Listen to the rogues that you come across.

These scoundrels are going to tell you things that make you uncomfortable. Hell, they might just tell you that your way of life is wrong, that it’s contributing to greater evils. When you give them an open ear, they’ll fill it with all sorts of detritus. Stuff that’s bound to upset your sensibilities. Ideas that make you want to vomit. Maybe they’ll ask you to chew on the notion that everything you believe is a lie. They’ll be vulgar and angry and a bit discomfiting.

And you need to listen to them.

`Cause right or wrong, if we don’t entertain roguish ideas then we have no right to accept the easy ones. Sure, some of the time the doomsayers and fringe-dwelling miscreants are wrong. But we can’t know that for sure unless we give `em a chance. And every now and then, when the blue moon turns blood red, the rogues are right. And when this is the case, they’re usually showing us that Daddy Society’s been belting the most hapless, defenseless of his children.

Listen to the rogues.

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Welcome to the Monday Morning Commute! I’m going to highlight some of the pop-culture junk I’ll be snackin’ on over the course of the week. Then, you hit up the comments and share your own recipes for entertainment-treats. It’s show-and-tell amongst the crew and passengers of Spaceship OL.

LIFT OFF!

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Better Off Dead is one of the best high school comedies about the absurdity of adolescence. It presents a myriad of predicaments that could conceivably mire a typical student’s well-being–mental, familiar, financial, social, and sexual, just to name a few–and runs wild with them all for the express purpose of laying waste to the insecurities and hang-ups that concern most people during this weird time in life. Every romantic hiccup is exaggerated to disastrous dimensions; every apparent shortcoming is tantamount to total deficiency. In turn, most of these problems that might trouble a young person are revealed to be completely laughable when they are properly framed for bizarre effect: anything this ridiculous and cartoonish should not be taken seriously, and issues even remotely similar to them should, as a result, become less world-crushing. When it can’t get any worse, it can only get better, and Better Off Dead is leaps and bounds funnier than many other comedies because it’s more than willing to go to some humiliating and hilarious lows before its protagonist ascends the proverbial mountain in the end.

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I love Dumb and Dumber. It’s one of my “movies to watch when I’m sick” staples, even if the “doggy bag” scene scarred me for life as a child (it was a long time before I could look at a beating heart without making a face). I totally overlooked the prequel, because, well. But the fact remains, the movie is a classic and I know  it will remain untouched by the fingers of some greedy Hollywood execut–

Sorry, what was that? I… oh.

Well, fuck.

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