Admit it: You WANT this to be a real game...

The game that really lets you battle Hell on Earth!  Guaranteed to send Dianne Feinstein into a frothing frenzy, make Chuck Schumer's gray matter have a meltdown, give Hillary Clinton a cardiac arrest and President Obama is already drafting an executive order against it.  May or may not be advisable to play this on school and university campuses.  Or play it anyway.  Even THINKING of this game is illegal in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Washington State.

(Whipped it up in ArtStudio with the Apple Pencil on my iPad Pro, if anyone's curious.)

The video that brought cops to my house

I just figured out that I can embed videos from Facebook onto this blog!

Which may or may not be a good thing.  Considering the videos I've been making for my Facebook audience of late (yes, Yours Truly has been busy even if it didn't reflect on this site).

Okay well, here's the one that got EVERYONE talking.  I've mentioned before how the mayor and city council of my old hometown of Reidsville, without real due process, removed a hundred-year old Civil War monument and in its place put up a $30,000 monstrosity straight out of a Hellraiser movie.

I finally saw it with my own eyes about two months ago.  And, well... I kinda went mad with power and my new iPad Pro:

 

I put that on Facebook and the views came like crazy!

Then the next morning, two Reidsville Police officers arrived at my front door.  Mind ya, I was living fifteen minutes away from the city limits, but they still came.  Apparently some idiot had seen the clip and gone Homeland Security about it and notified the authorities.  The cops and I had a nice conversation for about twenty minutes or so.  They told me that they could tell it was just someone having fun, especially since they could just look out their window and see the statue was still intact, "but in this day and time we have to investigate."  They made it absolutely clear that I had done nothing wrong, and didn't give me a warning or anything like that.  They seemed pretty entertained by it.

But y'all wouldn't believe how many people around Reidsville have told me that they REALLY got a thrill out of watching that abomination getting blasted to smithereens.  Methinks the "monument" is far less popular than the town father's would like to admit.

More videos soon.

The journey thus far...

After the previous post, Tammy and I left Reidsville.  A few hours later we were in Asheville and it was there that I hooked up with Weird Ed for a special screening of the original Ghostbusters.  Check out Ed's costume!  He made everything but the proton pack (and that's coming soon)...

 

Two days in Asheville.  We left on Tuesday morning then dipped down to Greenville, South Carolina and hooked up once again with our very dear friend Melody Hallman Daniel (she of Forcery and my first school board campaign ad fame).  Here she is with Tammy and her service dog Sasha:

 

And at the McDonald's near my hotel I met the delightful Jeff and Marie from Norway!  

 

Left Greenville on Thursday night.  Atlanta just before midnight.  We were there until Saturday morning.  

So... where is all of this going?  It's been five weeks now and I still don't know.  What I'm doing now, all I can really put it is that it's something God has laid on my heart since this past winter.  Dad's house was sold a few days before we left Reidsville.  That was really the only thing keeping me there.  I had known it was coming.  And it was like God was saying "Chris, what are you still doing here?  You're at a better place than you've ever been before with the manic depression.  You've come out of your longest and darkest period by far.  You have a full life ahead of you... so go and make the most of it!"  

And that's what I'm doing now.

  Why haven't I been posting hardly at all these last several months?  It was a little over a year ago when the absolutely WORST bout of depression I've ever had, hit.  And there was scarcely anything that worked.  Heck, two different medications I tried during those months almost drove me to suicide.  It wasn't until around Christmas and when The Force Awakens was about to come out that things began to improve.  What REALLY did the trick was a daytime program I went through during most of January at a behavioral health facility near Greensboro.  

  Almost immediately after that ended, is when the drive to set out from Reidsville began.  Where to, I didn't know.  But I saw it so clearly: my Camry packed with the bare essentials.  Me behind the wheel and my miniature dachshund Tammy in the passenger seat.   Headed out of town, going wherever God may lead us.  A classic American story: a boy and his dog, setting out to find their destiny.

  On June 12th, that's what I did.

  So let's see, where were we?  Oh yeah.  I didn't know where to go from Atlanta: I-75 north into Tennessee and beyond, or west?  For a number of reasons, west "felt right" more.  So for the rest of the day that Saturday we went through Alabama...  

 

...and some time later hit Mississippi...

 

 

In Tupelo we stopped at the birthplace of Elvis Presley before heading on to Memphis.

 

The next morning before leaving Memphis, we made a brief "religious pilgrimage" to the gates of Graceland:  

 

Then we were off again.  Across the Mississippi River, into Arkansas and north.  Several hours later we made it to Missouri.  Later that   evening we arrived in St. Louis:

 

 

The next night I finally got to meet in person a longtime friend from across the Internet: Scott, along with his very lovely bride Claire!

 

 

We were in the St. Louis area until Thursday.  Then we were off again, vaguely headed to Kansas City.  En route we came to Waynesville, along historic Route 66.  And for the first time in many years met up again with Matt, a friend from Elon:  

 

That night, headed out again.  But instead of all the way to Kansas City we made it to Springfield.  I would have loved to have stayed a few days and checked out the town, but a zillion Jehovah's Witnesses were descending on the city for some big meeting and they'd booked ALL the hotel rooms long months before.

  So Tammy and I had breakfast and were in the road again.  Before heading north I took us about 45 minutes out of the way because I just HAD to see what the big deal about Branson, Missouri was all about.  I had honestly underestimated the place.  Its reputation is WELL deserved and someday Lord willing I have a family I'd love to take them there.  Would have been awesome to see Mel Tillis in concert, but we had to get going...

  It was about 5-ish on Friday night that we got to Kansas City.  I was eager to see if that town's barbecue was really "all that".  The desk clerk suggested a joint nearby, which turned out to be a SERIOUSLY aloud honky-tonk outfit.  The ribs I brought back to the hotel room were astonishingly massive.  Like the kind that tipped over Fred Flintstone's car in the end credits of every episode.

  Kansas City until Monday.  I had planned to go to Wichita.  Again, no real end destination clearly in mind.  Along the way we had to stop for gas.

  And that is how I discovered the town of Emporia, Kansas.  Among other things, the childhood home of legendary North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith...  

 

We stayed in Emporia for more than a week.  Sweet little burg!  There were girls playing hopscotch in the park.  Real, honest to goodness hopscotch!  And families having cookouts with their neighbors.  I didn't know such places still existed in America.  Emporia is the kind of place every small town in the country should aspire to be.

  Sunday night, July 3rd, Tammy and me drove more than an hour to Wichita and found a place called Firebirds.  And once again I had barbecue ribs.  Made with an exotic sauce derived from coffee.  Maybe the most succulent ribs I've ever enjoyed:

 

 

On the drive back, I saw something I had never witnessed before and would have been impossible to behold anywhere in North Carolina: from horizon to horizon, all around us, every little town and community and village was setting off their own fireworks shows, celebrating the Fourth a night early.  You could see fireworks lighting up the sky for MILES around, across the prairie.

  We left Emporia on Tuesday morning.  Stopped for an oil change in Wichita.  And then, for no real apparent reason other than it seemed the right direction, we were headed to Oklahoma.  We made it to Tulsa and spent a few days there.

  Tulsa is home to Oral Roberts University and that's where they have a kaiju-sizes pair of praying hands at the entrance.  Almost like somebody severed King Kong at the wrists:  

 

Thursday morning is when Pokemon Go went live.  I had it on my iPhone (yes folks the impossible has occurred: Chris Knight now has an iPhone, may God have mercy on my soul...) later that afternoon and I caught my first Pokemon at what used to be City of Faith.  Many of you might remember that as the place where Oral Roberts said he saw a 900-foot tall Jesus telling him to go on television and declare that if people didn't send in millions of dollars, that God would call Roberts "home".  My first Pokemon was a Zubat.  Make of that what you will.  

We left Tulsa on Saturday morning.  But before leaving the area I finally got to meet some of the good people at Team Covenant: that terrific gaming website I've mentioned a number of times in recent years!  They have their own retail store now.  Great place!  I wound up buying the Imperial Veterans expansion pack for the Star Wars X-Wing Miniatures game.

 

 

On to Claremore, about thirty miles away, and the Will Rogers Memorial Museum.  In a garden adjacent to the museum is the final resting place of "Oklahoma's Favorite Son" along with most of his family:

 

 

Some hours later we arrived in Oklahoma City.  I had directed Siri on my iPhone to get us to downtown.  When we got there, just on a lark I asked how far were we from the location of the Murrah Building: the federal building hit by the bombing in 1995.  As it turned out, we were less than half a mile away, straight down the street we were already on.  

It also turned out that the Murrah Building was never rebuilt.  On the site there is now a memorial to those who died:  

 

We got a room.  And the following night I had dinner with a longtime reader of this blog: the lovely and exuberant Crystal!  

 

Incidentally, Tammy has been a hit EVERYWHERE we've gone.  She has ridden in my lap practically every bit of this thousand-some mile journey.  A lot of times with her head out the window.  Oh, she certainly loves the attention :-)  

'Course, with the Pokemon Go craze currently raging I haven't been able to keep from having fun with it along the way:  

 

And I was able to find one of the precious few Krispy Kreme shops west of the Mississippi:  

 

So here we are: five weeks later.  Still in Oklahoma City.  At the moment I'm contemplating stuff.  Doing a lot of prayer.  Asking God to show me... where do we go now?  I think we've arrived at a crossroads.  I could keep going west.  Or southwest toward Texas.  Or back through Kansas and points beyond.  Maybe even south toward Louisiana.  

I don't know yet.  But, it doesn't matter.  This adventure has been predicated from the start on keeping going until God makes clear that we are wherever He needs me to be.  The place where, I really believe there will be a happiness I've never been able to know.  Not until now.  It's like all this time, God was using circumstance to keep me from doing something this bold.  And now He's set me loose into the world.  To see if the American Dream is really out there, or something.  

They say it's not the destination, but the journey.  Already, I'm not the person I was when I left Reidsville.  I'm not going to come back there someday the same person who left.  That guy is gone now, forever.  Even now, the things that have happened along the way... and I've BARELY scratched the surface here... have altered me.  Transformed me.  Into someone far better than who I had been before.

  And I think I'm going to become someone even more.  Because this journey is far, far from over.

  More soon.

Not the end ...

Listen to church bells ringing "Space Oddity"

This may be the most amazing tribute to David Bowie that has been done in the past few days: Dom Tower, the tallest church tower in the Netherlands, built in 1382 and with bells dating back to 1505, tolling out "Space Oddity".



I've grown ever more fascinated with Bowie since it was announced that he had passed. Having listened to his final album and watched the last two videos he made ("Blackstar" and especially "Lazarus"), one most certainly gets the sense that Bowie was not only fully aware of his mortality, but that he was accepting it with a mighty grace.  I can't help but think that there is also a sublime acknowledgement toward God in some of the lyrics and images, and that Bowie was surrendering to that.

When I posted about his passing a few days ago, I wrote that perhaps the most amazing thing of David Bowie was how he was not afraid to grow and change as he grew older.  That went for him as a showman.  But even more importantly, it went for him as a man.  The David Bowie of 2016 was not the David Bowie of 1976, and he never pretended to be.

There is a good philosophy in there somewhere.

And now, Alan Rickman is gone

We are losing an unfortunate amount of truly extraordinary talent this week...

Hans Gruber. The Sheriff of Nottingham. Rasputin. Marvin the Paranoid Android. The Metatron. So many roles that Alan Rickman had in his amazing career.

But for me, there is really only one that best exemplifies Rickman's profound ability. The role he had throughout eight films for more than a decade. A character who has come to be considered one of the most complex in all of modern fiction.

There was really only one person who could have ever brought Severus Snape alive on the big screen. And from the moment I first saw him in Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone, it's been Rickman who I've seen whenever I've re-read those books.

So in his memory, here are all of the scenes of Severus Snape from the Harry Potter films, in the character's chronological order:

"And the stars look very different today..."

Very sadly, they certainly do.




A true artist in every possible sense. I think what fascinated me most about David Bowie, other than his musical and acting talent, is that he was never afraid to grow and change as he got older. He had the strength to adapt, and become even better. Too many performers try to cling to their younger days. Bowie didn't flee from his age, he embraced it and made it his own. A lot of artists would do well to emulate Bowie. And some might still be with us had they done so to begin with.

When I think of Bowie as an actor, what will always come first to mind for me is his brief but electrifying (pun horribly intended) portrayal of Nikola Tesla in The Prestige. I can't really think of anyone else who would have possibly done the role any justice.

David Bowie
1947 ~ 2016

THE STAR WARS HOLIDAY SPECIAL aired 37 years ago tonight

It was on this night in 1978 that The Star Wars Holiday Special - arguably the WORST two-hours of television in history - aired on CBS.

Y'all won't buh-LEEEVE what is going on here.

So in honor of this misauspicious occasion and thanks to some poor tortured soul on YouTube, here it is (absent some music for copyright purposes):

It's all here: Chewbacca's son Lumpy, Mark Hamill's make-up overkill, Princess Leia's singing, Boba Fett's first-ever appearance (the special's one redeeming feature), Harvey Korman, Bea Arthur (?!), lots of unused B footage from A New Hope, what can only be described as a porno machine... and about twenty-seven minutes of incomprehensible Wookiee grunting.

One viewing and you'll see why George Lucas has said he would take a sledgehammer to every copy if he could.  But what about you?  Can you endure to the end?

"When the skies of November turn gloomy..."

Forty years ago tonight. Here's the post that I composed on this evening in 2005.  But YouTube wasn't as pervasive as it is today.

So here is Gordon Lightfoot's forever haunting ballad, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald".

The tradition will continue today.  The church bell at Mariner's Church will ring thirty times: one for each man on the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald, and once more in memory of all who have perished on the Great Lakes.

As I wrote ten years ago tonight: Here's to a good ship and crew.

The state of things

Hello.

It's been awhile.  Maybe the longest that I've gone between making posts.  I'm making this one because a lot of readers have asked if I was okay (alive, semi-comatose, joined the French Foreign Legion or what have you).  Neither have I been active on Facebook and that led to family insisting that I make some indication there that I was still among the living.

So many of you are asking how things are.  And things have come to a point where I'm more than compelled to offer up an answer.

So here it is:

Things are not okay.

Some very bad things have happened in my life.  If there is any aspect of it that can be named, chances are it has happened.  Including some physical situations which are rather considerable.  I have had to take time to address these.

So far as the book goes: it's on indefinite hiatus, for a few reasons.  Among them, I have reached a place where I cannot write past a certain block and it requires some things falling into place to break through that.  Things which, I doubt will ever happen.  I can't see past it.  I was able to surpass an earlier, similar block but this one has proven to be much worse.  So for now, the book is stalled and I would give anything to get past that.

I don't know what else to say at this juncture, apart from asking that you keep me in your thoughts.  I am past the point of being at the end of the rope.  Thing are now at the shreds of the end of the rope.  My own prayers haven't worked.  Maybe those of others will.

Wishing you all well.

    "Almost there."

"Almost there..."