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Here and Now

by C. Christian Scott on August 24, 2020 at 9:32 pm
Posted In: Blog, Main

I was listening to a podcast the other day. It’s about making comics (and making a living from comics). There’s your tagline.

So something that got brought up in the opening discussion was inner voices, which they’ve talked about before. Some people think in images, like pictures or videos if you were online. And other people think in actual words. So one of the hosts was talking about an experiment he and his wife did where they took a walk together and said out loud what their inner voices were thinking.

She tended to think about tasks she had ahead of her. Chores coming up. Appointments. That sort of thing. Whereas he thought about things he was looking at, what he saw as they walked around, and reflected on those. It came down to the idea that she thinks about the future, and he thinks very much in the present. The other host, as it turns out, also thinks more about the present.

But this hit me kind of in a bad way. Because I think most often about the past.

Like, it’s always been something I’ve done. I will just go days and nights honed in on some mistake or even just a perceived error that I did one time, sometimes years or now decades ago. And I’ll try to trace back to it, what made me do the wrong thing, what if I’d chosen differently, that kind of deal. A lot of my anxiety over the last nearly 15 years has been the decision we made to buy our house in California when we did. The market crumbled almost directly after we’d gotten our mortgage and moved in, and while we did get some help on it eventually, it just swept over us and put us in a bad place in a way that we still actually haven’t recovered. And that’s with having sold and moved out of the place two years ago. One year’s difference would’ve changed the entire thing. The price would’ve probably been half of what it was when we bought in (we likely wouldn’t have gotten the same place, but a place just as good. Maybe better. Maybe smaller and doubly more affordable).

Every month as the payment would come due and I’d wonder if we could make it, or what we’d have to sacrifice to do so, it would weigh me down so badly. To this day, I still have an aversion to looking at my bank statement because I just feel like we have no money at all, and when bills are due, I let them stack up or fall behind because I’m too freaked out to face up to them. And things are honestly better now that we left. But I can’t get around it.

And that’s one small part of it. Mistakes with friends, mistakes with family, high school and grade school and jobs and even the move to California itself. I am constantly second- third- and quintuple-guessing every decision I’ve made.

It’s worse honestly since moving back to Michigan. Because my brain wanders back so easily to the places I grew up. Even though we’re on the other side of the Mitten from where I grew up, the surrounding environment is enough to put my head into the mode of “this is all very familiar.” So I listen to music and it triggers thoughts of growing up, even if this music didn’t exist then. And every time I listen to the same songs or albums (which I do a lot because I’m very set in my ways at this point), as soon as I hit play it’s like, “Here we go. Same imagined scenario as last time, let’s just go with the replay for the hundredth time.”

I think it’s slowly killing me. Like, not literally causing my death. But giving me less to make me feel like I’m alive.

I was asked to leave my High School (“invited not to reapply” is the technical term they used. Or maybe my brain filled in that blank over the years) in what was to be my last year. I was 17 and wasn’t exactly a great student at all, but I didn’t feel like I was someone that had proven themselves unworthy to come back. Granted, they had no idea how I had pushed myself to get my head on straight to make that last year happen. My mom, the day the school year started, was surprised when I was up and ready to go. My grandmother as well. “Why are you up so early?” they asked. I said it was the first day of school. And they both said the same thing. “You’re going?!?” It wasn’t that they lacked faith in me. I just hadn’t really decided or said that i had until then. Maybe if I’d known that it was more on me to decide, I would’ve chosen not to.

See? I’m doing it again. The “what if?” thing.

Being denied finishing up my classes put me into a strange place. Now I not only had to decide if I wanted to worry about getting a High School diploma, I also had to find the path to do so. High School basically funnels all your learning towards that one thing for you. You show up, do your work, pass the tests, here’s your papers, move along. That’s it. Now it was on me to figure out what I was going to do.

I wound up in Adult Education, even though, again, I wasn’t 18 yet. My credits weren’t enough to do all I needed to in the one year, so I decided to get my GED and apply it to my credits. Passing that test (which I did, easily. I was a lousy student, but it wasn’t that I wasn’t smart enough. I just hated applying my focus to school) knocked me down to just needing a few classes. But it took three semesters instead of two because they kept realizing at the end, “Oh, wait, you also need this other thing.” It was probably for the best. I wasn’t in a rush, and it allowed me the free time to still get those couple of years of having friends and a “life” in without me spending too much time in a classroom. I was a late bloomer when it came to having a social circle and knowing how to talk to other people my age. That’s another reason why I was so bad at school. I spent most of my time terrified.

The point of this is that, even after getting my GED and my eventual diploma, I never felt a closure to high school. I did about a year’s stint in college a while later, after a break when my childhood home got sold out from under me and I had to move hours away from everyone and everything I knew. I was both lucky to have some place to go, and totally unprepared for living as a grown-up, paying bills and rent, working every day. I know, some kids do that well before they’re an adult. But i came at things at a different pace.

The combination of the school thing and the home thing and the feeling abandoned even though I was the one who left thing… It all put me more into a shell. Most of it worked out eventually. But I had a lot of sleepless nights because I’d wake up from anxiety nightmares about things unfinished, things I still had to do to actually show that I was an adult now.

That’s part of why I moved to California when I did. Sure, a big part of it was the opportunity. One of my close friends lived there and offered for me to come stay with her. That helped a lot. But I gave up everything I knew again, this time by my own choice. Some of my closest friends at the time didn’t even bother to see me off. They said, “Oh, it’s just Corey. He’ll be back here in a few months, tops.”

Maybe it was spite that kept me from coming back. I don’t know. But my twenties moved really fast. I spent less time thinking about if I’d made the right move or wrong move, because each day was so many new experiences and people that I didn’t have the time.

When my grandmother passed away, very suddenly, that’s the first time I had a real breakdown after moving away. And that was when I started looking backwards more. Which is realistic. My grandma was one of my parents, as much as my mom or dad were. I lived with her during my entire teen years. She shaped a lot of who I am. When I left, even though we didn’t live together any more, I was still going to see her regularly, helping her with errands. We were still extremely close. But I took off, and she never made me feel like I was letting her down by doing so. But for her to suddenly not be there to come back to… That changed me. In some ways, I think that’s what affected my then relationship with my ex-, although I can clearly see now that we both were better off as friends in the years to come than we were as a couple. My moods got darker. My outlook got more bleak. I still had a lot of good times in my life. But I was way more guarded about things. More closed off.

And I started looking backwards more. Easily as much as I looked forward. Possibly because of having to confront death in the most personal way I ever had. Or maybe it’s just that I was getting older, and making decisions on a whim was no longer something I could afford to do. I had responsibilities to other people. I had a responsibility to myself.

At sixteen I’d reinvented myself. New name, new look, new personality. At twenty-two, I reinvented my life by moving away from everything I knew. At around twenty-six, twenty-seven, I lost some of the most important things to me. It made me more careful. It made me scared.

Looking back at my role with my friends as a teenager, if there’s one thing I think maybe I could say I brought to my little group, it’s that I was a dreamer. I always wanted to make things. Tell stories. Write songs. Play music. But i wanted that for all of us. I wanted to push my friends towards their dreams too. I can’t say I was necessarily good at it, but I tried. My heart was there. It took some doing to focus more of that on me. When certain opportunities would fall into my lap, like the first time someone read some of my writing and offered to publish me, I had no idea how to react to it. So I left it alone. I just contented myself to keep doing what I wanted for no personal gain. I played guitar because I enjoyed the feel of the instrument, the way my hand would make chord shapes. I didn’t play for anyone else. I wrote stories with no care to if they ended or if they mattered. If a couple people read and enjoyed them, it was more than I would’ve expected. My audience was narrow and that suited me.

But at some point, I thought, maybe I should do more. Maybe I should want more. Why did I let stuff go to waste? Why did I squander opportunities that other people would’ve done anything for? Why did I act like none of it mattered?

I still don’t know. Maybe because trying is scary. Not trying, just letting things happen, is fun.

Yet I felt like, okay, enough is enough. I’m ready now. Let’s seriously write. Let’s seriously make something. You’ve run every day of your life (figuratively. I mean, I’ve never run once), let’s see what happens when you try to run an actual marathon.

And in nearly every single instance of my trying to push myself outside of my boundaries, I’ve choked. Like flat-on-my-face failed.

And you know what? That’s fair. If you want something bad enough, it shouldn’t be easy. I mean, sure, it would be nice if it was. But it shouldn’t matter if it is or isn’t. What matters is that you’re working towards that thing. Because you want it. You need it to happen.

My realistic side knows that. Of course.

But my dreamer side, the one that got everything easy, just looks at all the time I wasted, and all the chances I had that I fucked up or danced around and let piss down the drain, and says, “You blew it, buddy. You had it all once. Now it’s gone. Never again.”

Every year I seem to go through a stint, especially as it creeps closer to my birthday, which then inevitably heads us into the year’s end, where I think that I’ve gotten too old. All of this was a younger man’s game. I’m old. My job takes up so much of my time and energy. My wife and my cats and my parents and my couple of things that I do with friends here and there… It’s enough. It should be enough. Why do I have to fight out these couple of pipe dreams anyways. Now, quickly approaching fifty, I absolutely think that I’ve got more life behind me than ahead of me. My hands hurt when I type. I’m not sure i can make those chord shapes any more. My back and posterior scream at me after sitting in a chair all day for work, so adding time at the computer after to write seems like an added cruelty. My eyes are struggling even with a large computer monitor (doesn’t mean I can’t stare at and fuck around on my phone half the day though). I content myself with making the random quip on Facebook and getting Likes and Laughs instead of doing anything of substance. Or, worse, reposting something from my Memories on there, which I had something really witty to say two years ago.

And I just keep thinking backwards.

No one can give me what I want. I am now surrounded by the most amazing people who work hard at the things they love. Podcasting, writing, music, art. My wife is an incredible artist. I see her constantly at her desk drawing or painting, or on her iPad sketching. She’s taking up sewing, and sculpting. She’s younger than me, but not thirty years younger than me, so I know the excuses I make for myself are complete bullshit. I just can’t figure out how I’ve gotten so buried in this mindset for so long.

I don’t know that I have it in me to be that woman who is always thinking ahead. Always looking at what she needs to accomplish, what she has on her ToDo list to keep her successes going (she is a fantastic TV writer by the way. One of my dream jobs). I still associate a lot of my future with dread. What bills do I have due soon? What happens when we have a household emergency and can’t survive it? What happens when my next parental figure passes away? I’ve become a bit too much of a pessimist to look forward to things in the same way. And because my expectations are always so low, there’s not a lot for me to be excited about anyways.

But if I could just shift, even a little, to thinking more in the Now than in the Past. I could get my head out of reruns and into “What’s Featured.” That would be a pretty major step in the right direction for me.

I just need to figure out how.

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Mr. Bundy’s Sad Ride

by C. Christian Scott on August 24, 2020 at 3:06 pm
Posted In: Blog, Main

“If you don’t love selling shoes, get out of this business.”

That was said to a room full of us. I had been working as a retail manager for a shoe company for about two or three months. I’d taken the job due to a previous manager and District manager of mine from another shoe company I’d worked at recommending me for it.

This guy, speaking to all of us, was a motivator. I don’t know if he was a Regional boss, probably higher, because everyone else in the room seemed to think it was such a big deal to have him there speaking to us. I was new, I was still getting my bearings.

And I was miserable.

MIS-ER-A-BLE.

I could make a lot of jokes about being a shoe salesman, but Al Bundy had already delivered on that material better than I ever could. I was in my late twenties at this point. I’d worked retail my entire adult life. I’d just come off of a two year stint bouncing around an outlet mall, leaving some jobs because the stores went belly-up, others to find my way to promotions up the ladder that wouldn’t have come otherwise (not in the time frame I was looking for at least). One because my manager was The Devil.

It’s strange to think of my time there as only being two years because it felt much longer. I’d wound up at the outlets because the first job I had in California, a comic shop, had been taken over by another The Devil. Perhaps the illusive Super Devil. Either way, I’d been a manager at a comic store in Michigan, found my way to one when I displaced myself from my home and buggered off to NorCal, and then essentially became everything that Kevin Smith had been talking about when he made Clerks.

“Just because they serve you … Doesn’t mean they like you.”

Which, yeah, can be true. But I found that I loved retail. Or aspects of it. Enough of it to be okay with being there. And that, my friend, is the spell that being just gainfully employed enough to be able to functionally pay your bills and eat does to you. It allows you to think that satisfaction equates to happiness.

Side note: I don’t really know what equates to happiness. If you are reading this thinking I’ll have some revelation for you by the end of what does and how to get it for yourself, you belong here as much a I did that shoe job.

What I do know is that I left that meeting, went back to my store at my mall. And, on my lunch that day, I walked through the place and looked at the other stores. Most of them were clothing, a high percentage aimed strictly at women. There were, of course, more shoe stores. But I walked past one that was a mix of a toy store with a lean towards education, and a adult novelty shop. Not “adult,” but where you’d find interesting things that go clickity-clack in a way that screams “science” to make you look interesting but fun. It was affiliated with PBS, so it had a lot of classical music, Irish tenors and such playing. They needed a co-manager. I applied and got the hell out of… Hell.

I did that for a year and, for the people I worked with, had a great time with it. It was the most financially lucrative job I’d ever had at the time. I had an amazing manager and team. I learned a ton because it was the largest staff I’d ever worked with (let alone co-managed) and the biggest volume of sales. My Christmas there I started to have chest and arm pains because it was so crazy. Not sure if it was a heart thing or an anxiety thing, but I was more amused by it as it eventually passed than I was worried (because I was in my twenties and still felt invulnerable enough of the time to shake something like that off as a once-and-only thing. My thirties and since have mocked me endlessly for believing that).

I was recruited to another job probably two weeks into working there. I interviewed, only because it was, what I’d considered at the time, to by my dream retail job. And I was offered it. It was even more money. And i turned it down, which they were incredulous over, because I felt a loyalty to the kind person who just hired me. I still don’t regret my decision.

A year later, I went back to that dream job and let them know I was ready. Not because I was unhappy where I was. Same deal, I was looking to progress. My manager wasn’t going away. I wasn’t moving up. I was certainly satisfied, but I’d been accustomed to trying new things the last few years. That’s what got me out of my parents basement on onto California. I was no longer interested in being safe. This was the time of my life that I pushed forward.

Dream job offered me even more money. And, quickly, I moved up. Pay increases happened often. Even if I got passed over for a promotion, I somehow got a bump in pay just for being considered for it. It was weird. But it was electronics retail right before the .Com crash (and eventually during and after).

What happened that was most interesting is that I somehow conned my way off of the sales floor and into the tech area. That actually changed everything for me.

Retail sales up until my big box electronics store experience was normally very easy. Someone comes in, they want to buy something. You find it, sell it to them, collect their cash, they take their stuff. It goes on and on and on.

Big box doesn’t work like that. I was fortunately in a place that didn’t work on commission (and I have thankfully never had to do that kind of work), but did have a lot of trackers and charts and things to follow to see if you’d offered about a dozen or so different “services.” ISP sign-ups. Credit card sign-ups. Service plans. Installations. Cables and add-ons.

I was able to see these things as they were. They were a bottom line margin maker for the company that sold most of its stuff very close to price they paid for it. The kick-back of getting someone to sign up for three years of a Microsoft dial-up plan made continuing money. Especially if the person stuck it out beyond the three years. Credit cards are well known for the interest rates they bump up without hesitation after you get done with your introductory period. I actually could see the value of a lot of the service plans (inside baseball allowed us employees to know which ones worked to our advantage. Buy a video game system this year, pop on a $40 replacement plan, get the upgraded version of the system for free in two year’s time). And the margin on cables… That’s where the employee discount really shined, well before Amazon came about, flooded the market with cheap (but working) cables and no one would buy anything labeled “Monster” unless it was liquid crack in a colorful can.

But working at the service bench, while not technically freeing me completely from these other things, really took a lot of the onus off of them for my day-to-day. I got to fix computers. I got to play with technology in a way I never did on the floor. I learned a ton, very quickly, and got super good at my job. The introduction of the blaster worm and my figuring out how to correct it AND what to charge to fix it put my bench at the number one in the company that month. A bit of a fluke and unsustainable for me because I don’t care about numbers or scores.

I cared about helping people. And working on people’s technology allowed me to do that in a way that normal retail doesn’t. People come in frantic when their computer doesn’t work. I was not only able to put them at ease and reassure them it could be fixed, I could meet or exceed their expectations.

I modeled what I did after Leo Laporte at TechTV, which had become the only channel I watched when I got home until Buffy or Smallville came on. Leo’s job was to educate people on tech, make it work for their needs specifically, and to make it less scary and more fun. As if to prove to me that I was on the right path, it was when I was working at the tech bench that I met Leo for the first time. He came in randomly one day and was easily my favorite celebrity interaction. I went up to him, shook his hand, and told him, “I do what I do here because of what you’ve taught me.” And in that couple of minutes, he was warm, genuine, funny, and everything that I wanted to be.

So, again, I felt like I was happy. Maybe I was. I was definitely satisfied with my career.

Things at Big Box eventually hit speed bumps. I got moved from the tech area to operations, and it was about the same amount of misery I had selling shoes. Loved my team that I oversaw, certainly, but felt no joy when I went to work each day. Hated moving back to the blue polo shirt uniform. It was a lateral move, but it felt like I was demoted. It felt like I was degraded actually. But when one of my favorite people at work transferred to another store as a manager (actually, two of them did), I asked him if he needed someone to work as his in-home tech person. And he took me with him. And for another couple years, with more bumps and such, I felt like I was happy again.

Then the economy tanked. And, let’s be honest, my inability to give a crap about score cards and add-ons and margins above making my clients happy… That didn’t do a lot to endear me to the new Big Box management. The company had already gone through restructuring once to cut the pay of most of their in store workers. The writing was on the wall. I was paid an outlandish amount of money (in comparison to other people in the company. In Northern California for the time, though, I was paid something we’ll call “Almost a living wage”). On the fourth of July, we had the day off save for a conference call. On the call, they said that there would be lay-offs coming. I got a call about a half-hour later that said I’d be one of the people having my position eliminated. I had the opportunity to find and apply for another job in the company, which I put a less-than-half-assed attempt into. But then I parted with them, just about two months shy of my twelve year anniversary.

That crushed me. Because, again, I thought I had been happy. And honestly, I very much wasn’t. I hadn’t been in a long time. Part of it was because I could barely make my mortgage on the house we’d bought at exactly the wrong time. But also, I was realizing just then, I hated what my job had become. It was so much less about fixing things and making people happy. It was every bit of the sales and retail that crept back into my tech job.

And now I spent over a year and a half trying to figure out if i had to go back to retail proper. Because that was all I knew. I was lucky, I’d been able to fake my way into doing tech work for the last eight years. But I wasn’t seriously qualified, right? I couldn’t work on servers, or for businesses. I was the guy who fixed your browser, who set you up with a data backup system or a home wireless network. I thought there was no way I could offer anything to the real Tech industry.

But I was wrong. Because, at the heart of all of it, my retail experience and my tech experience that stemmed from it, I loved helping people. Yes, I’d developed a specific path that i wanted to take in doing that. Fixing tech, puzzle and problem solving computer and network issues. Make things work, hopefully better than they had before.

I got an interview and somehow landed what I know now to be the best job I’ve ever had. And I’ve worked at or managed three comic shops (two of which land at #’s 2 and 3 on my favorite places I’ve worked). I was the I.T. person for one branch of a larger company banner head, that had not had their own on-site tech, I think ever. They’d always dealt with remote support from across the country, and the occasional visit from one of the I.T. team. I was hired specifically because I’d been a retail person. Because this building wasn’t used to someone being there who wanted to help them. Who was visible and approachable. Who would pop around the corner randomly and ask how everything was doing.

And that was me. That was what I got to do. Heck, for the first year there, that was mostly all I knew how to do. I learned so much, very quickly, because that’s how these things are. You get something dropped in your lap, you figure it out. I also took it upon myself to improve systems I could see hadn’t been tended to in years. But I was mostly there to be the “Face of I.T” for my building.

And that, i can say, was me actually happy. Happy at a job. Truly.

I’m not going to pretend that everything was always perfect. My last several months there, things got incredibly frustrating, both from a giant project that was simply stressful, but also because of a power struggle that was going on between my different leadership teams. I hated being in the middle feeling like I had less and less power to take care of the people I worked with every day. But I saw all of that eventually working out, one way or another. The only reasons I left were related to both that mortgage that we never could get out from under, and my family.

So, moving back across the country to Michigan, not in the place I grew up but in many ways familiar, I had to essentially start again. I.T. work in this area is different. I don’t know if the kind of family-oriented job that I had out there exists. I work as a contractor for a larger company, and, while a lot of things are the same on the surface, it feels very different. Scorecards and metrics are brought up all the time, which I understand. Instead of selling items to customers, my company is selling itself as a service to the corporation we work for. There’s even more management, so there’s more power struggles between them, and us on the front line. It’s got all the bad aspects of retail mixed into some of the most beloved aspects of I.T. So I don’t know if happy is a thing I get to be at this job, as much as satisfied. Or grateful to be able to eat and have shelter.

But I also don’t know if there were someone standing in front of me, telling me, “If you don’t love I.T., get out of this business,” if I could or would take them up on it. Part of it is that I’m much older. Jumping from job to job doesn’t hold the excitement or promise it used to. Stability counts for a lot.

On top of that though, I can’t say I don’t love I.T. Or if I can think of something else that I do love. And that’s where it gets you. Does satisfaction equal happiness? No. But is happiness something we should expect to just be able to find? Do we automatically deserve it? It was forty years of my life before I found that I.T. job that I loved. Some people never get that. But they go on. Because we have to. And we are grateful for the high points when they’re there, and we struggle through the lows.

But forty-plus hours a week going towards something that doesn’t make you happy. That’s a lot to give to not get something that you need back. And I’m thinking about that. A lot.

I guess it was easier to walk away when it meant I wouldn’t have to touch strange people’s feet all day.

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Explaining Nostalgia

by C. Christian Scott on August 24, 2020 at 3:02 pm
Posted In: Blog, Main

I’ve been on a YouTube kick where I’m finding a bunch of the teen sex comedies from the 80s that I watched as a kid. Some of them way too early probably, but some when, yes, it’s exactly what a 15 to 17 year old boy should be watching late at night when the parents are asleep.

They are so gross and so misogynistic and so wonderfully encapsulating a time that, in that moment, felt completely normal and okay. I hate that i have a love for them because they point to so many screwed up things that people still think today.

Nostalgia is so bad for us. Like, I get it. The Thundercats cartoons are hitting Hulu today, and I watched those as they came out. And then they did a revival about ten years ago that I mostly missed, but I kind of want to watch those too. And aside from the overly machismo characters, Thundercats wasn’t a bad example (I think. But I’m definitely looking back with rose-colored glasses).

But a lot, and I mean A LOT of the stuff that I watched back that, be it movies, comedians, the music (hair bands), TV shows and so on… It was problematic. And that’s an issue now because no one likes being told that the stuff they grew up loving was bad for us and should be put away forever. Its one thing to say that there was systemic racism in Gone With The Wind, drop a disclaimer at the beginning, and then still feel okay watching it for the artistic cinematography, the acting, the history. But it’s something else entirely to try to explain the inherent value of them having panty raids and having live cam feeds of Delta Pis in Revenge of the Nerds. “Oh hello, pretty blonde lady I just passed nude photos around of without your permission and then had sex with under false pretenses. Forget about all this rapey stuff and be my girlfriend to show that I’m somehow the good guy in all of this.”

A few years back I watched a seemingly innocent film called “My Science Project” again. I remember enjoying it a lot more when I was a teen, maybe even in my early 20s. And it has its moments, although it’s also all over the place. But Fischer Stevens plays the snarky sidekick in it and drops so many gay slurs… Let’s just realize that Fischer Stevens was problematic in a lot of his roles back in the 80s looking at it through today’s lens. And we probably should’ve seen them for what they were then. But we were way too comfortable with those terms, with blackface or brownface, with racial and gendered stereotypes.

That’s just it. I see 80s movies as quaint. As a product of their time. I watch Zapped (although not in a long time since Baio went psycho) not for the teen sex comedy of it but more for the love story of it. Barnie and Bernadete at the Prom dancing to “You’re the Queen, I’m the King of Hearts” and I still get that puppy-love melt in my stomach. I’ve always leaned towards the romantic stuff. Another movie I’ve tracked down, Lovelines, is a Romeo/Juliet starcrossed story about two teens in a batter of the bands from competing schools. Again, the love story and the music (so bad but so perfect in its time), not to mention Jonna Lee playing the drums (I’d follow her over to her lead role in Making the Grade with Judd Nelson later). Or Gimme An “F,” the cheerleading camp comedy that Bring It On and especially Fired Up! owe everything to. It’s not even technically a love story since Mary Ann, the captain of the underdog Ducks, doesn’t “get the boy” when she offers herself to the handsome cheer coach Tommy. I guess maybe it falls into my weird love of sports and competition movies, even though I hate both sports and competing for things. But otherwise it’s an excuse for camp shower scenes and faux sex and the same grotesqueness as the rest of them. You compare these to something like Hardbodies and they look positively progressive. But I loved that movie too, from the moment I saw Rags flip someone off in 47 different languages.

It would be different if I just loved campy (not “camp” as a setting) movies. But this isn’t something I seek out now. Yes, I mentioned Fired Up! and I can honestly say, sure, I do like that movie. It may be the last example of that kind of film that actually got away with it (probably not financially. I don’t know how successful it was). But these kinds of films don’t happen today. At most we get adult men acting like juveniles, but the women in the films now aren’t going to fall for that shit, or forgive those types of actions. Which, good. You compare a movie like Old School or Wedding Crashers to something like Bridesmaids. The male lead movies are still “men being boys.” But they love it. They relish in it. Bridesmaids has Kristin Wiggs character struggling with crippling anxiety and failure and being afraid that she’s losing the only friend she has because she can’t grow with her. Men rushing towards being juvenile. Women struggling to be an adult.

I watched something called “Good Boys” the other day. It was like Superbad for the pre-teen crowd. It was really funny. The actors were all great, and they let them act like actual kids. Yeah, adult humor and jokes, but done at a level where boys their age are just learning how to make those kinds of jokes, to cross over into that adult-style of comedy. A year or so back was the movie Blockers, about teen girls who make a pact to lose their virginity on their prom night, and their parents find out and try to stop them (well, two of the parents do. One they actually manage to approach with a sex positive attitude). The adults lean into the really gross comedy, the teens have stuff that feels more appropriate for their age and individual stories. It really touches on friendship and acceptance and encouragement and so many things. I find that I love both of these movies, and they are essentially the modern-day teen sex comedies, but they do so much right in comparison to what we thought was all right then.

So how can I still love Joysticks? Or Up The Creek. Or, jesus, Caddyshack?

It’s one of those things I guess that, being that i was there for it then and raised on it, i can try to make the excuse that I’m “grandfathered in.” As long as I’m aware that a lot of it is not okay, that it’s only played for laughs (and some of those laughs are uncomfortable ones now, in a way that’s different than how I was uncomfortable watching breasts bounce across the screen if my parents were in the room watching the movie too). Do we a film because of the bad it has in it even though there might be a lot of good in it too? Or do we put these things away because, while we who lived through them the first time may get that they’re bad actions with some possibly not-as-bad intentions, they might be seen by kids today that aren’t as likely to recognize that. Who might pick up terms and actions and not get how that could be seen as ridiculous or humorous. Or, worse, see it and not realize that it’s wrong at all. How many people that were watching these films from the 70s and 80s on up see nothing wrong with them now?

Since i don’t have kids of my own, and won’t ever, it’s easier for me to see this stuff as an outsider. I don’t have to explain Louis wearing a mask and taking sexual advantage of a girl in a moon room. I don’t have to try to talk out how it’s funny when Bluto looks at the camera with a raised eyebrow when he’s spying on a co-ed through her dorm window as she changes for bed. Effectively as a non-parental, that’s someone else’s cross to bear. But as a person who is constantly trying to make my way into being a better, more enlightened, more caring person today… I do think about it.

I guess it’s easier to explain than my undying love of Xanadu.

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