A man named Fisher

An ant has no warning of impending doom from a descending foot, not because the signs are not readily evident but because the ant's mental processes are not configured to interpret them. Such was the unavoidable oblivion of Jacob Fisher to his immediate future. Only God could have predicted the outcome, but to God it was so obvious that a prediction was laughably meaningless.

Jacob Fisher's hands swung freely as he walked down the narrow corridor from his cell, preceded by the uniformed officer. They stopped swinging momentarily as he waited for a door to be opened, and then jammed themselves into fists in his pockets as he entered the divided room. Between prisoner and civilian, between crime and victim, between just and unjust was erected a barrier. Glass partitions permeated by telephone wires, a glimpse of freedom that made Fisher more aware of which side he was not on. A brief breath from the outside world that only emphasized the ensuing lonely silence.

On the other side of the glass partition sat his father. Oliver Fisher was taller than his son by nearly a foot, but stooped his thin frame into the seat provided with characteristic ill posture and humility. His grey eyes penetrated the glare on the glass, at first the only feature Jacob could make out. Then his father leaned closer and his face came into focus, concentrated in an intense gaze that lit up the inside of Jacob's mind like skyscraper lights at twighlight. Jacob felt memories reviving, stretching out to connect to new thoughts that Jacob didn't know he had been thinking, but now realized had been sustaining his hope all along.

He picked up the phone, breathless to hear his father's first words.

"Jacob you are better than this. Better than they are letting you believe. Better than you are believing yourself. You have no excuse to sit behind that wall and look at me like there's nothing you can do about it. You just have to learn to be more careful."

Jacob's eyes flared with surprise, anger, and then excitement. He gripped the phone by the mouthpiece and stared fixedly at a point on the glass in front of him. He swung the earpiece of the phone, gently tapping the spot on the window directly in front of his father's face. He saw his father break into a smile.

Jacob kept tapping on the glass, an insistent rhythm but not loud enough to draw the notice of the guards. As he tapped, he began to smile, a smile like his father's, but the rest of his face creased with concentration.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Click. Click. Click. Crack. Crack. Crack.

As he tapped, he changed nothing about the way he swung the phone, but something doubled, tripled, quadrupled the force of the phone against the glass. A gentle swing now yielded a crunch as powdered glass drifted down his side of the window. Lightning-trail fissures branched and split, now reaching to the edge of the window, widening with each tap almost as if being hit with a sledgehammer.

Tap. Click. Crack. CRASH

With the hidden power, the unnoticed sound of a crushing waterfall, the entire window dropped in cracked pieces onto the table. A guard heard the clatter of a million misshapen beads and came to investigate. He saw Jacob rise from his chair and drop the phone casually into a sea of broken glass. Taking his father's hand, Jacob stepped into the crunching aftermath and down again on the other side. With a deceptively slow, measured tread they escaped the shouts and shots of the guard and proceeded with purpose for the door.

It wasn't that Jacob didn't know what he had done. He just didn't know to whom he had done it.

Fly on the wall again

In his fitful sleep, Jacob dreamed...

Turning away from a doorway he walked down a few cement steps and then turned his head. She still stood in the doorway, sillhouetted by the light behind her. Or...something shifted perhaps, and she was the light, or the light proceeded from her...not pure white, but brilliant and sparklingly yellow-golden it shone, splintering from her fingertips, her eyes, her heart. He turned to walk down the sidewalk now, and her light fled in front of him, chasing and flashing its way down alleys and around corners, leaving illuinated impressions in his mind like the afterimage from a lightning bolt.

As he walked, trailing his fingers along rough brick walls, his feet tripped and tangled suddenly. He stumbled, caught himself by bracing a rigid arm against the solid masonry, and looked down. His long grey coat had become wrapped around his shoes, but as he tried to unwind it he found it bulkier, the sleeves flowing and swathing his arms as they struggled to free his feet. Helplessly enfolded in thick grey wool, he fell forward, flailing to find a firm support but failing to feel anything but the fluid weight of his new-found burden.

He tumbled now through golden-lit space, somehow landing on his feet, his arms spread wide for balance. In the light, in his dream, he could now see himself clearly. The fedora and coat he usually wore for protection in River City's coolly biting fall winds had been transformed to the elaborate robe and near-comically pointed hat of a wizard. Looking like something out of a fantasy novel or video game, his appearance immediately conjured everything typical about a Wizard: frail but with deep wisdom in the secret arts and inner workings of the Universe and Beyond, holding a power unknown to mere mortal men.

The light suddenly somehow grew brighter, flooding and disintegrating his costume until he fell from his dream shattered and returned to consciousness where he was no storybook wizard in robes but a prisoner in a small cell, with a guard shining a flashlight in his face.

It was Laughlin.

"Come on, Fisher, get dressed. You've got a visitor."

Picking up a dropped ball

It has been far too long since I have helped you schedule your weekend cinematic experiences.

Ready Go.

Pride and Prejudice: Guys love to moan about how they will never watch this movie, and married men have learned better. I read the book just to give it a fair chance and never actually finished it. But Keira Knightley has proved herself time and time again - I recommended the movie Domino to you primarily because she stars in it (in a sad side note, Domino Harvey - the bounty hunter who's life story Keira portrays in that movie - died of an accidental overdose several months ago after being a longtime friend of the director and producer of her film). So Keira Knightley in Pride and Prejudice should be enough to attract any hardened male chauvenist. Not because she's hot. Because she's a fiery actress who doesn't flaunt her body but has no qualms about doing what's necessary for a film. She will make this a good picture for everyone even if they don't already like the story. Ladies, it's in your genetics to go see every incarnation of this story out there, so I don't have to tell you twice, but men don't make your women beg you this time, eh?

Zathura - Jumanji in space. What a waste of time. Doesn't even have Robin Williams. It's made by the same producer, so it's obvious that he had this idea when he ran out of other ideas. What a waste of time. I wish he could have made something more original. Great one to take kids to - those who are young enough to enjoy it are too young to have seen Jumanji when it was first popular...

Get Rich or Die Tryin' - Rappers turned actors are hit-and-miss as we all know, but they are not universally bad. And they tend to be good when portraying their own life stories. If you don't respect today's gangsta-rappers then this movie will either change your mind or solidify that belief because it will show you the truth of what they are all about. Think of it like 8 Mile - totally different plot but the same type of powerful ethos. Some of these guys actually have real motivation in their background for acting and singing the way they do. Yes rap is music. Of course it's bound to be full of sex violence and swearing, so don't take your kids or anyone else who doesn't need to see that kind of stuff.

Derailed - The trailer does an excellent job of making you think it's just another attempt by Hollywood to justify an extramarital affair on the basis of steamy romantic attraction (I mean come on it's Clive *sigh* Owen and Jennifer *my brother thinks she's hot but I don't know why* Aniston). And then it switches gears on you. I expect the film to do this same thing even more powerfully - Two "ordinary" people having an affair for the first time, fumbling their way through something they know is wrong but convince themselves is "worth every penny", suddenly find themselves paying for what they've done in a very real way as they are blackmailed by a violent intruder. There might be some moral value, there will almost certainly be some twists, but I think that either way this movie is going to keep you tightly in suspense for quite a long time.

More on the Jacob Fisher story tonight or tomorrow perhaps, but until then...

SEE YA!

Brief and to the point

No message is neutral.

Every movie is a message. Every song is a message. Every book is a message. Every blog is a message. Every painting is a message. Every sculpture is a message. Every joke is a message.

Every story is a message.

No message is neutral.

What messages are you receiving?

Fly on this wall, too

A prison cell, flickering hall lights fluorescing through bars, feeble flashes falling on faded paint, old concrete, filtering through a darkness more than physical.

The shadows of the prison bars fenced in Jacob Fisher more closely, following him when he walked, haunting him from one corner of the cramped cell to another, and trapping him on his bed as he sat and held his head in both hands in an effort to still his swimming mind. The world seemed to spin inside his head, whirling dizzily past and then clicking back into place only to swing by again, repeating the same pattern like a broken record or a dinging typewriter carriage. His eyes focused and his hands did not falter as he picked up pen and paper, but his brain seemed quite convinced that he was dizzy.

Jacob had never possessed anything more than a most rudimentary artistic talent, one that was rarely enough to commit to paper the images in his mind's eye. Now once again his inability tormented him as he wrote four names on the paper and recalled a face for each one. He could not draw any reasonable facsimile of the four women but he could see each one clearly, the physical features enhanced by his memory of each one's personality - the inner beauty shining through the outer beauty until the two intermingled indistinguishably. No one else looking at any of the four would see exactly the same thing that Jacob now imagined, a fact not lost on him as it furthered his frustration over his artistic impotence.

He surmised that he was hardly the only man to look back on women from his past with regrets. Better men than he had left behind bitter trails of lost love and heartbreak. Many of those same men had truly loved, truly cared for, and truly hurt a succession of different women. Who was not vulnerable to the difficulties, the obstacles, the painful wounds inherent in love's labors? Ah but along with this deep connection to all mankind came the desire to throw off the burden of similarity; the longing to search and find the ways that one was not just like every man and woman to have loved before now; to prove that the same mistakes had not been made once more with merely the names and faces changed while the foolishness remained constant. Perhaps it was a selfish wish to be better than everyone else, or perhaps it was a vain hope that humanity's ability to relate to itself was improving as a whole.

Fisher knew well the lessons he had learned from each one of these women, at different ages although he was still young. For each name, each regrettable loss he could list the ways he had matured and grown. The things God had taught him and grown in him from the seeds of his tragic romantic failures. He also knew that for each profitable deduction he had made out of his experience, he had turned a blind eye to a dozen or more far deeper truths. That was why he had to keep making these mistakes - to keep failing at the same thing until he learned the lesson God wanted him to learn.

His eyes closed in weariness, trying to shut off the feeling that the room was spinning. His thoughts turned again and again past the same landscape of memory as he tried to focus on the faces and figures who seemed so far off. Eventually his body sagged against the wall, his head hung heavy and sightless, and he gave up and fell to the springy matress with a squeak his ears never got a chance to translate to his brain.