We're men, we're men in tights

From the 1930s to about the 1960s, westerns were a pretty big deal. I’m still trying to figure out why; best I can tell, movies about cowboys tend to drag, featuring long passages with minimal dialogue, and extended close-ups of ugly men hawking globs of tobacco into spittoons. If you have a weird fetish for stubbly old cranks, then I could sort of see the appeal. Of course, if you have a weird fetish for stubbly old cranks, you probably don’t make it to the cinema very often. A basement and a reliable Internet connection are probably your best friends.

We associate westerns with a certain era because at a certain point, Hollywood pretty much stopped making them. You see one trickle out occasionally, but half the time they have some incongruous modern twist, like robot dinosaurs that the cowboys kill with bazookas. Save for the odd throwback here and there, westerns are a dead genre.

Perhaps the same fate will befall the superhero movie.

The two genres don’t have a lot in common at face value. Westerns are slow and sparse; hero flicks are speedy and overstuffed. Westerns are cheap to produce; hero flicks cost more than the gross domestic product of Tanzania. Westerns feature macho outlaws dressed in ridiculous outfits; hero flicks … okay, so they have something in common.

But the main quality they share is that they saturated the market. Since westerns could be cranked out on shoestring budgets, the local cineplex was silly with tales of jug-hatted desperados making a go of it in the rough-and-tumble plains. You couldn’t escape them. They were the cinematic equivalent of mosquitos, only you couldn’t get rid of them with incense and cartons of Virginia Slims.

Superhero movies are complex, big-budget affairs, but they’re prevalent because they make their money back and then some. Google the 50 top-grossing films of all time and a shocking number of them feature protagonists who wear underwear on the outside of their pants. And that’s not even taking into account teenage wizards, lusty vampires or giant blue hominids in loincloths. Assemble all of these odd characters in one room and it’s like the hallucinatory dreams I used to have during puberty.

Full disclosure: I love superheroes. I was a huge comic book nerd when I was a kid, which meant I spent a lot of time indoors and didn’t know any girls. Comics were a window into a giddily absurd fantasyland, awash with primary colors and soap-style melodrama. The good guys got to wear Halloween costumes every day of the year, and the bad guys had absurd names like “Dr. Doom” and “Killer Croc.” Everything was exaggerated and distorted. This is a medium ostensibly run by adults, but clearly their creative imaginations are deeply rooted in childhood; how else do you explain metal claws popping out of someone’s hands, or a man who turns into a big green beast whenever he gets mad? Desert wanderers succumbing to heatstroke have had less vivid visions.

The glut of comic book films over the past decade-plus are tailor-made for people of my generation -- unabashed geeks who crave an adult spin on their childhood indulgences. A lot of these movies actually work, and they owe their success to computers; with digital animation you can take an absurd concept, like Spider-Man tussling with a masked goblin on a flying surfboard, and make it look as real as someone’s front porch.

This is in stark contrast to anything made prior to 1989. I remember watching a Captain America movie that was produced sometime during the early 1980s, and it was like seeing home footage of a mentally disturbed man having a very public nervous breakdown. His supposedly “indestructible” shield bent in the wind like an oversized Frisbee, and his costume seemed stitched together from the full-body onesies favored by small children with Kool-Aid mustaches. In the modern iteration, he comes across as remotely plausible, at the very least inspiring you to suspend your disbelief. Thirty-five years ago, he was a walking, talking cry for help.

Westerns had a pretty good run -- their peak lasted around 30, 35 years, give or take, equivalent to the lifespan of an average sea urchin. If superhero movies are in for a similar reign, then they’ve still got a long way to go. That’s good news for anyone itching to watch Superman and Batman beat the everloving snot out of each other, bad news for those who feel a cape is only appropriate on a magician.

Either way, I’ve got to believe they’ll come a day when these films reach the point of oversaturation. They’re not there yet, given the box office numbers, but there’s only so many times you can tell the story of the Caped Crusader before the audience collectively yawns and starts shopping for garden gnomes on Amazon. Hollywood has become addicted to “rebooting” these franchises -- scrapping continuity, enlisting new writers, casting new actors, and approaching the stories with a fresh angle -- and that’s fine, for now. But there may come a day when even die-hards like me say, “You know what? I’d love to plunk down fifteen bucks to see ‘Batman Adopts a Puppy,’ but maybe I should watch a nice historical drama instead. Is ‘Churchill Eats a Crumpet’ streaming on Netflix yet?”

The day is coming. When it does, who knows? Maybe westerns will be back in vogue by then; like fashion, there’s a chance these things are cyclical. Or maybe genre mash-ups will be the order of the day. Just imagine: cowboys wearing capes and skin-tight leotards. Hide your children, folks.

Air today, gone tomorrow

If you crammed four live kittens into a plastic carrier, cut windows into the sides, loaded it into a giant catapult and sent it careening through the sky, those kittens would probably know what it feels like to fly on one of the major airlines. All they’d need is a pretzel and a dog-eared copy of Skymall.

Just don’t say “dog-eared” around them. They hate that.

Or hey, here’s a better idea: Don’t load kittens into a catapult. Chances are they’ve got nowhere to be. They’re not like we humans, with our burning need to travel long distances quickly. Of all the differences between people and other species, one of the strangest is our tendency to gather in large groups and sit facing in a certain direction. We do it at concerts, we do it at the movie theater, and we do it on airplanes, even though the most scenic thing in front of us on the plane is a shock of brown hair tied back in a ponytail. They should put a window on the bottom of the aircraft and have all the seats facing downward. Bet the crowds at the jetport would thin out in a hurry.

Air travel is an experience like no other. Somehow it manages to be quick, convenient, and a complicated pain in the butt, all at the same time. Sure, you can start a day in Maine and end it in California, but by the time you walk out of the terminal it feels as if you’ve spent nine hours under interrogation from a pinstriped mobster named Johnny Big Hands. And boy, what he does with those hands.

You know it’s going to be an ordeal as soon as the TSA asks you to remove your belt and shoes. The shoes I can understand -- people have used their shoes to smuggle bombs, and bombs are bad. (Just ask Pauly Shore. Zing!) Requiring us to remove our belts seems a bit excessive. Most of us don’t wear full-fledged utility belts, so they don’t seem like prime transporters of contraband, unless someone’s stupid enough to sheath a hunting knife and a couple of grenades. What are we, Batman? Yeah, I know, terrorism and safety and yadda yadda yadda. It just doesn’t inspire a great travel mood when your pants are one misstep away from falling down around your ankles. Next person who laughs at my Salvador Dali underwear gets a stern talking-to.

That’s nothing compared to the waiting, though. You’re advised to get to the airport an hour and a half before your flight, which seems prudent, but once you get your tickets and go through the TSA screening, you mostly just sit. And sit. And then you sit some more. Travel veterans use this odd dead-time as an opportunity to wander the terminal and check out some of the shops, knowing that hours of additional sitting await them on the aircraft. But that can be a trap. If you’re apt to make purchases as a form of entertainment, you can find yourself walking to the gate with 12 extra books in your carry-on and an $8 bagel causing havoc in your gastrointestinal system. Plus, admit it: You weren’t even hungry for that bagel. Richard Simmons weeps for you. And by you I mean me.

Once you’ve settled in on the plane, the quality of the flight can vary wildly depending on your seating assignment. On a recent jaunt to Chicago I was stuck in the middle seat, which is fine if you’re the size of a Keebler Elf. I hover around 6’4” and have the wingspan of a pterodactyl, so assuming the role of sandwich meat isn’t what you’d call an ideal situation. For me, being bookended by two dudes is like squeezing into an old pair of jeans after a week of eating nothing but Cadbury Eggs and cake. All you can do is draw in your shoulders, keep as still as possible, and hope against hope that neither of your aisle mates decides to cut a righteous fart.

Sometimes you get lucky and there’s a video screen installed on the back of each seat. With a complimentary set of headphones you can settle in for a three-hour marathon of “The Big Bang Theory,” which coincidentally is one of the torture techniques formerly employed by federal interrogators at Guantanamo Bay. These screens are a great idea in theory, but in practice they’re a pipeline to some pretty questionable content, considering all the reality shows now in production that revolve around eating or just being weird. You can get access to higher-quality shows and movies, but for a price -- which means it’s possible to pay theater prices to see “The Peanuts Movie” yet still watch it on a screen the size of a spatula.

And of course there’s the disembarking process, which is far from a model of efficiency. Passengers typically grab their belongings and file out row by row, so if you’ve got a seat near the back of the aircraft there’s just enough time to plow through “War and Peace” before your number’s called. If you’re on a jumbo jet, you can teach yourself a new language and read Tolstoy’s tome in the original Russian. In a world run by Willie Wonka, the bottom of the craft would simply open up like a trap door and everyone would fall from their seats into a giant kiddie pool filled with foam. Oompa-Loompas would hand over your carry-on bags and shepherd you to the gate with cattle prods. It’d be a ruder process, but at least you’d make it down to baggage claim before your family files a missing persons report.

But here I am grousing about the miracle of human flight. Even a couple hundred years ago, such a thing would have been inconceivable; put James Madison in the window seat on a nonstop to Philly and he’d probably go insane. As comedian Louis C.K. pointed out, “You’re sitting in a chair in the sky. You’re like a Greek myth right now.”

Like it or not, our current method of passenger aviation is the best we can muster … for now. Still, I’ve grown rather fond of the catapult idea. Think I’ll tinker with that one for a while.

Hit me, dealer

When I was a grade school pipsqueak growing up in Lewiston, a video arcade called “Aladdin’s Castle” set up shop in a local mall. For nerds, it was a watershed event. Mine was the first generation to become obsessed with video games, and a video arcade is to gaming what a movie theater is to film: A way to transform a home entertainment offering into a legitimate outing, something requiring a car ride and clean pants. Our parents didn’t get it -- they were of the go-play-outside generation -- but we kids were enraptured. The loud noises, the colored lights: It was like stepping inside a giant disco ball filled with glittering jewels, and if you were handy with a Skee Ball you could leave with a big plastic dinosaur. Kitschy, but fun.

Las Vegas is sort of like that, only it pulses with mutant strength and scale. Imagine a video arcade that doesn’t end. Garish neons and deep shadows battle for space on the casino floors, rolling beeps and pings banish the silences of the night, and every face is lit by the glow of something artificial -- the screen of a slot machine, the lonely spotlight over a gold-rimmed blackjack table. There are even plastic dinosaurs, although most of them are either wearing bikinis or holding giant pot leaves.

Seeing it all in person for the first time last week, it occurred to me that Vegas is basically a mammoth video arcade for adults. Adults with vices. And disposable incomes. And a hankering for bazooka-sized chili dogs.

Granted, my perception of Sin City was limited by my mission and duration of stay. This was no vacation. I was in town for work, spending most of three full days in the Sands Expo, writing stories based on coma-inducing Powerpoint presentations, and taking photos of expensive ties knotted around wealthy necks. Paying the bills in a most bizarre fashion. What I saw of the prototypical Las Vegas experience was snatched in odd moments of free time, mostly at night, when you could stand in front of a 20-foot-high CVS sign and get a suntan from its near-nuclear glow. I’m convinced the city is powered by a secret underground sun.

My admittedly intermittent exposure to the nightlife seemed like an accurate impression regardless. The first full night I was there, I arrived at Planet Hollywood to meet some coworkers for dinner. I’d gotten there early thanks to a cabbie who had no respect for traffic laws, so I found a bar near the casino and nursed a beer while I waited. Nipping at the bottle as I passively watched a basketball game on TV, I was distracted at one point by the guy sitting next to me, who was hunched over a video poker device installed directly into the bar. He was muttering to himself in a manner that suggested deep mental instability, and rubbing at his forehead as though he expected a genie to pop out of his skull. His other hand kept pumping in dollars, punching buttons, pumping in dollars, punching buttons. He was clearly losing money, and I was about to feel sorry for the dude, but then I was approached by a waitress wearing fishnet leggings and a corset. One wrong move and certain anatomical features would have come tumbling out like the inflatable slides on the sides of airplanes. I think she asked if I wanted another beer. I’m not entirely sure.

As she was leaving, I looked from her back to Poker Guy and thought, “Well, I guess this is sorta what I expected.” Gotta give the city props for truth in advertising.

Technically I shouldn’t be sharing any of this, because what happens in Vegas is supposed to stay there, isn’t it? Any minute now some brass-knuckled goon will materialize in my living room and snuff out his cigar on my forehead. There’s a code. Only I’m pretty sure I’m exempt from all that, because this was business, not pleasure; I showed up, I wore a suit and said words like “synergy” and “analytics,” and then I left. This lent me an objectivity that not a lot of people in Vegas can boast. When I checked out of the hotel I spied an old man in the casino cranking on Lucky Strikes and blankly pulling the lever on a slot machine. This was at 3:30 in the morning. Did the old man realize how bizarre and vaguely sad this whole scene was? Probably not. But I did. I was unique in that I was sober and could still afford to buy socks.

It’s a strange town. The bad things you hear about it seem to be mostly true -- the tackiness, the audiovisual assault, the $12 snowglobes. Despite all that, there’s great stuff there if you do a little digging. Midweek, I was assigned to shoot photos of a private event at Madame Tussaud’s famous wax museum, which features sculptures of people who make way more money than me. It was closed off to the general public for the night, but since I was a fancypants media person, I was privileged to duck in ahead of the crowd and set up shop. It was creepy from the onset, but in a cool way. With the shindig still half an hour away, I found myself alone in a room with fake Will Smiths and Sandra Bullocks staring at me with inanimate eyes, giving off a faint zombie vibe that would have been right at home in an epic haunted house. Larry King smiled at me over a pair of wax suspenders. The moment was so surreal, I had to chuckle to myself; in the midst of the glitz and hubbub, there existed a moment of serenity so unexpectedly perfect that, for a while, I didn’t mind all the neon and cheese. It’s an offbeat culture, but it’s culture nonetheless, and there’s value in experiencing that kind of thing.

As magical and gratifying as Aladdin’s Castle was, it’ll never top that.

In the zone

Time zones are a gigantic pain in the butt.

They’re necessary. Without them, there would be one slim strip of Earth that experienced normal, sensible times -- a sunny midday noontime, pitch-black midnight, evening sunsets -- and everywhere else would be a tangle of disorientation. Ethiopians would go to bed at 10 in the morning, the Chinese would eat breakfast at three in the afternoon, and students in France would see the sun rise about midway through algebra class, assuming they’re not nodding off over their cheese-and-baguette lunches. C’est dommage!

We need time zones to make sense of it all, to ensure most people have a shot at getting into the flow of a normal day. That doesn’t mean I have to like them. I’m generally not affected by time zones, but every once a while you travel somewhere and have to engage in an activity so unpleasant it should be banned by law: mental math.

Ugh.

Time zone mental math goes something like this. Say you’re traveling from Portland, Maine to Las Vegas, Nevada, and you’ve got a layover in Chicago. Portland to Chicago takes about three hours in the air, but by the time you land, only two hours have passed, because you’ve crossed from the Eastern to the Central Time Zone. The layover lasts about an hour, and then the final leg from Chicago to Vegas is about four hours. That’s five hours total, but as you enter Nevada airspace and look out the airplane window onto the neon-colored strip below, you realize the past five hours have gone by in three, an eight-hour day has gone by in five, and it feels like midnight even though it’s 9:30.

If you can read the preceding paragraph without getting a major headache, I will personally mail you a cookie.

Technically this constitutes time travel, but time travel is supposed to be way more fun. You’re supposed to see dinosaurs or laser-swords or something, and have a bunch of wacky adventures, altering history so now your dad is rich and has a mustache. Instead, you’re sitting at an airport bar holding a cocktail to your forehead, wrestling with the conflicting urges to either go to bed or stay up five more hours playing Blackjack. Not once in my many viewings of the “Back to the Future” movies did I ever see Marty McFly with jetlag.

Logistics get more complicated the farther from home you venture. I went on a trip to Australia when I was 15, and during that time, if anyone from the family wanted to chat they had to catch me in a hotel room at about six in the morning, Aussie time. Back in Maine, my parents just wrapped up that conversation about a week and a half ago.

For a world that’s so small, it sure seems big sometimes.

Maybe that thought crossed the minds of the old 19th century railroaders, who were largely responsible for establishing the early time zones used in adolescent America. A handful of semi-local time zones were in use before then -- like in southwest England, where it’s extremely important to know when to sip your daily tea -- but in the States, it was rail transport that changed everything. It’s important to keep strict and accurate time when you’re transporting dehydrated pig eyeballs from Baltimore to Los Angeles. If you’re a railroad company going by everyone’s wildly varying local times, you can’t exactly keep track of scheduling. It’s surprising more trains weren’t booked on the same rail heading in opposite directions. Can you imagine two trains colliding head-on, one carrying hog meat, the other toting scraps of iron? The whole scene would smell like burning motor oil and dead animals. At least you could use the track fire to cook the meat.

These “railfolk,” as I’ll affectionately call them, have been dealing with time zones for a long time. Being a jet-setting, transcontinental traveler is a newer beast, and it amplifies the whole effect just due to the sheer speed in which a person can zip from one coast to the other. Long-range ravel used to require months crammed into a stagecoach, and by the time you got to your destination, four family members and a pet dog had died and you were traveling with your aunt Evelyn and a crate of preserved beans. Plenty of time to get used to the whole sunrise/sunset dynamic. Now the same trip is a day’s travel, and it’s an unspeakable inconvenience not to have a pillow and an in-flight viewing of “The Peanuts Movie.” You simply step off a plane and the time, climate and culture are all radically different. It’s a special kind of whiplash brought on by physics and the trappings of advanced civilization.

Which brings us to this moment. I’m sitting in a conference room in Nevada at what’s supposed to be 9:15 in the morning, but my body knows the lie. With breakfast still gurgling in my belly, it’s saying, “Hey, isn’t time for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and an apple? Get your act together, fool!” Not that my body can always be trusted; it also seems to think that blueberry muffins and milkshakes constitute proper nutrition, and that beer is one of the major food groups. I take what my body says with a grain of salt. Which is another thing it likes.

I know what’ll quash its protestations, though: good ol’ Eastern Standard Time. It’s been said that home is not a location but a state of mind, and that’s mostly true, but my state of mind wants a siesta and a midday Facebook break. Travel is wonderful, and an experience necessary to a fully-rounded life. Yet what greater relief is there than stepping off that plane and feeling familiar ground beneath your feet?

Dorothy was right, man. There’s no place like home.

The ghost and Mr. Beer

There’s a band called Muse that’s become pretty popular over the past several years. They’re not really my cup of tea -- too much pop, to little grit and growl -- but every time the singer opens his mouth I have to smile, because his falsetto sounds like someone’s bad impression of a prototypical ghost.

Think Casper singing over bad rock music, only alive and with a crooked upper lip. That’s Muse in a nutshell.

The thought occurred to me as a friend was showing me smartphone video he took at a recent Muse concert in Boston. This particular “musing” (zing!) caught me off guard, because with the obvious exception of Halloween, I never think about ghosts. Ever. Not even when I’m watching old movies starring actors who have been dead longer than disco pants.

Because I don’t believe in them, see. I consider ghosts to be as fictional as Huckleberry Finn and bad doughnuts. A human invention no different than Willy Wonka. A myth.

Which isn’t to say they’re not cool. They are in fact quite pleasing, in a goosebumpy, flesh-crawly kind of way. Belief in ghosts dates back to ancient times, appearing in Homer’s “Odyssey” as well as the old Hebrew Bible, so the whole concept has a very old-world feel to it; when your imagination attempts to explain what’s going bump in the night, you’re tapping into something that has a lot of collective weight and human history behind it. There are times when I sort of wish they were indeed a real phenomenon, until I remember that fiction usually portrays them as menacing creatures prone to possessions and terrorizing. Then I realize they’re jerks and turn my attention to tangible concerns, like the guy who walks through downtown Portland with the bush-like Duck Dynasty beard and the “Gone Fishin’” trucker hat. He’s a lot scarier than any ol’ ghost, trust me.

I’ll say this: I sometimes miss believing.

Flash back about 20 years or so and I wasn’t such a skeptic. One February I was staying up late at night in my friend’s basement; basement hang-outs are how a lot of ghost stories start. We were celebrating his birthday with a small coterie of fellow dweebs. I say “dweebs” because our idea of a party was playing car racing games on a Playstation and depriving ourselves of sleep to the point of drooling delirium, fueling ourselves with case upon case of the highly-caffeinated soft drink Jolt Cola. Jolt Cola is also how a lot of ghost stories start.

The later it got, the loopier we became, and the more we started swapping stories about “things we’d seen” (or heard or felt). Those types of conversations always seem goofy during the light of day, slightly embarrassing in fact, but past the witching hour anything goes. One of us could have dropped the dubious revelation that we’d played gin rummy with the ghost of Sigmund Freud, and the rest of the gang would have stared at him believingly: “Yeah, man, I can totally see that happening!” Like, whoa. Far out, dude.

Approaching three in the morning, there was a collective sense that all of our respective skins were crawling at roughly the same intensity. Adding to the chill factor was a sliding glass door to an outdoor pool area, which showed us the stillborn night at its deadest and blackest. The tales were getting taller, our eyes a little wider. “Joe” remembered hearing the ghost of his grandmother traipsing across the living room carpet one wintry night. “Logan” thought he once had a sighting in an old New Hampshire graveyard.

As typically happens in these scenarios, we eventually fancied there were muted ghost sounds issuing from within that very house. This was the point at which fatigue and caffeine conspired to make our brains thrum like little window-mounted air conditioners. A creak from the floorboards above our heads and a dozen eyes all snapped to the ceiling, our breaths in silent limbo behind our lips. A hiss from the radiator and we flinched like startled cats. A faint sound of wood settling on the basement steps and we were all up on our feet, limbs akimbo, rushing to the stairwell to peek up at the heavily-shadowed kitchen door. And for a millisecond, we all could have sworn we saw a shape: a colorless, translucent old lady in an evening gown, silently looking back at us over her shoulder before dissipating in an ethereal, tea-kettle mist.

Did I mention we’d all eaten a ton of cake, too?

Tellingly, these “sightings” always take place when our minds are at their most impressionable. There’s a story my father loves to tell about a night when he arrived home late after closing up shop at the tavern he owned. Walking in at around 2 a.m., he noticed a man in the living room with his feet propped up on the recliner, watching an infomercial on television. Dad didn’t think much of it at first; my grandfather was known to pop in unexpectedly in those days and plop himself down in front of the boob tube, so it wasn’t an altogether alarming sight. But after packing away his things, my father approached the man, only to see his form slowly disappear, vanishing like water vapor -- leaving a propped-up footrest and a flickering TV screen as the only evidence he was there.

It’s a cool story. It’s a story you want to believe. But what Dad always leaves out is that he used to pound Heinekens by the case. You’d see some ghosts too if you had a 12-rack of suds in your gut.

I remain unflinching in my disbelief, but there’s a part of me that still hopes to see an apparition, draped in chains, leaning against a basement boiler or trudging through mud-black cemetery gates. If nothing else, it’d make for one hell of a story. In the meantime, there’s always Muse.

Toon goon

Perhaps the best feeling in the world is waking up late on a Saturday morning. Eggshell light trickles in through the scant slit in the curtains covering your bedroom window. You flex and stretch the muscles in each limb, one at a time, making sure all systems are fully operational. You sigh. There’s no hurry. You’re not working today, there’s nowhere to be, and there’s nothing to do, really, except feed the cat and eat Fruity Pebbles until your stomach feels like a giant sand-filled snow globe.

The second best feeling in the world is flicking on the TV to catch your Saturday morning cartoons.

And there’s a limited shelf life to this particular pleasure, because past a certain point, cartoons seem about as childish as pacifiers and picture books. The feeling starts to creep in once your age hits double digits, and by the time you’re in your teens, you’re horrified that you could ever endure this saccharine-sweet fare. Talking chipmunks and ducks? Cats that swordfight with ghost pirates? What is this, some feverish malaria hallucination?

Oh, but think of how glorious those days were, when a flying dog with a cape was all you needed to get through a morning. That brief window seems increasingly distant as you hit various stages of life -- college, career, family, mid-life crisis, AARP. It’s entirely possible you have young children at the moment, and now Saturday mornings are all about them and their particular viewing habits. Is there any jealousy there? A feeling that you wouldn’t mind swapping places with them for a couple of hours? These are the kinds of questions I ask myself sometimes when I wonder what it would be like to have kids. Then I realize I have the freedom to curse really loudly and drink milk from the carton and I stop wondering.

Cartoons are created for all ages and demographics now; “The Simpsons” injected its turbo juice into that trend. Yet they hold a special appeal for kids, and it’s easy to see why. If adults are all about hard-headed practicalities -- bills, groceries, premium cable packages with special nudie channels -- then children are all about escapism and fantasy. That’s why girls hold tea parties with button-eyed ponies and boys break lamps re-enacting scenes from “Iron Man.”

Animated offerings tap into that mentality because they’re not confined to any real-world rules. Any cockeyed whimsy can serve as a perfectly acceptable plotline. Let’s say you’re staring at stormclouds one listless Sunday and an idea for a story pops into your head: A powerful king, who also happens to be a giant mutant iguana, passes a law in the animal kingdom prohibiting all species from dancing to Billy Joel songs. This is troubling because Billy Joel is extremely popular among most animals, especially manatees, who can’t dance but are obsessed with intricate piano arrangements. Several animal species band together to form a resistance, and attempt to take down the mutant iguana king with a combination of political subterfuge and mixed martial arts, taught to them by a robe-wearing cheetah who’s allergic to waffles and chain smokes Pall Malls.

This couldn’t be a live-action series without some major changes. Animals have difficulty delivering lines since they’re mostly dumb and can’t talk, so instead of an interspecies political movement, you’d have to re-envision that part of the story -- maybe have disparate tribes on a remote island join forces to stop the evil island king, who can still be a mutant but is probably not an iguana. And the martial arts master couldn’t be a cheetah, which is vexing, since in a perfect world all martial arts masters would be cheetahs.

So the whole thing would be one big compromise, a watered-down shadow of your original conception. It’ll be lame. It’ll be weak. It’ll draw a zillion viewers in the premier.

Make it an animated affair, however, and you wouldn’t have to change a thing. You could make it even more outlandish, perhaps throw in a kamikaze pilot who’s also a hard-drinking hippopotamus. Or a general who can’t salute his troops because he’s a Beluga whale.

Two zillion viewers and a line of action figures and bedsheets. That’s my prediction. Only don’t steal my idea, ‘cause I’ll totally sue.

When I really stop to think about it -- which is probably a bad idea, mental health-wise -- the fare I watched on those distant Saturday mornings wasn’t that much crazier than the mutant iguana king premise. There was “Garfield and Friends,” a show about a housecat who eats mutton chops with his hands; “Ducktales,” about a wealthy, monocle-wearing bird who dives daily into a giant bin filled with gold; “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” about reptiles who gobble pizza and stab robots in the neck; and “Talespin,” about a bear who’s a bush pilot running an air cargo freight business. The common theme among all these shows, if they can be said to have one, is that they feature cartoon animals who do things real-world animals can’t, which means the creators were either loaded with psychedelics or they understood children very deeply. Kids love animals and they love adventure. Like chocolate and vanilla (or chocolate and anything), it’s a winning combination.

Talking to various parents, I can tell that not all adults have lost their appreciation for goofy kids’ fare. Some moms and dads are as obsessed with animated princesses and penguins as their offspring, and this is heartening. It means they’re still in touch with something close to their core. People are like Russian nesting dolls -- the older we get, the more layers we add to ourselves, and the more our gooey centers get obfuscated and buried, lost to time. Those of us who retain a kinship with anthropomorphic ducks have a pipeline to those first couple of layers, which for me were calcified during languid Saturday mornings, wrapped in bedsheets, a remote control in hand. Would the heroes in a half-shell defeat the dreaded Shredder? Probably, but I’d follow their journey anyway, submitting myself to a waking, fantastical dream.

Hey, maybe the iguana king is a fire breather! I can smell the licensing rights already.

Field of dweebs

Political commentator and consultant Paul Begala once said that politics is “show business for ugly people.” I want to send this guy a cake.

His observation has been true for decades now, but it wasn’t always the case. When this quaint little republic was born in earnest, politics were a straightforward affair: You elected a person, they were your representative, and they voted the way you wanted, or else you tossed the bum out on his pleated-pantalooned keester. Easy peasy, pass the guacamole.

When money corrupted the political system, with Congress capitulating to corporate cash rather than its constituents, it turned into something else entirely. America ceased to be a functioning democracy, and the political arena became a circus sideshow of posturing, preening nincompoops spouting any number of substanceless platitudes to keep themselves locked firm in the public eye. Politics was the country’s first reality show, only there’s probably more wit in an airing of “The Bachelor” than there is in your typical presidential debate.

Clowns, the lot of them. Which brings me a sick kind of joy.

Anyone got any popcorn?

Were I in any way a decent human being, I’d be deeply concerned about the current race. Brow furrowed, I’d watch in consternation as one brain-damaged chimpanzee after another made rounds of ridiculous promises while the spittle spewed from their lips. “I’ll build a giant, gold-plated, diamond-encrusted wall along the border and have it paid for by the three-eyed bounty hunters from Gorgon-5, who owe us a favor!” “I’ll scare off the terrorists by constructing an 80-foot statue of a ruler-wielding Catholic nun shaking her head disapprovingly!” Sure, sure. And I’ll grow wings and poop Lucky Charms.

It’s not the promises themselves that are alarming this go-’round, though. It’s the blithering lobotomy patients who are making them. This election cycle’s contestants boast all the intellectual heft of an old toaster oven. Forget their policy proposals and whether you agree with them; the views of Candidate X might align perfectly with your own, but none of that matters if he lacks the cognitive wherewithal to tie his own shoes. History is littered with idiots, but never before have so many of them been in serious contention for the nation’s top post. Watching them jockey for position is like seeing a litter of cats scrambling over themselves to suckle at their mother’s teat, except cats have better foreign policy proposals.

This is what passes for my incisive political analysis, by the way. A Peabody Award can’t be far behind.

So this is who we are now, a nation that rewards dunderheads. Unfortunate to consider that this isn’t overly surprising. We’ve been tending in this direction for a while now, what with our proclivity to scoff at expertise and reward those who “shoot from the hip” and “tell it like it is.” If a scientist devotes the entirety of his or her professional career to studying climate change, amasses decades’ worth of fact-based evidence, and then makes an announcement that human activity is threatening habitation on the planet, the public reaction is, “Pfft! What does Miss Know-It-All Science Lady know about the issue? Keep reading books, nerd!” Meanwhile, a know-nothing politician with tangible interests in the oil industry tells the public that solar energy is a threat to jobs, and the reaction is, “Hey, ‘jobs!’ I know that word! I admire your lack of education, sir. Give ‘em hell!”

We live in a topsy-turvy bizarro world where right is wrong, up is down, and Pauly Shore movies are nuanced and insightful. Historically, great civilizations have sometimes tripped over their own shoelaces on the road to progress; western Europe had to slog through the Dark Ages before the Renaissance restored public faith in art and science. Take a look at the current landscape, though, and it’s natural to wonder if we can find a way out of this particular rut. Our fractured leadership reflects a fractured society in which everyone is entrenched in their own niche. Instead of coming together every four years to collectively choose a national direction, everyone identifies with a sub-group, or a sub-sub-group, and sequesters themselves in their own comfortable little pocket. We’re like moles who burrow into the ground and never come to the surface to compare notes with the other moles. Not that moles keep notes. They lack opposable thumbs and have brains the size of Fruit Loops. But enough about moles.

This fragmentation was happening long before the Internet, but virtual culture has taken the political process by the scruff of its neck and held it up to a funhouse mirror. There’s a home for just about any mirco-opinion that can be conceived. There are online communities dedicated to papier mache hats, for Pete’s sake. You can spend hours on a message board swapping recipes for lentil soup. Heck, even Mike Huckabee supporters can find solace in each others’ bits and bytes, and Huckabee has fewer fans than the L.A. Clippers. They’re a basketball team, by the way.

Now it would be pointless to rant and rave without offering some kind of solution, so here it is: Place the presidential contenders in front of a panel of judges so we can watch them get blasted for their inability to sing “Even Flow” by Pearl Jam. Then make them go through a Gladiator-style obstacle course in which they have to use monkey bars to span a 10-foot-deep pit populated with fire-breathing alligators. When the field gets whittled down to two, they can arm-wrestle for the Oval Office live on pay-per-view television.

It’s not the most civilized means of picking a commander-in-chief. But considering the divided and contentious race we’ve seen so far, it seems like the next logical step.

Like an eagle

In “Fly Like an Eagle,” Steve Miller sang the line, “Time keeps on slippin’, slippin, slippin’ into the future.” I’m not sure if that qualifies as poetry, necessarily, since one “slippin’” would probably have sufficed. But let’s give him a pass, seeing as he was probably loaded with more pharmaceuticals than a Rite Aid.

It’s not quite an accurate statement either, since the future slips toward us, becoming the present for one fleeting moment before receding into history. Still, one gets his point. It’s slippery and slithery and doesn’t stay in our hands when we try to grasp it -- like a wet snake, only not as gross.

That’s why photography has always been so fascinating to me. In a photograph, “now” is always “now.”

Most people think of time in concrete, practical terms: It’s two o’clock, squash is next Thursday, Lindsay’s birthday is in April. We’ve taken an intangible aspect of physics and everyday existence and given it size and shape, our meager little means of exactifying the vagaries of sunrise and sunset. Time’s not as intimidating when it’s divided up into segments. It makes more intuitive sense. Meanwhile, it gives us a means by which we can file and sort and contextualize our individual histories, so when we capture a moment in a photograph, we can can stick it in a folder on our computers labeled “June 1997” and establish a reference point -- sort of a yardstick by which we measure progress and change. Photographs reveal the truth of a moment: That each is one of many in a long, long procession, all of them unique and unrepeatable. Here and then gone. Forever lost, but forever ours.

Not to get all “Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy” on y’all.

It was a long time before I thought of photos in that way. As a kid, I just liked taking pictures. My first camera was an old film job geared toward children; in the bottom-right corner of every image was a cartoon imprint of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, so if you weren’t careful with your framing, your cousin’s face would be partially obscured by a vein-laced bicep and a set of nunchucks. The picture quality was horrible, made all the worse by my subject matter, which at that time tended toward piles of plastic video game cartridges and unflattering butt-shots of slumbering cats. Those old images aren’t what you’d call “art,” but they revealed what was important to me at the time, and so they work as a kind of archaeology exhibit. “World Through the Eyes of an Obsessive-Compulsive Introvert.” I can see the lines forming.

In college I got my first digital. Giddy up.

Young whippersnappers might take it for granted, but what a digital camera allows you to do is essentially curate your own history. A crappy shot instantaneously announces itself as crappy, so you hit a button and poof, into the ether. Folded into in time’s great expanse like most other moments. It’s the proverbial double-edged sword -- you end up with a better collection of photos, but you lose little imperfect moments that comprise the discordant music of a life. Maybe self-editing isn’t the best way to get at the truth of time. Maybe it’s all about volume.

Were you to glimpse the contents of my hard drive, you’d think two things: Wow, this guy listens to way too much heavy metal; and wow, this guy’s got a lot of photos. Folders organized first by year, then by month, stretching back to the days when I had hair and an extra chin. As soon as that first digital was in my hands, every microscopic happenstance, every parking lot conversation and board game melee, became camera fodder. Over the years, it became the record of a life, more revealing than any honey-tongued diary confessional. Time compressed into bits and bytes. Heady stuff.

And what it illustrates is that, whether we’re recording it or not, the human experience of time boils down to nothing more than the assemblage of experiences. Comprise enough of them -- slam your hand in a car door, attend your daughter’s high school graduation, see Motley Crue’s farewell tour -- and brothers and sisters, you’ve got a life.

Friends and me, 2004.  I'm the dude in the Metallica shirt.

At my good friend Rick's wedding.  I'm on the far right.

I was a Journal Tribune photographer at one time. In September 2011, I drove down to McDougal Orchards in Springvale to grab images for a feature story on apple picking season. That kind of stuff is always a crapshoot; sometimes you come across someone doing something interesting, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes they don’t mind being photographed, sometimes they do. Sometimes you feel like a nut … well, you know.

Luck was plentiful that day. Bounding through fields of late-summer green was a boy no older than four, decked out in a red Spider-Man shirt and toting a cloth sack filled to overflowing with Cortlands, the apples of his eye. I submitted myself to the necessary awkward moment with his parents -- “Gee, can I photograph your son? Thanks a bundle!” -- and set myself up at the base of a tree, where fresh fruit awaited his eager, sticky fingers.

It only took one shot, That’s all it ever takes. He reached out for an apple, I hit the shutter, and voila, there’s your front page. I don’t know if it’s necessarily the best shot I’ve ever taken, but there’s something about the composition, the splash of primary colors, and the look of unmitigated joy on the boy’s face that make it a favorite of mine.

Forever four.

Strange to think of that boy now. In the intervening years he’s more than doubled his lifespan, growing and changing and no doubt morphing into an altogether different person, miles from the diminutive bundle whose scant body weight was balanced by a sackful of fruit. He’s in the second or third grade, perhaps. He’s starting to identify his strengths and weaknesses, the things that define him. Possibly he has a crush on a girl.

None of that will ever be known to me. All I have from him is that one moment, innocent and seemingly inconsequential, preserved for eternity in the lens of a battered Nikon. He’ll be four years old until the earth is dust, when everyone who’s ever lived has returned to a cold and impartial cosmos.

A speck of time to remind us of its unrelenting nature -- slippin’, slippin, slippin’ into the future.

Ballin'

Balls! What a concept.

Balls for baseball, balls for pool, balls for football and basketball too. Balls for cricket and tennis and bowling, balls used in golf that just keep on a-rolling. Rugby’s got balls, and so does lacrosse, so if you don’t love balls, then dude, it’s your loss.

It’s an amazing invention that no one ever talks about.

Why should they? It’s not like the ball is a hot new innovation. Certain ancient Egyptian monuments depict people playing some sort of ball game (I’d squibble my gizzards if it was soccer), and in Homer’s epic poem “The Odyssey,” the protagonist spots a character named Nausicaa playing ball with a bunch of maidens, thus laying the foundation for the modern WNBA. So it’s been around.

What’s more, most of are introduced to the whole ball concept while we’re barely old enough to make a play for grandpa’s nose hairs. When considering buying a toy for a pint-sized youngun’, you really can’t go wrong with a brightly colored ball of some kind, providing it’s not small enough to be swallowed or inserted into any bodily orifices. This gift idea also works across species, including dogs, cats and for some strange reason, seals, who handle balls better than most of the starters on the New England Patriots’ receiving corps.

Which means we shrug when we see balls of most varieties. Spotting one is a non-event, inspiring exactly zero “Dear Diary” entries. Yet most of us have at least one ball story.

Here’s one. In high school I belonged to a clique of music dorks and drama nerds with the combined athleticism of a stoned sea urchin. Every once in awhile, when we weren’t rehearsing showtunes or spending allowance money on vanilla lattes (a rowdy bunch we were), we’d head down to the local ballfield to play pickup games of softball, which typically devolved into four-man batting practices as the outfield trickled home to solve algebra problems and apply acne cream. On one such outing, I found myself locked into a rare groove: While I generally couldn’t hit a grizzly bear with a bat the size of a solar panel, I was seeing the ball that day with eerie clarity. We had long given up on trying to complete an actual game, so I settled into the batter’s box, eyeing underhand pitches from a classmate and drilling them one after another into a summer field of purest green.

I got cocky. Big mistake. Because balls are unpredictable, see. Their spherical shape gives them a tendency to spin and curve in unanticipated ways, and only a veteran batsman would have known, with near 100-percent certainty, which pitches were too dangerous to try to pummel. After crack-whipping about a dozen consecutive softballs into the center field expanse -- and feeling very Ted Williams-like in the process --  the pitcher lobbed me a meatball that trailed to the inside, arcing in toward my hands.

Had I been playing a for-real game, I would have taken it for ball one. But I was on a roll. In unconscious imitation of the Incredible Hulk, I wanted to smash, smash, smash. So I swung the bat, and instead of hitting the ball flush with the barrel, I nicked it with the handle, which normally would have resulted in a foul tip, some bruised knuckles, and a string of expletives that could have melted the chrome of a Cadillac fender.

Instead, the ball’s spin and trajectory met the angle of the bat handle awkwardly. It caromed off my Louisville Slugger and hit me square in the face.

An inch or two to the left and it would have broken my nose. It was a softball, remember, meaning it had roughly the size and heft of a small dog. And my nose is a pretty big target. Long and beaklike, it’s a miracle it hasn’t gotten clipped by a passing bus.

As it happened, the ball slammed into my right cheek, just below the eye. I wore thick glasses at the time, and the right lens was caught by the force of the projectile and driven into the flesh just below the cheekbone.

Four stitches. Thanks a lot, ball.

Another type of ball or spherical object and it may not have done quite as much damage. If I’d gotten hit with a golf or ping-pong ball it would have caromed off my glasses with a cute little ping sound and that would have been the end of it. For that matter, if it had been a clown nose, I wouldn’t have felt it at all. But it would definitely have raised the question of why I was standing in a field hitting clown noses with a baseball bat.

I like to envision what the future may hold; you could call speculation a bit of a hobby of mine. Yet predicting the ball’s future is nearly impossible. The concept may be old, but specific balls for specific things are new -- your baseballs and basketballs and American footballs. These sporting implements couldn’t possible exist before the inception of their respective sports, and those sports were all invented within the last couple hundred years. The oldest of them, baseball, is still younger than the Liberty Bell, which in turn is much younger than ancient Egyptian civilization, which in its turn is only slightly older than Larry King. So over the next 200 years, it’s possible we’ll be filling stadiums for sports that haven’t even been invented yet, played by balls that are beyond the scope of our imaginations. Heat-seeking balls that change course in mid-air. Balls that sprout wings and fly. Super-intelligent balls that can avoid volleyball spikes and then beat you at chess. Anything’s possible.

So simple and perfect, the ball. So versatile. Just be sure you don’t take one in the face. It’s never a good time.