Sentential Links

Linkage!

:: But now I’m home, and it feels as though I never left. Did I just dream the entire thing?

When you travel, you are who you are in each exact moment; there isn’t time to question yourself. Everything is new. Survival instincts guide every decision… shelter, water, food. A lumpy bed, canned corn for dinner, and cold showers start to become natural, but so does swimming under a waterfall, visiting ancient ruins, and eating couscous in the Sahara Desert. It is a lifestyle of constant change and adaptation. At home, those instincts vanish and our biggest obsticale becomes ourselves. (You know, I think that’s what Tolkien was getting at when he ended The Lord of the Rings with Sam getting home, after everything that’s happened, after bidding farewell to Frodo and Bilbo and Gandalf and all the Elves, and saying, “Well, I’m back.” It’s the idea that the great experience of his life is over but life still looms ahead of him. I often feel that way after trips elsewhere, although my longest trips have never gone more than a single week. Returning always feels like a recalibration of the brain to its original level of smallness.)

:: There will come a day in the future when you will wonder how you could have ever smiled, and you will think that before your life was filled with smooth seas and ignorance is bliss. Hold the memories of the good times like a talisman to your heart, and let the knowledge that the bad days won’t last forever warm your indifference and renew your spirit.

:: I don’t know much about the upcoming sci-fi comedy, Space Station 76, except that it is directed by Jack Plotnik, stars Liv Tyler (whom I adore) and Patrick Wilson, and that it’s currently doing the film festival rounds. Well, I also know that it apparently takes place in the future as it was depicted back in the ‘70s, with Old School sets, costumes, effects, moustaches and feathered hair… which is why I’m mentioning it here on Space: 1970 at all! 

:: It is nowhere written in the heavens that Pro Football shall always and ever be America’s most popular spectator sport. A hundred years ago the most popular sports in the US were horse racing and boxing, and those have faded almost completely from the scene. How much longer does football have at the top? (This is a good point, one which I argued with a friend at work a few months back. He utterly rejected the notion that football will ever lose popularity, to which I pointed out that even baseball is nowhere near the going concern it once was. He seem to deny this, too…but I remember when the World Series began on a Saturday night and when its ratings were high enough that networks simply didn’t schedule new episodes of anything while the Series was running. Now it starts in the middle of the week and networks don’t avoid it at all. None of which is to say that football will be forgotten in fifty years or whatever, but it’s worth noting that the sporting world changes too.)

:: With only a few weeks to go before the very few students I have left write their GED exam, I find these images on the Tumblr. I have nightmares that these will be the answers they will put down even though the real GED test is mostly multiple choice except for the written essay.

:: No wonder people back then believed Heaven and Hell were as real as London. They lived in not just a demon-haunted world but an angel-infested and God-bothered one. They believed the borders between this world and either of the next were permeable and devils and angels were roaming back and forth between here and whichever place they called home and taking living human beings with them as they went. Essentially this meant they believed that this world wasn’t quite real, and you can hardly blame them for that.

:: I always wonder how they’d do THE FUGITIVE today. Richard Kimble would have a bitch of time getting a new identity every week and getting an apartment and job without having his credit record and job history revealed. Whatever story he told employers could be checked on line.

More next week!