I'M SPEAKING AT A SCI-FI CONVENTION THIS WEEKEND

Eternity is really long, especially near the end. - Woody Allen

I'm speaking at a Sci-Fi convention this weekend.

For those of you who cannot make it ... which means most of you,

I thought I would give you a bit of my first presentation :

IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD!

AGAIN!

AND WE LOVE IT!

We’re doomed. Hollywood says so. Why?

Pop Culture has long had a fascination with the end times.

21st century Man is like the proverbial kid in the backseat :

“Are we there yet?”

Man becomes preoccupied with the end of things During bad times.

And these have certainly been bad times lately :

earthquakes, tsunamis,

famines, wars,and economic collapse.

Sociology professors say that our fascination with the end times

reflects a hunger for meaning in these admittedly bad times.

We want to know where we are going And how soon we will get there.

And while myths and religions have long talked about the end of the world,

It has only been since the rumblings that led to the first World War

that literature,and later movies,

started telling stories of individuals struggling during the world’s death.

H. G. Wells wrote his famous WAR OF THE WORLDS in 1898.

Scholars call the study of the end times … Eschatology.

Which is fun for the dark little boy inside me

because it Is only letter and one syllable removed from Scatology

Which is the scholarly study of folks fascinated with Excrement.

And sadly, sometimes it’s hard to know the

Difference lately what with Hollywood has been giving us.

And so here we are in 2011.

Some experts said we wouldn’t make it.

Some theologians thought the end would come In 1988.

Why then, of all years?

It marked a full generation passing since Israel became a nation in 1948.

Then, the theologians said the time clock For the

End Times started When Jerusalem was in Israeli hands once more in 1968.

2008 came and went.

Terrible times especially around here in Lake Charles after Rita.

But no End Times

Unless all of this is a bad dream.

And sometimes it does feel like one, doesn’t it?

But the truth is when the end comes :

For you, For Man, For the World,

That time is unknown. The unknown.

Its allure is what gave birth to myth,

legend, and tales told around the campfire.

Man wants to know the unknowable.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

Human Nature hates it even more.

Mankind can't abide not knowing.

If Man doesn't have an answer, he will make one up.

And that is why we have myths.

And the desire to make up the answer is why we have science fiction and fantasy.

And the greatest unknown, of course is Death.

We listen to doomsday economic, political,religious jihad news.

We go to the theater and see the world end, only to go outside in the bright light of day,

seeing the cars pass by and hearing the pedestrians chatting away on their cell phones.

Just Hollywood. We're safe. Aren't we?

Not so you’d notice. Jamestown.

Jim Jones convinced his followers that the world was about to end in nuclear horror. They mixed in cyanide with their Kool-Aid and drank it down.

Personally, I believe something stronger was called for. It's a terrible joke for a horrendous reality But …

There is Heaven’s Gate and its herald, Marshall Applewhite,

whose followers believed his tale that

their souls were about to be snatched up by the spacecraft flying in the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet.

All they had to do get on board

Was die.

No Kool-Aid for them. No, sir. They mixed their poison with good old American Pie,

washed down by vodka.

It is no wonder Hollywood considers us gullible.

But there is another reason why we all flock to End of the World movies such as Armageddon, Deep Impact, When Worlds Collide, I Am Legend.

We want to believe

That somehow, someway,we’ll be able to fix it and make things right.

Science has become our new God. And it will make things right.

Right?

Science may be God to some.

But it is a vengeful God.

Man has never made a weapon that He has not ended up using. Even a limited nuclear exchange

{
5% of the global nuclear arsenal}

would almost certainly ANNIHILATE life on Earth as we know it.

Hollywood responds with THE ROAD

THE TERMINATOR MOVIES

THE BOOK OF ELI

SKYLINE

Hollywood tells us what we want to hear :

Something good of what we were would survive.

Hollywood doesn’t seem to get the TRUE message. Which is :

WE want to survive, skippy!

Which is why the end times movies that do the most box office are the ones in which the main hero survives

MAD MAX franchise.

The first MATRIX.

The 1st PLANET OF THE APES movie

{Yes, I know Charleton Heston’s not ecstatic.

But he’s alive and he’s got the babe. And a kicker of a last scene.}

Think INDEPENDENCE DAY : Great last scenes. “Get up and shout” scenes.

Now think CHILDREN OF MEN : “Put the gun in your mouth and pull the trigger” last scenes.

And the box office receipts showed it.

You and I don’t want to spend ten dollars to get depressed! We can stay at home and be that for free!

Oh, and don’t think that the scenario of CHILDREN OF MEN could happen?

Think again, skippy.

The average sperm count has dropped by HALF in the last 30 years!

HALF.

People in industrialized countries don’t make nearly enough babies.

People in the third world lose many of their young children to poor conditions. It gives you something to ponder.

And then, there is the zombie craze.

Oh, sure, it’s all fun and games until your girlfriend suddenly wants to make a snack of your brains.

But Hollywood knows we are drawn to a story following a small group of friends,

facing a world of devastated, formerly familiar streets filled with throngs of trudging,hungering, walking corpses.

We ask :

What would I do in such a situation? Where would I go? Who would I take? What would I bring?

It is why the TV series, THE WALKING DEAD, did so well for AMC.

But behind all the movies lies the promise that we could survive if we were smart and lucky.

Bottom Line : We could survive.

There would be a tomorrow.

We all have an inbuilt need to associate ourselves with those who survive.

We all have this crazy human need to believe that we will beat the odds when others do not.

There's a powerful scene near the end of The Road,

the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize—winning novel,

where a father and son sit silent together under brooding skies on a wasted, nameless beach,

littered with human and whale skeletons.

They have finally reached the coast after traversing by foot a post-apocalyptic America filled with nightmare dangers, hardships, and traps.

The boy, about age 10, has never seen the sea.

"What's on the other side?" he asks.

"Nothing," replies his father,suffering from malnutrition and despair, after having fought off evils both human and animal.

All along he has urged his son to maintain hope —

to "carry the fire" — but has slowly lost his own.

The boy, who believes there's still goodness somewhere in their dark and dying world,

looks out to the sea and says,

"There must be something."

Wanting to keep his son's hope alive, the man pauses and then answers.

"Maybe there's a father and his son, and they're sitting on the beach too."

Like McCarthy's 2006 book, the film is both depressing and redeeming;

it depicts one of the most loving father-son relationships to appear on the big screen.

And this particular scene speaks volumes for all of us asking a universal question.

What's on the other side?

And that is what good Science Fiction and Movies do for us :

They help us discover for ourselves what we feel is on the Other Side.

In my worldview,there is indeed a Father and His Son waiting for us On The Other Side.

And remember …

"apocalypse" doesn't mean end,

but is Greek for "revelation" --

an unveiling of truth.

Let us keep looking for truth in the world around us and

in that most puzzling world : The one within us.

TWLIGHT'S CHILDREN_PART 1 of 4_TESSA'S OUTSIDE THE BOX BLOGFEST

http://tessasblurb.blogspot.com/2010/10/announcing-outside-of-my-box.html


Tessa wants us to write outside our comfort zone. Oddly enough, so did my best friend, Sandra.

I complained to her a dozen times too many about Justin Cronin telling not showing his novel THE PASSAGE.

She challenged me to write a short story doing what did Justin did but better. Obviously, he was aiming at something he missed.

Could I do any better?

And so the short sequel to THE COLOR OF HER THOUGHTS {and my take on the end prophecised for 2012} was born. Here are the first three pages ....}


TWILIGHT'S CHILDREN

From the cliff of our birth we keep falling, falling. Our fingers reach out for something to hold on to.

Money. Power. Sex.

But they are lies, mirages without substance. We are in free fall. Despite the lie we tell ourselves, we all hit bottom. Yet somehow it always feels like a betrayal.

You would think that we would finally realize the truth. But what is it that the white historians say? The past is prologue.

We First People knew better. The past is only a footnote. As Man is but a footnote in the ancient history of GrandMother Earth.

She existed long before Man peered with bewildered eyes out of his cave. She would be here long after his useless monuments to himself had crumbled back into her soil.

Darkness was descending. And soon would end Man's strange history. Would he, like the dinosaur before him, stare fearful and uncomprehending into the storm that swallowed all his preconceptions into oblivion?

The lights to the room flickered. An odd coldness settled upon me. I had been sensing it for years. It had to begin sometime. And now it had.

Night pressed in on the window. Wings, large and leathery, beat my death song in the darkness. I looked at my wrist handcuffed to the railing of the hospital bed.

White Men. They had always made my life interesting. Why shouldn't they make my death the same?

I looked out through the locked window. Nothing. Not yet. But I sensed a straining from beyond the glass, from beyond what the White Man foolishly called reality.

Man sought to explore that imagined reality as he struggled to roam the stars in ships. I shook my head. He was already on one.

The living planet who gave him birth.

She sailed through a sea of stars at speeds Man could only dream of attaining in his fragile vessels of steel.

Like the most agile of ballerinas, GrandMother Earth spins on her toes at just over a thousand miles an hour.

With the Northern Lights in her wake, she swims through the icy void around her father, Sun, in strokes of over sixteen and a half miles a second.

While Sun holds his daughter in his mighty arms of gravity, he speeds towards a dark destination in a gait of some twelve miles a second.

It is a wonder our noses don't bleed and our heads fly from our very shoulders.

The White Man had become arrogant in his mastery of science as the dinosaur had become confident their rule would never end.

But I had seen the rules of science grow dark with the dawn of quantum mechanics. In the microverse, the same rules did not apply. In fact, often they were reversed.

Why did the White Man feel it would be otherwise in the macroverse?

In my bones I felt GrandMother Earth was just now at the edge of seas where different rules applied.

The freakish weather pointed to it. Energy blackouts were on the rise. Insanity's bloody crimes were daily shouted from the headlines.

GrandMother had taught the First People how to survive in such a realm. The White Man in his arrogance and greed had succeeded in nearly wiping us from her shores.

Most of her teaching to us had been lost.

Was I the last to know it as she had taught it? If so, it would be poetic justice, for the White Man wanted me dead. He would certainly get death.

Killing me would signal the end for him and the rest of Twilight's children.

I stared into the alien depths between familiar stars and whispered, "Weep not for the dead nor mourn him. Rather weep for him who goes away, for he shall return no more nor see his native country."

They were the words of Jeremiah, speaking of another enforced exodus. Jeremiah. I made a sour face. Though the White Man claimed him, he was mostly forgotten ...

or dismissed out of hand as a relic from the past. He was much like the Lakota in that.

The Something beyond the window laughed. The sound rose, spindled, and twisted like icy smoke from the funeral pyre of Man.

The straining stopped outside the window. The cold presence swept away into the night. It was gone.

For the moment.

Death was both patient and impatient. The presence would be back. After all, it had all the time in the world. And Man? He had squandered most of his.

And me? I could not win. But perhaps I could lose more slowly. A darkness within whispered I had best try for this was my last hand.

What had Thomas Wolfe written at his last?

I said the words low, "Something has spoken to me in the night, burning the tapers of the waning year. Something has spoken in the night, and told me I shall die. I know not where."

The door to my hospital room opened silent and quick. A chill filled the darkness within me.

The Mossad assassin, Shadow.

She stood in the doorway and looked at me with haunted green eyes. In her mid-thirties now, she had been a lost angel at twenty when I had spared her on the Isle of Skye. Now she was just a fallen angel, no longer able to remember the scent of lost innocence.

There was a solid finger-wide streak of moon-white at her right temple. GrandMother's Sign. Estanatlehi always marked those she chose to heal.
***

THE END IS NEAR! AGAIN! AND WE LOVE IT!

Eternity is really long, especially near the end.
- Woody Allen

IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD!

AGAIN!

AND WE LOVE IT!



We’re doomed.

Hollywood says so.

Why?


Pop Culture has long had a fascination with the end times.

21st century Man is like the proverbial kid in the backseat :

“Are we there yet?”


Man becomes preoccupied with the end of things

During bad times.


And these have certainly been bad times lately :

earthquakes,

tsunamis,

famines,

wars,and economic collapse.


Sociology professors say that our fascination with the end times reflects a hunger for meaning in these admittedly bad times.


We want to know where we are going

And how soon we will get there.


And while myths and religions have long talked about the end of the world,

It has only been since the rumblings that led to the first World War

that literature,and later movies, started telling stories of individuals

struggling during the world’s death.


H. G. Wells wrote his famous WAR OF THE WORLDS in 1898.



Scholars call the study of the end times …

Eschatology.

Which is fun for the dark little boy inside me because it

Is only letter and one syllable removed from

Scatology

Which is the scholarly study of folks fascinated with

Excrement.


And sadly, sometimes it’s hard to know the

Difference lately what with Hollywood has been giving us.


And so here we are in 2010. Some experts said we wouldn’t make it.

Some theologians thought the end would come

In 1988.


What? Why then, of all years?

It marked a full generation passing since Israel became a

nation in 1948.


Then, the theologians said the time clock

For the End Times started

When Jerusalem was in Israeli hands once more in 1968.


2008 came and went. Terrible times especially around here in Lake Charles after Rita.

But no End Times Unless all of this is a bad dream.


And sometimes it does feel like one, doesn’t it?


But the truth is when the end comes :

For you,

For Man,

For the World,

That time is unknown.

The unknown. Its allure is what gave birth to myth,

legend,

and tales told around the campfire.

Man wants to know the unknowable. Nature abhors a vacuum. Human Nature hates it even more.


Mankind can't abide not knowing. If Man doesn't have an answer, he will make one up.

And that is why we have myths.

And the desire to make up the answer is why we have science fiction and fantasy.


And the greatest unknown, of course is

Death.


We listen to doomsday economic, political,religious jihad news.

We go to the theater and see the world end, only to go outside in the bright light of day, seeing the cars pass by and hearing the pedestrians chatting away on their cell phones.

Just Hollywood. We're safe.

Aren't we?

Not so you’d notice.

Jamestown. Jim Jones convinced his followers that the world was about to end in nuclear horror. They mixed in cyanide with their Kool-Aid and drank it down.

Personally, I believe something stronger was called for.

It's a terrible joke for a horrendous reality

But …

There is Heaven’s Gate and its herald, Marshall Applewhite,

whose followers believed his tale that their souls were about to be snatched up by the spacecraft flying in the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet. All they had to do get on board

Was die.

No Kool-Aid for them. No, sir. They mixed their poison with good old American Pie, washed down by vodka.

It is no wonder Hollywood considers us gullible.


But there is another reason why we all flock to End of the World movies such as

Armageddon,

Deep Impact,

When Worlds Collide,

I Am Legend.


We want to believe

That somehow, someway,we’ll be able to fix it and make things right.

Science has become our new God. And it will make things right.

Right?


Science may be God to some. But it is a vengeful God.

Man has never made a weapon that He has not ended up using. Even a limited nuclear exchange {5% of the global nuclear arsenal} would almost certainly ANNIHILATE life on Earth as we know it.


Hollywood responds with

THE ROAD

THE TERMINATOR MOVIES

THE BOOK OF ELI

EIGHT


Hollywood tells us what we want to hear :

Something good of what we were would survive.

Hollywood doesn’t seem to get the message. Which is :


WE want to survive, skippy!


Which is why the end times movies that do the most box office are the ones in which the main hero survives

MAD MAX franchise.

The first MATRIX.

The 1st PLANET OF THE APES movie

{Yes, I know Charleton Heston’s not ecstatic.

But he’s alive and he’s got the babe. And a kicker of a last scene.}


Think INDEPENDENCE DAY :

Great last scenes. “Get up and shout” scenes.


Now think CHILDREN OF MEN :

“Put the gun in your mouth and pull the trigger” last scenes.

And the box office receipts showed it.


You and I don’t want to spend ten dollars to get depressed!

We can stay at home and be that for free!


Oh, and don’t think that the scenario of CHILDREN OF MEN could happen?

Think again, skippy.


The average sperm count has dropped by HALF in the last 30 years!

HALF.

People in industrialized countries don’t make nearly enough babies.

People in the third world lose many of their young children to poor conditions.

It gives you something to ponder.


That’s why I emailed Megan Fox told her of my excellent genes,high I.Q,and sturdy genetic stock.

With her looks and my brains, we’d make beautiful babies. Her lawyer emailed back something silly about cease & desist.

She’s just thinking it over.


Riiiiiight.


And then, there is the zombie craze.

Oh, sure, it’s all fun and games until your girlfriend suddenly wants to make a snack of your brains.


But Hollywood knows we are drawn to a story following a small group of friends, facing a world of devastated, formerly familiar streets filled with throngs of trudging,hungering, walking corpses.

We ask :

What would I do in such a situation?

Where would I go?

Who would I take?

What would I bring?


But behind all the movies lies the promise that we could survive if we were smart and lucky.


Bottom Line :

We could survive.

There would be a tomorrow.


We all have an inbuilt need to associate ourselves with those who survive.

We all have this crazy human need to believe that we will beat the odds when others do not.


There's a powerful scene near the end of The Road, the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize—winning novel, where a father and son sit silent together under brooding skies

on a wasted, nameless beach, littered with human and whale skeletons.

They have finally reached the coast after traversing by foot a post-apocalyptic America
filled with nightmare dangers, hardships, and traps.

The boy, about age 10, has never seen the sea.

"What's on the other side?" he asks.

"Nothing," replies his father,suffering from malnutrition and despair, after having fought off evils both human and animal.

All along he has urged his son to maintain hope—

to "carry the fire" — but has slowly lost his own.


The boy, who believes there's still goodness somewhere in their dark and dying world,

looks out to the sea and says,

"There must be something."


Wanting to keep his son's hope alive, the man pauses and then answers.

"Maybe there's a father and his son, and they're sitting on the beach too."


Like McCarthy's 2006 book, the film is both depressing and redeeming;

it depicts one of the most loving father-son relationships to appear on the big screen.


And this particular scene speaks volumes for all of us asking a universal question.


What's on the other side?


And that is what good Science Fiction and Movies do for us :

They help us discover for ourselves what we feel is on the Other Side.


In my worldview,there is indeed a Father and His Son waiting for us

On The Other Side.


And remember …

"apocalypse" doesn't mean end, but is Greek for "revelation" -- an unveiling of truth.


Let us keep looking for truth in the world around us and in that most puzzling world :

The one within us.