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Have you ever wondered why you like the bad guy so much when you watch a movie or read a novel? You cannot quite seem to put your finger on it, but there is something alluring about being afraid. Sure, we lash out at fear from time to time. We hate fear when we are under the impression that it is causing us harm. And sometimes fear does cause harm by crippling us with irrational phobias. Anyone who has ever seen a three hundred pound adult male screaming like the female lead in a horror film over the sight of a mouse knows this all too well. Sometimes fear can make us irrational. This is certainly true. However, fear is an emotion, just like love or happiness, and, like all emotions, it has a very distinct evolutionary purpose. Though we may no longer need the intense fear that is felt when living in a jungle and seeing a wild animal all the time, even this extreme fear has its uses, especially when we are confronted by terrorists, cult leaders, rapists, and other bad actors who mean us harm. But there is a much more rational use for fear than simply evading predators. Fear motivates us to achieve and make goals for ourselves. Often times what motivates us to change careers or to pursue the impossible is a fear of being unwanted, undervalued, forgotten, or left behind. We fear some things that are actually pretty awful, such as failure, disappointment or rejection. None of those things have any real benefit. So, the fear in these situations is actually the motivator to change, not the problem. When fear is functioning properly, it instructs us and informs our decisions. Perhaps we avoid certain situations we know are dangerous. But why do we do this? Because we are afraid of the consequences of course. Perhaps we refuse a particular substance because we have heard on the news that this particular substance causes harm; again, fear in this situation actually benefits us instead of making us act irrationally. It is completely rational to fear the consequences of ingesting foreign chemicals, especially when those chemicals are on the black market or have not been tested for quality. Then there is the classic example of domestic abuse. Is it irrational to fear having the living daylights beaten out of you in the name of "love"? Of course not! We should absolutely fear this and we should use that fear to escape the undeserved punishment. So, in short, fear gets blamed too often. A person without fear is a person who does not understand life, a person who has no business lecturing you on how to live your life and a person who can cause you great harm if you let your guard down. High levels of fearlessness is also closely associated with psychopathy. So, be afraid...but don't be very afraid. That would be overdoing it. 

September the eleventh 2001 is not the story of Osama Bin Laden. It is not the story of Al Qaeda, nor is it the story of terrorism. It is a story of humanity in all its forms, both glorious and brutal, triumphant and foolish, strong and weak, joyful and discouraged. I could try and make 9/11 about me if I wanted to. I could talk crap about George W. Bush Jr., but you probably already heard that on youtube and twitter. I could rail against the scourges of radical Islam, but you have already seen that on the news. I could tell you it was all a plot by the government, but Alex Jones has already lied enough for all of us when it comes to that. I could get real childish and blame those attacks on the right or the left or the middle, but someone you know has undoubtedly already taken care of that. I could even make the silly claim that America's outpouring of grief for 9/11 is somehow insincere, that people never really did come together that day, that, beneath it all, people are just performing when they say they care about 9/11. But you already heard that in a gossip column somewhere. You have already heard most of what people have to opine about that day. This episode is not about my opinions. That is not to say I will not share them with you, but that is not what this is about. I simply want to present you with a history of 9/11 that does not shy from the agony of the fateful day, that does not try to sugarcoat what actually happened both during and after those cowardly attacks and how it changed the course of American history forever. I will leave no information out. No American story will go untold. This is the history of 9/11, a history of using agony as motivation to achieve and overcome the impossible. This is the real 9/11. It is my story. It is your story. There is no "his" story to speak of. 

We have all been there before. You get in an Uber right before the deadliest pandemic in the world begins having absolutely no idea that such a thing is even happening. You are stoked to be going home after a long night of performing for complete strangers, but you are still exhausted from a long week's work, so much so that all that talk about your company shutting down for the next one, two or three years and having to lay you off goes right over your head. You get in the car, thankful to not have to take Caltrain, which, if there is a devil, is almost certainly his preferred method of transportation. You splurge and decide to take a car home for once. The car is nice and in impeccable condition and, look at that, the driver is well dressed, quiet and seems to have great manners. No thoughts of the driver being a raving maniac who has devoted his life to spreading misinformation crosses your mind. You kick, back and relax. The drive goes smoothly, but, as you near your house, something changes. Sweat beads on the driver's forehead. Then you realize his entire face is covered in sweat. He seems upset, deranged even. He jumps from sentence to sentence, while jerking his head around to talk to you in sudden and intrusive ways. You cannot even tell if he is looking at the street anymore. His eyes dance around the car. He is not really talking to you anymore; he is lecturing you, but the lecture is completely incoherent. Something about Trump. Something about the virus you just heard about a couple of weeks ago. The phrase, "the media is lying to you" gets used a lot. Something about waking up is mentioned. Then you finally reach your destination and you hop out of the car before it's too late. The mad driver shouts some other nonsense about "sheep" or "cattle" and drives off into the night, leaving you mystified and confused. You don't take him seriously, very few people could. But you remember the panic in his eyes. You know the panic is imagined; but you also know that panic was very real to him, and that when people panic, they become dangerous. Okay, well, maybe we have not all been exactly there before, but you get my point. The Uber driver, or as I like to call him, the dude with the crackhead face represents so much of what used to be my life: fear of rejection, obsession with prophetic visions, desiring to be in groups that you are not wanted in, feeling left out, lashing out at others, a desperate yearning for control, unbridled paranoia about the unknown, defensiveness, distrust of the media, wild assumptions about those more successful than you, and so on. I left all of that behind, but I can still recognize it when I see it. I suppose I looked that way once. I suppose I once yammered on incoherently to someone while they listened in horror. And, almost two years into the pandemic, whenever I think about the dude with the crackhead face, all I can ever seem to think to myself is, "conspiracy theories are one hell of a drug".  

The landlords of the nation recently made it seem as if they were victims in the recent debate over eviction moratoriums. They were on the news everyday, violins softly playing in the background as they whined about the evil poor people who were supposedly taking advantage of their kindness. That is an interesting claim, especially considering that they had to be forced into compliance from the get go. The truth is that the landlords never wanted any help from the government. They did not want the money; they wanted to force people out of their homes so that they could jack up the rent. Most of the landlords specifically refused money set aside for them in the rent relief program initiated by the Biden administration. Their reasons for doing this were as childish as they were downright insidious. According to the wall street journal, landlords stated that they wanted to evict tenants that they considered "problematic". Problematic? What the hell does that even mean? It is hard to say what they meant by that because they never actually elaborated on their claim. However, their tenants were free people; they were not in jail. So, can we really just assume that these people were trouble makers? Shouldn't the tenants have had their right to a trail to be deemed problematic by an actual judge? This never happened. Let's face it, the word "problematic" can mean a lot of things. Perhaps some tenants smoked when they should not have or perhaps they listened to music a bit too loudly or maybe even engaged in free thought on occasion or, god forbid, free speech. Is that grounds to toss someone out on the street? Hardly. Another reason the landlords gave for refusing the relief money was that they did not want to give their information to the government. Um...what? Why is that an acceptable excuse? Do you know who else does not like the government to have their information? Criminals, especially those committing tax fraud. Al Capone would certainly approve this message, but I sure as hell do not. Meanwhile, just today a couple dining at an outdoor eating establishment was robbed in broad daylight in an affluent neighborhood. I suppose that is the price you pay when you side with greedy landlords instead of the so-called "problematic" poor people that could still be sitting in their homes right now had you all not fell for this stupid song and dance about poor landlords. We all know that, when faced with death, people will do anything to survive. I suppose that now the landlords problems are your problems. Have fun dining out. Sounds like a real blast.   

It makes perfect sense that competition, one of the cornerstones of American economics, is hailed as a positive trait...in America anyway. Capitalism operates by pitting businesses against each other, forcing them to engage in a kind of Darwinian dystopian brawl to the death where one business is constantly trying to figure out how best to scam the other out of valuable resources and customers. This has led many to opine that our system is somehow broken; I would argue that the system is working just fine. Capitalism is designed to make a few people very rich, very quickly. It serves no other purpose than that. The only period where capitalism did not do this was after WWII (a luxury reserved mostly for white male veterans of WWII by the way; black people, women and others never benefited from this brief period of compromise between monopolies and the working class), but all the labor movements during that period have long since died out. Sure, you still have labor unions, but their power has been so weakened by the system, that they are hardly taken seriously by political leaders any longer. There were also strong movements to nationalize at least a portion of the economy during these times; France and many other nations attempted to nationalize about a quarter of their economic systems in order to get people out of poverty. However, this attempt at fairness was eventually rejected by the monopolies and corporate owners of the time and have once again been smacked down by democrats and republicans of this era. We are now operating in what is known as "the free market", but it is really nothing more than corporate welfare. The wealthy refuse to pay taxes and seek out ways of avoiding paying them at all cost, while at the same time paying out comically low wages as landlords starve us all to death with equally laughably high rent and utility costs. There will be no savings or property gain from this idiotic system of competition and the prize waiting for us all at the end of the contest is most likely a trip to a subpar nursing home with drastically reduced social security payments and likely no retirement to speak of. The heartlessness in such a system should be more than apparent, but, instead people like to make excuses for this callous behavior, arguing that it is good for people to suffer unnecessarily because that increases competition. Well, they are right that it increases competition, but they are wrong that competition somehow produces better character or stronger work ethic. It produces neither. When we compete against each other, we are trying to win at all costs. That means breaking the rules, fudging the facts and even sabotaging others who may be more talented or likeable than we are. In fact, studies have shown that people who display good, pro social behavior during competitions are rewarded for their efforts with bad, anti-social punishments from others in the same group. In fact, the study showed that people were five times more likely to punish people for good behavior during a competition than they were when there was no competition going on at all. I don't care what your politics are; if you are punishing people for being good, then it should come as no surprise to you that things like crime and the hatred of social institutions are on the rise. The irony of competition is that it encourages anti-social behavior. It makes you money, if you are ruthless enough that is, but it certainly does not make you any friends. 

I was born into this world a loner. I have always been alone. As a young person, this was extremely depressing to me. I would often lay in bed, fantasizing about how I would make the world love me. I was so sad, so deeply sad, and I thought that the love of others would cure me of this sadness. But, that is not how depression works; it does not have an on or off switch. It depends on your physical as well as your mental well being, and neither of those can be obtained by making friends, especially if those friends are not even in it for the long haul. Many friendships are unfulfilling for me. I take a lot of time trying to understand others and it is a rare occasion that I get that kind of attention in return. Call me needy, but I think that a friendship should be a two way street. You put in what you want out of it, and if what you are putting into a friendship is nothing more than giving someone a phone call every six months, then you are just not the kind of person I would have any desire to sustain any kind of relationship with. But don't take my word for it. Have a listen to Plato, where we get the term "platonic relationship" from. Plato stated about friendship that, "...when one of them meets the  other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy and one will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment...” Now, that kind of friendship is something that I can really get into. It is sad to think how much we have lost sight of what the word friendship originally meant in our culture, how it was so much more than just a quick like on twitter or a trip together to the mall. While we often associate the sharing of personal information with friendship today, the Ancient Greeks valued honesty and frankness. They also understood this concept of frankness on the continent of Africa. An ancient African proverb states, "honest advice doesn't destroy true friendship". The emphasis in the ancient world was on honesty, while the emphasis in the modern world seems to be much more about vanity and keeping up the appearances that go along with friendship. Then there are those from my career who claimed to be my friends, all the producers, all the directors, all the managers, all the people who are only friendly when they need something from you. Those people lied to me and said they would be there for me, only to abandon me during the pandemic. Are they expecting me to forget this, to pretend as if people somehow can just be put on hold until things "get back to normal" in two years? Or three years? Or, if you are in the entertainment industry, five years? I sure hope not because, if they do, they will be sorely disappointed. Yes, I am alone. I am not sad, just alone. And, for once, I am proud of it. Here's looking at you loner. 

Perhaps you have not noticed. Maybe you have not been paying attention or, more than likely, you just don't give a damn anymore. But, unfortunately for Hollywood, the honeymoon very much seems to be over. Box office numbers tanked for the second year in a row in 2021. This may seem to be just a temporary situation due to the pandemic, but, as I am sure you know, people have continued to attend various events, many of them indoors, even when lock downs have been in full affect. This makes the argument that Hollywood's box office struggles are just a symptom of the pandemic seem much less sincere than they were in 2020. In fact, box office numbers have been declining for years. Hollywood was able to disguise this by making mostly short CG films (low cost green screen romps that last for about ninety minutes and leave the audience super bored...I mean, "wanting more", as the producers say); however, these short and often incomplete scripts have left audiences cold...at least on going to the theater anyway. Streaming services are booming. People just do not see the worth in making the expensive trip to the theater anymore. And, really, can you blame them? I have been saying for years that Hollywood has forgotten the key rule to entertainment: if the audience does not show up, you do not have a show, you have a liability. In the case of Hollywood they have thousands of liabilities that cost them billions of dollars to make, and with nothing but negative returns to show for it. This has been a long time coming. Hollywood spends most of its time marketing in movies now. You do not watch a Stephen Spielberg film anymore; you watch a ninety minute commercial Spielberg supervised for a few hours. You are not watching a movie preview; you are watching a very sophisticated marketing campaign based on the viewing habits Netflix records. You are not watching acting; you are watching pill pushers, lifestyle gurus, hellfire preachers, political pundits, and talking heads. None of it is original. All of it is the same. After awhile, people catch on. They realize that, if everything is just going to be a big advertisement anyway, then why not just stay at home? At least then you can fast forward through the commercials. The last movie I attended had about thirty minutes of commercials and previews combined! That's not advertising; that's some Guantanamo Bay shit. In fact, it's worse than torture; people don't make you pay eighty bucks for torture. I have also noticed that Hollywood is now becoming less and less progressive: offering less opportunities to LGBTQIA members, fewer opportunities for actors of color, steadily distancing itself from liberal causes. I mean where the hell were they on abortion? Voting rights? The constant abuse of trans women? Nowhere to be found. So, forget Hollywood. They don't want people like you and me anyway, so screw em. Come to think of it, it really hurt me when they raised those prices. I grew up dreaming of being in the movies and those constant price hikes made me feel like there was no place for the likes of me in a movie theater anymore. But hey, we all have streaming services now and some of us are even lucky enough to have backyards where we can build our own outdoor theaters and enjoy real acting that we want to see. You know, the good stuff, the real interesting stories that spineless marketing executives and cowardly movie producers will only ever ignore. So, pull up a bean bag, make yourself comfortable, grab some popcorn, and let the binge watching commence. Welcome to the new night at the movies my friend. It's been a long time coming. 

When the first horror film, "House of the Devil", slashed its way onto the projection screen in 1896, people probably thought it was a fluke, a genre that was doomed to eventually fail, like the romantic comedy or the all too overdone team sports movie. However, in the year 2021 horror movies are, in fact, the only genre that has consistently drawn large groups of people to theaters during lock downs. All other genres have failed miserably at repeating this success story. Family oriented films are struggling; yes, even Pixar. Who would've thought that movie goers would actually want to see real people acting? It's much better watching poorly drawn cartoons with a bunch of CG crap edited on top of it to save money, am I right? Summer box office smashes are flailing and bombing big time. And action movies are dying harder than ever before. But the horror film lives on, no matter how corny or unrealistic they can be. This makes perfect sense to us. After all, Melissa and I have always loved Halloween. I don't care if I should have said Melissa and me because Melissa and I sounds better, so deal with it. Horror has a funny way of bringing people together, especially when the times are tough. I will never forget the early days of the pandemic when the only place I seemed to find any solace was in horror movies. I also took a lot of pleasure in researching all of the fantastic costume and makeup transformations people had put together online. It was truly amazing watching people take concepts that should have disgusted people and turn them into some of the best art I had ever seen. Of course the search engine gods were not happy with me observing all of this naughty material. Several times, as I searched for the next best gore and horror concepts I had ever seen, I kept being inundated with messages about how suicide is not good. The algorithm was essentially making the assumption that, because I liked looking at fake horror costumes on a computer, that I was now suicidal. Mind you, this was during the Halloween season last year so you could see how I would be a little offended by such an assumption, the kind of assumption that only the boring wealthy people who have no time for costumes would make. Since when do you have to be suicidal to play pretend? Horror is about so much more than just the look or the special effects. Sure, that's part of it. But the horror story is just as important to understanding why people become so infatuated with the number holiday of the dead and sugar crazed. Horror movies are essentially the story of fear and paranoia. Fear plays tricks on the brain and paranoia shortly follows, turning those optical illusions into a sense of impending doom. But horror movies often show us the error of our ways as well. These scary films frighten us into realizing the crucial mistakes we made in building a society that is only for those deemed "successful". The killer in these films are often lonely, abandoned individuals, who, for whatever reason, do not fit in to society as they should. Because of this these killers grow bitter and cold; their love for their fellow humans turns to hate and their lust for revenge increases with every kill. The victims in horror movies are often self-absorbed, full of hatred for those who are different from them, spoiled, and arrogant. So, in a sense, a good horror movie makes you see things from the killer and the victim's perspective; and, perhaps most unsettling of all, it reminds us that there is not all that much difference between the two...apart from a butcher knife and a bloody mask of course. 

Do you like pop culture? Whatever your answer to that question may be, it is also important to note that some people you have most likely never met want you to despise it. There are many reasons for this, but the main one is that hatred of pop culture creates division and, eventually, isolation. Popular culture gives us something to talk about, something that, after all of the toxic shouting matches we have with each other on an almost hourly basis, we can rely on to provide us with some common ground. I am not saying that pop culture is the ultimate uniting force in the world. However, it is an effective way to get different groups talking to each other so that, one day at least, they can sustain peace with each other. Sure, I may disagree with James about the validity of protesting social injustice, but at least we can share a snack over a baseball game. I may not agree with Jessica that the government should stay out of our business, but at least we can talk about the latest episode of "Godfather of Harlem". Perhaps Justin is a bit of a loner, but we still share stories about Gordon Ramsay's latest recipes. In fact, when you start to analyze how well pop culture brings people together, it kind of makes you wonder why someone would want to attack it in the first place. Why put up more barriers instead of breaking those barriers down? What is the goal here? What are the various talking heads trying to do with us this time? As long as there has been pop culture (it started during the industrial revolution with the creation of the mass printing press), there have been people, generally very wealthy people, who have attacked and tried to censor, distort or control it. Perhaps the elite do not want us to see what we have in common. Perhaps the whole goal here is drive people further apart by destroying anything they could have found common ground on. Popular culture is, in a sense, American culture. You can get it fast, cheap and at a high quality. And it even comes in all shapes, sizes and colors. I must admit that I once hated popular culture as well...But I also must admit that the reason I once hated popular culture, may very well have been because I hated myself. 

Pretentiousness, the act of showing off to others in order to inflate your own talents and abilities, annoys most people...or does it? It certainly seems as if pretentiousness should annoy at least most of us. After all, many of us claim to be moral beings who seek truth and justice for all. But actions always speak louder than words and what we do in real life is often very different from what we report about it later. The reality is that pretentiousness comes from a deep place of wanting to be heard and taken seriously. A person can want to be heard for many different reasons, but the drive to be heard over others can either come from a place of insecurity or downright arrogance. Some people are so haughty that they simply believe that they must be right and cannot be wrong. Others feel left out by society and so devolve into fantasy in an attempt to cope with the pain and rejection that often accompanies being proven incorrect. But, if all people who are pretentious are attempting to do is get our attention, then why on earth would they further push us away by doing something we dislike? Most would simply assume that it is because they are crazy, but that is a lazy person's answer often used to dismiss a person without providing any real evidence. The real answer to why people behave pretentiously is that people respond to pretentious behavior more than they respond to what would be considered "good" behavior. If you think about it, pretentiousness in popular culture and even in what people would call "high culture" (opera, symphonies, ballet, etc.) is pretty much everywhere you look. Billionaires boast on twitter about their latest stock purchases. Celebrities brag constantly about being the best in their respective fields. Politicians constantly talk about all the wonderful things they have done for all of us instead of addressing current problems. But it goes beyond just bragging. Being pretentious is a great way to get everyone to pay attention to you and it has become almost a required part of all marketing campaigns. It is not longer just news you are watching; it is the most unbiased, most professional, most error free professional journalism you have ever seen. It is not longer just a debate; it is a childish war between two ideologies. I can no longer just tell you a fact; I have to cite twenty-nine sources before you will even admit the sky is blue. It is no longer about being rational while keeping an open mind; it is about having the biggest brain in the room and "destroying" detractors with your superior high functioning cognitive abilities. Everyone has to be the best at everything now. However, people are so busy trying inform everyone on the planet that they are the best around that they have forgotten such behavior is the very definition of pretentiousness. So, why are people being so pretentious? Perhaps, deep down, we all would like to be.