She's Driving. I'm Listening.
I'm sitting in her car. She's doing some errands and I'm along for the ride. It's a day off and I wanted to spend it with her. A day off. I get days off again, instead of having all my days off looking for a job.
"You need to update your webpage," she said as we got on the highway.
"Huh?" I looked at her strangely, because she dramatically changed the subject from whatever we were talking about before, so much so that I suddenly had forgotten about whatever we were talking about before.
"I read your weblog, and I want to know that you've got a job and you're okay now."
"But you already know."
"Yeah but you still need to update."
"People still read that thing?"
She smiled at me with a curious sparkle in her eyes, "You'd be surprised."
I don't know how much detail I can go into. I made a sort of deal with myself years ago that I'd stop using this space to talk about work. I did that a lot back when I had an actual online journal, but that's just not what this place is for any longer. In fact I guess I'm uncertain what this space is for at the moment. It's not that I've forgotten this is here. I just haven't had much to talk about. This website was not the reason why I lost my last job technically, but it didn't help. I don't know if the job I have now would like my using this space to talk about it. There are many there who are computer saavy, so I'd rather just not go into much detail about that. The past year's been very tough. I've been consistently looking for work for a whole year and almost celebrated my first anniversary as an unemployed American, part of six percent of the country's population. In fact, this time last year, the second week of July, was when my last job let me go. I had some working possibilities by mid September, but when Nine Eleven happened those possibilities dried up overnight. I couldn't find a job in my field of expertise (computers) no matter what I did. What I'm doing now? Well it's similar to what I used to do. I still answer phones and work on computers, but I no longer do computer troubleshooting. It's actually a sort of marriage of two of my favorite things. Computers and the stage. I think I'll leave it at that for now. I won't get a paycheck until at least next week. There's wolves at the door but I'm hoping soon to have a bone or two to throw at them so they won't eat me alive. To be brief, I cut things real short. I almost bought the farm.
But I got a job. I'm okay now. =)
7:01 PM | link to this post
The Truth Is Most Decidedly NOT Out There
Putting Mulder on trial. Well that was creative. Not. I know what killed X-Files and it wasn't last night. There are many places where the house of cards began to crumble. I'll cite a few prominent ones in the interest of space. It's more detailed, but here's a general overview.
One of the many things that made X-Files so potent a story in the early seasons was that the main female role was not a helpless prize for the Dudley Doorights of this world. She wasn't squeemish around gross insects or dead bodies. She knew her way with firearms. She was both physically and mentally superior to her male counterpart who came to rely on her. The glue that held this show together was not Mulder. It was Scully. However, by the time Duchovny left the show, it had already deteriorated because Scully's character had been compromised repeatedly by incompetent writing.
In the second season episode One Breath, Scully had been captured by aliens and effectively became an abductee. From that moment on her skepticism was irrelevant. Though it took a few seasons for this to ferment and stink up the show, Scully without skepticism is like Sampson without hair. It is a testament to Gillian Anderson that she could play the character as well as she did, even though the character had become as false and empty as a cornhusk. She should get a wall full of Emmys for her effort. Carter's writers should get a lobotomy. Yes, I include Carter himself among them, since he was allegedly leading their charge into battle.
Despite this and some other major plot poopies, X-Files was great for the first four seasons. The final blow that made it unredeemable was the movie. When the movie came out, the Shippers won. Scully & Mulder became an item and there was no looking back. Though they didn't kiss, they almost kissed, which introduced a romantic element that despite so many Shipper's desires, hadn't belonged in the series and didn't belong. This was not Moonlighting or Remington Steele. Introducing romance however deminished X-Files to that level, and ruined the series despite its many successes.
This last season Dana Scully has been diminished to a pining damsel who had suffered greatly for the sake of her man. Pathetic, but I'm sure the "shippers" were happy. They got what they wanted at the expense of the conspiracy arc. The show had lapsed into romantic drivel, with the annoying alien stuff just getting in the way of letting the ingenues climb into bed together and live happily ever after. I could hurl. Anything outside the Scully/Mulder romance suddenly became obstacles in the way of their happiness. The show lost sight of its true purpose: to be freakyweird spookygross fun.
X-Files' first four seasons have very few misses and quite a few hits. After the movie, episodes which stand out for me are fewer and farther between. Below is a list of my personal favorites, done in a way which is intended to be helpful to those of you who could describe the episode but couldn't remember the title. Episode Guides abound on the 'Net, to further assist those who care to know. And if you don't that's okay too. The acronym "TOW" means 'the one with/where/about' a la Friends fame. Notable special guest performances are in brackets.
- Squeeze/Tooms - TOsW a century old stretchy gross liver eater. [Doug Hutchison]
- Fallen Angel/Tempus Fugit/Max - TOsW UFO enthusiast Max Fenig [Scott Bellis]
- Eve - TOW evil clone girls killing their adopted parents. [Harriet Harris]
- Ice - TOW We Are Not Who We Are/trapped in arctic with alien parasites. [Jeff Kober]
- Beyond The Sea - TOW Scully's father dies. [Brad Dourif]
- GenderBender - TOW the amish hermaphrodites.
- Darkness Falls - TOW swarms of green carniverous light-hating flying bugs in the woods.
- The Erlenmeyer Flask - TOW Deep Throat dies/Purity Control. [Jerry Hardin]
- The Host - TOW flukeman the giant bloodsucking worm.
- Duane Barry/Ascension/One Breath - TOsW Scully gets abducted. [Steve Railsback]
- Die Hand Der Verletz - TOW evil occultists as school faculty/The Hand That Wounds.
- Humbug - TOW Scully eats a bug/the circus sideshow freaks. [Vincent Schiavelli]
- Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose - TOW a psychic insurance salesman. [Peter Boyle]
- War of the Coprophages - TOW doctor bambi/alien bug probes scaring people to death.
- Pusher - TOW a mind controlling loser dying of brain cancer. [Robert Wisden]
- Hell Money - TOW a chinatown organ theft crime ring. [BD Wong]
Jose Chung's From Outer Space - TOW Alex Trebek & bleeping Jessie Ventura [Charles Nelson Reilly]
- Wetwired - TOW Scully goes hypno psycho from television.
- Home - the one with the inbreeding pig-people.
- Musings Of A Cigarette Smoking Man - TOW CancerMan kills Kennedy.
- Small Potatoes - TOW Van Blundht morphs into Mulder. [Darin Morgan]
- How The Ghosts Stole Christmas - TOW Ed Asner & Lily Tomlin
- This Is Not Happening - TOW things just get really really weird.
- Improbable - TOW Burt Reynolds plays God.
- John Doe - TOW Doggett gets amnesia and is lost in Mexico.
- Sunshine Days - TOW the Brady Bunch.
I find it amusing they have an episode called Jump The Shark. I didn't see that one. Perhaps I would have liked it. X-Files will be remembered as having jumped the shark and little else. It's one thing to Nitpick but quite another to feel completely cheated by the storytellers.
Carter's writers put as many of the frayed pieces together as possible in the final episode "The Truth", and the result was alphabet soup. Sufficient to prove Mulder had been duped my his own paranoid delusions and dragged all his coworkers into his dementia.
The big finish with Cancer Man appearing as if he were an old wise indian shaman was painfully laughable. The ghostly apparitions of Krychek and X appearing around Mulder indicated the man had clearly lost his mind, not aquired some tangible connection with the afterlife. Even The Lone Gunmen made an appearance. I wasn't aware they were dead. I guess I missed that episode. Or maybe when their tv series failed, their characters just died.
We'd seen nine years of eyewitness proof but there was never any solid evidence. How convenient. In essence Carter was saying all the effort of nine years was a waste for these characters. They had accomplished nothing. Back to square one. As were we. Just as Rosie will learn that her magazine will fold within a year of her leaving her TV show, so too will revenues for X-Files dry up. The effort had been fruitless. There is no franchise. There will be no successful sequel motion picture. Perhaps a TVmovie reunion in 25 years. Perhaps that's for the best.
Overall, I was reminded of how they ended the british tv series The Prisoner. Not with answers and conclusions but with psychedelic eye candy and open ended uncertainties. The intent is to keep the audience's mind reeling all the way to the end, like some G-rated striptese act. The result was more empty than eating a gallon of ice cream after a painful breakup.
The Fugitive had a definite conclusion, and is in many's eyes still the best season finale ever. It fulfilled the promise it made the audience from the very beginning. To do any less is unfair to the audience. The only reason Seinfeld got away with how they ended their show was because in some ways Seinfeld was a continuous parody of sitcoms in general. Something about nothing. At least Seinfeld had always been honest about that. Yet even Seinfeld gave a definite ending. Not by killing off characters or having each of them part their separate ways. They threw the four principals in jail. Now that was rather original, and in a strange way somehow fitting.
I'm disappointed with Carter, but not surprised. In a way it makes sense. He couldn't answer the questions he posed. He couldn't tell the truth because despite the show's constant claim that "The Truth Is Out There" the fact of the matter is for the purposes of X-Files, there is no truth. There is no definitive answer. You can't say there are aliens. You can't say there are no aliens. That would be like trying to prove the existence or nonexistence of God, and perhaps ultimately that's the point Carter was trying to make. This however is for the realms of theology, not boobtube entertainment.
To me, with this final episode, Carter's message to us was this, "Remember those dumber episodes I did in the first season like Jersey Devil or Ghost In The Machine? Those times when you found your hand resting on the remote contemplating whether or not you should change the channel and never come back cuz you thought maybe I wasn't gonna deliver in the long run? ...You were right. You should have changed the channel. I didn't deliver. I fooled you all."
Thank you Chris, for finally admitting the truth. You gave us monkey pee. You're on your own.
4:58 PM | link to this post
Duh Bomb
Luke Helder has allegedly come forward (okay the feds chased him down through Nevada) admitting that he was the guy who left a score of mailbombs all over the country. He was trying to draw a smiley face on the country, believe it or not. He barely started on the mouth when the long arm of the law took him down. Why did he participate in this domestic terrorism? Are there others involved? Is this a publicity stunt for a new religion, or a bad rock band? History will probably be the judge of that, but hopefully history will not even make a footnote referring to this. It's getting harder and harder for someone to get people's attention, especially when they have nothing to say. I should know.
After reading the hackcrap letters and junk, I've come to the conclusion this guy doesn't believe a word of what he's saying. It is perhaps the sickest failed attempt at a joke ever. His prose reads like like a sick marriage between Discordian and Branch Davidian. It's worse than those spammails promising "the answer" to fame, money, or whatever, but then just goes on and on promising and never actually getting around to explaining. It's a satire of all the motivational blah of humanity from the religious texts of the ages to Tony Robbins to any runofthemill 'get rich quick scheme' that might find it's way in your inbox or mailbox.
He claims he knows while everyone else just believes but then he beats around the bush explaining simply another untestable theory. A theory so full of holes, if this is the alternative to Islam, Christianity and Judaism, there's a reason why those Big Three are so popular among theologians. He makes fun of religions but then tries to start his own. He's a wannabe L.Ron Hubbard with vague and misdirected leanings towards nihilism, anarchism, and bad music. He probably thought he was being so incredibly unique and revolutionary, but the Sex Pistols made a bigger statement in their heyday and they didn't have to kill anyone to do it. He stood on the shoulders of chaotic giants, and then blew up stuff. Big deal. A trained chimp could do that. The bomb thing is just an attempt at cheap publicity for what he thinks will revolutionize the world. Ultimately all he wants is attention. Well, he'll get it for awhile, but then he'll be locked in a cell for life and hopefully the world will forget about him completely. His best hope at this point is to be the Charles Manson of the 21st century, but I strongly doubt that he will ever be that remembered.
Disappointing. I wish someone with that kinda drive would actually have something pertinent to say for once. I guess this is what happens when the young people of a society have no true heroes, no goals, and no future.
11:55 AM | link to this post
