Holiday Splendor 

So. We find ourselves in the thick of the Holiday season, fast approaching, ever returning. The heavy side of the year’s cycle spinning round with a gyroscopic zig-zag of a Hula hoop with sand in one side. The Holidays.

They used to mean something different to all of us. The level of distraction has increased the speed of life. I find myself caught in a turning pool below the great waterfall of the age of information. I’m given enough air to keep my body from death, but I can feel myself dying. A leaf turning green to gold, yet not as graceful. More like necrotic flesh making it’s slow and steady march up my leg, with the patience of Job, Ache and heartbreak. But this is not what the Holidays are for. They are for family, for finding that shred of wonder in yourself as you desperately conjure up a brave face for the young who’s own sense of wonder is vibrant and hasn’t been beaten down by the indignities of growing up.

Such indignities as the blind hunger for sex, parking tickets on your windshield like leeches on a farm animal, hell, even a job interview takes a bit of the wonder out of life.

As I’ve aged I’ve tried to recall the sense of wonder and possibility that I had as a child. I’ve tried not to reduce it to base facts. I’ve tried not to think of myself simply as a poor kid with no money excited for toys I would never have been able to buy myself (stupid child labor laws!), I’ve tried to look further. I’ve tried to conjure up what made that sense of wonder so prescient in my mind as a child during the holidays. And what I’ve come up with is akin the same feelings I would get while exploring in the woods, or walking around carnivals, it’s the sense of POSSIBILITY. The open ended back half of a novel with its’ pages still blank. Open land on all sides, the joy and the terror of looking upon the expanse in every direction that are the potential paths of your life.

I used to love the poem, “The Road Not Taken”, by Robert Frost. In the last stanza he writes,

I shall be telling this with a sigh,

Somewhere ages and ages hence,

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I,

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

When I first read this in my late teens I thought it was Frost being counter cultural, going against the grain, and as a card carrying loner in my own mind I thought this to be worthy of a credo.

Then in college a friend in the English program told me the poem wasn’t about taking the road less traveled, it was just about choosing a road. I was livid, here was the ornate mission statement of my own personal brand of loner being picked apart. Now what am I going to recite to myself while I smoked cigarettes on the roof of my crappy apartment in Azusa?

It was only later, much later, that I began to appreciate the true sentiment of the poem, which is to simply make a choice, to leave the crossroads behind you. This is the natural part of humanity, the gradual thinning down of choices until they form a narrative, of what you were while you were on this earth.

But as a child, and especially during the holidays, there is nothing but possibility. The world is open, the sky is the limit. Try to shake off those wandering blues. Have your cake and eat it too. Let the wonder of the season numb those nagging fears of your inadequacy. That’s what I’m trying out this year.

The Met Cinema  

The Met Cinema

 My hometown movie theater has closed its’ doors. Maybe it’s a sign of the economic woes America has been wading through over the past few years, maybe it’s a herald of what is to come in the 21st century entertainment landscape. Maybe it’s a bit of both. I am not a soothsayer or economist. But I do know that televisions are getting bigger and blu-rays are getting sharper, and I don’t have as much money to spend on popcorn as I used to. Regardless of whatever the cause, I’m saddened by the loss of The Met Cinema in Oakhurst, California.

 As a Child living in an isolated town in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, movies were a keyhole to the rest of the bustling, industrialized, multicultural world. Movies let me see the Manhattan skyline, Upper West Siders hailing cabs at rush hour, the dreary melancholy of England, a galaxy far far away, etc. In the days before world-wide connectivity and information, the movies I saw at the Met Cinema as a child were bits and pieces of the wide wild world parsed out in celluloid given to my brain as a medicine against narrow-mindedness. It fueled my imagination and began a lifelong obsession with Film.

 When I was in the second grade my parents snuck me out of school to see the first showing of the live action “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” movie. I remember thinking that I had the coolest parents, they knew my insatiable need could not be quenched by waiting 2 hours for school to let out. We got popcorn, and my dad took a carton of milk duds and generously shook them into the bucket of popcorn, “to surprise you every other bite,” he’d say. It was a quirk I used to think bizarre but in retrospect find endearing and actually quite delicious.

 In the back corner of the lobby there were quarter gulping arcade games and a claw machine that promised treasure and delivered frustration. Once when we were left unattended, my little sister found a way to shimmy into the Claw machine through the drop shoot and grab the stuffed animals inside. We were bandits! Stealing from the claw and giving to the poor! Did not get away with it though, Mom found us and made us give everything back.  

 As a teen my relationship with the Met changed dramatically. No Longer was it merely a place to see movies and be transported to new and interesting worlds, It was also a place where you could take your girlfriend to explore the inside of each other’s mouths. I bought many tickets to movies I never actually saw a single frame of.

 After graduating from high school and before my illustrious and short-lived college career I worked concessions at the Met. It remains to this day one of my favorite jobs.  Here’s a breakdown of how a workday would go,

I arrive, restock candy, check soda syrups, and make popcorn. Impending hordes file in for the first show, I am frazzled for 10 minutes as the crowds of theater goers crash upon the concession counter like hungry waves upon my salt and sugar encrusted beach. Then, as quickly as they came, they are gone, nestled in their respective seats like docile babes. It is at this time that I am given 30-40 minutes to sit and read, I burned through Jack Kerouac’s On the Road during the first month of working there, which began my early twenties obsession with beat literature.

 Then, about fifteen minutes before the movie let out, we braced ourselves, triple checked supplies, four man teams waited by the doors as the final scene played. The once docile sugared movie goers would stampede out into the world, into our once peaceful lobby, where a short while before I was reading about Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty. Madness! Children running for their parents, Parents running for the door, my co-workers and I would brave the dark to see what presents the movie going public had left us. The worst shows were the kid’s movies. As a child it’s hard enough to eat when you can see what your doing, add the distraction of a pitch black theater and your favorite cartoon characters playing on the wall in front of you and it’s nearly impossible to get any food in your mouth.  

 Once, during a showing of the first Pokémon movie a frozen bon bon made it’s way from the back of the theater down the sloping rows of chairs the front, leaving a snail trail of melted chocolate goodness. This, to a teenage minimum wage earner, is enough to make you want to kill yourself. In retrospect I’ve cleaned up tougher messes. One of my roommates in College used to get drunk and piss in the closet thinking it was the bathroom. That was worse, but I digress…

 The Met holds a special place in my heart. I left my tiny town of Oakhurst for Los Angeles to work in movies. The Met was the only place I could go to escape the feeling of obscurity that fills someone like me up like a hundred-year flood. It gave me a rush of excitement every time the lights dimmed. I still get that way at the movies, Just not as strongly as I used to, when I was huddled in the back, with my feet on the seat in front of me, transfixed by a window to the world that would call me from my rural upbringing to Hollywood. God bless You Met Cinema, you will be sorely missed.