Can you see the real me?

Image from here

We've started watching this British TV series on DVD called Being Human.  It's about a vampire and a werewolf that live with a ghost. Sounds like the opening line of a joke, right? So far, we really like it. Perhaps even more than most stories of supernatural beings, the focus here is very much on the monster within.

I've had enough long drunken nights with enough different types of people to know that we all have a monster inside of us. Or at least people that will drink with me seem to have one. No matter how much we show to those around us, we hide a creature that we believe to be so vile that we cannot afford for even those closest to us to catch a glimpse of it. Or maybe the point is that we especially can't afford for those closest to us to see it.

I wonder about those perpetually perky types that hide their monsters beneath mountains of bunnies and flowers, or (somewhat ironically) the Bible and the Holy Spirit. Are they truly unaware of this primitive presence within themselves? Or are they ones working hardest to conceal it, lest someone catch wind of how the sight of a full moon makes them want to tear off their clothes and run howling into the forest, eviscerating those same bunnies that decorate their kitchens?

Or maybe it's not monsters for all of us. Perhaps, in what Arianna Huffington calls our "lee-zard brains," some of us are prey rather than predators, secretly longing for the fangs in our throats, and the sweet release from perpetual fear that only comes as we bleed out onto the snow. I suspect we all have a little of both. This is a theme that may get explored in this series, though it's too early to tell.

How did we get this way? Do chimpanzees hide their true motivations from their community?* Did secrets somehow evolve alongside language? I guess the ability to tell goes hand in hand with the option not to tell. But do we really need to believe that others lack the same primitive motivations as ourselves?

I suppose the answer to the last question is "yes." It is probably much easier to build civilization when we can believe that our wife has never had the urge to cuckold us with our boss, or that our children have never considered killing us in our sleep. And isn't that the whole point of civilization, after all? To allow us all to believe we live in a world of order and fairness and safety? Instead of the one we really inhabit, where a looming shadow could be the last thing we see, and the only thing keeping that moment in the future is our wits, and a great deal of luck.

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*This is not to imply that I believe we are related in any way to chimpanzees.**

**But I do.

The Eagle has Landed

When I started college for the third time at the age of 32 I was required to (re)take a number of introductory courses, despite the 100+ credit hours I had already accumulated in my previous academic wanderings. Which is how I found myself in freshman English Composition with 20 or so people who still thought drinking 'til you puked was sexy. We were introducing ourselves on the first day, and I had just finished a summary of myself which I'm sure was both deep and engaging, when the girl next to me turned and exclaimed, "Wow! You were alive when they landed on the moon!"*

Yes, I was alive when they landed on the moon. In fact, I was nearly six feet tall, my voice was changing, and I was beginning to feel ways about stuff. I watched Apollo 11 take off, I watched them land, and I watched a grainy and semi-transparent Neil Armstrong step off the ladder and speak the words that caused 750 million people to turn to those closest to them, tears in their eyes and ask, "What'd he say?" I can still remember staring up at the moon, trying to wrap my mind around the idea that there were people standing there.




I guess this is one of those events that will forever separate those who remember it from those who don't, like Pearl Harbor, JFK's assassination or the
premier of American Idolfall of the Berlin Wall. Like those other events, the moon landing forever changed how humans viewed themselves and their subsequent experience, and the world was in some way fundamentally different from the way it was the day before.

It is almost impossible to convey the audacity of the act. It had been less than a decade since people had sent the first object of any kind beyond our atmosphere. Most Americans had never flown on an airplane and no one was really sure what the moon's surface was like. There were knowledgeable people who believed the LEM would sink into a powder many feet thick and never been seen again. Less than a year before the landing, humans had never laid eyes on the far side of the moon, or seen the Earth from a distance. If they tried to do this again today, they would never even get the contracts awarded in the time it took to develop the entire Apollo program.

These three men took off on a dangerous adventure in a largely untested craft because -- well, wouldn't you? I know I would have. It was the first time people had ever set foot on any solid surface other than the Earth. It was crossing a boundary that had never been crossed in Earth's three billion year history, and that could never be uncrossed. It is estimated that one fifth of the world's population watched on about one-twentieth of that number of televisions , and it was all anybody talked about. And I don't mean all they could talk about like Michael Jackson. I mean as soon as someone walked in the door of their home or their job or a restaurant they would ask how it was going, or if there was anything new.

I watched every launch of every American spacecraft from Mercury 9 through the first handful of Shuttle launches. I grieved every cancellation of the later Apollo missions, and mourned the subsequent loss of exploratory manned spaceflight. Because let's face it -- what they have done with the Shuttle and the Space Station is certainly important, but it's not exploration.

I still follow the space program pretty closely, and I check on the Mars rovers every now and then. They are still wandering around up there, more than 5 years after their warranty expired, doing important science and taking cool pictures. And I'm sure I will be watching the return to the Moon and/or the first manned trip to Mars, on the off chance that I'm still around by then. But for me, none of it could ever match the feeling I got hearing Armstrong's voice crackle out of the speaker on our big console television, "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."

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* I think I'm beginning to understand why my first paper in that class was about the best method for committing suicide. I got an A+.

Synchronicity

So I'm up at two-o'frakking-clock in the frakking morning (sorry, Rassles brought up Cylons earlier) with a case of insomnia, mostly induced by middle age interacting with overindulgence in cheap and plentiful Mexican food, but probably enhanced by a rapidly approaching paper submission deadline, in the midst of writing what is undoubtedly the longest sentence I have ever constructed for a blog post, and one which is almost certainly too long for the medium and definitely too long for the taste of most grammar checkers, and I'm wondering what to do next. I've been up for a couple of hours, and the feeling of being an overstuffed burrito (we are what we eat, you know) has mostly passed. I could probably lie down and might even sleep eventually, but I am not the least bit sleepy.

While I'm weighing the relative merits of trying to get back to bed or powering through the night until the inevitable crash at about the time I'm supposed to get up, I hear the coffeemaker signal that it is finished brewing. This is a suprise to me, as I have not (intentionally) made any coffee. See, what had happened was our power went out during one of the storms today and we have one of those coffeemakers that comes on automatically because neither the wife nor I are to be trusted with dangerous and complex tasks like measuring and pouring when we first get up in the morning. So the clock on the coffeemaker never got reset, the countdown began, and voila! Mmmm, coffee. Decision made. This is going to cost me later today.

I guess I will see what's on TV. I can probably learn how to make a fortune, rid myself of acne and enhance that certain part of a man's body all before the sun comes up.

Pushing Daisies Thanatopsis

I cannot let the passing of Pushing Daisies go without comment. This is one of the most original shows to come to television in a long time, by which I mean that they reached all the way into the first half of the last century for their ideas instead of just recycling old shows that we all remember, and that weren't that good the first time. Not only were the story lines and dialog complex, original and entertaining, but the show had tremendous visual appeal.

What is it about us as a society that leads us to turn our backs on original, intelligent work in favor of predictable humor or a seemingly endless series of second-rate crime/medical dramas? It is much harder for me to bemoan the way that television executives treat us as if we are mindless sheep when we continue to act like mindless sheep. I mean, how many CSI's do we need?

Of course, we the viewers are not alone in our culpability. I don't see a huge push from any of the networks to promote any of the more original work until after it becomes a phenomenon like Lost. I don't recall seeing the Good Morning America team discussing the plot of Pushing Daisies or Eli Stone on the morning after, like they do with Dancing with the People Whose Names You May Have Heard or American Star Machine. Then again, Diane, Robin and the rest are just giving us what will get them ratings.

I know, it's just a television show. But in addition to the fact that I get 70% of my information and 85% of my imagined human interaction from TV, television is what passes for culture in our country today, and we spend our breaks and lunch hours talking about Meredith and McDreamy or what's up with the Desperate Housewives. TV has real impact on our lives, at least until you kids take over with your Interwebs and your iPods and such.

In the end, I suppose the forces at work are much like those that helped disappear everyone's 401k in these last few months. Everyone is so interested in short term gain that long term goals are forgotten or ignored. I'm afraid we are in for a crisis of culture someday soon, if we are not already in its depths. And I don't see the government coming up with a trillion dollars to bail out PBS. They haven't even done anything to get the Saenger Theatre in New Orleans reopened.

If you think art and music are unimportant, and you're not worried about disappearing art, music and drama programs in schools, then the passing of higher culture is no need for concern. But if you believe, as I do, that our appreciation of art and music build our capacity to understand and appreciate mathematics, science and the more mundane aspects of life, then you should be afraid.

Oh, and Sarah is right about another thing: Grey's Anatomy has gone seriously off the rails. I don't know if they are chasing the ratings like everyone else or what, but I may have watched my last episode.