Exposing The Truth
We’ve been passing around a virus or three for the past couple of weeks, with my wife now suffering from a sinus infection and my chest feeling these days like a sore hamstring. It’s minor and minimal, and so obviously it’s way more annoying than it should be.
On a positive note, I’ve been able to avoid my usual routine in these cases, which is to try to tough it out and end up sicker. I’ve been slowly working on getting all of my personal videos on an external hard drive so that I can pull them up on my home network (using Plex) from any TV or connected device, so that gives me something slow and restful to do.
Kind of busy-work, too. I’m not sure I’ll take enough advantage of this to warrant the time involved, although time is what I have to work with at the moment. And it does add a second layer of backup to those original home movies, beginning in 1984, that have been sitting on VHS tapes and then DVDs for a long time now, mostly unseen.
I own a limited amount of movies on DVD, and most of those are Blu-ray, which is time-consuming to transfer and, really, not worth the trouble. The regular ol’ DVDs, in contrast, are easy to rip, and it’s fun to watch Plex pull thumbnails from the web and arrange them neatly.
Two of those DVDs were the first two seasons of Northern Exposure, a favorite from the ‘90s, ordered a few years ago when my son-in-law and I made a day trip to Roslyn, WA, where much of the series was filmed. Northern Exposure was a local phenomenon in 1990, a quirky show filmed completely in the area, either in Redmond or up in the mountains in Roslyn.
The show isn’t streaming anywhere that I’m aware of, most likely due to wrangling over the music rights (one of the background devices in the series was the small-town radio station, KBHR, in Cicely, Alaska, and the musings of Chris In The Morning and his eclectic selections provide the narrative flow and easy exposition), so with the momentary urge I bought the first 15 episodes for nostalgia (the show had two limited seasons at first, 8 episodes in 1990 and another 7 in 1991 before going to a full season in 1991-92).
So I ripped those 15 episodes, and of course I ended up watching. I went ahead and ordered the next two seasons, thinking I’ll spend some time in Cicely this winter. I suspect this won’t be my first cold.
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Northern Exposure tends to bog down, in retrospect, from a very contemporary inclination to go all weird on us. I think this is due to the success of Moonlighting and a couple of other series that went off at oblique angles from conventional story lines, with fantasy and dream sequences popping up intermittently. This feels dated and a little contrived, although sometimes it paid off in a big way.
But the show affected me, once I picked it up a few years after it went off the air (my wife was a fan at the time it was on). It was a bad time for me, and some cable station showed an episode every afternoon. I was thirsty for inspiration, some sort of creative bump that to push me out of a sour life, and it seemed every episode had a special meaning to me.
And, as my son-in-law said on our trip to Roslyn, it’s a little bittersweet to accept that we’ll never be able to visit and hang out with all of these people. They feel like my people.
It’s funny, too – it’s an ensemble cast whose acting abilities vary widely. A few were actually non-actors, and it shows, although they’re some of my favorite characters. Some of the others are barely acceptable in terms of acting, often broad or stilted (the scripts with their wild tangents didn’t help), and all of this is held up by the veteran actor John Cullum (as the owner of the town bar) and Rob Morrow as the star of the show, both of whom are consistent and wonderful throughout the run.
This feels like a mix, then, although it comes off as complete, somehow. I’m enjoying revisiting it, at any rate. I do like these people.
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I don’t like all people.
I’m not inclined toward misanthropy, just because I tend to be kind of sunny and optimistic for a person who’s been clinically depressed most of his life. I have cynical periods, sure, but most of the time I enjoy being social and just appreciating the people in my life.
This is a time for peak cynicism, though. Our leaders don’t even pretend to tell the truth, and this is accepted by millions of rapt believers. My head explodes on a daily basis, and it carries over, you bet.
And that cranium blew up last weekend, as I watched people I’ve come to know well as they dissembled and, as far as I was concerned in my over-heated mood, sold their souls to keep the world from moving on.
None of this was important. It really wasn’t.
That didn’t keep me from cynicism and eventually anger, which is ugly and I don’t enjoy and I can’t help. I’m being uncharitable and honestly irrational with this anger, directed at people who are as flawed as I am, I suppose, no more.
But what’s done is done. I tend to head over the top when I sense selfishness in the community arena, and injustice of some sort. And lies. All the lies, dressed up as just disingenuous but they’re still lies.
And I can fix myself, by withdrawing a bit and generally backing off. It fits with my role in this scenario, anyway. I just need to shut up.
Some friendships will no longer be quite the same, though, now delimited by my awareness of their opinions and apparent desire to obfuscate and bully the rest of us into making their lives a tiny bit more comfortable. Jeez louise, listen to me. This is all about me.
You know? To paraphrase Maya Angelou, when people tell you what they think, believe them. That’s my default position now, and it gets ugly, and this would never happen in Cicely, I think.
