Sue Gets Depressed Over Star Wars

You know you're not feeling well when you can't eat, can't drink, can't sleep and just watching a car drive by on the television screen gives you the motion sickness 'urp'ies. That was my state of being for an entire week and I'm here to tell you, it sucked. Heck, I'm not even sure if the dog was staying close out of loyalty or with intent to chow down once my corpse stopped twitching. (I love my dog, but he's a pragmatist. I know he thinks Nyquil is a marinade.)

So how did I spend the week, you ask? I caught up on my reading. In fact, I sort of caught up to it, passed it and left it wheezing in the dust several mile markers back. Reading was the only thing I could do that didn't have immediate dire consequences involving stresses on the household plumbing or inadvertantly leaving a lung under the pillow.

I started my book-a-thon with the best intentions. I have 'quality' literature in the house, you know. Raymond Carver, Ha Jin, Saroyen, Salinger, Solzenitzyn, Remarque, I've got all that. No reason not to expand my mind even though the rest of me is going the way of the Dodo, right? Except it didn't happen like that because I picked up one of my kid's Star Wars Jedi Apprentice books, and next thing I knew, I was off and running.

By my count, in one week I read (cover to cover) twelve Jedi Apprentice books, nine full length Star Wars novels and a rather disturbingly graphic comic book. By Wednesday, my young padawans, I was more steeped in the lore than the cup of tea I started to make at some point and forgot about. (It's probably still sitting on the counter, achieving sentience as I type.) When I could finally sleep again, the sizzle of lightsaber battles punctuated my dreams. "There is no illness," I told myself, while squinting cross eyed at the thermometer, "there is the Force." I found myself able to toss kleenex into the wastepaper basket from any place in the room, merely by meditating and finding my center before letting fly. Sentence structure, I began to reverse. Notice it, I did not. Pretty cool actually, it was. Disagree, my offspring did.

But I might have created a larger problem for myself than I solved. No, I don't mean my kids' imminent plans to cart me off to an asylum or the fact that it's practically impossible to find lightsaber parts in rural Wisconsin. I mean... well, it's like this.

I like my new Jedi friends. I really like them.

I admire Barriss Offee who has the talent and compassion to be a healer. I like that Luminara Unduli admitted that the hardest part of showcasing her mastery of the Force was in not throwing up. I know that Obi Wan Kenobi once left the Jedi Order and had to come crawling back. I also know that he had a love interest, who she was and how it ended. I think Kit Fisto rocks the house a lot more than Mace Windu. I cracked up to find out that Yoda's dietary preferences nauseate his esteemed fellow Jedi. Okay, Anakin is still an egomaniacal twit, but that goes with the territory. Man, I LIKE these people!

Enter Revenge of the Sith and the inevitable torrential downpour on my midichlorian parade. You can't be even casually acquainted with Star Wars without knowing how all this is going to turn out. Watching the trailer only served to punctuate the inevitable — and the inevitable is extermination. Even considering that I've known all this since the seventies, I'm still massively depressed.

The novels aren't perfect reads, of course. They're still chock full of political wrangling, senatorial wibbling, corporate macinations and other things that I find immeasurably boring. But at least they weren't written by George Lucas. They were written by (go figure) actual writers, and consequently the characters are real and vital in a way that the two (soon to be three) prequels failed to achieve.

So where does that leave me? In one sense, I can't wait to see the third and final prequel. From all reports, there's going to be a lightsaber battle that makes the Maul/Kenobi fight look like a playground scuffle at Kindertots Daycare. A lot of questions will be answered. A lot of dangling plot threads will (presumably) be tied up. The saga will be complete. The era will be over.

But on the other hand, I'm sitting here squirming with anthropomorphically induced guilt. There's going to be a train wreck and I'm going to pay good money to watch it. There will be snack food involved. Then I'm going to buy the novel and read the stuff George forgot to mention. I nearly have already, because the freakin' book is out and it's all I can do not to buy it NOW RIGHT NOW. I may invest in action figures. I will undoubtedly reinact certain scenes with my offspring... I already have leftover cardboard tubes from Christmas gift wrapping. I'll make mine as bright blue as the magic markers allow.

I already know I'm going to do all this. Heck, my AIM avatar is, even now, a de-mulleted Obi-Wan.

I'm going to be a spectator to the destruction of the Jedi. I feel like a traitor. Like a voyeur.

It's fiction, I tell myself. It isn't real. It never was real. George Lucas has done his level, if unintentional, best to prove to me it isn't real.

Still... it feels real.