Dear Ed,

First of all, pot does make 13-year-old girls pregnant. I should know. I have, like, a million of my own babies already, thanks to my inability to remove my face from the bong during those formative preteen years. It was worth it, though, dude. Mommy got me this rad 6-foot bong for my 12th birthday that you could only use if you were sitting on my top bunk. Hot damn, those were good times.

Anyway, what's ... where am I? Oh yeah, "Six Feet Under." It's funny, because a lot of people wrote to me about the David Gets Tortured episode, saying that they found his predicament intolerable and found him irritatingly passive. Naturally I agree with you about the show's subtle moments and Arthur and wimpy Russell and scary Olivier, but I still don't feel it's fair to accuse "Six Feet Under" of being moralistic. When I think of all the times that characters on SFU 1) took drugs without killing themselves or someone else, 2) got drunk and drove without crashing, 3) had cheap sex without getting pregnant or getting an STD or even seeing the person ever again, 4) talked shit about each other without being found out, 5) got upset and ignored the baby without the baby falling off the bed onto its head, etc., I really have to say that, if anything, David's suddenly having to pay for his carelessness -- and it was his carelessness, and not his gayness, that got him into that mess -- is a truly unforeseeable twist. Most of the time on "Six Feet Under," there's seemingly very little rhyme or reason for the shit that hits the fan, from Nate's brain ailment to Lisa's drowning. If God strikes the Fisher family with misfortune a little more often than seems reasonable, maybe that's because the Fishers are so entertaining when they're suffering. You can't really blame God, can you? God needs to have his fun, too, just like the rest of us.

Plus, I thought it was cute how David tricked himself into thinking he wasn't cruising. As I see it, "Six Feet Under" is mostly concerned with punishing those who fool themselves and rationalize their behavior in ways that don't honor their ideals. What's wrong with a morality play that punishes those whose lack of self-awareness leads them far from their beliefs and their calling? Sounds like real life to me.

Nate, for one, continues to suffer because he's starting to build his whole personality around suffering. He's obsessed with the unfairness of it all -- not surprising, but any kind of a belief system, even if it's built around the supreme deliciousness of blueberries, would get him out of the mess he's in. If he knew himself better, he'd know that arbitrarily choosing some belief to trick himself into moving forward would be a good call for an idealist like him. But then, idealists are not very good at willfully tricking themselves, so that, once they trip and Pandora's Box spills open, they end up wallowing in their own 100 percent pure and natural bitterness indefinitely.

"Six Feet Under" does such a great job of overturning stereotypes (while working within the bounds of reality, mind you -- this isn't the typical "Free to Be You and Me" P.C. fantasy) that it's not exactly fair to attack the writers the second they stumble on a story that doesn't topple the common wisdom on a subject. Look, self-loathing, drug-abusing gay men who are gay bashers certainly exist, and I really felt that the story fit into David's unpredictable emotional trajectory well. Here he is, in a good relationship, he's finally safe, and he not only insists on feeling insecure anyway (sounds familiar, doesn't it?) but invites disaster into his life out of that insecurity. People who feel tremendously needy do stupid, stupid things in an effort to get rid of that feeling, and often end up knocking down the walls of their happy little Hobbit holes in the process.

See, just considering this makes me want to set my little Hobbit hole on fire right now.

ILTW

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