Griffin and Pacific

"You wanna sell me some Vicadin?"

"Excuse me?"

I turn around and see a middle aged guy at the curb. I had seen him in my periphery walking towards me as the light changed but I was heading towards the donut shop and really didn't wanna be bothered by complete strangers. Like, ever. Even when I need to know the time, I don't wanna start a conversation I just wanna know the time. I especially don't wanna be bothered by anyone wanting me to sell them drugs. I'm now about four limping steps off the curb aka in the middle of one of the busiest streets of downtown Dallas. Fortunately, this ain't rush hour. It's about nine pm in the evening on a Saturday night.

"You use a cane. That tells me you got Vicadin."

I glanced down and back up, "sorry to disappoint but I just use OTCs. I'm not Dr. House." I continue walking with a nervous laugh. The light of the white walking stick figure just turned into the blinking red hand gesture saying people without canes should start running and people with canes should prepare to be run over by a bus.

I don't really need the cane anymore, but it helps on the longer walks when I'm out of breath to help me keep going. Like an extra leg. Both my ankles are still tender from the beating I've been giving them the past several months. I sprained my right ankle and pulled a muscle or two on the lower left leg. Been nursing them back to health the past several weeks. Also, the cane scares off would be attacking dogs in my neighborhood. I don't really need the cane, but it's become a thing of comfort. I kinda like having it around.

"Of course you ain't Dr. House he's a fictional fucking character." His response sounds like it was intended to be good natured, but there's also a frustration in his voice. Methinks he might have just run out of Vicadin himself, tho he has no cane.

I'm trying to be good natured about this too, but the guy's now following me down the crosswalk, in much the same way I recall myself in my youth following the occasional beautiful woman who just tried nicely to reject me, and is about to meanly tell me to bug off.

At my regular limping pace I continue making my way to the other side of the street. I see him in my periphery on my left. He's half following me, but obviously he's heading towards the liquor store while I'm still aiming for the donut shop. My beer is already in my backpack. I bought it at the last bus stop so I wouldn't have to visit both the beer store and the donut shop here while waiting for the next bus. In hindsight this was a good thing because I do not think I woulda wanted to continue the small talk that follows with this stranger as we both shared a liquor store.

"Besides, " I add for no apparent reason other than small talk as the two of us begin to gravitate away from one another like celestial bodies on different orbital trajectories, "my problem's just my ankles. House is missing a thigh muscle."

"Yeah but House doesn't make his own prescriptions for Vicadin."

"He did in season three."

He glances away and shrugs. I laugh to myself. As I enter the donut shop I find myself marveling at what a weird exchange that was with a complete stranger. Even if I could get Vicadin I wouldn't sell it on the streets of Dallas. The place is crawling with cops. It was rather silly of that guy to go up to complete strangers and try to buy a fix. Guess he was desperate.

I'm kind of torn with the new direction my life seems to have taken as of late. I can't remember being without a car after college. It had become something I just took for granted was always there. I've always heard the phrase "driving is a privilege and not a right" but only this year have I been forced with the sobering reality of what that phrase means. I'm forced to agree Thomas Jefferson didn't include "car" in the definition of "pursuit of happiness." However, I swear if he were alive today a ride in a Lamborghini would make him add an amendment to the Constitution. Finances and other pressing matters have made me still having a car an impossibility, so now I function at the whimsy of public transportation, and Dallas Area RAPID Transit is poorly labeled.

Still, I am forced to interact with complete strangers that for the past twenty years or so I've been able to instead just drive past and never acknowledge. I'm sure this is good for my psyche or something. I no longer believe in souls, so I know it's not any good for that. Maybe someday I'll meet enough people and have "real life experiences" that I can then write about and turn into a book and make millions of dollars. Until then, it's sixty-five dollars for a monthly bus pass. I'm still waiting for the December card to show up in my mail.

After I was done in the donut shop (apple fritters and chocolate milk rule) I'm heading towards the bus stop and another complete stranger turns to me with pamphlets in his hand. I glance down and see the word "HELL" in big red letters and that's all I need to know.

"Would you like one?" He asks with a toothy grin and big doll-like eyes that make me think Stepford Wives all the sudden.

I muster up the most compassionate and pitiful face I can muster which probably came off more as just tired. I also fought the urge to roll my eyes at him. "There is no god," I said as simply and matter of factly as I could.

"Of course there is!"

"I'm sorry. I checked. He ain't there."

"Prove to me there's no god," he says with this false bravado I hear echoed in the back of my mind as memories of me twenty years ago, which chills me to the bone. Or was that the November wind that gusted up from between skyscrapers? I'll blame the wind.

"See that's the thing," I said with less false but more pompous bravado, "I don't have to prove a thing. I no longer believe." I pointed at him with the hand holding my bag of donuts, since the other hand was holding my cane, which was holding up the rest of me. "It is incumbent on the believer to prove there is a god."

"I can give you five reasons-" Oh this one's been coached. He can count the reasons he knows off the top of his head.

I decided to cut him off at the pass. "Anecdotal evidence doesn't count," I said flatly.

He went to say something but it got stuck in his Adam's apple. I turned away and continued down my path having left him silent and frozen on his own.

Several minutes later I'm sitting at the bus stop and that same dude who wanted Vicadin walks up to the bus stop and announces loudly to the handful of us that are all busy trying to ignore each other, "ROSA PARKS everybody! Let's give a hand to Rosa Parks! Let's give it up for Rosa Parks everybody." He's clapping his hands loudly and a couple others join in. I just look at the back of his head and he continues walking past us and against the light. No traffic this late so there's little danger of him getting run over, but I chuckle to myself as I see a policeman carefully following the guy about twenty paces behind him. They both saunter on into the night. I'm sure that guy's story is much more interesting than mine, but this ain't his blog, so you're stuck with me.

I'm a maniacal cane-wielding ex-Christian with a bag of donuts, a backpack of beer, and a monthly bus pass. I take off my hat when I pass Rosa Parks in honor of what she represents to me, but I don't applaud her cuz she's a fucking statue. I lord over the intersection of Griffin and Pacific and all the West End. You may never see me, but that doesn't mean I'm not there. I'll take away your gods and make you pray for Vicadin. Don't cross me.

Left 4 Dead In The Details

My new addiction of the nanosecond is the video game Left 4 Dead and its sequel/expansion/whatever the hell it is Left 4 Dead 2. If you haven't played it yet, and care about spoilage, read no further. If you have played it already, or don't plan to ever play it or don't care, keep reading. No I ain't playing it. I can't afford to buy games on my paycheck. I watch videos of others playing it at places like YouTube and I read about it at places like Wikia and I have searches running via TweetDeck so if anyone happens to mention L4D or L4D2 I can eavesdrop on their conversations. Like I said, it's an addiction of the nanosecond. By the time I'm done writing this I will have probably already lost interest. In a nutshell this is the story behind Left 4 Dead.

About a month ago someone came down with an unknown contagion that caused them to lose any shred of humanity and lash out at anyone. It's believed this Patient Zero was taken to Mercy Hospital, but that's speculation. Well hell, a lot of what I'm about to say is speculation based off observations in the game. After this first case, others began to exhibit similar symptoms. It appears the medical community, and the military in the form of an organization called The CEDA, first began to treat this disease as some sort of cross between the common flu and rabies, but when that didn't work and incidents escalated, the government turned towards evacuating the uninfected, and leaving the infected behind. Because the infected react violently to anyone not infected, deadly force was required, and the hasty process of building SafeHouses created a sort of underground railroad giving people occasional respite as each time attempts to fortify failed the survivors were forced to retreat. That was a month ago. At the beginning of the game, you are one of four of the last survivors still in a highly contaminated area, surrounded by humanoids who were not long ago just mild mannered normal people and are now rampaging insane lunatics frothing at the mouth and attacking anything that makes too much noise or knows the difference between a TV remote and a fire hydrant. So you got no choice but to shoot them back before they kill you, as you make your way across urban and suburban environments hoping to find safety just beyond the horizon, cuz there ain't nowhere safe where you are now.

But what is it that I find interesting about this game? Usually shootemups like this bore me to tears. I haven't bought a shootemup since Quake 3. I haven't bought a first or third person adventure game since the second or third Tomb Raider. The last MMORPG I invested in was City of Heroes. I completely avoided World of Warcraft and didn't see the appeal of ElfQuest. Halo I prefer to watch than play too. I especially like Machinima comedy like Red vs Blue, where helmets bobbing up and down passes for talking dialog.

One of the things that intrigues me about Left 4 Dead is the cooperative gameplay. It's difficult to grief fellow players in L4D, and even when you do, the results are more immediate that you're just shooting yourself in the foot. I imagine there are still griefers out there. The same bastards who go to online multiplayer games where the object is to draw words so others can guess and they just write out the word instead of drawing it. Griefing that doesn't help you and it doesn't help anyone else. It's just griefing for griefing sake, but I imagine in a game environment like Left 4 Dead that sort of thing would police itself. What works in L4D that I haven't seen much elsewhere is that if you really want to progress and do well you gotta work as a team. Friendly fire is pretty much unavoidable given what I've seen, but except for extreme cases that's usually quickly forgiven and focus is on getting the foursome from point A to point B with a lot of chaos and carnage in between.

Something that is more interesting to me than the gameplay itself though is the story behind it, and how it's presented to the audience. Rather than long boring cut scenes where the players must remain passive, there's clues embedded throughout the game that cause the player to become more involved in the present events as well as the preceding events leading up to the here and now. Even more anticipatory is where they're going - is any place safe? Will they be safe when they get there?

There's clues throughout the games in the form of dialog said between characters, graffitti on walls in SafeHouses, and visual cues throughout the environments themselves that if utilized with deductive reasoning can lead one to surmise what is making these zombies and how it's spreading, or more precisely how it's NOT spreading. Cuz the Valve Boys behind the game are keen to give a lot of false clues and then knock the more obvious guesses down.

The people themselves are the first clue. In Left 4 Dead 1 we have a Vietnam vet named Bill who must be pushing seventy if he was twenty while serving in the military. We also have a biker named Francis, a cubicle rat named Louis, and the token tomboyish female named Zoe. In Left 4 Dead 2 we have a school teacher named Coach, a con man named Nick, a redneck named Ellis, and another token tomboy named Rochelle who this time appears to have a vocation of reporter, but little is made of that. Based on how they behave with one another, we are led to assume that they knew little to nothing of one another prior to the contagion taking effect. They were not friends prior to the "Green Flu" infecting over half the populous, and causing those infected to attack the rest. The Valve Boys take great care to convey to its audience that these eight people each come from dramatically different walks of life. One might think the reason for that would be to increase the odds a player might find something in one of these four people that'd make them feel more comfortable in that particular skin, but if that were the case they'd have put more effort in allowing players to personalize their avatar more. When picking a character in Left 4 Dead it's more like choosing a player marker in the game Monopoly. Some people prefer the horse, others the boot, and still others the thimble. Psychologists may waft eloquent on what this means about your psyche but ultimately you pick one because a friend took the one you really wanted and you didn't want the other choices more.

I surmise that these characters were invented and chosen for reasons that help advance the story The Valve Boys wish to convey. Four people who have never knowingly met before today suddenly have one thing in common: they're not infected. What brings them together in the chaos is the fact that they're the only ones in eye shot of each other not drooling and growling like mad dogs. In any other way they are remarkably different from one another and had they ever been in the same public place together prior to this day, it would have been a marvelous coincidence. This means that the reason why these four have somehow been singled out as the only survivors in a post apocalyptic America can't be because they hung out with the same people or frequented the same place or ate the same foods or anything environmental.

So what could it be? Well off the top of my head maybe they all have the same rare blood type. It's NOT, but that's the first logical guess. Let's explore this for a moment. In the U.S. at least, over half the population has a positive type blood. In fact close to 75% is either O+ or A+. Less than 15% have negative type blood, the most rare being AB-. B+ is at just under 10%. I know that cuz that's my blood type. I memorized that cuz when I found out I'd had a rough day, and I remember laughing cuz I thought it was a backhanded joke God was making at my expense: telling me to "be positive." So just for sake of argument, let's pretend that the survivors of Left 4 Dead all have B+ blood. It's somehow fitting, in a sardonic dark humor way that the game seems to enjoy. Less than ten percent of the population of America may be immune to this disease due to blood type. Anyone of any other blood type succumbs to this infection some in the game culture are calling "Green Flu" or "Zombie Cancer." This would mean at least nine infected for every one 'immune' person. That still wouldn't explain how we get whittled down to four, but the number isn't four. It's more like a few hundred. Others before our foursome have run the gauntlet and made it out safely. They've even left behind a trail for our guys to follow to safety, or presumed safety, in the form of SafeHouses. It's never quite clear just how safe the rest of the world actually is, or will be by the time one gets there.

I should point out here that in Left 4 Dead 2 we see infected people wearing HAZMAT suits that show no sign of having been compromised, so either ALL the ppl wearing these protective suits (that are flame proof and presumably germ proof) were dormantly infected prior to putting their suits on, or you don't contract this disease via blood, saliva, semen, or any other bodily fluids. It's also probably not airborne. What's that leave? What indeed. That's just what I'm trying to figure out.

Our foursome in the game are late to the party. For reasons not particularly made clear in each case, evacuation has already happened and as we first meet these characters, they're trailing behind hundreds (maybe thousands) of others who have not only escaped successfully, but they managed to build crude but effective safe houses and they've left behind a near infinite arsenal of weaponry and ammunition. Our special foursome are not trailblazers. They're in last place for the race of their lives.

Looking at the SafeHouses a moment, it's fun to note that as our foursome continue forward, they purposefully barricade the SafeHouse doors in order to keep the Infected they left behind from following them. This however also sabotages any chances of anyone behind them from escaping. So again, either they have very good reason to assume they're the only living people left, or these four are thoughtless, hateful human beings. Had the people before them been so uncaring of their plight and barricaded the SafeHouse doors...

Why have the eight characters surrounding this game each put off leaving the infection zones for now? We don't know. If this were a TV series like LOST, there'd be elaborate back stories revealed in flashbacks that would tell us just how well they knew one another prior to the zombie apocalypse, if at all. It'd also explain why they're still where they are when all indicators pointing to RUN already existed. However, this ain't LOST. We don't have the luxury of flashbacks. Cut scenes take away from playability, and get real boring on repeats.

Perhaps even the writers of this game don't know why these are the last ones to escape. Someone has to be last, right? And it's a good thing they're last because as a player you are literally shooting anything that moves, at least if you're a newbie. No one's stopping to check for pulses or brain activity in these humanoid targets. Everyone from Bill (who appears the most knowledgable and collected of the eight when it comes to being at war) to Ellis (who is more of an immature joyrider not taking the experience remotely serious) is shooting first and asking questions much much later. They have reason to believe they're all that's left of humanity that hasn't made it to Disneyland. Presumably there have recently been people escaping alongside them, but none of them are in earshot or eyeshot now that haven't either escaped themselves, succumbed to the infection, or become cannonfodder.

I might note here that aside from rare instances where piles of cattle indicate failed scientific examinations trying to uncover where the disease came from, we see little to no animal activity anywhere. We see no infected birds or domestic animals. We never encounter any zoos. We also see literally not a single infected or dead child. The reasons for this are more likely external to the game storyline. There are censoring organizations that make it difficult for a game company to market a game that shows excessive animal mutilation, and abuse of children is pretty much not only censorable, but unmarketable. No ingame explanation is made, however, a presumption that ALL children were evacuated without their parents is both unfeasible and unrealistic. However, I'm not able to utilize this information one way or the other. Either the game designers did this on purpose and will explain later on as to why, or they had no choice but to make all infected grown adults in appearance, and the absence of children is not a clue just a necessity of having to cater to today's immature, short-sighted, ignorant censormongers in our global community.

There's some countries that required a less violent version of the game, that is so censored it actually adversely affects gameplay. Some of the violent visuals are necessary to tell if an enemy has been properly incapacitated or needs another hit. Imagine playing PacMan but not being able to tell whether or not the ghosts in the game are edible. That's how much censorship has threatened to castrate these games. Have I mentioned I hate censorship? Even when I agree with it, as in the case of children missing from Left 4 Dead? I wouldn't want to see children getting shot to pieces, but their absence from the game without any explanation is almost as unsettling. Were they abducted? Did CEDA force parents to abandon their children to the care of the state?

In the first game there are four campaigns and at the end of each campaign, our foursome is rescued (provided you as a player make it to the end). At the end of No Mercy, a helicopter pilot picks them up at the top of a hospital roof, but at the start of Crash Course we find out that something strange happened on the chopper. Zoe was forced to shoot their pilot dead because he changed before her eyes in midflight. He turned into a zombie.

I should probably add here that these things aren't really zombies in the strictest sense of the word. They're infected. In fact they may actually be alive when you're killing them, and if there's some kind of cure of this infection.. well, perhaps thinking of them as zombies makes it a little easier to deal with but they're not undead. They just stop behaving as if they have any humanity. The game refers to them often as zombies, and it's more convenient occasionally for me to do so as well, but I'd rather reserve the actual argument of what a zombie is for some other diatribe.

Anyway, so a guy was normal before picking up our survivors, and begins to change after meeting them. Now, to be fair, we are given indications during the finale that perhaps the chopper pilot has been 'bitten.' He hints to that in some of his dialogue. However, our foursome are attacked by these creatures regularly and it's rarely if ever indicated that the zombies are biting anybody. In fact it doesn't seem like any of them have any appetite whatsoever. If you watch their behavior, infected sometimes exhibit signs of starvation, including irritability, lethargy, atrophy, and even vomiting or 'dry heaves.'

Later on in Death Toll our foursome come across "the Church Guy." In one of the more effective 'crescendo' moments of the first game, they find a guy who has locked himself inside a SafeHouse and won't let our stalwart friends in. He thinks they might be infected. Turns out he'd been 'bitten' a little over an hour ago and has gone a little crazy, thinking he might be running out of time. However, he's fine until our foursome walk up and bug him. I mean, he was obviously crazy before they arrived (later investigation of his SafeHouse reveals he got a little happy with the black magic marker and wrote "better safe than sorry" on the walls a couple hundred thousand times), but he didn't turn into "one of them." After he rings the church bell bringing all the infected within earshot barreling down on everyone, he then exits the SafeHouse having turned into a special zombie (either a Boomer, Hunter, or Smoker depending on random factors) his own self. Needless to say, nowhere in this game do you ever actually get to save a fifth human being from the infected. They always seem to turn.

A possible exception to this is at the end of Death Toll. There's two people in a boat that come to rescue our survivors: John and Amanda Slater. However, we never learn of their fate because there's currently no direct story narrative between the end of Death Toll and the start of the next campaign called Dead Air. That could change in the future. Crash Course was "Downloadable Content" or DLC that the game designers added after the fact as an expansion update for their player base. Death Toll opens inside a greenhouse, and gives no explanation why these four people would find themselves holed up in one of those. None of these guys look like they have a green thumb. Some player speculate there is no correlation between Dead Air & Death Toll. That these are completely different scenarios perhaps in alternate realities or that the game has no linear narrative at all. Others speculate that it's very plausible secret plans are in the works to connect Death Toll & Dead Air and also reveal the fate of the Slaters. My guess is Zoe had to take them out too.

At the end of Dead Air, our survivors are saved by an airplane pilot. At the start of the next campaign called Blood Harvest, our survivors appear to have spent at least the past night or so sleeping in a forest. There's three sleeping bags, indicating that one person always stayed awake to keep an eye out for zombies. Again there's no indicator this is in direct correlation to Dead Air, but it's possible a future expansion will come out that reveals the fate of the airplane and why our foursome find themselves in the middle of the woods. Blood Harvest ends at a Farmhouse with the survivors hitching a ride on a massive looking All Terrain Vehicle from the military. Surely they're safe now, right? Well a later expansion to the game is known as The Lighthouse, which game designers have said, "is what might happen to our survivors if they took a wrong turn.." It's only for Versus and Survival modes. Rescue never comes for the foursome at the Lighthouse. It's where they go to die.

Left 4 Dead 2 has a similar breakdown, but better correlations between the different campaigns. Dead Center ends with this new foursome escaping in a race car. At the start of Dark Carnival the race car is unable to take them further because the highway is literally jammed with abandoned cars. Dark Carnival ends with the heroes in an helicopter escaping a concert stadium. Like in No Mercy, it's later revealed in Swamp Fever the helicopter pilot was also infected. Nick had to take him out in midflight, just like Zoe. Ellis argues with Nick on this point occasionally through the course of Swamp Fever. However, Swamp Fever starts in a box car, so again we don't see the direct story narrative between the end of Dark Carnival and the start of Swamp Fever, leaving ample room for future expansions that might shed more light. Swamp Fever ends at a plantation near coastline, where our survivors meet Virgil. He's a boat captain that essentially becomes the taxi service for the Left 4 Dead 2 survivors from Swamp Fever onward. Like the survivors, he appears to be immune, but apparently his wife wasn't so lucky. In Hard Rain, Virgil drops off the survivors to get him some diesel fuel so he can take them the rest of the way to New Orleans which they hope is safety. The opening of The Parish reveals that's not the case, and the final climax of Left 4 Dead 2 occurs on a Lift Bridge as once again the military arrives to take our survivors to presumed safety.

Something curious is revealed through Left 4 Dead 2 that is not as apparent in Left 4 Dead 1. Grafitti on walls and evidence of NON-infected human beings being killed indicate that there was a growing belief among some survivors that some who appeared to be immune to the infection were actually carriers and the only good carrier is a dead one. At the start of The Lift Bridge scenario, we hear the military guy on the radio refer to our survivors as "immune" but then we overhear him talk to the copter pilot on the other side of the bridge and when he talks about the survivors, the words "immune" and "carrier" are treated as synonyms.

This and everything I've said thus far has led me to the following hypothesis. I believe in future expansion packs and perhaps a Left 4 Dead 3 (already rumored to be in the works), it will be more fully detailed that this pathogen is not airborne and it's not contracted by blood or saliva or any other conventional method. It is perhaps not even a disease. Carriers who appear to be immune to the condition actually spread it by close proximity to the non-infected. Just being around an immune carrier for an indeterminate amount of time can cause one to be stripped of their humanity and behave like a rabid dog. How can this be? Certainly not by any known conventional scientific method. If I were writing this, I'd be leaning towards either magical curses or alien technology. Probably a meteorite was uncovered by the government containing alien mystic energy was incorporated into a series of military experiments intended on creating The Ultimate Super Soldier, but inadvertently led to making people who can't die, but are cursed to kill everything around them. This would also explain why it's so difficult for the zombies to kill our survivors; because their immunity makes them difficult to kill, and curiously capable at any kind of weaponry they touch regardless of how much life experience they have shooting and fighting and throwing Molotov cocktails.

Why? Cuz this is a zombie movie. Zombie movies always end up having crazy explanations as to why all this is happening. The crazier, the more fun! So by trying to escape, Bill, Francis, Louis, Zoe, Rochelle, Coach, Nick and Ellis are inadvertently spreading the disease! Put THAT in your pipe bomb and smoke it!

A Little Late

So I'm reading the Dallas Observer, which is a free publication available offline at every other street corner or eating establishment in downtown. Online, you can go to DallasObserver.com for five seconds, shrug and say I'm right, then surf on. So anyway, I'm reading Jim Schutze's latest article, "The Power of the Table" which is yet another tired attempt by Schutze to be as cool about demonizing local politics as Laura Miller was fifteen years ago. She used to be in the D.O. as often as he is now, and she used to shake her fists at City Hall and tell the people of Dallas why we should be outraged this week. Then she became a member of City Council and later Mayor herself and completely failed to exorcise the demons out of the Dallas City Council. Some might argue that she became a demon herself, but I digress. What I just did there may appear mildly ironic to you later on. I think I'm using that word right.

Whatever. Laura Miller used to write for the Dallas Observer, then she put her money where her mouth is and ran for Mayor, she came and went and according to Jim Schutze, City Hall is still just as evil as it ever was. I guess this is why they give the Dallas Observer away. I wouldn't pay to be told this. I already know. In fact, I find it amusing that I'm currently criticizing the D.O. in much the same way the D.O. criticizes City Hall, Belo Corp, DART, state government, and pretty much everything in Texas that's not hot & spicy or fried. Frankly, the D.O. food critics are not critical enough in my not so humble opinion, but this is why they get paid the big bucks and I can't even give my words away. Who would pay to be told this?

Anyway, so I'm reading Jim Schutze's article as I said before, and he's plodding along eloquently about how some guy I don't know who is named Don Hill has the power to postpone deals between land developers and "buzzing people" who are "friends" of Hill. I'm reading along for the ride, wondering when Schutze is going to get to the point of why I should give a shit about any of this, and for the record I don't. I quit voting some time after Nine Eleven and before Sarah Palin. My voice is less effective than Laura Miller was at fighting City Hall. Schutze makes a good case but at this point I'm reading to pass the time and not be enlightened. It's either this or flip to the back of the Dallas Observer and read the classifieds where lonely desperate people try to shack up with each other. That's always good for a laugh. In his plodding eloquency, Schutze begins illustrating why whatever he's talking about matters by tellling me a story about something that happened five years ago. Newspapers usually stick to things that happened within the past week or so, but the Dallas Observer is, well, let's say "special."

Schutze introduces a character in this true-life narrative drama as "The Late Lynn Flint Shaw." That's curious of him. So okay, not only did this story he's weaving happen before 'teabag' stopped being a euphemism for lewdness & turned into a nomenclature for nonsense, but one of the key players in his drama is already dead. I hate it when stories do this. You already know how it's going to end. In death. How tragic.

Am I suddenly intrigued? Well, yes, but not for the reasons Schutze has been trying to manipulate me into caring about, because he continues on talking about Don Hill and some other guy completely named John Tatum. A couple paragraphs later, Schutze happens to mention while continuing to detail something about John Tatum trying to turn DART property into a museum, that The Late Lynn Flint Shaw "died in March of last year in an apparent murder-suicide with her husband."

Erk! SLAM ON THE BRAKES! Schutze keeps right on going but I feel like I just hit a speed bump the size of a DART bus. I get whiplash looking back at that previous statement as Schutze continues pressing onward about This Other Thing. Something I don't care about. At all. Even though I ride DART every day, the property that was supposed to be a museum by now is on Corinth Street. I've lived in Dallas since before Mississippi ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, but I don't know where Corinth Street is.

This dead lady interests me though. A dead lady who 'apparently' died by killing herself and her husband, or maybe her husband killed her and then himself - I DON'T KNOW - why don't I know? CUZ JIM SCHUTZE JUST SKIPS THAT as unimportant to the point he's trying to make and continues putting Dallas to sleep w/politicians who use their power to put off developers until they cave to whims of special interests.

That's politics as usual. How is this news? That's NOT news. That's dog bites man. The Late Lynn Flint Shaw isn't quite man bites dog because as I find out later it's also old news, but it's slightly more interesting than Schutze moaning about how the Don Hills of the world generate red tape to wrap up the John Tatums of the world because they won't hire friends of The Late Lynn Flint Shaws of the world. Anyone, and I MEAN anyone, who tries to be a politician does so with alterior motives. I KNOW this to be true. This is why I stopped voting.

You may have looked at John McCain and Barack Obama and seen two dramatically different choices. I saw Coke & Pepsi. You may look at Rick Perry and Kay Bailey Hutchison who are both currently running for governor of Texas and see two dramatically different choices. I see The New Coke & Coke Classic, only both have been left out in the sun opened and have gone warm and flat. I don't wanna drink any of that. Most recently I've turned to V-8 even tho it's too salty, cuz I'm too lazy to ride a bus to the Farmer's Market every day and get something that might actually be good for me. ...weren't we talking about politics? Well, the metaphor still works so I went with it.

Why did I stop voting? ALL politicians are corrupt. Even and especially the ones who claim not to be. Even and especially the ones who put themselves into a position where they have friends buzzing around developers who want to get something from the gov't. If we really wanted uncorrupt people in office who would get things done, gov't positions would be a random draft, like jury duty. People who didn't want the job would be dragged to an appointed office, given crap to get done, and they'd get it done as fast as possible so they could say they did their duty and go back home to watch Oprah. We don't do that. We like our politicians dirty and corrupt and greedy little bastards. Otherwise, we'd do something about it. Or, like me, we'd give up because the only way to stop this corruption at this point is through a major revolution, and I'm allergic to bullets, so I ain't gonna start one.

But this, right here, is why the media has a problem with its audience. Jim Schutze wants to talk about political corruption. Again. And he thinks he's taken this tired and worn out topic and dressed it up with a new paint job and some decals and he's gonna try to sell it to his audience again. What pops off the page for my eyes? A lady offing herself and her hubby for no immediately forseeable reason whatsoever. That's a mystery to me. That's actually almost interesting. Not political corruption, which I've heard before. How many times can you see the same old card trick over and over? But if Penn & Teller threaten to shoot each other with bullets that are written on by people in the audience, hell that just never gets old does it?

This is why conventional media (unlike unconventional media like the D.O. which as I said before is "special") puts death and destruction front and center in news reports. They tally the dead in headlines where people can see them, and throw out the boring details that make us change the channel. Jim Schutze does what I believe Kevin Pollak might refer to as "burying the lead." He focuses on what he finds interesting, and hides what his audience might actually find interesting.

I went ahead and read the rest of the article. Yes of course this is a terrible thing for a politician to do. People in power positions have friends who want things from the businesses that want politicians to just do their damn jobs without all this wheel greasing and project tabling. It's disgusting and unethical and amoral and horrendous and I'm sure they'll all be smited by their respective deities and burn in whatever hell they deem to believe exists. More importantly this all leads to expensive litigation that the taxpayer will no doubt end up footing the bill for, and is the real reason why everything from potholes to skyscrapers take forever to get done, unless some troll who is blocking the proverbial bridge gets paid to step aside.

The Late Lynn Flint Shaw is only mentioned once more, to remind us that she was one of the trolls. Shaw wanted John Tatum to 'hire' one of her people as a 'consultant' on his project. Tatum didn't do that, so Shaw, then chairman of DART, stopped him cold.

Then, for some reason Schutze fails to explain, Shaw and her husband killed each other a couple years after this happened. Apparently the two events are completely unrelated, which is why Schutze didn't bother spending precious copy inches explaining to me why. Besides, it happened so long ago. Why even mention it?

I've thought about Googling The Late Lynn Flint Shaw and putting the pieces of her sordid drama together for my own edification, but I wrote this instead and now that I'm almost done, I really don't think I care about some complete stranger offing herself and her husband. I mean, why does it matter to me? Why should it? Why do I want to get my facts straight when it serves me no personal satisfaction at all, and won't put food on my table or help me brave the bus line to work tomorrow. Sure, she was the chairman of DART before I started using it, but maybe I should find out how insane and corrupt the current DART chairman is. Maybe that would be slightly more useful to my current situation, given that I'm at DART's mercy when it comes to getting around in this city. Frankly, I don't even know the names of my favorite bus drivers. So why would I bother to figure out who's running the gig?

Fox News keeps their audiences glued to the boob toob with constant reports of dirty dealings and carnage and mayhem. Anything that might make their audiences feel superior to complete strangers of questionable morals and character. Anything that will keep their audiences glued to that screen through the next set of commercials. This isn't news. This is catering to the lowest common denominator. This is giving the people what they want and not what they need. This is unethical and wrong and all kinds of shit. Know what I do to combat that? I don't watch Fox News. Not much more I could do than that. Vote? Rebel? I might as well start praying again, like that ever did any good.

I watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. That's how I like my news. Maybe Jim Schutze should try to be more like Jon Stewart and less like Laura Miller.

Surrounded

Yeah I know. I really should stick to blogging about unimportant stuff like my opinions regarding television shows and movies. I might get back to that. However, this is weighing heavy on me and this is where I leave bits of brain so I can find them later, if I ever want them again. This piece of brain is getting pretty big. It's probably a metaphorical tumor. Paging Dr. House.

Again I state for the record, and I simply cannot emphasize this enough, I am an atheist now not by choice but by default. I have been born again again. Or maybe I'm dead again. I'm not sure how that metaphor worked the first time around. Anyway, I saw the light and it turned out to be a trick of the light, and was never there.

Not long ago a (now fellow I suppose) atheist said he was surprised to learn I was taking this so badly. When he found out there was no god it was like a weight had been lifted, and he was very happy about it. I'm reacting to it the same way I reacted when I learned there was no Santa Claus. I was pretty pissed off back then too. My own parents deceived me. Hell, THE WHOLE WORLD IS IN ON THAT LIE. There's a Father Christmas of some sort in practically every country on the planet. We still lie to children about that even today. If you're reading this and you have kids, you probably help perpetuate that lie, and you don't think there's any harm in it. You're probably right, but even if it's a little white lie - IT'S A LITTLE WHITE LIE THAT THE WHOLE OF HUMANITY HELPS TO PERPETUATE. which is a pretty big little white lie.

And now I learn there's no god. Never was. It's a lie. A lie that the vast majority of humanity still accepts as a given, like assuming magicians can pull rabbits out of hats or take quarters out of ears, or assuming a rain dancer can make it rain.

If I could choose to go back and take the blue pill, like Cipher in the Matrix thought he could do, I would. I really don't want to care if I'm in the Matrix. I liked it before. But I can't go back. I can't. The genie won't go back in the bottle. Once the kid realizes Santa Claus can't work in every shopping mall on the planet simultaneously, there's no going back.

There's simply no proof that there is a god. Up until now I've assumed the burden of proof is on the nonbeliever but it's not. If someone tells the police that their house was robbed, the cops are gonna wanna check the house for stolen goods, forced entry, fingerprints, etc. They're not just gonna assume the guy's telling the truth. They could, because why would someone bother to lie about having been robbed?

...see what I just did there?

We can take for granted that the guy wouldn't steal from his own home, but there are reasons why someone would make that up. Insurance for example. Or even if he didn't steal from his own house, he doesn't know who did, so the cops have to investigate and gain knowledge into the crime so they can suss out who did. Detectives don't solve crimes by taking presumptions for granted. If they did, they'd be called Presumptionists. They're detectives. They DETECT.

All 'evidence' that there is, was, or might be someday a deity is simply anecdotal or inconclusive. Deductive reasoning demands such inconclusive evidence be corroborated with solid facts. Knowledge IS power, and religion feeds on ignorance.

Now that I see this truth for what it is, I'm frankly stymied that religion still holds such a firm grip on humanity. I mean, I'm really not that bright, and if I can figure it out, why hasn't the rest of the planet? But they haven't. Humanity has been on this kick about believing in things that aren't there for millenia, with no end in sight. Why? Cuz if you look at history, every few hundred years or so the people who do believe band together with weapons and KILL ANYONE WHO DISAGREES WITH THEM. And sometimes they kill each other over discrepancies in each other's figments. And let's face it, they're overdue for a genocide. Haven't had one on a Spanish Inquisition kind of scale in awhile.

When I was taking The Christian God for granted and assuming he was there cuz everyone and my mom said he was, it didn't look remotely scary, cuz when the next Crusade was gonna go down, I felt relatively safe that they wouldn't be pointing pointy sticks in my direction. Now, I'm not so sure about that. I'm a heretic. I'm a blasphemer. I'm a nonbeliever. And as any diehard zealot will tell you, if you're not with God, you must be working for The Other Guy.

Of course the irony of this is if I can't believe in God anymore, it means there's no Satan either, and never was. John Lennon once asked me to imagine there's no heaven, and assured me it was easy if I just tried. I scoffed at that back when I was a kid. Now I wish he'd take it back, because it IS easy if you try. Too damned easy, if you ask me. It also means there's no hell below us as John was quick to point out, and above us is only sky. I made the tactical error that no believer should ever make if they want to continue believing: I looked up.


So if there's no God, Devil, Heaven or Hell, then there's no sin either. There's choices people make and every action has consequences. So do inactions for that matter. In fact, every exhalaton of breath affects the world around you, even if in ways you can't easily measure with just your senses. The bacteria crawling around on your skin are more real than a grey haired old coot in robes on a throne of clouds, but you can't see them any more than you can see him. So how do we know they're there? Science. Get me a microscope and I can prove to you there's animals crawling on your skin. Thus far, science hasn't found a microscope that susses out gods.

And there's a lot of scientists who are also still believers, so believe me there's still a lot of people out there actively trying to figure out a way to prove that there is a god. It's just that we haven't found anything yet, and the more we look the less places we have to check. Maybe he's on one of those planets out there. I'm no longer holding my breath on that one.

But the point is there ARE scientists out there, people far smarter than me, who still believe. Beyond all common sense or reason, they still think there's a god. They still go to church. They still pray. They still tithe. They still read the Good Book. And I'm not necessarily knocking the book, I mean it's full of holes and contradictions but what great work of fictitious literature doesn't? So very smart people still assume God exists. Now, either all of them are wrong, or I am. That's kinda creepy.

Cuz it's not just scientists. It's politicians, and sanitation workers, and bus drivers and coworkers and friends and family members and grocery clerks and waitresses and doctors and lawyers and firemen and dog walkers and complete strangers at bus stops - literally billions of people on this planet, despite the overwhelming evidence that there is not a god AND the overwhelming lack of evidence that there is, still insist there's a god. These billions of people disagree with one another over just who what where when why and how god is, but they do all agree on a monotheistic deity that likes them personally and roots for their respective favorite sports teams.

Except of course for those who don't. The polytheistic believers for example, or the many variant forms of nonbelievers such as myself, but comparatively speaking we're outnumbered worldwide by the Catholics alone. So let's focus on the real threat.

Let's say you and I are standing in front of an object, and we both utilize all our senses to determine what it is. I look at it. I touch it. I listen for sound and hear nothing. I may even put the tip of my tongue to it or take a whiff inches away from it. I come to the conclusion that it is a fire hydrant. You do the same. Utilizing your masterful talent at conquering your own senses, you observe the object before us and come to a similar conclusion. It is a fire hydrant. On that, we both agree.

Now we compare notes about what kind of fire hydrant. I observe that it is painted grey. You observe that it is painted red. We argue over this briefly and each come to the rational determination that the other person must be crazy. It doesn't occur to me that perhaps I am suddenly color blind. It doesn't occur to you that perhaps you are wearing rose colored glasses. I simply see a grey fire hydrant and you see a red one. We eventually realize we must agree to disagree.

Now it also doesn't occur to either of us to check to see if this object that appears to be a fire hydrant actually has the capacity to put out a fire. Neither of us are firemen. We don't have the necessary tools to open her up and let her rip. For all we know, this fire hydrant has no water inside it, but we both just take for granted that if a fire ever erupted on this spot, firemen would come along open her up and let her rip. We call it a fire hydrant because that's what it looks like, and when I say fire hydrant and when you say fire hydrant, we both assume the other person knows what that phrase means.

What if it can't put out a fire? What if for some reason it doesn't work? Maybe the plumbing in this area is damaged. Maybe the object was made to look like a fire hydrant but is really just there for decoration, or as a prank to piss off firemen. We have no way of knowing. We're taking a lot of stuff for granted here, predominantly cuz it's just a silly fire hydrant and I don't know why we even care about it still.

This is how I'm seeing this whole god thing. No one is bothering to check to see if there's a god, except for people like me who do and find out he doesn't exist. Then we go back and tell other people and they look at us like we're mad. Well did you look everywhere? Maybe you missed a spot. Well okay you go check with me, or find out for yourself then report back. Oh I don't need to do that. I already know there is a god. I don't have to go looking for him. Well actually, you do. It's kinda stupid not to. You're assuming there's a god without any proof.

What is faith? It's the belief in something without proof. It's accepting as a given something that isn't true, because you don't know if it is true and you don't know if it isn't, and you decide to assume it is true just to be on the safe side, cuz what if you think it's not true and it is? Then you'd be in a pickle wouldn't you?

Every now and then at a bus stop downtown there's this sweet lady who walks around with big signs hanging off her shoulders and her back. They don't say The End Is Near. Worse. They say something to the effect that God wants to free people from sin and let Jesus save them. She walks around with a big smile on her face handing out little booklets, and people who already agree with her take these little booklets from her hand and with big smiles on their faces go on about their day with this silly booklet in their hand telling them what they already know about what they already believe. I never actually see any of them read this booklet. They just thank her and take it and walk away and go on about their lives with this really big smile on their faces. It's eerie.

If someone believes in fairies, or monsters, or zombies, or thinks he's Napoleon, we lock them away. Yet billions of people on this planet are under a delusion that there's a man in the sky who knows all and sees all and has a personal plan just for you but he's not letting you in on it and if you do any number of things wrong he's laid out your life like a mine field and will blow you up if you do wrong, but he loves you.

All around me are delusional people, and if I were to point out their delusion, they'd look at me like I was the one that's crazy. BILLIONS of people. ALL OVER the planet. Making decisions that sometimes affect me, with this illusion that they got a little cherub w/wings floating over their shoulder pointing the way for them.

This time last year I may still have been one of the deluded. Now, all the sudden, I feel like I'm Ben in Night of the Living Dead. I'm surrounded, there's no escape, and I think they're coming for me, Barbra.

Sudden

I've been trying to piece together for myself at what point did I become an atheist? It's not like I woke up one morning and realized hey I'm an atheist, and yet at the same time, it kinda is. Not too recently I just realized that not only am I an atheist, but I have been one for some time and I didn't really realize it. I was trying to NOT be an atheist for the longest time. I was desperately clinging for years to the idea of a deity, long after it just stopped making sense.

Why did it stop making sense? I was born a Christian, into a Baptist family. I was raised by a woman who still strongly believes in the Trinity, and has personal anecdotal evidence to support her beliefs. Practically since birth I've heard stories from my mom about how during times of stress in her life she has heard her god speak to her. She has seen Him in out of the body experiences and dream-like moments of premonition. You can laugh all you want, but my own mother told me she met Jesus Christ. My own mother admitted to seeing the ghosts of recently departed people visiting their own funeral. These events were very real to me from childhood, because my own mother told me they happened, and I had no reason nor desire to ever question my own mother. My entire life, I have been strongly motivated to take everything and anything else I've ever learned, and make it relate to my mother's anecdotal evidence of there being a deity. If it didn't make sense, my mom trumped pretty much everything else, and for the longest time I never even thought about this. I never questioned it. No matter what else goes on, there's a God. Cuz Mom said there was. The alternative that my mother was either lying to me or delusional, was simply an unthinkable direction to allow my brain to go.

It's never sudden, but it's always sudden.

One of my favorite atheists, and a favorite long before I realized I was one myself, is Joss Whedon. He made a little TV series called Buffy The Vampire Slayer. One of the many episodes of that series written by Joss Whedon is called The Body. Quick summary for the uninitiated: Buffy is a vampire slayer who had saved her mother countless times from vampires and zombies and ghosts and monsters and even another vampire slayer. However, in season five Buffy found her mother fighting cancer, and cancer is something at which a vampire slayer is completely and utterly powerless. It's kinda hard to use a wooden stake against cancer. But Buffy's mom went into remission and everybody thought she beat it. Then one day Buffy comes home and Joyce is on the couch with her eyes wide open, and she's never getting up again.

So Buffy finds herself at the hospital later that same day, and the rest of her friends have all run off on various errands because after a loss like this everyone feels like they have to go do something to be useful or whatever, and Buffy's just sitting there in the waiting room and her friend Tara is sitting next to her. Tara had lost her own mother not long before this happened, and seemed to have come to terms with it. Tara and Buffy sit there alone for a quiet moment and Tara tries to think of something to say to comfort her friend. What comes out of her mouth has haunted me for years: "It's never sudden, but it's always sudden." They knew Buffy's Mom was sick, and had been fighting cancer all season, so her mortality wasn't sudden, but then they thought she was okay. So when she died from complications of cancer recovery, it was sudden. It's possible for something to be both sudden and not sudden.

I'd experienced that myself about when this episode of Buffy came out. My dad died in October of 1998 and this show was first broadcast in February of 2001, so dad's slowly failing health and then quick decline were still fresh in my mind when I saw The Body. I was right there with Tara when she said that to Buffy.

So from birth I was a Christian but around college (or was it high school? Actually I think as early as junior high) I found myself questioning first the Baptist denomination. It seemed petty for example to not allow dancing. Also, though I attended many different Baptist churches, they all seemed full of people more interested in showing off what they'd purchased that week than in exploring their spiritual awareness. Attending church seemed to just be something traditional to do and didn't have any actual meaning behind it. So as soon as I was old enough to not HAVE to go, I stopped going. I still considered myself a Christian, but prided myself in not being religious.

In the past ten or fifteen years I've thought of myself more as a Deist than a Christian. I still held as best as I can to Christian structure because it was like a security blanket, but I was painfully aware the god I believed in could actually go by the name of Jehovah, Yahweh or Allah as easily as "God." In fact, my impression of a god had to wear many hats. I refused to accept that any one denomination or religious doctrine was more or less right than any others. The more I learned about other beliefs, the more I found there were commonalities and well as contrasts, and that these different elements seemed as much byproducts of cultural evolution as anything. No one really knows who or what God is. There's a lot of guesswork going on.

And just who wrote The Bible? Men who were presumably inspired by God, and we are not to question the lack of credentials of these people. In fact whether it be a shaman or a pope or a televangelist, the only criteria that appears to be necessary to be a Man of God, is to have enough self-confidence to go around demanding people acknowledge you as such. Well, that and you have to be able to talk a good game.

Throughout history, religions are run by a select group of usually men with resources and connections and money, and they tell other people how to live their lives. Things they don't want the masses to do with wanton abandon are called sins and followers are told to deny the urges of the flesh with a promise of spiritual riches after life is over. Meanwhile, the lofty rich leaders wear expensive clothes and make grandiose temples to honor their god. Oftentimes throughout history, these rich and powerful leaders of religions are eventually discovered to also fall from grace but are often forgiven even if they eventually lose their power, only to be replaced by new leaders who promise to do better. It's a creepy viscous cycle.

These sins are more often than not connected to things that are deeply ingrained in "the flesh." Some of the advice makes perfect sense. Thou Shalt Not Kill is just good advice no matter how you look at it. However, then the religious leaders find caveats even for that 'sin.' For example, anyone who disagrees with the tenets of a given religion can be killed during a Holy War. Killing in self-defense is perfectly acceptable, and these leaders will say that their god told them to tell their followers to go kill anyone who disagrees with them, as they are heathen and do not enjoy the love of the One True God. There's a lot of One True Gods by the way. Almost as many as there are sports teams. So I knew all this stuff and more and yet still I found myself clinging to these beliefs that fit me worse than a T-Shirt from fifth grade.

So at what point did I lose faith? Or rather, at what point did I realize that faith is belief in something that can't be proven, and therefore makes no fricken sense whatsoever?

This past March I had an operation. My first. No big deal. It was a private big deal for me but objectively speaking it was a routine operation. I had an umbilical hernia which was the byproduct of poor exercise and overeating. My own damn fault. And the operation itself was standard and routine. I have never been given any reason to believe I should have had an out of the body experience or a near death experience. There was no moment while on the operating table where I flatlined.

Or so far as I know. I mean. I wouldn't know. I wasn't exactly there at the time it happened. I remember cracking jokes in the operating room, asking the doctor to please get this golf ball out of my belly button. Just take a golf club and whack it. Whatever it takes. I was in good spirits. I felt I was in good hands. Capable intelligent people whose careers revolve around doing this kinda stuff every day. I felt good, considering my gut was killing me. The anesthesiologist asked me to count backward from one hundred. I don't remember actually counting.

I don't remember anything. When you sleep, and then you wake up, there's still a sense that something was there between the going to sleep and the waking up. You may not remember any dreams or anything but there's a sense that time has passed. It's very vague but it's there, and we take it for granted.

I remember becoming conscious and it was very dark, later I realized it was cuz I was too weak to open my eyelids. I felt a sharp needle in my wrist and I didn't want it there, so I remember feeling my left arm reaching over to pull something out of my right arm, and I remember being restrained. Then I went to sleep. And then I woke up in a recovery room and pushed a button asking for vicadin. From the point of the needle in my arm to the point of the vicadin, that was normal sleep. That felt normal. However, the point before that between the operation itself and becoming conscious realizing there was a needle in my arm I didn't want there, that wasn't normal. That is Missing Time.

As I was being restrained from pulling the needle out of my arm, I recall being mildly surprised to be alive. There was no out of the body experience during my operation. There was no recollection of conversations that happened elsewhere in the hospital. I was not visited by family and friends who have passed away. I didn't get to shake Jesus' hand and marvel at the scars on his hands and wrists. I didn't get told I can't stay in heaven because it's not my time yet and I need to go back. There was none of that. I can tell myself it was just the anesthesia. That I wasn't supposed to remember anything because they just used strong drugs and there was no life after death moment for me because I wasn't anywhere near dying. However, if there were a god in the sky somewhere, it woulda been nice if he at least popped in at this point in my life and said hello. After all, he's on a first name basis with my Mom.

What I experienced can only be described as oblivion. There was nothing. When I actually die, that's what's going to be there. Nothing. And I won't have any emotional response to that because there simply will be no 'me' to have any kind of response to about that. At all. And that's the way it is. That's the way it's always been. One can choose to believe all they want but that doesn't change what actually is. There's subjective perception of reality, and then there's reality. You can believe in leprechans and aliens and the Bermuda Triangle and Bigfoot and unicorns and the Loch Ness monster and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri coming to feed on your brains. Believe in whatever you want all you want. If such things actually exist, it's not because you believed in them. There's no correlation between believing in a god and one actually being there for you when you have a golf ball stuck in your navel.

I can tell myself it was the moment of oblivion that suddenly turned me atheist. I can tell myself that. I can perhaps even believe it. Unfortunately, there's evidence supporting another explanation. Before I went into the operating room, a sweet lady visited me in while I waited for surgery. She was a priest and she had the papers I'd requested. The ones you sign telling people that after you become a vegetable and can't talk or think for yourself and there's no hope of ever being cognizant again it's okay to pull the plug. Those papers. So I signed them and she and I had a nice little talk and before she left she asked me if I wanted her to pray over me before going into surgery. I thanked her for the offer but said no. I honestly didn't think a complete stranger praying over me was going to make a bit of difference.

So I stopped believing before I stopped believing. It's never sudden, but it's always sudden.

Why Others Don't Watch Dollhouse

This originally started as a post over at Whedonesque, but at the last minute I decided to put it over here instead, cuz it got too long. I left a bit of this over there, but I wanted to get into more detail so I moved most of it here.

Dollhouse flies without a net. It's got limitations built into it that Buffy and the other shows didn't have. Dollhouse is more down to Earth which you'd think would make it more relatable to a wider audience, but it's more in your face about things without using metaphors like vampires or reavers to talk about uncomfortable subject matter.

That is for me its strength. It may also be what keeps some away. Dollhouse cuts very close to the bone in regards to the fragile nature of humanity. Many don't like to accept the fact that we are ultimately just conditioned animals with a vague sense of self-awareness. If we are conditioned properly, we'll see reality not as it is, but as whatever conditions us wants us to see it.

It's why we still believe in gods. The naked truth is far too painful.

Please let me preface this by saying I love Dollhouse. I plan to stay with it come hell or high water cuz I'm seeing it as an unique experiment in television storytelling. Something that I haven't seen before and I fear may never come again. Grey Hour. True Believer. Man On The Street. Epitaph One! How can these be episodes of the same show? They're different shows with a remarkably different feel to each of them, but under the same umbrella.

I hope Dollhouse stays with us a long time. I fear I may know why it won't. I also fear I may know why so many fans of Whedon's previous efforts seem to not warm up as quickly to his latest effort.

What makes Dollhouse better than any of Whedon's previous efforts (Yeah you heard me right. Better than Buffy) is that he's got no crutch. With Buffy and Angel he had magic mumbo jumbo to fall back on to explain stuff that shouldn't do what it does. With Firefly he used some technobabble but mostly it was just "it's the future. in space. by now we'll figure out how to do X" Gravity on a starship for example. Or how terraforming multiple moons made everything look like east Texas.

With Dollhouse there's very little of that. Granted "the chair" is a little technobabbley, but when you accept the concept that the human brain is just another computer, you're done. All the other pieces fall into place, at least for the first season. The scifi tech of the show isn't a crutch. It's not far fetched enough to be a crutch (as is evident when they add to it things like remote sensing causing blindness in Echo, or the silly lactating thing). It's more like a widget that helps set up the story but you can't put a lot of weight on the scifi tech of the series cuz it'll easily break. We're talking about technologies not as far fetched as one might think. We understand a lot more about how the human brain works than we did even a decade ago, and there's already tools that can rudimentarily allow direct control from brain to computer. We may be twenty years from being able to let a computer tell a body what to do. Maybe less than that. Concepts like hypnosis, brainwashing, conditioning, and voluntary (or not so voluntary) submission have been with us for awhile. The audience doesn't have to jump as far to get on board, unlike his previous work.

But along with a premise a wee bit closer to home comes limitations. Joss Whedon can't suddenly turn Echo into a rat or give her the powers of a god without upsetting the delicate world he's already fabricated. The rules of Dollhouse are more restrictive, and it's far easier for writers to paint themselves into corners where they can't get out.

It's more difficult for audiences to relate to characters whose personalities can go away never to come back in less time than a commercial break. I enjoy Amy Acker's work on Dollhouse, but I'm concerned it's all for naught. And the fact it's not by now all for naught has me concerned. Why didn't Topher wipe Whiskey before she left? Dr. Claire Saunders' is obviously glitching. She's figured out that she's not the original Dr. Saunders, but she's no longer just an Active named Whiskey. And she's got no idea who Whiskey was before she became Whiskey. So she doesn't even know what she is but she's self-aware, so Topher's torn about whether or not to deactivate her - wipe her and start fresh.

But last season it was established that Topher has no real moral compass. So the fact he's not 'fixing' Whiskey doesn't make sense within the confines of the structure that Dollhouse has already built around itself. This is just one of many little things about Dollhouse that I fear makes it difficult for some old viewers to ride out, and new viewers to jump on board.

Even a show as absurd and over the top as Doctor Who has within it very specific rules that it doesn't break. There's ways that the laws of physics work in that show which while crazy have an internal logic, a method to the madness. Buffy had that. Angel had that. I fear Firefly really didn't but there's not enough episodes really to prove that one way or the other (how many planets? how many stars? moons? where were they in relation to one another? the astrogation of Firefly is completely unrealistic. and don't get me started on the very concept of planet terraforming. or ship propulsion.)

I question whether or not the internal logic built early on in Dollhouse's first season is being kept consistent, or if its being thrown out in favor of making Echo lactate. Cuz each week we need something startling to keep the audience guessing. I question whether or not Dollhouse can hold up to its own scrutiny, and stick to its own inner logic.

If Dollhouse can't be true to itself, audiences can smell that, and like a dog can smell fear or sharks can smell blood, the end result of that gut reaction to a TV series lying to itself is.. well, it's never pretty.

Why I Watch Dollhouse

Over at Why I Watch Dot Com people are saying why they keep coming back for more Dollhouse, so I submitted my own reasons which I'm reposting here for completeness and cuz I haven't thrown up a blog entry in awhile. Dollhouse is on FOX on Fridays by the way, at least at the moment. Someone is spreading rumors that once again the show is under threat of cancellation. The ratings aren't great, so once again I find myself looking at a great show that presumably no one is watching. Well, I am, and here's why.

Why do I watch? I watch cuz Joss Whedon has never steered me wrong yet, but that's not why you should watch.

Other people might tell you Dollhouse deals with deep and meaningful subject matter while posing poignant questions that are pertinent and applicable to these difficult times humanity is facing in this century. Screw that. Sure it's deep and meaningful and all that crap. It's also fun! In the first few moments of the first episode, two people drive their motorcycles onto a dance floor. Why? I don't know why. It's crazy! You might scuff up the wood. But who cares? It's television! It's fun!

I watch cuz you don't know what to expect from this show. Why watch a show that's predictable?

I watch cuz the women are hot and the men kick ass.

I watch cuz the men are cool and the women kick ass.

I watch cuz Enver Gjokaj can say anything with a straight face.

I watch cuz I enjoy Eliza Dushku playing dress up.

I watch cuz Tahmoh Penikett can throw down a mean fight scene.

I watch cuz Fran Kranz knows how to do justice to WhedonSpeak.

I watch cuz Dichen Lachman surprises me every other time she appears on screen, and when she's not surprising me, she's dazzling me. She's got a smile that if properly weaponized could bring about world peace.

I watch cuz Harry Lennix exudes confidence, wisdom, and you can't tell from one second to the next if he's gonna make some pithy remark or take the other person's head and shove it into electronic equipment.

I watch cuz Olivia Williams has taken the most morally twisted and disturbing character Joss Whedon has ever conceived and breathed a life into her that makes her as real as the next new friend you will make.

I watch cuz Miracle Laurie had my heart at "lasagna."

I watch cuz this show is flying without a net. It's taking risks and going where other shows don't dare. Yes it's not perfect. You want your TV formulaic? Watch the news. Yes sometimes the writing falls flat on its face, but sometimes it soars beyond the stratosphere.

I Watch cuz I like my entertainment fearless.

I watch cuz it's a show that doesn't dumb it all down for me, even though sometimes I wish it would.

I watch cuz at first I thought The Attic was A Place, and then I realized it's more of A Condition. Then I thought it meant being dead. Then I thought it meant being physically dead but mentally cooped up on a hard drive. I thought maybe it's both A Place and A Condition. Then someone showed up in Epitaph One who shouldn't have been there, and now I don't know what to think.

I watch cuz it doesn't insult my intelligence, and it challenges that intelligence in ways that sometimes make me feel kinda stupid. But it's all good.

I watch cuz it looks great. It sounds great. It feels great. It's Dollhouse. It's on Friday nights on Fox. You should watch it too.

...while you still can.

We Invaded Them

This was originally a response to a post over at Facebook but got too long and Facebook doesn't like it when one gets verbose, so I'm putting it here instead. I was responding to Rick Yost who said: "Afghanistan- again we've moved in without a clear purpose or a plan to leave. I don't think we can win this particular fight?" I wanna start this off by saying I fully understand religion and pollitics are two places I really shouldn't open my big fat mouth. I want to continue this by saying I'm gonna anyway. I'm just doing it HERE which is my virtual home and not on Rick Yost's Facebook wall cuz that seemed kinda imposing on my part.

Now understand, we're laymen. Rick Yost is a phenomenal musician. I'm a guy who answers a phone all day. I don't even really have a real career anymore. My career went overseas and I don't know what I'm doing with my life anymore, but I look at my country and my world and the humanity I'm stuck with and I really feel no incentive to fix my life and make it something profound and wonderful. I'm basically just surviving nowadays. I don't really like to think much about why. I just try to get through the day to day. I can't do anything about the injustice I see all around me. Well. I can complain. I do that a lot to no one in particular. I'm rather powerless. So I whine a lot.

We are invading their country. I say "WE" in the same way I say "WE THE PEOPLE" when referring to the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. I'm a part of this WE due to my place of birth. I didn't get a choice. Just like most people who live wherever they are and have spent their lives there don't get a choice. I can't just pack up and move to Ireland cuz I happen to agree with their politics more. I don't. In fact, I can't think of any place on the planet where I'd be content politically, so where I am is just as good a place as any.

No one asked me if it was okay for my tax dollars to be used to invade Afghanistan, and nobody went up to some middle aged guy in Afghanistan who makes a living answering phones all day and asked what he thinks about it. We didn't get a say in this, and yet by proxy we are each forced to be a part of this WE. Well. It's WE to me. His WE is a THEY to me and my WE is a THEY to him. I'm sure over there they got different words for WE and THEY and they write right to left where WE write left to right. Same difference.

Anyway. We invaded their country.

Maybe the government of Afghanistan asked us to come in, and maybe we invited ourselves because we think Al Qaieda is in there, and the Afghanistan government was powerless to stop us. I don't know. I imagine there were power lunches involved where our people talked to their people and they did lunch and then we did lunch. Whatever. We may or may not have gotten some kind of formal okay from somewhere to go in and that makes all this kosher.

We are invading their country. That makes us the bad guys. If a guy puts a gun to my head and then asks me to break bread with him, I'll smile and be civil, but only cuz I'm allergic to lead.

Since I was a kid I've been told by my elders that America is the hero. We're the good guys. I have since looked at American history objectively as an elder myself now. When were we heroes? World War Two maybe? That was only cuz what the Nazis were doing was pretty damn bad. We'd never make a concentration camp where we gassed masses of people, but we would ride a terrorist around a room naked with a bag over his head while making dogs bark at him. We'd threaten to drown him and then later tell people we were only pretending to drown him. We'd make terrorists climb on top of each other like high school cheer leaders making a pyramid. We'd never gas them. There's degrees of evil here.

I was born during the days of Vietnam and while I was sucking on my thumb and peeing in my Pampers, my elders would take a hill and the enemy would just dig underneath us. We napalmed babies. We tore homes apart. We burned down communities. We weren't being heroes then. We were stupid and crazy.

Where's our cape now? We look more like bullies to me, and I don't appreciate being on the wrong side of the argument due to my place of birth. I've had people tell me if I don't like how America does things, I should just move. That's ludicrous. I shouldn't have to move. I should be able to count on a representative government to represent me when dealing with other governments. They don't, cuz I'd never go into someone else's country and blow it up. I'd go into someone else's country and put my feet up on their coffee table. That's about as insensitive as I get.

Fantastic Fringe Part One

Before I begin, I wish to preface the following with this: my comparisons are based on what I know about these characters. You will no doubt disagree with me on some findings. For example, I have been informed that the Marvel Ultimate series of comics is a major revamp of what I consider to be canonical mythology, which for example claims that Reed Richards is younger than the other members of his team. I find that to be poppycock. Reed Richards has always been the oldest member of the Fantastic Four. His temples are gray for goodness sake. Some things there's no need to change when you retell a story for younger generations. When I discuss the Fantastic Four it's based on stories with which I am familar, particularly the comic books of the 1970s and 80s. Just as when I discuss Fringe it's primarily the first season, which as of this writing is all I know because there's this petty thing called linear time which keeps me from seeing future seasons of the series before they are produced. If there's Fringe novels or comic book adaptations or fan fiction or what have you, I'm not familiar with that stuff so please accept my limited capacities. I am after all only human.

The other day around the proverbial water cooler, a friend mentioned he'd read somewhere on the Web how someone compared the FOX TV series "Fringe" (going into its second season later this month) with the Marvel comic book series 'Fantastic Four.' Before having a chance to see the article in question, my mind already began racing with those implications. My first instinctive gut reaction was to scoff at such a thought. Comparing Fringe to The Fantastic Four is like comparing X-Men to The Brady Bunch, or DC's Justice League of America to any celebrity reality television show. Even if you stretched the premise to make it fit, at best you're illuminating coincidence and at worst you're wasting everyone's time. There are some commonalities to any and all character driven story-telling. There are formulas or recipes that writers use to draw out conflict and accentuate plots so as to maximize entertainment potential. One cannot create a group where all the characters are just duplicate puppets for the writer. Each must have its own voice. However, many writers utilize archetypes (and sometimes even stereotypes) to make it easy for the reader/viewer/listener of the story to catch on quickly to what the writer's trying to say.

Such archetypes are at times universal. The mad scientist. The self-absorbed wunderkind. The tough guy with a heart of gold. The quiet and reserved pillar of loyalty. A brief examination of your favorite television show or book or series of movies might reveal similar brief descriptions that you could then overlay on any combination of other shows or books or movies you hold dear. There's nothing new under the sun. When it comes to storytelling in today's modern world, the trick isn't to come up with something entirely new, but to take that which the audience is already familiar and utilize it in new and exciting ways.

Some readers may see the more obvious comparisons and contrasts that make this exercise even more irrelevant. The Fantastic Four utilize powers granted them by an 'accident' in space involving cosmic rays. None of the Fringe four can turn invisible or spontaneously combust or stretch their bodies and none of them are impervious to harm. Furthermore, the visuals differences in these characters is particularly striking. One can argue that the actress who portrays Fringe's Agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Korv) would have made a far more accurate (particularly when looking at John Byrne's renderings of the character) Susan Storm than the actress currently being used in those campy movies. However, there are no actors on Fringe who would do a better job portraying The Thing than Michael Chiklis, who seems practically born to play the role. I'm dismissing the obvious contrasts, and hoping to focus primarily on character personality traits and interactions between the characters. In that way, I hope to show how there is a similarity among the foursome that's unmistakable, and perhaps a little more than merely coincidental.

Despite my immediate pessimism that such a comparison as Fringe to Fantastic Four held any merit or could reveal insight as to the inner working of either series or the writers behind them, I couldn't help but find the exercise of comparing these characters to be enticing and fascinating. Before reading the article that inspired my friend's mention of the idea, I already found myself seeing the most glaring and obvious connection: Reed Richards versus Walter Bishop.

Both characters are essentially the brains of their respective outfits, and the senior or eldest of their teams. Both gentlemen have devoted their lives to fringe sciences. Both gentlemen are easily distracted and forgetful, to the chagrin of those around them. Walter & Reed both suffer from inadequate social finesse and a general inability to see past their own egos, arrogance, and inadequacies to understand and empathize with those around them. This often leads to choices that some would find eccentric or even insane, but there is always a method to their madness; a modus operandi for their intentions and actions. These choices lead both men to think that under certain circumstances it is acceptable to use human beings as proverbial guinea pigs. It's also acceptable in both men's minds to utilize sciences that can dramatically alter our very perceptions of reality without first bothering to question the moral and social implications of such activity. This leads to amplify their anti-social tendencies and causes them to appear amoral or even unscrupulous in their undying search for truths in the universe despite the dangerous and even disastrous implications should they succeed.

For Reed Richards this has caused him to at times create devices that were intended to help humanity but sometimes became a nuisance if not a threat to mankind. I understand in more recent years, Reed's utilized his knowledge of alternate dimensions to create a prison for advanced humans that refused to accept the Registration Act, which in my book makes Reed essentially a criminal to the future of human kind. I see little difference in this Post Civil War Marvel Universe to Reed Richards and Tony Stark when compared to any assortment of super villains. It's a rather sad direction the editors of Marvel have chosen to go with the characters, but they're trying to entertain younger readers now who actually buy comic books rather than read about them at websites. So I can't complain. ..I digress.

For Walter Bishop this amoral behavior towards humanity in the face of scientific discovery has left him a mere shadow of his former self. We learn that twenty years ago he was working with William Bell on a wide variety of questionable experiments as they did strive to outsmart or outwit a potential enemy they had not yet met; essentially an alternate reality much like their own, but with people more inclined to use scientific discovery to pillage and ruin other alternate realities. This is the 'war' that is referred to throughout the first season. Bell & Bishop were trying to create super soldiers that would be ready to defend their reality from enemies both in their own reality and others. Where Reed Richards has been known to use alternate realities as prisons, a young Walter Bishop perceived alternate realities as war zones to protect his own.

When I read the accompanying article that inspired this madness, I see that they too found Walter Bishop & Reed Richards to be kindred spirits, perhaps cut from the same mad scientist mold. Well-intentioned Truth Seekers essentially too smart for their own good. This modern archetype dates back at least as far as Mary Shelly's Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll & Hyde. Some historians argue that one can go even further than that to the alchemists of the Dark Ages or even in times of Greece when Daedalus & Icarus tried to use knowledge and invention to fashion powers of the gods, only to be stricken down by the gods for their folly and impertinence. It's an old stock character concept, and a common trope many writers have used to facilitate understanding in their readers. When a character is revealed to a modern audience as a mad scientist or evil genius or even absent-minded professor, these phrases already paint a picture in the mind, without the writer having to describe much further detail, beyond how this particular character may differ from the stereotype that an audience anticipates. So this comparison is not out of the ordinary, nor is it uncommon. One could compare these characters to Doctor Strangelove or Doctor Horrible and get similar results. Still, it's fun to explore.

Perhaps even more fun is to explore how Bishop and Richards differ. Beyond the obvious 'stretch' thing, there's the fact that Reed is married to another member of his foursome, whereas Bishop is a widower. Reed is generally understood to be perhaps a little eccentric but aside from occasional bouts of paranoia or obsessive compulsive disorder, he's predominantly sane and only slightly socially inept on occasion. However, Walter Bishop is legitimately insane, and spent almost two decades in a mental institution because he was deemed unsuitable for public exposure to humanity without the constant supervision of a blood relative. Reed is more of a Type A personality, meaning he's assertive and driven and efficiently proactive in his behavior towards both his environment and his social requirements. Walt is more of a Type B personality. He's emotionally burdened, more easily distracted, tends to question authority and even his own behavior as being legitimate or necessary, and while in his youth he'd get far more done than perhaps he ever should have, in more recent years he'd just as soon milk a cow or read a fruit cup than get any serious work done, unless he's prodded by others to maintain focus. Reed's self-sufficient and can multi-task with little effort. Walter is at times studiously focused on one thing to a fault, and at other times will wander from work to play to curious meditation in a heartbeat. There's also drug use. While Reed is not theoretically averse to the use of psychedelics, he's rarely bothered to utilize them without good reason. Walter will dope up at the drop of a hat if left to his own devices. In fact there's evidence in the first season that he regularly self-medicates in order to function in the real world to a level expected of him, regardless of his personal inner turmoil or desires at the time. To put it bluntly, while perhaps cut from the same mold, these two characters are just not made of the same stuff.

I was hoping to churn all this out in one blog sitting, but there's too much material to cover, and I should probably go to sleep eventually. I'll have to continue this on into the weekend I fear. I hope to write a continuation of this soon that will compare Astrid Farnsworth to Sue Storm, and show how Peter Bishop and Olivia Dunham share personality traits with both Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm. I know you wait with baited breath. =)

Loony Libby

As the months seem to drag on in anticipation of the Final Season of ABC's hit TV series LOST, I find myself contemplating the questions that will probably never get answered. Also, when time and real life crap allows, I am still watching the old seasons again to refresh my memory on all the ins and outs and ups and downs of this crazy cockamaimee kooky show. Many things assault my senses.

I'm amazed at Terry O'Quinn's performance of Locke, as are pretty much all of us. I swear there are times when his very gait is a deliberate character choice as an actor. There are times when O'Quinn walks with a swagger that suggests his legs aren't even real: that Locke is moving on stilts. Like his legs are operating like a marionette on strings. I can't tell for 100% certain if this IS deliberate, or if the terrain of the jungle, beach, and sets like the cabin or the swan just naturally lend O'Quinn to maneuver himself in ways that would have made John Wayne envious. I'm not sure if O'Quinn was asked if he'd give us a concrete answer. He'd probably prefer letting us wonder.

I'm astounded at how Rose & Bernard are used throughout the series very selectively. Again I can't tell if this is deliberate on the part of the writers or producers or if they honestly can't get these actors more often than we've seen them. I personally adore whenever Rose & Bernard make an appearance. It's too precious and rare for my taste. However, I understand other fans are not quite as fond of them as I am. Whether intentionally or on purpose, I think the amount of use of these two characters is like the use of powerful spices in a gourmet meal. Too much or too little and you can ruin the entire presentation. Though I personally could do with at least one more Rose & Bernard centric episode before Season Six winds up, I understand objectively that we don't want to overdo their welcome. In fact if they remained behind as the other characters return to the present time, we may learn that "Adam & Eve" in the caves were actually Rose & Bernard. One white stone, and one black. They live together, and they die alone in the past, together.

Which brings me to what I really wanna talk about in this rambling monologue: the season finale of Lost season two dubbed "Live Together Die Alone." In this episode we see Desmond meet Libby. They meet in a coffee shop in the States. Why Desmond is in the United States is never particularly clear, but he has so recently arrived that he hasn't had a chance to change his british currency to American dollars. He mentioned the last of the American money he had went to cab fare.

Libby offers to buy his coffee, having never presumably met him before, and the two of them sit down at the coffee shop and exchange pleasantries. During their conversation, Desmond reveals to Libby (a complete stranger mind you) that he is going to compete in a boat race organized by a man named Charles Widmore (of whom Libby feigns ignorance) but that he doesn't have a boat. Libby tells Desmond that she has a boat, which was named after herself by her now deceased husband David. All this by the way sounds like a scene straight out of a Dickens novel like Great Expectations or Nicholas Nickleby. I mention that because of Desmond's fondness for the author. While not close enough to any particular dialog from a Dickens' work to be intentional, I get the sense that whenever writing Desmond scenes, the writers of LOST have a Dickensonian voice in the back of their mind. Desmond Hume is truly a Dickensian man. Riddled with strife, internal conflict, and unfairly laboured upon by friend and foe alike. He's Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim and a young Ebenezer Scrooge all rolled up into one and given a Scottish accent. We also now know so much about Desmond's character from his youthful fascination with Penny to his decadent preference of booze, that dissecting his character is no less fascinating and delicious than carving a Christmas turkey.

However, for everything we know about Desmond Hume, we know less than a tenth as much about Libby. Most of what we know from Libby came from her own mouth and there's little substantial to corroborate what she says. She claims to have done some medical training, but became a clinical psychologist. Yet in her flashbacks we never actually saw her practice either. In fact we saw her in one of Hurley's flashbacks as a patient of Santa Rosa - not a shrink.

Libby claims she was married to a man named David, and that David died of an illness a month before she met Desmond. However, we've never seen her with anyone named David. In fact, the only David we know of in the series was a fabrication of Hurley's mind from when he spent time in Santa Rosa. The producers of the series have gone on record saying that Libby's David and Hurley's Dave are not the same character, but that still doesn't dismiss the curious coincidence. Again, coincidences are common occurrences in Charles Dickens' works.

Libby just happens to own a boat she's doing nothing with when she meets Desmond, and Desmond just happens to be in need of a boat. She happily offers it to him, having met him only that afternoon. He reluctantly accepts, after hearing her story about her dead husband. When the viewer first watches this, we are for the most part relieved. This is an opportunity of the writers letting us in on useful information. We know that Desmond competes in Widmore's race with a boat named Elizabeth - a boat that gets washed up on shore on the mysterious Island, leaving Desmond stranded with Kelvin and The Button for three years or more, before the arrival of the surviving passengers of Oceanic 815. Keep in mind here that while they knew of one another, Desmond and Libby never actually meet on the Island. Desmond escapes from the Island on his (Libby's) boat before the tail section survivors make it to the fuselage side of the Island, and Libby is killed by Michael then buried by Hurley & Kate before Desmond returns on The Elizabeth drunk as a skunk.

Desmond doesn't even know Libby was ever on The Island. No one has ever thought to tell him.

This is just one of the many things that make Lost unlike most any other series ever in the history of television. Most television is pretty cut and dried. Ross is doey-eyed over Rachel. Chandler is the sarcastic one who falls in love with the cleanfreak Monica who used to be fat. Phoebe's the crazy one who sings about cat odors, and Joey is the stupid one with the heart of gold who wants to be an actor. Not a lot of depth here. Fun. I'm not dissing Friends. For what it is, it's entertaining. It's just that the deepest the show ever got was to explain that the reason Chandler cracks jokes all the time is because his father was a transvestite. Not very deep, or even remotely logical. Funny.. but meh.

Lost can be many things to many people. If you just wanna look at the surface you can. You won't understand the details but you don't have to. There's people trapped on this Island against their will, and there's other mysterious people who seem to know more than they're telling, and they purposefully make life difficult for the people we're rooting for. If you wish to dig deeper, it's like Alice venturing into Wonderland. There's many layers to this onion and there seems to be no end to it. At least, not until the end of the series, but there's no way all these questions are going to be answered. I don't think the writers of the series even want to try to answer them all.

This is probably something that will never be explored. The many gaping holes in Libby's curious history will probably never be illuminated in season six. There's simply no need for it. The story has long since passed this moment between Desmond and Libby by. Why delve into it deeper?

The story at hand going into season six is whether or not Locke is dead, and if so, who the hell's been walking around pretending to be him the past season and a half? Has Locke ever even been Locke, or has he been nothing but a puppet since the moment his father pushed him out that window?

The story at hand going into season six is whether or not Jack and the others back in DharmaVille's past succeeded in affecting time by using a nuclear explosion to destroy the land which would have been used to build the Swan station which is believed to have been what shot Oceanic 815 down out of the sky in the first place? Did it work? Did the bomb go off? Or was it a dud? Or is the very Incident that Jack instigated a temporal disturbance that threatens to destroy the very fabric of space-time and therefore what caused the initial problem leading to their predicament in the first place? Were they always fated to be trapped on this Island, or by dabbling in parasciences they could not fathom, did everyone from Dr. Pierre Chang to Vincent the Retriever each do their own part to generate this fate for themselves?

Libby's been left in the dust. We'll never know why she was in Santa Rosa. We assume it is because her husband died and she was distraught over that. We will never know why she was on the plane. We'll never know why David got a boat and named it after her. We'll never know why she just gave the boat to a complete stranger in a coffee shop. We'll never know who put her in Santa Rosa and under what conditions these events occurred.

In a time leading up to season six when many actors are being approached by the producers of Lost, and information is leaking out revealing just how many past characters both alive and dead may be returning, the actress Cynthia Watros is nowhere near the top of the list of names being batted around. She has been very busy, making appearances in shows like CSI, The Closer, Family Guy, Gossip Girl, and upcoming movies like Mars and Calvin Marshall. However, not a peep about her showing up in even a flashback or dream sequence during Lost's sixth and final season. The last time we saw Libby she was haunting the tragic and starcrossed Michael as he postponed the explosion of the freighter long enough for some to survive.

What makes this bittersweet is that, again whether it was intentional or accidental, the lack of detail regarding Libby makes that scene with her and Desmond at the coffee shop incredibly unique. You can take it at face value if you wish.

[FLASHBACK]

[We see Desmond at a coffee bar counter.]

DESMOND: Just give me which ever one has the most caffeine in it, brother. [he opens his wallet] Damn, um, I'm sorry. I've just arrived and I spent all my American money on a taxi.

LIBBY: [putting money on the counter] I've got it.

DESMOND: That's not necessary.

LIBBY: It's just 4 bucks.

DESMOND: I don't suppose you have 42,000 more of those do you?

LIBBY: Depends on what it's for.

DESMOND: I was joking.

LIBBY: No you weren't.

[We see Libby and Desmond sitting with each other. Libby is looking at a brochure for a sailing race. There's a picture of Widmore on the brochure.]

LIBBY: So, a sailing race around the world?

DESMOND: I have 8 months to get into the best shape of my life. I'll tell you what, miss, I'm going to win.

LIBBY: And what do you get if you do?

DESMOND: What really matters is who I win it for. [he pushes the brochure toward her]

LIBBY: [looking at the brochure] Charles Widmore.

DESMOND: He tried to buy me off. And when I didn't take his money, he took away the only thing in the world that I ever truly cared about.

LIBBY: Who is she?

DESMOND: His daughter. I was unsuitable on several levels.

LIBBY: And what' the 42 grand for?

DESMOND: It's a wee bit complicated. As of yet, I don't actually have a boat. [Libby looks sad] Sorry, did I say something wrong?

LIBBY: I have a boat. It was my husband's but he got sick. He wanted to sail the Mediterranean—he never—he passed away about a month ago.

DESMOND: I'm sorry.

LIBBY: I want you to have it.

DESMOND: I can't take your boat, miss.

LIBBY: But you have to. He'd want you to.

DESMOND: What was your husband's name?

LIBBY: David.

DESMOND: And what did he name his boat?

LIBBY: Elizabeth. He named it after me.

DESMOND: Then I thank you, Elizabeth. And I shall win this race for love.

By the way, just for grins, look at the numerical significance in this scene for a second. Four bucks. Eight months. Forty-two thousand more. These are some of "The Numbers" that hold unique significance in the tv series Lost, as they show up repeatedly in a number of other places throughout the run of the show.

You can take this scene as it is. Two strangers meeting in a coffee shop and finding common ground; a way to help one another cure what ails them. It's a nice tender moment all by itself. No need to delve further. You can take it at face value and walk away entertained.

Or you can delve deeper.

What if Libby's insanity were more than a fleeting thing? We are led to believe what drove her crazy was the loss of her husband, but when she speaks to Desmond she claims David died less than a month before. If you look at the time table, she must have been at Santa Rosa before she met with Desmond, so she didn't give him the boat and then go insane. She was insane before she gave him the boat. We are less to presume that she got better which is why they let her out of Santa Rosa.

What if the reason she were in the hospital was because she's a pathological liar? What if everything she says to Desmond is a lie? She doesn't have a husband named David who named a boat Elizabeth after her. She doesn't even have a boat. We know her name is Libby because that's what the nurse calls her in Hurley's flashback.

If that's the case, how did Desmond get the boat? Why is it named Elizabeth. There's a number of ways to explain that. Perhaps Libby found a boat named Elizabeth (a common name for a boat) and stole it. She gave it to Desmond before the cops got to her, so when the authorities approached her about it she didn't have it in her possession, so they never found it. Perhaps they would have eventually investigated further and found Desmond, but by then he was already lost on the Island.

Another possibility could be that she wasn't just a pathological liar, but part of a Long Con that was being orchestrated to keep Desmond away from Penny. Libby feigns ignorance when Desmond talks of Charles Widmore, but what if she knew precisely who Widmore was because Widmore told her to tail Desmond and befriend him, then give him a boat that Widmore could rig in a special way to end up going off course during the storm and wind up on The Island?

This would mean Libby was working for Widmore. This would also explain why she was on Oceanic 815. Let's go back to when the Oceanic 815 crashed on the Island. Ben and the Others behaved as if they had been anticipating a moment like this. Ben immediately told Ethan and Goodwin to infiltrate the camps of the survivors pretending to have crashed with them, make lists of names and return to Ben for more details later. This was part of a well-orchestrated plan. Ben had been waiting for this moment. Now, why would he need lists of names? Well, so he could have Patchy over at The Flame to make up dossiers on everybody, which Ben then memorized so he'd know with whom he was dealing. The code phrases the Others used referring to these list used variations on the words good or bad. There were good people and bad people. Presumably this meant "good" people they could control or bring under their wing, and "bad" people who would become troublesome in one way or another aka "hostile" to their efforts.

What if Ben was looking for something else as well? What if the reason why The Others couldn't just welcome all the survivors with open arms and leis and pina coladas was because an unspecified number of people on Oceanic 815 were plants of Charles Widmore? What if Oceanic 815 going off course wasn't an accident, but intentional? What if Libby was one of the people, sleeper agents if you will, who were supposed to get on Oceanic 815, befriend whoever survived, and await further instructions that never came?

All of this is plausible and possible, without adversely affecting anything that is actually canon in the series itself, so long as the producers of Lost ever venture back to shed more light on Libby's past. Libby is an enigma. Like Schroedinger's Cat, so long as the box is left closed, Libby can be all or none of these things.

Is she a sweet innocent who befriended Hurley and fell in love with him? Is she a double agent working for Widmore who would have been eventually found out by Ben anyway had she survived Michael's target practice? Is she a crazy woman who bought Desmond a cup of coffee and lied about owning a boat because she wanted so badly for Desmond, a complete stranger, to be indebted to her so some day he'd fall in love with her? And she stole the boat then later threw herself at him? Did he spurn her advances and dare to call her crazy to her face, then took the boat in spite of her madness because he so desperately wanted to win the race for Penny?

Now THAT would be deliciously Dickensian.