Culture | KTP | Page 5

Heartbreak and “Big” (1988)

Posted on September 4, 2016 by "Bad" Billy Pratt

“Who wants honey? As long as there’s some money. Who wants that honey?”

In a flash Amy was able to transform our hetero-normative experience back into something she was more comfortable with, her own safe space of gender neutrality, with the magic words: “get this shit off me.” Tossing her the tissue box, I chastised her for breaking the narrative, something usually reserved for slightly longer than fifteen seconds after sex. Amy may have rolled her eyes, but the fact of the matter remains: sex is the narrative of attraction.

Authenticity and “The Cable Guy” (1996)

Posted on June 9, 2016 by "Bad" Billy Pratt

“I’d rather be anywhere, doing anything…”

There was a gleam in her eye when Ghostbusters (2016) came up in the group’s discussion. She corrected the speaker, a male, who didn’t make an elaborate point to reference the movie’s notorious gender component- “the new Ghostbusters” he offhandedly called it, but this was “girl Ghostbusters,” she said with pride. After all, she was a high school Science teacher and this was a victory with which she could attach herself.

This attachment was the point, existing independently of the movie. She may not see it, nor should she have to- her attachment to “girl Ghostbusters” had served to bolster her identity. The actual film is an afterthought- a big budget talking point. Beyond all the fuss, Ghostbusters is a pile of crap with regurgitated jokes, so who really cares?

Bamboozled

Posted on January 9, 2016 by "Bad" Billy Pratt

Even if the dire unavailability of parking in Jeanette’s neighborhood had made the task of meeting her at her apartment for sex seem daunting, only minimally rewarding, I always had a thing for girls who looked like the nerdy Chipette and this fact added a feeling of urgency to a situation marred with inevitable difficulty. Parking matters; inadequate parking is as off-putting as a bridge or toll, and I distinctly remember cursing the wind on an early August morning in 2006, drunk out of my skull, taking the parkway home because I was forced by law to relinquish my hard-fought spot, as per alternate side rules, and couldn’t find a new one anywhere.

How would I have explained this to a dutiful officer of the law? Would he have been so kind as to understand the inadequacies of parking in that god forsaken, asshole neighborhood?

Problem Glasses

Posted on September 12, 2015 by "Bad" Billy Pratt

We were somewhere around our second bottle of wine when I made the startling realization that Amy’s unexpected British accent had faded into something more typical and American. Picking her up that night for drinks at The Reptile Zoo, I told her I wasn’t expecting a British accent. She asked what I was expecting, and I didn’t have a good answer. You exchange a few messages with a girl on OKCupid and agree to meet for drinks- what is there to expect?

You’re there because your perceived value matched her barest threshold- stripped to its core through years of careful revision; weathering her expectations down to the essentials that she would have scoffed at as a younger woman- grade-D, but edible, meat- but edible, the part you’d like to emphasize.

She’s there because she wrote back.

Casey Anthony and Captain Crunch

Posted on August 10, 2015 by "Bad" Billy Pratt

Casey Anthony epitomized something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on as I sat on my couch, eating Captain Crunch and smoking weed, watching the coverage of her trial during a tranquil evening in the Summer of 2011.

There was something missing from my life at the time… I wasn’t conscious of it but felt its weight all the same. It wasn’t that I was unhappy- I was definitely comfortable; I had a career made possible through the the empty achievement of multiple college degrees, I had a fat girlfriend who was a crazy bitch but I loved her anyway, and I spent my free time feeling good… after all, life was about maximizing consumption while sleep-walking through minimal responsibility. The idea of ambition beyond this baseline was something foreign and laughable. Isn’t that the American dream?

Yet still… alternating between video games, television, pornography, processed food, oxytocin and marijuana left a fuzzy feeling on my brain that something wasn’t quite right, but I wasn’t quite ready to see it just yet…