Thursday, February 10, 2011

I WASN’T THE ONLY ONE PAYING ATTENTION TO HIDDEN MESSAGES AS THE SUPER BOWL COMMERCIALS RAN ...

… but my mind was attached to a distinct agenda.



Do I really mind the uproar over what we exposed ourselves to through media of any kind? Of course not! I am and not Q-Tip, is the ‘Abstract Original’! That is why my method is quite eclectic, because I look at the world within the words and the actions they represent.



The Home Away ad for the Super Bowl was contested by The Sarah Jane Brain Foundation. The chairman for Home Away (a company that I did not know existed until the controversy) Brian Sharples caved in to the pressure despite stating a very compelling case for the Home Away ad.



"It's a gratuitous act of violence against an infant child, advertised to a demographic that is the number one cause of harm to innocent babies," Donohue told USA Today of the ad shortly after it aired.


I thought the ad was bland and forgettable. You can see it here if you click the link above if you like. But I often take it as an insult when I am called out about my parsing of media.  To me it says, “There you go again, Mark, doing that thinkin’ thing again!!” Just as Brian Sharples had a definitive reaction and confirmed it as best as he could with the information at hand, so did I. You know, I actually DID feel taken aback at first blush when I saw the baby slam against the glass in the Home Ad commercial, but I have a particular hard-on when it comes the projecting adult themes on children and adolescents. That is why I keyed in on the E*Trade baby, whose appearances I have long found as a transgressor of common morality but never gets called out for it.



THE COMPLEXITES


Watching an episode of NOVA  about the computer that is going to compete against Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings on Jeopardy, its evolution is something that I identify with. The machine learns form the context of the questions that it answers WRONG to later come up with the right answers for questions it would face later on in totally different categories.


I miss Tee Jay the most not because of anything tangible enough to describe to anyone, really. What I will do is my best and let readers understand for themselves… which is one of the things about her that made me want her the way that I once did.


Her relationship experiences prior to ours had fit into a pattern. Before she met me, she had made the decision that she wanted to head in a different direction with her next relationship. And there was NO DOUBT that is what was in store for her when it came to dating me!! Now I was not doing any ‘active pinging’, which is being sensitive to what popped up on my internal radar. When I first met her at work, the ‘proximity alert’ went haywire and I was in disbelief with what I was feeling. Our initial meet was QUITE inauspicious, almost negative. After that, she was on my mind the entire day.


I would ask questions of my co-workers about her. They quickly picked up on my interest but I advised them NOT to hint anything to her because I would either talk at her or not. What I will never know is whether or not someone spoke to her about me, but it did not matter. At the end of the day, I asked her out to an event that I was attending that weekend and she agreed to go. It was either at the DFT or Old Redford Theatre, and we had a really nice dinner at Maria’s in Ferndale. That much I do remember because I was asked why we were going from one part of town to the other. I reminded her that “…this was my ‘date night for me’, because I was not wanting for company that is, until I met you.”

We were both taken with each other as looks go. But what was more importantly we were both looking for ‘something different’. A couple of months into our relationship, we were somewhere with her crowd and I had came up with one of my ‘left of the middle’ observations that someone had given me a cocked look in response… and she defended me with “…well, he is an eclectic thinker…” . Up to that point in our relationship, I would confirm a lot of what I was feeling about her, but that she used an accurate and just as important, unmistakably positive word to describe me as she deflected skepticism away from me is something I hope I never forget. From that point on, our relationship soared.


STORM BREWED IN A TEACUP…



… imagine any mix-up and the lot could blow. A small misunderstanding occurred as a personal storm swept over me and I handled things quite badly all the way around. We officially had broken up, not take a break or say ‘I don’t want to see you right now’, but ever again. And as much as it would hurt me to stick to my own coda, I had no other choice. Do I regret not rescinding my decision regarding the end of our relationship? I will NEVER tell.

What I will say is that if I had tried a more standard route back to her then I may not have made it to Omaha. Which brings me back to “… do, re, mi, fa, lo…”


During the day of my nights and the nights of my days here on this mortal coil I have learned some lessons. When it comes to making those ‘tribal connections’, I am going to have to be careful, grasshopper. It isn’t just that the accident may have worsened my condition… it well could have started them anew even without my condition being present. The impact split the foam in my helmet and that meant the collision was more than a slight bump.

Of all the bags that I would carry into any prospective relationship I feel that a truly special and magical person would have to be willing to help me with them. That is were the rub lies and why there is such a gulf between the things I need and the things that I receive.

2 comments:

Toon said...

I agree that the ad was bland and forgettable. Why do we waste our outrage on the meaningless??

Ken Riches said...

We need to have more of a sense of humor and not be so quick to take outrage. It is getting so that everything is unacceptable to somebody.