Minister Faust's final thoughts

There were so many things I wanted to blog about, but just didn’t have time. So let me get a last few things out:I want to thank Jeff for this week. He’s a terrific guy, very thoughtful and helpful, and I had a great time here.Thank all of you who wrote responses... I had a great time reading your ideas and jokes and wise considerations.Sorry I wasn’t more positive, especially after I said I would be. For some reason I went on a Sarah Palin tear. Maybe it’s because I’d spent months blogging on my own site about why Barack Obama made me so worried, that he was a pretty coloured face for American Imperialism abroad and corporate tyranny at home. And while I think that’s true, it’s not my impression that Obama is interested in, say, annihilating most of the human race, whereas Palin, by her religious convictions, believes that people who aren’t Christianists like she is are on God’s hit list. Way I figure it, is somebody believes God is planning to murder us anyway, that somebody might figure on helping God out a little. Like “doing God’s work,” dig? The people who are now calling Obama a sexist for this pig/lipstick remark are a cynical bunch, since these are largely the type of people who attack others for using the words “sexist” and “racist” to call out people perpetrating racial and sexual supremacy. These are the same people who like to call Rev. Jackson and Rev. Sharpton “race hustlers” and use phrases such as “playing the race card.” And now, my gosh, out of nowhere, they’ve discovered sexism! Fascinating. So it does exist! Well, how’s this for sexism? How about McCain calling his own wife a c--- in front of other people?

Solutions. I have an extensive set of links on my blog, The Bro-Log, for top-notch independent news sources and activists. Please check them out.Finally, without much time to say much of substance, I want to thank the year 1982. 1982 was a great year for genre films from the US. We got ET, The Thing, Blade Runner, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Tron, The Secret of NIMH and the double-bill re-release of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, which my buddies and I saw five Friday nights in a row and topped it off with a final Saturday. There were probably more but I can’t find my old copies of Starlog right now. And if you go back and read Starlog from that time period, shocker of shockers, it was a pretty good magazine back then, not just promotional puff for Hollywood. In 1982 I finished grade seven, the year I had my first slow-dance with a girl, I girl I code-named “Leslie Minty” in my quasi-autobiographical The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad. Leslie Minty. I can still feel her heart beating against my chest. Damn.In 1982 my biggest art influence was Jim Starlin’s work on Warlock. My best friend was Seamus Hendrick, a cat who’d introduced me to souvlaki and cream soda two years before, and whom I re-met last summer and found he was hell-bent on screenplay writing (amazing) and full of great ideas. In 1982 I shopped at a terrific comic store in E-Town called Dark Star, to which I paid homage with a fictional restaurant in From the Notebooks of Doctor Brain. and whose owner was and is a dynamite man named Bill Moroziuk who was almost an Uncle-at-Large to me and is now a friend and mentor. In 1982 I still hadn’t been traumatized by a math teacher who was awaiting me in grade 8 and 9, whose effect on me was so great I went from an above-average math student to a struggler from grade 8 through to grade 11, mostly recovering in grade 12 yet after permanently ending my then-ambition to become an astronomer... but without whose abuse I might never have changed plans to become a novelist. In 1982 I still had a terrier named Scotty, who was kind and overly-energetic and gave birth to seven puppies in our house, and whose death in 1991 ripped my heart in half. In 1982, I was still delivering newspapers after school, I was still an altar-server at St. Anthony's, I still read X-Men, Dazzler, ROM and Micronauts, I still watched Battle of the Planets whenever I could, I still drank pop probably every day of summer, and I still felt like everything was possible. In 1982, I had no idea that 1983 would suck, I had no idea what 1987, 1995 or 2008 would look like, or that one day I’d be married to the woman I married and for whom I’d give my life, or that I’ve have the daughter I have who is my life.Thanks everyone. Been great sitting in with you. Raise a cup of free-trade Earl Grey in my direction from time to time, will ya? And please let me know about your own 1982s, either here or at the Bro-Log.Hotep and maãt,Minister Faust