On the dude in the ads for Calvin Klein briefs

... A dispatch from bewilderness

Once upon a time, there was a magical place. Beamers glistened in the sun, and all the teens were white and played by actors in their 30s.

It was a TV set.

Where once in a while an actor broke the big rule of playing a teen on TV by actually being one. 

The white dudes kept taking off their shirts.  There were two or three non-white guys and a honey-colored girl or two.  The non-white guys kept taking off their shirts, too.  One of them looked like the guy in the Calvin Klein boxer brief ads.

Unless they were vampires who lived in Dysfunction Junction. Where just about everyone has a dark secret about to catch up with them plus parents who are all flavors of effed up, too.  They’re rich and useless, or not rich and useless, or they’re crazy, misguided, drunk, stoned out of their minds, disappeared or dead.

One honey-colored character said immigration is like a reality show where you get voted off the island and sent back to the country you escaped from because it wants to kill you if you’re shipped back. 

Another honey-colored character says the people who are supposed to be taking care of this stuff are in office or running for office while they break laws and stash cash offshore. 

FYI, in real life, one guy who played a parent on teen TV skied into a tree, broke his head, and ended up in Brain Training like me.  

There was once a book called something like “everything I know I learned in kindergarten” or something like that.  Everything we unlearned put us there.

Like we were once a full pie-chart of talent and then a huge piece of pie was gone. Some pieces were gone forever. Others seemed to come and go, leaving strange combinations that came and went.

Like smart parts with dumb parts, for instance. Or like the front of a car joined to the back of a boat, or the front of a horse to the back of a cow.

One guy in our group was a psycholinguistics professor who could quote from his own lectures but could not recall his address. While the actor in teen TV recalled short bits from a few of Shakespeare’s soliloquies — but had a blank look most of the time and couldn’t say much of anything else.

thank you.