Winter In Cleveland

"Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does a damn thing about it."-Attributed to Mark Twain, but probably said by somebody else.

Last week, I visited my parents in Sandusky when I was on vacation from work. At one point, my mom noticed that something seemed to be bothering me and asked what was wrong.

"It's just my depression," I said. "It tends to come and go."

"Oh," she said. "What are you depressed about?"

I didn't know how to respond. Because most of the time, there is no reason. Depression is something that doesn't have a particular cause or a motivation. It just exists, like the weather. Asking someone why they're depressed is like asking why it's raining outside. And like the weather in Cleveland, it changes every day. Some days are filled with sunshine and beauty. Others are like a torrential downpour with no shelter anywhere to be found. You can't really stop it. Sure, I take antidepressants and try to maintain a good sense of humor and positive outlook, but it's not something that can ever really go away. It will always be a part of me. Maybe it's because I was bullied as a child. Maybe it's because my love life has seen more wreckage than the Daytona 500. Maybe it's because I tend to fall in love with all the wrong people and take it too hard when my heart gets broken. Maybe it's the fact that I've been in the same retail job for over a decade and feel like I'm not not really going anywhere in life. I don't know. Speculating as to why I'm this way or trying to pinpoint the cause of it is fairly useless. It's just something I carry with me, like an invisible weight hanging on me that I can't take off. The election of President Fascist Cheeto certainly doesn't help matters any. It's hard to keep a sunny outlook when your civil liberties are slowly being eroded every single day. It's easy to feel powerless and pessimistic, especially in such dark times. You just have to keep moving on, like a snowplow digging through the blizzard.

You can't stop the rain or the snow from falling. All you can do is navigate through it the best you can and hope it passes soon. Just be careful and drive slow.

I'm sorry that this post is so melancholy. I promise some more happy ones will be coming. I'll end this with a quote from the great singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt, in response to a concertgoer who kept asking why he wasn't playing more happy songs.

"Lady, these are the happy songs. You don't wanna hear the sad ones."

Buried Treasure: Sorcerer

Note: this entry is the first of a new experiment that I'm trying out: a semi-regular series of blog posts in which I try to shed light on certain aspects of popular culture (movies, albums, TV shows, etc.) that I feel have been unfairly overlooked or underappreciated by the general public. My first entry takes a look at a forgotten thriller from the 1970s that had the misfortune of being overshadowed by a more popular summer release.

Sometimes, timing is everything.

In 1977, William Friedkin was one of the hottest directors in Hollywood. His landmark action thriller The French Connection cleaned up at the 1972 Academy Awards ceremony, taking home five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. Two years later, Friedkin followed that up with an even bigger success, the horror classic The Exorcist, which broke box office records and became a cultural touchstone that is widely considered to be one of the scariest movies ever made. The future was wide open and the popular director had the leverage to make any film he wanted. He set his sights on a remake of The Wages of Fear, a 1953 thriller from French director Henri-Georges Clouzot, about a group of four men faced with the difficult task of driving trucks filled with nitroglycerin through the dangerous mountain roads of South America. One false move on unsteady terrain could lead to instant death. The result is a film that is deeply cynical and horrifying, a brutal indictment of a corporate system that exploits the desperate and the poor, complete with a darkly ironic gut punch of an ending. It would seem to be the perfect film to be remade for the 1970s, an era when directors such as Friedkin, Sidney Lumet, Roman Polanski, and Martin Scorsese were making films that reflected the malaise of the post-Watergate years. Friedkin's remake, entitled Sorcerer, was set to open in the summer of 1977 and would undoubtedly be another hit that would be embraced by critics and audiences alike.

Or so it seemed. Unfortunately for Friedkin, a new kind of movie had been released in the spring of that year that had captured the hearts and minds of moviegoers: a little film called Star Wars. The tastes of the general public had shifted from gritty realism to escapist fantasy, and offered a different type of viewing experience. While Star Wars had clearly defined heroes and villains, Sorcerer offered a quartet of morally ambiguous anti-heroes with criminal backgrounds. While Luke Skywalker and his friends were guided through life with a mystical Force, the protagonists of Friedkin's film face one hardship after another and make it through only with dogged perseverance. While Star Wars has a happy ending in which evil is defeated and the heroes triumph, Sorcerer ends on a downbeat note, in which the efforts of the main characters appear to have been all for nothing. It's not hard to see why the American public might have rejected a dark, unnerving thriller in favor a comforting fantasy. Critics were also hard on the film and the director for having the nerve to remake a foreign classic. (Compare that criticism to today's film industry, where nearly every hit film from another country is remade for American audiences.) Another source of confusion was the movie's title (the name of the truck driven by Roy Scheider's character), and audiences who assumed that the director of The Exorcist had another supernatural chiller prepared for them were in for a big surprise.
All of these helped contribute to the movie's poor box office and lukewarm critical reception, which is a shame, because Sorcerer is a masterful work that is definitely worth a second look.

Like its predecessor, this movie is centered around a group of broke, desperate men who are hired by an oil company in a small South American town to drive the aforementioned nitroglycerin-stocked trucks. But while the backgrounds of the characters in the original film remain unknown, Friedkin and screenwriter Walon Green spend the first 45 minutes setting up the origins of our anti-heroes. Nilo (Francisco Rabal) is a contract killer from Vera Cruz. Kassem (Amidou) is a Palestinian terrorist on the run after a bombing in Jerusalem. Victor (Bruno Cremer) is a French banking official facing indictment for embezzlement and haunted by his partner's suicide. Jackie (Roy Scheider) is a New Jersey gangster in hiding after killing a priest who turned out to be the brother of a rival mob boss. All of them have fled to a small South American village to escape their pasts and have taken on this deadly, nearly suicidal task out of desperation. Much like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, this is the story of corrupt, untrustworthy men whose desire for wealth eventually brings about their undoing.

Like his idol Alfred Hitchcock, Friedkin is a master of generating suspense. One particularly brilliant set piece features Jackie and Nilo attempting to drive their truck over a rickety suspension bridge during a rainstorm, with Kassem and Victor following behind in their own vehicle. The frustration and terror felt by each men is made palpably real by each actor's performance and by Friedkin's skillful direction. Another beautifully-shot sequence features Jackie driving his truck through a desert landscape as surreal and alien as any of the outer space worlds from George Lucas's sci-fi epic. It is during this scene that Jackie struggles to maintain his sanity as guilt and fear begin to overwhelm him, and Scheider's performance may be one of the high points of his career. The movie ends on a brutally ironic note where, without giving too much away, Jackie learns that while he may be finished with his past, his past isn't necessarily finished with him.

Like many films that have initially crashed and burned at the box office, Sorcerer has had a critical re-evaluation over the past few decades, and is now considered a forgotten classic of the 1970s. The movie's fans include filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, who named it one of his twelve favorite movies of all time, and author Stephen King, who called it one of his go-to video rentals. Friedkin himself calls it the best movie he has ever made. After having only been available in heavily butchered versions, an official cut of the film approved by Friedkin was released on Blu-ray in 2014 by Warner Home Video and is well worth seeking out. Disappointingly, it features no commentary or any other special features, but it does feature a booklet containing an excerpt from the director's autobiography, The Friedkin Connection, which sheds a lot of insight on the making of the film and is definitely worth a read. Fans of this uncompromisingly bleak work of '70s cinema can rejoice that this lost film has been found again.

This Blog Kills Fascists

Today, I went out the Capitol Theatre to see the movie Silence and afterwards, I headed to one of my favorite coffee shops where I bought a copy of the Plain Dealer. After a few minutes of flipping through the paper on this historically tragic day, I decided to turn my attention to the copy of Stephen King's Firestarter that I had also brought along. It was the less horrifying option. To quote Network's Howard Beale: "I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everyone knows things are bad."

Many of you probably saw the horror movie footage that was the inauguration of Donald Trump as America's 45th President. I couldn't bring myself to do so. I cannot bear to even fathom the notion of that man as the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth. I refuse to accept or acknowledge the Presidency of a bigoted, thin-skinned, hot-tempered, fascistic, misogynistic bully who has the maturity and temperament of a spoiled child (which is essentially what he is). Trump isn't the leader of the free world. He's a loudmouthed frat boy who's had too much to drink and tries to pick a fight with the toughest guy at the bar. In most cases, however, the toughest guy at the bar doesn't have access to nuclear weapons that will blow the rest of us to smithereens. Nor will I respect the Vice Presidency of the rabidly homophobic Mike Pence, whose assaults on the LGBT community (including his support for cruel and ineffective "conversion therapy" and the passing of Indiana's discriminatory Religious Freedoms Restorations Act) should have every citizen concerned. Nor do I respect the appointment of a white supremacist like Steve Bannon as his presidental advisor or the viciously racist Jeff Sessions as his pick for Attorney General. Or any of the other embarrassing criminals, reprobates, and all-around sleazeballs that Trump has invited to slither their way into positions of powers that they don't deserve and will abuse in order to fit their twisted, hateful agendas. There really was no reason to release a sequel to Independence Day last year. Those aliens couldn't destroy the White House any worse than Trump and his cabinet are already doing.

Today, I read that the Trump Administration is already planning to cut funding for the National Endowment of the Arts, which scares me, but doesn't surprise me in the least. After all, the first step to fascism is to take away the voices of dissent. The weapons that Trump fears the most aren't the semi-automatics being stockpiled by angry white men preparing for their imaginary showdown with the government that they irrationally hate and fear. It's the words of those who would dare speak out against him and expose him as the fraud that he is. It's the voices of the oppressed, the angry, the bullied, the ones who have had enough of his bullshit and aren't going to go down without a fight. The most dangerous weapons in the world aren't the ones covered by the Second Amendment. They're the ones covered by the First Amendment.

On behalf of artists everywhere, I urge everyone to fight back the best way they know how: with their art. Write a poem. Sing a song. Write a story or a play. Paint a picture. Sculpt a bust. Draw a cartoon. Write a blog post like this one. Make a film. Every piece of art you make is a raised middle finger to Trump and his odious administration. Every creative gesture is a "fuck you" to a dumb and uncultured society that would allow someone so hateful to occupy the most powerful political office in the country. They can cut our funding, but they won't cut off our words. They won't tell us to shut up. They can mock us by calling us "crybabies" and "special snowflakes", but you know what you get when a have a million snowflakes?

An avalanche. And we're coming to pull a landslide on those motherfuckers.

The Post-Holiday Blues

They're taking down the lights and cardboard snowflakes
They're boxing up the angels and the stars
They're stripping the trees naked and dumping them on curbs
Like drunks falling asleep outside of bars

You say this year things are gonna be different
You know they're probably gonna be the same
You think of somebody you love but cannot have
And once again your heart is filled with shame

You remember those cold nights of years gone by
Braving through the fury and the storm
On your way to make love to someone special
Your body heat the only thing keeping you warm

It's been three years ago this winter
You haven't been with anyone since then
One fine day she called you up and broke your heart
But you'd do anything to have her back again

Outside your window snow is piling up
You look outside and see it falling fast
You tell yourself you won't waste another year
You tell yourself this one will be the last

You tell yourself tomorrow will be different
As you walk to the fridge and get another beer
Someday everything is gonna be just perfect
Maybe next week
Maybe next year

2016: The Year in Review

It was the worst of times, it was...well, there's really no other way to end that sentence.

History will remember 2016 as one of the most embarassing years in recent memory. It began with a bunch of armed lunatics holding up a bird sanctuary in Oregon in order to protest...something (Obama?) and ended with the most horrifying two words in the English language: "President-Elect Trump". A gorilla was shot by the staff of the Cincinnati Zoo and everybody on your Facebook feed turned into a fucking expert on both parenting and animal behavior. Everywhere we went, society crumbled all around us, but we were too busy with our noses in our phones playing Pokemon Go to notice. The "Bernie or Bust" and pro-Hillary crowd were too busy fighting with each other instead of coming together to unite against the real threat, which is why we now have a presidential cabinet that resembles a rogue's gallery of supervillains that would put the Suicide Squad to shame. In retrospect, it's probably a good thing that the revival of The X-Files fizzled out when it did. After all, what government conspiracies could Mulder and Scully uncover that would be more sinister than anything that President-Elect Dumkopf has in mind? When it comes to pure horror, an orange-hued narcissist in the Oval Office trumps any monster that Chris Carter and his writing staff could come up with. (Pun definitely intended in this case.)

Death was a selfish bastard, too. While we lost several wonderful celebrities this year --David Bowie, Prince, Leonard Cohen, Alan Rickman, Carrie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds, Muhhamed Ali, John Glenn, Garry Shandling, George Michael, and Arnold Palmer, among many others-- the ones that hit the hardest were the people that we knew personally. Seems like everybody I know suffered a personal loss this year. At least two broke my heart. I lost a close friend and co-worker earlier this March, and my workplace feels like an entirely different place, almost like a ghost town. I like everyone else well enough (one of my best friends even works there now), but it just isn't quite the same. A friend of mine also recently lost her little sister, who was the best friend of my niece, and it affected my family greatly too. It was a harsh reminder of how precious and fleeting life is, and to always appreciate the ones you love. Death does not always announce itself. Sometimes it just shows up uninvited when you least expect it.

My heart continued to play tricks on me and tried steering me toward disaster yet again. I won't go into full detail, but I will say that I suffered a severe emotional conflict (and near-breakdown) this past year brought on by a bad romantic situation that could easily have been avoided if I had not given in to feelings that I knew were a mistake. Sometimes your heart say yes while your brain is saying no. Listen to your brain. It knows what's good for you. "Your heart wants what it wants" goes the saying. Maybe that true, but sometimes your heart can't always get what it wants. And in many cases, it shouldn't.

This was the year that the Dover Players closed their doors at the Old Town Hall in North Olmsted. Whether we'll continue in a new location remains to be seen, but we seem to be on hiatus for now. It was a bittersweet farewell to a wonderful group of friends and creative individuals, all of whom made the past near-decade of my life fun and memorable. I don't exaggerate when I say that some of closest friendships and happiest memories were made within that group. I will still continue to act and perform in some capacity and will still see my friends from there on a semi-regular basis. To quote the Decemberists, "I was made for the stage". You can't keep a performer down.

2016 did have some good things going for it. The Cavs won the NBA playoffs and brough a championship to this city for the first time in 52 years. My parents celebrated their 50th anniversary with a fun family camping trip at Lake Hope in southern Ohio. One of my best friends now works alongside me at Half Price Books and she seems to be loving it. (A sweet romance has also blossomed between her another co-worker.) All in all, there have been a few roses growing up through the manure patch that was this past year. Success and happiness still elude me (and Miss Right is nowhere to be found for the time being), but I remain optimistic. I'm working on steadily improving myself and taking more risks. I recently played guitar and sang at an open-mic night and had a great time. I'm making Er-Bear great again. I look forward to seeing what 2017 has in store and if we survive past January 20th, I think we'll be all right.

Bully-In-Chief

They called me retard.

They called me fat boy.

They called me faggot.

They broke my school supplies, tripped me in the hallways, pinned me down and farted on me, gave me headlocks and Indian burns. They made fun of me for my weight, my shyness, my lack of interest in sports or anything they cared about. They found out my phone number and tortured me with prank phone calls. They goaded me into fights, knowing that I was weaker than they were and would easily kick my ass. They sent me home in tears, making me feel like something less than human. I hated them and often fantasized about killing them. After I got off the bus, I would get the BB gun that I had gotten for Christmas a few years before and shoot at plastic two-liter pop bottles in my backyard, pretending they were my classmates. To this day, I am grateful that I did not have access to real firearms.

I carried that anger and humilation with me for years, plotting revenge fantasies that I knew probably weren't ever going to happen. It's no exaggeration to say that being bullied as a kid has shaped me into who I am as an adult. I still suffer from severe depression and anxiety issues. I am frequently concerned about what others think of me and am always nervous about being confronted. My sense of humor and happy exterior are sometimes the armor that I need to wear for when the pain becomes too great. Behind this goofy, sarcastic front lies a heart that's breakable and nerves that fray far too easily. Though I'm relatively happy these days, there are times when I'm on the verge of tears and it's all I can do to keep from breaking down. Medication helps, as does support from family and friends, as well as exercise and keeping busy. Anything to take my mind away from the darkness that I've carried with me since I was a boy, when one of my classmates randomly beat the shit out of me on the playground for no apparent reason. I was hurt and angry, but mostly, I was confused. Why had he singled me out for abuse? I had done nothing to hurt him. I continued to be a target of his abuse for years afterward, to the extent that I had to switch schools. I later learned that he lived a life of poverty and came from a broken home, but at that point, I didn't care anymore. Fuck him. He didn't have any right to take it out on me, no matter how bad his upbringing was. He later went to prison for burglary, and I didn't have one lick of sympathy for him. I hoped he was getting his ass kicked every single day by hardened criminals, the way that he had done to me years before. It served him right.

I was reminded of that bully and all of the other ones who harrassed me as a child this past year, when I saw Donald Trump campaigning to be President. In Trump, I saw all of the traits of those assholes all over again: mean-spiritedness, narcissism, arrogance, pettiness, and a lack of empathy toward anybody that they viewed to be inferior. I was reminded of them when he mocked a reporter with a physical disablility. I was reminded of them when he bragged that he could shoot anyone on the streets of New York City and not get arrested. I was reminded of them when he talked about grabbing women by their "pussies" and all of the other disgusting misogynistic comments that spew out of his landfill mouth. I'm reminded of them when I hear horror stories of his supporters spraying anti-Semitic graffiti in public parks or stealing hijabs from the heads of Muslim women. I think of them when I hear stories of him appointing Steve Bannon, an admitted White Nationalist, into a position of power in the White House.

Trump's America is a place for bullies. His election is a triumph for every racist, bigoted, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, misogynistic, ableist cretin who feels that they have the right to feel superior to any other human being on the planet. It empowers every lowlife who carries prejudice and hatred for others in his heart and makes them feel better to make someone else feels worse. And like all bullies, Trump is a thin-skinned coward at heart. This is a man who has the nerve to offend everyone in his path, but can't handle a little ribbing from Saturday Night Live or a heartfelt message of optimism from the cast of  Hamilton. Anyone who can't handle criticism is not qualified for the office of the Presidency. How is he going to handle threats from ISIS if being spoofed by Alec Baldwin throws him into a rage?

Nevertheless, I haven't given up hope that maybe Trump will change for the better. People can change. Earlier this year, I received a message on Facebook from one of my former bullies. He was very apologetic for what he had done, and seemed genuinely remorseful for the way he had treated me over twenty years ago. I did something I thought I would never do: I forgave him. I did so because I was tired of letting anger and resentment consume me. What he and his friends did was not OK and it did shape my life in negative ways, but I was tired of hating him and planning unlikely revenges. It was obviously difficult for him to reach out to me, knowing the shame and guilt he carried inside. And plus, his father had recently passed away, so I wasn't going to add a "fuck you" on top of that as well. We'll probably never be friends, but at least we're no longer enemies.

Who knows? Maybe Trump will learn the error of his ways and change his tune, making America safe for the poor and the downtrodden, and every persecuted minority in the nation will no longer have to feel angry or afraid. Sure, the guy is seventy years old, but it's never too late to change. Maybe when he's in his nineties, he's finally have his act together.

Listening to the Aliens

It has now been exactly one week since we received the news of President-Elect Baby Hands' win and I'm not feeling any better than I did before. The election of our tax-dodging, pussy-grabbing, Klan-approved sex offender of a new world leader coupled with the death of one of my heroes, the wonderful Leonard Cohen, has made this past week a pretty difficult one. For someone who suffers from severe depression and anxiety disorder, every day can be a struggle, and these next four years will be even more of an uphill battle. Not even Kate McKinnon's stirring performance of "Hallelujah" on last weekend's SNL can kill these blues. But I'm trying to remain positive and as long as my heart still beats, I'm not going to give up hope that we can fight to make things better.

Everybody has a moment when they hit rock bottom. Waking up in a strange place is a good indication that you have a drinking problem and those chest pains you're feeling might be telling you that it's a good idea to lose some weight. Perhaps that's what's going on with the country right now. We've reached our moment of clarity. Maybe the election of a sleazy fascist billionaire is the kick in the ass that we need to wake us up from our complacency and ask us how it got this far. It's no secret that there's a severe divide in this country between the progressive left and the working-class right, but how can we make things better? Trump's victory is the culmination of eight years of resentment from angry white men, enraged that "their" country was being changed in ways they didn't approve of during the Obama years, which in turn, were a reaction by progressive voters to the failures of the George W. Bush administration. "Well, at least it can't possibly get any worse than Bush," we lefties thought back in 2008. Boy, were we wrong. As disastrous a President as he was, I cannot recall a single thing he ever said or did that filled me with as much horror or revulsion as the bile that spews forth from President-Elect Joffrey's mouth on a daily basis. That may be Trump's greatest achievement of all: making W. look classy in comparison.

Trump's election looks to be one of the symptoms of a disease that's been plaguing this nation all this time: a lack of compassion and understanding of our fellow humans. Maybe instead of fighting with each other, we should try to communicate with one another. Earlier this week, I went to see the movie Arrival, in which Amy Adams plays a linguistics professor assigned to communicate with a group of aliens who have mysteriously come to Earth. Toward the end of the film, the Chinese government misunderstands a message from the aliens as a threat and begins to make plans to attack them. It's up to Adams to convince them otherwise, that they need to listen to what the aliens are actually saying in order to avoid conflict. That's a lesson that we all need. To be more empathetic and caring to each other instead of jumping to violence and hatred as an automatic reaction. Maybe that's what we need to learn in order to prevent another Trump administration from ever happening again.

And if not, then maybe the aliens will let us hitch a ride with them to their home planet. We could all use a change of scene.