I Guess I’m Rick Sanchez. This Is Not Good News.

There are certain fictional characters you’re allowed to see yourself in.

Batman is fine. Everybody thinks they’re Batman at some point. Han Solo works. Wolverine is angry, hairy and generally irritated that other people exist, so there’s plenty of room to identify with him. Even someone like Jack Burton is acceptable because while he may be completely full of shit, he’s having a great time doing it.

What you should never do is sit down to watch a cartoon and slowly realize you are Rick Sanchez.

This is the equivalent of taking one of those stupid Facebook personality tests and finding out that you are 99% asshole. That is not a personality test result you brag about. Imagine waking up one morning and discovering you’re Skeletor. Or Megatron. Maybe Rick isn’t quite as bad as a giant robot whose long-term plan involves exterminating the Autobots, but we are swimming in the same general end of that pool.

You’re supposed to watch these people and laugh at them. You’re not supposed to recognize yourself.

Yet here we are.

I Was Just Trying to Watch a Cartoon

I am extremely late to Rick and Morty. Everybody else has already watched it, quoted it, bought the T-shirt and moved on with their lives. I’m just now getting around to it because I like my pop culture the same way some people like their wine: aged to perfection.

At first, I just thought Rick was funny. Then Rick would say something and I’d think, Yeah, exactly. Then he’d get pissed off at somebody and I’d think, Well, what the fuck did they expect? Then another character would react like Rick had just committed some outrageous violation of basic human decency, and I’d find myself wondering why everyone was being so dramatic.

That should have been my first warning. But, instead, I kept watching.

The sarcasm made sense. The impatience made sense. The general irritation with people who take a perfectly simple situation and somehow turn it into a complicated one made a lot of sense. Rick’s absolute certainty that he can solve whatever problem is in front of him if everyone would just get the fuck out of his way made perhaps a little too much sense.

I wasn’t watching Rick and Morty anymore. I was watching an animated reenactment of my personality. Minus the science, the portal gun, and the spaceship. Basically, I got all of Rick Sanchez’s personality defects without receiving any of the benefits.

Fuck You, Morty

There is a particular look Rick gets when Morty says something stupid. I know that look. I have kids and I have made that look and I spent a significant portion of my adult life making that look.

It’s the expression of a man who has just realized he is going to have to stop whatever he is doing and explain something that, in his mind, should not require an explanation. There is irritation, disbelief and just enough disgust to suggest that perhaps the human experiment has run its course.

That guy lives inside me.

This doesn’t mean I hate all people. I do hate most people of course but there are also several people I like very much.

Rick has almost no tolerance for somebody turning a simple problem into a nineteen-step disaster. Neither do I. If there is a direct route from Point A to Point B and you have somehow ended up in Kentucky, I’m probably not going to admire the journey.

I’m going to ask why the fuck you’re in Kentucky!

The more episodes I watched, the more evidence started stacking up. Sarcasm. Impatience. Irritation. The belief that most problems have solutions and most of those solutions would reveal themselves much faster if everyone would stop talking for five goddamn minutes. Still, none of that was enough to convict me.

Then I met Pickle Rick.

Oh Shit. I've Said This Before.

Pickle Rick begins with Rick trying to avoid family therapy. Being Rick, he does not simply say, “I don’t want to go.” That would be too easy. Instead, he turns himself into a fucking pickle. There's avoiding something, and then there's fundamentally altering your biological structure to get out of an appointment. Rick Sanchez never half-asses anything.

Eventually, after surviving an increasingly insane chain of events that includes sewers, rats, homemade weaponry and enough violence to make you forget this whole thing started because somebody wanted him to sit in a chair and talk, Rick ends up at therapy anyway.

Then the therapist asks him why he doesn’t respect therapy. So Rick starts explaining himself.

His basic argument is that he solves problems. He creates things. He changes things. If there is something about reality he doesn’t like, his instinct is to do something about it. Sitting in a room talking about how the problem makes him feel seems completely pointless when he could be spending that time actually fixing the fucking problem.

I stopped laughing, not because I was offended, but because I have said this. I have made essentially that exact argument to my wife multiple times. I did not learn it from Rick Sanchez. I had never seen the episode.

This motherfucker stole my material.

At that point I could no longer pretend we simply shared a few personality traits. Somewhere in a writers’ room years ago, people sat down and independently constructed an animated alcoholic super-scientist using the same operating system I have been running for decades.

I have questions for Adult Swim. Let’s start with: have you met my lawyers?

Everything Can Be Engineered Away

Here is the worst part, I still think Rick is right!

If there is a problem, fix the problem. If something isn’t working, make it work. If the system is broken, change the system. If there is an obstacle, go around it, over it, under it or straight through the bastard. Everything can be engineered away.

Everything.

That statement puts me firmly in Rick Sanchez territory, which is unfortunate because I was hoping for Tony Stark. At least Stark is rich.

Rick looks at life like one enormous engineering problem. There is always another move, another solution, another way to change the circumstances. The idea of simply accepting a problem because that is how things are doesn’t seem to enter the equation. That makes perfect sense to me.

Which is becoming a recurring problem.

The similarity isn’t even limited to how Rick handles actual problems. It’s the absolute certainty that somewhere, somehow, there is an answer and it is probably going to become obvious the second everyone else stops making the situation worse.

I’m sure this is an incredibly healthy worldview, just don't ask a therapist.

I Don’t Give a Shit About Anything

Then there is probably the biggest one. Rick constantly acts like he doesn’t give a shit about anything. People. Rules. Society. Consequences. Feelings. Whatever. Nothing matters. Who cares? Fuck it. I tell people all the time that I don’t give a shit. The problem is that I give a shit about fucking everything.

So does Rick.

He will spend half an episode explaining why something doesn’t matter and then risk his life because that completely meaningless thing suddenly matters quite a bit. He treats Morty like an inconvenience while repeatedly putting himself through hell for him. He acts annoyed by his family while constantly inserting himself into whatever disaster they are currently dealing with.

The man’s entire personality is essentially one long declaration of “I don’t care” delivered while demonstrating that he very clearly does. And every time he does it, I’m sitting on the couch thinking, Well, shit. I’m not sure what is worse: realizing I do the same thing or realizing I completely understand why he does it.

Probably both.

Television Has Been Watching Me

This is also not the first time television has gotten uncomfortably close to my life.

I recently wrote about Ed and how parts of that show somehow lined up with actual events in my life years before I ever expected to be writing about them on a website. That was weird, but at least Ed Stevens was a fundamentally decent guy who owned a bowling alley. That is a perfectly respectable television character to accidentally resemble.

Rick Sanchez is not.

There is a substantial difference between realizing your life has a few strange similarities to an NBC dramedy and realizing your personality has been animated by Adult Swim.

One is a coincidence.

The other feels like identity theft.

This Was Supposed to Be Entertainment

Television needs rules for this.

You should be able to watch Superman and think it would be cool to fly. You should be able to watch Batman and briefly convince yourself that unresolved childhood trauma might be worth it if you also got the Batmobile. You should be able to watch Optimus Prime and think being honorable, courageous and capable of turning into a semi seems like a pretty good deal.

You should not be watching television and have the television suddenly turn around and say:

SURPRISE, ASSHOLE. YOU’RE THIS GUY.

Yet somehow that is exactly what happened.

I started watching Rick and Morty expecting a funny cartoon about a lunatic scientist dragging his grandson through increasingly insane adventures. Instead, I got sarcasm, impatience, irritation, absolute confidence that every problem can be solved, complete disbelief that everyone else is making the solution more difficult than it needs to be and a man insisting he doesn’t care while obviously caring about damn near everything.

Then Pickle Rick showed up and removed any remaining reasonable doubt. I didn’t choose Rick Sanchez as the fictional character who most resembles me. Nobody would choose Rick Sanchez. If I had been given options, I would have gone with Batman. Wolverine. Han Solo. Hell, I’d take Skeletor. At least Skeletor gets a giant purple cat and an awesome castle.

Instead, my results came back:

Congratulations! You’re Rick Sanchez.

There has clearly been some kind of clerical error. I would like to appeal. Unfortunately, I have a terrible feeling the appeals process probably involves therapy.

So fuck that.