"Holy smokes, my friends! I'm so pleased you're not dead!"

Today's my birthday. Remarkably, it happens the same day every year. And that's not just me being flip, because if events had played out according to expert opinion at the time, the mere fact of my having another birthday after July 10, 2009 would peg the Remarkable-o-Meter into the red zone. Today, as Elizabeth reminded me here at our weekend cabin getaway half-way up Mt. Rainier, is my second "rebirthday."

As I mentioned in my post from this day last year — "Yeah, I know, and such small portions" — and the March 2010 post that initiated this blog in the first place, on my birthday two years ago I survived an incident that feels like a Very Special Episode of House or else a discarded scene from the Final Destination series. And yet here I am, having not merely endured but prevailed. (Hat tip to William Faulkner.)

Given that this is a Mostly Movies blog, and in lieu of another original post on the incident (after all, Rainier awaits, to say nothing of Elizabeth and the dog), here are a few relevant movie quotes to commemorate the occasion of yours truly still being here to press Publish and go climb a mountain:

"Sometimes a little near death experience helps them put things into perspective." — Something To Talk About

"It's alive! ALIVE" — Frankenstein

"'Ere, he says he's not dead." — Monty Python and the Holy Grail

"Has it ever occurred to you that how we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life?" — Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan

"Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more. It's contrast." — The Hours

"Funny how gentle people get with you once you're dead." — Sunset Blvd.

[In response to Death coming for Jonas Skat]: "Is there no exemption for actors?" — The Seventh Seal

"Honey, we all got to go sometime, reason or no reason. Dying's as natural as living. The man who's too afraid to die is too afraid to live." — The Misfits

"If a man doesn't know death, he doesn't know life." — Grand Hotel

"No man can walk out of his own story." — Rango 

"I don't like things that finish. One must begin something else right away." — Last Tango in Paris

"Bad things happen, but you can still live." — Super 8

"Get busy living or get busy dying." — The Shawshank Redemption

"Do I know what I'm doing today? No. But I'm here, and I'm going to give it my best shot." — Zoolander

"And then ol' Danny fell, round and round like a penny whirly-gig. 20,000 miles. It took him half an hour to fall before he struck the rocks. And you know what they did to Peachy? They crucified him, sir, between two pine trees, as Peachy's hands will show. Ol' poor Peachy, who never done them any harm, just hung there and he screamed, but he didn't die. And the next day they cut him down and they said it was a miracle he wasn't dead and they let him go, and Peachy come home in about a year." — The Man Who Would Be King

"Your life's 'To Do List' must be a baffling document." — Get Him to the Greek

"There are times when suddenly you realize you are nearer the end than the beginning. And you wonder, you ask yourself, what the sum total of your life represents. What difference your being there at any time made to anything. Or if you've made any difference at all, really, particularly in comparison with other men's careers. I don't know if that kind of thinking is very healthy; but I must admit I've had some thoughts on those lines from time to time." — The Bridge on the River Kwai

"If the sky were to suddenly open up, there would be no law, there would be no rule. There would be only you and your memories, the choices you've made and the people you've touched." — Donnie Darko 

"I don't think any word can explain a man's life. No, I guess Rosebud is just a piece in a jigsaw puzzle." — Citizen Kane

"Just steer the ship, Captain. Don't speculate." — Around the World in Eighty Days

"Live every day as if it is your last, for one day you're sure to be right." — Breaker Morant

"There's nothing sadder than getting to the end of your life and saying, 'I didn't do it right'." — All of Me

Grim Reaper: "A hit. You have sank my battleship!"
Bill, Ted: "Excellent! Yeah!"
Ted: "I totally knew he put it in the J's, dude!"
Bill: "Good thinking, Ted."
Grim Reaper: "You must play me again."
Bill: "WHAT?"
Grim Reaper: "Um, best two out of three."
Ted: "No way!"
Grim Reaper: "Yes way."
— Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey

"I was dead too long this time. The anesthetic almost destroyed the regenerative process." — The Doctor (Paul McGann), Doctor Who TV movie

"In that moment, I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite.  That existence begins and ends is man's conception, not nature's.  And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing.  My fears melted away, and in their place came acceptance.  All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something.  And then I meant something too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something too. To God, there is no zero. I still exist." — The Incredible Shrinking Man

"Life's like a movie. Write your own ending." — The Muppet Movie

::Squiggly swirly light thingy:: — The Tree of Life


And since I began last year's post with a Woody Allen quote, how about I end this one with another:

"Yeah, I know, and such small portions"

Today's my birthday.

No big deal, ordinarily, except that one year ago this same date was so close to being my final birthday — given that I kind of died for a bit that morning during a "routine" heart surgery gone horribly wrong — that you would have made a foolhardy bet to lay down money otherwise. (cf. This blog's first post.)

And yet here I am, pleased to be here, thrilled to be married to a rare woman who was fiercely determined to stare down those odds and slam Death's door so hard you could hear his bony foot crunch in the jamb. I'm here enjoying a (re)birthday with a new appreciation of the expression, "Whoa." Thanks yet again to all of you who were near us (figuratively as well as geographically) through the ensuing weeks and months deep into 2010. It's good to be alive, and many of you are among the reasons why.

Now, after a year the moratorium is up. Having glimpsed The Other Side, I’m finally permitted to tell the truth about it:

It's an enormous mid-range restaurant. Its staff is made up of every god human beings have invented in our own image. In other words, they get to serve us for a change. Its branding slogan: "Have it Yahweh."

 Seriously.

The decor is tacky — think Denny's with the orange extending to every horizon — but as tidy and clean as a Carnival Cruise Line lounge. For the most part the service is impeccable. ("Hello, my name is Osiris, I'll be your waiter.") But I swear that when Dakuwaqa, the Fijian shark god, refilled my water glass he copped a bit of an attitude. Fortunately it was Aphrodite's shift and when she saw him do it she dropped his ass into the decorative fish tank near the salad bar.



The menu comes chiseled on two stone tablets, so it’s unwieldy. Nonetheless, I'm here to say that Thor's Grand Slam breakfast is literally awesome on toast, and that Quetzalcoatl can brew one fantastic bottomless pot of coffee. I passed on the daily special — the Prometheus pâté — in favor of Herne the Hunter's all-natural veggie burger, which was a bit dry but helped me carb up for my weeks in a coma. Sadly I wasn't there long enough to try the pizza ("The Passion of the Crust"), but I can testify that Zeus does indeed wash his hands after using the restroom, although I'm thankful for the ceiling fan in there.



Naturally I checked out the juke box. Too much Styx, and evidently Zarathushtra got the rights to his theme song back from Stanley Kubrick. I really dug a new group called Chthonic Youth. But before I could punch in the entire Eric Clapton catalog, I heard Mercury call my name over the loudspeaker. Time to go.

On my way out, I wanted to buy a t-shirt, but the deity at the counter was a Mayan howler monkey god in a bad mood and who could fling something unmentionable with an arm like Cy Young. Damn. I did, however, duck fast and yoinked a fistful of mints from Kali, who was restocking the bowl while simultaneously making change and scrubbing down the counters.

Rebooting

To those of you who still follow this blog after months of it lying fallow: I'm back, and thanks for sticking around.

While the general thrust and tone of this blog will remain the same, I'm going to implement some changes, starting with removing all previous posts and rebooting.

Why restart this blog now? Simple: I'm in the mood for a fresh start on a refreshened site at a time when renewal and new starts are much on my mind.

I won't rehash the near-death (very, very near death) medical cataclysm that rendered much of my 2009 calendar moot and void, and put a dent in the first months of 2010. (Hint: Long-expected, "minimally invasive" heart surgery to fix a congenital aortic stenosis, followed by, to phrase it with comical understatement, "complications.") You can backtrack through it via my wife Elizabeth's daily LiveJournal starting July 11, '09 (some posts Friends-locked), and/or open my own handful of LiveJournal summary write-ups under my LJ tags "heart surgery" and "heart surgery recovery" dating back to July '09.

Addendum: Here in Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL, a couple of later posts under the Blogger label heart surgery serve as brief follow-ups.

So, yeah, I had my life shaken up like a bag of marbles in a clothes dryer that tried its best to plummet off a cliff and burst into flame. But now it's Spring 2010, I'm alive, chugging through recovery just fine, scars are fading, life's feeling pretty good, and I'm looking around wide-eyed asking, "Now what?" Months of incapacitation piled onto the current crippling recession means that my reasonably healthy freelance writing business is experiencing its own temporary slowdown. It reminds me of that scene in Singin' in the Rain:

Cosmo Brown: "Talking pictures, that means I'm out of a job. At last I can start suffering and write that symphony."

R.F. Simpson: "You're not out of job, we're putting you in as head of our new music department."

Cosmo: "Oh, thanks, R.F.! At last I can stop suffering and write that symphony."

Whether I like it or not, at last I can start and/or stop suffering and write that symphony. Which in my case means getting back to the fiction and other writing I've put off for too long. (For a while there I was a hot up-and-comer in the science fiction & fantasy field, and then I stopped. Several reasons, all boring now.) I'm also considering some travel writing, specifically a chronicle, Bill Bryson-style, revisiting my Southern roots; especially since, with both parents passed on, I'd be revisiting certain shaping places and influences for the first time in my adult life without external duty forcing me back there. But that's for later.

This new(ish) blog is a tool. It's here to help me refocus attention onto some new writing as well as who I am and what interests me after the events of 2009. To help me answer, "What now?" And to keep me in touch with friends and acquaintances -- some old, some new -- who revealed themselves to be more numerous and more important than I had suspected before.

Thanks for being here. It's nice to be alive to see you.

Music: Steely Dan, Gaucho
Near at hand: duck-on-bike windup