Personal Yak

I heard about Stephen Pressfield’s ode to the Muse, The War of Art, on the Nerdist podcast, which is always straddling the line between encouraging aspiring artists and obnoxiously shaming them for not throwing themselves headfirst into what the hosts readily admit is a frustrating, punishing lifestyle with little chance of a payoff. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit this is the second piece of merchandise I’ve purchased after Nerdist approval, although I have nary a complaint about the Tweaked Audio earbuds… yet. I bought The War of Art after another episode where professional comedians Chris Hardwick and Jonah Ray badger their friend and part-time comedian Matt Mira to write more jokes and Ray casually tossed off the book as a cure for the writers’ block. Amazon had a used one for about eight dollars, and I had this gift card I wanted to be rid of, so the stars aligned perfectly.

Pressman gives some serious lip service to the ideas of professionalism in being an artist, for producing art for its own sake, but he clearly sees writer’s block as a kind of spiritual poverty. Your fear leaves you closed off to the Muse, he analyzes. He dips into the well of Jungian psychobabble — procrastination is a disjunction between the Ego, operating in the world of Reality, and the Self, which functions in the realm of Possibility. Whatever, dude. Page after page of locked doors to inspiration isn’t very useful unless there’s a key at the end, which there isn’t — unless God loves you, but then you wouldn’t be reading this book in the first place, would you? Pressman diagnoses, then personifies, writers’ block as capital-R Resistance. It’s fair enough, lumping all the shit that keeps you from achieving your dreams under an umbrella term and whacking you repeatedly with the term, like a manifesto.

But the thing is, Pressman’s constant bludgeoning with this bullying Resistance character is, at least in the short term, a decent prod. The book moves incredibly quickly — 169 pages in a little over an hour for me, which is probably my speed-reading personal best — so every thirty seconds or so, there’s another exhortation to stop dicking around with Resistance and get a move on. Pretend you have cancer, just six months to live — Pressman doesn’t hesitate to dump that weight on the reader and ask the obvious, would you still spend time watching TV, or buying useless crap, or having meaningless, emotionally unfulfilling sex, or would you finally get started on that novel you’re always talking about, geez! More than once, I did consider dropping the book in my hands and getting a move on that screenplay, and that web venture, and that girlfriend, and that better job. But I didn’t. And now I’m writing a blog post. I guess we’ll see what I do next.

The debt crisis bill that President Obama signed on Tuesday made nobody happy. It pissed off progressives like myself because it lets mega-businesses and the obscenely wealthy rape America’s working and middle classes, and it pissed off the Teabaggers because they’re not happy we still have a government impinging on their rights to be skullfucked by the Koch brothers and Americans For Prosperity. But I’ve come up with a solution that will not only make everyone happy, but also reduce our national entitlement expenses, and I’m totally disappointed that nobody from the Administration asked for my advice before screwing us all over.

Here’s the deal: if you’re an unpatriotic, avaricious sack of shit who equates paying your taxes to surrendering to the tyranny of a government that sometimes half-heartedly thinks maybe the mentally insane should have to wait a couple of days before buying a stash of automatic weapons, then I have a new tax rate for you. Zero. That’s right, you can live here in America, in what your buddy Sean Hannity called “the best, greatest, free-est, most awesome, bitching-est, amazing-est country God ever created so all the rest of you nations can suck it,” without paying a dime in taxes. Yes, you can hold onto all of your money, even though we all know that the U.S. dollar is just an Islamo-atheist-socialist conspiracy to take away our God-given rights to barter with sheep.

There’s a catch, of course. If you’re not supporting the country financially, then the country’s not going to reciprocate. I assume since Teabaggers hate the government, this isn’t going to be a dealbreaker for them — like when an ugly woman refuses to sleep with you. Y’all know what I’m talkin’ about, Alabama. So, no taxes, but also no more Social Security checks, no more Medicare. When God gets sick of your anti-climate change bullshit and sends a tornado or hurricane or flood to wipe your trailer park off the map, don’t expect FEMA to show up. The free market can clean up the mess.

I’m still working out some of the details. I know, for example, how frustrated Teabaggers are when airplanes land safely on airport runways instead of falling out of the sky after their wings and engines detach from the fuselage, so maybe the FAA can do something about that. It’s just a matter of figuring how to segregate planes between actual tax payers and rugged individualists. Also, the Teabaggers hate going to their local grocery store WalMart and feeling confident that the FDA and USDA made sure there’s no rat feces or dismembered human body parts in the food they’re about to put into their bodies, so I want to help them out with that, too. And the Postal Service: sending a letter from Maine and receiving home delivery in California a few days later for less than fifty cents? That needs to stop. And banking — how fucking irritating is it when you go to the bank and you know that your money will be there, since it’s FDIC insured?

I’m thinking of a class of Tea Party businesses — also tax-free and federal government free. Businesses that can do whatever the hell they want, with only minor exceptions like enforcing trademark and patent claims, transporting goods via the Interstate Highway System, getting SBA loans or low-interest Federal Reserve loans, getting passports to do business abroad…

See, President Obama, this is what we call “win-win”.

It’s no secret that I’ve been on OKCupid for a couple of years now. It’s certainly no secret now that I’ve written about it on this blog. There’s a lot to recommend about the site — it has a kind of cheeky, encouraging attitude; it’s free; and the creators are really into math, so the site is full of dating tips with some statistical evidence behind them rather than your hapless friends trying to tell you what women are into. It has a feature that lets you upload pics of yourself and it presents them to the community in a Kittenwar-style survey that reports back which photos are most likely to get you noticed by which demographics. It’s all really… well, I can’t say “useful,” so I’ll go with the more nebulous “interesting.”

The psychological process behind the site both fascinates and horrifies me. It was loading slowly today, so on the home page, my browser rendered the snippets of womens’ profiles before it had downloaded the corresponding photos. Maybe ten usernames and half a profile paragraph each, and I started reading, judging and classifying — file this one away for later, ignore that one. And then the photos came in… and this profile blurb that had caught my eye just ten seconds ago suddenly turned into, “What was I thinking?”

I know we all do that, even though we were taught not to judge a book by its cover and that an ugly duckling might become a beautiful swan, we’re all fundamentally superficial assholes. But my issue is that I’m very much aware that I’m no Abercrombie model, or Abercrombie store employee, or Abercrombie customer. In euphemisms, I have a great personality. Okay, maybe not a great personality. But I do have a personality. Anyway, I guess I’m figuring my personality doesn’t get much of a chance to grow on you — yes, like a fungus — when my physical appearance has to compete with the guy next to me. The good news is that an overwhelming proportion of OKCupid’s male population is pretty fucking hideous. I’m talking scales and lizard tongues and extra nipples on their foreheads, plus a lot of us look like Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. Yeah, people who look like Don Draper or Robert Pattinson or whoever the beefcake of the zeitgeist is generally don’t need to post headshots on a free dating service and complete the sentence, “When I masturbate, I think about…”

Point is, it sucks being rejected just because your nose is too big or your hairline’s too high or you’re only five-foot-six, which I am not. I’m five-foot-six and a half. And there’s the Golden Rule, do unto others, which makes me feel like a dick when I reject someone I could be really compatible with just because their photo doesn’t conform to our cultural “standards” of “beauty” that the “media” forces on “society”. Or they have tattoos. Sorry, body art’s a big turn off for me.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t be friends. …No, really, I said that rejecting someone on their picture makes me feel like a dick, but it should make me feel like a dick because it’s a total dick thing to do. I don’t care if everyone does it, if it’s a by-product of our six-million years of evolution, trying to keep the species flourishing — as an adult, you’re supposed to be able to find value in things besides ogling someone till you fuck them. The strange thing I’ve found is that as you come to know someone, come to like them, they magically grow more physically attractive and all that biological imperative stuff flies out the window, as if God’s rewarding you for not being a totally superficial, horrible asshole.

Since OKCupid is so study-minded, I’d be very curious to see what would happen if they turned the user photos off for a couple of days, if people contact the same kinds of people they do when they’ve got a thousand words they can jump to a conclusion from. I wonder if the domain name “blinddate.com” is available — I’m fairly confident someone’s scooped it up by now — but I’d like to do the world a favor and build a match.com where you only get to see someone’s picture after you’ve sent them a message. OKCupid had a similar feature — it’s gone now, so I’m assuming it didn’t do all that well. Because people are shallow twits.

Um… date me?

My friend Erica and I were making our fall travel plans when we got some disturbing news out of the fractured remnants of the Hapsburg Empire and forcing us on an emergency detour. The far-right Dutch government, tired of tourists getting giggly at the Anne Frank house and being just plain old prickly far-right buzzkill douchebags, is closing all of the country’s famous coffeehouses to foreign tourists. This is the problem with Dutch koffiehuis patrons — they tend to be preoccupied on election day.

The strange thing is that I was never in all that big of a hurry to sample Dutch “coffee” in the first place. Amsterdam — Holland — has been on my bucket list for a while, but I fantasized about the Rijksmuseum and bringing home duty-free Delftware. I figured I’d check out the red light district, more out of anthropological curiosity than anything prurient, since here in America at least, red light districts are about as erotic as a gas station bathroom and covered with a slithering, slimy film of venereal disease. It could be different abroad: the red light district in San Jose, Costa Rica is a strip of downtown full of Vegas-style Atlantic City-style casinos, tiny women with huge freak tits swarming the blackjack tables, keeping the turnover high save for the one glazed-eyed guy robotically hitting and standing. The red light district in Prague — well, the whole city is more or less a red light district — but it has a wonderfully Bauhaus post-expressionism, like the city, well over-saturated in smut, grew totally jaded.

And I figured I’d check out Amsterdam’s “coffee” culture, to dip a toe into the laid-back, anti-establishment peer group I aspire to. Just cause you can over there. I’ve been offered “coffee” twice in my life, and both times I’ve turned it down out of general pussitude, the irrational fear that the TV propaganda from the Partnership for a Drug-Free America might be onto something. My first offer was my junior year of college — I had some friends who had this friend who was a walking pharmacopeia, who’d rattle off crazy drug slang like “pikachu” or “greenies” and who’d patiently explain to us the difference between Afghani hashish and Pakistani hashish. The conversation would invariably end with bewilderment, “How do you… know this?” I mean, I have trouble getting medicine for an inner ear infection. Anyway, this guy knew a guy who knew a dealer, and anyway, the second guy was in a sharing mood with his “coffee.” We lit and passed around a “mug” of it, but by the time it got to me, I thought, “Gee, that is not sanitary at all.”

I suppose it’s telling; swapping germs probably isn’t something “coffee” aficionados spend much time worrying about. Or anything else.

The other time I was fixing this dude’s computer, quite the libertine, and he just offered me some “coffee” right when I was there upgrading his Windows XP. A friendly gesture, really, since he also offered me booze and girls (or boys), but it seemed like a rather meretricious way to lose one’s “coffee” virginity. Goddamn dignity!

So I was taken aback by my reaction to the news of the Netherlands transitioning their coffeehouses to a members-only network, that something I have no real interest in participating in back at home is suddenly (a little more) off-limits on the other side of the world. It’s a sign of where the world’s going, that same crusty old white-man shock that hits when some racist mouth-breathers down in Arizona demand to see Hispanics’ papers at a traffic stop or when fundie psycho-Christians try to ban abortions in South Dakota. The world is slowly slipping back to its status quo from the days when President Obama said he’d close Guantanamo Bay and Conan O’Brien was still on network television. It’s probably unfair to compare the masterpieces at the Van Gogh Museum or the Sloten Windmill, built during the Industrial Revolution and still draining the dikes, to the Administration’s failure to pass single-payer healthcare or the Catskill-quality comedy stylings of Jay Leno but I want to see the world before it all falls apart.

That was my impetus behind visiting the lesser Europe in the first place. I still have a lot of the more prosperous, non-former Iron Curtain Europe on my list: Spain, Switzerland, Amsterdam, but I’ve got to believe that they’re all whitewashed by globalization. One of my tour leader’s warnings about Great Britain was that things on this continent might be different — not quite as civilized, let’s say — than on your home continent, whether that home continent is North America, or Australia, or North America. I assume it’s boilerplate tour guide spiel, standardized for Los Angeles or Tokyo or Mali, but the first world is the first world and the biggest difference between New York and Paris, or Zurich, or Berlin is the language. That, and of course the free health care and the name of the local big-box discount store, but I’m talking culturally. Croatia, of all places, has opened itself up not to just to adventurers looking to explore the Dalmatians but also to shit-beer swilling, fanny-packed, sunblock-slathered tourists, the same idiots clogging up the sidewalk in front of Rockefeller Center. And someday, they’ll overrun Romania, Bulgaria, Albania — I even found “Let’s Go: Kosovo” on the shelf in Idlewild Books, and I still thought, “Let’s not.”

This could’ve been a teachable moment, but of course it turned into a circus with the puritanical Republicans faking umbrage and the spineless weasels running the Democratic party calling for Weiner to resign. Weiner himself, who’s generally not a total pussy carrying his tail between his legs, was a disappointment too. I don’t care what the hell he does in his free time, who he tweets or how many photos of his cock he has — if the man can get me affordable health coverage, I want him in Congress. This would have been perfect too: Weiner is not a moralizing family-values Republican, he was never flipping out about the kids these days sexting, plus he never even met the women he was communicating with, let alone fucked them Vitter-style. I wanted to his press conference be a two-sentence smackdown of our country’s lazy, embarrassing news media and its journalists who can’t tell the difference between relevant stories and fodder for late-night comedians. “It’s none of your goddamn business. Fuck off.”

Now Weiner’s off to rehab, which is where white people go when they fuck up publicly. Not fuck up publicly like starting an illegal war in Iraq that the media’s not covering because their journalist contingents are too busy looking at dick photos or following Sarah Palin around and broadcasting whatever idiocy comes out of her mouth. And not fuck up publicly like by failing to close a loophole in our nation’s gun laws that a crazy guy could exploit and then shoot Gabby Giffords. But, you know, if it’s drugs or sex, prurient crimes that let us titter behind our imagined moral superiority, then it’s rehab.

I walked on past. It was a grotesque failure of coordination, but what exactly could I do for him? Besides, the guy who just belly-flopped face first on the sidewalk already had a companion for leaning on, someone to ask him the egregious, obnoxious question, “You okay?” There was a man coming the other way, on his cell phone. There were only four of us on the block, and we all must have seen each other. He ended his conversation, hung up his phone. We passed each other. I didn’t turn back. I hope the cell phone guy didn’t stop, bend down, ask, “You okay?” That shit would just make me look the a-hole.

Not to be phlegmatic, but there’s nothing I could do, no magical healing touch hands or time machine, heading back to warn this poor guy that the sidewalk’s uneven. I still felt guilty — rationalizations aside, no, I still looked guilty, and felt resentful at this moral point. Next time I klutz out and wipe out, I’d actually hope that the useless innocent bystanders would have the common courtesy to pretend like nothing happened, that I didn’t just make an ass and a spectacle of myself in front of total strangers.

The obvious solution would be to replace all of our sidewalks with spongy foam blocks, turning our lovely city into a grown-up Gymboree.

Glee and I don’t agree on a whole lot, especially in the second season finale, but I did feel a bit of a spiritual connection to useless supporting character Sunshine Corazon, crumbling under the overbearing pressure of glee club competition. “I used to love singing. It was the only thing that relaxed me,” she said after puking. “Now I hate it.” Who wouldn’t, dealing with Vocal Adrenaline, apparently the doped-up stable of twelve-year-old Chinese cyber-gymnasts of high school show choir? Three weeks of twenty-four hour rehearsals on I.V. drips — Glee likes going to extremes, but then again, music competitions, and even musical showmanship, is its own brand of hysterics, just like sports except without the end satisfaction of winning and being able to say that you’re objectively better than the other guy.

I used to love love love being in my own school band. I played the piano and the saxophone for anyone who’d listen, although a lot of the time, that was just me and the after-school janitor cleaning the halls around the auditorium. Performing was okay, too — it was stuffier, since we weren’t going to have the timbre of a real pro wind ensemble, or the tonal consistency of one, or be in tune like one, we could at least have the pointless eighteenth-century formality of one. The concertmaster would play a high C on her flute and we’d all tune to its pitch, even though we already went through a real tuning with a fork and everything backstage, and besides, figuring out whether we were sharp or flat was basically a coin flip anyway. We played for friends and family, two perfunctory concerts a year that would last for-fucking-ever. The big prize was a road trip to Busch Gardens, all the way in Virginia, at the end of the year. One year we even made it to Disney World, getting to perform for unfortunate park patrons waiting in line to see Space Mountain.

I was jaded even then — I skipped out on watching my school’s shows; I even skipped out on one marching band performance that I was supposed to be in.

I joined the marching band because all my friends were doing it, and like any high school drug education program could tell you, “all my friends were doing it” is a great reason to do anything. Go, peer pressure! I always thought marching bands were kind of retarded, I always thought marching was kind of retarded. Band camp started up, we were all walking around our mock football field in the August heat, playing Copland and being the drum major’s trained monkeys. Our formations were shapes on the field: a triangle… a circle… a squiggle. One thing they don’t tell you is that you can’t actually see the show unless you’re in the bleachers, and if your sound gets lost to the open-air auditorium, your performance gets lost in this silly line drawing. Besides, playing the saxophone shouldn’t require a costume fitting.

I remember the exact moment that I turned on music, too. The music program at my school had a storied reputation, and maybe some talent, too — we were Vocal Adrenaline, or at least, we had been. There was a touch of hubris, some coasting on our name recognition. I picture our drum major queen sipping a margarita from her drum major perch, meanwhile the school’s territorial hornet population was chasing the rest of us around the field.

How do you even grade a marching band performance, or a glee club, or rep theater? Were they marching, yes or no? Were they playing music, yes or no? Did they form all the required shapes, the triangle, the square, the squiggle, yes or no? I couldn’t tell you what makes Vocal Adrenaline better than New Directions, or Aural Intensity, or the Warblers, or my new show choir, Eargasm. (I’m trademarking “Eargasm” by the way.) Glee certainly got the mercurial, arbitrary judging process down perfectly. I could maybe tell you the difference between an “excellent” performance and a “superior” performance, but first and second place. Welcome to the entertainment industry, I guess — Rachel and Finn’s mid-show kiss may have been “unprofessional” to the little snot Jesse St. James, as if stage performers never have to kiss each other, but they’re not professionals. It’s a silly little high school club whose real problem is that their original songs were asinine — they should’ve sung Brit-Brit’s “My Cup” — and their whole performance was a last-minute afterthought.

“There’s too many bees out here,” I forget who complained.

And our assistant director, who wasn’t an object of wasps’ curiosity, who wasn’t sweating or carrying a heavy instrument, who was standing in the shade waving his arms around like we’re actually following him and not the percussion section, replied, “I don’t care.”

I never learned how to study, and I never learned how to practice. My piano instructor tried to teach me how to practice. I had this book of complicated fingering exercises, and she wrote on the cover: 2 octaves, 5x each. She could’ve given me a book of John Cage random musical scribble for all I could comprehend of this thing. “It’s not really a tune, so why would I play it?” I never said it out loud. It’s years and years later when I realized that’s what professional musicians do, going over and over and over and over and over the basics. Playing the same tricky ten-note passage again and again for an hour. That’s why their fingers aren’t slipping on a wrong note every couple of measures.

…That sounds tedious. It sounds like not fun. It sounds like work.

Our marching band didn’t need to work. Just being in the wind ensemble was an optional burden, and the marching band was an optional burden on top of that, and they were at least trying to not overtly antagonize anyone. I marched for another week or so, now pretty aware that I’m not getting a goddamn hornet injury for this. I’m sweating, I’m tired, I’m pissing away my last days of summer for what, exactly? A trophy? We’re not even going to win. The bandleaders would win the trophy — the snotty, arm-waving, not even marching bandleaders.

It’s a band. I had a few solos, but I always realized that its sound was a mixture of overtones and consonances and dissonances, my alto sax layered above a tenor sax, layered above a trombone, with percussion keeping us all together. But this was the first time I actually just felt like a cog, no longer playing for myself and whatever poor audience happened to be listening. I was playing for the saxophone section leader, who was trying to please the drum major, who wanted to impress the director, who was sucking up to fucking Rod Remington of WTKA, central New Jersey’s News Leader.

I quit wind ensemble the next year, although I’d completely stopped caring three months earlier. I didn’t have any solos that year, and that made it easy to come in late, or leave early, or just play hooky all together.

They advertised dirt cheap airfare to London, so I set my heart on the British Isles. Whether dirt cheap airfare included the arbitrary taxes and fees airlines throw onto their tickets didn’t matter; I was going.

I made a pact with myself after wasting too much precious travel time once at a bunch of attractions only notable in their non-necessity: the Museum of Sex Machines, the Museum of Medieval Torture. I hoped I’d get a good story out of them to impress my hipster friends with some vicarious coolness, which is the best reason to spend thousands of dollars on a vacation and find yourself a quarter of a planet away from home. My new rule is that under no circumstances will I travel ironically, no matter what camp, cheeseball tourist trap sneaks up on me. I could go home and watch The Soup if I needed to feel better than something. It’s not necessarily easy — just try finding an Irish souvenir without a stupid leprechaun on it — but there’s an entire country of people who actually live there, non-ironically, every single day.

Scotland and Ireland were exactly what I wanted in a vacation, a chance to join another culture, even just briefly. They have bagpipes over there, and they double or even triple distill their whisk(e)y, and everyone sings along to the folk songs in the pubs. The Chinese buffet in Northern Ireland is more foreign than Northern Ireland, but the area has an identity, the community working to distinguish itself, even if what that means is feeding your tourists spiced sheep guts for breakfast and writing all your street signs in English and in the otherwise dying language that English is subsuming.

I can’t say the same for England, where they may call them “crisps” and a “lift” and the “loo” but nevertheless has the same white-bread middle America blandness that pervades my podunk suburbs here at home. London felt like Old New York, except that no one would shut the fuck up about this upcoming wedding that the whole world apparently had to close down for. I’m sure the couple must do some truly important, spectacular things for their wedding to generate this much excitement among people who’ve never even met them! Like, I bet he’s a fire fighter who rescues puppies and kittens from burning buildings, and she’s probably a doctor who performs life saving surgery on orphans. Orphans with diseases.

Oh, they live off the British taxpayer — not to mention the tourist who didn’t bother to reclaim his VAT — and do jack squat.

England has more than a thousand years’ worth of history and culture, and an amazingly misguided, Disney-fied sense of what tourists are looking for, although I had no idea how absurd it is till I got to the London Bridge and its depressing tenant, the London Dungeon. And I just gave up and thought, “Really? I’m trying to broaden my horizons. Fuck this place.”

I bet it’s like one of those talking head documentaries on the History Channel, about the Tudor succession to the throne. With one of those elevator drop carnival ride things, and apparently there’s someone on the ride who’s dressed in period clothing for some reason. Meanwhile, there’s the actual Tower of London maybe a mile down the road, where the Beefeater guide-guards tell the story of the prison and its place in English history, but without the amusement park spectacle. The London Dungeon sort of depressed me, like paying fifteen bucks to see a mock-up S&M dungeon at the Museum of Sex Machines, but I didn’t really think “Fuck this place” until I saw ads for the nearby London Bridge Experience, a London Dungeon knockoff that bills itself as London’s number one Halloween attraction, even though the United Kingdom doesn’t even celebrate Halloween.

It’s all artifice, and not even the Grand Guignol artifice for the sake of artifice. It’s artifice for the sake of marketing, capturing and expanding American commercialized buzzwords. Did you like Avatar in 3-D? Then try the all-new London Eye 4-D Experience! The London Dungeon is in heart-stopping 5-D! That’s a whole two extra D’s! They’re like boobs — more D’s are better, but there’s a point where it gets absurd.

I talked to a few people who actually took time out of their London vacation to escape the vile embrace of the most pestilent pus ridden disease in history, to survive the tunnels of terrifying torment at Bedlam, and enjoy other alliterative gore-fests, and they said the London Dungeon was pretty good. Maybe it is, at least for the perverse history lesson that it tries to be. Britain is littered with the detritus of campy pseudo-historical hell houses, ghost walks, re-creations, and other fodder for shitty Showtime programming. I went on a ghost tour in York — to me, the tour was mostly a narrative experience with the added atmospheric benefit of taking place in a number of old, cramped, poorly-lit alleyways, and I thought it was very well told nonsense. It was entertaining. Some of the other people on the tour took it the same way middle-class white people take Death Wish 5: Don’t go over there, or some uncontrollable horrifying evil will murder you and laugh about it.

But at no point on my ghost tour was there a suggestion that anyone would be burned at the stake, cause that just sounds fucking awful and the only imaginative distance the narration left between you and the wandering undead was whatever tools you came with to deconstruct the stories. The London Dungeon comes from Merlin Entertainments, the same people who keep the world forever sated in new incarnations of Madame Tussaud’s wax museums, a corporation betting that tourists will spend twenty bucks to have their pictures taken with a lipid pile that looks kind of like Kim Kardashian, so I doubt that irony is in their vocabulary, and good for them. There’s clearly a market of creepy people out there: “Where the rotting corpses of the dead fester? Fuck yeah!” And I know there’s a secondary hipster market, too: “As opposed to the rotting corpses of the living? Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha!”

I’m sick and tired of having to cover my ears when the people around me start talking about Inception, so, picking up a trend about six months after it’s died down, I watched — and dare I say, understood — it last night. It’s not perfect, and since I already took a philosophy class in college, it didn’t make me question the nature of reality, posit a Malicious Demon, or do brain-in-a-vat thought experiments. But it was certainly entertaining, and I understand what all the crowing was about. Here’s my Flixster review:

I went into “Inception” with relative ignorance. I read Roger Ebert’s less-than-useful review and a couple of vague, spoiler-free pieces on the AV Club, and I saw the surreal trailer. But while I stayed away from them, I couldn’t help but be aware of the pages and pages of online commentary, explaining the ending, explaining the characters, explaining the philosophical underpinnings. The biggest problem with “Inception” is that it came laden with so, so many expectations that it had to be a let down — especially since the audience imposed a lot of those expectations on the film, and Christopher Nolan had no interest in meeting them. But I still really like “Inception,” whether it’s metaphysically reductive or emotionally stultified or whatever, it hit enough of the right buttons to entertain me for two and a half hours and leave me disappointed in the critics rather than the film.

I wanted a massively convoluted plot to untangle, like “Memento.” I wanted a surreal love story. I wanted a Metaphysics 101 seminar. I could care less for a bunch of action set pieces, but I’m not aesthetically opposed to them or anything. And while they’re all parts of “Inception,” I guess I was led to believe they’d be there in different proportions, along with the heavy expositional glue that binds the whole mess together.

What really surprised me was how straightforward “Inception” is, given the buzz, given its never-logical settings, given the “Primer”-like temporal simultaneity the characters are trapped in. There’s not a lot of subtext, honestly not a lot of ambiguity — or at least not a lot of ambiguity that matters. I kept processing till the last few minutes, fully expecting that odious climax with all the flashbacks, putting all those supposedly extraneous scenes into context, or re-context, or whatever M. Night Shamalyan calls it. But there’s none of that nonsense, and I think the clarity of DiCaprio’s narrative journey is well-served by the fact that the movie traces a coherent plot. It turned out I was wasting energy making sure Nolan wasn’t misleading me while his real goal is to hand the audience responsibility for engaging the broad, yet very genuine relationship between DiCaprio and his sort of Schrodinger’s Cat wife.

That relationship grounds the story — DiCaprio is the only character with any real emotional heft — but it also makes the film easier to consume. There’s the requisite film shorthand of DiCaprio’s estranged kids appearing incongruously in, where else, his dreams. The scenes of domestic bliss preceding questions of DiCaprio’s degree of culpability in the dissolution of his marriage (although that’s handled in an interesting, subtle way). The relationship, and its effects on DiCaprio, present a quiet malevolence hanging over most of the movie, but its only real presence occurs over a few hollow scenes — oddly the most intellectualized parts of the movie, several bizarre dreams within dreams with bits of reality that the audience is left to pick through.

In practical terms, though, “Inception” is an action movie with lots more room for gratuitous fighting and gunplay than pathos. Which is why I’m finding all the criticism, especially the reading of “Was it all just a dream?” so frustrating, because ultimately that’s the one question that absolutely doesn’t matter. Fine, the final shot is one of those cut-to-black right before a big reveal may or may not be revealed, and it gets mentioned in the same breath as “The Sopranos” final shot, but “Inception” is so much cleaner, where the thematically appropriate ending matches the meta-textually appropriate ending. I feel like questioning the ending, and implicitly the reality of certain other events, almost diminishes the film’s fragile but honest emotional underpinnings, as if the catharsis isn’t nearly as important as the question of whether we should even be feeling that catharsis in the first place. Coming to a full understanding of the nature of reality is a job for the philosophers — the movie-goers should understand that it’s fiction anyway, it comes directly from someone’s imagination and really exists only in the viewer’s mind.

I’m not exactly a paragon of self-discipline and willpower, he says after finishing a five-minute game of “Angry Birds” that he began over an hour ago. Social science — not to mention coaches in training montages from eighties’ movies — sees a negative predictor here, those of us who are flighty-minded, who like the rush of immediate gratification and blowing our paychecks all at once instead of saving some up for a rainy day tend to do more poorly on standardized tests, earn less and have more health problems than the steely-resolved do. NPR’s Radiolab put out a podcast on the science of willpower and an experiment that the psychologist Walter Mischel began in the sixties, assessing the self-restraint of a few hundred four-year-olds and then following those test subjects through the present day.

At around age four, children — some children — develop the mental capacity to delay gratification. I’m not sure what hypothesis Mischel was testing, he put a kid in a room, put a cookie in front of him, and left him alone with a choice: either eat the cookie, or wait for the experimenter to come back into the room and be rewarded with two cookies. Some kids hold out, others can’t. Mischel’s analysis is pretty definitive: compared to the children who demonstrated self-restraint, the latter group underperformed in every metric he and his team measured over the years and decades. Lower SAT scores, worse grades. Less likely to attend college, less likely to get a good job.

I remember Christmas mornings, back in my three-foot-tall days, waking my parents up at the crack of dawn to open Santa’s gifts, and I clearly remember one Christmas, sitting on our living room couch waiting for Dad to come downstairs and I can snap my fingers and call back my anxiousness growing like a fidgety fungus every single second I had to pull myself back from tearing open wrapping paper. This year, last year, the year before, present time’s been pushed back later and later and I couldn’t care less. I’m not sure what happened to me, but I guess it bodes well for my future SAT scores.

There’s a lot more to delayed gratification than this rational economic binary choice. You’re in this room, there’s a cookie in front of you, and the experimenter walks out. You have this cookie, right now, and an uncertain future. That experimenter might come back in the room after the longest minute ever, or the longest five minutes, or the longest hour. By the time he gets back, I might not even want that cookie any more. He might never come back, and I could spend the rest of my life in this room, staring rapaciously at the cookie. Who knows? Delayed gratification requires some faith, not to mention some calculation about the value of having one cookie versus the value of having two cookies later. When they do these kinds of experiments with capuchin monkeys, they need to condition the monkeys so they’ll expect a reward for waiting, so I’m curious about two variations to the experiment. What happens if you demonstrate for the kids that waiting earns them a reward — make it a concrete experience instead of just telling them in the abstract what will happen? And what happens if you put a timer in the room so the kid knows exactly how long he’ll be waiting for the cookie?

Mischel’s analysis sounds like the subjects’ entire lifetime is somehow related to this behavior from their post-toddler days, a behavior that seems largely autonomous. It would be straightforward until Mischel points out that the children who held out demonstrated “bridging” behaviors, ways to distract themselves from temptation. Kids would sing a song or turn their back to the cookie or whatever, and that’s something that can be taught.

My interest is kind of parallel: as a lazy-ass fatalist, my struggle is in finding the willpower to take action towards something onerous, not inaction from something pleasurable. I can’t think of what the parallel to bridging behaviors would be, something distracting but goading. If there were only a clock, something I could watch and count down till the payoff. I spent several years on a fairly regular gym schedule, assuming that if I did for long enough, I’d feel healthier, I’d look better, the energy and effort would finally pay off. Maybe it would’ve, maybe my timeframe was still too short, but I didn’t have the willpower to find out, and I didn’t want to spend the next fifty years of my life exercising and then realizing I was just spinning my wheels all that time. But you beat a level in “Angry Birds” and it’s not a massive endorphin rush or anything, but at least there’s a quick tickle of gratification, and I don’t head off drenched and sticky in sweat.