Last night I had this dream: Although I was fairly certain I never had any, I knew I'd somehow lost my golondrinas.

For class I've been reading "On Being the Object of Property" by Patricia Williams and "Decolonizing the Mind" by Ngugi Wa Thiongo. In a desperate and ultimately futile attempt to free myself from bottomless nausea, I grabbed my battered copy of Dharma Bums, read it, re-read it, and imagined myself not-here. Out of here. There.

Maybe that's why I had this dream of tracking down my golondrinas. Beautiful afternoon, in my dream, wearing shorts and flipfloppers, no shirt, a red bandana over my hair, sunglasses; and I was drinking a glass of milk for some reason that began to bother me after I realized what I was drinking. I'm not quite sure, but I think that's when I started thinking about my missing golondrinas.

It was a pretty heartbreaking moment, actually, oddly, not frightening or making me panic, but so sad that I knew I was about to lose it--right there in public. The next part of the dream I can't quite remember, though I have an impression of a strange hike to my apartment, dodging streets and bars where I believed people might recognize me--and I don't remember why I was hiding; maybe it was an extension of not wanting to break down in public. Still, I wasn't really sad anymore. I just wanted to get home unnoticed.

I'm pretty sure this home I was trying to reach was not where I live now; on the other hand, I'm pretty sure I've never lived in the apartment that I eventually located and entered. At this point I'm excited, anticipating the telling of my adventure (fleeing home, not searching for golondrinas) to my girlfriend. When I finally open the door to my apartment, she's lounging in a huge beanbag drinking something clear and icy, wearing a light, intricately flowered summer dress that covers fewer important things than a long t-shirt. She's watching the Food Network.

"I made it!" I hollered. I'm happy as can be. She giggles. Then she asks me what's the problem.

I'm stumped. I can't think of any way of telling her what I've just been through. Then I realize that I'm not sure what I've just been through--the one thing I can remember at all is that my golondrinas are missing. And that's when I wake up.

And that's also when I realize I have no idea what the living hell "golondrinas" means. I was pretty sure "golondrinas" was Spanish for something-or-other, or it was simple gibberish that my brain had scrounged together for uncouth reasons unclear.

So I get up, 6 AM, piss like I'm sourcing the Nile, and Google my "golondrinas."

Tree Swallows. I need more coffee.

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Taboo Tenente: A Thinker's MFA Journey - Home

Two months, let's say, until spring.

Days, afternoons, evenings, stupid nights, mornings--I remember the mornings. I get up early. I like mornings. I love coffee. I don't give a shit about food in the morning, but I French-Press the living shit out of French Roast. I wait--no, I pace until five minutes pass. I pour coffee into a spaghetti jar. I clean the filter, soak the press. Maybe I open a Powerbar. Sometimes I make a cup of Shredded Wheat. Doesn't matter. I make the coffee, I bring it upstairs to my computer, drink, and think about spring.

I feel the caffeine in my eyebrows. That's how I know it's working. I can look forward to the morning hours once my eyebrows start fizzing. Yeah. Nice. All is well.

Except for the winter, which I used to love before I got this damned computer. Who can write in front of a computer? I've got stacks of journals and notebooks, pack-jammed with righteous bullshit; I have a hard drive filled with two-paragraph introductions to a world of nothingness.

My voice is different on a computer. It's not me. Or it wasn't. In the spring I throw forty pounds of books, three notebooks, a thirty-two ouncer of blue power-aid, two v-ball extra-fine black ink pens, an iPod, some cash, some tissues, a towel, a cellphone, five different drafts of the same story, and maybe a snickers into a ten dollar backpack, and then I walk down to the Boston Commons. That's it. I'm good for three hours and fifteen minutes until bladder bubbles foam to the surface. On especially good days, I can clean myself up and then return to the Commons. I can write all day, long hand, looking at trees, defending my snickers against squirrels, making friends with day drunks, looking at the sun.

I worry about my voice. What's more important than voice? I've been living on cellphones and email and suddenly my voice sounds like a dial tone. I can't see my audience, I can't speak to my friends or my lovers--in a way that I should be speaking. Relationships look like sitcoms. Or tragedies. Or melodrama. Or nothing. Afternoon, evening, night. An alarm.

Space. Space. Shift. Return. COFFEE. Spring.

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Taboo Tenente: A Thinker's MFA Journey - Home

"Hills Like White Elephants"
By Ernest Hemingway
The Complete Short Stories Of Ernest Hemingway

"THE HILLS ACROSS the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went to Madrid.

'It's pretty hot,' the man said.

'Let's drink beer.'

'Dos cervezas,' the man said into the curtain.

'Big ones?' a woman asked from the doorway.

'Yes. Two big ones.'

The woman brought two glasses of beer and two felt pads. She put the felt pads and the beer glass on the table and looked at the man and the girl. The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.

'They look like white elephants,' she said.

'I've never seen one,' the man drank his beer.

'No, you wouldn't have.'

'I might have,' the man said. 'Just because you say I wouldn't have doesn't prove anything.'

The girl looked at the bead curtain. 'They've painted something on it,' she said. 'What does it say?'

'Anis del Toro. It's a drink.'

'Could we try it?'

The man called 'Listen' through the curtain. The woman came out from the bar.

'Four reales.'

'We want two Anis del Toro.'

'With water?'

'Do you want it with water?'

'I don't know,' the girl said. 'Is it good with water?'

'It's all right.'

'You want them with water?' asked the woman.

'Yes, with water.'

'It tastes like liquorice,' the girl said and put the glass down.

'That's the way with everything.'

'Yes,' said the girl. 'Everything tastes of liquorice. Especially all the things you've waited so long for, like absinthe.'

'Oh, cut it out.'

'You started it,' the girl said. 'I was being amused. I was having a fine time.'

'Well, let's try and have a fine time.'

'All right. I was trying. I said the mountains looked like white elephants. Wasn't that bright?'

'That was bright.'

'I wanted to try this new drink. That's all we do, isn't it - look at things and try new drinks?'

'I guess so.'

The girl looked across at the hills.

'They're lovely hills,' she said. 'They don't really look like white elephants. I just meant the colouring of their skin through the trees.'

'Should we have another drink?'

'All right.'

The warm wind blew the bead curtain against the table.

'The beer's nice and cool,' the man said.

'It's lovely,' the girl said.

'It's really an awfully simple operation, Jig,' the man said. 'It's not really an operation at all.'

The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.

'I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig. It's really not anything. It's just to let the air in.'

The girl did not say anything.

'I'll go with you and I'll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it's all perfectly natural.'

'Then what will we do afterwards?'

'We'll be fine afterwards. Just like we were before.'

'What makes you think so?'

'That's the only thing that bothers us. It's the only thing that's made us unhappy.'

The girl looked at the bead curtain, put her hand out and took hold of two of the strings of beads.

'And you think then we'll be all right and be happy.'

'I know we will. Yon don't have to be afraid. I've known lots of people that have done it.'

'So have I,' said the girl. 'And afterwards they were all so happy.'

'Well,' the man said, 'if you don't want to you don't have to. I wouldn't have you do it if you didn't want to. But I know it's perfectly simple.'

'And you really want to?'

'I think it's the best thing to do. But I don't want you to do it if you don't really want to.'

'And if I do it you'll be happy and things will be like they were and you'll love me?'

'I love you now. You know I love you.'

'I know. But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you'll like it?'

'I'll love it. I love it now but I just can't think about it. You know how I get when I worry.'

'If I do it you won't ever worry?'

'I won't worry about that because it's perfectly simple.'

'Then I'll do it. Because I don't care about me.'

'What do you mean?'

'I don't care about me.'

'Well, I care about you.'

'Oh, yes. But I don't care about me. And I'll do it and then everything will be fine.'

'I don't want you to do it if you feel that way.'

The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.

'And we could have all this,' she said. 'And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.'

'What did you say?'

'I said we could have everything.'

'No, we can't.'

'We can have the whole world.'

'No, we can't.'

'We can go everywhere.'

'No, we can't. It isn't ours any more.'

'It's ours.'

'No, it isn't. And once they take it away, you never get it back.'

'But they haven't taken it away.'

'We'll wait and see.'

'Come on back in the shade,' he said. 'You mustn't feel that way.'

'I don't feel any way,' the girl said. 'I just know things.'

'I don't want you to do anything that you don't want to do -'

'Nor that isn't good for me,' she said. 'I know. Could we have another beer?'

'All right. But you've got to realize - '

'I realize,' the girl said. 'Can't we maybe stop talking?'

They sat down at the table and the girl looked across at the hills on the dry side of the valley and the man looked at her and at the table.

'You've got to realize,' he said, ' that I don't want you to do it if you don't want to. I'm perfectly willing to go through with it if it means anything to you.'

'Doesn't it mean anything to you? We could get along.'

'Of course it does. But I don't want anybody but you. I don't want anyone else. And I know it's perfectly simple.'

'Yes, you know it's perfectly simple.'

'It's all right for you to say that, but I do know it.'

'Would you do something for me now?'

'I'd do anything for you.'

'Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?'

He did not say anything but looked at the bags against the wall of the station. There were labels on them from all the hotels where they had spent nights.

'But I don't want you to,' he said, 'I don't care anything about it.'

'I'll scream,' the girl siad.

The woman came out through the curtains with two glasses of beer and put them down on the damp felt pads. 'The train comes in five minutes,' she said.

'What did she say?' asked the girl.

'That the train is coming in five minutes.'

The girl smiled brightly at the woman, to thank her.

'I'd better take the bags over to the other side of the station,' the man said. She smiled at him.

'All right. Then come back and we'll finish the beer.'

He picked up the two heavy bags and carried them around the station to the other tracks. He looked up the tracks but could not see the train. Coming back, he walked through the bar-room, where people waiting for the train were drinking. He drank an Anis at the bar and looked at the people. They were all waiting reasonably for the train. He went out through the bead curtain. She was sitting at the table and smiled at him.

'Do you feel better?' he asked.

'I feel fine,' she said. 'There's nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.'"
--The Complete Short Stories Of Ernest Hemingway"

"Hills Like White Elephants" was something of an experiment for Hemingway, or perhaps this story was a culmination of several experiments. Ernest Hemingway devoted himself to the true, declarative sentence. Every sentence was either true or eliminated. This is a strange sort of truth: the essential truth of a fictional character floating to the surface of an ocean of Hemingway's own, real life experiences. Late in his career, he said that he never wrote what he knew, but what he knew existed below the surface of every single word.

If Hemingway knew something, he eliminated it from his stories. The existence of his fictional characters depended on the truth that they found for themselves.

But in "Hills Like White Elephants," the crux, the glue of the story has also been eliminated from the narrative--making "Hills" an excellent, and frequent literature class text.

This story, more than any other of Hemingway's works, is about what isn't said. This framework is set up from the very beginning. Some sort of disagreement is taking place between a man and a woman. She compares the hills to white elephants, and the man responds by saying he hasn't seen one. He has a need to hammer home the point that what cannot be seen does not exist.

But consider this exchange (1):

"No, you wouldn't have [seen a white elephant]."

"I might have," the man said. "Just because you say I wouldn't have doesn't prove anything."

The man sets up two conditions of knowledge, though he does not realize it: nothing is certain until it is seen; and saying something does not create truth.

Meanwhile, time passes without a word. For example, take a look at the passage of time during this exchange (3):

"'Should we have another drink?'

'All right.'

The warm wind blew the bead curtain against the table.

'The beer's nice and cool,' the man said.

'It's lovely,' the girl said."

How much time has passed? They agree to order drinks, and now they are drinking cool, lovely beer. Time disturbs the bead curtain several times throughout the story, indicating that the bulk of the real story is passing without any description whatsoever!

Take a look at an earlier scene (exchange 2):

"The man called 'Listen' through the curtain. The woman came out from the bar.

'Four reales.'

'We want two Anis del Toro.'

'With water?'

'Do you want it with water?'

'I don't know,' the girl said. 'Is it good with water?'

'It's all right.'

'You want them with water?' asked the woman.

'Yes, with water.'

'It tastes like liquorice,' the girl said and put the glass down."

Think about all the things that happen without being said: there is a bill to be paid; when the bar woman wants to know whether they would like water in the drinks, he must translate from spanish into english for his girlfriend's benefit (though the narrator never said anything in spanish, nor was there mention of a need for translation); the man translates for his girlfriend, but he must know that she will defer to him anyway; and, of course, there is the glaring absence of time's description between the final order, and the girl's comment on the flavor of the drink.

It is easy to assume that this couple is so estranged from each other that nothing is ever spoken; however, in exchange 3, they agree to order drinks and then they are sipping on drinks, but the reader wasn't witness to the actual ordering of the drinks.

We have to accept that time passes, and that the bulk of the story remains hidden. When their conversation finally gets to the core of the issue that exists between them, the reader still is never included in the specifics. The woman looks to the bead curtain several times, as if time could once again hide her from reality. The unspoken remains that way, but she can no longer hide from it, and she is forced to leave the bar.

And the peace of her solitude is broken as the man exits through the bead curtain. Everything remains hidden, but there is nothing at all she can do to hide. The problem is hers, and the man for all his meddling cannot or will not share her burden.

The taboo subject that first year literature students try to pin to words within the text is abortion. Of course, the text never explains; the reader must be willing to read what is not there; and abortion is the most hidden, most taboo of subjects (and doubly so at the time of this story's publishing).

The man wants her to have an abortion. She knows that without the man's support, she will not be able to have the baby. She wants to have the baby; and yet, because this man cannot understand, she knows she will not have the baby. He ruins her--and the ruin is all hers. She suffers all the consequences of the decision; and worse, she will suffer in the solitude of silence. The entire world of men has ex-communicated her even from her own story.

The narrator himself refuses to name the subject of her story.

What does it mean, that she sees hills that look like white elephants? She has created meaning. But both the narrator and the father of the soon-to-be aborted fetus refuse her meaning, refuse her creation.

They leave her story unspoken.

The Complete Short Stories Of Ernest Hemingway

Check out Hemingway: Taboo's Meditations

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Taboo Tenente: A Thinker's MFA Journey - Home

Taboo's mom's not well.

I'm flying to sunny Milwaukee for the week, but I will check in from time to time. Drop a note here, if you like. I'll be back in full action next Tuesday.

Here's to Mom.

Taboo

innate people

i have waded through the ancient nile
and driven north to the end of roads.
why She asked and i told
her about it in a letter.

not everything
is a beginning, i write.
worlds wrap their way around
the old, withering bend,
a ruinous, curving blue
that is sky and sea
and also nothing, always
the same, circling like the ancient Eagle
around the fact of death.

there are people whom i love, but
such people are ideas with blurry faces,
silent reverberations of promises,
responsibilities above all
to innate, though misunderstood, goals.
about such people little new can be learned,
i think, but i write that i have traveled far
that i might see them soon.
i will see.

and this was your canada
She smiles across some time zones.
i shut off the light and through the wall
stars wink at me a billion years ago
as i put down my pen. leaning,
steadying myself on the wall i find
suddenly only air in a world of doors
that open and close themselves.

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Taboo Tenente: A Thinker's MFA Journey - Home

Sometimes you get to a place in your life where all those assumptions--what is right, what is wrong--must be called into question.

You leave your parents. You leave your home town. You learn something about a loved one that you didn't want to hear. The foundations of your life move farther and farther away, and now YOU must make your way forward, or not. You must find a way to do what is right. Or not. In your isolation, you are Untouchable. No one else shares responsibility with you. No one takes your part.

The hardest part is the weeding that you must do. You must weed through what your parents told you was right; you must weed through your apprehension of punishment, searching yourself for what it is that you believe. Year by year, you grow less assailable. Fewer and fewer people can legitimately hold you accountable for your actions. Is there a god? Perhaps your god holds you accountable for your actions. The Testaments brim with "do theses" and "don't do thoses," all the while suggesting that humanity itself is incapable of determining right from wrong on its own.

None of that changes this simple fact: confronted with a choice, when deciding right from wrong, you stand alone, by yourself, with only your reason, your heart, your soul, your desire to guide you.

For some time now, for various reasons of heart and soul and desire, I have wanted to write down My Rules. Let's suppose for the moment that there is a right, and there is a wrong. Let's suppose I can figure out the difference. At a moment of choice, if I knew the Truth, if I knew what was right, what was wrong, would I choose to do what was right?

Sometimes, I imagine. Even most of the time, perhaps. If always I knew the difference, then I would no longer have the best of all excuses: there is no right decision. Both are evil. Everything is nothing but a shade of grey.

But if I knew the right and the wrong, always, if always I knew the difference, then I would still choose wrong, if only some of the time.

My Rules--as they currently exist as a flow of blood from my heart to my gut to my brain and then into bone and muscle and action--aren't Truths. They are compromises between what I believe at a given moment, and what I want to believe.

Goethe wrote, "I've never heard of a crime that I could not imagine committing myself."

This is a strange Truth--it frightens us to think that we might have the same capacity to create harm as those people throughout history who we deem abhorrent, evil, Untouchable.

It is easier to believe that we are innocent of others' wrongdoings. It is a seductive fantasy to believe we are innocent until proven guilty.

When choosing between right and wrong, sometimes the decision appears to be a simple one. Usually the choice is complex, with ripples of consequences that play out through space and time.

Consider these abstract "right" choices: faith, honesty, self-sacrifice, patience, love. Suppose you make a choice for faith, for honesty, for another human being through an act of self-sacrifice, if you fight despair with patience, if you combat isolation and envy and anger with love--suppose those are your Rules, then what happens when they conflict?

In the name of faith or fear, it is written that Abraham intended to sacrifice his son. And who is wise enough to see the right path, when the honest dictates of your heart tells you that you love someone you should not? Is it Right to sacrifice Self and Honesty, to give up your Truth, to withhold your honest word in order to preserve Order? If I love her, and I shouldn't, shall I speak or remain silent?

I can't withhold. I can't act. But I can't shut it down. Nothing answers the pain. Nothing helps, not hope, not breath, not the Lie, not the Truth. A Book of Rules I compose over and over in my heart dissolves endlessly into dust, and I keep thinking that I can hold on to things that feel right if I don't forget them. Everything that ever meant anything to me, I lose, because I cannot choose.

My Book of Rules had dwindled to five generic Rules. This weekend I broke each of my five in the name of another of the five.

Dedication.

Empathy.

Intention.

Gentleness.

Love.

I'm looking for new Rules. I've gathered two: if not integrity, then honesty. If not dedication, then hope.

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Taboo Tenente
Copyright ©2004, ©2005, ©2006 Joshua P. Suchman.

Who's the Real Handler?

Yes, I have a stream of blather for everything, even Groundhog Day.

Among civilized folk, Groundhog Day is widely accepted as one of the top-five funniest movies ever created. Here is the official list:


1. Groundhog Day
2. The Big Lebowski
3. Caddyshack
4. Ghostbusters
5. Office Space.

Because today is February 2, Groundhog Day, again, and I'm feeling pretty good, I am willing to accept the following honorable-mention selections:

1. National Lampoon's Vacation
2. Raising Arizona
3. The Pink Panther Movies
4. Old School OR Road Trip
5. ONE of the Monty Python Movies

Bad Boys makes an acceptable alternate, and I have a nostalgic fondness for the days when Fletch made the holy list.

Inevitably, people say, "But what about Miller's Crossing or European Vacation or Napolean Dynamite, or, in fact, any Bill Murray movie ever made?" Sadly, I'm forced to respond, "I feel you, my brothers and sisters. I do. And I'm sorry."

And someone will always say, "What about Waiting for Guffman or Best in Show?" I retort by quoting Martin Lawrence: "I go AROUND you." Feel free to disagree--though have care, your soul may be in danger. Tread lightly.

Being the MFA guy that I am, and wanting to show my respect for Groundhog Day, I decided to write a little critical response to GHD. Here we go:

I started thinking about Groundhog Day's references to the idea of déjà vu. We start with these lines:

"Do you ever have déjà vu, Mrs. Lancaster?"
"I don't think so, but I could check with the kitchen."

Later, we get these:

"Have you ever had déjà vu?"
"Didn't you just ask me that?"

Here's a definition of the déjà vu phenomenon: the illusion of having already experienced something actually being experienced for the first time; or an impression of having seen or experienced something before.

Some of the crap I've read and written this last semester deals with the idea of "nostalgia." There's the commonplace definition, which distills down to something like this: a wistful longing for a time or place that no longer exists in a fixed, present location.

The original definition was medical, something like this: the pain a sick person feels because he is not home, with his homies, in his hood; or the related fear of never seeing "home" again.

Nostalgia was associated with injured soldiers, or terrified soldiers who believed that they would die before getting to see home again.

But the term lodged itself in common-speak, and we typically use the term nostalgia to describe the longing for the good ole' days. Philosphers, writers, psychologists, and epistemologists picked up the idea, and eventually, "nostalgia" evolves into the common theory of the modern world.

Nostalgia, in this sense, means a present-time longing for a time or place in the past to which we can never return, or that never existed in the first place. The bulk of existentialism evolves from this idea: whatever else the universe may look like in reality, to the individual the universe seems to be composed of opaque, isolated spheres.

From a man's individual perspective, he lives inside one sphere, and he can't communicate with, or affect anything outside of his own sphere.

Déjà vu is the present-moment, passive "doubling" experience of a past moment that never existed.

Nostalgia is the present-moment, active "doubling" experience of a past moment that never existed.

Back to Groundhog Day:

Phil Connors talks about déjà vu--probably without any serious consideration of the problem. Everything happens over and over again--except he's the only one who believes it--nothing happens over and over again for anyone else (except Groundhog Phil, maybe--and maybe Ralph: "That about sums it up for me.")

Because he refuses to consider WHY he's experiencing the same day over and over, his situation looks like a serious case of déjà vu. He doesn't care about the cause; instead, he wants a cure for the effect. This makes Phil crazy. He's willing to enjoy the madness or escape it as long as he doesn't have to deal with why it happened.

He confronts his madness angrily, but passively:

 
1. With frustration

2. By enjoying the madness

 
3. and by trying to kill himself.

But there's nostalgia all over the place, as well: "Why couldn't I get THAT day over and over, and over again?" Phil asks. And after so many times of repeating the same Groundhog report, he snaps: "This tiny little hamlet in western Pennsylvania. Blah-blah blah-blah blah blah blah blah. There's no way this day is EVER going to end, as long as the groundhog keeps seeing his shadow! He has to be stopped. And I have to stop him."

Phil think's he's prevented from experiencing the good life that's out there somewhere. The good life he "remembers" refers to one-night stands on the beach, and perhaps his weatherman career. But mostly he wishes for the sureity and worth and importance that he thinks he used to have.

The audience knows he's a prick and always was a prick--and a lousy local weatherman prick at that. But he thinks that he used to be the nuts, the goods, and if he can just get back to Pittsburg, he'll return to his good life. Unfortunately, he's "not GOING back to Pittsburg!"

Déjà vu is the present-moment, passive "doubled" experiencing of a past moment that never existed. Nostalgia is the present-moment, active (longing) "doubled" experiencing of a past moment that can never be objectively remembered--or that never existed.

Day after day, both Groundhog Phil and Phil Connors wake up, and both their own shadows.

Everytime his radio clicks on in the morning, he remembers that his life isn't going anywhere. So he attempts to kill the shadow by killing himself--still refusing to consider why--and each act of refusal makes the shadow darker and darker.

 
Eventually, he starts to see the problem, and then the movie moves into the typical Hollywood hokey- pokey: Phil has to eliminate his shadow by admitting his failures, seeing outside his own skull, helping others, loving Rita instead of laying her.

Groundhog Day may be the funniest movie of all time, but what do we do about them Hollywooders squishing their canned morality into every orifice they can find? Here, the story's moral says, "Take responsibility for yourself, for your actions, and of course for how you treat other people."

Even if you can't reach them? After all, that's the result of living in a modern world, existentialism this, existentialism that. But Hollywood takes it upon itself to solve the problem, thus we get a stale can of moral responsibility, or, referencing Fight Club, moral responsibilities are modern, "versatile solutions for modern living."

Déjà vu, in this movie, is the echo that something was always lacking in Phil's life. Nostalgia is the unhealthy urge every modern human being has to solve our problems by returning to the past--some time of happiness and pleasure that never really existed.

Groundhog Day's punchline? "Let's live here. We'll rent to start."

Well, thank you, Mr. Ramis and company. Live in the present, we're stuck here anyway: "Blah-blah blah-blah blah-blah blah blah."

Which is why, by the way, our remotes come equipped with the rewind button. We can watch Bill Murray trying to drink sweet vermouth over and over, and over again, while we say "Can I get another one of these with some booze in it?"

****

And if you haven't seen the funny movies we discussed, please don't make me ask again:

1. Groundhog Day: Special Edition Deal
2. Groundhog Day, Ghostbusters, and Stripes: $22
3. The Big Lebowski
4. Raising Arizona: $7.50
5. Office Space: Special Edition w/ Flair, $10

Most of these babies are cheap, so there's no excuse for shirking your societal responsibilities. Get them. Watch them. Know them.

Taboo Tenente
Copyright ©2004, ©2005, ©2006 Joshua Suchman. All rights reserved.