{"id":43050,"date":"2024-03-06T20:19:57","date_gmt":"2024-03-07T01:19:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=43050"},"modified":"2024-03-06T21:26:29","modified_gmt":"2024-03-07T02:26:29","slug":"on-depressions-and-westerns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2024\/03\/06\/on-depressions-and-westerns\/","title":{"rendered":"On Depression and Westerns"},"content":{"rendered":"

Special guest Article by Leigh Evans Kreuz<\/strong><\/em>\"\"<\/a>They say you never forget your first love.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m thirty-eight now and I\u2019ve forgotten a big chunk of my life up until this point. Sometimes, if I\u2019m especially #blessed, the right stimuli and the right amount of THC knock a few things loose. Being born before the turn of the century, I was a kid who, like my parents before me, was raised largely by television. Our story begins during the little slice of my life in which I was often sat behind the arm of a floral patterned sofa, staring in rapt attention at the rabbit-eared television; relic from the time when sets were advertised as being (holy smokes, Batman!) IN COLOR. I happened to be born into a culty Assembly of God church run by a guy who wore Jim Jones sunglasses without a single wit of irony and utilized information control in the guise of \u201ckeeping the children safe\u201d.<\/p>\n

That meant we weren\u2019t allowed to just watch whatever we wanted because the stuff on TV would send demons through the screen or something. (For further reading and cringing so hard your back cracks read \u201cTurmoil in the Toybox\u201d by Phil Phillips). The selection of \u201cJesus approved\u201d material was pretty slim for the child of \u201cGod and country\u201d 1980s Reaganites.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>So what was \u201csafe\u201d enough for my young, malleable brain? Well, as luck would have it, the ubiquitous western and frontier re-runs from the 50s were being broadcast to New York\u2019s murder capital back then. That was what got the holy seal of approval. I presume it was because the 50s was the time of god-fearing American exceptionalism in media. Remember Disney\u2019s \u201cDavy Crockett\u201d series with Fess Parker? American as apple pie. It was the greatest, most fascinating thing I\u2019d ever seen in my short life. To this day I can probably still sing the entire theme song backwards and forwards with minimal effort. Did I watch Disney\u2019s other contributions to the genre? Hell yeah. Somehow, during the airing of a certain Disney series with Guy Williams, these mysterious Zs written in chalk began appearing on doors. (We never found out who the culprit was. They may still be at large.)<\/p>\n

As I got older I\u2019d watch quite a few John Wayne movies, usually because my dad was watching them, even though the subtleties of the plots were still way too advanced for my mushy brain to comprehend. I still remember recreating the \u201cthe hell I won\u2019t\u201d dialogue from \u201cMcLintock!\u201d and making him wheeze with laughter. Dad even let me watch some of \u201cThe Good, The Bad, and The Ugly\u201d with him when I was about seven and gradually introduced me to this phenomenon called spaghetti westerns. Unlike the John Ford films that could get sort of gritty but mostly shied away from the really intense stuff, Sergio Leone didn\u2019t sugar coat anything.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The first time I saw \u201cOnce Upon a Time in the West\u201d I was \u201cblown away\u201d (haha) and admittedly a bit frightened by the lengthy opening scene. It didn\u2019t matter to me how old the shows were or what the underlying message was. I just saw stuff that was action packed and bad ass and boy howdy, did I eat it up. It sounds dense, but I really didn\u2019t recognize how much of an impact it had on me.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, back at the ranch… It was a year ago when the inexhaustible depression was kicking me in the face. I was wrangling with the grief of losing three friends in rapid succession, and that last one in October… that one hit like a freight train. It\u2019s something I still wrangle with, the grand total graves I\u2019ve metaphorically dug from May 2022 to the last day of 2023 totalling seven. It was on one of those horrifically gray days in January where I was just exhausted and feeling like I wanted to find an escape rope that maybe came in the form of a noose. Faced with a dilemma, I chose the better option of taking a toke, going online, and plugging in searches for some of the shows I used to watch but hadn\u2019t seen in more than a decade.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>That time the right stimulus and the right amount of doobage worked their magic in a way I wasn\u2019t really expecting. I feel like it kind of flipped on one of the light switches that illuminate the dark passages in my brain. It just so happened that\u2019s where I was storing a lot of happy things. It had an unexpected domino effect. Every time I re-watched the things I knew and loved I unlocked a little more of the things that came with it. I remembered watching \u201cChisum\u201d one weekend when I was twelve, listening to the \u201cLeftoverture\u201d album by Kansas for some reason, and telling my friend Adam all about this really cool old movie I\u2019d seen. I remembered my mom giving me a big box copy of \u201cThe Big Rip-Off\u201d (AKA \u201cThe Dirty Outlaws\u201d and \u201cEl Desperado\u201d) that she found at work in case I wanted to see it and thinking \u201cWow, Andrea Giordana is both the least attractive man and the most attractive man I\u2019ve seen up to this point.\u201d (I lost the big box with its great cover art long ago but I\u2019ve still got the tape squirreled away like a family heirloom.)<\/p>\n

I remembered watching \u201cDaniel Boone\u201d and for some reason my brain has always associated it with springtime. I accidentally found out while I was writing this that it aired on ABC in March of 1988. Piecing things together from when you were two years old is a trip and a half, let me tell you. Having found something that sparked a little bit of joy in me, I did what you do when you\u2019re an undiagnosed ADHD weirdo and threw myself completely into it. I discovered that I\u2019d just barely scratched the surface. There\u2019s absolutely loads of TV shows no one has heard about, \u201cPony Express\u201d being my new favorite obscurity (see \u201cWesterns on the Web\u201d on YouTube \u2013 they have a phenomenal \u201cForsaken Westerns\u201d series that I\u2019ve thoroughly enjoyed).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I\u2019m pretty sure it was around February last year when I did the math and realized that this is probably the earliest non-human thing I recall really becoming a fan of. I\u2019m pretty sure it was the first time I experienced the terrible and lovely embarrassment that I feel whenever I get inexplicably attracted to something or someone, so technically my first love, right? I\u2019m cautiously optimistic in saying I haven\u2019t fallen back into the pits too much since I rediscovered my love of ye olde cowboy kitsch, despite an often tenuous grip. Hell, it brought the writing spark back, which is a huge thing in itself when you\u2019ve pretty much resigned yourself to never again putting pen to paper in any meaningful way.<\/p>\n

Sure, I may be pretty garbage at it but I\u2019m inspired garbage, dammit. It\u2019s been a weird, wild, wonderful journey over the last year. I guess I did end up finding an escape rope in the form of a lasso, if you\u2019ll forgive the cheeesiness.<\/p>\n

Everyone has a first love, a second, love, a fifth love, maybe a brand new love coming down the track. Put your boots on, saddle up your horse and go find it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Special guest Article by Leigh Evans KreuzThey say you never forget your first love. I\u2019m thirty-eight now and I\u2019ve forgotten a big chunk of my life up until this point. Sometimes, if I\u2019m especially #blessed, the right stimuli and the right amount of THC knock a few things loose. Being born before the turn of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[1307,2097,2739,737,2894],"class_list":["post-43050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pcthugs","tag-cowboys","tag-john-wayne","tag-mental-illness","tag-nostalgia","tag-westerns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43050"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43050\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43058,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43050\/revisions\/43058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}