The amount of times I have heard people say comic books are our modern mythology is so often that if I got a nickel for it, I’d be guaranteed to use up the full package of nickel rolls. And then some. To be honest, I used to say that too. In fact, more than a…
Two stories unexpectedly collided for me this week. The first was Adaptation. Spike Jonze’s metafictional comedy-drama told about Charlie Kaufman’s strange, self-referential film experience about trying to adapt a book that seemingly has no story. I hadn’t seen it in years, and I found myself moved by it in ways I couldn’t fully explain. The…
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about one surprisingly simple question. What are we really searching for? In This Old House, I explored why so many of us spend our lives searching for a place that feels like home. In The Quest for Fire, I looked outward, asking why humanity has spent thousands…
Where does culture become your evidence? There are certain stories humanity never seems to tire of telling. Humans have always chased fire. Symbolized best in The Hero’s Journey. Culture is littered with examples of this. Every civilization leaves behind clues. Pottery.Architecture.Weapons.Graves. But cultures also leave behind stories. Stories that tell us what people couldn’t stop…
I’ve actually spent most of my life trying to build a home, before I even knew why. I just didn’t realize that’s what I was doing. For years, I thought I was collecting people. Communities.Careers.Ideas.Relationships. And looking back, I wasn’t collecting any of those things. I was searching for somewhere to belong. For a long…
I don’t think people miss pop culture. I think people miss the benefits of automatic synchronization. Friendships have become transportation vehicles for offloading shared interests. Not even connection, exactly. Just verbal diaherea for what you’ve experienced lately. At least, thats what operates on the surface. What happens inside? Something much stranger than that. You finish…
You used to be able to assume people saw the same things. We watched TV shows on certain nights of the week. Waited for a new song to drop on the radio. Memorized the same commericals. Not universally. But enough of us did it in our respective fandoms that there were common threads. Enough that:…
I didn’t think it would matter that much. It was just a song.Just a moment.Just one of those things you don’t plan for, but you do it anyway. But I keep coming back to that memory. We were singing Bohemian Rhapsody. In the bar, of course. Rob, Nick, Chris and I. Probably after a shift…
In the last couple of essays, I’ve been circling the same idea from different angles. What maintains us and what happens when we lose track of it. Internal.Relational.Cultural. But there’s a third part to this. A practical question – how can you actually maintain yourself? Personal. The lens from me matters. The cultural lens matters….
I watched John Candy: I Like Me recently. As you may know, I’m a child of the 80s and have loved all sorts of films for most of my life, but I have a particular soft spot for directors like John Hughes, Ron Howard and Chris Columbus and films released between the the 1980s and…