeting-in-person in the modern dating scene. And that is why boys and girls in America have such a sad time together, today. Continue reading Dating— (Hint: It’s Supposed To Be Pleasant) →

Written at the bar of Emry’s Garden, 2 King Street in Troy, New York; Brian Bartending, April 10th, 2024.

It has been a goal of mine for the lat 19 years to take a raft down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. It goes back to 2005, when I was 21, and my friends and I were trying to build a raft and float down the Hudson River to Manhattan. That particular endeavor took me 5 years, saw 7 iterations of increasingly complex vessels constructed, and cost me about $20,000. Since the Hudson from Albany to NYC is around 150 miles, and the Ohio and Mississippi from Pittsburgh to New Orleans is roughly 2,000 miles, logically, “the Mississippi Trip” should take me 66.3 years, require 93.3 different vessels, and cost me $266,666.

I jest, of course. Luckily, we rational animals learn from our mistakes and each time we approach a challenge we do a better job at execution.

[It is funny to me that “execution” means both “to follow through on a task” and “to kill someone.” For the last couple of years I’ve been trying to construct this joke, but I haven’t gotten it yet. It would be like, “What did one Roman say to the other Roman when they got done crucifying Spartacus? …. You really nailed the execution. Wacka wacka wacka. Too soon? Geeze I didn’t realize there were so many Spartacus fans in the crowd…”]

I did try, and fail, rather spectacularly, to go 2,000 miles from Pittsburgh to New Orleans in 2018. If you are one of those rare few people who have Facebook, I had a Facebook page called Float of the Phoenix if you care to see pictures and see some video with top of the line cinematography [the best you can get with an iPhone leaning against a cooler on a sinking vessel.] There are cobwebbed posts on this site about the construction.

It was made from two pontoons made from 55 gallon drums, procured from a car wash [they’d contained soap] and duck-taped into pontoon-shapes and fiberglassed. The pontoons worked very very well, but I built and tested the boat here in New York, then had to take it apart and transport it to Pittsburgh in a 20 foot Uhaul, and while I was in the process of re-constructing it with my ship-mate Sam on a boat ramp at Silky’s Crows’ Nest Marina in Sharpsburgh (just up the Allegheny from Pittsburgh Point), the area got hit with Hurricane Florence, which totally flooded the entire region and valley such that for the next 45 days we only saw one other pleasure boat on the river, the rest having been wrecked or taken out of the river for the season. Towns were flooded up to their Main Streets. We had to jettison weight after our center hull ruptured and pulled our boat under the water. We spent two weeks marooned on Davis Island [including Sam’s 30th birthday] until someone from Pittsburgh NORML saw us on Facebook, got a boat and crew, and pulled us against the current back into the center of the river so we could proceed through the first Ohio River lock. Unfortunately our fourth-hand motor died, and our second, second-hand motor also died, and after 45 days we had only made it to Portsmouth, Ohio, at the confluence of the Scioto River, 365 out of 2,000 miles downstream, by mid-October, when it fell below freezing at night, the boat had no propulsion, was sinking, and I was so broke I had to ask my mother to put $600 into my checking account at KeyBank in Ravena so I could afford an Enterprise Rent-a-Car to drive me, Sam, and some of our belongings back to New York. Later that winter I got a call from a nice officer from the Shawneetown Marina who told me that my boat had completely sunk, and a few months later, a woman Facebook Messaged me that she had salvaged pieces of my boat from the river bottom and it was now functioning as a faux-sunken boat flower bed near the pond in her front yard.

That was October of 2018, and I was broke and, at 34, had to move back into my parent’s basement. I called the manager at El Loco, the Mexican restaurant in Albany where I’d worked, and got a shift the next day. A month and a half later I started working as Insurance Analyst for the central staff of the New York State Assembly, where I had worked as an analyst 2007-12 and 2014-16. But I realized I needed to have some sort of passive income if I was going to try to do a months-long trip again. So I read some real estate books, worked three jobs, and bought a two-family in Troy to subsidize my rent and to sublet when I was away.

I was promoted so that I had 5 Legislative Committees under my jurisdiction (Corporations, Labor, Governmental Employees, Real Property Tax, Science and Technology and later Insurance) and then COVID happened. Between March 6, 2020 and June of 2021 I ended up working every single day, including weekends and holidays, except for 8 days.  No remote opportunities. A “leadership position” that paid substantially less than $100,000. My money went into house repairs and my time went into doing those repairs, because it costs 1/10th of what a contractor charges if you do the work yourself, and thanks to boatbuilding I had lots of tools and some experience doing construction work (plus a healthy appreciation of the fact that there is no “right way” to do something, and if you mess it up you just re-do it and it is still less expensive than using a contractor.)

By the end of 2022 I was burned out from 4 years of 80-120 hour weeks with almost no time off. I want to observe that some employers view “burned out” as a temporary state that you recover from after a couple days of rest. No, burned out is a permanent state. If you burn out a circuit, it will not work, no matter how long you let it sit there. You have to replace at least one electronic component because it has been physically destroyed. I got an offer to work for an Executive Agency with a substantially better salary, 9-5 hours, and remote work opportunities and I took it. Combined with 2-family home-ownership, that was the final piece of the puzzle to enable me to start thinking about a trip down the Mississippi again.

One pre-requisite for taking a vessel 2,000 miles is to actually possess, or better yet to own,  a vessel.

On the one hand, there is a substantial price difference in second hand boats (and I only want second, third or fourth hand boats, because I like to ram them and beach them and screw things into them and not worry because they are new and pretty) in Albany versus in rural PA or OH. So it would make sense to go overland to Pittsburgh and buy a boat there. But then I would miss out on the part that I like, which is designing some contraption after drawing sketches on cocktail napkins, hearing people say that the design is inefficient and unwarranted, and being motivated out of spite to figure out a way to put the pieces together so that I can say “I told you so” for a day or two until it breaks.

My first attempt at procuring a “kernel” of a vessel—something to serve as a center hull and power plant— was a 1973 yellow used fire-boat from Saratoga county, which I named Daphne.

What I liked is that Daphne was a center-hull boat, essentially a work boat. I had transitioned from wanting to take a “raft” down the rivers. I pictured putting a crane and lift to bring cargo onto the boat, and to retrieve artifacts off the bottom of the river along the way. I took Daphne out magnet fishing on the Hudson and the Schodack Creek. But after three times on the Hudson, the motor stopped working and she’s now been at my mechanic’s for 3 years. They don’t make the outboard  brand that’s on Daphne anymore, and the motor is the most expensive part of a boat. She went into the shop in 2021 and that was when I was working 120 hour weeks and I kind of forgot about her until a couple of months ago. My mechanic thinks he can get her running again with spare parts, but I am wary of how much money to pour into a boat if I can find another with a better engine. And worried about her breaking down on the Ohio and not being able to find replacement parts.

So last year I found a boat on Facebook Marketplace which has a 1959 Lyman hull and a 1965 Mercury 50 HP outboard. When I went up to Saratoga to look at her, the owner opened up the engine cowling and it was the cleanest second hand engine I’ve ever seen. I bought her and brought her home and she started and ran like a horse who’d eaten two dozen oysters, no problems at all. If I pushed her up to 20 mph I might as well have poured gas over the gunwales into the water, but she moved, man, she moved.

She was the best boat I’ve ever owned, and I’ve build or bought 11 boats not counting kayaks and canoes. I planned to use her for a center hull and to make a second boat which floated on two pontoons, which this boat could park underneath for protection, but also move, like a tug boat that fit at the back and also within a barge.

It’s a great idea. But the best laid plans of mice and men….

I was doing great at the beginning of January. Took the month off of drinking. On the 9th I have a journal entry about how great I was feeling, and how I had a clear mind and clean house and that allowed me to wake up at 6:30 am and take a bath and read and then leave for work early and therefore not get late to work because of an accident on the highway. And I had a full fridge and I was going to the gym three days a week.

And on January 10th there was a big wind storm and a tree fell on my Jeep, on my garage, on my pergola, on the canopy over my boat, and on my boat itself.

Trees company…

That was January 10th. Today is April 10th and my Jeep is still in the shop. Luckily my parents live nearby and have an extra truck I’ve been able to use, or I’d have had to spend thousands of dollars to Uber to work since my rental ran out after 30 days. I lease my Jeep so that’s $630 a month that I give to Chrysler Capital for nothing. I’ll never lease again. But the boat is salvageable.

It has been a long, dreary, sunless winter here in upstate New York. In January my dad, 67, cut the tree up, and I split it by hand, but its resin wood, which is no good for firewood. By March my yard was clear and I was able to untangle the mangled aluminum poles of the canopy that I’d put over the boat, twisted and tied like dinosaur bones doing yoga.

I extricated the boat and trailer from the yard. It had been impressed down into the mud by the tree, and towed her into the driveway so I could assess the damage.

The trailer is twisted such that I don’t think I can take her on the road. The hull has a hole where the tree forced her down onto the trailer which punctured the bottom. The bow is damaged, the dash and driving mechanism has been smashed, and the windshield has been transformed into myriad smithereens.

But she is salvageable! I can fix her below-waterline hole, and honestly I don’t care that much how she looks above the waterline as long as she floats.

It is now getting to be nice weather, with sunshine that continues after I finish my day job work for the day. I’ll have this baby floating by May 15th. And now I have a Hobie Cat catamaran to deconstruct and turn this into a “trimaran” or three-hulled boat. That will be the subject of my next post.

I know this movie is 10 years old. I am behind the times. But I have COVID and I’ve caught up on Star Trek and figured I’d watch something mindless.

I’d say I’d gone to the right place but this movie isn’t really mindless. It’s more like it was written by someone with multiple personality disorder, one of which personalities is a dark and brooding teenager, and the other of which is a sophomore at a state school on adderall and cocaine.

This is the point where I warn you that there are spoilers coming. Sort of. I guess. There were some surprises, I guess, but they are less plot shockers than unexpected ways in which the writers took the wrong narrative fork in order to…disappoint our expectations?

Let’s start at the beginning. I’m not going to watch this movie again so pardon me if I don’t get all of the details exactly right. But we start with Bond, gun drawn, inside some building in the Middle East, and there are dead bodies on the ground with pools of blood. Then Bond finds an agent in a chair, with lots of blood on his chest and coming out of his mouth, still alive, but unable to talk. Someone talks to Bond over an earpiece as Bond explains that whatever MacGuffin it is he is looking for isn’t there. The voice says he’d better get after it. But Bond pauses, and puts towels on the dying agent’s chest. The voice yells at him to get going. “I’m stabilizing the agent!” He yells. “There’s no time!” The voice yells. Nonetheless, bond puts another towel on the agent’s chest, before leaving the room.

What??? I have no idea what that scene means and I am already jolted out of the movie. What could Bond possibly have done for the agent who is like seconds from death? And then he puts some towels on the guy’s wound and that counts as stabilizing the guy? I thought maybe there would be a quick cut to a helicopter with medical staff repelling down, and Bond’s towels saved the guy, but nope. He jumps into a car with a beautiful woman and chases the bad guy. Was there a joke that I missed? The writers can’t seriously expect that the audience thinks that putting some towels on a gunshot wound to the chest “stabilizes” somebody….could they?

Then we get the car chase-turned motor cycle chase on top of a bazaar through crowds and crashing through windows until Bond and the Bad Guy jump a bridge on their motorcycles onto a train. Now we’re talking! Meanwhile the beautiful woman follows in a Land Rover or something that can go fast but also go over rocks and uneven terrain.

Bond is at a tactical disadvantage because he is on a low part of the train with his hand gun while the bad guy is on top of the train with a machine gun that’s like a Tommy Gun except it has not one but two circle things that hold bullets. But Bond gets inside a digger bulldozer that’s on the train and uses the shovel to try to push the Bad Guy with the machine gun off. But oops! Bond gets shot through the chest! (Luckily the right side of the chest, which allows him to keep fighting, and not the left side of the chest, where the agent in the chair was shot a few minutes ago, which means Death!)

Its OK because Bond can fight through this chest wound. No problem climbing or punching. (Later on some forgettable character says that the bullet was a special bullet that “would have cut you in half” if it had hit him straight on. Good thing it hit him three inches to the right!) I forget how the Bad Guy loses his gun but, as expected, Bond and the Bad Guy end up on top of the train having to Quickly Duck because of Tunnels. At one point the Bad Guy is on his stomach and Bond is standing up, but the Bad Guy grabs a chain and then swings it at Bond. I literally laughed out loud and said to my cat, Jack, “Guess that chain wasn’t attached to anything…it was just sitting on the roof of the train for some reason.” I mean I really wanted to be into this movie but now I’ve been jolted out of the plot by crappy writing twice and the opening sequence isn’t even over.

The Beautiful Woman gets ahead of the train but warns the voice on the earpiece that she is Running Out of Road, whatever that means. So she has to get out and put her sniper rifle together really quick. The train comes out of a tunnel and Bond and the Bad Guy are fighting on top, and the the camera pans to the right and the train will enter another tunnel soon. The Voice tells her to shoot the bad guy but the Beautiful Woman says she can’t get a clear shot. But the MacGuffin is so important that the voice —its M!—tells her to take the shot even though she might hit Bond. She takes the shot and hits Bond who is thrown off the moving train, maybe 30 stories down into a river, and his unconscious body is even shown going over a maybe five story waterfall.

Roll Intro Music by Adele!

Can we pause here for a second? Because right now I am thinking there are a couple of OK plot threads already established. M told the Beautiful Woman to shoot even though she might hit Bond — that’s gotta put a big rift between them. The Good Looking Agent just messed up the whole mission and shot the best spy ever—that’s gotta lead to some narrative issues later in the movie. This Bad Guy shot Bond in the chest and got away with something really important. Surely there is going to be a climactic fight scene between the two of them near the end of the film. And Bond has now been shot—at least once in the chest—and fallen off a moving train into a river where he is unconsciously washed over a waterfall. Boy, how is he going to get out of that one?

OK, unpause, and for brevity’s sake, let me summarize how those plot threads are resolved.

There is a scene where Bond says to M “you told her to shoot” and M says something like “that’s what you signed up for.” And this is never discussed again.

The Good Looking Agent shows up like three scenes later, shaves Bond with a straight razor, and they have sex. Not even angry sex or anything. Neither character seems to care that one sexual partner shot the other, like a month ago or something.

Bond finds the Bad Guy and follows him into a building maybe 10 scenes later. Very much in the first third of the movie. They are in Shanghai or some city that has lots of moving neon lights and glass-front sky scrapers. The Bad guy sets up a sniper rifle and aims it at some people in another building across the street. Bond sneaks up behind the guy and points the gun at him but inexplicably doesn’t shoot him while the guy assassinates someone across the way and then they both lose their guns. Then, even more amazingly, the two men fight in silhouette near the broken window until one falls down, and its the Bad Guy and Bond is holding him, but he can’t because of the gunshot from before, remember (I guess it didn’t heal good or something) and the Bad Guy Falls To His Death. And a beautiful woman who was in the room next to the assassinated guy looks across the way and sees Bond and there is Attraction. Bond takes his sweet time rummaging through the Bad Guys bag (don’t worry about police coming or anything) and finds a poker chip.

Oh and the plot point about Bond getting shot in the chest and then shot again and flying off the train into the river and over a water fall. He just lived. That’s it. That’s it! Like, after the credits, the movie starts, and Bond is in a hut shooting his pants pistol into a woman, and they lie there together. And in the next scene he is drinking shots, I guess because he is angry? No explanation for how he got out of the water. How long was he in the water? Did the water pressure stop the gunshot wounds from bleeding or something? Did he wash up somewhere and someone found him and helped him? No clue! Oh well, I guess nothing in this movie has any repercussions.

There is a reason I like Science Fiction, and action, and don’t enjoy fantasy. When John MacClane looks down and sees he has only two bullets and three bad guys, he has to figure out how to use what the plot has established is at hand to win the day. That’s good storytelling. Watching the character use their character traits to solve a problem is good story telling. Some deus ex machina where a wizard is about to be trampled by a giant chipmunk and uses a magic acorn to conjure a giant squirrel to fight the giant chipmunk is fantasy and it is poor story telling. I want characters to save themselves. I don’t want the writers to use the opening credits to save the main character from the hopeless situation they put the character in during the opening sequence. I feel like Kathy Bates in Misery. “This isn’t what happened last week. Have you all got amnesia? They just cheated us! This isn’t fair! HE DIDN’T GET OUT OF THE COCKADOODIE CAR!!!”

Let’s speed this up a little because the rest of the movie is basically a rehash of the same problems.

Bond goes to a casino or something on a gondola. No explanation to the audience of how he knows how to get there or get on the gondola. But he gets there and cashes in the poker chip which gets him a suitcase full of a trillion dollars. In retrospect, maybe that was supposed to be payment for the Bad Guy sniping the other guy in the building, but if so it’s not explained. And the Bad Guy had the poker chip before he sniped the other guy. (There is never an explanation of who the guy was that got sniped. In this movie characters just move around like cardboard cutouts where the plot needs them to go). And in this day in age the Bad Guy could more easily have been wired the money rather than given a poker chip to cash in at a casino you need a gondola to get to. Or maybe the poker chip is not the payment for the Bad Guy. I have no idea. I’m starting to think maybe I am an idiot because this movie has a 92% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. All those people must have been able to follow the plot, right?

Lo and behold, who is at the casino, but the Beautiful Woman who was in the room with the guy who got sniped the night before! She and Bond have a drink and there is repartee. Bond deduces that the woman has been human trafficked as a sex worker since she was a kid, and promises to do away with the bad guy who somehow is also the guy that Bond is looking for. Good thing they’re the same person. How does Bond know they are the same person? Cause that’s what the script says, dummy!

Blah blah so Bond has to fight three guys right in the middle of the casino as people watch. Nobody calls the police or intervenes or even seems particularly amused. Which makes me think that this is a lair of Bad Guys who are in cahoots with the Main Bad Guy. Except that when Bond wins the fight, he just walks out of the casino and no one tries to stop him. So I guess the casino patrons aren’t in cahoots with the Main Bad Guy. I’m starting to wonder if all of the patrons took gondolas there, or if there is a gondola taxi or something.

So then the Beautiful Sex Slave Woman is on a sailing ship and Bond sneaks aboard and they have sex in the shower. The next day he wakes up and she is standing on the bow, looking over the waves toward what looks like ruins of an old city. He walks up to her and he says it is a beautiful view and she says or maybe not and suddenly there are five guys with machine guns on the deck behind them.

Cut to the ruins where Bond and the Beautiful Sex Slave have their hands behind their backs as the Men With Guns walk them along. Why is the woman tied up? I thought she was the sex slave of the Main Bad Guy. Did she do something wrong? I donno. Oh, who cares.

Believe it or not, I was enjoying this movie well enough until this point. You know, whatever, its Bond. But at this point, halfway through the movie, it’s like the writers forgot they were writing a Bond movie, and instead just threw together a bunch of hackneyed one-off scenes from other popular movies.

First: Bond is tied up and there is a scene so Tarantino he should have sued. A ridiculous Main Bad Guy (I can’t even remember his name, which is never a good sign) descends an elevator far in the distance and tells a story over the course of maybe three minutes as he walks from the elevator to close to the camera in one take. The story is about him growing up on an island and rats infested it and ate coconuts so they dug a pit and all the rats fell in and ate each other until only two rats were left, and then they let the rats go because those rats now eat other rats instead of coconuts. I am not shitting you. That is supposed to symbolize Bond and the Main Bad Guy somehow. Because Art I guess. The Bad Guy also does some weird stuff touching Bond’s chest and thighs before untying him. I guess he’s…gay? It has nothing to do with the plot and never comes up again, so don’t worry about it.

Next we have the most frustrating scene of the whole movie. The Beautiful Sex Slave Woman is tied up in the town square of the ruined city and the Main Bad Guy puts a shot of whiskey on her head as she begs for mercy. (I always hate people begging for mercy in movies, its why I watch almost exclusively Star Trek The Next Generation.) The Main Bad Guy has some dueling pistols and he gives one to Bond (who has a gun held to his head by one of the Lesser Bad Guys). They will take turns shooting until one of them knocks the whiskey off the woman’s head. Bond goes first, and misses. Then the guy goes, and shoots her dead. She slumps over.

“What do you think of that, Mr. Bond?” The Main Bad Guy asks.

“I think its a waste of good whiskey,” Bond comments, before dropping to the ground and using some martial arts and contortionist skills to kill everyone and hold the Main Bad Guy at bay.

Ok, what? If Bond could drop and kill all of the Lesser Bad Guys at 12:00 in the afternoon, after the Beautiful Sex Slave was shot, why couldn’t he do it at 11:59, BEFORE she was killed? And my God, “a waste of good whiskey?” Christ! I guess she wasn’t very good in the sack, huh Bond? I mean I know the guy is supposed to be a chauvinist but the woman he promised to save and could have saved but didn’t just got killed after getting beat up. If the writers needed a line before Bond killed the Lesser Bad Guys, how about something that makes fun of the Main Bad guy or something, anything, other than making it seem like Bond values a woman’s life less than a shot of bourbon. I almost hate Bond at this point. He’s now let one guy get sniped and the other woman get killed when he could have prevented both.

Then some helicopters arrive and its Mi6 and that means the Main Bad Guy is captured. I hit the pause button to see if the movie was over, thinking “well, that was anti-climactic” but, amazingly, there was still an hour left of the film.

From here on out the show is basically an episode of The Black List mixed with some crap from some of the lesser Die Hard Movies. The Main Bad Guy is held in a Glass Cell in the middle of the Really Secure Mi6 Headquarters, ala Silence of the Lambs. But, surprise! The Main Bad Guy wanted to be captured! You see, so he could infect the Mi6 Computer System from the inside!

There is, of course, no explanation of how the Main Bad Guy got out of his Super Secure Cell—it happens off camera and all the guards are dead. Also there is no explanation of how the Main Bad Guy put the virus (?) into the Computer — I guess he typed it in? And what does this virus have to do with anything? I couldn’t tell ya. It makes some squiggles appear on a big CSI-like screen and the new Q has to figure out what the squiggles mean, with his messy brown hair, like the guy from the Apple commercials had to do in Live Free or Die Hard.  

The most complex computer virus ever created takes approximately 1 minute to decode because Bond sees some letters close together in the bottom of the screen and tells Q to put them next to each other and they look like they spell out the name of an old subway stop that isn’t in service anymore and Bond tells Q to “use that for the key!” and then the virus visually unravels into a map of the UK underground tunnels. Good thing that virus turned into a map when the Code was put in! Who the hell is writing this.

Oh I forgot to mention that there is an attempt at a point or a B-plot or something. James Bond, since his injury, is not quite what he used to be. This is shown by a shaky hand, and he can only hold onto the underside of an elevator for 100 floors before he starts to lose his grip. In a scene where he talks to the young Q (you always know these tech guys because they wear Glasses and don’t know how to comb their hair—and they always have lots of hair!) the young Q tells Bond that they don’t make fancy gadgets like exploding pens anymore. (Isn’t that part of the fun of watching a Bond movie?) And also there is a really forced plot about Parliament shutting down Mi6 because they work in the “shadows” and rely on “human intelligence.” It seems like the writers came up with this subplot about halfway through the scripting process (which I am guessing took place over a couple of power lunches at Dave and Busters) and grafted it onto the plot with duct tape and a staple gun. I bring this up only because the writers can’t figure out if the Main Bad Guy is supposed to be Bond’s foil. On the one hand, he uses Software to attack people—that’s a next gen kind of thing. On the other hand, he tells Bond that he was M’s favorite agent in the 1980s (sorry, forgot to mention he’s an X agent. It doesn’t matter much). So he’s a generation older than Bond, but uses technology that the new generation uses. I kept waiting for there to be a setup or a showdown between the Main Bad Guy using New Technology and Bond defeating him with traditional methods. But nope. These points are just brought up to be dropped with no impact on the plot.

Take a scene where Bond is chasing the Main Bad Guy — I’m getting sick of this, let’s call him Dave — Bond is chasing Dave through an underground tunnel and he shoots at Dave as Dave is climbing up a ladder. Dave stops because Bond has him and can shoot him dead. Bond doesn’t shoot him dead, in order to give Dave a chance to say something about how he (Dave) can use a technology even Bond can understand-radio-to defeat him. He pushes a button on a remote that blasts a hole in the roof of the tunnel they are in, behind Bond. “I hope that wasn’t for me,” Bond  quips, instead of shooting Dave. “No, this is for you,” Dave says, and a subway train crashes through the top of the tunnel and almost hits Bond as Dave gets away. Good thing Dave thought to put that explosive charge on the ceiling, instead of getting away, so that when Bond caught up to him right before the train was arriving overhead and didn’t shoot Dave, the train would get Bond!

Blah blah Dave is trying to kill M. Oh no, not M. She’s only been the target in a couple of Bond movies so far. This must be serious.

Bond gets M and they make an escape from London and he stops to pick up an old Bond car from the 60s that has an ejection seat and machine guns for headlights. And he tells Q to leave a trail—an electronic trail, made of software—that’s hard to find, but not too hard to find, that only Dave can find, to lead Dave to the place where Bond wants to trap him.

“You’ve got a tough job there, son,” says a guy whose name and role I’m supposed to know because he’s been in the movie since the beginning but like everyone else he has no character. “You’ve got to make the trail hard to find. But not so hard to find that Dave doesn’t find it.”

”And not so easy to find that Dave knows its a trap,” Q observes, as a map of Great Britain shows up with dots moving northward showing where Q has left software breadcrumbs for Dave to follow.

If somebody said “Don’t call me Shirley” I would think this movie was one of the best parodies I’ve seen.

Our Heroes Bond and M pull up to a old Scottish Manor and as they drive through the gate the camera pans to a plaque illustrating the name of the place: Skyfall! That’s the name of the movie so you know that the plot must really be going somewhere now.

When I was a kid I named our house in the woods “Pine Haven” because we had a bunch of pine trees. I wonder if Chicken Little was the original owner of the Bond family estate.

Now for the part of the movie that is like Bond Meets the A-Team!

M and Bond, and a caretaker who is old but knows how to shoot a shotgun, have to prepare the Bond House for Dave. But they don’t have a lot of weapons. So they have to rig up some booby traps like bullets that fly up from the floor if you step on the floor board and bags of screws that explode when you turn the lights on. There is a melodramatic scene as they wait for the attack and philosophize about something I can’t remember as I hit the pause button to see how much time is left and realize This movie is almost two and a half hours long! They should have cut like 45 minutes out of this. Why are they now having this pretentious pseudo-philosophical scene? Is this supposed to build suspense? Is this supposed to be like the scene in Saving Private Ryan when the Sarge and the two other sit on the steps of the bombed out building, listening to the Victrola, before the big battle? Boy Saving Private Ryan was a good movie. 

Some Faceless Bad Guys With Guns show up but instead of driving their vehicles close to the house, they park a quarter of a mile away and walk toward the fortified stone structure where our hero’s are waiting. They don’t even spread out to surround the house so that the occupants have to defend multiple fronts. They walk basically line abreast so that anyone with a machine gun could mow them down in 30 seconds. It is also getting dark now.

Our heroes take out all the bad guys using booby traps and guns taken from the Lesser Bad Guys. But Dave is not one of the dead bodies! Then, oh no! A big military helicopter is heard approaching with speakers playing (I can’t remember I think Zeppelin). This makes me think that Dave represents the generation before Bond again. But he used the software cookie trail to find him, so he must be part of the younger generation that will replace Bond. These troupes are confusing me! What does the Main Bad Guy playing this particular song signify?? Nothing? Gah!!

The helicopter does a number on the place with its Even Bigger Guns and once again I am thrown out of the movie with the thought “Jesus Christ do you think the guys who just approached on foot and got slaughtered knew that this helicopter was coming? Maybe they should have waited five more minutes to attack, from two directions at once?”

Bond tells the caretaker and M to use the tunnel in the kitchen to get to the chapel that has not been mentioned before. But wait I forgot to mention that the caretaker had earlier told M that when Bond found out that his parents had died, he had gone into the tunnel and didn’t come out for two days and when he did, he wasn’t the same. I’ll give the writers credit for this: by introducing the tunnel ten minutes earlier, it is at least not a sudden, fantasy-like escape route. But I expected something more from the tunnel where James Bond literally buried his trauma as a child. It is a tunnel! Have these writers ever heard of tunnel vision? Or repression? “Burying” one’s trauma? I’m not saying I want to see James Bond crying on a couch but how are you going to introduce this idea into the movie and then just leave it? Nothing happens with the tunnel. It is merely an escape route for the protagonists. That’s it. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and a MacGuffin is just a MacGuffin.

Grenades, explosions. The helicopter explodes and it is the biggest explosion. The helicopter must have had like a million gallons of gas in it’s tank. Like the huge explosion of the airplane that crashes in Die Hard 2 Die Harder even though the plane was landing because it was out of gas. I’m not sure if the helicopter exploding in this movie reminded me more of the helicopter exploding in the first Die Hard because it descended a little and then exploded, or the helicopter exploding in Die Hard 5 A Good Day to Die Hard because it kind of looked like a soviet helicopter, like the helicopter that exploded at the end of Rambo 3, the one that takes place in Afghanistan. Yeah, that’s the exploding helicopter it reminded me of.

Everybody dies except Dave who follows M and the caretaker out to the chapel and he puts a gun to M’s head and his own head next to M’s and he wants her to pull the trigger so that the bullet goes through M’s head first and then his. He tells her she has to pull the trigger. He had no problem shooting up parliament and shooting a house with a helicopter when he thought she was inside, but now he needs her to pull the trigger. She is reluctant to do so, and that gives Bond enough time to show up and throw a knife into Dave’s back! Dave turns and as he dies he says something to Bond that I couldn’t hear but its so annoying to rewind on Roku, I always go back too far, so I just kept watching. Turns out M was shot and she dies in Bond’s arms and there is a hint that maybe he was going to show some emotion but not really, and one gets the impression that that is supposed to be The Scene That Everyone Will Remember About This Particular Bond Movie.

It occurred to me that the good guys know that Bond and M are holed up at Bond’s house. Why could they not have had some troops standing by in ambush for when Dave and his Lesser Bad Guys showed up? Plot holes are one thing when they occur to you when the movie is over, but when they are so obvious they occur to you when the movie is going on, sheesh.

Well so M is dead and Bond’s house is destroyed but that’s OK because Bond feels good now, he is physically strong and mentally back with no problems and it turns out the Good Looking Agent who shot him in the beginning of the movie is going to take a desk job and its Moneypenny! Surprise for anyone who didn’t see that coming because they are both blind and deaf.

So what is wrong with this movie? Its not that it defies belief and is full of plot holes. It’s not that it tries to imply that the main character has some trauma he needs to work through. Its that…both! In a James Bond movie.

Why do viewers watch franchise movies? Because they know what they are getting when they sit down to watch. If you get something else you feel cheated. I wanted to watch a movie where a spy gets some gadgets, finds himself in absurdly maniacal situations, and uses his gadgets and spy abilities to get out, save the day, save the woman (at least one of them!) and do it with class. Instead, in a vapid, almost insulting attempt to “bring the franchise into the new millennium” we get the suggestion that Bond is suffering trauma, but he never deals with it; that he’s “getting too old for this” (like Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon 4 not Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon 1) and doesn’t save anybody throughout the whole goddam movie! He doesn’t save the Asian guy that gets sniped; he doesn’t save the Beautiful Sex Slave Woman, and he doesn’t save M. Plus, I’m not even sure that he secured whatever “list” he was fighting the guy on the train for at the beginning of the movie! Not a single character grows or develops. What did Bond learn, or how did he grow, over the course of the film, while all the other people died? Especially the woman who had the whiskey on her head, that was really just gratuitous.

Look, I’m not saying that I want James Bond to become a more enlightened character with each mission. I understand escapist entertainment. I’m saying don’t pretend you’re modernizing a franchise because you desaturate the color of the film, suggest Bond has “trauma” and do nothing with it, and kill off characters because you don’t know what to do with them. If that’s “modernizing” a franchise, no wonder everyone prefers an original.