Month: November 2021

REVIEW: The Wheel Of Time

One of Amazon TV’s latest original productions is a long-awaited adaptation of Robert Jordan’s epic High Fantasy series, The Wheel Of Time. It is in some ways between the more famous fantasy epics, not as bloody and cynical as George RR Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire, but a little more political and complex than JRR Tolkien’s Middle-Earth cycle. It’s like Dune in that there is an all-female order of mystics trying to guide the destiny of human affairs, but there is a specific reason for the gender bias in magic. In a previous age, the Aes Sedai order was co-ed and led by a man named Lews Therin, called the Dragon. But when he and his allies confronted “the Dark One” and stopped him from conquering the world, the Dark One laid a final curse, corrupting the male side of the One Power that channelers use to perform magic. This taint corrupts male channelers in proportion to their power, and since Therin was the most powerful channeler of his age, he ended up going insane and killing his own family, and ended up doing far worse before finally dying. Since then the Aes Sedai has been an all-female group and one of their responsibilities in addition to finding female channelers to recruit is to isolate any male channeler and “gentle” him by cutting his access to the One Power. If this seems like a euphemism for gelding a stallion, that’s probably intentional.


The fact that this world’s Pandora/Eve equivalent is male instead of female creates an unusual influence for women in a fantasy setting; I sometimes think of The Wheel Of Time as the anti-Gor. It certainly has more pivotal female characters than Tolkien. In fact the series’ main Gandalf figure is Moiraine, a wandering Aes Sedai (played by Rosamund Pike, the closest thing to a name actor in this production), who at the start of the story enters a small village called Two Rivers because she has determined that the Dragon Reborn is one of five young townspeople: The hunter Rand al’Thor, his best friends, blacksmith Perrin Aybara and neer-do-well Mat Cauthon, along with Nynaeve the village wise woman and Egwene, her new apprentice, who happens to be Rand’s girlfriend.

There have already been a lot of changes made in the Amazon production compared to Jordan’s source material. For instance there’s a shocking character death in the first episode that wasn’t in the books. The main divergence as far as the plot goes is that in the books, Moiraine was originally seeking only the three male protagonists, but in the show, both Egwene and Nynaeve are potentially the Dragon Reborn. I had thought this didn’t make sense given that they wouldn’t be any more dangerous to the Aes Sedai than other female channelers, but someone on the Internet pointed out how this change resolves a plot problem with Jordan’s first novel: Moiraine has to take Rand, Mat and Perrin to her superiors but has no reason to bring Egwene, who basically tags along out of sheer stubbornness even though she still has a family in Two Rivers. The TV series takes the element of choice away: After the Dark One’s monsters attack Two Rivers, it’s clear that they’re hunting for the Dragon Reborn, and if the five youths don’t leave with Moiraine, their family and friends will be endangered again. Not only does this explain why Egwene would leave her parents, it also explains why Mat would leave his family, given that he seems to care about his little sisters more than their parents do.

Another change is that in the novels it was made clear no later than Book 3 that Rand al’Thor was the Dragon Reborn, but at this point in the TV series (four episodes in as of Thanksgiving) Rand has only performed one arguably superhuman feat, whereas Episode 4 ended with Nynaeve performing an epic channeling that saved the day.

My impression of the TV series is that it’s pretty decent but not spectacular, which is right because my impression of Jordan’s book series was that it was pretty decent but not spectacular. I, like a lot of folks, quit reading before it got to Book 10. (I liked one Internet comment that went ‘I plan to watch until Season 6 and then stop.’) I personally think of Robert Jordan as being akin to George Lucas: possessed of a great ability to create likeable heroes and a vast, enchanting background setting for them to adventure in, combined with an even greater inability to give those characters believable plots and dialogue. And so far, even George RR Martin doesn’t have Jordan’s problem with wrapping things up; Jordan died of heart disease in 2007, and the book series was only completed with notes given to his designated successor, fantasy author Brandon Sanderson (who is listed as a producer on the show along with Rosamund Pike).

Thus so far The Wheel Of Time does a pretty good job of conveying the setting, although like Amazon’s adaptation of The Boys comic, it reserves the right to change things around and keep the audience guessing. And while some purists are objecting to the changes already made to Jordan’s narrative, I’m sure there are at least as many who think that any change could only be an improvement.

REVIEW: Marvel’s Eternals

Marvel Studios’ Eternals is based on an idea Jack Kirby had, after he’d already left Marvel Comics to create The New Gods for DC Comics, only to have that and other titles cancelled by the company. The “elevator pitch” is that some Chariots Of The Gods-type aliens experimented on prehistoric humans, creating the evolved Eternals and warped Deviants, and charged them with stewardship of the Earth. Of course, the two groups had different ideas on how to do that, and the battles between the two allegedly led to the development of human myths like Odysseus vs. Circe, Herakles vs. The Hydra, and Thor vs. The Midgard Serpent.

The problem being that Marvel Comics already had Thor, and Hercules, and a bunch of other deities in the modern world playing superhero, and Thor’s pantheon at least has already been introduced in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Not only that, the MCU, huge and involved as it is, is only part of the huge realm of intellectual properties Marvel Comics developed over the years. With the possible exception of Sersi (the Circe of the Odyssey analog), the Eternals have never been as popular with Marvel Comics fans as the Inhumans, let alone the X-Men. So the existence of The Eternals poses a meta-fiction question: Why do we need them? As in, what purpose do they serve in the setting that isn’t already fulfilled by other characters? And in terms of the MCU’s recent narrative, you inevitably get to the question: If these guys were here all along, why didn’t they help the Avengers fight Thanos?

As it turns out, while a certain Eternal claims to be a brother of Thanos, and the disappearance and reappearance of half Earth’s population causes one Eternal to make a critical decision about the group’s mission on Earth, the matter of recent MCU history is mostly waved off. Eternals focuses mainly on the aforementioned Sersi (Gemma Chan, who actually played a Kree in the Captain Marvel movie). Sersi is currently living in London, with her boyfriend, professor Dane Whitman (Kit Harrington, whose character is just as out of his depth here as Jon Snow). However they soon deal with the return of Sersi’s former lover, the Eternals’ main warrior, Ikaris (Richard Madden, who’s not as cool here as he was playing Robb Stark). In flashbacks, Sersi and Ikaris are shown coming to Earth, guiding civilization, falling in love and even getting married, but the reason they broke up isn’t made clear at first. It turns out Ikaris left Sersi due to a major plot twist that I will not reveal to anyone who hasn’t already seen the movie, because it counts for such drama as Eternals has.

I haven’t fully decided what I think about this movie, or even if it’s a good movie. I also don’t know if it’s a bad movie. It is of course extremely long, partially because of the time scope and also because there are no less than ten principals. At the same time, Dane Whitman (who is a notable character in Marvel Comics) is introduced at the beginning and then hardly used at all until the last scenes. In the source material, Deviants were distinct individuals with their own love-hate relationships with Eternals, and in this movie most of them are just giant CGI effects. The Eternals use American-style slang when hanging around the Babylonians and Gupta Indians, and yet Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani) and his mortal valet are the only characters who have the sense of humor one comes to expect from Marvel heroes.

In fact, given the generally negative reviews for Eternals, it now seems to be fashionable for critics to bash Marvel Studios for a standard, mechanical approach to film making, but if anything the problem with Eternals is that it’s not enough like a standard Marvel movie. Deviants aside (and ultimately, they’re kind of a red herring) there is no real Good vs. Evil conflict. There is no easy resolution. Chloe Zhao (the award-winning director of Nomadland) has presented a story of genuinely cosmic scope, posing the question of whether individual human lives really matter against the greater cycle of universal creation and destruction. It isn’t a question with an obvious objective answer, and the Eternals ultimately do not all agree. Eternals intends to be deep, and sometimes succeeds. But all this means that, as with Black Widow, it’s basically a separate story that just happens to take place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and so the formula, mechanical approach to putting all the Marvel Comics Easter eggs into a continuing narrative are (like Dane) done as afterthoughts or saved for the now-standard after-credits scenes.

Although in that regard, Harry Styles is the greatest stunt casting since David Bowie playing Pontius Pilate.

Schrodinger’s Don

It was recently announced that Norm McDonald died after fighting cancer for years, which no one knew about cause he didn’t want to tell anybody. But don’t worry folks, I’m sure that’s just his idea of a joke.

Okay, that wasn’t very funny. Here’s a better joke. My best friend is dead.

It’s been about two months since September 14th. That’s when I found out. I am still trying to process it.

Don Garner has been a friend of mine since… I can’t even remember. More than 30 years. I was still hanging around UNLV and met him through one of the Dungeons & Dragons groups, along with at least one other close friend and a few other guys that I’ve run into a few times since then. And even more than most of those guys, I had a lot in common with him. He knew that much more about Star Trek, and about naval history, than I did, though I think a lot of that was precisely because he’d researched the military history of every US Navy ship named “Enterprise.” He had a great sense of humor. I’ve posted some of his stuff on Facebook. Like: “In the news this week… Richard Branson beat Jeff Bezos into outer space by nine days… and Richard Branson does NOT have over 56,000 people’s names on a petition to not allow him to return to Earth the way Jeff Bezos does”.

But Don had been in a decline for years. And years. Such that when I learned for sure that he had died, it was sort of like how my roommate’s cat passed away. He took him to the vet and they found out the little guy had lung cancer, and they told my roommate that the cat maybe had weeks to live and it turned out to be only a few days. So it was sad, but we knew it was going to happen at some point, we just didn’t know when. The difference being you expect your pet to be completely dependent on other human beings, and you don’t think there’s anything else you can do if the pet goes terminal. When you’ve got somebody who’s otherwise able to take care of himself and who doesn’t do so, it’s that much more perplexing.

When I said recently on a completely different subject, that I had told someone “you can’t expect other people to care about your life more than you do”, that was Don I was referring to.

For example, Don was the guy who invented the sixburger. That is, you go to Wendy’s, you order two Triple cheeseburgers, and you put them on one bun. I mean, I weigh over 300 pounds, and I couldn’t compete with this. The thing is, for whatever reason he didn’t even have the same work ethic I did. I don’t see why anybody actually wants to work, but this was different. Like, years later when he was on SSI, he frequently seemed surprised that I couldn’t put him into my schedule cause I had a job. It was like, Don was intellectually aware that other people had to work for a living, but that wasn’t really part of his reality. It would have gotten in the way of his hobbies.

And as he aged, his metabolism slowed and he was less able to absorb the results of eating like Dagwood Bumstead. And if you, like me and Don, are on the Standard American Diet (or what Penn Jillette calls ‘SAD’) it’s that much more likely that you’re going to end up with heart disease or Type 2 diabetes and then you’re that much more likely to need consistent long-term medical coverage. And in this country, if you don’t get that coverage through your employer, you need to rely on the generosity of the state – or lack thereof.

If I can think of a point of real divergence, it was around 2006 or so. Prior to that Don had been going from job to job and eventually wound up living with me and my Mom, and we eventually had to kick him out cause he was unemployed and we needed a roommate who could support the household. Don ended up moving in with Jason, a gamer friend of ours down in Henderson. In the summer Jason referred us to jobs with the call center where he worked. It sucked, frankly, but I stuck with it, because it paid for medical insurance and I could see where I was going downhill and how Mom was going downhill with old age. This is how I got to see a regular doctor and how I got diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. That sucks, and I can’t tell you I have been good with my diet, but I have been eating less sugar than I did before then, and smaller portions. I have also been given prescriptions that have kept my blood sugar under control.

Don meanwhile quit the call center job after only a few weeks cause he couldn’t handle the work. He stayed at Jason’s and gamed with us, but spent a lot of his time asleep. He wasn’t looking for work, or looking into the issues with his health. And when I talked to him about Jason’s place, he would always grumble and complain about his living circumstances (living not only with Jason but his mom and other relatives), but would always move to whatever room they put him up in, as long as they gave him a place to stay, and food to eat, and they didn’t ask questions and they didn’t make him get up and look for a job. His illness was getting to the point where he had band-aids on his toes all the time, and one of his legs looked like a rabid wolf had ripped it up then pissed on it. And because Jason was at that point living with his sister and her two young children, she started to object. His other sister was a social worker who had tried to get Don to get some kind of public assistance and help with his issues, but he had refused. Eventually they forced the situation, and by that time, my roommate had moved out, and then my older brother, so I was once again asked to move Don in. I told him at that time, “Don, the only reason that I am taking you in now is because this is your LAST CHANCE to not die on the street homeless.”

In fact now that I recall, it was my mother of sainted memory who really saved Don’s life, or least gave him more years than he would have had. A couple days after he came back in the house, it was about 2 am or so and Mom had gotten up and noticed Don on the couch and saw that he was unresponsive. She eventually got him up, but from her own experience with Type 2 diabetes realized he was going into a coma. She immediately got me up (even though I had to work in the morning) and take him over to Sunrise Hospital to be checked in. I dropped him off for the ER overnight and they decided his condition was bad enough that they were going to take him in with no questions even though he had no insurance. That’s when Don was first diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. But that was the good news. It was good news in that at least we knew what was going on. But then he had to proceed from there.

After being at Sunrise about 5 days, he got a veritable grocery list of prescriptions and other scripts he had to take to the UMC (University Medical Center) hospital, because that was the only place where he could get those prescriptions filled with no insurance and only state support. So one day I took him over at 11 in the morning, thinking it would be a couple of hours. They told him that in order to fill the prescriptions from Sunrise, he would have to go through the whole admissions process again at UMC. So I dropped him off. He was there til about 9 pm.
This involved going through several hours of admissions procedures at the ER, going into the Pharmacy line several times- where they had only ONE teller processing orders for a line that (not coincidentally) averaged over 20 people deep, finding out that the doctor at Sunrise who made the prescriptions was not listed in the UMC roster of doctors authorized to prescribe, and in any case they had to change at least one of the prescriptions because they didn’t actually have the brand of pain medication the doctor wrote. While waiting, my friend also went through blood sugar crash at least once BECAUSE he was waiting for the prescription to regulate it, and in direct contrast to the Sunrise staff, no one really bothered to do anything for him at the time.

Compare this to my barely-adequate insurance from work where at most of my jobs I’ve been able to schedule an appointment with a doctor, get regular checkups, the doctor will fill out a prescription with a pharmacy I specify and I can go to the drive-thru and pick it up less than an hour after the fact.

But we eventually managed to get that prescription regimen, and Mom and I both told Don that one of the conditions of him staying with us was that he had to do SOMEthing to support himself. And in a couple weeks we got him to go to the welfare office down the street and got him on food stamps/EBT. And that’s ALL he did. Even after Mom died from her own various co-morbidities he did not do anything to support the household other than get the EBT, which was often not enough to cover his usual diet (which hadn’t changed all that much). So I had him living in the house, I was still paying rent to my sister who has been managing the house ever since, but I was the only person making money and Mom’s Social Security was gone. (If I made enough money to live by myself, I wouldn’t have been in my Mom’s house.) I knew by now that Don was really not able to hold down a job even if he’d wanted to (which he didn’t), but he should have at least been able to call someone to arrange social services and expanded coverage. He did not do that. There was no way I could babysit him or get him to do what he needed to do if I had to work full time during the day. Meanwhile I still had to cover bills by myself on ten dollars an hour even as he jacked the air conditioning up and pushed the power bill past $200 a month because his circulation had made him intolerant to heat. After a few months of this, I told him, flat-out, ‘I don’t care if you get a job, get on welfare, or suck cocks on Boulder Highway, you are GOING to do something to pay your way here.’ He did not. He didn’t want to admit that he needed to be on government dole, but at the same time he had absolutely no problem with couch-surfing at my place, or Jason’s or anyone else and expecting us to cover his upkeep on our budget while he did the absolute bare minimum to maintain his own life. So again, a few months after the ultimatum I had him move out.

And at that point, he really was homeless. He’d been at Catholic shelters for a few weeks and that basically convinced him that he needed to actually get some professional assistance and support. He was in this flophouse downtown at Ogden for a little while but eventually after getting SSI the state moved him to the apartment in Henderson where he stayed for the rest of his life. Once he’d gotten that much stability, we were able to resume social activities again, see movies and play role-playing games with our friends again. And it mattered a lot to me that we just managed to get together, tell jokes and have fun, even if it was just the two of us and a couple other guys. He wasn’t in the same game group with Jason, even though Jason and his sisters did ask if he wanted to come back. I guess in retrospect Don didn’t want them to see what happened to him. Among other things, he lost both legs over the years, mostly due to diabetes but partly because the people tending to his various infections were no more attentive than the people at UMC.

My current job obliges me to work graveyard (just about dusk to dawn) and September 12, I got a call from our mutual gamer friend Hugh just before I was about to get ready for work. He normally helped Don with rides to games (since he lives on the other side of town) but his truck broke down and he hadn’t heard from Don in about a week and he feared the worst. Unfortunately I had to work Sunday and Monday and I had no time to get out to Don’s place, which is over 13 miles away. Not only that, on my next day off (Tuesday the 14th) I had two doctors’ appointments set up back to back starting before noon when I only left work Tuesday at 4 am. So I was already on the other side of town from where I live, that much further away from Don’s, and had barely gotten any sleep.

At this point I had every expectation that Don was dead, but I didn’t know. I also knew from experience that he could sleep for over 24 hours and not respond to the phone or even to a knock at the door. So as I drove across town, needing to move yet getting caught behind every construction cone, red light and dumbass driver in Vegas, Don’s status was unknown. He could have been dead. He could have been alive. Schrodinger’s Don.

I was on the road stuck between lights and I was scanning rock radio. It started with AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.” I thought not. I turned to another album rock station and got Alice in Chains:

I believe

Them bones are me

Some say

We’re born into the grave

I feel so alone

Gonna end up a big ol’ pile of them bones

I got to the apartment complex after 3 pm or so, went upstairs and the first thing I noticed was all the empty paper bags left out from Amazon’s delivery service. So clearly Don hadn’t left the apartment, or he would’ve taken them to the garbage. I hit the door several times, and called on the phone, and when I got no answer either way, I warned him I was calling 911. So I did. The Henderson Police came out 20 minutes or so later and interviewed me for what little I knew, then they had me go to the ground floor to talk with one of the cops while another one got the superintendent from the office. Then they opened the door, and as I was talking about the situation with the cop and Don’s downstairs neighbor, we smelled it. All the way from upstairs.

You know that weird combination of stale locker and festering wound? That’s the first time I’d ever smelled that.

The neighbor told us that he’d smelled something odd in the pipes in his bathroom for a few days, which supported my suspicion that Don was dead even before Hugh called me.

My friend Hugh is one of those Trump guys who considers Don’s treatment to be an example of state “death panels” deciding who gets to live or not, and I kind of agree that this is what happens if you rely too much on the government, or on anybody. But that just raises two points: One, the alternative to Nevada’s indigent health care system would be to sink more money into the state government to establish reliable care for everyone, including the indigent. But that would be socialism. The only other option is to go back to the previous American standard which is that everybody only gets health care depending on the plan given by their employer, and Don was already psychologically unable to hold down a job even before he was physically too sick to hold a job.

Two, if there is no collective system of care, that just brings the issue back to individual responsibility. If there is no socialized system, that means you are solely responsible for your own upkeep, and that means holding down a job to get medical benefits whether you like working or not. Because again, no one is going to care about your own life more than you do. Even if they’re paid to care.

Don was not of subnormal intellect. He knew what day it was, at least when he wasn’t zonked out on painkillers. He, like me, and many of our gaming friends, started off as politically right-of-center, and like me but unlike most of those friends came to realize that voting Republican these days is like sticking your dick in a drum of radioactive waste. I’m saying, he wasn’t an idiot. On some levels, he was one of the smarter people I knew. But even more than those guys who want to court Trump Virus to own the libs, it felt to me that there was some broken gear in his system that I didn’t know how to fix.

A few days after the event, my sister suggested I post on Don’s Facebook page to find his next of kin, and his cousin in town managed to reach his sister and brother who both live out of state. The next week I had a long talk over the phone with his sister, who confirmed that all of the issues that my friends and I had noticed with Don’s behavior were no news to her.

This Monday, November 8, would have been Don’s birthday, which is just a week off from mine. And every time that holiday season rolled around I was always wondering if Don would survive for another Thanksgiving or Christmas, and I was always kind of impressed that he did. And that won’t be the case anymore.

There will be no real funeral. There will be no formal obituary. It took over a month for Don’s sister to get a cause of death from the Henderson office. After all this, I have taken it upon myself to summarize another person’s life, and as before I ask myself what more I can do, and again reach the conclusion that no matter how much it is, it will never be enough.

Don had a lot to offer. And like a lot of people I’ve known, he deserved a lot more out of life than he got.

If I can’t do anything else, I can at least speak here. So, Goodbye, Don Garner. You were my best friend for over half of my life. Your life mattered. To me and to those of us who saw the best of you.

You are still remembered.

You are still loved.