Fear and Loathing in Overland Park pt 60

It all feels like a bit of déjà vu, doesn’t it? Like the mind is playing tricks on us to make us believe we’ve seen all this before? Like everything that is happening in our lives and in the world has happened once before and we just get to replay it like so many annoying video games with terribly hard levels that piss us off and have no save screen.

This is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time.

By the way, this blog is brought to you by Fear and Loathing in Overland Park pt 29. You’ll see why later on. I promise.

“It’s déjà vu all over again.”

-Yogi Berra

You see, this morning while having a discussion with a gonzo regarding this weekend, my brain flared. I was forced to remember something I’d seen in a dream. Something I’d imagined while sleeping away the day and forgetting all the shit holding me down.

I was forced to remember a plan I had set into motion for changing my life and updating my plans for world domination in my own small steps.

You see, when I dream, I dream of the future. I get little flashes of what is to come. I remember them for a brief period of time, but if I don’t write them down immediately, they are lost to me until they reoccur and come true.

It happens to a lot of people. I’m not special in this regard. It’s just weird how often it happens.

And I mean it happens often. Like almost every day. I see things that could be months, even years in the future, and I either write them down in a small black journal that I keep (used to be called my Indiana Jones journal until the newest movie came out and sucked so much ass, now I just call it my thoughts) or I forget, doomed to repeat the mistakes and the errors I made in the dream.

It’s astounding.

And it’s a phenomena depending on who you talk to.

“Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time.”

-Stephen Wright

I’m not really a forgetful person. I remember a lot of things that I probably shouldn’t. I have memories in my head from when I was 3 and 4 years old and onward and upward throughout my life. Doctors say that drugs and alcohol corrupt the brain and torture you with their ongoing destruction, but I don’t believe it. Unless I took some mind-blowing drug that increases brain capacity and the ability to remember something, then my years of abuses didn’t affect me at all.

And I’m not complaining. I’m not whining. That’s not what I do.

Yes, before you say that most déjà vu just comes from your brain recognizing something from your past, either an event, something that occurred to you or around you, and then something similar happens and you just believe it to be something you’ve seen before, I’ve thought of that. I’ve thought of all of it.

The morning commute to work is déjà vu every single day with the same cars, the same light delays, the same fog or cloud cover, the same everything. I don’t consider that true déjà vu as it’s just a mundane part of the day and unfortunately we’re forced to relive these things almost on a daily basis.

I’ve mentioned before that sometimes life at the Company feels like Groundhog Day. This is that, all over again.

This is me writing a blog that even features déjà vu to those old blogs.

“Do you ever get the strange feeling of vuja de? Not déjà vu, vuja de. It’s the distinct sense that somehow, something that just happened has never happened before. Nothing seems familiar. And then suddenly the feeling is gone. Vuja de.”

-George Carlin

Vuja de. Depending on if you’ve read any of my previous blogs or not, this blog could in fact be vuja de for you. This whole damn day could be. Maybe you just woke up from a coma and found yourself in a world you can’t recognize and never knew existed.

Just like the Matrix.

There are a lot of ways that déjà vu can affect your everyday life. It can affect you in the mundane tasks you perform. It can seem like repetition of tasks, repetition of the things you say, it can be making conversation with the same people. And it can be boiled down to parapsychology as well.

Just like Peter Venkman. He had a PhD, don’t you know that? Parapsychology. Apparently it is real and it deals with déjà vu. Just like they told us in Ghostbusters.

It seems this blog is coming back to Bill Murray movies quite frequently, doesn’t it? Almost coincidentally, even.

Hmm.

Strange really.

“Déjà vu, also called paramnesia, is the experience of feeling sure that one has witnessed or experienced a new situation previously (an individual feels as though an event has already happened or has happened in the near past). The term was coined by a French psychic researcher, Emile Boirac (1851-1917) in his book L’Avenir des Sciences Psychiques (The Future of Psychic Sciences), which expanded upon an essay he wrote while an undergraduate. The experience of déjà vu is usually accompanied by a compelling sense of familiarity, and also a sense of ‘eeriness,’ ‘strangeness,’ or ‘weirdness.’ The ‘previous’ experience is most frequently attributed to a dream, although in some cases there is a firm sense that the experience ‘genuinely happened’ in the past.”

-from Wikipedia

You see, déjà vu is so ingrained into the public consciousness that stupid movies called Déjà Vu come out with Val Kilmer in supporting roles behind Denzel Washington and try to deal with time travel and try to make it seem logically plausible.

Even though it’s all but impossible to explain time travel without then creating an infinite number of parallel realities all hinging on the briefest spark, the briefest change that could eternally affect each and every single thing that happens in that reality.

Like right this second, if you believe that time travel is possible and there are an infinite number of realities, then right now I am sitting and reading a blog written by someone else who is writing about déjà vu and parallel realities and right now in another reality Gooch is the narrator and I’m Tyler or vice versa.

It all hinges on the smallest of details.

And when I saw this tidbit of news, I felt like I stepped smack into déjà vu.

Article regarding the twists and turns of the Ghostbusters sequel

You see, there has been word of a Ghostbusters Sequel in the works since the second one came out. Mostly it would deal with Hell, a lot of them called for the entire cast to come back and fight against an invasion of demons or some shit.

Yeah, does that sound like Constantine to anyone else (a movie that COMPLETELY sucked).

So that was nixed for being too expensive. Then there was an idea to do a CGI-movie ala the most recent Ninja Turtles movie, which then came into being as a video game with almost the entire original cast back. That’s the reality of what’s going on right now.

Back a few years, the idea was to staff Ghostbusters with all new people, like Chris Farley and Ben Stiller, but Chris Farley went and overdosed and that nixed those plans.

Forcing the issue even further, Bill Murray wasn’t set on coming back for the entire movie. He thought the idea was kind of ridiculous and that they were all a little too old and didn’t want to retread on previous material.

He softened his stance over the years it seems, but prior to the video game involving all of the original cast members (besides Rick Moranis), he wanted to come back, only to die and come back as a ghost. Stupid idea.

Then of course there was the obligatory rumor circulating that the Apatow crew was circling this and willing to take it a new direction with a lot of the old cast still involved but a new crew as well.

Déjà vu.

Let me point you to this article I wrote, having no knowledge previously that this existed or was even mentioned.

“Remake idea number 666 (that's right, the sign of the devil returns): Ghostbusters. Starring Dane Cook (urgh), Martin Lawrence (urgh), Ben Stiller (urgh) and Jack Black. Directed by whoever directed any piece of crap that Ben Stiller has been in or Michael Bay. I'm surprised this hasn't been remade yet with this cast or the Apatow crowd (Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Jason Segel, and Paul Rudd as directed by Judd himself). But with my cast in place, you're sure to strike it rich at the box office. No heart. Pure explosions. Ghosts as played by people from SNL or MadTV or Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly and Seann William Scott could show up in small roles. And just take a massive crappening all over our childhoods right then and there like Hollyweird is doing with GI Joe and Transformers and Robocop and Red Dawn and all the rest.”

-Momar Van Der Camp

That comes directly from Fear and Loathing in Overland Park pt 29. June 11, 2008. As I mentioned, I had no forward knowledge that the Apatow crowd was involved in any capacity at all, whatsoever.

So we’re treading water here. News comes out now that they are writing a script for Ghostbusters 3 and Harold Ramis is possibly writing it with some of the writers of the Office that he was worked with on a few occasions on that wonderful TV show.

It seems that Hollyweird is going to force the issue on this.

We’re going to get a new Ghostbusters video game at some point in the new future that acts like it’s the spiritual equivalent of a third Ghostbusters movie, and we’re going to get a sequel or a prequel to Ghostbusters, or just an out and out remake.

I’m scared of this potential, but I saw it coming the whole time.

Déjà vu.

Ghostbusters is one of those movies that I constantly quote, that I constantly hold true as one of the movies that cannot be remade, cannot be touched, does not need to be improved upon.

But since Hollyweird cannot look forward and has to look back to the past and what worked before, we will get a remake or a sequel to this fine movie. And here’s another idea of how it will go:

Venkman’s pseudo son Oscar will be a new Ghostbuster. It will involve passing the torch from father to son. That way, they can get Bill Murray involved as the lost father who is reconnected with his “son” just like he was in most of his more recent movies.

It would work.

I would see it.

But I’ll still be furious.

I hate the idea of remaking this or making a sequel to this. Next we’ll get a remake of Superman again (oh wait, they’re doing that already). Okay, or another Wayne’s World. Or another Terminator.

We’re going to get franchise relaunches for everything. We’ll get a new Howard the Duck, a new Daredevil, a sequel to Ghost Rider, a sequel to movies that make zero dollars in the general box office (films like No Country for Old Men will get prequels called A Country for Young Men and involve Anton Chigurh growing up as a bastard).

We’ll get sequels to Citizen Kane and remakes of the Wizard of Oz. We’ll get reimaginings of The Wizard and big screen adaptations of Boy Meets World and Dinosaurs and we’ll get movie versions of the stories of people you didn’t even care existed (like the biopic of the story of Carrot Top or hell, a biopic about my life and times).

It’s all relative.

It’s all happened before and it’s all going to happen again.

We’ll never escape déjà vu so long as we look to the past for everything. Once we attempt to look forward and move ahead with things, we may just be able to change what we already know. Change the world.

We’re looking for change in the presidential election, only I’m still getting déjà vu when all the politicians are saying the same things and all the same speeches are being repeated and repeated and repeated and all the same buzz words are being spoken.

I just hope I’m not being sexist or a bigot here when I say change is good and doesn’t need to involve a pro-life, gun-toting Jesus freak who wields her power over the PTA and likes to kill other Hockey Moms. Does that make me a bad person? Does saying that I won’t go see the movie about her life once they make it, regardless of who they put in it?

I don’t care. I’m still feeling this as déjà vu. I still feel like I’ve said this all before.

So the choice is yours. Choose the or and avoid the same pratfalls that are causing the downfall of Hollyweird.

And they wonder why ticket sales are down and people aren’t going to see the movies. It’s because of déjà vu. We’ve already seen everything they can show us. We’ve already played the video game or read the book or the comics. We don’t want to see some big budget exploration of our childhood. Or re-exploration.

We just want to see something new and exciting. We want vuja de.