"Daddy wants to fuck," by The Uncredible Duke

Ed.--Good to see you back, Duke! Ladies, you can never be "one of the guys." We know it hurts, so just get over it, will ya? That's the point. Jesus. ;0)

Okay, so I promised to tell you this story. I hope it isn't too boring. This goes back to my days at Ball State University. I was always too smart for my own good, and not half as smart as I thought I was. I still am sometimes, but I'm trying a little harder to keep it in-check. I lived in an apartment with three other guys, and we were all very bohemian.

We wore black leather motorcycle jackets, even though none of us drove motorcycles. We were all intellectuals. But we were all sort of "bullyish" too. We didn't go around threatening people, but people THOUGHT we did. And we didn't really terrorize too many people, it was all just a pose, really. We were bullies in one respect: we were intellectual bullies. We were conversational bullies, if that makes any sense, and we loved to be shocking. We'd do things that would get reactions out of people.

So that's the first part of the story.

The next part is... I stopped buying text books about my third year of college. I was hitting the old man up of cash for text books one day, and he said, "I never had any of the books when I was in college. I just paid attention." And then I thought about it. The truth was, in my first two years of university, I had always BOUGHT the books. But, like Dad, I paid attention in class, and I never really used the books. (Note, I was a communications major, and liberal arts aren't all "facty" like science and medical fields), I had discovered that the Ball State Library had most of our textbooks in regular rotation, AND if you got there early enough you could just check the dang thing out for the semester. So I did this in classes which I absolutely needed the book. This leads us to...

Film Genres 301 (or some such) taught by Wes Goering. Goering was very odd. [Ed.--And he had an unfortunate last-name. Why do I think he was ugly as well?] In his late forties or early- fifties at the time. He had written a couple of books about the Marx Brothers, and he sort of resembled Groucho, but in a more Germanic sort of way. You would think he would be really wacky, but he was very very square. Or at least so eccentric as to come-off as being very square. A very "just the facts, ma'am." sort of professor, although he would utter a profanity from time to time. [Ed.--You gotta give him credit for this.]

Well, old Wes had produced and edited the textbook for Film Genres. He wrote the chapter on screwball comedies, and he had other people write the other chapters, but he was getting most of the cash. The college book stores sell used text-books, but only if they get permission from the author or a publisher. Guess who wouldn't give them permission? WES! AND it was the most expensive book I ever had for any of my classes. AND he made sure that the library's copy was reference-only and could not be checked out. [Ed.--I would have made 1,000-copies and distributed them to everyone with a pulse. Thank God for the internet--all I'm sayin.'] Whenever we would have a writing assignment, his only criticism of my work was always, "I would have liked to see more reference to the text." [Ed.--Right, HIS dumbass book. Why didn't this asshole marry himself?!] YEAH! Because I don't HAVE the text.

So we have to choose a film, and write a paper describing it the terms of a film genre. It didn't have to be something that was strictly, say, a western, or a horror. It just had to cross over into that genre enough for your analysis.

I chose to write about Blue Velvet, as a dark comedy. My paper was entitled "Daddy Wants to Fuck!" I got a C+, and got comments like "would've liked to see more from the text" and "I'm not really sure this fits."

I don't know if you've seen Blue Velvet. But it is somewhat disturbing. In fact, some find it very disturbing. It's...I guess you'd call it a psychological thriller. But here I was writing about how funny it is, throwing the f-word around fairly freely. I'm pretty certain Wes looked at me a little differently from then on. But I still think it's funny, especially the looks on the faces of my classmates when they saw the title of the paper I was turning in--AND the looks on their faces when they saw the graded paper returned. LOL