Jack of Harts

Cowboy Bebop came out two decades ago, and is one of the best animes of all time. IMHO it is one of the best TV shows in any category, and it ends very bravely, with a fade to black after a deadly fight. The show creator has said that the main character died at the end, but I’ve always had this idea of a fan fiction where he survived. The death was figurative, him shedding the sins of the past and starting a new life. That writing prompt has hovered in the back of my mind for years. One of these days I will write the story, though suitably changed to fit into the Jack universe. I know who the guy is. I’ve got the rough story in mind, which means it really has been percolating in the back of mind for a while. Soon I will write it, and I hope it will work out as well.

My mom had collected sixteen 30-quart flat boxes full of Christian romance novels by the time she died. That is hundreds of books all told, and most places were not interested in having more than a few of them. So I have been looking for a good home for the entire collection for a while. I finally found one. A Christian bookstore in a church that uses the proceeds to support missions. And mom graduated from a missionary college, so her legacy will go into supporting exactly what she always wanted to be. I delivered four boxes on Friday and they were happy to receive them. I told them I had sixteen total and the lady nodded and said that I should bring four more the following Friday, so her girls would have time to sort through this bonanza of books. I also had some bags of mom’s shoes in the back, preparing to take them to Salvation Army, and she told me that the church was running a shoe drive at the moment. So she happily took them as well. My mom would love it.

I watched the recent President Biden speech. From when the Marines marched in until Biden’s upbeat ending. I watched the lights turn blood red. I watched the Biden’s march up to the speaking stand to the martial music. I watched Biden shake his fist for the camera and yell angrily. I had the feeling that I’ve seen this speech before, many times, in historical recordings of speeches made over the last hundred years. The way he singled out a large group of citizens and called them a threat to the nation. How he accused those citizens of believing things and doing things that are antithetical to civilization, many of those things being what his own leadership has encouraged, and his own people have done. I have seen this kind of speech and rhetoric before, and those nations that remained on that path have progressed through dangerous and deadly ground for years or decades to come. We must stop this. Or what will come next will be far more dangerous for all of us.