MACGRUBER

I remember my mother buying the tickets, then handing them out, one to my father and one to me, with the warning to “Keep the stub”—I guess we traveled the precincts of more zealous ushers, back then, though that isn’t saying much. As if I would go to the bathroom, and risk missing a minute. A recent trip upstate confirmed a hunch: only New Yorkers pee after the film, never knowing if where they’re headed next will have a public facility. For us the porcelain present, the flush that heralds opportunity’s bloom.

A mind-blowing film, and that’s not the bong hits talking. Though without them would I have seen, as if never before, the zang of neon resplendent upon the façade? Or been thus reminded of the David Foster Wallace story “Good Old Neon,” regarding the suicide of a seeming success who knows himself to be a bottomless fraud? The very crux of MacGruber—but as comedy so dark I nearly melt laughing, and when Kristen Wiig appears reach hysterics. Carley looks over like I’m losing it.

The 80s! I also had one of those pull-out car stereos with the little handle (stressful). It’s too perfect when someone disses his car and he notes and remembers their license plate, and later it’s revealed keeps a Shining-style notebook devoted solely to that number. Between gags they play it so straight that half the audience buys right back into all the conceits and situations of that period’s tame, absurd entertainments. What indignity and delight to recall it: the journey I went on, listening to Journey.

My one fear: all this autistic wallowing in our own abjection is just more ideology. We ate it—now we have to watch it come up? I’m still so stoned I can barely fix a shoelace—nice one, MacGruber. RIP Dennis Hopper. Blue Velvet, wow. To have truly zoomed in to where the lawn’s depths churn.