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Friday, September 25. 2009
Pleasures, Guilty and Otherwise
Do you have a guilty pleasure? Sure, I have many pleasures, some of them obvious to anyone who has read this screed throughout the years, but not many of my pleasures carry much guilt — or shame, for that matter.Oh, I may downplay, or even avoid, a few of those pleasures around certain folk, like my three lovely sisters, if that gives an indication of which pleasures alluded to with this circumlocution. But guilty, not in the least. Guilt, for the most part, is a religious construct, designed to build shame within religious communities so the “faithful” will feel guilt, confess their “sin” and then drop a few extra duckets in the collection basket when it travels around the congregation. I reject all of that.
But this isn’t a diatribe about the vagaries and evils of religion. I’ve cemented my hole in Hell enough with that topic. That’s funny though; rejecting religion and then invoking the visage of the underworld used by those who worship the God of Abraham to illustrate just where we will end up if we don’t accept religion.
Ever wonder why the Devil, or agents thereof, are so popular as Halloween costumes? We all would like to get away with being devilish, or maybe a little creepy, in a sexually alluring sort of way like Count Dracula. Oh, how we all lusted for Morticia of the Addams Family! Well, we men did! To be Gomez Addams, speaking French and kissing our way up the arm of Anjelica Huston or Carolyn Jones.
Okay, when the series ran for two seasons during the 1960’s, I was a little young to … err … appreciate … to the fullest extent the sexual attraction of the sultry Carolyn Jones, but at that age, to paraphrase the 1970 President’s Report on Pornography, I knew it when I felt it.
Moms, I’m telling you right now, if you ain’t figured it out yet: your young boys, even at the age of eight, get all lit up when a physically — no, sexually — attractive woman is on TV or the Big Screen.
Ariel, from that mermaid movie is popular exactly for that reason. Eh, just my humble opinion.
Not to mention Hermione in the Harry Potter series. Emma Watson plays Harry’s friend, and wife to Harry’s other friend, Ron, and she has blossomed into a lovely young woman. And, for those who may care to know, Emma has provided us with several photos, widely available on the Internets, with her unabashedly undressed. Now the young boys really have someone to lust over. Thank God for the Internets! Don’t worry, she’s over 18 now so don’t feel guilty for looking!
Then of course, the female minions of Count Dracula are all of the very sexually attractive nature. When Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula was released, didn’t we men, all of us heterosexual males anyway, want to be in Keanu Reeves’ position, on that bed as he was being “attacked” by the count’s three courtesans? Of course we did, if only secretly. If you’re married, or in a serious relationship, that’s a fantasy you might not wish to fully share with your lovely spouse. I don’t know though, having never been married.
Anyway, we’re getting off track here. There certainly is no guilt about my pleasures in this regard. Guilty pleasures are the ones I’m embarrassed to mention in public, although I do from time-to-time. Usually though, when I mention a guilty pleasure, several other people chime in and say they like it as well.
Like the SyFy network’s Ghost Hunters. I love watching that show on Wednesday Nights! Usually, the new episode is preceded by two previous shows so if you missed some there’s a good chance you’ll catch the rerun if you tune in at 7 p.m. Can you imagine! Three hours of Ghost Hunters!
My friend John, who provides the comfortable confines of the condo I inhabit, scoffs at the program and that’s okay. He watches all the marathons of House and NCIS. Okay, I like House a little, but jeez, do that have to constantly use that graphic depiction of the body’s insides in nearly every show? I think not! Marcus Welby and Medical Center got along just fine without all that. I mean, it’s like looking at video of your mother’s colonoscopy for crap’s sake!
Okay, back to Ghost Hunters. What these two guys Grant Wilson and Jason Hawes (plumbers by trade) do is don their ghost hunting apparel, jump in their ghost hunting vans and SUV’s and go around the nation investigating — scientifically I might add — purported hauntings. They bring their crew along, this season including Steve Gonsalves, Dave Tango, Kris Williams and Amy Bruni. Kris and Amy are two reasons enough for watching this show!
TAPS is the acronym for the name of their group: The Atlantic Paranormal Society.
Usually, they appear to come up empty and often enough they and their crew end up debunking a lot of what people consider to be ghostly transgressions. Like, on the show this past Wednesday, they investigated an Episcopalian church in New York. They didn’t find anything ghostly. One of the great ghostly occurrences in the church was that chimes would start ringing by themselves and when they did, a candle close by would flare up.
Now, if you’ve seen the movie The Exorcist or read the book (or both), having big, heavy chimes start clanging (seemingly) on their own, that’s going to give you a fright. But, the Ghost Hunters, skeptics that they are, found an air conditioning vent right below the chimes and candle. Well jeez, you don’t have to be a ghost hunter to figure that out.
On a couple of episodes, their cameras and audio recorders have picked up spooky apparitions and mysterious voices, but nothing as remotely visual as the face to the right. That’s from The Exorcist 2000. It was one of the scenes edited from the original version because it was deemed too horrific for the audiences of the day.That’s what I’m waiting to see: irrefutable, visual evidence that strange beings of another dimension exist in this world with us, primarily to scare and provide us with great ideas for Halloween costumes. I’ve been watching the show for at least a year now and haven’t been so satisfied. Just one ghost, that’s all, who floats over to one of their cameras and smiles for the audience. If that ever happens I’m gonna go back to church and be as good a Catholic as St. Francis of Assisi. Well, I’ll at least think about it for a day or two.
In the mean time, I’ll continue watching Ghost Hunters and playing Zinga Poker on FaceBook, among my other pleasures, guilty and otherwise … and there’s a lot to be said for the other.
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