Ben Avicolli is a Stupid Pathetic Moron (by Dave Terruso)

The island won't let me!

For those of you who only know me as “Finally Lost”, in real life my name is Ben Avicolli and the following was submitted by guest blogger Dave Terruso:

This article is for those of us who’ve seen every episode of LOST. Maybe you’ve watched each episode when it first aired since the premier. Maybe you watched the first three seasons on DVD and then started watching them each week with Season 4. Either way, you know as much as any other viewer knows about what’s going on with Magic Island.

When we find out that a friend of ours has started watching LOST, our first thought is “Finally. Finally. I’ve been telling you how good it is for years and it finally sunk in. You would think that when I described it as ‘as good as hate sex with your hottest ex on a bed of your favorite treats, so that you could just tear off a Fruit Rollup in the middle of humping,’ you would’ve gotten onboard sooner.”

Once he starts watching, we start to get jealous. We remember how amazed we were when something ripped the pilot out of the airplane and then a polar bear ran through the jungle. We remember how blown our minds were when we first discovered that the Others used to be able to leave the island whenever they wanted and were in contact with the main land. We think about those joys, and we feel sad because we know we can never experience those things again in the same way. If we go back and rewatch the episodes now, we’d just be thinking “Oh, look, I didn’t even realize that guy was gonna be such a big deal later!” It’s the feeling we get when our friend starts dating someone new and is all googly-eyed and overjoyed, and we think about our five year relationship and miss those firsts and the euphoria of infatuation. (Thank goodness we can’t watch past seasons of our relationships on DVD, that would be awful.) We want to wipe our memories of LOST like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and start the magic over.

Then comes a feeling of superiority. Our friend starts telling us what he’s seen and what he thinks is going on. And we get to laugh at him and smirk and think, “Oh, Ben Avicolli, you stupid pathetic moron. I remember what it was like to be you. So green, so clueless, so adorably cute in your out-of-the-loopness. You really think Bernard is Jacob? Really? Idiot. Your world is gonna be so rocked the first time you see Vincent stand on his hind legs and reveal that he’s Jacob. (I can’t write any real spoilers for Ben’s sake).” Then we realize we don’t want to start over with the show. We like knowing as much as we know, obsessing over it after all these years and then getting rewarded with earned plot twists. Our five year relationship is great; it’s not infatuation any more, it’s true love, with depth and history. We lie in bed with our live-in lover laughing about how Ben just found out that his new girlfriend hates rap music and Harry Potter, and it’s never gonna work out between them. Or whatever. (I may have taken the relationship metaphor too far.)

Just imagine what it must be like to be one of the writers of LOST. To be Damon Lindelof. To be Carlton Cuse. To know the last thing to be revealed before the final LOST title pops up to end the whole shebang. To know secrets about things that the rest of us don’t even know have secrets about them yet. That must be the greatest feeling ever. To be a god of knowledge over everyone. Even the stars of the show are in the dark compared to you. You’ve known how important Charles Widmore is to the story from the beginning, back when the rest of us stupid pathetic morons just thought he was the dad of Desmond’s girlfriend, a throwaway character like the guy who played Hurley’s boss and Locke’s boss. And, hey, maybe you know that the guy who played Hurley’s and Locke’s boss is actually more important to the story than Christian Shephard. You’re one of a handful of people on this earth who know how this will end, and you have from the beginning—or you have since season three and you know about the lie you’ve told the public about knowing how this will end since the beginning.

You, the writer, know why Libby was in the mental institution with Hurley.

You, the writer, know why the Dharma Initiative was dropping food on the island ten years after everyone who worked for them had been wiped out.

You know why that giant parrot flew by and screamed Hurley’s name.

You know the real reason none of the women on the island can get pregnant and take the baby to term.

You know what the whispers in the jungle are.

All of this makes me think about what it must be like to be God. To know everything. God already knows how LOST will end, has known since before the first episode. God knows how the world ends, if it ends at all.

I sure hope God isn’t jealous of us for watching the episodes of our lives for the first time, or even worse, finds us to be stupid pathetic morons like Ben Avicolli.

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About Dave Terruso:

An aspiring novelist/screenwriter, Dave Terruso’s screenplay MAKE YOURSELF was a finalist in the 2006 Set in Philadelphia Screenplay Contest.

As one-half of sketch comedy duo Animosity Pierre, Dave has been a finalist in the 2007 Project Breakout Comedy Competition, a finalist in the 2007 XBox Live Originals Contest, and had his cartoon short The Inventionors screened at the 2007 New York Television Festival. Pierre’s viral video about the TV show LOST earned them a write-up on Time Magazine’s website.

Dave is one of the founders and producers of Philly Sketchfest, the only sketch comedy festival in Philadelphia.