Torgo

Is it wrong to laugh at the MST3K version of "Manos": The Hands of Fate?  

For me it's serious quandary. I would have glided through the experience just fine if the friend who lent me the movie hadn't mentioned in passing that the man who played Torgo killed himself just a few months after the premier back in the 60s.  

The Wikipedia entry states that his suicide had nothing to do with the failure of the film, that Torgo had no social life and a non-existent relationship with his father:  

"John Reynolds (Torgo) committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with a shotgun on October 16, 1966, although the incident reportedly has no relation with Manos. He had a depressing social life as well as being a drug addict and had almost no connection with his father."

One thing that strikes me here is the rationale that the incident had no connection with the failure of his BIG CHANCE. Finally, something is going right in his life. Here's his chance at success. His ship has come in. He's going to be in a film. He'll get some recognition. Directors will be lining up outside his door. Torgo was just the beginning.  

But no. Manos was a flop. His dreams went down the drain. What's left?  

What I find alarming is his capacity to kill himself with a shotgun. Is that common? Seems like it would be very difficult, and I know it's macabre of me to bring it up, but honestly, I just can't picture that. Not that I want to. But I just can't begin to imagine how someone could hold a shotgun up to their head and reach the trigger, though I'm not one to go around putting guns of any sort up to my head.  

So it seems to me that they WERE RELATED. It's like saying the rampant growth of the tomato plants in my garden has nothing to do with the soil, rain, or water. They just grow independent of those things.  

Poor Torgo.  

OH. AND BY THE WAY. That thing about the drugs and Torgo, did I neglect to mention his drug abuse was related to his role in the film? Oh, yeah. Right. Well, according to the Wikipedia entry, during shooting, Torgo wore this metal rigging to make him look like a satyr (ohhhhhhhh, he's supposed to be a satyr!), BUT he wore it backwards. And no one told him. It damaged his kneecaps permanently and it was, apparently, really painful. He self-medicated with drugs until his death.

Anyway, it's funny how those two facts are so far apart on the Wikipedia entry. Not that I'm accusing Wikipedia of some conspiracy to cover up the truth about Torgo or something. It's just interesting.

And sad.  And it made me feel incredibly guilty to laugh at everything Torgo did, particularly the "itsy bitsy spider" part, where he's trying to seduce the unconvincing actress who played Mike's wife.  The "itsy bitsy spider" scene is one of the best.  Well, pretty much everything with Torgo is hilarious, from the Torgo-music to the wives molesting-him-to-death scene.  

But how can I laugh when I know that Torgo killed himself due to the film's failure? I just can. Call me cold-hearted. Call me evil. But maybe Torgo would be really happy to know that his film has achieved cult-status. That they're making a sequel. And a production company in Nashville redubbed the audio track last year and I guess there's a documentary on the director in the works. 

Someone should also make a documentary about Torgo, because I sense a good story there.  

So I guess it's not entirely sad. It's just rough to know that it was someone's failure and they got depressed enough about it to die. You know?   

CNN Is the Devil

I'm wondering who, besides me, sits in their cubicles and reads the news. From time to time I do, and some days I get so DEPRESSED that I want to die.

This has led me to the conclusion that the news is the devil. Once upon a time I wrote about the devil room in the house Stoker and I bought -- which we converted to a harvest yellow in an attempt to overcome its natural gloom. So, I'm very familiar with the devil. The devil likes things to be black and dark and depressing. The devil room was black and dark and depressing . . . and it sucked the light out of the world. It took grueling hours of work to exorcise the demon and make the room livable and friendly and . . . yellow. Honestly? I wish the room wasn't yellow now. I'm probably going to have to go back and paint it again. Maybe a nice, flat black.

Anyway, the point is, I was sitting here, depressed as hell, when it dawned on me that the news is the devil, and I wanted to share this revelation with the masses, not that they'll listen, because . . . well, they're the masses and I'm not Bono or Oprah. And I guess it depends on your definition of devil. Mine is this: the devil ruins my life; the devil makes me want to give up; the devil robs me of hope; the devil makes me do my worst because I'm no good anyway.

Sound familiar? It sounds like a chant. Like I'm writing terrible lyrics to a heavy metal riff. Maybe that's why it sounds familiar. In any case, why do I read the news? I've been learning to cope with the daily onslaught of horrors, but some days they're just too terrible. Like today. Here's a sampling of stuff I read: babies in China dying because of poisoned formula; man on trial for brutally beating his ex-girlfriends' cat to death; woman still searching for her husband who disappeared over a year ago in Iran; Finnish guy murdering college students; E! online writing "obvi" to mean "obviously" (you can see why this one is so upsetting).

Ok, I don't mean to contribute by sharing the horrors myself. But I must be a masochist because I keep going back. And if I was more of an optimist, maybe I'd see more hope in those stories, hope for man's redemption or something, that there is still goodness in people, that they're all trying, they're all doing the best they can, that sometimes good people just get misled. The news doesn't cover that part of the story, and why would they? Sensationalism is what sells, right?

These days journalists suck. They have twenty seconds to pump out a story and thus their writing is awful and the stories are chopped up to fit the sensational tripe that attracts viewers. They have no pride in their stories. It's a news-mill. So what we end up with is a skewed perspective of the world and how it's doing. It feels like hell out there if we listen to the media, but it is it really any different than it's ever been?

At first I was sort of joking about calling the news the devil. I thought it would be funny to sound very fundamental, like an I-live-in-a-compound-with-my-religious-compatriots zealot that the news LOVES to crucify. I don't. That is to say, I obviously read the news and participate in the machinery of our great over-newsed society and so I'm clearly not one of THEM. I'm a news junkie. It's in my blood, I need a fix often, I've fallen prey to the CNN drug cartel. I can't believe this crap is legal. And now I realize I'm right. The news IS the devil.




Quite honestly, I do believe in a fallen angel named, variously, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Satan, Mephistopheles, Ned Flanders, etc. I think it's important to remember the things unseen that have the power to sway us, including the Internet. Can you see it? No! You see a manifestation of it, this page for example, is not real. It's ephemeral. You would not be able to touch it if you tried. It's unreal, yet its effects on you are real. Right now you may be livid with rage that someone might suggest that there is such thing as a fallen angel or that the news does more negative than positive in our society because you worship at the altar of the holy fount of CNN. Proving my point, this page is nothing. It's an idea, and yet it has the power to influence you. The most real and powerful things in our world are the unreal, the unseen. Think about it. (Yes, yes, so true, I am a genius philosopher.)

Summer Is Just Another Word for Torture

The heat is ruining my life. I may have said something similar when I was living in Arizona, but only because it was. And it is now. At least in Arizona we had central air conditioning. Right now we're keeping our house cool with electric window units and fans. It's very ineffective and very trashy. The house we bought was built in the forties and none of the previous owners had felt inspired to get central air. We're inspired to, but first there are other pressing matters, like the roof.

Anyway, the heat is killing me. Each day that brings me both high temperatures and high levels of humidity wipe me out. The only thing I can do is swear, curse Tennessee, long for Utah and sometimes cry in frustration. Not to give you the wrong idea, I don't really cry. We have this air conditioner the previous owners left us and it sucks. Something is broken about it, I'm not sure what, probably the temperature gauge because it fluctuates so drastically, one minute it's 54 degrees and the next it's 83. When it thinks it's 54 it turns off and I swear at it and cut the power to it and then restart it. Stoker thinks it doesn't help, but I know it does.

Another thing that's killing me is the hills of Tennessee. Oft cited as beautiful in song, these hills are a bane and a curse and I curse them. The extreme heat and humidity and the hills have put the brakes on exercise. Last year I could tolerate it because I ran by the river amidst the trees and that lowered the temperature a little. Plus I ran home to the central air conditioner. This summer I run home and never cool down and I want to die. And there's no river and very few trees and everything is a hill. Stoker thinks I overdo it, but I assure you I do not. If you came to my house and we took a run on a day at 92 degrees and 65% humidity, or even 40%, you'd melt with me. And it wouldn't resemble a romantic song. It would be like a house of wax. There would be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. And swearing at Tennessee.

Stoker says there are lots of hills in Utah, but there aren't. There are mountains. When there's a sort of hill, it looks like a hill and feels like a hill. In Tennessee, there's some kind of weird optical illusion going on and you can't tell it's a hill with teeth until you're running up it and dying in the extreme humidity and heat.

Long ago my pioneer ancestors tried to settle in Missouri and then Illinois, but things didn't work out. So they moved on and eventually set up camp in the Utah territory. It was hard for them and stuff, but after living in a humid climate and having been to some of the places that didn't work out for them, I thank my lucky stars things didn't workout in the Midwest. The desert is a superior climate. So maybe water was scarce and harder to come by and maybe it was grueling to drag those rocks out of the quarries to build with because there weren't a lot of trees, those things worked out, right? Once you live in a swamp, it's always a swamp and it breeds swamp creatures. The desert breeds hearty stock. Tall, lean, strong people. I can't decide for sure if this holds merit, it's just my perception, I'm sure.

I'm telling you, the heat is killing me. I'm very depressed right now. That's probably not super obvious because I'm being so hilarious at the moment. But I am. I'm wilting like a flower in a damn car out in the sun.

I tried to find scientific proof that extreme temperatures cause depression and other problems in people. I don't have time to rummage through all the studies, so I let the BBC do it for me. They came up with this article on the effects of extreme heat on moods. So I'm right, then. Thanks for playing. Now I'm going to go cry and melt in the pointless heat.



p.s. Recently I read this line from a short story by Chekhov ("He Understood"): "It was a stifling June morning; the air was sultry, the leaves drooped, the dry ground cracked." And I finally understood the power of that word sultry. Sultry only has power if you've been exposed to extreme humidity. I hadn't until Tennessee. Do I obsess? I do, I know I do.

Not that an Exorbitant Raise is Necessary . . . a Small One Would Do

Suddenly, I feel no satisfaction with my job. I’ve been working here since December and at first I was floored to have a position as a copy editor. But then my friend, Hotbaugh (aka Baughtronic, Kiki, CBG, Tofu, Baugh-baugh, Baby Cakes, Hotcakes, HEC, Honey Cakes, et cetera), blabbed her salary to me (I begged her to spill the beans), and now, it’s funny, I feel no job satisfaction. The polls say morale is low at the Nicole headquarters.

I’m reminded of an article I read recently in the New Schmorker about poverty. It was a bunch of crap. The most important thing I remember about it is that if you surround yourself with people in the same economic bracket, you can be happy. But, say your neighbor gets a new boat and you see it, you’ll feel unhappy. They’ve done studies on this. Not that they needed to, you know, because anyone intrinsically knows that it’s difficult to watch others have more than you.

Anyway, it’s the premise of lots of movies, books, and lore about witchcraft in certain Native American societies, and now it’s the premise of this blog entry. The point isn’t that I’m jealous of Hotbaugh’s salary or anything. For hell sakes. I’m really glad for her. She actually deserves more, and the funny thing is, she feels like she should be paid more. I do too. I also think I should be paid more. I mean, my big question is WTF?

Part of the problem is that I’m relatively new to the workforce. I put off entering it for as long as possible. In fact, because it’s so miserable, I might postpone this misery, leave the workforce and go back to school to get a totally useless PhD. What do you think?

Ok, so I’m new to the workforce. It makes sense that I don’t know what kind of salary I SHOULD be making. Plus, maybe Nashville salaries are lower than Salt Lake City salaries. How can I possibly know (the answer to this lame question is research. Of course, but why waste time researching that? The answer won’t lead to job satisfaction. Or will it?)? What gets me is that my mentality is “what I should be making” and not “Sally forth! Carve out your own destiny! Demand the salary you want! Capture the American Dream!” And by carve out my own destiny, I mean shrug off the cubicle life and do something else.

I forgot to mention that part of the desperation I feel about the job is the mindless slaughtering of writing as art. It kills me that people who don’t seem to respect the beauty of language write books. How can that be?! I feel as affronted as Mark Twain was by Fenimore Cooper’s cheap, quick literature.

Monday, Monday You're a Big Fat Meanie

Oh man, I'm so depressed. I don't know why. Because it's Monday? Probably because it's Monday. "Monday morning you sure look fine, Tuesday I got travelin' on my mind." It just so happens that Monday has more songs about it than any other day of the week, and it does because it's the crappiest.

I would say shittiest, but I'm trying to cut back. Stoker was recording me the other night, singing this song we wrote together (I suck, as we both know), and I messed up and said, "shit," and Stoker kept playing me saying it over and over again in my headphones. It sounded like . . . shit. It was terrible. I sound terrible when I swear (AND when I sing). So, I've decided it's OK to write swear words, but not to say them anymore.

By the way, about that thing I said up there, the thing about Monday having more songs written about it than any other day of the week? I made that up. It's not a fact. I'm sure I could research it and everything and come up with some statistics showing that it is fact*, but who has the energy to do that? This keyboard kind of sticks and my fingers get real tired from typing.

"Monday monday, can't trust that day, monday monday, sometimes it just turns out that way."

I prefer "California Dreaming," if you now what I mean. Mondays are typically tough for me because I can't sleep Sunday night. Who knows why. Probably because on Saturday I sleep in an hour later than usual, on Sunday I often take a nap, and the whole weekend I eat like crap. I don't eat crap, but if crap could eat, it would probably eat the kind of stuff I eat on weekends, like Zingers, more cheese than is necessary, and lots of Dr. Pepper (I've stopped drinking it during the week). I'm sure all those things in combination disrupt the bio-rhythms or circadian rhythms or whatever term you prefer. Maybe if I got a body suit of health magnets or something. Feng shui. Something alternative, because I'm really into that . . . whole thing.

And to close, a little shout out to my hero Stoker, who bought me a mountain bike on Friday. Yeehaw, Stoker! Let's ride**!



*"Faith is a fact . . . . Ha ha. I almost said faith is a fact. Faith's not a fact . . . . . I'm going to prison because you don't know what a blooper real is?!!!" George Bluth Sr.
** Bikes.

Crazy? Yes, please.

Owing to my dramatic personality, I broke up with one of my friends. That's the deal; I basically sent her a long goodbye in the form of an email. Who does that kind of thing? Often, I can hardly stand myself.

I thought my days of sending emails in the heat of the moment -- usually at night -- were over, because now I'm married and I generally sent those kinds of emails to boyfriends who were either breaking up with me or had already broken up with me, or who I was in the process of breaking up with. I'm a stayer, so they were usually breaking up with me, something I'm very grateful for because otherwise I might be with one of them still. And I'd rather be with Stoker, who, as expected, is still perfect for me.

But just because I'm married does not mean that I don't need friends. I may not need them every day and may not call them as often as I did when I was single. But I love them, still. And in some ways I wish I could call them as often as I did when I was single. But that would be pathetic. Part of the problem with that is also scheduling. When I have time to call them, they are busy. When they call me, I'm either working or having a rare moment with Stoker (who works between 60 - 70 hours a week; another reason I need my friends: I get lonely) and he comes first, naturally. And were my friends married, I'd expect their spouses to come first.

Anyway, I guess the thing with this friend (who I essentially broke up with) is that I had deluded myself into believing that she put as much importance on our friendship as I had. We all know that relationships are give and take. When one person feels like they're giving more than the other, something's wrong. And the both of you better address it. This kind of thing works better when it's an intimate relationship because it's weird to have two friends discussing a relationship. That's the beauty of friendship. You don't have to do things like that because you both obviously feel like things are going well. You don't have to have a DTR. Or a state-of-the-union. If a friendship isn't working, you both just fade out of each other's lives without much being said. It just happens.

That's why everyone who knows anything thinks friendship is a beautiful thing. It is the relationship that is chosen and not held together by marriage or biology. It exists purely for itself. It is completely voluntary and when it goes sour it is such a sad thing. But for all these reasons, that it is voluntary, that it is not held together by anything except pure will, it is the relationship that is not so much discussed. You don't go to counseling if it's not working. You don't usually say to your friend, "This isn't working for me," or "You don't call me enough," or "I want out," or "I feel jealous about your other friends," because if you did, you'd seem somewhat cuckoo.

Which, I guess is what I must be. Because basically I said many of those above sentiments to the friend I broke up with. But I'm a jealous person. I get jealous over the stupidest things. I suppose that's because I inhabit the world of ideas. I think about things. And my moon is in Scorpio, a very jealous sign. I didn't say to her you don't call me enough. Or I want out . . . at least not in those terms. I said I'm leaving. And I said this isn't working. And something about feeling jealous.

I know I look like a very small person. And I feel like one. And I feel sad, like I've lost my best friend. But she was probably only my best friend in my head and not in her own perception of the relationship. Because a best friend would have behaved like one. A best friend would have been aware of me, and so often she wasn't. And maybe I'm blind or simply ignorantly patting myself on the back, but I thought I was aware of her.

I'm full of shit, aren't I. You'll notice that's not a question. The thing is, I have many friends that I keep in touch with. None of them ever made me feel like I'm not quite as important as their other friends. But in this friendship, I nearly always felt that way. And perhaps that's just my perception. But that's the only one I have.

I'm going to go now and have my pity party by myself. I've been very depressed lately. Depressed and stressed. My job is ending soon and I don't have another lined up and to top it all off, this sick Egyptian I work with asked me to be his assistant and that just depresses me more. He's always borderline sexually harassing me, I'd have to be insane to consider taking his offer of being his assistant. Yeah right. But that's the only lead I have on a job. And then in my great, dramatic way, I go and end a friendship. Who the hell does that?

JJ's

In a few minutes, I'll be heading to JJ's. It's my new favorite place. I should always have a favorite place. It makes life worth living.

JJ's doesn't look like much from the outside, but inside it's gorgeous and clean and chic. They have coffee, espressos, energy drinks and my favorite Steaz Green Tea Sodas. And to nibble on? Imported chocolates. To read? A plethora of magazines (to buy).

Unfortunately, it's frequented by the rich college kids who bring their Mac laptops and set them up on the coffee tables and listen to itunes while they conduct "research" on the internet and write their fifteen page papers that are very important and pressing. They have to, you know, write those papers so that they can graduate and start out as CEO's of major corporations.

I'm being sarcastic. What those students probably don't know is that they'll start at an entry level position, maybe making $12.50 an hour, where they'll slowly work their way up the depressing corporate ladder. Or they'll look and look and not find a job in their chosen field and so they'll work for temp agencies while they wait for a law firm to hire them. Or maybe that's just what happened to me and I'm a cynic.

It's just depressing. I get so depressed looking at them with all their expensive clothes and computer gear and ipods and bags and taste. They have no idea what they're in for. Unless they know someone. Because it's really about who you know, not what you know. If they only knew . . . .

But anyway. I have to hang out at places like JJ's because I'm essentially single, again. Single while being married. Because Stoker works 15 hour days and even on his days off he wants to go to into the studio for some reason. Isn't that weird? Hmmm. Maybe he's not really going to work . . . .

Just kidding. Now I'm getting depressed. Again. Seriously, he has a demanding job. He does work. And very often I go into the studio to see him and hang out. I was there, just last night, after I left good ole JJ's. I sat in the studio while he recorded this pretty good, though somewhat pathetic, guy, who is convinced this album is going to be HUGE. Maybe it is. You never know. It's not like bands know their album is going to be HUGE while they're making it. Right?

Sigh. I'm leaving.