Tag Archives: entertainment

Commemorate

Commemorate: (v) to recall and show respect for someone or something

Mediocre is always so busy dragging down excellence that it doesn’t have the time to lift up inferior.

Because of this, mediocre keeps sinking deeper and deeper into the sag of inferiority, desperately trying to change the rules of operation and the requirements for the rewards provided.

We have a system of entertainment and information that streams in our country, which feels the need to commemorate events by finding the heroes, the standouts and those who fared well, interview them, extol them and then, within short weeks, dig up dirt on them to prove there was really nothing exceptional about them in the first place.

Why? Because without this kind of reporting, Ma and Pa Kettle, sitting at home, start getting depressed–thinking less of themselves because they don’t measure up.

After all, the problem of going to a nude beach is that you’re fully aware that everyone is stuck with an eyeful of you.

How do we commemorate the attributes, the virtues, the kindness and the intelligence that sets the human race on fire with an explosion of knowledge and unveiling of great cures and advances?

Well, we certainly can’t do it if we spend all of our time mocking initiative and making it seem that those who portray a classy morality are really just stuck in the past.

These are the three great things we should commemorate if we expect to shine:

  1. Empathy

Any time someone feels for someone else, it is miraculous.

  1. Research

Stop settling for the status quo, and find a better way to accomplish things.

  1. Humility

The only way to achieve the first two is to be humble enough to know when you’ve made a mistake so you can change it quickly and improve your cause.

May we step out of our doldrums of self-satisfaction and begin to commemorate–and therefore imitate–those who are actually doing matters better than us?

 

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Comeuppance

Comeuppance: (n) a punishment or fate that someone deserves.

Sometimes I’m convinced that there are no history books. Matter of fact, I’ve gone on the Internet to make sure they still sell them.

Sure enough, there they are.

So my second supposition is that they just must not be very popular.

Because it does not take too long when perusing a history book, to realize that if you’re going to cheat, lie, steal, abuse or kill, you’re going to get your comeuppance.

You may do it for a while, with authority, seemingly uncontested.

But there is always someone, or sometimes it’s a whole clump of people, who will rise up and stop the foolishness before the human race ends up in the ground with its bones being eventually studied by some other species in ten thousand years.

You just can’t pursue evil and succeed.

That’s enough reason right there to at least consider the option of good.

Yet all of our entertainment, our politics, and even our religions are so power-hungry that they present the illusion that evil might just have a bad enough day to have a good day, and beat the crap out of righteousness.

It doesn’t seem to bother people that it’s never happened.

After all, Adolph Hitler, who thought his Third Reich was going to last a thousand years, fell a bit short. Thirteen years were all he got.

Oh, yes–he destroyed a lot of people along the way and maybe he should have been stopped earlier, but you will notice, he’s not around to take interviews on the subject.

It’s something I need to remind myself of from time to time. I can go ahead and tell that little white lie, and maybe even think I got by with it.

But after a while, the feeling of self-confidence about being nasty catches up with me.

And I do get my comeuppance.

Even worse than that, I end up looking like a fool to have pursued such a retarded, unfulfilling and doomed process.

 

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Comedy

Comedy: (n) entertainment intended to make an audience laugh

The least humorous thing that can be done is to have a discussion about comedy.

So since I find myself writing an essay on the subject, you can count on two things: it will be brief, and as non-discussive as possible.

Comedy is what sane people do to try to change things they know will probably not transform, but still need to be addressed. In that way, it can sometimes be
heavy-handed. (How appropriate to refer to it as a Comedy Club.)

To me, comedy that benefits the human soul, like a medicine for our emotions, always has three ingredients:

  1. Self-deprecation. (You have to make fun of yourself.)
  2. Commonality. (It is all part of what the tribe does.)
  3. Some hope (leaving the hearer aware of the difficulty, but ready to approach the situation.)

When comedy provides these three angels to our journey, it may be the closest thing to defining God.

 

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Collapse

Collapse: (v) to fall down or in; give way.

Some folks think it’s hilarious when a big man like me sits down in a chair and it collapses. It’s why I have to judge furniture much too harshly–“spaciously” profiling it.

Yet it has taught me a lesson–to pay careful attention to ideas that keep popping up, which certainly will not withstand the weight of
human involvement. After all, human interaction comes in three forms:

  • Support
  • Criticism
  • Attack

Every idea has to be able to survive all three things, or it will collapse.

I often feel that way about politics. It collapses under the pressure of being questioned and challenged–dare I say, attacked?

Entertainment and entertainers are certainly way too fragile, and hide behind their make-up.

And religion collapses like a cheap lawn chair the minute real human conflict comes sitting.

What makes me collapse?

What makes me give in?

Where are my weaknesses?

What warning should you receive about my possibility for folding up?

All things human have to survive support, criticism and attack.

And truthfully, whenever I can’t, I need to get the hell out of the way and make room for better ideas.

If we were raising a generation of young souls prepared to withstand such scrutiny, maybe our future would be brighter. Perhaps it’s where we should begin.

If we could take every child born on Earth under the age of twelve, and teach him or her how to support, withstand an attack, and keep perspective during criticism, we might secure another hundred generations of human beings.

 

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Clump

Clump: (v) to form into a clump or mass.

There is an unwritten command to never challenge contradictions–especially if they are well-populated or in some way garner profit.

Yet it is what maintains the presence of a universal ignorance, which on occasion, rears its head and growls at humanity because we refuse to rectify the obvious.

The objection should be simple.

For instance, we maintain that human beings are individuals unto themselves while insisting that we have a predilection to “clump together.” Our excuse for this anomaly is that there are times when we want to be autonomous, and other occasions when being part of a group is essential to our well-being.

This paradox is supported all over our society, from religion to politics, entertainment to business, simply because there are so many adherents and it allows us to make a lot of money from lifting up one culture above another.

No one stops to ask if clumping is good for people, or under what auspices linking together is positive, and when it is running for the corner of the room to avoid responsibility.

When should I clump?

Should I clump because I’m in a room with people of German descent?

Should I clump because I’m around a congregation of believers who favor my view of the Eternal?

Should I clump because I have a penis instead of a vagina and find those who share that appendage?

Should I clump because I like romantic comedies better than adventure films?

And once I decide on clumps I want to pursue, how do I escape them to gain my own uniqueness and flavor?

Maybe there’s only one clump–the human race. And we escape the human race by temporarily splitting off to our own thoughts, which prepares us to come back and be more gracious to one another.

 

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Cavalier

Cavalier: (adj) showing a lack of proper concern; offhand.

If we can laugh at it, we can mock it.

If we can mock it, we can make it seem insignificant.

If we can make it seem insignificant, we can deny its importance.

If we can deny its importance, we can stop doing it.

A nasty little process that’s being practiced every day in the entertainment industry, politics and even religion.

The cavalier approach we take to essential issues is damnable. You cannot take life-giving activities and place them on pedestals and put them in the museum of
“practices of the past” without setting up the destruction of our species.

Every morning I get up and ask myself, “What is important?”

It’s not important that my eggs are over-easy. That’s just nice.

It’s not important that my coffee was made correctly. That would be amazing.

It’s not important that my car did not start. That sets up a possibility for a lasting repair.

It is important that I have enough self-awareness to be aware of the other “selves” I will encounter.

To take the cavalier attitude that certain situations, certain occupations and certain people don’t really matter because they are either impossible to handle or not worth the time is the definition of hell on Earth.

After all, hell is the absence of God.

And God is the presence of “loving your neighbor as yourself.”

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Cajole

Cajole: (v) to persuade someone to do something by sustained coaxing.

Debate is a debacle.

We certainly should have learned that over the past few years. It is permission to insult without embarrassment.

Conversation seems to lend itself to insincerity, mainly because the truth required on the inward parts of the human being to create excellent fellowship is reluctantly provided.

Preaching is preachy.

Teaching is tedious.

Entertainment is crippled with the need to be commercial.

There is much that needs to be said. Deep in our hearts we all know that humility is not an option, yet we continue to tolerate the boastful and proud being given overuse of the stage.

There are many things we know to be true which seem to slink to the rear for fear of being called “old-fashioned.”

So it is the job of sane souls everywhere to use art, puns, humor and silliness to cajole brothers and sisters who walk among us to begin to think and feel again instead of settling for inadequacy.

Cajoling is when we realize we need to be merciful to the ignorant. Ignorance is not a sin unless it persists and gains power.

We need to catch it when it is still in a childish position–to be gently cajoled into repentance.

 

 

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Cable

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Cable: (n) an insulated wire

Life is very reassuring if you’re not stubborn. You’ll find out very quickly that answers are not evasive, just require a moment of patience.

The first time I rented a home and decided to sign up for cable television, I was in awe of the whole process. When the cable man came–three days after his promised arrival–and brought all the boxes, all the instructions and all the drills to do his work, it had the feeling of God arriving to create the universe.

I was infatuated.

I was over-complimentary.

I was perplexed.

I listened carefully and then took notes to make sure that when the magic man departed my home, I would be able to access the universe of channels on my own.

But when he left, it suddenly stopped working.

I tried to remember what he had done, fooled around with it a little, but quickly became convinced that I was a four-year-old in a hospital operating room.

As time passed I became more and more enraged that this mysterious system I had ordered was failing to meet my entertainment needs. So I called the local cable operator and they immediately sent someone over. Two days later.

By that time I had built up a good head of steam and was prepared to ram my emotional freight train into the hapless technician. I ferociously explained how they had cheated me and how they had wasted my time. The young man was rather nice.

He asked me a simple question. “Did you move the TV after the guy left?”

Actually, yes. It was a little distant from the wall, and I had pushed it back. I retorted, “What?? I’m not allowed to move my TV?”

“Sure,” the repairman replied calmly. “But when you did, you knocked the cable loose.”

He reached down and with too much ease, restored my world of wonder.

I was embarrassed. I tried to duplicate in apologies what I had spewed forth in fury.

The repairman smiled and said to me, “Just remember–it usually isn’t something difficult. Just a loose cable.”

 

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Boring

Boring: (adj) not interesting; tedious.

I used to be deathly afraid of being boring.Dictionary B

Because of this phobia, I almost accidentally became friends to my children instead of a good parent, denied my faith rather than creating a backbone for my principles, and attempted ridiculous entertainment projects to prove I was youthful and alive.

I don’t know why “boring” scared me so badly–except in our particular American culture, it is the word that ushers in the “last rites” for misunderstood ideas.

In other words, if something is determined to be boring, it is soon abandoned and left to die in the field of forgetfulness.

But then one day it struck me–every great notion and progressive invention in the history of our race was at one time considered boring.

Can you imagine Thomas Edison explaining to all the people who deeply loved candles and gas light lamps how his incandescent bulb might be able to work better, and ultimately even be cheaper?

Boring.

Or how about Abraham Lincoln, stumping to his Cabinet and Congress, how the addition of the freed slaves to our everyday life would give us a great brotherhood to exemplify the idea of liberty?

Really boring.

Or the guy named Salk, who came along and said that just weeping over children with polio was not enough–that maybe we could come up with some sort of vaccination to protect them from the disease instead of just praying for them and telling stories about their hideous struggles.

No thanks, Jonas.

Boring is not what is truly misplaced or ill-timed. It is the piece of truth that we do not yet understand, which we decide is meaningless because it mystifies our limited reasoning.

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Bodily

Bodily: (adj) of or concerning the body.

Dictionary B

Every piece of contradiction is held in place with a reverence to a little scrap of silliness that we’re frightened to abandon.

So in politics we accept lying because it is the silliness we believe holds the process together.

In entertainment, we talk about the “bottom line,” preaching the notion that the pieces of art we foster must make huge profits–otherwise they are not worthy of production.

Likewise, we lift high the silliness of “blind faith,” when it is our doubt that makes our spiritual experience rich with discovery and hope.

And finally, this certainly is true when we talk about bodily functions.

Everybody craps, pisses, farts, screws, sweats, stinks and has aches and pains.

But rather than finding the great commonality which might remove a lion’s share of foolish bigotry, we whisper about these bodily similarities for fear of offending those who somehow believe that the One who created us would find such talk “nasty.”

I have nothing against appropriate dialogue in given surroundings.

But as long as we are afraid of our bodies, we will generate a cloud of deceit to hide our human essence.

 

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