53. The Divorce, Part 1: Dates. Data. Doc Brown.

It’s been a minute. Hope you’re well. Enjoyed writing this one. Hope you enjoy.

Dates. Data. Doc Brown.

I’ve always been someone who is overly fascinated by how often we commemorate or memorialize events, movies, music, books, etc. that came out in the past. Even as someone who lives as much in the present moment as I can, I find myself doing it all the time, too. When you notice it, you start to see it everywhere.  

This past August saw the 80^th anniversary of the US dropping two atomic bombs on Japan, one on Hiroshima and one on Nagasaki. Because of that fact, that means it’s officially been 80 years since the bloodiest conflict in human history came to an end.  Did you know it’s been 30 years since the OJ verdict OJ got away with murder? Or a recent one that we face every September, it’s been 24 years since the September 11^th terrorist attacks. Did you do your requisite Facebook post? For everyone not named John Rambo, the war in Vietnam ended 50 years ago. For Rambo, the war in Vietnam took a brief pause 50 years ago and the started again, briefly, for a couple days in the mid-1980s when he went to go free some hostages. 60 years ago, Malcolm X was assassinated. 100 years before that, we’re told the Civil War ended. Read those last two sentences in whichever order you like.  

Technically every year has these same commemorations, but we do like a good round number that ends in a 5 or a 0, don’t we? This previous July 4^th was the 249^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. 249. That’s a wet fart dud commemoration year. Doesn’t have any pizzazz. But next year, we’re at the big 250, baby! Now that has some juice!  

It’s easy to gravitate towards the dark or the historically significant, but we do the same thing for brands and for pop cultural stuff, too. Food packaging always has this kind of stuff written all over it. There’s a great Lewis Black bit where he’s talking about how A1 Steak Sauce has “Established in 1862” on the label and how funny it is that someone decided to create a delicious steak sauce while the Civil War raged on outside. One of my favorite details of a Dr Pepper can is the “Est. 1885” written on it. Happy 140^th birthday to Dr Pepper!

Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending Inception came out 15 years ago. If I didn’t already know that because of my ridiculous pop-culture infused brain so easily remembering stuff like that, I would have been reminded of that from a couple different pop-culture podcasts I regularly listen to. The final act of George Lucas’s legacy wrecking Star Wars prequel trilogy (Revenge of the Sith) came out 20 years ago. 60 years ago, in 1965, the Beatles released both Help! and Rubber Soul (ridiculous output for one year), while Bob Dylan officially went electric. Did you know Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill came out 30 years ago? You oughta know that one.

Date commemorations are interesting to us because they serve as emotional anchors to a time and place. If I say, “it’s been 34 years since Nirvana dropped Nevermind on the world,” my brain automatically goes back to who I was 34 years ago in 1991. I think back on who I was and what I was doing when I first heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” But more importantly, I think back on how all of that music made me feel when I first heard it. I’ve heard people say that we often forget the who, what, when, where, and why details of our memories, but we always remember how the events in our memories made us feel. I may have a vague memory of watching MTV on some random summer day and seeing the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video play while I heated up Hot Pockets in the microwave, but I can instantly recall with pitch perfect clarity how that song made me feel every time I heard it. And when I listen to that song (or any song that means anything to me), my brain tethers itself to that feeling and it’s almost always a fun space to visit again. 

Sometimes the date commemorations correspond to important life dates, too. It’s been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina, which means I’ve officially been in Austin for 20 years. My then-girlfriend/now-wife and I moved to Austin in mid-August 2005 as some massive storm was forming in the Gulf. After a fairly arduous moving process featuring triple digit heat in both Denton and Austin, Texas we secluded ourselves in our new apartment where we’d go back and forth between unpacking our stuff and taking weed infused unpacking breaks. We did a lot more of the latter. It wasn’t until a week or so later that we finally left our apartment for pancakes at Kerbey Lane where we learned just how much the world had changed while we were blissfully unaware.  

1977 was the year my favorite movie Star Wars came out. It was also the year I came out. …of my mom, not the closet. My literal coming out. It was also the year Elvis died of a heart attack while trying to squeeze a half-eaten fried peanut butter, banana, and bacon sandwich out of his body… which I guess wasn’t all too dissimilar to what it must have felt like for my mom trying to squeeze me out, too. You can all but guarantee we’ll see 50^th anniversary articles and shows about both. Not sure about that, though. The good folks at Lucasfilm are notoriously shy about promoting Star Wars. I may celebrate with a fried peanut, butter, banana, and bacon sandwich of my own.

I was browsing YouTube not too long ago when I stumbled upon a trailer for the theatrical re-release of 1985’s Back to the Future as part of its 40^th anniversary. Wow! I can’t believe Back to the Future is 40 years old! That’s one of my favorite movies. If that movie is that old then I must be really old. Sometime between watching that trailer and wondering what it’d be like to see that movie again on the big screen, it dawned on me that if Back to the Future is 40 years old, that also means it’s been 40 years since my parents split up.  

That’s when an even larger realization took hold; I’ve spilled a ton of digital ink talking about my dad’s death and even more digital ink talking about all of the random stuff I have floating through my head at any given time, but I’ve somehow failed to give any real time (maybe none at all) to talking about my parents’ divorce. Surely that can’t be right. In a lifetime of monumental crossroads, how have I spoken so little of the crossroadiest one of all?

When huge events like a divorce or a move across the country or a death happen, it can often feel like your lifepath is literally changing before your eyes. You were on this path with this destination. Nope. Now you’re on this one. Adjust. Or don’t adjust and be damaged. Or adjust and be damaged. Regardless, damage and danger ahead. Hope you’re buckled up. You traverse those new kinds of paths carefully. And when you’re a child, that kind of whiplash change is so far out of your control and out of your ability to really comprehend what’s going on you’ll inevitably feel lost and like you have zero control over your life (because you don’t)!

I was 25 when my dad died. I wasn’t old, but I was an adult. I had already served in the military and was not too far away from graduating college. I always intuitively knew that if everything went to plan, or at least to expectation, I’d probably outlive my dad. His untimely and unexpected death unfairly pulled me from one life path and placed me on another, but I was still driving the car. You feel me?  

But when you’re a child and your parents split up, you’re in the backseat of that car. Or at times it feels like you’re stuck on the side of the road. Or it can feel like you’re stuck at home while one parent or the other heads out. Regardless of the analogy, the point still stands that when you’re a child of divorce, the path you’re on is their path, not your path. Unless you’re Drew Barrymore, you don’t go on your own path until you’re an adult. And even then, you’re in a constant state of navigating on and off your parents’ path like some bizarro Twilight Zone episode where you endlessly find yourself on some road with no exit.  

40 years of Back to the Future. 40 years since my parents’ divorce. Sometimes all we need in this world is a good piece of escapist entertainment to make it through a hard life change. In 1985, I had several options.

My dad left my mom, my three siblings MaryAnn, Katie, and Luke, and me, back in the Spring of 1985. That’s the nice way of saying that. The general way. The more cynically accurate way of saying that is after months (if not years) of cheating on my mom with the woman who would one day be my stepmom, my dad decided he’d had enough of the family life he helped to build and physically walked out of the house, leaving my mom, my siblings, and me on Mother’s Day 1985 (which fell on May 12, 1985). Mother’s Day, y’all. Mother’s. Fucking. Day. Who wants cake? I loved my dad, but dang, dude.

There really is no great age for a child to experience things not working out between your parents, but I do know from first-hand experience that 7 years old (and younger) is probably the worst age for that to happen. You haven’t really developed the proper brain or emotional processing capabilities to begin to even comprehend that kind of massive thing at that age. You’re probably driven more by your emotions than your intellect at that age. At least I was. Wasn’t that one of the whole plot-points of Pixar’s brilliant Inside Out? Happy 10-year anniversary to that one, by the way.

But that’s just it. At that age, you’re happy. You’re sad. You’re scared. You’re joyful. You don’t always know why you’re any of those things at any given moment, your just are. …like in the Buddhist sense of that term. But you’re at that age where you’re starting to process the “why” of it all. Why am I happy? Because I just got ice cream? Why am I sad? Because my ice cream fell on the floor? Why am I scared? Because I could tell my dad was mad at me for dropping said ice cream. Why am I joyful? Because I just got more ice cream.

You start to understand cause and effect in a very real way that eluded you when you were younger. But when you’re 7, when it comes to your parents’ dysfunction, it’s all effect. Divorces don’t exactly come from peaceful houses. You probably do see your parents argue or be unhappy with one another, but if you do, you don’t really understand the “why” of it. It’s just the emotion of any moment at any given time without its cause. It’s just emotion in the moment and then the divorce; all effect. The cause and the why of it all are too big and too vast and emotionally complex to wrap your 7-year-old brain around.

My parents separated in May 1985. The Goonies came out in June 1985, so it’s the 40^th anniversary of that movie, too. Few movies have ever provided as much escapist fun as that movie does on every watch-through. My 7-year-old brain and heart were in the early stages of grieving my parents’ split and I really, really needed that movie to take me to a new place, if even for a couple hours. And few movies are ever as fun from one minute to the next as that one.

I think almost every child from age 5 to probably 15 or so has a desire that exists way down deep in the booby trap level of our subconscious to go on an adventure with your friends where you’re seeking some kind of hidden treasure. This desire probably goes back to caveman days. Or maybe it’s Freudian psychology or something. Maybe it stems from an innate desire to prove something to our parents or to ourselves by doing something extraordinary. That kind of thing. I don’t know. But “kids go on a quest” stories existed well before the Goonies sought out One-Eyed-Willie’s treasure, well before the Stand By Me kids sought out Ray Brower’s dead body, and well before the kids in The Explorers (also a 1985 movie) launched into space.

I was obsessed with The Goonies. I know I must have seen that movie at least 5 times in the theaters and then countless times at home after it dropped on HBO. I owned the board game, not so much so I could play the game, but so I could just stare at the pieces that looked like the characters. Every time Cyndi Lauper’s “The Goonies R Good Enough” would come on MTV, I’d plaster myself to the screen until it was over.

I’d come to later learn that I wasn’t alone in my obsession, as that movie became an obsession point for pretty much anyone born in the mid- to late 70s. I bet I could walk into a room full of Gen Xers and say “Goonies never say…” and have everyone shout “die” in response. Or I could drop a “Sloth love…” and wait for the “Chunk” response. People in my cohort of Gen-X may have been obsessed with The Goonies, but it wasn’t exactly a smashingly huge box office hit like we remember it to be. Like The Wizard of Oz before it and The Princess Bride after it, The Goonies was more of a cult hit than a box office smash. It certainly did okay. It more than made its money back and then some. But I wonder if part of its “just okay” box office status was due to parents dropping off their kids at the theater while they went out for a drink down the street. It’s plausible.

But the obsessive nature of its fans turned it into a massive cult hit that still lives on to this day. It’s why Sean Astin and Josh Brolin (really, every cast member who finds themselves in the public eye) still get asked about both the original movie and the ever-percolating, but still unproduced, sequel.  My dad would later joke that he was worried about how obsessed I was with that movie. I needed therapy. In its place, I had Sloth and Chunk.

I sometimes wonder if there’s more going on with The Goonies than it’s given credit for.  It’s a fun piece of escapism, sure, but is there anything under its surface on a deeper level? On its face, it’s a very straightforward movie about kids seeking treasure in order to save their neighborhood from greedy land developers. It has pirate ships, both booty traps AND booby traps, gadgets, and relatable (if not believable) characters. But one of the first things you lose in a divorce is your friend group. If you’re not moving cities, you’re missing out on this thing or that thing because one parent has visitation rights that weekend or month. There is something very primal, I suppose, about kids taking it upon themselves to clean up and fix the mess caused by the generations above them.

If kids of my generation were obsessed with that movie and divorce rates at that time were spiking, maybe we were finding the friends we needed at the cineplex. That’s perhaps the most depressing sentence I’ve ever written, but it’s probably accurate. And there’s nothing really wrong with that. One of the reasons stories exist and why great ones endure is for that very reason. They give us found friends and found family. Plus, is there anything better in this life when you’re feeling down than a good Sean Astin speech? I could point you to several.

I sometimes feel really lucky to have been born when I was. I’ll probably talk about that in some other post on some other day, but again… 1977. Literally plug in any pop-culture release date that happened up until 2025 and plug my age in at time of release; perfect age. That’s always been one of those things where I feel particularly blessed. Sure, sure, I know that the corporate suits designed it to be that way, but that’s on them, not on me. It’s best not to parse out your blessings too thoroughly. Words like “commodification” belong in textbooks. These movies were my lifeblood, regardless of how or why they were produced.

The Steven Spielberg produced The Goonies got me through June. The Steven Spielberg produced Back to the Future got me through July and the rest of the year. I must have seen that movie a similar 4 or 5 times in the theater and then an additional, oh I don’t know, 50 times again on the HBO/VHS combo. My Uncle Ted was one of those guys who was always way ahead of the technological curve, and I remember he had this great stash of movies he recorded off the television. I think every family has a person in their family who mans that entertainment battle station. Thanks to him, I must have watched that movie at least once a day for a month or two.

I wore out that VHS tape, perhaps literally. Even if you get beyond the weirdness of the mom-son family dynamics displayed in that movie, Back to the Future is a pretty unique movie in its own right. Marty is an unconventional hero who (in classic Spielberg mode) always seems a step behind and slightly outclassed for the situations he finds himself in. But in classic Spielberg mode, Marty is precisely the right man for the job at hand. But I’ve always argued that when you apply the classic Joseph Campbell style hero’s quest template over the movie, it’s perhaps Doc Brown who better fits that role than Marty. It’s Doc who does the most growing, has the most doubt and conflict to overcome, and who is ultimately the actual hero of the movie. Marty is more of a guy who is either navigating or steering the plot, but it’s Doc who goes on the journey and is changed in the end. Doc learns the lesson. Marty gets the truck.

Similarly to The Goonies, Back to the Future is one of those touchstone movies for my generation and I’ve both read about and spoken with people who watched it a similar number of times as I did. My generation came of age in an era when movies like Jaws, the original Star Wars, and Raiders of the Lost Ark (among others) proved that Hollywood could make an obscenely ridiculous amount of money off a generation stuck at home while both their parents (who were statistically probably divorced by this point) worked outside the home. And unlike the box office for The Goonies, the box office for Back to the Future was ridiculous. Back to the Future spent 11 weeks at number 1 at the box office, 21 weeks in the top 5, and 24 weeks in the top 10.

It’s one of the reasons why I always laugh at my generation who now tsks-tsks the younger generation for staying inside all day on their phones because “my generation didn’t come home every summer evening until the streetlights came on by golly.” Look, I get it. I used to tear up the woods around my house pretending I was everyone from John Rambo to the Hardy Boys, but all of that MTV wasn’t watching itself. We have every beat of every movie that came out between 1976 and 1986 memorized to the word, to the grunt, and to the soundtrack musical cue, okay? We watched an insane amount of television. …and not just an insane amount of different programming but more often than not the same movie over and over and over and over again. If the current younger generation is indeed hooked fully into their phones, it’s only (or maybe partly) because my generation helped pave the way for that to happen. Cool? Cool. I digress.

Like The Goonies, Back to the Future was a much-needed form of escapism, for me. It’s a pretty perfect movie for that kind of thing. Even Quentin Tarantino agrees with me on that. It’s hard to focus too much on how your own family could be fixed when you’re too busy watching Marty travel through time to fix his own.

There were other movies that operated on this level for me that I glommed onto in the immediate year or two after my parents’ separation. I could talk about how the first two Karate Kid movies taught me a lot about life, but I could also say that I probably learned the wrong lessons from those movies, too. Mr. Miyagi was trying to teach us about balance, but the 8- and 9-year-old me watching those movies was, at least partly, more interested in learning Karate in case I needed to punch away my feelings.

I could talk about Stand By Me and how no movie felt more immediately real to me as a sensitive kid growing up both literally and figuratively on the wrong side of the railroad tracks in Houston, Texas. When you’re 8 years old, you think the theme of that movie is adventure itself. When you get older, you understand it to be about the fall of innocence that happens when they experience the trauma of seeing the body of Ray Brower. When you get even older than that, you realize the real lesson of that movie; that we all enter adulthood (I mean *really* enter adulthood) the moment we realize the adults in our lives, the people who we’re supposed to trust and who are supposed to love us fully, are often the ones who hurt us the most or who betray our trust most cynically. Between Teddy’s dad who nearly burned off Teddy’s ear in a fit of rage, Chris’s teacher who pocketed the money he returned after stealing it, and Gordie’s dad outwardly (but non-verbally) expressing that he secretly wishes Gordie had died instead of his much more popular and athletically gifted older brother, they all learn this lesson while on their trek. Heck, even the in-story made up character Davey “Lard Ass” Hogan learns this lesson. That’s such a bitter lesson to learn but it’s one we all eventually understand in the end.

I’ve always wanted to talk at length about E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which remains my favorite movie of all time even 42 years after its release date. When I rediscovered that movie in the late 90s, it almost single-handedly gave me the life tools I’d been missing to begin processing many of the divorce stuff I’d purposely been avoiding working on. Maybe I’ll do a post on that later in October, since it’s a Halloween movie and all. I’ll say, though, that it’s hard to talk about movies you love unconditionally. We’ll see.

Writing about these movies in this way seems a little silly to me now as an adult. These are movies. In some ways, they’re not even particularly good movies. But as a 7-year-old kid who was going through a lot, they felt like sustenance. To their credit, my parents were both pretty great at encouraging me to talk about my feelings, my mom in particular. My dad’s encouragement could always be a little more situational, or, perhaps, situational as long as the blame and responsibility didn’t fall back on him too much. If something was his fault, he didn’t want to hear about it. Shame is a real beast. We pass it on like we pass on hair color. He needed therapy, too.

But make no mistake about it, being encouraged to talk about your feelings (and sometimes even talking about them in practice) is not the same thing as having a professional therapist sit down with you to talk you through the one-million complex emotions we often have rolling through our heads at any given time. I, like many of my generation, was a product of a broken home. Therapy was what I needed. Self-coping and self-soothing were what I got.

I’d venture to guess that most of us didn’t get what we really needed on that front. I’m not saying we’re in a great state of mental healthcare now, but it was almost unheard of for families to go to therapy in the early 80s. So, we turned to whatever we could to help us out and through. In my case, 40 years ago, it was treasure maps and flux capacitors. So, in 2025, I commemorate 1985 and 1986 and honor all the great movies that came out those years. Here’s to you, Marty McFly. Happy 40th birthday to you, Mikey, Brand, Chunk, Mouth, Data, Stef, Andy, and Sloth. Here’s to you, Jack Burton and here’s to you, Daniel LaRusso. I don’t want to be overly dramatic and say that you saved my life, but you definitely kept me afloat in rocky waters. Because dork thinks he’s gonna drown. And if you get that reference, you’re one of my people. And I see you.