The season finale ends on a cliffhanger, but the Others are soon given more airtime in the middle of the second season, where they are shown as a raggedy band of barefooted kidnapping rogues with unkempt body hair and primitive fighting gear. They eat dried fish and live in teepees by the northern coast. They walk around the Island with knowing gaits, and generally terrorize people with their reverberating whispers and baby snatching and bone breaking ways, while the Castaways either traipse around the Island looking like you owe them a great deal of money, or stumble in the woods and cry about how their fathers let them down (prime example being Terry O’Quinn’s character “Locke”, whose kidney was stolen by his father whom he had met just a few months before the aforementioned kidney-stealing happened).
As the second season trails on, I try to imagine how living in a deserted Pacific island might be like, to actually grow up and live in one, completely detached from the rest of the world, much like how the Others are in Lost. I try to imagine what would actually be “the cool thing” in such an existence, what would “suck”, what their popular culture might be like: are pineapples “on the out” because coconuts are “the in thing” this year and I wonder if mangoes would be next year’s?
But then as Lost’s season two ends and season three begins the Others are revealed to be relatively normal people who actually live an almost suburban Americana existence, albeit transported to a scifi island in the Pacific full of mystery and intrigue and monsters and danger and sexy blonde lady gynaecologists who like reading Stephen King, and their whole Lord Of The Flies look was just that, a look.
~
I prepare three books for future publication, collectively called Bedlam Bebop Trilogy, my own bid to that contemporary cataloguing of the “modern mental malaise” of the females of my generation, dubbed “Chicklit”, but filtered through the male macho tomcatting beer-guzzling perspective of things, “written for men”, so labelled “Bayawlit”.
Bedlam Bebop is about three friends in their mid twenties trying to find meaning and purpose for their future selves while trying to make sense of their lives in the “big long now”. Each book revolves on one particular narrator’s dilemma, relevant and “of our times” although not very moralistic, written in contemporary tones but still remaining unanchored to any particular era, hopefully achieving a sort of “modern day timelessness”. All three books share an overarching theme of Growth, mostly in the emotional and spiritual sense than the physical, but it has that, too.
Some of the things that happen in Bedlam Bebop: illicit sex, vanilla sex, solicited sex, unsolicited sex, premarital sex, marital sex, extramarital sex, solo sex, participatory sex, sex in trains, confused sex, lucid sex, sex in motels, sex in parties, sex in cars, sex by proxy, sex in the morning, sex in the afternoon, sex at night, sex at midnight, sex at dawn, sleepy sex, sloppy sex, dry sex, degenerate sex, secret sex, famous sex, internet sex, sex with dead people, sex with young people, sex with old people, sex with the girl next door, sex with the girl next door’s sister, sex with famous people (not to be confused with “famous sex”), sex with members of the proletariat, sex with members of the bourgeoisie, sex by the fire, sex by the fridge, sex by the sea, sex by the TV, sex by the river, sex under the moon, sex under the sun, and, of course, as always, sex between people with daddy issues.
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I construct these books to be written and read short and fast (the ultimate macho nightmare!) but to remain in the brain far longer than that, like boxes of fast food french fries eaten in rapid succession only to be digested for three long weeks. But this comparison of Bedlam Bebop to McDonald’s menu implies that the books will be bad for you if consumed in large doses over a certain period of time, but that’s pretty much the truth about everything, from bagoong to beans, laundry to linoleum, sleep to sex, isn’t it? The key is, of course, as always - and any regular masturbator can confirm this - “moderation”.
