personal reflection

Chris Knight's avatar

Today is Election Day here in the United States. As it’s often being called, “the mid-terms”. Because it’s coming at the halfway point in the four-year term of the president.

I’ve never liked calling these elections “mid-terms”. Every election is supposed to be of grave import, not just those that might swing political power away from or (more rarely) toward whoever the President of the United States is. But for most of this country’s history we have made the president the focal point of American temporal presence. The person most empowered to define the country’s identity. And barring some drastic dislodgment from so-called conventional wisdom, that does not look to change anytime soon.

I’ve been asked quite a few times about what I think about this year’s elections. That I’m in South Carolina has made some especially interested, given the U.S. Senate race here.

What do I think is going ...

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Many years ago, during a particularly dark period of my life,  I wrote a one-scene play.  It was one of a number of works that I felt inspired to create.  Thankfully I seem to have come out of that melancholy for good, but there will forever be a mark on my soul from that time.  I like to think that what I’ve done since has been, for lack of a better term, “happier”.

So, about this play…

It’s a single scene.  Involving a man and a woman.  And they come to have a heated discussion involving another woman.  All throughout the play you’re wondering “who are these people?  What are they talking about?  Does this involve an affair that he’s been caught in?”

Finally, in the last moments of the play, comes the big reveal.  The object of their conversation is a woman who is about to be executed and ...

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Yesterday I shared an excerpt from my memoir Keeping the Tryst, from the end of chapter 37.  That excerpt dealt with my life on September 10th, 2001.  And the last thing that I did before falling asleep late that night was to thank God for all of the good that He had brought into my life.  If the previous several months could have been that good, I had no doubt that the rest of my life could be just as amazing.  I was 27 years old, with everything ahead of him.  I was in love, I had a good job, I was writing for publication on a daily basis.  And on the night of September 10th I had started writing the script for my very first movie.

My eyes closed, and I was looking forward to another day of being grateful.

Here is another excerpt.  The final part of ...

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The following is an excerpt from my memoir Keeping the Tryst.  It appears just before the end of chapter 37.

~


September 10, 2001…

That night I was scheduled to work. And there were three things that I was eager to do when I got home…

The first was to call Lisa.

Secondly, I wanted to start work on writing the script for the movie.  Even though I had no grasp whatsoever of crafting a screenplay.

Finally, it was a big night for TheForce.net staff.  We would be up all evening getting a bunch of stories about the Episode I DVD release ready to publish at midnight Pacific Time.

Lisa and I talked for a bit, then I threw a pizza into the oven and while that was cooking I started writing the first lines of what I was calling “Sithery”.  It seemed as good a working title ...

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This weekend in Atlanta is the annual Dragon Con.  I’m remembering the first time I went to that.

It was another Labor Day weekend, twenty-five years ago.  The night before it started, my Star Wars website TheForce.net published an interview that I did with “Weird Al” Yankovic.  I left my apartment in Asheville the next day and drove three hours to my girlfriend’s place at University of Georgia.  We got to Atlanta and walked around Dragon Con a bit, then we hooked up with another TheForce.net staffer named Alena.  We wound up having dinner along with a few Dragon Con guests (the actress who played Vasquez in the movie Aliens was a few spots down the table from us).  Alena was a really sweet young lady, she was host of the site’s new weekly video feature.  We then went to a little gathering where among other people were Peter Mayhew ...

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This past weekend was a bittersweet one for me.

As of five days ago I am the owner of a brand new car.  It’s the third Toyota Corolla that I’ve driven and it’s the very first car that I’ve gotten on my own.  All the others that’s have come over the course of my life I’ve had help with or co-owned.  This new one is all mine.  And when I have time I’m going to properly go through the owner’s manual and familiarize myself with all the gizmos and do-dads that are part of a modern automobile.  I regret to say that my father would be mighty upset at me, that I’ve bought a vehicle so apparently overly-laden with technology.  Dad hated computers and he especially hated computers in cars and trucks.  I can still hear him now: “A car only needs gas, air and electricity, it don’t need no
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This is the first photograph that was ever taken of me.  A few hours after I was born on March 31st, 1974.

 

A lot of people over the years have remarked that I was the brightest and most alert baby that they had ever seen.  That they had never beheld a newborn who had a smile like that.  One person told me that even then it was like I was plotting mischief upon an unsuspecting world.

Keep that photo in mind while I openly ponder some recent developments.

A few days ago Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey signed legislation that radically expands abortion in that state.  It is now perfectly legal to kill an absolutely normal and healthy baby in the womb immediately before it would be naturally delivered.

Massachusetts is now the twelfth state as well as Washington D.C. that allows abortion without limits.

I used to believe that ...

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When you have been a medical professional, there are a lot of things that you’ll never be able to unsee.

Things like severe anal lacerations.

Things like fungus in places where it should not be.

Things like genital warts and sores.

Things like diseases such as hepatitis, monkeypox, and full-bore AIDS.

Things like balls, beads, and light bulbs shoved up into a person’s large intestine.

Things like cancers that a normal person would usually be able to avoid having.

Things like “meth mouth” stemming from selling one’s body.

Things like walking corpses barely able to stand.

Things like depression, of a kind for which there is no medication to alleviate.

Things like fights between two people that go far beyond the typical domestic disturbance.

Things like malnourishment.

Things like slashed wrists and deliberate drug overdose.

Things like suicide attempts that more often than not succeed.

Having seen such tragedies, too ...

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What if the Palpatine we saw in Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker was not the “real” Palpatine at all?  What if he was some kind of replica without an iota of Palpatine/Sidious’s spirit whatsoever?

There is precedent for such a notion.

In Timothy Zahn’s two-part “Hand of Thrawn” novel duology from the late Nineties, the galaxy hears whispers about the return of Grand Admiral Thrawn.  Thrawn in the still-venerable expanded universe, you may recall, was killed toward the end of The Last Command.  The galaxy thought he was dead.  But he prophesied that he would return in ten years’ time if he ever was thought to have died.

Long story short, it turns out that at Thrawn’s hidden fortress (see what I did there?) in the Unknown Regions, the grand admiral had prepared a clone of himself.  It had been in stasis all that time.  Just waiting ...

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My memoir Keeping the Tryst has been getting around some.  I confess, its biggest audience seems to be composed of people who have known me, friends and family.  It’s gotten some other purchases, though it’s far from being a “bestseller”.  Still, I’ve been happy.  And one never knows how far a book will get in the larger scheme of things.  A lot of books started out selling small but went on to bigger things.

One of the most consistent remarks that I’ve gotten about Keeping the Tryst has been about my memory.  This book covers half a century of the lifetime of an American boy, and it does so in at times almost microscopic detail.  As I said in the first chapter, I have no idea how it is that I remember some things so vividly and clearly.  It just “is”.  Sometimes I feel like Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist
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