Stay pure.

THIS is the tough one for me. The fourth of five commitments that Craig & Amy Groeschel cite to "fail-proof your marriage" in the book I read last week and will need to re-read (with Martha if she is willing) From This Day Forward is not only engaging in actions and words exclusive with your spouse but also even thinking such things with someone else besides your spouse! It unnerves me I have (the words not the actions), that I can even envision something that a few years ago would have been unthinkable to me. More than I thought I could imagine, I know what a jerk and how undeserving of Martha -- maybe of life -- I am. It's not worth it.


What manner of world is this that we have massed to destroy?
Inconsequential even in its own sun-system, where it has yet to annex a single sister-planet!
So technologically inferior that it lacks the basic science to detect our fleet poised a mere 3,574,042,800 of their miles away...on their very doorstep, as it were! 


I hate explaining things, because people believe what they want to believe which is all too often the worst of us. I don't know, I'll probably scrub this whole blog after I've written it at the rate I'm doing, so read it and save it before it's too late! I got home with Sarah and Jeffrey after church last night and we -- with Martha after she got home -- finished off burritos and also got the kids started reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a book that got read to me and my second grade class well before I'd ever heard of a movie adaptation! And it's still one of my favorite reads; in fact, a character modeled on Mike Teavee after his accident at the factory made it into one of my own novels!


Yet I alone have discovered the metagene that turns humans into super-heroes -- and I alone have discovered how to negate it!


The two above italicized quotes comes from individual Dominators, ghastly yellow-skinned humanoids who organized the more hostile alien races of the DC Comics universe (at least as of our real-world 1988) into an alliance to take down Earth and obliterate its super-hero population as any future threat -- including some of the aliens on Earth such as the Kryptonian Superman, the New Genesisan Mister Miracle, and the Martian Manhunter. For a three-part, 240 page story with no ads, Invasion! was a lot of fun to read, starting out with the aftermath of an alien (Dominator) abduction of fifty people of whom six survive to become the newest super-humans on the planet!


Get that ... camera outta my face!


Then one Dominator (who's NOT quoted above, by the way) after the aliens lose gets a virus into Earth's atmosphere that drives most people's super-powers crazy before an antidote is found, but I digress. Other readings I've done this week include another DC Comics collection, Brian Augustyn's Batman: Gotham by Gaslight (ISBN 9781401211530) which places Bruce Wayne as Batman in late 19th century Gotham City and pits him against both Jack the Ripper and the Master of the Future who gets ... carried away with wanting to prevent what he sees as the worst excesses of the 20th century through the World's Fair. At least that's how I read this first retroactive Elseworlds story.


I have been watching the Americans. You like to think you decide things, but you only ever decide not to change. Because you are afrightened of change. You are the man who likes a big menu but always orders hamburgers.


Yes, I used this line from Adam Rex's 2014 novel Smek For President! (ISBN 9781484709511) yesterday, but it makes so much sense to me because we ARE afraid of change and we hate to admit it! This fun sequel to the novel that the animated movie Home is based on takes the young girl Tip and her Boov friend J. Lo -- the naming and series of events are a bit different than in the movie, you'll have to check it out yourself -- to New Boovworld (the Saturnian moon Titan) where Smek the captain from the film has to now run for election, which he's never had to before. J. Lo is put forward as an alternative and that's where the trouble begins!


AND you could argue -- even if you didn't remember to wear green today -- that this is the annual celebration of a life and culture 1,555 years in the making! (Check it; Patrick died March 17, 461.)


Pure is not the problem, staying so is.

David