The Trouble with Absolutes and Extremes

I haven’t been writing for a while because I’ve been busy with work and summer cleaning/arrangement efforts. Also, someone has to binge watch all these shows on Netflix. I’ve also been contemplating an idea or thought that has stumped me from writing much about anything else.

The trouble I’m having concerns absolutes and extremes.

If absolute means that something is “complete and total, not limited in any way, or having unlimited power”, then I really can’t think of too many things in my life, or this world, that are absolute. I guess we all absolutely die? We were absolutely born into the world? I don’t know, even those two absolutes aren’t 100% true, either.

Extreme is also troublesome. If we’re saying that it means “very great in degree, very serious or severe, very far from agreeing with opinions of most people, or not moderate”, it seems like a pretty rough idea, too. Where’s the compromise? Where’s the understanding? Where’s the flexibility?

Things that are absolute or extreme mean serious business, right? They mean you’re going ahead full-bore, no turning back, no middle, and no room for understanding or change. It is or it isn’t, no waffling, no guessing, and you’re left just searching for the absolute and extreme truths in life and latching on without looking back.

That’s kind of f*cking stupid.

I don’t want a life like that, no one truly lives like that, and that world and way of life seems rather bleak.

Shit, like I said above, we’re not even absolutely certain we die or that we are born. If we knew that those two things were absolute, life would be entirely different than it is now. We’ve spent our entire human existence debating and trying to understand that, so if we can’t even decide if we’re here or if we ever stop being here, how the hell can we say, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Ishtar or Howard the Duck are completely shitty movies?

How can we say, with 100% certainty, what we are or are not doing is right or wrong? How can we even say something is true or any of that? We can’t. We’re guessing or gauging the moment, taking a temporary inventory, in pencil, with a very thick eraser, and hoping for the best.

Where was I going with this? (Besides nowhere? Really, just thinking…mental masturbation.)

Oh yeah, cut the shit, people, is the point. Settle down with the absolutes and extremes for yourself and the world around you. Things like “never” or “always” are pretty useless and carry no meaning beyond the moment they are thought or expressed. We change and adapt to what’s around us and the times where we forget that we get REALLY lost and/or confused.

There are too many moving parts in the world, way too many changes and evolutions, that to sit back and draw lines in the sand feels as nutty as actually drawing lines in sand. Every second that passes means a little changed (and before you start, I can just as easily say that nothing changes and everything remains the same, too, that’s the point), so to anchor a thought or a belief seems like a setup for failure.

What If There Was A New Daenerys Targaryen?

Apparently there was some sort of to-do that Emilia Clarke would be axed from Game of Thrones.

Would replacing Clarke as “Daenerys Stormborn of the House Targaryen, the First of Her Name, the Unburt, Queen of Meereen, Queen of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, Breaker of Chains, and Mother of Dragons” be the worst thing ever?

I don’t really think so.

Clarke is terrible at doing the whole acting thing on this show. She really is. She’s a cardboard character who’s mouth moves just enough for the audience to know she has a pro’pah eng-ish acc’nt and attractive enough to not mind so much that that’s all she really brings to the table.

But really, she’s terrible.

When she walks, she’s stiff. Some would argue that she’s carrying herself like a queen; I say that she may be just a bit too overwhelmed to act and walk at the same time. Is she really going to be able to pull off riding imaginary dragons in the future? Nah.

When she talks, her dialog and voice are stunted and monotone. Again, queen-like, some would declare. Not me, she is monotone and dull because talking lines is acting, too, and she’s not good at the whole acting thing.

Clarke is beautiful and she does have an air of royalty that comes from her accent, but there’s a reason her role on the show is all about sitting in front of subjects and rambling off her stupid ass title over and over again, and that reason is that she can’t act.

Is it the material she’s given? Is the show itself just boring?

Well, no.

The rest of the actors on the show have the same writers and source material as Clarke and the show happily continues forward during their scenes and doesn’t grind to a halt like when the Queen of Dragons, Daughter of a Man and a Woman having had Sex, Walker of Slowness, Talker of Monotones, Boring of Showness pops up. Her storyline is terrible and cutting to it frustrates me because it usually takes away 10 good minutes of awesomeness for not real reason other than to remind us that there are frikin’ dragons, y’all!

I’ll admit that the whole slave-freeing storyline is dull (And raycess – really, the freer of slaves is a tiny blonde-haired white chick? Really? Nothing wrong with that? The brown citizens were totally in need of Barbie to come save the day?) in the books as well as the TV show. Basically, at this point, we’re all just waiting for her to amass an army and grow her frikin’ dragons, so it’s naturally going to be somewhat slower than the active fronts, which makes Clarke’s inability to be interesting even more frustrating.

In the books (ugh, that f*cking guy, right?) the character does at least have a shared sense of frustration that the reader does as she waits for her babies to grow and has to deal with them feeding off peoples. Clarke doesn’t seem to be too urgent or genuinely frustrated with waiting. I’ll even go as far as to say that because she’s so terrible, they had to have some sort of weird love interest between the leader of the Unsullied and the Queen’s numero-uno slave lady, even though the Unsullied guy has nary a penis nor nuts to, you know, have sexy time with. Oh, and I think the two characters, in the book, are brother and sister, but you know, I think the missing twig ‘n berries is more of a barrier.

(God help me, if Grey Worm suddenly has reproductive organs, I’ll throw my remote at the TV!)

My point? Don’t really have one other than I think Clarke is not very good at being the Mother of Dragons. I fear that when fire reigns down on Westeros there will be two dragon riders and one hot cardboard cutout taped to the back of a third dragon spouting off a stupidly long ass royal title. Maybe a new Daenerys wouldn’t have been too bad, is all.

The Leftovers: The Review (S1E1)

Where to even begin?

So, on October 14, three years in the past, 2% of the world’s population up and disappeared. Mommies, daddies, babies, everyone, vanished.

-POOF-

‘Muricans, Vietnamese, Egyptians, Muslims, Christians, Jews, white people, black people, gay people, straight people, smart people, stupid people, stakeholders, clients, homeless people, rich people, people certified to operate motorized vehicles, people with poor driving records, Gary Busey, one of those popes, and even Kate Winslet (Probably, because I know if I were in charge of snatching people mysteriously, she’d be on the short list. Not that I think about those things, just saying is all) all just vanished.

Where’d they all go? What was the meaning of this? Is this some sort of joke? Is it those kids from the block up to their shenanigans again? IS IT!?! SO HELP ME, IF IT’S THEM I’M GOING TO BEAT THEIR ASSES!

Ahem…

People vanished and three years have passed and of course, humans being humans, we’ve gone and made something confusing even more confusing by just making shit up. It was God, it was aliens, it was my God, not your God, blah blah blah (example – see Middle East).

We’ve got people that are all broken hearted and lost, like the Chief of Police of Maple-something and his family. We’ve got weird ass cult people, like these ones in Maple-something that only wear white clothing, smoke cigarettes all the damned time, and don’t talk, at all, which includes the Chief’s wife. We’ve got horny people that like to do the drugs and play spin the iPhone, like the Chief’s daughter. We’ve got a sassy mayor (I said sassy because she’s black and a woman and she is seemingly a strong character and is running shit, so by law she’s sassy, not just the mayor of Maple-something). We’ve got some strange desert cult that fixes congressmen or something that involves the Chief’s son. We’ve got dickhead cable newscasters. Basically, we have everything we have now except baby Timmy and honey-buns Bernice are just vanished and the Chief of Police’s family is all up in it.

Oh yeah, the show centrally takes place in some small town called Maple-something, New York. Also, the Chief of Police might be the main character. Forgot to mention that.

Basically, the pilot episode of this show is setting the table for drama, mystery, and probably a shitload of twists and turns. All anyone needs to know is the stuff I’ve already mentioned.

What I liked: The characters seem interesting and the actors appear capable of pulling off the illusion of the story. No one seems too campy or is going through the motions with a smirk on their face. I like that there is no answer as to what caused the vanishing, meaning this isn’t some religious attempt at scaring me to church because I’M NOT GOING! And, so far, people seem to be as utterly confused as they should be, looking for answers, making up answers, or numb to the entire answer process.

What I didn’t like: When an HBO show says there will be nudity, that doesn’t mean we want to see a bunch of male asses. Where were the bewbs, HBO? Also, we don’t want the borderline, almost going to be female nudity, to be performed by the supposed teen characters. I’m not some sort of sicko. They also seem to have issues with dogs, meaning some dogs saw the shit that went down during the vanishing and went bonkers, so some mysterious stranger has taken it upon himself to just start killing dogs…that ain’t right, yo.

To summarize: I liked it, it was a good start. HBO needs to earn their nudity warning or else a strongly written rambling letter will be arriving in their mailbox.