A Conservative Conservationist?

I love nature.  When I was at home for a month a few years ago after my knee surgery, and again a year later with my second knee, I often found myself watching Animal Planet during the day instead of endless daytime game shows, talk shows, and soap operas.  If I give myself half a chance, I tend to gravitate towards shows about animals.  It’s an interest, and perhaps it could have been a possible pursuit if given half a push – and if it wasn’t for my horrible allergies!

     I admire guys like Jarod Miller, Jeff Corwin, and Steve Irwin.  These are young, energetic, and yes, entertaining guys who have devoted their lives to the preservation of nature and animals in their natural habitats.  They have a respect for nature that is infectious.

    One Sunday, years after Steve Irwin died and Jeff Corwin seemed to disappear, I happened across this nature show on channel 5 called Animal Exploration with Jarod Miller, a show geared towards kids in which another young and impassioned guy visits all kinds of zoos, parks, and nature conservatories to learn all about the animal kingdom.  The excitement these guys feel for animals kind of rubs off, and like them, I was always the type that would much rather shoot them with a camera instead of a gun.  I understand that there is sometimes a need for hunters, for whatever reason, but it’s just not me.  Instead, I identified with the Tom Hanks character of former medical student and standup comedian Steven Gold in the movie Punchline (1988), who has the following meltdown during one of his routines on the night his father and brother, a couple of hunters, happen to be in the audience:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgkVb8XUu28

     That speech from that movie has always stuck with me, because I have felt that too.  I don’t like to see things suffer either.  I was the kid who, on fishing trips, had a moral dilemma because I didn’t want to cause an earthworm to suffer and wriggle while I stuck it on the hook.  I don’t have quite the same dilemma anymore – I will kill ants and spiders, of course – but this world will do that to you.  While other kids were inflicting cruelty on insects, I was always the one to feel their suffering if they lingered in pain.

     I don’t believe in death.  I don’t like it.  I try to avoid it wherever I can.  I think a lot of modern hunters actually enjoy it!  It’s not because they have to.  It’s because they want to.

     In the back of my mind, I kind of wonder if people like the famous conservationists have a similar problem with suburban hunters.  Listen to me, I’m starting to sound like a bleeding heart liberal, who values the life of an animal over that of a human being!

     But you can’t fault me for not want anything to suffer.  Call me an enigma.  I am an entrenched conservative Christian who just happens to love nature to a point of not wanting to see anything suffer.  My politics are thoroughly right wing right down the line, for the most part, but in this one area in particular, me and the conservative right tend to part ways.  The death of animals at the hands of modern day hunters breaks my heart.  I’m not ashamed to say that I have a tender heart, or that I used to have a much more tender heart than I do even now, now that I’ve been desensitized to it all somewhat.  Please don’t tell me that that’s a bad thing.  I have a passion for life – all life – and it’s something I feel I share with these conservationists and ecologists much more than with weekend hunters.  I won’t apologize for that.  In fact, in some ways, I wish I was even more like that.  I have a great respect for guys like Corwin and Irwin and Miller.  Dare I even say it?  The world would be a much better place if people everywhere had the love and passion for nature that these guys have, and there’s nothing wrong with it – as long as we don’t go overboard and place animals above man in importance.  We need to treat nature with the respect God must have for it as its creator.  Man is God’s special creation, but nature is His creation too, and as such, I think it deserves more reverence than we, particularly over on the conservative right, usually give it. 

A-Huntin' We Will NOT Go!

My brother Terry needed to attend a hunting class since he’s going hunting with his father-in-law, and I took it with him because he didn’t want to take it alone.  He and I haven’t gotten along nearly as well lately as we did during the weekend we took that class!

     He picked me up very early on both Saturday and Sunday, Saturday so that we could have breakfast together, which we did at the Colorado Café, and Sunday so we could get to the class early and get our shooting on the range out of the way.  I seem to be a natural shot, and came very close to the bullseye on my target several times, but Terry wasn’t as good.  It took me longer on the range than everybody else though because I was being way too dainty.  After you shoot, you’re supposed to load another shot by pulling back on the action.  The used shell would flip out so you could load the next one.  Well, apparently, I wasn’t pulling back on the action hard enough, so after shooting, the used shell would still be in the chamber, and I was spending time picking it out with my fingers.  Terry was joking that I would raise my hand and ask the instructor for tweezers!  “Um, Sir…could I possibly have a pair of tweezers?  You see, there’s a used shell in here, and it simply won’t come out!”

     The guy who taught the class was a tough old bird who had his first name legally changed to "Papa Bear".  He reminded me somewhat of the character of Darnell from the movie Christine.  He seemed jovial, even a little goofy, but was also very blunt, outspoken, loud, angry, and very passionate when it comes to hunters and their image in the eyes of the public, and has no sympathy for idiotic hunters who help to perpetuate that negative stereotype.

     And the stories!  For every major point he taught, there was always a long story about somebody that was hurt through stupidity with either firearms or not being prepared.  It was a very interesting class, and I learned a lot in two days (I got 98 % on the test, and Terry got 96).  I now own a Hunter’s Safety Card that is good for life (and I’ll probably never use it!)

     But to take a life, any life!  I get squeamish and perhaps a bit revulsed and melancholy even squashing a bug, especially if it’s a big bug!  I don’t think I could kill an animal, unless I had to for survival, and even then, I’m not sure.  And to clean a slaughtered animal!  Neither Terry nor I could do that!  It would be like Frasier and Niles going hunting!  As it was, this hunting class, and Terry and I in this hunting class, would have made for a hilarious episode of Frasier!

     I learned a lot of neat McGiver tricks though!  I can now build a portable heater out of a coffee can, a roll of toilet paper, rubbing alcohol, 2 AA batteries, and some quadruple ot steel wool!  Terry’s afraid he’s going to get shot when he goes elk hunting.  I told him to be careful when picking branches to make a fire, and not to carry two big branches, one in each hand with his arms up.  Despite how he treats me sometimes, I still love him, and don’t want to see him dead!

 - From my journal, March 1999

Fairy Tales, Police Politics, and Sloppy Suburbia: Three Modern TV Shows I Like

If Raising Hope shows the “trailer trash” side of life, The Middle has its finger pressed firmly on what is so funny about sloppy, suburban existence.   The writers and actors are adept at mining comic gold from this all too normal Heck family and the problems they have, from frantic Mom Frankie to stoic Dad Mike, the oldest teen boy Axl who doesn’t apply himself, eats everything in sight, plays guitars and video games, and usually goes around shirtless, the daughter Sue who is a bundle of goofy, frenetic energy, and finally the youngest boy Brick, a weird yet charming little kid obsessed with books and with strange ways, and I wouldn't be surprised if the fictional family doesn't find out at some point that he has Asperser’s.

     But there is something else I like about this sitcom.  It dares to deal with issues that are somewhat controversial, such as Christianity and homosexuality (Sue’s first boyfriend is obviously gay, and she loves her hippie-ish youth group leader from church, both of them clichéd, but handled well).  Yet, like most other sitcoms that deal with such topics, they don’t just automatically come down on the side of the politically-correct liberal, but try to look at it from all sides, including the conservative side, and wind up being more thought provoking because of it.  On one recent episode, when the youngest boy Brick has questions about the Bible, Sue has her youth group leader speak to him a couple of times, and she is very upset when her brother isn’t just “fixed”.   Although the youth pastor character is still a cliché, he correctly tells Sue that he’s done what he can, but it is ultimately up to Brick as to whether or not he becomes a believer.  Compare that with most other sitcoms where Christians are usually portrayed as overbearing and shrill, goody-two-shoe rabble-rousers who are, unlike the enlightened regulars, completely clueless about modern life. 

image from http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20459145,00.html

On The Closer, I'm behind on my DVR, but so far, Brenda and the team have to be so careful now, because somebody has it in for them!  When investigating a crime scene, they now have to be so cautious not to do or say the wrong thing, lest they add another lawsuit to the pile instigated by that slimy and villainous attorney Peter Goldman, well played by Curtis Armstrong.  So now they have to fill in logs down to the minutest details, and it appears to be sucking the life right out of them, such as in Captain Sharon Raydor (Mary McDonnell), who is so unhappy having to micro-manage the team now that she desperately wants a transfer!

     I know what that’s like, though I didn't heed the warning signs to be extra careful and diligent.  But really, who wants to have to work like that anyway, having to tippy-toe around and fill out intricate logs for fear of unfair repercussions?  For whatever reason, this attorney wants to drag Brenda down, and in the finale to last season, when he started bringing up case upon case upon case and calling into question all of her actions and decisions, Kyra Sedgwick did so well playing the character as putting on a brave face, with a professional mask, like she has been able to do with so many criminals, yet you can see the break in that mask in her eyes, and so can that lawyer, and the camera pulled down to her hands, which were shaking.  I’ve been there!  When somebody wants you gone, they can find a reason.  I’m sure I could have been extra careful with the person I once considered a friend, if I had wanted to.  But this is the way the world works, and that old job of mine simply wasn't worth it.

     A show like The Closer ties in with real life, and keeps it fresh and exciting.  Of all the police procedurals we watch, including Castle, The Mentalist, Unforgettable, NCIS, and Blue Bloods, The Closer is actually the only one I would consider buying as a series because the characters and plots are just so well written and understandable.  I like all these police shows, but they can often get rather mundane, and I absolutely love the characters on NCIS, but I usually don’t quite understand the plots and the Tom Clancy-like cases the team is assigned to investigate.  But The Closer doesn’t ever seem to be mundane, and I can follow it.  I don’t mind all the police politics like I do with some of these other shows.  There are some really good police procedurals these days, and I’d include the Law & Order’s and CSI’s on that list as well, and The Closer stands among them as one of the best.

image from http://sosaloha.blogspot.com/2011/12/aloha-to-mary-gramlich-and-closer.html

I don’t know what it is, but fairy tales and fantasy seem to be all the rage these days.  There are two new Snow White movies being released soon (Mirror, Mirror with Julia Roberts and the darker Snow White and the Huntsman with Charlize Theron), and there's Ever After, Enchanted, Red Riding Hood, Alice in Wonderland, the Shrek movies and Puss in Boots, The Brothers Grimm, lighter, modern day twists on the theme, such as Sydney White, and even shows like Grimm and Supernatural have entertained allusions to those old fairy tales.  I guess a show like Once Upon a Time was therefore inevitable, and owes as much to films like Enchanted, Red Riding Hood, and Shrek as it does to the tales of the Grimm Brothers and Walt Disney’s classic retelling of other books and stories by the likes of JM Barrie, Lewis Carroll and Carlo Collodi.

     What an interesting twist on this idea!  It’s basically the plot of Enchanted, though the fairy tale world these characters come from is much darker than the cartoon world of that film, and the characters, not knowing where they come from and of their true existence, are quite different from Amy Adams’ and James Marsden’s more enchanted take on the premise.

     The focus here, so far, is not so much on Snow White and Prince Charming, or their modern day equivalents of elementary school teacher Mary Margaret Blanchard and reawakened coma patient David Nolan as it is upon the rivalry between Jennifer Morrison’s Emma Swan and Lana Parrilla’s manipulative Mayor Regina Mills, and with the Mayor’s “son” Henry (who is actually Emma’s son) caught in the crossfire.  The show usually goes back and forth between these characters’ fairy tale pasts and their present existence in the town of Storybrooke.  Not even the Evil Queen who used this spell on them all can remember her own past, yet the true nature of each of these characters can be seen in their modern day doppelgangers.

     I like this show because it opens up and expands the possibilities of what entertainment can mean.  Let’s just hope it isn't eventually watered down because the network can’t maintain the budget, like what has happened on The Walking Dead with the ousting of Frank Darabond over budget issues.  Sometimes it works, but business and art don’t always make for the most comfortable or lucrative of relationships.  Just ask anybody on the artistic side life, whether it be writers or actors, musicians, or even famous painters like Michelangelo and Van Gogh!  The two sides don’t always play together nicely. 

image from http://www.undertheradarmag.com/reviews/once_upon_a_time/

Self-Esteem and the Art of Reading People

It almost seems as if my life is a dream sometimes, not real, but synthetic.  I don’t know how to explain it other than I feel like I’m just going through the motions of existing, rather than actually existing, and I wonder, “Is this how insanity starts?”  I’m already eccentric!

     I’m falling into that same old trap of low self-esteem and paranoia, but I have been around long enough to have seen my fears about what people really think of me come to horrifying light.  And I already know I shouldn't live to try to please others and make them like me; in fact, I probably don’t really, or I would have changed by now.  But when someone I love reveals that he is embarrassed of me sometimes, it hurts.

     Reading people successfully is difficult and can be either rewarding or painful, because sometimes you read them correctly, and sometimes you don’t.  As skilled as you might be in perceiving truth or deception in another person, you can still never be sure about that person and what they are thinking, leaving our relationships open to all kinds of faulty assumptions that aren't always accurate, and may not actually be what they really think, say, or do.

     It may hurt me somewhat to be an “outsider,” but there is also happiness to be found here; yes, even here!  This is who I am.  If strange and eccentric are part of the package, then so be it!  I can be an adult, and I can be serious.  This very self-reflective entry is a perfect example.  But I’m also happy that there is still an innocent child within me.  This is the type of quality that is a double-edged sword as an adult; it makes me an outsider, but it also makes me different and unique, and I should be content with the knowledge that I’m not like everybody else, and don’t run with the crowd.

            So why do I struggle with this issue so much?

     I don’t feel like I really need an awful lot of humility since I already have a low self-esteem, and I usually need all the compliments I can possibly get, even if it gives me a swelled head from time to time.  For instance, my older brother said he was “worried” over the fact that I had read The Biology of Star Trek, and he didn't want their liberally slanted world view to infect me.  To prove to him that I still had a good perspective on things, and was actually discerning towards my entertainments, I read to him my passage from this very journal in which I describe how I feel about the book and its author and my comparisons between Evolution and Creation using the holographic Doctor from Voyager.  He said he didn't want to give me a swelled head or anything, but that my writing was as intelligent as anything else he had ever heard or read.  I am so flattered, yet I also know that the intellectual elite would probably think nothing of my writing and philosophy.  Am I wrong to think the common man would not understand it?  That’s one reason why Star Trek is mostly enjoyed by Science Fiction geeks; people, in general, don’t understand it the way I or other trekkers do, nor do they want to.  And let’s face it:  A lot of trekkers are geeks, even by MY standards!

From my journal, March, 1999

Made-For-TV Christmas movies, the Morgans, and Spiders (lots and lots of spiders!)

Every month in my journal, I rate the movies I saw and pick a few favorites and a few stinkers.  This is from last month, December of 2011:

Movie of the Month: The Christmas Cottage

I was expecting this made-for-TV Christmas movie to basically be like all the others, with stock writing, flat characters, forced cutesiness, and a wholesome but stale message about love (see my section on Stinker of the Month below).

            However, for this film, I was incorrect in that assessment, for the most part.  Don’t get me wrong though; this movie did have some flat, unbelievable characters and writing, strained charm, and an obvious message about love and family.  Not that those are bad things to have in a movie, but if this sort of thing isn’t handled just right, it can be rather implausible and garish!  And truthfully, about a half hour in, I was getting worried when Aaron Ashmore was learning to be an electrician from Richard Moll (the big guy who played Bull in Night Court) and they started having a Christmas display war with the people across the street, and then Ashmore and Jared Padelecki’s dad, played by Richard Burgi, showed up as a cardboard thin character, a drunk with grand schemes that never paid off, and Padelecki (of Supernatural fame, though never as good as Jensen Ackles), playing a painter named Tom, started painting a mural of all the townspeople, but looked at it as beneath his talents, and Marcia Gay Harden was actually a welcome addition as his struggling mother, and there were cameos galore from the likes of Chris Elliot, Charlotte Rae, Ed Asner, and Nancy Robertson who we enjoyed as Wanda on the Canadian sitcom Corner Gas. None of this kept this movie from being just another forgettable Christmas movie among the hundreds of made-for-TV Christmas flicks that have been released over the years.  Yet there are three elements that made this rise above the normal holiday dreck:  Given some of the plot elements, such as the holiday decorations war, it managed to eventually focus on the correct elements and overcome such other loud and obnoxious holiday films as Christmas with the Kranks and Deck the Halls; in the end, I realized this was the story of Thomas Kinkade, the famed Christian “Painter of Light,” and that revelation was handled just perfectly for me; and most importantly, Peter O’Toole added real weight to this film as Glen, Thomas Kinkade’s mentor who lived close by and was slowly losing his ability to paint, or even think.  He added a real gravitas to this movie and it managed to make me appreciate Peter O’Toole as an actor like I never had before.  The part was maybe just a throwaway part like most of the other characters in this movie, but he did such a wonderful job with it, it lent not only his character a substantial veracity, but it managed to give the other characters and the entire proceedings an authenticity as well that otherwise would have been sorely missing.

Runner Up:  Did You Hear About the Morgans?

And here, I have to apologize.  I saw the  old black and white version of Julius Caesar this month, and starring Marlon Brando, James Mason, and John Gielgud, and I also saw Stephen King’s Bag of Bones, which, like The Christmas Cottage, took a while to find its direction but by the end, redeemed itself as a very involving ghost story about a murdered, black soul singer and her murdered little girl reaching out from beyond the grave to haunt and condemn the grown children of her murderers to commit the same horrible atrocities their fathers had committed, and to do it upon their own children!  With films of this caliber or weighty, thematic material, why did I pick Did You Hear About the Morgans? as my choice for second favorite movie of the month?  Well, these kinds of lightweight films deserve a bit of recognition too!  It reminds me of the lyrics to that Alan Jackson song, “Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning”:  “Did you turn off that violent old movie you’re watchin’ / And turn on I Love Lucy reruns.”  It’s why light comedies never win Oscars (nor should they probably), but in a serious world, we sometimes need these light, frothy, and fun diversions, and Did You Hear About the Morgans? is, if nothing else, light, frothy, and fun.  Julius Caesar was terrific, with great performances, and, of course, was well written by Shakespeare, but it was also full of violence, as all of Shakespeare’s tragedies were, and Bag of Bones had some very shocking and disturbing scenes given its subject matter, yet, to its credit,  Did You Hear About the Morgans? had little of this seriousness (aside from the plot contrivance that got the feuding husband and wife characters into witness protection in the first place).  The movie was really nothing more than excuse to get two charming actors together in a fish out of water tale, and though I’m not a fan of Sarah Jessica Parker in Sex in the City, she, along with costar Hugh Grant, has lots of likable charm to spare here.  I also liked Sam Elliott, though I suspect Mary Steenburgen only took her part to make fun of Sarah Palin (and there was at least one obvious Sarah Palin joke made from it), but even so, I get the feeling even she found the heart of this character (and if not, it’s her loss).

Stinker of the Month:  Trading Christmas

 Debbie Macomber’s Trading Christmas, new to the Hallmark Channel this year, like all these kinds of Christmas Movies for the Hallmark Channel (or ABC Family, etc.) wasn’t a BAD movie really, and I actually like the actors who starred in it, including Faith Ford, Tom Cavanaugh (the recent go-to guy for made-for-TV Christmas movies these days), Gil Bellows, and Gabrielle Miller, who we enjoyed as Lacy on the Canadian sitcom Corner Gas (those Corner Gas people seem to be popping up all over the place!), and looking back on it, it was actually quite charming.  So even though it wasn’t necessarily BAD, there was one thing it was, and that was… forgettable!  Until I googled “Debbie Macomber’s Trading Christmas,” I barely remembered what it was about or who was in it, and that was less than a month after seeing it.  That means this movie is quite different than the Christmas movie I named as movie of the month, The Christmas Cottage.  There was eventually nothing real here, no “based on a true story” element or exquisite performance by Peter O’Toole, and though I suppose the same thing could be said of Did You Hear About the Morgans?, I thought the writing of that movie was fresher and less forgettable, and Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant really know how to play these kinds of likable characters and make them memorable.  This one was simply cute but forgettable.

Runner Up:  Kingdom of the Spiders

My gosh, I did NOT want to put this movie on the stinkers list, yet of all the movies I saw this month, this was still one of the worst, I’m afraid.  The acting was pretty bad, from everyone, least of all Shatner, the writing and the dialogue are dreadful but appropriate for a B-movie about killer spiders, the production values are very low, it’s dated, and the plot doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.  Just how fast do these spiders breed?  Yet this movie still delivers in the one area it set out to deliver, and that was with the spiders.  There are tons of big, hairy tarantulas running all over everything and everyone in this movie.  They really didn’t slouch on giving the main audience for this sort of thing exactly what they wanted, which was simply dumping a whole bunch of big spiders all over everything.  So scenes such as the one where the little girl is swinging and the camera pulls down to reveal the grass covered in spiders, or the pilot using DDT to kill the spiders but then being covered in spiders in the cockpit and screaming like a little girl and crashing the plane, or scenes of the rampage on the town, or crawling through the air vents as the small band of survivors take refuge, coming in under the door, dropping down the fireplace, crawling all over William Shatner as he tries to make it up the stairs to safety, and that ending, regardless of the fact that it’s so unbelievable; these are all great scenes that manage to do what so many other B-movies eventually fail to do, and that is to really deliver the goods.  If you’re going to have a movie called Kingdom of the Spiders, the best thing you can do, even on a shoestring budget, is to give the audience a bunch of big, scary spiders, and that is the one thing these filmmakers managed to do here!  That’s why I didn’t like putting this on my stinkers list, yet this was still not the best of films really.  Call it a guilty pleasure at best, especially if spiders give you the heebie-jeebies!   

Karaoke and Diabetes

I'm not sure how I'll work this blog yet.  Going back over my journals, there is a lot I've written that other people might like to see or read, even the old, old stuff.  A co-worker of mine was so interested, she read stuff over a decade old, and loved it!

I think what I'll do is to pick something old in the middle of the week to post, something I really liked from my old journals, and work my way through them, and then to pick something a little more fresh and relevant to post on the weekends.


And so, what I'll post right now is this old entry from January of 1999, back when I first started writing these journals into my computer (and making them easy to just copy and paste).  Of course, I don't want to share names, at least not yet, so I've changed family names to designations, like "brother" and "nephew".  In this month, I talked about my love of singing, even though others don't seem to want to hear it (and have collective amnesia when I point out the times they liked it, such as in this entry, which I can guarantee my family would not remember all these years later), and this was also the month my nephew was first diagnosed with diabetes, and I wrote about how I felt about it:

In elementary school, the music teacher wouldn’t let me be in the choir because my voice was too low.  My mom thought it was such a rip-off, and I wasn’t too happy either!  My friend got in, even though he had a deep voice, because he could play drums.  I remember Mom feeling sorry for me when we would sit in the audience while all my classmates and friends were on stage, and I would mouth the words, and wish... I loved music, but everybody’s words and actions always told me that I was not a singer!

It didn’t get any better later when I joined choir in Junior High.  It was almost as if I was being forced to sing in keys that did not feel natural.  It was too exacting, and helped to reinforce the notion that I was not cut out for singing.  In later years, all of this taken together didn’t do much for my self-esteem, and actually had me believing I really do sound like a frog.

Then came Karaoke!  Of course, the first few times we did Karaoke, I was too scared to try.  I started with group songs, like our comical version of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”  The first I ever did on my own was “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley, figuring it would be a good one for me to start out on since Rick Astley’s voice is deeper, like mine.  I did pretty well, especially considering it was my first time.

However, I suffered a curse afterwards, not realizing that doing pretty good the first time made me overconfident and cocky.  Subsequent attempts to sing produced horrendous versions of “Lifestyles of the Not So Rich and Famous” by Tracy Byrd and “Mysterious Ways” by U2.  I sang both of them way too high, but it has taught me to try to sing in a lower key whenever possible.

Later “successes” included “You Might Think” by the Cars, “Losing My Religion” by REM, my brother and I doing a comical version of “Little Lies” by Fleetwood Mac (I can do a passable Stevie Nicks), or my over-the-top impersonation of John Travolta for the song “Sandy” from Grease, which made everybody laugh at various parties.  My usual crowd pleaser is “Love Shack” by the B-52’s, and this month I also sang “(Don’t You) Forget About Me” by Simple Minds, and everyone seemed to really love it.  I get done singing it, and everyone is looking at me with shocked expressions, like they’re stunned that I managed to sing well, and even the DJ tells me “You know… that was really good!”  When they offered Karaoke at church, my sister tells me I should do it, then turns to her friend Kelly, and says “He’s got a good voice.”  She probably wouldn’t ever remember saying that.

I know it seems silly to be that happy about singing Karaoke of all things, but with my background and self-esteem, I need all the pats on the back I can possibly get!  From an impossibly deep-voiced frog of a singer to someone who can actually do pretty good when given the right song sung in the lower registers is quite a leap!  It’s just something I like knowing I can do, so that whenever anybody tells me I can’t sing, I can at least think back to these few accolades and highlights.  I like knowing that some people actually enjoyed some of my singing... on occasion.  Dare I say that I thrive on the attention?

There was really, really sad news this month when my nephew was diagnosed with diabetes, and started daily testing and taking daily shots.  That poor little kid!  I hope he can deal with it okay, especially when the shock of it turns into the horrid realization that this is for real – and as long as he lives, unless they find a cure.  He’s going to have a tough time when the monotony of this sets in:  testing himself four times a day and taking a shot of insulin twice a day for the rest of his entire life!  I worry about how he’s going to feel some day when he has to get up and face four tests and two shots yet again, and no one seems to care or pay attention, because now it’s just normal, and they’ve got their own problems.  His diabetes will be old news in just a few short years, and we’ll all get on with life and new joys and tragedies, while my poor nephew will still have to suffer through four tests and two shots every day!  It makes me very sad to think about it!

Reel Heroes: Michael Sullivan, from the "Star Trek: Voyager" episodes “Fair Haven” and “Spirit Folk”, played by Fintan McKeown

Every month in my journal, I pick somebody I like or admire in some way and write about what it is I like about this person or fictional character.  Most recently, after reviewing a few new Star Trek magazines that rated every show and movie (don't laugh; after all, my blog title is "Thoughts of a Sci Fi Christian Guy") it peaked my interest in these old shows again, and so when I was looking for someone I might admire, this character from two Voyager episodes caught my eye because of his simple, unfettered nature.  It's something that caught my attention, and so I wrote about it:

I don’t like politics.  I don’t like fighting.  More and more, I’m beginning to realize that if I really had my way, I would settle for the simple, peaceful life.
          I admire this guy because he is untroubled, even-tempered, and is reluctant to get mixed up in a brawl even when all the evidence seems to point that way.  All he wants is an unworried life, and the love of his girl Katey.  Of course a character like him is too good to be true!  Not only is he not real, he’s a fictional character within another fiction, a fiction within a fiction!  He’s an illusory holodeck character dreamed up by the imaginary television characters on the series Star Trek: Voyager.

            The crew of Voyager is far from home, and they may never see Earth again, but they have a holodeck at their command, a fantastical technological wonder that can recreate any place and any time that ever existed, or never existed.  So Tom Paris, of Irish decent himself, decides to use it to create a quaint Olde Irish Towne called “Fair Haven,” including a sensible, unfettered Irish bartender named Michael Sullivan.  Captain Janeway is captivated by him when she meets him, perhaps because he is so Olde World Charming and uncomplicated.  Coming from a world of technology in which she is responsible for hundreds of lives under her command 70 thousand light years from a home they may never see again, this fictional character, created using the most sophisticated technology, actually represents a simpler, friendlier, easier kind of life, and that’s appealing to Janeway… and, after some reflection, it’s appealing to me too.  I’d like to be a man more like the undemanding and good-natured Michael Sullivan.

            Yet Janeway might overanalyze the situation.  Since he is a fictional character, his parameters are adjustable, and she makes him taller, scruffier, educated and well read, and single (“…and computer… delete the wife”), but keeps his gentle nature and personality intact; in short, she makes him into the kind of man she simply can’t resist, real or not.  Yet she calls it off before it goes too far.  After all, he is just a hologram.  He might appear to be real, with flesh and blood just like her, but he is, in fact, just a computer program with projected light and force fields.  He doesn’t even know what he really is.  Yet she has a talk with Voyager’s doctor, who is a hologram himself, able to walk around with the crew with the help of a 29^th century device called a “holo-emitter”, and with knowledge of who and what he is, and he explains to Captain Janeway that as the captain, she cannot fraternize with the crew, leaving her little options for any romantic relationships.  She is in a unique situation, unlike what most other Starfleet officers have ever had to deal with, and so she decides to keep seeing Michael, even though she knows he’s not real.  At least it’s somebody.

            Then something strange happens.  With this special program running almost all the time for various members of the crew, it starts to experience technical problems. Some of the characters vanish, and when the Voyager crew operate the holodeck and give the computer commands, the fictional characters, being part of the program, are not supposed to notice such things or remember it all… but they do, and they start to think that perhaps these strange visitors are enchanted fairies, witches, and wizards.  When Tom and Harry call up Michael Sullivan’s program in a holodeck work station, he is terrified, for he is still conscious at this point, though he plays along with Tom and Harry as if he doesn’t know a thing.  Later, when they capture the Doctor, Michael uses the Doctor’s 29^th century holo-emitter to visit Janeway on the bridge of her ship.  Yet even at this point, his character is effortless and agreeable.  His world as he knows it has just come crashing down around him, and yet he keeps his head.  Janeway never tells him the whole truth, but introduces him to concepts of science fiction much like Jules Verne and tells a bit of a lie, saying they are all travelers from the future, which, in a sense, and from his perspective, they are.  That would be easier for him and the residents of Fair Haven to take than to tell them that they aren’t even real, and Michael and the residents of this fictional town accept this, and the crew.

            Ah, if only real life were more like that fictional town, and more real men were like Michael Sullivan.  The world would be a better place.  Yes, that is more the life I want, and the man I want to be.  I want to live in a place where everyone knows everyone else, and everyone is friendly, and technology is kept to a minimum.  It’s one reason I like the new show Heart of Dixie.  Michael Sullivan is the type of creation who owes his very existence to technology, and the very town he inhabits is created from this same technology, and yet he doesn’t know it, and is content to live a simple life, with simple love, a job he fancies, a few good books, and his charming Katey.

            The same kind of thing would make me just as happy and content.

A Short and Sweet Second Introduction

I don't rightly know what I may share in this blog (if anybody ever reads it, no less!), but I don't want to be sharing personal stuff about what's going on in the family.  I started this blog because I like to write, and I've been writing in a journal for decades, and have this huge backlog of writing.  I'm less likely to share the more personal stuff, and more likely to share stuff I've written that could be considered commentary, like essays on God, or the news, or movie and TV show reviews, or the people I admire and want to be like, whether or not they are real people or fictional characters.  I'm also less likely to type stuff on the spur of the moment in here, like I'm doing right now, because that kind of stuff is what I usually save for my journal anyway.  This platform is more an opportunity to put some of my journal musings in a blog, and so I'm much more likely to simply copy and past journal entries, and see if anyone notices.  I don't really expect it, and would be rather surprised if I start to receive comments or start to notice that more than a handful of people take the time to read what I might have to say, whether it's old or new.

My First Post

Being that I'm a novice, I will keep my first blog posting rather simple.  I'm also not sure how personal I should get, and will probably be rather cryptic about family and names and such, at least until I get the hang of this.

As I wrote in my introduction, I was embarrassed recently when someone asked me what my hobbies are and I admitted I like to write, and considered myself a writer (though an unpublished writer), and have been writing in a journal for years, but that I don't blog.  He seemed shocked that I had been keeping a journal all these years, but didn't blog.

Part of the problem has been the things one writes in a private journal they may not want others to see.  Even among the very few things from my journal I've posted on my Facebook page, I have occasionally hurt the feelings of some family members, so I shall have to be very careful what I chose to include or post from my journals.  This may or may not include some political ideas, but keeping in mind that, although I am squarely in the conservative Christian camp, I am not a politician or a political pundit, and would not do well exposing myself to such heated discussions like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and those on the other side of the coin like Bill Maher, Joy Behar, Janeane Garofalo all seem to thrive on.  I agree with those on the political right, like some of these blogs are sure to confirm (especially if I share some of the stuff I've written over the last twenty years), but I'd rather be known for my easy going personality and goofy sense of humor.

I expect this blog to be somewhat like my journal has been over the last few decades, and hopefully will continue to be.  It will be out here on the internet, and I will be selective in what I decide to say and any journal entries I may decide to share, old or new, but I expect I will talk about a lot of different things, just as I do in my journal, whether it's about a person I admire, I book I'm reading, movies and TV shows I watched and enjoyed, or absolutely hated, my walk with God, what's going on in the news, what's going on a work (a whole subject in itself these days, if I ever decide to share that part of my life) and maybe, just maybe, thoughts on the family, as long as they are not too personal.

For the past ten years, I've been going back over my journal entries from the entire time I've been writing these, and so, along with all my essays and trips down memory lane, I've collected sort of a "Greatest Hits" of some of my writing, and so, along with new blog posts, I'll probably eventually share some of this as well.  Like writing in my journal, this may take a bit of time for me to find a rhythm.

I don't expect to be followed.

We'll see.