The media has never really influenced me much. I could always watch what I wanted on television and suffer no ill effects, like a man who can eat a large piece of apple pie a la mode every night after dinner says it doesn't bother him because he sleeps like a baby. But let a guy do that over a period of years and it will eventually catch up with him. But mine was not the cumulative effects of media consumption over time; I had a one-time episode resulting from a movie that I know got the best of me: American Gigolo . Richard Gere played a . . . well, okay, a gigolo in the movie who hung upside down shirtless in inversion boots and drank Fresca out of the can. (This is all I really remember about the movie except that Lauren Hutton was also in it, and I figure if she came of age now they would have put braces on her to fix the gap between her front teeth.) I believe it was around 1982 when I saw the movie, so you can guess what happened next: I bought a pair of inversion
by Chris Rainey. This is a blog of my journaling, essays, opinion pieces, religious satire, and creative writing.