On the Passing of Mr. Maloney

Recently I learned that Mervin “Ed” Maloney, one of my favorite high school teachers, passed away. He retired when I finished Grade 11, and I hadn’t heard from him in over fifteen years, knowing only that he had left Shauanvon for Mossbank. However, on hearing of his passing, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, because the man was one of the greatest teachers I ever had, first in a line of the very great who I had at SHS. A teacher of twelve years myself, I was moved by it all the more.

                When I think back to what those of us who had him appreciated about him, it’s easy to dwell on the idiosyncrasies first. The smoking, the same outfit for days on end, the rumour of a bottle hidden in the school’s furnace room. But these are all just touches that add to the overall story, make him that much endearing a figure.

Because Ed Maloney was first thing in life a truly great educator.

His last three years of teaching were my 9^th, 10^th and 11^th of school. I’ve been in this job long enough to know that here are some teachers who retire ten years after they should have. Mr. Maloney, though, remained inspirational up until the end. I had him first for English classes, and I remembered days where we were “forced” to read for pleasure, logging the books and pages as the year went by. In the end I came to treasure those accounts of what I’d read when. Through his classes I began a love affair with grammar and philology, two things that are essential in my daily grind as an ESL and Creative Writing teacher. Also, I recall from him the first ever positive yet constructive criticism—written and verbal—on my creative writing, on a short story I had written in Grade 9 as a sequel to “The Sniper.”

In Grades 10 and 11 he taught me History, and ignited in me a lifelong love for the story of humanity. I recall writing an essay on Napoleon’s march to Moscow, and asking Mr. Maloney what a Cossack was. “Okay,” he said, and sat in the desk next to mine to recall every considerable detail he knew about these mounted Russian warriors, for me and me alone while my classmates sat captivated by his storytelling; I felt like I was being given a private lecture.

It was after studying World War II that he brought in a group of veterans to speak to our class about their service. This included my uncle Len Illebrun and Robbie Norton. Mr. Maloney encouraged those of us he knew that were passionate about the subject to ignore our teenage reticence and ask these guests what we could, and at the end of the afternoon Mr. Norton asked me to chat with him again sometime. A friendship began that day that would see Robbie stand as my best man at my wedding in 2006.

All in Mr. Maloney’s class.

Now, there’s no doubt I’m glossing this. I know many of the girls didn’t like him, saying that he favoured football and hockey players (though I was neither by high school), and more than once he punched me quite hard in the arm for a wrong answer. And, anyone who would be a Leafs fan has to have something off. But the man was a great teacher.

When I was in my second or third year of university, he sent me a Canadian History Quiz he’d copied from a magazine, scrawling atop it in that familiar hand the fourteen year old in me still recognized: “Paul, this is so easy!” I completed it and sent it back. At the King’s one night the following summer, he bought me a beer and told me the two answers I’d got wrong and why. Four years he was retired by then, and there were three or four of us at that table that night, still being taught.

I keep a photo of a man named Samuel Crowther in my classroom. He was an iconic teacher here in Strathmore, a dedicated and self-sacrificing educator. I keep the photo to remind me of what I need to strive for. Mervin “Ed” Maloney was another true teacher, igniting a fire in me that was fanned by other greats at SHS such as Penny Selvig, Tim Miller, John Cazakoff, Audrey Carleton, and Mark Benesh. On the other side of my first decade as an educator and a writer, I have seen what a thing it is to be the right person for the right kid at the right time.

His passing has reminded me why I teach. It is my hope to do half the job he did and be content.

What Do You Celebrate on Canada Day After the Flood?

I stole this from a Dave Rutherford tweet, but am pretty sure it's going viral, so that should be okay. 

On 11 September 2001, we were told by those who could remember days of similar impact—Hiroshima, Kennedy’s assassination—that there are days we remember every detail of. Forever after, we tell people where we were when, what we were doing when, how we heard that. We define our life by before that day and after it.

                Forever our days are the pre and the post.

                For many in Canmore and High River, those days will be the days before and the days after Thursday, 20 June 2013. A day later for the people of Calgary and Siksika Nation. Over the course of the weekend, breath was held and then released in Red Deer, Drumheller, Medicine Hat. After the devastation upriver, their fear was understandable.

                June 20 and 21, and the days which followed. The longest days of the year twice over in 2013.

                This is my tenth year in my adopted province. Twice in that ten years Southern Alberta has been ravaged by floods, though 2005 is only a memory now. The Flood of the Century forgotten in less than a decade. I have come to love Alberta, and am proud and delighted to live where I do.

                On this day where we celebrate the nation we live in, if you’re like me you’re feeling, perhaps, a little guilty to be celebrating anything while others toil in in homes that, unlike your own, are not dry or safe or perhaps even standing. How can we celebrate anything, especially something as vague as our national identity when people are shovelling sewage out of their basements rather than looking aloft at fireworks?

                I won’t remind you of the savagery of Mother Nature. I won’t add my voice to the chorus of “This too shall pass.” Instead I will encourage you to celebrate things that are very worthy of it, as an Albertan, as a Canadian, as a human being. I will remind you of the good.

                Of the grinning firefighter carrying the little old lady through knee-deep water.

                Of the volunteers who keep coming, long past the expectation, to work in their neighbors’ devastated homes.

                Of Edmonton military, police, firefighters, rushing down the QE2 to come to the aid of their beleaguered sister city.

                Of the people who opened their homes to complete strangers needing a place to stay.

                Of students and teachers from Strathmore who, a day away from summer break, went to Siksika to help the stricken.

                Of the people who donated clothing, food, or time to those who lost a little or lost it all.

                Of the people who said, over and over, “At least we’re alive. Stuff can be replaced.”

                On this Canada Day I’m proud of us. As we march further into the days that came after, we need to remember this unity, this good. The clean-up and rebuilding will be long and difficult, and possibly more demanding than the initial shock of tragedy.

                We have two lives now, the one before and the one after. What we need to remember is the unity we saw at the point where our days became divided. Where we stood as one and we held a mud-streaked hand out to a brother or a sister.

                I love you today, Southern Alberta, for I have seen us all stand as one. 

Get Passionate, It's Okay. In Fact, It's Better

Hey, just FYI, if you Google "passion," the majority of images depict either porn or Jesus. 

I am a passionate person, at both poles. I come with a healthy Norwegian temper (and its accompanying knack for holding grudges), and, because of North American bloodline mixing, also with French-Canadian Catholic guilt. A product of late-20^th century “I feel” education, I am predisposed to self-analysis and doubt.

So I ask myself when it is okay to be passionate. When is it okay to show intense emotion on display? Arguably, always when you’re showing love, but the rules for public affection tell us there are times where it’s possible to be too passionate. What about happiness? Can you be too happy? Can you have too much joy? The inspirational-poster answer is probably no, but realistically, expressing too much unabashed and extreme elation actually cheapens it. If you celebrate the tenderness of your boiled broccoli with the same fervour as you celebrate a sibling’s nuptials, your sincerity is suspect.

That’s happiness, but what about more awkward passions, like anger? Is it ever okay to lose it? I try to keep that Viking temper of mine bottled publicly and privately, but there have been times where say, Shaw Cable, NHL officials, anything Stephen Harper spins, or a rude idiot at the airport have warranted an outburst. I’m not proud, but it happens. Unlike my ancestors, I have not been responsible for any rage-related fatalities. To date.

                Why do I keep mentioning where this is happening? Because we really don’t handle public emotion of any sort well, do we? Crying, screaming, fighting, kissing, laughing, smiling—all of these can be viewed as awkward if done in public. We judge anyone who allows himself the indulgence of his emotions as immature, irrational, flaky.

                Is there a merit to passion?

                For fear of not being taken seriously, I have endeavoured to reign in my passions in most circumstances. I’ve noticed they put people off. Unfortunately, in my career as an educator, my second career as a writer, and my hobbies such as playing music or sports, passion is not only encouraged, it’s critical. What use is a dispassionate teacher, writer, musician, or athlete? Passion equals success, and it’s hard to turn it off.

                 So, if I’m in favour of being passionate, why reign it in? Because I’m sensitive to offending the delicately introverted, or, to a lesser degree, to being thought an emotional twit. It’s hard, though, when your very nature is to be excited by life, whether positively or negatively. EXCITED! says I.

                I don’t stress over whether people think my passions make me dumb or silly. I know I’m not dumb and I am passionately silly. But I don’t want my happiness or anger to be overbearing, to offend. More importantly, I worry about ho-hum mediocrity.

                Being in control, expressing no emotion is too often defended as an adult approach to life. “I don’t get excited” is the mantra of the smug. I would also argue that it’s also the mantra of wilfully dull.

                I’m not saying that a perfectly-folded paper airplane should illicit the same joy as attending your team’s championship victory, nor that you respond the same way to a paper cut as you would to a car crash. But, dammit, there are proper times to get good and angry or to laugh out loud or to cry for the sake of your own sadness. There are good times to let it out.

                Emotion is a human quality, and most innate human qualities have merits that are far too often unrecognized by humans.

                And that pisses me right off.  

I Don't Want My Kids Watching Star Wars . . . Yet

No, they're not mine--but easily could be.

Parenting is often harder than I was led to believe.

                Me, I struggle. With choices, with doing what my dad did, with doing what my dad didn’t do, with doing what other parents my age do, or with ignoring what they’re doing. It’s a great schmozzle, a plethora of options. At risk: your kids’ adulthood ruined by the choices you made in their childhood. Or, your own un-ending guilt despite having pretty normal kids and despite your own faults as a parent.

                Currently, I’m struggling with a lot of things, but a silly one taking up big chunks of my brain is, of all things, Star Wars. I’m a child of the 80s, and grew up with a fairly decent obsession with George Lucas’s meal ticket. I recall the spring of 1983, when  mother took me to see Return of the Jedi and had to read Jabba the Hutt’s subtitles to me. The eldest of my two sons is the same age, and I’m reluctant to show him those movies of my youth.

                When you consider these parallels—where your kids are in relation to where you were at their age—you get caught in the conundrums I’ve outlined above.

                Returning from a Star Wars-themed birthday party recently, my son showed me a Chewbacca tattoo on his arm. Immersive advertising works, and he could recognize from the style and colour that—like superheroes and Thomas—this is someone he should recognize. It’s only natural that many of his peers have seen the movies: their dads are my age, raised in the same era. You can’t avoid the decisions of parents or permeative marketing that, really, is the fault of the 80s anyway. Our own karma.

                They are, after all, kids’ movies, right?

                Right?

                Do we excuse them as kids’ movies because George Lucas originally employed fairy tale motifs, or because he was such a bad writer that we can’t in good conscious regard them as mature? I’d say the majority of Star Wars fans are middle-aged nostalgics with more money than they know what to do with attempting to buy back their childhood at ten times the original cost. Thank heavens for Calgary Comic Expo!

                It’s not like my kids watch much TV. We don’t have Treehouse, but they watch movies sometimes, like weekend mornings. They watch releases by Disney, Pixar, and their thousands of imitators. I like that these are the movies my kids watch. The films are relatively innocent, and usually have the sorts of messages I can get behind (with the exception of the always-embedded BUY THIS!)

                What’s different about Star Wars? The damn violence. Guns, shooting, explosions, lopping off of limbs. Bobba Fett watching his daddy decapitated. I hate guns, even fantasy lasers, and just because I grew up playing with them doesn’t make them okay now.

                Little boys like—even crave—guns. They have such a knack for imaginatively converting a stick or a rod or a bat into a firearm that one sometimes believes it’s a genetic predisposition. Some parents just accept boys being boys, and despite that I want my kids to grow into their own people and not who I want them to be, I’ll admit that my wife and I fight against gunplay hard. I grew up playing Star Wars and G.I.Joe, and even if I’m kidding myself, I want my kids not to play that way. At least right now.

                I’m aware that it sounds like I’m resisting boys being boys and am over-concerned about what it means in the future. I had a toy AK-47, and today I shun weaponry as piddly as slingshots (Saskatchewan gopher-hunting aside). The excuse that “they’re just as bad as we were” doesn’t hold water for me.

                I also run the risk of appearing like one of those parents I despise: those that hide the realities of the world from their kids, creating ignorant innocents who then get trampled by society when they leave the commune. I am not. I readily expose my kids to reality, encourage them to make the right decisions, without me—as the lingo goes—hovering above them. I do enjoy having small children who are innocent. I see no need in shoving them into the world’s nastiness—that’s different than hiding them from it.

                I like having sensitive boys. It’s my way of resisting this recent wave of New Men I’ve railed against in past posts, those that feel manhood has been robbed of us so we need to fight and spit and “screw chicks” and eat meat and hunt. Apparently, the only way to show you have balls anymore is to scream it from the rooftops, rather than have balls enough to move on and carve a new identity for men. Dudes what can cry and still lower a clean body check, grill a mean T-bone and yet can be soothed by vocal harmonies. It’s an evolved man I’m talking about.

                My wife puts Star Wars in my decision category—with the caveat we discuss it in advance of course. Right now, I’m resistant. I see them as violent films that treat women as weak supporting characters in need of rescue, that state a good blaster can solve anything, that all films should be nothing more than an advancement of merchandising, and that storytelling is nothing more than a series of badly-dialogued fight-scenes strung together by romping chamber music.

                I want my boys to be better than me, and I’m not satisfied with using my own childhood as an excuse for their behaviour. There will be a time for Star Wars (and its superiors like The Avengers and Lord of the Rings) later. Right now, I’ll lay the foundations of good and important storytelling in Brave or The Lorax.

                After they climb a tree. And possibly fall out of it.

This Film is Based on a True Story

You’ve just watched a film, likely one from Hollywood. You may have caught the quick text flying across the

screen—just after or before the opening credits—declaring that this film was “based on” or “inspired by” a true story, or, even more vaguely: “true events.”

                Inspired by true events. How’s that for safe? What story isn’t inspired by true events at some level? And “based on”? “Based” means the directors and producers—I carefully avoid using the term “artists” in this sense—are declaring their right to take as much licence with the truth as they feel is necessary to sell tickets. Every film, if you stretch your thinking far enough, every piece of art at all, is based on true events, or inspired by them. I mean, where else do ideas come from?

                They add and alter to create drama. The question becomes, why can we not simply tell a true story? Why must we inject lies into truth to make it supposedly more interesting? Sin? Sex sells?

                So you watch the film, which follows a pretty basic Hollywood formula. Despite this, because of the little disclaimer at the beginning, you keep telling yourself: true story, true story, true story.

                Then, if you’re like me, once you’ve seen the film, you go look it up. You’re surprised that what you watched was nothing like what really happened. You’re a little hurt. Maybe you even feel cheated. Very little of what you saw was true, yet they used the names of real people, they used actual dates and locations in quick flashes across the screen, so that you would note “this moment was important,” and, depending, draw parallels to other events in history or your own life that were happening at the same time. (Was I the only one thrilled by the Star Wars toys at the end of Argo? Doubt it.)

                So you’re disappointed, feeling conned into believing this great story of sacrifice /success /ingenuity /perseverance /insanity /sex was actual, when really it’s just another fiction.

                When you follow up those inaccuracies, you learn that the director or producer or screenwriter made the changes for the sake of drama. That is, for the sake of fiction. To make the truth more moving, they needed to turn it into a lie.

                This always bothers me. Not because I don’t like fiction—I love it—but when they use real names and events and then dress them up, they try to fool the audience to gain its sympathies. It’s like they don’t trust themselves enough to tell a good made-up story, so they give steroids to a true story, but then hide what they’ve doctored.

                Braveheart, Pearl Harbor, Zero Dark Thirty, Argo, Titanic, Munich, Bonnie and Clyde, Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind, Patton—just a cursory glance at the Academy Award nominees list for any given year will reveal that lying about the truth sells very well as art. But when you do a little research, you ask yourself why they didn’t tell the truth in the first place, why it wasn’t good enough.

                One of my favorite films is Finding Forrester. It’s loosely inspired by the life of J.D. Salinger, author of Catcher in the Rye. Rather than deal with awkward bits of reality, or whore up the truth to make it exciting, the creators took the themes and a handful of applicable facts regarding Salinger’s seclusion and turned them in to a very fine fiction, without using real names, people, or events. If you know Salinger, you know it, but you don’t need to know Salinger to know it. It’s inspired by a true story, but they don’t need to flash you a lie at the beginning. They trust that their art can stand by itself, and it does.

                When I was young, I saw the violent climax to the film Bonnie and Clyde. Clyde gets out of the car to help a stranded motorist he recognizes. He munches an apple and smiles in the bright sunshine. Suddenly, a Thompson-toting posse springs up from some nearby bushes, the old man dives under his truck, and the ambush is sprung. Clyde gets that one, meaningful look back at Bonnie, who is sitting pleasantly in the car with the door open. Then, for what felt like forever when I was ten, the bank-robbing lovers are hammered with machine gun bullets. I recall still the spasms of Bonnie’s body as they fired and fired.

                Violent, horrifying, intense.

                Untrue.

                In reality, the car never stopped. The posse leapt up and opened fire—no one gave the order—and turned the couple into Swiss cheese while they were still driving. Hundreds of rounds were fired, passing through the car panels, the couple, and then the other side.

                Violent, horrifying, intense.

                True.

                I’ve often wondered what that ending would have been like if the true version would have been filmed. Would I have felt cheated because Beatty and Dunaway wouldn’t have been filmed in close up for that last “I love you” look? I don’t think so, but my dependence on art has begun to influence my truth.

                Cliché time: art imitates life. But when life becomes so informed by art that only art can be depicted, where is the life at all?

                Have we become so dependent on drama that we can’t tell a true story? Has capitalism and salesmanship so permeated our thinking that lying isn’t just easy and natural, but expected?

                Perhaps the next great movement in film will be a true cinema verite; the true story as accurately as you can give it without making a documentary. How’s that for a challenge for actors: to make them act like it’s life, not art. 

Canada. Winter. Snow. Cope.

If this surprises you, you better be a brand new immigrant from Thailand. 

     I always marvel at the reaction to a day like yesterday in Southern Alberta. It's March and it snows. People freak. They rant, they rave, they curse as they shovel mounds of accumulation that didn't have the good sense to come down as rain.

     Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter go buck-nucking-futs with images of "the view from my window this morning, swell" or "the view from my car this morning, great" or "the view of people digging out their cars, gotta love Canada." Angsty declarations of how horribly unfair the world is abound. One in every twenty of your friends quips about how much they miss it (NOT!) and post the view from the beach they're currently sitting on somewhere . . . and yet the only thing they're surfing is the Internet.

     S'Canada. It snows here.

     Suck it the hell up.

     Every year I spend the winter listening to people gripe about a season that takes up half of our year and 99% of our cultural identity. 

     "Getting pretty sick of winter," he says just after Thanksgiving.

     "This is nuts," she says, scraping her windshield.

     "I can't believe this," he opines, when it snows in a month that is winter, spring, or fall in a country that is not straddling the equator.

     You can't believe that we got a blizzard in March? That it can happen in April, May, or even June? Huh. Where'd I put that Willy Wonka meme . . .

     Listen, I'm sorry that your ancestors figured this was a better place to live than wherever they came from. If the Bering Land Bridge Theory is accurate, every single person on this continent is in the same boat. It might just be time for you to deal with the fact that you live where winter is, and it doesn't pay attention to dates. I'm a believer in climate change, and for a decade we've seen later, more temperate falls, winters that hold on longer, wilder storms, more snow. It happens. Stop treating snow like it's a four letter word, stop whining for six straight months, stop shopping for real estate in Victoria. 

     This country gets winter. We also have free health care, great education, a sparse population, and relatively little pollution. I'm in such a good mood today that I'll even ignore a long commentary about how our various Conservative governments are hell-bent on undoing all of the above.

     It's time for you to embrace winter.

     I'm sorry your car got stuck. Build a snowman.

     I'm sorry you have to shovel again. It's great exercise. Afterwards, why don't you get bundled up and go for a walk in that haunting winter evening light. It's like therapy. 

     I'm sorry the highway is a mess. Slow down.

     I'm sorry that snow covers everything. Have you noticed any cockroaches, packs of wild dogs, or mounds of maggoty-garbage? No? That's because winter is Nature's broom. 

     Having lived and traveled in many places where they don't get winter, I have a great appreciation for the good it does. Hell, if nothing else than for the euphoria of springtime.

     It's time to stop wishing for an earthquake to hit your friends in Vancouver. It's time to stop blowing $3000 you don't have on a week in Mexico. 

     It's time for you to see the good in winter, you Canuck knucklehead. 

     Snowboard, cross country ski, snowshoe, build a fire. Hell, pick a snowball fight with that irritating neighbor's kid. Stop and look at the savage beauty around you for a second. Your landscape changes from the top down. Frequently. Try to view this as remarkable rather than just getting on your knees and praying to the Chinook gods--if you are so blessed.

     Stop spending six months whining, moaning, and cocooning yourself on your couch, surrounded by chips, chocolate, and reality TV. Stop only exercising when you can wear shorts outdoors.

     Winter is special. It can be very giving, and wondrously harsh. That's a hell of a lot more fun than the status quo. 

     Just think about how great your life is going to be once you stop spending six months pining for the other six. 

About (about) a decade with (basically) no TV.

                I watched the Oscars on Sunday. No, this isn’t some post-awards rant. I didn’t have any favourites (with the exception of Christoph Waltz in Django). I wasn’t cheering or betting. I just really like it as a show. One of America’s biggest, most wasteful self-loves and the absolute zenith of what’s wrong with art and yet, and yet, I have always been captivated by it. I think I’ve seen every Oscars telecast for the past fifteen years or so. Rarely miss a second of it, even when they’re (and they usually are) predictable and dull.

                I like watching hockey, CFL football, some NFL, and smatterings of other sports. Winter Olympics. I watch it, but unless it’s playoffs or my Habs or Riders, I usually am busy working on something else, reading a book, something. Not often able to sit through an entire sporting event, save the playoffs again. Still, I can’t tell you the last time in the past twenty years I’ve missed the Stanley Cup being awarded.

                I used to have shows. Like most folks, I grew up watching whatever was on. Sitcoms, and cop or lawyer dramas. Danger Bay. I watched a fair amount of TV as a kid. I was raised on The Simpsons. I recall that just before I left Canada I was hooked on this teaching show called Boston Public. That would’ve been about a decade ago.

                Like most folks again, I probably felt guilty about the amount of TV I watched. There was a lot of crap, and there was a lot better I could’ve been doing. Great form of procrastination. But even despite the gruelling work of university, I was able to get in my fair share of the boob tube.

                Then, about a decade ago, I moved to Asia for a bit. Needless to say, North American prime-time TV was hardly as prevalent there. The major shows were hard to track down. Some of the big reality shows of the time were on, and lots of reruns. Had trouble finding my precious Simpsons, and forget about Rick Mercer or 22 Minutes. This was 2002, so there wasn’t a lot of online TV. I remembered there being an overabundance of Sex and the City and Two Guys and a Girl reruns. Big events like the Oscars and hockey playoffs were still miraculously available. Mostly there were just a lot of movies for the English-speaking public.

                My time there came and went, and I basically fell out of any sort of a TV routine. Got my news from the Internet, saw movies, read a lot as I always have.

                When I moved back to Canada, I just had better stuff to do. For a decade now, I’ve been functioning pretty much TV-free. I watch some sports, some news (though most comes from Internet or radio), and the odd event like the Oscars. Really, that’s one of the only events like that I see. Not the Grammys, not even the Junos. And some of that watching is half-hearted at best. Most evenings that don’t involve me doing my job after my kids go to bed involve reading and writing. Running. Playing guitar. 

I don’t miss out on water-cooler discussions of the latest antics of The Walking Dead because I don’t have a water cooler job and also because it just seems so long a commitment to get excited about a zombie show once a week. Got better things to do. I’m thankful that Game of Thrones is available for download and only ten episodes per season, so I can watch it all in about four weekend evenings with my wife.

                My laptop clock says it’s 8:02pm. I have no idea what’s on right now. The only show schedules I’m aware of the  are, say, Grey’s Anatomy, which I know keeps my wife up late on Thursdays. I’ve never seen an episode.

                I think it’s fitting that I got out of watching pretty much anything on TV around the same time the reality TV craze got swinging, because that’s a low ebb for even the most brainless medium we have access to.

                I didn’t quit watching TV to make some sort of a stand. I’m very happy that I don’t, but I’m not lording it over anyone. Unless you watch the Bachelorette or shows about people bidding or storage lockers or Texans hunting pigs. Then I am, because you’re an idiot.

                No, my point is that I cut TV out of my life and really didn’t notice. Freed up a whole bunch more time, I guess. Have more to my routine than sitting on my ass watching sex jokes. I’d get rid of the physical device itself altogether but, as I said, I like some of the above.

                I hear people talking about Netflix and Apple TV or whatever the latest thing is. Complicated cable packages geared to you as a person. When I say I’m not interested in such stuff I’m often viewed as behind the times, like an analog monkey trying to still run with rabbit ears. Fact is, I just don’t care.

                Woke up the other morning and realized, “Huh, been ten years since I cared about TV.”

                Just got better things to do.