September 2, 1998

Do you know reality?

It is a most curious aspect of human behavior, the way we make everything true to life. We can read any story, "Beowulf" if you want, and try to understand them as life itself. The story of warriors fighting the evils of Grendel, their camaraderie, their relationship with God, their view of death… all of it we must understand and work into our own view of the world. We do this with every story. With 'Cinderella," we understood that good will always have a happy ending. From there, we read every story, every book, and hope the heroes and the heroines fulfill the fairy tale ending. Their loss DIMINSHES us. We become obsessed with what we all know is UNREAL! But we do it again… humans are a picklely thing.

We hear stories about people we don't now, about those long dead, or those venturing into the future. We crave to learn about them: their struggles, their lives, their triumphs. We shout at them in some form of god-like advice, but they can't hear us. They do not exist. We know that.

But who am I to criticize, for as I write this, I'm watching a favorite movie of mine. "Mr. Destiny" stars James Belushi (who never will live up to the legend of his brother) is a man down-on-his-luck who believes that if he had just hit that home-run in the big high school baseball game, his life would have been better. And in a Capraesque quality, he gets the chance, but learns like Jimmy Stewart that the original life is much better. It's not a great movie, the performances are poor, and the plot is rather fanciful. Yet whenever this movie comes on... my heart skips and my gut rumbles for I worry about the character. I wonder to if certain moments in my life, if they had happened just a tad bit differently, would things have been better? And when the credits begin to roll on "Mr. Destiny," I don't doubt for a while.

I'm just as picklely as everybody, aren't I?