Read It Or Don't

My dad gave a kidney to my uncle. Surgery went well. They are sleeping and I’m…

…

Just sitting around here.

Katie Ryan: broadcast news reporter.

I also went to a dance with her in High School. It was a Sadie Hawkins, and god bless that gorgeous girl for taking sweet pity on me.

Not sweet enough that I leaned in for a kiss at the end of the night, nope, I was too chicken to do that.

But now she reports at KOB in New Mexico in the Roswell Bureau. You can read all about what she did between line dancing with me and now HERE.

And watch her bite into an apple in the middle of her news report HERE.

Nerve.com has featured myself, Kate Kuen and Alex Wallace in their photo-essay series “The Ex Files” where a current couple is photographed and questioned with an ex-boyfriend/girlfriend present. 

CLICK HERE to see it.

One of my Twitter friends asked me if I was concerned that this would limit my prospective dating pool. My first answer was: “what pool? There’s a pool? I’m choosing, not just catching whatever fate throws my way?” and my second was “No.”

In all honesty, the article could have made me look worse. The only problem I have with it is a truncated quote from me. Here is how it appears:

I had a thing for actresses, and Kate was beautiful and seemed to fall for a lot of the bullshit I would spout. I love being in a sage-like position with women. I’ve always wondered if I still harbor some sort of complex and repressed emotion, or if Kate wearing low-cut shirts is just always going to get me to look. (I hope Alex understands.) Could [I] get closer to those magical orbs I was denied all that time ago? You know how you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone? Well try having it shoved in your face with big boobs and fantastic lips for months, nay, years after your own mistake became apparent to you.

That’s not how I talk, that’s how I write. There is usually a difference. The phrase I have a problem with, the one that makes me look like a bigger asshole than I am is “I love being in a sage-like position with women.” 

That’s not something I would necessarily say. Here it is as I wrote it:

QUESTION: How did you meet your ex?

Answer: She lived in the dorm room a few floors up. She knew some people on our floor, and specifically our room was always filled with booze from my roommate who was a functioning alcoholic (I’m being honest, no fair judging me now!). I have/had a thing for actresses and Kate was around, beautiful and seemed to fall for a lot of the bullshit I would spout, bullshit I was probably labeling truth or philosophy. It all hinged around one night that we stayed up late talking and bonding. My memories of that night are pulled taut between “being a good friend” and laying the groundwork for a sexual conquest. I think she came down because she had received some bad news about something that was happening at home. There were a few of these crises at the time and I love being in a sage-like position with women. Not to mention those who are really attractive. Her blog has a more-fond memory: 

“an eternal appreciation for dave and morgan, my saviors (one in my general definition, the other, just because she looks after me, specifically).  kindness and the need to protect are funny things…just so innate in some people, and i’m not used to it being such, it is generally earned through respect, utter closeness, etc, but when its automatic, i can’t help but be amazed….dave and i talked about everything and nothing with a rather satisfing soundtrack of old school goo goo dolls followed up by…chipmunks???… dave: apparent newfound respect…curiosity turned to lots of respect and further curiosity. stayed up til 6:30 in the morning talking to him…was not typical male and didn’t even think to assume implications that others would by this action.  i don’t even know what we talked about specifically, high school, family, virginity, here, frustrations (is everything really a sexual innuendo now???  argh!), just…stuff.  i am still laughing about his excuse for not putting ari in an “uncomfortable”, sock on the door, situation: springs slowly descending onto his head with the knowledge that he’s putting his poor bunk bed roomie underneath that.  the special effects made it all worth it, with a little “this is my highest note, this is my lowest note” rendition, i couldn’t help but be entertained.”

So I guess we both felt that the pull was partially sexual and partially, I’m not sure… displacement? It was freshman year of college after all. Though the answer to the next question will always inform the answer to this one.

The next question was “Why did you break up?” and that’s one of those stories I don’t tell on the internet. 

When the story is told from both sides like that, it makes the “sage” thing a little less pompous, I think. It’s not that I always like being in a “sage-like” position with women, it is that Freshman year there was emotional crisis on both sides of the relationship. I’ve certainly grown beyond the point of using drama to bond and try not to trick people with the illusion that I know something about them or about the world that surrounds us.

Just thought I’d fill out that phrase before I’m labeled sage-like in my narcissism, which wouldn’t even make sense.

Ok, I’ve been avoiding Lost and everything that had to do with it since September 22nd 2004. When Lost premiered, I thought it was Survivor made into an hour-long drama and that didn’t sound interesting to me - at all - in 2004. 

At the time that Lost started, I was a Sophomore at NYU and living in a dorm that no only had maid service, but had free HBO. At the time, I was also studying screenwriting and journalism, avoiding the writing for television tract in my writing program because my thinking at the time was that TV was a lesser medium. Obviously, it’s not, but this is 2004, before I watched any Six Feet Under, Sopranos, Dexter, Friday Night Lights, Battlestar Galactica, Buffy, Firefly,  etc. I had just gotten over the fact that I had only seen, like, 5 episodes of Friends in my life and everyone else seemed to be working out of a larger zeitgeist pool.

I’ll credit my friend Emily Offen with bringing me into obsessive TV watching when she made myself and my two other roommates (both named Ryan) to watch the entirety of The Sopranos before Season 6B came out. I joined the national television sensation pretty late in the game, but I was watching the final episodes along with everyone else. As we were catching up with Sopranos, we were reading along with Alan Sepinwell’s blog posts on each episode. By the time the finale came along, I could tell you when certain characters died, why, in what season this arc was hinted at, I had a wealth of Sopranos information at my fingertips because I had spent the previous months digesting episodes two-to-three in a night.

Since then, I’ve picked up on television in a wicked way. I get it now (thanks in part to Steven Johnson’s eye-opening Everything Bad Is Good For You and David Foster Wallace’s guilt-making essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction”).

As Lost progressed, my family became swiftly addicted. I have many a memory of slipping into my room in my parents house during the holiday as my brother, mother and father watched Lost DVDs in the family room. I avoided it then for no good reason. It wasn’t until there was an end in sight, namely Lost’s upcoming sixth and final season, that I was ready to start and speed through.

There were many times in the critical buzz (boring 3rd season with rocking finale, redemptive 5th season, something about time travel) that I thought it was time for me to jump in and start, but it ended up being Netflix Watch Instantly that pushed the “go” button.

ABC signed a deal allowing the first four seasons of Lost to be streamed on command to my laptop, meaning I can devour what episodes I wish when I wish them. I’m missing out on Making Of featurettes and commentaries, which were half the fun with my Battlestar Galactica quick-watch, but at least I’m not paying additional money to watch TV everyone assumes I’ve already seen.

I’m through Season One and into Season Two, so I thought this would be a good time to update y’all with how well, or poorly, I’m getting Lost.

THINGS I LIKED:

- What a fuckin’ pilot! It’s rumored to have cost between $10 to $14 million, making it the most expensive television pilot of all time. Opening on Jack’s eye gave me my first peek at the “Eyes” trope and the first few minutes represent the panic of a plane crash pretty damn well.

- Matthew Fox as Jack is complex enough of a pretty boy to not annoy me (like Sawyer annoyed me for the first half of a season). But that didn’t stop me from loving Terry O’Quinn’s Locke from the first episode. Locke is the best Season 1 character by a slim, but evident margin. 

- No matter how much I wanted certain characters to die early, the series denied me this pleasure. At first I was pissed that I had to deal with Shannon being useless and playing a one-note character for episode after episode, but as soon as we got her flashbacks with Boone, the whole thing made more sense. I’m glad they didn’t kill either of the half-siblings off when I wanted them dead, somewhere around episode 8.

- The Monster and the Black Rock were awesome mystery’s/symbols.

-Numbers. What’s not to like about Hurley? Not to mention that the connection between his numbers and Rousseau’s ramblings was the plot thread I needed to plug into the Locke’s “the island has a purpose” mentality.

- Thematic line. The first season, as a whole, does a great job of putting us into science fiction territory without making us feel like we’re in a sci-fi story. By the time the conspiracies and secrets start to interconnect (basically, when The Hatch enters the fray), we’re so plugged into the inter-personal drama that it feels right. The fact that the island has a mystical power to let people work out their issues just starts to feel right. Which is odd, because the series goes almost seamlessly from realism to sci-fi.

- Deus Ex Machina. Like I said before, Locke’s storyline gets my winner’s trophy for this season. Deus especially for being the episode that tested Locke’s faith and for his really emotionally bizarre backstory about his father stealing his kidney. Maybe my own father’s impending kidney donation is hanging over my head, but I fell for this episode hard core.

THINGS I DIDN’T LIKE:

- Charlie. Sorry, buddy, but heroin addiction storylines are not my cup of tea. As a matter of fact, addicts are a tough thing to portray, especially in an episodic manner. The only tension that exists for them is “can they quit?” which is fine if we’re on the island, but by the time we get to Charlie’s second flashback episode “Homecoming” I just could not give less of a shit about his brother and DriveSHAFT. Dominic Monaghan is charming as hell, which is the only thing that keeps Charlie’s story from being horribly predictable and boring.

- Any Sun/Jin centric episode. Strangely enough, this isn’t the fault of either character, but rather a choice in momentum. The pilot drops you onto the island and poses enough questions to keep the audience interested through 5 TV hours. White Rabbit wraps up Jack’s daddy issues (for awhile) then drops us into a Korean love story. It was just a lag. Ditto for …In Translation, which closed the trilogy of Homecoming/Outlaws/…In Translation or “predictable Charlie storyline,” “ghost boar,” and “raft burning.” It’s not that the Jin/Sun storyline is bad, it’s just that it gets plopped into really bad story slots.

- Shannon. Bitch.

- “The Others” Ethan Rom was a cool adversary. “The Others” in general was biting off a little too much than the series could chew for the first season. Random whispering is cool, but by the time we were supposed to fear the imminent coming of “The Others” in the finale, they get explained away and forgotten until they show up…on a boat.

- Heroin in Virgin Mary statues. I’ve said before, the story of an addict’s struggle is not interesting to me. As soon as Boone revealed that the plane was filled with heroin a flag went off in my head: “Here comes a Charlie storyline that will be dealt with when I’d rather be having questions answered.” Should he do heroin? Should he raise Claire’s baby? Who gives a shit.

FIRST SEASON CONCERNS:

- The structure of the season allowed for many mysterious “reveals” that fit perfectly into an act break or complicated a situation. However, much like “The Others” were left for another season, so many floating plot points were tossed up into the ether to be dealt with later that I’m a little concerned that the series doesn’t know where it’s going. Then again, neither did Battlestar Galactica, so maybe I’m just whistlin’ Dixie.

- No one mentioned DHARMA. Isn’t that, like, a big thing? Are they just going to suddenly Ret Con it at the beginning of Season 2?

- Walt’s telekinesis. I guess I won’t know for sure if there are lots of Polar Bears on the island or if Walt made a Polar Bear with his imagination, but Walt’s manifesting powers weren’t given any rules or explanation. As a matter of fact, it was rarely mentioned. Can the Others get him to just manifest things now?

- Time. Some of the notes I’ve been reading suggest that Rousseau was supposed to reveal that her team was studying “Time,” but ABC told them to back the eff off the Sci-Fi angle. But, shouldn’t some hints be dropped? Have they already been dropped?

- This is going to get confusing. That’s what everyone tells me. I have managed to avoid all mythology discussions concerning this TV series, but I’m aware they went on. I was told by several people to watch Lost with someone else who could explain it to me, but - being the dick that I am - I can’t imagine that I could follow dozens of complex TV series (or Daniel’s backstory in Battlestar Galactica S04.5) and somehow get confused by Lost. If I DO get confused in an unintentional matter, it will reflect poorly on the writing staff. If I DON’T get confused, but rather thirst because I’m lacking key information, I hope it’s done artfully. Just knowing that I’m supposed to be confused in the next few seasons hangs like a cloud over my head. I’m waiting for this shit to get bananas.

BEST EPISODE(s): Pilot/ Deus Ex Machina

WORST EPISODE(s): Homecoming/…In Translation

BEST BACKSTORY: Hurley

BEST ISLAND STORY: Locke