Dear Dr. Emmott:

Dear Dr. Stephen Emmott: Last night, I read through your recent book, Ten Billion. In it, you outline the global ramifications of the growth of the human population, covering how it will affect the global carbon cycle, climate change, crop and water demand, and how greater demand for everything that humans need in general will eventually tip the world into spiraling hothouse-mass-extinction decline. In fact, the last line of the book (and I should point out here that, even though it tops the 200-page mark, most pages only have a sentence or two, and every image and chart is given a double-page spread) clearly states that, in your educated opinion as a scientist, "I think we're fucked."

Now, I don't question your statistics. I'm sure that in your lifelong quest as a scientist, you are more aware than the vast majority of us about the troubles we face, and what would need to be done to overcome them. What I call into question is your moral irresponsibility in publishing your book. Because what we come away with is a definite statement that we have already gone too far, and there is nothing that can be done, short of changing every social, political, economical, and instinctive (re: procreative) behavior we have. Globally.

So my question to you, sir, is: What purpose does your book serve, exactly?

I think I am a rather practical person. I think I have a pretty good idea of what I can control and what I can't, and don't spend much time worrying about things that are beyond my ability to influence. Some people might even say that I embody this trait to a fault. Which is why I can say that after reading it, Ten Billion left me with a stronger sense of futility and fatalism than I have experienced in a long time. And, I wonder, if *I* felt this way, what might your book do to someone else, someone who is more sensitive to declarations about the ultimate fate of the human race?

And this is why I wonder whether your heart is in the right place on this issue. Because while your book is quite clear on how many gallons of water it takes to make one hamburger patty (800, which is mostly wrapped up in the growing of feed and maintaining of cattle), it doesn't give us any idea of what to do about it other than "consume a lot less". And even then, as you say, we're still fucked, because the change we have already presented to the world is enough to send us past the ecological tipping point. You present a hellish vision of the future, but offer no solutions on how to change it. Is that because (and here I know I'm guessing at it) you don't see the point in attempting any?

It's your clear cynicism of global politics and business that motivates most of your reasoning for why things cannot change in time to stave off disaster. You argue that fossil fuel companies are too big, have too much power, and are responsible for making too much economy-fueling money to change course, politicians' only interest is in getting elected again, and geo-engineering is too poorly understood to fix the problem. And yes, many globally-supported programs to curtail carbon emissions and resource consumption have already failed. But does that mean we should stop trying?

If humans are going to change this disastrous course, then they need to only be given one thing, the thing that is sorely lacking in your book: hope. Cynicism has never produced any result other than apathy, which I think we can both agree there is too much of, and has been for too long. (And I considered the possibility that your book is a double-feint, a dare for the rest of us to prove you wrong, but I honestly don't think you thought about it that carefully.)

Ultimately, what you're leaving out of the equation is exactly what you see as the source of the problem: humankind itself. True, if we continue on the current track, there will be ten billion people before the end of the century. But if, as you say, the world profoundly changes sooner rather than later because of our influence, won't our own growth be part of that affected change? Any number of the effects you talk about in your book will cause overpopulation rates to slow, and some would argue that the change is already starting to take place.

So here's something that I've been thinking about for a while now, and it seems to have been fully brought up out of the depths by my ruminations about your book: that the ones who really control the world aren't politicians, or titans of industry, or even great ethical leaders. It's storytellers. Think about it... Most of what inspires us as human beings, what grounds us to the world and also lets us fly beyond it, investigate its realities and imagine its possibilities, are the stories that we tell each other. In the end, stories are the only thing we really have that lasts. And I'm not just saying this because I fancy myself a storyteller. I say it because we all are, in our own way. And that's where moral responsibility comes in.

There's a story Ray Bradbury wrote in the mid-20th century called "The Toynbee Convector", where a man announces to the world that he's created a limited time machine that allowed him to see 100 years into the future, and he describes the beautiful, near-utopian society he glimpsed there. In response, humanity bands together and works toward the common goal of a bright future that they already know is going to happen. They do it because they now know it is possible; not only that, it is destined. And they make it happen. Taken in this light, what do you think it is likely that your book will do?

I know, I know... scientists deal with facts, not fancy, and your job is to seek the truth, no matter what form it takes. But what you have done with Ten Billion is to present the facts and then extrapolate them, in effect writing a story about what you believe will happen, in the guise of inevitability. Yes, your opinion is more educated than most, but what is the price of putting this problem-with-no-solution book into the world? The twist ending of "The Toynbee Convector" (fifty-year old spoiler alert) is that the man who saw the future was lying. He never built a time machine. But what he did understand is what I already stated earlier: people need hope to change. So here we come to a place where fancy is more useful than fact, in fact is better at ensuring the survival of the human race.

Do I think you should have presented a rosy, I'm-sure-we'll-come-up-with-something ending, wrapped in a bow? Of course not. But I think that you could have split the difference between your instincts and Mr. Bradbury. Don't just point out the problem, but endorse new solutions, instead of knocking them down known ones like ducks in a shooting gallery. As much as science likes to pride itself on its impartiality, it doesn't exist in a vacuum, either. I can't imagine any thinking person coming away from your book with anything less than a vague sense of despair, maybe even a profound one. And I then have to question your motivations in publishing Ten Billion. Maybe your responsibility as a human should at have at least partially eclipsed your responsibility as a scientist.

Henson’s Legacy

First of all, I'd like to thank those of you who have been following the blog links I post here every week (or at least try to). My pageviews often get into the triple digits, and I think it's significantly beyond awesome that so many of you take the time to see what I'm blathering about any given week. That being said, my outpu here is about to slow down a bit... that's going to be happening for two reasons. First of all, I've gotten a new job, and of course that's necessarily going to demand more of my time. Secondly, I'm taking the next few months to focus on a new project, one with a deadline, so that's where my mind is going to be.

This new project I'm talking about is a contest that is being run by the Jim Henson company. I've followed them off and on over the years, and they always seem on the verge of getting a new Dark Crystal project off the ground. This time, they're preparing to publish a YA prequel novel, and they're allowing submissions from anyone who thinks they are worthy of adding a new tale to the mythology of Thra. Seeing as I was squarely in the target audience for that film – just having turned 11 before its mid-December opening – and have spent more than the average person’s time contemplating the first in the 30(!) years since then, I’ve decided to try to come up with a compelling story to add to its ever-evolving story.

For a period of time, The Dark Crystal was one of those movies that obsessed me. In a world where every sci-fi/fantasy film wanted to be the next Star Wars, Jim (along with conceptual artist Brian Froud) brought us a weird, beautiful, grotesque, almost dream-like movie about a broken world and how it was healed. And while I still loved Star Wars, there was something about the Dark Crystal that intrigued me. It was altogether different, resonated on a deeper level. I took time during school to draw pictures of my favorite scenes, at home read the movie novelization (which I still have, and apparently fetches a fair price for a used copy on Amazon ), and wondered about what came before and after. And that’s why it’s such a no-brainer that I should try to write something new. So before December 31st, I'm hoping to do just that, and turn in 7500 words, representative of the Dark Crystal prequel story I would tell, to the Jim Henson offices.

But it’s kind of a daunting task. First of all, there’s more to learn about the history of the world of Thra (only the first part being that the world has a name). There's the film itself to consider, along with graphic novels and ancillary tales. It's all part of Jim Henson’s original design in creating a deep, rich world that you feel has existed for a long time. I've just finished the first two Dark Crystal Creation Myth graphic novels that have been released in the last few years, and have been trying to get my head around all the new backstory.

Thinking about this particular creation of Jim’s has got me thinking about him more than I have in the past decade. I remember exactly where I was when I heard he had died... I was at Disney World, of all places. I was on spring tour with the U of M Men's Glee Club. We did one every May at the end of the school year, and that particular year we were traveling the southeastern part of the country. That day, we were free to walk around Epcot Center and then had an outdoor evening performance to meet for, but when we arrived that morning on the bus someone had heard the news and passed it on to everyone. I was pretty shocked -- Jim Henson was still a relatively young guy -- and was profoundly sad to hear it.

My first thought on hearing of Jim's death was, "Damn. I was hoping to get to work with him someday." At the time, I was all geared up to be a filmmaker, and honestly thought that I was going to break into the industry one way or the other. Movies had been my childhood and adolescent obsession, and it would be a few more years until the indie film revolution came and went, and even a few more before I realized that making up the stories was the only part that I really wanted to do.

The news that day affected me the same way all this Dark Crystal research has: it got me thinking about what a product of Jim's imagination my own imagination really is. When I think about it, he was an almost constant presence for the first fifteen years of my life, when I learned how to act toward others, how to create, and how to dream. I started with Sesame Street in the early 70s, then switched to The Muppet Show in the late 70s (which I would watch religiously every Sunday night, and marvel every time at how fast a half hour could go by), Fraggle Rock in the 80s, then The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth after that. My favorite Christmas album always has been (and I assume always will be) A Christmas Together, a collaboration the Muppets did with John Denver -- it's the only one that is actually funny and moving as well... which is a spirit that also infused the HBO special Emmet Otter's Jugband Christmas. I absorbed all of this in my first fifteen years of life, and didn’t really lose touch with it until high school brought me under its sway.

So what did Jim teach me? Well, he taught me that you don't have to be a grandstander to be a good leader. Kermit the Frog never made a big deal about the fact that everyone seemed to answer to him, in fact he questioned it often -- most notably in a strange conversation with himself in the middle of a midnight desert two-thirds of the way into the first Muppet Movie. But Kermit didn't need to doubt himself. He never used his position to force his ideas on people. If anything, what he really showed was an ability to let everyone around him be themselves, and good things would come from it. The Muppets were the quintessential band of misfits -- the comedian who was never funny, the diva who had questionable levels of talent (and was a pig to boot), the cook who kept getting antagonized by his own ingredients, the scientist who constantly blew things up... But Kermit was the rock, the focal point of all their attention, because he was really their audience. I don't think Fozzie ever cared that his jokes bombed every night, because Kermit was still his friend afterward. I imagine that Kermit's relationship with his performers was much the same as Jim's was with the artists he surrounded himself with. He was the one who took all their disparate talents and brought them into focus.

But Jim showed us the darker side of leadership as well. Aside from that conversation with himself I already talked about, Kermit does encounter other moments of profound self-doubt. The most famous one, of course, is the song "It's Not Easy Being Green", which I still think is one of the most profound meditations on identity and self-acceptance you can find under three minutes in length. In that time, he goes through what for most people is a lifetime of second-guessing yourself and your worth, and breaking through to realize how important you really are with the question, "It could make you wonder why... but why wonder?"

The thought that I might get the chance to add something to Jim's vast set of worlds and characters is one of those instances where you find that after all the years and miles, you've somehow come back around to where you started, and the thought that all the dreams and stories and adventures you've had all along were just small parts of a glorious, uniform whole. I thank Jim and his family for this coming opportunity to show my appreciation for all that he gave to us.

Ozzy Explains It All

I used to work with a young woman who had no idea that Ozzy Osbourne was a celebrity before his family's reality show in the 90s/00s. When she casually mentioned that, I was stunned. "No no no," I wanted to say, "He wasn't always a bumbling, mush-mouthed sitcom dad. He was BIG, he was dangerous, he was scary!" I'm glad that Ozzy now has re-established himself as one of the founding fathers of metal, and that maybe these youngsters are getting a much-needed schooling in pop culture history.

Ozzy has gone through a number of transformations over the years. In the 80s, he started leaning more heavily on synths after the untimely death of his guitar muse, Randy Rhoads, which was in a way fortunate because that was the way the winds of change in metal were blowing anyway. He even participated (somewhat half-heartedly) in the mid-80s glam metal boom, when it seemed that the formula for success was spandex, sequins, and at least one power ballad that would get teenage girls to buy your album. He didn't start working his way back toward his heavier, crunchier roots until he found guiatarist Zakk Wylde.

It was during this time that he wrote the song that's prompting this essay, because I think it offers more emotional depth than any other metal song I can think of. In fact, it attempts no less than to encapsulate Ozzy's whole twenty-year rock-idol experience. It's a hidden track on his 1988 album "No Rest for the Wicked", so well-hidden that I didn't realize for many years that it actually had a title: "Hero".

You might not notice the psychological importance of the song on the first listen. It's full of Zakk's arena-filling power chords, and Ozzy's trademark wailing vocals soar over the top, as razor-sharp as on the album's other tracks, but it's the lyrics that really showcase an artist laying his soul bare. While it's not entirely out of character for Ozzy, an artist who has often used his music to let us in on his inner torment, I'll tell you why this song is really different...

It starts out with the lines "I don't wanna be a hero/I don't wanna ever let you down", and right there we realize we're in different territory. He's giving equal weight to the idea of shying away from being a celebrity, and realizing that he has a responsibility to his fans. This is the crux of the song, and he's put it right up front for us. The song is actually filled with imagery that signifies his reluctance to be seen as important: "I don't wanna wear your broken crown", "Don't want to sit upon your crippled throne".

Then comes the chorus, which for a long time I thought I must be mishearing, because in it, he actually tells us -- his fans -- that we've been wrong all along to believe in him. Underscored by the power chords that opened the song, he bellows, "I don't wanna disappoint the fools no more, the fools no more." Now, I've heard music artists talk in interviews about how they don't want to be perceived as role models, some have even written songs about it, but I've never before or since heard one that outright calls their fans fools.

But here's where the genius of the song comes in. We've just been called names, but Ozzy keeps us from being offended by then telling us exactly *why* we shouldn't admire him, and why if we want someone to look up to, we should look elsewhere... He also says, "Don't think you'll ever understand me/*I* don't even understand me", and "I couldn't answer all your questions/And if you're lost, I couldn't find your way". He's actually harder on himself than he is on us.

But it's the final verse that puts the exclamation point on the whole idea. After a typically blistering Zakk Wyde guitar solo, Ozzy finishes the song by executing an incredible lyrical sucker punch. "I am not your destination, or a road that's gonna lead you home/So, baby, please don't go." Then he keeps repeating those last three words over and over, going so far as to be joined by a choir that assists him the whole time the song is fading out.

It's that last part that really gets to me. You have to remember that it's coming from a man who, at that point, had been in the music business for almost 20 years, and finally had, admittedly not for the last time, overcome his inner demons. In fact, the track before this one is called "Demon Alcohol", and talks about how hard it is to stay sober, narrated in the voice of his addiction, a relentless hunter of souls. By the end of the album, Ozzy seems to understand the corner he's painted himself into, with a mind clearer than ever. He's idolized by millions, but is painfully aware of his own shortcomings, as an artist, a husband, a father, and a man.

But he chose to make the last refrain of the album a plea, begging for everyone to stick with him, despite all the reasons he doesn't think he's worthy. Even though he knows he doesn't deserve it, he knows that he's come too far to turn us away. He's shown us the frailty behind the mask, the quasi-symbiotic relationship he (and by proxy, all celebrities) have with their fans. He needs us, actually much much more than we need him. I can't think of another artist as prominent who has expressed a sentiment like that, or ever would.

Clouded Thoughts

I told some friends a few weeks ago that I was going to watch Cloud Atlas, and enough of them wanted to know what I thought about it that I started writing down some notes. Turns out, I had a lot more to say than I expected, and so I'm turning to my blog to give me room to put it all down. I hope they don't think that's too impersonal, but when the ideas start going, you've got to give them room, don't you?

Anyway, after a few days, I've been thinking about the movie a lot and trying to piece together what I'm left with after watching (and, I should say, being entertained by) the whole thing. When all is said and done, I've come away with an appreciation for what Tykwer and the Wachowskis were trying to do, telling a huge, sprawling epic with emotionally resonant stories, but it’s also incredibly apparent how they could have made it much tighter and better.

The overall theme of the film seems to be that our actions have effects -- sometimes far-reaching effects -- beyond our own existence. Like Sonmi says, "Our lives are not our own." We're responsible for not only what we do with our lives, but what those lives will ultimately do to others' lives. It's almost enough to make you not want to do much of anything, for fear of causing hardship for those around and future generations, but if you can get past that, the idea gives you an awareness of your place in the tapestry of the world.

We're presented with versions of the same people in six different epochs, from the 1800s to the 2200s. Their personalities and circumstances change every time, and there's always some sort of connection between one epoch and the next... someone reads a book or hears music written by one of the other epoch's characters, or visits the same place. And here's the first instance in which I think the storytellers missed an opportunity. Sometimes the connection between one epoch and the next is really tenuous, and the influence characters have on each other isn't really clear. Take Jim Broadbent's modern-day publisher, for example. You can fleetingly see him reading the book written by Luisa Rey (Halle Berry in an earlier epoch) while he's on the train, but never mentions it. Whether her story of uncovering a nuclear power lobbying conspiracy inspires him to break out of the nursing home/asylum he's forcibly placed in is not clear. I think the movie would have been much stronger if there had been a clear line where one character's overcoming of adversity had clearly affected another. Even a further explanation of "The Fall", some kind of man-made apocalypse which apparently led from a futuristic society to a broken-down wilderness, would have helped.

There's also the issue of what these characters are fighting against. It's usually a human rights issue of one sort or another, and stories separated by 400 years end with blows being struck against human slavery. If the movie’s central theme is the progression of the human race, one has to wonder how far we have come if we're struggling with the same issues over and over again.

That idea of improvement over time is a missed boat with the individual characters, too. I understand that it's a neat selling point (both to actor and to audience) to have movie stars playing up to six vastly different characters – e.g. Halle Berry as elderly male Korean cyborg doctor! -- but it doesn't seem to have any real value in the story itself. For a while, I thought that maybe Tom Hanks' character was really the same soul, making better decisions as he came back time and again. He did go from a corrupt doctor who would slowly poison a man for his gold to a selfless peasant of the future who risks his life for a stranger in need. But then I remembered that in the modern-day epoch (chronologically the fourth out of the six stories), he was a disgruntled Cockney author who, in cold blood, killed a man who gave him a bad review. How much richer would the story be if you could see him improving from life to life instead?

Now, keep in mind that reincarnation isn't something that I brought to the table myself. The recurring characters all have an identical shooting-star birthmark on their bodies somewhere. And at one point, Hanks and Berry actually talk pointblank about how they get the feeling that they keep meeting over and over again in different lives. But after all that, I'm not sure what the birthmarks are supposed to represent. Are these people marked in this way to represent the unique way they are linked? Because if that's the case, it's blunting the movie's message about how we *all* are linked and *all* are responsible for those around us. Or maybe the birthmark means that these are special people, destined for this cycle of lives in a way that the rest of us aren't. That muddles the idea even more.

I'm ignoring the fact here that it's also kind of distracting to play find-the-star in each of the epochs, especially with extensive make-up jobs that often change the race of the actor. Admittedly, there were more than a few that I missed, which I learned from watching the recap that precedes the end credits. Like I said, it would have meant more if there had been a reason for it, but clearly a fair number of these "links" were background cameos and weren't even necessary. Wouldn't it have been a better, more cohesive story if they had been, if we could have seen relationships and situations evolve across centuries? Is it really worth the credibility lost when Hugo Weaving plays a Nurse Ratched-like Englishwoman? Or when Jim Sturgess tries to pass as Asian in a room full of actual Asian actors?

Like I've said, I appreciate what the filmmakers were trying to do, and maybe going back to the source novel would help in explaining what all these stories really have to do with each other. But what I see is six stories that don't have a lot to say in and of themselves, loosely woven together into an ambitious film that appears to be deeper and more important than it really is.

The World's Girl

My daughter started kindergarten this week. I have been in her school before, but aside from a few pictures of her classroom and her teacher, I have no idea what her school experience has been like so far. This is mostly because for the last few weeks, I've been working nine hours a day and adding a forty-five-to-sixty-minute commute on either end.

As many of you know, I've been out of work pretty much constantly since Borders closed its last shutter in the fall of 2011. Since just after Lily turned three, I've been home with her and my wife nearly all the time. Now she's five, and all of a sudden I'm struck with the reality of going from experiencing thirteen of her waking hours a day, to only being around for the last three. It's a pretty big adjustment, and honestly it's hitting me harder than I thought it would.

I like to think that I'm a pretty adaptable person. My philosophy is that if you can look at a situation and say, "okay, good or bad, this is what's happening now", then it usually turns out to be easier to deal with than it seems. But this whole situation is weird. Amy, Lily and I have spent the last five years as this tightly-knit group, this indivisible little family unit, and now in the span of a little over two weeks, I'm off to work far away and Lily's off to school. It feels, well, wrong somehow.

Of course I worry about my little girl. That's a parent's job. I know that she's going to go to school, and when she gets there not everyone is going to "get" her the way we do at home. Not many of the kids are going to know about (or certainly want to talk as much about) Lalaloopsies, or Minecraft, and no one's going to be amused by our family inside jokes. And what's worse, she's going to come home with a whole new set of influences and references and jokes that I'm not going to understand. Maybe that's the part that worries me most.

Ever since I knew I was going to be a dad, I've told myself -- very pragmatically, or so I thought -- "Okay, the parents have the first five years of their kids’ lives to help establish the foundation of their personality and beliefs, and from there on out they become more and more their own person, building off of what you gave them." What I didn't think about was that typically the people who build the foundation usually get the chance to build the rest of structure as well. Not only that, but it's making me realize that maybe we didn't have quite as much influence in that foundation as we thought we did.

It's not that Amy and I won't have any influence anymore, it's just that there's going to be a lot of other stuff coming at Lily. It's going to be stuff from kids who were raised by parents with ideas that I might think are all wrong, or from kids who have older siblings who, in time-honored tradition, introduce their younger brothers and sisters to stuff that they have no business knowing about yet. That environment is where Lily is going to be spending over half of her waking hours. It's almost totally out of our control, and will be mostly unseen by me or by her mother. That's what bothers me.

Of course, there’s a world of difference between thinking lofty thoughts about establishing foundations, and what it's like to actually reach the points where the fundamental changes happen. I kind of take solace in the fact that when I come home, Lily acts as if I haven't really been away that long. I actually like that better than to have her running toward me when I come in the door. I want her to know that even when I'm not there, I'm still there, and when she casually looks up from what I'm doing and just says "Hi" when I walk in the door, that's how it makes me feel. I prefer that the situation is harder on me than it is on her.

I know I'm far from the first parent to feel this way. And I also know that, in a way, my recent unemployment has been a blessing in disguise. I mean, not a lot of fathers get the chance to spend virtually every day with their kids between the ages of three and five, which has got to be one of the most crucial times in their mental development. Although the financial aspect of it was at times excruciating -- and I have to profusely thank our friends and especially our families for their continued, ongoing, and sometimes totally unexpected, generosity -- I'm always going to look back on it as a golden time, and I hope she carries at least a little bit of that feeling into the rest of her childhood, and maybe even adulthood.

Of course, my and her mother's work is nowhere near to being done. In fact, I'm sure it will even get harder, because of all these outside influences that Lily is going to find herself up against in the coming years. We're making that leap from being mostly in control of what she sees and hears, into the area of unknowns, things that we can't know about unless Lily tells us. And I hope that we've instilled in her that that's what she should do. Our days of keeping her utterly safe and insulated in our world is coming to an end, and now we have to share her with the rest of you. She's starting her transition from being simply "our girl", to becoming the world's girl. And just like every other parent, I can only hope we've given her all the tools she needs.

FAST FICTION #6: LAST DAY

Patty’s only thought was: Flowers!

They were sitting in a huge glass vase on her desk between keyboard and monitor, a fountain spray of color, swaying ever so slightly in the breeze from the vent over her desk that always made her broil in the winter and freeze in the summer. She sat down, numbed to anything but their beautiful scent. It took her almost a full minute of admiration before she noticed the card sticking askew out of the center.

She removed it from the plastic pitchfork that held it aloft and opened it. “So sorry to hear about your job. We’ll always remember you! –C.” The words had been printed in noncommittal, separate cursive letters by an ancient electric typewriter.

C? Who the heck was C? Carl? Catherine – did she even spell her name with a “C”? Charlene? And what did she have to be sorry about her job for –

Her blood froze. This was it. Rumors had been spinning around the office like miniature tornadoes for weeks, that there were going to be layoffs, but that happened at the end of every fiscal year. Someone must have known this was happening ahead of time, and sent her flowers to —what? Soften the blow (like Charlene would), or twist the knife a little harder (as Carl *definitely* would)?

She started looking around, trying to catch someone’s eye. But lunch wouldn’t really end for another fifteen minutes, and everyone had their heads down, working through it. She sat there for another minute, not knowing what to do. Did this mean she didn’t have to finish the monthly report? Could she keep her bus pass until the end of the month? Should she go talk to her supervisor?

The longer she thought, the madder she became. This stupid company was always saying that it was run like a family, blah blah blah, and that everything was fine when everyone knew it wasn’t. For all she knew, security was on their way down the hall right now, ready to stand there stoically while she piled her accumulated twenty-two years of personal items (in a plastic mail bin that she would have to actually return to this building under penalty of US Postal Service law). She had a few things to take care of before she was going to let that happen…

“Carl?” she said brightly, poking her head around the corner of his office, making him jump just a little. His reaction gave her the guts to finish with, “Looks like you can drag out that bottle of scotch that everyone knows you have in the bottom drawer of your filing cabinet and drink up, ‘cause I’m outta here!”

Patty turned without letting him react. The face he would make looked better in her head that it ever would in reality. She next rapped on Sue’s cubicle, and said in a voice that was just a little louder than it had to be, “Sorry to interrupt your weekly phone call with that married guy from the downtown branch where you plan where you’re going to go for ‘drinks’ after work—“ here, she executed the biggest air quotes she had ever made in her life “—to let you know that your dream’s come true! It’s my last day!”

She spun on her heel to address Yolanda across the aisle, who actually flinched when she met her eyes. She hollered, “And be sure you keep that duplicate key to the cash box well hidden, Yol! You never know when inspection’s coming around, right?”

She went right down the hallway, opening fire on every single one of them. She might not have collected many personal items in twenty-two years, but she certainly had enough dirt to go around. By the time she had gotten back to her desk, half of the office doors had heads peering out of them to hear what she was going to say next, and the other half had been slammed shut, denials and escape tactics clearly being scrambled for behind them.

It took Patty a full minute to realize that the flowers as she finished her circuit of destruction at her desk, and another fifteen seconds to realize where they had gotten to. The flower delivery man, who had clearly heard her verbal barrage and was keeping his eyes shaded under his official delivery man hat, was clearly placing them on Rita’s desk. Rita was there too, eyes puffy and nose running, silently collecting her things and placing them in a plastic mail bin. Charlene stood quietly next to her, looking at Patty as if she had just come shambling out of a swamp.

She stood there, eyes wide, fists clenching and unclenching at her side, as the flower delivery man turned and walked past her toward the front doors of the office, the only place where sunshine was streaming in.

“Oops,” he muttered, never raising his head.

FAST FICTION #5: MILES

“Miles said, ‘Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.’”

Tyler thought for a long moment before responding, and he was aware of everyone else’s eyes swiveling toward him as he said it. “I don’t get it.”

Maybe the goateed man sitting on the edge of the stage blinked with incredulity. Tyler didn’t know, because the blue-smoked John Lennon glasses, coupled with the shade cast by his carelessly/artfully tilted beret all but erased his eyes. “He’s saying that you need to look behind the notes, at what informs them, at what the player is adding of himself to the piece.”

Tyler found himself nodding automatically, just as he had done in countless over-his-head art lectures before. But since this wasn’t an academic setting, he felt irritated enough by his not understanding to try to lift his head a little higher so that he might actually catch something. “How are you supposed to know what someone’s *not* playing? Especially if it’s an original composition…”

The jazz man might have sighed a little. Or maybe he was just tired after finishing his set, and was unsure if he wanted to spend the time schooling these college kids who hung around afterward for autographs. “Even an original composition will lay it out for you first, young friend. At least, the good ones will. Then, like a branching tree, or an opening flower” – here he was actually moving his hands sinuously back and forth, clasping and unclasping his fingers – “it will go off in other directions, become its own thing. You grok it now? You dig?”

Tyler almost had it, but just as easily he lost hold of it. He could feel the friends he came with imperceptibly inching further away from him, into the smoky reaches of the crowd. “Uh… no, I don’t really, um, dig. So, to really put across a musical idea, you’ve got to… play something other than what it’s supposed to sound like?”

“You’re getting there, my young friend,” the jazz man said, snapping his fingers appreciatively. “Keep spinning the discs. You’ll get there.”

Tyler was about to ask if he meant “keep thinking about it” or “keep listening to the music”, but then, somewhere between the glasses and clipped beard, a nicotine-yellowed smile appeared. It was the first time the artist had done it since he took the stage eighty minutes ago. And for what might have been the first time since he had left high school, Tyler felt a rush of adrenaline brought on purely by academic thought. He felt like maybe he was blushing, or that the back of his neck was reddening, and people around him would think he was embarrassed that he had to ask a man such as this to explain his craft, but he didn’t care. He had actually asked a question and gotten an answer that made things clearer to him. He felt a little smarter, a little weightless.

Tyler never listened to jazz again after that night – admittedly, he had never listened to it before – and he broke up with the girl he had come with only two weeks later, but that rush he felt by making a connection with a learned person stayed with him. He found himself seeking out that feeling like a drug, asking more questions, getting more good answers. And it led him, inexorably, to the second part of his life.

FAST FICTION #4: DOUBLE YELLOW

Ethan didn’t know what the little metal tube was at first. But the more he turned it over in his hands, the more he realized he knew about it. Every few moments he would dip it back into the stream where he had first seen it, gleaming, halfway-stuck in the sandy bottom. Each dip would wash more of the creek-grime from it, and he could feel himself coming to full realization as it came more and more clean.

It was one of Garry’s bullet casings. It must have fallen here while he was out on one of his target practicing sessions. All the kids at school knew that he had come somewhere near here, to a corner of fields just before the woods started, to practice his aim, and hone his reloading speed. The more he thought about it, the more it fascinated Ethan – had the bullet jacketed in this casing originally been part of the box that Garry stored in his pocket that day he had walked into town, strolling right down the double-yellow line that ran down Main Street?

Ethan’s mind kept reeling off questions, faster than he had ever realized he could think. What had Garry been aiming at when he fired this particular bullet? And beyond that, what had he been thinking about? Was he imagining the act he was going to commit later, seeing face after face among the distant trees? And what had the expression on his own face been when he pulled the trigger?

Ethan felt too close to it all of a sudden, acutely imagining he could smell the gunpowder as it hovered over the creek bed like a ghost, all these months later. He began to shiver – he told himself it was because of the coldness of the creek – and ran. But his fist still held onto the casing. It was his now, and he already knew he was going to put it on his shelf, where it would sit forever. He was still young enough to think that some things can stay where they are put forever, despite what Garry had obliquely taught him, in fact had taught them all.

He kept running all the way back into town, breathlessly following the same double-yellow line, and didn’t stop until he was sure he had gotten farther than Garry had.

FAST FICTION #3: ORION (based on sculpture - "Orion" by Mark di Suvero)

“It doesn’t look like it’s supposed to be there.”

“It’s outside the art museum. Doesn’t that kind of exempt it from having to look like it belongs?”

“Don’t think so. In fact, that makes it even more necessary to make it blend in. I mean really, does standing under a fifteen-foot arm-bladed robot colored like blood make you want to look at some impressionist art?”

“You’re completely missing the point. And, I might add, you’ve been watching too many of those made-for-TV sci-fi movies. It’s supposed to pique your interest.”

“It actually makes me want to run screaming.”

“Quit being so melodramatic.”

“Not melodramatic. Just confused.”

“But there’s nothing to be confused about!”

“Do you think I’m the only one who thinks that?”

“You just think that the rest of us look at it and ‘get it’ and you’re afraid that you don’t.”

“And don’t you?”

“A little bit…”

“Aha!”

“Seriously, if we understand something you don’t, it just that we know that there’s nothing to ‘get’. It is what it is.”

“Don’t say that phrase. I hate that. ‘It is what it is.’ Can you tell me, right now, something that *isn’t* what it is?... Didn’t think so.”

“So are we going in or what? Maybe they have some information inside about this piece. It could give it some context.”

“I personally don’t think you’re supposed to have context for art. If it’s not there when you look at it, it’s not there.”

“But context can give you insight. You can really figure out what the artist was inspired by, why they did what they did.”

“I thought that you said there wasn’t anything to ‘get’, and this whole context thing sounds like there a lot of ‘get’ I should be getting.”

“I’m just saying, there’s layers to it. There’s what you see when you first see it, and then there’s what you see when you know what the artist was thinking.”

“That doesn’t make it any more inviting. It’s like something you’d see in a slaughterhouse chute.”

“But look how it reaches up to the sky! It’s like a pair of arms stretching up to the heavens!”

“It looks like it’s about to fall over on me.”

“Fine. You don’t want to go in. I get it. We’ll go play some foosball or something. How about that?”

“No, come on. I’m giving you a hard time, but we should take a look at what they’ve got.”

“You’ll keep an open mind?”

“So open my brains will fall out. I promise.”

“Good. Love me?”

“Of course.”

“See? You’re still looking at it.”

“I, for one, welcome our new alien overlords.”

“You’re a jerk.”

“Yeah. Love me?”

“Of course.”

Heads Up, Y'all

Hi everyone, A few weeks ago, I started talking about gathering some of my stories into an ebook collection. Well, I'm just about to pull the trigger on that. I now have a 16-story collection called Dream Escapes that will be available through Amazon for purchase for your Kindle. The down side of this is that I've had to remove those sixteen from being posted for free here. As reluctant as I was to do that, I realize that it's the next step in my evolution, so I hope you'll take your righteous anger and take it out on me by going to the Kindle store and purchasing a copy that you may keep with you until the end of time (please, take it out on me!). It's reasonably priced at $3.99 (which comes to just under 25 cents a story), or unreasonably priced at $203.98 if you don't happen to have a Kindle and need to buy one. I will continue to post new fiction and non-fiction here, of course, and I hope you'll continue to join me in both formats. Thanks for reading! -Aaron

FAST FICTION #2: THE ADMISSION

I'm going to tell him. Right now. He's sitting across from me, eating his lunch, and when the second hand of the clock on the wall behind him sweeps back around to the twelve, my mouth is going to open and I'm going to tell him. Doesn't matter if he's in the middle of talking about this backyard-deck project that he can't seem to stop going on and on about, or if he's taken so big a bite that I'm sure he's going to choke on it when he hears what I have to say. The time will come, and I will speak the truth. Finally.

So where's the truth? The second hand's back to the one, the two... and yet I just let him yammer on as if his life's not about to change any second now. Why even wait for the twelve to come around again? He must be able to see the sheen of sweat on my forehead. I know it's sitting there, making me light up like a neon sign in the ugly track lighting that this restaurant insists on using to light every single corner. Didn't dining establishments used to have moody lighting, shadows and all that? Now they're just trying to light up every plate on every table, because the chef is the star now, every one of them is jockeying to be the Next Food Network Star. Each dish that goes out is some sort of audition, and they'll be damned if you don't notice that they're artists.

God, he's still talking. I think he's moved on to the elaborate set of criteria he used when choosing what kind of wood he bought for this deck that he's probably not going to bother building when I finally open my damn mouth and say what I came here to say. No reason to build a deck on a house you don't even live in anymore, right? And even if he keeps the house, I know he's building this with some idyllic suburban fantasy in his head, some four-color dream of backyard barbecues with the family, friends and relatives basking in the sun... I'm about to drive a stake through the heart of all that. Doesn't he deserve that, though? Shouldn't he know that there's this whole other world going on right under his nose?

I've known him for a dozen years, and I've never really been further from behind his friend than I am right now. Because I know what his wife has been doing. I honestly wish I didn't, but I do. And frankly, I don't know how he doesn't know. It's not like it's been subtle, or unclear. Maybe that will make it easier. Maybe he does know, and just doesn't care. I can't imagine that he's so clueless that he hasn't noticed the signs. The way she lights up when the other man comes in the room, regardless of whether her husband is there or not, the way she's been riding around town with her convertible top down, her hair whipping around wildly, even on that day last week when it was almost cold enough to snow. She's riding high on new love, and he's got his head buried so far in his deck blueprints that he can't see it.

There goes another twelve. I'm still not saying anything. Maybe he really is that clueless. After all, he hasn't noticed that I haven't said anything, and have let him rattle on for the last ten minutes. I haven't even taken a bite of this bacon cheeseburger that I don't have the stomach for, and he's plowed through almost all of that salad while expounding the virtues of various wood sealants. She's waiting for me to call when it's done.

I'm assuming that I'll be in some kind of condition to speak after I've told him. Would he beat me down, right here in this immaculately well-lit restaurant? I'm betting not. He's not that kind of a guy. He'll probably even finish his meal before getting up, driving back to the office, and never speaking to me on a non-professional level again. He'll leave me with the check, which will be as aggressive as he'll get. That's why I brought him here to eat in the first place, isn't it? For that extra layer of insurance against my face being permanently rearranged. But even if I hadn't, he wouldn't do that to me.

He doesn't deserve this. He deserves to be happy, to live in a world where decks can be planned, bought, and assembled to completion without the nagging worry in the back of his mind that his wife is being unfaithful. But what was it that my dad said, right before he left for good? "The heart wants what it wants." Yeah, and most of the time the heart is a selfish asshole. That's what the brain is for, to give the heart a good throttling every time it gets out of line. How is what I'm doing to him any different than what my dad did to me?

Because I'm not ceding responsibility like he did, that's why. All that crap about what the heart wants is just passing the buck, pointing at some internal organ and saying, "I had nothing to do with this, really. It's all his fault." Then you can move in with your girlfriend and her kid (who was actually older than I was!) and start over. Reset button.

So am I really going to do this? We've fallen into some sort of uncomfortable silence. I think he's realized that I'm not eating, talking or listening. And I haven't been. So now would be the perfect time. Look, if it wasn't me, his wife would be cheating on him with some other idiot, someone who he didn't even know. She was looking for a way out, and I couldn't help the fact that I'd always wanted her from afar. It was just a mutually advantageous situation. It could be worse... she could have broken my heart too, by picking some random other guy. And I think she and I really have a shot, to have the happiness that she was never going to find with him. That's what I should tell him, that it's actually better for me to be the one to do this to him than some unknown quantity that he can never understand.

The twelve came and went, and I actually started talking right after the five. I wasn't even aware that I had started until the words were coming out of my mouth. I did it right; I didn't sugar-coat it, didn't appeal to his higher nature to "chin up, old boy" and all that. And it wasn't as bad as I thought. Clearly he'd been thinking that something was up for a while now, and this just solidified something that had been wobbling uneasily in his mind. That it was me was the only thing that he seemed truly surprised about.

What I didn't count on was how good I felt once I started telling him. As I started telling him how it all started, it really felt like I was weaving the beginning of a great love story, not just hacking through the ending of one. What she and I have is something greater, something that he could never be a part of, and if he really loves her, he'll come to see that holding her back from that love would only end up hurting himself in the end.

Speaking of hurting, once the adrenaline burns off I'm going to need to be in the close company of several doctors. But now, lying curled up on the floor of this restaurant while blood from my nose soaks into my hair and I can feel my ribs loose and shifting inside my shirt, I actually feel happy.

FAST FICTION #1: PIGGY

He stared at the pig for a very long time. He felt almost as if he couldn’t move until he made a decision, as if the pig would know his intention, and would bolt out of his bedroom if his thoughts were unclear in any way. It stared right back at him, seeming to mock him with its beady but kind black eyes.

The pig was spotted and blue, and had been given to him on his fourth birthday, two years before the day that he now sat on his bed across from the dresser where it had stood, smiling at him day at night, for all the intervening seasons. That smile was what kept him affixed to his bed, made him unable to cross the room and pick it up. The pig knew, somehow. *The pig knew*.

It knew that he was just a small moral decision away from picking it up and smashing it to bits. Its little ceramic life was about to be snuffed out, and still it smiled at him. Why couldn’t his parents have bought him one with a removable bottom? Why did he have to destroy it in order to get at the money inside? After a long time, after the parallelogram of sun had swung a perceivable amount across his bedroom wall, he realized that it was probably his parents’ way of getting him to make this very decision. To determine whether the thing he wanted the money for was really worth annihilating his benign little pig friend.

And was it, really? Was the amount needed even in there? It had been so long since he had started tossing his grandpa’s spare change into the bank that he had no idea how much it contained. It had been heavy on the rare occasions he had picked it up, cupping it like a dinosaur egg in his palm. It was so loaded down it felt solid, like a hand grenade – or at least what he imagined a hand grenade would feel like. Would it explode like a hand grenade when he dropped it?

He supposed he should think about how he was going to do it, if he was going to do it at all. It seemed unfair to drop it, like a betrayal to the little pig that had shared his room with him for so long. He supposed he should use a hammer. He at least owed it the dignity of looking into the little painted dots of its eyes as he dealt the final blow...

He almost laughed at himself. Final blow? Dignity? Was he really thinking that he owed this unfeeling little hollow rock anything, that it would actually expect some sort of compassion from him? After all, even it wasn’t an inanimate object, it had been *made* this way, with only one possible ending in place. The only way to get out what you put in was to smash it. That was its purpose.

So why was he still sitting on his bed? What was stopping him? The pig wasn’t going to answer.

Pen's Envy

I recently took a creative writing workshop via my local Rec & Ed department, and since it ended, I've been thinking a lot about where I want my writing to go in the near future. As you may have noticed, I've started promoting my writing in social media (Facebook and Twitter, basically), which is something I never did before. It's not part of my nature, actually, to want to call attention to myself, but in talking with my teacher, I started to wonder whether that tendency was becoming detrimental to getting my writing out there. So here I am, announcing to my friends and family every time I have something new. It's strange for me.

I suppose my freshest round of reluctance goes back to my time at Borders. I worked on the .com part of the business, and I was the go-to guy when a self-publishing author wanted to know how to get their book listed on our site. Some of them were legit, but I fielded enough calls from people who were either deluded in -- or oblivious to -- their obvious lack of talent that they were clearly banking on their ability to cram it down everybody's throat. One fellow who was having trouble with the process all but accused me of being part of a conspiracy to keep his book off the shelves. I all but told him it was merely that his book sucked.

At the last session of the writing workshop, I was the only student that showed up (I guess that's the danger of holding this kind of class in the early summer), but it gave me and my instructor the chance to sit and just talk about writing for two hours. She's a published author, and has been in the game for a while, so she had a lot of good advice to give. I took the class as a way to kick myself in the ass, to remind myself that I actually have a legitimate talent for writing, and in that sense it was a total success. I found myself voicing insights about my fellow classmates' writing -- and my own -- that showed me that I really do think in terms of storytelling and focus and detail and actually seem to know what I'm talking about. I even wrote some spontaneous pieces in class that I'm proud enough of that I'm going to post some of them here soon. Like I told my instructor, it's sometimes too easy to feel like I'm a writer only in my head, to make it just another one of the stories that I tell myself to amuse my own mind from time to time, and it's another thing entirely to drag it out into the real world and acknowledge that it's part of my waking life.

Another aspect I've been thinking about is that I have friends from high school that are successfully making a living at writing. I'm sandwiched right in between them year-wise, one graduating before and one after me. One has been a successful TV and comic-book writer in LA for over ten years, and the other is a well-reviewed author of a short-story collection and a large historical novel. (And outside that circle, there was another alumnus of my high school who now is a Hollywood writer so big that they use his name in trailers. Trailers!) I keep looking to them, and reminding myself that there is still opportunity out there. Before that last brainstorming session with my instructor, I was almost convinced that the prospects for an unproven author were dwindling, but now I'm realizing that they've actually expanded, just in unconventional ways.

The thing that bothers me about the proliferation of outlets for writing is the signal-to-noise ratio. When every thought that anyone writes down is equally available to everyone, how will a worthwhile author cut through all the clutter? Of course, when I worked for the book industry, I placed my faith in the publishers... they put their money where their mouth was and spent money printing and promoting only the stuff that people would actually want to spend money for, and some of the time that was something other than the legal-thriller/romance of the week. But now that publishers have had to downsize and restructure like everyone else, I'm starting to think that maybe the court of public opinion isn't as bad a proving ground as I once thought it was.

I’m not immune to chasing that elusive audience, either… I even tried to change my style to be more “marketable” once. When I started seeing all these paranormal romances come out (culminating in hits like Sookie Stackhouse and the Twilight novels), I made a conscious effort to write one, but what I ended up with is “Nadir”, a novel-in-progress which is essentially a love story between a demon and a human working their way through the different levels of Hell. It’s far from the dashed-off pulp masterpiece I was hoping for, but I wouldn’t trade it for one now. I like the idea too much, and the thought that I’m actually going to find out how it all ends is exciting.

Of course, there's always going to be Fifty Shades of Something that everyone is going to be grabbing at wildly, and may or may not stand the test of time, but what this sea change in book publishing has really done is to level the playing field for everyone, to lower whatever stigma still exists around any particular genre and really show our tastes as a society for what they really are. And isn’t that the ideal? To be free of the constraints of what we *should* be reading and figure out what it is that we *want* to read? How many more people would become readers if that were the case?

All this is my way of talking myself into publishing my own e-book. Years ago, Borders ran an internal contest, and employees could submit entries that would be considered for printing and promoting by the company. I submitted a short story collection. I took the process very seriously, the selection of my best stories as well as the order they should appear in. The file is still sitting on my computer, ready to launch. My writing instructor said that I definitely should pull the trigger and send it out into the world with a price point of my choosing. Who knows? I see dozens of interesting titles that I would never have heard of in while scrolling through the Kindle bookstore, and sometimes a dollar or two sounds like a fair price to try something sight unseen...

In the end, I guess I just have to allow my writing find its own way. I can accept that I’m never going to bully it into making money for me. Let the notice of others come as it will (and I have to stress that the only reason I would want to make money off my work is so that I’d be able to spend more time writing). First and foremost, I have to follow my muse. I think that’s my primary responsibility here. As it should be for everyone.

Happy Nineteen

This past month contained my and Amy's 19th wedding anniversary. Can you believe that? It was 1994 when we and a bunch of friends and family trudged out to the sweltering woods outside of Three Rivers, Michigan, and tied the knot at a little Latvian cultural day camp called Garazers (which our invitation designer insisted on pronouncing “Gazzazaps”). And now, almost two decades later, we celebrated by dropping off our daughter at her grandparents' house, hitting a Chinese buffet, and then going home to read for an hour in utter and complete silence. It was awesome.

But while we were scarfing down sushi, we did take a little time to talk and reflect, and one of the things we discussed was how we’ve managed to last so long. Not that we're particularly surprised by it, but more that in the world around us, it seems like less and less marriages do. Not many first marriages, anyway. And high school sweethearts, as we happen to be, are even rarer. So what did we do right? And I have to preface this by stating that we in no way consider ourselves "gooder at marriaging" than anybody else, or that we're just "more in love" than other couples. We just noticed that we’ve had a few factors in our life together that have conspired to get us to this point. I'll enumerate them now...

First of all, we were friends first. As clichéd as that sounds, I think that really is the most reliable way to form a lasting relationship. Like I mentioned, it was in high school. She thought I was nerdy and cute, I thought she was funny and pretty and was clearly a great friend to have. And even though it took a little over six years from the day we met to the day that would later necessitate celebrating a nineteen-year anniversary, we spent the first three and a half years of that courtship setting up a great friendship. That hasn't changed, as it does with all the best friendships. We still say things that the other finds funny and surprising and supportive on a daily basis. If you've got a friend like that, you’d better hang on to them.

Next -- and this reason is central enough that it affects the rest of the reasons -- we couldn't get pregnant, and it took over ten years of work and sacrifice to actually get it to happen. As terrible as it was at the time, it gave us plenty of time to figure out who we were -- not just as a couple but as individuals -- before we started introducing brand new little people into the mix. We went through a whole lot of stuff in those thirteen years; illness, bankruptcy, infertility ... now I can see that it all made us stronger, that each little victory was adding another brick to the foundation of the team we've become. If we had also been dealing with young children at the time, it would have been immeasurably harder.

When you become a half of a couple, there's less room to give priority to your own wants and needs. There's another person to consider in every decision you make, major to minor. And then, when a child comes along, your own ego and selfishness has to be pushed even further into the backseat. If your relationship up front isn't solid, the chances that you'll be able to continue to live with each other goes down. Maybe (hopefully) not by much, but it does go down.

Another major decision that we made before little folks became a factor was our careers. I had been working at Borders since shortly after we got married, and by the time the century changed, I knew that it was where I wanted to stay as long as I possibly could. And after going through several jobs, Amy decided that what she really wanted to be was a stay-at-home mom. It was really her dedication and refusal to give up -- combined with my improved health insurance when I successfully lobbied to get back into Borders after being outsourced -- that made it possible for us to jump through the necessary medical hoops to make our dreams of parenthood come true.

Lastly, and maybe even most importantly, is the fact that we have differing opinions on a lot of things, and we don't necessarily feel the need to convert the other person. It's something that I attribute to our first getting to know each other when we were still teenagers. When you go through your late teens and early twenties, you suddenly find yourself in successively larger worlds, moving from high school to college to career to full-scale independence. You change a lot in those years, mentally speaking, and your worldview and how you see your place in the Universe really gets solidified during that time. We went through that side by side, and eventually came out with differing ideas about things. For example, Amy's a Creationist, and I'm a believer in evolution. Every now and again this becomes something we discuss, but for the most part it doesn't come up, and because of that it demonstrates to us, I think, how unnecessary it is for people with such different beliefs and ideas to hold animosity for the other. The journey toward your own personal truth is a slow, gradual realization, and having someone by your side who is going through that same journey, no matter where it leads, is something that's supremely valuable.

There. I think I've managed to sound sufficiently smug and superior for one entry. Seriously, I don't think that we have all the answers, in fact I know we don't. We're just two people who lucked into meeting someone we're incredibly compatible with, fell in love, and had faith in that and stuck with it even when things got rough, even really really rough. Outside the world of romantic fairy tales, that's the true heart of a couple's relationship: the dedication and work that it takes, the self-sacrifice and faith in the other person. I guess that's the takeaway here.

To wrap up, let me re-dedicate this site to my wife, Amy, who has stuck by me (and been stuck to by me) for the last nineteen years. We've got a long way to go, and I'm glad she'll be the one to make the journey with me.

The Existential Horror of Temple Run 2

The tablet game that I've spent the most time playing in the last few months is Temple Run 2. For those of you who haven't had the sheer adrenaline rush of playing it, here's a brief explanation of the game, which at first does little to belie the soul-crushing implications of the game itself:

Temple Run 2 (as in the original Temple Run game, just with better graphics and more bells and whistles) takes its cue from the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Harrison Ford gets chased by a giant rolling boulder after stealing a golden idol from an ancient Peruvian temple, thereby setting off all the ancient traps and obstacles -- that are all somehow still in working order – meant to prevent him from leaving with it.

In the game, you play another intrepid explorer (one of several you can unlock after achieving high scores of one kind or another) who has stolen a golden idol and now has to run... the difference here is that you're running down a series of vertiginous bridges above a misty mountain valley below, turning, jumping, ducking, and leaning to avoid fires, spinning spike wheels and crumbling sections of bridge. The point is to run as far as you can, picking up as many coins that are lying around as you can -- they help you unlock special powers and buy new characters.

The big change from the Raiders scenario here is that, instead of a giant boulder, you're being pursued by a twelve-foot galloping monkey demon who is inexplicably wearing a skull mask (at least, I really really hope it's a mask). As if you didn't have to worry about plummeting to your death or slamming into trees and low overpasses, when you stumble over too many obstacles the monkey catches up with you and slams you on the ground. In any event, it's game over.

You see all this from a vantage point above and behind your running explorer, so you don't actually see the galloping monkey demon for most of the game. Only when you hit one of those stumbling obstacles do you actually see its hairy back and grasping arms, coming up behind you. That's when you know that you had better not even so much as misstep again, or you're going to get bodyslammed into oblivion.

It's an intense, fun, and patently simple game, but something happened a few weeks into playing it that changed my thoughts on exactly what's going on in this game, and the implications, frankly, were chilling. It all started when I had to pause the game to attend to something my four-year-old was doing. I had just gotten to a place in the game where the bridge falls away entirely, and my character had to jump on a rope and zipline down to where the bridge picked up again. This is the only time when you change perspective, because the "camera" briefly swings below the character as they slide down the rope.

My pause came just as the angle was changing, and when it stopped I was surprised to see some strange artifacts on the screen. Near the top, I could see four downward pointing arrows, gray and stony-looking, and near the bottom of the screen was a reddish, snaky looking thing that had a small fork at the end. It took me maybe ten seconds to realize what I was looking at... and my blood ran cold.

I was looking out from the inside of the monkey demon's mouth. I had just happened to pause as the swinging "camera" was poised between his upper teeth and tongue. Then I thought about it a little more... I had been doing well. I hadn't stumbled at all during the game so far. I hadn't even seen the monkey demon since the brief prelude to my run where I saw it racing out of the temple to follow me.

So here's how it breaks down, folks. The people who programmed this game could have just set it up so the back of the monkey demon appears when you make that first stumble. But they didn't do that. They set it up so that the monkey demon *is* *always* *there*, *whether* *you* *see* *it* *or* *not*. It is not even onscreen, but it's always invisibly snapping at your heels, ready to leap forward into view the moment you screw up. And even worse, they took the time to give it huge, sharp teeth and a forked tongue, *even* *though* *you* *never* *see* *the* *damned* *thing* *from* *the* *front*, except in that initial glimpse.

That's the moment that it stopped being a game for me. I'm not saying I stopped playing it, but the way I played it changed. It became more of a personal mission to do better, run faster, to stay even farther ahead of that dark, loping thing, even though I now know I can't run fast or far enough to keep it more than two steps behind me. Sometimes it feels like it's the most apt metaphor for life I can think of.

What Raiders Taught Me

A few months ago I wrote a blog called "The Collected Works", in which I mused about the size of the body of work I've written over the course of my lifetime. I knew at the time I wrote it that I had, in my basement, several filing cabinets and boxes in which I had many handwritten projects that never saw the light of day, either because they were unfinished, or had been written in my childhood and were ridiculous. But what I decided to do after I wrote that piece was to go through and digitize whatever I could still decipher of my chicken scratchings (winner of the 1989 Rosetta Stone award for questionable handwriting in my senior year of high school, thank you very much), just so I could have some record of it existing in the first place, for good or ill.

What I found as I started to go through and collate the contents of those file drawers was startling. I found several aborted short pieces, and a full screenplay, that were excessively violent and at times just mean-spirited. My style suddenly swung from swordplay and Dungeons & Dragons-variety derring-do to spies, devil worshipers, and more deadly gunplay than any Sam Peckinpah film. It seems that I was always eager to set up simple kill-or-be-killed conflicts, mostly with one person against incredible odds, and require them to slug or blast their way out, with no quarter given.

I'm still in the process of going through all these old stories, but early in the process I started to see a pattern developing, a clear tipping point when my work turned more violent and turned into a series of action set-pieces. It became clear during my attempts to place these writings on a timeline; the most reliable method turned out to be following my progress through my preferred writing process: from longhand block writing to cursive, back to print, then to manual typewriter, followed by electric typewriter. Adding in any recollections I have of where my family lived when I originally wrote them, I found I could usually place a piece somewhere within a year of when it was written. And that sea change came somewhere around 1981, when I was nine years old. So what caused it?

A little background: growing up, I was in what most people would term a "progressive" household. At the dawn of the Seventies, I had a mother who worked, a father who changed diapers, and a strict no-gun toy policy. All of these things, I probably don't need to point out, were turnarounds from the way houses had been run in the Fifties and Sixties. Not that my parents were hippies in any sense of the word, but they took the lessons of that decade to heart and raised my brother and me in a kid-friendly, stable household, with emotional support and a sense of safety.

Keeping this in mind, I’ve realized that my early works fall into two clear camps: pre-Raiders of the Lost Ark and post-Raiders of the Lost Ark. That film, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas's homage to old-time movie serials, was Harrison Ford’s first turn as archaeological explorer Indiana Jones, and came out over thirty years ago, right at the beginning of summer 1981. I remember that I saw it twice in the theater that summer, accompanied by my Dad, who fell asleep midway through both times.

Up until that summer, the most action I had experienced on screen was three years before, when I saw Star Wars for the first time (I didn't catch it until the 1978 summer re-release, so there's no need to call the sci-fi math police, folks). Raiders was a different kind of animal, though. Seeing an alpha male blow his problems away with a pistol that sounded like a cannon, while repeatedly saving a woman who was simultaneously helpless and able to drink a giant Sherpa under the table, must have been more of a revelation to me than Star Wars.

I have to say, this shocks me more than a little bit. And it's taken me all this time to realize how that movie had held such a strong hold on my childhood psyche. I’ve rewatched the film a few times in the last decade, and every time I watch it as an adult, it kind of washes over me without having any effect. I know all the individual shots, I know so perfectly how it's going to go that there's no excitement or suspense. I took this for granted until now, thinking that it was just one of those movies that was so overplayed on HBO back in the day that I just sort of absorbed it. But maybe the fact that it’s been so long since the film had any emotional impact on me is evidence that it’s part of my DNA now.

This recent evidence has now proven that I was hypnotized by this movie specifically, and action movies in general, so much so that it stuck me in a creative rut for the next five years. Looking at my creative output during that time, it’s astonishing how clear my M.O. became: Take someone with no experience or background, and throw them into a life-threatening situation where they have to use violence to escape.

Of course, once I figured this out, I had to go further and figure out exactly why I gravitated toward those kind of stories. Here's the best I can come up with, and it matches up with something else I know about myself. It goes back to the choices my parents made bringing me up. Like I said, there was a no-gun policy in our house, toy or otherwise. And while I don't argue that my parents should have been more active in teaching my brother and me about violence, I think that might be the reason.

My parents were always clear with us that violence was not the answer to problems, and while they let us watch pretty much any TV shows we were interested in, they didn't let us watch old Popeye cartoons for that very reason. Growing up in that environment, I didn't end up having a real frame of reference for the consequences of violence. So when Raiders of the Lost Ark exposed me to it on a level I had never seen before, I don't think I knew how to process it correctly. It's strange; in being somewhat sheltered from violence, I also took a while to really learn the value of life. The pendulum ended up swinging the other way in my later childhood and early adolescence, when I began almost hyper-aware of onscreen violence, and even the dispatching of the most despicable/expendable evildoer would cause me to sympathize with their untimely end.

For a while I actively stayed away from violent material, but eventually the balance righted itself. And don't think that I'm calling out Spielberg and Lucas for making Raiders -- it's solid entertainment and delivers exactly what they set out to accomplish. I just wish I hadn’t taken it so much to heart, and thought it was the only way to tell a story. Still, if it hadn't been that film, another would have taught me the real price of violence, even if it did take me some time to work out. I suppose there are all sorts of issues that people just have to work out in their own time, and this is one that I'm still unearthing from my past.

Shining Inconsistencies

Being such a big Stephen King fan, you'd probably be surprised to know that The Shining was one of his books that I never got around to reading until recently (I still haven’t gotten to The Dead Zone yet either). While I knew Stanley Kubrick’s movie version was quite different from the book, I was surprised about how *really* different it turned out to be. And I can understand why... virtually all the conflict in the book is inside the character's heads. You get an even-handed view of what's going on from the vantage points of all four of the main characters, and there's virtually no way to translate that to the screen. I get what Kubrick was doing… he had to make someone the “bad guy”, because in the book it’s really the hotel itself and how it messes with people’s heads.

But what really bugged me most about it was this... remember that episode of Friends where Joey is reading The Shining and has to keep it in the freezer because it's so scary? Well, when he discusses it with the other characters, most of the things he talks about are references to the movie, not the book! For example:

- "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" is a phrase that Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson’s character) types obsessively in the movie... in the book Jack actually finishes a play, although he doesn't like the way it turns out.

- Joey mentions the two creepy girls/ghosts in the hallway... in the book, although it's mentioned that two little girls were previously killed in the hotel, they never actually show up.

- Joey also ineptly tries to keep his discussion spoiler-free and mentions when the father goes after the mother and kid with a "blank" but they get away at the last minute... he could mean "axe" like in the movie, or "oversize croquet mallet" like in the book, but what he doesn't mention is the big explosion that happens at the end of the book... the movie ending is much more low-key.

- He does get the dead woman in room 217 correct, but that's one of the few things that's in both the book and the movie. (Except that in the movie, the room number was changed to 237 because the hotel in which the movie was filmed actually had a room 217 and they didn’t want customers to freak out about that.)

I guess I’m just surprised about how the TV writers who created the episode managed to choose the movie version over the book for *every* plot specific detail that they mentioned. If it was just an oversight, it was a stunningly consistent one.

Okay, nerd rant over. You may all resume your lives.

I Wanna Hold Your Five-Digit Cybernetic Appendage

I recently went through a phase where I read a lot of speculative non-fiction about the future of humanity, where things will progress in the next hundred years or so. It started with Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines. It turns out that this Kurzweil guy is one of the most prominent thinkers about the future of humanity, and although he wrote the book back in 1999, he made bold predictions about what would happen in the next few decades.

It was interesting to read… some of the things that Kurzweil predicted would be happening today were way off (convenient and cheap virtual reality? Microcomputers embedded in our clothing? Nope, not yet.), he did have some things right. Mostly that computers would become more and more something that we would come to grow dependent on and be unable to function without. And he also put forth an interesting idea… it’s a well-known concept that the rate of computer processing is doubling every year and a half (it’s actually called Moore’s Law). But he says that this pace can only be sustained if we *become* computers ourselves. It will start with implants for our bodies (which we’ve already started doing), then augmentations to our brains (imagine a chip that will help you learn languages, or master the math you were never able to understand!), and soon the difference between a person and a computer will be completely negligible.

That makes sense to me… although I found myself asking if a machine that thinks and acts like a person really is a conscious entity. But Kurzweil had an answer for that, and basically it’s this… it doesn’t matter. For example, how do you know that the people around you are conscious entities, real thinking people? Well, it’s because they act like they are. And since the only subjective reality we can know is our own, there’s really no point to asking whether a human-like computer is really a living being. By all definitions we have, it’s just as much alive as we are.

Something else that I’ve been hearing about it is how we’re approaching the point when a computer can do more than a human mind. It’s called “the singularity”, and the prevailing thought it that if we don’t make sure that a computer learns to be human – to have compassion, and to want to preserve human life – then the kind of thing that happens in the Terminator and Matrix movies not only could happen, but probably *will* happen. The computers will see us as irrelevant at best, or at worst, a threat. There’s actually a big consortium of important people in the computer industry who are actively working to figure out how we can stop this from happening.

It seems to be the most logical way to teach a computer all the things that make us human is to actually merge humans and computers.. This process has already begun, and it’s a trend called “post-humanism”… people today already have powers and abilities well beyond our actual physical human capacity. We’re able to communicate with almost anyone we want to at a moment’s notice, no matter how far apart we are… we can move in the physical world at speeds of up to 600 miles an hour (17,000 if you count those folks in orbit). We can store and call up facts and memories by flicking our fingers across a screen. Each one of us is already much more than a human ever has been, and it’s all because of our use of computers as tools.

When I first heard about what the future of humanity was shaping up to be, I found it completely depressing. This idea of losing ourselves as organic beings and becoming mechanical seemed bleak to me. But the more I think about it, it really sounds like this is the next step in evolution. We’re not turning humans into machines, we’re turning machines into *us*. From that standpoint, it’s actually more depressing to think that we now sit in chairs eight hours a day tapping keys, and then go home and do the same thing for recreation. In a hundred years it will seem entirely primitive. Computers won’t be something we do, it will be who we are!

Can you imagine a world where we aren’t shackled by having to have some kind of mechanical interface to be connected to the world? We will be part of that network, any time we want to be, just by thinking about it. Of course, that brings up another question: What will we do with our physical selves when our access to work and recreation on the Internet is freely available at any time?

Dreadful Tunes

I'm willing to bet that this happens to everyone... there are songs out there that, even though they're not supposed to, instill in you a strange feeling that is the exact opposite of what the song is supposed to convey, or at least one that probably isn't what was intended. It might have something to do with the circumstances of how you first heard it, or maybe it taps into something in your psyche in just the wrong way, but you can never hear it the way you know you should. For me, there are a small bunch of these songs, but I've waited until now to discuss them because I've never been quite able to articulate what it is about them. Now, I have three songs that I'm at least somewhat confident I can discuss what it is about them that, well -- not necessarily bothers me, but gives them a weirdly specific emotional resonance. Here we go...

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"Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles (1981) - This, tellingly, was the first song played when MTV kicked off, and I’ll be damned if it wasn't prophetic. Music videos quickly became the propelling force behind the entire music industry for the next twenty years, and celebrity image became inextricably entwined with musical talent forevermore. This song always reminds me of all those artists who weren't photogenic enough to make the transition to video -- people like Peter Frampton, Steve Miller, and Christopher Cross come to mind.

The song itself, written and performed by future uberproducer Trevor Horn and keyboardist Geoff Downes (who would later be a part of my favorite 80s supergroup, Asia), delivers the exact message that the title implies. It's a message to an aging radio star about how different music is now, how the "golden age of wireless" is never coming back, and how the world will be poorer for it. You get lines like this, delivered by Horn in a tinny, lo-fi buzz:

"Now we meet in an abandoned studio"
"Pictures came and broke your heart"
"We can't rewind, we've gone too far"

The whole thing smacks of irrevocable loss, which I'm coming to realize is a real emotional hot button for me. To top it all off, there's the chorus, which is the title phrase delivered over and over by a pair of women's voices, which somehow manage to sound cutesy-poo and robotic at the same time. It's the musical underlining of the song's point: from here on out, folks, surface is all that’s going to matter.

Maybe the fact that MTV predicted its own effect on music is what really makes this song seem deeper than it really is. After all, within ten years, acts like Milli Vanilli and C+C Music Factory would try to prove that it didn't matter if the person in the video was the one who really sang the words (thankfully, we didn't entirely fall for the trick). But the music did become more a part of a package, instead of being the package itself. I'm not saying that music before was less about the celebrity of the musician than the music itself, but substance got pushed even farther to the side. Rock ‘n’ roll became less of a revolution than a movie about a revolution.

Then again, when this song comes on I can't help but wait for the stinger at the end, and it's the only part of the song that isn't delivered in a clipped staccato: it's a woman's voice, distant and echoey, that comes in and repeatedly intones "You are a radio star". It sounds like an afterthought, but I can't help but think that she uses the word "you" for a particular reason. Maybe we're all in the process of becoming obsolete.

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"Somewhere That's Green" from Little Shop of Horrors (1986) - I know, this song is supposed to be hopeful, or at least humorous. The character who sings it, an urban naïf named Audrey, is dreaming of a life away from the squalor of where she currently lives – an unnamed city’s Skid Row in the 1950s. Her dream is simple... what she wants is a husband, two kids, nice appliances, a 12-inch television, and a lawn. That's it.

Now, taken in the context of the film, it's supposed to be fun and clever. This woman wants the most simple things, and dreams of them so rapturously. But to me, a fourteen-year-old at the time it came out, it seemed completely bleak and hopeless. It said to me, "Well, there it is. That's the best you can hope for in life, kid. Not much, is it?"

I probably thought this because I was exposed, at a particularly young age, to the songs of French songwriter Jacques Brel, who I guess can be called the Morrisey of the 60s. The collection of his songs, "Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris", is one of those albums I actively dreaded as a kid for the same reason I hated "Somewhere That's Green"... it’s just too bleak and existentially brutal to be enjoyed on any level. Brel’s songs contain angstfests like "Next", in which a man reminisces about losing his virginity in a dehumanizing military brothel and contemplates suicide, or "The Old Ones", where an old couple waits to die in their increasingly small, silent home, or "Sons Of...", an even more depressing song about children growing up and leaving home than "Sunrise, Sunset"... I had all these memorized by the time I was ten.

So "Somewhere That's Green" hit all the same buttons for me. Mowing the lawn on Saturdays and watching TV in the evening? That's all life is, kid, and you'll be lucky if you even get that.

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"Don't Worry, Be Happy" - Bobby McFerrin (1988). I know this one is the most out of left field. I mean, it's right there in the freaking title. This song is supposed to be a happy one, maybe one to turn your day around when it's all going wrong. But I propose that it is anything but.

Again, I think my original feeling about it was because of the circumstances... the first time I heard it was at the tail end of the summer of 1988. I was away from home at camp for a week, and my girlfriend had just moved to Florida, so this might have influenced my state of mind at the time. The first time I heard the "ooh-ooh"ed chorus, I couldn't help but think that there was a different feeling lurking behind the just-smile sentimentality. I mean, it wasn't a carefree "la la" or its even more carefree cousin, the "na na". It was a string of "ooh"s that descends, and flips into A-minor before resolving. That's the part that got me. It's a vocalized version of a mournful whistle, the joy in which sounded to me like it was only halfhearted.

The verses aren't that much better... Bobby intones a list of bad things that may already be happening to you in a faux-Jamaican accent (if there was ever a shorthand for oppression, that's it!), from being loveless to homeless to being run through the legal system. The solution to all these ills? Be happy! That's it. Then we're back to that somewhat haunting "ooh-ooh" chorus again, each time with more harmonies laid across the top of it. In my opinion, it starts sounding quite desperate by the time the song ends.

One more thing that bugs me about the song... at several points Bobby flat-out states that you shouldn't make *everybody* *else* feel sad by acting that way yourself. Now, I'm all for the idea that changing your physical demeanor and outlook can't help but make you actually feel better, but do we really have to start worrying about how other people feel when they see us struggling? Not helping, Bobby.

As a postscript, let me state that I think Bobby McFerrin is a ridiculously talented musician and vocalist. If you haven't seen his Spontaneous Invention concert video, I suggest you do so immediately. Or at least do a Youtube search of his version of the Beatles' "Blackbird". I just don't think that "DWBH" is what America naively embraced it to be. It's a much more sly commentary than that. But then again, there are plenty of songs that the rah-rah American public took at face value in the 80s (Springsteen's acerbic-in-retrospect "Born in the USA" comes immediately to mind).

As I've said, I'm sure that all these songs are influenced by my state of mind when I first heard them, or what they came to represent afterward. But isn't all art, really? There's some absolute musical crap that I (and you too, I imagine) completely adore, and that love hinges entirely on factors that exist outside the music itself. It's something to consider, when you take a look at what you like and what you don't.

The Moon Illusion

For a long time, I was convinced that the Moon Illusion wasn’t true. No matter how many scientists discussed what it was and theories about why it might work, I just didn’t believe it. Maybe you've heard about this trick our eyes play on us... when you look at the moon low on the horizon, it appears to be huge, much larger than when it is seen up higher in the night sky. However, if you really take the time to analyze it (maybe by checking to see if there are any features that are clearer when the moon is nearer the horizon, or by holding up a penny at arm's length for size comparison between low and high moons), you'll find that there really is no difference in the apparent size of the moon, no matter where it is the sky. Sure, while it's on the horizon, the moon might be a little distorted and orangey, thanks to the larger amount of atmosphere you're looking through to see it, but for all intents and purposes, the moon appears no bigger on the horizon than it does when it's directly overhead.

Like I said, I used to be skeptical of this. My eyes told me that the moon had to be bigger when it was low in the sky, just had to. I could look and verify it on any clear night. There was no shaking me from that thought. Now, I have to admit, I realize that I was wrong. And what brought me to this conclusion was a simple thought experiment that taught me not to believe everything my eyes think they see.

Start off by thinking about how you judge the distance of objects, especially objects overhead. The ceiling above you right now, for example. If you're sitting down, the ceiling of an average room would be, say, about four feet over your head. As you look at the ceiling toward the corners of the room, the amount of space you have to look across goes up markedly. If you're at the end of a long hallway, the distance from your eyes to the upper corner of the ceiling at the far end is longer than the actual hallway itself, because you're looking across the space at a diagonal. This holds true even when you’re outside -- the distance of clouds near the horizon is clearly much farther than clouds that are directly over your head. So this is the framework your mind is constantly working in, in terms of perspective: directly overhead is closest, the horizon is very far, and the more you lower your gaze, your distance from objects at the same level goes up exponentially.

Now think about the moon. Your actual distance to the moon when it's on the horizon and when it's directly overhead differs by only about 4,000 miles (the radius of the earth -- sketch it out on a piece of paper and you'll see what I mean). Given that the moon is almost 250,000 miles away, that's not a lot of difference. So while in every other earthly situation, items an equal height off the ground will be hundreds of times farther from your eye depending on whether they're right over you or just above the horizon, when it comes to the moon there’s only a change of less than 2%.

And that's how your eye gets fooled. In this unique instance, you're looking at an object that barely changes distance from when it's overhead to when it's actually coming over the horizon. Your brain processes it in the same way it processes perspective to any other object, and the result is that it thinks the moon on the horizon has got to be much larger than when it's above. That’s the only way your mind can figure that it looks to be about the same size. This conflict between its apparent size and the brain's judgment of how far it must be given that it's close to the horizon is what causes the Moon Illusion.

I've heard many people talk about the Moon Illusion, how it's perplexed scientists for centuries, and I've also heard it explained in confusing ways like "because it's near the horizon, your mind processes it like a background object instead of a foreground object", but once I realized my own personal explanation for it, all my confusion just drained away. It made me realize what power there is in scientific acceptance, that beautiful moment when you realize that what you were so sure of five minutes ago is dead wrong, and that it’s okay.

I think a lot of what causes the problems the world has today is our inability to realize when we've been wrong, and to shift our beliefs accordingly. There are so many people holding onto antiquated ideas and dogmas, simply because it's what they're familiar with. I realize that it's scary to give up a belief system you've had for so long, even for so long that it's one you inherited from older generations you love and admire. But keep in mind that many truths we now know, at one time was thought to be either wrong or simply unknowable. Hold fast to what you believe, but not so tightly that you can't let go when it's time to.

An Ending is a Very Delicate Time

That title comes from the prologue to David Lynch's film version of Dune, although I've changed the word "beginning" to "ending". The epigraph still works though... the only thing that will more reliably derail a great story than a shaky beginning is an ending that just doesn’t stick the landing.

In general, the entertainment industry these days doesn’t like endings. When it comes to the stories that they tell/sell us, they’d rather chase after one word: "franchise" (this is second only to the word "cult", which in this case translates as an avid, engaged and loyal fanbase). That's where the real money is, in this world where film and television studios and publishing houses are only moderately-funded arms of titanic multi-national corporations -- whose main focus has always been building brand loyalty. The down side, therefore, is that the people we trust to lead us through epic, years-long stories, often don't know where, when, or even how their stories are ultimately going to end. And it's been proven over and over that there is no greater vitriol than a fan base who feels like they've been betrayed or cheated when a franchise doesn't end the way the feel it should. Ironically, the longer a story goes on, the more elaborate and fleshed-out the mythology becomes, and the harder is it to come up with an ending that has enough of a twist to it to delight, albeit one that fits so perfectly that it's the exact resolution that the fans didn't even know they wanted. It's like trying to hit a moving target that keeps getting smaller and smaller.

This is especially true of TV, since there's rarely an auteur with a singular vision. Even people like Ronald Moore, Aaron Sorkin, Bryan Fuller, etc., can’t be the sole visionaries of a five-season series the way a movie director or a novelist can. A person just can’t sustain that kind of creative involvement for so long. It’s the most precarious position of all, I think: you have to provide millions of people with an hour’s worth of entertainment every week, which the vast majority of them won’t directly pay for. They have high expectations, and will turn on you in a heartbeat if they see something they don’t like. So who, in my opinion are some of the winners in this extended high-stakes gamble? What series do I think really got it right? Or, barring that, which ones at least made the ending interesting, or polarizing? Here's just a small sample – and does it go without saying that spoilers abound beyond this point?

"Friends": I’m starting with the obvious, really. This was the biggest show in its day (1994-2004), was the anchor of NBC’s classic Thursday prime time lineup, and could have kept going for as long as they liked. True, the final season ran into the problem that many shows do when they start getting long in the tooth, having to revisit (and sometimes contradict) previous plots and themes once their characters’ lives and backstories are fully fleshed out. But in the case of Friends, they also set several story arcs in motion that would give all the characters plenty to do: Chandler and Monica's adoption process (with Joey being the main "antagonist" in the plot), the potential of Rachel moving to Paris and taking her and Ross's daughter with her, and Phoebe's wedding (and, as much as I enjoy watching Paul Rudd, shouldn't she have ended up with Hank Azaria in the end?!) It all built toward the final scene, with the characters standing in the bare apartment, talking. That's all the show was really about at its best, and watching them all walk out the door together for the last time (and the slow zoom on the iconic frame around the door's peephole) had just the right tone.

"Twin Peaks": By the time the end came, this David Lynch/Mark Frost show, which had been the hottest thing on television just a year before, was staring down its second cancellation after being revived due to fan clamor, which in part took place on the fledgling Internet. After the resolution of the central mystery early in the second season (“Who Killed Laura Palmer?”), the series devolved into a weird amalgam of queasy humor, macabre/incomprehensible side plots, and stunt-casting (why oh why did they let Diane Keaton direct an episode?!) Fortunately, Lynch and Frost had enough passion to eventually take the reins back and give us a great finish. They had never wanted to solve Laura's murder at all -- but the network nixed the MacGuffin idea and pressed for an answer, fearing that the audience couldn't be teased forever. So after the mystery was resolved and a half-dozen foundering episodes that pretty much sealed the show’s fate, they set up an even larger mystery, leading up to a cliff-hanger ending that put no less than five major characters in life- and soul-endangering situations. The result of what Cooper found in the Black Lodge (and what he brought back with him) has fueled fan speculation for over twenty years.

"Gilmore Girls": Amy Sherman-Palladino and her team have a way of constructing a small-town community from the ground up. And by the time you've spent even a few hours in Stars Hollow, you feel like you live there. You know the people, and you could probably find your way around if you suddenly found yourself dropped off at the city limits. It's actually a testament to her style that, when she left the show after six seasons, she had assembled a team that was so on board with what she was trying to do that the show was able to close with one more season while only minimally degrading the quality. Of course, the ending centered around the dissolution of the mother-daughter relationship that was at the heart of the series. For Lorelai, the mother, they basically hit the reset button on her on-off-married-divorced relationship with the curmudgeonly Luke. And Rory, the daughter, ended up leaving home to work on the presidential campaign trail of a first-time candidate... some unknown Illinois congressman with the unlikely name Barack Obama. I can't help but wonder where Rory is now in that alternate universe.

"Newhart" - I remember the night this sitcom finale aired, and the way the series' final scene created such a collision of nostalgia, hilarity, and plain old shocked surprise. Of course, it's now the textbook example of how to twist and subvert expectations when closing out a TV show... Bob Newhart wakes up next to his wife from his previous television series, revealing that what we have been watching for five years was really an extended dream sequence within that original show. It could have felt like a rip-off (like the way that Dallas erased a season of ill-advised changes with an “It was all a dream!” moment), but Bob and Suzanne Pleshette played it perfectly, instantaneously creating a classic moment.

"St. Elsewhere" - Where the Newhart ending was a unanimous success, here's an example of how a twist ending can polarize an audience, even to the point of alienating them from the show as a whole. In the final scene, it is revealed that the titular hospital exists only inside a snow globe, and the people and events we watched for years were all in the mind of a young autistic man (never mind that the show had aired several crossover episodes with other shows which supposedly took place in the real world). Still, that's probably what the show will be remembered for generations from now.

"Lost" - It's now generally understood that the creators of Lost didn't have their endgame planned out from the beginning, although they played it as if they did. It would all be explained, they said, and no, the characters were not in Purgatory. Looking back on it now, five years later, it's starting to matter less and less that all the questions that were brought up during the show weren't really answered satisfactorily. What I remember more are the characters, the relationships, and the sense of wonder the series evoked, which was severely lacking in nearly all shows before and since. It was all tied together, yes, but its ending “revelation” didn’t live up to the endlessly complex mythology and weirdness that came before it. Seeing as the show had spent seven solid years weaving an immensely convoluted tapestry of mythology, I suppose no ending would have.

"Futurama" - While forever being The Simpsons' less popular cousin, this show was actually more consistent in its focus and the clever way it twisted science fiction tropes to its own hilarious ends. When the series was cancelled after four seasons, Matt Groening and his team decided to make an open ending, with the Planet Express team willing throwing themselves into a black hole (and possibly into an alternate universe), sure only in the knowledge that whatever their fate, they would face it together. It was an uplifting way to send off the characters, although it would turn out to be somewhat premature – they would continue to live on in four straight-to-video movies, then two more seasons on another network. As of this writing, there’s still 13 episodes left to air even though the second cancellation has been announced, so this show will be the only one on this list to have *two* series finales. We’ll have to wait and see what Groening & Co. have dreamed up for the ultimate finale.

"Pushing Daisies" - For the two seasons of Bryan Fuller's comedic series about a pie-maker who solves murders by being able to briefly resurrect the dead(!), Pushing Daisies wrapped every one of its 22 episodes with enjoyable quirk, by way of astounding comic-book style art direction, endearing characters, and the occasional musical number. Here's a rare case of a series creator knowing the end is coming, and doing his best to make it pay off. Although it seemed a bit rushed, the show used its last two episodes to wrap up all of its ongoing story arcs, and brought the characters to a conclusion that, after being charmed by them for two years, paid off handsomely. It might not have been particularly surprising, but with characters we had grown so close to, not having a resolution would have been crueler than rushing the ending.

"FlashForward" - The mid- and late-00's were full of people trying to find the "next Lost", and we were flooded with shows that promised big, mythic, sci-fi based ideas on the meaning of life, love, and existence, with enough convoluted mythology for the newly-minted Internitpickers (my own word-creation, patent pending) to obsess over and catalog in wikis. This was my favorite of that crop, the premise being that, one day, every person in the world is given a simultaneous 137-second vision of what they will be seeing and hearing exactly six months in the future. One man saw himself visiting his Marine daughter, who he thought had been killed in action. One woman saw herself cheating on her husband with a man she hadn't even met yet. One man saw nothing at all. The show dealt with the FBI trying to sort through all this... why did this happen? Did someone cause it, and was it an accident, or on purpose? All the characters had to deal with the aftermath of their visions: How should the man go about finding his daughter? Would the wife still cheat, knowing full well that she was dedicated to her marriage but about to meet her future lover? Was the man who saw nothing going to be dead in six months? By the end of the first season, most of the answers were given, and the show looked like it was going to wind down. Not surprising, since it hadn’t been picked up for a second season... but then the ending turned into a cliffhanger in which the world went through *another* "flash-forward", which showed even farther (years, if I'm remembering right) into the future. What impressed me about it was that the show creators could have changed the ending, knowing that a second season would never come, but they kept it. The reason was most likely because they had put so much time into crafting that final montage, full of flashes of different locales, situations, new characters, etc. that they had nothing to lose by keeping it. Where Lost didn't know where it was going, FlashForward kind of had to know, at least a little bit, because the characters’ visions used footage that would have to woven into the actual story when the time came. All that unfulfilled promise still intrigues me.

"Fringe" - Fringe was always a borderline show for me, and by that I mean that after all the alternate realities and complex mythology, I almost stopped caring about the characters. It wasn't that they stopped being well-written or interesting, but it was just that at the end of season three, Joshua Jackson's character permanently switched timelines, and from them on worked with a set of identical characters who did not know him (in the alternate universe he switched to, he had died as a child). I couldn't help but be continually reminded of the fact that the characters were *not* the people who I liked from the beginning of the show, and wondered what had happened to them in "our" world. There was some mumbo-jumbo about him causing his girlfriend to "become" the old character we were familiar with – he transferred all her alternate-universe memories into her or some kind of nonsense -- but after that point I found myself always on the verge of losing interest. I kept up with it until the series finale, and at the end the course of time was reversed so that the show's final cataclysm never happened, giving the characters license to have their happy endings. It was well done, but I never quite got over the taint of that third season switcheroo.

"Firefly" - This Joss Whedon western-in-space show didn't have a series finale, per se, because was cancelled halfway through its first season. But it was what happened *after* the cancellation that made it so impressive. The nineteen-episode series -- including four or five that never got the chance to air -- were released on DVD and started taking on a life of their own. Online communities got involved, championing the show's wit, charm, propensity for swearing in Chinese, and just plain goodness, and managed to rally enough troops to convince the powers-that-be that a follow-up movie should be made. That film, "Serenity", didn't make too much of a splash outside of the already-dedicated fan base of Browncoats (as they came to call themselves), but for those who loved the characters and style of the show, it was just about everything they wanted it to be -- bigger, bolder, shinier. Whedon has said that he crammed what he had planned for the next two seasons of plot into the film, and the result was a brilliant resolution and sendoff for a show that should have lived on for years.

"Sports Night" - Aaron Sorkin's other millennial TV show (the first being "The West Wing") was a sitcom about the crew of a Sportscenter-type TV show. It flew along at a thousand miles an hour, throwing out clever dialogue and obscure references in patented walk-and-talk sequences, with the characters joyfully debating all sorts of topics, only a few of which directly dealt with sports -- I think my fellow-Aaron picked the subject just because it could be used as a metaphor for so many other human situations. A good example is the character who became obsessed with researching a particular championship sailing accident as a way of dealing with his parents' divorce. I remarked to my wife that watching the show actually made me feel smarter, mentally challenging myself to keep up with it, and it was exhilarating. The show ran for two full seasons, and it was a rare case of the end being both premature and prepared for. There was an extended plot arc where the titular show was about to be cancelled -- meta, right? -- while the management tried to find a way to salvage it. The end was a meticulously plotted word puzzle, which gave so much of just the right amount of things-changing vs. things-staying-the-same, that it felt like it had been Sorkin's endgame from the beginning.

“M*A*S*H*” - When it went off the air in 1983 after 11 seasons, this series finale was the most-watched television episode in history. I was only 11 at the time myself, but I understood that it meant a lot to a lot of people. And looking back, I can understand why. While the show was about a mobile medical unit in the Korean War, it started its run just after the US finished a humiliating defeat in another drawn-out Pacific war, this time in Vietnam. The show was always hard to pin down... was it a goofy comedy? A harrowing war drama? It managed to somehow hit both of these points, and every bit of spectrum in between, which I think was the secret of its success. As for me, I remember watching it in syndication and being slightly bewildered by the fact that I could never figure out whether whatever happened on screen was about to be followed by a laugh track or not. To be honest, I was watching the night of the finale, but fell asleep during the middle, so it seemed surprisingly short. I was aware that there were dramatic farewells and other moments happening that just didn't resonate with me because I didn't understand the show well enough. Still, it remains one of the most beloved send-offs of a show that ran for a ridiculously long time, by 1970s standards. So they must have hit that sweet spot between comedy and tragedy that so many other shows swing for, but never quite connect with.

"Roseanne" - I'm probably in the minority, but I thought the ending of this series was brilliant. To some, it was a poor payoff of a season-long joke that made it appear that the show had run off the rails. To sum up: the ninth season of the story of the Connor family started with them winning the lottery. For a show that had spent its entire run up until then featuring (and appealing to) a staunchly blue-collar, scrappin'-and-survivin' family, it was a pure left-field moment of "Whaaa???". And as the individual episodes got more surreal and outrageous, with celebrity guest stars, world travelling, and divorce drama, we all thought that we were actually watching the psyche of volatile creator/star Roseanne fragment in front of our eyes. The idea seemed plausible; by the ninth season, the series had pretty much run its course and was on the way out anyway, who's to say that she didn't just announce "I don't give a crap anymore" in her trademark nasal tone and just start throwing in everything but the kitchen sink? But it turns out there was a plan after all... in the series finale we learned that all along we had been watching Roseanne's character writing her life story. And while the beginning of the series was "true", more and more the show became life as the Roseanne character wanted it to be... children married who she thought they were supposed to be with, instead of who they really did, the family found their way into money, her husband had never died of a heart attack partway through the series, etc. What we thought was creative laziness had really been a run-up to the final shocking revelation that what we were seeing was a character creating an alternate version of her life, the one they wanted instead of the one they had. This did, and still does, strike me as very profound and moving.

Of course there are lots of examples I’ve left out, and if I have it’s probably because (shocker!) I haven’t actually seen every TV show ever made. Aaron Sorkin said that the hardest thing about television as a storytelling medium is that it's "all middle". Meaning that you need to have a great premise, and a great resolution to that premise, but then you also have to stretch out the middle part, never actually getting to the ending, but always progressing toward it, for an indefinite amount of time. Mysteries have to be teased and teased and teased, but as we saw with "Twin Peaks", solving the mystery is almost as lethal as making the audience wait too long, as we saw with shows like “The Killing”. It's a high-wire act that only a talented few can make worth our while, and I always applaud anyone who attempts in a new way.