Five Questions, take one

Here's the first installment in my current iteration of the "Five Questions" game, with questions posed by Simon:

1. You are given free rein within a single paragraph to elucidate on the core of the appeal that Star Wars has to you. Make every word count.

It makes me wonder, it thrills me, it was the first thing that made me think of story in terms of archetype, and it was the first story that made me think in terms of good and evil. That's all I need, really.

2. You are given the opportunity to bequeath perfect health upon your son at the cost of yourself inheriting his every malaise. What do you do and why?

Nothing, because I can't predict the future for him, but I do recall one thing one of his doctors said in the NICU: "This level of brain injury in an adult would result in a complete, irreversible coma with no hope of awakening."

This probably sounds flip; I mean, who wouldn't jump at the opportunity to confer perfect health upon their child? Well, there's the nature of his illness, and the fact that for my family right now, a healthy him and a vegitative me would be far, far worse than the circumstance that exists now.

Plus, I've never been one to subscribe to the view that parents should be willing to sacrifice everything for their children. I don't understand the view that once children arrive, all of an adult's dreams and wishes and desires should suddenly be stuck on life's back burner.

(Ironically enough, Simon has a post today that's germane to this very topic. As bad as Little Quinn has it, the thing with cerebral palsy is that it doesn't get worse. The affliction Simon's co-worker's son is suffering does.)

(BTW, I often think about how stunningly sad the entire Buffalo-Niagara region is going to be when Jim Kelly's son inevitably passes away. It's hard for me not to think about stuff like this nowadays.)

3. Working at The Store is not your dream job. What is, and, more specifically, what is preventing you from realising it?

Writing, obviously – writing what I want, when I want, how I want. For the most part, I am realizing it; except that I'm not getting paid for it. So why is that? Time, possibly; I don't have enough of it. But then, neither do lots of people. So maybe I just don't have the right level of "drive" to do what I need to do to get there -- drive to write enough, drive to market it, who knows. Strangely, I'm slowly making my peace with that.

4. If you could give one piece of music to everyone in the world to listen to, which would it be?

Rachmaninov's Symphony No. 2 in E-minor. Or the Jeff Beck/Rod Stewart cover of Curtis Mayfield's "People Get Ready". I'd probably flip a coin.

More seriously, though, I don't think there's any way that having everybody listen to a work of my choice would be very effective. There are classical listeners who would eat Rachmaninov up, but there are also classical listeners who can't abide Russian Romanticism. And there are people who don't grok classical at all.

So what I'd really like to do is give every single person on Earth an iPod or some similar device, tell them all to cue up some piece of music that means most to them, and then all sit down at one time and listen. Silence would reign all over the world -- but in the inner ears of every human, there'd be music. And then a new era of peace and joy would dawn on Earth. (More likely, we'd just go back to screwing and killing each other, but man, that hour or so of silence would be golden.)

5. Finally getting around to cleaning up the clutter in your domicile, you stumble upon a time machine that you forgot you invented while in the throes of creative abandon. Which single historical event (in ANY time) do you go back to witness and not affect in any way?

Just one? Shit. I want to go to Dallas on November 22, 1963 and see just who, if anyone, was behind the fence on the grassy knoll. But I also want to be on the deck of the Titanic and see just how close James Cameron got it. I'd like to be able to see a "time lapse" of early life on Earth. I'd like to be at Agincourt and see how close Shakespeare was to what King Henry V really said. And for nerdy personal reasons, I'd want to be at the Chinese Theater in Hollywood on May 25, 1977. Oh, and I'd like to be at that magnificent Bills-Oilers playoff game in January 1993, when the Bills rallied to win after they fell behind 35-3. I'd like to see that one because...I went grocery shopping at halftime, figuring the Bills to be out of it. When I got home, they were only down 35-24.

I have another set of five questions coming soon (actually, I already have them, I just have to finish answering them and post 'em). If anyone wants me to ask five questions, leave your request in comments. And feel free to ask me five questions, if you so desire. It's a fun way to "blog outside the box".