I’ve been making movies in one form or another since I was a child. In 1996 I started a sketch comedy TV show on public access with some high school friends in Bremerton. We called it “Dammit This is Stupid.” I moved to Olympia in 1997, and took the show with me. DTIS ran on TCTV from 1997 to 2003, winning several awards for innovation and original writing. DTIS ended at episode 42 or so, and there were also a handful of phone-call in shows for a time, not counted in the 42. The 42 episodes were sketch-comedy. Though I wrote, directed, shot, edited the majority of the material, a revolving cast of friends lent their faces to the program. I finally put the show out to pasture in 2003. Some of the content made the transition to the digital age, most of it did not. Some of the original VHS copies have even been permanently lost to the ravages of time.
At times DTIS was intentionally offensive, using words and content that I no longer employ, as I’ve grown and changed over the years. My only excuse is that I was an idiot – I mistook saying offensive things as championing my 1st Amendment rights, even though those rights were never threatened. Eventually I realized that employing hurtful terms wasn’t a freedom of speech issue, it was an issue of being a decent human. I’m still passionate about speech and the control of it, but as the issue has evolved, so have I. I still believe that it has to be okay to say anything, or it’s not okay to say anything. To abstain from using hurtful words is my choice. I may still use them in context of writing or creating, provided that I do so with care and thoughtfulness about their impact. During the DTIS years I used them recklessly. I only hope that my words caused no harm. I only bring it up because we are in the midst of a sea-change of culture in our country, and I think about this stuff. To summarize; Lacey still sucks.
KenzoFKC 