On being alone

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 3 Comments

Stringer the lab, asleep on the author around 6pm Sunday

I have spent the last week dogsitting my excellent nephew, Stringer. Stringer is the best labrador that ever there was. He belongs to my friends Ben and Sarah, who work at home from a big house in the hills and therefore have given Stringer a pretty fantastic life. When they are gone, he misses them. He consoles himself by loving me—usually by laying his big, soft head on whatever part of me has briefly stopped moving—and I console him with Dog Adventures. Every time I stand up, Stringer thinks we are going on a Dog Adventure. He follows me from room to room, and in this way I am never alone. Which is interesting, because I have not spoken to another human being in just over 36 hours.

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Two acts of aesthetic morality

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 6 Comments

Charles Snelling, who killed his wife and then himself after Alzheimer's Disease concluded their 60-year marriage, and Robert Wilkinson, who sang "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the back of a squad car (at right)

With today’s post headline, Combat! blog abandons all hope of attracting a general audience. If you have read this far, you are animated by a loyalty that most of the internet simply does not possess. Tomorrow we’re changing the format to nothing but videos of cats falling into toilets,* so I figured we’d use today to consider the ontology of morals. On Friday, the New York Times ran what was perhaps the most approving murder-suicide story ever. Charles Snelling, who in December wrote an essay describing his six-decade marriage to Adrienne Snelling and the Alzheimer’s Disease that consumed her last five years, killed his wife and then shot himself. Also last week, the internet became enraptured by video of a drunk man singing Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” in its entirety while locked in the back of a RCMP squad car. Everyone considered both these acts profound expressions of the human spirit.

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I don’t know how to feel about Gallagher’s heart attack

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 2 Comments

Gallagher continues his gradual convergence with The Crypt Keeper.

If I asked you what you thought of the prop comedian Gallagher, best known for making audiences sit through an hour of visual puns before his famous sledge-o-matic routine, you would probably say something mean. When I was ten, I loved the sledge-o-matic. I distinctly remember walking more than a mile to the video store to rent Gallagher videos with my brother. Twenty-five years later, that video store is a Subway and I am not laughing uproariously at the gag, “You want that cheeseburger to go? [Crushes cheeseburger with mallet.] It’s gone!” Yet Gallagher is doing the exact same thing. There he is in the photo above, making some sort of racket joke and wearing a t-shirt with a picture of himself on it. He is clearly an object of derision. Also, he just emerged from a medically-induced coma after his second heart attack. Now who’s an asshole?

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Is it okay to have an opinion about this photo?

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 9 Comments

The photo above was uploaded to Facebook by my friend Lucas. Here I use friend very loosely.* I haven’t seen Lucas since high school, when he was a year behind me. While we were friendly acquaintances, we never really hung out, and we certainly haven’t kept in touch since then. We became friends on Facebook sometime last year, presumably due to the “people you may know” feature. Lucas is a person I might know, had we not both left our hometown essentially for good at the end of high school. As it is, he is someone I know not at all, except I knew immediately when his wife went into labor and that he lives in LA and where he goes to lunch pretty much every day.

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I choo choo choose to die alone

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 7 Comments

Okay, so it’s not a choi choi choice exactly, but it seems to be where we’re headed. Today is Valentine’s Day. If we had the instruments to measure such things, I suspect we would find that ironic observances account for the majority celebration of same. As any single person will tell you, Valentine’s Day is fake. It is a construct designed to sell flowers and prix fixe dinners—as opposed to Christmas and May Day, which are totally real. Exactly who conspired to create Valentine’s Day and market it across multiple industries against the will of Earth’s people remains unclear. Probably, she is pretty and wants watermelon. Possibly she does not really exist.

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