Cowboy

One more sun goes sliding down the sky
One more shadow leaps against the wall
The world begins to disappear
The worst things come from inside here
All the king’s men reappear
For an egg man, fallen off a wall,
And he’ll never be together again.
-Duritz, Einstein on the Beach

Jen sent me an email with a video of Jason, my puppy, barking. It’s only about fifteen seconds long—any bigger and the file wouldn’t go through—but I watched the damn thing for about half an hour straight, over and over. I miss the little guy. I feel silly to admit this, but I’m worried that he won’t remember me when I get home.

I had a good idea. Now that we have whole series of TV shows on DVD, and it would be possible to even do this, I wonder what it would be like to take a whole show and watch it backwards. Watch the series finale first, and then work your way back to the series premiere. Or take the season premieres and finales and watch only those. I don’t know, maybe it’s stupid. I think most television is horrible drek, but the shows I like, I love. I wonder what insight you could gain, or enjoyment, by watching a character regress from the fully-developed final product to the early one-dimensional stereotype.

Think about Scully at the beginning of the X-Files and at the end. Chris Moltisanti at the beginning of Sopranos and the end. John McGuirk in Home Movies. Shepherd Book in Firefly. Jimmy James in Newsradio.

It is not possible to do this with most shows, I realize, because most shows are crap. They are lowest-common-denominator garbage that are never clever or surprising and where everything is back to normal at the end of every episode. Characters never develop in these shows because most of their audience doesn’t have the patience or attention span to watch a character grow. But the good shows, the excellent ones, have excellent characters that are really worth following. I admire writers that say dammit, I want my characters to change, to have real challenges and life-altering experiences, and if some of the audience are too frightened or stupid to follow, then screw them.

We are working hard here. I am not sure that leave will be possible for anybody, with how short we are. It should get better with the drawdown in troop strength, but by the time we reap the benefits it will probably be too late.

I saw on AFN that we lost again. To Tech. How humiliating is this going to get? We went through all this nonsense a couple years ago to boot out a perfectly good coach and bring in a new one that everybody talked about like he was Jesus. Well, here’s his chance to prove it—for us to be taken seriously as a football team, he’ll have to perform a miracle. One of my buddies said that he doesn’t care how many games we lose as long as we beat Texas. That would be lovely and very poetic, but at this point we’d be lucky to beat a 5A high school team. They need to shape up. This horrible record is negatively affecting the war effort.