Harry Potter Sucks

I am speechless at the mania that surrounds a middling prose piece. I should be happy that a work of fiction - in print – attracts such an audience; but I’m stunned by a kind of double standard.  I am practically disturbed about an apparent dichotomy: Some of my accquaintances display untrammeled Potter love - to the point of dressing up in garb to wait in line for the premiere of a film that will very very soon be EVERYWHERE (I don’t use “all caps” lightly), and yet profess undying disdain for rabid sports fans. Of a sudden, it was all made clear to me by some snippet I heard on some NPR show or other as I was correcting the oversight of others, cleaning decades of god-knows-what from the drip-thingy of that evaporative-A/C unit thingy in my new condo unit-thingy. Apparently we (by we I mean, trammeling my brief NYC-PHL past, us U-Mans) have some kind of mimicry-nerouny-thingy. Meaning: we (Umans) are apparently hard-wired to fit in. It’s our camouflage; Dr. So-and-so says we even adapt our toe-tapping rhythm to those immediately around us. Whew! I thought it was just my weakend self-control!

In the interest of full disclosure, I took insane irrational pleasure in “my” Indianapolis Colts winning the Super Bowl in February, and of course those White Sox breaking a “curse” (fucking idiot sports fans, superstitious bastards) and winning the World Series in 2005. I’ve never, and “god” willing, will never, paint my face in any team colors. Perhaps this comes from my frustrated prep school past, in which I was a member of a football team that finally won A (1) game, then progressing to an urban university whose real estate restrictions left them with somthing of a basketball tradition, and little else – fraternities on “campus” had little doll houses in the cafeteria. I begged off. At parties as an undregrad, we drank horrid red wine from a disreputible shop near Lincoln/Fullerton that seems to have been reincarnated as a yuppie boutique of some sort. Such is life, and the passage of time, and gentrification.

No. I’m not merely snide. I’m nostalgic, and pensive. There is a prose strain brewing within me which will attempt to deal with the eerie similarities between H. Potter and S. Holmes.

For fuck’s sake, at least I didn’t give away the ending.

Ok. Everyone dies. How else to really end it? What else is Rowling going to do, enjoy her billions? Fat chance…

And if there are any misspellings or grammatical errors, blame it on my lack of self-control – I mean will power. Everyone I know was drinking while I wrote this.