About Fred

Sunday

A quiet day. Not that yesterday wasn’t, really, but at least today was relatively free of health problems.

I had my weekly writing group and wrote this:

The city below them lay in ruins, or at least it did from the vantage of command, where the smoldering rubble flickered in the static of the ship’s main viewscreens.

“You can’t put much stock in that,” said Tendall. “Those images are from at least twenty-four hours into the future.”

Bergen grunted, it seemed in assent, but then just ask quickly she asked, “And how many hours until we make actual landfall?”

Sighing heavily, Tendall said, “Thirty-seven. Even if we push the engines to the breaking point, we won’t be back in same-time for another day and a half.”

“So we’ll miss being concurrent with the disaster?” Bergen asked.

“That’s assuming it happens, ma’am,” Tendall said. “But yes. I’m afraid if these images are the future, we won’t exit the probability stream in time to prevent this disaster from happening. Or even to ascertain its cause, most likely.”

“Can’t we turn around, then?” Bergen asked. “Or exit the stream earlier?”

“You’ve never flown in a timeship before, have you, ma’am?”

“No,” she told him. “We don’t have much call to in the Ambassadorial core. This trip was…unexpected.”

“Well, we’re fighting more than the usual tug and drift of spaceflight,” Tendall said. “We’d just as likely tear the ship apart if we tried adjusting course once we’ve entered the stream.”

“Can’t we even send a message ahead?” Bergen asked. “If we know in twenty-four hours the capitol city is going to be destroyed, we have an obligation to send them a warning.”

“You’re free to talk with engineering about that, ma’am. I don’t see how it would work, but that kind of physics is a little above my pay grade.”

“You seem remarkably calm. Don’t you have family in the capitol?”

“I’ve had family in most of the cities I’ve seen destroyed in the future, ma’am. After a few relative-centuries, I’m afraid it’s an occupational hazard. If I let not being able to do anything about it bother me, I couldn’t pilot the ship.” He offered her a smile which he knew she would not return. “I suppose that’s why time-flight isn’t recommended for you folks in the core.”

I dunno. The prompt was “When we lose our innocence, how do we regain it?” Yeah, I dunno.

Saturday

This turned out to be a very different day than what I was expecting.

I started the day off with the G.I. Joe episode of Community. (Yes, the G.I. Joe episode. There’s a young fanboy inside me whose head just exploded.) I did my taxes, and I hung around the house. I did some laundry, watched some TV, and then watched Ghost in the Shell, which was decent, and interesting, but probably not as revolutionary as it seemed back in 1995. It wasn’t a very out-of-the-ordinary kind of day.

Of course, I was doing all of this while my parents spent the day at the hospital.

Let me just preface this by saying that everybody is fine. My father hadn’t been feeling well for a few days, and there was definitely some concern over the ten hours or so they spent at the emergency room this afternoon, but he’s fine. It’s just kidney stones, which admittedly isn’t at the top of the good news list, but it’s a treatable and temporary condition. I don’t want to talk about it a lot — partly because I wasn’t there, partly because I’m not him, and partly because…well, do you really want that? — but everybody here is fine.

We did, of course, have to skip our plans for dinner and a show this evening.

We had tickets — my mother’s Christmas gift to my father — for A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder and dinner reservations, and both ended up going to waste. After my failed attempt to see Waiting for Godot back in January, 2014 is not turning out to be a good year for me and Broadway.

But, really, my father’s the one who had the lousier day.

Or maybe the dog. He’s the one who has to constantly be on guard against insidious threats like home mail delivery. Yes, the dog definitely had it rough today.

Random 10 4-4-14

Last week. This week:

  1. “Watching the Detectives” by Elvis Costello, guessed by random passer-by
    They beat him up until the teardrops start
  2. “Unforgetful You” by Jars of Clay
    You never minded calling me a child
  3. “Vienna” by Billy Joel, guessed by Occupant
    You’re so ambitious for a juvenile
  4. “2 Bit Blues” by Kid Koala
    It’s what I do with what I got
  5. “Korean Parents” by Randy Newman
    Never forget who sent Fido to the farm
  6. “Mama Kin” by Aerosmith
    Shootin’ fire from your mouth just like a dragon
  7. “Night and Day” by Sarah Blasko
    How could we grow old together?
  8. “Turn the Page” by Bob Seger, guessed by Clayton
    You don’t dare make a stand
  9. “Evil” by Interpol
    Leave some shards under the belly
  10. “Youthless” by Beck
    Shake your seasick legs around

Good luck!

How I Met Your Wednesday

Last night, I decided to marathon my way through the last nine episodes of How I Met Your Mother‘s final season. I first discovered the show on DVD, and I’ve often felt, particularly in the last couple of not-quite-as-good seasons, that the show holds up a lot better, at least for me, in larger block viewing. There’s a certain momentum to watching it like that, and while it can sometimes throw a harsher than usual light on the show’s flaws — like, for instance, that this last season had surprisingly very little momentum of its own — it can also underline the show’s strengths and build up my investment in the characters. I’d watched most of this last season already, but I’d decided some two-thirds of the way through to take a break and let the remaining episodes pile up for one long, final watch.

And then I started hearing over Twitter about terrible the series finale was.

I should probably say that this post is going to contain some spoilers. Also, that the Twitter chatter was right. It was a very disappointing way for the show to end.

Todd VanDerWerff, who is one of my favorite TV critics, wrote a long post about the show, and the episode, and he sums it up I think nicely:

The ultimate takeaway from the final season is that series creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas were at once too good and not good enough to tell the story they ultimately wanted to tell.

The problem for me was this: for the show’s creators, the title was apparently just a misdirect, another joke nested within all the others. And yet for those of us watching, those of us who cared about these characters, it was the driving force behind the show. We wanted the love story, wanted that genuine — and moreover earned — happy ending, and, yes, we wanted to know how Ted met his future children’s mother.

VanDerWerff writes:

Bays and Thomas simply looked like shitty long-term planners, unable to understand that getting the audience so invested in the Barney and Robin coupling or in Tracy as a character would make it all the harder when the series finale abruptly dissolved the former and treated the latter’s death as an aside in the narration. That the show never seemed to suggest Ted mourned her feels like a vital betrayal of his character.

So they were telling a different story than they seemed to be, and the evidence suggests that they’d been doing so all along. (A scene at the end with the kids was clearly filmed very early in the show’s run, if not in the very first season.) But it’s the story they seemed to be telling that I cared about, and this other story, the one in which “How I Met Your Mother” is just a joke, was terribly disappointing. I don’t think it’s a story that could have worked when introduced like this, and after nine years with these characters.

So I don’t know if I hated the episode, but I did kind of hate where it ended the show, and what it decided to break in its attempt to get there.

Monday

It snowed this morning, which came as something of a surprise. It’s not that it never snows here at the end of March, or even into April, but I don’t remember seeing anything but rain in the forecast. Almost all of the snow had melted by late afternoon, which makes the whole thing feel like some early, strangely elaborate April Fool’s Day prank.

Still, I’m glad I didn’t have to trudge through it to get to the office this morning.

Meanwhile, there’s a new issue of Kaleidotrope up and waiting, if you’re looking for some short stories and poems to read.