When I was a teen-ager, I used to write my own stories. It actually started when I was young child, but I didn’t write them down until I was a teen. As I went to sleep each night when I was small, I would lie in bed and make up stories. I was always the hero. As I got a little bit older, the hero would have a different name, but he was really still me.

In one of my stories — when I was about 14 years old — I was one of a group of teen-agers who went to Cape Canaveral and toured a real space shuttle on the launch pad. For some reason, the shuttle was ready for launch and they let a group of teens — about five or six of us — alone to tour the ship. Something terrible happened in the country at exactly that moment and we had to take off in the shuttle. It turned out to be armed with weapons. I was the captain, of course. I brilliantly guided my little band of kids to go blow up some bad guys and save the country.

What I didn’t know at the time is that my immature teen fantasy would one day be roughly the concept behind a reboot of the Star Trek franchise.

I went to a midnight showing of “Star Trek Into Darkness” Wednesday night and I left the theater with really mixed feelings. There were parts of it that were immensely satisfying in an emotional way. The actors do a dead-on job of recreating the original characters in a way that you’ll recognize.

In many instances, you’ll feel a sense that you really might be watching younger versions of the original characters. It’s not that they look exactly the same. It’s simply that they’ve taken care to interpret the characters in very similar ways. That’s emotionally satisfying if you already know the relationships between the characters in what will be their future.

The biggest problem for me is that these are essentially children who have been placed in senior crew positions of one of Starfleet’s flagships. In the original Star Trek series, we were told there were only 12 starships in the fleet, so we can assume there are no more than that at the point of the new films. (We can also assume there are many smaller vessels.)

Think of the modern U.S. Navy. There are hundreds of ships in the fleet, but there are only 10 active aircraft carriers and three more are under construction. A starship is roughly equivalent to a present-day aircraft carrier.

Now think about this. Can you imagine that a crew of Naval Academy cadets or recent graduates would be handed the keys to an aircraft carrier? Of course not. Young officers serve as junior officers. They get experience. The best of them get promotions and end up in command of smaller vessels and then increasingly important vessels. Eventually, the very best experienced captains in the fleet end up in command of the carriers.

If you look at science fiction books about heroes who end up in command of similar vessels, they all get experience and then move up to bigger jobs. (The Honor Harrington series is a great example.) The fact that Kirk and Spock and Co. end up crewing and controlling the Enterprise when they’re straight out of the academy is an indication that director J.J. Abrams’ conception of life is pretty close to that of my teen self who fantasized himself as the young hero to save the world.

The familiar characters in this series need to be the heroes of the movie. There’s no question about that. But the original Star Trek showed us a number of times that Kirk had a series of commands of lesser ships before he earned the right to command the Enterprise. A reasonable concept for this reboot would have been to put these characters into some small ship or setting that allows them to unexpectedly be heroes.

If Kirk, Spock and Sulu were set up as the young command crew of a 20-person ship that was old and not very important — but they managed to do something important and save the day — it would feel more real and more true to the concept of adult life. Give them increasingly better jobs as they move up successfully through a few movies. Have them longing for the day when they were in command of a starship.

That would feel like a concept for adults. The concept we’ve been given in the reboot is a concept for comic book characters who don’t live in a real world.

To me, things like this remind me all the time that the people who write, direct and produce today’s movies don’t have the life experience that writers and producers used to have.

Star Trek creator and original producer Gene Roddenberry had been a bomber pilot in the U.S. Air Force during World War II, right. After the war, he was a commercial pilot for Pan-Am and then became a police officer for the Los Angeles Police Department while he worked his way into entertainment. When you look at some of the things he injected into his fiction, you can feel the mature experience that comes from having lived a real life outside of entertainment.

What about J.J. Abrams, who is the guiding creative force for the new Star Trek? He’s never worked outside the film industry. He doesn’t have experience with what might seem like real life to the rest of us. He’s a good film director and he knows how to make a pretty film. But his work lacks the adult quality that someone such as Roddenberry brought even to his silliest work.

I generally like the new Star Trek movies. I’m glad I’ve seen the first two and I’m sure I’ll see the next one (or next dozen). But make no mistake about it. This is Star Trek as interpreted by children, not something with the depth that I think could have been brought to it.

I’m avoiding talking about the plot simply because I don’t want to include spoilers. The plot is a silly mess, but that’s secondary to my biggest concern. Both of the villains of the story — the obvious one and the surprise one — come across as flat and boring characters. In the case of the primary villain, I don’t think I’m giving away too much to say that it’s someone from a future Star Trek episode. When you know who it is, compare the depth and strength of the character as originally created to the cold, boring and antiseptic version of him in the new film. There’s also a brief appearance by one of the original characters, but it only left me wondering why they bothered.

I hope you’ll see “Star Trek Into Darkness” and I hope you’ll enjoy it. I hope you’ll also think, though, about what the film could have been in the hands of an adult with life experience in the real world.

It was the blue of the sky that suddenly grabbed my attention. Then it was the various shades of green in the trees around me. I was taking a walk in my neighborhood Wednesday afternoon when the beauty around me hit me so hard that it almost hurt my heart to feel it all.

For this moment in time, I couldn’t imagine being in any place on earth more beautiful. I couldn’t imagine anything more perfect than the stunning colors and shades and smells of my surroundings. It wasn’t just beauty, though. It was an emotional feeling that welled up inside.

It was about being in the place called home.

I don’t understand nationalism or patriotism anymore. George Bernard Shaw said, ”Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it….” I don’t have any particular argument at the moment with those who feel differently. I’m just saying that I’ve come to a point in life when I don’t feel connected to a country or a government. But I understand what it means to love the land you call home.

For me, home is a place that’s both wonderful and flawed. It’s reviled and misunderstood by outsiders. It’s full of people who have internalized so much of the criticism and prejudice about themselves that they’ve become insecure.

I once had an employee whose engineer husband had been transferred to Birmingham by his company. When they found out they were being moved away from their home in Wisconsin, all of their friends told them how terrible Alabama was going to be. They were told that it’s flat and has no trees. They were also assured that there were no white people here, so they were going to be ignored. The picture that was painted for them by their all-knowing friends was one of gloom and doom.

When they moved down here, they were delighted with how beautiful it was. There were hills and trees and  natural beauty all around. The people were generally warm and friendly and welcoming. The cost of living was lower and they were able to afford a nicer home with better schools than what they had experienced back home. When it came time for the company to move them back to Wisconsin, he left the company and found another job — so they could stay in the state they had come to love.

People don’t understand the South or southerners in many respects. They’ve seen too many bad movies made by ignorant directors who paint southerners as just a bunch of hillbillies who live in trailers. Of course you can find people like that, but you can also find intelligent, talented and educated people (and everything in between), just as you can anywhere.

About five years ago, I was planning to marry a woman from another part of the country. When she broke the news to her mother, the horrified mother said something on the order of, “But you wouldn’t actually live there, would you?”

People who would rail against prejudice — and the ugly racial history here that’s the legacy of slavery — don’t realize just how much prejudice they show when they judge and condemn a place they don’t know anything about.

For many southerners — including me — there’s a weird sort of defensiveness and pride that go hand-in-hand. In many ways, we’re ashamed of the racial legacy that other people brand us with, but we wonder why the same condemnation doesn’t apply to other places where slavery also once existed. We wonder why some people are so eager to preach tolerance while pushing a political and historical agenda that demonizes people with standards that aren’t applied to the ancestors of other people.

That mix of pride and defensiveness makes many of us eager to latch onto the most positive things we can to prove to people that we’re not the rubes that we’re portrayed as. (Until the company had financial trouble and had to be broken up, Saks Fifth Avenue was headquartered here in Birmingham. That used to make people’s heads explode as they tried to come to grips with it.)

It’s become a cliche because it’s been played so much, but we love “Sweet Home Alabama.” A band from Jacksonville, Fla., spent enough time recording in Alabama that they loved the place and wrote the song as a response to Canadian Neil Young’s songs “Southern Man” and “Alabama,” which were his indictment of racism in the ’60s in the South. In response, Lynyrd Skynyrd sang:

Well, I heard Mr. Young sing about her
Well, I heard ol’ Neil put her down
Well, I hope Neil Young will remember
A southern man don’t need him around anyhow

It was just a song to Lynyrd Skynyrd. For many in Alabama, it was a defiant defense — a raucous and joyful statement that we didn’t appreciate being stereotyped. We didn’t appreciate the broad brush that was used to paint use as a bunch of racists. If you want to make a crowd here happy, play that song. It’s become something of an unofficial state anthem. For me, it’s become a statement to the world that basically says, “You folks might not understand us. You might judge us without knowing us. But we’re proud of our home — and you can’t take the dignity of loving our home away from us.”

Identifying with the South in general — and Alabama in particular — is an emotional thing and it crops up when I least expect it sometimes. When my university — the University of Alabama — won college football’s national championship three years ago, for the first time in close to 20 years, I got teary-eyed and emotional. It’s not that I care that much about football. It’s that my team — my school — was the best at something, even if it was simply running around on a football field and hitting people.

I can get emotional and feel intense pride when I see progress the university is making. My school attracts a ridiculous number of National Merit Scholars, usually in the top two or three among public universities in the country. More than half of the most recent freshman class is from out of state. Various schools of the university are highly ranked. I won’t bore you with the specifics, but the point is that it matters to me. It matters because every little piece of advancement I see is one more way that I feel I can say — that we can say — we’re not what you think we are.

I’m proud of the artists and athletes and scholars who are from here. You know who many of them are — even if you don’t know where they’re from — and there are many others you’ve never heard of. I’m proud of what many of my people have done. I don’t care if they’re black or white or Hispanic or anything else. If they’re from here and they’re making the world better in some way, I claim them and I appreciate them.

I’m not a fan of country music, but a country band called Alabama had a song about 20 years ago called “My Home’s in Alabama,” which speaks nicely about the way I feel about myself. The chorus goes:

My home’s in Alabama
No matter where I lay my head
My home’s in Alabama
Southern born and Southern bred

I don’t know where the future will take me. I’m very willing to live wherever I need to. For various reasons, I might very well move away from here. That’s fine with me.

But wherever the future takes me, this place will be my home. The trees and the hills. The water and the blue skies and colorful sunsets. Even the people and the ugly history. The land and the people — the good and the bad — are where I came from. They’re who I am, whether it makes sense to you or not.

Come visit Alabama. Get to know us. You might come to love us and realize we’re not who you think we are. Stay here and become one of us. Maybe the South can become your home, too.

Note: The pictures with this article are mostly photos I’ve shot around here. At top is a sunset on I-20 westbound on the eastern side of Birmingham. Next is a tree in my suburb, which happens to be very close to the place that caught my attention Wednesday and prompted this piece. Third is former Alabama football player Bobby Greenwood celebrating the 2009 college football national championship. Below is an old mill that was converted decades ago into a home in a wealthy suburb of Birmingham. For more other random beautiful and interesting things in Alabama, check out this Pinterest page maintained by the Birmingham Public Library.

For months, Republicans have been trying to use what happened at Benghazi as the weapon with which to mortally wound Barack Obama’s second term. Although it seems clear to me that some terribly bad judgement was used connected with Benghazi (and it’s clear the administration lied about it subsequently), there’s no way it was something to bring an administration down. It was just politically embarrassing.

The brewing IRS scandal, on the other hand, is starting to look as though Richard Nixon rose from the grave and started giving Democrats political advice for the past few years.

You’ve heard about the scandal already, so I’m not going to waste time covering the specific allegations, partly because you can read them elsewhere and partly because it’s still early in the story, so the facts are developing. All we know is that the Internal Revenue Service used agents to give extra scrutiny to conservative groups and also leaked confidential information to media about conservative groups. (ProPublica is a progressive left media group, and it’s the one admitting that it was given the documents.)

Nobody is questioning that it happened. The question is how widespread it was and who directed it. First, we were told that it was limited to just one IRS office. Then it became clear that IRS officials in Washington were involved. How high did it go? Nobody outside the government knows yet.

I don’t have a clue whether Obama knew about the illegal activity. It’s possible that he’s just as surprised and outraged as anyone else. The White House is certainly denying knowledge of anything improper. In fact, White House press secretary Jay Carney went so far as to claim that the fact the IRS apologized for the illegal activity didn’t mean anything wrong had occurred. (Huh?)

In the early days of the Watergate scandal, nobody seriously believed that Nixon knew anything about the burglary or the subsequent activities to cover it up. Nobody knew that he had an “enemies list” which was used by the IRS to go after his political opponents, but that’s what turned out to be the case. Sound familiar? Or is that the way it happened? We don’t know.

Republicans are positively gleeful about these developments, of course, because it’s giving them a legitimate club with which to whack an administration they hate. The media is also turning on the White House, and it doesn’t help that the Justice Department just went after phone records for hundreds of Associated Press journalists. Whether you like them or not, it helps to have the media mad at the same folks you’re mad at, so this is a lucky break for Republicans.

Can we say that Democratic politicians are evil and abuse their power? Absolutely yes. But we can also say that Republicans are evil and abuse their power, too.

Here’s the real point. I don’t really care that much about the new scandal. It’s probably going to cost Obama some serious political capital. Some people will be fired. There will be congressional hearings. Somber people will say somber and hypocritical things on television. Some people might even go to jail. But this is a sideshow compared to the real issue.

Republicans and Democrats point fingers at each others and claim that the other side is evil. And everyone who supports the whole statist system says we have to have such a system because people are so inherently evil that the public has to be protected from them. Are people evil and untrustworthy? Of course. But if you give power to control a society to a group and call it government, who is going to end up winning the power? It’s people being drawn from the “evil populace” — and the worst among them are going to tend to be successful in winning power.

All of the D.C. scandals are just tempests in teapots. Some bad people on one team did bad things and then they lied about it. The people on the other team found out about the bad things and are sanctimoniously going after the bad people. That’s pretty much what every Washington scandal is about. The specifics change — and which team is on which side changes — but they all follow similar scripts.

Don’t get sucked into this scandal or the next one or the one after that. Will it make your life any better to follow the scandal and zealously hope that get the evil-doers are punished? I can’t see how it would. It certainly won’t change anything about the scandal and it won’t stop the next one from happening.

Quit supporting the statist system that gives the power to these people. This particular administration isn’t the problem — just as the Bush administration wasn’t the problem before this and the Clinton administration wasn’t the problem before them.

The problem is a system that demands all of your personal information and takes the power to control every aspect of your life. Don’t fight one random scandal after another all your life. Fight the system that allows the scandals in the first place.

Take away the power that these people have to collect information and control your life. That’s the only long-term solution.

UPDATE: Here’s a nice piece that gives the history of IRS abuses going back to the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

“I have not gotten the results from the biopsy yet, but my gastroenterologist and oncologist are fairly certain the tumor in my esophagus is cancerous,” Chris wrote. He said the doctor was making plans for chemo, radiation and surgery. “I am not really happy with the idea, but there may be no other option. If you have any thoughts you’d like to share, I’d appreciate it.”

Just 41 days later, Chris was dead.

After his initial message about the surgery, I posted the details of his situation and asked others for treatment options. Nothing interesting and viable turned up.

I didn’t keep up with the specifics of how he was doing, but I knew he was getting treatment. On March 12 — just eight days after his initial message to me — he posted on Facebook about the way his situation looked.

“It has started to spread,” he wrote. “The reality kind of sunk in today. This may kill me.”

I could tell from the pictures and short comments he made over the coming weeks that he was having surgery. On April 12, I sent him another email to ask how the recovery was coming along.

“David, thank you for your continued interest,” he wrote. “My response may seem a bit disjointed and rambling as my brother-in-law is hovering over me with my prescriptions. For the most part I am on hold until we can discover who wants this info. Generally speaking, healthy.”

I saw that as very positive news. He was recovering, surrounded by family. And his health was, “Generally speaking, healthy.”

I felt he was someone else who had beaten cancer and that he was going to be fine. I didn’t hear from him after that. I got busy with life and didn’t check on him again until this past weekend. When I went to his Facebook page to send him a note, I found a message from his sister and brother in law:

To all the friends of Chris Kahn,
He passed away Sunday evening [March 14].
Please post your messages on his Facebook wall.
He died in our home in hospice care.

I know that people die every day. That’s just the way the world works. But it’s not every day that someone I know dies, so it leaves me with the same sorts of melancholy feelings that such deaths bring to so many of us. As much as I’d like to pretend that the feelings we experience are grief for the loss of a friend or loved on, I think the feelings tend to be about ourselves.

Other people’s deaths remind us that we’re mortal. They remind us that we’re going to die, too.

Chris Kahn was an intelligent and thoughtful man. He was a principled libertarian who frequently had insightful comments about subjects related to politics and society. In the short time I knew him, I came to see him as someone interesting enough that I’d like to have known him better. (When Chris posted this picture in January, friends joked that he was going for the record of “longest beard for someone who actually has a job.”)

At this point, though, his politics and his intelligence don’t matter. He’s just another mortal man who’s “gone beyond the gate we must all pass some day,” in the words of the great songwriter Terry Scott Taylor (in “One More Time“).

From the day a doctor told him he thought it was cancer until the day he died, Chris didn’t quite have six weeks. It reminds me of how fortunate I was last year when a doctor told me that I had breast cancer and lived to tell about it. It reminds me of the cliche that none of us know how much time we have left on earth.

More than anything, though, it reminds me that we’re here to love and be loved. Some people mistake that for just the physical things they do for people and that they allow people to do for them. Those things are important, but the real point is the feeling of loving connection and understanding that exists between two hearts — at least every now and then.

Don’t waste the time you have in this world. Don’t accept less than a real loving connection. Don’t let any kind of pragmatism or “what others would think” get in the way of having what you need. When you lie in a bed dying one day, you’re not going to worry about what people thought of you or whether people thought you made the right decisions. You’re just going to want to know you’re loved and understood.

I’m going to miss my friend, Chris. And I thank him for forcing me to think — one more time — about what I really want and what’s truly important in this life.

Goodbye, Chris.

I get a lot of mail from people I don’t know very well (or at all). The subjects are all over the place. Some people write to say they enjoy reading what I write. A few send me nasty messages. One woman was writing love messages about me on her blog and then sending me links. A flight attendant based in Philadelphia wrote to say that she didn’t agree with me about anything politically, but she had fallen in love with me from reading anyway.

A surprisingly large number of people make personal observations about me, based on what they read here and what they see of me on my open Facebook page. I got two messages over the weekend, though, that were sort of thesis and antithesis.

“I love reading what you post because you’re always so happy and nice to everybody,” one woman wrote, in part. “You’re smart and tough, but I can tell you’re really happy and love the world.”

Interesting.

“I’m thinking this inbox is a bit overdue,” a man wrote. “You seem angry lately. I actually prefer angry David vs. disinterested David … angry David remains rational in his anger.”

Both messages had additional content, but these parts stuck out to me. One person sees me as happy. Another person sees me as angry. Which is true? And what could account for people coming to such strongly different conclusions?

I’ve written before about the fact that the human mind will always be the weak link in communication, so I already believe that it’s pretty much impossible for me to accurately convey to you the precise thought I want to convey. I lose some of the message in the encoding into language and then more of it is lost when you decode it slightly differently than I meant.

But let’s assume here that one person is accurately seeing anger and another is accurately seeing love and happiness. Which do I feel?

I feel a lot of things. I feel happiness, anger, joy, rage, frustration, love, desire, need, wonder and a million other things. I seem to feel a very wide range of emotions, and a lot of times I feel out of step with the world as a result. (“I am an emotional man, emotional man with obsolete feelings,” wrote Mark Heard in a song he wrote in the ’80s that I always identified with.)

I feel many different things — about the world, about people, about my life. They’re contradictory things at times. I rage against a large chunk of the human race. I don’t especially like people in many cases. But I also have an intense desire to help make the world a better place, for those people and the ones to come in the future. I’m angry at people who don’t understand things in the same ways I do. I’m angry at people who assert the right to control others (including me) without any moral reason, but at the same time I understand them. I know why they believe what they believe. I think they mean well, for the most part. I see both sides.

I can see flaws in someone I love and see things that hurt me, yet at the same time, an understanding of the person makes the flaws irrelevant. It’s not that they don’t exist anymore. It’s simply that I hold contradictory pieces of information about people and places and things — and I can know that the truth isn’t in any one discrete piece of information. The truth is in the synthesis of the seemingly contradictory pieces.

When I was younger, I didn’t understand what F. Scott Fitzgerald meant when he wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” But at this point, I don’t know any other way to think. Contrary to what Fitzgerald said, I don’t think it’s about intelligence. I think it’s more about the willingness to feel things and not be overwhelmed by the seeming contradictions. It’s about withholding judgement even in some cases where it would be easy to judge prematurely.

At the risk of making it too complicated, understanding the world is something of a Hegelian dialectic. At least, that’s one model to use in understanding it. You take a thesis and then the antithesis responds, so to speak. They can’t both be true, according to typical western logic, but somehow the truth emerges out of a synthesis of the two contradictory ideas.

I’ve come to see the world as a wonderful place and a terrible place at the same time. When I see the beauty and wonder, it’s not that I don’t see the ugly parts. When I’m in despair over the horrors of the world, it’s not that I suddenly deny the good parts. Instead, I’m looking at the innocence of life and also looking at the stark reality of death and loss — and I’m looking for what’s true between those extremes.

Both innocence and death are real. It’s not that truth is somehow found in finding an average between them. The truth is found in something that’s real across the board. It’s found in the emotions. It’s found in love and being loved. It’s found in experiencing beauty and the warmth of being understood by someone else.

As I was thinking about the two messages I got over the weekend, I was reminded of an old song by Pat Terry that addresses seeing both sides of life. In a song called “Man of Steel,” on the 1984 album, “The Silence,” Terry wrote:

It’s a typical day for the man of steel
A little happy and a little bit sad
Seems like a reasonable way to feel
For a man in a world gone mad
There’s a baby that’s bouncing on his daddy’s knee
Grinning like the world’s his own
There’s a Cadillac climbing a cold, dark hill
To a grave with a fresh-placed stone
And the man of steel has a gleam in his eye for the innocent one
And the man of steel has a lump in his throat for a loved one gone
And the man of steel has hope in his heart for anyone
Who can see what’s true between the two and carry on

Later in the song, he adds:

And the man of steel has a lump in his throat for a world gone wrong
And the man of steel has a gleam in his eye for the one whose despair is gone
And the man of steel has hope in his heart for anyone
Who can sing a clear and truthful song
Who can hear a lie and still be strong
Who can see both sides and still decide to carry on

I see both sides. I see “a world gone wrong,” but I also see the joy in those “whose despair is gone.” The world is a wonderful, terrible place. When I look at my own life, I see things I hate and desperately want to improve, but I also see things that make me love life — and that make me have hope for the future.

So who was right of the two people who wrote to me and saw very different things? Both. And neither. Notice the detail on the M.C. Escher painting at the top of the page. If you look at individual parts, you see things that look right and normal. If you just look at one narrow slice, you see people walking up stairs. But if you look at another narrow slice, you’re equally sure that the stairs are going down. Which is it? Both views are true, but both views miss the broader truth that encompasses both.

It’s easy to live life as a Pollyanna. You just ignore what you don’t want to see. It’s also easy to live life as a miserable and cynical person who expects the worst. You just ignore how wonderful and beautiful certain things are — and you ignore the possibilities of being loved and understood.

To do either extreme, you have to ignore some parts of reality. But if you look at all of reality, you’re faced with a mixed bag of contradictory facts.

I think contentment, happiness, serenity — whatever you want to call it — ultimately comes from accepting the world for what it is. It comes from accepting the good things and bad things and all that’s in between — and then making a conscious choice to carry on with the business of loving people and accepting love. Both sides are important. You can’t take care of anyone else — or really love anyone else — until you take care of yourself and love yourself.

I’m all over the chart with what I’m saying here. This is one time when I don’t have the words to properly convey what I feel. I have abstract pictures in my head and my heart of what I’m talking about. In my heart, it all seems so obvious.

I wish I had the words to show you all these emotions in my heart, because the world makes a lot more sense in my heart than it ever will in my head.

In those 24 months, I’ve had visitors from 182 countries. I’ve had more than a quarter of a million unique visitors. I really do appreciate all of them. I’ve been surprised — well, shocked is a more appropriate word — that this kind of traffic is possible for one random guy with some decidedly out-of-the-mainstream opinions.

I’ve enjoyed spending time with you, and I look forward to spending more time with you in the future. Maybe I’ll eventually even start making the monkeys work again. You never know.

Thanks for being here, everybody. And a special thanks for the few who leave comments. Whether we agree or not, I appreciate a crowd that’s more likely to think and discuss than to shout and scream.

If you look in the dictionary next to the phrase “dysfunctional family,” there’s a picture of my family. There were five of us. In addition to my parents, I had two younger sisters. We were born just two years apart, so we were like three little stair steps. (That’s me with my mother around the time of my second birthday.)

My mother was very intelligent, artistic, funny and sensitive. She was a free spirit who didn’t even hear the drumbeat of the rest of the world as she marched to her own. She was oblivious to anything except following her own heart. In college, she had been selected as one of the “beauties” for the yearbook — back in the days when they used to do that — at the teachers’ college where she and my father both went to school. She was wildly popular and widely loved.

My mother was too sensitive to be married to my father. I didn’t understand it at the time, but his strict and controlling nature drove her to a mental breakdown. They were nothing alike in temperament or habits or much of anything else, but he insisted that his way was right about everything. He pushed and manipulated and controlled and cajoled to force her to be exactly what he was.

She had a breakdown when I was 5 years old. I remember what happened very well, because I was standing there watching when she snapped. I could tell the story in detail, but I see no reason to. She was soon sent to a mental hospital in Virginia for a stay of about six weeks, where she had shock treatments.

She was never the same after that. When she returned, there were various things she no longer remembered had occurred. For instance, she had to experience the grief of her father’s death all over again, because the shock treatments had stolen that memory — and many others — from her.

She soon left my father. At the time, I was just distressed at the threat of my family breaking up. With an adult perspective — and a fuller understanding of who my father is — I don’t know how she lasted as long as she did.

She was on anti-depressants of various kinds. (Remember that the drugs were far worse back then.) Her official diagnosis at the time was manic-depression (called bi-polar disorder today), but a psychologist I’ve used for counseling in trying to understand the past says she believes her diagnosis today would be borderline personality disorder.

For about four years, she was in and out of our lives. At first, she took the three children with her when she left, but my father found ways to track her down each time and get us back. She finally understood that the only way she would be able to leave — and save her sanity — is if she allowed my father to have custody. When I was 9, they divorced and my father raised us.

There were a few aborted attempts by them to get back together, but they were doomed. After about the age of 14, I didn’t see her anymore until I was in college.

On the spur of the moment one day, I drove to Birmingham — where she taught at an inner-city elementary school — from Tuscaloosa and waited for her to get out of school. It was like seeing someone who I sort of knew intimately but who was sort of a stranger. Off and on over the years, we attempted to have a relationship, but it always seemed more as though I was seeing a woman I didn’t know.

For her part, she was always happy to see me and wanted more. She was still the same happy and sensitive and loving person I’d known as a child, but she was irresponsible and childlike. I never could deal with all the years of hurt I felt from having felt abandoned. And I couldn’t get over feeling that she was a stranger.

We eventually lost touch. The reasons are complicated and hard to explain. She now lives in Nashville in a residential facility of some kind. I’m told that she has Alzheimer’s to some degree or other.

For me, Mother’s Day is about the memories of what I didn’t have. It’s about the regret of not getting to grow up feeling that I had a mother who was there for me. As an adult, I can make excuses for the things she did — and I can explain to myself that my father was the one who drove her actions — but it doesn’t change what I felt.

I have a great desire to have a dearly loved wife and children of my own. I’ve learned enough about both of my parents to finally understand what’s important and what’s not. I’ve learned not to be someone like my father. I’ve learned to accept the differences and imperfections of someone like my mother. It’s taken me this long to get to the point that I can feel certain I won’t repeat their mistakes.

I’ve been through a lot of varying emotions when it comes to my mother. I’ve loved her, despised her, pitied her and felt anger for her. The emotions are still mixed and I’ll never be able to change the past.

But if I can change my future — and create the kind of emotionally healthy and happy family I didn’t have — all of the struggle will have been worth it.

I’ve resented my mother quite a bit in the past for abandoning us. I felt that she couldn’t love me or she wouldn’t have left. I finally understand that she did the best she could. I’m finally at peace with that.

Eight years ago, I made a short film. I had been saying for years that I wanted to make movies, but I hadn’t done anything about it. I was scared and I found every excuse under the sun not to do anything other than talk about it.

Then I met a woman. She was interested in film. She was interested in me. I was intensely interested in her and I wanted her to fall in love with me. I wanted to impress her and I wanted her to be proud of me.

So I put aside my fear and my insecurity and my ignorance. I made a film. It wasn’t a perfect film, but it was good enough to get into 20 smaller film festivals and win five awards.

The woman and I did fall in love. In a very real sense, my film was a love letter to her. It never would have been made without her in my life.

I think about this a lot lately when I think about why I haven’t made any more films and why I’m not turning out the kind of art I’d like to be making. I have several scripts in various stages of pre-production. I have a documentary that I’m working with a producer to try to bring to life. I even wrote half of a book last year that I ended up deleting in despair because I didn’t love it enough.

But I’m not finishing things. I don’t have enough enthusiasm for anything. I’m not using the talent that I know I have. Why not?

We’re told that we should do the work we do for ourselves — because we simply want to do them — instead of doing things for other people. I can honestly see that point of view, but I know it’s a sterile argument that leaves me cold. The only motivation I know is love — wanting to conquer things and win things as treasure to give to someone I love. Money and power and position don’t mean anything to me. Being loved and understood and appreciated is all that works for me.

A couple of days ago, a friend and I were talking about why I’m not doing the things I ought to be doing. She’s been encouraging me to write a book. Earlier this week on Facebook, I had joked that I could write an entire book about the things I didn’t understand. (Another friend quipped, “Just one?”)

Mary thought it could be a good concept for a book, so she’s been encouraging me to do something about it. She mocked up a fake front cover, using a picture I happened to post earlier in the week (the one at right) and her whimsical idea of what it could look like. (Here’s the art she came up with and sent to me.) She’s trying to prod me to do almost anything, and this was her fun way to do it.

I have books to write. I have films to make. I even have photos that I’d love to turn into a gallery show. I have things I want to make. I have things I need to make.

I just don’t know how to do it without the right person to do it for — the right person to give it to.

In my mind, I have a very old-fashioned image about this. I picture myself putting all of my talent and effort and sweat into making things and then laying them before someone I love. I picture myself saying, “I made this for you. I can’t give you the world, but I can give you myself. And this is what I know how to make. I hope you like it.”

I have to have a reason to make good art. Without love as a motivation, I’m just being a craftsman making a pretty trinket. It’s not real art, at least not in the way I understand it. In some mystical way that I can’t explain, love is the magic elixir that turns the work of a craftsman into the work of an artist.

Maybe there’s a better way. I honestly don’t know. I just know that the only way I know to breathe life into my work — and make it become good art — is if my sincere message to a woman is, “I made this for you because I love you. I hope you like it.”

Without that, I’m just making pretty pictures and stringing together pleasant words that don’t mean a thing.

If you or I were to murder a police officer, what do you suppose the sentence would be? Death? Life without parole? 40 years? Whatever it would be, it wouldn’t be a slap on the wrist.

So what happens when a police officer murders an unarmed 54-year-old Sunday school teacher and flat-out lies about what happened? If you’re Daniel Harmon-Wright, you get three years for “voluntary manslaughter.”

Why do we have one set of rules for people with badges and another set of rules for us?

Harmon-Wright was a police officer who responded to a report of a “suspicious woman” in a church parking lot in Culpeper, Va., at 10 a.m. on a Thursday morning last year. The woman was actually at the church to apply for a job, and nobody has said what made her “suspicious.” Harmon-Wright claimed that he tried to reach inside the woman’s vehicle to take her license, but she suddenly rolled the window up on his arm — trapping him — and tried to drive away.

There were problems with this story, though. Most importantly, a carpenter working in sight of the confrontation said nothing of the sort happened. He said the officer had his gun in one hand and had his other hand on the woman’s door handle. When she tried to drive away, the officer fired at least six shots, killing the woman.

Pure and simple, Harmon-Wright murdered a woman who tried to drive away from him.

He was put on trial on charges of murder, malicious shooting into an occupied vehicle resulting in a death, and use of a firearm in the commission of a felony. Do you know how hard it is to even get those sorts of charges against a police officer in a case such as this? But small-town juries in conservative states such as Virginia are prone to being soft on police when evaluating their actions. So even though they agreed he was responsible, they convicted him of “voluntary manslaughter” and recommended just a three-year sentence.

It’s hard to see a more open and shut case for sending a bad cop to prison for murder. So why did he get off with so little punishment? Why do we have one system of justice for the rest of us and another standard for people who are given a gun and a badge?

There are good police officers, but the fact that so many people are willing to give a blanket pass to those who truly do wrong makes me more and more afraid of all of them. In too many cases, they have a virtual blank check — and this kind of cop is going to make you pay with your life when you don’t “respect my authority.”

Many of us have thought that Big Brother might arrive in our homes through TV sets, but what if we had the wrong appliance? What if Big Brother is really coming to control your refrigerator and oven and other very mundane appliances?

In Great Britain, the National Grid — the group that runs the power grid — has proposed that all appliances be required to have special sensors that give the power operators control to shut appliances down temporarily if they need to manage shortages of electricity. (I don’t like to link to RT.com, because it’s a propaganda organ of the Russian government, but this story appears legitimate.) The plan is also backed by power operators across the European Union, who want it adopted all over the continent.

Here in the United States, some power companies are adopting what they call “smart meters.” Who could oppose a “smart” meter? It sounds great, doesn’t it? For a power company, smart meters provide obvious benefits. They can monitor your power usage remotely, so the company no longer has to send someone to your house to read the meter. Just as important to the company, though, these meters give a power utility the ability to shut off your power remotely and “manage” your usage in other ways.

If the utility is having trouble supplying enough power, it can choose to cut back on your usage during peak periods. In other words, you’re giving a company (or a municipal utility) the right to shut your power off when it’s convenient for them.

In theory, it sounds good. In practice, it might even work as advertised for the time being. In some places, companies are offering financial incentives for them to have the right to cut your power off at certain peak times. It’s the implications for the future that scare me.

(Let me also mention that some people have worries about health problems because smart meters send their data back using radio waves. Some are even being arrested trying to block the installation of the meters, for both safety and privacy reasons. I think the safety issue is nonsense and I don’t take it seriously. The atmosphere is full of radio waves and they don’t hurt us. This is no different. It’s just like the people who were scared of WiFi signals and claimed they harmed health, too.)

A connected world — an “Internet of things” — is the wave of the future. Devices are going to have sensors and IP addresses and they’re going to talk to each other. I see that as almost inevitable. What I don’t like is that we aren’t going to be in control of our own devices. Companies and governments are going to have the technical capability to remotely control major aspects of our daily lives.

Even if the current uses of the technology are fairly benign, are you comfortable giving government the power to control what you’re using and the information about what devices you’re powering? What if you’re using power to grow plants indoors? Is that going to be enough to trigger a drug raid? (Buying indoor growing equipment is already enough to justify such a raid.)

I like technology and I like being connected, but I like to have control over my own devices. Maybe it’s already too late to stop this. I honestly don’t know. But I do know that a wave of major change is coming — and most people aren’t even going to know it’s coming until it’s too late to stop it.

I’m not happy about it, but I have no idea how to deal with this one.