Broke Sheep Nightmares

I was on my Christmas hike on the 24th. For those of you unacquainted with the tradition, my friend, Ian and I hike down the Tennessee Valley in Marin on Christmas Eve to the Sea. We look at Venus rise, eat some cookies, and swig some sort of alcohol. This year it was a 1997 Sierra Nevada Christmas Ale. Yeah, nine year old beer, it’s aged well. After the hike back up the valley, we eat dinner at Piazza De’Angelo in Mill Valley. Ian and I are usually not alone. We bring friends and family (in his case Ian’s wife, and his eight week old daughter.) In my case, the SO.

We also allow other’s who have been along in the past, and we always’ invite a guest homosexual. He –as it’s never been a she—fills in for Josh, the original homosexual, on the original hike, in 1996, who, was a he. We don’t really discriminate, and it could be a she, but Lesbians seem to have their Christmas Eve act together better than we, and are usually unavailable This year, for only the second time, there was no guest homosexual.

I was concerned about this. Afraid the Ghosts of Guest Homosexuals Christmas Past might visit me in my dreams. Think about it, eight guest homosexuals tromping into your bedroom in the middle of the night. I already have no respect for Christmas, I don’t exchange gifts, I don’t go to Midnight Mass, I don’t even have a tree. The arrival of Harvey Firestein and seven other drag queens at 3AM was assured. Ian’s wife pointed out that the sexual orientation of her daughter was unknown and she could be gay. This would make her the Potential Guest Homosexual.

I grumbled a bit at the pretence. Much like Enis in Brokeback Mountain does when he is confronted with a breadfruit concept. Brokeback Mountain is the gay movie of the year. --Apparently.

NPR says so, “Blah, Blah, It’s and understated cowboy romance. A cutting edge tragedy set against the epic backdrop of the Sawtooth’s” (They are a mountain range in Idaho btw. Though the movie takes place in Wyoming, in theory, but was shot in the Canadian Rockies. No Sawtooth's that I could see.)

“It deserves an Oscar for the innovative resurrection of the Western circumstance,” some thesaurus looking up guy in SF wrote in the Weekly. --He’s gay. I bet he's never been anyplace wild other than Yosemite.

To be honest I had my doubts. (That Brokeback was anything, that is.) I saw the previews when I went to see some other independent movie in Berkeley a month or so back. Just the dialog between Jack and Enis up on the screen in the Montana/Wyoming wilderness saying, “I wish I knew how to quit you,” made me turn to the SO and say, “That’s going to be dumb.” But, NPR and a few newspapers and a TV news show hyped it. Needing to fulfill my inner need to make Pat Robertson ponder if rouged men with short hair and scraggley beards are the work of the devil, I went to see it.


The premise, two 19ish guys in 1963 take up a summer of sheep tending on Brokeback Mountain. A month or so into it, they decide sheep aren’t as attractive as each other, and so begins “the thing.” “This thing we have”, as Enis puts it, (Its one of his longer pieces of dialog in the whole movie) lasts fifteen years.

The movie has great scenery. It has some good understated dialog. Stuff like the West Wing is known for. Enis , Joe real cowboy, is the king of it. I haven’t heard that much meaning sandwiched into minimal mutterings since my last family reunion in Kansas. But that’s all that’s good about the movie. What bad? For one thing, it’s way too long. I walked out of it, and said to the SO, “It’s like what they said on Seinfeld about the English Patient, “Its too long”” Also, I never thought I’d say this, but, it has too many male on female sex scenes. About every five minutes or so after the first hour of the film we seem to find Jack or Enis in bed with a wife or girlfriend facing their inner doubt or something.

Now I bring this all up, because there was another person on the Christmas hike this year. Guest Homosexual from Christmas Past. (2003) He asked if we’d seen Brokeback. We dipped our heads appropriately. (Like Enis would.)

“Wasn’t it great?” he asked.

Everyone in the car muttered in Enis like half rotted straw verbs.

“You didn’t like it?” GH from Christmas Past responded, kind of puzzled.

We had not, but like Enis in the movie, were at a loss for words. We were at a loss of criticism, we were at a loss for ability to describe, “the thing. " This broken back, thing.

GH from Christmas Past just said, “I hope they make more like that.”

I had to think, what? We need more movies where guys who lack of interest in sheep go for other guys?

We can use this as a basis for an extremity relationship?

I should pay to see this?

Then, I thought of my friend Mike who was so incensed by the movie he sent me a review by Gary Indiana of the Village Voice. (Yeah, another gay guy. From New York, no less. Gary probably don't where the Sawtooth's are either.) Mike’s quote, “I wouldn't be caught dead going to that trash." But that’s Mike. He’s from Texas, a Professor of Classics, but limited in his understanding of the Northern Cowboy way. Mike seems absorbed by Southern mannerisms, so understanding Montana rough guys is left to me. Though Jack ends up moving to Texas so Mike may insight I don't. Gary’s review, on the other hand, went on about how, in a not so cowboy way, he was just generally pissed that two closeted cowboy’s were not getting over the closet. --
Jack and Enis were so closeted, that Enis finds his lost shirt, from the summer of sheep substitution on Brokeback. (Go see or rent the movie, I’m not telling you the whole story) in Jack’s closet after his death. Then and only then do you understand the love Enis (the non verbal) has for Jack. Gary, not being a cowboy, but rather a poof from New York, takes rash notice of this fact, calling it something like “graffiti from a spray can.”

That’s the problem with Brokeback. Its broke. It’s a movie, based on a 70 year old heterosexual woman’s view of closeted gay cowboy relationships in the 60’s. Then two other straight people adapted a six page short story to a 2 ½ hour movie. This the guest homosexual from 2003 gets excited about, and Mike the guest homosexual from 1999 abhors.

The SO and I changed the conversation. But late that night, it wasn’t the Guest Homosexual of Christmas Past the visited me in my dreams, it was Enis.

--And true to life, he didn’t say much. But he haunts me. -And he keeps waking me up.

Understanding the Idites.

So,
You could infer from the proponents of Intelligent Design (ID) that the confluence of the concepts of Evolution and Creationism come down to one word: “Theory”.

The “Theory of Evolution” suggests that though a process called “natural selection” all creatures are the products of the elimination of non-best attributes. All creatures, we’ll consider plants and bacterium as creatures for the sake of limited argument, as we are discussing intelligence of design, a theory most often proposed by those who lack design skills or the other attribute. Plus I’ve had a few beers and can’t remember the word for flora and fauna, so I’m ready to understand IDs merits. But anyway, all F&F are therefore are the product of the somewhat malevolent forces of nature on the products of itself. Those forces favor the attribute(s) which best suit the current situation for that species. (Oops, I remembered) That attribute may be favored only temporarily, as things change, like the climate. This change of favor over the millennia has led to the diversity of creatures we see today. (or find in the fossil record.)

The “Theory of ID” equates diversity of species with divine intervention. (ID=DI, not too clever huh?) The Universe didn’t have time to wait for evolution, so everything must be the product of ID (An intelligence, which btw, has always been here. If not, it probably designed itself. ID begat ID.) “Natural Selection” is okay, but, err, an ID must “of” set natural selection into play. (Forgive me for my Southern use of idiom there.)

They are indeed both theories. One has a bit of evidence to back it up. (The constant observed evolution of the flu virus, for one. The mathematical proofs of cosmology -not cosmetology, cosmology- and the ability of people with too many tattoos to find mates, another)

ID, is a bit of conjecture based on campfire whoppers handed down over the last six millennia. The inability of the Idite’s to stop wanting to believe the whoppers has led them to whopperize more. In a democracy where debate and free expression of ideas rule, I suppose proposing whoppers to evidence supported theory has equal merit. John Stewart Mill did advocate the calculus of truth through debate. Though, one does have to question the merits of ID, when one of its major proponents, Pat Robertson, declares that not believing in the theory relegates the challenging citizens of Dover PA eligible for the wrath of the ID. –And, he hopes they suffer it.

My theory is the “Theory of ID” is only a method of making people with lesser favored attributes think they should be the IDer.