Two Different Phenomena.

(Recommended listening before reading:  Porcelina of the Vast Oceans by Smashing Pumpkins and Stumbleine by Smashing Pumpkins)

[Gulls squawk in the distance, occasionally, throughout.]

Porcelina:  I’ll say this much – the chef here can cook a filet of salmon.

Stumbleine:  Fillet.

Porcelina:  You mean stuff it?  With what?

Stumbleine:  No, fillet.  F-I-L-L-E-T.  Not “filet.”

Porcelina:  What?

Stumbleine:  “Filet” is usually reserved for French cuisine.  Fillet – don’t groan at me!  Fillet is the more general term, although the Americans tend to use them pretty interchangeably.

Porcelina:  [Porcelina sighs.]  You’re a pain in the ass.

Stumbleine:  That’s what little sisters are for.

Porcelina:  Heh.  You still have to learn to let go of the handlebars and enjoy things here.  The handlebars, y’know?  “Let the waters kiss and transmutate these leaden grudges into gold.”

Stumbleine:  I was born listless – restless.  Always have been, always will be.

Porcelina:  With the storm cloud over your head.

[Porcelina sits back in her chair and looks around the small restaurant, sighing again before returning her gaze to her half-finished plate.]

Porcelina:  It’s because they’re from the North Atlantic.  They get them sent here fresh from waters that are barely above freezing.  It neutralizes that funky fish taste.

Stumbleine:  You think this little bloke knew he’d end up filleted over wild rice and three different kinds of fried tomato slices next to grilled asparagus?

Porcelina:  Makes you wonder.  I’d only take points off because he was farm-raised, not properly caught out at sea. 

Stumbleine:  Fuck me; how can you tell?

Porcelina:  It costs the skin and muscle some color and makes the filet fattier.

Stumbleine:  Fillet.  Also, really?

Porcelina:  Hey, here’s one to spur your sense of curiosity.  In Mexico in September, it rained fish.

Stumbleine:  It what?

Porcelina:  You heard me.  There have actually been more than a dozen recorded incidents of animals raining from the sky in the last 150 years alone.  Mostly it’s been small fish, but there have also been tadpoles –

Stumbleine:  Eww.

Porcelina:  - spiders –

Stumbleine:  Fuck that.

Porcelina:  - and jellyfish.

Stumbleine:  Right, jellyfish I could believe.

Porcelina:  Because that’s a lot more logical than the others…?

Stumbleine:  No, because jellyfish are so lightweight.  They’re like 95% water aren’t they?

Porcelina:  97.  Spiders are light too.

Stumbleine:  Alright, but if I admit it could rain spiders I’ll never leave my flat again.  Jellyfish can sting, but they’re bigger and less gross.

Porcelina:  Okay.  So why do jellies make sense?

Stumbleine:  You and I know better than anyone that clouds and tornadoes pick up droplets of water from lakes and oceans and shit to make rain elsewhere, yeah?  I just think of jellyfish as hitching a ride up and raining down with the rest of the storm –

Porcelina:  Like the baby spiders at the end of Charlotte’s Web?

Stumbleine:  - Shut it! - wherever the storm makes landfall.

Porcelina:  Right in your backyard.  Bath, 1894.

Stumbleine:  Of course.

[Porcelina laughs.]

Porcelina:  But out of all the animal rainfall occurrences, nobody’s ever reported seeing any wildlife traveling skyward from these “lakes and oceans and shit.”  Not even the jellies.

Stumbleine:  Just because nobody sees something doesn’t mean it’s not happened.

Porcelina:  Tree falling in the woods, sister – wonders of Mother Nature, diamonds from pressed coal. 

Stumbleine: Are you working your way back round to selling me on these immortal jellyfish again?

Porcelina:  Turritopsis Dohrnii?  Strewth, I’d forgotten about them.  It’s true though!

Stumbleine:  Porce.

Porcelina:  They’re just like the caterpillar-butterfly life cycle only instead of offspring –

Stumbleine:  Porce…

Porcelina:  - They just decide to return to infancy themselves!  How did they figure it out, y’know?  And why haven’t any other species?

Stumbleine:  Porcelina!  Let’s get back on track.

Porcelina:  Ok.  But they did an Octonauts episode on the dohrnii you should watch.  Anyway.  So, play along.  If animals are raining down from the sky 15 kilometers and not being sucked up by rain clouds first, where else are they coming from?

Stumbleine:  You don’t think… [Stumbleine casts her eyes upwards towards the ceiling.]  Exodus, chapter 8?

Porcelina:  You said it.  Or, hey, when’s the last time you saw Xolotl?

[Stumbleine scoffs.]

Stumbleine:  Don’t remind me – family reunion in Seattle.  Has he still got dog’s breath?

Porcelina:  That’s not nice.

Stumbleine [playing with her food]:  Speaking of smog, you know I’ve always wished I could’ve –

Porcelina: - seen the stars on a clear night before the Age of Man?

Stumbleine:  An hour we’ve been together and I’m already repeating myself?

Porcelina:  You mentioned it last time.

Stumbleine:  It still stands.  I can’t fathom looking up and seeing 3,000 stars and the band of the Milky Way.  It must’ve been as bright as daylight.

Porcelina:  It wasn’t all that.  Quit fidgeting.

Stumbleine [setting her fork down firmly]:  You’re just saying that to make me feel better.

Porcelina:  I am not.

Stumbleine:  Let’s talk about something else.

Porcelina:  Okay…

Stumbleine:  Well don’t sound so excited, P.

Porcelina:  What did you want to talk about?

Stumbleine:  Well, I’ll likely be thinking about animal rain until the next time I see you, so let me think of something to blow your mind with.

Porcelina [laughing]:  Sounds good.

Stumbleine:  What do you know about Fibonacci?

Porcelina:  Isn’t that the place on Telegraph Hill with the amazing super-thin-crust pizza?

Stumbleine:  No, you bitch! [Stumbleine laughs.]  That’s Baonecci.  Fibonacci was a 13^th-century mathematician from Pisa who published the Liber Abaci.

Porcelina [taking a sip of her water]:  What did the Liber Abaci say?

Stumbleine:  Fibonacci wrote this generation-by-generation formula of rabbit breeding in optimal or conditions – y’know, “How quickly could rabbits multiply if you work the duration of carrying a pregnancy to term and if each baby is the right gender to have it away with another rabbit?”

Porcelina:  Was the answer “As quick as a bunny?”

Stumbleine: …Right.  The sequence is that each new number is the sum of the two numbers before it.  You start with one and one, which add up to two.  Then the latest two numbers are the second “one” and the two.  One and two makes three.  Two and three is five –

Porcelina:  And three plus five is eight.

Stumbleine:  Yes it is.  1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34…

Porcelina:  I got it; I got it.

Stumbleine:  Stay with me.  Divide each new number by the preceding number.  2 over 1 is 2, 3 over 2 is 1.5, right?  5 over 3 is 1 and two-thirds.  The calculator on my phone says 8 divided by 5 is…

Porcelina:  1.6.  So?

Stumbleine:  Okay, so let’s skip ahead.  34 over 21 is 1.619 and some change.  The further you go in the sequence, the closer you get to the following: the ratio of the final number to its predecessor is one and six hundred eighteen one-thousandths to one.  That’s 1.618:1, okay?  Remember that.  Or write it down on this ridiculous paper tablecloth with the ridiculous crayon the server used to write his name.

Porcelina [writing]:  You mean it gets even more interesting?

Stumbleine:  Shush.  This ratio – 1.618:1 – has become known over the last 700 years as “The Golden Ratio.”  Give me that crayon.  If you lay it out with geometry, you draw a sort of wide rectangle like a film screen, like this.  This is The Golden Rectangle.  Then look at the top and bottom edges running right to left and draw a vertical line, from top to bottom, just to the right of center like this…so it’s cut up into two bits.  The left bit is a perfect square, yeah?  And the right bit is a tall rectangle instead of a wide one.

Porcelina:  Maybe not the way you draw…

Stumbleine:  Well ideally, for fuck’s sake.  So the distance across the whole original wide rectangle – the square on the left plus the tall rectangle on the right – compared to the distance across the leftmost segment – the square – is The Golden Ratio.

Porcelina:  1.618, which is the “all the way across,” to 1, which is from the bottom left corner to the vertical drawn line just to the right of center.

Stumbleine:  Yes.  Now, the smaller, tall rectangle on the right here should be the exact same proportion as the original wide rectangle, just smaller and rotated one-fourth around to the left.  So then you start again.  Draw a horizontal line near the top of this smaller set to make a wee little sideways rectangle and rotate.  Then make a vertical line on the left, and so on …connect the corners with an arc and you get The Golden Spiral.

Porcelina:  Okay.  So you’ve got this nifty rectangle-ish spirally thing.  What does it do besides winding around down into the infinitesimal?

Stumbleine:  It makes for a quaint doodle when you’re on the telephone, but that’s the lot, really.

Porcelina:  …Seriously?

Stumbleine:  You should see your face!  Just taking the piss, darling.  If you measured your height from the top of your head to the bottom of your foot, then divided it by your height from your bellybutton to the bottom of your foot –

Porcelina:  I don’t have a bellybutton.

Stumbleine:  - If you did, do you know which proportion they’d be in?

Porcelina:  1.618 to 1?

Stumbleine:  You know your friend the nautilus?  Cephalopod mollusk, white and orange-brown spiral shell, little mandibles for a mouth, spits air bubbles out and swims backwards?  How does it grow, then?

Porcelina:  Every year it makes a new chamber in its shell, bigger than the last.

Stumbleine:  How much bigger?  About 1.618 times bigger?

Porcelina:  Shut up!

[The check arrives.  Stumbleine looks slyly away; Porcelina retrieves her checkbook and pays cash.]

Stumbleine:  If you look at the nautilus from the side, you could lay the Golden Spiral over it perfectly.  Every nautilus in your seven seas has got a perfectly Golden Spiral-shaped shell.

Porcelina:  What else?

Stumbleine:  You name it, you’ll find the Fibonacci Sequence.  Sunflowers, pine cones, the length of most humans’ fingers and arms and legs, The Last Supper, da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man,” most music, Jaws, Stagecoach – why do you think most films are shown on a wide screen in cinemas in an aspect ratio of 16:9?  The eye just naturally responds better to wide rectangles.  The whole reason televisions were square-shaped for 50 years was only to fit in the corner of the bloody living room.  It’s an half-century marketing mistake is what it is.  Good thing the high-definition sets have got it right.

Porcelina:  I love Jaws.

Stumbleine:  No shit.  Imagine the entire length of the film runs from the bottom left corner of our Golden Rectangle to the bottom right.  You know what happens at the mark where you draw the vertical line?  [Stumbleine pauses for effect.]  You see the fuckin’ shark for the first time.

Porcelina:  So what is it – the ratio, the rectangle, the spiral?  How can it pop up in so many independent and different systems – unless everyone’s using it on purpose in secret without telling anybody?

Stumbleine:  Only The Battleship Potemkin and the song “Lateralus” from that album you quoted earlier have been proven to be intentional.  As for the rest… [Stumbleine rises from her seat.]  I call it “The Fingerprint.”  Not sure of whom.  Think about it and get back to me next time I see you.

Porcelina:  To be continued.

[Without another word, Stumbleine smiles and leaves her older sister behind.  Porcelina spends only a minute staring at the hastily-sketched rectangle and the spiral within it on their paper tablecloth before walking inconspicuously out of the seafront dining establishment and diving back into the Atlantic.  Her physical form thins and once again becomes one with all the waters covering nearly three-fourths of Earth’s surface, as she has for countless ages.  She knows that her sister is, at the same time, slowly dissipating throughout the air into eight billion specks, each worming its way into the ear of a human and alighting in it a sense of restlessness and insatiable endeavor.  And these eldritch sisters dream of two different phenomena.]

National Book Lovers' Day.

I've only learned in the last 20 minutes that there's such a thing as National Book Lovers' Day, but it has made me reflect on my history with reading and writing, so I wanted to spend a bit of time today discussing it.

Input (a love letter, not a credentials list):  I started reading at the age of two, and by the time I reached first grade I was reading at a college level.  I read Michael Crichton and Stephen King and Stephen Hawking, John Keats and Edgar Allan Poe and Frankenstein and Dracula and J.R.R. Tolkien and Isaac Asimov and John Steinbeck  Then when I was 13 and living on Maui, one of my most beloved teachers introduced me to Neil Gaiman, who quickly became my favorite author and comics writer (although I'd also become enamored with the comics of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison and Katsuhiro Otomo).  I sat and absorbed George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway (of whom I'm still not a fan), F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ralph Ellison and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Paradise Lost and T.S. Eliot and William Faulkner.  At some point in high school I went through a Noam Chomsky phase (because, hey, who doesn't?) and gobbled down the Beat Generation as quickly as I could get my hands on it - my friend Jimmy Campbell was so entranced with Kerouac's The Dharma Bums after I loaned it to him that he started buying and carrying around five copies of it at a time, giving it to friends as gifts for no reason other than its potential influence on them.  Around this time I also started my collections of Chuck Palahniuk (whose nonfiction collection Stranger than Fiction influenced my first book, 100,000 Years in Detention) and HP Lovecraft.  I read Ernie Pyle and Hunter S. Thompson and Jonathan Swift and I decided I was going to major in journalism, so I did.

College introduced me to the works of David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell and The Best American Short Stories anthologies and The Epic of Son-Jara and John Locke and Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Journey to the West and Benjamin Franklin.  I dropped my bullshit veneer of tough guy machismo that got me through the jungle of high school and I finally read Virginia Woolf, Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman, Ursula K. LeGuin, Maya Angelou and Zora Neale Hurston.  It wasn't until adulthood that I really fell in love with David Mitchell and Philip K. Dick and Cormac McCarthy and Koji Suzuki, but they and every writer previously mentioned have invaluably influenced me as an author, a journalist, a reader, a father, a husband, a son and a friend.  For example, I first read McCarthy's The Road in the back room of a Hot Topic I was running when my wife was six months pregnant with our daughter and it completely changed my outlook on parenting.  Growing up in white suburban Illinois I rarely saw any institutionalized racism, but reading Ellison's Invisible Man and Richard Wright's Native Son and the speeches of Dr. King began to open my eyes to it at a young age.  I learned to break rules and how objectively ridiculous we all are from Hunter S. Thompson and Chuck Palahniuk, and that plenty of great fiction begins with a simple "What if?" question from Neil Gaiman.  Great literature affects us, opens our eyes to worlds we didn't know existed, becomes a potpourri of compassion and thought, puts our imagination into overdrive.  A regular reader can live 1,000 lives in every era of history and on every planet in the cosmos.  When people tell me they don't read, I feel bad for them.  Instead, I hear them discuss hours a day spent with reality television, but with the same anger and frustration and derision as politics or incompetent colleagues, and I'm too afraid of sounding snooty to ask why they'd devote so much time to making themselves miserable.

Output (a learning experience, not a resumé):  The other side of the reading coin is writing.  I started writing typical angsty teenage bullshit when I was 13 - two-paragraph flash fiction imitating David Lynch about people vanishing into thin air or finding dead bodies in abandoned houses.  A friend told me to keep writing, and a few years later he told me I seemed to be on to something.  I was incredibly fortunate to have "found my voice" by my second year of college, thanks in no small part to the authors I'd read by then (see? I told you there'd be a point to this!).  Armed with a few tricks I'd inferred from Palahniuk, Sedaris, Thompson and Gaiman, I spent my final two years of college exclusively in literature and journalism classes, hammering away at keyboards in my dorm and college library.  I took British Lit, American Lit, Media Ethics, Feature Writing, News Writing, Creative Writing, Creative Nonfiction, Interviewing Skills, Photojournalism, Grammar and Editing, Page Layout and Design, Photo Editing, Copy Editing and Journalism Law.  Two professors set the bar high for me and didn't let me slack, which was bad news for Party Jonny and Girl-Seeking Jonny but good news for Everything Else Jonny.  I doubled down and tried twice as hard for their classes (and, eventually by habit, all my other classes) as I ever had and I walked the line in cap and gown with a 3.4 cumulative GPA and half of my first book.

So here's what I did and why.  I finished my first book around the birth of our daughter in Spring 2010.  A collection of silly and sad true short stories about me growing up as a geek, 100,000 Years in Detention is about 38,000 words of NPR-inspired self-deprecating Americana.  The day I sent its manuscript off for print I started working on my sophomore project, Penny Cavalier - a year-long investigative journalism project (thank you, diploma!) about "real-life superheroes," people who dress up in costume and fight crime for a living.  At what I thought was around the halfway point in my book, I watched a bizarre maelstrom of events unfold among my interview subjects and their peers that included jealousy, mistrust and sabotage.  I asked my brother for advice and he said "Spend a month away from it, come back and work whatever Jonny magic you do with all your shit and finish it."  During that month off I reread Heart of Darkness and rewatched Apocalypse Now Redux and framed the book around my parallel experiences starting as a window or passive character who is pulled into involvement in the story.  Once I had my outline, I sat and wrote the book in four weekends from cover to cover, working for 16 hours a day each Saturday and Sunday in April 2011.

A phone call with a photographer I know in New York turned into a two-day visit to Centralia, Pennsylvania, which itself turned into a 10,000-word feature essay called DisasterLand: Centralia, complete with beautiful pictures of the abandoned coal mining town that inspired the film Silent Hill.  Part narrative nonfiction, part geology lesson, part local history, it eventually got the attention and approval of both Konami Europe and Konami UK.  In an effort to write video games off my taxes for 18 months, I wrote my longest geek nonfiction project to date, The Broken Paragon, a collection of essays on video games and the gaming industry.  Using my modest experience as a reader and writer of academic essays in college, as well as the Feature Writing class I took, I sought to bridge the gap of casual reading and games studies to give gamers something new to think about and non-gamers an easy entry point to the art form.

Then came Fogworld.  I've always loved themes of isolation and lawlessness in fiction, so somewhere between Fallout 3, The Mist, Lord of the Flies, Waterworld, Mad Max, Metro 2033 and The Last of Us, I IM'ed my college roommates one day and asked "What if (thank you Neil Gaiman) we had to live way above the surface of the Earth?  Like in skyscraper penthouses or on the backs of enormous creatures?  I'd need something to drive us away from ground level though."  So I decided on a poisonous fog, and I wanted to see the project done so badly that I decided to write my first sci-fi novel, Wandering City Blues.  Set 99 years after a red-orange fog (which carries an incurable respiratory illness) blankets the Earth and mankind has left the surface permanently, WCB is ultimately a noir-inspired murder mystery set on five of the 13 colossi on which mankind has built cities to escape the fog.  The pain of it was making every single thing in the book (aside from the titans) be 100% believable.  I spent up to 60 hours a week for four months researching everything from renewable food and energy sources to cigarette substitutes, various methods of fire-building without matches or lighters or trees, catching and filtering rainwater, transferring from one colossus to another, rope-climbing gear, consequences of incest and cannibalism, distance in miles between over 100 cities across the world, growing fruit and vegetables in soil substitutes, indoor gardening, aeroponic and hydroponic gardening, compost, manufacturing pharmaceuticals, Islam, Tlingit Indians, survivor's guilt and a whole lot more.  I wrote Wandering City Blues in under a year, published it last Halloween and have turned the Fogworld series into an interactive community experience and a Patreon page while I work on future installments in its series.

So what, right?  I mean, not to be a dick, but by this point, if you're still reading, you've got to be wondering where the hell this is going.  It occurred to me after I started doing the Virginia convention circuit with my first two books and getting proper feedback from audiences that I had the opportunity to repay my debts to the industry that had shaped me so much as a human being.  Dozens of authors, poets and playwrights had played such an enormous part in my life, helping me think outside my usual perspective and giving me opportunities to go on adventures across time and space, I could finally turn the tables and take everything I'd learned and inspire someone else.  I couldn't have written 100,000 Years in Detention without having read David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell and Chuck Palahniuk, and the greatest compliment I've gotten on it is from readers seeing the book cover again at a future meeting and immediately bursting into laughter, telling their friends how much they enjoyed my self-deprecation.  "I was howling laughing, dude."  I get the best wide-eyed reactions from people who have read Penny Cavalier and infer the subtle "Fuck You" and final takeaway of some of the RLSH culture that I wrote into PC's ending.  I've been honored by parents telling me The Broken Paragon finally convinced their kids to pick up and read a book, since it's about video games; or by gamers themselves, saying that I've given them something to think about with their favorite franchises.  Fans have told me how blown away they were by Wandering City Blues and its twists and turns - they've even started hounding me for the sequel.  I had someone walk by my table at a convention two weeks ago and point to it and tell a potential reader "That's one of the best books I've ever read."

I don't care if it's a cliché; giving is just as important as receiving when it comes to literature.  I'm humbled to the point of tears to be able to send friends, family, fans and strangers on the kinds of journeys that opened my mind or inspired me to live my life in a slightly different way than I had before.  Books take the time and the effort to flesh out worlds and stories and people and events, giving readers an inimitable experience.  I'm a lover of film, music, visual art, comic books, video games, even TV at its finest, but to not curl up with a good novel every so often is unwise at best, pitiable at worst.

Happy National Book Lovers' Day.  Go read something awesome.

Self-serving and rather shameless shilling:

100,000 Years in Detention on Amazon:  http://a.co/8oVnsoo
Penny Cavalier on Amazon:  http://a.co/gSFMj5e
The Broken Paragon on Amazon:  http://a.co/5MCf072
Wandering City Blues on Amazon:  http://a.co/aV62TS4

Fogworld information on Blogger:  http://www.WanderingCityBlues.com
Fogworld Patreon:  http://www.patreon.com/jonnylupsha
A Carrier of Fire (my publisher) on Facebook:  http://www.facebook.com/ACarrierofFire
A Carrier of Fire on Twitter:  http://www.twitter.com/acarrieroffire
Me on Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/jonnylupsha

The Fragile (And All That Could Have Been).

Project:  Nine Inch Nails - The Fragile (And All That Could Have Been)

Tracklist and Introduction

01. Somewhat Damaged
02. The Day the World Went Away
03. The Frail
04. The Wretched
05. Missing Places
06. We're in This Together
07. The Fragile
08. Just Like You Imagined
09. The Great Collapse
10. The March
11. Even Deeper
12. Pilgrimage
13. One Way to Get There
14. No, You Don't
15. Taken
16. La Mer
17. Adrift and at Peace
18. The Great Below
19. Not What It Seems Like
20. White Mask
21. The New Flesh
22. The Way out Is Through
23. Into the Void
24. Where Is Everybody?
25. The Mark Has Been Made
26. 10 Miles High
27. Was It Worth It?
28. Things Falling Apart
29. Please (+ Appendage)
30. Can I Stay Here?
31. Feeders
32. Starfuckers, Inc.
33. Complication
34. Claustrophobia Machine (Raw)
35. Last Heard From
36. I'm Looking Forward to Joining You, Finally
37. And All That Could Have Been
38. The Big Come Down
39. Underneath It All
40. Ripe [with Decay]

Runtime: 2h44m13s

Expanding on the original release of Nine Inch Nails' 1999 masterpiece The Fragile, this collection has been titled The Fragile (And All That Could Have Been), henceforth referred to by the acronym TFAATCHB.

History

The Fragile - CD and Vinyl cover.

When The Fragile was released on September 21, 1999, its CD tracklist ran for 103 minutes and 37 seconds, or 1 hour, 43 minutes and 37 seconds, split onto two discs.  It featured the following 23 songs.

Disc 1 (Left)
01. Somewhat Damaged
02. The Day the World Went Away
03. The Frail
04. The Wretched
05. We're in This Together
06. The Fragile
07. Just Like You Imagined
08. Even Deeper
09. Pilgrimage
10. No, You Don't
11. La Mer
12. The Great Below

Disc 2 (Right)
01. The Way out Is Through
02. Into the Void
03. Where Is Everybody?
04. The Mark Has Been Made
05. Please
06. Starfuckers, Inc.
07. Complication
08. I'm Looking Forward to Joining You, Finally
09. The Big Come Down
10. Underneath It All
11. Ripe (with Decay)

The cassette version of The Fragile added on a remix/epilogue to "Please" called "Appendage" to even out the runtime on each side of the second cassette.  The vinyl version of the album, on the other hand, left "Appendage" off its tracklist but featured two bonus tracks, "10 Miles High" and "The New Flesh," on the second half of the album.  These bonus songs were seamlessly mixed into the album following "The Mark Has Been Made" and "Complication," respectively.  Oddly enough, the vinyl version of "Ripe" cuts off the last minute or so of the song, ending before the "Decay" section included on the CD and cassette releases.

Between these three formats, the complete experience of officially released material for The Fragile wasn't the 23-song version on the CD but the 25.5 songs attainable by adding the bonus material from the cassette and vinyl releases into a new playlist at their appropriate times in accordance with their releases.

Things Falling Apart

In 2000, Nine Inch Nails released a remix CD for The Fragile called Things Falling Apart.  Leading up to its release, a website of the same name launched with small videos and music clips of material from the era, including a 65-second untitled segue song that has not been released before or since.  The release of Things Falling Apart featured an original composition called "The Great Collapse" that was intended for The Fragile but cut from its final release.  Often repeating "The Wretched" chorus lyrics of "Now you know this is what it feels like," many fans brushed the song aside as a remix.  This raised the amount of Fragile-era material by another song and a half.

Two years later, before NIN mastermind Trent Reznor put his career on hiatus to go to rehab for cocaine and alcohol, Nine Inch Nails released a live album called And All That Could Have Been with a limited edition companion EP called Still.  Boasting nine songs, Still featured four quieted versions of classic NIN favorites and five new compositions.  Among the five new songs were "Adrift and at Peace" and the title track "And All That Could Have Been."  Reznor has since confirmed that "Adrift and at Peace" was at one time considered an outro or ending piece for "La Mer" from the original release of The Fragile.  Likewise, a brief breakdown between the first two verses of "And All That Could Have Been" features the same chord progression as the crescendo of The Fragile's Disc 1 closing song "The Great Below," confirming its at-one-time intended use on the album.  Nine Inch Nails frequently use leitmotifs and recurring lyrical and musical themes throughout multiple songs across an album (see the chorus of "Heresy," piano outro of "Closer" and acoustic guitar of "The Downward Spiral" on 1994's The Downward Spiral), and 'The Fragile' is no different ("La Mer" shares chord progressions

Still.

with "Into the Void" and "The Frail" is a piano version of the guitar solo from "The Fragile").

The three remaining new tracks from 2002's Still have unconfirmed origins, though Trent Reznor has stated that "some" of the new songs were composed for his unused score of Mark Romanek's film One Hour Photo.  Since I can't verify any of those songs' intentions for The Fragile, those three were left alone while the other two ("Adrift and at Peace" and "And All That Could Have Been") add to the increasing list of songs we can confirm as having some kind of home in the original The Fragile recording sessions.

To recap, by this time, bonus material on top of the main CD release of The Fragile includes the vinyl bonus tracks "10 Miles High" and "The New Flesh," the cassette remix epilogue "Appendage," the untitled song from ThingsFallingApart.com, "The Great Collapse" from the remix album Things Falling Apart and the two clearly-related songs from Still - "Adrift and at Peace" and "And All That Could Have Been."

Fast forward 13 years.  In 2015, following five subsequent Nine Inch Nails LP's, Trent Reznor began working with Dr. Dre and Apple to launch Apple Music.  To promote the launch of the program, Reznor released instrumental versions of Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile and With Teeth.  The Fragile (Instrumental), a collection of wordless versions of the original 23 commercially-released Fragile songs, even boasted alternate versions of some of its already-instrumental songs and three MORE bonus songs from the recording sessions.  These songs were titled "The March," "Can I Stay Here?" and "Hello, Everything Is Not OK."  "Hello, Everything Is Not OK" shares a chorus with "10 Miles High" and is believed to be an alternate, early or demo version of the latter.  "Can I Stay Here?" is previously unheard and "The March" was taken from the vaults and reworked into the Reznor-produced "Skin of a Drum" by Saul Williams in 2007 - it's been confirmed in interviews that some of the old The Fragile leftovers were used for Williams's album The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust, which not only features "Skin of a Drum" but is entirely produced by Reznor.

Finally, around this time, Reznor teased "new NIN in 2016" though nothing was heard from the band again until December 2016 when they announced a new EP and "definitive versions" of most of their previous records, remastered on vinyl.  Included in this new catalogue was not only The Fragile but a new, expanded take on the record, called The Fragile (Deviations 1).  This four-LP set contains all the Apple Music instrumentals (and its bonus tracks) as well as nine ADDITIONAL songs and bits from the 1997-1999 Fragile recording sessions.

It was at this point in time it occurred to me that the world finally had as exhaustive and complete of an allocation of material from Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile sessions as it was going to get.  The only problem was that it was spread across a half dozen releases, some of which had gone out of production up to 16 years before (more on that later), and the most comprehensive version (Deviations 1) didn't have any of the lyrics.

The Curation Process

The Fragile (Deviations 1)

Inspired by the blog Albums That Never Were, I decided to finally make some kind of ultimate/comprehensive/director's cut of The Fragile, maintaining as much integrity of the official releases and taking as few liberties with them as was humanly possible.  The added complication with The Fragile is Reznor's tendency to run one song into another seamlessly, without a moment of silence in which one could insert bonus material.  In addition, the places in which he *had* split up previously-conjoined songs to add new tracks were only on the instrumental versions of the album; the original releases with vocals didn't have the new clean breaks between tracks.

My framework was to start with the Deviations 1 and Apple Music instrumentals sequencing, restore as much of them with the original 1999 CD release as possible, fill in the bonus tracks where I had clues (e.g. the vinyl bonus songs, patterns of leitmotifs and interviews with Trent about song placement) and then add the rest wherever it felt right.  As a lifelong fan of Nine Inch Nails, I felt a real obligation to the project.

The actual tracklist for Deviations 1 (if we don't yet differentiate between instrumental vs. vocal versions) is nearly identical to the tracklist for 'TFAATCHB' with the following exceptions.

1) "The Great Collapse," "Adrift and at Peace," "And All That Could Have Been" and "Things Falling Apart" (which is what I've named the untitled segue from ThingsFallingApart.com) do not appear on Deviations 1.  At least the first three are completed and officially-released songs from The Fragile recording sessions so I felt they belong.  The unofficially titled "Things Falling Apart" is the only remaining audio heard from these sessions with no other releases.

2) On Deviations 1, "Feeders" is preceded by "10 Miles High (Instrumental)" which is actually "Hello, Everything Is Not OK" from the Apple Music instrumentals.  I replaced "Hello..." with the original "10 Miles High" and moved it to its spot on the vinyl release (after "The Mark Has Been Made").  I felt that having both would be redundant, and "10 Miles High" sounds more polished, final and in-line with the official 1999 releases than "Hello..." does.

3) On Deviations 1, "Please" and "Appendage" are split into two separate tracks.  I rejoined them to honor the spirit of the 1999 cassette release, which lists them as "Please (+ Appendage)" rather than

The Fragile - cassette.

as two separate songs.  "Appendage" even starts in time with the end of "Please" after a couple silent beats and is clearly an epilogue meant to be attached to it.

My reasons for placing the four songs not included in Deviations 1 where I did are as follows.  The first two listed below felt like they'd appear on the first disc of the 1999 CD release; the last two just felt like disc 2 material.  Now for each song individually.  "The Great Collapse" shares its only lyrics with "The Wretched," as I've said.  Also, much like "The Frail" is like a reprise of "The Fragile," I can't deny the simpler nature of "The Great Collapse" in comparison with its lyrical counterpart.  I feel that they're linked.  Also, on the original 1999 releases of The Fragile, I happened to notice that most of the related songs ("The Frail" and "The Fragile," "La Mer" and "Into the Void," etc) were three or four tracks apart, so I stuck "The Great Collapse" four songs after "The Wretched"'s place on the 1999 release.  I think the other two pairings and this one are clever ways to take a breather and recall or anticipate a musical or lyrical theme.  "Adrift and at Peace" was a no-brainer, since, as I mentioned earlier, Trent has stated that it's essentially a closing piece for "La Mer."  The difficult part was separating "La Mer" from "The Great Below," which I did by cutting off the post-vocal section of the 1999 release of the song and replacing it with the Deviations 1 version, which ends without mingling with "The Great Below."  I then cut off the slow fade-in/intro at the beginning of "Adrift and at Peace" as well as "La Mer"'s overlap with "The Great Below" and fused them together for a surprising but nonstop flow between the two tracks similar to how "Missing Places" on Deviations 1 ends and "We're in This Together" begins after an excised intro.

"Things Falling Apart" was a little 65-second segue and it just felt right to put it before "Please," since Trent had already separated the vinyl edition's "10 Miles High -> Please" with the new "Was It Worth It?" on Deviations 1.  The song "And All That Could Have Been," on the other hand, has always, always struck me as a continuation of "I'm Looking Forward to Joining You, Finally," despite sharing some chords with "The Great Below."  In both "And All That Could Have Been" and "I'm Looking Forward to Joining You, Finally," the protagonist of the story dwells broken-hearted on loss, specifically involving some kind of relationship, using winter imagery (frost, snow, freezing, ice) to express his lamentations.  Something in my gut told me to put them together as a slow reaction to the album's preceding events before the final descent of the last three songs on the album.  I was able to sew them together by giving "Complication" its independence with a Deviations 1 ending, then after the new songs, using the longer intro to "I'm Looking Forward..." from Deviations 1 and sneaking it onto the beginning of the 1999 CD release.  At the end of "I'm Looking Forward," I took the 20-second rain-and-synth intro for "And All That Could Have Been" as it appeared on Still and I did a very short fade-in to help it stand alone.  I then took it and overlapped its first 10 seconds with the last 10 seconds of "I'm Looking Forward" so the two flow seamlessly.

In any other place in which a song from the original release was tied to its successor but I needed to separate them to fit bonus tracks in, I used similar tricks taking the intros/outros from 2016's Deviations 1 and replacing the problematic segues.  Sometimes I broke songs apart (e.g. "The Wretched" and "We're in This Together") and other times I rejoined them ("The Mark Has Been Made" and "10 Miles High"), in accordance with getting every song flowing smoothly with as few breaks as possible.

The final runtime for TFAATCHB is 164m13s, or 2 hours, 44 minutes and 13 seconds.  This is longer than the original CD release by just over a full hour.  It boasts 40 songs compared to the CD's 23 and culls material from seven separate audio sources.  From the time I envisioned this project in high school (when the multiple versions of The Fragile were released on 9/21/99) to its final completion, it spanned 17 years, three months and eight days.

Sources

All 23 songs from the original 1999 CD release of The Fragile represent their place in this mix, except for "We're in This Together" and the intro/outro exceptions noted above.

All bonus materials which appeared first on the Apple Music instrumentals and subsequently on Deviations 1 are taken directly from a high-quality digital download of The Fragile (Deviations 1) from store.nin.com.  This includes "Missing Places," "The March," "One Way to Get There," "Taken," "Not What It Seems Like," "White Mask," "Was It Worth It?," "Can I Stay Here?," "Feeders," "Claustrophobia Machine (Raw)" and "Last Heard From."

We're in This Together (Pt. 1) CD single.

"We're in This Together," "10 Miles High" and "The New Flesh" are taken from the out-of-print CD single We're in This Together (Pt. 1).

"The Great Collapse" is from a CD copy of the 2000 remix album Things Falling Apart.

"Adrift and at Peace" and "And All That Could Have Been" are taken from a CD copy of Still as it appeared in the deluxe edition of the 2002 live CD release And All That Could Have Been.

"Things Falling Apart" is taken from an mp3 of a web rip from ThingsFallingApart.com.

"Appendage" is taken from a high-quality mp3 import of the original cassette release of The Fragile.

Quality

Every assurance was made to achieve the highest possible sound quality.  Regarding the above-listed sources, the original release of The Fragile as well as the CD's We're in This Together (Pt. 1), Still and Things Falling Apart were ripped on a MacBook in iTunes (from their commercially-bought physical editions) as 44.1khz WAV files.  The Deviations 1 bonus songs are all downloaded WAV files of equal or higher quality directly from the digital purchase of The Fragile (Deviations 1) on store.nin.com.  Only "Things Falling Apart" and "Appendage" arrive as-is from their original mp3 sources.

Any required editing was done in WavePad Sound Editor.  Every finalized WAV file has also been copied and converted to a 320kbps CBR mp3 in Switch Sound File Converter for ease of use, although the original WAV files remain uncompressed for purposes of continuous/gapless playback.

Disc Breaks

Disc 1:  Tracks 01-12
Disc 2:  Tracks 13-27
Disc 3:  Tracks 28-40

Availability, Ethics and Random Thoughts

For obvious legal reasons, I can neither give nor sell The Fragile (And All That Could Have Been) to you no matter how nicely you ask or how much you offer me.  It's also a matter of supporting the artist; these songs are all worth owning.  I legally own purchased copies of every song on here aside from the website rip of the untitled song I'm calling "Things Falling Apart."  Even "Appendage," which I'll admit I downloaded for this - I own my cassette copy of The Fragile but never figured out how to hook up my cassette player to a computer and record a good-quality version of the track.  So instead of sharing this with you, I'd encourage you to purchase a CD copy of the original 1999 release and track down as many of the other songs as you legally can and curate your own personal version of this sprawling epic for home use.  Curating extended album mixes is actually a lot of fun.  Sure there are reasons some of these songs weren't included on the original commercial releases, but nobody's telling you to burn your old copies and only listen to a personalized mix instead.  I've also fleshed out versions of Radiohead's The King of Limbs and Kid A/mnesiac and I'm proud of those too.  We're fortunate to live in an age where we can customize our own music and make albums into personal experiences again.

That brings me to my next point.  I'm sure that plenty of people (read: imaginary) will ask "Why didn't you include (insert other Nine Inch Nails song from 1997-2000 here) on this?  You suck!"  Well, several years ago I saw someone had really gone "kitchen sink" on The Fragile and made a mix that included something like every new piece from Still, a couple remixes from Things Falling Apart, "Deep" (from the Tomb Raider soundtrack), and all of Trent and Co.'s contributions to the Lost Highway soundtrack.  It may be longer, and it may work for them, but to me it was more of an endurance test of that entire half-decade, losing the focus of the original record in favor of just "having more."  More power to the person who made it, but that's not for me.  I forced myself to only include songs that I knew were written and recorded for the purpose of inclusion on The Fragile (whether they made the 1999 cut or not), which was difficult because the remaining Still pieces are gorgeous.  

Anyway, I digress.  Thanks for reading; this was incredibly fun and I'll soon be thinking about what to do next.

Marriage Equality.

Last year for Pride Month I wrote a blog outlining my thoughts on equal/civil rights for LGBT's and was honored that it received several hundred views (106 just this past Tuesday!).  This morning, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in a vote of five to four that the institution of marriage legally extended to include same-sex couples, so I decided to speak up once more as a straight ally and advocate for equal rights for those who identify as non-heterosexuals.  Hear me out; it takes a minute to get there.

I got married nearly six years ago to an amazing woman.  In my own opinion or experience, marriage begins with that proposal, and the outside chance you'll get rejected slingshots into the joy of engagement so fast it made me dizzy.  Suddenly my world was ready to change for the better: I'd proposed that Kristy and I live our lives together, joining as one into something greater than ourselves.  We celebrated with family and friends and then started planning one of those "wedding" things you hear about.  I started planning it a few months later, once we'd gotten our announcements and engagement party taken care of; my wife started planning in the car on the way home from where I proposed (a hibachi restaurant in Newnan, Georgia).  We figured things out systematically, which was fun for the most part.  Our venue (the Ritz-Carlton at Amelia Island, Florida) was fantastic in walking us through everything step-by-step, using a coordinator and inviting us to a menu tasting to decide on food (filet and crab cakes, which rocked).

Now, there's a point at which someone receiving your money for some component of the wedding will ask you a question.  This question makes you realize just how absurd all the details are.  It's the reason people elope.  You'll have made, roughly, 150 or so decisions regarding "your special day" with no end in sight and some doe-eyed human will look you in the eye and need your opinion on something, and you will just snap.  It's a different question for all of us.  My Best Man, who just got married a couple months ago, never wants to hear the word "boutonniere" again as long as he lives.  My brain completely shut down when our wedding planner's assistant presented me with the options for napkin folds at the reception tables.

"If you want them on the tables, not in the wine glasses, they can be French Pleat or Single Fold."

"I'm...What?"

"Or if you'd prefer to have the napkins inside the wine glasses, which is the case for most weddings, we could do Flame Fold, Lilly Fold or Candle Fan Fold."

"I'm gonna be honest with you; I appreciate everything you're doing for me but I really don't know that I can convince myself that this will have any bearing on either of our lives."

"Well, there's also Crown Fold, Diamond Fold..."

"I don't...We're looking at napkins."

"Yes sir."

"Okay.  Ask Kristy."

But it got settled, and we ended up throwing ourselves the best party of our lives.  I had my grandparents talking to my college roommates, a young cousin being a junior bridesmaid and we picked out so much sweet music to play that people still ask me for our playlist/soundtrack.  We were married out back of the hotel, near the beach, and dozens of people sat on their hotel room balconies watching the ceremony and applauding for us when it was over.  At my wife's request, I wrote not only both our vows but the whole ceremony.  We hired a photojournalist I know to shoot the wedding and our pictures are fantastic.  The entire thing was the most fun I think I've ever had.

And I feel so wistful and dreamy looking back on it, I can't begin to reconcile that kind of unadulterated joy with someone like Rick Scarborough, who claimed this week he would light himself on fire if two men or two women were allowed to experience the same happiness in a lawful marriage.  By using such a dramatic example, Scarborough loosely implies a likeness between himself and Bồ Tát Thích Quảng Đức, a Buddhist monk who, in 1963, self-immolated as protest against Ngo Dinh Diem - a tyrant in Vietnam who made Buddhism all but illegal.  Thích Quảng Đức's public suicide shocked the world, catalyzing a coup and assassination of Diem.  For people like Scarborough (or Nick and Sarah Jensen, an Australian couple who vowed to divorce if marriage equality is passed by Aussie parliament), the unquenchable thirst to be martyred for their religious beliefs betrays Thích Quảng Đức's self-sacrifice.  It instead reminds one of the child threatening to hold his/her breath to a point of passing out unless Mommy or Daddy buys the child a new toy - an immature and morally reprehensible threat that sullies the ideas of the sanctity of life and marriage, respectively, just as much as those against whom they rally, if not more so.

Most religious people I know (including that wife of mine) are incredibly peaceable, live-and-let-live types.  Unfortunately, detractors of marriage equality almost exclusively try to use religion as the shield for their opinions.  It usually goes along these lines:  We're told by this small but vocal portion of the population that United States law is founded on Christian principles.  John Adams, on the other hand, is quoted as saying "The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."  Thomas Jefferson agreed - "Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the Common Law [of England, to which legal matters not covered by the Constitution defer]."  I've also been told that the Founding Fathers would've wished Christian law to reign over the entire American populace, to which Thomas Jefferson also said "It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods, or no god.  It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."  In response to that, we're often told that The Bible forbids homosexuality (and The Word of God never changes); meanwhile we're absolved of other practices forbidden in The Bible (e.g. eating shellfish, mixing fabrics) because The Word of God does change.  The last point of discussion is that legalizing something forbidden in The Bible inflicts upon "religious freedoms."  Around this time, someone usually asks "Why isn't eating pork made illegal, to guarantee the same 'religious freedom' to Muslims?" and we're back to square one: because United States law is founded on Christian principles.  I've seen this train circle this track for hours on end.

The Supreme Court was established in Article III of The Constitution of the United States of America as the highest possible court of law to which any legal case could appeal.  Meant to be absolutely impartial to cases, their jurisdiction covers Constitutional Law, controversies involving matters between more than one state and so on.  Now, marriage can be seen as a complex legal contract since the Constitution doesn't explicitly define marriage but Former President Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, restricting it to be a union between one man and one woman.  Clinton later decided he'd made a mistake and advocated for its repeal with support from President Obama, who declared in 2011 that parts of DoMA were unconstitutional and would no longer be an admissible defense in court.

So when the vote came in today, the four justices who sided against marriage equality were Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito Jr., Antonin Scalia and John G. Roberts Jr.  Their dissent from their colleagues' decision is as interesting as the judiciary gets:  Justice Thomas, an African-American judge, is married to a white woman, which would've been illegal if not for the Supreme Court's ruling of Loving V. Virginia in 1967 in favor of interracial marriage.  Many have been calling for him to abstain from voting on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act since 2011, when his wife Virginia Thomas was revealed to have supported a conservative lobbyists' group that rallied for the repeal of the health insurance law.  He voted against the ACA this week, but it was carried through anyway.

Justice Alito was appointed on Halloween of 2005 by Former President George W. Bush as a replacement for Sandra Day O'Connor.  His vote comes as less of a surprise, arising several years after attacking a school's anti-harassment policy - arguing that derogatory statements against gays is part of free speech.  Justice Scalia, alongside Justices Thomas and Alito, is the third of four Supreme Court judges who dissented from the ruling.  He's also the third of them to attend fundraisers supporting the Federalist Society, a conservative special interest group who were investigated less than 10 years ago for their influence over the Justice Department and over a half-dozen firings made by that office.

So, by the thinnest of SCOTUS margins, amid threats of suicide and divorce and accusations that marriage equality is the beginning of a holocaust against Christians - and waiting mere decades for the legal right - two members of the same sex can finally join together in a personal rite/institution that most of us have taken for granted our whole lives.

Better late than never.

Christmas Movies that Don't Suck.

So you’ve seen Tiny Tim say “God bless us, everyone” so often you’ve turned Satanist.  You know the exact number of times that Joe Pesci would’ve died in real life from Kevin McAllister’s torture in the first two Home Alone movies, and every time a bell rings all you get is annoyed.  Believe me, I’m with you.  If you’re like me and just can’t take seeing a young Natalie Wood pull Kris Kringle’s whiskers again, here are some alternatives to cure that Christmas Movie Fatigue.

The Ref (1994) - Denis Leary – angry, loud, fast-talking Denis Leary before the Ice Age films – stars in this black comedy about a very dysfunctional family in the suburbs (including Kevin Spacey and Christine Baranski) being taken hostage by a jewel thief on Christmas Eve.  In 93 minutes it manages to poke fun at suburbia, entitled teens, local law enforcement, high-maintenance mothers-in-law and marriage.  If you’ve ever wanted to tell a loved one’s parent “I know loan sharks that are more forgiving than you,” this is one to watch.

Scrooged (1988) - Frank Cross (Bill Murray) is a mean-spirited but highly successful network executive, happy to make others miserable until his old business associate comes back from the grave to warn him of visits by three ghosts to help him see the wrong of his ways.  Sound familiar?  It’s because Scrooged is a (very refreshing) update of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.  He’s supported by an all-star cast, including Karen Allen, Carol Kane, Robert Mitchum and Bobcat Goldthwait.  Clearly a comedy cast, director Richard Donner (The Goonies, Lethal Weapon) delivers a hilarious look at a modern-day Ebenezer Scrooge that manages one of the best closing monologues in film history.

Trading Places (1983) - Wall Street milquetoast Louis Winthorpe III (Dan Aykroyd) and con man Billy Ray Valentine (Eddie Murphy) are the unwitting pawns in a life-switching experiment by Winthorpe’s multimillionaire bosses, the Duke Brothers.  Just in time for Christmas, Winthorpe finds himself on the streets, framed for drug dealing, penniless and befriended only by a prostitute (Jamie Lee Curtis) while Valentine suddenly lives the high life with a private chef and chauffeur.  Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy are at the top of their game, working adult humor into this dark comedy directed by John Landis (Animal House, The Blues Brothers).

Bad Santa (2003) - “If I’d have known this is how my life would turn out, I would have killed myself a long time ago.  Come to think of it I still might.”  In this pitch-black comedy from director Terry Zwigoff (Crumb, Ghost World), Billy Bob Thornton is a robber posing as a mall Santa.  Together with his elf (Tony Cox, Oz: The Great and Powerful), each year they work a new mall, entertaining kids by day and casing the joint by night.  Thornton’s addictions to booze and sex occasionally get in the way of him mooching food and shelter off a lonely bullied child, but the kid brings out some Christmas goodness in him and his girlfriend, a bartender with a Santa sex fetish.  This is likely not one for the kiddies.

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) - Tim Burton and director Henry Selick bring this stop-motion classic to life with songs by Danny Elfman.  Jack Skellington is the de facto leader of Halloweentown, scaring kids worldwide, but he’s grown bored with his repetitive task and tries to bring Christmas to his spooky village instead.  Beautiful for its entire 76-minute run, it works great for kids, with themes about trying to be something you aren’t and learning to embrace yourself for who you are.  Selick went on to direct James and the Giant Peach and Coraline, while his animation studio also created Paranorman and The Boxtrolls.

Love Actually (2003) - A romantic comedy?  Really?  Yes, really.  I was a real naysayer on this until I agreed to watch it, and now I’m converted.  An ensemble cast including Liam Neeson, Hugh Grant, Martin Freeman, Colin Firth and Keira Knightley lead this series of interwoven stories of romance, drama and humor in England on the week of Christmas.  On the funny side of things, a bachelor decides to book a plane ticket to America based solely on the presumption that American women love a British accent; an aging and jaded rock star (Bill Nighy) stuck in the machine of the celebrity industry takes outrageous steps to stay relevant in an age obsessed with boy bands (“Don’t buy drugs, kids…become a rock star and people will give them to you for free!”); a male and female body double for adult movies meet and make shy small talk while in the most suggestive poses/actions.  At the same time, a middle-aged man (Alan Rickman, Harry Potter) has trouble staying with his prickly wife (Emma Thompson) when a young co-worker expresses her feelings for him; a new bride (Keira Knightley) discovers that her new husband’s best friend (The Walking Dead’s Andrew Lincoln) is in love with her and it may cost him his friendship with the couple.  Love Actually is a bit cutesy at times, but a pretty tight movie.

A Christmas Story (1983) - An official Red Ryder carbine-action two-hundred shot range model air rifle.  This is all that Ralph Parker, a nine-year-old boy, wants for Christmas: a BB gun.  Non-fiction writer Jean Shepherd (who also narrates the film) brings us this amazing holiday story in the vein of NPR’s This American Life.  Ralph is a kid in the Midwest growing up post-World War II and this film runs him through the gauntlet of experiences that childhood and Christmas are made of.  A mouthful of soap for cursing, mom bundling her kids up in too many layers, seeing someone get their tongue stuck to a frozen pole on a dare, hideous homemade Christmas outfits from a crazy relative – it’s all in there.

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989) - Only a little gentler than The Ref, the original National Lampoon movies starred Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo as Clark and Ellen Griswold, a slightly dysfunctional Chicagoland couple with a son and daughter.  In Christmas Vacation, Clark deals with hosting his parents, in-laws, brother’s family and uncle for the holidays.  Of course nobody appreciates Clark slowly losing it while desperately clinging to Christmas traditions, leading to some pretty crazy moments.  Aside from the 60-second insult Clark spins at his boss at the end of the movie (If you don’t YouTube it, you’re basically a bad human being), there are scenes like Clark’s senile aunt being asked to say the blessing over their dinner and in return reciting the pledge of allegiance.

Elf (2003) - Elf is a Will Ferrell movie for people who don’t like Will Ferrell.  Ferrell is at his best as Buddy, a human raised by elves at the North Pole.  Bob Newhart plays his adoptive elf father, while James Caan is his real father, Ed Asner is Santa Claus and Zooey Deschanel is Ferrell’s love interest.  Buddy learns he’s a human – and not just an elf twice the size of all his friends – in his thirties and goes to find his real father, a cranky children’s book publisher.  Jon Favreau directs while Buddy learns to be a person, often the hard way – including getting in a fistfight with a mall Santa for calling him out on not being the real Santa (“You sit on a throne of lies!”).  Seeing Peter Dinklage beat Buddy up for calling Dinklage an elf is worth the price of admission on its own.

Pride.

June is LGBT Pride Month, in anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village starting June 28, 1969.  If we're going to talk about this, I'd like to get myself out of the way first.  I support marriage equality.  I support equal rights for the LGBT community.  I've heard the phrase "straight ally" tossed around to represent my thoughts on this, and that's fine by me.  Call me what you want; whatever term means "I don't bat an eyelash whether you like men or women."

As a straight white guy, you can imagine I've faced little to no real prejudice against myself in my 31 years.  It pains me to see people with a different skin color, gender or sexuality than mine have to struggle and fight to obtain what I got for free at birth: the right to marry, freedom from most hate crimes and social skepticism and so on.  My eyes were opened to discrimination when I lived on Maui for four years with my family and I was bullied daily, beaten regularly and stabbed when I was 13 years old, just for being white.  And it sucked.  A lot.  Then we moved back to the mainland and I saw people being treated the same way I was for those four years - but this was their entire lives.  And it was worse out in the world: rape, homicide, suicide, second-class citizenship, life-long trauma and abuse just for being different.

Now, people who "look like me" have the least flak thrown their way - no doubt.  In fact, having even tasted a bit of prejudice, I was changed for life.  So let's consider some of the points being thrown around regarding LGBT's.  

I've heard it said that the movement for LGBT rights is "being blown out of proportion," that "there aren't that many of them in this country."  So first, let's look at the LGBT population of the country.  A study published many years ago claimed that 10% of the American population was LGBT, while a 2012 Gallup poll claims the numbers are around 3.4%.  Even if someone performed polygraph tests on all 316 million plus Americans, asking about their sexuality, polygraphs are only 99% effective, offering a potential error margin of over three million people.  Finding an exact report of the sexuality of the United States is impossible, but what we can do is consider the most conservative figures as an "at least" figure.  If 3.4% percent of 316 million Americans fit into LGBT identities, that makes for a 10.744 million population, which is more than the state populations of New Mexico, Arizona and Idaho combined.  Just over half that many people (excluding the slaves they owned) seceded from the Union and formed the Confederacy, leading to the American Civil War.

That sounds like a lot of damn people to me.

I've heard it said that "being LGBT is a choice," not a matter of how you're born.  I'll pretend it's any of my business what the deepest roots of your sexual identity are, but only for a minute, so I can say this.  In college I read a study (my apologies for losing the source material since then) in which lab technicians sprayed paper strips with pheromones of either men or women.  They offered the strips of paper to test subjects who only knew they were there to smell strips of paper and choose which of the two they found more pleasant or attractive, or both.  The subjects had no idea which strips were sprayed with what.  Then they were asked if they identified as straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, etc.  The results came back and the correlation between sexual identity and natural attraction to pheromones was in the 90th percentiles.  Speaking on the laws of probability, the odds that over 9 out of 10 people would coincidentally identify as a sexuality and choose their preferred gender's natural body fragrances over the non-correlating result is pretty astronomical - not impossible, but incredibly unlikely.  Other studies have been conducted since then, but the pheromone test helped seal the deal for me.  My own personal belief is that people are born with their sexuality, even though it often makes itself known in adolescence.

Many people believe, however, that sexual identity is a choice.  Travis Nuckolls released a YouTube video in 2008 asking people on the streets "So when did you choose to be straight?" and it makes a good point - it's worth watching just to see the expressions on people's faces - but I'd like to stick a pin in everything else for a minute and talk about the belief in "LGBT by choice."  So, if some undeniable, empirical, end-all be-all, absolute evidence were released that proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that these 10.74 million Americans were making a conscious choice to be gay or straight...isn't that at the very least a choice that they have every right to make?  If we have the right to be romantically involved with all kinds of consenting adults, whether they differ in hair color, body type, age, skin color, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, credit score and everything else under the sun, then shouldn't we also - as physically- and mentally-matured adult organisms - get to choose whether we prefer the company of men, women, both or neither?  I've made it a life habit of putting the shoe on the other foot, so if you've read this far, consider this: how would the world react if people said that being straight was just a choice - a phase or a mental condition, even, likely developed from some faulty upbringing - and eventually straights would grow out of it, stop the foolishness and find the right same-sex partner?  I hate to go out on a limb and speculate, but I imagine a lot of people would be less than thrilled.

I've heard it said that marriage equality shouldn't pass because homosexuality goes against the word of The Bible - and I'm going to offer my opinion because I'm an idiot.  Much of the debate centers on Leviticus 18:22, which reads (in the English Standard Version) "You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is abomination."  Most of my religious friends practice a very "live and let live" or "love thy neighbor" attitude when it comes to religion and sexuality, but this argument is still alive in the news and such, because many see Leviticus 18:22 as indisputable evidence that homosexuality is a sin, and should therefore be against the law, especially when it comes to marriage.  The full grounds for some is "If The Bible says it shouldn't be done, it shouldn't be done regardless of what it is."  I can respect people wishing to adhere to the word of their god; however, there are dozens of other things condemned by The Bible as well.  There are passages in The Bible that forbid tattoos, working on Sundays and women speaking in church, and yet none of those things are made illegal - in fact the tattoo taboo is in the very next chapter of Leviticus.  There are lingering connotations about people with tattoos in general, but rarely are they suggested to be made against the law.

I've heard it said that that's different, that homosexuality is "the really important one" to outlaw.  And it's fine for people to believe that in their own lives, and to speak their beliefs.  The issue is generally that forcing one's religion onto everyone's law is not only a conflict of the separation of church and state, but is actually why colonists fled Europe for North America in the first place.  From the Library of Congress:  "The religious persecution that drove settlers from Europe to the British North American colonies sprang from the conviction, held by Protestants and Catholics alike, that uniformity of religion must exist in any given society. This conviction rested on the belief that there was one true religion and that it was the duty of the civil authorities to impose it, forcibly if necessary, in the interest of saving the souls of all citizens" [emphasis added].

I've heard it said that the nation is founded on Christian principles, which should be enacted into law.  If that's true, nobody told John Adams, who - alongside uniting the colonies in the revolution against Britain - also said "The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."  None of this is to say that the morality of Christianity - or religion in general - shouldn't overlap with society's laws, but only that forcing 316 million Americans to live in accordance with only one religion is fundamentally contradictory to most foundations of our country.

Turning away from the strictly religious facet of the debate, I've heard it said that "tolerance" is a hypocrisy because those who favor marriage equality call it being "tolerant" while also being "intolerant" of its opponents' freedoms to stand against marriage equality.  However, this is also untrue.  If a marriage equality proponent says to someone against it, "You're not allowed to think or speak on your beliefs," then that is hypocrisy - the First Amendment guarantees your right to express your opinions.  However, that opinion does not equal fact, law or justification for a crime.  To rape, shoot in the head and beat to death different LGBT's isn't anyone's right or freedom regardless of their motives, nor should a civilized society be "tolerant" of that person's actions.  This argument is akin to Hitler addressing America and saying "If America is all about freedom, why am I not 'free' to commit genocide in my own country?"

I've heard it said that allowing same-sex marriages will make hetero marriages "less special" and "less enjoyable," and that it "takes away straights' freedoms."  When America freed its African-American slaves, did whites all decide that it wasn't as fun or exciting to be free anymore?  Did whites have less freedom (besides the abhorrent privilege to own, rape and kill another human being as their own property)?

In summation?  Whether you believe sexuality is genetic or a choice, the LGBT population isn't going away.  The camps they're sent to, to "pray away the gay," will look in 50 years like a Whites Only bathroom.  The "gay agenda" is to not fear for one's life walking down the street.  And opinions opposing it are legal to express - but subjugation, harassment and violence in the name of that opposition are not legal, nor respective of the society we claim to represent.  Think what you will, but I say when one in six gays report being a victim of a hate crime, and only one in 10 crimes reported lead to a conviction, it's hard to claim that the perpetrators are the ones under attack.