It's The End Of The World As We Know It

Thanks to all who offered suggestions for getting up to speed on pop culture. I received a wonderful email from a Nephew Who Shall Not Be Named (for fear of his father's wrath) detailing all the manner of hip-hop artists worth my time; apparently, I should get "hyphy". Also, Monica swung by to put in some quality time with the SRSG and drop off stacks of DVDs in the process -- Dr. Who! Treme! The Sopranos! Deadwood! Six Feet Under! Veronica Mars! The woman knows her television.

I'd like to say that the only reason I haven't written sooner is because I've been so enraptured by such great storytelling, but that would be a lie. The truth is -- well, I almost gave this thing up over the last ten days; I almost gave everything up. A decision was made, and... well, it sucked. The title of this post is not merely a pithy reference -- it's a pithy bit of complete honesty.

I've always thought myself a noble character, a man in pursuit of truth and salvation not just for myself, but for all people. At bottom, though, I'm as selfish as anyone. I got into this game not for abstract principles of justice but because I wanted to know where the hell my sister was. I got an answer, or a kind of one, but along the way enough wrongs were perpetrated against me and especially against Dr. S. to motivate a whole 'nother lifetime's worth of questing. And now one of those wrongs has come to haunt us once again.

I'm being vague because it's all too damn hard to put into words. A chip, a neck, a gamble; a reckoning, for me and for us all.

I thought about giving up writing this thing, which seems now so frivolous, but in the face of no happy endings I decided that the need to write it all down is greater than ever. Dr. S. used to mock my aversion to professional validation but it is now she who works without recognition, toiling to save the world, and the record must be clear no matter what our own fate may be: if humanity survives it is because she made it so. She is the best thing about this place and I would give it all up, every last one of you, to keep her around forever, but mine was not the deciding vote and Dr. S. is, as it happens, a more noble person than I am.

Lucky for all of you.

Culture Shock

I was making a grocery run this week (not a quick task when you live way the hell out in the sticks) and caught part of an NPR program about music in the 90s. It was fascinating and also rather saddening -- although I'm about the same age as many of the hosts, I shared about fuck-all of their nostalgia-soaked memories of that era. Maybe it's because I feel like I'm are still living in the 90s; the rest of the country, and the world, got pretty distracted at the outset of the new millennium by Bush's presidency and then by 9/11, but Dr. S and I have been tilting at the same ol' windmills for nigh-on two decades now. And as it happens, efforts to save the world from alien domination rather preclude cultural engagement.

I've been catching up, though, bit by bit. On the road, I whiled away many an hour in a crummy motel watching "Seinfeld" reruns and keeping up with "Lost," desperately hoping that the ending to our little adventure would be more satisfying than either of those. Two years ago, S's little brother sent us DVDs for a great little show called "Arrested Development," which led even the stern doctor to crack a few smiles (although I must take umbrage at milady's claim that it was funnier than "Caddyshack" -- heresy!), and last summer Gibson brought over a stack of discs for the new "Battlestar Galactica." (Dr. S opted out of that one; her loss.) I'm even liking this show "Community" that's on TV right now, and S falls asleep each night making her way through Franzen's latest doorstop. In short, I -- we -- have been reconnecting with the world at large, trying to remember what the hell it is exactly that we're trying to save, anyway.

So to you, blogosphere, I present the question: what else have I been missing? I checked the Internet-at-large, which seems to have many (variably articulated) opinions about what's worth anybody's time, but I don't trust the hordes of strangers to appreciate my refined tastes. So what do you folks recommend? What cultural artifacts -- books, music, TV, movies -- enrich your life, affirm your humanity, and generally make you feel as though this world is a place worth the effort of preserving?

Tell me in the comments, or post the artifact itself. We accept regular mail and carrier pigeon.

Slayed!

I have no noble reason for my radio silence this past week, except that a) there's been nothing of note to really report and b) I went and signed us up for Netflix (hey, if we're bold enough to have this blog, we can let the conspiracy know where we receive mail-order DVDs, right?), only to discover that the entire series of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is available for instant streaming. The friends that I wrote about in the last post always tried to get me to watch the show, so I decided to give it a try, and Gibson and I have basically wasted the entire week watching it. So far: exceedingly enjoyable.

(Also, I cook. M-Dubs set up a greenhouse in the fall and we've actually been getting some good produce from it, which bodes well for our post-apocalyptic survival if it comes to that. Never thought I'd play chef during the end of the world but Dr. S -- a fine cook -- has her hands full with science, and when we let M-Dubs in the kitchen it was kale and lentils for a week; Gibson took a turn, too, and after three days of ramen noodles and Easy Mac I realized that I could still make a difference after all...)

The Move

So, this blog has moved from Wordpress to Blogger, for boring tech-y reasons we don't really need to delve into (apparently, Wordpress is too overpowered to be trusted in my aged, non-digital-generation hands). In addition to making me feel terrifically old -- largely thanks to the constant digs of one Gibson Praise -- it's also got me all maudlin and nostalgic, in a way I try and avoid.

Here's the thing: my life has a lot of loss. Everybody's does, but the work that Dr. S. and I have devoted ourselves to led, fairly directly, to a lot of our loved ones losing their lives. Our losses were not merely the steady march of time, or the capricious designs of chance; our losses have been, more often than not, tied to the will of the powerful, men -- and it is almost all men -- who act without consequence and with no regard for the humanity of others. I was, in some ways, complicit, chasing the truth so heedlessly, even -- especially -- once I knew what the stakes were.

This is all a new(ish) way of looking at this stuff, at least for me. It used to be a matter of pursuing the truth at all costs; nothing else mattered, and in the truth I was certain I would find my absolution. Dr. S. had a certain scientific curiosity about the matter but her commitment to the cause was not in the name of truth, but its close and better cousin: justice. I told her once that the truth would save us but when I found it I was terrified and paralyzed, and salvation, it turns out, is an active verb.

Now, we are acting on that truth, seeking to bring justice to a world that men of power would so easily abandon. The truth is just the first step.

When I was fiddling around with Wordpress I had the same impulse I've had for a decade now, the unanswerable need to call some friends who are no longer. Byers, Langly, and Frohike, three of the most solid friends I've ever known -- almost comically paranoid but unfailingly genuine, even if they would've given me heaps of shit for not being able to figure out all the details of blogging software. They were the good guys. They were truth-seekers. They acted on it, too. They lost their lives acting on the truth which they discovered, and I miss 'em like hell, even still.

I've been thinking about those guys a lot lately, getting back into blogging. It can seem so silly, and their paper could seem silly sometimes too -- but in the end they found something real, and they fought for justice, and they saved lives. They got mixed up in big things just because they decided to go ahead and write what they saw.

I'm trying to save the world for a lot of people: for the memories of my sister and my parents, for Dr. S. and the entire S. family, for Gibson, for humanity at large, for a ten-year-old boy I last saw as an infant. But this particular facet of it -- this blog -- this one, I'm doing for my boys over at the Lone Gunman, and I hope it matters as much as they did.

We're Back, Baby!

It's been a while since I last posted (nearly a year, but who's counting?).  It turns out that blogging is hard, especially when you're trying to save the world, but we've come far enough in our basic r&d phase that a little PR is necessary.  So: I'm pounding the keys once again, trying to flatter the entire Internet into rallying for the cause.  If you are like me, you might ask yourself: "How did The Former Agent Mulder, one-time Bureau bad-boy and lone wolf battling against conspiratorial domination, wind up with blogging duties?"  That answer is complicated, and hinges in part on my devastating good looks (hey, if a little sex appeal helps bring folks to the fold, then so be it!).  But it mostly hinges on the fact that nobody else really wanted the gig.  To wit:

1. The divine Dr. S is too busy doing "science" (which seems to me as foreign and obscure as witchcraft, only with more sterile implements);

2.  Our very own SRSG, with significant experience in international communications, remains terrified of overexposure, given the various hells she has been put through by her former employers;

3.  Gibson can't finish a post without either a sex joke or a Will Ferrell reference (kids today!);

4.  JD and the Skinman lack the ready wit and linguistic facility necessary to impress the masses at this whole Internet game, although their martial gruffness serves us all very well in other ways, even if it's not Twitter-friendly;

5.  Nobody can keep track of where Monica is on any given day (except the aforementioned SRSG, whose talent for secrecy is veritably unmatched);

and

6.  MDubs, our intrepid living director, has spent most of her adult life on a commune and distrusts most forms of technology.  Plus, if we (and by "we" I mean "Dr. S, long-time frenemy on a soap operatic scale of which I never dreamed my dear life partner capable") piss her off, she's not likely to stick around, and we'll have to find somebody else willing to set up composting toilets.  I know it's a recession, but that's still gonna be a tough sell.

 

That's our core group, here at the house, although we've got a bit of a satellite operation through a certain nutty (and tenured!) professor at a certain mid-Atlantic public university -- although now that I think about it, why the hell isn't DrChuck taking the reins here at the blog?  We've also got some other folks on board, as far away as the Ivory Coast, and we're pulling intel from all over the world.  You've probably heard by now that the uprising in Tunisia was spurred in large part by rapidly increasing food prices, themselves a result of more and more food crops going to industrial purposes like ethanol -- pretty interesting, then, that a large Tunis-based agricultural holding company named Strughold saw fields of its corn crops burned to the ground as part of the revolutionary protests.  After all, if food prices were the central issue, then reducing the supply of a staple crop even further by destroying it doesn't make much economic sense, does it?

 

But people did destroy it, and they burned it because they knew that Strughold was an entity complicit in their oppression, even if they didn't quite know how.  That's why I'm back to blogging here; the democratic sentiments that have recently been expressed in the Middle East are about people rising up, taking control of their own destinies, and that's what we're trying to do here.  If we can disseminate what we know, and if we can find solutions, we can challenge power on our own terms.  We can take back the future from the cabal of old men who have sold us out for nothing more than their own uncertain survival.

 

We're partnering to create a vaccine.  We're identifying magnetite deposits and extraction methods.  We don't have a lot of time left, but we're still fighting for our future.

Five Things I Miss About Being On The Lam

5.  All those mini shampoo bottles at motels.

4.  Growing a beard.  Not bothering to shave was a nice form of apathy.  Plus, I felt all manly.

3.  In-N-Out Burger and burritos.  The American West has some good, quick, cheap food that the American East does not.  On the other hand, getting a good slice of pizza or a decent cheesesteak could be a herculean task, so it was ultimately an unequal trade-off.

2.  Survival as the only expectation.  I used to want a pegleg, because in the face of such a handicap all that society demands of us is to simply survive -- getting through the day becomes its own achievement, and all the expectations for success and adulation etc etc become moot.  Being on the lam is kind of like having a pegleg in that way.

1.  Spending all day, every day with Dr. S.  Although at numerous points we were about ready to strangle one another, it was still nice to have her around.  As great as it is that she has a fulfilling job and a steady paycheck and all that these days, I am selfish.  Also, did you know that she can't even answer her phone from the OR?  Hmph.  It was never a problem for me to interrupt an autopsy or two, but apparently that doesn't fly these days (or so I've been told... numerous times).

In other news: Georgetown lost to Ohio?  WTF?  This whole first round has been full of some pretty monumental cratering so far.  My bracket looks like crap right now.

In Which I Attempt To Shame One Gibson Praise

I'd like to take this opportunity to give a shout-out to JD and the Skinman, who spent their first remotely springlike weekend working on a building project out here in the middle of nowhere.  As it turns out that I have no appreciable construction skills, and Dr. S's demanding schedule precludes much time spent drywalling, their expertise and labor was invaluable.  Those are two guys who know their way around tools.

(Entendre only partially intended.)

So, yes, our "basement remodel" is finally complete, and nearly fully furnished.  (How many other couples do you think have argued over the placement of an in-home centrifuge?)  Also, I did manage to catch a few lessons in the ways of the handyman, so as to be at least slightly less useless in the future.  My next project: attempting to build my own chicken coop, which is itself a subsidiary of the "Mulder becomes a master gardener" scheme.  Everyone needs a good post-apocalyptic skill or two at the ready, right?  Just in case?  Right now all I've got to rely on is my sneaking suspicion that, should we fail, Dr. S will still somehow come to rule us all, and I'm pretty sure she'd keep me around as her concubine.  But I figure I still better have a backup plan.

Oh, and Gibson?  Way to be too cool for your elders, kid.  You missed some CRAZY fun.  And nobody knows fun like a bunch of repressed, middle-aged ex-or-current-feds.  Booya.  (That's still a phrase, right?)