I am planning to re-watch all eight hours of Netflix’s Stranger Things. I can’t help it. I really seriously love that show. And the reason is the kids in the series. Yes, it was set in the 80’s, a decade I long to return to, but I wasn’t a kid myself in the 80’s. That was my first decade as a teacher. The thing is… I taught each and every one of the kids in that series. I admit, they had different names and lived in different bodies, but they were the same faces, the same personalities.
And it is not so much the characters the kids inhabit in the show, though they were obviously cast as themselves. It is the real-life screwiness that Jimmy Fallon brings out with the silly string that I recognize.
Finn Wolfhard’s character, Michael, is basically me. The dreamer determined to make the fantastic become true. And when they played Dungeons and Dragons in the basement, he was the Dungeon Master. That was me. The teller of the stories, the maker of the meaning. He’s the one who creates the Demogorgon adventure that eerily comes to life. He is also the one who finds and befriends the mysterious Eleven. He is the driving force that leads them all to the inevitable conclusion of the adventure.
And while I never met anyone quite like the mysterious Eleven, Millie Bobby Brown is definitely no stranger to me. She is bubbly, outgoing, and utterly charming. She can channel Nikki Minaj. I must’ve taught at least five different versions of Millie in three different schools when I was a teacher.
She makes the weird and otherworldly character of Eleven become believable through the sheer force of a natural talent for empathy and understanding. She is a highly intelligent girl with a knack for making things work.
I have also taught about four different incarnations of the Dustin character’s actor, Gaten Matarazzo. The goofy but courageous kid with a broad sense of humor and a focus on food is a very common type of junior high kid. And while he isn’t usually a leader in the classroom, he’s the one you turn to when you need help getting the group to choose the right path.
I swear to you, I know all these kids, even though I have never met them. You see, when you are a teacher for long enough, everyone in the world comes in through your door. You have to get to know them and learn to at least like them if not love them. You do the thing for long enough, and you learn that there are a limited number of different faces and personalities that God distributes over time and circumstance to many different people. It is possible to get to know nearly all of them. And there are no Stranger Things than kids.
Catch a Falling Star 
The Darkest of the Coming Darkness
I do not claim to be prescient. But like any overly smart and perceptive person, I often see what’s going to happen before it happens. Sometimes it is almost as eerie as a Vincent Price movie. Sometimes eerier. After all, on the 60’s Batman TV show, Price played the ridiculous villain Egghead, and was completely creepy while doing it, but still, you know… Egghead.
One thing that I have to predict about the coming darkness is about politics. I mean, the current Republican administration, where it is decisions by all Republicans all the time, has become nothing more than a monster movie. Not merely a bad monster movie, but a super-creepy-bad monster movie with a gigantic orange rubber rooster as the main monster.
The reason it is bad is because, basically, to become a member of the Republican Party’s elected elite, you basically have to have your heart removed. Heartless, soulless monsters have a tendency to do things like take away Meals on Wheels for invalid seniors, health-care services from Planned Parenthood, and any hope of ever having affordable health insurance that actually pays for health care.
And now, the monsters who have taken control of the theater are pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement because… well, apparently clean air isn’t good for decaying, desiccated monster skin and shriveled monster lungs that don’t breathe air anyway.
So here are my predictions for the coming darkness.
I won’t live to see it. My body is breaking down at age 60. My lungs are compromised by years of bronchitis and flu. I am diabetic, so my very body chemistry is betraying me. There is a family history of heart disease. And I have already gone broke once on health care bills that the health insurance people really don’t pay for. (They are in the business of collecting premiums, after all, not making people well.)
As the climate changes take away large parts of our food production and resources, and the sea rises to take away land and major cities, people will be at war increasingly over diminishing resources vital to a population of seven billion souls. Graveyards and unburied bodies will become a part of every monster-movie scene.
Love will become more complicated, because people who are selfless and put others before even their own life will die out first. The heartless, selfish, and often stupid ones will have the best chance for survival because they put themselves ahead of everyone else, and so have an unfair advantage over those who are not content with mere survival and exhibit self-sacrificing love.
So, if you find my black-and-white monster movie post upsetting with the darknesses I am sincerely predicting, please remember, this is a satire post in a humor blog. The way it is supposed to work is that you wake up to the factors that make it upsetting and decide to do something for yourself to change them. Everybody doing a lot of the same little thing to make the world better can move mountains and fly to the moon. Big things don’t happen without everybody taking a hand. Maybe we can dream dreams once again and make some good things come true.
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Filed under angry rant, battling depression, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, horror movie, humor, monsters
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