Better Than Sex

Well, never having “slid” between alternate Earths myself – I watched a repeat of the premiere episode of Sliders last night, and it still holds up well after nearly twenty years – I'm not sure I can agree with Wade Welles' initial characterization of travel through the inter-dimensional tunnel (in the parlance of the show, an “Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky bridge”). But the title besides being attention-getting also reminds me of a fun show. Science fiction, yes. Of course, the first episode I ever saw was the final episode of the first season, “Luck of the Draw” where winning the lottery is a national obsession – sounds familiar – but twenty four hours later you have to kill yourself – not so much. In its original run Sliders lasted five seasons and in the mornings I'd catch repeats on the Sci Fi Channel when Martha and I still lived in our apartment by Kmart where she worked at the time. Now if I want to watch it's on the Hub network after the kids go to bed!

Occasionally I get to see it, and I've even gotten Martha interested in the show! (I guess this would make her first show “A Current Affair” in fifth season, where one of the sliders is a double – the same person on a different Earth under possibly different circumstances – for the President's mistress, but gang aft agley.) When Sliders is good, like most things in life, it's very very good but when it's bad it's horrid. And right now I will relate when I was bad and horrid, just this morning … I asked Jeffrey since he had some extra time to read before school this morning after he'd eaten breakfast and changed his clothes and made sure he had everything for school today to please do some reading. He brought me that big Dr. Seuss collection we have and started to read The Lorax to and with me. We'd alternate pages and after Jeffrey would mispronounce and slur so many words – not the nonsense words, just regular words – that I accused him loudly of not trying. He cried and ran to the bathroom.

“If a child lives with criticism, he learns to condemn.” Yeah. As tomorrow is his sister's seventh birthday and we'll do something for her that day along with hold a sleepover party for her and her girlfriends Saturday night, I have got to make sure Jeffrey is not left out. Heck, now I have to make sure Jeffrey is not left out in spite of myself. More so than Sarah, he's my “spitting image” because we're both boys; I'm just a much bigger one, as Martha will oft tell you. He likely says I don't know when he feels the response will get him in trouble because I do, among other things. In my prayers that I want to make more active this Lenten season and carry over into the post-Easter world, I've divided them into four segments or ACTS – Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. And it is helping me focus and I'm feeling like my time is ending too soon.

I just have to let it show, David