Eliot's reaction to Arrested Development's fourth season

I'll try to keep this short so I don't have to write so much. I'll also try to avoid making any Arrested Development joke references in this post because that's cheeky.

I fell asleep during the 14th episode of the fourth season of Arrested Development. I wasn't sure whether to be disappointed in myself or disappointed in the show. It was a little of both.

The Funniest Show's fourth season had a distinctly different feel to it than its previous three seasons, which were a dream. It was sitcom television reinvented. To compliment it to a just extent is unnecessary at this point, which is ironic, yeah.

This fourth season was something different. It wasn't more Arrested Development. It was a new mold, another innovation. And it doesn't leave you the same way the original seasons left you. Here is a really fair argument against the show.

In summation, here were the gripes:

• It wasn't as funny as the first three seasons
• The episodes dragged on sometimes
• It got boring seeing the same scenes repeatedly with an extra line or so of information
• Its self-awareness was gratuitous and detracted from the story
• Celebrity cameos were overabundant and forced in some cases
• Netflix's style of releasing shows to the masses prevents united consumption

I agree with all those things. All those things passed through my mind while watching the 15 episodes.

But in the end, my heart sided with Arrested Development and its creators, Jace Lacob and The Daily Beast be damned. Seriously. They can go to hell.

Here's why you can box up your complaints and ship them up your own ass.

 • No one watched Arrested Development at the same time anyway.
Arrested Development was like a disease to which the masses were exposed and of whom very few were infected. They spread the disease directly to others and soon the entire country had the itis for AD. Sure, if they released episodes one at a time, it'd be cool to watch it as this giant family of infected Arrested Developers, but that's not what the show was about, nor was it what we missed about it. It was never a communal experience, and it has become one now, more or less, with everyone racing to various devices to see it within about a week or so. An hour (or half hour) per week doesn't really fill the hunger of TV fans. People always watched AD at their own pace. This keeps that up.

• The show was saturated with celebrity cameos out of respect.
Everyone wanted to be a part of this show because everyone loved it and wanted to pitch in. I thought it was adorable. Dozens of new funny people scraped out screen time, and I think it's great because it allowed the show a massive cast. It was a comedic inspiration, and everyone wanted to pay respects by playing a part. I think the real winners here were Kristen Wiig and Seth Rogen, who landed the parts of flashback-Lucille and flashback-George Sr., respectively, and did well with them (I liked Wiig better than Rogen, for what it's worth). I didn't necessarily like all the cameos. I didn't light up when I saw the boys from Workaholics on screen, but I was sure they were really honored to play roles in the show and it made me think about what this season meant to television comedy as a gesture, if nothing else. It was like a living funeral.

• The fourth wall has been broken on this show for a long time.
The reason they couldn't reel off a smooth fourth season is because their previous season was cut short awkwardly as they made subtle jabs at their own cancellation and general doom, and also was seven years ago. The time element is impossible to ignore, and with that, you have some gray area there that, if ignored, lowers the quality of your show. Had they just made the narrative, and ignored the gravity of their resurrection as having a tangible impact on their story, they'd be ignoring the most triumphant aspect of the return.

• The structure of the storytelling was a good thing.
Like it or not, this season had to go in circles because the premise of it is "What happened?" So they have a lot to explain, and it wouldn't be AD's style to lay it all out chronologically and run out of breath exposing the next event in the story repeatedly until we're done. That would be boring. Instead, the writers gave fans something to do, keeping with the same active watching crowd that praised the original works. Now viewers are trying to keep the whole timeline in their head, piecing together events and scenes as a means to enjoy what is a fairly arduous expository story. It took a lot of effort for the show to separate itself from the season three ending that all its fans had come to understand as the end of the show. And then to create a position for the finale (being the movie) to take off from was more effort. A lot of basic moves needed to be made, and they found a way to do it interestingly.

• It serves no one to limit the show in any way, timewise.
The episodes dragged on. They were longer. The older ones were shorter. Yes, the quick editing made for a wittier dialogue between show and viewer. But given the opportunity for more show, there's no reason to turn it down. I truly believe that as much as anything else, this show's return was about catharsis. Being able to watch the Bluths again, to see the characters be their hilarious selves was the real win. Fans had gone so long without seeing them do new things, and now, blessed with that opportunity, the writers took serious advantage, and I don't blame them at all. We now had more time to spend with them. No one was pining for shorter episodes. Perhaps quicker editing could've been utilized but that doesn't mean I'd rather cut out dialogue that helps me get to know or affirm what I know about these characters.

• At a certain point, the quality of this season didn't matter.
There were things about this season that were really hard to accept, watching strictly as someone who watched as many of the old episodes before the release of season 4 to immerse myself in AD. I found myself laughing less toward the end of the series, as things became gradually more clear in ways I was expecting, rather than the AD tradition of things becoming suddenly clear in ways I didn't expect and had only subconsciously considered. But while I wasn't laughing out loud, I was smiling. This goes back to the catharsis of having a fourth season. Arrested Development was always unique for being a plot-driven sitcom, and its narrative momentum was gutted by years of hiatus. But when the bell was rung for the new season to begin, every single person involved with the show's initial run came back. Not just the main characters, but a majority of the smaller characters as well. Short of J. Walter Weatherman and Wayne Jarvis, I didn't notice anyone missing that I wanted back. The important thing of this season was that it happened, and that it didn't compromise the spirit of the show. It was pretty much a lock that its spirit wouldn't be compromised because everyone came back to put it back together. I don't think anyone expected to go in and make Arrested Development's best season yet, but to right the wrong of the show's cancellation. The show was back. It was itself, only a little aged.

So yes, in regards to season 4 of Arrested Development, there were some things that I wish were not. The majority of them had to do with circumstance. Those that didn't were understandable choices. At this point, we — the beggar crowd that blamed the rest of the country for canning our baby — cannot complain. If there is a loss suffered at the release of this show's fourth season, it is lost in the time elapsed since the last new episode, and nothing more. We got what we wanted, which is more than we expected, and it couldn't have been done better.

--Eliot Sill

Some Russian stranger

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, no one has ever recommended I read you. None of my friends my age, to my knowledge, have ever read you. I, in a certain sense, could be considered never to have read you. All the while, I really enjoyed reading The Idiot. Thank you for writing it.

I don't know anything of 19th century Russia. What I do know of it, which is nothing, I know from reading The Idiot. I don't know the type of aristocracy that exists there, I've only read about it. I've read an account of it, rather. I do not know much of anything about what I read, but I read it.

Jeff Kirshman (sports editor Jeff) quoted someone in the final sports desk meeting before last summer, that as an aspiring writer, you should read stuff that intimidates you. OK so he paraphrased. But Dostoyevsky, you son of a bitch, you are intimidating.

The only reason I knew who Fyodor Dostoyevsky was is I remember my dad read a book by him several years back, and so enjoyed his name, Doh stoi yeff ski, that he often said it in a certain gruff, low voice. And that he would, when inquiring about my English classes in high school, ask if I read any Doh stoi yeff ski. He would say it so that the Doh was a regular quarter note, the stoi slurred into the yeff, which was staccato, as was the ski. If you don't know exactly how he said it by this point, I'm sorry for wasting so much of both of our time.

Anyway, my impression of this guy was simple: gruff, Russian (Grussian). After reading For Whom the Bell Tolls, I wondered if Dostoyevsky was like a Russian Hemingway. I wanted to read something by the guy who had inevitiably earned the favor of my father. So while perusing my mom's vintage boutique, Birdsong, located in Elkhart, Ill., right off I-55, where you can fulfill all your vintage clothing/book/miscellaneous needs, and my mom might have Mac(s) with her, and you could pet him, and tell him hi for me, ... I saw an old copy of The Idiot. The cover was black and white, featuring a fair haired and bearded young man, whose eyes carried both frightened vulnerability and determination. This was the Idiot, I supposed. I decided to grab it, and that I would read it at some point or another, and see what this Russian guy was about. I remember liking the work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, so why not Fyodor here?

I met the Idiot, and Fyodor, and a lot of semicolons. The Idiot, Prince Myshkin, which is a great name that I one day would absolutely consider endowing to a cat or dog, is more than a dim-witted royal junkpiece. He's epileptic. That's what "idiocy" is. The disease translates fairly well to the modern slang colloquialism. The Prince is an utter dupe, he takes everything at face value and doesn't learn from being duped in the past. He is, at first acquaintance, the most wholesome person one could ever meet, and never shows any depth of character beyond that. He is honest for better and worse, and has an inherent trust, or rather, love, of everyone he meets.

It's hard to know what you want for Prince Myshkin, should his climax be to climb out from under his illness, to break through and be 'cured'? (The novel used single quotes for every quote, and double quotes for quotes within quotes.) Or should he fall in love with the beautiful Nastasya Fillipovna, who is also crazy? Or should he settle for Aglaya Yepanchin, who is the more decent looking, slightly crazy but more home-y type who loves him for his simplicity. My personal hope was for Vera Lebedev, the landlord's lowly daughter, but it wasn't to be.

Should he even have a love interest? After all, he's mentally ill. Perhaps if he helps everyone else find their dream match, I'll be satisfied as a reader. Also, reading from his perspective becomes grating and difficult when someone is pulling his leg. As a character, he's sympathetic, frustrating and ultimately pitiful.

If anything, Dostoyevsky's writing struck me as brave. Whenever I pick up a 'classic' novel, I fear that it will have a cliche ending, excusable via grandfather clause of it setting the bar for said cliche, but nevertheless disappointing. This novel was unique, and I found it bold to write a story with a mentally ill person as the main character. Because of this, you can never doubt that Dostoyevsky knew exactly what he was looking to do with the story, otherwise he would never have dared to tell it in such a way. If I lived in 19th century Russia, I think I would find it a fascinating commentary on my civilization. As it is, it is a fascinating social commentary given the time and place. The narrative is intricate, but the story was long, at about 660 pages.

Dostoyevsky used semicolons and colons seemingly as often as commas and periods, pretty well thwarting my Ernest Hemingway comparison. But I'd say he tackled the subject he aimed for with the exact type of fortitude and informed confidence that made Hemingway great. And there were a couple passages where the novel gets on a roll and makes you laugh or leaves you agape, similar to how Hemingway throws himself into drunken tirades or explodes his own powder kegs at a climax. It was a translated work, so any superior manipulation of the language itself was lost, which is most unfortunate.

Fyodor. No one recommended you to me. You were dead for a century before I was born. You wrote in the other hemisphere, about the other hemisphere, for the other hemisphere. You didn't even write these words; some bloke named David Magarshack translated them. But hey, I read your story about Prince Myshkin. And I rather liked it. Thank you.

--Eliot Sill

The New Orleans trip, part I

By Eliot Sill

John Steinbeck and I were leaving Texas together. He ended up getting out a couple hours before I finally did, but we were there together, and instead of consuming he and Charley's travels, I was rivaling them. Instead of a dog, a fully equipped truck and a fantastic poetic disposition, I had Nick, Brian, Conor and Nina Horne — a friend of Conor's from Oklahoma University — for companions.

I suppose the most important aspect of my vacation is that I did it. Until a week before, I was fairly committed to the idea of using Spring Break as a sabbatical to catch up on classes and read some books in the solitude of my efficiency apartment, in a city that everyone I knew would be vacating for a week. It would be nice. But I was tired of turning down my friends' expeditions for the sake of giving myself time that I could only hope would be put toward bettering my journalistic aspects. I could only hope to use that time. I would put myself in the arena and wait for the game to be played around me. I needed to leave the arena. The ease with which I did so was liberating. I simply decided to go. A week later, I had gone.

The trip began without ceremony. I left my dog Mac(s) and my mom behind, riding with Nick and Brian out of Springfield (we were to meet Conor in Norman, Okla., and Nina in Dallas). I fell asleep pretty soon after we got on the highway, have vague sleepy memories of the difficulty experienced navigating St. Louis, then woke up in earnest somewhere in Missouri. How nice.

The weather for the first leg of our trip, a 10-hour dive down to Norman, was utter shit. Gray skies made for ease of sight, but eventually those skies opened up and spit and urinated on our silver Taurus for approximately 900 percent of the trip. My driver's license was suspended, so I was useless beyond added conversation and enthusiasm for radio plays of Taylor Swift's “Trouble,” which I had picked up on pretty quickly as what would be a hallmark of the trip. Other hits were Justin Timberlake's “Suit and Tie” and R.E.M.'s “Losing My Religion.” What a crew.

After Nick spent a few hours trying to outrun the rain — which looked on the radar like a Google Maps route line for our progress thus far — we pulled into a Steak N Shake for a late lunch in hopes that the rain would get over itself. I felt the familiar judgment one feels whenever walking into his local Steak N Shake chain; these places are typically filled with locals who have a good chance of knowing anyone who would walk in. I ordered cheese fries and was greeted with phony ass nacho cheese drizzled over my fries. Oh, Missouri. Pretty soon after Brian took over the driving duties, the rain became inconsequential.

Robert once called Missouri “the brooding artist of the Midwest,” speaking about its geography. I don't know if they were his words, but if they were, he can take satisfaction in knowing that the phrase has stuck with me and is warmed in my memory every time I travel through Missouri. Missouri has great hilly rifts within itself that paint the highway scenery in such a way that makes even the 70 mph speed limits not enough to counteract its beauty. Steinbeck wrote of his travels in the time when such interstate highways were just being built, and he saw them as a potential demise of the aesthetic appeal of travel. I subscribe to this belief, if for no other reason than that I've never been wowed by high speed countryside.

The 70 mph speeds, when combined with the gray rainy weather barf, were enough to make Missouri as breathtaking as a pile of wet toilet paper. At one point, Missouri open fired on us with a barrage of hail that changed the 70 mph speeds to 0 mph ones. Nick, driving, laughed in terror as Brian and I sat more upright in our seats and used our hands to hold on to things. Other than that minute-long sample of hell, the weather was drab and boring. Brian, Nick and I were left to commenting on Missouri's alter ego, Missouruh, which is how we referred to Missouri's trashy parts. Brian went so far as to say that Missouri's landscape is just like Illinois' but with hills, which I agreed with in the same vein that I think the ocean shares Illinois' geography, only it has water.

Eventually Brian took us into Oklahoma, which geographically is an impressionable friend of Texas and Missouri that holds no loyalties to either state. It is plains upon plains with minor variations here and there, but nothing particularly characterizable. It is also a big state, and hides Norman from Illinois like the human body hides its liver. We traveled through Oklahoma for exhausting lengths of time.

Our correspondence with Conor to this point had been very little. We were going to spend the night with Conor in Norman before shipping out for New Orleans the next day. Eventually we made it to Oklahoma City, where I saw that one building TNT always shows during city cut-away shots before and after commercials of Thunder games. OKC phased seamlessly into Norman, and suddenly Conor was within shouting distance.

Conor was a friend with whom I had become quite distant over the past couple years, mainly because I kept turning down offers such as these for extended stays with him. Staying in Champaign had produced exceedingly moderate results, but this decision produced Conor O'Brien, right in front of me, when I otherwise simply would not be in contact with him. At Conor's, we had beers like men while catching up and swapping stories and engaging in a random dance-off to please the funk emanating from his iHome. The catching up felt sweet and genuine and more or less I was with my boys again for the first time since Solstice 2011. A game of Mario Party 3 stopped short, thank God, and I went and slept.

I had read John Steinbeck's “Travels With Charley” at a stone's pace over the semester, and was determined to finish it on this trip because the stack of books I was “determined to finish” before the end of the semester was mounting, having been defeated by course readings yet again. Steinbeck was an appropriate romanticizer. He would take a brief conversation had by some local in a stranger, with he in all his writer's pretense and massive, overstocked truck dubbed “Rocinante” — he may as well have been a blog riding an elephant, and characterize an entire state or region with care and poignancy. Many digressions of his tackled seemingly outdated subjects with an uncanny timelessness that made me lower the book in incredulity. Maybe it was his writings, and how he tied these tales of wisdom to the simple fact that he got the hell out and went somewhere, that persuaded me to enlist in this vacation.

I read a lot of “Travels With Charley” before the trip, and this made me want to take Mac(s) with us, though I knew how implausible that was. But the half of the book I read on the road made me glad Mac(s) had stayed back.

That and the fact that we picked up a fifth person just a few hours after leaving Norman and our car became stuffed. Nina Horne, an Ultimate teammate of Conor's from Oklahoma, whose parents live in New Orleans, was someone who had let me sleep in her bed before I ever met her. Maggie Tyson turned out to be one of these people as well, but we'll get to her later. Nina was someone whom I'd wanted to meet since Conor began telling me stories involving her two-plus years ago. Plus she was from New Orleans, so how awesome could she not be? Nina's dad, Kevin Horne, or Mr. Kevin, as Conor called him, had shelled out drinks like peanuts last time Conor, Nick and Brian had visited. He had quite a reputation, and his daughter was friendly, polite enough not to chastise us for singing along everytime “Trouble” came on the radio, which was very frequently. We had to alternate the GPS with the iTrip because the Taurus only had one cigarette lighter plugin. The iTrip was off in city areas, and the competition between “Trouble” and “Suit and Tie” was in full swing. As of this writing, it is still ongoing.*

It was during this leg of the trip, after picking up Nina from Dallas, where I read to the end of “Travels With Charley.” The sun had joined us for the drive from Norman to New Orleans, thankfully enough, making reading a more pleasant experience. I am not a skilled reader. I still pass through stretches of text while thinking about my personal life without remembering to reread the passage. I hate to think of how many intricacies I passed over during moments of sleepiness and bright sun. I hate to think this because I don't like rereading books. I like it in theory, but I am not a skilled reader, and thus read quite slowly. To reread one book is to unread another, and I need not unread any books, few as my kill total stands. I always try and force more interaction between myself and the outside world than is required, because ultimately it is this interaction that keeps one from passing through the world unnoticed. However, I know full well that I still do a lousy job of this. In Steinbeck's time it was more commonplace to talk to strangers, now everyone's just afraid you're here to rape their loved ones, and with understandable reason, given the commonality of such tales of late.

I came to a part in “Travels With Charley” where Steinbeck drove through Texas, which was doubly cathartic when read while traveling through Texas. A memorable passage was of a grand dinner he and his wife (who had visited him during this phase of his traveling) had with some wealthy Texans. He talked of the special preparation with which the meal was prepared. He ended by stating he refused to believe people in Texas ate like that every day. This realization is one that everyone should inherently know about hospitality, but doesn't think to consider specifically. In Steinbeck's journey, he left Texas for New Orleans, which in reading created a giddy excitement in me. I was also heading to New Orleans via Texas. Steinbeck was going to see the Cheerleaders, New Orleans mothers who protested integration of schools. I was going to glorify the unique cultural blend harbored by the city. There we differed, and it was ironic. Steinbeck's writing lost passion after New Orleans. He tired of traveling and this was reflected in his writing. It made me feel good to know that the Steinbecks of the world get tired of projects they enter with ample excitement and are carrying out successfully. For this reason, the book ended quickly after Steinbeck's trip to New Orleans, and I partly wished it would have ended there, but I was thrilled with the parallel nonetheless. Of course, I had been riding the superhighways that defeated the beauty of travel, and was neither writing my experience down as it occurred nor washing my clothes in Brian's trunk.

Nina soon ran into a traffic jam. We chided her for “driving so slow” and she took it well in stride, which while not surprising was pleasant and went to make it easier to talk to her. I wanted to get a start on my next literary target, Dostoyevsky's “The Idiot,” which was, uhh, placed in the trunk for this journey. Our traffic jam slowed to a dead stop, however, and Nina agreed to pop the trunk while I ran out into the middle of I-20 to retrieve it. “The Idiot” scared the hell out of me. Tiny text, imperceptibly thin pages, translated work, 1800s writing, Russian setting I knew nothing about. This was not the timeless Steinbeck writing an acute depiction of a country I already knew in a neat 250 pages. This was Dostoyevsky, whatever the hell that meant. I read that day until it got dark on the road, reading for pages and trying to invest myself in a story I knew a certified nothing about.

We got to New Orleans after midnight.

The city — though we were merely on the outskirts and away from “the city” in the sense one would imagine it — greeted me with a hug of warmth, the kind which I had not felt in months, that of a natural, night warmth. Like an invitation to see someone you thought was angry with you, it grabbed me by the shoulders and led me out of the car. Here I met Kevin Horne.

Nina's dad, Kevin Horne, was here for the same reasons I was. The difference was that he had gotten to stay here and raise a family, and I likely will never get that chance. It only took about halfway into our handshake for me to envy him. His salt-and-pepper moustache was not so flamboyant as to be handlebarred, but was an upward twist away from that level, and nevertheless a prominent feature of his. He sported horn-rimmed spectacles that reminded me of something my mom would find at a thrift store and subsequently try to pass off as vintage-fashionable. His gut toed the preferred side of the line between happily married and fat. He was wearing shorts and sandals, but the rest of this paragraph should have given that away to you already.

Out of the corner of my eye, from the low-lit front yard, palm trees tugged at my attention from the corner of my eyes, as if to say “Hey, see us? We're palm trees. And down here, we're freaking walkway foliage.” I took their arrogant jabs in good stride, knowing that I'd have palm trees in my front yard if I lived in New Orleans as well, and they'd be instructed to convey the same message to any out-of-towners.

New Orleans, for its cultural sublimity, is my version of a dead-sexy Hollywood actress that I can't get out of my head, that I don't admit to my friends just how much I love her based on only surface knowledge. She is the one whom I must have, be she out of my league or not.

We parted with Nina and went over to the Tysons to sleep. We parked our car in front of their yard and nervously walked our way around the house to the back door, where we were greeted by a bug-eyed black and white miniature boxer pug pup with a red, rubber-stubbled ring in his mouth. It was as if we were late to an appointment to play. No humans found us as we snuck up quietly to the bedrooms the Tyson family had sacrificed and set up for us. We quickly, quietly divided rooms, before finding one of Maggie's two sisters — whose name may have been Sarah but I can hardly remember and she shouldn't credit me for thoughtfulness if I'm correct — who gave us the Wi-Fi password so we could get on with our lives after hours spent away from the Internet.

Classic and I shared a room, and the puppy came up to play with us, feeling stood up. We were nervous about making noise and thus were poor playmates. We sent him out of the room eventually, and I turned a light on, read a chapter of Dostoyevsky, and went to sleep.

part II will come out eventually; just wait, knuckleheads.

*- It is no longer ongoing. 

Someone should be shot in the face for this

Whoa, that is some delicious looking juice. As we all know, red and green are complementary colors, so this bottle pops. It's a slim bottle, weighing in at a petit 10 ounces. Great, now I don't even have to count calories. But can I draw attention to that red ass grapefruit again? I mean look at that thing! It looks like and uncooked steak or something, or an ocean with the sun setting inside of it. It's goddamn gorgeous, which could not be a more perfect adjective, because I want to gorge that grapefruit or anything associated with it, namely this bottle of grapefruit juice.

Right now, you probably feel like you're watching the hopeful beginnings of a horror movie. We're all going to camp! Where we'll tell ghost stories, eat s'mores, drink merrily without getting caught by the police, and yay! But the title of this post suggests that yay is code for a serious violation. I'm getting there. It is.

The juice itself tastes slightly underwhelming. There's the initial "Mmm!" factor, where you're hit in the mouth with sweetness and red flavory redness. Those are the 33g's of sugar at work on your tongue. It's so sweet, so regularly sweet, so pasteurizedly, processedly sweet. It's not too sweet, but something is fishy. Let's go back to the bottle.

100% juice! Praise Jesus, 100 percent of what's in this bottle is honest to goodness bone raising juice. If you took away all the juice from this bottle, nothing would be in your hand. Even the bottle is made of juice! Plasticized gourmet labely juice. Man, what a great tasting thing. Good thing I paid $1.55 plus tax for this nectar of steak-ocean grapefruit paradise. And BAM! If you don't want 100 percent juice, there's no way you don't want 100 percent Vitamin C. So we'll at least give you a bottle that's only 10 fluid ounces that carries 100 percent of your daily value of Vitamin C. That's 10 percent per ounce. Holy mackerel. By the time I've taken a gulp of this baby I'm already throwing colds off my shoulders. Both shoulders! Left and right. So this grapefruit elixir, that tastes so plainly sweet. How did they do it?

Wait, I thought that was supposed to just say, like, "juice"?

Now the horror begins.

First ingredient: filtered water. THANK GOD THEY FILTERED IT, BUT, I'M PRETTY SURE NEITHER FILTERS NOR WATER ARE JUICE. .......... Wow. Ok. I guess most things have water in them. That doesn't mean they're lying to me, I guess it has concentrated juice or someth—WHAT THE FUCK WHY DOES THAT SAY WHITE GRAPE JUICE CONCENTRATE?

Let's examine the label again.

I'm not crazy, am I? That says RUBY RED GRAPEFRUIT! They even specified the shade and color! There is no way white grapes are on that label? Maybe they're really small and hard to see. MAYBE BUT I DON'T SEE THEM. So it's grape and grapefruit. That's why the sweet is so civilized. There's no space in "GRAPEFRUIT" either, I checked. Still there's a bunch of other st—WHY THE SHIT, THE NEXT INGREDIENT IS APPLE JUICE CONCENTRATE! LOOK!

So this 100% RUBY RED GRAPEFRUIT JUICE's first three ingredients, the three most prominent ones, have absolutely nothing to do with rubies, red grapefruits, and aren't 100 percent juice. Right now we're at 66.67 percent juice. Jesus. The next ingredient is ruby red grapefruit juice concentrate, as if it's any consolation. It's like when you ask for 100 dollars for your birthday and you get a suitcase, a book about lawns, a 12-pack of Dasani water and 15 dollars. You're like great. I was going to use 100 dollars to feed my homeless friend, but now I'll have to settle for a meal for two from Subway, even though we both hate Subway.

Tropicana, Mr. Tropicana, if you're out there. You sick-witted filthbag, what makes you think white grape and apple juice make a combination suitable to lead the ruby red grapefruit juice bottle into the American marketplace. IF LEBRON IS SCORING THE MOST POINTS IT'S CLEARLY NOT D-WADE'S TEAM, RIGHT? Well in this case we're claiming the team is Mario Chalmers'. It isn't. I'm drinking a lie, living a lie. And what the hell is the word "Tropicana" anyway? It's some dumb word association between Americans knowing that fruit is made in tropic climates and "cana" is a Latin suffix. What a genius combination. If this is the way America views grapefruit juice, America should be deported. It's a travesty. It's a transvestite.

I bought this bottle of 10 ounces — which is really not a satisfying amount of liquid — to taste the acidic quenching sweetness I get when I fang into a plump pink grapefruit. Grapefruits, the best fruit by the way, are made up of crystal shards containing a sweet stinging citric acid packed nectar. And this tasted like grape juice with apple juice and grapefruit flavoring poured in. It's the artificial flavor made authentically, and it defeats the purpose of selling grapefruit juice. I'm hurt by this lie, and I don't know why it's been deemed acceptable to market such a deceptive product.

Oh yeah, it says 3 Juice blend on the front of the label in the bottom right corner. Haha. Joke's on me. You got me Tropicana. For the last time.

Shout out to Espresso Royale for carrying this falsehood in its Caffe Authenticana atmosphere; it fits right in.

--Eliot Sill

Hell, you were askin' for it

By now, he should have noticed what his watch was telling him: it was past the hour, he was late, and he was blowing it.

Samuel Price couldn't have been any more oblivious to what he was missing at the time, for the interview was the last thing on his mind. For Samuel, routine ruled all in the suburban nation of Ecklandburg, and waking up meant video games for as long as the sun poured through the panes of the basement windows, business when those warm rays turned to a more generic light, and pleasure -- drinks, friends, more video games -- when that light had succumb to nighttime. Stuck in a game of Wii bowling in the furnished basement of his old home, he was patting himself on the back for a finely bowled 216 before it occurred to him exactly where he was supposed to have been at 1:30.

A sick feeling tore through Samuel's abdomen and up into his chest before materializing in his brain: the interview was supposed to start 40 minutes ago, the job he wanted vanished into an ether of laziness and attention deficit. As the feeling made its way through his esophagus and out the back of Samuel's neck in the form of sweat, seepeing toward the sensory perceptors in his face where it became throbbing, red hot reality, Sam slinked back into his chair and stared in amazement, showing a shellshock that would have been more than enough to convince Mr. Essing of his wholehearted commitment. The rims of his eyes became hot and watery, but the pulsating light from the number 216 flashing on his television prevented him from resorting into a cliched despair. He simply sat, and began calculating his recourse, like a population after having suffered from a violent tornado.

Sam made his way upstairs, where his mother was preparing for her first errand of the day, the bank.
"Mom," he began, but was cut off.
"Sam, you're not... done with--" he retaliated her interruption, to admit his guilt before the accusation could beget his regret.
"I fucking missed the interview."
His mother took some time to assess the situation and calculate the next move, like Sam had. She had no answer.
"How did you forget the interview," she said softly.
"I don't know... it was totally just ... inexcusable."
"I didn't know you were still here, otherwise I would've gotten you out of here, I had thought you were gone already."
"Nope, I was playing Wii bowling."
Sam's mother said nothing, as Sam took solace in the fact that she was as hurt by this absurdity as he was. She wouldn't laugh, but be right there in his frame of mind, sharing in his disappointment taking in the gravity of the situation the same way he was.
The silence of Sam's statement lingered in the air, before he broke it as a mercy toward both himself and his mother.
"Should I call him?"
"Only if you have something to tell him other than you missed your appointment to play video games."
"Yeah." He pondered the notion. He couldn't just be "sick," like when he missed days in high school. He needed a reason, a profound and legitimate reason, and he could think of none right now. He set the issue aside.
"I hate being this bad at succeeding," he threw out.
"Well, it's something you'll have to avoid, letting things like this happen."
"Yeah."
"And it's just a summer job, at least it's not a permanent job."
"If it were permanent, I wouldn't have forgotten it."
"Well now you won't forget next time even if it isn't permanent."
"Small consolation. I feel like shit."
"Well you can't go back and fix it, so feeling sorry for yourself isn't gonna help."
"Yeah, well neither is pretending this is OK."
"Yeah, well..." she searched for proper words. "If you learn from it, you can make this a positive experience."
"Almost as positive as an internship with Claire's dad's firm."
"Almost," she said, growing tired of the conversation's hopelessness. She disclosed dinner plans as she grabbed her keys and left for the bank.

Sam, feeling slightly decompressed about the issue, went into his old room and sat on the guest bed that used to be his. A jealous montage of his friends working successful office jobs ran through his head, as he pictured himself literally lagging behind as they pacingly walked-n-talked about their bright futures. The future was only as bright as Sam could make it, and being absent from what was a make-or-break interview cast a rather dim light on everything Sam could find to think of.

Sam suddenly felt all of himself, of his weight pushing down on his thighs and buttocks, which were pressed against the crisp, cool cream-yellow sheets of the rigid spring mattress. It wasn't new-age comfortable, and that's what Sam liked about it. He tossed his head back over his shoulders and fell back onto the bed. He glanced at the plain white ceiling for a brief moment and allowed his eyes to crush closed and thought about the things he used to want.

For his eighth birthday, he had wanted his dad to build him a treehouse. In his conception of it, the smell of oak wood and patterns on the two-by-fours that topped the amateurly erected walls would help him to feel independent and removed from the boredom of life in Ecklandburg. His father had always wanted Sam to become a lawyer, but never took him up on building the treehouse in exchange for a pledge to live his life around going Pre-Law. Sam's proclivity for mathematics steered him toward being an accountant, a profession that his father was only distantly interested in and made no attempt to fully understand. By the time Sam's parents divorced during his first year of college, Sam had already defaulted to an allegiance with his mother.

From this daydream, Sam opened his eyes and re-encoutered the blank ceiling staring back at him, motionless and emotionless. He continued to gaze, determined to see his future emerge from the white canvas; to his mind came sheets of paper with printed type on them, though they faded away before he could read them and the ceiling became white once more.

Checking his phone again with contempt for the time, Sam sauntered back into his basement and turned off the Wii. He grabbed his down comforter off the couch, wrapped it around him like a cloak, and collapsed onto the couch devoid of thought, ready to sleep for awhile. He dreamt of living in a tree house, raising only pet animals and bowling scores above 300 on the Wii to pass the time.

--Eliot Sill

Unbuckled under the legal limit

It's all typography. Something about these characteristics makes it apparent. The old fraud wouldn't be getting his view from that window back for many days. It was just something that couldn't be prevented. The giant sky rose like glitter over the rest of the world. Everyone turned out their lights to avoid being burned alive. Something in that kettle made her wish she had never been alive. As it turned out, only kind of was she proven incorrect.

Something in the dog's breathing reminded me that elsewhere, a child was being raped. I looked away from the dog, for a moment, then I looked back at it. I longed for music. Because when I was listening to music, nobody was getting raped necessarily.

They found her screaming at a tree just two miles south of here. Screaming curse words. Throwing sticks. She was dirty.

From somewhere came this horrid noise, and it sounded like a car engine stalling due to a dying rabbit stuck in the carburetor. I looked out into the forest, took a moment to sneeze, and then carried on with the conversation.
"So, tomorrow then. And don't be late with it this time."

The three of them sat facing inward at a central point, trying to combine their theories and ideologies into one central all-powerful idea. It didn't work. Only one of them would know the way.

Some say the reason she was so scary was because of her dark humor. Others, more observant others, would say it was how she was hung in effigy from the stoplight just outside the school, wearing a T-shirt that read: "...until now, that is."

The puppy, Gruber, threw his legs in front of themselves, bounding toward a destination he had never felt before: speed.


You know, I never won any young authors competitions. Not even close. I wrote once about Fastky the dog, I wrote about The Good Week. But apparently my work was bullshit. It still is. Nothing I've written can grow. It all dies of my own A.D.D. I feel that maybe I used to be a more focused writer. Though maybe my writing itself wasn't focused, I could sit down and go and go and go until I had wasted 2,000 words of thought on the simple subject of adjusting from high school to college.

Something about writing trips you up. It's a different something for everybody, but no one can feel perfectly fine with the way they write. Otherwise they're not writing at all. They're doing some other menial activity.

Where has all the time gone? Oh I don't know. Oh, oh, but I don't know. Wake me up. I'm a timeaholic. I'm having the time of my life. Of all of our lives. I'm having it as though to myself, I am keeping the fourth dimension.

If everyone in the world battled cancer untreated at the same time, they would all die.
"Don't mess up my hair," God said, "ever."

--Eliot Sill

Stick a fire in the shellhole: A corn on the cob story

Now old Maurice was really uptight about his wares. There's hardly anything in his shop you could talk him down for. But his wife Candice would work the shop on Saturdays and that's when you could strike it rich. Something about the smiles of innocent children made an affable sale seem more important than cold currency.

One Saturday morning, after a couple hours of catch down at the sandlot, my friend Pete and I went down to Plum Pickin's for a score off the old batty woman. She had graying brown hair, and it was tied up in a bun on this particular morning. She was wearing a blue dress with frayed hems around the wrists. Pete and I had dirt all over our clothes from the ballfield and so she insisted we go outside and brush ourselves off before we look around.

In the back of the store — where all the good stuff was — we found an old chess set with about half the pieces missing. The pieces themselves were fair quality, made of old oak, and there were more black pieces than white. Carrying that and a set of used boxing gloves up to the counter, we asked Candice Pinsleton how much.

"Altogether that should be 10 dollars boys."
"Oh, but Mrs. Pinsleton," I groaned, "we only got five dollars on us between us both."
"Well, those boxing gloves are right expensive for a boy your age." (I was eleven) "You should ask your mother if she could get them for you as a birthday present." (My birthday was in two and a half weeks, but there's no way she could have known this)
"Well this chess set here is missing about half the pieces, and as you can see, these gloves have been used."
"Well everything in this store's used, Quinton, you know that." (Pete nudged me to indicate he was ready to leave. I shot him a look and he looked at his shoes.)
"But Pete doesn't have any money, and I'm buying these gloves mostly for him." Pete looked at Mrs. Pinsleton and became obnoxiously sullen. Mrs. Pinsleton sighed, and turned back to me.
"Do you boys have any change on you? Or just the five?"
"I've got a quarter and two dimes," Pete piped in.
"Well there you go," Mrs. Pinsleton was sold, "I'll take $5.45 for the lot."

We gave her the money and turned to leave when Maurice Pinsleton walked in, back from an early lunch or so it seemed.

"Howdy, what's going on here?" He asked.

Thinking quickly, Pete punched me in the stomach with one of the boxing gloves and I chased him out of the store.

I was mad though, because he had hit me hard, so I actually did chase him down and punch him in the back. Pete was ten.

From inside the store, the sound of the Pinsletons arguing became audible through a couple of the store's open windows. Meanwhile, I tried to think of ways to make a chess-based game that involved boxing. I also scanned the ground as I walked for any spare change that may be lying on the ground.

--Eliot Sill

Cannon Delight

None of these took me more than five minutes to write. So I'm pretty proud, considering. -->

•••

Country, country, oh far and wide.

Unceasing sight for sight to see,

see the light cease at night,

for forts we fight, fortnights lay siege.

Discomfort fester in a sea

seeking comfortability

wind still whirring, stirring tea

to all the fish, afloat, or flee.

Lifeless, lustless, headless, hauntless

harness lifelessness, be gone with

such and such, or so for whats,

As reason slips. And skips. And cuts.

A newfound friend, a foreign hand

Oh country, country, now our land

You bled and burned and dried and now

this blessed land, not for whom, but how?

•••

Unrepenting southerner, I lay to thee a blow

For somewhere out among the stars,

your reason stands to grow.

Not here, nor there, nor everywhere,

may you tread, black tires forwarding.

Heed, rebellious confederator,

that old Civil forewarning.

•••

I found a cut upon my lip,

Tender and wet across the tip.

My tongue massage, lather, and sense,

whether one slice, or increments.

I found a cut upon my brow,

I saw it yes, but don't know how.

To thee I muse, and feel thy soul,

No clear mirror could I cajole.

Now it is night, I lie awake,

As effects upon my face take.

To know that nicks and cuts abound

returns me to thy battleground.

•••

Away the redbird flew to morn,

wormless, chirpless, now forelorn.

A song he sings to doves and gulls,

"Be mindful of the trigger pulls.

While all wiser, the early riser,

Curtailed hopes may spare a miser.

So dream your dreams and find your fun,

But know I speak for everyone,

there they are,

there may they stay,

lest they sing:

Men, bombs away.

Two-fold is it true for thee,

a stainless bird, a crooning she.

As ivory feathers adorn our nest,

My scarlet cometh from war out west.”

--Eliot Sill

There's these things and they're pissing me off.

Man, fuck coffee. Or fuck my body. Something's not right — I drink a beverage and now I can't control myself? Fucking Parkinson's juice.

Cigarettes are dumb too. I found one at a party last Saturday, brought it home and smoked it. Now it's sitting in my scented candle-turned-ashtray, all tan, white and black tainting the sky-blue wax, a perfect metaphor for itself. I look at it and feel cool for having a cigarette mashed into my candle. It looks cool. That's fucking ridiculous.

I have work in an hour, and it's the worst thing that could happen to me. Working at Jimmy John's, an expanding company that's glorifying a man's idea to rip off the masses for a solidly made sandwich, thus exploiting the fantastic American laziness and allowing Jimmy himself to live his life however he wants, which he deserves no more than the panhandlers that'd love to score a J.J. Gargantuan that day, sucks. It's a minimum wage job that doesn't compensate its employees with a free meal or sandwich (or cookie, or pickle, or day-old bread, or garbage) unless you work a double-shift. I've worked their four hours today already and have 5-and-a-half ahead of me. Let there be life.

Death is such a fag. Hanging over my shoulder every unhelpful second, checking my work and making silent judgments. If this is the last thing I ever write, and it had better not fucking be, I want death to know that I saw its game for what it was.

Sadness too. Sadness can shoot itself in the head with a dick-loaded rocket launcher. It's either there like a blanket, keeping you draped in it so you're impervious to outside emotions, or its worn like a hat, purposefully worn for certain situations for as long as necessary. You take it at your leisure through movies, books or stories about high school kids whose sports teams get better after they die.

Sadness should be like death, hanging over you but mostly avoided. Death should be like work, necessary for most people but totally fucking stupid to do and done for the sake of others. Work should be like cigarettes, trendy and eventually fatal but people do it for some reason anyway. And cigarettes should be like sadness, unfortunately permanent or sparsely but willfully consumed. Coffee should just calm down; whatever.

--Eliot Sill

Go buy Tig Notaro's stand-up special on Louis CK's website

Nothing like this Tig Notaro stand-up comedy set exists. Laughter and tragedy are so far separated on the emotional spectrum, typically the only thing that can bring the two together is time.

Tig Notaro single-handedly takes that linear spectrum and forcibly molds it into a circle, bringing together those two emotional points we typically consider to be polar opposites. I don't want to talk about it much, or recap it at all, because I'm still digesting it, listening to it again, and appreciating it. My brother gave it to me free of charge this morning via Skype, and I bought it this evening for 5 dollars out of principle — it's Louis CK's awesome webstore, so 4 of the dollars go straight to Tig and charities.

It's breast cancer awareness month. Go buy this. If you really don't want to pay 5 bucks for it, I'd try to find a way to listen to it anyway. It's important and surreal.

https://buy.louisck.net/purchase/tig-notaro-live

--Eliot Sill

About the Packers game

Keep in mind, this started with a Russell Wilson throw. The guy had just ran back about 15 yards, like how I used to play Madden when I was 11, and threw it 55 yards because that was his only chance to win.

Now while the ball is in the air, Seattle's odds of winning are pretty low — in fact, let's not go there. Because odds mattered so little in this game all along. Odds the Packers offense would get shut out and allow eight sacks in the first half, odds Cedric Benson would be the key to a comeback, odds we'd be facing a classic Hail Mary to end it all, odds we'd end on the conclusion we did. If you were to look at them, you'd be wasting your time, this all has to be examined qualitatively.

My examinations? It'll never happen again. Thus, it is historic.

Since it's a new season, and the Seahawks have attractive Nike threads, a trendy quarterback whom Bill Simmons crowned as the most important player this season, and the Packers are coming off a gazillion-1 year, this game had mass appeal. Everyone was watching. This wasn't Seahawks-Cardinals, this was Monday Night Football.

People will look at this game and see the conclusion, mostly for the fallout it induced. But what's missing is the amazing "rising action" to borrow some literary words that are often paired together.

But eventually the ball does land, and it's a toss up. I'm on the phone with my brother, and I'm in my friends' apartment which is currently a please-don't-yell zone, and I don't yell, because I'm trying to process what the hell is happening, and the thought in my head is "tie goes to the runner."

Seattle is the runner for multiple reasons. They're the underdog, they're the offensive team, and they're the home team. I can't stress enough how much of me figured the refs would call it Seattle's way just because this was in Seattle. Have you ever stood before 70,000 people that consider themselves the most avid 70,000 people out of 32 groups of 70,000 people and thought "what your protagonists have accomplished is very impressive and remarkable, but it's not technically the way things should be." No, you haven't. These refs haven't either.

When the play is ruled a touchdown, I immediately am thinking back to a 2009 Packers-Steelers game in which the Steelers won on a last second touchdown throw by Ben Roethlisberger to Mike Wallace. Both teams were out of playoff contention, competing for pride, and the game was of serious importance, but nobody cared because it was between two scrub squads. But, lo and behold, those teams met again in the Super Bowl at the end of the next season, and I viewed that game — a gutwrenching defeat — as the day the Super Bowl XLV Packers were born. Moments like those — where you're crushed and helpless but you gave it your all and have nothing to be ashamed of — they make you certain of who you are and ready for a bigger moment, say a Super Bowl saving defensive stand against a team who has trademarked late Super Bowl heroics.

And then I'm thinking, well, at least the Seahawks didn't beat us. Yeah, they got helped by the refs. These refs were in a dreadful situation, and I don't know what I would have done, let alone the real refs. It might have gone the same way, albeit a preceding pass interference penalty wouldn't have been called, and the Seahawks would have 32 more yards to chow through before seeing the goal line. It was a dreadful situation, but you have to make a call, and they made a really simple call. Touchdown, home team victory, comeback complete.

So Russell Wilson is parading around like a hero, Golden Tate just bullshitted the biggest moment of his life, Pete Carroll's talking about season-defining wins before his team's even kicked the extra point to make it official, and all the while the Packers are off in the locker room, probably thinking something along the lines of "fuck it." Fuck it — we played well enough to win this game, we intercepted the ball on the last play, we know our man had it, we played well enough to win. Fuck it — we deserved to lose based on the way they destroyed us in half one. Fuck it — this isn't the playoffs, it's Week 3, we've got time and that will never ever happen again ever. Fuck it — they called it, whatever, I guess we lost.

The game goes official and I'm really not all that bitter. It's like how eventually I realized in high school that rich kids just got things easier because their parents could pay for them. I wasn't a lesser person, I just didn't have things handed to me. This game was handed to the Seahawks by someone else. I mean, this mindset borders on denial, but I'm okay staring down a 1-2 record. I'm not scared. Now, I'm dying to hear Mike McCarthy's press conference, and sort of hoping we file a lawsuit or something absurd like that. By all means, practically any recourse is justified when a team is victimized to the extent we were tonight. I know that the fallout will be totally supportive of Green Bay, Skip Bayless will probably say that we're 2-1 all week on "This is Bullshit and I'm Skip Bayless" or whatever that show on ESPN is called.

The replay itself is stomach churning. The guy, M.D. Jennings, jumps up — so high — and gets his hands on the ball and rakes it in — great success! — but as they come down — watch out for poor Sam Shields down there — Golden Tate begins to force himself upon the ball. They fall to the ground — who's got it? — Jennings turns away, trying to yank possession all to himself — he fails at this and thus leads the referee to believe he has less of the ball than Tate — and Tate clings on as the ref signals touchdown. The words "simultaneous possession" have been murdered by overuse and may or may not apply. Let's not oversimplify it — the catch was confusing, and honestly a competent basketball ref would be running in with two thumbs up and we wouldn't have to decide who had the ball first, because we would just figure out who could have the ball now. It's a football play, and it's a fucking weird one that I've never seen before.

I watch the press conferences, read some of the reactions, read more of the reactions, and get increasingly upset. Some of these responses are funny, TJ Lang and Josh Sitton (Packers O-linemen) don't give a fuck how light their wallets become after their tweets tonight, Clay Matthews gives America Roger Goodell's phone number and I call in and offer a couple thoughts, including this suggestion: Why is it necessary to establish a call on the field in situations where the game (or half, or quarter) is over? In a situation like tonight, why can't the refs just be like "WE DON'T KNOW. DID YOU SEE THAT? WE'RE GOING TO GO LOOK AT THAT AND DOUBLE-CHECK BEFORE WE ESTABLISH A BURDEN OF PROOF HERE." While perhaps not conventional or loyal to the process, the idea of a "call on the field" is just saying you have to argue against something in your replay review, you can't decide something by replay. This isn't American court, we're not proving guilt or innocence, we're deciding something. Let there be a decision made upon review in situations where the officials are obviously flustered and uncertain.

Before this catch, there was the uncalled pass interference on Golden Tate — a blatant no-call that affected the game not only by not penalizing Tate, but by taking the defender in best position, Sam Shields, out of the play. Before the play, there had been a 32-yard pass interference call against  Shields in which he was actually tugged by wide receiver Sidney Rice, this was another call I think the refs knew something was wrong, threw a penalty flag to seem competent, then called it on the road team to appease the immediate audience. Before this there was a penalty for roughing the passer that negated an earlier Packers interception that really had serious dagger potential in itself. Obviously these refs tonight took a flyer on the whole "protect the quarterback" zeitgeist that plagued last year's officiating. They dropped laundry several times in the tackle box and here flagged Erik Walden on a play that players have been making all season without consideration from the refs, lament from the fans or protest from the players. If no pass interference is called, do you really think Seattle is whining about not getting that call? No. So there's three key missed calls by these referees which Roger Goodell backed several weeks ago and has not voiced much support for since the regular season began.

Blaming the refs is silly, to a degree. I mean, I may have been not far down the list of replacement officials, for all I know. These guys are coming from all different kinds of backgrounds and clearly are outclassed here. They still fuck these plays up and are influenced so much by trying to appear normal. Referees aren't an entity that should resemble Milford men — not seen and not heard — they should be controlling the game, setting a framework for the players to work within. These guys are afraid to intrude, because they are so unconfident in their abilities.

So we look around, we know it's commissioner Goodell's fault, it's also the fault of the Owners and I guess the players and I guess the fans for not taking serious action to combat this lockout. But I know it's not M.D. Jennings' fault, it's not Sam Shields' fault, and it's definitely not Golden Tate's fault we lost.

All I'm seeing is probably the most interesting football game of my lifetime and wondering how that affects the future for the Packers this season. We've got the Saints on Sunday, and we had better not make it close.

--Eliot Sill

College V: Ace or disgrace

Lately I've been writing like I'm going to live forever.

"That's an interesting thought. ... That'd be interesting to write about. ... I could probably write something really cool about it. ... If it was Wednesday, I think I'd post about that. ... But I won't. ... Because it's not Wednesday. ... Or something."

I've been using my computer less, on a related note.

Whatever it is inside me that gives me the need to write, totally gets off on being withholding. Too busy humping the legs of compliments and giving puppy-dog eyes over my readers' shoulders to realize that I've been reading a lot, and there's a lot of stuff to read, and none of it is mine anymore because I'm reading so much that I don't write.

Right.

I had a moment of weakness, where I enjoyed the thought of wanting to write about something. I thought about reflecting on my summer and comparing myself to where I was two years ago before I left for college my freshman year. I didn't even have to write it to get the pleasure out of it. Instead of masturbating, I have waking wet dreams on command. My arm's getting less work. Can't push a pen very well with a weak arm. 

Writing used to be an embodiment of the life. A sacred stakeholder in uncertainty. It was my muse and my ruse. What do you want to be? they'd ask. A writer, so that I can write, I say. And then I remembered that Mark Twain wrote poetry and I thought "nuts, I don't do that." I am a one-weaponed warrior. While others boast arsenals of broadswords and sniper rifles and shurikens, I call myself a fighter holding an unblemished flail.

I'm here for the biggest and most important semester of my life. It's like the fifth sequel to a movie series about the biggest and most important semester of my life. It keeps getting bigger, being more important.

I worked my first day at Jimmy John's on Monday. Which included the following exchange:

Sara: Do you have the sandwiches memorized?
Me: No (sound of me dropping a tier in her mind). ... (I pick up a menu.)
Sara: Yeah, you typically won't have time to read the menu during your shift.
Me: Right.
Sara: I mean we consider that pretty much something to do on your own time.
Me: Oh, okay. (I fold the menu to put it in my pocket for later.)
Sara: Did you not get a menu when they hired you?
Me: Oh, um, well do you mean, like the sandwich study guide thing?
Sara: Did you get a packet? I'll show you-
Me: Yeah, no yeah, I got one of those.
Sara: Okay.
Me: ...
Sara: So.
Me: ?
Sara: It's just, those menus are really expensive.
Me: Oh, right. My bad. ... (Puts menu in pocket)

Sara's a manager, obviously. Vote for Jimmy.

After work I turned in my first article on the Illinois volleyball team. Writing it felt like working out for the first time in months. Finishing it felt like finishing my final set on eight reps instead of 10, because it was as many as I could do. I'm weak. I'm tired.

I'm back.

--Eliot Sill

The Dark Knight Rises

Spoiler. Alert.

I loved it, first of all. I am a full-on Batman fan. Not the biggest one, but a true one. This movie appealed to me. The movie has brought about buzz for a number of reasons: plotholes, length, telegraphed twists, larger picture statements and more plotholes.

I was afraid that this Batman wouldn't be the perfect idyllic conclusion we all assumed Nolan would deliver. As more audiences saw it and grew to have opinions on it, conversations escalated to debates, to arguments, to achieve the polarization we sit at now in the response to the film. But I think in the end, it is not what this movie was about overall or the hidden subtexts, it's what this movie caused that we will remember.

 A week ago, I had not seen The Dark Knight Rises. The following ideas did not exist in my universe:

Anne Hathaway as a damn good "cat" burglar.
A broken back healing in 5 months.
John Blake, a Batman named Robin, or what the hell Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character was going to be.
A Batman saga without the Joker.
The Bane voice.
Dun, dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, (repeat).
Gotham City facing a nuclear bomb threat.
This critical, cynical, dare I say why-so-serious backlash to the film.

Do you remember people poking so many holes in The Avengers? It's insane to think the Avengers didn't have anything to "live up to" in the way that TDKR did. The Avengers was teased at in like, six movies over five years. Yet the plotholes aren't so magnified in what is looked at as more of a joyride than an Oscar prospect.

Nolan's Batman began with Begins. It presented a fresh believable superhero world, with a couple military technology-related leaps of faith (such as those of the Tumbler from rooftop to rooftop). The movie was a quiet killer. Shows no caution in presenting a full-on origin story without pulling any punches, and clocked in at 2 hours, 20 minutes.

The series continued with The Dark Knight, which brought a reimagined Joker into the fray, included modest upgrades in technology from Begins, and took superhero films to a new level. Heath Ledger didn't merely portray a comic book character, he acted the shit out the Joker. And his death nearly derailed the series. In fact, why didn't it derail the series? Had it been Christian Bale and not Heath Ledger that died, this series would have ended. It would have been impossible to continue the story without Batman.

As it stands, and so many people forget, it was near impossible to continue the story without the Joker. Yet, dimming the bright light shining upon Nolan's artistic control of the series, the American public demanded that the show go on. Nolan obliged, per his large sack of change and promise of more millions.

Chris called his brother John, and together they attempted to put together a new image from the puzzle pieces that remained. As it turned out, there were plenty of ends to tie up.

Shocked, we should be, that they sniped every hanging thread from the two previous movies — except one, obviously, being that of Ledger's Joker. A dead elephant in a room full of people who claim to be snubbing their noses at something else. This was not Nolan's baby. This was his adopted child.

"This is a time bomb story," one critic wrote, as if he had left the showing when he found this out, deeming it thusly unworthy.

Others didn't like the film's tone, which means absolutely nothing if you think about it. "It hasn't earned its darkness," said a Rotten Tomatoes top critic. In essence, his complaint is that since this movie lacks the Joker, and instead has a more practical superstrong warlord as its antagonist, it is not allowed to be as frightening.What he wishes, is that Nolan submit to the idea that the Joker was the only way to achieve a level of darkness, and that sans Joker, the film has to be less threatening. The point of this movie is that things can still happen without the Joker. Darkness can endure. Havoc can be wrought. The stakes can be raised.

"The 9/11 subtext is more explicit than ever here," wrote CNN's reviewer, of course.  Superheroes needed to prevent catastrophic genocidal plots before 9/11, you know. If there's an attack on Gotham City (or New York, Spiderman) in a superhero movie, it's probably because it's a superhero movie, not because of Osama bin Laden.

"Bane’s intentions with regard to Gotham and its protector go from uncertain to outright contradictory over the course of the film, with the character flip-flopping between a desire to empower Gotham’s populace (at times seeming like the spokesperson for the real-world Occupy movement) and an urge to obliterate every living person in the city." - A critic who didn't get it. Bane explicitly told an imprisoned Bruce Wayne that he was going to destroy Gotham, but give it hope at first that it could survive (so long as no one crosses that fucking bridge).

The reputation of realism that precedes this film is the bane of its critical interpretation. This movie is just as fun as The Avengers. Except you have your fun in the villain's successes as much as the protagonist's rise to stop them. The bigger the wave, the more awesome the surf. For instance, it is when The Joker blows up a hospital that The Dark Knight goes from good to great. In Bane, people are expecting a step down in scale, I guess? Bane blows up a football stadium, and does it a hell of a lot more credibly than Joker sneaking in barrels and barrels of explosives to a hospital. No one cares that Bane's blast was bigger and more realistic than the clown's, because they miss the clown, and he's the best.

A lot of criticism has been lobbed at the lack of actual Batman in the film as well. The movie is called The Dark Knight Rises, so I don't think that leaves room to complain of his precursory downfall. The point is to see what happens when Batman is incapacitated. See how much Gotham City needs Batman. They hadn't needed him for eight years. Batman had won his war. Batman leaves Gotham after the first stroke of Bane's revolutionary decree is made, and comes back 18 hours before his initiated and carried-out plan is complete. It is essential that Batman be gone this long, so that the problem can loom so large and ending need to be executed so hastily.

Then there's the 15 botherances posted by /Film:

1. How does Bane know who Batman is? You answered it yourself. He found out because of his longstanding affiliation with Talia Al Ghul and the League of Shadows.
2. How does Blake know who Batman is? Nolan paints Wayne's playboy personality, but doesn't focus on it enough for people to get this: there's no fucking way Bruce Wayne would be Batman. Blake sees through this mask Wayne wears because he knows how it is able to be concocted. Sometimes superheroes identities aren't known to the public. Prove that real life dictates otherwise, if you feel so empassioned.
3. Why does Batman fall and rise twice in the movie? Yeah, he faces multiple obstacles. What? I don't even.
4. Alfred's goodbye scene wasn't good enough. This happened. Sorry you wanted it to be more cinematic.
5. Why didn't the SEC void the trades Bane made? "Long term we'll be able to prove fraud." -Lucius Fox. But seeing as the trades were made by Bruce Wayne's fingerprints. They are temporarily true. Bane wasn't trying to bankrupt Wayne for the future, just temporarily and to give control to Dagget. Almost.
6. Why did Bruce and Miranda Tate do it? Talia wanted to infiltrate Bruce Wayne's privacy. And she's fucking hot. That's how it happened.
7. Why did Batman take time to make that burning batsymbol? It was a rallying cry heard by the entire city, a burning beacon of hope. Instrumental in mobilizing the police force against Bane's gang. (LOL Banegang.) Also it was awesome, so shut up.
8. Why did Bruce Wayne stop doing background checks (on Kyle and Tate, specifically)? Why would this bother you? Why do you care? And he's been out of the game for eight years and been without enemies.
9. Why did Bane fly with Batman to the pit? Because Batman is the single most important element of resistance against his plan, and worthy of his concern.
10. How did Bruce Wayne get back home in days with no resources or money? He had a month and he's resourceful. Also it's a movie. He figured it out. Calm down.
11. Why does the prison exist in the way that it does? The prison is an awesome idea.
12. Gotham post-Bane revolution wasn't realistic enough? Compared to what?
13. Were the GCPD and CIA really that stupid? Yes, I guess they were.
14. The fighting sucked. I disagree.
15. Too much happened at the ending. It's a Nolan movie. Look at you talking about it though.

I think this movie wore on people due to its length, lack of the Joker, and outstanding preceding installments.

I think of it more as a connecting line. A conclusion to tie everything together. What would bring everything to a final resting place? And the result is more "does it do it?" than "what is done?" I think this movie did it. It tied it up. It solved the puzzle, missing Joker piece and all.

A lot went into this movie. The stakes were as high as could be. There were obstacles in making it work. Yet we found someone to break the Dark Knight. And he found a way to rise.

They passed the torch to JGL, and the future of the story is open for interpretation. The point is, Bruce Wayne is done. He killed his public self, but is still alive in Florence. There will be no sequel. But life goes on, as Bruce Wayne's end is not crime's end, and so the symbol must continue breathing.

Critics viewed this movie deductively. I think it was fucking great.

--Eliot Sill

It's my birthday

After this post, Classic Brian will be a blog consisting of 620 published posts, 100 of which are tagged with my name, Eliot.

While it is unknown as to whether Nick or I have accumulated more blog posts over CB's existence (it's certainly turned into a two-man game of late), let's just pretend that I own the lion's share. If you were wondering whether I would mention this being Eliot post No. 100, I'm sorry to potentially disappoint you.

Today, just now in fact, I was at an ATM. The ATM has become a depressing place for me recently, as my lack of employment rings in louder and louder harmony to my dwindling funds. But I was taking out money today so that I could go to St. Louis and see The Dark Knight Rises in OMNImax, which I feel is the best way to format that word. As 6 o' clock approached and the store wherein I made my withdrawal reached its close, I staggered up to the ATM behind a middle-aged black lady.

She was sensibly dressed, wearing something of a gray and maroon full-length floral outfit. She was even wearing a sunhat. It suited her. As I stood behind her in line, she turned around and met my gaze for just nearly a brief second before turning back to the ATM, whether she bore a stern face or not, I did not know.

ATM etiquette is one of the most nominal and silly social norms of today. It's right up there with male bathroom etiquette in terms of unnecessary caution. But I am not fully educated on ATM etiquette, and began to question myself as to my standing position — was I too close? Did she distrust me? I don't know how to take advantage of a PIN number, unless I follow that person around until they inadvertently lose their debit card where I can easily retrieve it. Even then, she's a woman. Someone somewhere would probably track me down before too long if I was using a card belonging to Linda Johnson. Just like in the bathroom, if some guy sees your penis, keep in mind, he is still miles away from sucking that thing. You don't have to file assault charges quite yet.

Anyway, I was unsure if our gaze had been a infinitesimal signal of "back off" or merely an intersection of two careless people taking money out of their accounts to spend it and bring their net worth to a new, regrettable low. I stood back, and pretended to focus on a bronze floorpiece that commemorated the University of Illinois on "Agriculture and Science." The two subjects were imprinted in the circle on opposite pages of an open book. Agriculture was hyphenated, because it would be unrealistic if the word went across both pages. There were symbols surrounding the book, one a spade tucked into the earth, another a microscope, and a third appeared to be a agricultural AND scientific object, but I could make no mental connection as to what the piece actually was. I decided the bit of bronze floor was a shabby artifact, not vital to the University.

As I came to this conclusion, the black lady in front of me pulled away from the ATM muttering utterances I could not understand. Whether she was condemning me in a foreign language or rapping Lil Wayne lyrics under her breath, I could not tell. Then I looked at her hands, she had a lot of cash, and was organizing it. One of her bills had an approximate third of it torn off. She was talking about it, but again, I didn't know if she was inviting conversation or if she was ticked off at my intrusion. If she was mad, I feared, she would present me with of some of that patented black-lady sass (patented black-lady sass is preferable to stereotypical black-lady sass, I am hoping).

I resorted to my only plausibly safe recourse: the nervous but entirely audible laugh. She looked at me and, in agreement, shook her head. We were on the same team, I was almost sure of it.

"What?" I said, realizing that I hadn't heard her legitimately.
"One of my bills is torn in half," she said, content to have her complaint heard.
"Man."

And there it had went, by far the most efforted social interaction I had all day.  For some reason, this felt like enough. Like just talking to that alone, middle-aged black lady was satisfactory to think "I talked to someone at the ATM today." For what it's worth, I think her 20 was still usable. I didn't mention that, however, because now she got to go inside the store and talk to a clerk about it, and that would be two conversations on this ever-wilder ATM quest. Tired, hot and full of a Buffalo Chicken footlong from Subway, I stepped up to the ATM, when it hit me.

I turned my head in her direction as she faded into the store.

"That's quite literally a rip-off," I said.
She stopped. "What?"
"I said, 'That's quite literally a rip-off.'"
"Ha ha ye-es," she replied with on-the-go humored enthusiasm.

I grinned alone in that lobby even as I threw away my receipt with depressing figure-based reality imprinted upon it. Out the door with $30 I went, and headed toward my still un-air-conditioned apartment. To tell the world of my brave adventure.

This glamorous life I have.

Here's to going for it when there's no reason not to, and in return receiving modest-but-positive results;  the very essence of Classic Brian itself.

--Eliot Sill

Out of controll

My mind only produces commentaries in brief, tweet-length bursts. See scenario. Comment on scenario. Edit on comment to make it fit. And flick the two-cents of information into the wishing well of hopeful and righteous life analysts. Check back in five minutes for possible feedback. Check back in ten minutes for next subject. Check back in an hour because you've lost your way and forgotten what else it is you actually do in a day.

To my mother: to check your email, simply type "comcast.net" into the URL bar above (wherein it says classicbrian.blogspot.com/etc.) and hit enter on the keyboard. When the page loads, select "Email" or "Inbox" or whatever option presented that reminds you of an email account. It may ask you to sign in. If you need a reminder your email address is jetmusic@comcast.net and your password is songbird — no capital letters or spaces.

My mother used to rant about how society was becoming so out of touch with itself because it spent long hours mindlessly staring into the space occupied by a television screen and clicking ever so purposelessly through a web browser — something my mother could not define, should you ask her — instead of reading books and playing hopskotch or learning to cross-country ski.

Now my mother is technologically crippled, a symptom of long snubbing her nose at a generational nuance she considered not worth her time. She needs help accessing her email account, the equivalent of walking to the refrigerator as far as technology's concerned, let alone actually utilizing the Internet for its more lucrative and fulfilling benefits, such as promoting a business, writing a blog post or tweeting about whatever it is you just saw on SportsCenter.

She is the overlooked sliver of pie in the graph that shows how computer-based our society is today. The kind that didn't move forward to that era of technology because they didn't want to, rather than because they couldn't afford it or didn't know about it. She could have been told by someone somewhere down the line that she was going to end up out of touch with the same society she claimed was getting out of touch with itself, but she wasn't. She was left behind to teach violin and play music on wooden instruments that require horse hair to make them sing. Her office didn't upgrade its computer network, get wireless Internet, require her to get a company app, or use Skype at a budget meeting. My mom doesn't know what the hell Skype is, but if you told her, I'm sure she'd be amazed.

The phrase "simpler times" is so sweet in its truth, so loyal to the notion that technology isn't making the world better, only easier. As long as your wired in, you're clear to float on in peace. But once your technology comes undone, you go ape. We keep pushing technology forward because we can, and because it's cool and useful. But at some point, maybe my mother is less handicapped than we are. My mother's computer will be out of commission for months at a time and it causes her little to no strain. If she wants a recipe for something, she doesn't go to Pinterest, she thumbs through a cookbook until she finds what she wants, perhaps discovering a couple other interesting recipes in the process.

The notion that we can't live without technology is pathetic in how close it is to being accurate. If I got stuck on a deserted island, I know I would really miss Twitter (This is serious! If I don't get found soon, my phone is going to die! #NoOutlets @barackobama). We're reaching an age where we're becoming engrossed, drenched to the bone, undryably soaked in technology. Television is becoming outdated. What in the hell does that say? The mere fact that I'm saying this at age 19, not age 45, convinces me that technology is moving rapidly, and that I will soon be behind the times, whether it be now or when I'm 35 or 60 or 90 or 130, because lord knows we're all going to start living that long.

Meanwhile, as the world begins to quiver under the sheer weight of all the people it now holds (7 billion? That's a billion more than when I was growing up!), we continue to pretend there's room for everyone, jobs for everyone, happiness for everyone. If you can't have real happiness, well you can still have an iPhone. We create social media networks to try and lessen the amount of people in our universes, to try and recreate our own personal society filled with people we like, are interested in, and care about, and no one else. We try and add something that hasn't already been thought of or added, we try and make music like we've never heard, and then we wonder why that band is playing such weird shit. There's too many people to do anything anymore.

We have to realize that this system isn't sustainable. The foreseeable future grows shorter and shorter every year. If the world ends in 2012 with a bang or a series of natural disasters, we'll have the solace of knowing that it didn't come to us pruning the race ourselves. I'm not saying we need to do something about it, because who cares what I think? I'm a hair follicle on the testicles of a jester compared to someone who makes a difference, who just might be nobody anymore in an age where being the President merely makes you famous and blameable.

I woke up Sunday with a rash that I got from God-knows-where doing God-knows-what, and all my friends don't seem to like it very much when I show it to them. There won't be any pictures of it on Facebook or Instagram, though it's an accurate depiction of what my life's been for the past four days. I got disgusted looks when I mentioned it on the radio, because people don't want to hear about it. But I've been thinking about rashes a lot lately, specifically the one I have that has been begging me to itch it the entire time I've been writing this post, and I think they're a fair reminder that some things take time, no matter how fast your wireless loads, and that anything other than having a disgusting, itchy rash all over your torso is grounds for a good day.

The balance in the world has shifted, and it's now whatever you want it to be. Hell, they make different versions of the news to cater to different people anymore and interpret the Bible to mean whatever necessary to back their beliefs. They write books where the main character is dead or alive based on the reader's preference, and life's cruel subtleties — rashes and the like — are locked in a box and shoved in the corner with dirty clothes thrown over them to hide their presence. As the world becomes a niche-based society, people stop mattering.

I've been in my apartment all day doing next to nothing. This slothlike behavior has affected no one. I am experiencing what it's like to be utterly inconsequential. I've often said I would prefer to have lived in a previous era. This rapid crescendo of technology overpowers the buzz a single bee such as myself produces. I just float around, not able to hear myself think because darn it all there's no room for isolation in the modern world, searching for a flower to pollinate. But there's so much more to it than that when you're a real socially functional person, isn't there? I envy them. The bees seem just as happy as I do. Simpler times, I suppose.

--Eliot Sill

My cave is a human

All my wretched and diabolical plans for this summer appear to be in mid-thwart. Originally, I was going to snooze through a job at the Country Club, earning way more cash than is necessary, while raking in a fair check from Illini Media in my work as assignment editor. I would scoop up some easy credits from Parkland in an online course or two, thus eliminating the need for me to slog through the bitches that are economics and political science during a real semester. My friends here and I would go out on a bi-nightly basis, scoring cheap drinks at bars, eating grease foods while inebriated and engaging in general goodhearted brouhaha. And I would write six or seven brilliant endeavoring feature stories while chipping in a couple dinky beat bits for the paper. And I would have an apartment to myself for a negligibly cheap sum, where I could play PS3 and Final Fantasy X at my leisure.

By the sheer amount of good things referenced in the preceding paragraph, you may have correctly assumed by process of elimination that I'm not having the best of summers. One of my larger concerns at the moment is this what is becoming chronic shoulder pain and odd discomfort of the lower back. Because they make moving harder, which translates to every thing being slightly harder. Luckily, one of my roommates left behind a bottle of Ibuprofen that is currently blanketing those pains. It wears off at night, though. Bummer. Additionally, I was rejected by the Country Club, then everywhere else I applied (read: Chipotle and IHOP) and oh hey, it's July on Sunday. Furthermore, I wasn't able to sign up for classes, partially because I didn't have a job to fund the $300 credit nuggets, and partially because I was late in beginning the process of registration. My job at the paper has been a double-edged sword. In that it gives me first pick of all story ideas, then full power to assign them to whomever I like. As in, not myself. Meanwhile, I'm clinging to the pithy salary I'm getting, trying to fund my life and buy food that I can feasibly cook. And socially most of my nights have consisted of light reading and boredom, as I've only been out to the bars a couple times. It's senseless to go spend money there when I have no job.

Which brings me to my apartment. My home. My cave. The air conditioning is broke. I'm hesitant to call the landlord because technically I don't live here. It's a no-table-involved lease agreement that I have with Gordon Voit, a swell chap I might add, that I get this apartment for the summer for $500 bucks. That figure looked way less threatening when I was banking (literally) on $12.50 an hour, 20 hours a week. It's as hot as a human mouth in here right now. The thermostat tells me we're at or north of 90. The only light right now is from the relenting sun and this computer screen, the only other electricity being used is to power my fan, which is admirably blowing right at my face, doing its very best to keep up.

Earlier today I was wearing my fall jacket to keep me cool. But eventually I made Chunky chicken and gumbo soup, and put Frank's Red Hot in it (read: gave up). I followed that with the coldest shower I've ever taken (a bookend to the hottest shower I've ever taken, which occurred at Blaisdell Hall of PAR after getting back from the Return to Titletown celebration in Lambeau Field), which I took with the door open for good measure.

The remaining of my two roommates moved out (for a month) yesterday. So how's living alone? Well, it's lonely. But I have no problem with that. The problem is that I'm not miraculously self-motivated sans the presence of others. I'm still making good excuses not to do necessary things (what if he flips a shit and kicks me out? I'm lambed). I can't even find a good place to hang this disco ball. The one thing I need right now is for this weather to go the hell back to Texas or wherever it belongs and to let things cool around here so I can stop being all hot and bothered.

That or a vacation. My cave is a human.

--Eliot Sill