Abandon Text!

The problem with most punditry is that commentators are rarely held accountable to their predictions. By the time events pan out, everyone's lost interest and moved on to new predictions. So, when I make predictions, I try to keep accurate score. (Warning: spoilers follow).

With Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, I correctly predicted that Dr. Horrible would win a compromised victory, one that left him in pain. That one was pretty easy – as I said before, Joss' whole philosophy of story-telling is that pain is the basis for sympathy and human connection. If the main character isn't in pain, we lose interest pretty quickly.

Where I went totally off the rails was in predicting a greater role for Penny in the unfolding of events. I thought she would have some kind of agency in the way things turn out . . . but nope, she was just cannon-fodder. In my defense, a lot of other people had exactly the same critique of Act III: couldn't we have the girl do a little more than just be the passive motivator for the macho-men? But I will let that go . . . for writing seven years of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss deserves an automatic bye on any feminist critiques. Once in a while, a guy deserves to be allowed to write a passive female role.

What also surprised me, but I didn't articulate very clearly in my predictions, was how much Hope got overshadowed by Pain in the conclusion. The structure of the songs and the story suggested a dynamic tension between Penny's world-view (do-gooding is good, what matters is human connection) and Billy's (do-gooding is for saps, what matters is who has the power). The third act doesn't do much to contradict Billy's position; Penny's reward for her do-gooding is to be publically humiliated shortly before she gets killed. I had expected at least one more song from Penny to stake out Hope's position: "All your Power and Domination is bereft of meaning, so who's the sap?" Rather than just falling in love with Penny the object-of-desire, Dr. Horrible could have fallen in love with Penny's virtue, and wished from afar that he could be that way. That would have made the tragedy of Billy's fall more complete, and also perhaps have indicated a path for his eventual redemption in a sequel. Instead, everything about Penny's behavior, right up to her dying words ("Captain Hammer will save us!") confirm that she really is a deluded sap. I think Joss' absurdist philosophy got the better of him, here.

^    ^    ^

At the risk of appearing like a raving fanboy with no life, there's a few more random items I wanted to point out, simply because the begged for someone to notice them:

• In the newscast in Act III, the anchor says, "Next up: who's gay?" This is almost certainly an in-joke referencing Neil Patrick Harris, the actor portraying Dr. Horrible. In 2006, a report circulated in the media that Harris was gay. Harris' response was, essentially: "Yeah . . . so?" He was widely lauded, not so much for coming out (he had been openly gay for years among friends and co-workers) as for refusing to act like it was a big deal. I guess Joss & company thought it deserved to be cataloged among the sins of a media world obsessed with celebrity non-stories.
  
• In the background of Dr. Horrible's lab, there's a model of Serenity, the spaceship from Joss Whedon's earlier TV series Firefly. I'm sure if spent more time watching I would find lots of other in-jokes . . . I'm told there are lots of cameos by friends-of-Joss. Not that I would ever do such a geeky thing, myself . . . I'm just sayin' . . .
  

(Warning: spoilers for Act III of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog follow.)

Man.

I . . . man.

I seriously underestimated Joss' guts when it comes to story-telling. I saw the darkness looming in the story, but I didn't think he could go all the way into Wagnerian tragedy with a premise as silly as "Dr. Horrible." And yet he did . . . and convincingly, too.

I should have known there would be blood. Bad Horse had called for blood repeatedly. It couldn't have been otherwise. And death was really too good for Captain Hammer – he needed to be utterly humiliated for the story arc to complete itself. So the blood had to be Penny's. And Billy's descent into full-bore villainy is seen for the human tragedy it is. Billy's decency never left him – in spite of his rage, he hesitated to pull the trigger on Captain Hammer, even while calling for "no mercy." Horrible's "victory" was achieved, ironically, by his own incompetence at evil – had the freeze ray held a minute longer, or the death ray not blown up in Hammer's hands, things would have turned out very differently. And equally telling that it's Hammer's arrogance (and genuine lack of remorse) that ultimately defeats himself and does in Penny, too. So Horrible stumbles across the threshold into full-bore villainy, more the victim of a corrupt society than a willing agent . . . and we feel, with him, the hollowness of his victory, and ultimately, the complete loss of any feeling at all.

"Feeling" is the real theme of the entire story. Both Billy and Penny show their humanity in their capacity to feel pain, which opens to them the capacity for empathy and connection to other people. Captain Hammer evidently never felt a moment's pain in his whole life . . . making him an arrogant self-serving tool. When Hammer does finally feel pain, his capacity to oppress is completely undone. And only when Billy's capacity to feel is extinguished, numb with grief and horror, can he become truly Horrible.

"Pretending" could contend as the central theme, too. Joss mercilessly pounds on the shallowness and banality of society in the final episode, demonstrating how it hides from inconvenient truths with pasteboard heroes, thin veneers of caring over the power of the status quo. I thought it was a sweet to see Penny sitting in the Coin Wash, obviously waiting for Billy, extra frozen yogurt at the ready, and she asks herself, "Should I stop pretending?" Even at that point she knew she was playing along with something less than genuine, denying her real feelings for Billy in favor of the security of being with the established power of Captain Hammer. She alone had the sense to be mortified by Captain Hammer's speech at the dedication . . . but too late. All that pretending – Hammer pretending to be compassionate, Penny pretending to love him, Billy pretending to be the villain he really wasn't – was what ultimately creates the tragedy.

I love the last cut of the film. We see Dr. Horrible fully realized, his white coat and gloves traded for red and black, walking into his place in the Evil League of Evil . . . but at the very last we cut back to Billy's blog. Billy: still human, still small and alone, calling out to the world from his blog, still a human being. This is "Horrible"'s greatest achievement: to humanize evil, to see the person behind the mask.

The final episode of "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" airs today. My young kids are TV-free, so I won't be able to watch it until late this evening. So . . . how will Act III conclude?

• Were Dr. Horrible an aspiring super-hero, we might anticipate a classic hero conclusion: guy defeats nemesis, guy gets recognition and respect, guy gets girl. But Dr. Horrible isn't a super-hero; he's an aspiring super-villain, and even though he's a sweet guy who is only putatively evil, story-telling conventions can't hand him an unadulterated victory. Besides, that's not Joss' way . . . even in victory, the winner has to be in some pain, or the audience stops caring about them.
  
• On the other hand, I don't think Dr. Horrible can outright lose, either, because as stark as Joss' philosophy is, he still believes in goodness and doesn't want to disappoint his fans. So I think we're looking at a compromised victory for Dr. Horrible.
  
• What kind of victory? Hmmm . . . well, here are some possibilities:
  
  • Dr. Horrible is redeemed. Billy attempts to zorch Captain Hammer during his big date with Penny, but fails, as usual. Captain Hammer reveals himself to be a total tool by the way he humiliates Dr. Horrible, and Penny's sympathies shift to Billy. Bad Horse suddenly shows up, ready to rub out Dr. Horrible for his failures. Dr. Horrible somehow defeats Bad Horse, winning his girl's love but crushing his ambition to be super-villain. This is the way Hollywood would do it, which is why I don't think Joss will do it. Joss will want to keep the premise of Dr. Horrible alive – "nice guy wants to be bad" – and turning him into a superhero just kills the fun.
    
  • Dr. Horrible wins, but Billy gets the girl. Dr. Horrible succeeds in being the villain he always wanted to be, defeating Captain Hammer. But in the process he terrifies Penny. Through a series of quick costume changes Billy manages to "save" Penny from Dr. Horrible. Billy wins the affection of Penny, but she doesn't know he is Dr. Horrible. Now Billy is in a real bind – Bad Horse is on his case to do evil, but he must hide his evil-doing from his love. This seems like a better, more Jossy outcome – the show's premise is preserved, even magnified, letting the main character win and lose all at the same time.
    
  • Penny wins. Dr. Horrible and Captain Hammer duke it out to a draw, revealing their true natures to Penny. Penny is both sympathetic and disgusted with both of them, and says as much. Penny is endangered by Bad Horse, and Captain Hammer and Dr. Horrible compete with each other to save her (or, alternatively, they reluctantly join forces to save her, still sniping each other in the margins). In the end Penny is saved, both Hammer and Horrible remain even more themselves, but no one gets the girl. This also has potential, because ever since making Buffy the Vampire Slayer Joss is expected to write empowered women, and he won't want Penny to be anyone's prize to be won.
    

It's always easier to write about pop culture than philosophy . . . so I guess I'll indulge in random analysis of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (as of Acts I and II – caution, spoilers follow.)

• At first it seemed like a totally unique genre-bender: a super-villain story instead of a super-hero story. But in retrospect it seems only natural. The revival of the whole Dark Knight tradition in comics and films shows that the difference between heroes and villains is exceedingly fine. In fact, every superhero franchise in recent memory – Batman, Spider-Man, X-men, Hulk, Dare-Devil, Hellboy, Buffy, Angel – all feel obliged to explore the dark side of their heroes and the moral ambiguity under which they operate. So it seems only a small step to cross the line and start with a "bad guy" with a good nature, instead of a good guy with dark side.
• Even though the tone of "Dr. Horrible" is blessedly silly, I see places where Joss' darker philosophy creeps out. His writing not only manages to make Billy sympathetic, it even makes his philosophy of villainy sympathetic. In the Dr. Horrible universe, the only difference between the "good guys" and the "bad guys" is which ones happen to be in power. In that realm, the super-villain represents the powerless and dispossessed rising up to reclaim their just due, and cast down the smug and corrupt. Neither Captain Hammer nor Dr. Horrible are particularly admirable – both claim to be serving the larger world order, but are ultimately motivated by a desire for personal power and recognition. Only Penny's heartfelt empathy for the world's suffering seems genuinely good . . . but even that is in for a gentle drubbing. When Billy sneers at Penny's quest for petition signatures, I couldn't help but think that Joss was sneering with him. "Bless her heart, she means well . . . but that's not the way the world works." As, indeed, it doesn't – it takes Captain Hammer's political pull to win the building, not Penny's petition drive. Her innocence and goodness, as good as it is, is rooted in her naiveté.
• Neil Patrick Harris plays the introverted geek well . . . almost too well. When Penny approaches him to a get a petition signature, I was expecting the usual "guy makes fawning idiot of himself" routine . . . but what we get is something slightly different. He's interested in pleasing her, but not nearly as interested as he is in not appearing desperate. His attention wanders to his geeky exploit at hand. Even the facial tics . . . boy, he's got weird loner down pat. The effect is interesting . . . we sympathize with him, but we also witness with agonizing frustration how he's missing the human connection. And what ultimately redeems him for us is when his humanity pops out naturally and unbidden, totally outside of his consciousness. He doesn't even know how decent a human being he is.
• The only reason the Big Bad of the show is "Bad Horse" is to give Joss an excuse to make a silly song in a Western style. Showoff.
• I gotta hand it to Joss for his pioneering use of contemporary language. Anyone who can use the word "dork" in a heartfelt song is on the cutting edge.

   

I keep vacillating between two positions:

1. Busy is good. Having lots to do is a blessing -- it means you have lots of opportunity to make a difference, and lots of people wanting you to do it. Nothing like the urgency of time constraints to focus the mind and get things done. All the people I admire, including the creative geniuses, work like dogs. Protestant work ethic rules.
2. Busy is bad. The constant sense of not having enough time (something I share with practically everyone else I know) is symptomatic of a life that is out of balance. If you feel like you never have the time to do what's most important, your priorities may not be in order. Or, perhaps your desires and aspirations are out of step with reality -- you might want what can't be had, and you need to scale back what you think can be accomplished. You can't really enjoy life unless you have the freedom to engage it on your own terms.

^     ^     ^

Most of the parenting literature I've studied has spoken highly of "unstructured free play" -- kids just kicking around, playing with what comes to hand in a free-wheeling make-believe, without any schedules or rules or leagues or facilitators or teachers. Such play is critical to developing "executive function," especially self-regulation. It's how kids learn to control themselves and their impulses. It seems to consistently result in creativity; I'm amazed at the things the boys create when left to themselves.

Which leads me to wonder . . . Is "free play" just for the kids, or could it have some benefit for adults as well? Rather than dwelling in the constant teleological crunch of having to accomplish the next task, might it help to have some time to just, like, do whatever you fee like doing? If left completely to my own devices, with no schedules or deadlines, to read or write or think or ride my bike or whatever . . . What would I do? Would I connect with a creative drive and achieve something undreamt of? Or would I sit on my butt and lose all desire to do anything?

Some interesting precedents for the "play time for grownups" can be found. Google requires their employees to spend 20% of their time working on whatever pet project they feel like working on. Google hopes that the extra freedom will pay off in innovations that nobody in the executive suite could have planned for.

What would grown-up play look like?

We interrupt our regularly scheduled tedious rant about philosophy to bring you this special announcement:

Joss Whedon is up to something. Something evil and nefarious and, and, well, Jossy.

Namely: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. It's a mini-musical about a second-rate super-villain. Evidently Joss has been thoroughly bitten by the musical bug after composing "Once More with Feeling," the musical Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode for which he should have won an Emmy, had the Academy not "accidently" left his name off the ballot. So, during their downtime in the writer's strike, Joss and his friends did a little internet project on the cheap.

This is one-time streaming event that is only happening this week, so check it out soon. Act I one was released yesterday, and Acts II comes out tomorrow. Also don't miss Joss' letter explaining the Master Plan.

Look for some familiar friends-of-Joss, including Nathan Filian (as swashbuckling and self-absorbed as always) and Felicia Day (a.k.a. "Vi", one of the potential slayers from the seventh season of Buffy). And Neil Patrick Harris, whose musical stage experience and goofy sense of humor make him a great fit for the title role . . . not to mention a vague resemblance to Joss Whedon himself.

Last week Sir John Templeton, the founder of the Templeton Prize for Progress towards Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities, died at the age of 95. Templeton also happened to be a superstar investor, but I felt obliged to mention his spiritual work first, since nearly every other obituary recognizes his material success before acknowledging what he considered his real work: bringing a scientific mindset into spiritual inquiry.

Templeton was the premier advocate for open-mined spiritual exploration. He called it "the humble approach":

"The main focus in my life now is to open people's minds so no one will be so conceited that they think they have the total truth. They should be eager to learn, to listen, to research and not to confine, to hurt, to kill, those who disagree with them."

Many people have championed religious tolerance and mutual respect, but Templeton was unique in his call for religious progress. He believed that we could do more than just quietly put up with each others' religious views – he saw spirituality as a field that could be studied, critiqued, analyzed, and tested, as much as any other endeavor of knowledge, and that new understanding could emerge from an open-minded inquiry. And he put his money behind it . . . a lot of money.

Of course, Templeton ruffled lots of feathers among both scientists and religious scholars, groups he was supposedly trying to bring together. Many religious leaders didn't like the implication that their knowledge was antiquated, nor did many scientists care for someone trying to tie them back to traditions of thought they had been running from for several hundred years. But in his own way, I think Templeton gave voice to the general opinion of most of the secular civilized world:

1. There is a spiritual dimension to our experience of the world.
2. Nobody seems to have all the answers about it.
3. I wish I knew more about it.

It was that basic recognition of spiritual ignorance, and a personal desire to know more, that led me to working with Augie Turak to form The Self Knowledge Symposium. And when Augie Turak was awarded the grand prize in Templeton's "Power of Purpose" writing contest, I felt a profound sense of vindication for the work we had been doing. Now, as then, I'm grateful to John Templeton for supporting new evolutions in spiritual thought.

I know this may seem like a small thing. It's a kid's book. It's been around forever. People like it. Why should I even bother? But it bugs me. It continues to bug me every single time I sit down with it. I can't take it anymore. I have to tell the truth and shame the devil.

Busy, Busy Town, supposedly one of Richard Scarry's classics, is a fake.

Ok, maybe that's a rash thing to say. Someone will sue me for libel. But the evidence is so overwhelming that something weird is going on.

When toilet-training our two boys, we encouraged them to sit on the potty by reading to them while they did their business. The favored bathroom reading was (you guessed it) Richard Scarry. As much as I love Richard Scarry and regard What Do People Do All Day? as a timeless classic, I am conditioned to literally yawn every time I open the books up, as a result of our endless potty sessions. "No, I'm not done yet, Dad. Keep reading."

After such close study over two kids' worth of reading, I couldn't help but notice . . .

• The overall quality of Busy, Busy Town is nowhere near as high as What Do People Do All Day, or Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. The text is boring, disjointed, flat. The pictures are not as appealing. I found myself wanting to read the other ones. That was the first clue.
• Everything about the visual style of Busy, Busy Town was different than the other books. Now, that in itself would not be a surprise -- Richard Scarry drew in several different styles over his career. The style in Best Mother Goose Ever and The Animals' Merry Christmas is much different than the other books – more painterly, more subtle shading, and very different conventions for representing animals. But Busy, Busy Town is just . . . bad. It looks like someone with no imagination and low talent trying to imitate Scarry's style.
• In fact . . . most of the themes in Busy, Busy Town are exact repeats of themes in the other books, only with one-tenth the level of detail. Trains, airports, supermarkets, policemen . . . it's the same stories, but drained of all vitality. The Scarry I love would have two-page spreads with lavish detail. Busy, Busy Town has isolated images floating in white space, with almost no interlocking context.
• In fact . . . even some exact images are copied from the other books into Busy, Busy Town, but without the same context. For instance, in Cars and Trucks and Things that Go, there's a street sweeper that has a broken nozzle that sprays to the side instead of straight down, and it sprays water into the Pig family's car. That exact same street sweeper shows up in Busy, Busy Town, right down to the broken nozzle . . . but totally out of context. It's like someone copied the image without even bothering to understand what it was about.

   

  Here's the original image in Cars and Trucks and Things that Go:

   

  And here's the totally ripped-off image in Busy, Busy Town:

   

• The copyright date for Busy, Busy Town is 1994 . . . the year of Richard Scarrey's death. Hmmm. The most extensive online biography of Richard Scarry notes that he died of cancer of the esophagus, and that his eyesight began to fade in the 1980's due to macular degeneration. The same biography says his last book was The Biggest Word Book Ever . . . published in 1985.

How can one explain this inexplicably poor book at the very end of Richard Scarry's career? A few theories:

• Theory #1: Scarry's capacities were diminishing late in life, due to bad eyesight and bad health. He tried to make one more book, and could only create a shadow of his former greatness.
• Theory #2: After his death, Scarry's heirs (or his publishers at Random House, or both) were eager to keep as much of Scarry's extremely profitable franchise productive. They cobbled together the best imitation they could manage of Scarry's work, slapped his name on it, and sent it out. At this point it's hard to identify whether Scarry is the author, or just a brand name to be commandeered and marketed at will – Busy, Busy Town does not explicitly say "by Richard Scarry" anywhere, but merely bears the title "Richard Scarry's Busy Busy Town." I suppose his son, also named Richard Scarry, could have produced the book and put his name on it, capitalizing on the ambiguity of names. Other children's franchises have freely cloned their creator's style, but at least they had the decency to acknowledge it; the more recent installations of the Curious George series clearly say "illustrated in the style of H.A.Rey by Martha Weston."

I doubt I'm the only one who noticed. Someone posted to Flickr a catalog of changes between the 1961 and 1993 releases of The Best Word Book Ever, so I know people notice these things. But perhaps I'm the only one who cares who actually drew and wrote a book. One of the sad things about Scarry's career was that he sold so many books that literary institutions refused to give the slightest acknowledgement or critical acclaim. By that reckoning, who cares who wrote it, if it's making money?

Yesterday I went to my mother-in-law's house in Winston-Salem to take pictures for selling the house. It was overcast for most of the day, and I busied myself pulling weeds and clipping hedges while praying for the sun to come out and give me the light I needed to make the house look good. I guess hunters must feel like this – preparing and planning and waiting, but still mostly dependent on blind chance and forces of nature outside their control to bring them success.

I have no particular skill as a photographer, and certainly no training, other than a few bits of common advice on composition I picked up from old desktop publishing magazines. I spent enough time creating posters and marketing pieces to acquire some vocabulary and concepts for evaluating images: what was too busy, or too boring, too dense or too sparse. What struck me then, as now, is how much the process is one of just looking at something and judging how it makes you feel. Evaluating images is an introspective process; you look at the image, and at the same time you watch yourself watching the image, and seeing how you react to it. Out of nowhere, thoughts occur: "That corner is dark, I can't tell what's back there, and that makes me feel uneasy." "I keep looking at this tree in the foreground instead of the house." "I like that flower, I wish there were more of them." From these random thoughts you devise experiments: change the light, change the angle, pull that damn frog statue out of the frame. And then you compare and conclude: "Yup, that's definitely better." "Nope, didn't make much difference." Eventually you start to recognize patterns and devise simple rules: "Don't include the light source in the frame." "Get as much light as possible into the room." "Windows are interesting. Walls are boring."

I know I'm only rediscovering what people probably learn in the first twenty minutes of an introductory photography class. But what's more interesting is what it says about how we think:

• As Dan Ariely pointed out in Predictably Irrational, we think largely in terms of comparisons. Judging whether a picture is "good" or "bad" is complicated, but judging whether this photo is better than that photo can be instantly recognized by most anyone. In fact, the only way we devise broad principles at all is through lots and lots of comparisons.
  
• There is a discrete difference between knowing how we react to something and knowing why we react that way. As Malcolm Gladwell repeatedly demonstrated in Blink, we formulate impressions and opinions long before we are consciously aware of them. And sometimes we never figure out why we react the way we react: "I dunno, for some reason I like this one more than that one."
  
• We like to believe that our decisions are following rational, logical, consistent principles . . . but the logic and the rationale come later, after the fact. Most of the time, we are responding in the moment to gut reactions – warmer, colder, warmer, red hot – which only later we understand.

For the last week The Onion has been running their "Green Issue" with stories about the environment. In tiny print above the title banner are the words, "The Obligatory . . ." Which sums up the state of environmentalism in our culture, these days: even if you don't care that much about the environment (and I don't think the majority of people do), you are at least obliged to pretend that you do. "It's the new patriotism," said Denver mayor John Hickenlooper, in a recent Wall Street Journal article described the lengths the Democrats are going to make their national convention green . . . or, at least, look green. The rules seem as focused on how things appear – such as mandating bright colors for catered food – than on the real substance of the matter. Many of their "greening" strategies are of questionable value (do biodegradable coffee sleeves make sense, if you have to ship them all the way from China?) but certainly look environmentally sensitive. In fact, so many of the unavoidable requirements of a convention (jet travel, balloons) were incompatible with the green goal that they had to revise their target to be the most "sustainable" convention ever. "Sustainable", it turns out, means doing some questionable math to account for your environmental impact, and then paying someone else to actually do something to offset the damage. I don't have a problem with cap-and-trade schemes in principle – you've got to do something to make conservation economically viable – but it only underscores the whole problem: our culture is fundamentally at odds with environmentalism. It will always be easier to look green than to actually be green, and as the rhetoric heats up the hypocrisy will only get worse.

I suppose it has to be this way . . . it takes an awful lot of noise and cultural pressure to make people change their ways. I am old enough to remember a time before recycling. In fact, I vividly recall being in grade school, and seeing an article in a children's publication about this new-fangled idea of "re-cycling" trash. Even then, at the tender age of eight, I thought: "There's no way you'll get every person in the country to voluntarily sort through their trash." But lo, thirty years later, recycling is commonplace. I still wonder at the overall impact – even after recycling all plastic and paper and metal, the volume of my trash is still twice as much as my recycled items – but I suppose every bit helps.

Some young friends of mine recently returned from a year-long stint in China, teaching English and working in hospitals. They were headed back for another year-long hitch, but were starting to make plans for settling in the U.S. The most significant factor in their plans: "After seeing China . . . we really don't want to own a car." Now used to doing everything by bike or bus, and having breathed the ubiquitous China smog, they were ready to live life without an automobile. I don't think they saw it as a particularly big sacrifice, either, some monumental offering on the green altar . . . it was just a sensible choice for them, that's all. I, myself, am not ready to live without a car, nor can I foresee I time when I or the rest of my generation will give up driving. Younger people are every bit as steeped in consumerism as the rest of us, if not more so . . . but I see, in the younger generation, the possibility that the culture might shift. Which is a good thing, too, since I, like the organizers of the Denver convention, am hoping that someone else will be willing to make the choices I'm unwilling to make.

"Dad, do you think Disneyland would be fun?" asked Aidan.

"Hmmm . . . You know what I remember most about the amusement parks I went to, when I was your age? Standing in line."

I have vivid memories of the wooden railings at Great Adventure outside the Log Flume ride. Constellations of gum stuck to the walls. I remember the slant of the sun, the sunburned feeling on my neck, the sound an artificial decorative stream bubbling near the entrance. The disgustingly sweet smell of cotton candy. The hollow thunk of empty flume boats drifting past towards the loading area, still slightly too far away to be seen.

Yes, I remember the waiting.

Of the ride itself, I have absolutely no memory. Well, not quite true. I remember the flume boat hitting the bottom of the final drop, and what my soaking-wet shoes felt like when I was getting out of the boat. Being soaking wet, I recall, was not nearly as much fun as advertised.

^     ^     ^

Lying in bed one night, my wife and I try to recall the first time we met. It was at an SKS meeting at UNC-Chapel Hill, in the early summertime. I have one image of her from that encounter still intact in my memory. I remember thinking that she was attractive, but that she didn't talk enough that night for me to know whether I liked her or not. She says she remembers me talking a lot that night, and thinking that I was really smart . . . But neither of us remembers what I said at all. It frustrates me that I can't remember the exact room we were in. Even with the two of us talking together, reminding each other of details, we have a hard time piecing together the chronology of our early relationship -- when exactly, did we go out on our first date? And the first time we broke up?

When, exactly, did the most tumultuous, passionate episode in my life start to become fuzzy and confused in my mind?

^     ^     ^

I try to summon memories of the early childhood of my first son . . . I find it disturbingly difficult to summon specific memories unaided. Some routines were, through sheer repetition, burned in permanently. I remember every contour and detail of the wooden changing table beside the bed in the bedroom, but I can't recall what his face looked like then. I remember the streets and sidewalks and trees where I walked with him at night in a sling, trying to get him to sleep. I remember the pattern of the sling, but not what he wore. I remember the shape of his hands, the bump of his legs against my side, the weight of him in the sling. I cannot, for the life of me, remember his face.

^     ^     ^

I started reading The Sandman comics by Neil Gaiman a couple years ago. I just got Volume Three of the bound collections. The Sandman is Morpheus, the incarnation of dreaming. As an eternal being who has been around for millennia, he's constantly running into other long-lived gods and demons and recalling old times: "We drank wine in Babyon together . . . " I find it slightly annoying that all these immortal beings have such crystal-clear recollections of events centuries ago, when I can only hang on to a few shreds of memory from a mere five or ten years ago. It seems more likely they would say things like, "You're my brother? Ohhhhh, yeaaaaaah, I kinda remember that . . . " Or "What the heck did we do with ourselves in Babylon? Was that Ashurbanipal's place we stayed at?"

It makes me wonder about God himself . . . All of humanity's drama may rise and fall away, and all God might ever remember is the theme song of "Gilligan's Island."

For some reason, theological questions always seem to come up at bath-time. Aidan, standing naked in the shower, said, for no particularly visible reason:

"You know, Dad, Jesus sounds like a story."

"Mmmm . . . what do you mean?"

"Well, magical things like that don't happen very often, except in stories."

What could I say? "Well, that's a very astute observation," I said. He said no more on the matter, and neither did I.

*    *    *

When I was in my teens, questions of religious truth were dichotomous: either you believed in Jesus, or you didn't, and anything in-between was either dishonest or lazy. I was aggravated with people who said squishy things like, "Well, no, I don't think it's literally true, but I think it's a beautiful story, a metaphor for an eternal truth." I was not much interested in metaphors, back then. I wanted the truth, by God, and if all you got out of religion was a pretty story, I could hardly see how it would be worth all the bother and inconvenience. I suspected that the non-literalists were quietly trying to defang their religion, removing any claim it had on ruling their lives while still nursing some small bit of consolation and order from it. It smelled like a scam.

On the other hand, literal interpretation of scripture challenges even the most willing of minds. Even if you completely accepted the events of the Bible as literal fact, the reasoning behind them still makes no sense. Why, exactly, is Jesus' death necessary for my salvation? Why should belief be the determining factor in the afterlife, when action is the determining factor in everything else in life? Even when I was perfectly willing to accept it all, the basis of its reasoning felt foreign, and primitive, and weird, and wrong.

There is a whole school of theological thought that regards religion as fabulation – as story-telling. Story-telling has its own logic and rules, which are not the rules of science. A story can be true – that is, true to life -- without being literally true. That was always the reason I loved great literature: the feelings it prompted in me were identical to the feelings of religion. Rapture. Awe. Longing. Resonance.

There is no such thing as "just" a story. Stories hold a more powerful influence over our thinking than abstract theories. All the things that make life possible and worthwhile – love, honor, duty, commitment, trust, peace, justice – bear a stronger resemblance to story than scientific fact.

I cannot really claim to be teaching my kids anything about religion. I tell them the stories . . . lots of stories. At some point, I expect them to be able to see stories for what they are: the language of the psyche, and pointers to the truth. Until then, the stories will work on their imaginations and hearts.

Some readers have commented on the fact that they're seeing some post-dated entries popping up in the blog. No, you're not imagining it – have been writing stuff, but then failing to post them the same day, and so they molder while I get distracted. I try to post things on the days I actually wrote them, just to be representative of my writing activity. I realize that this is antithetical to my original mission, which was to write something, anything every day and then post it no matter what – I'm supposed to abandon my text.

Sigh . . . try, fail, get up, try again, repeat until success or the apocalypse.

I dreamt last night that I was running around an apartment building, checking and rechecking locks to keep some burglars at bay. It seemed that the same perps had been coming around to the same buildings routinely, and I thought if I just checked everything enough times I could catch them, and hold the intruding world at bay. The whole time I'm doing the checking, I'm waiting for someone to jump out and grab me. If it was a TV show, the suspense music would have been playing.

Sounds like a real nightmare for me. If my security depends on me locking down enough details in my life, then I'm doomed. Sometimes it seems like there is no "big picture," just an endless series of details to attend to. Or, worse yet, I see the big picture and despair entirely, and console myself with the small pleasures of small tasks.

I got up this morning, shuffled through my usual morning routine. Pet the dogs as they mug me the moment my feet touch the floor. Brushed my teeth, went downstairs with the dogs' bowls to dish up their breakfast, back upstairs to give them their food in their crates, back downstairs to make coffee, and then finally settle in study to work.

Hmmm, no email. That's odd. I poked at one web page, picking up where I'd left off the previous evening, and suddenly get the blank whiteness of a 404 message. A Skype icon, forelornly grey, was spinning it's little heart out in the system tray. Ugly red X's dotted other items in the system tray. My business phone, with a kind of frantic earnestness, is spinning its own "wait" icon while it assured me: "Opening 234.27.34.117 . . . "

Shit. The internet's down.

What is this feeling? A sort of blankness . . . For a moment my head had stopped completely. I couldn't even complete the thought of what to do next, because I knew through experience that anything I might want to do at the moment was tied to a network connection that didn't exist. Wait for a thought to come . . . Nope. Still blank. I craned my neck at the bank of blinking lights on the bookshelves, all the routers and switches who were happily blinking away, still convinced they were doing something useful. I mechanically unplugged the cable modem, waited five seconds, plugged it in again. Sat in the blankness. The icons remained unchanged.

I've seen this happen to some of my clients from time to time . . . They sit there, staring at their screens, eyes flitting about, and then they say with anger, or frustration, or resignation, but always with a sense of helplessness: "I can't do anything." Sometimes I might offer, "Well, surely there's something productive you can do right now . . . You can still use your computer. You have everything there."

"No," they say, "I can't do anything."

We're undone by the collective weight of several compulsive behaviors: the desire to check email, to see who's online in IM, to pull up the news, read the blogs . . . It seems like everyone has their own set of internet-based rituals for starting their work, and if those rituals are interfered with, everything stops dead. I am no different. I might flail around at my desk, picking up papers that are asking for something to be done with them, but they only remind me of something that needs to be done online: "I could enter those reciepts, but then . . . Crap, the online banking wouldn't work . . . Here's that letter, I need to email so-and-so about that . . ." Had the gods struck me blind and deaf and dumb, I couldn't feel any more useless.

I couldn't even go get a cup of coffee. I already had done that.

What a perfect opportunity to meditate. If you want to embrace the Advaita tradition of thoughtless awareness, connected to the Ground of Being with no particular thought to limit your sense of self, just do this: sit at your computer when the internet connection is down.

I was feeling tired at the end of the day while I was putting the kids to bed. It's a typical feeling: you feel like going to sleep, but you have miles to go. You cuddle with your four-year-old to get him to sleep, and you're fighting the desire to fall asleep yourself because you know you have work you have to do, especially in the quiet hours when the children are asleep and the phone will not ring.

In that state, I walked into Aidan's room to tuck him in. On the floor I saw a tableau of toys arranged in one his complex scenes. As my eyes adjust to the dim light of the seahorse nightlight, I saw what he had done. Every single wooden animal he had collected over his seven years of life had been lined up, in a huge arch that wrapped around most of the floor space in his room. They were arranged from largest to smallest, with the enormous moose and caribou and elephant leading the way, and a progressively smaller cavalcade of horses, cows, lions, tigers, wolves, foxes, and whatnot following behind, finally trailing down to a thin strand of yellow baby chicks no bigger than your little fingernail. Most of the parrots and other jungle-birds were riding on the backs or antlers of the bigger animals . . . But a matched set of bison were carrying bird stand on their backs, with a fanned out arrangement of birds, like one of those tall floats in a Mummer's parade.

That's what this is: a parade . . . A celebration in which all the glory of the community is marched out. The great chain of being, out for review.

My reaction is odd. Normally a floor covered with toys would just provoke exasperation in me. I would wonder if my children are spoiled with so much stuff. Have we, for all our careful effort at education, merely churned out a new brood of materialists, just with finer tastes? Wouldn't this, after all, be the sort of arrangement you'd see in toy catalog? But no . . . No toy merchant would ever think to march a caribou side-by-side with an elephant, nor to adorn his antlers with a parakeet. No marketer would think to tilt the two sheep's heads together, like they were gossiping together while waiting in line.

Maybe it was the dim light, blessing everything with the aura of quiet. Maybe it was the careful arrangement, the precise ordering by size. For some reason, the scene moved me. This was the work of someone who is trying to make sense of their world.

"What's this?" I asked Aidan.

"I have fifty-three of them," he said. "That's a lot."

"Yes," I said. "That's a lot. We have a lot to be thankful for."

I guess he was counting his blessings. I was reminded to do the same.