Upset over the excruciating ending of the Pats - Denver game, I lit out for the Anytime Fitness gym in town and sweated to the oldies, only to find later that I had left my one and only Mississippi State Bulldogs tee shirt there. Too late to return to get it, it was left to this morning, when I didn't appreciate the break in my schedule one bit. But as I stepped out onto the parking lot, an odd sensation greeted me - the daily joy of being alive. Analytical as I can be, I quickly attributed it to the sunshine, which we haven't seen since leaving Costa Rica last Tuesday. There were piles of snow standing tall around me, not palm trees, but it could have been an ideal beach for all l knew. How sweet was the air!
The night before, there was another ballgame after, a blowout between two teams I didn't care about, and it left us waiting impatiently for the new X Files mini-series as one Panther victor after another told us it was a team effort and they looked forward to the next... blah blah blah, until at last Scully came on the screen, looking spookily old, and then Mulder, looking like a rummy pulled out from behind the dumpster. We saw footage of aliens crashing; of scientists with a reverse-engineered alien space craft that used point 0 energy and could slip to anywhere in our universe through cross dimensions; of strange Men in Black watching and killing coldly. The conspiracy was back, now bigger than ever. Perhaps not by coincidence, it dovetailed all too well with the sci-fi novel I am finishing. Spooky coincidence or script pirating? You (music plays louder) be the judge.
I thought it moved too fast, but I'll still watch the rest of the series as long as the stars don't fall from the sky. The original has made me a life-long fan, although not quite enough to have a poster on my wall reading, "I want to believe." Actually, maybe I would. But why? Why the love of the strange and the alien?
One might first say "boredom" and that would not be a bad guess. How much more interesting to have aliens and spacecraft and a parallel government leading us to an edge leading to either a new age or the end of the world? How much better this, than a life of slogging through the gray of winter, and then the chores of summer, one after the other as our teeth go bad, and then our kidneys or chromosomes fail, and then our bodies give way with that final whimper. But that's not quite it. That's not it at all.
Rather, it is about standing in the sunshine and feeling the nameless, even pointless joy of being alive.
It is this because something in us knows at all times that this life we have made is a temporary facade. The daily grind, or D Factor, has as little to do with reality as Scully and Mulder's X Factor, is in touch with reality no more or less than the conspiracy of the Men in Black. We have been formed by a limited concept of nature, and continue to help form it, as comfortably alive in it as a turtle in its shell. But, good lord we are bored with it! Turtles aren't, but we are not turtles - we are not solely of the limited reality embraced by the natural order. We know we are meant for cosmic things because we are able to penetrate into its mysteries now and then, either intellectually or as a sense, as nameless but elevating as a sunny morning. We look to shows like the X Factor to flesh out the marvel that we have inured our daily selves from. Such a show straddles the divide between our turtle world and our cosmic selves, but at no cost to our boring but coveted security. To watch it is, then, not a flight into fantasy, but a tenuous step towards a greater reality without all the fuss. We can step away from it instantly and return to our safe schedules, as mind-numbing as they might be. Here, the torch is kept a-lit, if only barely.
I was upset about a game that means nothing, concerned for a cheap tee shirt that could disappear today for all the world cares, while a flaming ball of nuclear power punched its energy through a thin shell of translucent sky over a tiny orb to land right there on my shoulders and whisk away every care, even if for only a few minutes. How can we not grasp that everything in the X Files is small potatoes compared to what each one of us has now, and forever? How can we not be always aware that the D Factor is an X Factor to the unlimited power?
The clouds are returning as we turn towards an evening of snow and freezing rain. The shell is back. How we can step into the sun forever, now, is a problem that seems to require a Scully and a Mulder to solve. And yet, with a lift of the chin or a turn of the head, we could do it ourselves - but won't while thinking we can't. Beam me up, Scully. FK
The night before, there was another ballgame after, a blowout between two teams I didn't care about, and it left us waiting impatiently for the new X Files mini-series as one Panther victor after another told us it was a team effort and they looked forward to the next... blah blah blah, until at last Scully came on the screen, looking spookily old, and then Mulder, looking like a rummy pulled out from behind the dumpster. We saw footage of aliens crashing; of scientists with a reverse-engineered alien space craft that used point 0 energy and could slip to anywhere in our universe through cross dimensions; of strange Men in Black watching and killing coldly. The conspiracy was back, now bigger than ever. Perhaps not by coincidence, it dovetailed all too well with the sci-fi novel I am finishing. Spooky coincidence or script pirating? You (music plays louder) be the judge.
I thought it moved too fast, but I'll still watch the rest of the series as long as the stars don't fall from the sky. The original has made me a life-long fan, although not quite enough to have a poster on my wall reading, "I want to believe." Actually, maybe I would. But why? Why the love of the strange and the alien?
One might first say "boredom" and that would not be a bad guess. How much more interesting to have aliens and spacecraft and a parallel government leading us to an edge leading to either a new age or the end of the world? How much better this, than a life of slogging through the gray of winter, and then the chores of summer, one after the other as our teeth go bad, and then our kidneys or chromosomes fail, and then our bodies give way with that final whimper. But that's not quite it. That's not it at all.
Rather, it is about standing in the sunshine and feeling the nameless, even pointless joy of being alive.
It is this because something in us knows at all times that this life we have made is a temporary facade. The daily grind, or D Factor, has as little to do with reality as Scully and Mulder's X Factor, is in touch with reality no more or less than the conspiracy of the Men in Black. We have been formed by a limited concept of nature, and continue to help form it, as comfortably alive in it as a turtle in its shell. But, good lord we are bored with it! Turtles aren't, but we are not turtles - we are not solely of the limited reality embraced by the natural order. We know we are meant for cosmic things because we are able to penetrate into its mysteries now and then, either intellectually or as a sense, as nameless but elevating as a sunny morning. We look to shows like the X Factor to flesh out the marvel that we have inured our daily selves from. Such a show straddles the divide between our turtle world and our cosmic selves, but at no cost to our boring but coveted security. To watch it is, then, not a flight into fantasy, but a tenuous step towards a greater reality without all the fuss. We can step away from it instantly and return to our safe schedules, as mind-numbing as they might be. Here, the torch is kept a-lit, if only barely.
I was upset about a game that means nothing, concerned for a cheap tee shirt that could disappear today for all the world cares, while a flaming ball of nuclear power punched its energy through a thin shell of translucent sky over a tiny orb to land right there on my shoulders and whisk away every care, even if for only a few minutes. How can we not grasp that everything in the X Files is small potatoes compared to what each one of us has now, and forever? How can we not be always aware that the D Factor is an X Factor to the unlimited power?
The clouds are returning as we turn towards an evening of snow and freezing rain. The shell is back. How we can step into the sun forever, now, is a problem that seems to require a Scully and a Mulder to solve. And yet, with a lift of the chin or a turn of the head, we could do it ourselves - but won't while thinking we can't. Beam me up, Scully. FK
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