A man. A dog. A fucked-up farewell.

Ralph Stanley - O, Death (Hey! A reference to my last post! Synergy!)

As in the past, I was inspired to write an angry post after a night of watching Sunday night television. Two shows in particular, both airing at the same exact time. The shows couldn't be more different, but in their most recent episodes (one a season finale) they both made the same mistake: killing off a major character.

(WICKED SPOILERS LAY AHEAD BRO)

Boardwalk Empire decided to kill off my favorite character, after disgracing him first, and Family Guy killed off the family (talking) pet.

I'm not one of those people that petitions the network to cancel a show for killing a character or petition the creator to bring back the character; in fact, I love when a series has the balls to kill off a main character, if it's done well. If it makes for a great episode and story line, and it works for the show as a whole, kill those sons of bitches. But these two deaths felt forced, unnecessary. Just...wrong.

First off, the easier one: Family Guy. I'm not the biggest fan, but I think it's the third best prime time cartoon ever (right behind Fish Police). Brian, the talking, martini-drinking dog, is easily one of the best characters on the show. He is often the one that keeps the show grounded in reality (ironic considering he's a talking dog) and gives it a sense of class. He is the voice of reason in the family, and the show itself. Family Guy is not a show that deals with serious topics. It has an entire episode dedicated to making fun of babies left in the dumpster after prom night. I watched a rerun last night where Peter mistakenly, yet mercilessly and horrifically, slices Quagmire's new cat to death without batting an eye, and all of his friends show no real concern.

There is the occasional "real" emotion, but the show deals mostly in the absurd.Then, this past Sunday night, Brian gets run over by a car right in front of his best friend, Stewie. It's bloody and gross, like the show often is, but it's not played for a gag. Stewie and the family are generally upset. Stewie figures he'll use his time machine to go back and fix it, but he had dismantled it earlier.

So Brian dies.

Stewie can't fix it.

The family gets another dog.

The dog has a heart to heart talk with Stewie about missing Brian.

End episode.

What the fuck? Did Seth McFarlane commission a middle school PSA on dealing with dead pets? What the hell did I just watch?

The one article I read about the episode said it was an idea that came up in the writer's room and they just went with it. They thought it was just the bestest idea ever! How fun it will be to watch the whole family suffer! We'll make this absurd cartoon about a moron, his murderous baby, crazy family, and talking dog into an after school special about the harsh realities of pet ownership. Fun!

Well, the backlash is upon them, and this time, the same internet fury that got Family Guy back on the air after cancellation might just get their asses booted off the air.

I don't mind when characters die, if it makes for a good show. This did not. And there's no way it can be beneficial to the series. Even if Paulie Walnuts was amazing as the new dog (he's not) there is no coming back from this. Think about when your own pet dies. It sucks for a very long time. It's a hard decision to get another pet, and even when you do, you don't love that new pet as much. Maybe you will eventually, but that also takes a long time, and it requires that you accept this pet as an entirely different individual that you will love differently. Well, this is a tv show and audiences don't want to love our shows differently. We want our dramas to remain dramas and comedies to remain comedies (hear that Weeds??). When series replace actors it hardly ever works; we have grown attached to this character, represented by this person, for so long that it feels fraudulent when another actor tries to emulate that character. We can't accept it. And adding new characters is such an obvious ploy to draw attention and boost ratings that the Family Guy writers should be embarrassed. I mean, we all learned that trick on The Simpsons (a much better show overall) a long time ago.

You know the Family Guy writers saw that Poochie episode. One of them remembered it a decade later and instead of seeing it as a hilarious parody of the tv industry's lack of creativity, he took it as a tutorial.

Maybe this is a part of a larger story line and they are planning to bring Brian back, but it seems to me this is a permanent, long-term move (unless they eventually buckle to fan pressure). It was a horrible decision, but like everything else Seth MacFarlane does, it's not the quality of the material that matters, its how much attention the material gets. This move got plenty of attention, I just don't think it's the attention they wanted.

Besides, Futurama already did the ultimate dead dog cartoon. No cartoon should ever deal with the subject again. Ever. Please.

The next death didn't get as much attention, but I think it was just as devastating to the series in which it occurred. Richard Harrow, the man with the half-tin face, made his very sad, sad departure from Boardwalk Empire in the finale of the very sad, sad season 4. The show may have jumped the shark in the previous episode, so it's no surprise that the finale was so disappointing.

The shark jumping occurred when Gillian Darmody confessed her murder (of that guy in her bathtub) to her new fiancee, who ended up being an undercover detective. I won't get too much into it here, but it was a ridiculous twist to an uninteresting subplot.

After the last season finale, where Richard shoots up about 20 gangsters and takes Tommy to a new home, Richard has lost his edge. He doesn't appear too much in season 4, but one scene early on involves him being unable to even kill a dying dog. Late in the season, we see him interact with Chalky White, and it seems as if our (my) wildest dreams will finally come true: Half-face and Chalky are gonna get together and fuck shit UP! Yes!

In the season 4 finale, Chalky meets with Dr. Narcisse, and we see Richard in a balcony with a rifle about to take Narcisse out. Hell yeah! But Richard hesitates. His hands are shaking. His fingers are stiff. He refocuses and pulls the trigger...only to shoot Chalky's daughter, who had just walked in front of Narcisse, right in the head.

Damn. Okay. Didn't see that coming. Surprises are usually good. Like Eli killing the federal agent earlier in the episode. Awesome! But this? Damn.

Richard runs away as Narcisse's men shoot at him. Chalky is dragged away by his people.

Later we see Richard, meeting little Tommy and his new wife in Wisconsin. He's smiling, and we see that he has his real face...he's dreaming. Cut to the final scene of the season: Richard dying alone on the beach under a pier.

Fuck. That was depressing.

Ok, I'm admitting bias here because he is my favorite character, but...WHY YALL DO HIM DIRTY LIKE THAT HBO?

I get it. He's a soldier who lost his nerve, and a soldier without the ability to kill serves no purpose, especially in 1930's Atlantic City. His time had come. But why have him kill the girl? That disgraces his whole legacy. Not to mention, it taints Chalky. Yeah he'll be more outraged than ever, but instead of focusing all the fury on Narcisse, now he'll have to face the fact that he is partially at fault for his daughter's death.

I don't want to see all that. I just want Chalky to fuckin destroy Narcisse. His character is well rounded enough, and deals with plenty already (race relations with the whites, race relations among the blacks, balancing a business and family). This is another level to his character, and it feels very unnecessary.

And Richard. Poor fucking Richard. Besides Buscemi's legendarily ugly mug, he was the face of the show (no pun intended). He was the most interesting character, and it seemed as if he had the most story and character to still develop. When Jimmy Dormady died, it was sad. But he had to go. It fit the story, it improved the story, and it pushed the story forward. I just don't see it with Richard's death. Maybe (hopefully) they prove me wrong, but this season as a whole has left me disappointed.

But what do I know? I don't write these shows, I just watch. I'm just a fan.

A fan with a broken heart... *cue violins*

I Love You All (Goodbye, Brian and Mr. Harrow)...Class Dismissed.

O, Death

Kno - Death is Silent

I don't fear death. I certainly don't want to face it any time soon (I don't have a death wish or anything) but I have come to terms with my own inevitable demise.

On the other hand, when death is in the vicinity of my loved ones, it's harder for me to accept. I've been very lucky to not have lost many friends or family, but even when death takes a friend's family member or a friend of a friend, I start to question the wisdom of the universe's routine of granting sentience to beings just to snatch it away so mercilessly. I'm quasi-Buddhist so I get the whole yin and yang, need-the-dark-to-appreciate-the-light philosophy, but fuck all that. Death fucking hurts. Life would be just fine without death, I'm sure.

When I am far enough away from death, though (or rather, when death is far enough away from my friends and family) I can see the beauty in it. If we can separate ourselves from the pain a little and take a lesson from it, it does make us appreciate our short time in existence. But more than that, as my favorite author stated, when it comes down to it, there are fates far worse than death.

We've probably all considered this notion after watching countless tv shows and movies featuring a person in a coma and the family deciding whether or not to maintain life support. I remember as a kid thinking, "keep that shit on motherfucker!" (I listened to a lot of Wu Tang as a kid). Some point in college, it evolved to, "The answer all depends on whether or not the practical value of keeping me alive outweighs the practical value of removing life support." (I read a lot of John Locke in college.) Now, my official stance on it is: "Let me go." Basically, if I've missed two or more episodes of Boardwalk Empire, pull the plug.

As I said before, I don't fear death...but I'm terrified of any kind of brain damage. It's almost an obsessive fear. When I get headaches I start to think about my brain splitting and having to speak like Sylvester the Cat for the rest of my life.

"Sssufferin ssstroke victim."

Cut off all my limbs and I think I'd have a strong desire to still live, but mess with my brain? Just get it over with and kill me.

I'm exaggerating a little, but it's an honest fear. And its a very good likelihood. Every year, 795,000 people in the US have a stroke, and 135,000 of those stroke victims die. Fuck.

Then there's traumatic brain injuries: 1.7 million TBIs every year in the US alone. You gotta be out of your mind (no pun intended) to play football and suffer concussions regularly. I'm not trying to forget my name at 55 years old. Even if I avoid high contact sports, there's always the possibility of a car accident or a hard fall, both of which I've had. Fortunately I only broke some bones and not my brain.

What really concerns me--and strangely fascinates me--is that my mind will just snap one day. It has always fascinated--and concerned--me how little control we have over our brains. The brain is an organ, and just like any other organ it can malfunction. There have been times where I've felt on the constant verge of breakdown. I have studied (to some extent, I'm certainly no scholar on the subject) the way the brain works, and the scientific consensus is that we really don't understand the brain that much at all. It's very easy for someone's brain chemistry to change and cause an alteration in that individual's personality. A particularly vicious knock to the head, or a parasite, or a virus, or even the ingestion of certain substances can change a person's identity, the essence of an individual. Just think about the last time you got really drunk. You become another person for a while, to the point where it's almost a viable excuse to say "I must have been drunk" when our bad decisions come back to haunt us.

Even if we are perfectly sober and healthy, we still have less control over our own minds than we believe (which is weird in itself because our minds are the mechanism that allows us to "believe" so you'd think it would know best). One of the biggest functions of the brain is memory, which helps us create a vision of ourselves. Unfortunately, memory is tenuous at best. That link is to an article describing all the bizarre things that affect our memory, and that's just the start of the list. So this ability of ours, which is so important to identity creation, is very weak, and as we age, or if it is afflicted with certain diseases, it gets even weaker. Great.

Memento was like a horror film to me. How can you live with no memory of yourself, or your life, or especially (like in the film) with no memory of the past at all?

That shit scares me. What if I just wake up with no memory one day? It could happen. Or what if I wake up crazy? That happens all the time, too. Even Oprah almost suffered from a nervous breakdown. What if I go into work one day and see Nick Jake's 607th bandana and I just lose it?

I sympathize with people who have mental breakdowns. I never sympathize (or condone, obviously) those who harm other people, but I can understand. They're not thinking straight, that's the problem. A lot of them don't understand what they're doing at the time or the ramifications of their actions. I've read too many true crime books about all types of killers to think that they are much different from the rest of us.

That last fact scares and comforts me (I've mentioned that paradox is my favorite word before, right?). The majority of us are living on the verge of crazy. We all do our best to suppress it, and some do better than others. Sometimes external factors cause a snap, sometimes our own personal decisions and mistakes lead to a breakdown, but either way, it's a reality we all could face a lot easier than we assume.

The world is fucking crazy, and if we really paid attention and contemplated all the fucked up things happening in the world for very long, we'd probably all go insane. That's the beauty of human nature. We persevere, we carry on, despite it all.

We prepare for the worst and do our best to understand the realities of life, but that doesn't make life easier. It just makes it tolerable. And that's the most we should ask for out of life. That part of Buddhist philosophy I have completely bought into: life is suffering. A lot of people hear that and think it's really depressing. I think it's a beautiful philosophy, because it means that if we are lucky enough to have a life that's anything but constant misery, we should be thankful for it every second of every day.

Then again, it's hard to maintain that thankfulness. I always thought a particular scene from The Sopranos was the perfect summation of the human existence (not the scene where Christopher gets high on heroin and sits on Adriana's dog, but that one too, I suppose). Tony was recovering from being shot, and he goes to Dr. Melfi's office to tell her he's becoming depressed again. He knows that life is precious, now more than ever, and he knows he should appreciate every moment, but it's just so...well, I'll let him tell it: "This isn't painful. Getting shot is painful. Getting stabbed in the ribs is painful. This shit isn't painful. It's empty... dead."

It's the mundane, endless minutiae of life that gets people. It's why people turn to drugs and alcohol, or any addiction really (and just like with mental breakdowns, it's much easier to become an addict than we all assume). The monotony of life is what drives people crazy. There is no purpose to life in and of itself, we have to do our best to give our lives purpose. Life is suffering, so we do what we can to ease that suffering. I have learned to focus on the positive, and I'm mostly successful in that endeavor. I keep up with the horrible shit (aka "the news") but I balance it out with pictures of puppies, and stories about Malala and heroic acts from average people. Positive psychology scientists (those exist!) believe that  it takes a 4:1 or 5:1 ratio of positive emotions to negative emotions to keep you balanced, so it's important to get a good dose of positivity throughout the day.

And it's important to spread positivity throughout the day as well. Any little way you can. Never underestimate the power of a simple, kind gesture. Sometimes people just need somebody else to hear their stories.

CHiPs saves the day again! California Highway Patrolman Kevin Briggs, aka "The Guardian of The Golden Gate," convinces Kevin Berthia that there are alternatives to ending his life. Berthia is one of hundreds of people Briggs has saved. 

There are people who may be beyond the point of no return, especially if drugs and alcohol are a part of the problem, but it's worth at least trying to help. Otherwise, one day we may be the ones on the wrong side of the bridge, with no one to hear our stories.

Man that's pretty dark. Sorry. Did you know that it has been scientifically proven that optimists live longer? Here, I'll end it with a picture of a dog pulling a kid on a skateboard:

He should really be wearing a helmet though, he could crash and...shit. Sorry!

Epilogue: As I revised and prepared to publish this post, I read a facebook post from a friend of mine. He had just decided to randomly talk to a guy who looked upset. The guy was very depressed and talked about his problems for about an hour. He had been headed to a bridge to jump, but telling his story to a friendly stranger made him change his mind.

And that is the shit I live for.

I Love You All (it's not just a tag line, it's real)...Class Dismissed.