Best TV show ever

...I hate when people say shit like that. It's not the best show ever. For one thing it's cancelled, after only 2 seasons, though rumor mill has it possibly being picked up by WB. The show is/was Dead Like Me, formerly on Showtime. I did an online quiz somewhere where they asked what book I'd like to see as a movie that hasn't already been done. Piers Anthony wrote a story which turned into a series (don't all Piers Anthony books become a series?) called On a Pale Horse; Book one of the Incarnations of Immortality series (the rest of the series, while good, got tedious, telling the same story from different perspectives). The premise was that Death was actually an office held by a mortal. The mortal then ceases to live and becomes immortal until he is killed (almost impossible if care is taken) when the killer becomes Death. His job is to collect the souls of people whose lives are in the balance between good and evil. He can, on occasion, refuse to let them die or to give them back their life. The book raises some great points about the nature of death, and man's fear of, and flirtation with it. I've read that Dead Like Me was based on that premise. Georgia Lass, just turned 18, temping in a mindless office job, is killed by a toilet seat from the falling MIR space station. She is approached and told that she can now live an almost normal existance as a Reaper, collecting and shepherding souls from people already slated to die. They keep the person from experiencing the pain of their own death.
Mandy Patinkin is the biggest name in the show, as Rube, George's boss, who hands out the daily assignments to the crew of reapers under him, at their morning gathering at Der Waffle Haus.

The writing is so well done, and the characters so complex that you get to know and understand their excentricities. I've been watching the second season DVDs just out. Some of the thoughts that have come up have really hit a chord with me. One was, "It's the imperfections in a person that makes us fall in love with them." Gods, how true. If everybody were perfect, how boring it would be. Another which hit me, "You are so beautiful. I love you. I just don't like you very much right now." (I know at least one person in my life right now that I want to say that to.)
I've thought about putting one of those as the sig line of my email, but I can't bear to give up the one I have, "At my age, pleasure lies in the contemplation, not the act." from the book Making History, by Stephen Fry (yes, the wonderful British actor.) That one saying encapsulates so much of what I'm going through right now, surrounded by so much temptation, and unable to act on any of it, from lack of interest in any other part than mine.
I do a lot of contemplating.
I recently came across a letter from my friend Becky, who died a year ago. I had written and told her of a party I was at, and told a certain young lady of medium acquaintance, that I really wanted to kiss her. She, oh, so politely, refused. Becky wrote back that not all women were like her, that what we had had and shared was unique and special, and that it couldn't be counted on to ever happen again. Becky took almost 20 years to want to love me, and, long past my prime, still loved me for the me that wasn't a fat old man with a lot of complication in his life. I don't think I'll ever find another friend of that depth.
Damn. Here.