Day 101 : Monsters and Ghosts

Monsters are real and ghosts are real too and sometimes they win

Stephen King

Anybody who knows me very well will probably tell you that Criminal Minds is one of my favorite television shows. The more I think about it I realized that it could very easily be obvious to strangers considering that I named my golden retriever after one of the main characters. I’m currently engaging in a game of catch-up to the current season and the above quote was used as the closing line in an episode. We are all faced with personal monsters and ghosts every single day. The skeletons in our closets which we try valiantly to bury in the darkest recesses of our brains jump out with macabre parodies of happiness when we least expect them. Perhaps this is the real reason so many people celebrate versions of Halloween. If we can make fun of something then perhaps it is not as bad as we originally thought. Perhaps if we laugh and smile at those things which we are afraid of maybe we can make ourselves believe that the abyss into which we find ourselves staring won’t link back, that may be the greatest fairy tale of them all.

day twenty: “you seem a decent fellow, I hate to kill you,” or exploring human nature with the help of Yoda, The Princess Bride, and Jason Gideon

Image by sushi the great via Flickr

For those of you who are unaware, the quote in the blog title is from the 1987 movie The Princess Bride. The line itself was spoken by one of the main characters,Inigo Montoya, a Spaniard whose sole mission in life is to search for the six fingered man who murdered his father in front of him while still a child. Inigo, while undeniably a very purposeful and driven person also strives for honor even when he has been hired as a thug by a criminal mastermind, or at least a person who thinks he is.  Yoda was very careful to teach Luke Skywalker the importance of the controlling his fear, because as I’m sure most of us remember hearing,”fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.” A lesson to remember folks: truth may come from anywhere even from the mouth of a Muppet.When the ideas that eventually became fodder for this posting were bouncing off the walls of my brain  it did not occur to me at the time that two of the referenced characters were actually played by the same person. Both Inigo Montoya and Jason Gideon are played by the same actor.  I have always appreciated Mandy Patinkin work as an actor.I especially enjoy the series Criminal Minds in when he played FBI profiler Jason Gideon for a few seasons. The FBI can very easily be perceived as “big Brother”, watching us and making sure we don’t step out of line.  Jason and his team serve the purpose of humanizing the real-life FBI while doing the same thing to the fictional criminals they help catch.  Logically most people are aware that if something really bad happens Gideon & Co. are not going to show up at the door for real, but people who have skills and knowledge very similar to those portrayed on this show very well might. Hopefully if the  real FBI ever show up at someone’s door they will be at least slightly more willing to help because of the show.  I’ve come to the conclusion that most people, even the ones who eventually  go on to do awful things were once fairly decent people. I grant that people like Charles Manson were most likely nut jobs from the start, but if you really wish to know my opinion on people like him, I personally believe that they were born without a soul.  That’s a whole post by itself.  The thing to remember is that life is stressful, treat people with as much kindness as you’re able. You never know when your act of kindness might keep someone from turning into a monster.

Why blog?

Image by elvis_payne via Flickr

Several days ago, during the commercial breaks for Criminal Minds, I found myself explaining the concept of blogging to a friend. I explained the various reasons and things about  which people keep blogs. Because of that conversation I started thinking about why I personally keep one.  Believe it or not I was originally dragged into the world of blogs kicking and  screaming.When I was 19 a friend of mine pestered me about not having one, so much so that I finally created a LiveJournal account to finally have some peace on the subject. It has been years since I posted there. Since then my writing has matured vastly, at least in terms of construction, the subject matter can still be rather mundane at times I suppose.  Sometimes I wonder why I blog.At the risk of being thought less of I will be honest. My disability and the decided lack of public transport where I live means that I don’t go out nearly as often as I would like. Blogging therefore has become a way to keep contact with the rest of the world. People leave comments sporadically but thanks to the stat  tracker I  realize that just  because no one left a comment doesn’t mean it wasn’t read. As a matter of fact this blog has garnered far more attention than I ever thought it would. I used to believe that I might as well be putting a note in a bottle and casting it adrift for no reason. I have happily discovered I was wrong.