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Don’t Speak, I Know What You’re Thinking

One of the things I initially intended when I set myself the rule that I’d post three times a week on this site, back at the start of 2019 — in the midst of a divorce and trying to find a new structure for myself, as well as a new sense of agency, and having literally no idea that a pandemic was a little over a year away, because who did? — was that I’d share things written elsewhere that I wanted to keep track of, whether they were stories written for print that didn’t appear elsewhere on the internet or simply things that hadn’t appeared publicly for whatever reason.

It’s fair to say that I haven’t actually done that over the past, what, 20 months or so, by this point. Part of it was, simply, that I didn’t get around to it — there was always something else to do, or else I was simply forgetting and ending up writing new posts instead of repurposing old ones. But part of it was that, when I did write things that I would have wanted to share, it wasn’t necessarily a good idea to share them.

A case in point: I did what could, I guess, be considered unpaid consulting for a publisher earlier this year. It didn’t start off that way; it was, instead, a simple question asked by someone at that publisher about something that I can’t share because it’d break confidences. My answer, however, was a short essay, going far bigger than they’d intended, and creating a Unified Theory Of That Publisher’s Public Image that, sure, answered the question but did a bunch of other things, too.

(So many other things, in fact, that I worried that I’d gone too far and wrote a follow-up message that was basically, “I’m sorry if I went overboard.” I hadn’t, I was reassured.)

I couldn’t share something like that, because it was all said in professional confidence, for want of a better way to put it. And so much of the stuff I’d want to post here that was originally written elsewhere falls under that category. The moral of this story may be either, I should shut up elsewhere more often, or perhaps I should publish and be damned, anyway. I’m not sure which, or if it’s either one at all.

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Something Came Along, Secrets of Surprise

A post of two separate THR newsletter weeks, this one. I mean, that’s almost always true, but in this case, it’s more true than usual because the two weeks were so different — for the first, there were a bunch of makeovers for a variety of reasons (“Tomorrow Never Dies” and “The Amazing Amy” were for the same story, for example), but the following week, not one image got reworked. Did we just all get ourselves together for once, or was it just a happy coincidence? I wish I knew.

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Look On Up, Look On Up At The Bottom

It feels like tempting fate, especially considering the trash fire that is 2020, but there are moments recently that feel like things might just be getting a little… easier…?

That needs to be put in a greater context, I think; I’m well aware, all too aware, that the year continues to be a nightmare for most, if not all. Even without the continuing threat of COVID, there’s still the looming election and the many ways in which systems and norms are being deconstructed in front of our eyes by a President and party that will do anything to remain in power. There are still record numbers unemployed, and a recession unlike anything we’ve experienced in a century opening up right in front of us. There’s still massive inequality prompting protests against police brutality, systematic racism and more. All of that remains the case, in addition to whatever personal problems people might be experiencing on top of all of that — and, to be honest, almost everyone I know has experienced some kind of personal problem this year in addition to everything else. It’s been an especially, cartoonishly difficult year.

And yet, I still find myself thinking that things might be getting better.

I wish I could explain why; I wish I could find a logical argument for the feeling, a way to adequately describe the belief — sincere, even if it may be misguided — that we’ve somehow turned a corner and may be headed out of the quagmire. I can’t, though; it really is just a feeling that, through whatever magic or unlikely circumstance, things might — just might — be changing for the better, as unlikely and uncomfortable as that sounds after everything we’ve gone through.

Perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe this is Stockholm Syndrome writ large, the result of a man so beaten by the year that even a brief respite from shit feels like a turnaround. Or it could be the fact that a small number of unusual, but positive, things have happened to me lately — small, tiny things, sure, but still — and they’ve turned my head around irresponsibly. Who can tell?

It’s an unusual, unexpected, feeling, this optimism. Maybe it is foolish and unrealistic. But it’s also a comfort, to feel this again after so long. I think I’ll stay foolish, just for a little bit.

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Station to Station

I have, I admit, surprising amounts of feelings about Bill and Ted Face the Music, the just-released third installment in the movie serial that seemed abandoned after 1991’s Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (AKA Bill and Ted Go to Hell, which was always the better title, but I get why the studio wanted them to change it).

It’s not just that I’m overwhelmed with happy nostalgia to see Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves back as these characters 29 years after they last played them, although that’s obviously a significant factor; I loved the first two movies, even though I remember them being little more than cult favorites in the U.K. at the time — the first one, I remember, was something I knew about in advance purely because it was advertised on the back of DC’s comic books for a couple months in the summer of 1989. I even adored the Marvel comic book series that spun out of Bogus Journey, which I’m pretty sure I discovered around the same time as I found Milk and Cheese, cementing my longterm love of Evan Dorkin’s work. To see a new Bill and Ted movie now, and for it not to be terrible — or, for that matter, just an exercise in nostalgia and nothing else — feels like a victory in and of itself.

But my feelings come from, really, the fact that Face the Music feels like a movie aimed at people my age, and a movie about getting over yourself — about allowing yourself to escape the story that you’ve told yourself about yourself since you were younger, and accepting who you actually have become, instead. It’s couched in dumb jokes and sci-fi conceits, sure, but from the very title of the movie — “Face the Music,” I mean, come on — to the fact that a solution to the movie’s problems only comes when Bill and Ted stop telling everyone, including themselves, “I can fix this!” and instead admit that they can’t, it’s a surprisingly touching movie about failing to live up to your potential and being okay with that.

Indeed, it’s a movie about realizing that failing to live up to your potential in one thing doesn’t mean that you haven’t done great things elsewhere in your life that are more worthy of celebration. (Bill and Ted raised Billie and Thea, after all, and they’re the ones who solved everything.)

Maybe I’m projecting, and none of this is actually in there; maybe these are all things that I’m reading into a silly movie that just wanted to get William Sadler back into Death make-up and came up with a convoluted way to make that happen. I don’t think I am, though. For all that Bill and Ted Face the Music is a movie about kindness and pure-heartedness and the need for people to come together as one — and it is all those things, too — it feels, more than anything, a movie for middle aged guys to accept that they’re middle aged and that that’s actually kind of a good thing, really.

As a 45-year-old man, why wouldn’t I have feelings about that?