What........? Why..........? How........?

I can't take anymore, Mr. Lucas. You have crappified so many things....I didn't think it could get worse.....really.....I mean, I was patient, you're an older man now, not quite as up on your game as you used to be.....I just thought, let him do this but know that it isn't real. None if it. Star Wars I-III are figments of the collective unconsciousness's imagination to aid a dying movie director into a slightly cushier retirement.

But no longer. I'm not gonna take it. This--what the hell is this? It looks like an extended Final Fantasy cut scene. I thought the trailer was another lame video game ad. Pixar's Toy Story came out in 1995 and they still had better-looking graphics. How dare you give people these cartoony crap images of Yoda, Jabba the Hut, even C3PO..... What gives you the right? Why haven't we rebelled yet? Why haven't the pure golden nerds of the 70s and 80s generation ganged up and assassinated Lucas yet? For his own good! I can't........I feel so much anger.....my hands.....they keep clenching.....I feel an extraordinary energy inside my bones, building to somehow prevent the shame and embarrassment this movie will inevitably bring upon itself. Why. WHY?!

I watched Hellboy II for five dollars in West Jordan the other evening. It was more charismatic, more beautiful, more charming and interesting and visually captivating than anything Lucas has done in this century. The creatures in Hellboy II made Darth Maul look like a Disney villain. No, worse. Maleficent was way scarier than Darth Maul. I wash my hands of George Lucas from now til forever. Sorry, old friend.

Stormy Weather Fever Reading

Northern Utah this week has been a beautiful mess of thunder, lightning, and double rainbows. I escaped several times this week to my dead grandfather's old garage past the yellow blossom thorn bushes and into his cemetery of massive rusting Caterpillar construction equipment; Gardner, Inc. semi-trucks with breaking hinges and rat droppings on the chapped leather seats; aging tractors my grandfather built practically from his own two hands. It has been haunting and poignant. I want to walk to the cemetery down the lane and lie across his grave, the communion between himself and mine being as raw as it has been as I've retraced his old haunts, slept in his old bed in his old room, kept my clothing in the drawers he once kept his. There is a small brass key I found behind his chest that I like to try in different locks around the house and yard.

I've been reading Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, too, climbing into the driver's seat of Grandpa's CS-323C Vibratory Soil Compactor to get out of the rain, to sink deeper and deeper into Brontë's fever dreams about Heathcliff and his Catherines, of Mrs. Nelly Dean and her clever, humble, tender narration of her several masters and her sideline participation in their selfish bourgeois dramas. I couldn't help but fall victim to their temper tantrums and their angry, vengeful, bitter, torn hearts and subsequent acts of passion. I despised, then pitied, then revered Mr. Edgar Linton and his poor stupid younger sister. Even when I found Heathcliff's demeanor and choice of actions to be despicable and demonic, I wept for him and cried real tears when he dug graves and tore into coffins to reach, in any possible way, the love and light he had selfishly tried to tuck away since his horrendous, abusive boyhood.

I wept for Hareton and fell in love with his Yorkshire accent. I even felt for awful Hindley when Nelly saw his boyish ghost sitting innocently atop a stone wall in the thick of the foggy moors. I am so grateful for Emily's ending to her only novel as I thought for sure the story would have no redemption or hope after all as I neared the closing chapters. I was far from disappointed.

I feel spooked and morbidly active. I dozed as I finished the novel, lying prostate on the antique sofa in my grandma's parlor, waking to the claps of thunder and lightning flashes that echoed through the huge windows overlooking the dirt road running west from the house. I read during a heavy downpour of rain about Heathcliff starving himself on the wet moors beyond the Heights and following the ghost of his other half, his blood soul sister to the kirkyard and back to the house and back to the woods. I know it isn't right, I know these things aren't true--soulmates and such--but I sank my teeth in anyway and bit hard against Heathcliff's agony and wasted revenges and felt Emily should not be critiqued for creating his character in all his monstrosity. His tragic tale manured the soil in his death for what progeny was left of the Earnshaws and Lintons and I think the young people at the close of the novel know more of gratitude for peace and tranquility than they could have otherwise. A beautiful, haunting tale, and one that I will keep by my nightstand for future windy dark afternoons and feverish illnesses.

I will also add that the whole story would have been moot if the society of the novel was not so entirely restrained to two households in the middle of nowhere, to the extreme isolation that cousins had no choice but to marry cousins.

And to follow up from my last blog post, The X-Files movie sucked. Sorry David Duchovny. If any of you all want to really experience the X-Files, go buy seasons 1-3 and enjoy episodes starring more celebrities than you might remember from the 1990s.....Seth Green plays an awesome long haired hoodlum in one of the very first episodes and I just watched a Season 3 episode last week where Jack Black plays the long-haired nerd who owns a Video Arcade and dies in a pile of his own quarters. That episode is also nice for the Sonic the Hedgehog level 1 music playing consistently in the background, not to mention the James' songs that hit the jukebox just before another victim bites it. Revisit them! You can't be disappointed!

To be out there, or not to be out there--that is the Truth.

Yes, I am very excited. I'm taking my mom to see the new X-Files movie the day after it comes out--July 26th. I have fond memories of when Mom, Amanda and I went to the theater for the first X-Files movie back in 1998. I was a junior in high school and still coming out of one of my many awkward phases. Amanda wanted to shove somewhere between 5 and 15 straws together to make one long superstraw so she wouldn't have to keep lifting her drink out of the arm-rest cupholder. She handed me her fistful of straws and napkins and sent me to go save seats. I remember thinking that was a huge low point in my life....sitting by myself in an empty dark theater, waiting to see the X-Files movie with twenty straws in one hand, twenty napkins in the other, no food or drink to accompany them.

I was not a huge fan of that movie....I was a huge of the series, though. An X-Phile before even hitting puberty. These episodes of aliens, bigfoots, vampires, and giant leech-men who live in the sewers were my escape from the stupid 7th grade world I hated. I would daydream about Fox Mulder in Spanish class, when Mr. Ferrin (who doubled as the school drama teacher) would give us such Spanish commands as, "We will clean up the stage. Limpiamos la etapa. We will paint this wood. Vamos a pintar esta madera. You will not sleep on that couch. Usted no dormir que en el sofá."

Mom and I would snuggle up with blankets and ice cream and popcorn for each new weekly installment of Scully and Mulder drama. The flesh eating bugs, the midnight corn crops, the government conspiracies, the dark cellars of abandoned houses, the unexplainable and the weird played on my since-elementary-school enthusiastic lust for science fiction (I blame Madeleline L'Engle and Roald Dahl. And Ray Bradbury. And L.M. Montgomery while we're at it. Emily of New Moon had psychic powers, man). How could a 13-year-old awkward young girl not be in love with David Duchovny? I really felt like we could have had an intellectual connection if we ever met in real life. "I believe!" I would have said, and we would have commenced on wild adventures and always survive them because that's how TV works.


Well, I'm a little older and disillusioned these days, but still fan enough to blog a plug for the upcoming film. Chris Carter says they dropped most of the uber-complexed spiderweb network of clues and conspiracies that suffocated the end of the original series--the bees, the smoking men, the Mulder in a Native American healing yert...... Instead, they scripted a film akin to the first few seasons of The X-Files, the glory days, the salad days. I think I just might have to wear my pajamas to the theater and cuddle up with a blanket and bowl of popcorn.

[Jade, if you're reading this, I haven't forgotten our midnight X-Files routine and how you were too afraid to have your feet on the carpet while we were watching. Those were the days when Conan didn't always spin right before his opening monologue. We loved it when he did, though.]

Celebrating Independence in Idaho

4th of July weekend was one of the better weekends of my days. It was everything a 4th of July should be.....I felt very full of celebration, freedom, hope, God, love, blood, and the pursuit of happiness. Rexburg has become a place for my soul. Some places still catch my breath, some places still make me breathe easier than I have in weeks. Rexburg is like the trail for me. There are trees, rocks, trails, people that make the air sacred, the soil different from other soil. Places like the Bloody Basin and Cherry Creek and Sharon's backyard are the kind of places that possess people to take jars of sand and bags of rocks to carry their sacredness with them wherever they go. I have heartstrings there. I have broken pieces of myself scattered throughout, but they are tenderly broken, tenderly mended. Not like Logan, where parts of me have shattered and been bit....I do not think of Logan fondly. It is one of the only homes I've had that never became home to me. I met kindred spirits there, I found hope and light and reason there, but I do not care to visit the soil there. The Logan cemetery, maybe, but even that place's peace is too uneven.

These are the things I did that I loved about last weekend. The pictures are from last weekend and from the summer of 2005, when Sharon and her land embraced me home from Japan. The shish-kabob pictures are from mere days after I returned from Tokyo. It was one of the fondest reunions next to when I greeted my mom and my family at the airport and they drove me back home after being away for so long. I am so blessed by my family and friends. I am so blessed by what the different homes of my life have kept and remembered for me.

Things I Loved:

1. My car got egged the morning of the 4th. I drove from Layton to Rexburg with egg yolk running down the side of my car, egg shell stuck to dried egg whites on my side-view mirror. I embraced the rebellion of the boys/girls who attacked my haughty 2000 Hyundai Elantra. I feel like it was an initiation hazing for her. I'm going to call her Elaine. I think her spirit mingled with Charlie's in whatever pre-existence engine souls come from.
2. The Rexburg, Idaho, Independence Day Parade. They drove a tank down the streets and sprayed everyone in the vicinity with gallons of high-powered water. I loved how heated up and political that made Sharon. I love that the bike cop was Chompers from the College Ave days of 2001. Chompers, the security guard at the old Spori before it burned down...or was he the security guard at the Spori as it was being built? My years are jumbling together. Those were the Christopher Bailey days...my arch nemesis who sat on my chest and stuffed my mouth with Brazilian nuts and threatened me with swirlies every Sunday. I had arch nemeses in those days.
3. Sharon and her Writing Center toadies. The David O. McKay Writing Center kids...what a clan...what a cult. We are all blood brothers. We're like Shriners. They ought to wear a red fez to match their little black vests. I used to keep candy in those vest pockets and then forget about it. That would really peeve Jared off.
4. Lying on the grass. Independence and freedom is the ability to lie on the grass if you want to. Lie on the grass with a humongous 59 cent drink from Horkley's. Stare at the overcast Idaho sky and look at Chandler's bird books, breaking in your new sneakers with grass stains.
5. Madison County's Whoopee Days Rodeo. My vegan sister doesn't need to know I went or that I enjoyed it. I love love love that I went to a Rexburg rodeo with Jen Russell Parkins little brother. It was as close as I could get to Jen. It was pretty darn close too! Neither one of them are rodeo people and getting either one of them at a rodeo is a success! Jen, I miss you!! The rodeo was great, even when my allergies kicked in just before the bulls came out. I love making whoopee with Madison County.
6. The Whoopee Days fireworks. We didn't make it to Idaho Falls for any of the Melaleuca Extravaganzique but the Rexburg 'works were charming and perfect in their own way. One explosion.........another explosion.........another.....two at one time!........one explosion.........one.........another......ALL OF REST AT ONCE!!! BOOM! FLASH! KICK IN THE PANTS GLORY! More lying in the grass. Running in the grass, lying in the grass, switching back and forth.
7. I sidestepped out after the fireworks and saw Old Friend Troy. We watched Rosemary's Baby and ate pizza in one of Rexburg's crappier top floor apartments. I had been there five years earlier when it was girls' housing. I had studied Spanish on the balcony. The movie was excellent. I'm glad I wasn't pregnant when I saw it.
8. We finally chainsawed up the trees that fell in Sharon's yard. Take that Emily L. Pew! (She didn't think me + chainsaw = good idea)
9. Meeting up with Sharon's toadies in Rexburg's big fat real theater/bowling-alley and watching WALL-E--a surprisingly fantastic
and I-will-stand-behind-it film. I highly recommend it. I laughed, I cried, I watched it by myself on the front row next to two five-year-olds because it was too dark to find my new friends. I laughed at all the places the five-year-olds did and felt proud of that.
10. I love that two .9 mm pistols showed up at the pinochle table at the exact moment two ghostly white kittens appeared on the edge of Sharon's porch, walking towards where we sat talking into the smoke of the fire, roasting marshmallows.
11. I love that the cops were called, that Megan, Sharon, and I boxed up the kitties and drove them to Idaho Falls at a quarter to midnight and rescued the pink-eyed sickly white white kittens to the Humane Society drop-off, with cat food and styrofoam bowls of water. I love that two huge collared owner-less dogs ran around us while we secured the kittens in their metal quarters. I love that we stopped for slurpees on the way home.
12. I love talking to blood sisters.
13. I loved driving home....the road between Layton and Rexburg will always be a time for reflection and processing for me. It is a highly symbolic road, signifying so much travel, so much movement, but it always leads me right back to one of those two homes. I remember when I first traveled it at 18-years-old in August 2000. I remember thinking, "Wow, cinder blocks to make your bed go higher! How brilliant!" My roommate, Erin Hamp, and I watched the first episode of the second season of Survivor that night, when reality TV was so new and strange...it would never last, we all thought. It was both our first time for the show. We ended up watching the whole season in our apartment that semester, and we would occasionally vote people out of the apartment. Mostly me, because I left dishes all over the house. But I was the funny one, so they always let me back in. That first night in Rexburg I ate corn-on-the-cob and orange sherbet and vanilla ice cream and I cried myself to sleep. But even as I cried myself to sleep, I remember I still acknowledged that cinder blocks truly were a brilliant idea.

Wipeout! Game Show Completes My Soul

I am in love. Nothing has so gratifyingly scratched my persistent itch for slapstick humor since John Ritter tripped over his bellbottoms into lemon meringue pie held against Suzanne Somers' chest. I watched the rerun of the first episode with my grandma on Sunday, and my heart was transformed. I was skeptical at first (we had had a bad experience with American Gladiators the week before....two thumbs waaaaaaaay down), but by the time the second girl had to have her buttcrack digitally censored because her pants were falling down, and then she proceeded to bellyslide limply through the obstacle course's finale because she was close to passing out from fatigue, I laughed so hard I gave up grading papers and propped my feet upon the pile of them at the other end of the couch, leaned back, balanced a plate of sandwiches on my chest and focused on nothing else for the rest of the hour.

I miss the golden age of Double Dare after school. I miss Marc Summers and his obsessive-compulsive disorder at odds with the gaggles of green-gooed kids tackling him around the waist from the sheer bliss of their new bikes and Nike tennis shoes they won from successfully de-flagging The Giant Nose. I miss Legends of the Hidden Temple with Olmec and I even sort of miss that stupid Shop Til You Drop show my little sister used to make me watch with her. I miss obstacle courses.

Thank you Wipeout! for being my summer companion. If you have not yet experienced this television program, please watch the following clip in all its entirety. You will not be disappointed. You have to keep from getting cynical in the first couple of minutes, namely the girl who hates her ex. John & John, the commentators, are particularly punny in this first round, but things really get rolling with Margie Stubbs, the second contestant. She won me over to this show. She did, and the Big Balls did. I have yet to see someone try to cross the Big Balls that didn't make me laugh out loud in realtime. I love the Big Balls. I'll say it again. I love the Big Balls. I'm not ashamed to say that. The Big Balls are my favorite. And I even finally found John & John palatable when they quipped, after the particularly effeminate kah-rah-tay specialist bellyflops off part of the course, that he "must have received his rainbow belt from the Bob Fosse JouDou." It was a distasteful joke, but a suprisingly clever one. Or maybe that was just because it came after a long stream of puns.

Remarkably, by the time the show progresses to the end and you've seen people fall on their heads enough times for them to have lost vast amounts of freshman college curriculum brain cells, you are actually rooting for the last survivors on the final obstacle course. This one is held at night time, and there is a glorious spectacle of fire and water, and it's all very electric and post-apocolyptic. I want all my friends to start watching this show so that someday when I'm on it you can all cheer for me while I make an ass of myself reality-TV-style. Watch it. Tuesday nights or Sunday nights. ABC.