Nostalgia

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Gorilla Costumes + Pizza Delivery = Awesomeness!

 

If I knew I couldn’t be arrested or die, there are certain social experiments I would like to participate in. They are not violent or hurtful at all. But they could easily go wrong if I wasn’t immune to police arrests or gunshots.

The one that comes to mind is this: I would dress in a gorilla costume and show up at someone’s front door with two hot pizzas. Mumbling in grunts that I was there to deliver their pizzas they had ordered (which they hadn’t), the goal would be to get them to take the pizzas. If that happened, I would walk back to my car nonchalantly and drive away. And the pizza-accepting family in the cul-de-sac would never receive an explanation of what happened. Just free, hot pizza.

 

While the thought of a person dressed up in a gorilla costume delivering pizzas to a family who did not order them may seem bizarre, we do live in a country where it’s normal and accepted for kids dress up in silly costumes in order to accept candy from strangers. And we call it a holiday.

Match point.

 

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Friends by Default: From Work, College, Church, Etc.

As kids, it was a common occurrence for my sister and me to be halfway eaves-dropping as our dad would tell our mom how his day went at work. We would hear him say strange names of people like Foot, Goose, Groucho, and Murdoch. Sometimes our curiosity would prompt us to ask the question, “Who’s that?”  He would always respond with “G.F.W. Guy From Work.”

It’s interesting to me when the word “friend” is followed with the word “from”. Friends From Work. Friends From College. Friends From My Dorm. Friends From Church. These are all Friends By Default.

In a sense, the friendship is forced because of the place these “friends from” met. But over time, as they spend more time outside of the common place, they may find themselves becoming friends without the “from”. And really, that’s how we obtain most of our friends anyway. By default. We just never gave thought to the fact there was a gradual conversion.

 

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The Invisible Touch, Yeah (The 3rd Installment)

 

As a kid I always looked forward to when my sister and I would spend a Friday night with my Italian grandfather, who lived just a few miles down the road from our house. I knew that dinner meant a freezer-burnt TV dinner and some freezer-burnt ice cream for dessert, along with some semi-flat Ginger Ale. As quirky as it was, on Saturday afternoon we braced ourselves inside of a big plastic barrel as he would push my sister and I down a hill in his yard, then let us push him down the hill afterwards.

I will never forget the “I’ve gone cuckoo” look he always made as he would dizzily crawl out of the barrel each time. Then, he would let us do it a few more times before stumbling back to the house with us.

My sister and I still refer to the many funny things he would do. Like the fact he taped WWF Wrestling, then made us watch it with him. I never got a good explanation why a 65 year-old Italian man from Wisconsin loved the Southern-fried “sport” of pro-wrestling so much that he not only taped it, but watched each episode multiple times. That was the sole reason he owned a VCR- to tape Ric Flair and the boys reek havoc.

 

I never remember having to sincerely ask him if it was fake, but we just always knew. And watched it anyway.

And just last week as I flipped through the channels to find a rerun of Friends like my wife asked me to do, I stumbled across pro-wrestling. The intro music. The backstage drama. I was in a trance until my wife helped me realize what was going on.

There’s just some invisible touch involved with pro-wrestling that causes people like me to stop and watch, and causes millions of others to go out and spend big money to see it live. Even though we all know it’s fake. It’s captivating.

I’ve caught myself in the same situation with infomercials late at night and on Saturday afternoons. So much joy can be found in sarcastically mocking the fact that the host of the infomercial is always so smitten by the product and surprised as the chef conjures up all kinds of new delicious treats in the kitchen studio in front of a live audience.

And while I can’t relate, daytime soap operas have to go in this category as well. Entertainment at its worst, yet still drawing in an audience.

So fake. So lame. So unbelievable. Somewhat enticing.

The Invisible Touch, Yeah

The 1st Installment
The 2nd Installment
The 3rd Installment

 

Being that this is the 3rd installment of this series and I have yet to explain the title, I am finally choosing to do so. I am a huge Phil Collins/Genesis fan. The title refers to the first and only #1 hit by the group, entitled “The Invisible Touch”, released in 1986. The first line of the chorus is “she seems to have an invisible touch, yeah… she reaches in and grabs right hold of your heart”.

It’s really funny to me that as Phil Collins wrote the song, he couldn’t think of a word to put after the phrase “invisible touch” to fill that line, so he just says “yeah”. That’s hilarious to me. And that’s what gives me the off-beat title for my series: The Invisible Touch, Yeah.

 

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Manspeak, Volume 10: Exploration

It’s not something we sit down and think about, but there is definitely something morbid, grotesque, and disgusting about a whole refrigerated bin full of chopped up bones, blood vessels, and body tissue for sale. With blood swishing around in the Styrofoam container. Somehow it never processes in my mind when I’m with my wife at the grocery store, walking by the Meats Department as we plan for that week’s meals.

Blood is an interesting substance. I am intrigued by the human love/hate relationship with it. It is the physical source of life- without it, we die. Blood is a major theme in both the Old and New Testament of the Bible, with countless traditional hymns and modern songs with the word in the title.

But for most, the sight of blood gives an uneasy feeling. With good reason. The sight of blood is a sign of death.

From a skinned knee to a busted nose, when blood leaves the body, it is life escaping.

While blood keeps us alive, we don’t usually want to see it. It’s definitely better kept inside. The main exception I have found to this is the male population. Like most American men, the Rocky movies along with Band of Brothers and Fight Club happen to be among some of my top favorite films of all time. All include a lot of blood. Why are men so fascinated by other men causing each other to bleed?

Danger. Seeing how close to the edge of life a man can get and still survive. A subconscious curiosity about life after death. To step up close to that window between life and death and try to look through it, knowing that once that line is crossed, there is no coming back to this life.

A form of exploration.

Three weeks ago when my company moved offices, I decided to take a walk around the development. I scaled down a steep hill on the other side of the building and found an interesting discovery, the kind I longed to find 20 years ago when I was a boy pretending to be a Ninja Turtle in the woods behind my backyard.

What I found was a 6 foot tall tunnel. I could barely see a light at the other end. After stepping inside and walking about 50 feet inside, not being able to see anything around me, and unsuccessfully trying not to think about the Saw movies , I pictured a creepy man wearing a pig skin mask, poking me with an anesthetic needle. Within about 10 seconds flat, I was back outside.

A challenge was now set in place: Must conquer the tunnel. I recruited my co-worker John. We made it just as far as I did alone, until he said, “I think I’m stepping on a snake right now…” After darting back outside to equip ourselves with big sticks we found outside underneath some trees, we marched back inside a little bit more confident this time.

We trekked the tunnel all the way through.  It was only a few hundred feet long, but at the end we found a metal ladder.  I climbed up to a welded shut drain opening, where I could see the sky and hear the cars cruising on the road above me. We did it. Made it to the end of the mysterious tunnel. And to this day, we are the only two people at our company to have explored and conquered that tunnel, not to mention the only ones to even know where it is.

While I am not “discovering the New Word” like Christopher Columbus did (even though the Russians had to be well aware of our continent based on the fact that there are only 53 miles of ocean between Russia and Alaska), I can still discover and explore not only interesting places that few people know about, but more specifically in my case I can uncover new social observations and conspiracies that seem to successfully slide under the radar. I thrive on it.

Why the true stereotype of the man ignoring his map and/or GPS and refusing to stop to ask for directions? A man is wired to explore new things. There’s no getting around it. The stereotype must live on.

“If you could keep me floating just for a while, ’til I get to the end of this tunnel…”  -Dave Matthews Band (“Jimi Thing”)

All pictures with the “JHP” logo were taken by Joe Hendricks Photography:

Blog- www.photojoeblog.com

Website- www.joehendricks.com

 

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Would You Define Your Life as a Comedy or a Tragedy?

The same question goes for the movie Garden State.

I have struggled for a solid ten years trying to figure out what makes things funny. Universally, seeing someone fall down (who doesn’t get hurt) is always funny, but I don’t know why. Defining what humor is, is almost impossible to simply and briefly put into words. What I can do is make a judgment call on whether something as a whole is a comedy or a drama.

One of my college professors taught me there is a clear way to distinguish between the two: Comedy involves a protagonist who in the beginning of the story is standing outside the borders of his society and by the end of the story is accepted into it. Therefore a tragedy is when the protagonist in the beginning is accepted as part of the society but by the end is expelled from it.

To test this theory on comedies, I will take Adam Sandler for example: Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, The Water Boy, The Wedding Singer, and Big Daddy all involve a character who starts out as one or more of the following: incompetent, poor, lonely, selfish. By the end of the movie, Adam Sandler’s character is accepted into the fold as these previous attributes are resolved. So I can see how the definition of a comedy works here.

For tragedies, I will take some horror movies for example: The Blair Witch Project, Skeleton Key, The Strangers, Quarantine, and Carrie. The protagonists end up either dead or in a really bad situation by the time the credits roll. So I can see how the definition of a tragedy works here, as death or loss of freedom is a way of being ousted from a society that the protagonists were once a part of.

The end of a movie ultimately defines it as a comedy or tragedy. Garden State, which is more a drama than anything, ends with Zach Braff’s character being able to overcome his dependence on his doctor’s/father’s misdiagnosed prescription of anti-depressants and feel alive for the first time as he moves back home to New Jersey, making new friends and finding love: That’s a comedy.

Using this theory, these other genre-vague movies would also be considered comedy: Fight Club, Forrest Gump, and Elizabethtown. And these would be tragedy: Into the Wild, Vanilla Sky, and One Hour Photo.

Life is comprised of rotating moments of comedy and tragedy. Times where I’m on the outside looking in and I get in (comedy) and times where I’m inside but am pushed out (tragedy). In ways big and small. But a person’s general perspective will cause him or her to see it ultimately as one or the other:

 

If life is comedy-in-progress, then life is me trying to figure out how to be normal enough to succeed in being accepted by my immediate society, eventually dying satisfied, knowing I’m surrounded by those who love me.

If life is tragedy-in-progress, then life is me already having everything I need and want in life but having it all taken away from me in the end, eventually dying sad and alone.

Big decisions, big decisions. I’ll go with comedy-in-progress.