Yeoman Smith The Human Sacrifice

Author’s Notes:  One of these days I am going to write a story that uses Mansions of the Lord as part of the Soundtrack. This music is raw and powerful. The version I am listening to can be found in the video below this line.

The lyrics are as follows:

“The Mansions of the Lord”
Words by Randall Wallace

To fallen soldiers let us sing
where no rockets fly nor bullets wing
Our broken brothers let us bring
to the mansions of the Lord

No more bleeding no more fight
No prayers pleading through the night
just divine embrace, eternal light
in the mansions of the Lord

Where no mothers cry and no children weep
We will stand and guard tho the angels sleep
All through the ages safely keep the mansions of the Lord

(excerpt from “Sgt. MacKenzie” by Joseph Kilna MacKenzie)

If Captain Kirk were narrating this piece it would be Stardate 3.14 and the Enterprise would be exploring the Euclidean Black Hole on the edge of the PI Universe. Some unnatural anomaly on a nearby planet would catch Kirk’s eye and he would assemble a landing party to go investigate.  The party would be made up of the usual suspects, Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Yeoman Smith the human sacrifice. Good old Yeoman Smith would die some horrible death on the planet. Unfortunately for Yeoman Smith his death wouldn’t be one that saved the others.

There wouldn’t be any honor in it. He wouldn’t go to his space grave knowing that he died to save the rest of the crew. Nope, that last fleeting vision would be of Kirk getting a good shellacking by some unusually hot and attractive alien. Always good to know that while you are dying in horrible agony the guy next to you is playing hide the salami with the queen of the creatures that created your current unfortunately unsolvable conundrum. The good news is that you didn’t really die because you are an actor and Yeoman Smith is just one of many roles that you have played during your life.

One would hope that you are not bitter that even though you are a master thespian with experience on Broadway and on the London Theater circuit. No, need to be bitter that some guy with far less talent and a lot more luck just happened to nail a part that led to a career of notoriety and fortune. Now you are just a footnote in a few databases and your former colleague is starring in a show spawned by the recollection of a man’s rantings on a social media network. Yep, he got more work based upon something that birds do…Tweeting.

Not to mention that he has parlayed his overacting into any number of other goofy roles including more than a few where he played a caricature of himself. Really, you don’t mean to focus on things you have no control over. You don’t wish to be bitter about the past, but for heaven’s sake he is the personification of  As You Like It:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,

It is growing harder to be reasonable

It has been a long week for me. For reason great and small I have found it to be tough to get through and upon more than one occasion screamed at the universe. It is not my normal behavior to scream at the universe, but my patience has been tested in more ways than I care to think about. I would gladly characterize this week as having been…brutal. I suppose that the easiest summation of why is to say that it felt like everything I did was twice as hard as it needed to be. Countless hours were spent working on tasks that never should have come up. Instead of  taking care of the things that I had planned on I found myself fighting through the unexpected crap that we call life.  And for good measure my new phone (the DroidX) died two days after I received it.

So here I am, staring at the tail end of Friday afternoon and doing my best to unwind, decompress and relax. It is time to let go of the worries of the week and focus on family time. Besides this time next week I’ll be hanging out with a bunch of others in The Emerald City. So I suppose that sometime over the weekend it will be time to make sure that Traveling Jack has the proper gear and clothes for his trip.

Ok my friends, this post has been a bit strange. I’ll take responsibility for that and attribute it to having started and stopped writing it 17 times.  No surprises there, the theme of this week has been let’s make everything harder than normal. So I am going to sign off for now, but I expect to be back later. I want to work on a couple of storylines and there is no better way to do that than by writing. See you around.

Besides, I need to end the week with a post that makes more sense than some wacky ramblings about Yeoman Smith.