"Or Am I Standing Still?"

Don’t know if you’re catching the latest version of the Sopranos. When it first came out we watched it pretty religiously like the rest of the cable nation but then it got strung out and winded and we lost interest. And of course it was GONE for two years. That may have has something to do with it. Such that when it came back out a week or two ago I was fairly numbed by the hoopla. Sopranos is back – big deal. Show the game.

Well I read a review of the first episode where Tony got shot and I had to watch. In a TV way I’m sort of glued to HBO because I have to watch my boyze on Entourage (Yo Drama!) so I’ll go a round or two with Tony. But I thought Episode 2 was fairly fascinating.

After Junior, in an Alzheimer’s haze, shoots Tony in Episode 1 we know he’s basically going to be on death watch for awhile. But Episode 2 starts of with Tony as Joe Regular Bidnessman attending a conference in Costa Mesa (just down the road here). Seeing Tony attending a conference and wishing he can get in to hear the first speaker is a far cry from Bada Bing. Seeing him sit at the bar trying to wile away the hours of another boring business trip was a grand juxtaposition as well. And if even before he went through the missing identity bit in the program I turned to Deborah and said “He’s in purgatory”.

One of my favorite words – and a funny favorite word for a term that essentially means the holding place between heaven and hell. And growing up Catholic I should know it well. Hell, getting to purgatory would be good.

Or am I already there.

My mother thinks we live in hell already. Well maybe only 50.1% of her thinks that way. But the girl who was schooled by nuns likes to think that way at times. Especially when there's cork in her Cabernet.

If you hadn’t seen the show, Tony is lying in a coma but you see him dreaming in this alternative state that has him at this business conference in Costa Mesa which interestingly enough shows local (and typical SoCal) burning brushfire images on the TV in the bar. Hell or heaven?

Deal or no deal? (I 'm also kind of interested in the notion that Costa Mesa is potentially hell).

In this netherworld Tony also loses his wallet so he has no ID and cannot get on a plane and leave or check into a hotel and stay. He has to borrow the identity (credit card) of someone else to hang around. Admittedly he is no one.

No one and still hanging around.

Ever feel like that? (I mean that explains my last three weeks!?) Is my angst just dripping? For some of us who travel alot this is amost what it feels like - always going someplace but frankly not going anywhere. When Tony is sitting there at the bar I imagined myself just last week - and a thousand other weeks. He later tells a group of fellow conventioneers in the bar (fellow "purgators" - or should say "purgatorians") that he just turned 46 and he still didn't know where he was going. Hey I got two more years on that one Ton.

Aaah fuhgedaboutit.

I had planned a longer rant but college basketball still beckons - and I think you get my drift. Tony will do okay - he's still got two more seasons.