Words

My mother was a hard woman. She was rigid in her opinions, and spoke her mind with no care for who was listening. Often without thinking about what she was saying, either. As a result, a lot of people did not like her.

A lot of people loved her for it, as well. Me included.

I can’t really encapsulate a woman as complicated as my mother in words. Not without wearing out a few keyboards, at any rate, and to be honest I don’t think I want to try. Those of us who knew her well will know what I mean, and will carry it with them.

You had to take the barbs with Ma. She was worth the venom, in the long run. My stepfather knew that almost from day one, though other members of my family did not. Or could not. You had to stand up to her, while accepting that she was not going to change her mind. You had to convince her that you were worth it, as well. If you could earn her respect, you were in the good books of one of the kindest, and fiercest, people you ever met.

She didn’t make it easy. Her default mode was antagonistic, and she came off as confrontational and aggressive. She suffered no fools, and would not be crossed under any circumstances.

When my now wife was about to meet her for the first time, it was as my girlfriend. She and I, in the company of my best friend, were visiting from school for the weekend. We had her terrified, and to this day she is convinced that she witnessed my mother actually breathe fire. I half believe it. When we walked into the house, the entire family, my mother and stepfather, my brothers, their wives, and their children, all were sitting at the dining room table. And they all stopped their conversation immediately to turn and watch her walk in. She was the first girl I ever brought home, and they wanted to meet her.

It was an impressive sight for a woman whose family, for three generations, have had two kids.

It was Ma that made her welcome. Ushering her in with a smile and setting a cup of coffee in her hands, sitting her down in the crowd and making sure she didn’t get lost in it. It was Ma’s opinion of her that really mattered to me. The others all accepted her immediately, but it was Ma that I really wanted to like her.

When I had a bad day, I called Ma. When I had a good day, I called Ma. When I needed help figuring something out, I called her. When I was bored, or when the kids did something cool, or when I just wanted to chat, I called Ma.

She was, for a long time, my definition of ‘parent’. My father died when I was five years old, and my brother and I had her. My two oldest siblings were already out of the house, one with a kid of her own. So my brother and I were raised, for most of my formative years, by my mother. Children see their parents as the very foundation of the world. Everyone else are strangers; it is our parents that guide us. We learn our first lessons, and the most lessons, from them. My worldview was shaped by a difficult, fiercely independent woman who was quick to anger and who could frighten the hardest of men without saying a word. Who would, when she dialed the wrong number on the phone, exclaim “Fuck!” down the line and hang up rather than apologise and explain.

Is it any wonder I am the way I am?

I have so many memories of her. At the table, mostly, and laughing. But also of her more vicious moments. Though, to be honest, even those are mostly hilarious.

And now she’s gone. I will generate no more memories.

I talked to her, for the last time, in October. In the ICU of the Aberdeen Hospital. She was awake, but couldn’t speak with the breathing tube in her throat. I told her I loved her, and she saw my two kids. The Weenit drew her a picture, and my son made her smile. I told her that I would see her again in November, and that she would likely be home by then.

She passed away on Remembrance Day, in the early afternoon. I got the call from my oldest brother, and we were at the house by 10 o’clock that night. We buried her, next to her first husband, the following Wednesday. My son and daughter still have their Papa, my stepfather, and I still have him as the only father I really remember. But it will be hard when we visit in the Spring, without her there. I am more worried about him over Christmas than I can really describe.

The Weenit is having a hard time with the loss. She sees pictures of her Nanny, and I see her eyes fill with tears. I have explained this all to her, and told her about my own father. She talks to me about it sometimes, and I try to help, but each person deals with this sort of thing in their own way. I only hope that she feels comfortable talking to me about it more when she is older, and can articulate her feelings better. I never did with Ma, and I wish now that I had. It would have changed a lot of things, I think.

The world lost a wonderful woman, and is lesser because of it. But then, I had my mom for thirty-three years, and I am a better person for it.

I love you, Ma. We all do.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone.
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling in the sky the message She is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

She was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that she would last forever, I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

WH Auden, with some liberties.

The greatest indicator of my mother’s illness over the past few years has not been her shortness of breath, or her massive amounts of daily medication. It has not been my step-father’s changing shifts, or the many, many trips to the hospital. Though these are all obvious signs, and worrisome.

My mother lost her first husband to cancer in 1984, and was left to raise two young boys by herself. Her two older children were grown enough that they were on their own by this point, but here she was, grieving and saddled with a burgeoning teenaged young man and a boy barely old enough to know what was really happening, but definitely old enough to be shattered by it.

She was unemployed, and raised us on her pension, and the pension the military gave her for my father. She lived in a house next to my grandparents, and they helped in raising us a great deal. As did friends from the area, and family. But for the most part, she was alone.

She still made sure that we got to school, and had full bellies, and washed behind our ears. She still managed to get us everything we needed, and about half of what we really wanted (the NES we got for Christmas in ’86 or so still remains one of the most exciting moments of my life), which is a good ratio for any parent. She still kept her house in order.

When she met my step-father, and eventually married him, my brother was mostly grown, but I was still little more than a boy. Finding my way. We moved to his house, a massive log cabin in the middle of the woods, but Ma’s rules remained in place. She was stern, but loving. We lived in terror of angering her, but we all knew that if we needed anything, anything at all, she would provide it if it was in her power.

And though the square footage tripled, she still kept the house in order, while raising two messy boys and with a husband that worked rotating shifts driving trucks to the valley and back.

Since she’s been ill, she has tried to keep up the pace she has led for decades. But at 67, things start to slow down anyway. Add cancer and a quarter of a lung gone, and it slows down even more.

Her house is not as tidy as it once was.

After an emergency, and landing herself in the ICU this week, on life-support and with serious kidney failure, we made a trip over to see her, and to potentially say goodbye. With my wife and two kids, we drove over and stayed with my step-father, spending days in the ICU with her, relieving his vigil when we could, and relaying information out to others, taking calls with news from those who were there when we weren’t. All the chaos that surrounds an event that is, sadly, quite common. A loved one, struck very ill, will halt everything; and rightly so.

Seeing her with a ventilator was hard. Seeing her with twelve IV bags and half a dozen machines around her, each one doing it’s critical part to keep her alive was hard. Hearing people talk about resuscitation orders, and having to make that decision, was VERY hard.

But the hardest thing, I think . . . the thing that really drove it home for me, was the cobwebs in her house. In every room, you had to brush them away when you entered, or you would be hit in the face with silky filaments that made your skin crawl.

My mother hates cobwebs, and hunts them with ferocity. But she no longer can.

It was the third or fourth one that I walked through that made me realise. I knew she was ill, and has been for some time. Stays in the hospital don’t happen for no reason, after all. But it was always sort of lessened, in my mind. My mother is made of iron, and will still be sitting at her table when the world burns around us all, generations from now. She will pull the foundation stones herself, and seal the remains behind her as she leaves.

Even seeing her so sedated that she couldn’t breathe on her own, and with tubes shoved down her throat to fill and evacuate her lungs and stomach didn’t change that image for me.

It was the cobwebs that did it.

Thankfully, the doctors are confident that they can repair her, restore her kidney function and tackle her breathing issues, get her back on her feet again. But she is no longer indestructible. She was very nearly gone forever, and there is still a chance that it will happen in the very near future. But at least we have hope, now. It bothers me, though, that the hope comes tangled in spiderwebs.

So as a guy, I am a fan of making lists of my favourite things. I like to do this while placing as many restrictions on myself as I can. For example, some of my favourite movies released in the last 10 years, in no particular order:

Batman Begins
Sunshine
The Dark Knight
Inception
28 Days Later

Do you see a pattern here?

When I saw it, I was genuinely shocked. I had not noticed it at the time, and was surprised to see it.

Cillian Murphy stars in each of these movies. Granted, he’s on-screen for all of thirty seconds in The Dark Knight, but he’s there. In each of the others, he is either the main character, or key to the plot of the film.

I had not paid that much attention to him, to be honest. But after I put this together, I started thinking about his performances, and his skill as an actor. The man is damn good at his job.

The fact that these movies are directed by either Danny Boyle or Chris Nolan is not lost on me, either.

I am a huge fan of movies. I like the spectacle, I like the story-telling, and I like the inherent pointlessness of them. Most of all, though, I like the magic. There is a multi-billion dollar industry surrounding something that actually serves very little practical purpose. And there are millions of people who immerse themselves in this, while not being directly involved, by writing about movies, and posting about them on the internet.

The trivia that goes into this process is amazing.

For example, did you know that Peter Cushing (Grand Moff Tarkin) found the boots he had to wear in Star Wars so uncomfortable, that they actually changed most of his on-screen appearances to make sure you could not see his feet, so he could wear his slippers on set?

Shit like this is amazing to me.

Caution, there may be spoilers for Portal 2 ahead. Or behind. Depends on where you placed the orange portal.

A few years ago, Valve released a perfect video game. Absolutely perfect, from start to finish. It evolved from a proof-of-concept demo, and was very, very fun. It was packaged with the Orange Box, which is where I first played it. The Orange Box was a collection of great Valve games all in one: Half Life 2, Half Life 2 Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal.

I have only played Team Fortress 2 for an hour or so. I get bored on the beaches in Half Life 2. I played Portal. I played the shit out of Portal. I still play Portal, and I still love it.

At it’s heart, it’s a puzzle-based first person shooter. Except you don’t shoot anybody. You get a gun, but the gun opens portals. One shot will open a blue portal, a second shot will open an orange one. Step into the blue one, and you come out the orange one. Using this dynamic, you solve puzzle chambers by getting from one location to another.

But the game itself is so much more than that. You don’t know why you are being tested. You don’t know who is running these tests, and you are being taunted and prompted the whole time by an electronic voice that gets more and more malevolent as the game goes on. Sh promises cake, but it’s pretty clear that the cake is a lie.

Sorry, I had to put that line in here somewhere.

The true beauty of the game is GlaDOS, the AI that is running these tests. She is absolutely insane. And she wants nothing more than to see you run these gauntlets forever. And she is quite possibly the funniest character I have ever encountered in any medium.

“That’s my ethics processing unit. The scientists here installed that after I flooded the facility with a deadly neurotoxin to make me stop flooding the facility with a deadly neurotoxin.”

It is a perfect game from start to balls-tighteningly fantastic end.

I just completed the sequel, Portal 2, about ten minutes ago. Based on teasers and game-play trailers released over the past year or so, I had very high hopes for this game. Valve, like BioWare, does not fuck about with creating games, and it shows.

While this one was a little less subtle in it’s humour, it was as devestatingly funny as the first. There were at least three points in the game where I actually had to pause the game, set the controller down, and leave the room because I was laughing so hard.

The extra characters in this game (Wesley and Cave Johnson) are as delightfully mad as GlaDOS was (and is), and the voice actors chosen to portray them were absolutely perfect. Some of Wesley’s lines trumped GlaDOS’s for hilarity, and (SPOILERS!!!) he actually turns out to be a better enemy that she did. Rather inept, but still as deadly, which is actually a little scarier. Where GlaDOS was pure precision and cold indifference, Wesley is cheerily, and obviously, trying to kill you in as painful a way as possible.

And he puts her in a potato. How can that be topped, as far as ‘fuck you’ goes?

Absolutely perfect. At no point was it hard enough to be frustrating, but it was challenging enough to give a sense of satisfaction. The puzzles were, at times, devious, but at other times quite simple. The level of difficulty of these puzzles was story-driven, as well. When Wesley designs them himself, they are blindingly simple. But when he finds GlaDOS’s cache of chambers that she had hidden away, the difficulty level ramps right up.

I can’t begin to explain how much I enjoyed this game. I need PSN to get back online, now, so I can play some of the multiplayer.

Thank you, Valve, for taking the time to make your games amazing. Not enough design teams do this. They push things out early to meet deadlines, or holiday rushes. Thank you for taking the time to make this right, and not releasing it until it’s ready.

I have been a fan of Penny Arcade for a long time, now, as have the vast majority of humans that scurry about the internet. It is, nominally, a webcomic about video games, but it is so much more than that, as well.

I started off just reading the comics, and ignoring the news posts, because I thought that the comics were the point of the thing. But when I started paying attention to the words that Jerry puts down in the posts, these quickly became the focus of my visits to the site. I still read, and love, the comics, don’t get me wrong. But the posts are so much more.

Today’s struck me, more than most of the others have. I’m going to post this here, the important bit of it, and let him speak for me.

“I can read books and enjoy them now, certainly; I still have whatever organ is responsible for secreting joy. But that was a very strange time, just after I had failed AP English, where for some reason everything I read hopping an inch or two off the page. I honestly couldn’t stand that class, if we already knew everything there was to know about Ulysses, then why were we pretending to read it? That is something I am bad at: f. I began turning in all my papers in iambic pentameter, at least, the ones I deigned to do at all. I can remember the final very clearly: the teacher was passing the tests out, going over his expectations, and he passed my desk without giving me one. Being refused the opportunity to fail the test communicated the full extent of my dereliction.

I’m mentioning it not because I think you should fail your classes and tell your teachers to fuck off in a syllabically constrained fashion. But I failed, miserably, and did not die. Quite the opposite, in fact.

This is good information.

My first and only F well in hand, the illusion I had of myself – that of a pristine jarred brain casting aspersions on greasy, cavorting bipeds – was obliterated. I was enrolled, then, in a series of what were (and may still be called) “bonehead” classes, which was apparently where they hoarded all the Twain. And I Am The Cheese, and Watership Down, books that played with modern language and perspective and voice, and played rough. There’s really no doubt that my entire life turned on that point, and it never really stopped turning: the point at which Writing became decoupled from English.

(CW)TB out.”

Thank you, Jerry.

In the great history of story-telling, there are a handful of well-trodden tales that hold humanity’s interest, time after time. There’s the one about the boy and the girl who fall in love despite no reasonable expectation that they would do so, there’s the one about the youngster who is downtrodden and rises up to become a saviour, there’s the one about the friends who become enemies, etc…

The basic breakdown, and I do mean basic, is as follows:

1) man vs man
2) man vs himself
3) man vs god
4) man vs nature
5) man vs society
6) man vs machine

In these rather loose boundaries reside every story we’ve ever read, heard, or told. Again, these are extremely basic, and you will have to look pretty deeply into some stories to find out where they fit. Many even span several of these.

But I’m not talking about the basics, I’m discussing the meat of the stories themselves. Sons who work to cast their own shadow rather than live in that of their father, or sons who wish to live up to their father’s ideal. Daughters who hate their mothers, women who fall for ridiculous men, and men who devote themselves to causes while pining for women. We’ve heard it all before, and though most of it has become stagnant, we still love them.

Because they speak to us, at a fundamental level.

They spill out, in words, the lives that we wish we had. Not because they’re better than our own, but because they’re predictable, and therefore safe. We don’t have to work too hard to feel empathy for the man trying to survive war long enough to get home to his children, or feel anger toward the monolithic and obvious villain who wishes to kill our protagonist.

I’m a fan of these stories, as long as they are done well. We all are, which is why they continue to be told to us. I prefer the grim, stark flavours, though, more than most people. Horror, harsh reality, brutal ‘true’ fiction– these are what I crave. Monsters in the night, seeking to shatter my bones and feast on the flesh of my organs, never mind that they are all metaphors for our own existence.

But most of these have grown old, as well. We have been frightening ourselves with tales of beasts and fiends for as long as we have had language. Even babies, with only a tenuous grasp on social dynamics, will scare each other for fun, and delight in doing so.

There are any number of monsters to encounter in book, film, and television. But they all tend to follow certain paths. I’ll deal with the four classics, to which all others can be tied, albeit some only marginally. These are the Vampire, the Beast, the Golem, and the Zombie.

Of the four, the Zombie is my favourite, and I will save that for last. The Vampire is the monster that used to be us, and now feeds on us without us being aware of it. The Vampire is sensual, driven by lust and desire. It is, at first glance, everything we wish to be. Immortal, intelligent, and powerful– it holds us enthralled because we are in love with it, and horrified by our own attraction. They feel nothing but contempt for us, as lesser beings or invaders, yet they are, ultimately, completely dependent upon us. Vampires, obviously, fall into this category, as do demons and devils of almost any sort. Ghosts and spirits also fall into this category. The Vampire lends itself to introspective stories of love and passion, and it stands in place of our own failings to express our desires openly.

The Beast is a twisted, monolithic monster, akin to an animal than human. It is the oldest of the monsters, because every sound on the African savannah was a Beast, a slavering, hungry monster that, if you were not careful, would rend you limb from limb. It is the most outwardly frightening of the four, because it is all strength and fang, hunger and instinct. You cannot reason with the Beast, nor can you hope to survive if it chooses you as its next meal. Werewolves are the most obvious Beasts, but anything that hunts humans with an animal’s drive and purpose fits here, as well. The Beast is our fear made flesh, and is the method by which we manufacture our heroes. For what better way to prove oneself a warrior than to slay a dragon?

The Golem is a manufactured threat. One that we have created ourselves, in our desire to better our condition or to simply prove that whatever God can do, we can do just as well, thank you very much. The Golem is often created as an extreme solution to a mundane problem, and quickly gets out of hand. It is the representation of our hubris, and our desire to push the boundaries of nature and science, simply because we can. The most obvious example is the monster in Frankenstein, but the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park would fit here as well. The Golem is a warning against scientific advancement, and it saddens me that in this day and age we still see it as often as we do.

Now, onto the Zombie. The dead, risen. This is a fear as old as mankind, that they who have died will rise again, and seek us out. It is the extension of humanity’s instinctive repulsion of necrotic flesh, and instinct which served the purpose of keeping us, as a species, alive. The Zombie has evolved over the ages, however, and though it’s basic form remains the same– a dead body rising and moving about as if alive– the underlying meaning to this has changed dramatically. The Zombie is ourselves, at our most basic. Romero started the trend, but every Zombie story since has continued it. Without external forces pressuring us, without other people to see what we do and approve or disapprove of our behaviour, we would descend into our most basic instincts. Feed, and move on; feed, and move on. The Zombie story is one of reproach, and one of warning, as well. Better yourself, lest you devolve into a pure consumer. A consumer of goods, of food, of yourself.

Now, taking these four examples, I’m going to get a little personal here. I used to love vampire movies, and, given the choice, I would gladly become a vampire myself. They’re just damn cool. But that’s the problem with the vampire story, now. It’s all ‘hey, I’m a vampire, I’m so cool’. Don’t even get me started on Stephanie Meyer. The Beast story is always the same. Horrifying beast, professionals being played by inappropriately cast actors, most of whom you know will die the first time you see them on screen. A plucky few who live to the end, make improbable leaps of logic, and come out on top, supposedly as better people. The Golem story is Jurassic Park, as mentioned, a thinly veiled warning about the controversial scientific discovery of the day.

But the Zombie story, that never gets old. Because, if the storyteller has even the slightest idea what he (or she) is doing, the Zombie story is not about the monster at all. In fact, you rarely need to see them around. The Zombie story is about people. It’s about humanity, and dealing with a mind-boggling crisis on the fly. It’s about survival, and continuing on in the face of enormous stresses. Yes, these always go the same way, as well; I’m not denying that. But that path is so interesting that it doesn’t matter that we’ve walked it so many times. It’s fascinating to see ourselves– and we are seeing ourselves– crumble under that pressure, and come out the other side. We have all thought about what we would do if the Zombie story was real. Some of us have a plan on what to do when it comes– myself included. We all think we could handle it, and we can empathize with the characters we encounter, and even though we know it’s coming, we feel sad when some of them don’t make it. We don’t need to see the monsters at all. The threat is enough, just to fuel the human story that follows.

I have been playing video games for a very long time. I started playing Pong on the Intellivision. I’ve played video games in all formats, on all consoles, and in all genres.

I have done a lot of things in games. I have been a saviour and a destroyer. I have won World War II countless times. I have single-handedly saved the known universe, and also destroyed it. I have saved the princess, and I have executed her.

I have twisted the head from a god’s shoulders, and used it as a grisly, but effective, flashlight.

I have baked the perfect pie.

Suffice it to say, I’m a pretty big fan of the medium.

The Call of Duty series is, for me and for many others, the pinnacle of the first-person shooter genre. And there is a new one out, two weeks ago. Now, the previous installment, Modern Warfare 2, is considered the cadillac of the CoD series, and rightly so. It is near-perfect. The new installment, Black Ops, however, is shiny and new.

I’ve played through it, and am enjoying the multi-player for the most part. But it doesn’t hold up to MW2. I think the reason for it is that Black Ops feels like a game, where MW2 was completely immersive. I didn’t depress a shoulder button to trigger a reaction on screen, I pulled the trigger of my rifle. That’s missing from Black Ops.

That being said, I discovered something last night. One of the attachments you can get on some weapons in the multi-player portion of the game is an underbarrell flame thrower. I used one in the campaign, and it was fun, but I discovered that it holds an entirely new fascination for me now.

As mentioned, I have done, in games, pretty much everything there is to do. But there are few things that give me a greater sense of satisfaction and grim pleasure than setting another human being on fire. Even if it is virtual.

I don’t know what that says about me, really. But in the campaign, the victim was AI. It wasn’t real. In multi-player, though, there is another person controlling that 3D model, and I know they are sitting there cursing in panic as their world turns to flame.

I encountered a room last night with three enemy players in it. None were looking at me. I calmly switched to my flamethrower attachment, and set their entire world ablaze. I could see by the reactions of the models that the other players panicked, and I couldn’t help but laugh. Not at the ridiculousness of their fear, but at the fact that I had just set three people on fire.

Good times.

I don’t really like people, as a whole. Human meatsacks annoy me to no end, and it is generally only a few individuals that I actually enjoy spending time with.

I don’t know if this is obvious in the way I carry myself or not, but it works out that most people don’t talk to me. Which is fine. Keep your inanities to yourself, thank you very much. I don’t care that your kids are growing up. That’s what they do. And yes, I know it’s a nice day, I’m out in it too.

Casual conversation with strangers baffles me. I can’t imagine striking up a conversation with a complete stranger, just for the sake of conversation. What could you possibly have to talk about? What if that other person turns out to be an idiot? Then you’re stuck in a conversation with an idiot, and no way to get out of it gracefully.

When I was about ten years old, my mother started dating the second man she would marry. He is a wonderful man, and he is perfect for my mother. As a child, I idolised him. He was funny and wise, and worked on interesting things. He drove, and still drives, a transfer truck, and he would take me with him on runs in the summer. For a ten year old boy, this is the greatest adventure in the world.

My step-father has a gift. He can talk to anybody. He can set anybody at their ease, and wile away hours of idle time in pointless conversation. And he does it in such a way that you don’t even really see it coming. You could be planning to sit and read a book for three hours, but he sits down next to you and you find yourself chatting away contentedly for the entire time.

It’s amazing.

I’ve seen him do it. I’ve watched the man walk up to old women and have them laughing uncontrollably. I’ve seen him sit down next to bikers in their cuttes, and slide himself into the conversation with absolutely no effort at all. He is easy to talk to, and loves to do it.

Seeing him do this as a child, it seemed natural to me that I would do the same as I grew older. And for a while, I tried. I struck up conversations with strangers in stores, on the street, wherever I could find them. But I quickly found out that most people are boring as hell, if not outright offensive to speak with.

They smell, and they find the most ridiculous things interesting. Idle conversation is a mystery to me, and why anyone would want to spend time with people they don’t know, as opposed to doing something constructive with their time, is something I simply don’t understand. So I stopped, and most people stopped striking up random conversations with me, as well.

But the odd one still tries. Even now, and it infuriates me. It should be obvious by the notebook I am scribbling in, or the book I am reading, or whatever solo activity I am engaged in at the time, that I do not want to talk. If that doesn’t do it, the permanent scowl on my face should do the trick. Mostly, it’s the crazies who try anyway. The ones who have no one to talk to, and I try to be polite with them. They’re just trying to get by, and that’s fine. You can easily say a few meaningless words to them about the weather as you pass by, and they move on.

But when I’m sitting in a chair, waiting for the Weenit to finish her dance class, and I have two notebooks open and being worked in, and a book in my lap open to the page I’m reading, and I just get off the phone, don’t talk to me. This is not a perfect time to ask me what kind of phone I have. The answer is I have the kind of phone that lets me have conversations with people who are not in the room. Now fuck off, and let me get back to ignoring all of you. This is not a good moment to ask me about my day. I work nights, and I am awake before noon. I look tired and pissed off. You should be able to tell what kind of day I’m having with a single look.

But some people don’t get it, and want to try anyway. I imagine my step-father would be the same, but very few people have his gift, and can’t put me at ease and draw me into a conversation with little to no effort. You’re not that good, so please don’t try. You’re just going to make me angry, and you’re not going to get anything out of it.

It’s annoying, at the very least.

I am an atheist. Technically, I am an explicit hard atheist. What this means is that I know that there is no god. I know it completely and with absolute certainty. The same way that a pastor knows with absolute certainty that there is one.

I cannot prove it, and neither can he. But I know it. If I was out walking one day, and heard a blast of trumpets from overhead, and looked up to see the clouds part and release a choir of angels, and god’s hand descended from the sky in a beam of light to slap me across the face as proof of his existence, I still wouldn’t believe. I’d be inducing vomiting to speed up the purging of whatever hallucinogen was in my system.

Now, while television and film have been expanding their boundaries of what is taboo quite a lot lately, the big sticking point is faith, and the existence of god.

Sure, they make the effort, and at first glance it would seem that they embrace both sides of the argument equally, and try not to influence anybody. But see if this plot line seems familiar:

A tragedy strikes a small group of friends. They band together to face it, and it is revealed that one of them, the one most directly affected, is an atheist. While the others are praying for him/her, he asks them not to, and turns to science to rectify the situation. The others are horrified, and it starts to break the group dynamic. Eventually, one of the friends convince the atheist to join him/her at church, or temple, or wherever. At some sort of gathering of the faithful.

The agreement is made, and the atheist joins the gathering with a cynical air. But the power of faith strikes him/her, and they suddenly open up their eyes just a little bit. Not to god, that would be too far (though I have seen that happen), but to faith. Suddenly, whatever tragedy happened, and is still ongoing, starts getting better.

Now, nothing is implicitly stated here. No one comes right out and says that it was the power of faith that fixed the issue. But it’s pretty heavily implied. That plot line up there is pretty much how it always goes. You never see the opposite path. You never see somebody turn to prayer, only to be shown the power of science and suddenly have a change of heart. That would be offensive.

But here’s the thing. If it’s offensive one way, it’s offensive the other. No, nobody comes right out and says that prayer woke him up from his coma, but that’s the lesson we’re supposed to take from it.

Faith is, by it’s very definition, belief in something that is unprovable. You may have faith in god up in heaven, and that he is looking down on you to keep you safe. You may have faith in the invisible pink unicorn (may her hooves never be shod). I have faith that we’re alone, no gods up above, and nothing after this life.

Why is it that only one of those three is acceptable for television? A character who shares that faith in god is okay. A character who shares one of the other two needs to be convinced otherwise. It’s offensive, and infuriating.