Last year, while I was writing a two-sentence horror story for every day of the month in October, I put to publication one particular experience that I denoted as being completely NOT a work of fiction. It was the closest to an actual paranormal experience as I’ve ever had in my admittedly dull and at times dreary life, and it’s something I’ve never forgotten. I wanted to expand on that experience a little, and tell it in a narrative fashion that allows me more detail than the quickie I wrote a year ago.
I had been home from college for the summer, and between school years worked a job as a host at a family restaurant. This establishment typically never closed, which meant I often ended up working the night shift. Being a natural night-owl, I had no problem with this, and often ended up working from 9 or 10 in the evening until 4 or 5 in the morning.
I had just gotten off my shift one night, at about 4 a.m. I did my typical check of the back seats of the car before getting in–not that the parking lot wasn’t well lit enough, but I’d read enough scary stories books about assailants hiding in people’s back seats that I figured it wasn’t a bad idea to check, just in case. I think by that point I’d also seen the movie Child’s Play, and I seem to remember Chuckie murdering one of his victims by stowing away in the back seat of his car and stabbing him through the chair.
So, yeah. No big deal.
I start the car, and pull out of the parking lot and onto the highway. The restaurant I worked at was nearly at the intersection of two busy state highways, so I usually got on one to turn onto the other. It’s a fairly simple, but large turn, as there are a lot of lanes on both roads.
It was as I was making this big turn that I heard a clear, friendly baritone voice speak, its two words sending ice down my stomach.
“What’s up?”
As the fear shot immediately through me, I flicked my eyes towards my rear view mirror, searching frantically for the source of the utterance. Otherwise, I didn’t move a muscle, aside from what I needed to do to complete the turn. When I saw no one there, I had a brief, panicked thought: was Chuckie about to stab me through the driver’s seat? Was there someone so small in the back seat of my car that I had missed them when I checked?
All of this occurred in the flash of an instant. As I completed the turn onto the next highway, I found the only reply I felt I could make in this situation, and turned in what I hoped was a casual motion and responded, “Not much, how are–”
That was all I got out before I was able to get a firsthand view of my back seat. No one was there. There was also no small person or thing hugging the back of my seat, either. I was alone, and as best I could tell, I was safe.
I finished the drive home without incident, but I didn’t end up going to sleep until much later in the morning.
I am not, to my knowledge, given to hallucinations of any kind. It might be easy to say that I was just tired, and that my senses were shot, but I’m both a natural night person and was used to doing my duties at the restaurant. I didn’t have the radio on before the encounter, so it couldn’t have been that either.
The only explanation I have, that makes any sense to me, is that I got a very, very brief visit from a ghost on the highway, who either vanished before I could get a look at him, or who just spoke briefly to me that one time, as if in passing.
This setup makes for a dark, gritty, and often violent story that only gets darker as the exposition continues. An older Charles Xavier (the ever-venerable Patrick Stewart) is now prone to seizures, which cause him to psychically lash out to anyone nearby during his episodes, and Logan has to keep him both isolated and medicated, and works as a driver to try to make ends meet. When a woman approaches him with a request for help, he is soon pulled into a chase that involves him far more intimately than he could have imagined. Pursued by a ruthless agency, Logan and Xavier embark on a road trip that may spell the end for them, even as it delivers hope to a new generation of mutants.
Logan has aged, in several notable ways. He clearly looks older now, which makes sense given that Hugh Jackman himself has aged in the last 17 years. But there’s more: his healing factor is no longer working the way it used to, and appears to be slowly failing him. He has wounds that no longer heal, he looks older and more beaten-down, and he’s overall in a darker place. He can’t just slash his way through a fight anymore and expect to self-patch up afterwards. He’s playing reluctant nursemaid to Xavier, and the two have clearly had their differences during this time, even if it’s clear they still care for one another.
Of course, the most obvious way in which Logan has aged is embodied in the character of Laura (played perfectly by Dafne Keen), who anyone who’s familiar with the comics will know is X-23, a.k.a. Laura Kinney, a.k.a. a clone of Wolverine. She looks like him, acts like him, and has his power sets and gifts, in virtually every way identical. When it’s confirmed that she was indeed cloned–well, actually birthed in the film–using his genetic material, Logan has to deal with the fact that, like it or not, he is responsible for her–something he is clearly not eager to do.
The importance of relationships is also a strong theme in Logan. Logan and Xavier. Logan and Laura. Laura and Gabriela (Orange Is the New Black‘s Elizabeth Rodriguez), the nurse who died to get her to Logan. Laura and Xavier. There are genetic obligations, there are relationships that are built on the foundation of a long association and trust, and there are familial relationships. It’s telling that Logan leaves Laura behind when they first come under assault, grabbing Xavier and saying, “She’s not our problem.” Clearly this changes as he learns about his connection to Laura from Gabriela’s recording and Xavier’s prodding, but the real sense of family between those two doesn’t come through–at least from Logan–until nearly the film’s end.
One such project, which I just finished a few hours ago, involved running EmulationStation, a slick front-end navigation software that lets you glide between emulators you can run on your computer, on Windows. Of course, emulation aggregators still being fairly new to me, I didn’t realize that was all it did until shortly before getting everything to work. Fortunately, the searching I did led me to a 
I wanted a similar experience, but for Windows instead. That way I could put the full power of my PC behind the gaming, and run some of the more robust systems. In this day and age, I knew it would be more than capable of running any of the systems RetroArch supports.
At any rate, as the doubtless imaginative title of this post suggests, I’m all full of New Year cheer, and eager to get underway with my resolutions. All the more remarkable about it is the fact that, by and large, I don’t formally make resolutions, at least not during New Year season, as I find them arbitrary, trite setups for failure that can really be made at any point during a given year with equal importance. And I’d say that’s still a relevant attitude I sport towards them in general, so it’s fair to say that I’m not going to be making any new resolutions for the coming year.
Happy 2017, and may it be a great year for us all! Now, let’s get this ball rolling, and knock it out of the park as best we can.
If you’re one of those folks who feels the need to make these snarky response posts, take my advice and just let people grieve in the way that most fits them. I know it may be a little annoying, but it’s not like it isn’t coming from a genuine place. Trying to put people in their “place” for their venting only makes you come off as douchey, elitist, and far too concerned with others’s responses to things that don’t concern you. You’re just a half step removed from being a bully.
So, with all that said, I was delightfully surprised to find Rogue One an excellent entry into the Star Wars mythos. In addition to strong main characters with more than just memorable personalities, as well as a cleverly crafted plot that both sets up A New Hope beautifully as well as resolves a notorious long-standing question fans have had about that film, we also get a film that has a strong emotional core that does a good job of showing the high stakes that make up the conflict between the Empire and the Rebel Alliance. It’s well executed, though far from flawless, and manages to be both fun and strong on substance.
There are some flaws, though I would say they’re relatively minor. A few of the cameos are good and add to the feel of the universe, though some just feel tacked on for sake of doing so. The CG effects done for certain legacy characters were of varying quality, and occasionally took me out of the story–I think I would have preferred they re-cast the parts. And finally, there were one or two physical challenge-style obstacles that had no practical place in the narrative, and just make people wonder what drunk designer could have possibly kept his job after placing said contraption where it ended up.
Spidey Librarian 