Drugs are for Losters

(posted by ben axelrad)

Coming at you a day late with my weekly LOST coverage ’cause T.J. hogged the site yesterday with his awesome interview. I’m glad you wrote an excellent post dude, but the rest of us need to use the internet too.

Anyhoo . . . LOST!

Of all the seeming impossibilities made prosaic on LOST, none seems more far-fetched to me than anyone following Hurley anywhere that didn’t have a snack bar or a water bong. Hurley found weed on that island, right? No one could stay that dumb, calm, and hungry without cannabinoids.

Speaking of drugs on the island, I bet after three years people are starting to get pissed all Charlie’s heroine burned up. I would’ve been pissed after three hours. This ain’t NA, bitch, we’re stranded on an inescapable island and you just torched our only artifice of escapism. If I was there this is how it would’ve gone down:

ME
Charlie, did you find heroine?

CHARLIE
Uhhhh…Nooooooo. This isn’t heroine.

ME
Cut the crap, dude. That’s heroine.

CHARLIE
Fine. But don’t tell anyone.

ME
I’m telling EVERYONE. Hey everyone!
Charlie found heroine! Let’s all do heroine.

CHARLIE
They don’t do heroine.

ME
I don’t either. But this is the worst situation
ever and rumor has it that’s the best shit ever.
I think we’ll make an exception.
EVERYONE, COME QUICK!

CHARLIE
Shhhh! You’re going to get me in trouble.
I’m a recovering addict.

ME
Dude, no one cares about your stupid addiction.
One, we only met your junkie ass like a week ago.
And two, we just fucking plane-crashed on an
island they’re NEVER gonna find. You think
Hurley’s counting calories or Shannon’s working
on being less of a giant twat? No.
“Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em,” brother.

CHARLIE
But I had a real problem with the stuff.

ME
Yeah, well you have a few real problems now too.
And most of them won’t get you high as shit.
Try catching a buzz off that homicidal billow of
anthropomorphic black smoke.

CHARLIE
I guess you’re right. Let’s do some heroine.

ME
After this we should try my addiction.

CHARLIE
Oh yeah? What’s that?

ME
Masturbating to tropical polar bears.

CHARLIE
Uh…

ME
Don’t judge me, junkie.

CHARLIE
Fair enough.

ME
This island is magical.

THE END

We all know the island cures everything except death, and apparently heroine addiction. So that means either heroine addiction is as bad as death or the island condones it. I mean, am I wrong? Probably.

Don’t do drugs, kids. Unless you’re stranded with me on an island. Or in a prison. Or at a somewhat long stop light.

My name is Ben and LOST is my drug of choice (as are drugs).

Lost in the Fight

(posted by ben axelrad)

I ask you: What can be said about LOST that hasn’t already been said about being in a fight club? It’s cultish; no one on the outside understands it; it’s time-consuming; life-consuming; and eerily exhilarating in a self-abusive, pain-is-pleasure sort of way.

Here are some quotes taken from the movie FIGHT CLUB where LOST replaces “Fight Club” or “fighting.” You tell me if the two are similar:

1. After LOST, everything else in your life got the volume turned down.

Starting you off easy. That could be anything you’re obsessed with. Like when a horoscope tells you Monday will be a rough one.

2. LOST wasn’t about winning or losing. It wasn’t about words. The hysterical shouting was in tongues, like at a Pentecostal Church.

You’ve been watching LOST for six years now and only last night did you learn the central premise of the show. And even that might’ve been a lie! Shouting in tongues? That’s a nice way to put it. Wrongful foreign imprisonment? Sometimes it feels like that.

3. Yes, these are bruises from LOST. Yes, I’m comfortable with that. I am enlightened.

The bruises are of the ego variety. I don’t know a single LOST viewer who doesn’t feel dumber for doing so. But through our ignorance, like children of God, we feel in the presence of enlightenment. Even though we’ve yet to see a light!

4. When LOST was over, nothing was solved, but nothing mattered. We all felt saved.

Well, that’s the hope idinnit? But something tells me the end of LOST is going to lead to a few newly minted fight clubs. Too many of us are hooked on the feeling.

Oh, and as if it needed saying, I was right about them being similar.

My name is Ben and I lost this fight.

LOST Gets Found In Translation

(posted by ben axelrad)

***LOST SPOILERS (SLIGHT, BUT STILL…)***

If you watched last night’s episode of LOST you are probably wrestling with the same skepticism I am, knowing that moments of clarity are always followed by one of Rousseau’s elaborate traps. Every season, in one of these formative episodes, we are granted more information than we’re prepared to handle and then left to our own mental wanderings. Last night:

JIN
Claire?

CLAIRE
*squint*

ME
OHHHHHHH!

SCREEN

ME
AWWWWW?!

Anyone who has made it this far with LOST knows that understanding the show is, at best, being able to decipher between misinformation and disinformation. By now I think I can tell when a character is lying, but that has never brought me any closer to the truth. UNTIL NOW. Unless this is just another one of Rousseau’s elaborate traps. I don’t think it is.

(I had evidence to back up my claims in the form of very astute notes recorded during last night’s episode, but I spilled au jus from a French Dip on them. True story. Was THAT one of Rousseau’s elaborate traps?)

Consider this analogy: LOST is like the weekend-long high school party you throw while your parents are away. As crazy as it can get over the course of Friday and Saturday, Mom and Dad are coming home on Sunday so eventually you need to stop partying and start cleaning up. Sure, Sunday is still fun, your best friends stick around to help you clean, but it’s fun with a purpose, knowing that if the house isn’t spotless your parents are going to be pissed and never leave you home alone again.

Of course, some weekend-long high school parties are thrown by bad kids who destroy their parents’ home and get sent off to military school, so analogously that’s a possibility for LOST too. But I think they’re going to do everything within reason to tidy up their mess. It’s really just a matter of whether the the house will be Spic and Span or will the lingering smell of stale Smoke Monster remain.

It’s time to kill this analogy; I don’t like being somebody’s metaphorical parents. It makes me nervous about finances.

My name is Ben and this blog is less lost than it was a week ago.

Zip It, Jack!

My patience is wearing thin, LOST. Not for your unanswerable mysteries or unfathomable ecosystem. Not for your physical impossibilities or temporal impossibilities or possibility impossibilities. I’m still cool with all of that. It’s this repeat conversation that’s starting to drive me batty:

NATIVE DUDE
Come with me.

OCEANIC DUDE
Where are we going?

NATIVE DUDE
I must show you.

OCEANIC DUDE
I won’t go.

NATIVE DUDE
You must go.

OCEANIC DUDE
No.

NATIVE DUDE
Then we will conk you on the head and drag you.

OCEANIC DUDE
No you wo…

*Conk…Drag

Or sometimes there’s this conversation.

NATIVE DUDE
We need to speak in private.

OCEANIC DUDE
Whatever you have to say to me you can say in front of everyone.

NATIVE DUDE
This is only for your ears.

OCEANIC DUDE
Well I’m not leaving my friends.

NATIVE DUDE
They aren’t really your friends. You were in a plane crash together and at one point all of them have tried to kill you.

OCEANIC DUDE
And I them. You can tell it to all of us or none of us.

NATIVE DUDE
We can do this the easy way or the hard way.

OCEANIC DUDE
Fiiiiiiiiinnne. But if you try anything funny there’s a guy in LA blogging about this and he’ll tell everyone.

We could’ve wrapped up this mystery two years ago if Oceanic dudes weren’t so goddamn stubborn about following the natives. Newsflash: You’re jumping through time on an island that may not exist! Ditch your dogma, listen to the dude who isn’t shocked by the jungle temple or the giant boot in the middle of a beach.

For people covetous of answers they sure do put up a fight when someone tries to offer some.

My name is Ben and I blogged this.

The Meaning of Lost

I hope you’ve spent the last eight months basking in intellectual self-satisfaction, because LOST is about to spend the next four months making you feel like a stupid idiot again.

***SPOILER ALERT***

Milk goes bad when left in an automobile for a week.

***END SPOILER ALERT***

Oh, I guess I should’ve mentioned that spoiler didn’t pertain to LOST. It was merely intended to forewarn those of you prone to lactose-informational-queasiness (LIQ), recently included in the amended Diagnostical Manual for Imaginary Ailments in the section Crummy Tummies.

Back to LOST. I don’t know what’s going to happen this season. And even if I did, I still wouldn’t. LOST is television’s perfect analogy for life: It’s beautiful and stressful and chaotic and unyielding, always, and it won’t all of a sudden make sense as it’s ending; it’ll just end. And even if those last concluding moments do offer up some clarifying wisdom, it still ends and you don’t get to do anything with it.

It’s okay to be terrified for the end of LOST. We like to hope that despite our inclinations towards a meaningless existence that the demigods who paved LOST’s fate have deciphered or created some vast existential code; that when it all ends we will be better in life for what we’ve witnessed on screen. I don’t think it will happen. Will it be entertaining right up until the final “LOST” appears on your screen? Yes. But at no point will you be “FOUND.” You just won’t.

At this point I watch LOST for the same reason you put an extra bullet in the bad guy: Because it’s fun and important to see it die. Do I still love the show? I have no idea. Again, it’s like life: Love it or hate it, you just live it. LOST is a part of my existence. I crave it, like cigarettes and failure, enjoyably, but more without the will to quit.

What separates LOST from cigs and self-destruction but not life is that eventually it will quit me. In the case of LOST, come May. In the case of life, come June. I haven’t been renewed for another season either.

I’m ready to see LOST go, but don’t mistake these statements: I will really enjoy watching it leave. And in that way LOST is less like life and more like a fine booty. LOST is back…TA-DAO!!!

My name is Ben and I LOST this.