Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 11/1/24

Once More into the Breech edition

Everyone here at the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker is on high alert, making sure we’ve got provisions laid in from November 6th to January 6th, 2025. We as a bunker do not have any faith in the rest of the scattered population in this vast, blasted hellscape. And yet, we also acknowledge that while there will be bruised egos and inchoate anger from at least one third of the population, if not just over one half, we are also fully prepared to point fingers and waggle them at the mention of an uprising, a coup, any “fight to defend fill-in-the-blank” or any of that other incendiary rhetoric.

I’ve been in a gray fog this whole month, and I’m glad to be on the other side of it, but now that I’m staring into the black abyss of the next few days, I am fighting back the urge to pound shots until my brain melts. The years 2016 to 2020 were such a nightmare for me; stressful, full of tragedy and so much pain and anger. I don’t want to repeat that and I am getting together, in advance of Tuesday, all of the strategies I used to manage stress and balance my brain chemistry, just in case.

Roanoke Writer’s Conference is Nigh

We are approaching the weekend wherein I reveal secrets, instruct and inform, and hopefully educate and entertain a bunch of people who are coming to Roanoke to listen to me and my fellow scribblers. Will attending this free conference make you a better writer? Yes. Yes, it will.

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Halloween Check In

Our candy handout at the movie theater was way up this year, mostly because of the downtown Halloween Candy Grab that has been happening for a few years now. People will line up on one side of the street, their candy in the trunk of their car, and the children will dutifully march by and get stuff dropped into their sacks.

I really hate this modern trend of “Trunk or Treats.” I get that you’re worried about these non-existent and confirmed urban legends about razor blades in fun-size Milky Ways and worse! Marijuana gummies in the shape of Spongebob or whatever it is the kids are into these days. None of that is real, of course, but I don’t think the solution is to send your kids into a church parking lot to take candy from the back of a stranger’s wide open car trunk. That feels like two steps back, to me.

This needs to be real.

Especially in small towns. You don’t want to send your kids into a strange neighborhood in Houston? No problem. Right there with you. But in a small town, you know where everyone lives. You know who they are getting candy from. You know these people. What, exactly, is the problem, here? Y’all all want to participate in Halloween; you want to dress up, buy a bunch of candy, decorate, and all of that. But for tricks and treats? That tradition of knocking on a door is dying off.

That being said, we gave out all of our candy to the people in line waiting to walk the world’s safest gauntlet to get a bag of processed sugar, even as the churches were braying loudly about the glorification of demons and witchcraft. Tell that to the kid who came dressed as a Jurassic Park dinosaur wrangler. Clearly, he’s on a path to Satan. Everyone knows the dinosaurs were a just trick played on gullible Christians.

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Goldfish Memories

I have a serious question for everyone over the age of fifty who are reading this: what happened to your memory? Not the short-term stuff; I’m talking about the files from the 1980s and 1990s. You were there. You lived through it. Why don’t you remember any of it?

If you tell me “We had kids,” I’ll accept that as a valid answer. Having kids refocuses your priorities around the children. In order to make room for things like their birthdays and what shit they are allergic to, and so some things might get overwritten on your hard drive. If you tell me you were hit in the head by a t-shirt fired out of a cannon at Lollapalooza, I’ll buy that, too.

What about the rest of you? What’s your excuse? How is it you can recall the Rice-a-Roni jingle from the mid-70s with perfect pitch and clarity, but you don’t remember the plot of the Iran-Contra scandal? Or the Anita Hill hearings? Or the first Gulf War? Or the Columbine school shooting?

Let’s get real, now: where were you in the year 2000 when the Supreme Court decided the election outcome? Remember that?

I get that memories shift and drift over time. We all misremember things, both innocuous and significant, and we’re involved in our own memories, to boot. But it’s the willful compartmentalization that I keep having the most problems with. We wall off bad memories and negative emotions because if we don’t it’ll give us ulcers. I think of this as the mental equivalent of putting your old yoga shit into a Rubbermaid plastic tub and slotting it into your metal utility shelves in the garage, maybe labeled, maybe not.

It's a survival skill we’ve picked up over ten thousand years of evolution. The thing is, I don’t think it’s helping right now. There’s something magical about an election year, in particular a post-9/11 election year. Few things are as dire or consequential as the things that we are suddenly confronted with, gaslight style, to assure us all that not only are things terrible, but they are getting worse! Prices are too high! No pets are safe! Crime! The border!

After the election, things will shockingly, suddenly return to pre-hyperbolic levels, and we’ll forget all about those bugbears and hobgoblins until the next election cycle when it starts all over again. None of this would be a problem, except that we go all in for it, don’t we?

Not all of us do, of course. I am immune to the Republican rhetoric this year because I have heard it before; in 2020, 2016, 2012, and even 2008. It never varies. The fearmongering is a tried-and-true playbook that they truck out every four years to strike fear into the hearts of god-fearing citizens. The only thing they haven’t brought up this year is the soaring price of gasoline, because it’s not. I mean, it’s never stopped them from using it, but I guess there’s only so many chambers in the cylinder, huh?

I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. I’m ready for all of this to be in my rearview mirror, assuming that anyone is going to give it a rest, accept the outcome of the election, and move on with their lives. I get that one of the candidates is fighting to stay out of jail, and that if he goes, it’ll be an attack by the other and a gross abuse of power. Yeah, I know. I know. I just wish there was a way for me to not have to be involved in the four years of fallout from this election that is sure to follow.

If only there was a way to forget all about...hey, wait a second...! Goldfish!

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Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Note: we’ve gotten all of the spooky movies and TV out of our system, with the exception of FROM, which continues to be the soothing balm on my still-tender LOST burn. One clueless reviewer claimed that it was too much like LOST, and our measured response to this was, “Yeah? So?” because longtime followers of the newsletter will know that there is no such thing as an original idea, and your only real requirement when dipping into that reservoir of inspiration is that you do something different (or in this case, better) by learning from the mistakes of the past and not repeating them. If you’re not watching FROM, and you were a fan of LOST, don’t miss out. Season three is halfway done. Now’s the perfect time to jump in.

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Loudermilk (Netflix)

A former rock critic and recovering alcoholic is trying to get his life together by running a support group for a band of misfits.

Lots of little touches in this show. I spotted a Sub Pop shirt and made a Squee!

Ron Livingston (my hero ever since Office Space) shines in this savage cultural critique of modern Pacific Northwest life.

Every so often someone writes a script for a movie or a TV show that cuts through the demographics and attempts to appeal to a wide swath of disparate people and just aims for a particular segment of the population. I think Loudermilk is aimed straight at Generation X and in particular the people who were in their 20s in the 1990s and all of the shit they got up to while trying to figure out life and also have something clever to say about Pearl Jam and Mudhoney. Me, in other words.

I don’t know if Loudermilk is frickin’ great or merely really damn good. But oh golly, do I feel acknowledged.

Livingston plays Sam Loudermilk, a guy who did a lot, had a career, and then wrecked his life from drinking and drugs. Now, he’s a sponsor for “Sober Friends,” which is a stand-in for every 12-step program out there. He lives with his sponsor and ends up sponsoring a young woman in the first episode. That’s the whole set-up. It’s pretty simple: Sam has to worry about everything because he doesn’t want to drink again. The problem is, he’s got strong opinions about modern life, and all of the hipsters in Seattle are the targets of his observations, which makes for hilarious cold opens and some inspired rants as the series progresses.

Loudermilk’s rants are occasionally personal but likely as not are aimed at a particular segment of the population, calling out behaviors and affectations that don’t line up with his own sensibilities. He’s as wrong as he is right much of the time, but he’s still expressing a basic frustration with how we’ve developed as a people.

A stand-out of this series is that, while it deals with a serious subject, seriously, they manage to balance it out with comedy without sacrificing what goes into managing addictions. No concessions are made for this being a TV show; Loudermilk doesn’t get the girl. He’s a mess and he knows it. People relapse on this show. It happens. They also go to a meeting and get back on the horse. For all of its bluster and kvetching about people, Loudermilk cares about his group, even while acknowledging they are all brain damaged.

The support group figures into every episode and the characters are largely one-note personalities, because there’s so many of them, but as a support group, it totally works. Comedian Brian Regan is a stand-out here in that “who knew he could act” kind of way—and it helps that he’s playing essentially a version of his stand-up persona—and the rest of the cast makes the most of their personality quirks. Yeah, they are misfits, but they are kinda lovable in that effed up way that people in Farrelly brothers movies tend to be.

One half of the Farrelly brothers is involved in the writing of this show, and both brothers directed episodes. You can tell it's an extension, if not an outright evolution, of their type of comedy, with Livingston delivering an incredible, snarky, constantly put-out, over-the-top, rant-filled exploration of being the smartest hipster in a room full of people who are even more messed up than he is. Loudermilk is a fair-play comedy drama that will feel familiar to fans of High Fidelity and other 80s and 90s staples that have given rise to the cultural divide between X’s, Mils, and Z’s. A great palate cleanser with only three short seasons with 30-minute episodes. You get a lot of bang for your buck.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”