Life is what happens to you ...

Many of us who gather here had a friend named kyfho, who died at the end of April 2008 after a life of thoughtful reflection in the name of liberty. He comes to mind of late as I kick-start projects that I originally intended to complete in time for him to read them.

Kyfho said it's important to have a philosophy of life — perhaps paraphrasing what Shepherd Book says in his exit lines of the brilliant film Serenity: "I don't care what you believe — just believe!" I haven't necessarily completely embraced his urgency — I don't mind a little fuzziness and uncertainty — but his point was, in part, that your life will reflect the principles you believe, so it's probably important to know what those principles are.

Refuse To Be Afraid, a book based on the themes of this blog, and The Imaginary Revolution, a novel that embraces the Zero Aggression Principle as its theme, are the creations that will scream "This is what I believe. This is how I try to live my life." As such, I have embued them with too much significance; I have been reluctant to pull them together, for the same primal fear we all share: What if we were to say "This is true and important," and the vast mass of folks out there sniffed at it and said, "No, it's not. You're a lunatic. Worse: You're irrelevant."

Maybe I am. But you know, books that are never published touch no one. So I plow ahead. I've provided a taste of RTBA in an ebook (go ahead, click over there), but there's much more to say. I've gotten a podcast of the first two chapters of I-Rev done only to turn around and start over, but the arc of the tale is now in my mind and it only needs to be written down. They were going to be ready by Christmas 2008, and now I expect to offer them up in 2010. Two years too late, or right on time.

And wherever kyfho is, I hope he'll somehow enjoy the final products.

B.W. At The Movies: The Bucket List

The first sentence spoken in The Bucket List tells you that if you sat down for a buddy comedy about two geezers, you was robbed. This is a movie about facing death, and cancer, with whatever dignity and good humor you can muster. So it's not going to be quite the light-hearted romp you might have seen in the commercials.

That said, I found this an unexpectedly moving and entertaining film. It's two legendary (may I say beloved?) actors — 70-year-olds Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman — at the top of their games and confronting a story about their mortality.

Carter Chambers (Freeman) is a quiet, intelligent family man who has led a comfortable if uneventful middle-class life. Edward Cole (Nicholson) is a flamboyant millionaire (Chambers asks several times, "How much money do you have?") who has married four times and led a comfortable but unsatisfying rich man's life. They meet as patients in the cancer ward of one of Cole's hospitals (Oh yeah, he's one of those evil health-care profiteers, too), and each learns his time on Earth is finite.

They take a trip around the world on Cole's dime (hence Chambers' frequent inquiry) to check items off a mutual "bucket list," a list of things they want to see or do before they kick the bucket. The TV ads focused on an amusing scene early on, when they go skydiving. The TV ads, as often happens, don't do the film justice.

Maybe it's because I have so many friends who are confronting the realities of The Big C right now (it's only a handful, but more than one feels like many), but this movie struck a chord — several chords, really — in me. One was unexpected: Chambers is portrayed as a man of faith, whose confidence in that faith can be tested but not broken; not what I'm used to seeing on the screen. The film challenges the viewer — this viewer, anyway — to examine what's happened so far and reflect on what needs to be done before the inevitable arrives.

And the last sentence spoken in The Bucket List ought to coax a satisfying laugh out of freedom outlaws everywhere.

This may not be the best movie I've ever seen, but it's a very good one, and it gets filed away with the ones that struck me deeply and lingered long after the closing credits.