Lost, again

"Don't make no difference who the guy is, long as he's with you. I tell ya, I tell ya, a guy gets too lonely an he gets sick."

"Of Mice and Men"

So, I have been on a binge again. I will plead extenuating circumstances. My wife and the youngest and still mostly portable kid are back in Detroit for the summer. Suddenly, the house in Tokyo becomes empty and quiet. Not empty and quiet in a nice-to-have-an-undisturbed-moment-to-check-Facebook way. More like house arrest with an electronic tether. More like the gulag.  More like the quiet of Ivan Drago in Rocky IV. When the house finally speaks, this is what it will offer: "I must break you." Yes, a better man and a deeper thinker would plunge with exultation into these cold waters. Me, I need the warm and shallow end of the pool. If in the dark night of the soul, we must fight or flee, I am going to run like the devil is chasing me.  And so I buy the first three seasons of "Lost" on iTunes, roughly 48 hours of viewing distraction, two full days, about a dollar per hour. Cheaper than a cheap motel. And I check in. And I do not leave. And dishes pile up. And laundry mounds. I ignore the phone and leave the mail unchecked. I go feral.

It's amazing in a way that despite my dangerously compulsive instincts I have managed to stay employed. Maybe it's because I have found a way to channel these instincts into work often enough to keep a paycheck coming. What is it they say about heroin addiction? It's not the drug that kills you, it's the poverty. 

At any rate, I watch the first 72 episodes of "Lost" in an alarmingly short period of time. A little more than three days, but not much more than three days. It is not pretty, but it happens. I am not proud.

There is little to write about "Lost" that has not already been written. The pilot aired in September 2004. The last episode of the third season aired in May 2007. As I slipped into my fugue state over a long weekend just ended, I found myself flashing back to my own backstory as it played out in those three years.

I bought and mostly fixed a house in California at huge cost. We had the first summit in Snowmass. We drank Feral Boy's homemade brew. Somehow I agreed to "run" a half marathon -- clamber up the mountain, realize your hands are horribly distended, limp down to the finish, queasy. Then I was in New Orleans helping with Katrina coverage. And then I was out of Los Angeles and back to Detroit, back to Plymouth. I left a house and a neighborhood I loved to go back to a place I had thought I would never return. In the summer of 2007, just after the Season Three finale of "Lost," Stoner and my oldest son took the fateful drive to Memphis and Graceland that became such an anecdote spinner. It all happened so fast. And now I'm gone again. And we lost our brother.

In some small way, "Lost" became something more for me as a sometimes absentee dad in those years. When kids one through three came to visit from Japan for the summers of 2005 through 2007, they got into the show. We bought the DVD box sets, and I just let them burrow in. I enjoyed watching their reactions to the plot twists more than the show itself the first time round. "What? Jack and Claire have the same father? Did not see that coming." I don't know why I thought a show that featured such toxic or distant fathers would be a good bonding choice, but I let it happen anyway.

It's interesting to go back after almost a decade. The show has moments of utter TV nonsense, like the the diamond-stealing couple that poison each other with a previously undiscovered species of spider and are buried alive. Or the pilot-eating monster. It backs away from the darkest "Lord of the Flies" undercurrent pretty quickly. When bad boy, heart-throb Sawyer threatens to veer from antisocial bravado to sociopathic scheming, you can almost hear the producers step in to protect the franchise. Make him apologize to Sun for attempting to kidnap her. Make him kiss a baby. Make him lose at ping pong. Thank you.

Of course, this is also no guide to surviving 80 days on a desert island. The writers get tired pretty quickly of chronicling the whole nasty business of staying alive. In the first season, it's a big deal when Jack finds fresh water. By the third season, food is literally falling from the sky so we can get on to weightier matters like the nature of faith and fate versus free will.

There are many other satisfactions. A truly despicable character named Edmund Burke is hit by a bus. A character named Locke and another named Rousseau square off in the jungle. The show name checks or quotes from Hemingway, "The Brothers Karamazov," "The Third Policeman," "Our Mutual Friend," "Taming of the Shrew," "Turn of the Screw" and "Of Mice and Men." Ben quotes the line above from Steinbeck. An annoying know-it-all blows up in the middle of a speech on the dangers of dynamite.

It's also fun on the second time through this to watch the writers see how many of the characters they can get to say some version of the same set of lines. I imagine a running bet in the writer's room where whoever could shoehorn in a line could take what had accrued in the jar. These cycling phrases include: Don't tell me what I can and can't do. Do you think I'm stupid? What's the difference, I'm dead already. I did not see that coming. Oh, yes, and run like the devil is chasing you.

And then there's Locke, the old guy in a primetime show shot in Hawaii where all the men and some of the women have to take off their shirts. A decade ago, Terry O'Quinn, the actor who played Locke, seemed like somebody's still vigorous Sun Belt grandpa who works as a Wal-Mart greeter. Today, as I'm watching I am closing in on the age at which he was cast, and I am thinking, Terry O'Quinn is jacked. Damn, he looks good in a sweaty camo t-shirt. I am man crushing on the old guy. 

When I leave the house to buy food in the middle of this marathon, it takes me a while for ambient Japanese to come back into focus. I realize that for three days I have been immersed in Korean from Sun and Jin. Without trying, I have learned the phrase they say most often to each other -- gwen chan ah, "it's okay." 

But it takes until the last episode, for my own quest of nostalgia and avoidance to make sense.  Something resonates. By the end of season three, Jack, the tortured protagonist, is washed up and strung out on airline cocktails and Oxycontin. We see him in a flash forward but we don't realize at first this is a glimpse of his flawed future. He does not live happily ever after.

Like me, Jack is pining to go back to a place and time he had been in a hurry to leave. He wants to get back to the island. He wants to get lost. The problems he had then seem like nothing compared to what he faces now. He wants nothing more to see his friends together again. He wants a chance to do it over and do it right. Barring that, he will take a state of sedated and suspended animation. And he speaks for me when he says, "We weren't supposed to leave."

Then Kate channels the realistic and healthy people everywhere, the well adjusted people who have not just spent three days holed up somewhere watching this damn show, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. 

Yes, she says, yes we were.