TeeVee and Me: <\/strong>I’ve had a tumultuous love affair with the little screen my whole life. Whether controlling the action via the mighty Odyssey2, chilling out while watching Battle Of The Planets or Star Blazers in my youth, or getting so deep into Star Trek: The Next Generation that I’d do something nutty like write an episode guide that would later form the core of a 2,000 page web site that consumes at least an hour of my life every day, the tube has been a constant fixture in my life.<\/p>\n And now I hardly watch it at all. Odd, eh? Well, this is due to more than one factor. In 1989, I embarked on a bizarrely meandering broadcast career that started in radio and then moved into TV in 1993. And I still work in TV, writing and producing nightly news promos and content-managing the local end of our station’s web site. But when I get home…the TV tends to stay off, or I’ll put on CNN on the Weather Channel or NASA Select, just so the thing is offering some sort of useful information.<\/p>\n
My disdain for TV and radio as it is these days is hard to sum up in any other way than the following words: the good old days are gone. The technology is now there for TV to do more than it has ever done before, and yet we still get Jackass and the Man Show and so-called “reality” shows. Kids’ shows are now hollow marketing ploys, attached to a video game or toy line, with no inherent value of their own. And where radio is concerned, the deregulation of the industry – removing the requirement for FCC licenses and their attendant training – has trashed much of that side of the industry. Back when I started out behind a microphone, saying “ass” on the air wasn’t cool, trendy, or acceptable; it was a one-way ticket to unemployment. Now everything’s changed, and suddenly I’m a member of the old guard.<\/p>\n
It could be that I’ve lost my sense of humor where broadcasting is concerned – I’ll admit that, now having spent nearly half my life working in radio and TV stations, that is a possibility I can’t deny. But I still have hope that every once in a while, we may yet be graced with some gem of television storytelling or news reporting that speaks to the human condition rather than minimizing its dignity and importance and then exploiting it.<\/p>\n
Past favorites include a healthy dose of British science fiction shows, their American counterparts, and an oddball selection of other shows: Blake’s 7, Doctor Who, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Babylon 5, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Red Dwarf, Star Trek: The Next Generation, the original Star Trek, The Prisoner, Max Headroom, South Park (especially in recent years), Jeremiah, Crusade, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, some of the early seasons of Roseanne, M*A*S*H, and a show that apparently only I saw or remembered, a very short-lived PBS all-star comedy anthology called Trying Times. And since it’s almost un-American not to list a favorite Japanese cartoon or two, the aforementioned Star Blazers and Battle Of The Planets. And begrudgingly, though I resisted the hype until long after the show had left the air, I’ve grown to like Seinfeld reruns.<\/p>\n
I write and produce television promos for a living. For those of you who don’t know, promos are commercials that advertise the station itself and its news and\/or programming. Whenever you see an ad for Joe Bob’s Barbecued Ribs, that’s a commercial. But when you see the little thing that tells you what movie will be on your favorite station tonight, or the top news story right after it at ten, that’s a promo. So go get some ribs and watch our movie. Mmmmm-mmmm.<\/p>\n
I’ve been working at KHBS, Fort Smith’s ABC affiliate, producing promos for the nightly newscasts since early 2000. This job fluctuates between two extremes: Interesting Events (which usually mean tragedy and terror for someone out there), and Holy Shit, What Are We Doing Tonight? The latter of these categories requires no explanation – when there’s nothing big going on in the news, how do we spice up this perennial cookie cutter package on driving safety? Sometimes I pine for the days when I was doing promos for movies, series, and special events.<\/p>\n
There’s actually quite a bit more to promotions than that. One of the main reasons I’m in the promotional side of the business instead of writing commercials is because, tending toward such activities as scriptwriting, acting and music composing, I’m much more in tune with the entertainment aspects than the business aspects. There’s always compromise involved, but with commercials you’re saddled with the client’s wishes to shoehorn sixty-five different bullet points into a thirty second script, with the added request to “Make it funny!” In promotions, your client is the station, program or production itself. You’re pushing entertainment (sort of – but I’ll get back to that). When you’re advertising something entertaining, you have a great deal of latitude to create something entertaining yourself. You can make a great deal of impact with the right combination of your good material and someone else’s good material.<\/p>\n
You may be asking, don’t you make less money than the people with big-dollar clients then? Well, yes and no. I once passed on a job at an independent commercial production house (for a variety of reasons which I won’t go into here), and realized eventually that this was for the best. Independent ad agencies have to work themselves silly to make sure they’ve got plenty of clients and revenue. Working within the structure of a television station is a much more sane experience. You can actually spend a day or two cooling your heels and letting your mind cool down enough that smoke isn’t coming out of your ears. This is a much more ideal environment in which to be creative.<\/p>\n
In a four-year gig at Fort Smith’s Fox affiliate, where I oversaw and executed virtually every aspect of both commercial and promotional production, I encountered at least one station sales associate who confronted me with the notion that promotions are less important than commercials. (This was mainly due to the fact that he had just turned in his paperwork fifteen minutes ago and wanted to know if his spot was finished yet.) Station promotions and commercials are equally important. Never forget that television is, first and foremost, a business whose object is to rake in money.<\/strong> People talk about over-the-air local TV as being “free,” and in a way that makes it hard to explain how exactly money is made. Money is made by showing Nielsen ratings to prospective advertisers in the hopes that they will buy X number of spots in Y number of shows for Z amount of money. In order to draw attention to these shows so that you’ll see all of the ads for Joe Bob’s Ribs, I put together promos – either from material prepared in advance by syndicators (do you think anyone at any station really has time to sit down and crank out a promo for every episode of The Simpsons?) or from scratch – and schedule them where they will be the most effective, usually in other shows which appeal to the same general audience.<\/p>\n The fun thing about promo work? You get neat crap! I don’t know where I’d be without my Due South portfolio, which I carry around in a Nightman book bag while wearing my Honey, I Shrunk The Kids sweatshirt and Earth: Final Conflict baseball cap. None of which I paid for. The ad guys? They get free lunch from Joe Bob’s Ribs, and we all know where that’s going in twelve hours’ time. (And the downside? Nothing worse than having someone say, “Oh sheez, you like Nightman?” – or, even worse, “WOW! You like Nightman! That’s my favorite show! Do you remember the episode where…”)<\/p>\n
But that’s enough about my job. Unless, of course, you do want to know more, in which case, feel free to look at my professional section.<\/p>\n
As for work, has it diminished my fondness for TV? Well…yeah. When you have to sit through stuff like Melrose Place, Homeboys From Outer Space, Mercy Point, Baywatch, and countless others, because you have to, yes, you begin to go home, walk in the door, and not turn on the TV. (The same thing happened to me after working in radio for about a year – I rarely, if ever, listen to the radio now.) I get frustrated because television has so much potential, and now it’s being wasted on “reality” shows which are as pre-fabricated as anything to have emerged from the confines of a soundstage. Even the once-intellectual field of science fiction on TV has fallen several notches, with shows like Enterprise overloading on effects and forgetting to use them to tell a story. C’mon, I grew up watching BBC sci-fi shows. I don’t care what’s making the spaceships fly, whether it’s a length of fishing line or a high-end 3D rendering workstation. If they’re not there in the service of a worthwhile story with interesting characters (and I don’t ask for every story to be some kind of sociopolitical allegory), it’s worthless.<\/p>\n
I’d still like to take a shot at writing for television, in something bigger than 15-second chunks, to try to give back some of that potential. I think this is why I’ve fallen in love with the arcane medium of the radio\/audio drama in recent years – the visual trappings (and traps) are ripped away, so if it’s not on the page, it really isn’t on the stage.<\/p>\n
Music: <\/strong>To say that music is an important part of my life would be an understatement, somewhere along the lines of “the second World War was a really bad thing.” Some people have vices, some people have drugs. I have music. And I listen to a lot of it. Having served my time as a disc jockey in my late teens and early 20s, I actually seldom listen to radio (and spend absolutely no time with the abomination that MTV has become). Despite this, I’ve got a sizable and eclectic collection, top-heavy with stuff that no one else has ever heard of as well as stuff that everyone has heard of, along with quite a few guilty pleasures. There’s at least one of everything in there – techno, rap, opera, country, gospel, you name it. I generally like at least one or two songs on every CD in that monolithic shelf of mine, else I would’ve gotten rid of it. I do, however, have a soft spot for:<\/p>\n\n- Anything that combines rock, world music, and\/or classical, or any combination of those three. Good examples: ELO’s Eldorado<\/em> and A New World Record<\/em>, Pyramid<\/em> by the Alan Parsons Project, Peter Gabriel’s OVO<\/em>, The Moody Blues’ Days Of Future Passed<\/em>, The Seduction of Claude Debussy<\/em> by Art Of Noise, Further In Time<\/em> by Afro-Celt Sound System, and even not-quite-orchestral concoctions such as Split Enz’ Second Thoughts<\/em>, Ben Folds Five’s The Unauthorized Biography Of Reinhold Messner<\/em>, The Juliet Letters<\/em> by Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet, and countless other examples. I grew up on the soundtrack from Star Wars<\/em><\/strong>, so I’ve got a thing for strings, especially if they can be incorporated in original ways. They don’t even have to drench the whole song.<\/li>\n
- Complex or, failing that, interesting arrangements – Tori Amos’ classic first album, Together Alone by Crowded House, ELO’s Time, Neil Finn’s sometimes-challenging Try Whistling This and One Nil, Jellyfish’s Spilt Milk, Todd Rundgren’s groundbreaking A Capella, Time & Tide by Split Enz, Circle by Ralf Illenberger, Broken Frame by Depeche Mode (back when they were consistently great), and almost anything by the Beatles. And again, these are just a few examples. I like songs that take me to unexpected places, songs with innovative uses of harmony and counterpoint, songs with complexity, both structurally and emotionally.<\/li>\n
- Soundtracks. ‘Nuff said.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Video Games: <\/strong>One of the biggest, and most popular, destinations on this site is the Phosphor Dot Fossils classic video game museum. Though it’s hardly the only one of its kind on the web, this part of the site easily nets more feedback than anything I have on offer.<\/p>\n I think I know why, though. As my generation slithers inexorably toward middle age, we’re starting to pine away for the trappings of our youth. And for me – and I suspect I’m not the only one – that means blocky, old-school video games, Star Wars action figures, and new-wave 80s music. Admit it – if you actually dig this site, this is probably your childhood too, or perhaps your adolescence. I wasn’t even ten when I became a certifiable Pac-Man addict, and then when my Uncle James gave me his seldom-used Odyssey2 console, there was no going back.<\/p>\n
Somehow, I don’t think my folks minded. It kept me out of trouble, and yet it was something all the kids were into at the time, so it didn’t exactly make me a social pariah either. My allowance was saved up for video games, action figures, and the occasional LP – not cigarettes or worse. Now, beginning my trend of staying indoors all the time parked in front of a TV playing games also likely directly contributed to my weight gain at a young age, and that may come back to bite my now-vast ass later, but I’m okay with that. It’s a fair trade.<\/p>\n
I got my first real computer around 1981 after months of pathetic begging, an Apple II-compatible, 64K Franklin Ace 1000. What did I do with it? Play games, of course. I also started spending a lot of time at the word processor, coming up with all manner of juvenile Star Wars and Doctor Who spinoff stories, trying to make my own role-playing games, and other such silly activities. I also did a lot of amateurish BASIC programming, trying to create my own games (with varying degrees of success), and then, in fifth grade, I fell in love with a new and very expensive piece of equipment: a blisteringly fast 300 baud modem.<\/p>\n
I quickly discovered the rather sleepy local bulletin board system scene and did my damnedest to become a major player, even to the point of joining the local Apple user group and taking over custodianship of their BBS, which they named after the software, Public Messaging System (or PMS). I was trying very hard to be a great promoter of that BBS, but it’s hard to be taken seriously when you’re 12 or 13 years old, and you keep calling the damn thing PMS. (I almost used the adjective “bloody” there, but thought better of it.) I also fancied myself a hacker, though I was really more of a poser than anything; I was asked to vacate the premises of the local Apple dealer – and the club – when I was busted making a copy of the demonstration disk of an Apple II animation program called Fantavision – not the actual program, mind you, but just the demo. Right in the store. I was also dead guilty of other common childish BBS antics, like logging in under several names and talking to myself, and even occasionally giving myself hell so I had someone to evict from the board and show what a good SysOp I was. Unlike today, when kids routinely get banned from message boards or flamed to a crisp for pulling such pranks, I think most everyone was quietly ignoring these strange cries for attention. Quite wise of them, really.<\/p>\n
I was on the modem all the time. My parents eventually had to get a second phone line. That opened the floodgates for a whole new time-wasting activity for me: running my own BBS. Still zipping along at 300 whole bits per second, that bulletin board system seemed to change names every third or fourth day. Various iterations of this included 10538 Overture (the name of the first ELO single), Scorpio Stargate, and numerous others I’ve since forgotten. By now I had ditched my pirated copy of PMS and was using a BBS package I actually bought, called SnAPP.<\/p>\n
By this time, my main topic of discussion on my BBS was Star Trek, and it was about this time that I started writing synopses of each week’s episode and posting them on my board – an exclusive feature you could only find there, woohoo! – and thus was born the Star Trek: The Next Generation LogBook, which, aside from a few high-school writings and drawings in Scribblings, is easily the oldest material on this site.<\/p>\n
Around 1989 or so, I discovered the opposite sex and suddenly lost interest in running my own BBS. Isn’t that always the way? I migrated to Steve Prado’s Pseudocode BBS (later Jackalope Junction) to do my Trekking, and that’s when the LogBooks started to get an audience.<\/p>\n
I was still Apple II-bound until 1993 or so; once I discovered the power of a 286 running Qedit (the DOS-based, minimal-memory-footprint text editor I still use to this day), there was no going back.<\/p>\n
The only video game consoles I had back in the day were the trusty Odyssey2 and the venerable Atari 2600. I got myself a Game Boy a couple of days after New Years’ Day 1990, primarily to amuse myself during my interminable weekend radio shifts. I lost interest in it about a year later, though, and went into gaming hibernation until 1995 or so, when I once again hooked up my Odyssey and this time left it hooked up – I had a fairly steady stream of guests around that time, and the Odyssey’s nutty two-player games were a big hit with anyone who ventured into my apartment. That unit was later destroyed in the great 1996 tornado that blasted through the north side of Fort Smith, but I tracked down an identical replacement; fortunately, I was already in the habit of keeping the Odyssey’s games securely under lock and key, and the console was the only thing to be damaged. I did a Saturday’s worth of Odyssey2 screen grabs at work around this time, and Phosphor Dot Fossils – originally an Odyssey archive only – began.<\/p>\n
In 1998, I was living in Green Bay and was having to undergo some major dental surgery. It was long, drawn-out and painful – to say nothing of expensive. It wiped me out completely and I don’t think I’m exaggerating at all when I say it demoralized me, especially when that pain and that expense stretched out over months. In the kids’ area of the dentist’s waiting room, there was a cocktail table Pac-Man<\/em> machine which I would go and play after getting out of the chair. I wouldn’t leave until I’d cleared level two and gotten to the first intermission; at that point I figured the local anesthetic wasn’t quite clouding my reflexes as much. By chance, another client sitting in the waiting room one day asked me why I was over in the kids’ area playing that game, and when I told him, he told me I should go check out a used toy store called Toy Exchange, not too far from the dentist’s office – they had a ton of used Atari games that no one ever touched, if I was into that sort of thing.<\/p>\n I went. The rest was history. When five bucks could buy me a big heap of working Atari cartridges, that became my new hobby, and my escape from the pain – I’d go every week after getting out of the dentist’s office. Those poor people must’ve thought I was stoned every time I walked in the door, with my big puffy lip and slightly slurred speech. (I can see where they’d think that too; it’s to their credit that they never freaked out or called the cops, and instead just smiled and sold me stack after stack of Atari games.) My collection, which had mostly been bequeathed to my nephew, was almost empty, but now it was growing by almost a dozen or so games a week. Even common stuff was good news to me, and the Atari came out of its cardboard box permanently, a new full-time fixture in my entertainmet center. I got the Odyssey2 out of its box and set it up too, and it grew from there. I bought an Intellivision and a ColecoVision through the newsgroups, and as if by magic, cartridges for those systems started to show up at Toy Exchange.<\/p>\n
The rest is history. Especially after I discovered eBay. But if you want to learn more about the collection I’ve built, you’ll have to click here<\/a>.<\/p>\nCritters: <\/strong>If it boiled right down to it, I could probably live without my music collection, my computer, and my games. Just give me my four-legged friends and I will be happy.<\/p>\n![\"Self-portrait](\"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/graphics\/sk.jpg\")
I’ve actually been in that situation before. I’m not going to go into it, but there have been a couple of occasions where it’s been down to me, a cold hard floor, and my ever-faithful kitties, Othello and Iago. They’ve been with me since 1994, when I adopted them both as kittens, and they still haven’t gotten sick of me. If anything, we grow closer all the time. I just don’t wake up right unless one of them is on my pillow, sleeping next to me, or better yet sleeping on me. Most of the time that I’m working on this web site, they’re in the room with me, sitting back, snoozing, or watching me work.<\/p>\n
Othello is the “alpha male” of the herd, protector of the household, and as such thinks he’s entitled to an all-access pass which includes the kitchen counter. He gets nervous easily, and the sound of the doorbell puts him on full alert. Iago is more quiet, reserved and calm, and while he’s more easily spooked than Othello, he doesn’t make as much noise about it. Storms scare them both due to their horrible experiences with a tornado and its aftermath. Like many people who live in tornado alley, I own a weather alert radio whose alarm siren will sound when activated by the National Weather Service in the event of a nearby storm warning; when that siren goes off, no matter where Iago is in the house, he turns to face that direction and hisses at it. If I’m asleep and a storm comes, I’ll usually find a little furry face buried in each of my armpits. Both of them have a purr that can rattle the walls.<\/p>\n
(I know the above is in the present tense, and I’ve chosen to preserve it that way; sadly, Iago died in December 2003, just days before I began moving into my new house, from feline diabetes. Othello and I both miss him a great deal.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
![\"Self-portrait](\"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/graphics\/myhorsie.jpg\")
And then there’s Sultry. Sultry is an Arabian mare who has been through some tough times of her own; her previous owner rescued her from a path that probably would have led her to the slaughterhouse. She, too, doesn’t trust easily, but for some reason she accepted me instantly – maybe she sensed a kindred spirit, or maybe she sensed someone who would never in a million years hurt her. Whenever I show up at the farm for feeding time, she’s always there waiting for me – not whinnying at the gate when I show up, but calmly and quietly waiting for me to come pay her some attention, or brush her, or take her for a walk. She’s not trained to ride, and neither am I, so we end up being quite the sight, a big brown horse and a short balding guy walking side-by-side through a field somewhere. On a few occasions, she’ll lay down in a patch of sunlight, and I’ll half-sit, half-lay down, with my head resting on her belly, and we’ll both catch some shut-eye. And that, my friends, is contentment.<\/p>\n
I can confidently say that Sultry, Othello, Iago, Chloe and Xena are among my very best friends. I truly think that animals understand the concept of “unconditional love” better than humans do. I don’t think humans can<\/em> grasp that concept. It’s not enough for people to just be kind to each other – there’s always some other underlying bullshit, be it money, politics, race, classes of society, or what have you. For animals, it’s simple – just provide them with the basics of staying alive, and kind words and attentions, and they love you. Maybe this means I’m a simpleton, but that’s the kind of relationship I can handle. I still get along better with animals than I do people. And I think how people relate to animals tells more about their true inner nature than any interaction with other humans.<\/p>\nAbout Me: <\/strong>So all this doesn’t really tell you about me. Maybe that’s for the best. I’m a centrist on both the political and religious scales, with liberal leanings in some directions and much more conservative ones in others. Politically, I’m beginning to find that most of my views are echoed by Libertarians or independents. (In the 2000 presidential election, I voted for Dr. John Hagelin after doing a great deal of research on his platform and his proposed solutions and reform plans. Who here remembers Hagelin? Didn’t think so.) In terms of faith, I have a relationship with God and Jesus Christ, and yet I don’t throw my lot in behind any particular church or denomination. I feel that faith<\/strong> is an intensely private thing, your own unique relationship or lack thereof with your particular deities and\/or prophets of choice. Religion<\/strong>, however, is a man-made construct, with differences and deliniations and dogmas laid down by various people as their best guess<\/em> as to how to serve their God. Small churches are just fine, but the ones with business holdings and political lobbyists and public relations machinery and payrolls and their own television shows? That, to me, is a sign that someone’s lost the plot. That is the point at which someone – a mere mortal – is trying to use their visibility to wield influence over others – and that’s the point at which religion becomes a bastard stepchild of politics. To sum it up: I do think God exists, I do try to live by some basic precepts that are my<\/em> best guess as to what He might have in mind, and I think that large-scale organized religion takes us away from God – and can often be used as a tool for manipulating the masses.<\/p>\n You also won’t find me trying to preach to anyone (despite a fair few e-mails accusing me of doing so through the guide to the Left Behind radio series and other related media). As I’ve stated above, your relationship with God is an intensely private thing. I’m not going to try to invade anyone’s mental or spiritual airspace with my beliefs, because those are just that – my beliefs. You can’t be prodded or coaxed into finding God and truly find Him – you’ll only see His reflection through the mirror of other people’s beliefs, which ultimately may not help you. To find Him directly, that search must take place under your own motivation. And too often, those who try to hammer the point home, actively trying to convert or recruit are doing more harm than good. If and when you do find God, it’s not going to be a color-by-numbers experience proscribed in the Bible or the Qoran or the Talmud. If it’s the real deal, it will be your own unique experience – and your own decision. And I’ll leave it at that while you either (A) wait for your head to stop spinning, or (B) sharpen your knives.<\/p>\n
I’ve actually been writing quite a lengthy diatribe on the faith vs. religion thing for quite a while. It’ll appear here in my blog at some unspecified future date, presuming that faith wins out before the demon that is man-made religion gets us all killed.<\/p>\n
Also, for practical reasons more than anything tied to a particular belief system, I do not drink, smoke or use drugs. Without going into too much detail, I’ll just say that there’s ample evidence in my family of the kind of obsessive-compulsive behavior thar often results in addiction. Considering that I already have trouble knowing when to stop eating sometimes, I’m sure as hell not going to get started on anything that has its own built-in track record of addiction. And I prefer to stay away from situations where people will be doing that sort of thing around me (a necessity, since I’m very allergic to second-hand smoke).<\/p>\n
What else? Let’s see…personality-wise, I’ve struggled with an instinctively hot temper my whole life. A few years ago, I began making a conscious decision not to let that anger get the best of me…and it’s really worked. It can be done. And it helps a lot. Learning to laugh about almost everything, especially myself, has been a big part of that (and my habit of launching into smart-ass running commentary on almost everything that happens is my attempt to share that with everyone around me). I do take things seriously, but even the serious stuff is best tackled without a lot of stressful baggage. One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard is as follows:<\/p>\n
Find the comedy, not the drama.<\/strong><\/p>\n In my line of work and my personal life, I’ve run into far too many people who live for confrontation, and if there’s a particular type of person I tend to stay away from, it’s those drama queens (who can be male or female, by the way – I still call ’em drama queens). There are plenty of opportunities in your daily life for others to challenge your skill, your worth, your knowledge, and your honesty. I’ve gotten to the point where I feel that inventing extraneous challenges isn’t necessary – because it just invites more of the same (I think this is why, with very few exceptions, I have an utter and complete loathing for “reality TV”). Patience, humor, and an ability to know when to laugh at something and when to rage at it are vital.<\/p>\n
And what does<\/em> piss me off? Aside from the usual ills of the human condition (man’s inhumanity to man, needless violence, intolerance, bigotry, and compound interest, cruelty to animals, and those with the inability to respect others and admit their own mistakes), the modern American health care\/insurance racket is one of the most twisted schemes anyone’s ever dreamed up. I don’t know if socialized medicine is truly the answer, but the money-obsessed health care system in our country thrives far too much on its own shark-like economy, with little in the way of accountability for those reaping the benefit. And the insurance industry is almost a kinder, gentler edition of the classic mob protection racket: you pay us, up front, a ton of money – and we’ll decide at some later date how much of it will apply to your care, or if you can even be covered for certain things. That’s brilliant. Maybe I’m in the wrong line of work, but the right set of scruples keeps me from getting into anything like the insurance industry. I’m sure there are honorable people in both the health care and insurance fields, but whoever dreamed up the whole thing, and whoever helped escalate it to the kind of Rube Goldberg-esque bureaucracy that it is today, needs to be subjected to an even more classic staple of the mafia, the aluminum bat to the kneecaps. The people who made that industry what it is can, presumably, afford to have that patched up.<\/p>\n Accountability in our health-care industry is all but a charade these days, and I find that more deeply disturbing. And I know of what I speak, for I have been a victim of that side of the medical profession. In 1996, I had a severe attack of abdominal pain that sent me to the hospital. After waiting in the emergency room for hours, I was finally told that it was almost certainly an ulcer (which I didn’t dispute, due to my level of job stress at the time and the fact that I was still spending much of my time, at that point, an Angry Young Man). I took the prescription meds for a year, and the attacks kept on coming and going. In late April 1997, another attack literally doubled me over in pain while I was at work, and once again I was taken to the hospital. After running urine and blood tests, and taking X-rays, it was determined that my gall bladder was failing and needed to be taken out immediately. When I asked if I could go home and take care of some vital tasks such as feeding my cats and getting a change of clothes, the doctors refused: these damned attacks had been gallstones all along, and now that I had been having a constant string of them for a year, my gall bladder was infected enough to toxify other vital organs and kill me. I was scheduled for a laproscopic surgery the next day, and immediately taken off of solid food.<\/p>\n
Then it got worse. The surgery was botched<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n The surgeons removed the offending organ and tied off the bile duct – which links the gall bladder to the stomach itself – with gallstones still inside. Within a week of ending my two-week hospital stay, I was once again in pain and had to go back to the emergency room. This time, it wasn’t going to be the easy surgery where they just poke a couple of small holes in me. This was going to be the big one where my stomach would look like a well-used tic-tac-toe board by the time I woke up.<\/p>\n
And still, there are complications. To this day, I frequently have an alternating parade of both diarrhea and constipation. None of it is linked to any specific food, and it’s always painful. I tend to have upwards of 3-4 bowel movements a day, frequently lengthy and unpleasant. It disrupts my work, my life at home, my comfort, and my well-practiced patience and good humor. While I haven’t ever really been a social butterfly, the complications of that surgery have also enforced a strictly indoor lifestyle on me for the most part, and in the past five years I’ve been dealing with a new problem – psoriasis, a nagging skin disease which establishes persistent (and, thus far, unremovable) patches of itchy, irritated, raised skin on arms, legs, fingers and toes – and I’ve got a doozy of a patch right in the middle of my forehead which always seems to be threatening to eat my face. One of the many suspected culprits of psoriasis in general is a lack of exposure to sunlight, and when you can’t go anywhere because you’ve got to take a major crap every four hours or so, yeah, you’re missing out on natural sunlight. It itches like crazy, and flakes like dandruff without hair there to catch it, but I deal with it. Most people are a little too polite to ask what it is; it draws quite a few stares.<\/p>\n
But despite all that, I still<\/em> think it’s important to know where your emotional center is and even more important to keep the ability to find it. I try to get out of the house as often as possible, even if it means stinking up someone else’s bathroom a few hours later (I’m still working on a sponsorship deal with major room freshener manufacturers that could help offset the cost of carrying cans of the stuff around wherever I go), or having people look at my forehead or arms and wonder what terrible disease I must have. My self-image is healthy enough that my glass is still half-full. Besides, I’m not a leading man on the stage of life anyway; I’m a character actor, standing off to the side, occasionally pushing events along, and commenting wryly on them the whole time.<\/p>\n Despite my rant about my medical misfortunes, let me touch briefly on another peeve of mine by letting you know that I do not consider myself a “victim.” Too many people claim victim status in our culture because of all the perks it offers – sympathy, lenience for unusual behavior, and, of course, being able to sue people who may be, in some way, tangentially related to whatever happened to “victimize” them. Sure, I’m upset that things didn’t go as planned, but I’ve learned to cope, and to work around it. Too many people strive<\/em> to be victims of something<\/em>, and that steals attention and resources that would better be focused on people who really are<\/em> victims. (It also runs the risk of making a real victim of abuse or discrimination seem as though they’re crying wolf.) People should strive instead to be resourceful, and to get on with life. I try not to hold grudges. Looking back in anger is a sorry way to live one’s life. Along with the bit about finding the comedy, let me share with you another useful adage: resentment is like drinking poison and expecting someone else<\/em> to die from it. I know that forgiveness can be hard, but in the end, you may need to find it in your heart to forgive – more for your own sake than anyone else’s.<\/p>\n So that’s me, in more detail than I usually care to reveal. I’d tell you what my favorite foods are, but then you’d know how to slip me a mickey.<\/p>\n
Oh, and one other thing – money isn’t everything. At least not to me. It comes in handy, but it’s not everything. Just thought you’d like to know.<\/p>\n
Putting Pen To Pixels: <\/strong>With all this time on the can, a nifty little technological miracle called the NEC MobilePro 780 handheld PC, and my own natural inclinations, I tend to write. A lot<\/em>. I write more than I read<\/em>, as a matter of fact – maybe that’s an imbalance I need to correct. (But then again, the handheld PC has to be recharged at some point, something books usually don’t require, so there’s still time to read.) Most of my output winds up here on the site – theLogBook.com is a monster which must always be fed, and you’d be surprised or perhaps alarmed to find out how much of the site’s stuff is written while other output is taking place. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) Much of my professional life also involves writing, though usually in chunks of four to thirty seconds – and sometimes, given how hard it is to squeeze any kind of coherent thought into that space, I think that probably explains why I write the rest of the time too. To atone for all those times I’ve had to write “Police are still looking for a suspect in a string of convenience store robberies, tonight at ten.” (Or some variation on the parties involved and the crimes committed.) You can only regurgitate that sentence so many times before needing to say something of more value, even if you’re the only person who can find that value.<\/p>\n That’s a big part of why I keep doing this site. And so long as those of you reading this find some kind of value here, that’s all that matters. I know that what I write here isn’t going to change the world. It’s not going to enlighten you about the nature of humanity or the universe, or answer the big questions for you. But I’m not sure anyone can find that stuff on the web – or if that’s where they should be looking for it in the first place. If, however, you want to stick around and listen to my friends and I as we go on endlessly about music, TV shows, movies, games and other things that we happen to like, this is a very good place to find that sort of thing. And I hope you enjoy it.<\/p>\n
I have but two rules for house guests: no smoking, and be nice to my pets.<\/p>\n
![\"With](\"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/wishlist\/earlhal.jpg\")
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So, what goes on in the head of someone who puts together a site like this? Not a lot, sometimes. But occasionally, some thoughts occur. And here they are. Not that I’m going to tell you everything, mind you. Just some bits about my interests. TeeVee and Me: I’ve had a tumultuous love affair with the little screen my whole life. Whether controlling the action via the mighty Odyssey2, chilling out while watching Battle Of The Planets or Star Blazers in my youth, or getting so deep into Star Trek: The Next Generation that I’d do something nutty like write […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":622,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-205","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/205\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Actual](\"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/wishlist\/earlhero.jpg\")
So, what goes on in the head of someone who puts together a site like this? Not a lot, sometimes. But occasionally, some thoughts occur. And here they are. Not that I’m going to tell you everything, mind you. Just some bits about my interests.<\/p>\n