Georgia vs. Michigan?

Hey I might be in Chile a little longer.. noot like I have been posting pictures anyway. Even as I begin to find choice spots in Santiago, it beginning to feel a lot like Holland.

I may go see the Simpsons tonight, if I can fine a non-dubbed version.

In other news, I still suck at golf, and there is still no cure for cancer.

My Forth of July in Tahoe with Corrie. And my Boat.

Mitch Yost needs to get back in the game.  That’s one of only two things the angelically childish John Monad knows. The other is that “The End is Near”.  After four episodes of HBO’s John From Cincinnati, what game John is referring to is still unclear, but its likely that the guileless cipher  means Competitive Surfing, the sport the show revolves around, and  the one that Mitch and his troubled progeny revolutionized.  What could be so important about surfing that God would send such a messenger?  That’s the riddle of the show.  I suspect the answer is “Nothing”. Which is the point.  Let me explain.

Mitch blew his knee out surfing decades ago, and has since turned into an insufferable poseur. He’s the kind of guy who loves to spout self-serving new age truisms and boasts of his “spiritual discipline” during post coital pillow talk with an adoring fan.  Oh, don’t get me wrong, he does it well enough that it took three episodes for the audience to see through him.  In retrospect his dismissal of his grandson’s competitive achievements as a perversion of the spirituality of surfing were clearly animated by envy and perhaps a bit of jealousy.   But the worst part isn’t that he’s a boor, it’s that he’s so full of shit he’s gone blind.  While everyone else in the show is rallying around the Yost family as if in preparation for John’s prophesized apocalypse, Mitch has he head shoved up his own ass.

For instance, the grandson’s surrogate father is a protective ex-cop who nevertheless manages to recognize the decency in, and find common cause with, the drug dealer that until recently supplied said absentee father.  But meanwhile Granddad Mitch can’t see that twenty-something chick he just banged was only trying to separate him from his grandson long enough for her business partner to maneuver his grandson into a surfing contract.  No less that three other characters saw as much within seconds of seeing her.

At one point in the third episode, Mitch impales the back of his knee on a nail as he is climbing over a fence.  It’s hard not to read the crucifixion into that moment given the religious nature of the series, but now I think that Mitch is pinned, figuratively, by his own rationalizations.  When he stopped competing, he elevated surfing from a sport to a religion.  

C.S. Lewis wrote of the folly of putting second things first. A pet is nice, Lewis would argue, but make fluffy the center of your existence and not only do you ruin your own existence, but you lose the simple pleasure of owning a dog.    Mitch has done that with surfing.   When John says that Mitch needs to get back in the game, he means that Mitch needs to stop confusing surfing with spirituality.  Competing is the way put it back into perspective.  Mitch needs to get back into the game so that he can recognize that which isn’t a game.  His family needs him: his son‘s head was smoking,  his grandson was brain dead for an entire episode,   and now the first Porn Star of the apocalypse has returned in her shiny red mustang.     The End is Near, indeed.