I Missed An Important Anniversary

Last Monday, I had my four wisdom teeth extracted. I don't remember much of Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday due to the steady flow of Vicodin pumping through my veins. It was probably good that I was sedated last Tuesday or else I would have not been able to help myself from screaming over the agony that now goes in hand with May 19th. It was the ten year anniversary of my childhood ending. It was the ten year anniversary of the release of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

Now, faithful reader, you must fully realize the role that Star Wars had played in my life. It was an obsession at the very least. I knew every word of every movie (something that comes with watching VHS tapes until they wear out, forcing {no pun intended} me to own no less than three copies of the trilogy at that time). I knew every character who popped on screen for more than half a second, and most of those who were on screen for less. My locker made the school paper because every square inch (literally) was covered in something Star Wars. Action figures. Comic books. Magazines. Trading cards. Video games. It was unhealthy, but ridiculously awesome.

It goes without say that come May 19th, 1999, my fifteen year old self was ready to have my mind blown by the all powerful Lucas. After somehow sitting through school all day, I headed over to my best friend's house. I went to the theater in jeans, a green sweatshirt, and a rocking Boba Fett helmet. My best friend (a guy) went as Princess Leia, wig and all. We both had telescoping plastic lightsabers, too, because lighsabers are AWESOME. As we sat in front of the large screen waiting for the LucasFilm Ltd logo to appear on the screen, shimmering in all of its glory, we had no idea that our childhood was about to end in deafening THX surround sound.

I really hope I don't need to tell you why this movie sucks. Crappy CGI. Jar Jar. Darth Maul. Darth Vader as a sweet little kid. Pod racing. Jar Jar. Mitochlorians (which sounds more like an STD than anything). Crappy star ships. Retarded robots. Jar Jar. George Lucas had successfully shot a cinematic proton torpedo into his fans' exhaust ports (hmm, sounded better in my head) and destroyed all that they held dear in an explosion larger than the Death Star. But I was in denial. I mean, they spun around when they had lightsaber battles. And there was R2D2. And did you hear Darth Vader breathe at the end of the credits? OH MAAAAN! I knew it had to be awesome somehow. By the end of the movie's run at the cheap seats in the mall, I had twenty seven stubs in my wallet. Twenty. Seven.

I had been duped. And thus the seeds of bitterness that have since blossomed into the flowers of cynicism were planted that day. The day that my childhood was killed by the very man who helped bring it to life.

A Fiveteen Word Sentence

The other day while strolling through my friendly neighborhood Wal-Mart [sorry consumer activists], I was incredibly alarmed. No, it wasn't the big bargain rollbacks, the human/banshee crossbreed children running freely through the aisles, nor the new Dora the Statutory Explorer dolls. It was the butchering of the English language. Now, I am not some stuck up Niles Crane-esque figure who cringes when the phrase "me and my buddies" is spoken. And I am certainly not picking on people who are learning the language, or people who are speaking their culture's dialect. None of that would be fair, and I would be the world's largest hypocrite for getting upset over that. But this... This was something entirely different. A woman saying "Him didn't pick up the phone", a man saying something is "fiveteen two seven" for $15.27. This is how adults are speaking in public now? What is probably even more frightening is that they were with their children. Those kids are screwed.

I was pretty upset by all of this and it was on my mind all night. I couldn't sleep after Letterman, and since Jimmy Fallon is in Conan's spot, I started to flip around the channels. After much clicking, I come across an old mind numbing love-to-hate favorite: MTV's Next. If you are not familiar with this show, five contestants follow a guy/girl they want to go on a blind date with on a big bus, they come out one at a time, and when the dater he gets bored [or, in a classic episode, when a girl pees her pants] they yell "Next!" and send them back to the bus. Then this girl recites a mocking poem summarizing what just happened four seconds ago while they walk back. While the date is going on, the four waiting/nexted contestants sit in the bus and read conversations off of cue cards. During this episode, one of the girls on the bus says "Do you want to hear a story? Once I found a photo on my boyfriend's phone of a hoohoo that wasn't mine" and it cut back to the date. Wait... Wait... That is what you call a story? There is no beginning, middle, and end. That was a statement. That was a fiveteen word sentence. That is not a story, my "hoohoo" finding friend.

Maybe this is what is happening to us, though. This horrible experiment where we start off with The Bachelor where some nonfamous rich guy has to weed out these girls and propose on the season finale. Then we replace the nonfamous rich guy and now a bisexual internet porn star is the object of affection/infection. This is such a success, they start putting in washed up rapper and rock stars. Then we put them on a bus. Then, after the success of Mork And Mindy, they start making spinoffs. Except instead of Robin Williams in rainbow suspenders, we get illiterate carriers of diseases I watched film strips about in fifth grade. What small shred of dignity reality may have once had is long gone, if it was ever there at all. Where we once had talented actors delivering lines written by college graduates, we now have girls throwing up on Bret Michaels' shoes. On the bright side, we can always count on quality material for The Soup.