I have started a multi-video series on vegetarianism. It will cover philosophical untertones, ethical reasoning, some common criticisms and much more. I invite you to have a first look at the very first video. More to come very soon. I appreciate your time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OCpfuOW0L4

Thanks,

Trent

The cycle is predictable. I spend several days putting it off. The overflowing hamper stares me down from the corner of the room, smug and quietly judging. My sheets start to look rumpled and gross and my imagination runs wild thinking of all the potentially dangerous contaminants living in my bed. Food crumbs, dust and lint, possibly bed bugs of some kind. The thousands of roaches that are probably hiding in crevices, ready to strike while I’m sleeping.

When I finally commit to laundry night and I’m separating my colors and my whites, I already want to cry. It’s just so painfully boring. And I look at all these wrinkled clothes thinking about how when I’m done, I’m going to have fold them. I’m going to have to match up all these socks. What’s the point? I might as well just kill myself right now.

No matter what, I never have enough quarters. And inevitably, the change machine is always out of change when I get to the laundry room. My usual course of action is to curse for a few minutes, flail around and kick things (scaring the neighbors) and then run down to the deli on the corner. I hang my head in shame and plead with the guy at the cash register, disgraced and embarrassed. Poor guy has to furtively glance side to side to check if his boss is coming. He’s not supposed to just give out change but he always does it for me. I’m despicable.

The dryers in my building suck balls. There’s no negotiating with them. They are on this crazy high power setting that dries the fuck out of everything at a scorching temperature, for a minimum of forty minutes. So I end up having to sift through my sopping wet clothing, picking out the items that are more delicate and will have to air dry (which is almost everything). I go up to my apartment with an armful of soaked dresses and sweaters and then proceed to lay everything out, all over the place. Then I have nowhere to sit.

Now, there’s nothing inherently scary about laundry. Right? Wrong. Static electricity terrifies me to my very core. I know, I sound ridiculous. I tried looking it up, and there doesn’t even seem to be a term for it, at least not that I can find. (Ten points if someone out there can find it.) Regardless, this shit is serious. Last week, there was a woman next to me pulling her sheets out of the dryer and I could literally hear the static electricity. I had to fight the urge to scream, claw my skin off and run for the exit. I live in constant fear of getting zapped by someone’s charged linens.

Once everything is dried and I’ve escaped the petrifying static, there’s the cruel task of folding. And then making the bed. Don’t get me wrong, few things compare to the glorious feeling of fresh sheets. But putting the duvet cover back on my duvet has to be the worst kind of torture imaginable. I spend forever trying to situate everything just right and wiggle the damn thing in there (that’s what she said) only to have it get all twisted up, lay there weirdly and silently mock me. I have to shake and fluff like a mad woman and by the time everything looks right, I’m exhausted.

And I’m going to have to do it all again next week. Seriously, what could be more awful?

I have this silly fantasy that I am driving South on the 405 through The Pass and I come upon Michelle Kwan worrying beneath the hood of a broken down car. Ok, not very likely, I admit. Though we both grew up in Torrance and, since she must occasionally at least visit the area, there are Lotto-esque odds that this could actually happen.

Anyway, in the fantasy, I pull over and – after a brief interval wherein she concludes that I am probably not a lunatic – she accepts a ride down the hill to Sunset.

The price of the ride is simply that I get a chance to talk to her. The reason I want to talk to her is that I want to tell her this.

I’m a long term sports fan. In my adolescence I watched Jerry West’s game tying 61 footer against the Knicks in 1970. I go back to April 15th, 1985 when Tommy the hit-man Hearns and Marvelous Marvin Hagler stepped into the ring at Ceasars Palace. My friends and I had pooled our funds to get the fight on the tube. My best friend Kirk drew a short straw and walked down to the corner to pick up a pizza, thereby missing the most astonishing round and a half in boxing history. Sure, they showed the replay a hundred times but he was inconsolable. I watched Kurt Gibson limp to the plate in the 9th inning of the 1988 World Series. Watched Larry and Magic’s decade long battle of wills. Sat transfixed while Michael with a capital M rained tomohawks and three’s on Motor City.

In a way, these moments are what sports fans live for. Those slivers of frozen time, where the best athletes in the world suddenly become something else. Or maybe just transcend everything else. Where the world falls away and what is left is a kind of perfection. An ease of perfection that only comes from the fleeting alignment of the gravitational force of amazing talent and dedication and artistry and seasoning and luck and determination.

I had seen this benevolent eclipse in other sports, but I had never seen it in figure skating. Now Mr. Button will surely shake his head. What about Scott? And didn’t Katerina give us a peek in 1984? And Kristi? Surely Kristi! You know, Mr. Button, he’s the boss and I probably wouldn’t argue. And I am in awe of anyone with the courage to choose this sport and get away with it.

It’s just that, well, it never seemed quite all in synch to me.

The music was droning on over here and the skaters were zipping like busy bee’s from one amazing leap to the other over there. And Mr. Button would comment upon their meticulous footwork or that they entered a jump on this edge and exited on that. But to the layman sitting on the couch, to THIS laymen anyway, it just didn’t seem all apiece.

The first time I saw Michelle Kwan skate was at the World’s in 1994. Had she been a horse, I would have thought her a philly. She looked gangly. Taller than the 5-and-change her biography indicates. That was until she skated. My friends and I had commandeered a timeshare condo in Palm Springs and were flopped on the floor watching – commenting freely and not always too kindly as the program proceeded. When Michelle skated, everyone stopped talking. Nobody resumed until she was finished. She skated well, but finished below the top three if I recall correctly. One of the commentators thought the judges just hadn’t seen enough of her yet.

After that, something happened. Now, I live in L.A., so a lot of folks might be tempted to categorize the ensuing phenomenon as a “local hero” thing. I can’t say for sure. I have never lived anywhere else. But I am a little doubtful. I think it was something else.

When the big events came up – The Nationals, The Worlds, Skate America – people would say “Michelle is skating tonight”. Not “the worlds are on tonight”. People would go out of their way to be home to catch her skate. My wife would come in the door and say “Has she skated yet?”. There was an element of the hometown thing in that, sure. But what we really wanted was to watch her skate. Just to see her skate. It was something beautiful. Something that spoke to everyone in some way, I think. To the brokers at The Wired building downtown and the cabbies bumper-to-bumper at LAX. To the high-school girls who would idolize her and Dominoes guy and the rocket scientists at JPL.

And to engineer dad’s, like me.

In January 1998, in the short program at the Nationals, Michelle Kwan stopped the world for one hundred eighty seconds. She reached down with a smile and kissed Michael with a capital M on his cleanly shorn head. She became the music and the music became her. My wife and I watched the program I silence. When it was over, I felt something odd on my face and realized there were tears on my cheeks. Nobody noticed, thank god. Michelle Kwan had just….transcended everything. When someone can do that, they show us something. It is like a gift. Like a possibility. It makes other things seem possible too.

If we, if humanity, can do THAT…..

Then she did it again. And again. Found something beyond the trophys and accolades, beyond the golds or silvers or bronzes. Something that we sports fans are able to vicariously experience but only Michael, Michelle and a few others could ever describe to us.

I know how the sports world media works. Any interview, any documentary, any retrospective will inevitably focus on that which was not accomplished. “What’s it like to strive so hard and not get…”. The Ring. Or the Trophy. Or the Gold. But I wish it wasn’t that way. I wish I could watch an interview with Michelle Kwan and someone would ask :

” How did you do that?”. “How did it FEEL to do that?”

Woody Allen has this great monologue at the end of his defining screenplay, Manhattan. His prototypically neurotic and theo-phobic character decides that, whether or not there is a god, we still have Groucho Marx and those lovely pears by Cezanne. I like that sentiment.

And I think we get pick our own Cezannes. Our own Groucho.

Me, I’ll take Sunrise by Monet. Just about anything by Thomas Wolfe. My son and daughter making up some silly game on Sunday morning. And Michelle Kwan soaring on one leg with the grace of the gods and an ear to ear grin, owning the place, owning everything, for four minutes.

When I was thirteen, the destined-for-shlock-immortality movie Billy Jack premiered in my home town of Torrance. My friend Steve and I walked to the “fifty-cent-movies” on Crenshaw and PCH to see it. This was a pleasant, two mile stroll which also provided a number of opportunities to finance the movie itself. It skirted Torrance Airport for about half a mile and litter from the busy highway accumulated along the cyclone fence.

Among this flotsam of the car culture were a quantity of bottles, some of which were redeemable for a nickel each at just about any liquor store. The bottles were usually good for a little less than half of our target funding of two bucks, which believe it or not, was good for a movie and popcorn for two. But the real mother lode was the Oriental Gardens Miniature Golf Course on PCH. The operator would pay a nickel a ball for every ball you could fish out of a stream or find lying beneath a bush. It was sort of a like an Easter Egg hunt, only you got paid.

Anyway, back to Billy Jack. I know. It’s practically The King of shlock classics now. But in the context of it’s time – The Vietnam War – and my age – Thirteen, it was amazing. Also, I fell smack in love with the twelve year old girl who sang the anti-war song. The plot, as you probably know, focuses around a group of hippy-esque kids who live at a school that practices a sort of do-your-own-thing culture that was popular at the time. Naturally, they decide to locate the school a few miles from a Southern redneck town run by a bevy of redneck caricatures. The Arrogant Sheriff. His Spoiled Narcissistic Son. The Sheriff’s Angry Assistant Whose Pregnant Teenage Daughter Has Joined The School. I mean, just light a match.

Now while The School practices pacifism, this is a difficult time and place to hold on to such ideals. The members of the school are subjected to all manner of classic redneck abuses, that, given their pacifist doctrine, they are forced to endure in silence.

Fortunately for them, there is Billy Jack. An ex Green-Beret war hero half-breed Indian who watches over the school and holds no such views. Billy has a gift for showing up just when the most intolerable of intolerable redneck escapades are in progress. Herding wild horses into a corral so they can be sold by the pound as dog food for example. In these circumstances, Billy amply compensates for the pacifist leanings of his friends by kicking the crap out of everyone involved. Being rednecks, the townsfolk typically exhibit a lack of repentance when they are so rebuffed.

So, you get it. Powder-keg-city.

Anyway, the whole thing predictably snowballs out of control until the classic ending where Billy Jack holds off the entire United States Army aided only by a couple of shotguns and a wounded pregnant teenager. The United States negotiates. Billy wins concessions for American Indians and surrenders.

I saw this movie three times. Ok, so it was mostly to see the twelve year old blonde girl. But I also swallowed the plot. I wanted to go stand by the side of the road as Billy walked by in handcuffs. I wanted to raise my fist in salute. And then maybe find an excuse to talk to the cute blonde girl.

Fast-forward, well, a whole bunch of years. I’m watching the insomnia channel at Three AM in my nice suburban home. My wife and two young children are asleep upstairs. And Billy Jack comes on. I can’t believe my good fortune. The opening scene of the beautiful wild horses sprinting across the desert to the One Tin Soldier soundtrack still affects me. I am suffused with nostalgia.

But as the plot unfolds, I notice a number of sensations and reactions begin to accumulate until they form the makings of a voice.

The kids at the school start to seem sort of like, well, like…like…

like… lazy, spoiled brats who are wasting their time.

And while the caricature-rednecks are still clearly the hateful ignorant buffoons they are written to be, I start to see some of their points vis-à-vis The School. The classically bad dialog finally seems to be, well, classically bad.

When the School is in the midst of one of their little Improv’ plays the voice suddenly speaks.

“These guys need to get a job….”

I check to see if my Father somehow entered my house at Three AM. But, no. He passed away in 2008. It is myself that has spoken.

Time has apparently moved on. My political leanings, while ostensibly liberal, clearly no longer lean as far. I am raising two kids. I design electronic countermeasure equipment for the defense industry. My leather backpacking hat lies inverted in my room and is filled with spare change. I am diligently squirreling away funds to finance my kids higher education and, while I am not the kind of parent who thinks it’s MIT or nothing, I would certainly be very upset should they elect to join a school whose curriculum revolved around getting high and making up little skits.

I have become the guy who tells kids not to ride their bikes along the cliff in Hill Canyon ( because it is dangerous ), or skateboard down the stair-rails in the pool area ( because it is dangerous ).

Ok. But now, do I have to go back and try to figure out if every grownup I ever thought was a total prick actually wasn’t? I don’t even know where to begin. I mean, a quick mental review reveals some gray-areas and some clear-cut areas. The old guy who lived on the route to Chris Palmers house and yelled at me nearly every time I went by for no apparent reason can clearly retain his jerk status. But what about “Applehead”? The universally reviled Security officer at South High School. He was more or less considered to be on-par with Adolph Eichmann by the student body. I clearly recall an elaborate plot that culminated in someone throwing an apple at his head on the quad. But, in truth, the only time I ever had a direct encounter with him – he caught me in the halls during class – he let me off the hook. Maybe I just bought in to the legend. Maybe he stopped kids from doing things like getting high because getting high is dangerous.

I can’t get my head around it. There is too much to undo. Too much footage would be lying around on the cutting room floor. The video of my past would be a mess. I’ll have to take the lesson at face value going forward.

Which is…

…what?…

We met in church when we were both eight, when her family moved to our town after the sudden death of her sister.  I had borrowed my mother’s pocket calculator and entered in 1 + 1 then hit the equals button as many times in a row as I could, watching the number grow and grow.  This had become a Sunday tradition that my mother never seemed to mind as it kept me from squirming non-stop the entire sermon.  After the last prayer, I had made it to almost five-thousand.  Not my best work.  I blamed the low number on the stupid dress my mother made me wear; I was too busy fidgeting with the scratchy hem to focus on my task.

“Pfft… five-thousand?  I get to sixty-thousand no problem.”

I didn’t know who that little girl was, but I sure as hell wanted to kick her.

“Nobody likes a bragger,” I said out of instinct, my mother having just told me that three times the day before.

For the next five Sundays, I couldn’t focus on my calculator.  All I could focus on was finding where she was sitting in the sanctuary to see if she was as fast a button puncher as she claimed.  Every time I’d stand up to look around, my mother would tug on my arm until I thumped back down.  At last, her family sat in front of us a few pews.  I couldn’t tell what she was doing during the sermon, but I definitely saw her bow her head during the prayers.  Amateur.  Liar.  Bragger.

My mother looked down at me and smiled, I smiled back.  I’d assumed she was just proud to see that her daughter was still the pocket calculator champion of Calvary Baptist.  Like everything else I’d assumed at eight years old, I was wrong.  At the end of the service she took my hand, still smiling at me, and we walked up to the black-haired family.  That’s when I officially met Lila.  You could smell the mathematical lies coming out of her pores.

After a few minutes of introductions, small talk about the church, small-minded talk about some of the parishioners and empty compliments, our parents set up a play date for Saturday afternoon.  I clenched my mother’s hand hard and she assumed I was so excited that I couldn’t help but tense up my hand.  Like everything else she’d assumed at thirty-six years old, she was wrong.

That Saturday Lila came over.   There was no apologizing over her lie, I never even called her out on it.  She’d come over and told me about kissing and rubbing and how boys called girls’ privates “peaches”.  Lila was the coolest and smartest girl I’d ever met and she really seemed to like me.  Honestly like me.  Not even close to how I pretended to like the home-schooled girl next door that ate bugs and talked to Jesus at our tea parties.  If I yelled at her for her little white lie, well, she might not have wanted to come over again.  The next morning she sat next to me in church – our parents said it was okay if we even sat by ourselves one pew in front of them.  We were inseparable for the next few years.

Had I ended our friendship when we were twelve years old, I could be a famous feel-good Chick Lit author by now.  I’d have a movie based on one of my novels starring some up-and-coming starlet before she discovered cocaine.  I’d own a closet full of mom-jeans and appliqué sweaters.  Instead, I’m living in a two bedroom apartment with my ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend.  I would have never thought mom-jeans would sound so appealing.

A month after my thirteenth birthday, my father left us.  He decided sleeping with the red-headed pharmacist down the road was a far better life than living with his wife and three kids.  In interest of full disclosure, it didn’t bother me.  I never cared for him anyway but I knew I could milk this situation for sympathy – especially sympathy in the form of presents.  Being a child of divorce was an absolute cash cow and all it took was a quiver of the lip and a pool of tears barely contained in my eyes.  Of course Lila knew the truth.  She knew everything about me.  She’d parade me around town and elbow me in the ribs to get my eyes to well up with tears and, of course, help me share in the wealth of free ice cream, candy and other small trinkets.

It wasn’t long before the sympathy dried up.  The Dillons got a divorce a month later, the O’Doyles a few weeks after that.  I was no longer a poor little girl, I’d become just one of a handful of fatherless kids in our town.  No more ice cream, no more candy, no more trinkets.  Though I was fine with this attention finally waning, as I’d grown tired of being elbowed in the ribs, Lila was anything but fine with it.  She got bored with me.  She told me I wasn’t fun anymore and that she’d rather be hanging out with the Sophomore boys that hung out down the street.

Life without Lila was lonely.  I sat in my room at night trying to figure out a way I could be more fun.  Unfortunately, I really was a boring kid and couldn’t think of anything. Desperate to win back her attention, all I could do was default to the only way I’d ever gotten attention in my life:  I ran to her house, lifted up my arm, slammed my ribs into the porch rail and rang the doorbell, tears in my eyes.

Her father answered, squatted down and grabbed me in his arms, “What’s the matter Angela?”

His breath smelled a little like beer and a lot like his pipe.  His arms were comforting and I could feel his heart beating against me.  I’d never felt my dad’s heart beat.  I don’t think I’d ever even been close enough to him to know what his breath smelled like.  As Mr. Connor’s smells faded, his heart beat slowed down.  He led me into the living room, sat me on the couch and called for Lila.  As she came skipping down the stairs past him, he grabbed her and kissed her on the forehead.  She pushed him away and lectured him for scratching her nose with his stubble.  My hand went to my nose; it had never been scratched with stubble and if I ever had the chance I couldn’t imagine pushing it away.  The rib tears turned into real tears.

Lila rushed toward me and threw her arms around me, “What’s wrong?  What happened?”

“I…I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?  You can’t be crying for nothing.”

She looked up at her father, scowled at him, grabbed me by the hand and pulled me upstairs to her bedroom.   Her older brother was asleep on her bed.  Lila stood on her bed, kicked him in the side and yelled at him to get out.  After mumbling a few words at her, he sat up a little, looked at me and rolled out of the room, slamming the door after him.

“Okay.  What’s wrong?”

I hadn’t thought that far.  I hadn’t come up with a reason for why I showed up at her door crying.  Wasn’t a very good liar either as I’d never had time to practice – Lila always did all the lying for me.

“If you don’t tell me, I can’t help fix it.  Tell me…please.”

So I answered honestly.  It wasn’t the reason I came over in the first place, but it was the reason for my real tears, “My dad…”

Those two words were all I could get out before I started sobbing like an asthmatic donkey.  I was mortified.  This was not how you look fun and cool.  This was not how you get a friend back who thinks you’re nothing but a boring, little kid.  Lila took a few guesses as to why I was upset about my dad: he died, he got back together with my mom, he’s marrying the pharmacist, he’s not my real dad because my mom fucked the kinda-cute mailman.  I just shook my head after each one.  How could I tell her I was so jealous of the dad she disliked so much?  How could I admit that although I thought I didn’t miss my dad’s presence, I missed what he could have been?  She’d laugh at me, or even worse, go laugh with her new older friends about what a baby I was.

No good explanations were coming to mind so I simply nodded my head at the next thing she said.  I didn’t even hear what it was, I just decided to nod so that she wouldn’t figure out how pathetic I was.  What had she said?  Her face wasn’t giving up anything, she was blank, numb.  After letting out a deep breath that she must have been holding for minutes, she threw her arms around me again and began to bawl herself.

“I told you nobody would ever understand you like I do,” she whispered so softly I could barely hear her, “We need to go tell your mom.  He’s not living in your house with you, he can’t hurt you for telling.”

I couldn’t respond.  I didn’t know what we were telling my mother about, all I knew is that I was so happy to have her so close again.  Lila hopped off the bed, pulled a piece of paneling off the side of her dresser and pulled out a box.  Inside was what looked to be about twenty dollars and a silver heart pendant.

“This is enough money right now to get us on a bus to the city if we have to, if they don’t believe us.  I’ve been saving up for a year now and was going to go myself but I haven’t been able to work up the courage to go alone.  If they won’t fix this, we’ll go fix ourselves. Okay?”

She pulled out the pendant and fastened it around my neck, “It was my sister’s.  She said it was good luck.  I know it’s good luck cuz the day she took it off to give to me was the day before she died.  It’ll protect you.  You wear it now and everything will be fine.  I’ll take it back when you don’t need it anymore.”

The box was placed back in the side of the dresser and within seconds we were downstairs.  I stood there, dizzy and sick to my stomach as  Lila hugged her father and told him she loved him.  He asked if everything was okay, but we were out the door and heading back to my house before either of us could answer.

She held my hand the entire way home – smiling at me and telling me how everything was going to be okay.  I believed her.  I still didn’t know what was wrong but I knew everything was going to be okay.  When we got to my house and found my mother in the kitchen, Lila started the conversation.  She told my mother that we had something very important we needed to talk to her about and that I couldn’t do it on my own, that I was too scared to tell her.

“I don’t know how else to say this, but to blurt it out.  Angela was raped.  By her father.”

I sat there unable to speak as I watched my mother age twenty years in ten minutes.  My mouth opened, my lips moved, but the only thing that came out was a deafening silence.  Lila reached over and grabbed my hand again.  Her touch settled my nerves enough for me to speak.

“Mom, please don’t cry.  It isn’t true…I don’t know why…I just…”

But nobody was listening to me.  Nobody ever really listened to me so I never spoke up about it again.  My mother kept crying and Lila kept feeding her all these details.  Details that I had obviously never given her – about how it started out with him just kissing me, then how there was a storm one night and he slid into my bed to keep me safe but ended up touching me in places he shouldn’t have been touching me.  About how he’d told me it was perfectly normal but that everyone would be jealous of how much he loved me so I needed to keep it a secret.  About how he’d shoved his cock in my peach and kept thrusting until I bled so I had to make up the fact that I’d gotten my period in order to have an excuse for the blood clots in my panties.  About how I prayed at church so hard but God wouldn’t answer my prayers.

My mother called the police, the police came and interviewed me though I didn’t say one word.  I could only sit and cry as my mother told them what Lila had told her. My father was arrested and tried.  I didn’t take the stand because my mother thought it would be too hard on me.  In my place, Lila gave her testimony of all the things I had “told” her.  Lila always did the lying for me.  Lila’s parents and brother were at court to support her and make sure it wasn’t too much for her.  Nothing was ever too much for her.

The trial ended in a series of convictions including incest and sexual abuse of a minor.  They sentenced him to fifteen years but he only served two weeks.  Child molesters, especially those that are parents of the victim, are not well received by other prisoners.  Though my mother wouldn’t tell us the details, my father died at the hands of another prisoner.  I should have felt guilty about never fully speaking up, never explaining that Lila was mistaken and none of this ever happened.  I should have cleared his name but I was too angry at him to feel guilty.  If he’d just been more like Lila’s dad, if he’d just shown us he actually loved us now and then I wouldn’t have been crying so hard that day.  I wouldn’t have told her that he was the reason I was crying.  I wouldn’t have lost Lila a few days later when her family moved away.

The day after my father’s trial ended, Lila’s brother hung himself.  Mr. Connor decided I was a bad kid, a bad influence.  He believed I brought all this pain on their family that they had worked so hard to escape when they moved here.  After much begging and pleading on Lila’s part, her family stopped by for a few minutes on the way out of town.  Her mother and father stayed in the car.  She gave me a hug goodbye and told me to keep the necklace, that she wouldn’t be needing it after all.  She told me when we turned eighteen, she’d be back for me and we’d go move to the city together.

I’ve not seen Lila in fifteen years.  I’ve never tried to find her.  But I think about her every time I see Monica yelling at Rachel for making a mess, every time Izzy and Addison swoon over some new doctor, every time Alexis Bledel is in a new movie.  Watching things so sweetly contrived makes me physically ill.  I can’t watch them anymore.  The anger I felt as a child didn’t take long to give way to guilt that eats up that saccharine bullshit like fertilizer.

There are nights I can’t sleep, wondering what hell is going to be like when I die.  But God has already gotten his revenge on me by making me have a passion for writing in an time where publishers only want women that write Chick Lit.  They don’t want memoirs like mine.  They don’t want stories of what childhood is really like.  They want more stories of one-dimensional women that grow together, overcome menial situations and stay OMG besties 4ever!

I don’t know those kinds of stories.  I can only write what I know because I suck at lying.  Lila always did the lying for me.

His father looked at him differently, he thought.  It wasn’t obvious but he could feel it all the same.  He supposed it made sense.  He didn’t know what to make of himself either.  He didn’t know where he stood anymore.

“How’s work?” His father asked.

“It’s all right.  More of the same.” 

They were silent again.  They’d never talked much, either of them.  Neither man knew why but there was an uncomfortable sub-current that had begun running through their relationship long before Byron had gone to war.  There may have been a different feel in the air between them now but the silence wasn’t new. They were both quiet almost fifteen minutes, just listening to the wind and watching the sun set further down the pasture, when Byron spoke again.

“I feel different.”  He didn’t know why he said it.

 His father just grunted in reply.

John Whitaker had fought in Vietnam almost forty years before.  He’d been wounded twice and Byron remembered marveling at his father’s limp when he was a child.  After the war his dad had come back to Richland County, Ohio, gotten married and gone to work at GM’s Mansfield Metal Center.  He was by all accounts a simple man. 

What Byron couldn’t know was why his father didn’t respond.  He couldn’t know that John Whitaker woke up once a month in sweats, remembering the jungle.  That his father recognized his son’s thousand yard stare for what it was and was scared by it, for both of them. He couldn’t know because his father couldn’t tell him.

“I’m thinking about going back to school.” Byron said.

“Yeah?”

“I only need two more years.  GI Bill will pay for it.”

“Might not be a bad idea.”

“I should get going.” Byron said.  He stood and stretched and waited for his dad to rise.

“Say hi to the missus.”  John Whitaker said, extending his hand but remaining seated.

“I will.” Byron shook his dad’s hand and went back into the house, letting the swinging porch door slam shut behind him.  He walked through the living room, past a sleeping dog and the brown recliner that he had never been allowed to sit in as a child. “Dad’s chair.”

His mother was in the kitchen and smiled when he walked in.  She set her coffee on the bright white counter-top, carefully scrubbed and a sharp contrast to the yellowing linoleum floor and water-stained walls. 

“It was so nice of you to just stop by.” His mother said. It was a sweet but not subtle reminder to do so more often.  “I hope that Debra is able to join you next time.”

“I do too Mom.”  He said, hugging her.  She was a large woman and his arms had trouble making it around her.  She kissed him on the cheek and let him go. 

He left the house and walked up the broken brick path around the grass to his truck.  It was a black F-150, about ten years old and fading but it still drove hard.  It was the only thing that was his and he loved it accordingly. He started it up and pulled out of the driveway onto County Road 60, a lonely stretch of highway that would take him the hour home.

He’d only been driving about ten minutes when the fear hit him.  All it took was a small white car parked by the side of the road. The closer he got to it the more he was sure that it was an IED, waiting for him to drive by so that it could blow him to pieces. He started to sweat as he put his foot on the gas, trying to get by before it had time to detonate.  The speedometer hit eighty and then ninety.  Byron gripped the steering wheel as hard as he could, no longer in his truck but a Humvee with not nearly enough armor. 

He kept his foot to the floor as he shot past farms and cows.  He wasn’t seeing them, just trying to get as far ahead of the white car as he could.  It was getting smaller and smaller in his mirror as he tore up the highway, not thinking just reacting, remembering his training.  And then he couldn’t see it anymore and his heart slowed down and he remembered that he was in Ohio. He took his foot off the gas and the truck slowed but not before he saw another car pull onto the road behind him and hit its lights. A cop.

Byron slowed the truck and pulled over to the side of the two lane road.  He felt his tires grind the irregular pavement of the shoulder and he sighed heavily when the car came to a stop.  He rolled down his window and took off his sunglasses as the police cruiser parked behind him.  He took deep breaths, still trying to shake his episode and wanting very much not to take it out on a police officer.

“Going pretty fast.” The cop came to his window and looked at him for a moment before examining the rest of the truck.  He wore mirrored aviator sunglasses and a wide-brimmed Smokey the Bear hat.  Byron recognized the uniform as belonging to a Richland County sheriff’s deputy and the smug smirk that came with authority.

“Yes sir.” Byron said.  “No excuses.”

“License, registration and proof of insurance, please.”

Byron reached into his back pocket for his wallet and saw the cop’s eyes widen slightly and his hand hover above his holster.  When Byron leaned over to get his registration and insurance card he noticed the cop’s hand start to tremble.  He couldn’t blame the man.  He knew all too well what that paranoia was like.

“Here you go sir.”

“I’ll be right back.” The deputy took the paperwork and walked back to his car to run Byron through the computer.  Byron stared straight ahead, cursing himself and knowing that he wasn’t going to tell the cop why he was speeding even though it would probably get him out of a ticket.  Even if a cop wasn’t a veteran they were usually sympathetic.  But if Byron couldn’t talk about it to his dad he sure wasn’t going to talk about it with a stranger.

The deputy came back.  “I’m going to have to write you up, clocked you at 94 in a 55.”

“Yes sir.”

The deputy looked at him.  “You in the service?”

Byron didn’t like that it was so obvious.  He’d been out almost a year and still talked to authority like a private.  Anyone who had ever been in could spot him from a mile away.  But he didn’t want to be spotted.  He wanted to be left alone.

“I was sir. Marines.”

“Iraq?”

“Yes sir.”

“How long have you been back? I was there in ’07.”

“Three tours sir.” he said.  “The invasion and then 2004 and 2006.”

“Bet you saw some action then.  I was off-shore, Navy.”

Byron didn’t laugh but he wanted to. “Some.” he said.

The cop’s eyes lowered and a sick grin came on his face.  “You kill anybody?”

“I’m sorry sir?” Byron’s eyes widened some.

“I asked you if you ever got some.  If you ever busted your cherry.”

Byron stared at him and didn’t answer.  He just bored his eyes into the cop’s face until the man looked away.

“Well, I think I can go ahead and give you a warning.” The deputy said to him, forcing an uneasy smile.

“Thank you sir.” Byron said as he got his paperwork back.

“Slow down.”

“Yes sir.”

The deputy walked back to his car and Byron pulled onto the highway, watching the police cruiser make a U-turn and head the other direction.  He was angry, fuming.  He was tired of people claiming they understood what he was going through, especially when there was no way they could. The only people who really understood weren’t the people that liked to talk about it. Not people like that asshole pogue of a cop.

He passed the rest of the drive listening to country radio, not to listen to but to keep time with, to keep his heart from leaping out of his chest.  He wanted to turn the truck around and chase after the cop.  He wanted to grab the man and throw him to the ground.  He wanted to kick him until he saw red. Byron squeezed the steering wheel as hard as he could, his face bunched up in rage. 

And then it subsided. The sky continued to darken and he turned on his headlights, watching the orange reflecting strips down the center divide whip past him as he calmed down.  Twice was a lot for an afternoon.  Forty-five minutes later he pulled into his driveway and saw his wife through the kitchen window, cooking. 

“Hi.” he said, as he walked into the house.

“Hi!” His wife turned around and smiled. “How are your parents?”

Their house was small, a two-bedroom ranch that they rented for 800 dollars a month.  The living room was furnished with hand-me down chairs and a couch they had bought at a rummage sale a few years earlier.  Byron kissed his wife and sat down heavily on the couch.

“They’re fine,” he said. “My mom was sorry you weren’t there.”

“Do you think she meant it?”

“Maybe.” Byron said.  “How was your day?”

She followed him into the living room and gave him another warm smile.  She wasn’t beautiful and she never had been but she was kind and looked it.  Her whole life had been about finding a local boy to marry and then having kids, just like her mother and nearly all of her friends.  Not a lot of people left Richland County and the ones that did tended to be exceptional.  Debra was a good, kind woman but growing up she had never been exceptional.  She had been to Byron though.

She was the best thing that had ever happened to him and they both knew it. Byron had asked her on a date in the eleventh grade and they’d been together since. When he went away to war the first time she waited for him and prayed and when he came back they got married.  She’d done the same for his second deployment. His third tour, that was when Debra started getting exceptional.

He had been posted back to Al Anbar Province where two years ago he had participated in the bloodiest battle of the war in Iraq.  Byron and the 1st Regimental Combat Team had invaded the insurgent-held city of Fallujah and spent more than a month pacifying the city through the fiercest urban warfare the Marines had seen since Vietnam.  Three men in his forty-man platoon were killed and seven more wounded. Byron had held the head of his best friend in his lap and watched as he died waiting for a helicopter.

When Byron had returned home from his second tour, his wife noticed the change in him immediately.  Where he had been a typically happy man he had become sullen and withdrawn.  The even-handed man she loved had grown a temper and flinched when cars would backfire or the sirens of a fire truck would pass by their house.  She had watched him suffer it quietly, accepting that the man she loved had been forced to erect a hard shell around his emotions.  When she saw him off at the airport for the third time she had cried but a small part of her was also relieved and she was disgusted by this.  So she took it upon herself to see that things would change.  She got political.

When Byron got back from Iraq for the last time he found his wife and his home different than when he’d left.  Underneath the Marine Corps bumper sticker on his wife’s Ford Fiesta was a new one that said “There was never a good war or a bad peace. –Benjamin Franklin” and on the other side of the bumper was a peace symbol in white against blood-red.  Byron hadn’t known what to say and so he had said nothing.  He just kissed his wife and went home with her to find that she wasn’t the woman he had left.  Still, he thought it was fair because he knew that he wasn’t the man she had married.

“My day was fine.” Debra said to him. “He’s been kicking a lot.”

She gestured to her burgeoning belly and smiled contentedly.  She was seven months pregnant with their first child and though neither of them knew how they could afford it, they were both excited all the same.  Byron had his fears but he knew that it wouldn’t do to talk about them.  Not when there was going to be a new life that he was responsible for.  It worried him that the last time he had been responsible for anyone’s life, some of them had come home in body bags.

Byron smiled for the first time that day and let his gaze drop to the television, which he turned on with the remote. 

“You got a letter from the VA today.” Debra told him.

“Yeah?  Did you open it?” He asked her without looking up from the television, not wanting to meet his wife’s gaze.  He knew what the letter was, it was a denial of benefits on the disability he had claimed.  For all the talk of taking care of the nation’s veterans, mental health diagnosis and treatment was still not easy to come by for former Marines who hadn’t been wounded.  It may have been better in some places but in Richland County, Ohio the closest he could get to a therapist was a mile-long waiting list to see one of the few counselors at the nearest VA Outpatient Clinic.  He had tried a few times and actually seen a therapist once but couldn’t bring himself to tell the man what he had seen and what still kept him up at night. Byron found he couldn’t talk to anyone.

“It’s not addressed to me.” His wife replied.  She waddled over to the kitchen counter, retrieved the letter and handed it to Byron.

“I know what it is.” he said.

“So do I.”

“Well I can’t fault the VA.”

“Of course you can!” Debra replied.  “It’s criminal!”

Byron just sighed and opened the letter.  He scanned it and noticed that the term Denial of Benefits was in bold red.

“It’s not criminal.” he said.  “There’s lots of guys who are worse off than me.”

“That doesn’t make it right.”

“Well there’s not a whole lot I can do about it.” Byron felt his temper starting to flare and took a deep breath, willing it to die in his chest.

“You know, the county Veterans Service will help you with an appeal for free.”

“So I can get denied again?  Why bother?”  

She didn’t have a reply to that.  She just took the letter back from him and put it on the counter.  She opened the refrigerator and stuck her head inside to hide the tears that were forming in her eyes. Until he wanted help she knew that things wouldn’t get better.  She didn’t know that he wanted that help and just didn’t know how to ask for it.

“What’s for dinner?” Byron called from the couch.

Debra composed herself and turned around to face him.  “Chicken.” she said. “Chicken and rice.  And broccoli.”

“All right.” he replied, his attention turning back to the television.  This was how most nights in their house were now.  When Byron wasn’t watching television he was out drinking, and always by himself.  Since he had come home eight months ago, Byron had made no attempts to resume his social life beyond his wife.  He had stopped calling his friends and stopped returning the calls they made to him.  It was as if he couldn’t bring himself to talk to anyone.

Debra stared at him, even now disbelieving that the sad and angry man on her couch was the same one who had proposed to her at nineteen during the fourth inning at a Cleveland Indians game.  The same man who had held her all night before he had shipped off to a meaningless war to kill for someone else’s profits.  Debra wasn’t the smartest woman, she’d be the first to admit that, but she knew the difference between right and wrong.  The difference between just and unjust.  And what had been brought on her house and her husband was unjust.

“What time are we eating?” Byron asked her, getting up from the couch.

“When I start.  Probably an hour or so.”

“I’m going to go out for a bit.” Byron said.

She stood in the kitchen and put her hands on her hips, affecting a pose. “Where?”

“To get a drink.”

“We have drinks here.” she said.

“I want some air.”

“You got home twenty minutes ago.”

“And now I want some air.”

She wanted to fight with him, to make him stay and talk to her.  She wanted to plead that he let just some of it out, that he trust her to help him get better.  She wanted to shout at him that it wasn’t his fault, that none of it was his fault.  But she didn’t know how to form the words.

“All right.” she said. “Go.”

Byron looked at her with narrow eyes and she felt them boring into her chest.  His moods changed without warning and she still wasn’t used to it.  She wasn’t able to tell when her husband was lying next to her in bed or when it was that other person, Sergeant Whitaker, who had cold eyes and a stony face.  She dropped her gaze and turned back to the refrigerator and listened as Byron left and slammed the door behind him. When she heard his truck start she began to cry.

Byron stared straight out the windshield and watched his headlights eat up the pavement.  He didn’t have a destination, just the inclination to get as far away from anything as he could.  As he’d sat there in his living room and seen the disappointed eyes of his wife, his mind had conjured up images of other disappointed eyes.  His father’s, when he would come home from school accompanied by a disciplinary letter. His drill instructor’s, when he hadn’t run fast enough or jumped high enough.  And Dominic Estevez’s eyes, which had pleaded with him to get that helicopter there just a little bit faster.

It was that last set of eyes that haunted Byron Whitaker.  Those eyes that had clung so tightly to the hope that Byron kept whispering.  Eyes that had slowly drained of life as their body drained of blood.  Those were the eyes that Byron was trying to escape and he didn’t think he could ever run far enough.  He didn’t think he could ever escape their gaze.

Byron kept driving, the only car on a lot of quiet roads.  He knew them so well, his refuge from home, from work, from his family and from his thoughts.  He knew where they all went, what towns they passed through and what rivers they bridged.  He knew where the railroad tracks crossed and where every night at eleven the flimsy white gates would close and the red lights would flash and a locomotive pulling heavy boxcars would rumble through. 

He let his fingers guide the steering wheel and tried to shut off his mind.  He turned off the radio and tried to sink as deeply into his seat as he could with his foot still pressed to the pedal.  He drove and tried to shut out the pictures from his head. The shooting and the screaming and the fear.  The wrenching, numbing fear that made his body frozen.  He tried to forget it all and it just flooded into his head that much quicker.  It kept coming and coming until the last image came, the one that he stayed awake to keep from dreaming.

He was in the turret of the Humvee, trying to yell over the sound of his machine gun as he fired it in short bursts at the muzzle flashes that were coming from every window of every building.  He saw a man dash into the street with a rifle and Byron turned his machine gun towards him and hesitated.  For no reason he was a second too late depressing the trigger and the man fired his rifle at the Humvee.

Byron started shooting then and watched as bursts from his machine gun tore the man apart.  He was still shooting when he heard the driver of his Humvee screaming and felt himself start to move in reverse.  He didn’t have time to see what had happened, he kept firing his weapon as they drove backwards, faster and faster, before pulling behind a row of buildings and finally coming to a stop.

Byron ducked his head into the vehicle to see what had happened, his ears still ringing from the noise of the machine gun and his fatigues soaked with sweat.  He saw the driver leaning over the front passenger seat and he saw the walls and windows coated with blood.  He tried to drop down further into the Humvee but was pushed up by the Marines in the back, yelling at him to stay on the gun while also yelling into the radio for a medic. 

For eight minutes Byron had manned the turret of his gun while his friend died. While they waited for someone to help them.  When reinforcements arrived in the form of two more Marine Humvees, Byron had abandoned his weapon and held his friend’s hand as he was pulled from the vehicle and lain on the back alley dirt road of Fallujah.  He had cradled his friend’s head as he watched the life leave his eyes and he had sworn at the medic who told him that help wouldn’t arrive in time.  And he had watched as Marine Lance Corporal Dominic Estevez had breathed his last breath.

Byron slammed his foot on the brakes and the truck skidded to a stop.  He sat there in the cab, sweat pouring down his forehead and his pulse racing.  He tried to breathe deeply and couldn’t and then began banging his fists against the dashboard as tears mixed with the sweat.  He yelled at nothing as the truck sat in the middle of the highway.  Then he looked up and saw the white gates of the train crossing closing and he noted the time, ten fifty-five. 

Byron wiped his eyes with his sleeve and drove forward.  He stopped the truck when its front bumper touched the gate and could feel the flashing lights pulsing in time with his heartbeat.  He pressed his foot on the gas pedal and felt the gate resist, trying to keep him from his fate.  He pressed harder and felt the engine strain to break free from under the hood.  He willed his truck forward with every aching part of his body and then felt a huge release as the gate gave way and his truck stumbled onto the railroad tracks. 

He had time to hear the powerful horn of the locomotive shake his truck and he looked left and stared at the bright white light, coming closer and closer.  He felt every jostle of his truck as the tracks reverberated from the crushing steel that was bearing down on him.  He looked away from the train and closed his eyes, not hearing the horn as it continued to blast.  He looked up once more and was blinded by the light, its shimmering mass seeming to hang outside his window for a very long second.  He saw his parents and his wife and Dominic Estevez and his unborn son.

The funeral was held a week later.  As Debra sat, still unbelieving, John Whitaker came to her and placed his hand on her shoulder.  She looked up at him and saw the hurt in his eyes.  She was struck by how much Byron looked like his father.  She wondered how much their son would look like Byron.

“I want to tell you about something.” John Whitaker said to her.

“What?” She asked.”

“I want to tell you about Vietnam.” He said.
 
 
The End

Chuck Palahniuk may have said it best, in his most famous novel, Fight Club: “We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives.”

An entire generation, raised on video games and fast food, taught that success lies in a too brightly lit cubicle and a bi-weekly paycheck and without a greater purpose to strive for. We have achieved, for the first time in history and against all odds, what could be the downfall of our civilization. We are apathetic, we are bored, and we want for nothing. We are comfortable.

This sense of comfort, this lack of fear, is why we see zombies around every corner. They are us, they are what we are destined to become, packs of ravenous automatons, mindlessly devouring everything in sight without conscience or even greed. No emotion but consumption. We fear zombies because we see them in the mirror. We are the living dead, our generation. No real rebellion, no individuals rising above the din that aren’t bought and scripted by corporations, no straying from the herd.

Can we defeat this malaise? Can we shrug off the chains secured so snugly by television and movies and popular music and the internet and every other in your face, gotta have it product and advertisement that keeps us wanting more of nothing? If the first decade of the 21st Century is any indication, the answer is no. If we judge by the last ten years, even by the last year, we find ourselves in an inexorable slide towards culture-less similarity. When the Supreme Court of the United States rules that corporate personhood extends to political speech, can the underfunded masses ever hope to compete with whatever brand of America those CEOs decide best fits their corporate model?

We may be destined to become zombies, consuming what we are told, when we are told and without thought to the consequences or even the very reason. We chip away at Earth’s resources, we drive ourselves further and further into isolation, and we hunger for more. We don’t know what it is we’re hungry for, but we want to eat and we don’t want to stop.

I, for one, don’t fantasize about the zombie apocalypse. It’s already here. I fantasize for the day we start to fight back.

On my eleventh birthday, my grandma had a heart attack.  He told me she was so upset that I’d lived to be eleven, that she didn’t want to live anymore.

When I was nine, he came running out of the bathroom visibly excited to tell me that he just found out the Snorks lived in the bottom of our toilet.  Mom screamed at me for an hour and a half for submerging my head into our toilet bowl and almost drowning.

At six years old, he had explained to me that tennis balls bounce because of peer pressure. A dining table full of adults sat laughing at me as I told them about my recent knowledge.

My brother hated me and his main purpose in life was to make sure my life was miserable.  He succeeded.  Often.

Now that I am older, I can look back on all of this with him and laugh.  Though it was absolute hell when I was going through it, none of it scarred me for life or stuck with me through adulthood.

Well, none but one incident:

He told me when I was seven that falling stars don’t work the way they do in movies.  You’re supposed to make a wish before you see the shooting star.  That way, when you finally see one, you know your wish is going to come true right then and there.  My parents had just gone through a rather messy divorce and I saw a very dark side of my dad for the first time. As a child, I thought the only option in life was to grow up, get married and start a family of my own.

I was terrified that I might end up with someone that would change personalities suddenly so I wished that when I saw a falling star, I’d be with the man I was supposed to marry.  I didn’t want to make a mistake like my mother did.   A handful of days later, at the drive-in, my brother pointed in the sky.  He’d seen a shooting star.

“Did you see it Colleen?  No?  Sucks to be you – I saw it and my wish just came true.  What did you wish for anyway?”

I’m not sure what made me think it would be a good idea to tell him what I’d already wished for, but I did.  I apparently was not very bright at seven.  Instead of laughing at me, he just looked sad and shook his head, “That’s too bad… I had wished that you’d never find a husband and die alone.  If you’d seen the star, they’d cancel each other out, but you didn’t see it.  Sorry.”

To this day, I’ve still never seen a shooting star.  I’m thirty-one now.  The realist in me doesn’t believe it’s because I haven’t met my future husband yet, but the kid in me still holds on to that thought.  Every time one of my friends mentions just having seen a falling star, I can’t help but smirk and think “Well, it’s none of you bastards…”

What started out as a horrible childhood moment has turned into a welcome bastion for me.   So many of my peers have grown up and lost their child-eyes, lost their ability to see the magic in the world.  They’ve pushed it out with reason and science.  Every moment has an explanation based in fact.  No more wonder exists for them.  Because of a monster of a brother, I’ve been able to keep my child-eyes into my thirties.

I want to continue to wonder if these inanimate objects around me have thoughts and souls, I want to continue to hear whispers in the wind, I want to continue to believe that if my dog and I run fast enough, we can soar up into the air and fly over this city, his gimpy leg not hindering his movement any longer.

I refuse to believe that my best friends are anything less than long lost siblings, I refuse to believe that when I dream of conversations at the swing sets with a dear friend that it is just a dream, I refuse to believe that no matter how hard I wish for something, it’s not going to come true. I don’t want to ever dismiss something unbelievable as a coincidence, my eyes playing tricks on me or reduce it to rubble through ‘logic’ and scientific explanation.

There is a monster in Loch Ness. There are ghosts of people past roaming around. When I blow on a dandelion and make a wish, that wish will come true. The shadows in my room at night are swirling with untapped magic. A pinky swear will always be the most important and binding promise of them all. My mother will always be able to fix my injuries with a kiss, better than any doctor can with bandages. My childhood home will always smile at me as I pass by it, and I will always wave back at it so it knows that it is still a part of our family. All the creatures that I drew and wrote about as a child, are all alive and playing together somewhere in the void.

I believe in magic. Maybe not the Harry Potter magic wand brand of magic, but I believe in magic.   If you don’t, I urge you to try and find your child-eyes again. Feel the magic in the air at dusk on a summer day when the fireflies are dancing just for you. Feel the magic resting in the dead silence of the night after the first snowfall, when the Man in the Moon is smiling down on you as he remembers what you used to look like as a kid. Feel the magic in the laughter of the little girl playing at the park who sees this world for all it is, who hasn’t had the magic taught out of her yet like you have. Find your child-eyes again before it’s too late, before they are gone forever.

What is it with people acting like punks and misbehaving in movie theaters? I think they make the instructions pretty simple. Before the previews start there are always polite messages to keep quiet and turn off your phone. It’s pretty clear what the rules are. I guess what we’re dealing with here is a bunch of senseless, rule-breaking anarchists.

I like to arrive at the movies five to ten minutes before the previews start. Just enough time to get situated, turn off my phone, and create a purse/jacket barrier around me to keep out enemies. I pick a seat as far from other human beings as possible. And then I wait. I stare straight ahead and ignore anyone who dares to walk past my aisle. My body tenses as the minutes tick by. I’m pleading with the movie gods – PLEASE for the love of all that is sacred and holy do NOT let anyone sit near me.

I’m sure you can guess what happens next. The previews start and I allow myself to relax slightly. I think I might be safe. But then a pack of rude jerks saunter in and plop themselves directly behind me. There’s usually a lot of pulling and kicking of my chair, and of course lots of rustling. People love to rustle in move theaters. They live for it. Shopping bags, snacks – doesn’t matter as long as it makes a lot of noise while you open it. People also seem to think opening things slowly is somehow less annoying so they’ll take ten excruciating minutes opening a bag of M&M’s when really they should grow some balls, rip open the bag and be done with it.

By this point I am fuming. No matter how hard I try to remain invisible, they always find me. Then they rustle. And of course, they talk. Talking is the worst offense – I can barely bring myself to talk about it. The rage that consumes me is terrifying. I am a shusher – I shush people fiercely and without mercy.

There are several different types of verbal offenders:

The Narrator / Captain Redundant: Comments like, “Oh my god look – she’s going in there!” Yes thank you I see that – BECAUSE I HAVE EYES.

The Gasper: Pretty self-explanatory. Lots of loud, dramatic gasping.

The Inappropriate Laugher: Uncontrollable laughter during serious or violent scenes. Like when Nemo’s mom died. True story, I saw it happen.

The Vengeful Scolder: Classy reactions to on-screen villains like, “HA! That’s what you get, asshole! Yeah!”

Texting is a close second to talking, in terms of irritation level. People seem to have gotten the memo that phone calls are really not okay, so that happens very rarely in my experience, but the texting thing is getting out of hand. Do people not see the blinding beam of light coming from their BlackBerrys? I mean the word “distracting” doesn’t even begin to cover it. I have literally had fantasies of climbing over seats like an animal and beating people to death with their cell phones. My reaction to texting is that violent. I mean I’m so terribly sorry the movie is not holding your interest but what is so goddamn important? Get the hell out of here.

Just once I would like to share a movie theater with like-minded people. Those who watch in silence, open their snacks quickly, and don’t kick my chair. Until that fantasy comes true (which will be never) I will just have to keep shushing and try desperately to contain my boiling fury.