Better grab another one.
DING DING DING. There’s the buzz.
In recent days I’ve become an absolute Seinfeld junkie. Yesterday I watched 12 episodes in a row and have no regrets or apologies or frank damns to give. It was great PLUS I made nachos. What could be better? But Seinfeld (much like my other favorite sitcom Frasier) is a thinking man’s show. You watch it and if you have any intelligence at all, you get your intellectual rocks off. I can see why it was a generational and cultural phenomenon; who goes into something and right off the bat claims it’s about nothing? Hipster before hipsters.
Not Walter White.
Does our generation have that? A generational voice? A flagship TV show? The 90’s had it all: Smells Like Teen Spirit for an anthem, Pulp Fiction was THE movie, and Seinfeld changed it all. “Post-Modernism” is what they called it. Where the fuck does that leave us?
With Walter White.
… Goddamn that’s a scary thought.
What happens when you leave the “post” world? What’s it look like out there? With Seinfeld we were in the bustling city fretting and poking fun at the mundanities of “modern” life. How people eat a Snickers a big deal. Formality insanity calamity motherfucking JANE. The West was deader than disco. A whole generation of 30 somethings who didn’t care and had a completely chic disregard for humanity because humanity didn’t care about them. But we’re younger now. Smarter, cleaner, more technically proficient, drunker, wilder, sicker, yadda yadda yadda.
But Walter White?
The mad men left the West to come East and do stand up.
Except Walter White.
The world after post-modernism is sick and desperate. We have no generational figure that can stand up and give culture a couple snide remarks behind a microphone. We have no unholy roller in a tweed suit and a frizzy pomp. We have the survivor who NEEDS to survive. Where would Jerry be without Superman and low-talkers? Where would Jerry be when there’s ONLY Superman and low-talkers?
With Walter White. Staring down the black metal chamber wondering why his wife is in love with a cripple.
(Not that there’s anything wrong with that).
But enough rambling. Let’s get down to brass tacks.
Hold on, I think I’ll have myself a COLD beer. PART II
SHIT! It’s my last one and I’m too drunk to go to the store! WHAT A WORLD! OH THE HUMANITY!
Anyway
We live in a time of paranoia we don’t see or feel because we don’t need to nor do we see any reason to be scared. You gotta know where, when, who, what, and how everybody is. We’re dumbed down, dressed up, chewed to pieces, tuned in, and zoned the fuck out. The picture perfect funny, mundane city full of Soup Nazis in puffy shirts has given way to the New New West; a post-apocalyptic wasteland where winners lose and losers win by being worse than the winners.
To finally get to the point (because these intoxicated rants are too much for sensible, mortal/moral beings), I’ve re-re-written a (thus rendering it a post-post modern) poem.
TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE FESTIVUS
By Dylan Merrick
'Twas the Night before Festivus
And somewhere in Albuquerque, New Mexico
A bald guy in Ray Manzarek’s spectacles (keyboardist of the Doors)
Was getting gas at a Texaco
Was getting gas at a Texaco
He was filling up his RV
And I know that wasn’t him AND it’s from another episode
But fuck you this is my poem
Don’t like it? (Something that rhymes with Texaco)
He just blew up an old guy,
Some black guy, and a Chilean national
Scared the shit out of his wife
Hey wait; have you ever heard the J. Geils Band song Centerfold?
(Anyway)
The meth bags were stashed
Inside the glove box so tightly
This lunatic white boy
Was none other than Walter White ysee?
He makes Archie Bunker look decent
And Hitler look mannered
But all us Millenials
Have him in our Facebook banners.
He’s killed more people
I only liked Cheers
For Frasier’s cameos and also Ted Danson.
“Mr. White” as Jesse Calls him
Is a complex tour de force
But we don’t want him to have remorse
This television program (like this poem) has gone way off course
We fear that when he goes inside to pay
Something bad will occur
IT’s like Mad Max meets Mr. Rogers
I don’t where I was going
Long live Biggie and Tupac Shakur.
I could weave a story but why should I? The truth is I don’t know where the hell Breaking Bad is going besides Nick at Nite right next to Kenan & Kel and All That. It belongs with those and all the other surreal, wacky shows we remember so fondly because it takes the concepts to the extremes. If Tommy Pickles is our Indiana Jones and Pokemon is our Darwin, Walter White is our Santa Claus. No show besides Mad Men captures the sentiments of our born-deranged generation. But they kick it back to the 60’s. We wanna see ourselves, we’re vain like that and that’s okay. White stalks and prowls the same collapsing Byzantine Empire dreams we wander, looking for some truth and he found it: good old fashioned rugged individualism.
We were all inundated with the idea that we need to love each other for our differences when we were children.
Walter White doesn‘t distinguish.
We were told to be ourselves.
Walter White does things his way because he says so.Jerry Seinfeld sat back and laughed and joked amidst the chaos. That doesn’t fly round these parts. He was above it. But like any good post-post modern profit, Walter White makes or breaks the chaos.
Alright. He just makes. That’d be too puntastic.
Like elves making toys for all the good little girls and boys, he reaches into his haunted chemistry textbook and gives what he sees fit to those whom he sees fit. Where Seinfeld shrugged while he was up there on the cross he was nailed to as the generational spectator, Walter White stands upon his crucifix with an outstretched arm. When the camera follows down that arm you see that jet black .38 Special clenched in his skinny fast, half dreading what he may do and half hoping he blasts the next thing to come in his way to smithereens.
Liz Lemon, Ron Swanson, and Abed are great, but they don’t rile us up with the way we really feel. They make you laugh and feel, but Walter White makes you dream.
He’s the New Age pioneer; a bloody Picasso who just blew up a nursing home.
There’s no doubt about it folks and fair readers; we’re not the spectators of the 90s like Generations X and Y. We’re the go-getter helicopter parent Millenials on a mission from Hell with no map. We’re not the dazed and confused, jaded slackers who think surf music is cool and the inescapable white collar prison is still lame. We saw where the red pill takes us. We know Tyler Durden well and we know the Titanic sank. It just doesn’t do it for us anymore. We need it fast-paced; a million mile an hour freeway generation who doesn’t care if you don’t like it. We’re looking to forge beyond the comedy of the American Dream’s grave. We’re looking for the resurrection and we know it’s gonna be a real Guignol Horrorshow.
This is why we NEED Walter White - he who knows or figures out everything all the time in the nation under surveillance. Rather than laugh to feel liberated we want someone who CAN liberate and who WILL liberate us. If Che Guevara and Subcomandante Marcos are the modern and post-modern revolutionaries, Walter White is the post-post modern Che Guevara. He’s come to deck the sullen halls in the wreckage of his Pontiac Aztek sleigh. He’s our reaction; our backlash; Richie Cunningham All Grown Up.
I don’t mean to ramble again and put in a bunch of weird, obscure references and allusions, but there are times to be a douchebag. These are those times. A baby’s gotta do what a baby’s gotta do killer tofu. Hipster is as hipster does. Think about Walt’s place somewhere in our political circus spectrum. Think about us. Do we care about the young folks? Do the young folks care about the young folks? Maybe too much. Is he the ringleader or the painter on the flying trapeze? Some whacko with a snub nose hidden in his Dickies or the patron Saint of the post-post modern American landscape?
I don’t know. I’m out of beer.
~D. Merrick
