please don’t expect me to deal with anything of any depth today. last night was the lost finale and my head is still spinning from all the confusion… i won’t go into detail out of respect for those with the still-unplayed 2.5 dvr hours but i am still wrestling with the capping of a 6-year investment. i was really quite happy with the first 2 hours and 20 minutes, minus the incredible frequency of commercial time but then, out of nowhere, nothing. nothing, no explanation but a pseudo-religious version of surprise, it was all a dream! i think the problem, as usual, was not what did transpire, or didn’t, on the island and the real world but probably with our expectation of a grand metaphysical explanation of life itself. from the characters’ names to scribbled mythology peppered throughout the show and what seemed like a clear understanding of the many fickle theories of the universe, we thinkers all believed there to be an opportunity for the finale to have been a roadmap to assembling all these philosophical nuggets into a dramatized brief history of time. we, i, wanted it this way. this was to be the show for us smart people who would sigh impatiently at “the others” who couldn’t understand the socratic and egyptian references because they didn’t care to augment their education with some library time in favor of passing out drunk on golf courses. this was to be a clever-yet-populous payoff to the various hints dropped 6-seasons long about the manners with which we humans so poorly deal with the ideal of redemption, a weakness more than made up for by every movie and television show which simply ask us to believe in order to attain it. this should not have been the solution here, and it seems to have been. and we are let down. beautiful? yes. emotional? absolutely. meaningful? meh.

still, this show provided my friends and i with the best excuse to get together and cook dinner every wednesday night for the past 6 years, give or take; a gift i cannot feel underwhelmed by or unthankful for. sure, call it whatever you like to take advantage of what ended up feeling like teen adventure stories to intensify friendship but it worked like a drink from stream. whereas it may have taken iCaling, phonecalls, babysitters and no-shows, a weekly date during which we often forgot to turn on the tv, was exactly the right prescription for those who, like us, turn to the family we choose, unlike that which was assigned to us, for comfort and love. perhaps the function of any tribal ritual, be it the beheading of chickens or charlie sheen comedies, is simply to assemble and not necessarily critique. simply, we provide our own opportunities not to feel alone and make up worlds in order to survive the apparent pointlessness. we create the stories of us that make the most sense based on our context, education, experience and enthusiasm. we fill the hours, years, decades with systems of our making which matter little in the end. we spend a lot of time wondering why when we should be asking who. our weekly diners were all who, no why.

come to think of it, maybe this is what last night’s episode was about… maybe. on that note, let me wish you and yours a perfectly stable week!