Static.

"All I know is that my mind is blown / When I'm with you...when I'm with you..."

Summer 2009: the summer that time forgot. Even now I try to remember the last three months and everything only comes in snatches. The checks bounced, the record player skipped. There was a power outage so brief you wouldn't have noticed except for that slight delay on all the clocks around the house. Absolutely nothing happened, and everything that did happen occurred all at once.

One way to describe it: "Static." is probably, in terms of consciousness expansion, a sequel of sorts to "Cottonfire" but it's a spiritual sequel to "Chain of Memories" (summer 2005) and a thematic sequel to "A Neverending Story" (summer 2006).

When you soundtrack three months of your life with the antic bubble gum camp of The Flaming Lips and the religiously feverish and blasé melancholy of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, you start to really play with notions of language and sound. Additionally, when you only read mythologies, creation stories from various religions and comic books and basically nothing else for a while, there's this weird sort of germination that occurs in your creativity.

I can't explain. One moment I remember a boy barely out of high school suddenly leaning in to kiss me in the passenger's seat with all the moxie in the world, and the next thing I remember is spasming on a bathroom floor, vomiting and being carried by strong hands. Next I see a fight with my mother over the phone, and then things seem to rewind (or fast forward) to girls from high school coming up to me in church thanking me for something I didn't really mean to write. I go backwards and then my sister is calling me, nearly in tears, over my boyhood hero and then forwards again to my boss telling me, "I'm sorry but I have to let you go." I hear bombastic and ridiculous guitar and a beer-bitter voice surrounded by choirs. I see red and blue streak across a sky and a thunderbolt striking my mailbox. I'm drinking Corona at a wedding, then I'm standing in pouring rain watching men dancing in cages while a drag queen raises above my head in a firetruck ladder. I'm sinking deep into the chair in my living room, then suddenly dancing like I've suddenly discovered for the first time that I have legs, awkwardly tripping and jumping all over the apartment. A slightly mentally disturbed man with a pony tail leans in to kiss me outside my door while on the other side I'm bringing the young man's head closer to mine. I'm sitting on a curb smoking my last Lucky Strike and then I'm taking a shot of whiskey to toast to my unemployment.

I just don't know what the hell happened.

re: "COTTONFIRE" ...

It's important to realize that the phrase "existential crisis" doesn't really cover it. It's the closest term I have found to describe the experience; there was certainly a crisis and imminent, lethal peril was very real, as I was suicidal, and the resolution to the crisis can be described as an existential one. But ultimately I don't know that the term can accurately describe just what happened. But I'm here to state, for the first time, a coherent narrative of "Cottonfire," which (in my soundtracks and written entries) is the "title" attributed to my 2007 summer, from the first week of May to the last week of July.

The name isn't meant to be necessarily cryptic. To begin with, often when I was in the car or walking around during those months, I would see little tuffs of cotton seeds floating aimlessly around all over the city. Later, the cotton would somehow become associated with the Tree of Life in Aronofsky's The Fountain - and I think it was more of a connection to Clint Mansell's score; I'd listen to that haunting piano and the strings and somehow it'd match up with the dance of the cotton seeds. Additionally, the name alludes to the 2007 Milford Flat fire (called the biggest recorded fire in Utah history) and the PG fire (curious to me because of its simple ignition - a lawnmower blade striking a rock). On the day the firespreads overlapped the most - the former near Saratoga Springs and the latter on the foothills below Squaw Peak - there were two giant pillars of fire and smoke as the sun set, one pillar in the east near my house (at the mouth of Provo Canyon) and the other in the far west across the lake.

So the imagery has something of fragility to it, my awkward metaphor of life and death that describes, in one symbol, what happened to me two years ago when my life almost inexplicably changed - inexplicably precisely because I still can't figure out what started my own fires.

It was definitely a countdown built from a few different factors. Most specifically, I was taking an Ethics and Values class from an adjunct professor named Ethan Sproat. At the time, I was (almost) completely devoted to serving a mission for the LDS church. The class wasn't necessarily forcing me to drastically change my religious views, but reading Nietzsche was a big mindtrip for my Peter Priesthood attitudes. My British Literature class may have added something as well because we were beginning to dip into heavy modernism and postmodernism, so I was spending some time with Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot and Salman Rushdie. In time, later that summer I read Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground and The Trial by Franz Kafka. So that was all forcing me to face some nihlistic (lack of a better word) concepts and concerns I'd spent most of my life being told I needn't worry about.

On another level, my music taste was radically changing (which may not sound relevant, but it was a huge deal). Up until that summer, I listening almost exclusively to Yellowcard, Hoobastank, Fall Out Boy, Dashboard Confessional, etc. But Spider-Man 3 was coming out, and so was the film's soundtrack - this will sound weird, but every time a Spider-Man movie has come out, my music tastes have changed to each soundtrack (after the first, I stuck mainly to mainstream alternative, like Nickelback, Creed, Evanescence and Sum 41). But after the soundtrack came out, I started listening to Wolfmother, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Killers, The Walkmen and Simon Dawes...and these "indie" rockers lead me to rock 'n roll roots; soon I was listening nearly every waking moment to Led Zeppelin, The Who, Fleetwood Mac, The Doors, Bob Dylan (it would take me until after I moved out to truly love him, though) and - eventually replacing Linkin Park as my favorite band - those Irish boys, U2. This 60's, 70's and 80's rock music somehow captured both the physical heat and the spiritual conflicted heat I was experiencing that summer. I watched the PG fire erupt on Squaw Peak as the sun set while listening to "Exit" from U2's seminal The Joshua Tree; the song sounds like a scene from Capote and describes the quietly violent story of...well, you can find out yourself here.

It's worth mentioning that I also spent most of the summer reading Homer's Iliad. In addition to the recent acceptance of R-rated movies into my house, my summer felt rather violent due in part to reading about the Trojan War for three months - however, the important thing is how by the end of the epic, my beliefs about human nature and concepts of love, divinity and destiny were drastically changed due to reading about Prince Hecktor and Achilles.

The escalation of problems in my family were a factor. Our family was struggling pretty badly financially and along with my sister I had to work the summer at Convergys, accompanied by my Kafka and Zeppelin, contributing most or all of my paycheck money to basic necessities like gas, food and even toilet paper. While I was privately nursing unsettling doubts and paranoia about the Church, my parents (my mother in particular) began taking a fairly negative position about early church history, particularly regarding Joseph Smith's little-known polygamous marriages and the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Soon almost each night our kitchen TV would be playing a fat red-haired man ranting anti-Mormon sentiments. I really through the whole thing that the Church was an uncrossable line for me, until one night my mom was watching the PBS documentary The Mormons and I saw the following clip:



That statement (I promise not taken out of context), taken for granted at the time, would echo very deeply in my mind for weeks as I struggled with my ultimate personal battle: my same-gender attractions. Because desirous as I was to serve a mission and "overcome" the attractions, I would still lie awake in bed at night pulling my hair out over the complete horror of the implications: did God really want me to be alone? Even if I eventually found a girl to marry, could I love her? And could I give her what she needed? Tales abounded of men I knew who were unhappy, even with children. A story of a man who could not arouse himself around his wife, and in her frustration she gave him permission to have a homosexual hookup, just because she hoped it'd make him happy. A story of a man who couldn't let down a decades-old porn addiction. Men who prey around on Craigslist asking for BYU RM's to come over when the wife's not home and fuck in their garments. Men who never told their wives prior to the honeymoon that female sexuality wasn't a turn on. Men whose (ultimately mislead) notions of masculinity and femininity seemed troubling to my 19-year-old mind. I couldn't continue clingling to my boyhood perspectives like security blankets.


The stories were everywhere, and none of them seemed to be what I wanted from the Church. The ultimate concern was not whether or not I could "overcome" the attractions, but whether or not I could live happily with myself and my choice long afterwards. And, as ever in the Church, we are talking about forever here.

In the face of that unadulterated uncertainty, that paranoia and doubt of having joy in this life, I was hearing on my left hand that the LDS gospel, the leaders and members were untrustworthy and on the other hand I was being told that I could never question. The years had taught me complicity; now, however, there was a strange shift and I was beginning to realize that I'd spent my life "settling" for what the Church was telling me. I became angry at the illogical façade of it all; reality seemed a joke. If I was "supposed" to end up with a woman, how did it make any sense that I couldn't be attracted to a woman? If there is a God, and He is loving - more to the point, a "perfect" God, and His command is a "natural" one, then how did it make any sense that a "homosexual" even exists? I felt like an anomaly, some hiccup in the Great Eternal Plan, and marriage was a holy recreation of Beckett's frightening endgame. And it felt sickening to literally be a freak of "nature" every minute of every day.

Given everything I was hearing on all sides, nothing made sense and I didn't feel like anyone understood me. I couldn't go to my parents (for reasons obvious and listed above) and my closest friends were either ignoring me because of my increasing depression or on missions across the globe. The lonlieness broke me, the countdown terminated and the culmination of these several factors, discernible and indiscernible, finally mounted to a rebellious - and perhaps even more illogical - conclusion: obviously, if I couldn't fix myself, then I simply had to kill myself. And soon.


It started slowly; I found a way to expose the blades on the cheap Bic razors we had in storage and I would sneak into the bathroom at night, turn on songs in reverse, and slowly draw. I only scratched at my wrists themselves, but soon there were very visible scars on my shoulders and legs. I rationalized that somehow I was bracing for the real pain, death itself.

So there was some elaborate planning. It would be at the end of the summer and it would be the most unexpected thing in the world. I had the entire morning of the day planned out. Friends and family would wake up to find notes and emails. I researched several methods before settling on one. There would be rope I could buy. And there was a bridge. The Provo River is sewn with a batch of footbridges all over and one of them would be my own end. I knew the knots. I would jump off the bridge and after my neck would snap, the rope's support would break away from the bridge and my body would fall into the river. I would wait until before sunrise to leave my house, head down to the river, and jump.

There wasn't much "talking myself into it" but there was more over the actual act of the choice itself. My problem was that while I was constantly thinking about suicide and planning for it, I couldn't be said to have been suicidal. My problem was that as desperate as I was to end my life, every time I came to the actual deed, it was like suddenly entering a vacuum in a wide and neverending desert, or climbing up walls. There was nothing to stop me, and yet something very clearly was stopping me. I don't know how to explain it. Every bone in my body wanted me to end it and I had every capability and opportunity to end it. But something, somehow, was in my way every single time. And this only infuriated me more - I felt even more incompetent that I couldn't control anything about my life, even how I would die. One more thing I somehow could only half-ass and never get right.

There are three music albums that came out in early 2007 which would narrate the weird "death" journey/ritual I acted out throughout the three months. First there was Welcome The Night by The Ataris, which detailed lead singer/songwriter Kristopher Roe's own existential crisis after his divorce (which I learned from his own mouth, after interviewing him with Lindsey at their St. Patrick's Day concert in SLC). This album conceptually narrated my own crisis and the album ended with an affirmation of the inevitability of death. Hence, the next album was Linkin Park's Minutes To Midnight and opened with the result of this affirmation: defeat and the choice to commit suicide. The album follows the slow process of saying goodbye to friends, examining the reasons for the choice while building up for the act along the way, and the last song is the dying breath of a victim of violence.


The third album was the most important: The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance. The very first sound on the album is the decline of beeps on a heart moniter. As a concept album, a story is told about an unnamed character called The Patient who dies of some sort of heart complication (openly interpreted as medical or related to the girl sitting at his side). Part of the mythic setting of the story is that death comes to you in the form of your most precious memory. The Patient's most precious memory is seeing the city parade with his father; hence, death comes for him in the form of a large goth parade that takes him on a Dickensian journey through time and space visiting various dying people in the form of memories - from a church revival, to a cancer boy, to the first World War, to a mental hospital, to a high school massacre, to a final confrontation with his father - all the while learning about life and death. The album ends ambiguously: by the final number, either The Patient has learned to accept his "life" in the hereafter, or at the moment he becomes at peace with death he suddenly wakes up in the hospital bed to find that the entire thing was a dream.

What this "narrative" did for me (particularly The Black Parade) in addition to all the philosophy was show me that while I didn't fear death, I actually wasn't necessarily afraid of dying, either. Ultimately, I was afraid of how I, as a person both spiritually and physically, would become irrevocably altered by the pain that would accompany the calamitous act. But one thing I took from U2 and The Fountain was that pain is intricately connected with life: pain is a physical signal of growth, conducive to being alive - a physical reaction to life itself. I wasn't afraid of dying - I was afraid of really living. And in the face of life itself, the choices were always mine.

When the appointed day came, the sunrise found me on the edge of the bridge. But that was, by itself, the only thing that had gone according to plan. It had begun to come apart when I sat down to write my "last letter" to my best friend serving a mission on the other side of the country. It wasn't until then that I remembered he had asked me one day in high school to never kill myself because it would be "tramautizing" and affect him for the rest of his life. I didn't want to believe that people would actually care about me being gone, but it wasn't until I'd sat down to write his letter that I realized that even if others did miss me, that wasn't the point. The point was that in this life, we make connections with others, and part of that connection is having faith. Pain is a part of every relationship, be it friendship, a romance, parental or otherwise, and I would have to accept that in order to accept myself and come into my own in this world.


As the sun came up, it became increasingly clear that whatever was inside of me willing me to live, it was stronger than any mere evolutionary impluse lulling me to reproductive priorities with a girl, or any carnal lust for masculinity and male bodies. It was stronger and much more clear than any of the darkness I'd endured since high school and the recent bouts of doubt and paranoia. It was some sort of light inside that just wouldn't die, inadequate and trite as that description is. What it finally came down to would affect me for years afterwards.

As I stared at the water, I began to work out images of myself in the future being with a wife and having a family. I could make myself in a nametag on a mission in the water. I strained my eyes for images and felt complete faith in a road that lay ahead of me. With that, I turned and walked off the bridge back on the sidewalk and headed home. I snuck back in my house, went to my room, and fell asleep.

I would later talk about visions and dreams, and a little after that I would even believe myself. But did I actually see the future in Provo River? Of course not. But what I'd done was much more incredible. I had actually created that road I'd put faith in. I'd created my own potential future and then tried to act it out - created it literally out of thin air. The implications wouldn't hit me for a long time - not until I'd already fallen in love with a girl for the first (and perhaps only) time in my life. But I'd realized that it was possible to create my own destiny. That for the first time, my choices were not preset by old men sitting in a SLC building or by teachers, historians or even friends and family. For the first time, I felt like my life was truly mine. It was an incredible feeling that had me walking on air the entire way back to my house.


Like Kris Roe and Allen Ginsberg wrote, this life is a passage between two doors, and perhaps we can't understand life while living it at the same time. But there are things to discover and other things must be earned. There are unspeakable horrors and there are breathtaking miracles. Nietzsche and Bono, vita femina - life is a woman, and she moves in mysterious ways. But if heaven is so great, then why this postmodern obsession with living as long as possible, retaining youth? I'm in no rush to get there; if there's one thing I've cherished from the five times I've read the Book of Mormon, it's Nephi's statment that "Adam fell that men might be, and men are that they might have joy." No matter what path lies ahead in life, it will always be one I carve and pave for myself. My perspectives on life, death, the nature of reality and everything else have become drastically different because of these realizations. While it's taken me this long to finally sit down and write down a basic summary, I have to constantly remember what I learned about myself during my Cottonfire summer two years ago.

Maybe Just Avoid District 9

Is there anyone out there besides me who didn't particularly like District 9?

I know Joanne Kaufman over at Wall Street Journal didn't. Neither did Kyle Smith at New York Post (and I love his "kill-or-be-krill" jest) or J.R. Jones at the Chicago Reader. Heck, even Ebert and I both have the same dislikes with the same movie for once. But for the most part, their critiques are brief and don't really give details. So here I go.


Let's start with what should be appreciated. Because really, you've gotta hand it to an August blockbuster that grosses over $35 million in its first weekend when it's got unknowns for a cast, relatively simple set production, not based on a comic book, video game or novel and its only real name credit is a man at the helm with a name stamp somewhere in the last ten years of pop entertainment. One film tried to do that earlier last year: Cloverfield. Like District 9, it was plenty hyped with a cryptic trailer as well as extensive viral marketing in addition to billboard signs. It came out at an unconventional time for a big-budget movie, it had the potential to spurt out spin-off films or tie-ins, it was about aliens, and it was produced by J.J. Abrams from the hit shows Alias and Lost. And nobody seemed to care about Cloverfield.

But at least Cloverfield's story lost its pretentiousness quickly. Cloverfield wanted to take the "alien blockbuster"/"disaster movie" genre* (see also: Independence Day; see also: Armageddon) and deconstruct it a bit; instead of big names starring as scientists or military personnel - usually men - who save their estranged families and the world, it told a street-level story of snobby teenagers who get trapped in the big mess of things, and all of them wind up dead by the end - including the guy who saves the girl, plus the girl. By itself, that's pretty predictable, but not usually in an alien blockbuster. Cloverfield also broke conventional norms by being shot cinema vérité style to give the film a more realistic look and feel. However much Abrams wanted to break from normal alien movie narratives, though, none of those methods employed ever got in the way of actually telling the story (unless, of course, you didn't like its predictability or you were one of those people who got vertigo in the theater from the HandiCam style and blew chunks).

District 9 has several similarities. The vague trailer teased audiences with the name "Peter Jackson" for months preceding its release and was greatly hyped with billboards and Web sites. It plays out documentary style, talking heads and all. I believe that it also tries to break away from conventional movie sci-fi structures.

In some ways, it succeeds, because District 9 certainly raises a lot of interesting stuff. Take, for instance (spoilers ahoy), the allegorical nods to apartheid, the "final solution" to move them all to a giant concentration camp of tents, or the protagonist's progression from small tuna working for the Man and leading a basically uninteresting life to - contrary to how most of these alien movie heroes react - become progressively cruel and selfish as he inches closer to his objective, even to the point of becoming cowardly and turning tail running during the final battle. It certainly raises interesting questions about humanity as an identity, and the film does a great job of realistically portraying how the world might actually react to an alien immigration. There are some moments in the film that had me gripped to my seat, like when the scientists force the protagonist to kill an alien. The film even has a touching father-son story. I can get teary-eyed at few things, father-son stories being one of them - and mostly in weak/simple films like Signs or The Lion King.

But from there, the film goes nowhere. And that makes me more frustrated with the film rather than hate it. As soon as the credits started rolling and I wanted to talk about these things, the longer I reflected on the film, the more it started to flake away and fall apart. And I don't mean story-wise. The story, when isolated and packaged for a Reader's Digest version, is pretty straightforward. But the internal logic itself doesn't work; several parts of the story rely on seemingly arbitrary plot points or devices that are either entirely unexplained or rely on heavy interpretive analysis from the audience. I can definitely handle the latter (The Fountain is my favorite movie, and I never see it the same way twice, so I'm not unfamiliar with films that demand a lot from the viewer). But the former aggravates me to no end, and it was my main complaint with Slumdog Millionaire (and I'm the only one I know who disliked that film, other than Salman Rushdie).

Like (again, spoilers) when the protagonist is wheeled into a room full of dead aliens (some in pieces, and a talking-head shot explains that no human has ever bonded to an alien and lived. This made me think that the room was full of failed metamorphosed human-aliens, and yet this was never explained. A friend later postulated that the room was actually full of aliens that had been kidnapped and subjected to testing. I'm open to that possibility, except the movie didn't provide much evidence to fully argue that, either. The movie had moments where you had to infer what was going on, which I'm usually fine with, except that too many times I had to say, "Well, maybe this, maybe that" instead of "The film gives A, B and C, so therefore this is what happened." Too many "maybe's" and your "clever" story starts to look like a spaghetti sieve. And I wasn't surprised by any of the "twists," including the transformation from alien to human.


And not being surprised by District 9 is funny because so things felt so random. You mean to tell me that the aliens are the only ones can operate their weapons, and the weapons are powerful enough to literally explode their enemies, and there are tons of these...and the aliens either don't use them to take over or they sell them for...cat food? (Um, cat food? Giant shrimp from another galaxy are in love with cat food? And calling them shrimp is about the only explanation for the ethnic slur "prawn," because the movie never tells me the how or why.) One friend pointed out that the film mentioned the aliens were likely low-level workers on the ship, which might be interesting enough to make sense, except that raises all sorts of questions like where are the other aliens who actually piloted or lived on the ship, and even then the film only raises that as a hypothesis. If the mothership was always operational, then why the hell do you need the fuel? (And the film never really tells you what the fuel is actually made from or why it takes twenty years to make.) Unless the "ship part" that fell is somehow part of the cockpit, since it can operate as one once it docks inside - but the film never tells me. How did humans learn their language - and, more importantly, how did the aliens learn English - in twenty years without writing anything down (which is one place where that "Well, they're workers" theory starts to look even weaker)? How did the aliens get human-sounding names like Christopher? And if human-sounding, why so English when the film is set in South Africa?

And speaking of the setting, when I stopped to think about it, Johannesburg felt more like a gimmick than a setting. It's interesting to see an alien movie taking place outside a big American city like New York for a change, and the allegorical reasons seemed appropriate to somewhere in Africa. But from there, it felt like that's the only reason to set it in Johannesburg, and trying to be so special is a bad reason to set any story. Change a few minor details and the story would've played out the same way in Russia, London or hell, New York. One thing I noted was the voodoo on alien bodies in the film which, again, is an interesting concept of how alien immigrants might impact local culture and/or religion, but from there the ball gets dropped because the voodoo felt like more of a reflection on South Africans being kooky witch doctors than anything, which starts to bother me when I think about using superstitious South Africans as a mere plot device. A friend suggested that Johannesburg was a good setting because Johannesburg has a very diverse culture and society where several immigrant groups are packed into shantytowns like sardines in a can, making it a giant melting pot where aliens could fit in. This is a good theory and it's definitely interesting...except the film doesn't do anything with it.

The editing of the film itself bothered me, too. There are a few places where you can tell they got sloppy - there's even a place during the climax where one character was barking orders, then crouching down to snipe out a building, and when the scene cuts to an explosion, the next shot of the character has him back on the other side standing and barking orders instead of crouched where he was. And the oh-so-realistic documentary style was poorly handled and ended up feeling like another gimmick. The film couldn't decide if it was a documentary or a typical sci-fi thriller because the film actually told the story both ways; most of scenes were told in normal linear film fashion, which felt weird because it would switch back and forth between styles from start to end. It wasn't necessarily confusing, but it felt weird.

Maybe I'm just an oddball when it comes to sci-fi films; one other thing that significantly separates Cloverfield from District 9 is that I'm the only person I know who really enjoyed Cloverfield. But I'm really not that particular about having answers spoonfed to me and usually prefer to be kept guessing during a movie. I feel like I could keep going with pointing out the weak spots in District 9, and that's because it's like one of those house-trained dogs that begins to act stupider the longer you give it attention. Ultimately I can't entirely hate the film because I was definitely entertained and had a good time in the theater. With some better writing and direction (and cleaner editing), the film might've suffered less under the pressure of its constant effort to be "unique" and "special." And perhaps the sequel (and there may almost certainly be one or two of them) will be better developed or explain some of these holes to me. But I can only recommend a dollar-theater or DVD viewing of District 9. I don't understand how it blew your mind, Sara Vilkomerson, or how the hell you could possibly find it "philosophically sophisticated," Christy Lemire. To me, those are gimmicky buzz phrases indicating only what this movie maybe could have have been.

*I consider alien movies like Independence Day to be part of the disaster film genre because when you look at the tyoical narrative structure of both films, they generally play out the same way whether the planet is threatened with asteroids, twisters, hurricanes, 2012, or space ships. Makes me think we should also throw in Transformers.

See Mike Run

This is Brother Pratt.



This is Brother Pratt in the Utah County Jail (as seen in the Deseret News).

Michael Jay Pratt - just saying the name puts courage in the hearts of hundreds of Orem High Tigers who remember him as the great seminary teacher. He was not just an inspiration to us, he was the closest thing some of us had to an actual general authority. People described him in terms of actual salvation. "Brother Pratt changed my life" or "Brother Pratt saved my life." He was a hero in almost titanic description; his spirituality, tracing back to Parley P. Pratt, was believed to be penultimate perfection. A short guy with a big heart who had just the answer for your problems and the right shoulder to cry on when he didn't.

And he has been arrested for sexual assault. A 16-year-old girl from his current teacher (and principal) position at Lone Peak's LDS seminary.

Video Courtesy of KSL.com

Brother Pratt - the man, the myth, the legend. It all sounds like gross exaggeration. Like me, and others, have blown things out of proportion. And that's precisely because that's what it is. A fiction. A man mythologized.

Michael Pratt's life story kinda sounds like something that came out of a seminary movie. He had a troubled past as a teenager fiercely rebelling against the Church he was born into until, one day, he was dared to read the Book of Mormon. It changed him into a spiritual powerhouse causing him to go around spreading love for Christ long before he ever blew out the candles on his nineteenth birthday cake. His mission yielded endless stories for what would inevitably be his life's work: teaching in seminary and Sunday schools.

He had a life on the go; he and his family would pack up and move whenever he came to a high school and stay for a few months before picking up again and going to a new school. But he left his mark all over the county. He could get the quiet kid to raise his hand and the talkative jocks to shut up. The door to his office was always open long after school got out for the day and, oftentimes, there was a line of people waiting to lighten their latest load on his shoulders, seeking his advice. His lessons kept you awake and energized; people could repeat the main points from his lessons by topic or memory...and, of course, everyone who took a class from him remembers his "Puddy Cave fieldtrip" lesson.

Like I said - a man mythologized. And I'm certainly no different; Brother Pratt is the reason I almost became a seminary teacher. I was one of a few who could comfortably call him Michael - he had been a lodestar in my life since I was fifteen, being the only church-related figure I felt I could talk to about my struggles with my same-gender attractions in high school - and even years later when I became inactive and began dating my first boyfriend, he came to visit me at my apartment and took me to dinner. There are several stories - from funny anecdotes I even tell co-workers to a curious winter night miracle I still can't explain to this day - that describe my friendship with Mike, and my journals from high school feature him and his advice frequently. He was one of my closest friends, down to his current position as the second counselor of the singles ward I inactively belong to.

What's interesting now is not just his arrest and this scandal that follows; it's the reactions from all my old high school friends. One friend said, "Bullshit. It's all bullshit - the girl was troubled and has destroyed his life." Another remarked, "I'm shocked. He was...well, everyone thought he was so perfect." Even my sister expects that sooner or later we may yet discover this all to be rumor. Some have already begun attributing "this tragedy" and "this dispicable man" to the subjugation of the devil. "All I can say is blame Satan," said one commenter on DesNews' website.

Not many seem to want to examine this for what it is: a beloved church-related figure who is now alleged to be a felon. Instead, all wait in nearly breathless anticipation to see how innocent Brother Pratt will escape and get out of this one intact and precisely as everyone remembers him. The response is largely disbelief, but most of all denial and paranoia. "We'll find out the truth sooner or later - this has all been blown out of proportion."

But proportions larger than life have surrounded and romanticized this short-of-stature man for years. We've put him in a light that, perhaps, doesn't truly exists. And now may be the right time for us - especially me - to admit it. It'll be better for any healing that needs to occur to keep the facts straight from the stories we tell...for such is the stuff that heroes are made of. In this important time, remember him not as that mythic hero-god...but as a human being. Like the rest of us. And in that way, maybe he can continue to inspire us. Brother Pratt can be both hero and felon.

And I think I know how it will all end. This will undoubtedly stain Brother Pratt's reputation for years. But in time, this will be seen as one other spiritual trial Brother Pratt "bravely" passed through. It will become part of the stories he'll tell in devotionals (which I'm either sure of or hoping) he'll be asked to speak at. "You know, when I spent those hellish nights in jail," he'll start, and the room will quiet. And this will all become hushed controversial apocrypha, like most LDS Church scandals.

But - "Do you think he really did it?" people ask me. I answer: "If you love Michael, does it really matter?" Loving doesn't ever mean seeing just the *good.* It means seeing the *person* in spite of the *bad.* And counting in the good. So let's allow God (and the laws of the land) to decide Brother Pratt's innocence or guilt. It need not concern us and is nobody's business but the families and people involved; the rest of us, let's follow C.S. Lewis and "get back to the business of loving." Which is precisely what, as Michael has taught us, Christ is all about.

Mike's mythology is too strong amongst too many people for him to pass away into bare naked factuality. This story could break Brother Pratt's heroic narrative among us old Tigers, as well as his other former students. We needn't completely let go of that inspirational myth surrounding him but we do need to break from any dependency on such hero fiction. We, all of us, have been writing the story from the very beginning. He never came to us claiming he was our hero. We did. ...I did. And I will always - always - love him dearly.

And so it is with all our gods.

Queer Film Spotlight: Shelter

Shelter (2007) This movie was a pleasant surprise because I thought it'd be just a softporn like Latter Days but with "surfer dudes." It turned out to be a well thought out story about a young graffitti artist named Zach who's stuck in urban California dreaming of getting into art school while taking care of his sister, his father and his orphaned nephew, Cody. When Shaun, the gay older brother of his best friend comes into town, Zach starts to rethink his relationships and the direction he wants to take with his life.


Shelter's fault is its vageness about its own story. It lacks plotholes but it also lacks focus. It's not clear how his sister finds out about him and Shaun, or why Cody's father is gone. One scene makes it seems as if Zach and his sister (as well as his on-and-off girlfriend) all happen to work at the same place. At times, the film's ambiguity gives way to gimicky plot tricks, like the com radio. In addition to taking care of Cody, Zach and his sister presumably must care for their mentally disabled father as well, and yet we only see the father at the very beginning and forget that his character exists until he's mentioned, in passing, towards the end of the film. These might be minor flaws, but they undermine the film's believability.

Zach often sleeps away from home, is socially disconnected, and is defensive over his artwork. He has to worry about being a father figure to Cody while maintaining so-called masculinity and applying to an out-of-state art school. I think these are good ways to underline Zach's feeling of restlessness, but unfortunately it was hard to buy all of these things when they happened because, due to Wright's acting, they went like lukewarm milk.

This brings me to the film's biggest problem: the characters were all believable except the protagonist himself. The character could have been very interesting, but Trevor Wright plays him like a wooden puppet. His angsty fits would be understandable but his age is supposed to be 22. It's difficult to care about Zach when everything he does feels somehow lacking. Worst is Zach's "change of heart" which feels like a magic trick out of thin air because of how sudden and unexplained it is. By the end when Zach is trying to convince his sister about the future, it sounds more like he's trying to convince himself.

Ultimately I think most of the problems I have with Zach were first impressions, and maybe the character will seem better handled on a second round. The film's protagonist might seem like the most underdeveloped part of the movie, which is unfortunate, but ultimately I'd recommend it to anyone. It's very enjoyable, tells a good story, and has a great soundtrack. Shaun's character was well-acted and so was his brother, Zach's best friend. Additionally, the kid who played Cody was good at being both sensitive to the tension between others as well as being innocent.

Batman is dead.

It's raining blood and tiger cats are riding giant dogs. The fabric of reality is being torn asunder. Batman's got a gun; he must choose between his consistent morality and a once-in-a-lifetime exception. The President of the United States is an African American Superman. Sexual objectification of contemporary female superheroes is fought out between Supergirl (the blonde bombshell, like Marylin Monroe) and Mary Marvel (with a shaved head recalling Britney Spears). Green Lantern Hal Jordan stands trial for a crime he didn't commit. There are crop circles. There are angels and prophets, cannibals and vampires. There's a tiger with a checkered jacket adjusting his bowtie after clawing out someone's innards. Prometheus is bound to a wheelchair. Frankenstein quotes Milton. A Rubik's cube turns people to dust. Hell hounds chase a school bus. An avatar of death, armored in black, is on skis. 98% of the world's population raise their fists to the devil himself after he hacks the internet. A beautiful kiss and tragic self-sacrifice. The first boy on earth, the last boy on earth. Time runs backwards, then forwards. Red and black. Superman screams, winks and sings.

I give you FINAL CRISIS by Grant Morrison, J.G. Jones and Doug Mahnke. And after spending the entire night up reading, enjoying every single minute with laughter and plenty of jaw-dropping moments alternating between shock and awe, I still have no idea what the hell just happened.

Many people have raised the same point about this work - and a true point: this comic is terribly complex and confusing. The story begins as a murder mystery dressed with Greek myth at the curtains, but from there it explodes into wild chases and space odysseys that, by there very dream logic nature, belong in a comic book. Gritty realism and nihilistic philosophizing switches places with completely over-the-top action and complete baloney physics. Earth-shattering truths are delivered in between outlandish dialogue lines you sometimes want to read twice to believe. Deus ex machina abounds frequently. The comic remains completely po-faced about it all from start to finish.

And that is exactly why FINAL CRISIS is so brilliant. It manages to be, simultaneously, what comics *were* and what comics currently *are* - what they have become. For Morrison, superheroes have begun to be little more than moralizing or philosophizing social commentaries with only enough life to sustain a narrative structures that can support "realistic" plots. Stories that give you factual reality to believe in, rather than any merit of the story itself. It's all very formulaic. And it's all so very...boring. The very image of Superman holding Batman's burned and battered body expresses this: the imagery is bewildering and chilling at once, and makes us ask ourselves what comics once stood for, and the grim redundancy they've become. Have we kept the magic alive or did we kill it?

I've been reading DC comics for less than a year. So I had to do my fair share of homework on characters and events. I knew Barry Allen gave his life to save the world in the first Crisis but I've had very little exposure to Darkseid. I was plenty familiar with the Guardians of the Universe but not the Monitors. I know who the Tattooed Man is but had no idea about Black Lightening. Did the story ever contradict itself, or even the artwork? At least a couple of times, yes. Did the story every become so muddled that I couldn't understand what was going on? Definitely.


But again: that's EXACTLY why this works. Because you have to just believe in the story itself. Morrison has said in interviews that while background will enrich the story, EVERYTHING you need to read and enjoy FINAL CRISIS is right there in its own pages. The will to believe - the faith in the magic of stories (not storytelling, but stories themselves).

"I've Waited Here For You, Everlong."

The first thoughts I begin to believe in after Kristian leaves is that I will never hear from him again. But the first thoughts I have are unrelated to whether I will hear from him again or not; instead, I'm more concerned about why I can't find the shirt - the shirt I let him use after the dust settled and the heat had reached its limits in my small room. Is it this shirt? Is it this shirt? Is it...this one...is it...And before long, my mind is beginning to wonder if he was ever here at all.

Of course he was here. I smell my forearms, then I put the the bottom of my shirt in my face, and I slowly drag my tongue over the dimpled skin between my lips and my nose. Of course he was here; he was here because I can still smell him and taste him.

And I can feel him, too...if the only thing I'm feeling by him is the emptiness and slightly unsettling ordinary-ness of my room. The floor is still a bookshelf for all the books - mostly poetry; all the Ginsberg, Whitman, Goethe, Eliot, Dante, Plath, Homer, everything that constantly reminds me that I have so much reading to do, but these Greeks and Beatniks also share the chaos of my floor with my Silver Age comics. The Flash and the Green Lantern shine their perfectly masculine smiles and costumed muscles up at me, along with a new Captain Marvel issue to my right and the nebulous heap of undershirts, underwear and other clothes scattered in a frenzy across the area to my left.

They are all still, the books and the comics and the clothes, but the fan is spinning widly. Everything is so quietly the same. I can feel my stomach churning. It's something not digesting properly, maybe the Frosty from three hours ago, but more than that, it's all trying to wrap itself around a familiar fuzzy emptiness. I usually feel that indefinite vagueness in my stomach when I pass a couple kissing or think of Erik. It's the damn romantic in me that always hurts when he doesn't get what he wants most. I only feel it now because instead of enjoying this - enjoying even the aftermath of it - I am trying to make it something serious.

"I gotta be cool / Relax / Get hip, get off my tracks...Gotta be cool / Relax..." I have been trying to make this serious from the beginning. I have to remember that the only thing I have to light knowledge on this thing is Erik. But things were particularly clear with Erik simply because we both made it clear from the beginning what we wanted most is what we needed from each other. That's why the relationship clicked together quickly only to burn slowly out on itself. But Kristian and I are moving at lightspeed, and that's precisely because we don't need each other. And the problem is that it's not "just a hook up" because at the same time we care about one another just enough to make it matter. This thing with Kristian is moving so fast that the only thing I can do to slow it down is maybe knock it over the head.

As I brush my teeth in the mirror, I try to remind myself that I have no reason to make things so serious with Kristian, just as I have no reason to expect anything from him. He knows this because I've told him. We've both admitted that neither of us want a relationship right now, and I know more and more everyday that a relationship with Kristian might not last long at all. We work well as friends but we could destroy each other in anything more. Even though we both refuse to "see" anyone else, I don't think he's as stuck on me as I wish he was. I know I'm just trying to save myself the pain again. I can't go through what happened with Erik. I knew from the moment we got together that Erik and I would never last the summer. But that was different. Because I do care about Kristian. But I fell in love with Erik.

It's not serious, Matthew. And, for right now, it doesn't need to be. This is what I've told myself every time I see him. That's why, instead of making the same mistake I made with Erik and always worry about when the spell will be broken, I will savor every day I spend with Kristian and always assume that it could be the last. It's not a fatalistic mentality, and neither is it merely realistic. It's just how I remember not to put my fingers around the neck of this thing and choke it into being serious. So that it will live.

My favorite thing will continue to be how his smell stays all over my hands and my shirt for minutes, occasionally even hours, after he leaves. I will continue to keep my hands off the steering wheel and let this thing drive as fast as it will. And I'll continue to believe. Not that I will never hear from Kristian again. But rather, believe that this - this, this moment...really is worth my while.

There's something slowly creeping down my forehead; I am still sweating.