The secret of the non-existent secret lives of dorks who want secret lives.

I have been having this urge to dork-out and write a fan letter to the writing teams of Pushing Daisies and Chuck because, well, they make me smile on a regular basis and not a lot of things make me smile on a regular basis. This is not to say that I am not a happy guy, but I am certainly not a happy-go-lucky guy and hopefully the distinction is clear because I have no idea how I would explain the difference in less than 3000 words and 20 hours of research in the Newberry's collections on philosophy and etymology.

Pushing Daisies is easily the "better" of the two shows: beautiful, fun, witty...great. It has been flawless except one moment in the second or third episode that only someone who wore an eye-patch for a year and a half of his life would notice...I had a lazy eye...the school nurse caught it...I'm not blind in my left eye because of her...they called me pirate boy...

I cannot conceive how anyone could not be addicted to Pushing Daisies and so I don't really see a need to defend it. Check it out. It is its own defense. Because it is brilliant. It is brilliant. It makes me want to write for television.

If you are reading this writing team of Pushing Daisies, I want in...Please...please.
Chuck, on the other hand, probably could use some friends. The basic story of Chuck is ridiculous: a very-smart-but-basically-regular-Joe gets a whole system of government secrets downloaded into his brain through some shaky hypnosis thingy that is sent to him through his email by his ex-best-friend-turned-CIA agent. So he is now a walking computer that the NSA and CIA have to protect and use on missions, which are all conveniently local. Sounds pretty stupid right? But the characters are, again, brilliant and whoever cast the show should probably be given a medal. F-ing hilarious with just enough action to make it somewhat thrilling. And all the actors are really pretty. I mean REALLY pretty.


But more than the eye-candy and unapologetic-no holds barred-we-are-going-to-entertain-the- shit-out-of-you-attitude, Chuck is tapping into the secret dream of every single dork, pseudo-dork, and semi-dork: to have a secret power, or a secret life, or a secret. Do we all want to be spies? No. Because dork fantasies maintain a certain degree of logic and being a spy would be pretty lame. Chuck knows this. He's not thrilled about having a super-computer inside his head. Who would? I already get migraines.

But we do all want to be heroes. Superheroes wouldn't be bad either. Depending on the power of course: there is a lot of literature out there right now about how being a superhero would probably suck too. And, likewise, Chuck is tapping into an interesting angle of the escapism of the hero-fantasy: we can all become heroes overnight if we just receive the right email or we just get bitten by the radioactive spider or get doused in the right combination of crime-lab chemicals during an electrical storm.

But when that happens, we are not going to stop being dorks. We are just going to be dorks with super-powers.

I am searching for a day job, and finding a day job is kind of like searching for the right secret identity: you probably won't love it, but you should at least try to find one that doesn't make you miserable. And if you are really lucky, your day job will be helpful to your secret life. The Flash: Barry Allen, police detective; probably hated the paperwork, but he was always in the know. Spiderman, Superman: work for news organizations. Do they like taking photos and writing articles, maybe. But it's probably not as interesting as soaring through the air.

Batman runs with the social elite. Do you think the brooding obsessive Batman, enjoys brushing elbows with those boring suits? Of course not. He would rather be down in his cave eating the souls of all the weirdos running around Gotham as he feverishly pushes his super-computer to figure out who the hell killed his parents and psychologically scarred him for life, but instead he has to sip champaign and hear about how Eleanor's poodles just won nationals and about Simpson's dissatisfaction with his new caddy. No wonder he is so irritable.

Ideally we could all be like Mr. Fantastic or Aquaman: merge our two lives into one. Not have a need for a secret identity. But I don't think that is going to happen for me anytime soon. So I need to find a kick ass cover. Because I don't want to be irritable. And I get irritable...

Writing for Pushing Daisies would be nice. Please...please.

no fate but what we make

I clean my desk and I clean the dishes in the sink because I think it is a way to clear my mind of the clutter that prevents it from writing. But I prevent myself from writing even when the silverware shines and the paperwork is neatly filed away. It is easier to sit on the couch and watch Terminator 3 (a damn fine movie no doubt) and ponder what it says about me as a person that the commercial advertising the success of a penis-enlargement pill (though they never use the word penis: that would be too vulgar) comes on every other break. It is Saturday night. And I am home alone with two cats watching Arnold before he became governor. What demographic am I filling? What statistic? There is a cast party up on the Brown Line; I think I'd have fun but it is just a little too far and just a little too cold. But it hasn't started yet, so I tell myself there is still hope.

Some advertising clerk decided that the 7 to 9:30 Saturday night slot on AMC attracts an audience of men who needed some enhancement...what if they are right?

Spent the afternoon in the Newberry Library: a public library that manages to feel like an exclusive country club...but for dorks. There are lockers on the main floor in which you have to stow your bag and coat before you can enter, which you can then only do when you explain what specifically you have come to the Newberry to find and then you sign in and then they give you some paperwork to fill out once you have reached the 3rd floor before you go down to the 2nd floor where you hand the clerks the information for the three (3) books you would like them to fetch for you; no civilian is allowed in the stacks. They give you a desk number and point you towards your chair and a few minutes later the clerk has come with the books...Public Mirror: Moliere and the Social Commerce of Depiction by Larry F. Norman (1999)...Moliere: His Life and Works by John Palmer (1930)...Moliere, a playwright and his audience by W. D. Howarth (1982)...and before he arrives you run quickly to the john and check to make sure your pen is functional because once he arrives you need to read, your hand feverishly keeping up, because you cannot check books out of the Newberry and photocopies are $.40 a page at the Newberry and the Newberry closes at 5pm on Saturday and aren't open at all on Sunday...

A dramaturg's utopic dream.

And it is quiet like no library is quiet because the rigmarole to get in is so thorough that once you are in you are there to work. You are there to get done what you needed to get done. You have a mission and you have gone through marine boot camp and survived the hazing and by-golly you are going infiltrate the Communist Military Base and deactivate the launch sequence because that is what you were trained to do...only the Military Base looks a lot like Paris in 1622 and deactivating the launch sequence involves discovering that Jean Poquelin IV is a lot like Horton Foote in that they were both actors well before they were writers...but Horton Foote is still alive. And Moliere's, well, not.

I wonder how many other people left the Newberry at 5 -- having satisfied their need for research; we are all researching the exact same question, we're just going about it differently -- only to find themselves on their futon with a cat 3 hours later watching commercials on male-enhancement...

If I stare at the television hard enough maybe I will see them staring back at me.

blue skies the earth's on fire

I fly through blue sky. Swift. Sure. Mozart. Debussy. Pachelbel. Angel wings brush my eyebrows. I sail on my back. Through the blue, a hint of stars. A hint of something larger. A hint of something distant. So easy to ignore, surrounded by the blue.

Below me: a burst. A pop. A bomb. A single scream reaches me, stacked on the sound-wave-backs of ten-thousand other screams. I am sure it is the scream of my love. We had met on the back of a hippo. And now she is dead. The stars would have warned me.

The ground is on fire. There is no where to land. And below me the tiny ships begin to swarm like militant bees. They are the fire. And now I, in my tiny ship, am the blue. I am Sky Patrol. And I am the dying world's last hope.

My parents did not allow video games in the house until I was comparatively old (comparative to the entirety of my friendbase who enjoyed duck hunt, mario, and kong at their release), and it was undoubtedly one of their many genius moves because they now eat away at my life in the most masturbatory of ways. And I am 25. I know better. I should be mature enough to be immature responsibly.

Without a console to console me, I would make up worlds as I biked around and around my neighborhood, dodging dragons and skirting under wall-sized doors as they smashed close. I would jump into the wind to save that pretty blonde girl in the second grade. I would latch around her with one arm and around the jungle gym with the other. I would save her.

When Dylan and Eric failed to blow up Littleton Colorado but incidentally achieved a minor semblance of their disastrous rampage, the country divided itself, as it is prone to do. I, of course, came to the defense of Marilyn Manson (whom I did not like) and Doom (which I had not played). Music and video games cannot shift a psyche in any significant way. Then their journals were released.

I think anyone who has both played a video game obsessively and seen The Last Starfighter would have to admit that it would be amazing if the skills learned in, say, Mario Kart were directly applicable to the real world. Dylan and Eric made their world one in which their expertise was applicable. I guess it already was applicable: they could have just waited a year and become quite useful to the marines.

One of my old students sent me a paper that she revised to submit to a campus journal. It asks the question: why do we celebrate pirates and demonize terrorists when in action and definition the two roles are not dissimilar. Why are Eric and Dylan monsters when boys their age are ordered to murder victims the same age as the students of Columbine every day? Cultural semantics? Proximity? The States are a sacred ground on which innocent blood shall not be spilt?

Man. I was going to avoid making these things political. But, hey, what the hell. I've started seven journals over the course of my life, and this is the only time I made it to the second entry.