All It Is

I'm walking down Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. I just moved out here and was feeling pretty good about it. I mean, you got the whole vibrant, alive city thing going and everything. You got the 2 million-plus people living just in your borough and what have you--all that personality and all those cultures from lands far away mixed in with the culture that all have come together and created that is NYC culture. It makes you happy. It makes me happy. Then I see a poster for Disney's Beverly Hills Chihuahua (chee'WOW'wa). Immediately the vitriol rises from darker places, the places that police the culture influx to my mind. Then and there my heart is filled with disgust and what of me that feels compulsion to voice goes to work and I can't wait to get home to write up something especially damning for this movie.

Then I think about who it is that would hear my voice, that would listen. It would be my like-minded friends, it would be the choir. The mothers and children, the teens on unnecassarily wholesome dates, and the fucking Chihuahua owners for whom this movie is meant have no channels tuned to me. These are people who delight in seeing toy dogs talk like people and give an overabundance of 'tude that has long been blunted and limp since the late 80s, and they are so far from me and out of my reach. And I am defeated, my voice squashed for those people are in multitude. Nothing I can say will diminish its opening night box office take. Nothing you or I can do will stop the jaugernaut that is Disney, that is mediocrity.

So I'm left with nothing to do for it but close my eyes, breathe in, and breathe out. It's just stupid talking dogs. It's just occasion for fools to gather and leave the streets to us and ours. That's all it is. So let's you and I, dear choir, keep dancing. Let's break out the booze and have a ball, if that's all that is.

Jody Callahan