February Sweeps - Day 390

This will not amuse you, but it did amuse me (although maybe "horrify" is a better word).  I finished the first season of "Modern Family" last night, and turned the TV off after the episode was over, meaning to go do something constructive (maybe record, except I don't have space on my recorder, so I'd have to sit down and edit something so I could delete it from the recorder so I could then record), but then I changed my mind.

I think I'll watch the next episode, I said to myself, turning the TV back on and clicking on Season 11, Episode 1.  It only took about four seconds before I realized what I had done wrong, and it probably took you less time than that.  I recoiled: Holy shit, what had happened to the characters?  They had aged SO MUCH as to be one of those "Star Trek" episodes with a time anomaly.*  They all looked so weird, because, just five minutes earlier, they had been vibrant and youthful, living in Obama's first term.  And now . . .

Still, I felt like I had to keep watching, even knowing that I had skipped ten years in real time, because I just wanted to see how a decade had changed everybody.  

Okay, this is a bit of an exaggeration.

The show's format was exactly the same as it was, and everybody who was on the show in Season 1 was on it still (even Haley's dopey boyfriend was still there), but the kids were all adults, and the adults were all . . . more adult.  The two who had aged the most were Phil (Ty Burrell) and Cam (Eric Stonestreet), though Cam is heavy-set and that tends to hide your years pretty well.  I kept on watching--though I ended up muting the sound--just so I could see what Ed O'Neill had become, and he looked quite a bit the same, just a bit greyer.

Sit-ups Today: 111 (I really could've done more of these, but I got lazy later on that night)
Sit-ups In February: 2640

In other news, I'm continuing to try to publish something new every week or so, so you can check out "Murdertown - 1 Mile" if you'd like to, or the audio of "My Friend of Misery" is finally available, so that means I can put out my episode about it, which isn't quite old enough to stamp a "Lost Episode" intro on.

Push-ups Today: 50
Push-ups In February: 2399 

I didn't know what to write, but having edited on a Ben Parks story that afternoon, and remembering that Deputy Anglesworth's brother becomes the sheriff in town in a later story, I thought it would be interesting to find out what kind of a man he is.  So, I wrote a scene of Ben and the new sheriff, that would ostensibly fit in the story "Sins of a Sidekick," which is the one that follows "A Sidekick's Journey" (though I think one day, if I live long enough, I'd like to write an in-between tale of what Ben and Lorelei Skruggs do on their little outing together, only hinted at at the end of that novella).

I wish a lot of things, but one of the things I wish most of all (and I'm sure my parents wished it as they saw this negative trait in me over the years) is that I could stick with a project until it was done, and ONLY THEN move on to another project.  But I flit from flower to flower like a coked-out bumblebee, and I guess I'm fortunate that I finish one in three stories (and when I was a kid, it was more like one in ten).  That's a roundabout way of saying, I don't know if I'll ever use today's writing in anything, and I don't know if I'll ever write "Sins of a Sidekick," even though I've had it in my head for three or four years now.  

Could be longer, though I was looking in my notebook just now, and I wrote up notes for it as recently as 2020.

Anyway, this Ben Parks stuff is flowing really fast, and I wouldn't be surprised if I get a thousand words i--

Fuggers are flashing the lights right now, and it's making me angry enough to use the word "fuggers."**

Words Today: 1039
Words In February: 17,907

*Little bit of useless trivia for you: The episode "The Deadly Years" where the crew ages rapidly is the only episode of the original series where you can see Shatner without his toupee on.  In his second-to-oldest incarnation, Kirk has his natural hair, and then, in the next iteration--the oldest version--he's back to a wig.  I'm not sure if that's interesting to you, but . . .  No, wait, it's definitely not interesting to you.

**That word dates back to high school, when my friend Rhett would use it in an imitation of the kids from our rival town, which I call Miller's Fork in my stories.  They had a particularly loathsome country accent (and granted, it was only the most inbred and willfully-ignorant townsfolk, probably less than ten percent of the people there, but it was so shockingly ugly that it stood out whenever you heard it), and would cruise the main street of their town on weekend evenings hoping to find youths from our school--or indeed anybody--who would want to fight them.  Rhett would say, with delightful relish, "Wanna fight me, fugger?" and "I ain't fraid of you, fugger," which probably made me laugh every single time he said it.  I don't use it often, but I sure do love that word.