Pat Tillman Does Not Belong in the NFL Hall of Fame

It's been twelve years now since ol' number 42 (40) died.  This past Friday, on the anniversary (funny word for marking the passage of time for a death, isn't it?) of Pat Tillman's passing,  NFL commentator Chris Collinsworth tweeted the following:

 "If it were my decision Pat Tillman would have been a 1st ballot Hall Of Famer."

It was a gracious thing to say, a gesture of remembrance and respect.

Peter King: It's my football, and
don't you forget it.

Peter King, the venerable columnist for Sports Illustrated, responded to the tweet by saying,

 "Not mine."

He then went on, apparently forgetting that brevity is the soul of wit, (not to mention the soul of Twitter):

"IMO: Silly to confuse patriotism with athletic greatness. Some will disagree with me. That’s fine. It’s a free country."

Predictably, his open invitation to disagree with him ignited a Twitter brush fire that he then spent the remainder of the day trying to fight, basically by saying the same thing over and over:

"Football players should be judged for the Hall of Fame based on their football credentials. Nothing else."

"My feelings about this, as a voter for the Hall, is players should be judged for football only. Nothing else."

Repaying the Debt #4: David Letterman

So tomorrow is David Letterman’s last show. It’s a remarkable thing. Some call it the end of an era. For me, the era of which Dave was part has been over for awhile now. But then again, I don’t even feel like I’m a part of the era in which I find myself.

I first met Dave sometime in 1984. I was fifteen or so, and I had recently talked my parents into letting me have a TV in my room under the pretext that I needed one for my TI-994A (if you don’t know what that is, google it). The TV was a little 13” black and white job. Offbrand, of course. Paid for it with my paper route money, or maybe I had started working at Lionel Playworld by then. The thing was, I was only supposed to use the TV as a monitor. And for the most part, I abided by my parents’ wishes. But late one night, I dared to turn it on. In the course of flipping through the six or seven available channels, I suddenly found myself confronted by the image of a pudgy, bespectacled man. His odd, distorted face completely filled the screen. I don’t remember what he was doing, or why he was so close to the camera. It didn’t matter. All I knew was that on my television was a man who looked like a Gary Larson cartoon come to life. It’s all I needed to see. I was hooked.

Come Dancing

Most days, I listen to Van Halen, Foo Fighters, or Green Day to help me through my “Thirty Minutes of Hell” workout, you know, something high energy and especially loud, which helps drown out the sounds of me panting and the occasional groan. Today, though, their brand of accompaniment doesn’t strike me right, and so I go with something else: The Kinks’ Live - The Road. As the title suggests, it is a mostly live album, a collection of songs recorded in concert by that most English of English bands circa 1987.

It seems an unlikely choice, I know, but it works surprisingly well. The Kinks happen to be my all-time favorite band, and they flat out know how to rock in concert. I crank through the first three songs, and before I know it, I’ve already whittled twelve minutes off today’s timed descent into suffering. The fourth song begins. It’s “Come Dancing.”

If you were around in the eighties, you might remember “Come Dancing.” It was the last big hit The Kinks ever had. It’s a bright, breezy song with a wistful, melancholy message, the kind that Ray Davies is so adept at writing. It’s the kind of song that seems crafted specifically to be remembered fondly. It’s the kind of song that you could easily imagine being sung in an English pub during the wee hours of the morning a hundred and fifty years from now.

Note to Self...

It is said that we are made in the image and likeness of God.

It is also said that God is Love.

What else, then, do you need to know?

The answers to your endless questions exist in that one simple truth.

You are not the fear that occupies you

You are not the doubt that undoes you

You are not the selfish lies you speak

Nor the selfish acts you do

You are not the envy that you feel

You are not the shame of your failings

Nor the pride of your victories

So, you’ve written a book…

What does it mean to have written a book?

That’s the question I’m asking myself now, a week after finishing the first draft manuscript of my first novel.  I’m wondering what is it that I’ve done.

I’m supposed to feel really good, and I did, for nearly the entire day.

But that euphoria didn’t last, and coming down was like a caffeine crash.  It was, in fact, a caffeine crash, because immediately after finishing the book I swore off coffee and the like, at least for a month.  By the next day I was in a completely explicable funk, tired and cranky.  I was mentally exhausted, having written the last six chapters in the last two weeks of the year.  Around, under, over and through the holidays.  When I complained of this to Elizabeth, she told me I was just tired and needed to rest. 

But I knew there was more to it than that.  I had a new question to answer, and no suspects.

What does it mean to have written a book?

For the next week, I did no writing at all, and stayed away from the computer as much as possible.  I felt lost.  Withdrawal symptoms.  Following Stephen King’s advice, I decided to put aside the manuscript for a month, use the time to gain some distance and some clarity.  I started thinking about the next book, and also about the future role and function of thunderstrokes.  But the question loomed over me the entire time, still hangs over me, and so now I’m trying to sort it out, the only way I seem to be able to sort things out anymore, in writing. 

What does it mean to have written a book?

Where do you even start to answer that question?  Elizabeth tells me it’s a great accomplishment.  But in my mind, the answer comes back quick:  it’s only a first draft of a manuscript.  One massive revision is needed just to make coherent and readable enough to critique, and then at least another to make it publishable.  And that’s only if I perform magnificently.  From where I stand, it doesn’t feel like a book yet.

The sober, rational side of me looks at how I’ve spent my time and wonders what the hell I was ever thinking.  Two-and-a-half years spent finding my voice, finding a way forward, and then dreaming up this crazy story about a kid who has to go to a strange land and accomplish the Twelve Labors of Hercules, and then turning that dream into a rickety reality, held together, it mostly seems, with equal parts duct tape and pixie dust. Two-and-a-half years of lost income and retirement savings, of trying to dress up a dream in work-clothes, of feeling like a bystander while Elizabeth bears the entire financial load for our family, of struggling with fears and doubts and uncertainties about myself as a writer in an endless procession of constantly changing mutations, each one as ferocious and as deadly as any monster Hercules ever faced, or will. 

I know that sounds dramatic, but I believe it.  The harshest battles most of us will ever face is with ourselves.  Our inner monsters cannot be seen, and for that we should be grateful.  I sincerely believe that if they were given a tangible form, they would fill us with such terror and paralyzing fear it would put Hollywood’s horror-meisters and their paltry creations to shame.

So that, at least, is something. I have learned that I can live with the doubts and uncertainties, and find my way through.

Are you Serious? Real Genius and me.

Sometimes, a movie just happens to come along at the right time in a person’s life.  It may not be a great movie per se, one that is received with critical acclaim or crowned by popular sovereignty.  It just happens to be the right movie for you, seen at the right time in your life for its message to hit you where you live, and change you in some perhaps small, yet substantial way.

Films like this are somehow able to tell you things about yourself that your family and friends don’t see, or can’t see, or don’t want to say, or can’t say.  These films help you recognize or realize something that you yourself may have been blind to, or unwilling to acknowledge before. 

I think that ability art has to communicate with our secret selves is one of its great functions, and the beauty of it is that it doesn’t have to be great art to have a great impact on the right person.  For a movie, maybe it’s just one in every showing, or every other showing, or every ten showings.  But for the person who is impacted, what difference does that make?

We tend to embrace the movies that help us see things in a different way, help us change and grow.  We invite these special films in amongst the collected assortment of relics that constitute our most private selves, and that’s where they tend to abide.  They become our friends.  We still laugh at all their jokes, long after they have lost their spontaneity and their ability to surprise.  Their well-worn gags still delight us, not in spite of, but because of their familiarity.  We overlook their flaws, and overemphasize their strengths, at least in contrast to the opinions of others.  Just as with true friends, we cannot be purely objective when it comes to them.  We have too much history together, and there is too much emotional attachment.  It doesn’t matter that critics trashed it (none of them to your face, mind you), or that it didn’t get a great meta-score on RottenTomatoes.com, or that your other friends look at you like you’re completely nuts when you tell them you love this film.  None of that matters.  Just as with a true friend, you don’t expect the rest of the world to see what you see, as much as you might wish they did.  The fact is you are bonded, friends for life, blood brothers. 

Real Genius is that kind of film for me.

For a long time growing up, I didn’t take life seriously at all.  I didn’t work hard.  I saw the essential folly, or thought I did, of any one individual who tried to do anything more than laugh at the fundamental absurdity of life.  I was a natural existentialist, long before Camus and Sartre meant anything to me beyond being simply funny-sounding words.

Grapefruit Picking

This one's for my dad, whom I love very much...

Grapefruit Picking at my Father’s House (After a Rainy Day and a Cold Night)

Dressed for cold

bird bath ice-filmed

we gather the typical implements:

ladder, gloves, empty boxes and plastic buckets

and the long, red-handled pole

with the wire basket

and grasping prongs

bent inward like a shark’s

backward row of teeth

for plucking the fruit

and catching it

before it can fall

and split

and be

ruined.

The sky beyond the tree

Is evangelical blue

the fruit is the yellow

of crayon suns

the tree is deep green

and dark with shade

and rounded

like a cave-hole

its bowed form

embarrassed

by its own

profligate

abundance.

The Big Year

More elusive than a great spotted woodpecker.  Harder to locate than a pink-footed goose.  More difficult to spot than a snowy owl.   

Is anybody getting these references?

For the last fourteen months, I have been diligently trying to pin down and watch this movie The Big Year. 

And yes I get the irony.  It took me more than a year to see a film called The Big Year.  Har har.

The film is about an annual competition amongst bird watchers.  I like birds.  I don’t stalk them or anything, but I am often distracted by them when driving, and I often sit around and wonder what it would be like to be a bird, or wonder where I would fit in the social hierarchy at the bird feeder, that sort of thing.  I also like the three lead actors in the film:  Steve Martin, Jack Black, and Owen Wilson.   

I wanted to see The Big Year when it first came out, but I missed its theatrical release.  Why?  For one, there are few things in life I do quickly, unless it’s driving home after hearing that one of our bathroom pipes burst, as happened last weekend due to our recent cold snap.  For another, I am the father of two young children, and therefore a Very Busy Man.  This means that it typically takes me a month or more of advance planning to get to a movie these days, even one I’ve actually set my mind on seeing.  This is why I tend to see and write mostly about blockbusters; they’re the only ones that can handle my requisite lead time.  The Big Year was not a blockbuster.

Having missed my opportunity, I intended to take up in hot pursuit of the film once it was released on DVD.  However, unlike ultra-ambitious bird-spotting champion Kenny Bostick in the movie, I constrained myself to using only using the most ethical and legitimate methods, which for me includes Netflix’s streaming service, Redbox, and the local library – but not paying more than a buck fifty, or poaching the movie illegally online.  I struck out repeatedly with all three of my sources, and was just about ready to acknowledge that I would probably have to wait for it to pop up somewhere on regular cable. 

The problem with watching a movie you haven’t seen before on regular cable (excluding Turner Classic Movies, thank God), is that you just don’t know how it’s been edited.  They always throw that disclaimer up on the screen before the film: “Edited for content, and to run in the time allowed.”  With that kind of a free hand, almost anything could be cut in order to make sure they get the right number of Geico commercials in.  And since you have no way of knowing exactly what’s been taken out, you can’t help but feel like you’re watching an incomplete movie.  It doesn’t matter what they actually do with the film; they could show the whole thing in its entirety.  They could unbleep the curse words, and unblur the T&A, but I would still feel wrong about watching it, all because of that stupid disclaimer. 

Are we there yet? Thoughts on Jackson's The Hobbit

Not much has been said about The Lord of the Rings here on the blog, the movies or the books.  The last of the movies came out long before I started thunderstrokes, and although I’ve managed to work in a few scattered references here and there along the way, they are in no way sufficient to indicate the depth of admiration I have for them, the movies and the books.

I am an unabashed fan of Peter Jackson’s trilogy of movies.  Jackson did a better job of bringing Middle-earth to life, and of telling the story of Frodo and Sam, Aragorn, Gandalf and company, than I would have believed possible.  The narrative was clear and compelling, the characters bold and nuanced, and the tale’s majestic scale and scope effectively replicated.  Best of all, Jackson found a way to consistently give satisfactory visual form to Tolkien’s unbounded imaginings. 

Frodo as the book, and Sam as the movies.

Yet for me, the films cannot begin to rival the books.  At their best, Jackson’s movies play Sam to Tolkien’s Frodo, faithful and loyal followers to the hilt, but always subservient, always ancillary to the one charged with carrying out the original task.  As Frodo would be the first to tell you, though, that is something special in itself, and renders the films deserving of all the bountiful praise they have received.   

I think I can honestly say no book, or series of books, has had the cumulative emotional impact on me that The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) has.  Oh, all right, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn did, but in a different way, for a different reason, which I will hopefully find the words to explain someday.  I was fifteen, or sixteen, or maybe even seventeen when I discovered Tolkien’s magic place.  By the time I finished reading LOTR, I was so completely and hopelessly attached to the characters, so utterly rooted to their world, my mind could not accept the fact that I was now being deprived of their continuing company.  My forced departure from Middle-Earth was physically painful; I felt as though I were being punished unjustly for no crime greater than finishing the story.  I grieved the sudden absence of Frodo’s band of noble heroes from my life like the death of a good friend.  I was heartsick for weeks, suffering from intense feelings of separation and loneliness.  I have no doubt that I would have been labeled as clinically depressed during that time, had anyone stopped to check. 

Christmas Meteor

At our house, Christmas strikes like a meteor.  Not one of those sneak-up-on-you-out-of-left-field, wake-up-one-day-and-discover-a-meteor’s-coming-for-lunch kind; no, this is one of those you can always see coming, the kind whose progress you can follow as it tracks its way towards you.  But it looks so distant and so tiny for so long that it fails to register any alarm (in fact, I can already see next year’s meteor way out there in space, twinkling innocuously).  By the time you’re ready to start taking it seriously, of course, it’s too late.  That accelerating ball of rock is looming over you in the sky, trailing fire and smoke, dropping its advance shadow on your house, and you look up knowing there is nothing that can deflect its weighty mass from smashing into you. 

At our house, the moment of impact is the same every year.  6:00 p.m. on Christmas Eve.  We have a tradition of hosting a Christmas Eve party every year, a tradition that goes back to Elizabeth’s parents, both of whom have since passed away.  The party, however, lives on, in the same house (now our house) where it’s been happening since about 1982 or so. 

Anyway, six o’clock is it.  That’s when all preparations must cease.  In years past, we have sometimes had a few moments to spare, when we would huddle together as a family in the eerie quiet, looking around in nervous anticipation, waiting for that meteor to explode all over us.  The past few years, however, we’ve been attending Christmas Eve service at our church, and so miss out on that fleeting, weird tranquility, which is no big loss.    

The meteor’s arrival is marked by the muted thud of car doors closing.  Within seconds of that, the first of many shockwaves comes blowing through our doors.  Within mere minutes, we are swept away by a surge of friends and family, pulled apart and lost amongst a roiling sea of merry-makers, often losing visual contact with each other for half-hours stretches at a time, even though we are all contained in three connected rooms within the same, modest ranch-style house.  There may be fifty or more of us on any given Christmas Eve, bumping and ricocheting and pardoning each other, and a fair number of children, who, with an art long forgotten by us adults, weave nimbly through a dense forest of moving grown-up legs. 

Goodbye to a Good Man

For those of you who met Kent Yoder through the guest post I published here back in June, I have the difficult task of informing you that Kent died on October 27th, 2012.

He battled prostate cancer for more than a year before the disease vanquished his body, and in doing so, freed him from his body’s terrible confinement.

Kent was 49.  He had been married to Janelle for eleven years, and in that time fathered a son and a daughter.  As I trust in God’s grace, they will all live on and do amazing things.

I last saw Kent the weekend before he passed.  I went along with our friend Rick to see him in a hospice facility.  We spent some time with Kent, and Janelle, and a few others who came through to see him.  He looked nothing like the Kent of just a few short months before, which was nothing like the Kent of a short year before that.  His body looked like that of a concentration camp victim.  He had that same ageless, ancient look that I remember from photos I would show my sophomores each year when we read Elie Weisel’s Night together.  As with them, it appeared that it was only the spirit of the man inside that prolonged the life of his body, and prevented it from crumbling to dust on the spot.

I took a copy of the Bible, and a collection of Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoons with me when we went to visit him.  If that seems like a strange combination to bring to a dying man, well it just felt right, knowing Kent to the extent I do.  Inside the Far Side book I tucked a copy of the lyrics to Bridge Over Troubled Waters.  I don’t know why.  I guess I was just thinking about what might comfort me, if it were me instead of him. 

Night of the Laughing Stars

One night, not so long ago, I went outside to the backyard, just trying to distance myself from a particularly irritating set of mundane household frustrations. 

Seeking relief, I looked up at the stars. 

These were the same stars I used to look at with wonder as a child, when I would spend hours imagining all the possible worlds that orbited distant suns out there, all the strange variations of life, and the fantastic civilizations that might exist.  When I was a teenager, I used to stand under the stars and beg for something to happen, for an alien spaceship to come out from amongst those stars and get me, take me away from the small, boring, insignificant life I had, break the chains I could already feel binding me to an ordinary, tedious future, and show me all the wonders of the universe.  Then, once I was out and on my own, I stopped looking up much at all (far too busy making a paycheck for that), and the stars receded into a beautiful, but flat, backdrop.  Years passed, and I finally reached the point where I would look up at the stars, and found that I resented them.  They represented the universe, after all, and the universe was no friend of mine.  Not a universe that kept me trapped and feeling miserable, not a universe that did nothing while I struggled so pathetically, not a universe that I had actually come to believe was conspiring against me.  It felt like the stars were only there to mock me, make fun of my pain, and taunt me with the reminder that I was stuck down here, hopeless and alone, while they were up there, far beyond my reach, living it up. 

But this night was different for some reason.  Oh, I was still frustrated and feeling empty inside and at a loss for what to do, where to go.  I had exhausted my ideas, and exhausted myself.  I looked up at those stars and felt the same old remorseless laughter in response to my puny human problems.  But I remembered how I used to see the stars so differently, how they had once been filled with so much hope and wonder, and it made me ask a question I had not yet dared to ask myself:  So, who was wrong?  The me I used to be, or the me I am now?  The stars themselves hadn’t changed; they were almost the exact same stars in every measurable way that I had been looking at all my life.  Clearly I was the one that had changed.  But had I changed for the better, or for the worse?   After all these years, had I grown wiser, or had I only grown more foolish?

Of course I knew the answer, even without admitting it.  And that led to more questions.  Was it possible that my whole way of looking at the world was fundamentally flawed?  Could it be that the pervasive sense of lack I was experiencing in my life was merely a perception, and didn’t represent the actual working reality of the universe?  Was it possible that I was wrong, and all those things that I felt I lacked:  work I loved, the opportunity to do the things I wanted to do, money, and most of all, the time to do anything about it, were really the result of a terribly misbegotten focus, a choice I had somehow unknowingly made, instead of the natural order of things? 

And if I was wrong, what did it mean to be wrong?  If the universe wasn’t my enemy, if it wasn’t actively seeking out chances to thwart me at every turn, or to punish me for continuing to cling to my ratty old dreams, if it wasn’t responsible for the helpless sense I had of things never going my way, then what kind of universe did I live in?  A neutral universe, empty?  The kind that doesn’t pay attention to you, and conversely doesn’t require that you pay attention to it?  In other words, the universe of my twenties, when I believed that I made myself, and that my will, my mind, and my hands were responsible for everything good that happened to me?  The stars as simple stage scenery?  Or was it possible that I had it right as a kid, when I saw something more out there: hope and wonder and beauty beyond my ability to encompass?   Was it possible that I lived in a universe that was not forlorn or expressionless, not antagonistic or cruel, but seething with boundless life?

Repaying the Debt #3: Michael J. Fox

“You don't save a place in the rest of your life for it to take over. You just live your life the way you want to, and it assumes the space that it naturally needs.”

You might think that this is someone talking about gaining weight, or planting a tree, or raising a ferret.  But these are the words of Michael J. Fox, and he’s talking about his attitude towards living with Parkinson’s Disease.

Michael J. Fox is an amazing individual.  There.  That’s the way I should have started this post.  Diagnosed with young-onset Parkinson’s at 30, he was eventually forced to give up a full-time career as a highly successful TV and film actor.  Though he initially struggled with the reality of living as a person with Parkinson’s, he has since allowed it to transform him into something far more inspirational:  someone willing to bravely serve as the public face of the disease, an advocate for all those who suffer from it, and a galvanizing force for advancing and funding the cutting-edge research that will eventually cure it.

I was reminded of Fox’s incredible faith and relentless buoyancy in the face of this grave medical condition by an interview he did with Marlo Thomas (yes, That Girl) which appeared last week on The Huffington Post.  Thomas has begun a series called “Givers,” in which she talks to people whom she considers to be “givers” in their approach to life, as opposed to “takers.”  Her interview with Fox is the first in the series.  I would gladly twist your arm to get you to read the interview.  Hopefully, it doesn’t come to that.

Aiming with Accuracy

I’m watching the local ten o’clock news the other night, and somewhere in the middle of the broadcast they run a story about a man by the name of Jeff Fabry.  Jeff Fabry is a world champion archer who happens to have only one leg and one arm.  He shoots from a wheelchair, holding the bow with the one arm.  To pull the string back, he bites a piece of dog collar material that’s been wrapped around the bowstring.  He is astonishingly accurate.  In the interview, he explains that he lost his right arm and leg as the result of a motorcycle accident at the age of 15.  He talked about how, after the accident, he didn’t like having to stay home while his friends went hunting, so he “figured out a way to shoot. I didn’t let anything get in my way.  And I think having that state of mind is what led me where I am today, because I don’t give up.”

Those words resonated deeply with me, because I had just been pondering the same thought.  Not learning to shoot a bow and arrow, despite the influence of Katniss Everdeen and The Hunger Games; no, I’m talking about the ‘figuring out a way’ part.

What Happens in Vegas...

It’s no secret people do crazy things when they go to Las Vegas.  For some it’s wearing a costume, like the dude we saw dressed up as Bumblebee from the Transformers movies in an incredibly detailed, perfectly scaled-down, complete-with-working-lights outfit that easily cost thousands, apparently all for the purpose of taking pictures with tourists for tips.  

For others, many of them women, it was wearing dresses that must have been as  painful to wear as they were to see being worn, along with heels that, if they were used on fur-bearing animals, would have PETA protesting their cruelty with a multi-million dollar advertising campaign.  Still others paid money to see Carrot Top perform.  

Yes, in Vegas it’s all too easy to end up doing something you would never do otherwise.    

We drove to Vegas recently, to meet and reconnect with some close friends who live in Idaho.  Elizabeth and I left the girls with my folks; this was to be 48 hours of pure adult concentrate, to be mixed only with alcohol, not juice boxes.  Upon our arrival at the Excalibur, we drank a little, ate, talked, laughed, and drank a little more.  Then, following the advice of shampoo bottles everywhere, we repeated the process as needed.  The first night we were there we absorbed the various sensations of unadulterated hedonism by walking the Strip, where the only apparent concession to restraint is the confinement of sex to business cards handed out by men dressed like Seattle fishmongers on both sides of every street corner. 

The next day, we ruled a domain that incorporated everything from the Excalibur to the Mandalay Bay.  We lived like royalty for a day:  we ate like royalty, we drank like royalty, we spent unconscionable gobs of cash like royalty.   The only difference was that, unlike royalty, we had no one we could oppress to replenish our monetary reserves.  That night, we were invited to cut the line and duck into a night club (the Cathouse at the Luxor) without paying a cover (Four middle-aged, middle-class, semi-fashion-conscious bourgeoisie – hmmm, what could they have been thinking?).  We thought we had pulled one over on them, until we got the $50 bar tab for four drinks.  Our response was to scoff at the exorbitant prices, drain those blankety-blank drinks, and then take our revenge on their dance floor, causing at least that much in damage to their prestige, if not the actual floor.   We danced the night away, more of it at any rate than Elizabeth and I have seen in years, finally keeling over in bed at 3:30 a.m. 

Much later that morning, true to the Las Vegas ethic, we left without saying goodbye.

Needless to say, we had a grand time.

Remembering Ralph McQuarrie

Note: this article has been updated with links to other sites with more examples of Mr. McQuarrie's work.

Ralph McQuarrie died on March 3^rd at the age of 82.

Not sure who Ralph McQuarrie is?  Ask your resident Star Wars nut; if they’re worth their weight in Wookiees, they’ll know.

Don’t know a Star Wars nut?  C’mon, really?  Not to worry; I’ll be happy to play the part.   

Mr. McQuarrie was a Korean War veteran from Montana who attended the Art Center School in LA.  After cutting his teeth drawing dental instruments and, well, teeth for a dentistry firm, he did technical illustrations for Boeing, and later, worked on animations used in CBS’s coverage of the Apollo moon missions.  Some mutual friends introduced him to George Lucas in 1974 as he was pitching his sci-fi film project Star Wars. 

The story goes that Lucas was having trouble selling his movie proposal to the studios.  He had been shot down by United Artists and Universal because he hadn’t been able to adequately communicate his radical vision of a new space epic.  The green-light executives he needed to convince couldn’t, or wouldn’t, buy the Star Wars that Lucas was trying to describe verbally.  Lucas asked McQuarrie to create some conceptual illustrations that would help the studios visualize the galaxy far, far away of George’s imagination.  

The amazing images McQuarrie produced helped secure the support of 20^th Century Fox’s Alan Ladd, Jr., and the rest, so they like to say, is history.  It’s entirely possible that without McQuarrie’s stylized depictions of Lucas’ fantasy, the movies might not have been made at all.

Valentine's Foolishness

Elizabeth and I have been married for twenty-two years, and we have long since passed the time when celebrating Valentine's Day is a big deal.  Some might find fault in that, but our attitude has been "If you stop to celebrate love on February 14th, what are you doing with the remaining 364 days of the year?" Not that we're the lovey-dovey, wear matching sweaters, PDA-flaunting kind of couple either.  It's more that, instead of sending her roses at scheduled intervals, I would rather bring home flowers five or six times a year "for no reason."  Occasions can become rituals, and there's nothing ritualistic about love.  It also tends to keep things a little fresher, and after this long, trust me, fresh is good.


Anyway, this year I wanted to do something I haven't done in a long time.  I wanted to give her a love-letter, in my own peculiar way.  And what better way to send an intensely personal message to someone than on a blog?


So, honey, Happy Valentine's Day!
You know you love me.

Thus does love make fools of us all.

--me

So the greatest scientific mind since Albert Einstein has admitted that the greatest mystery in the universe is not how it started, or how it will end, or exactly what dark matter is, or if there is a theory of everything.  It turns out that man’s greatest unsolved mystery is what we were afraid it would turn out to be all along:  woman.

When asked what he thinks about most during the day, Mr. Stephen Hawkings, who just celebrated his 70^th birthday in January, responded simply by saying:  “Women.  They are a complete mystery.” 

Okay guys, that makes it official.  If the greatest mind we can muster from amongst our ranks is incapable of making any headway into the area of feminine mystique, what chance do we have?  We might as well call it a day, uncap some beer, and see if we can find a game on TV. 

The Forward Path - 28 Jan 2012

Every great journey begins with a trip

– me

The Forward Path - 28 January 2012


If you’ve been following my jaunt down the Forward Path, you probably already know that a year ago I was teaching high school English.  What I haven’t said much about, however, is the trip that triggered my decision to give up teaching. 

For several months leading up to the holidays a year ago, I had been in a very dark place within myself, and I was visibly taking on enough water that Elizabeth knew something had to be done.  So, as a Christmas gift, she sent me to Carlsbad, New Mexico, for three days prior to the beginning of the spring semester.  


You may think that an odd choice for a Christmas gift from someone who claims to love another person, but it turned out to be the perfect thing to do.  It was ostensibly a trip to visit Carlsbad Caverns, but we both knew its true purpose: a soul-searching mission, a solitary retreat.  She hooked me up with a place to stay, some awesome music to listen to on the way, reservations for a tour of the caverns, and cleared her schedule so that she could take care of the girls while I was gone.

This One's for You

I’m 43 years old, and 2011 is the year my life as a writer began.  It really started in June, with thunderstrokes.  I started blogging for a definite purpose, to establish a showcase, or maybe portfolio is a better word, of my work as a writer. 

The underlying intention was that by starting a blog, I might be able to get over the fear of putting my work, and myself, out there.  That fear had always been my biggest enemy and had stymied my progress not just for years, but for decades.  I always knew I could write well, but I also knew that didn’t automatically translate into writing that anyone else would want to read.  I was also afraid of being rejected.  My writing is the product of me, and if my writing is rejected, it’s really me that’s rejected.  The best way to avoid rejection, according to this way of thinking, was to not do anything.  Fear, that irrational, pervasive beast, kept me motionless.   

So the blog was a big step forward for me, because it meant that anyone could see what I was writing.  Of course, that meant the possibility of rejection existed for the first time.  Theoretically everyone could read me now, and potentially hate what I’m doing.  But the reality is that, due to the infinite vastness of the internet and Google’s mysterious ways, you can be available to everyone, but only exist for a few.  And the further reality is, people who don’t like what you do just don’t come back. What you end up with are pretty much people who respond positively to something in your writing.

And that’s where you come in.  You may not realize this, but you, the reader, are an essential part of this blog, and an essential part of what I’m doing.  You probably aren’t clear as to the significance of your contribution, so allow me to enlighten you.

a funny thing happened on the way to a life

I want to dedicate today’s post to two people: one I know well, and the other is someone I feel like I know, but have never met, and couldn’t tell you his name. 

I’ve never dedicated anything before, but if a disc-jockey can do it, why not?

This post is dedicated first to Elizabeth, for always seeing through the fraud I was trying so hard to be.  Nothing that is happening now could have happened without your faith. (And don’t worry; you still get the dedication in the first book).

I also want to dedicate this particular post to a guy who goes only by the name “Kid,”  and writes a blog by the name “The Kid in the Front Row,” which TBF’s* of my blog have probably noticed appearing under “My Blogs List” for several months now.  Kid writes mostly about movies, but he also writes about writing.  His gift is the ability to think clearly about the truth, and transmit that honesty in a way that I find thrilling and a little shocking.  His writing resonates with me both as a writer, and a human.  Because of his work, I am inspired to continue drilling down in my writing through my own personal BS until I get to the bedrock of truth.  The following post is one such effort. 

*TBF = true blue friend