“ It is the cruel irony of life that we are destined to hold the dark with the light … (and some other dichotomies I’ve forgotten as they were spoken)” — Heroes. Said in one of those dark clipped british accents high caste Indians have, not the apu or call center cartoony accent. Not an observation, well, it is, just saying, American audience buy some crap more readily when the accent sounds … serious about shit. Who’d buy crap from someone who wasn’t serious about shit?
E.G. “Mr Nursery man, will this shit help my roses grow?”
“Lady, that shit is shit, this shit, though, this shit is the shit and I know shit. We have some lovely shinola too, aphids hate shinola.”
First off, irony isn’t cruel, it’s ironic, if it were cruel it’d be called cruelity, sometimes, I suppose, it’s ironic when something that’s supposed to be ironic is cruel, but, still, that’d be cruelity despite it’s intent. Second off, as much as that sounds like something from Deepak Chopra or even a real Indian like Kahil Gibran and maybe like it might have been poetic in hindi like Rumi, it doesn’t really say anything at all, which, um, might sometimes be Deepaks game, but Rumi and Kahil didn’t just say shit that sounded cool. With Rumi it was always going to have something to do with fucking or God.
In general short hand similes, metaphors and analogies with “life” as the subject are for bumpers; they are meaningful for the span of a stoplight, but a train crossing …? You begin to resent them. One of the many reasons that sort of stuff suckers people in is that that’s inclusive. Sitting there with popcorn stuck to your pj’s watching TV you feel a bit puffed up with the idea that destiny has you holding dark and light instead of greasy popcorn. My apologies if you eat crudites with your Television (though TV’s have a hard digesting veggies, best not to eat with your TV, the tv is destined, in a cruel twist of ironicness, to be the passive spectacle and you the aggressive spectator.).
What the line is supposed to mean, I think, is that there are good guys and bad guys and you can’t be very committed to either without a relationship with both. It’s kind of profound in a simple way like the way your yoga teacher or Lamaze coach tells you to breathe, but, if they said it like that in, say, a central California accent, channels would be changing (ok, would have changed a decade ago) across the nation.
Audiences like broad strokes too. We like the phrase “Jumped the Shark” because it’s extreme and recognizable, but there’s a lot of skipping the tadpole too and, sometimes, the repetition of rhetoric that worked earlier is a shark jump dressed as nostalgia. On a brief tangential detour, it’s one of the many reasons I dislike the movie Top Gun so much. I forget the lines but the love story line … something innocuous at the time but flirty is repeated after all the bad shit happens but slower and more feel uppity and with the music swelling and in the theaters noses sniffle and cheeks dampen. It’s like gold plating on a tin badge, you spend a lot for it and still use a cheap trick to imply value. If the economy worked like that script we wouldn’t know the words Stock Market but we’d be ass deep in ticker tape.
I’ve committed myself to this marathon so I’m seeing it through, though I’ve been finding excuses to do other things. I drove a town and a half over to get Beef Schwarma (I’m pretty sure they, that restaurant, spells it phonetically for me, their demographic pudgy Midwesterners who pronounce gourmet gourmand, not from lack of literacy so much as vanity). There’s a snow event occurring and the place delivers, but, shit, even the guy in his pj’s had to get up to nuke his bag-o-corn.
I like Heroes, I liked it better when I was younger and so was it and it took a week for a new episode or nine months depending. I think I chewed my popcorn harder and crunchier when the voice over said shit like “… cruel irony … destined … black and white”. It’s a reasonable reaction, sort of like when traffic or the weather or both are bad you turn up the volume. I know that sounds like a joke, but I can’t be the only one who crunchs during the parts he doesn’t care for or cranks the tunes when the going gets all road ragey for the rabble.
Rabble, that’s it, inclusive. “Cruel irony … life …” it separates you, the audience, from the rabble (the other few million members of the audience). I don’t know. I thought I had an idea when I started typing. Maybe it went to make popcorn. I stuffed to gills with schwarma. My fucking ideas don’t get that the microwave has a popcorn setting that pretty much works for all nukable corn. Instead my ideas stand there wait for the quickening of pops and when they slow counts the seconds between pops (e.g. pop pop pop pop pause one Mississippi pop pause one Mississippi two Mississippi pop pop) my ideas can’t ever remember whether the bag they once read said “stop when the pops are two seconds apart” or “three”. The bag probably mentioned “This is for an 1100 watt nuke, one minute longer for 900 watt. For 600 hundred; put nuke over open flame …”
Ok, so, it’s either finish the marathon or watch the snow. I seem to be able to do either at any time. I love you guys. You get me. One for the road, drive safe, and careful, you might almost be sober, but those other motherfuckers have had a few too many cruel ironies and seem destined to hold in their hands a steering wheel. Go on witcher badself. And I’m spent.
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