"Who Are You? Who. Areyou?"

Two Faces - Bruce Springsteen (mp3)
Who Knows - The Replacements (mp3)

There's this scene early on in The Breakfast Club involving my alter-ego, Brian Jones (Anthony Michael Hall). In it, the geek is contemplating the essay topic assigned by his principal for detention: Who do you think you are? Brian is sitting in his chair, screwing around with a pen and clasping it to his lip and teeth, and asking himself, "Who are you? Who. Areyou?" And he looks over to see the cool street-smart John Bender (Judd Nelson) staring hot needles into his soul. Brian shamefully removes the pen from his mouth, avoids eye contact, and huddles back over his solitary sheet of paper.

In that one throwaway moment of an arguably throwaway movie, Brian's question is asked twice and answered twice. It's first answered by how he's comfortable seeing himself: goofy, internal, capable of entertaining himself with otherwise tedious academic assignments. The second answer comes from the Bender's stare and Brian's reaction: aware of his inferiority, ashamed of his geek-ness, afraid and easily intimidated yet so eager to please in the hopes of just moving one rung up the social ladder. His weaknesses and flaws seem less acceptable under the glare of someone else's biased and calloused stare.

Comic books have always owned my heart because, at their core, most of them serve to remind the reader that a person is usually more than what any single person knows or sees. Oftentimes, the superhero side and their alter-ego have different personalities and different interests, and the public usually has opposite opinions of one versus the other.

Batman (scary, vigilante) and Bruce Wayne (popular corporate rich boy).
Clark Kent (awkward, homely) and Superman (composed, alien).
Hulk (huge, stupid, green) and Bruce Banner (brilliant, scrawny-ass white boy).
Ironically, some of the best villains have the same problem.

I could go on, but I noticed you yawning.

Point being, this is on my mind is because I just saw The Wrestler, which blew me away. In this movie, the two main characters -- played by Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei -- both struggle with the shitty side of being a superhero. Mickey plays both trailer park grocery store clerk Robin Ramzinski and veteran pro wrestler Randy "The Ram" Robinson. Marisa plays both single guarded-heart mother Pam and hot aging stripper Cassidey. Both are constantly struggling to figure out how to balance their dual personalities.

If you watch the movie in the near future -- and if you haven't, you really should -- I beg you to pay attention to just how many times these characters struggle with their names, with who they are and who they want to be. It was heartbreaking.

I'm not a very phobic person. Can't think of many things that scare me unreasonable amounts, that wake me up in the middle of the night, that paralyze me. But here's one: the fear of not being known. And I'm not talking about fame or popularity, not remotely. What I'm talking about is being understood.

Much like my beloved superheroes, whose inspiration for do-gooding stems from some tragic past experience, my fear seems to drive my personality. I'm extroverted; I share embarrassing stories; I write silly confessional blogs; I try -- too hard, often -- to stand out, in the hope that just maybe I can get out there enough to be, ultimately, understood. If I can just get enough of the puzzle out of my head and into the hands of all the people I meet, all the people who know me, just maybe the puzzle can be put together eventually. I'd sure as hell hate to die holding onto too many of the pieces.

And I find myself holding onto puzzle pieces even when I think I'm being honest and revealing. Or, as one friend put it, many of us think we're being open and revealing, but we're just opening and revealing very particular things we want people to see, which makes it all that much easier to hide the parts we want to keep hidden.

Even when we're out there in the open, we cast shadows.

We're all puzzles, and no matter how romanticized your notion of life, you can't just hand over that whole puzzle to just a single person. We're too complex and contradictory and confusing for one person to utterly grasp. Hell, most of us can't even manage to figure ourselves out without relying on those around us who know us and deal with us regularly.

Thank God we don't have to be utterly grasped in order to be utterly loved.

The list of possible songs to go with this topic are legion, and most of them pretty darn good, so I went with a crowd-pleaser and a personal favorite. Both bands should be a part of any collection, so head over to iTunes or Amazon.com!

Mixed Messages?

The Fray--"Heartless (Kanye West cover)" (mp3)
Continental Drifters--"Mixed Messages" (mp3)

Two events from today have convinced me that I need to respond to Billy's post:

1) a man in Taiwan sat down on the toilet in his house and was promptly bitten on the penis by a large black and gold rat snake that came up through the drain.

2) moral arbitrator Donald Trump decided that Miss California can keep her crown after all.

Now, the first event has no connection to this post, except to serve as a cautionary tale.

But the second, the defense of Carrie Prejean, serves as a kind of coda to Billy's remarks. While what Judge Trump has ruled would seem to only determine whether or not a "beauty"gets to keep her crown, it does, as Billy suggests, tend to cloud the major issues. Her statement yesterday that "I'm a model; I'm a Christian" is offered as some kind of duality that attempts to link the two when they do not link. Is it that "because I'm a model and my tits are Christian tits, and therefore what I do with them is beyond reproach?" Or is it that "because I'm a Christian, I operate on a higher plane than people who want to destroy the institution of marriage by having same-sex unions" and my modelling is irrelevant? Does being both allow one to use a public platform for "free speech" designed to curtail the rights of others? I don't know.

But the bigger issue is probably this: if you're expecting Donald Trump and his ilk to make the societal calls that will best serve our children, you're wasting your time and breath.

Ponder this. Each year, four guys go to New Orleans over Spring Break. One expectation of that trip is that each of us burns a mix CD of favorites for the other three guys. Now, suppose one co-founder of this blog put the Kanye West song "Drunk and Hot Girls" onto his mix, and one of the other guys plays the mix in his car while picking up his young daughters from elementary school. Those girls hear the song, in fact, like the song, want to hear it over and over, sing along with it, and know all of the words. Now, suppose the other co-founder of this blog has never, ever censored what his daughters have listened to, that, back in the day, he, too, used to drive around with his daughters and they had group-sings of Shaggy's "It Wasn't Me." Yes, we were all singing together, "Picture this/we were both butt naked/bangin' on the bathroom floor."

Do any of you, and I mean any of you out there, really believe that a repetition of these lyrics or similar ones or watching Brittney Spears videos or watching the implied co-habitation on S Club 7 will cause any of these girls to have a propensity for pre-marital sex or "sluttish" behavior?

I don't believe it. Not one bit.

Since the beginning of civilization, parents have been seeking to protect their children from the influences of the larger society. This is a good instinct, one that we should nurture. But the tendency to blame that society or even to claim that that society is worse than it ever was is both simplistic and misguided.

Here's a different look at the problem. I do not believe that there is a national epidemic of births out of wedlock. Now, I would be a fool if I denied that there are a lot of births out of wedlock. But an epidemic? No way.

"A prevailing cause of sexual activity and promiscuity in girls is a poor relationship with their fathers."

Here's why: an epidemic, a national disease, if you will, implies that the idea is spreading from one unmarried child to the next like the swine flu. Does the friend of an unwed mother think, "Gee, she had one, I guess I'll have one, too?" I don't buy it. If we want to get at the issues of promiscuity and the resultant preganancies, we've got to stop talking epidemic and start talking one case at a time.

You see, as my wife the Child Development major/social worker has often told me, and as simple Internet research yesterday confirmed, one prevailing cause of sexual activity in young girls is a poor relationship with their fathers. When we realize that when a father is absent, emotionally distant, physically intimidating or otherwise detached from his daughter, his daughter is more likely to do whatever is necessary with another male, to reassure herself that "at least one man loves her," then, I think we get at the heart of the problem.

I read the statistics in the Washington Post article: 38% of children in this country are born out of wedlock. It's a fact, but facts don't always tell the whole story. Are there, perhaps, portions of society where many of those illegitimate children are coming from, and are those portions of society unfortunately and tragically portions where fathers are predominantly absent? That is the issue.

Of course, our society is in many ways a wreck. Just as certainly, in many ways, it is as good as it as ever been. And the messages have always been mixed, always will be mixed, at least as long as we continue to worship the dual gods of Christianity and Capitalism. The thing that is clear to me, that is a completely unmixed message, is that, just as has always been true, if we are going to protect our children, it has to start with the family and not with the blaming of outside influences.

Continental Drifters are available at Itunes; the Fray cover is out there.