Getting Lost

Okay, you can talk about “Lost” around me now. I was worried that you were going to spill the mangos and ruin the whole thing before I got a chance to catch up to you, but my wife Kara and I finally watched the second season on DVD, so we’re all spoiler-proof now.

I can’t believe we made it until now without anybody ruining it for us. Back when I was the only person in the world who hadn’t seen the movie “Scream,” I dodged conversations about it for years until I finally broke down and rented the videotape. Just as I was popping it into the VCR, I pointed to this guy on the cover and said to my roommate, “I didn’t know this dude was in the movie.”

“Oh, you mean the guy who kills everybody?” he asked. I learned a very important lesson that day: if you don’t have any better options available, a VCR tape makes a passable blunt instrument.

But Kara and I successfully avoided everyone’s conversations about “Lost” until we finally got to see it for ourselves, and we’re lucky we did. The show is definitely worth donating many hours of your life to, hours that you might have wasted in meaningful conversations with your family or reconnecting with old friends. If you’ve never seen the show, it’s safe to say that there’s never been a more perfect amalgam of Gilligan’s Island and The X-Files.

In one of my favorite scenes from the second season, the character named John Locke told this other character named Thurston Howell III that the only way to find something is to quit looking for it. This might be a good first step, but I think that the only foolproof way to find something that you’ve lost is to accuse someone of stealing it from you. And that’s only after you ransack your bedroom, of course.

“Why would I want your iPod charger, Dude? I don’t even have an iPod,” your friend will say.

“Yeah, of course,” you say, but then you give them a look so that they know you’re on to them. If you don’t have to apologize to several people after you find your iPod charger in the freezer, then you just weren’t looking hard enough.

If you’ve accused friends and loved ones of stealing from you and you still haven’t found what you’re looking for, the next step is to give up and go buy a new one. Once you lose the receipt, you’ll find the one you already had.

Kara recently lost a book that she was dying to read. After searching around for a while, she decided that she’d better bulldoze everything off the coffee table onto the floor. It didn’t qualify as a proper ransacking, but it was a good first step.

“Maybe it got thrown out,” she said, eyeing my suspiciously. This was not quite as effective of a finding technique as accusing me of stealing it directly, but at least we were headed in the right direction.

I said, “Yeah, I was playing Throw Random Items in the Trash all day yesterday. I hope you didn’t want our spatula anymore, either.”

But eventually I pitched in, going into the other room and calling out, “What’s it called again? There’s one in here called ‘The Maiden’s Voyage.’”

“No, no, that’s not it,” she said.

“Oh, wait! Did you say it was called ‘Heart of a Warrior’?”

“Yes! That’s it!”

“Okay, it’s definitely not in here,” I said.

Also, if you want to sound smart, name a character in your TV show after a philosopher like John Locke, even if you have absolutely no idea what he philosophized about. If I don’t get my own TV show soon, I think I’ll name my next pet Voltaire. That’ll make me sound smart, even though I know far more about Voltron.

You can reach between your couch cushions and pull out Mike Todd online at mikectodd@gmail.com.