A sad documentary; a quiet day; a poem

I have been watching, on Hulu, the documentary series about Steven Stayner and his family. I remember viewing the 1989 dramatization, I Know My First Name is Steven; I was eight years old. Stayner was seven when he was kidnapped.

The dramatization was the bleakest TV show I had seen in my young life.

The new documentary retells the story and brings it up to date. Yes, much more has happened to the Stayner family. Terrible things. Imagine having to play a “horror lottery,” a “lottery” of devastation, as in the Shirley Jackson story, and losing it twice.

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Today was gloomy but not ugly. Daniel slept more than usual. I had forgotten that the weather has this effect on babies.

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A poem:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Son, my son

You are my son

You will always be my son

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

(Karin, to Daniel)

Binging

“You’re not a complicated guy, are you, Dick.” – Logan Echolls, Veronica Mars

This series keeps raising itself out of the grave. The movie appeared long after the show’s initial demise, and the newest TV season has been released half a decade after the movie. The actors are the same. Apparently, they can’t get enough of this blend of high school soap opera and detective fiction.

Neither can I. It’s my third viewing. In 2011, I watched the three TV seasons that, to date, had been released. A few years later, I viewed seasons 1 and 2 again, with Stephen. The Veronica Mars movie was released in 2014. I didn’t view it. But now that Hulu has released season 4 of the TV show, my goal is to work through all this material with Karin – we’re in the middle of season 2 – and then, maybe, we’ll glance at the spinoff, Play It Again, Dick, which Karin discovered on the Internet. (Dick focuses on a minor character; it, too, boasts appearances by most of the actors from the main program.)

Dick Casablancas really isn’t a complicated guy, but it’s fun to watch him plunge into pleasure-seeking. He has a parachute: his trust fund. There are lots of characters with trust funds in Veronica Mars, lots of very rich emancipated minors, and one of the interesting themes is the recklessness that their wealth affords them. It rubs off on their poorer high school classmates, with whom they feud.

Veronica (Kristen Bell) isn’t rich – she’s the daughter of a hardworking private detective. She pursues the same line of work, mostly inside her high school and its environs in Neptune, Southern California. She’s very clever. But she’s infected with the heedlessness of her rich schoolmates when, really, she ought to listen to her father.

Veronica is complicated. Some of the rich kids are, too. One is Dick’s friend, the aforementioned Logan Echolls, who makes sparks fly in unceasing confrontations with Veronica, with the local biker gang, and with his movie-star father. Another is Dick’s younger brother, Cassidy “Beaver” Casablancas, who uses his own trust fund to correct imbalances of power. Another is the outspoken Lilly Kane, Veronica’s best friend, whose murder is the focus of season 1.

Hardly anyone – except, perhaps, Veronica’s lunch buddy, Wallace – is unambiguously good. Veronica’s father is wise and brave, but it’d be a stretch to call him a straight arrow. Sunny Neptune is a snakepit. The teenagers circle each other, hissing.

Meanwhile, in each episode, Veronica solves a mystery.

Sometimes, she finds a missing dog (or goat, or parrot). Other times, she’s hired to get to the bottom of high school intrigue (Who sabotaged the election for student body president? Who spread the nasty rumors about the cheerleading captain?).

Occasionally, things are more serious. Veronica reunites long-lost relatives. She uncovers domestic abuse or serial murder or organized crime.

She taunts the corrupt sheriff and other local powers. At school, she attracts grudges – and when others wrong her, she takes fierce revenge.

Let it go, says her father.

Let it go, says Wallace, her friend.

Veronica doesn’t let it go. For all its fantasy, the series gets at the truth in the hard-boiled detective genre. It’s about enacting retributive justice in a world in which no one is blameless enough to throw stones.

The first episodes are bubble-gummy. Then darkness gradually descends.

Our church membership class, pt. 2

This’ll be my week of spring break – “do or die” time, as far as my dissertating is concerned. I’ve already had so many “do or die” weeks, I can’t count them, but this one really is the “do or die” week.

Don’t expect great things on the blogging front.

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We looked at the Missionary Church’s constitution in today’s membership class. We spent much of the time discussing whether it was constitutionally all right for members to drink alcohol. I thought Article of Practice 7 was pretty clear:

The Scriptures clearly command that believers are not to be conformed to the worldview and lifestyle of the world of which they are a part, but, on the contrary, are to function as salt to prevent the spread of moral corruption and as light to dispel spiritual darkness. It is therefore imperative that they set high standards for their personal and collective life including the following: …

[That] their bodies be treated as temples of the Holy Spirit thus making it inconsistent with both Christian testimony and sound principles of health to injure their influence or bodies by the use of tobacco, intoxicating beverages, narcotics and other harmful products.

[Pages 10–11]

But no. Apparently, various pastors in the denomination have decided that there’s some interpretive wiggle-room. They claim that as long as members stop short of drunkenness, they may drink away.

To which I reply: Article of Practice 7 condemns injury through the mere use of intoxicating beverages, whether or not intoxication is achieved. So the drinking had better not kill any brain cells.

I didn’t spell all of this out during the class itself, but I did go so far as to say that the constitution tells believers not to eat fried chicken (another “harmful product”).

The reaction to this was a collective Huh. Then the pastor said that our congregation was going to interpret the constitution so as to allow anything that the Bible permits. So drinking is allowed, but drunkenness is not.

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Tonight, Karin & I used Hulu to watch the very last episode of Detectorists. What a lovely show. I’ll leave it to you to find out whether the metal detectorists find their gold.

There’s nothing more satisfying to watch than when these detectorists put up their detectors after a long day of detecting and head off to the pub for a friendly pint of beer.