26 February 1998: Not Too Mindful

Thursday, 26 February 1998:

Not Too Mindful

You may have noticed that I don't get sick very often. Indeed, in the almost-four years I've been at my job I've only taken six sick days. But it seems like I always catch something in the spring, when it first gets warm. Well, it's up in the 50s this week - the radio says it's 60 today! - and I'm sick.

It's nothing serious - a cold, with a sore throat. But I know from past experience that taking some time off as soon as this hits helps me get over it faster. Plus it might help me be a little less contagious. It's always a big moral struggle for me to take sick days, though. Especially now, when I'm rather enjoying what I'm doing at work.

So I called in sick, read the newspaper, and then went back to bed. Slept until around 11:30, and then I got up and started puttering around on-line. I finally did put in my contacts and showered, but I never did get dressed!

Last night at the comics shop I made some more progress in completing my Avengers collection (well, of the first 200 issues, anyway). I picked up eight issues from the late 60s/early 70s for $50.00, which leaves me with about 16 left to buy. My collection is actually somewhat less valuable than you'd think, though, since I have the first 77 issues in reprint form - three hardcovers, plus 47 issues of Marvel's 1970s reprint series. I'm just interested in the stories, not in investing.

New comics I picked up included the second issue of Babylon 5: In Valen's Name, which is somewhat cheesier than the first part, featuring absolutely terrible dialogue by Peter David for a bunch of mysterious aliens. Yuck. Also the new Avengers with more gorgeous George Perez art, and the new JLA. And the third issue of Concrete: Strange Armor, which re-tells his origin, and is not anywhere near as good as the first telling, back in issues #3-4 of the original series. Chadwick hasn't really done a great Concrete story since Fragile Creature a few years ago, so it might be time to bail out of this saga.

I had a pretty mindless afternoon and evening, but being sick I didn't feel like doing anything mindful.

I watched two (two!) episodes of Scooby Doo on The Cartoon Network. They were exactly as ridiculous as I'd expected them to be, which made them kind of entertaining. I've probably gotten that out of my system for 5 years now.

Then I edited the commercials out of yesterday's Babylon 5 episodes. The re-run, "And Now For A Word", is better than I'd remembered. It was the first time we ever really saw combat between the Narn and Centauri, but it mostly succeeds because of the format of a TV show within a TV show. The new episode, "Strange Relations", was a pretty good one, although the entire Bester sequence seemed somehow unnecessary; just a delaying action before the real "fun" begins. Straczynski is writing some really ludicrous dialogue for Byron, but Lochley is starting to seem like more of a real person.

I'm still not sure I trust her, though.

B5's fifth season is doing some good (although not-entirely-intended, I suspect) exploration of interpersonal negotiation in human (well, western) social structures. Sure, there's the head-butting of Lochley and Garibaldi, but the matter of who has authority over what, who has the final say, and how things get worked out when people on the same "side" are judging a situation using very different value systems.

Myself, I prefer to work within systems where authority (if not responsibility) is clearly vested in certain individuals, and it frustrates me when that authority isn't exercised when it ought to be. A friend of mine once said that he's never shy about stepping in when he perceives a power vacuum that needs filling. Unfortunately, I am, and I wish I weren't.

I also watched my new (used) videotape of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which I've always thought was an underrated film. Not greatly underrated, mind you, but certainly better than movies The Voyage Home, The Final Frontier and The Undiscovered Country (all of which, frankly, sucked). There's a decent story in there somewhere, but unfortunately it wouldn't involve Voyager 6 or transcendental machine organisms, which this movie does. And the special effects are gorgeous in many places. And the strange stiffness of the sets, dialogue and acting can almost be counted an asset, as it adds to the alien feel of the whole thing. (I suspect that this stiffness is primarily due to the directing, since it very clearly is trying very hard to be 2001, which is itself a very stiff movie.)

It's also interesting to see the bit parts with Walter Koenig as Chekov; he infuses a little more life into his few lines than many other actors, and I wonder if he's been underrated as an actor. Certainly he's done a fine job in Babylon 5 as Bester.

It occurs to me that a good 24th-century Star Trek story (okay, maybe "good" is too strong a word) might involve the Borg finding a mysterious world at the edge of the galaxy, and it turning out to be V'Ger's home world. Seeing the Borg assimilated by something clearly millions of times more powerful than themselves would be amusing.

I also watched the last 40 minutes or so of my tape of The Shawshank Redemption, one of my favorite films. One of the big controversies here in Wisconsin involves paroling prisoners, especially sex offenders. There's a law on the books which allows the state to lock up people profiled as chronic sex offenders (likely to commit further crimes) indefinitely, but ironically the man for which this law was written was recently judged not to be such a risk and has been paroled to a halfway house in Madison. Needless to say, this has caused a lot of controversy.

Our society doesn't deal with criminals well. I think our laws generally handle criminals fairly well (with certain major exceptions; for instance, I think our maniac anti-drug policies are absolutely insane), but the social consciousness doesn't handle them so well. The concept of "parole" is really despised these days, it seem, to the point that Wisconsin is trying to pass a "truth in sentencing" law, which would essentially eliminate parole and require a convict to serve his full sentence. Which would no doubt throw sentencing procedures into complete chaos, as I suspect many criminals would then receive much lighter sentences than they do now.

I think people generally need to keep in mind that imprisonment is not a form of revenge. People are happy to say things like "this won't bring so-and-so back" or, "so-and-so is free, while his victim is dead; what kind of justice is this?" Justice is not retribution. Good justice involves dealing with the people who are alive, now. As Morgan Freeman's character says in Shawshank, there's not a moment that goes by that he doesn't feel regret for what he's done, and he wishes he could talk to the stupid kid he was and put some sense into him. The man he killed is dead, and maybe his family is still hurt by that, but for some there comes a point where there's nothing to be gained except revenge by keeping a man locked up.

The real problem is telling which men are ready for parole and which are not. That's hard, maybe impossible. But the way we're going now, we're making it harder and harder for us ever to be able to solve that problem.

I developed a mild headache during the later part of the day, and maybe a touch of fever. Although usually a fever prevents me from regulating my body temperature, so I feel alternately hot, then cold. Today I just felt hot, which may have been due to lying on the couch for 6 hours in my heavy bathrobe under a blanket in a nicely warmed apartment with all the lights on. Y'think?

So now I'm off to bed to try to sleep most of the rest of this off. Ta-ta!

Michael Rawdon (Contact)