Does Anybody Else Love Sherlock Holmes!

This one time, the old professor in the crime scene house (the murder occurred downstairs - the prof's assistant) was a smoker; he had some particularly NICE ones which Holmes recognized, enthused over as an aficionado - next thing you know, Holmes conducts the whole interview pacing back and forth, chain-smoking like a spaz and gesticulating wildly, filling the whole fucking room up with smoke as he and the prof have their little talk.

The whole point of this big act (apart from to put the professor at ease with all this unforced camaraderie) was so he could pop his head in the door an hour later and see where the murderer had been hiding! The tracks were right there in the scattered ash. She had been concealed in a cabinet or something. The professor knew it all the time.

HOLLLLLLLLLLLLMES!!

What a fuckin' weirdo that guy was, you know? Or what about the time he knocked the fucking oranges over and blamed it on Watson! Watson was like "what the fuck?" Still, Watson kept a cool hand, suspecting Holmes had a big fucking foot in the game. Which he did. Which he always did. I can't help but love Sherlock Holmes and his outré ways! It could be he is even as arrogant as myself.

It wasn't always so. Me and my love of Sherlock Holmes, I mean. I had a copy of the big huge A. Conan Doyle collected, "Compleat" as it were - couldn't fucking get any headway through it at all! Why, it might as well have been the fucking Bible at that age. I forget how old I was at that point, but I wasn't understanding the charms it had hath. So to speak. Anyhow, then years or decades later I see the Robert Downey Jr. / Jude Law ones - fairly recent films. Now I'm the first to admit Downey Jr. looks nothing remotely like Holmes-as-described, OK? But I have to admit, his take on the role made a mark, and when I saw that big ol' Conan Doyle doorstop kicking around, I said "let me have another go at it."

DELIGHTFUL! I tore through the whole thing in essentially, one sitting! Punctuated by several standings and a lying down, okay, but I assure you the book was open and in progress. Just, one's bodily needs, okay? You got to get yourself a cheese-grilled sandwich, you get yourself a cheese-grilled sandwich. Unlike Holmes, we the readers aren't necessarily compelled to ignore these things just because Sherlock's all hot on the scent and shit.

And you know what? It was Downey Jr.'s incarnation of Holmes that spirited me through Doyle's collected stories. All through that book and since, I just keep on picturing Holmes as Robert Downey Jr. Every time the story mentions or describes what Holmes looks like, I'll say to myself, "that's peculiar," then pass it by. I can't seem to picture Holmes another way, now. I think it's that wide-eyed look he gives us - that look of pretended innocence in some or another matter where we know full well Holmes is up to something! Picturing Sherlock Holmes in his usual classically-depicted unimpressed bird-nosed long-limbed gawky asceticism just wasn't doing it for me. Who wants to hang out with that guy? I don't care how smart he is.

Without changing the peculiar nature of Holmes's character - his acerbity, his impatience with others and disdain for ordinary life, his delight in a challenge and in the exercise of his powers, his pride in advancing the so-called "science of detection" (basically just some bull shit he knocked together himself that nobody else can even do right), his instinct for the dramatic flourish, with all secrets kept for the big reveal - something about Downey Jr.'s take provided the key to the character for me. He made all these things click. With previous Holmeses, a lot of the time I just thought "this guy's a dick, but we need to humor him if we want these crimes solved." Basically you bite the bullet for the greater good. Whereas Downey Jr. makes that same cocktail of characteristics delightful! Delightful. I love to watch him work!

Mind you, I'm not saying a bad word about Rathbone. My mom would kill me. This Cumberbatch guy does a damn good job as well, but something about seeing Holmes running around modern London makes me say "Why not just put him on the Starship fucking Enterprise at that point?" It's not fucking Sherlock Holmes, man. A perfectly valid update/reboot, of course - putting a character in a different setting, hey, it's just done. It's one of those things they're allowed to do - whether I buy it or not. And if you're going to do it, best to do it well. In particular, I must cite the brilliant job they've updating and adapting those methods of observation and deduction. Holmes trains his magician's eye upon all modern details to deliver a classic performance each time, very much in tune with the original. A neat trick.

There Have Been No Reasons.

For a very long time now, well, an eyeblink in geological terms; no wait, a mudslide in geological terms? An eyeblink in biological terms. A ring stained in wood, in botanical terms. In relative terms, a dead uncle. In inverse cosmological terms, an eternity. In terms of vague understatement, for a while.

For a very long time now, there have been no reasons. Well, then I see no reason to start having them now. I have no truck with reasons. I don't need to explain my reasons. I don't cotton to those. You're not the boss of me, but you are pretty boss I must admit, and I need to do a better job frankly. No reason. It just feels like it. Not even I feel. It feels.

I am going to go worry some people. I will use fingers and possibly lips, and possible a soft brush of some kind for a delicious variation in texture and sensation. I will worry them deep inside. I will worry them at their borders, at their edges, at their fringes and see if they fray. If they do, I will claim the fault for the idea, and vice-versa, and I will refute each of those claims, and I will do it easily, each in turn. See what they have to think about that! Feel what they have to taste about that. Hear what they have to stink about that. Smell what they have to say about that. Halitosis, you see, and synaesthesia: an unbeatable combination you can't get anyplace else but the human brain, or so we perceive dimly, as if through a looking twice. The human brain: a miracle of Intelligent Evolution, now on sale for a song, for a steal, for what that and a cup of coffee will get you, which depending on the steal could be fine, imprisonment, I don't care.

There have been no reasons since I gave up that last cigarette, and the one after that, and the one after that. Technically, what I'm giving up is less the cigarette than the butt. Are you surprised that I would give up the butt? I couldn't help it. My health was at stake. To be honest, what I miss now was that smooth, relaxing, satisfying flavor. And you could say this whole thing may have gone South, and not even ventrally - which would not be so bad, which could be lovely depending on one's pet taboos and the disparate acts and personal variables of persons and attraction-math that all add up (as far as you're concerned) to the magic number 144 on your personal scoreboard: gross! That's right, and you shouldn't be surprised. I am running the dozens now. Ask your mother. She will tell you the same damn score, and give no reason. She isn't the whore in this particular yo' momma joke, pimp. Look in the mirror.

I am.

Regarding Birthdays

Fuck the usual disclaimers, let's get straight to the asinine bullshit. 

So. Birthdays. Hip hip and tally ho! What is a world without a little celebration, yes? We get together and we do things and occasionally those things do us, or maybe we do those things to each other and it's great. Why? Because you reluctantly slid out of what will eventually become an angry vagina for a very long time afterward, or were given the old birthing ice cream scoop procedure as I like to call it. Caesarean Section for all you folks with more than two brain cells to rub together.
I like my way better personally but then I would, wouldn't I. 

Anyway. This is your day, man or woman or whatever. Eat, drink and be merry, for on this day you are more than a hairless monkey baby. Oh no. Today, you are a golden eagle soaring majestically over the land. We take all the shit you've dumped on the world over the last year and just shovel it down our necks for you. Forget that time you got way too drunk at the Halloween party last year and tried to finger my girlfriend. It's okay. It totally doesn't matter that you backed over our dog when you made good your drunk driving escape either. Water under the bridge, pal! Because IT'S YOUR BIRTHDAY, BRAH! LET LOOSE!

Or at least, that seems about the jist of it sometimes. Even without all that sweeping of shit under the carpet for an evening, as far back as I can remember I never particularly cared for birthdays. Oh sure, like any kid I was receptive of the gifts I totally didn't deserve, unhealthy snacks and cakes, and the absurd activities that can go hand in hand with the potential onset of diabetes. But deep down, there was always this sense of dread there for me. I still don't know exactly where that comes from to be honest. Maybe it's the reminder that death is a full waltz closer to asking you for your hand as you sit against the back wall, nursing a warm glass of life. I really couldn't say. Anyway.

People tell me it's to celebrate ones life and the like, and indeed that is a very sweet sentiment to put across. I can dig it. At the same time though, I wonder why everyday we spend with one another isn't celebrated, excluding the days when you're an asshole naturally, because there are those days, right? You need to vent, you need to chill, you need time to stop pondering how hard of a punch the offending party deserves and sometimes it's you but that's okay. We make mistakes and we punch each other for it and maybe we don't do that offending thing again.We probably will but look, we forgive. WHY CAN'T THAT BE A THING, WORLD?

Y'know, it's funny though. Even with all that shit I just said, and how much I truly believe it...sometimes I remember someones birthday that I no longer spend time with and I get a little sad. I start obsessing about it until nothing else feels solid and it's at this time that I start to see my own little piece of beauty in what I consider a yearly spit in the face. I don't feel sad for the parties we'll never have, or that I couldn't celebrate that particular day with them. It's not even that I'm grateful for the day their parents fucked and gave my old friend life, though serious kudos go to them for that.

No no, mine is a sadness altogether more fucked up, but potentially far more sweet if you're broken enough to see into this shitty mirror I use to reflect. 

I'm sad because I'm reminded that we aren't slowly dying together anymore. I loved slowly dying with you. You died in ways I'll never know or get to share in this year, and that's a bummer. I still celebrate your existence everyday, but it's just not the same. 

So this is me, Mr. FuckBirthdays saying Happy Birthday, old friend. Wherever you are.

Derf out.