Every once in a while, when I’ve highly esteemed a thing, or dismissed it out of hand, or ranted against its mediocrity, I like to re-experience it, to see if I really got it right. Older, more mature viewing. Maybe it’s not the masterpiece I thought, or the disaster it seemed. Maybe I wasn’t mature enough or in the right headspace to understand.

I’m not talking about how my love of The A-Team or Dukes of Hazzard as a child has been thoroughly reevaluated as an adult to understand how shitty they were (outside of Catherine Bach, because wow. Masterpiece). That was obvious.

I hated Star Wars: The Phantom Menace when my roommate dragged me to the premier. I wasn’t the biggest Star Wars fan, though I like the original series, but I couldn’t help but think, fuck, people waited twenty-five years for fucking THIS?

I mean, the text scroll starts by talking about tax and trade disputes. Tell me you’re an out of touch rich guy without telling me you’re a rich guy, right? Then, comes the wooden acting, and all around poor script. I mean, you’ve got Evan McGregor and Liam Neeson, and the only halfway decent performance comes from teenage Natalie Portman. I don’t include the racist caricatures of the Gungans and Neimoidians or the original character redux performances of C3PO, Yoda, Jabba, etc., where it’s imitation and not performance. And while I hated everything to do with the kid, it’s not Jake Lloyd’s fault. Like I said, one halfway decent performance coaxed by a director, who should know better, out of some pretty heavyweight talent means the kid is not at fault. The script had so much exposition as to be almost on par an 80s TV movie. How could we excoriate a child for material Academy Award winners couldn’t make compelling?

Anyways, my point is that sometimes, I find things better than I thought they were, and sometimes worse. This time, the result was exactly the same.

What a piece of shit.

Anyway, my point is that in trying to explore kindness while I write Father Lightning, I’m finding the shadow of my prior focus on conflict and anger and myopia is like a phantom menace haunting the back halls of my mind.

I’m finding kindness quite difficult these days, and fucking Jar Jar Binks didn’t help.

Bad fucking hoodoo, man. Bad fucking art.

Target: 1600 words
Written: 2192 words, novel: Father Lightning

Read: 100 Side Hustles: Unexpected Idea For Making Extra Money Without Quitting Your Day Job, Chris Guillebeau
Comics: WildC.A.T.S. v6 12
Music: Folk Rock Essentials, Various Artists (so good)