I'm Beginning to Dislike Battlestar Galactica,....

And I'm taking the night off from using that pitiful excuse for a President as a verbal punching bag!

Gentle readers (and long-time followers - all 5-6 of you judging by my hit counter), you know I don't post much about my personal life on this blog. I hoping that in doing so tonight, I can exorcise a few demons that are haunting my dreams most nights.

A few weeks ago, my mother - an old Italian-American bird hobbling her way to 90 - passed out and fell at home and was rushed to the hospital. She was in declining health, but nothing this bad since getting carbon monoxide poisoning in the early 90s, before it was chic to have CO detectors all over your house.

After a few days in the ICU, with highly-trained specialists poking and prodding her, ruling out one problem after another and generally scratching their heads and going WTF?, Mom's primary care doctor intervened.

And came the phone call my brothers and I expected but didn't expect: Mom's heart was failing. The veritable pantheon of pharmocopeia had begun to loose its efficacy - too much of one will stop her kidneys, too much of the other will stop her heart, etc,...

We began to talk of weeks and months. Mom was basically cleaned up and shipped off to a local nursing home to live out her days comfortably. A few days ago, the doctor now treating her at the nursing home was a little more blunt about her condition: "You know she's dying, right?" was the answer to some of my concerns about her care. We are now talking in terms of days,...

So, what does this tale of personal woe have to do with Battlestar Galactica, you might ask?

Ever since Mom became ill, my dreams have been party to multiple variations on the BSG themes of annihilation. The SciFi channel would pay through the nose to have access to what I'm dreaming: disintegrating beams killing off humans, but leaving buildings standing, and watching fatalists who believe "this has happened before, it will happen again" commit suicide before my eyes; outright war and occupation by the Cylons leading to interment camps and Nazi-style final solutions and seeing and hearing the humans as they are incinerated in modern-day ovens; being in the thick of a space battle as we're overwhelmed and tossed into the vacuum of space when the ship's integrity fails. And so on,...

I don't know whether to curse or congratulate the creators of this oh-so-realistic Battlestar Galactica for getting so far into my psyche.

Maybe I'll find the answer at the bottom of the next bottle of Jack.

I'll let you know,...