Blogstones (2)

So this is the 500th post I’ve made on the blog. If you know me well enough to be familiar with my fascination (or fixation) on numbers and metrics and such, you must understand how it killed me to not manage the feat of getting this post up on Sunday, the actual 2-year anniversary of this endeavor, and thereby make one big hoohaw out of the whole deal. I had my chance, in that I was well aware how close I was to 500 posts when August 1st rolled around, and I also knew the bloggiversary was near the end of the month. With a couple more Saturday Grab Bags or Sunday Specials or even a double-posting day or two over the course of the month, I could have had 499 posts in the archives by the time this past Sunday dawned. But it never quite came together; between visiting family members and defective dishwashers and water remediation and natural disasters, it has been quite the frenzied late summer.

It’s been quite the couple of years, though, really. When I started the blog I was living in a townhouse with my wife and our nearly-one-year-old son and our two cats and one dog, I took the bus to the Metro to get to work at my corporate HQ, and I wasn’t quite sure how long I’d last under the self-imposed demands of yammering out a bit of text almost every day. Now there’s a bigger house, one of the cats passed on and a new kitten has been taken in, joining the thoroughly absurd backup dog we also acquired, the little guy is about to turn 3 and has a little sister who’s almost 5 months old, I never have to drive on I66 except by choice, I’ve relocated between several desks and from one building to another to another (and oddly enough am now working a block down and across the street from corporate HQ) and these quotidian dispatches show no signs of letting up any time soon. In fact I am once again thinking up potential recurring features to keep things interesting, but those will have to wait for the fullness of time before I say too much more about them. Life does keep keeping on, and has a tendency to interrupt my plans pretty regularly (though obviously I’m hardly the first person to ever observe the phenomenon).

Perhaps in August of 2013 I will have my wits about me enough to align the 1000th post with the four-year anniversary of the blog. We shall see.

Tuesday Grab Bag o’ Bibliophilia

It took me a long, long time to get home last Tuesday. (Because of the earthquake. So two disasters ago, and I’m just getting around to it now. But anyway.) I left the office at the usual time after checking the VRE website and finding that trains would be running a little late. When I got to the platform it was crowded and steadily got more and moreso as people continued to arrive but no trains showed up to carry off the people who were already there. When the 3:57 pm train pulled in about 4:30, I did my level best to get on but it was already overflowing with riders and I wasn't close enough to the front of the mob to push myself through the doors. I had to wait for the next train, which on the one hand at least was an empty train that started at my station instead of two stops further up the line, but on the other hand didn't arrive until close to 6.

Anyway, the point is I was standing on the platform for about two hours and spent most of it reading The Grapes of Wrath. And at one point, perhaps inspired by the all-in-this-together spirit that commuters can sometimes develop during long periods of inconvenience brought on by natural disasters (is it weird that I recognize that as a recurring thing at this point in my life?), a man sitting on a bench near where I was standing said to me, "It is so good to see that people are still reading Steinbeck." As far as I could tell this was completely sincere on his part, like he was the kind of person who every day observes his fellow commuters reading the dumbed-down Express version of the Washington Post or Twilight novels or just kind of zoning out with their iDeviceOfChoice and laments the state of civilization. And we all know I read more than a little genre trash while I commute, but I still allowed myself to be inordinately pleased by the implied praise this random fellow rail-rider was granting me, however sanctimonious a place it might have originated. I smiled with a little aw-shucks and said "I feel like I'm a bit late catching up with this one, honestly" and he just replied "That's great, that's great."

At the beginning of the year I resolved to read 12 classics during 2012, and Grapes of Wrath is one of them, and I didn't do it to impress anybody but ... well if someone has their faith in western civilization restored an iota by me carrying around Steinbeck, I think that's not a bad thing at all.

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Oh, incidentally, The Grapes of Wrath is pretty damn amazing. Also pretty damn depressing. Still should be required reading.

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So if I'm reading classics does that mean that Beach Books on a Bus is over for the year? Not exactly. Even in high school I was exactly the kind of English-is-my-favorite-class nerd who would read ahead on the syllabus if at all possible. And it was very possible, since my girlfriend was a year ahead of me and the Honors English teachers rarely changed syllabi, so I knew eveyr summer what books would be covered the coming year. I’m pretty sure I read Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies at the beach between freshman and sophomore year. So, in general, the Western canon still feels like beach reading to me.

That said, though, BBB is definitely winding down. After I finished Grapes of Wrath I borrowed a book from a friend on his recommendation, and it’s kind of a time-tossed love story which may or may not require a belief in reincarnation and almost certainly owes a great debt to The Divine Comedy. (Which I have never read, but might very well make it onto my reading list soon, or possibly get rolled into next year’s BBB.) It’s the right feel, but after I finish it September will no doubt be upon us and I don’t have another book lined up next in the queue right now. On the one hand that means I will probably scramble for just about anything I can get my hands on. On the other hand, September is so inherently back-to-schoolish, which leads me inexorably back towards the classics yet again. Given the aforementioned 12-classics-in-2011 resolution, I should already have 8 checked off. The completed list currently stands at 6, so I’ve got some catching up to do and September feels like an optimal time to do it. I might even venture back to the town library, where fun and trashy stuff (that I haven’t already read) is harder to find but the classics are usually there for the taking.

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But meanwhile … NPR.org recently (in the last month or so) held an on-line vote for the Top 100 Greatest Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books. I voted, but not before I snagged myself an electronic copy of the ballot, which had about 237 titles on it to be narrowed down to the century mark. I also went back through the archives and found some of the previous summer reading vote results, including the Top 100 Greatest Thrillers and Top 100 Beach Reads. Partly I did that to see how many of them I had already read, and partly to get ideas for the next time I’m cruising the aisles of the used book store.

The Thrillers list surprised me because I had only read 15 entries, despite having nothing against the genre at all (I mean, duh). But apparently there are a lot of really popular authors out there who just aren’t my cup of tea, and who are very prolific. There was no restriction on how many times an author could appear on a list, so whole swaths were outside my usual reference points. Lots of Tom Clancy; I read The Hunt For Red October in high school and never felt the urge to dig any deeper. The complete works of Dan Brown; I read one page of one of his books lying on someone else’s desk once and just backed away quietly, shaking my head. A few Ian Flemings; I’ve never read a Bond book, spoiled by the movies I suppose. More than a few Michael Chrichton; meh, I say. I did, however, pretty much run the table on the Stephen King thrillers that made the grade, so there’s that.

The Beach Reads were my best showing, which at first I thought was odd but I soon realized that since the list was pretty much genre-agnostic and simply admitted anything that constituted a good read, it’s pretty close to my own eclectic tastes anyway. 41 out of those 100 I’ve already checked off. Some of the other 59 I’ve been meaning to get around to, and some I never will. But I have some good fodder for next year’s BBB.

I had read 48 of the 237 nominees in sci-fi/fantasy and apparently I mostly skipped the right ones because when that was cut down to the top 100 my already-read number only dropped to 32. And really, that’s a bit misleading because given the nature of sci-fi and fantasy and its tendency towards the epic, the saga, and the multi-volume duodecology, many of the entries on the ballot and the final list were a single line encompassing an entire series of books, like Dune or Foundation or The Dark Tower. I haven’t quite managed to find the time yet for the task of figuring out exactly how many discrete books you would have to read to get through the entire Top 100 of books-n-series, and by comparison how many of those I’ve already read (I’m sure my ratio still works out somewhere in the neighborhood of 1/3 though).

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I did find it particularly hilarious how the NPR.org comment threads ended up ringing with the howls of outraged book nerds who couldn't believe science-fiction and fantasy had to share a list, when clearly the genres are so VERY, VERY DIFFERENT and a Top 100 should have been established for each one.


Sigh.
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Of course even with all these accessible resources for cheap books and reading recommendations, I’m not sure how long it will be until I make much of a dent in it. Depending on how easy or hard it turns out to be in practice to get some more books in my hands in the very near future, I may end up just DVD-binging on the train for a good chunk of September. I do actually have some books piled up at home but as it happens they are all specifically for my other annual tradition, Spooktoberfest. Highlights this year include the second installment of Guillermo del Toro’s vampire trilogy, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (which kills two birds with one stone as a spooky Classic I’ve never read). Then there’s November and December, but after that …

… despite my obsessive urge to constantly add to the grand total number of books I allegedly have under my belt, I’m noticing more and more lately that I don’t remember a whole lot of the books I read. Maybe I’m just getting old and my brain is getting inelastic and my uptake isn’t quite what it used to be, but whatever the reason it’s kind of a drag. I’m seriously considering making 2012 the Year of the Re-Read and going back through a select number of books a second time in hopes that they’ll sink in a little more deeply. And there’s a couple of other motivators, as well: I got my wife to read The Name of the Wind this spring but it had been a few years since I read it myself and when she discussed certain segments with me it was maddeningly difficult to summon up the details in my mind. The sequel, The Wise Man’s Fear, comes out in paperback in March and that will be my wife’s signal to read that volume; I should be able to re-read both TNOTW and TWMF by March myself and be much better prepared to talk about it then. I think volume five of A Song of Ice and Fire will be out in paperback next year, too, which is my cue to read that particular sequel, so I also want to fit in a re-read of parts one through four ahead of time as well. And so on – mostly I suppose it’s a lot of brushing up before moving onward in popular fantasy sagas, but hey, that’s kind of my thing.

Aftermaths

For whatever reason, it didn’t occur to me to listen to the radio this morning before I left the house. We live far enough to the west, apparently, that all we saw of Hurricane Irene was one very rainy Saturday. There was a minute or two when the rain was lashing down so hard I thought it would be a brutal overall experience (and it just so happened that I was pulling into the parking lot of a store when said deluge started pounding down, and since I had both of my kids in the car with me I abandoned the errand-in-progress and headed home to hunker down) but that was all it was: a minute or two. We didn’t have any flooding on our property or in town, and the power never went out, and Sunday was cheerily blue-skied enough that I consigned the entire storm event to the past tense. I treated this morning as routinely as any other Monday, got in my car, and headed for the train station. Only when my car stereo came to life in mid-jeremiad of school closings did it dawn on me that (a) the VRE might not be running at all, or might not run all the way in as far east as I needed to go, or might be running at reduced speeds and make me much later than usual for work OR (b) my office might be without power, or the federal government might have give non-essential personnel (of which I am the very definition) the day off due to widespread power outages in the District, &c.

But as it turned out, the VRE was running on-schedule and at-speed, and my office was open and everyone is here, so I am left to conclude that everything worked out for the best. If I had been thinking last night about potential office closings, and obsessively checking for web updates until midnight or whatever, I would have been a lot more crushed to be cubicle-bound today. But a momentary “oop?” this morning was not enough to throw my entire Monday into upheaval.

As I said, we got off lucky, moreso than my folks apparently did. My father didn’t have any flooding or house damage, lost power for a little bit, but mainly had to contend with a massive old growth tree that fell squarely across his driveway. Insert obligatory joke about how he insists on owning an SUV for lifestyle reasons but even an over-accessorized light truck can’t help you drive over a three-foot-thick bole in your direct path. Still, that’s not the worst of all possible outcomes, either. My mother on the other hand, poor woman, just recently took up residence, along with my step-father of course, with his 92-year-old mother in New Jersey, and that house is in a very low-lying area near the Raritan River which flooded last time a big hurricane came all the way up the East Coast (’99 or so) and, sure enough, flooded again late Saturday night/early Sunday morning. They all had plenty of warning to evacuate and my mom’s sister-in-law had made a block of hotel reservations a few towns away (presumably on higher, drier ground) so that they would have someplace to evacuate to, if it came to that (which it did). And as mom was telling me when I spoke to her, they’ve rebuilt her mother-in-law’s house after a flood before and they will do it again, so the sense of confusion and uncertainty isn’t terrible this time. Not for my mom, at any rate; my step-father’s poor mother is starting to lose her mental faculties a bit in her advanced age at this point, so she’s been a bit of handful to take care of and repeatedly explain why they can’t go back to the (half-submerged) house just yet.

So everyone’s OK, some of us are already back to normal and some of us have a ways to go yet, but we’re OK. Thus I will end on a shot of professional wrestler Greg “Hurricane” Helms, whom I dressed up as once for a non-Halloween costume party because he has a Green Lantern tattoo and that amuses me.

Blogstones (1)

Technically, yesterday - August 28th - was the two-year anniversary of this here blog. I had kind of thought I might do a lot of blogging this weekend to commemorate the occasion, but that ended up not happening. Hurricanes and all, you know how it goes.


I didn't mark the first anniversary of the blog last year because it fell in the middle of a week which my family and I spent down in the Outer Banks on vacation. If I had let it pass without comment this year, then that would have essentially established non-recognition as a tradition forevermore, and I don't think I want to set that precedent.

So maybe next year there will be a bigger to-do. For now I just wanted to say hey, how about that, and thanks to anyone and everyone who's been reading for any span since 2009.

Five Technological Innovations I Resist

Holy crap, a Five Things post? For reals? For very reals.

On the long continuum between “Luddite” and “hyper-early adopter” I am definitely much closer to the latter than the former. I like gadgets, I’m pro-progress, and I place great faith in the ability of technological innovations and science in general to improve humanity’s overall lot. Obviously I make my living in a field that could not exist without both computers and the glorious, glorious interwebs. And yet … every so often I find myself realizing that there is some newfangled thingamajig which actually isn’t all that new and has in fact been widely embraced by most of my fellow first-worlders, all the while remaining alien to my personal experience because I just can’t bring myself to get on the bandwagon. I’m honestly at a loss to explain why this happens at all, let alone why certain things strike me as awesome while others leave me cold. Nevertheless, here’s a handful of examples:

1. E-books You would think that given how highly “voracious reader” ranks in my self-conception that any and all delivery mechanisms for the printed word would be dead center in my wheelhouse, but … eh. E-books really, really leave me cold, in an abstractly conceptual way because I’ve never read anything in that format (though I certainly observe them constantly on the train these days). Part of it is no doubt that I really like physical, dead-tree books and I’m having a hard time letting go of that sensory experience. There’s also the fact that I’m a collector and displayer and I like lining up spines on bookshelves so people can see them as they walk through my home, which e-books don’t really allow for. (Now of course I’m having visions of the near future where people hang plasma flatscreens on their den walls which would look like bookshelves with spines of books on them, and you could scroll from side to side as if the infinite shelf were on little ballbearings and then you could hold your personal tablet up to the flatscreen and tap a book’s spine and it would download the contents to your tablet to be read.) I think the real tipping point or me will only come when certain works are only published electronically and impossible to read in any other format. As long as I have a choice between paper pages and an e-reader, though, I seem to prefer things old-school.

2. Audiobooks Do not even get me started on audiobooks, though. What really drives me crazy is people who say “I read ten books this summer!” but that means they interpreted printed characters between the covers of two books, and listened to eight people reciting the contents of eight other books. Doesn’t count, I don’t care how irrational that sounds. Does. Not. Count. This has actually been on my mind a bit lately as I’ve talked to a couple of friends who’ve tried to tempt me into maybe jumping ship from my current job and working with them. All other considerations notwithstanding, both times my long commute came up and my friends pointed out that their offices were significantly closer to my house. But of course, those locations are not really mass-transit accessible. I’d be commuting for less of each day but I’d be responsible for all the driving, and goodbye reading list (and might as well cancel Netflix, too, while I’m at it). In my mind, I could hear the counter-counter-arguments, though: you don’t have to give up on books! You can’t read while you drive but you can listen to audiobooks! NONONONONONO. My brain isn’t wired that way; focusing on reading is a pleasure, but focusing on listening is a chore.


3. Facebook When Facebook started gaining critical mass I was a little bit mystified by it, but only a little. It was touted as a great way to keep in touch with people (even before “social networking” was a widespread-enough term to cover that aspect) but I considered myself already pretty good at keeping in touch with people I actually wanted to keep in touch with. Back in the Paleolithic-tech era I used to write longhand letters to my college friends over the summer, and then once everyone had the internet at home and free web-based e-mail, I figured I was golden. Who would ever need more ease of communication than that? But I also acknowledged that not everyone is predisposed to composing long missives in any format, and for whatever reason super-short e-mails never seemed to catch on as a viable use of the medium. Maybe someday I’ll be able to unpack why if someone e-mailed me and the entire message was “I had spaghetti for dinner!” I would think they were a little weird and a little dumb, but if someone posts their Facebook status as “Havin’ spaghetti for dinner!” it’s not weird at all and in fact 7 people are going to “Like” that. (At least I assume so from my outsider stance.)

The gulf between myself and Facebook is only getting wider as it now actively annoys me in various ways. Every time I am waiting for a webpage to finish loading and I can see that the elements holding up the process are Facebook plug-ins (utterly useless to me) I curse the whole insidious concept. And while I used to possess a certain equanimity of perspective along the lines of “I prefer to keep in touch via e-mail, other people prefer Facebook” I know find myself becoming steadily convinced that other people don’t just prefer Facebook, they use it exclusively. Whenever I e-mail someone and they simply do not respond in any way, I can’t help but wonder if things that don’t originate within Facebook just don’t exist for them at all. And rather than making me want to join up on Facebook myself, this just makes me loathe and resent it more. Which is not terribly productive, I grant, but there it is.

4. GPS Ha, I bet you thought every item on this list was going to have “book” in it somewhere, didn’t you? I’m far less antagonistic towards GPS than I am towards Facebook, but I’ve never gotten around to incorporating it into my life. I suppose I can tie it in loosely to the bibliophile vibe I was working in 1 through 3 above, in that I honestly prefer to go to Google Maps or something and get directions there and print them out on an actual sheet of paper that I will carry in the car. But I readily acknowledge that having an onboard GPS allows for a lot more improvisation and ability to roll with changing plans; like I said, I really can’t find fault with the concept. And in fact I’ve gotten to the point where I expect other people to have them, and harbor very little desire to find myself in situations where I have to rise to the occasion and give someone else directions. One of these years I’ll probably get a car that has a GPS as a standard feature and I’ll wonder how I ever got along so long without it.

5. DVR And finally, an element of modern technologically-enhanced life which I’m only resisting in an effort to abide by some token austerity measures in the household budget. Absolutely no principles at stake on this one; in fact, I actively covet a DVR. But every time I think too deeply about why I want a DVR – so that I can attempt to fit even more broadcast television into my life by recording stuff that’s scheduled inconveniently and watching it on my own timetable – I feel a bit guilty for even thinking that’s a consideration worth my mental energy. Hence I’ll just bury it down here at the bottom of the list and never speak of it again. (Until we inevitably get a DVR, of course.)

Three feet of perspective

A couple of quick Little Guy Anecdotes I wanted to share, in reverse chronological order:

When my family left our house on Sunday morning this past weekend, the good-byes of course included a lot of the requisite assurances that we’d all see each other soon and keep in touch in the meantime and so on, which led my wife to point out that we really should have taken advantage earlier in the weekend of my sister’s presence, since she is so completely a digital native and could have helped us finally hook up our computer to Skype. This proceeded to delay the departure for a scant number of minutes as they hooked up Skype in record time.

It seemed reasonable to test out the Skype connection but at that point it wasn’t possible to call my dad with it, since they had just left and would be on the road for six or eight more hours, so we called my Little Bro. By which I mean I called him on his cell phone with my cell phone and told him to get online so we could try out the Skyping. It worked! And at the outset we had my entire four-person family crowded into the webcam’s field of view, while my brother and his wife were also on screen. A lot of that early part of the conversation was given over to explaining to the little guy how he could see himself in the smaller window on the computer screen but also (more importantly) see his uncle and aunt in the bigger window. And at one point my brother observed to his nephew “You know, when your dad and I were kids, you couldn’t see people when you called them. Except in science fiction movies.”


Which I thought was a trenchant enough observation, but of course it had absolutely no impact on the little guy whatsoever. Between encountering and learning about brand new ideas every day and still having a shaky-at-best grasp on subtle time-space continuum components like “history” and “change” I don’t think the little guy is quite ready to appreciate notions of how things used to be like THAT but now they’re like THIS. In fact he pretty quickly got bored of the video-call and wandered off, not long after he had tried to show a new toy to his uncle and aunt by holding it up one millimeter away from the webcam lens.

I don’t mean to say that the little guy isn’t able to discern subtle distinctions at all, however. (Cue segue to anecdote #2) On Saturday night we had barbecued chicken, which was prepared in about the simplest manner possible that could still technically be classified as “cooking”: I dumped raw chicken breasts in a bowl and dumped most of a bottle of store-bought barbecue sauce on them, swirled it around to cover them all more or less evenly, threw them on the grill, flipped them a few times, and served. I also put the barbecue sauce bottle on the dinner table, for anyone who wanted to augment the flavors that had been mostly charred and cooked off. My wife asked the little guy if he wanted some ketchup for his, and I said “Or you could have barbecue sauce. Which is just like ketchup, only BETTER.” That is in fact my true personal opinion on the subject. I am the guy who will specifically get a packet or two of barbecue sauce at McDonald’s whether I’m getting Chicken McNuggets or a Big Mac, because I prefer dipping my fries in the barbecue sauce over ketchup. And I figured there was no harm in sharing this preference with my son, who has a pretty sophisticated palate if I do say so myself. E.g., he eats a lot of the home cooking in which my wife and I tend to lay the garlic on pretty thick. I expected barbecue sauce to be a bit of a revelation for him.

And it was, but not the pleasant kind. He tried it but it pretty thoroughly grossed him out. But endearingly enough, what bothered him more than the flavor which struck his tongue as unpleasant was the idea that he had been led astray by his father’s flagrant falsehoods. “It does NOT taste like ketchup!” he yelled at me, close to tears, after he had finished spitting out a bite of barbecue-sauced food. And then he added the kicker: “Never EVER do that again!” He’s been using that particular corrective here and there lately but it was pretty adorable under the circumstances. Never oversimplify the comparative qualities of one condiment with another again? Never make him try something he’s never eaten before again? I honestly don’t know, but I’ll do my best to stay out of that minefield for a while.

A pretty good ride, so far

Last week I finally finished watching season one of Supernatural on DVD. This of course means that I am jonesing pretty hard for season two, because season one ends on a cliffhanger, as most serialized dramas do these days (read: the 21st century so far). It actually ends on a bit of a double cliffhanger, which is simultaneously enervating and amusing to me.

In the simplest sense the cliffhanger is that the three main monster-hunter characters – Sam, Dean, and their father John – are driving in one car which is t-boned by a tractor trailer at the intersection of two back-country roads. The last shot of the episode is a slow pan through the car over the bloodied, unconscious bodies of the Winchester men, and then upwards to the cab of the big rig, where the driver is sitting stock still, with wide open all-black eyes (the series’ signature for demonic possession). So it’s a classic how-will-they-get-out-of-this-one non-ending, although the tension is greatly diminished by the fact that I am well aware the show keeps going with both Sam and Dean alive and well and is headed into season seven this fall. (Admittedly I don’t know how much longer their father stays in the picture, so his ultimate fate is at least somewhat in doubt.)


But in another sense the real cliffhanger is of the more soap-opera-y type, such as when a character answers the phone at 1:59 on Friday afternoon and says “Oh, hello Doctor, you have the test results?” and you have to wait until Monday to get the answer to the question. Because Supernatural never contented itself with being about a couple of brothers who knew in spite of conventional wisdom that boogeymen were real and traveled around America “hunting things and saving people”. It was about that, but it was also about the mysteries at the heart of why the boys knew there was more to life than conventional wisdom. There’s an early encounter with a paranormal evil that claims the life of their mother and sets the storytelling engines in motion, setting up knowledge of the secret world’s existence and motivation to work against it and pathos and angst all in one fell swoop, plus an arch-enemy in need of a reckoning that the whole season can build to. But for all that, it’s still deeply mysterious. It’s nothing as simple as “I know monsters are real because a monster killed my mom and now I hunt monsters.” There’s a constant suggestion that the monster went after the Winchesters specifically, particularly then-infant Sam, and that Sam is somehow important … and honestly it’s partly there in the episodes themselves in manifestations both subtle and ham-fisted, but partly it’s also in my consciousness because all of my buddies have seen way more episodes of the show than I have and I know there’s lots of stuff about prophecies and War Between Heaven and Hell and Sam’s role in things all coming down the pike. (I love my friends but they are not really spoiler-averse in general conversation.)

The point being that for all of Sam’s asking “Why us? Why me?” all season long, those questions never get answered. The mystery gets fleshed out with more and more information but it never coalesces into anything resembling a deciphered solution. And as I said, that is almost equal parts frustrating and impressive. I’m terribly over-invested in finding out those answers myself, yet I can’t help but admire the way the show’s writers kept things going for 22 episodes on a very slow burn that always felt like incremental progress, and then slammed into the final set of end credits with me twisting on the hook as ever. Five days later I am still in that strange state where I want to know what happens next and what it all means, but I’m enjoying the feeling, especially since at the same time I’m well aware that the payoff may be a big disappointment, whenever I finally do get to the point where they spell out what everything was supposed to mean. (Those revelations often are letdowns, I’ve found.)

Still, it certainly hasn’t been an experience that I’ve regretted spending time and brain-space on. Aside from the mysteries and cliffhangers and mythos-building and things like that, it’s a real reminder of certain other entertainment pleasures of mine. The soundtrack for the show is fantastic, almost entirely 70’s rock that makes me just want to cruise iTunes for hours pulling together a growls’n’distortion epic playlist of my own. And the episodes that spend about 40 seconds dropping another hint about what makes Sam so special and the other 39 minutes and change on the boys fighting the latest random, malevolent ghost remind me of well-played RPGs so much that I find myself making mental notes of how I could turn the urban legends from my own childhood into gaming sessions for my friends, which I haven’t had the opportunity to do in some time but hope to be able to work back toward sometime. And, of course, one of my buddies already has the rulebooks for the licensed Supernatural roleplaying game. Because of course they do.