The Balloon Flailer

I'm a wuss. It was confirmed long ago. There is no need for me to flex in front of the mirror each night before bedtime. Nobody has to worry about me asking them to feel my muscle. If a confrontation ensues, don't look to me for help. I'll be hiding behind a girl scout.

I'm lucky. Most guys probably go through life with an inflated impression of their machismo. I don't need to perpetuate that facade. I had a revelation. I have experienced a terror that represents a defining moment in my life. A moment of truth. The truth hurts, sometimes.

One night a while back I was re-reading The Fellowship of the Ring, which is the first book in The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien. The news, at the time, of the filming of its motion picture had sparked my need to delve back into Middle Earth. Right before going to bed, I reached a particularly ghostly passage where a Barrow-wight (a ghost) captured Frodo, our hero, and his traveling mates. I won't describe the whole story, but trust me - it's a scary part. Maybe not as scary as The Exorcist or Nancy Pelosi, but scary enough.

It was late and I was tired, so I decided to wait until the next day to see if Frodo and his gang survived (as this was my fourth reading of the book, I was pretty sure they were going to make it, but you never can be too sure with all those book-changing pranksters out there with their white-out and all). Feeling a little spooked, on my way too bed, as I walked through my dimly moonlit living room, I saw a faint image of something I believed to be a human form. Immediately, I reacted by covering behind my flailing arms and falling into the wall. It's quite an effective defense as it strikes fear into the hearts of perpetrators of all kinds.

Now, I'm not proud of how I responded to the apparent trespasser in my home, but at least I wasn't killed. The shame gets worse. The elapsed time between when I detected the "intruder" and reacted to it was probably less than a second. Within that instant I was able to determine that the suspected human form before me was that of an old woman carrying a bag of groceries and smoking a large pipe made of the bone of a wildebeest and covered in a sheath of octopus leather (I may be exaggerating about the details of the pipe or in the fact that there was a pipe at all, but it definitely looked like a hunched, old woman). My mind, hopped up on adrenaline, was able to perceive that the form before me was a harmless old woman, yet I reacted by cowering, like a..a...a..well, like a harmless old woman.

Obviously, the woman must have lost her way home from the grocery store where she picked up a few essentials and beer munchies, and she needed my assistance to find her way. A brave man, or even just a generally polite man, would have helped her home and took out her garbage. And, what did I do? I flailed and fell. I flailed at an old lady. Do you know what that makes me? That's right, it makes me a mountain nymph. Or do you say oread? No, it makes me a coward. A sniveling, spineless, yellow-bellied, cheek-chewin' chicken. I have always thought the yellow on my belly was from all of the butter. At least I now know who I am and can live the rest of my days with peace of mind (while hiding underneath my bed).

It turned out that my enemy was a gaggle of helium filled balloons my wife at the time had brought home from a baby shower the day before. They were tied to one of my kids' play chairs. I don't know what's worse, cowering to a hunched old woman or to a bunch of baby balloons. Had I known they were balloons, I could have easily popped them with my arm hair that happened to be standing on end at the time of the attack. I'm not sure if you can pop an old woman, and I'm not looking to find out.

The Lord of The Flung Dung

I admit it. I am a Lord of the Rings nerd. Dork. Dweeb. Whatever you want to call me. I’ve read the books multiple times, I attended the opening midnight showings of each of the three movies released earlier this millennium, and I refer to my penis as Treebeard. As much of a LOTR squid that makes me, I don’t consider myself one of those insane Tolkien gargantuageeks. I mean, it’s not like I garbed up Gandalf-like when I saw the movies or immortalized my devotion with a “Frodo Lives” tattoo on the small of my back (not a permanent one, anyway) or shun the movies because they betrayed the integrity of the books. I understand why Peter Jackson chose not to include Tom Bombadil or why he enhanced Arwen’s role in the story or why he ignored the scouring of the Shire. Screenwriters must make some concessions when adapting books to film. What works in the mind does not always behoove the visual experience. The modifications made for the movies were understandable.

WOULD IT HAVE KILLED HIM TO INCLUDE MORE OF THE DISCUSSIONS BETWEEN FRODO AND FARAMIR IN ITHILIEN!?!?!?! I mean, Jeez! OK, OK, I don’t mean to complain. I understand Faramir and Frodo’s verbal chess match does not necessarily translate very well to the big screen, even though it did illustrate Frodo’s emerging maturity and Faramir’s wisdom and ability to be much more of a hero and a leader than Boromir could ever be, no matter what that loony Denethor thought of him. Denethor. What a jerk that guy was. And there is no way he could have run, on fire, from the Minas Tirith tombs all the way through the Citadel and over the outer edge of the giant spur of rock. Sure, it was dramatic and served as a nice transition back to the battle in the movie, but the tombs were about a mile back toward the mountain. Who does he think he is, Joan of Arc? You can’t trick me.

But I did like some of the additions they incorporated, like Sam’s monologue of hope at the end of the The Two Towers. Oh, and near the end of the Return of the King, when all the people of Minas Tirith were gathered on the giant spur of rock for the coronation of Aragorn, and then Aragorn and his party approached the four hobbits and the four hobbits began to bow, but Aragorn stopped them and said, “My friends, you bow to no one” (for all their heroics in the battle against evil), and then everybody bowed to them instead. Every time I see that I feel like I’m swallowing a hockey puck, and, I’m not afraid to say it, tears of joy tumble down my cheeks.

Maybe I am one of those gargantuageeks, afterall (a closet one, anyway). But there was one thing they omitted from the movies that needed to be included. I don’t blame Jackson for it, since Tolkien, himself, chose not to include it in the story. I refer to, of course, the scenes featuring the Mumakil of Harad, aka the big, giant elephants. It’s been my experience, mostly in zoos and circuses (and sometimes at the grocery store) that whenever there are elephants, there is elephant shit, and usually a couple of guys with big shovels. Where was this significant aspect of elephant culture in the story of the one ring to rule them all? It seems too critical a dynamic to ignore.

Through some research I learned that Tolkien had initially used the presence of the Mumakil (Oliphaunt) dung as a crafty tool of warfare in the battle of the Pelennor Fields. In this version, Sauron had instructed cave trolls with big shovels to follow the Oliphaunts, scoop their droppings and deliver them to the catapults, where they would be launched over the stone walls of Minas Tirith. Some dung bombs would even be set afire. There is nothing more discouraging to an enemy than being hit by giant chunks of flaming shit. It’s the first thing they teach you at West Point. This element worked fabulously in the battle scene and added a fresh dimension of strategy to the struggle between evil and good. But, during a bender at one of the local pubs, Tolkien’s pious zealot of a friend, CS Lewis, talked him out of it, convincing him that if god wanted them to write about feces, he would have placed our anuses underneath our chins. Tolkien was so drunk at the time, he believed Lewis and deleted the crap the next day (after the prostitutes left).

Imagine how more riveting The Return of The King movie would have been had this element not been flushed away. The action in the events in the battle scenes would have been enhanced beyond comprehension. When Merry and Eowyn were riding the horse amongst the tree-trunk-like legs of the Oliphaunts, not only would they have had to dodge the Oliphaunt legs, and the trunks and the tusks and the arrows and the orcs, they would have had the added peril of being squashed by a suffocating load of steaming pachyderm pie. If that doesn’t get your palms sweating, I don’t know what would. Consider the tide turning scene where the big chief Nazgul had Gandalf cornered on an upper tier of Minas Tirith. The Nazgul had already destroyed Gandalf’s staff and was about to end Gandalf, too. But the Nazgul was called away by the tumult caused by the arrival of the Riders of Rohan and their crazy attack horn (like the Nazgul couldn’t take an extra couple of seconds to pound the cowering Gandalf before he flew off to tame the equestrians, with their goofy felt covered caps and shiny boots and intimidating dressage whips). Wouldn’t it have been more interesting if, at that pivotal moment, the Nazgul was hit accidentally by a friendly fired mound of flung poop? I think so. Not to mention the ominous foreshadowing it would have made regarding momentum of the battle. Later when Merry would stab that same Nazgul as he was about to sack Eowyn, a little comic relief could have been added if, instead, Merry pelted him with Oliphaunt dung balls. Right when the annoyed Nazgul would implore, “Would everybody stop heaving shit at me, PLEASE!”, Eowyn could have taken that opportunity to stab his face. The result would have been the same, but we all could have had a chuckle as we wept for the dying Theoden king. As is the case with incorporating bathroom humor into any epic, the possibilities for entertainment are endless. Tolkien should have stuck with his first instinct.