THIS BLOG IS RATED JULIE

There’s a Website—a dating Website of all things, and not even a Christian one—that scans blogs for objectionable material, suggesting various levels of parental supervision all the way up to FBI intervention and possible notification of the Department of Homeland Security. Mine rated the dreaded NC-17, the lowest of the low, right down there with those offering up guided tours inside Paris Hilton’s vagina, random clips of bestiality and kiddy porn, and graphic information on how to make and detonate a suicide bomb. To be directed to one or more of us, all the kids have to do is accidentally leave an “o” out of the word Google.

Since the program is only able to ferret out scandalous words rather than images, my alarming rating was apparently determined based on my aggregate usage of profanity. Over the years, I’ve employed the word fuck no less than fourteen times, although ironically this was all in one recent post meant to satirize the hypocritical nature of the relationship between language and censorship. There were ten references to porn, six to sex and three to death. I twice uttered the word dick—although I'm certain that one or more of these was in reference to a certain "private dick" played by Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon—and once referred to someone, or heaven forbid something, as “anal.”

I am a dirty, dirty girl, and for that I have been bitch-slapped. That’s right, bitch-slapped, I’ve said it twice now, like a prison inmate already living under the death penalty who up and offs another guard just for sport. Damn, another death reference. And damn, another two damns!

Well, two can poke around the Internet digging up dirt and naming McCarthy-era names, which is how I came to learn that the Supreme Court twice decided that the First Amendment didn’t apply to filmmakers. Larry Flynt, yes, Alfred Hitchcock, no. Both Psycho and Some Like It Hot were released without the required Motion Picture Association of America stamp of approval due to their “objectionable themes.”

I made it all the way through film school without learning that the Hays Code—banning the glorification of “crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin” from the nation’s theaters—remained relatively intact from 1930 (coincidentally the same year they gave liquor back to the people) all the way up until 1968. The MPAA then devised a four-tiered ratings system—G, M, R and X—that lifted virtually all restrictions on what elements could lawfully be in a film. M was later changed to PG, and the elevated PG-13 was added in response to the level of violence in—gasp!—Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The dreaded NC-17 replaced the X rating not in relation to content, but because the MPAA had failed to trademark the designation by then widely in use by the porn industry.

This happened right around the time they stopped making good movies altogether, instead offering up family fare that ever so covertly slipped in adult themes like dead babysitters, rat love and monster sex in the hopes inspiring kids of all ages to forgo a week’s worth of groceries in exchange for sitting through them as a four-quadrant unit on opening weekend.

In all fairness to the contemporary American viewing public, I propose a new ratings system based not on outmoded moral self-righteousness, but rather on, oh, I don't know, audience appeal. G would be for Geeks Only, PG for Pubescent Geeks and Above, PG13 for Pubescent Geeks and Thirteen Screaming Friends, R for Really Rude Pubescent Geeks with Fake I.D.’s and NC-17 for the The 17 Remaining Films Not Created By Pixar. Damn, I miss movies with people in them. I mean, darn I miss the people movies. Darn I miss the fucking porn, sex, death, anal, dick movies about humans.

FOURTH OF JULIE

My sister’s home feels like a luxury California resort and spa, with a yard three times the size of the house itself, an outdoor kitchen and bar with built-in beer taps and an infinity-edged pool and Jacuzzi with a waterfall overlooking a canyon and protected bird sanctuary. The lawns are expansive enough for a planned putting green, as well as bocci ball, horseshoe and badminton courts. In addition to the three separate picnicking areas, there’s a wooden grape arbor shading a farmhouse table for twelve.

At night, she fires up a lava rock fire pit and a wood-burning brick fireplace and pizza oven, with tiki torches and hanging lanterns providing optional firelight. Lavender and rosemary patches become most fragrant in the noonday sun, and in the summertime peach and apricot trees drop fruit around the yard. Yesterday she gathered all that to make homemade jam, barbecue sauce, cobbler and Fuzzy Navels for an impromptu Fourth of July picnic for sixteen.

Among her well-heeled suburban guest list in North County San Diego were two financial analysts, a mortgage broker, a State Department official, an Olympic-level athlete turned swim coach, and a contractor known to have cornered the local market on epoxy flooring. There were assorted children and mix and match wives whose names I didn’t catch. At least one was pregnant, although I only did a cursory spot check, along with plenty of talk about C-sections, Elmo, healthy snacking, squirt guns and time outs.

My sister’s husband is a stockbroker who wanted to be a television producer, and my sister is a lawyer who wanted to be a gourmet chef. In college, she studied in France and learned to speak flawless French but hasn’t made it back much since. Since he is bald and so white he actually glows, it was hard not to worry about the fate of his enormous head in the scorching sunlight reflecting off the sparkling, free-form pool, where he wondered aloud what “the poor people” were doing right now.

“We’re fine,” I told him, lying in a nearby lounger with my two farting wiener dogs at my feet. “I am a screenwriter who wanted to be a screenwriter,” I thought about adding by way of explanation. But he was on to a more pressing conversation about swim diapers and how it takes seven seconds for chlorine to kill uric acid.

In a more energetic mood, I might have interjected that, given the choice between authenticity and poverty, I chose the path less traveled by, the one with no swimmers to diaper, or guns to squirt or time outs to give. And even on weekends and holidays—when I’m occasionally compelled to go out and play with those who appear to have everything—that has made all the difference.

But I didn't bother with any of that, since he probably isn't all that big on the poetry of Robert Frost or really any of your major literary figures not recently published on the sports page. Neither did I hand him a hat and a tube of sunscreen and implore him to save himself. My sister recently told me that he and I are co-beneficiaries on her life insurance policy, and I figured if he wants to check out early from malignant melanoma, who was I to interfere? I may be a dreamer, but hell, I'm no fool.