Confession: I hate food words. I hate them as adjectives. I hate them as nouns. I hate them as verbs. Always have.
Dunno why. Dad railed against adjectives, so I do in echo. He never, however, railed against verbs and nouns. But if I am reading a profile of someone and the story includes a description of the person “noshing on a tasty morsel” of anything, I first will throw up on my shoe, then jump to the sports section.
This goes back to high school. Buddies on my basketball team would literally get centimeters from my ear and whisper that the school lunch menu surely contained something “nutritiously delicious.” Their whereabouts remain unknown.
So yeah, I said it. I hate food words. But I love food that thinks it’s people:
Teddy would get into shit, but never a toaster.
Ever been taunted by a sandwich? It’s horrifying.
Sadly, Timmy learned to feed his porn addiction with luncheon meats.
Wow, Trump even yells at eggs.
Why so cerealous?
I gotta be me!
A muffin never forgets.
“It’ll need an exorcism, ma’am. Please hand over the brownies.”
If more vegetables could dab, I’d eat them.
E.T., phone Cinnabon.
Whooo’s a good beer foam? Yes you are! Yes you are!
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s a tomato.
You know you suck at cooking when even your eggs disapprove.
He said he was boiling lasagna, but fucker clearly murdered Grover.
(Warning: Spoilers abound in this far away galaxy…)
And so, great empires fall and are forgotten.
No, not that Empire. Not the one with Death Stars and Stormtroopers and Darth Sinisters. That Empire didn’t fall. It exploded into a million incongruous pieces in a profitgasm called Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, which opened this weekend and supposedly ended the nine-chapter saga that began four decades years ago.
No, it’s the Star Wars Hollywood universe itself that’s collapsed, black holing into a void that once held brilliant stars and (storytelling) order but now vacuums any child or merchandising opportunity into its vortex before crushing it into a Disney Singularity.
Its demise came from the very thing Star Wars — a straight-laced Western at its core — tried desperately to avoid: Irony.
How ironic that a franchise built by a rebel alliance (which included Coppola, Spielberg and Scorsese) would ultimately fall to an Emperic Studio.
How ironic that the father of the Jedi Universe, George Lucas, would sell himself to the Dark Side for $4.05 billion in Disney stocks and cash. (Apparently, hell doesn’t take Visa.)
How ironic that in the ashes of what remain of the Star Wars/Disney empire, the most iconic survivor of the Resistance hearkens back decades, both in technology and sentiment: a Yoda Muppet that gives a Star Wars TV show its sole sense of heart.
In a rare confluence of hubris, both critics and fanboys agreed the latest film suffered from a singular weakness: It apparently sucks.
I can’t say for sure. I haven’t seen it. In truth, the franchise faded for me and legions of original fans on May 25, 1983, the day Return of the Jedi was released. As we watched credits roll, the Empire finally fell and fans went home relatively satisfied with the trilogy (though purists could see the Ewoks were a cutesy harbinger of peril).
Still, we still showed up for the second trilogy, for old times’ sake. And some diehards (like Mikey) even defended Lucas’ newest triplets, though they were cinematically stillborn).
Many of us, though, passed on the franchise as of Nov. 30, 2012, when Disney bought all Star Wars rights. Add to that Disney’s acquisition of Marvel and Pixar, and Emperor Palpatine couldn’t hope for more control over a universe.
But with the purchases came an odd Faustian bargain for the freshman franchises: Abide by Disney’s story arc, regardless of film genre, or lose your theme park ride.
The Disney story arc goes something like this: A tranquil world filled with tranquil denizens is threatened by the tyranny of Deadly Sin. Our denizens must then become a multi-cultural (ideally multiracial) familial tribe to defeat the evil band of Hoarders. Cue happy score.
Disney’s anti-introversion messaging is easiest to spot in Marvel comic-book movies. Remember when Superman lived in a Fortress of Solitude? Remember when Iron Man toiled alone and anxious in his ocean-view mansion? Now, even Ant-Man can’t get a flick without a Wasp sidekick. And Tony? He became starting quarterback for The Avengers.
Star Wars could have been the counter intuitive option to that. Sure, it was a hodgepodge of misfit toys. But from the moment Luke Skywalker gazed into a double sunset in 1977 on Tatooine, the Star Wars odyssey has been about the strength of resolve that resides in a single soul. Everyone in the audience was Luke Skywalker, and he us. Even if it did look like he ran around in linen pajamas.
Still, that was okay. We were in pajamas too.
But when Luke nonchalantly chucked his lightsaber in 2017’s penultimate movie, The Last Jedi, the viewing Force awakened: Fans eviscerated director Rian Johnson for betraying both film and franchise. They boycotted the Star Wars spinoff, Solo. And their blood was still boiled by the time Skywalker was dropped like a doomed lobster. YouTube nearly broke. Fans posted vitriolic reviews that had to be divided in chapters to contain all the bile. One reviewer’s critique was more funereal than fuming, with Adagio for Strings wafting in the background.
Not that Disney needs our tears. The film still grossed a half-billion worldwide in its first week, and The Mandalorian, a live action show, will still be the touchstone for the emerging Disney+’s streaming service.
But Skywalker was to be the film that bowed gracefully from the silver screen — and our memories. Instead, it served as a mirror for how much we’ve grown. And lost. Digital effects had long ago replaced puppets and miniatures. Tunisia was replaced by green screens. By the turn of the millennium, Star Wars wasn’t even a film that you could say was beautifully shot. Rather, it had beautiful algorithms. The software certainly was certainly elegant.
Alas, that misses the story’s point. Perhaps it had to. Nostalgia is like aiming for the bullseye of an invisible dartboard. Even if you hit it, you’ll need at least 40 years to recreate that astounding shot. Maybe longer.
Maybe, a long time from now in a mindset far, far away, we’ll yearn for space adventure again. Maybe we’ll want a plucky hero that squares off against the Machine. Maybe we’ll once more send out an urgent distress call: “Help us, Yoda Muppet, you’re our only hope.”
If the author of Evidentialism: An Atheist Guide to Faith ever gets off his ass and makes it an official book, there will be a chapter on recognizing HeavenNow moments.
HeavenNow moments are a lot like Halcyon Days (another chapter in the book, I swear). Whereas the Halcyon Days theorem posits that today is the halcyon day, that this is the halcyon day, the HeavenNow theorem makes the same assertion, just fractionally. Evidentialism acknowledges it’s a difficult state of mind to achieve. Consider HeavenNow moments a baby step towards Halcyon Days.
HN moments are easy to spot. You know you are in a HeavenNow moment if, given all options imaginable, you could not create a greater scenario in heaven. And if that’s the case, burn it in your mind. Even momentarily. You’re in heaven! Now, no less! Simply recognizing it is the first step. Do it often enough and you’ll begin to remember them. This was my latest:
Driving to my overpriced grocery store, a non-descript gray sedan pulled alongside me this week. In the car are three women, perhaps in their mid-70’s, and three tiny, yipping, bouncing dogs caroming in the car like Superballs bazooka-ed in a prison cell. They’d have leapt from the car had the ladies not rolled the windows up, leaving just a tiny gap of tantalizing air for the coked-out canines.
When I saw the fracas to my left, I must have cast a wide grin, because the ladies pulled up flush with my car so I could see the entire commotion. The dogs were loving their smello-vision. The ladies were loving their dogs.
Except maybe the lady in the back seat. She sat stoically as the rest of the car lost its collective mind. She looked like Miss Daisy at a monkey house. Maybe she was trying to bring some air of dignity to the scene. But the dogs just exploited her imperturbable body , using her rigid frame as a diving board.
One landed in the passenger seat. Or rather, was plucked by the passenger, who caught the Corgi (?) midair and brought it into her lap. She then lifted the dog, decked in a red Christmas sweater and no longer looking playful. The woman grabbed a paw and waved hi to me. The woman was grinning broadly, though her pup suddenly looked like it was in a hostage video. Muffy clearly wanted no part of this.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I waved back, though I’m not sure to whom. I guess it didn’t matter. Goddamn, I’m going to miss this place. And its HeavenNow moments. Below are some HeavenNow sitings posted online across the globe.
Perhaps that’s why our pets ignite so many of them. Deep down, we know they have a choice in the matter.
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