Annual Abscondments IV: In Closing

2013 was a busy, busy year for Fernando's more roguish clientele, though the nefarious acts of thievery came in bursts: first late February/early March, then a second wave in July, and finally an end-of-year push in November. It proved Fernando's worst year yet in terms of lost inventory; twenty-one of Fernando's beloved and not-so-beloved movies were torn from his loving embrace and taken into the unexpected custody of a great wide spectrum of ne'er-do-wells.

This is their obituary.

Expendables 2, Wanderlust, The Notebook: A lady comes into the store, one who hadn't been in since the days of the old Keeper. She had some late fees from that elder age, $21. Fernando informed her of this fact and, against all odds, she agreed to pay them off.

So how'd that work out for you, Fernando? You earned $30 only to lose about $60 in inventory. Look on the bright side: if you keep this up there may be room for you on the executive board of a major financial institution. And on the brighter side, you no longer have a copy of The Notebook available to recommend as a dumb-silly romantic chick flick.

I Am Number 4: High school kid comes in and sets up account, rents one movie, never returns it. He came back to the store on one occasion in the company of some of his less-lawbreak-y peers and Fernando shamed him so thoroughly that he actually put down five bucks towards his debt. 

He still owes Fernando $35.

The Greatest Game Ever Played: Because if you're a thirty-something woman setting up an account whose sole purpose, apparently, is to steal something, best make it a mediocre movie about golf that had otherwise never been rented in all the years Fernando worked at and owned the Dominion.

New Year's Eve, War, 24: Redemption: Remember the guy from way, way back who trashed a copy of Ice Age and then visited the store not long after Fernando took over in the misguided hopes that new ownership would erase his debt? Yeah, he, Fernando later learned, at some point hooked up with a gullible young lady who set up an account and, apparently, rented for him by proxy. Three pieces of Fernando's inventory went missing but at least two of those three were uninspiring renters even when they were fresh and new and the third, while a decent, testosterone-laden popcorn flick, was not of any particular importance in the grand scheme of things.

But hey if either of them ever return to the store down the road I can feel justified affixing the "saga" tag to this affair.

Warm Bodies, Cabin in the Woods, 127 Hours: Kind of a twofer with the next entry. See below.

Beautiful Creatures, Real Steel: Okay, so, two guys in their late teens/early twenties come to the store at the same time and both of them set up accounts to rent some movies. One of them is from Happyrock, about thirty miles away; the other is more local and claims an address in Melvinsburg. Fernando checks out the licenses and gets phone numbers from them (one of which is a local land line) and rents to them.

When the movies had been out for three days, Fernando calls them up in turn to request that they bring them back in. The cell phone goes to not-set-up voicemail and Fernando leaves a message. The other one rings and rings and no one picks up. The following day, Fernando tries again. Still voicemail, still no response.

This repeats for a number of additional days until, finally, somebody picks up on the landline, a woman.

Fernando explains the situation to her and asks that she inform the young man that his movies are still out and if he could return them promptly. The woman tells Fernando that he is "out of state for work." Fernando asks that she pass along his request and to check around if, perhaps, the movies were sitting there at home. She agrees to do precisely that.

Buuuuut she never called him back, and Fernando also never did get in contact via cell phone with the guy from Happyrock.

Stand Up Guys, Prometheus: A middle-aged woman comes in to rent a pair of movies and they don't make it back. When he calls her up to find out what is going on, she tells him that she gave them to her son to drop off on his way back to school. Fernando lets her know that her son never did drop them off, and that he would appreciate it if she could double-check with him to make sure they make it back the next time he comes home.

Nope.

Star Trek: Into Darkness, The Muppets: Okay, sometimes people wake up on the stupid side of life. This pair of customers set up an account back in April, after having just moved into the area, and had been absolutely exemplary renters up til then. They were genial, treated Fernando like an actual person, and almost never late; when they were, they killed off their late fees immediately.

Then, one afternoon, they rented the above movies and they didn't make it back over the next three days. Fernando found this peculiar, so he called them up. One of them answered and told him that their car had taken a dump on them and that they were terribly sorry about everything, and that they would bring them back promptly once they found someone to give them a ride down to the Dominion, for they resided well into the boonies. This sounded good to Fernando, so he wished them the best and told them they could hash out everyone once the movies got back in.

Alas, they never did, and all of Fernando's subsequent calls went unanswered. What a pity, what a waste.

Now You See Me, Despicable Me: The girl who'd gotten a sorta-but-not-really divorce from her boyfriend a few years back dropped by and rented these movies, which never came back. She ignored Fernando's requests to return them, and now Fernando's sympathies lie with her jilted ex, wherever he may be.

The most embarrassing part is that she used a full stamp card for a free rental on Despicable Me. Would she have had it if Fernando had been less kind when she initially asked him to divvy up their communal stamps?

The Purge, Disaster Movie: Fernando tries not to judge people based on their last names and familial relations, but sometimes circumstances make it so incredibly hard to do. The young lady who rented this, by all appearances, comes from a family of thieves: her parents rented some things back under the Old Keeper's watch and never returned them. Then her older sister rented some things a few years back and never returned them.

Now, of course, she has rented some things and never returned them.

Fuck it, the next time somebody with that last name stops in, Fernando is going to be King Dick and let his prejudices run their fullest course.

Not a day goes by on which Fernando does not lament the passing of every one of these unfortunate abductees. Yes, even you, The Greatest Game Ever Played, even you. In fact, your loss is felt most keenly of all.

The question remains: What promises does 2014 hold? This Fernando cannot say. Truth be told, he seems to have driven away most of the assholes and recent weeks down at the Dominion have been, well, enjoyable. No entitled women coming to manipulate him into free things. No characters from days gone by stopping by to put into motion their inscrutable goals. No curious and random new faces with wretched spatial judgment.

Just the normal, genial customer base who rents movies, returns them mostly on time, and clears up any small late fees with a humble apology.

In short, the Chronicles seem to have wound down. Like in every closed system, the occurrence of random and interesting things decays as entropy increases and said system approaches a uniform, vacuous state. Rather than continue to draw out the unnecessary by milking a franchise (such as this is) until even its bones have been rendered down and snorted by a dwindling number of consumers (such as it is), as is the case with a certain industry that revolves around the production and distribution of motion pictures, it is time, I feel, to bring this book to a close.

There shall be other happenings, other tales of woe and dread, and even occasional tales of uplifting experience, I'm certain. Entropy is almost inevitably stalled out in the short term by random occurrences. Perhaps a fluctuation in fate will jar a new wave of content appropriate for the Chronicles of Fernando H. Stevens.

But until and unless there is such a time, let me tell you of a man who, in the late summer of 2010, made the lifechanging decision to cast his lot into the realm of weblogging through the collation and recording of happenings of great intrigue and of possible interest to souls other than himself. The wrangling with irate word processing programs, the mostly-kept rigor of deadlines, and the random acts of God which threatened the stability and structural integrity of his Chronicles did not daunt him. 

That man was one Fernando H. Stevens.

He had a blast, and he hopes you did too.

Hiatus

Sometimes life is not entirely a great large boring or despairing thing. Sometimes a full week, or more, goes by without anything extraordinary or uncouth or offensive happening inside the Dominion's walls, despite the presence of out-of-town hunters.

This is one of those times. Sometimes I fear I've finally driven away all of the entitled or otherwise asshole customers.

Furthermore, this lull in interesting content coincides with National Novel Writing Month, which of course I am doing again this year. After writing over a thousand words per day to compose a narrative I'd only envisioned two or so days before the first of the month, the last thing my overtaxed right brain wants is to switch gears and come up with more words on another topic. That, and all the time I spend composing an essay on, I don't know, altruism or a snarky observation on some unimportant facet of human society is time I'm not spending on increasing the wordcount for my NaNo project.

And I certainly am not going to be one of those people who counts posts made to other places on the internet as words added to a separate narrative. I have some scruples.

So, I'm taking a small siesta from this weblog, at least until something interesting happens again. The holidays draw ever closer and that always brings out the characters. Snow will fall from the heavens and I'm sure a butthole snowmobiler or six will take this as a sign to churn across the naked asphalt. And it's been quite a busy year for sneaks and thieves for some inexplicable reason, so the fourth Annual Absondments come the year's end shall prove positively monstrous.

The Chronicles will return. For as long as there are customers, there shall be depressing tales to share about encounters with them.

Conspiracy Conspiracy

One afternoon Fernando is trying his hand at Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup when a man enters the Dominion. He approaches the counter and Fernando greets him.

“Yeah, do you have any documentaries on 9/11?” the man asks.

“Not really documentaries, no,” Fernando replies. "I've got the Oliver Stone picture, off the top of my head, if that was something you would maybe be interested in.”

“No, I'm looking for ones that are about covering up the truth.”

“The...truth? No, sorry, I know I don't have anything you're looking for with that particular...slant.” Documentaries are piss-poor renters to begin with, and the most recent one in the store is Michael Moore's Sicko...which came out around two years before Fernando even took hold of the Dominion's reins of leadership.

Notwithstanding most social and political so-called “documentaries” are attention-whoring malarkey with an investigatory and explanatory outlook about on par with the average 24-hour news channel, in that the creator holds to a normative position, rather than an empirical one, and then seeks out examples to shore up this preconceived notion. No scholarly or investigatory work can be wholly objective, as the researcher always imprints some of his or her views into the investigation at hand. But biased, histrionic bullshit is what sells to the average American; and even then “sell” is grossly overgenerous. As stated above, the Dominion's customer base doesn't care to watch the newest Michael Moore schlock; and Fernando would rather spend money on titles that turn a profit rather than pandering bullshit which, while it aligns itself politically with the plurality of nearby ignorant customers, they still don't rent.

Anyway, the guy wandered the store for a few minutes and then left.

Today, A Concidence

August 1^st, huh. That only marks five years since I set sail out upon the great ocean of entrepreneurship because it was the best of all options that had been available to me. Five years of sitting in the same chair (No, really. This chair has been in service at the Dominion for at least eight years) and doing the same routine on roughly three hundred-sixty days out of the three-sixty-five of each year.

I feel that I should be more accomplished than I am. Maybe it's because I sit in this chair most every day and don't have customers milling through the store on a nonstop conveyor belt, so there's plenty of time to goof off on the internet, reading Fark or watching Youtube or browsing Wikipedia. When it's slow I fire up The Binding of Isaac or Dungeons of Dredmor or FTL and pass no small amount of time doing that. Christ, I've got over 500 hours in Isaac since I picked up the game. Unfettered access to all the tools of procrastination and absence of a boss to chastise me? A most delicious recipe for distraction!

Oh, I've accomplished a few things, don't get me wrong. There are my attempts at self-improvement, my arbitrarily-chosen self-taught languages and nuggets of popular science, but these are of minimal practical value. My April forays into ScriptFrenzy (RIP, but I'm still dedicating every April to the cause), participation in NaNoWriMo each November. These projects are begun, some wind up finished, but none ever reach a level of quality which I feel is worth sharing with the world.

This weblog, you say, is it not writing which I share with the world? Yes, but it is different in a respect only other writers can really grasp. The various Chronicle entries are, for the most part, declarative and possess their own ontology. Yes, Fernando puts his twist upon the scenarios which are described, but they are all external to him (me?) and, therefore, safe. Even the rare opinion pieces are crafted as a response to some stimulus, an irksome pique or some lame and abrasive counter-commentary on whatever has the world in a tizzy at that moment.

The Chronicles are not artistry. They are not shining examples of the craft of writing (perhaps of the techniques of writing, but that I leave for people other than myself to determine). They are kitsch word-vomit. They have no literary merit. They don't seek to explore any of the deep and penetrating questions and concerns which plague the human psyche. They are only in the broadest sense a window into my own psyche, in that they show I am a person who does not brook inadequacies or failures or hypocrisies.

And yet I maintain them. I have my reasons. They are all selfish reasons.

The Chronicles are a psychological catharsis; they allow me to rant and rave about the abjectly stupid things I encounter, to get them out of my system so they are not a poison building up inside until some harmful, critical level is reached, mercury for the soul (Now there's an unsalable idea for a series of self-help books!). They entertain those people who do visit and read what pithy word-offerings I throw together. They give me an excuse, nay, a deadline which goads me to put words to paper (a schedule which, I will allow myself to admit, I have kept to quite rigorously).

I am the Keeper of the Dominion of Movies. Not many people my age can claim to be their own boss and to own a business, not without having had ample financial assistance or meaningful connections to smooth the path on which entrepreneurship directly lay. To paraphrase the immortal words of Li'l Brudder, I made it on my own. I do not regret my decision. I do not dislike my decision even in the slightest. After all, who else has a boss that permits a day on the job to be barely more onerous than an extended coffee break, who allows the employee's friends to camp the supply room and spend the day playing Dungeons and Dragons or Munchkin, who could care less that the day's take in the till doesn't go directly into the money bag for safekeeping and deposit if it has been independently determined that it would be better-kept in the wallet for use on burgers-and-beer night?

Yet, I still feel I should be more accomplished than I am.

Ponies

Ponies are pretty nifty little creatures. They're pint-sized horses, lovable and scruffy all at once, achondroplastic dwarf equines which have been enslaved and bred over generations for humanity's labor and amusement. The internet has a queer fixation in using pony-like creatures in various image-based memes, brought about by a bizarre subculture of adults who adore the new iteration of one particular show which originated in the glorious 1980s, when men were men and cartoons were full of more corn than the lowest-grade dry cat food.

These ancestral ponies were chubby and stocky creatures, as I recall. I never really watched the show, of course; I'd been more the type to sit down in front of He-Man or Dungeons & Dragons because what are expected gender norms, especially to a five year old, but I recall the original show rather vividly despite this, all thanks to the product tie-ins, those girly toys with brushes and stickers which bedecked the shelves of the toy aisle opposite awesome action figures (so dolls, except for boys. What are expected gender norms?). They resembled actual ponies, come to think of it. Not that I have anything against the art direction in the new cartoon, mind; Lauren Faust does simply marvelous work in her own style. But her creations are hip and lithe creatures, more like horses than fat bumbling ponies. Horses are cool too, but this is about ponies.

Bill the Pony from The Fellowship of the Ring, could you imagine if he'd been streamlined and sleek and athletic and charming, the cool alpha male of the equine pack (er...herd)? It just wouldn't work. Ponies are meant to be the ungulate world's jesters, much like pigs are the misunderstood and somewhat creepy ice cream truck drivers and alpacas are the curvy bikini models everyone wants, nay needs, to hug.

While we're on the subject of ungulates, tapirs are woefully underrepresented as anthropomorphized creatures. Llamas, giraffes, rhinos, deer...those all exist in the worlds of animation and video games, but tapirs are limited to, what, the Pokèmon Drowzee (which isn't even meant to be a tapir, but rather a baku!)? I hereby propose this as the new cutting edge in animated entertainment:

Imagine a world, grim and dark and dystopian, ruled by a ruthless and authoritarian syndicate, a committee made up of representatives from the major mammalian orders. Fighting against this machine of oppression, a band of guerrilla warriors (not gorilla warriors; no, the token gorilla would be like a pole dancer or something) who have had enough with their shitty lot in life. A tapir, a fossa, a hyrax, a nutria, and a slow loris, with a binturong injected for comic relief. They blow up things and piss off the Powers That Be until shit gets serious enough that the Council of Hate puts itself at great risk and by retaining the mercenary services of the most perfect and amoral killing machine imaginable: Man.

Anyway, by the series finale every one of the main characters has died, except for the human, who just lights up a cigarette, enjoys it, and stubs it out on a skull trophy collected from his first victim, that brave tapir.

Hollywood, call me.

Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before

Fernando walks into a bar.

He takes an open stool near a woman in her mid-50s and waits for the bartender to finish serving a group of young ladies seated across the bar. “You're Fonzie's brother, aren't you?” she asks.

“Indeed so, last I checked.”

“I'm sorry for your loss.”

Fernando tips the brim of an imaginary hat her way. “Thanks.” The bartender has yet to finish mixing these girls their drinks.

“Let me buy you your first drink,” the woman says. She knows Fernando's brother, and seems to know him (though by rumor and reputation, or because they'd met at some point in the nebulous past, is something Fernando does not know), but Fernando has no idea what her name is, and he doesn't particularly want to look like a buffoon by asking her what it is, not if she treats him so familiarly. He can return that favor.

Besides, Fernando is not one to turn down free booze. “I'd appreciate that, thanks.”

“What are you having?”

“Ginger vodka with a splash of lemon juice.”

The older woman raises a finger skyward and shouts. “Hey, Canada! Once you finish over there, get me another and a ginger vodka for this young man!” The bartender ducks his head briefly and this seems to satisfy the woman. “He'll get that to us.”

The bartender takes another minute to wrap up his mixology with the other ladies. “We don't have ginger ale here,” he says to Fernando. On the one hand, this is surprising, since ginger ale seems like a thing every bar should keep in stock. On the other hand, this is a bar attached to a restaurant in Zail-Kanzin, so why would they have the makings for good drinks? “Can I get you something else?” he asks.

“Southern Comfort Old Fashioned, then. Sour, please, orange slice but no cherries.”

The old lady looks at Fernando proudly. “You look like you know what you want.”

“I always have a backup plan.”

“What if you couldn't have gotten that here, then?”

“Then probably I'd have gone with a vodka tonic, or maybe a beer, if there any beers worth half a shit here.” All of the taps proudly bear the mark of Miller Lite or Budweiser or similar rice-water ilk, and Fernando can see no minifridge in which cans or bottles of less-wretched brews might lurk.

“They've got Corona.”

“If I wanted to drink piss with a lime garnish, I'd ask for a slice of lime and make my way to the restroom to serve myself.”

The old lady squints at Fernando. “You are exactly like your grandmother. She was so...so....” The lady trails off speaking as she undertakes a quest to discover the vocabulary

“Forthright? One does one's best.”

The bartender delivers the drinks. The old lady has something clear and fizzy in her tumbler, while Fernando's Old Fashioned is tinted ruby, likely with cranberry juice or grenadine. What either of them have business doing in an Old Fashioned is beyond Fernando's understanding of the bar arts, but it doesn't taste like a Bad Idea nor a Manhattan, so he is satisfied.

“How long you staying?” the woman asks.

“This drink, maybe another. I can't stay overlate. I have to work tomorrow.”

“It's the Fourth.”

“No rest for the wicked. I closed the store today so I probably should try to make up for it tomorrow. Hell, holidays are better for my business because people need something to park the kids while they grill and drink in the backyard.”

“You have an explanation for everything, don't you?”

“Everything has an explanation.”

“See, I can't believe that. Some things just happen for no reason.”

“Everything has a reason for happening.”

“Not coincidences.”

“Sure they do.”

The woman twists in her seat and faces Fernando head-on. Her posture is one of defiance. “Okay, explain that to me.”

“There's a reason for you to have been at a place when the coincidence happened.”

“Not always. Sometimes you're just there.”

“Nobody is just anywhere for no reason.”

“What if you didn't plan it?”

“Doesn't matter. You decided on something else that put you there.”

“So the coincidence isn't your fault!” she trumpets.

Fernando shakes his head. “Sure it is. If I decide to walk down Main Street in order to meet my best friend at the movie theater, then it's partially on me when the firetruck crashes through the brick wall and turns me into road lasagna and confetti in front of a crowd of innocent bystanders. If I'd not chosen to go down Main Street at that time, then I wouldn't have been there for the truck to pulverize.” Fernando takes another sip of his drink. It is quite good. “Good news is, this only counts for my choices, and not for others.”

“Why?”

“I can't judge others' choices because I don't know what choices they'd made previously.”

“You can't believe that.”

“Sure I can. I do. That's tautological enough for most purposes.”

“Doesn't it ever get to be too much?”

“Nah, not really. I've gotten pretty good at handling existential crises over the years.”

“But why even be like that?”

“Why not?”

“You say everything's because you made a choice.”

“Yes.”

“Then you chose to believe all the stuff you just said.”

Fernando mulls it over. “Yes, I suppose I did.”

“Why stick with it, then?”

Fernando shrugs. “Because I choose to. Because most other people choose not to.” Fernando tilts back the remainder of his beverage. “Thank you again for the drink, and moreso for the conversation. I'd best return to the afterparty, such as it is.”

“Take care, sweetie. Butt your head against me some other time soon, you hear?”

Fernando grins. “That's what she said. Have a good evening.”

It is easy to take another's “why” for living and apply it to oneself. It is not easy to create one's own “why.”

Butter-Two-Face

Paula Deen said some bad things recently.

The fact that an old, southern woman might have within the language centers of her brain the capability to use words in a fashion commonly deemed as racially inappropriate seems to have come to a complete shock to America at-large, who are, astoundingly, treating this as more newsworthy than Kim Kardashian having recently whelped and naming the kid after the latter half of a Hitchcock movie, after she drew the Apples to Apples card referencing it during her last family game night. Everybody is fucking outraged that Paula Deen planned to organize a wedding themed with a level of social ignorance/ineptude I could only dream to attain. And then, by Mimir's Well, all the so-called journalists and investigators have dredged through this woman's life history for every single race-related social faux pas she'd perpetrated over the course of her long existence.

I'm not defending her; she said and did some stupid shit and she should suffer the consequences thereof. I'm not excusing her poor decisions based on her age or the social cues and mores she'd picked up during her upbringing that stuck with her, perhaps overtly and perhaps only subconsciously, the rest of her life. That said, America, get some goddamn perspective.

Why are we suddenly giving so great many fucks about the Queen of Butter and her verbiage? “Probably,” one might say, “because it's symptomatic of all the things we suspect about southern people but can't really prove.” The South does get the short end of the stick on racial issues more often than not (rightly so or otherwise I'll leave as an exercise for you to puzzle out on your own), and on such occasions the rest of the country can come together for snide chortling at the South's expense. After all, though Americans pretend otherwise, we are among the pettiest and most Schadenfreude-seeking people on the planet. We crave stories of other peoples' fuck-ups. How the hell else could reality television thrive?

The thing is, the media has treated this Paula Deen fracas with all the gravity of the average Entertainment Weekly So You Think You Can Dance? article. Editorial-writers (people doing the exact same thing as me, except their works are presented via ostensibly well-regarded publications or institutions) poo-poo their noses at the poor reflection on her character which this horror provides. This is inappropriate and wrong, and this sixty-six year old woman's racist history which we've gone out of our way to (re)construct, why, it's just scandalous!

Okay....and now what? Let's agree it's scandalous that this thing happened. Do we use our fervor to some noteworthy end or....No, we don't? We'll just be incensed for a short while then, watch things invariably die down, and return to a daily slog identical to the one before this media buzz began, except maybe Paula Deen is out of a job? Okay then.

Here's my take: Let's stop pretending that we as a society have a responsibility to engage in this farcical moralizing. Stop being disingenuous with your surprised cries that this isn't how Real America does it, that we're not all like this, and that Paula Deen is a social anomaly. Don't post to Facebook or Twitter how sad and shocked you are that someone like this exists in modern America and swear up and down that you'll never buy a Smithfield ham or cook anything in butter ever again. Don't even bother wringing your hands at the travesty of it all if you can't or won't nut up that shit like this is commonplace all across the country among all age demographics and not limited to people living in Bumfuck, Missalabameorgidennesstuckansolina who happened to have one black friend while growing up under Jim Crow.

Or, we could take this opportunity to have a frank discussion on race and racism in this country, both of the overt and institutionalized varieties. This would require that the members of the American media take something resembling an objective, empirical approach to the matter, like maybe bringing sociologists or political scientists who do research in that area onto their news programs rather than reinviting those old-hat demagogues (and you know who they are) who provide absolutely nothing of value and instead offer up only their own biased claims and exclamations.

One of these options is the much easier and more likely of the two, and that's why this screed is the only fuck I'm willing to give on the matter.

Metaphorically Speaking

A high schooler approaches the counter with a small clan of buddies one day. They have been in the store for about ten minutes now and have shown no signs of wanting to rent or buy anything. Instead they have been giggling, shoving each other against the movie racks, and generally being annoyances.

“Hey, you're like a nerd right?” he asks. Behind him, his buddies chortle.

Fernando swivels his chair about to face the gathered youngsters. “I consider myself more than just a simile, actually.”

“What...wait, what does that mean?” asks one of the other teens. A third one punches him in the shoulder and they tussle for a few seconds. Fernando watches in silence until they finish up.

Once he has reclaimed what vestiges of attention they possess, he says, “It means I consider myself to have more than just the qualities of the object or a superficial similarity thereto. I consider myself to be said object. Though that does imply that there exists a distinction of some sort, in which an object could have the qualities of an object without actually being such an object.” Fernando ignores the kids and starts talking to himself. “If something is 'like a red cube,' does it necessarily have to be a red cube though?

“Considering that the statement is true, and not something I say just to make a halfassed comparison that really isn't one. The language doesn't require it. But if it's close enough as to make a worthwhile and meaningful metaphor....hmm. Maybe I'm being too literal.

“'Like a thundercloud.' Faces obviously aren't thunderclouds, but there must be some commonality between angry people and cumulonimbus. It will be an abstract commonality, and it could well be wrong because it requires people to agree on what qualities a thundercloud has, and an angry face has. It would be meaningless to somebody who has never seen a thundercloud nor been told or having learned that the idiom is what it is.

“So why have and use idioms at all if they require abstraction and possible untruth? It just leads to muddled communication unless all parties know what the deal is. I suppose that's why proper research papers or essays or whatever are written in the style that they are. No-nonsense and generally unfun but unambiguous in what they need to get across. The other kind is a...a self-congratulatory puzzle. That's why good writing makes warm fuzzies pop! Because the reader has to figure out on some level or another exactly what the writer is conveying, and it's a small personal triumph once that shared knowledge clicks! A treasure chest which is unlocked by the vagaries of words and meanings. Awesome.

“Hmm.” Fernando's thought-train tapers off at this point, and he refocuses his attention on the here and now.

“Oh, well then,” he remarks to nobody in particular, as the teenagers had vacated the premises. Our hero has reasoned out something marvelous, though, and so he is content.

Old Friends

 “I've been meaning to ask you,” a regular customer says to Fernando one day long ago, perhaps six months after he had taken on the mantle of Keeper. Fernando stiffens, because even by this point he realizes these words are rarely a prelude to something he wishes to experience.

“What's that?”

“Why's there a crab and octopus on top of your TV?”

Fernando looks over his shoulder into the office, where there are indeed a bathtoy crab and a bathtoy octopus resting atop the television. “Those are Crumbles and Octorok. They watch over the store when I'm not around.”

“Come on, really,” she insists.

“Well, if you must know, they were passed into my keeping. Neither of them is technically mine. They belong to some friends and are used to bless nerdish debauchary and so forth, and by that I mean they tend to be thrown around a lot. I actually don't think either of them have ever gotten wet, except for maybe via Pepsi or something.”

“Nerdish debauchary?”

“Dungeons and Dragons. Satan's game.” Fernando pauses for a moment. “Y'know, I'm still missing Kafka.”

“Kafka?”

“Yeah, he's a cockroach. I have no idea where he vanished to.”

Fernando's guest's face screws up in disgust. “They make cockroach bathtoys?”

“No, no. Kafka was actually from a cheap-ass dollar store magic trick package-toy-thing. I think one was supposed to be dexterous enough to make him a surprise. Practically that meant we would wait until someone turned his or her back and then we'd put Kafka in an obvious place.” Fernando's vision blurs as he retreats into the mists of time. “There was also an obviously fake pencil which never fooled anybody, but we still went along with it because why not.”

“Well, I hope you find your cockroach then.”

Alas, years later Kafka is still absent. Our little cockroach had grown into a strong, independent cockroach man. Maybe he settled down with a nice cockroach lady and birthed a brood of mini-Kafkas. Maybe he fell in with the wrong crowd, suffered a heroin overdose, and died alone and unmourned in a secluded alleyway.

Maybe, just maybe, he's still trying to find us, too. Godspeed, Kafka. Godspeed.

Brofist

One Monday in February was a sad Monday, for it was one on which his distributor failed to process one of Fernando's orders in anything resembling a timely fashion. It was not a pissant direct-to-DVD film either, but Skyfall, the long-awaited and highly acclaimed Bond flick. Arguably, this was the biggest release of the month.

It was with a heavy heart that Fernando accepted that he would need to make a midnight run to Inuitland so he can snag some copies and have them available for his customer base. The original plan was to head up there with Alfonso after the weekly roleplaying session ended, but that changed when Cortez and Ronaldo volunteered to accompany Fernando on his late-night sojourn.

They transformed and rolled out, heading straight to Mal-Wart district, an adventure beyond measure, for it was one in which Fernando escaped the Dominion's tentacled grasp for a short while. While he was out and about, Fernando figured he'd get some other shopping out of the way. Cart in hand, the trio passed into the bowels of Mal-Wart.

It had been Suit Night, so Cortez and Ronaldo were at their dapper best, looking quite professional indeed as they trailed behind Fernando as the Keeper went on his madcap collection. Cat litter, check. Onions, check. Crackers, check. A hodgepodge of inventory settled in the shopping cart's basket. Crowning it all were four copies of Skyfall, provided to Fernando by a genial albino.

The checkout lady did not want to be there, not in the slightest. She scanned the content's of Fernando's shopping cart in disinterest, until she came upon the DVDs. “You must really like Skyfall, huh?” she asks.

“No. This is for business purposes.” Fernando said these words of response as two suited men flanked him. The woman perhaps thought Fernando to have criminal connections, for she surrendered this conversational thread and little more was said until Fernando bade her a good night after paying.

The night was still young (only about 2:30 AM) and a night of All Flesh Must Be Eaten had just been concluded. It was time to consume vast amounts of unhealthy food! The original plan was to pay a visit to Taco Bell, but that place was closed, even the drive-thru. Well, McDonald's would just have to do. Ronaldo steered his vehicle into the drive-thru and the group waited for someone to take the order.

Three minutes of silence later, no order-taking was forthcoming, and someone else had pulled up behind Ronaldo. Cortez suggested telephoning the place to inform them that someone awaited service in the drive thru, but Ronaldo pshaw'd the notion. “Let's pull around and see if anybody's even in there,” he said.

So they did. As the car passed the window at which the money, under most circumstances, changed hands, the three passengers saw a skeevy man with a scraggly mustache at work inside. When he noticed the car, he ducked out of sight as if ashamed or worried for his life.

“Fuck this. Let's go to Hardee's,” Fernando said from his place in the back seat.

“I'm poor, and Hardee's is expensive,” Cortez objected.

“I don't care. You're carting my ass around. I'll buy the food.”

“A monster Thickburger does sound good....” Ronaldo dreamily whispered. So it was decided. To the nearby Hardee's! The lady in the other car at the McDonald's went her separate way. Farewell, Anonymous Drive-Thru Woman!

At Hardee's, rather than heading directly to the drive-thru, Ronaldo pulled into the parking lot behind it. The three climbed out of the car and stood before the gently glowing menu.

“I'm thinking of trying that jalapeno chicken sammich,” Fernando says.

“I dunno. Monster thickburger is a thing,” Cortez answers.

“Right, but two of those for one of those.”

“You don't know how big they are.”

“No, but it won't be the size of a McChicken or something. This is Hardee's, not a place which doesn't want to take your money.”

“It's a fair point,” Ronaldo admits.

“You guys do what you want. I'm for a thickburger,” Cortez says.

They reenter the vehicle, pull out of the adjacent parking lot, and realign the car in the drive-thru. A man cheerily cleaned one of the large windows in the dining area while a Beatles song blared over the builder's exterior speakers.

“Hi, welcome to Hardee's! What can I get you?” a cheery female voice asks out the drive-thru speaker.

Ronaldo leans over to the speaker. “I'd like four jala--”

“No, I changed my mind. Make it six,” Cortez says. “And some bacon ranch fries.”

“Sorry, six jalapeno chicken sandwiches--”

“Six you said?” the woman asks.

“Yeah, six. And an order of bacon ranch fries.”

The nice lady repeats what Ronaldo had told her to verify the order. Everything seems in order, and the final cost comes to about twenty-eight dollars. “Thank you for choosing Hardee's!” the woman says at the exchange's close.

“Thank you for not being McDonalds,” Ronaldo answers.

The food takes some while to prepare, but it's fine. The three sit in the car and share laughs and merry tales of how the evening had progressed to this point. The frightened man at McDonalds was compared to someone Ronaldo knows from work, a man he described as “a pedophile who talks as if he has a pine cone up his butthole.” When the food arrives, Ronaldo pulls aside and parks in the Hardee's parking lot once more so that the food might be enjoyed without worrying about crashing the car or traffic regulations.

And such sammiches they were. Oh, their splendor. Heaped with delightful hot pepper goodness and slathered in a mouthwatering chipotle sauce, hot and fresh and as satisfying as, in Fernando's own words, “Like a woman's hand in a llamaskin glove.”

Because it was 3 AM, these words were seen as the most hilarious thing on earth. Cortez conjured cans of Vanilla Coke from some nether dimension and a right and proper feast was had.

'Twas a good good night. But, at its end, Fernando returned to the Dominion, copies of Skyfall and bag of cat litter in hand: the ultimate hero's return.

Volkseinbildungsbesorgnisschrift

I had the good fortune to stumble across an inexpensive copy of Good Bye, Lenin! recently. This is a profoundly German film, despite the gratuitous English title, a sorta-comedy sorta-drama about a young man living in former East Berlin during the tumultuous reunification process which occurred in the early 1990s. I first watched it back in 2005, not long after its release in English-speaking lands. As I was the only person in my then-circle of friends to understand German, or to have any personal experience with the nuances of its language and culture and history, I merited the film more highly than the rest of them. Having the maternal side of my family hailing from the Fatherland helps.

I was too young to care about or understand my mother's and grandparents' opinions on the reunification at the time, but that changed once I matured mentally and politically. Even twenty years after reunification, former West Germans looked down at the former Ossies. The way the East Germans were treated by some (including my grandfather and to a lesser extent my mother) was seemingly paradoxical and profoundly patriarchal. On the one hand, East Germans didn't deserve any kind of assistance in getting a leg up on the pile. Using West German resources to bring the East up to economic speed was the worst kind of pandering. The incredibly generous currency exchange given to bearers of the East German Mark was seen as tantamount to robbery, or perhaps more accurately a financial scam, by the West Germans. On the other hand, the worthless ex-commies had nothing worth contributing to greater German society. That their manufacturing base was in the shitter was their own fault, not the fault of the centrally planned economy under which they existed for 40 years.

To anyone who follows American political discourse with any regularity, these arguments may sound a little bit familiar. Different players and different words, perhaps, but overall the same out-group ostracization that happens whenever the topic of using collective funds or political power to impact, for better or for worse, someone not of one's own social group comes up—North vs. South, urban vs. rural, Caucasian vs. non-Caucasian, male vs. female.

It's only natural for people to place the greatest emphasis on their local identity—the community to which they most immediately belong—because that is the social group with the greatest impact on one's daily life. People are the most forgiving towards, even ignore, egregious deeds which would make them scream bloody murder if anyone else asked it of them. Local taxes are a good example; people bitch about having to pay them, sure, people bitch about anything (*cough*), but how common is it for anybody to flip out over them when compared to state or, Osiris help us, federal income taxes?

Gender hypocrisy is another big one that I'll nudge with a twenty-foot pole right now. Things which are socially acceptable for men to do or for women to do are not okay when done by the opposite sex, and that's not even touching on the great twisting ball of one's social gender. That damnable, mysterious Other rears its head once more, and opacity of comprehension gives way to revulsion and indifference and no small amount of ignorance. I didn't know until about three months ago that I ought to refer to myself as “cis-sexual” in gender theory circles and discussions as opposed to “normal”; the rudeness and connotations of using that particular word never occurred to me.

One thing I perhaps ought to mention at this point is that Good Bye, Lenin! does not portray all of the former Ossies sycophantically, and that there is a great deal of nuance within the characters, particularly the protagonist's mother, who is an ardent believer in the socialist state and whose coma and recovery therefrom drives half the film's plot; the other half is, by necessity, a love story, but it's kept from being overly cloying because it is treated fairly realistically and the conflicts within the blooming relationship tie into the other half of the plot. The street of cultural acceptance (homogenization into the social majority collective?) runs both ways. As the old adage puts it, the horse can be led to water but cannot be forced to drink. Does the horse have a right to be as stubborn as it wishes, even if it will clearly result in a death by dehydration?

People much much smarter and wiser than me—Hobbes, Locke, Rawls and Nozick among many many others—have tried tackling this problem. That we as a species have not come to a consensus could portend that we never will come to a consensus. That does not, however, mean that we should not work towards such an end. One individual will never be capable of totally understanding another person's point of view and way of life, but not striving for at least some degree of understanding is tantamount to throwing our hands up in the air and resigning ourselves to not accomplishing anything seeing as perfection will never be had in pursuit of any endeavor.

What is it that prevents us from embracing a larger understanding of community, of opening our minds to the social and psychological Other? Is it merely cultural, the persistence of a clannish or tribal social upbringing that is passed on to successive generations through word and deed? Or is it something deeper, something more primal and biological, a style of social organization hardwired into our brain chemistry like pack behavior in canines or schooling among some types of fish? The constructivist in me believes it to be the former. The cynic, of course, tends to the latter. Sadly, there is no way to definitely, let alone ethically, prove which is the correct option, or if there exists some third (fourth? Fifth?) explanation.

But even that style of thought, a black and white nature vs. nurture sociological debate, falls into a zero-sum trap. The quest for absolutes, for a Platonic purity of logic and structure in understanding, drives most scientific discourse. The need for conformity, while understandably laudable given the methods and philosophy of science, seeks to compartmentalize the disparate flora and fauna, the varying geography and strata of geology, of the sprawling forest which is existence into a perfect solid, a thing which perhaps has many disparate and flavorful bits trapped within it but which, in the grand scheme of things, is as sterile as any modern medical lab.

I've been to parts of the former East Germany. Even twenty years after reunification, there's a distinct difference in the air, a unique visual and cultural flavor that two decades of Western integration has not entirely managed to stamp out. It's most prevalent in and around the small towns. The rail lines are iller-kept, the roads are more worn and prone to potholing, and the buildings are dingier compared to sibling villages in the former West. The dialects of German spoken there have a curious, generation-long lingual diaspora. The younger folk I interacted with were perfectly understandable, but I struggled a bit to understand older men and women, ones that had lived in and through the DDR, on the occasions when I spoke with them. Of course, they were eminently surprised when I revealed that I was an American student-tourist rather than a visitor from elsewhere in the country. Apparently it's rather uncommon for lone young Americans to pay a visit to Leipzig, let alone the Nietzschehaus in the cozy hamlet of Naumburg; the wonderful old lady who manned the ticket table at the museum's entrance told me that she thought I hailed from somewhere around Frankfurt once we got to talking.

For better or for worse (personally I feel it's for better), people are not all one uniform culture or creed. We'll have arguments over the “proper” way of doing things. Usually those arguments will be hashed out with harsh language; other times the situation will sadly devolve into an exchange of bullets and missiles rather than ideas. I don't hold to much of the Marxist (though technically it comes down from Hegel) thought I once embraced in my naïve university days, but one bit which I do cling to is an idiosyncratic interpretation of dialectical materialism, the notion that conflicting ideas can be resolved into a greater, more complete whole. The world and all its bits are not inevitably destined for Marxist-style communism, no, but they are destined for something different from and greater than what they are right now. It happened in the reunification of the two Germanys in the early '90s. Some places, like North and South Korea, may rejoin into a political whole, peaceably or maybe not so much, in the coming years. Other places have been and will continue to break apart along ethnic or cultural lines, like the state of Kosovo from Bosnia; or South Sudan from Sudan, also for the better.

Fighting change merely for the sake of fighting change leads to stagnation and frustration. Nothing can hold back the tides of progress; it is as inexorable and relentless as wind and rain shearing down a mountain range, and may need to act over just as long a span of time. Mindlessly going with the flow is likewise not the appropriate reaction. Being swept up in a gamut of new ideas without grounding oneself in the familiar is as short-sighted and suicidal as yelling, “Hey, watch this!” and diving into a tsunami's riptide.

As for the what proper ratio between the two ought to be...well, if I had the answer to that, I wager I'd be doing something with my life other than running a video store.

Wages of Sin

It is evening, a very short while before Fernando is set to close up for the night. A vehicle pulls up and deposits a teenage girl. Fernando has seen neither the girl nor the SUV before in his life. She enters the Dominion and approaches the counter.

“Hello!” Fernando booms as he is wont to do when the chimes above the door jingle. 

“Excuse me, but are you hiring at all?” the strange girl asks after a brief start.

“No, sorry,” says Fernando. He was hoping she would be one to put money into Fernando's pockets, not one to ask if he would like to give it up.

The girl looks crestfallen. “Are you sure? You wouldn't even hire me for less than minimum wage?”

Fernando presses his lips together. “One, that'd be pretty illegal for me to do. Two, never offer yourself to anyone for less than what you are actually worth. Enough bullshit exploitation and underemployment happens without people who go out of their way to offer an easy solution for the people who have fewer scruples than I do. Do something you enjoy doing and try to make money off that. Make jewelry or cookies or whatever and sell those. If they are good, people will buy them. But if you're dead-set on looking for work under somebody else, the best place is probably Paper World next door. They're usually looking for part-time people to work in the mailroom putting inserts into the newspapers. It's a shitty job, though. I did it for three years in high school.”

“Oh, I see. Well, I'll think about it!” The girl is strangely cheerful. “Thanks! Have a good night!”

“And you as well.” The girl then leaves.

Whether or not she took Fernando's advice to heart is a secret only the future can reveal.

Introspection and Bullshit

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Years of Our Lives

Fernando posts a sign and makes a small change to his ad in the local advertiser. It reads that the Dominion will be closed one Saturday in July. Because people cannot be arsed to read things, he also mentions this fact to all the people who enter the store the Friday before and lets them know they don't have to bring the movies they rent back until Sunday.

One of them, a younger lady around the age of twenty, asks Fernando, “Why are you closing up?”

“I have a social obligation I must attend.”

“Oh, got a hot date?”

“Kind of. Class reunion.”

“Oh, cool! I can't believe it's been twenty years already for you!”

Fernando looks at the young lady. His mouth may have hung open a tad from the shock. “Actually, it's my tenth. I'm not that old.”

“Well, you own your own business.”

“And?”

“Everybody else around here who does that is old!”

The young lady speaks the absolute truth, but Fernando snaps back, “That's about the finest example of a fallacy of induction that I've ever encountered.”

The next day arrived as is usually the case and Fernando enjoyed his fourth day off of the year. Less than half his class showed up at the reunion but the ones who did proved rollicking, and it was nice speaking with some of the people whom Fernando had not seen since they huddled in a sweaty, impatient mass at their graduation ceremony held in a gymnasium that had not ever considered adhering to the rules governing convection of gases. Fernando may or may not have imbibed an assortment of alcoholic drinks of varying natures and qualities.

About eight hours after the gathering started it petered out. By ones and twos the attendees vanished to parts unknown, fissioning off to pursue their own lives and accomplishing what they deemed necessary, much as had happened a decade prior when everyone made some of the choices which led them to where they are now. Fernando was, of course, among them, for the Dominion does not police itself. It is like a newborn infant in that sense, except instead of having to clean up meconium he deals with the general public.

For instance, when he meandered back inside the Dominion's loving embrace, he saw someone had deposited a movie from Family Video in the drop box. Ah, life.

Parade of Iniquity

The Fourth of July parade meandered past the Dominion again this year, and Fernando had a third-row seat. Much like in previous years, the parking lot before the Dominion filled with cars aligned in as many different directions as Steve Buscemi's teeth. Children frolicked about outside and one enterprising soul, given the uncomfortable heat outside, decided to make use of the Dominion's air conditioning while he waited for the parade to start.

“Hello,” Fernando greeted him.

“Hey. I'm not rentin' nothing, just want to get out of the heat for a while.”

Fernando had slept for shit the night before, unable to attain even a full REM cycle given the oppressive temperature and humidity. It was 4:30 PM, he'd been up since 5:30 AM, and he was running on less than four hours of sleep. His mood was understandably foul, given a convention was not around to temper his crabbiness. “Oh. I see. Tell you what, buy a soda and you can hang out in here and enjoy it.”

“I'm not thirsty.”

Alrighty then. Fernando heads to the rear of the store to turn off the AC. When the blower stops, the man leaves.

Once the parade got rolling such mooching ceased. People had set up chairs on sidewalks and truck beds and many cold ones were sipped as the procession meandered past. Fernando, being on the clock, was unable to vicariously join in their alcoholic revelry and instead procured a sodey pop from his fridge.

It was overall a nice parade, a small-town celebration of one particular nation-state's assertion of self-determination on an otherwise arbitrary day. People in the parade threw candy out to the kids, a local marching band played, horses the size of small buildings pulled floats of varying sizes and shapes. The local beauty queen sat among flowers and waved to the crowd with a not-quite-plastic smile on her face.

There were also, of course, the wretched politician vehicles sandwiched in. The local businesses and other organizations, like the Child Scout chapters, in the parade at least put effort into their advertising by creating floats of various qualities. The ten (Fernando counted) politician-whore vehicles were trucks or sedans with a VOTE FOR DIPSHIT sticker slapped on the side and an American flag decal on the window. Though Fernando believes that political organizations have as much a right to pimp their wares as the local propane dealership, Fernando reserves the right to affix labels of his choice to their activities.

Once the county police vehicle at the posterior end of the snaking procession passed by, everybody packed up and the parking lot transitioned into a churning morass of simultaneous departure. Compared to previous years, though, the emptying of the lot was fairly orderly and people were able to make it out without the honking of horns or the bending of fenders.

Once the crowds fully dispersed, Fernando was left alone in his Dominion, ever vigilant.