Day 1044

When I was a kid, I used to watch The Twilight Zone every Friday evening. It was one of my favorite shows. At the time, the endings to those shows never failed to surprise me. Occasionally, they even scared me. I've started watching The Twilight Zone again on cable. What a difference a few decades makes. Now each episode seems like a simple morality play, where someone must come to terms with good and evil. These are surprisingly uplifting tales about angels, devils, fear and greed; all with a moral at the end. How could I have been scared by these little dramas? Many of the episodes could be used as Sunday School lessons. Times have certainly changed. Just think about what scares us today.

The other surprising thing about those old Twilight Zone episodes is how good the acting was. You'll see someone who looks a lot like a young Robert Redford, and when the credits roll at the end, it turns out that it actually was Robert Redford. Just last night, I watched an episode where the lead was played by a very young Carol Burnett. I've also seen William Shatner, Charles Bronson, Elizabeth Montgomery, and Burgess Meredith in Twilight Zone episodes. It says a lot about our society today that I've gotten hooked on The Twilight Zone again. It's not because the shows are bizarre or frighting, but because of the simple goodness they now represent.

Today was like watching paint dry. It didn't seem like anything happened all day. I did manage to complete one of my writing assignments, but I saved the others for later in the week. There's no sense in using up all my work in a single day. Things are so slow that I think I'll go to another video editing seminar tomorrow. In addition to chowing down on a plate of free brisket and coleslaw for lunch, I'll learn how to migrate my studio to a tapeless work flow. Actually, I haven't shot anything on video tape for several years, so I guess I'm really going to this event for the barbecue.

The dogs had a new exercise to learn at training class this evening. They had to run a gauntlet between two long rows of sitting dogs. Dot and Dash both did pretty well at this odd task, although I doubt that they'll have much use for this skill later in life. It's weird. Those old Twilight Zone shows seem completely normal to me now, but dog training class occasionally seems a bit like traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. Your next stop...The Twilight Zone.

Ellis is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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