The Knowers Part II

I had decided I was going to play crazy. I could pretend that all of my memories were just fiction and what I Knew was completely and utterly wrong. I had to convince myself of that as a survival technique against the fact that no one would believe me. I had no proof, no credible credentials of any kind. There wasn’t much I could do about it anyways. The past was playing out again, and I was in no position to alter anything as the course of history made a beeline for its own titanic iceberg.

The financial crisis was already well underway at the point when we landed. I have no clue as to why the hell we weren’t waybacked to a point where we could assassinate the President or stop the planes from being hijacked or kill Hilter or sink the Mayflower or any number of momentous changes that would have taken care of all of this before it started. That would have been too easy. I’m not sure what they expect us to do apart from lashing ourselves to missile silo doors and refusing to budge until the world hugs and makes up.

I sat in the coffee house I had sat in countless hours before the end, reading the news that I had read before. With Iran just starting to shake its penis at the world over the Straight of Hormuz, time was running its last lap. A soul-hitching depression was clouding me, only part of it having to do with the world’s woes. Most of it had to do with him.

I know he thinks I’m nuts. That first moment back, after the shock of being suddenly yanked out of the middle of a global nuclear war had passed, I ran down to the coffee house to see him. I was still sorting it out, hoping it was a bad dream but Knowing it wasn’t. I wanted to hug him. Tell him that I loved him. I’m probably lucky that he didn’t have me arrested.

It was the look on his face that did it. The polite smile supporting suspicious eyes stopped me cold. “I think you have me mixed up with someone else,” he said. “What can I get you to drink?”

That killed me. Not knowing my coffee order. I courted him in that coffee house. A year passed with me ordering the same damn drink every damn day as I mooned over him from a table near the window before I worked up the nerve to ask him out. Five years of our lives spent together after that, with me never missing a day seeing him at work before we’d walk home together after his shift. He knew damn well what I wanted to drink. Only he didn’t. He didn’t know me at all. Family, friends, coworkers, lovers…nobody knows us. The weird thing is, we Know each other.

The Knowers - Part 1

It wasn’t a big surprise, looking back. Or ahead. Whatever. Time travel fucks with your verb tenses and your perspective on history. When the future’s in your past and you’re living it all over again in the most amazingly realistic high-def 3-D imaginable, you can’t help but have an irritating and completely accurate sense of hindsight.

What was a surprise was how insidious the lead-up was. Unless you were able to connect the dots on the competing news franchises, the writing on the wall flew in stealth mode well below the radar. There were a lot of dumb looks on the faces that turned from their Blackberries skyward, following the contrails of their country’s respective nuclear arsenals headed for other countries. The dots were financial crises, a wonky environment, followed by the droughts and natural disasters causing food shortages. Energy was in short supply and those who had oil weren’t interested in giving it to those who didn’t. Those who didn’t went to take it anyways, and the world blew up.

Connecting the dots is easy now. It’s just what we do.

I don’t know why we were picked. Out of the seven billion-ish souls on planet Earth, a scant hundred were the chosen few. Parker thinks there’s a pattern; a rhyme and reason to those of us who ended up in the wayback machine. He says it’s there, he just needs more time to figure it out, which is a commodity that’s in short supply. I called bullshit on the Parker theory early on, because believe me…we’re a pretty sorry group.

Take Mary for example. Something must have happened in the wayback process, or the stuff in her brain was just too big for her to handle and she blew a fuse. All she can do is stand on the corner, dressed in donation box fashions, and scream about the end of the world. The sad part is that she’s one hundred percent correct, and everyone thinks she’s the crazy one. Of course, she could have been a total lunatic before she got waybacked.

That’s the part that makes me think this has happened before. Those folks who spent their time wearing the sandwich boards preaching Armageddon may have just had something. Something they knew; something they were obligated to tell the rest of us reality TV-obsessed dopes who looked the other way as we walked by, turning up the iTunes to screen out the bleak but oh-so-real message of doom.

I don’t know how many chances we got, but I know this is it. The last chance. We are the last hope to change it all and this time it’s for keeps. No more waybacks; no more warnings; no more Crazy Marys shouting at the decaf skinny latte people. We have to change it. We Know.

Solstice Magic

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Copyright 2010
Larry Parrigin

It's Not Fair

Something hideous has taken root inside my friend Hank. The cancer he had so valiantly fought for months and had thought banished is back. I see the fear in his eyes; the fear that speaks of weakness and nausea and pain. I see the crushing of hope. I see the utter panic inherent in knowing what is in store and being unable to stop it. I feel the utter panic of seeing a friend so desperately scared and in pain and not being able to do a damn thing about it.

It's not fair.

I say that, and it goes unheard.

I SCREAM that to my ceiling, the sky, the ever-fucking-airplanes that remind me of him, the edge of space, the heavens, and still it goes unheard.

What sense does that make?

Unrelenting proof of the non-existence of God.

I have to believe that. I have to believe that there's no God, or I go insane. Insane with the though that if there is a God, It's one sick sonofabitch to allow this to happen to someone like Hank. According to Christian myth, God is all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful. God is benevelant; God rains his goodness upon mankind.

Bull fucking shit.

All I see is random fate; random associations of chemicals, DNA, and human physiology coming together to ruin the life of someone unique. Someone who has left an indeleable mark on my life. Someone who gives with great humor and humility and got royally fucked in return. If God is behind this, He's evil.

Christians usually say there's a purpose to everything, summing it all up with catchphrases like "God doesn't close a door without opening a window." I'm not sure what possible purpose there could be for torturing Hank. What could Hank have possibly done to deserve this? What lesson does he have to learn by this? If not for Hank's benefit, then for whose? If God abuses the innocent to teach the guilty a lesson, then God is the ultimate sadist.

I can't think. All I want to do is strike out in blind rage at an impossible situation. It's not fucking fair.

In the DVD Player 5

The Tomorrow People
Thames Television
Starring Nicholas Young, Peter Vaughan-Clarke, and Elizabeth Adare

For those of us who tuned into "Nickleodeon" on weekday afternoons in the 1980's, the US-formatted DVD release of "The Tomorrow People" is a blast to our Gen-X retro past. Yeah, the special effects were cheesy and the acting amateurish in that special British sci-fi way, but the stories were powerful and spoke to those of us who felt "different." For those who value style over substance in a sci-fi series, just compare the forty-plus year run of "Doctor Who" to the twenty-seven year run of the Roddenberry "Trek" franchise. Which one is still currently in production? That's right. "Doctor Who." And the "Lucasing" of Original Series Trek doesn't count.

The premise is one explored in the Marvel Comics' universe: people developing powers through natural mutation and evolution; the powers manifest themselves at the onset of puberty in a traumatic process called "breaking out" in the series. While powers acquired through mutation in the Marvel universe are usually singular and specific (laser eyes, control of weather, etc.), the powers displayed by the Tomorrow People include telekinesis, telepathy, and teleportation. Each of the Tomorrow People display all three abilities, but some have a greater degree of specialty in one or the other. One character is adept at telekinetically picking locks, while another is able to project images of ghosts through telepathy.

A mainstay of the series is the characters' ability to teleport, or "jaunt," a term borrowed from the novel "My Stars My Destination" by Alfred Bester. Just by thinking about it, they can teleport to any location they can imagine. They are mechanically assisted by "jaunting belts" which fine-tune their abilities and give them greater range. The characters are assisted in their adventures by a biomechanical computer named "TIM," voiced by Phillip Gilbert. Gilbert's is one of the classic sci-fi computer/robot voices, right up there with Roddy McDowell, Majel Barrett Roddenberry, Douglas Rain, and Dick Tufeld.

The episodes in the DVD sets are presented in their original 30-minute "serial" format, with opening and closing credits between each episode. While this makes for disjointed viewing of the entire story and can be tedious to view the "flashback" sequences from the previous episode, the format keeps the entire set true to the original series. The lack of original series artwork on the box makes it hard to spot on the shelf; for some reason A&E elected to go with original art on the box and DVD cases.

In any case, it's a set worth owning. Here's to A&E for finally bringing this series to DVD on our shores.

Fantastic Voyage

I'm not sure I understand the reported controversy surrounding the Body Worlds Exhibit at the Dallas Fair Park museum of Nature and Science. Okay, so the thought that these displays used to be people and have been immortalized by a process called plastination can seem a little Night of the Living Dead, but the works on display were so much more than mere cadavers. They're almost fluidic, kinesthetic sculptures; works of art that just happen to result from the anatomical study of human beings.

There's precedent for this: Renaissance artists like Leonardo da Vinci created detailed anatomical drawings from dissected corpses. Granted, the artist was the only one who actually saw the squidgy bits, but the basic concept was the same. The artist was preserving the anatomy in the only way possible given the science at the time. If the technology had been available, I'm sure ol' Leo would have been dunking specimens in plastics right and left. I suppose it's possible that anatomical studies were controversial during the Renaissance, but I'd like to think that they were somewhat more enlightened than your average Bible Belt resident.

The exhibit itself is almost whimsical, if that's at all possible. It's borderline inappropriate to refer to the displays as "corpses" or "cadavers," although technically that's exactly what they are. One is posed as a goalie, reaching to block a soccer ball with one outstretched arm. The opposite arm is holding aloft the body's abdominal organs, almost as if they were a trophy won at the World Cup. Another figure has the muscles splayed to allow one to see the attachment points of the ligaments. It is posed with what appear to be "jazz hands" and a jaunty hat perched on the visible muscles attached to the skull. A female figure kneels in repose, holding aloft the disembodied circulatory system of two birds as if freeing them to fly. The smoker with black lungs is posed holding what appears to be a lighted cigarette. A skeleton rests its hand on the shoulder of its suit of muscles that ordinarily belong around the bony frame as if to say, "Hey! Where do you think YOU'RE going?" While these touches of humor may appear blasphemous on the surface, it further blurs the line between life and death...a point made in the ubiquitous museum placards at the beginning of the exhibition.

Whimsy aside, the beauty lies in the fact that we're seeing these...bodies...in natural poses of rest and action, instead of eviscerated on the cold steel of a coroner's table. The muscles are dynamic. There's a sense of motion that a mere corpse cannot convey. The "exploded views"...figures posed with their parts exposed much like a cutaway drawing of a complex mechanical device...give a sense of proportion that's not available in any medical text. I never knew kidneys were actually that small or that the muscle surrounding the heart was spiral to allow for squeezing motion. Educational, to say the least.

I was disappointed in the fact that the curators chose to hide the pregnant figure and the series of preserved fetuses behind a curtain in a separate display. I suppose it's inherently controversial, but temper the gut reaction against the fact that none of the unborn children were products of abortion. The unborn child inside the female was beautiful and gave a sense of scale to the miracle that is conception. The fetal displays were from the second trimester on, and showed just how developed a fetus becomes in a relatively short amount of time. If the Bible-bangers were upset at the display of deceased fetuses, they should really reconsider their stance. I am, by and large, neutral on the subject of abortion. Not my body, not my decision. However, the display clearly shows without any doubt that what's growing in there is a complete little person. It seems to me that any anti-abortion activist would be buying tickets for the non-believers just to drive that point home. But by and large, the religious types just don't think that way.

Another potentially controversial point was the unabashed display of genitalia. Get over it, folks. United States-ians are so immature when it comes to concepts of the body. People have penises, testicles, vaginas, and breasts, respectively. Just the facts. They had no figures posed in the act of copulating; they had no erections or splayed vulvas. They simply were what they were: anatomical features represented in context along with the rest of the body. I'm deeply disappointed in some of the comments left by the visitors to the exhibit: "I haven't seen so many dicks and balls in one place before." So much for Dallas being a sophisticated and urban center of culture. The guy leaving the comment really isn't going to the right parties.

My only criticism of the exhibit has to do with my own squeamishness. While I found the full figures to be aesthetically pleasing, the individual organs on display in the coldly lit cases in between figures was a little ghoulish, if not downright Ed Gein-ish. But to some, the display of organs out of context is almost comforting in its scientific detachment. Judging from some of the comments left behind, some of us could use just a little more detachment.

In The DVD Player 4

"Soylent Green"
Starring Charlton Heston, Leigh Taylor-Young, and Edward G. Robinson
1973

Apparently, it's made from people. Okay, okay...even if you're pop-culturally challenged or oblivious to Charlton Heston's iconic utterance or simply misheard the quote and lived under the mistaken assumption for the past three decades that the titular substance was made from puppies, the revelation that a mass-produced foodstuff was made from recycled human remains really isn't all that odd.

Given the living conditions in the film: overcrowding, no jobs, scarce food, technology failing, the environment all wonky...the recycling of human remains made sense in the context of the level of crisis humanity was facing in the film. It's not like they were stealing babies in the middle of the night or herding groups of people cattle-like to the abattoir to get air-hammered in the head; the good ol' boys down at the Soylent Corporation simply saw an opportunity to turn lemons into lemonade. They were capitalizing on a world-wide waste disposal problem. A smart solution, in my opinion. In the great tradition started by Donner and Co., resources at hand were being used to benefit the rest of humanity. Problem solved. Next, tackling the crisis of Leigh Taylor-Young's god-awful travesty of interior decorating. That apartment was tacky, even for 1970's-cum-2022 standards.

Ya know, I'd have probably been MORE scandalized had they been making Soylent Green from puppies. For some reason, the sheet-shrouded bodies moving along the conveyor belt didn't strike any particular sick chord with me, but the thought of dogs being processed for food is nauseating. Apparently, my priorities got screwed up somewhere along the way.