You know it's not a good thing when your life is reduced to the latest Mary-Kate and Ashley DVD collection ...
These films fly in the face of all logic to me: You don't have a life because you are choosing to buy a set of movies about two fictional characters having a soap-opera existence that you are to do your pitiful best to emulate throughout your inner-city living young life.
So many things play into this societal drivel it ain't funny no mo'.
Hell they don't even list directors on the copy. Any director in their right minds wouldn't want to be associated with this pablum. But as all the teasers say: The Mary-Kate and Ashley Brand is #1 in Firls Video, Girls Videogame, Celebrity Fashion, Girls Book, 'Tween Lifestyle Magazine and has a growing presence in Music.
What the fuck is "'Tween Lifestyle'?"
I don't know enough to describe all the shortcomings here. Something about the reinforcing of the stories about ourselves we like to tell ourselves ...
Crap, I dunno. "It's hard to run when a coat hanger beats you on the thighs ..."
Highway 20. Coming or going. It doesn't matter really. What was ahead or what was behind, the anticipation and the satisfaction play on equal footing in my mind. (Crash into me and I come into you ...) CDs on random. Jack Kerouack and pushing that jack - on the road I went. I had no concept of what I was about to get into, with the Red-Head or with The Race that Changes.
Phone calls and bike rides. Runs in the hills behind; swims in the lake. Soerbet in the heat under an awning with a couple from Wenatchee. Steak Dinner at the Duck Brand before heading home ... On Highway 20. Radio pumping Rancid and Dave Mathews, knowing that she was there. She didn't care. She just liked to be around me. I knew I had to grab onto that and hold on with everything I had. It was precisely that feeling that pushed me away, running scared before returning and confronting the smile and the embrace that I will never leave.
At some point we all quit talking about what it was we were going to give up to maintain this freedom we felt and what we knew to be good and righteous and whole. Youth. We moved on to jobs and the nasty undercurrents of the desperate masses.
I'm imagining now, I find some solace in the training toward ultra-races. I get to still be in touch with that youthful idealistic energy that is the world and it keeps me going in my current "real world" life. Without Tri-Geek-Dom, I'm not sure who I am, or who I would have turned out to be.
The personal, unutterable darkness and lightness confronted and moved through and beyond. Joy.
If you were sitting and watching, you might have been asking yourself what the Hell we were thinking, letting her pick the tortilla chips off the floor, place them carefully in the plastic bowl (already home to several partially eaten black olives), meticulously pour water into the mix and begin to smoosh things together with a dilligence found only in Enron executives covering their collective behinds.
You might have even looked on like you were rubbernekcing while passing your favorite train-wreck as my daughter took several bites of this astonishing concoction. If you were watching her the entire time, of course, you would have missed the obvious thing to any and all parents everywhere: Mom and Dad had those few precious moments to place morsels of goodness into their faces and even move some into their atrophied gullets before having to wrestle with the 20-month-old Ninja again.
