GODZILLA, THE CAP'N, ZEN, HARRY, TIME TRAVEL, AND PENCILS

The last two days have been much better than the previous one. Sleep helps. I even got into another tense situation with a customer, and I handled it with aplomb. But enough about work!
I'm on to bigger things. My friend, Kellum, and I got into an involved email discussion about the history and evolution of Godzilla. I know that sounds kooky, but I've always been a fan of the big green guy from Japan. As a boy, I used to force my parents to take me to whatever remote movie theater in town happened to be playing a 'Zilla flick. My folks were good natured about driving me to such distant places as Casa Linda (on the far side of White Rock Lake) to sit, with their feet stuck to the soda-coated floor, in a crowd of screaming, popcorn-tossing kids. The movie theaters were literally trashed after all those young Godzilla fans were through with them.
I can remember watching "Godzilla vs.the Smog Monster" at Preston Center Theater, way back in the seventies. My dad said, "That Smog Monster is so ugly, he makes Godzilla look like Miss America!" My brother kept blowing radiation at me (carbon dioxide, actually), until I told him that his breath stinked and to cut it out!
Back in those days, we didn't have home video, so if we wanted to see an old movie we had to wait for a theater to bring it back around. We could still see vintage sci-fi like "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" and "Mysterious Island" on the big screen. We didn't, automatically, get to watch whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted, like you spoiled kids do today. Anwyay, I was always scanning the cinema guide in the paper for monster movies! Today, with those good memories very much in mind, I visted Wikipedia (the free online encyclopedia; highly recommended), and discovered just how diverse and labyrinthine Godzilla's alternate universe really is. For every monster he battled there is an equally complex and very unique movie history, and each of these histories cross paths and intermingle in dozens of different ways. Yep, it's six degrees of Godzilla! Of course, I was outgeeked (as usual) by Kellum (or "Lum" as everyone calls him) who recently did massive research and produced an in-depth report on the world, characters, life, and times of Cap'n Crunch (yep, the cereal guy) and discovered a mythology as rich and full as Tolkien's Middle Earth. Amazing. He's planning a similar treatise on Godzilla. I can hardly wait!
So..... tonight was Thursday and that meant I headed out to Aunt Sally's for dinner and a mystery. Joel (a wise old hippy dude, who is very Zen) was there, as usual, and we got into some interesting conversations about religion (I'm frustrated with literalism and fundamentalism!) and, believe it or not, the time travel aspects in some of the Harry Potter stories. I'd go into it right now, but talk of time travel always boggles my mind. It may or may not be a scientific impossibility, but we were discussing the purely "magical" concept of traveling backwards on the time continuum and the disruption it would cause... Star Trek fans have had this debate forever. Now, thanks to Hermione Granger and her "time turner", the Potter crowd has taken the baton (the phaser, the snitch, whatever!) and is off and running! Anyway, Sally was cleaning out her study and she gave me a pencil sharpener and three large jars filled with pencils. Now I have more pencils than any of my friends ...

I am king!