Peter Pan - Part IV

Part IV

Since the pirates (or at least their good captain) are so maniacally obsessed with weaving new rigging from Peter Pan’s entrails, they ignore Tinkerbell and the rest of the kids while Peter distracts them.  Not much is said about how he does this exactly, but one suspects that there was some mooning, and the appropriate amounts of nose-thumbing and finger waggling to accompany it.  

Wendy and the boys try to follow Tinkerbell, but they fall behind because she is too fast and gets way ahead of them.  Tinkerbell, as it turns out, while innocuously diminutive, beautiful and magical, is prone to fits of horrible murderous jealousy and rage.  Unbeknownst to Wendy and the boys (but beknownst to us) is the fact that Tinkerbell secretly loves Peter in a romantical way and has deduced that Peter doth doteth upon the Wendy girl a bit overmuch.  

Tinkerbell doesn’t seem to take into account the moral issues which arise from inter-species romance (although little literature is available on the ramifications of fairy/elf-boy unions), and doesn’t worry that her affections might not be reciprocated.  Instead of mentioning anything to anybody, she decides to solve her perceived love triangle problem by abruptly ending Wendy’s short, fragile life.  She nips ahead to the hideout and manipulates the lost boys into doing her dirty work for her by telling them (via little bell sounds which the lost boys understand somehow) that Peter wants them to shoot the wicked Wendy-bird out of the sky.  

The lost boys, in blind obedience to anything Peter says, even via Tink and even if it seems psychotic and unnecessary, trundle outside armed with slings and stones and bows and arrows.  They take to firing wildly into the air, and Wendy (to her credit) absorbs a few pebbles to the jaw before her happy thought wears out and she begins to plummet to her doom in abject terror.  The tragically disturbed Tinkerbell watches with glee.  

Peter, who must have known a shortcut, appears out of nowhere and catches Wendy just before gravity turns her into a griddle-cake, effectively shitting directly into Tinkerbells victory Cheerios.  He is mightily pissed off at Tink, and lets her know it by banishing her forever from Neverland (rather than imprisoning her for attempted murder, or hanging her, which wouldn’t really work since she has wings, and none of the lost boys knows how to construct a proper guillotine).   Banishment ensures that she becomes somebody else's problem, so Peter determines that it’s good enough.  

Wendy, who knows not what the hell even happened, feels compassion for the deranged fairy and begs Peter not to banish her forever.  Peter waffles and agrees that the banishment is only for a week (which is substantially shorter than forever and seems sorrowfully inconsistent with the severity of the crime), but Tinkerbell has already buggered off to parts unknown with her wee panties all in a wad, and doesn’t hear the altered version of her sentence.

Introductions are offered all around, and Peter promptly ditches Wendy’s brothers on the lost boys so he can take Wendy on a “tour of the island” which comes off as a thinly veiled excuse for a romantic interlude of sorts.  The romance is doomed to be short lived.  

"What better way to snuggle into a girls heart than to take her to see some real live mermaids?" thinks Peter, and his logic seems sound indeed until they get to Mermaid Lagoon.  The mermaids act incredibly fan-girlish around Peter and Wendy gets a little snooty about it.  Peter is oblivious, but soon discovers that rather than a peaceful bit of heart-melting magic and fantasy, a recently mooned and mocked Captain Hook is around the corner with his sniveling first mate Mr. Smee, using the rising tide to effectively water-board an innocent Indian girl in an attempt to get information about him.   

Previous (Part III): http://extremenoob.blogspot.com/2014/06/peter-pan-part-iii.html
Next (Part V):  http://extremenoob.blogspot.com/2014/06/peter-pan-part-v.html 

Peter Pan - Part III

Part III

The directions to Neverland are simple:  Second star to the right, and straight on ‘till morning.  This implies a heck of a distance to be flown, and it isn’t clear as to whether or not Neverland is somewhere on earth, or is on another planet/alternate reality/dimension or something.  One wonders how, living so far away, Peter Pan ever got the news that Wendy was telling stories about him in the first place.  

It could be that he wouldn’t exist at all without those stories; that his adventures transpired in real time as the tales were spun, brought into existence in a romantic sort of way by a little girl’s imagination, but that would mean that the stories would have to have been about Peter sitting outside the window listening to stories of him sitting outside the window right then.  That would be boring, and he’d stop coming to listen and the universe would explode.  Wendy must have been channeling the information through some sort of hands-free Ouija board technology, which in a way is even more remarkable than having a really good imagination.  

They get to Neverland, and as soon as they do they’re spotted by pirates, which is pretty incredible considering they’re up at ten thousand feet or so in the cloud layer.  The one guy in the crow’s nest with the spyglass managed to spot them coming in, which means he either must have been expecting them or is just unimaginably lucky.  He yells down to the decks and there’s a scramble of cutlasses and eye patches and whatnot while they get the captain, whose name is James Hook.  

Like any well-developed character, ol’ pirate Jim has a backstory.  Like any good children’s villain, the backstory is drenched in violence and blood.  Apparently, back in the day, Captain Hook got in a sword/knife fight with one Peter Pan and lost horribly despite the fact that he was a grown ass man with a bloody great big sword, and Peter Pan was a little kid with a knife.  This alone must have been hugely embarrassing, but that’s not all.  Peter went so far as to lop off one of the old bastards hands, and threw the severed limb to a crocodile, who munched on it with vigor while Hook gnashed his teeth and clutched his bloody stump of a wrist in agony, spurting blood like a sprinkler all over the freshly swabbed decks of his beloved ship, the Jolly Roger.  


Having once verily supped upon Captain Hook’s person, the crocodile rapidly developed a taste for human meat, and actively stalked the one handed pirate forever afterward.  Prosthetic limbs not in abundance on the high seas, Captain Hook affixed a hook where his hand once was, accepted the fact that with the last name of “Hook” the thing was probably inevitable, retired his banjo, and proceeded to go about his business always looking over his shoulder in perpetual horror and justified paranoia for the giant flesh eating lizard that is out to get him.  

As luck would have it, the crocodile had also swallowed a clock which went tick-tock loudly enough to be audible through the entrails and hide of a live crocodile, who apparently never takes a shit or else there’d be a tick-tocking pile of crocodile poop on the bottom of a lagoon somewhere.  Since the crocodile tick-tocks, Captain Hook has a bit of warning whenever the monster is nearby, which is almost always.  The tick tocking drives Hook insane with fear, and he suffers a panic attack pretty much hourly as a result.  

The clock never stops ticking or tocking, so it’s either on some wicked good batteries or if it’s a wind up clock the little coil spring never un-coils all the way, or else it’s one of those types that winds itself when you wave it around.  

There’s no documentation as to why Hook and Pan were fighting in the first place, but it’s clear that Hook has a reason to hate the little green tights-wearing ankle-biter now.  He wants to kill Peter with the fury and the vengeance, and sets aside all of his pirately duties in favor of hunting down and slaying him most violently.  His crew is remarkably tolerant of this agenda.  They’re very loyal, even though Hook emasculates them verbally at every turn.  The most loyal of all is Mr. Smee, who is at best an obnoxious whining sycophant.  

Anyway.  The pirate in the crows nest spots the flying kids, and Hook orders them to fire the cannon at them.  Firing cannons at children may seem unnecessarily violent, but don’t worry, the kids see the cannonball coming and duck behind a cloud (clouds being notoriously cannonball proof).  They barely escape being exploded into a fine bloody mist by the cannonball, but miraculously all manage to hang on to their happy thoughts and thus stay aloft.  

Peter, the selfless warrior type, tells Tinkerbell to take Wendy, John, and Michael down to the island while he goes down and distracts the pirates.

Previous (Part II):  http://extremenoob.blogspot.com/2014/05/peter-pan-part-ii.html
Next (Part IV): http://extremenoob.blogspot.com/2014/06/peter-pan-part-iv.html

Peter Pan - Part II

Part II

There’s a fairy with the homeless kid, and she can fly because she has wings.  She is very tiny, glows in the dark, and has some kind of skin condition.  Everywhere she goes, flakes of it fall off leaving a trail of glowing speckles.  If the speckles land on you, they make you able to fly, but only if your brain is fixated on something happy.  A stray negative thought will result in the immediate reinstitution of gravity and the consequential plummet to your death thanks to its unrelenting pull.  

No studies have been conducted on the effects of subjecting your happiest memories to prolonged near-death anxiety.  

In a nutshell, pathologically unhappy people cannot fly, and neither can absent-minded people.  People who are afraid of heights do not make great fliers either.  This makes sense.  

The kid with the knife is, of course, Peter Pan from the stories.  He has pointy ears, and might not be entirely human.  He’s more of an elf, if one subscribes to the Tolkienesque appearances of elves, and he likes to be called Peter even though a more colloquial “Pete” seems more along the lines of his carefree lifestyle, and even though “Peter” isn’t a very Tolkienesque sort of elfish name.  J.R.R. would have called him Estoladir or something like that.  

He can fly because the fairy, whose name is Tinkerbell, keeps a tiny cheese-grater in her back pocket which she applies (painfully, I'd imagine) to her dry knees and elbows in order to keep him coated in her magical skin flakes at all times.  Tinkerbell communicates with little bell sounds, which Peter can somehow understand.


Little do the Darling children know, he’s been lurking outside their nursery window listening to Wendy talk about him for quite some time, sitting cross-legged in mid-air, always in the same outfit.  This night, Peter’s shadow slinks silently around the room, under the beds and behind the dresser like some kind of nightmarish demon from Dante’s “Inferno”.  It is a being without substance.  Peter catches it in blatant disregard for it's lack of substance, and while wrestling with it manages to rudely wake everybody up.   Nobody freaks out.   


Against all odds, Wendy knows exactly what to do about a disconnected demon shadow.  She fetches a needle and thread and sews the bottoms of the shadow’s feet to the bottoms of Peter’s feet.  This is probably excruciatingly painful for the shadow, but since it cannot scream, nobody cares.  

It seems like it would be pretty painful for Peter too, but I guess she only sews it to the bottoms of his shoes, which means every time he takes them off his shadow is stuck to them and has to wait in the corner like a disobedient circus monkey, or under the bed or wherever, until he puts them back on.  It would be less terrifying if the shadow was wearing shadow shoes and that’s what she sewed, but then the shadow could just slip them off and run off into the woods barefoot, leaving Peter walking around with just the shadows of his shoes... so no.  She must have sewn horribly through shadowy foot flesh while the weird elfish kid played fiendishly jolly torture music on his pipes.  

That being done, Peter tries to abscond with Wendy but she tells him he can stuff it unless her brothers can come too, since if she left them home alone while the folks were out, they'd be wicked pissed at her and might take away her birthday.  He agrees even though he didn’t invite them at all and probably didn't want them tagging along screwing up what could have been a romantic thing.  Tinkerbell cheese-grates some forehead skin onto the kids and they all float into the air, and out the window. 

Nobody worries that Michael is a toddler, and as such probably has the attention span of a Chihuahua on a squirrel farm, and that he’s about to fly all night on no sleep, while holding a happy thought in his head lest he plummet, teddy-bear in hand, to an untimely and horrible demise, hopefully not over a residential area.  Imagine the ponderous pipe puffing in Scotland Yard the next morning after that unfortunate inevitability. 

Perhaps it’s best not to.    

Previous (Part I):  http://extremenoob.blogspot.com/2014/05/peter-pan-prelude-and-part-i.html
Next (Part III):  http://extremenoob.blogspot.com/2014/06/peter-pan-part-iii.html

Peter Pan - Prelude and Part I

Prelude

My daughter loves Peter Pan, and in that capacity I have read it easily a hundred times or more.  Probably more.  Occasionally I get to wondering about things, little things, that show up (or don’t) in the various variations of the story that I’ve read, and I’d like to go ahead and think about those things out loud, if you don’t mind.  Rather than trying to spell out the individual things that need pondering and then having to explain their individual contexts, I guess I’ll just retell the story as I remember it (should be pretty close to accurate by now) and ponder those things as I go along.   I'm going to break it up into a lot of sections lest they grow too cumbersome. 

Alright here I go. 

Part I 

On a quiet street in London, lived a family called the Darlings.  "Darling" was their actual name, it wasn't just what they were called, and they didn't actually live on the street; they lived in a house which was situated more or less next to the street.  If they lived on the street, the idea that they'd have a nursery (which they do), might seem strange or even ludicrous, depending on how intense your reactions to things like that are.  At the very least it would seem unlikely.  The fact that the street was quiet seems moot, considering that streets don’t make a lot of noise, except during an earthquake or a volcano or something like that.    

There was a little yard separating the house from the street, with a fence around it.  A buffer, if you will, from what little activity transpired on the street, e.g. the passing clip clop of a horse-drawn buggy and the dangers of chasing a lost ball, or shuttlecock perhaps, under the iron rims of spoked wheels as they rumble by.  The yard also housed a house, a small house, for the family dog, Nana.

Nana's house was a lovely cottage on the outside, and a shitty, undecorated, unfurnished, dirt-floored, empty wooden box on the inside.  Empty, that is, unless Nana herself was home, curled up alone in the dirt with a ridiculously large decorative pink bow on her head which she didn't put there herself, for lack of thumbs and a general indifference towards keeping up with human fashion trends.

Inside the much larger (and much more comfortable) house adjacent to Nana's house is where the Darlings lived.  Mr. and Mrs. Darling had three children; Wendy, John, and Michael, listed here in descending order of age.  Also height, weight, and affinity for clowns, incidentally.  The children spent the majority of their time in the nursery, which is where their toys and beds were kept, and which was the kind of place where children can be free to do the sorts of things that children do.  The rest of the house, presumably, was tidy and boring and filled with fragile and expensive things, and therefore reserved for adults and adult sorts of things.

Wendy had a colorful imagination, and at night in the nursery would tell stories to John and Michael about a kid named Peter Pan and all the shenanigans effected by he and his rough and tumble crew of lost, but free (also undoubtedly unwashed and smelly), boys.  Michael and John listened intently as Wendy spun tales of pirates and Indians and mermaids and that sort of thing, and then rampaged around the place with swords yelling "avast!" and "bilge-rat!” and other such piratey things.

This was fine, and didn't piss anybody off until Michael in his boyish innocence drew a treasure map on his dad’s shirt, right when he was already ranting and raving about having lost his cuff links.  This set Mr. Darling to stomping around, doing the dance and singing the song of indignant rage to the point where he blamed Wendy for telling the stories, kicked her out of the nursery effective the next morning, and told her she had to grow up despite the fact that she's not the one who drew the map and was by all accounts just minding her own damn business.  Michael escaped the whole thing without so much as an ass-whooping.  

Mr. Darling never did figure out that the treasure map probably would have lead him to his cuff links, which were gold and treasure-like.  He also never stopped to appreciate that a kid who was still in diapers had drawn a treasure map, which is kind of impressive and suggests that either Michael was a prodigy of some sort, or that John had done it and was blaming his toddler brother like a proper git.

Exit the parents, stage right, all gussied up to attend whatever function it was to which they had promised themselves.  This leaves the children in the nursery, all weepy about Wendy having to move into her own room where she will doubtlessly hang punk rock posters on the walls, write dark poetry, secretly get an innocuous tattoo of a ladybug that she thinks is rebellious and hard-core, feel sorry for herself, and generally be a pain in the ass, tragically misunderstood teenager.

Once they are all asleep, a homeless kid with a knife breaks into their house through the window, sneaks into their room, and starts skulking around in green spandex pants looking for his shadow in the dark.

Next (Part II):  http://extremenoob.blogspot.com/2014/05/peter-pan-part-ii.html

Vote...?

For months leading up to the last presidential election I made an effort to educate myself.  I wanted to vote, to make a difference.  More specifically, I wanted to vote intelligently; after all what good is my vote if I don't know what I'm voting for?  If I show up uninformed, they might as well put a dartboard in the voting booth, blindfold me, and spin me around three times. 

Television isn't my preferred source of news, so I listened to NPR on my thirty five minute commute to work, and again on my way home.  I read articles online from mainstream news, newspapers, magazines, and private blogs.  I watched YouTube videos of candidate speeches, read the rants of my Facebook friends about this or that "hot issue", listened attentively to group conversations at work, and really did my best to get an idea of what was going on.  I wanted the genuine unbiased big picture.  

After months of paying attention, I realized that I knew less than when I started.  I had no idea what any of the candidates actually stood for, what they planned to do, or to whom they owed their allegiances.  I'd witnessed countless testimonials from both sides professing the ineptitude of the other side, to be sure, and the subsequent analyzing and over-analyzing of every word by this or that professional analyst.  Still I had no idea what was going on.  

I realized that there are a number of words tossed around of which I didn't have a solid understanding.  Caucus.  Constituency.  Bipartisanship.  I looked those and many others up on dictionary.com, Wikipedia, and wherever else, and still don't really know what they mean.  I didn't know that G.O.P. meant "Grand Ol' Party", or why.  I didn't know that "Grand Ol' Party" meant "Republicans".  I didn't know what it even meant to be a Republican, or a Democrat.  I still don't know.

It doesn't make sense to me that there are two "sides of the isle".  How can anyone be entirely on one side or the other?  I remember from history textbooks that Thomas Jefferson and his "Jeffersonian Republicans" wanted a small, less invasive government, and that "Southern Democrats" wanted more legislation and this and that, but that was hundreds of years ago.  I can't believe we're still squabbling over the same old stuff.  The country exists in a state of perpetual change; foreign policies, trade agreements, allies and enemies and conflicts, regime changes, drug wars, immigration-driven demographic fluctuations, etc. etc... Is it still really so easy to align myself to one side of the isle or another, when neither side can take a firm stance on anything without splitting their votes?

I'm not one to get too riled up at a political rally.  Nothing motivates me less than a stump speech.  In all the confusion, smear campaigning, campaign promises, heart-string tugging, patriotism and nationalism infusions, mud slinging, and frenzied vote-fishing in general, I came to the conclusion that it didn't really matter who I voted for; I didn't know what I was getting either way.  

I wanted to vote to make a difference, because that's what I've always been taught.  If I don't vote, I don't have a voice.  If I don't vote, I can't complain about the outcome.  

I didn't vote.  I didn't think it would matter.  If I was leaning one way or another at the time it was towards Obama, because I thought his verbal eloquence would be useful in foreign policy negotiations and that maybe he could help the rest of the world see us in a more flattering light.  That's what was in my head as election time approached, but when I really stopped to think about what I thought I knew and what it meant, it became painfully obvious that despite my best efforts to the contrary I was as uninformed and clueless as I could possibly be. 

The president can talk about jobs, about the economy, about how Americans work hard to make our country great, and so on and so forth but he's not really the one pulling the strings.  The Federal Reserve Bank has a fist-full of strings though, with calculated manipulation of the amount of currency in circulation. Interest rates.  Inflation.  Nobody votes about that.  Governors, Senators, Congress, the House of Representatives... all are constantly manipulated by sponsors, intelligence agencies, religious institutions, corporate lobbyists, and foreign influences.

Maybe a couple bills will get passed, new laws, taxes, reform for this or that program.  Some people will hate it, some won't.  It will appear as if something is getting done in the foreground while in the background the momentum of the machine will not be altered in the slightest. 

Any information that trickles down to me has been crafted, filtered, massaged, tempered, padded... it's not real.  The only thing I know for certain is that what I'm being told is not the truth.  I am being swayed, goaded, prodded, tempted... never informed.

I don't believe that my government is my best recourse for affecting change.  Our elected suits (I hesitate to call them representatives) are not the diverse medley of honest folk that I'd like for them to be; Americans from all walks of life who bring to the table the salt and savvy garnered from lives spent toiling in the mills and factories, tilling fields, marching into war, maintaining the national infrastructures, building the roads, or protecting the streets.  Our lawmakers went to prestigious and expensive law and business schools which the majority of us could never hope to attend.  How much do they know about the bowels of this great ship that they're sailing?  How much do they know about what will, or won't improve the lives of us, the huddled masses, the "ordinary Americans"?  How much can they say about what it even means to be an ordinary American?

How much do I know about any of those things?  Little. 

I can vote locally in my state and city elections for this or that candidate in the hopes that they can talk to the suits in Washington, and maybe sway opinions in favor of some small facet of life that matters to me.  But I don't believe that matters much either.  Even with the best of intentions, the voices of our chosen are tainted before they are ever heard.  I don't even know what I would have them say if it were up to me.  


My vote is my voice, and my voice is the squeak of a mouse amid the deafening cacophony of other squeaking mice, each of us vying for a piece of the cheese.  My power is in my wallet.  It is small, but it is at my disposal every day rather than once every four years.  It's up to me how I choose to wield it.

The best way I can think of to make a difference is to empower my fellow mice.  I can support fledgling entrepreneurs and local businesses and avoid, to the best of my ability, sacrificing what little power I have to the bottomless coffers of billionaire corporations.

I'm an ordinary American.  All I want is for my country to not collapse.  I don't know much about the government, or the economy, or anything really, but I have played Jenga.  If you take too much away from the bottom and keep piling it on the top, the damn thing will eventually fall down.