Observations: The eighties are over.

Someone on Facebook said that with Corey Haim's death, it was a sad day for the 80s.

I'm just going to let that sink in for a minute.

OK, you know what was a sad day for the 80s?  January 1st 1990. On that day, the 80s were officially OVER.

Don't get me wrong, some great things came out of the 80s (for example: me), but seriously. What decade could be so unfathomably awesome that you feel the need to relive it at literally every single party? Didn't you wake up some morning in that ten years and think to yourself "Good Lord, it sucks to be alive today!"

Hasn't anything good happened to you in the past 20 years? I get it, most of you were in high school during the 80s. Woopdishit. I was in High School during the 00s (the 'Naughties' if you're a stickler).

They really sucked.

But hey, so did the 80s (OK, we win on whose decade sucks more).

We had Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, you trained and installed both of them. We had the mortgage crisis, you had the S&L. We both had Bush. You had Friday the 13th, we've had at least three movies about talking penguins. In your decade, Al Gore tried to say that music made kids kill themselves and the musicians did it on purpose. Anyone who disagreed with him was evil. Now he's trying to tell us that he can predict the weather for the next 30 years when people who actually study it can't do 12 hours, and anyone who disagrees with him is stupid.

You had Friday the 13th, we had the Scary Movie franchise. You had New Wave, we had Nu Metal. You had Goth, we had Emo. You fantasize about the good old days in high school when they were ruled by impenetrable cliques that scorned all outsiders. Every single school movie had the exact same fantasies about being the outcast from them. Your nerd got the girl in the end by, let's be honest, raping her (Revenge of the Nerds). Ours most likely didn't get the girl, but he did make her realize he wasn't such a bad guy.

In short, the eighties sucked for a whole bunch of reasons, and the Naughties (and that's from 'naught' meaning... 'if you don't know it I'm not going to explain it') sucked too. Unlike you, I realize how much my high school years sucked.

You don't see people screaming about how great the 60s and 70s were, at least not like you do. When's the last time you heard of a Baby Boomer holding a 60's party (there are a lot Baby Boomers, by the way)?

I'm not going to say that nothing good came out of the 80s, or my own high school decade either. Lots of great things came out of both... but enjoying the fruits of a decade is one thing and dressing up in the ugly fashions of yesteryear so you can discuss how great a time it was and even pretend they are still around is another.

This is another one of those posts I'm going to get in trouble for.

Read This First:

I just realized something. I oughta put up a disclaimer on this site.

As a writer, I'm used to having an audience, if you look at Facebook posts, or anything I do anywhere else, you'll notice (or not) that I filter just about everything I say. Every once in a while when I'm fully Manic I'll slip, but for the most part, I'm pretty normal and I keep my strong opinions to myself. That's because my friends don't all share them and I know just how horrible a thing can arise from DISAGREEING WITH SOMEONE ON THE INTERNETS.

This blog? Less so. This is my own little corner where I'll put all of my opinions out there without any apologies. If you know me and suspect I don't agree with you on something, for the love of God avoid posts on that subject. Do you think your mildly shy kid is Autistic? Don't read "Autistic Parents can go fuck themselves."

So yeah. That's all I wanted to say.

Observations: 'Autistic Parents' can go fuck themselves.

Before I go any further, being an Autistic Parent isn't the same thing as being a parent of a child with Autism. I've never actually encountered one of the people who are parents of full blown autistic children. I have no issue with them in the slightest. Saying you hate the Autistic Movement will generate a million flame letters from people who claim to be the relatives of someone who's neighbor's best friend has real autism, and boy what a douche you are for saying any different.

No. Let's identify the whole craze.

True Autism is pretty rare all things considered. By 1998 estimates, 10-12 out of every 10000 children will have it. If you've seen Mercury Rising, you have some idea what you're dealing with. They tend towards 'no concept of social interaction at all', they might not even be able to speak without a lot of coaxing (I read of one case where they taught a kid to speak by rewarding him with hamburgers). They might scream randomly, bash their heads into walls until they bleed, or something I am too sane to even think of.

However, they're also quite smart, generally in one hyperspecific area. It might not always be the most useful of them. The stereotype says math. Somebody understood bovine minds really well, I'm sure someone out there has memorized a road map of the entire world. I also met someone who was a complete music savant. He was completely blind, but could master an instrument in one month and could master a song in a single day, then play it on all of those instruments. Was I impressed? Yes. Yes I was. He took requests, I asked for the Flight of the Bumblebee and by God, I got it.

We'll call real autism the Macaroni Penguin (Eudyptes chrysolophus).

In the last 20 years, a bunch of people decided 'Hey, I want to relish in both the potential intelligence and crippling troubles associated with real Autism and say "hey. MINE IS TOO".

Of course, they couldn't get all of the Psychiatrists on board without osmething really marketable, so they invented the Autistic Spectrum. In theory, that would comprise of 'All Penguins'. In practice... no. Don't get me wrong, some traits of the Autistic spectrum kids superficially resemble Autism. Most of them are shy, smart, and have a bit of trouble relating to their peers. Where I come from, it was called 'being a nerd'. I grew up being called a nerd.

OK, I admit it, I got the Fashion Disease of the day, ADHD on my forehead, but we discovered later in life that I've got at least one real form of crazy to go with it (Bipolar 2, but that's a different show).

Nowadays, I'm sure I would have been pegged with Aspergers. Why? I was a little bit odd. I didn't understand how to get along with kids my own age. Why would I? I was the lone extrovert in a family of introverts. I have had people who should have known better suggest that I look into it.

Yes, Fuck Them Too.

But... I'm getting ahead of myself and burying my real concerns in a mountain of irrelevance.

The big problem is the parents. My heart goes out to anyone who has a genuinely autistic kid.  Now is where we note the difference.

A real parent will kindly tell me to take my pity and shove it up my ass. They have a kid, he or she is costly, stressful, and whatnot but they are still kids underneath it all and you know what? That's good enough.

The 'Autistic Parent' makes their kid wear this shirt:

http://www.zazzle.com/i_have_autism_please_be_nice_to_my_mom_tshirt-235210318290307420

It is the parent that is a plague on the world. They spend all of their time soaking up the pity and piling labels on their kids... and why? It's because they want everyone to praise them for being such a good parent, but they don't want to have the burden of their kids being good at anything. We're past the crazy parents who forced their kids to look at flashcards until the end of time and up to the crazy parents who read the DSM-IV in their spare time.

Then the dorks caught on and decided 'hey, I have it too! That's why I can't get a date! It has nothing to do at all with my insistence on dating only supermodels, or my creepy obsession with tentacle rape porn or even my arrogance or cardboardlike personality! I have ASSBURGERS.'

Now, it's spread to every seabird in the world.

So yeah. Fuck them. Fuck the parents, fuck the dorks, fuck the shrinks who let it keep going on. Fuck all of them.

What? You want more information of the Autistic Spectrum? What do I look like, Wikipedia?

Observations: Conan O'Brian isn't funny.

So, I remember a time long long ago when I watched the Tonight Show. Independence Day had just come out, the Daily Show was a horrendously unfunny show that still had the slogan 'When News Breaks, We Fix It', and I  was too busy getting the shit kicked out of me by the larger staff members at my boarding school to really care about politics. I want to say that at this point, they might have even still played music on MTV. Eerie.

On those rare occasions I got to go home, I was allowed to stay up late with my parents and watch the Tonight Show. Oh, what heady days they were. Jay would spend the first half of the show delivering a monologue, then a guest would come on. Unless by some twist of absurdity, we actually cared about the guest, we turned off the TV then and there and found something more interesting to do.

One night, I remember sitting in my old green robe (it was made out of the same stuff as towels so you could dry off with it!) and waking up to see another guy on the television. Jay Leno had, of course, already covered the news of the day, so he joked about.... uh.... something very memorable. The only thing I remember had something to do with snow. Sure, he had a few bits that weren't bad "In The Year 2000" could even be amusing. I did what every self respecting kid would do in that situation. I turned off the TV and went upstairs to look at internet porn.

Fast forward a few years and once again I found myself sitting in front of the TV surrounded by people watching Conan. Actually, one of us was watching Conan rolling around on the floor like a dog on ecstasy. Apparently, it was a really good bit for Conan. I won't lie, I smiled a few times, I might have even let lose a slight chuckle but for the most part, our boy Coco just seemed like a guy who really didn't want to be there. Leno had already done all of the funny material for the day, he knew it. The only people who watched him were the crack addled few who for some reason found his boring monologues to be comic gold.

Then I went to High School and life turned into an incomprehensible blur of lights and colors, one morning I woke up 19.

I had not watched an episode of Conan for a long time, I heard the rumors every year that Jay Leno was going to retire and pass the torch. It was a lot like the doomsday prophesies of 2012. Nobody was looking forward to them, few people believed them, and nobody was surprised when they didn't happen. I didn't care though (why would I?), neither I nor anyone I knew watched either show any more, the Daily Show had taken over what late night TV I watched. It was political, it actually gave me a sort of concentrated and sweetened version of the news. It was even before I realized that I couldn't trust the major news networks. Then came the Colbert Report. Boomicus.

I'm going to cut out everything else. You get the point.

Let me give all of you people at home a shocker. All of the shows that you watch are made for one purpose: money. They don't give a shit if you laugh at the jokes, they just want you to watch the show so you can watch the advertisements for Ponds Beauty Cream (or is it 'Creme' I keep forgetting).

Conan just wasn't getting them. As much as you claim that his unfunny jokes were loved by all, they weren't. All of the 'young edgy' crowd that would have watched him discovered in 2005 that there was a funnier show on at the same time, the Colbert Report. Jay Leno kept himself afloat by the fact that he targets a much wider audience.

So here's what happened when Jay Leno retired. His audience decided they didn't want to watch Conan. Most of us turned off the Tonight Show halfway through anyways unless it was AMAZING ANIMALS. or something. Coincidentally, the funny part of the show competes with the Colbert Report, which differs from Conan in that it's actually enjoyable to watch. A bunch of network suits realized that the vast majority of Americans had enough firing neurons to realize that Conan wasn't funny, and tried to bring back Leno in some capacity. They put Leno on earlier, which... uh, set up the same thing as before. Leno came first, told all of the good jokes of the day, and Conan proceeded to be unfunny (just like his glory years!) while anyone who might have watched him watched the Colbert Report.

Now Leno's back. Some of his audience will return. I watched his show the other day, he's still pretty funny. He had a bit where he walked into a random apartment complex and had people act out scenes from Oscar nominated movies.

Still, I probably won't watch him. My parents will, they're what we call 'Old'.

Let me incoherent train wreck up with this:

If half of the people who complain because Leno got his show back actually watched Conan when he was on the air, he would still have his show. His ratings would be through the roof and they would have no reason to change things back. One of you ought to invent a time machine so all of the Conan people can go back in time, slap themselves in the head, and change the channel. They could at least Tivo it. TV execs have realized that such stats are more accurate than the old ratings boxes anyways.

..and by the way. Some of you are downright retarded with your loyalty to the show you didn't watch. I heard someone say they weren't voting in a critical election (my daughter and mother-in-law thank you for that by the way) because they thought it had some bearing on who would keep the show. Maybe that's just the level of intelligence necessary to enjoy Conan's unfunny 'jokes'.

Whatever. I sleep now.

Writer's Blocks

Writer's block plagues me. As some of you may have figured out, I fancy myself a writer. I've finished one novel, I've abandoned at least ten of them between half and fully complete. I'm sure one day I'll be a single sentence away from finishing a book and will just look at the page and shout "OH FUCK IT!"

That's just me though.

What fiendish thing could cause it, you ask? The dreaded writer's block.

Yeah, I know "Gee Steve, there is no way I could have figured that one out!"

For me, they all fit into a three categories.

1) "Shit, I have to go back and rewrite a large portion, but it's a pain in the ass".

Generally I get these when I realize that I've written myself into a corner or the results of what I am writing are very stupid. I'm told that I writer in a very strange way, from beginning to end (I'd like to say it helps me keep my story straight, but really, I have no idea how else to do it). These are the most malevolent. I hate backtracking so much that they are almost guaranteed to kill a story.

2) "I know what's supposed to happen, but how do I pull it off elegantly/without derailing the characters?"

An example:

Secretly Good Wizard has come to propose releasing one hostage in exchange for another hostage. The heroes dislike the idea and want to get back their hostage and not have to give him another one in return. I have to A) have them plan it well, B) have the wizard succeed anyways, C) have the heroes take a hostage of their own (it's a very complicated story), and D) have the wizard reveal himself to be not so much of a douche. Oh, and it's an action scene.

3)"I've gotten so ahead of myself the plot element just looks tacked on".

I'm at this one right now. I described my world, developed the opening characters pretty well, and then came the plot. Main character gets a letter bidding she do a task for Obvious Minor Villain so she can be absent while the Big Setup rides in under the cover of night. The letter comes out of nowhere, it's all like "Oh! Mail's here! You got a letter!"

4) "Wait a second, this whole book is stupid! Why am I writing this? I should just get some cheese and like, watch reruns of Burn Notice or something. The cheese is the most important part!"

I think I'm going over. I'll get to the others later.

On Blogging: Strange

So, I've finally done it, I've started a blog. How about that? I've had people poke me towards it for a rather long while (cough cough, Wifey) and here I am.

Well gee. Maybe someday people who don't know me personally will decide to look at my blog and be all like "Damn, I sure wish I knew who this guy is!"

Fine, fine, here goes:

My name is Steven McCaw, I'm presently 26. I live near Salem Massachusetts (about 50 feet away, in fact) in Swampscott. I'm married, I have one daughter. I am a baker at Panera, but I also do such myriad things as scaring people at Halloween, writing books, talking without end, and in general not shutting up.

Ain't life grand?

I've spent a considerable amount of my life studying something or another so I've gathered an encyclopedia's worth of useless information. I guess I'll probably write about that. Maybe I'll do reviews of stuff while I'm at it...

Damn, there is too much stuff to write about, isn't there?