My Holy Trinity

We're all drawn to certain books/movies/TV shows that "speak" to us in certain lights. In a conversation with Lizbeth, I jokingly referred to the TV shows I love as "My Holy Trinity." So there you go. They are: 1) small town dramas with kooky characters, 2) intense metaphysical & surreal dramas that struggle with issues of life and death (and have a hard core sense of dark humor about them, as well), and 3) teen primetime soap operas. After joking with Lizbeth I got to thinking about why I'm drawn to these kinds of shows versus, say, crime dramas like CSI or half-hour sitcoms like (insert name here). I mean, I love a variety of shows and ones I've watched are crime dramas or sitcoms, but they're not what I keep coming back to on a regular basis. Maybe I can't know all the reasons I search this trinity out, and I certainly don't want to get over-analytical about the whole business, but I think it's what's gotten pressed on me--and into me--at an early age. I grew up in Lake Geneva, WI (which, at the time, only boasted a little over 5,000 people). It was there my family struggled through the divorce; I realized I was gay and suffered at the hands of cruel and zealous classmates; and tapped into my spiritual side outside the dimensions of Catholicism....It was there that my brothers and I stopped attending a Catholic private school, like we'd done back in Lemont, IL, and it was also there--when Lake Geneva was still so beautiful with all the forests and ponds and hiking trails--that I started delving into my more New Age-y, transcendental side. In addition, I've always been obsessed with death. Losing D was the first time I felt right in the center of death; up until a few weeks ago I'd been standing on the periphery--even during the passing of a grandparent, for example--and during the years I've tried to encompass and understand grief in my writing and through being a witness to other people's sadness. 'Til the day I die myself, I think I'll be working through questions of mortality, of what the frickin' heck God is/was/are/will be, and Why We Are All Here. I can't pinpoint a specific moment that I really pushed my personal envelopes and boundaries of God and my spirituality: could it be when Jeff and I killed that frog when we were kids? Could it have been seeing Gomer get hit by the truck? Could it have been watching my Uncle Chuck and my Grandma Nellie get sicker and sicker in the hospital, from cancer? Could it be the strangeness of funerals and memorial services, and how they are definitely more for the living than they are for the dead? Maybe, when it all comes down to it, it's the fear of losing my mother, and how nature inevitably wraps us up in its cycles, and how that moment will never come at an okay time. Finally, I know I carry a high Cheese Quotient by watching my teen shows--needless to say, people sometimes scratch their heads and smirk at my DVD collection--but there will always be that part of Inner-Nathan who is trying to figure out the atrocities of high school, why children do what they do to others, and how I always stood outside the Cool Circle (thank fucking God) and looked in at it through my writerly microscope. I sure am glad I got to be my weird and quiet and awkward and sexually confused self! Who knew at the time I'd be so thankful! But, really, I look back--in a healthy, curious way--and I notice that people don't really become more "mature" as they grow. Yes, we certainly become more ourselves; some of us crash and burn, some of us light the Wisdom-Sage, and sometimes we go back and forth; some of us have our own children and imbue them with lessons learned from our own experiences or others'. Still, adults are not that different from children--we just hide our wickedness better. We've fine-tuned our passive-aggressive capabilities. This, despite our Life Learning Curve at the exact same time. So I dive into these shows and I try to understand who I was, who I am, who I will be, and how these "Nathan's" all shift in crazy patterns like that magicians' game where there's a marble hiding underneath one of three walnut shells and you have to guess which one and sometimes you get it right and sometimes you don't (even though you were absolutely sure you had the answer). Anyway, I fully embrace My Holy Trinity and am trying to figure out this Universe through it. I'd love to hear from you all about your own trinities, or rectangles, or circles, or single points of light. Thanks for listening, and feel free to check out: Twin Peaks, Six Feet Under, Felicity, Picket Fences, Veronica Mars, Lost, Queer as Folk, Everwood, Tales of the City, Once & Again, My So-Called Life, Wonderfalls, Dark Shadows, American Gothic, Desperate Housewives, Carnivale, Freddy's Nightmares: A Nightmare on Elm Street the series, Friday the 13th: the TV Series, Buffy & Angel....(I'll stop now!!!!) And remember, we all need our Dark Humor to get us through this craziness. Even as I watch my shows, I'll only watch if they also make me laugh--even when I "shouldn't" be. It's laugh or cry, right?