Part 1: Careers In Science
The Venture Bros. is cancelled, and I am sad. So utterly sad. When I first saw The Venture Bros, I lived in a tiny studio apartment about a quarter mile north of the northern end of Lakeshore Drive in Chicago. It was not a particularly happy moment in my life, to be honest. I had good friends – excellent friends, in fact – but that was just about it. I had a desk job that just barely paid the bills, but I was almost as depressed as I have ever been in my life. Chicago just was not my city.
When I first moved there, my girlfriend at the time and I took an apartment that was fantastic, except that it was a half-hour walk from the nearest train station. That was…not a great decision. I have never been a huge fan of winter, but my time in Chicago turned a strong dislike into a vast ocean of loathing.
I remember trudging to the train station one morning, the dawn still an hour or so away. I know the temperature was below zero, god only knows what the wind chill must have been. As I climbed the steps of the train station, I caught myself shivering. I could not stop. I remembered my first aid training from my youth in the Boy Scouts. Uncontrollable shivering was part of the human body’s last-ditch efforts to warm itself. All I had to do to die in the next few hours was just sit here on the bench and wait.
As I wondered what I was going to do for the rest of this horrible, grey, dreary winter, I glanced to my left, hoping to see the train, but instead all I saw was a man with the permanent smug scowl I soon began to associate with Chicago natives. He was wearing a windbreaker and a pair of earmuffs. He was not shivering. He looked me up and down for a moment, then said “It’s not that cold.”
I should have left. At that moment, I should have walked back to my apartment, packed my bags and left. But I didn’t. I stayed, and so a year or so later, during one of my frequent insomniac episodes, I found myself watching The Venture Bros., the best show on television. It was, in a strange and indescribable way, a bright light in the darkness.
I went out the next day and bought the first season on DVD, and have spent the last fifteen years evangelizing for the show. A few weeks ago, when it was cancelled, I actually received several messages of condolences. I had no idea how to respond to them.
One of my best friends texted me a few days later (shout out to Miki), and she wondered why I hadn’t been in touch to talk about our shared grief. I didn’t know what to say. Beyond some deadline trouble, the only thing I could think was that there was no processing the loss of a constant for the last fifteen years of my life. Also, it was probably stupid to even have grief over the loss of a TV show. Yet here I am, writing a blog post I may well find embarrassing in a few years.
Oh, well, that’s the nature of my life. If I’m not humiliating my future self, I’m probably not learning anything today.
NEXT WEEK: Powerless In The Face Of Death!
Commenti