Hey, everyone… if you’re actually reading this on Thanksgiving (which I like to refer to as Mass Consumption Day), I can only assume it’s after you’ve all finished dinner, right? If not, shouldn’t you be off, um, consuming?

Anyhow, I just wanted to drop a quick little note here: In his column this week at amctv.com, the ubiquitous John Scalzi lists all the things for which he’s thankful in the realm of sci-fi movies. I agree with him on pretty much all of these items, except for the one about special effects (sorry, I’m a big fan of actual, tangible miniatures, although I concede the CG stuff is getting better all the time). I found one of Scalzi’s items especially resonant:

I’m thankful I’m almost 40 years old and still want a lightsaber and a speeder bike.

My geeky ego has taken quite a beating over the past ten years. From the Great Fanboy Prequel Wars that trashed the reputation of my favorite movie series and revealed one of my boyhood heroes to have feet of clay, to the remakes of damn near every movie or TV show I’ve ever loved, I’ve had to endure the diminishing, eclipsing, or outright dismissal of things that I used to think would never go away. Things that loom so large in my personal history and psyche that I’ve always assumed they must mean as much to everyone else as they mean to me. I know… naive, even childish. There have been times, especially lately with all the talk about the new Star Trek, when I’ve felt like a damn fool for clinging to my increasingly obsolete obsessions, when I’ve wondered what’s wrong with me that I apparently don’t see this stuff the same way everybody else does, i.e., as quaint old relics that were cool in their day but are now just silly and needing to be replaced. Not to put too melodramatic a spin on it, but these times of self-doubt have been genuinely painful.

But then something comes along like that video of the dueling sailors, and I feel that old familiar rush of endorphins and I realize that, yeah, I still love this stuff, in spite of what the rest of the world may think about it. Moreover, I’m glad that I still love this stuff, that the critics and cynics haven’t managed to entirely wipe out my enjoyment of it. I’m thankful indeed that somewhere deep down inside my wounded, stressed-out, overburdened, and all-too-often-exhausted grown-up mind, there is still a happy, carefree ten-year-old walking through his small, boring, rural town with a comic book rolled up in his back pocket, dreaming of slicing down trees with a real lightsaber or whipping through the fields in a vehicle that’s magically floating three feet above the ground. Sometimes, that kid still finds a way to speak to me, and sometimes I still find a way to be him. And surely that’s a good and even necessary thing…

Happy Thanksgiving, my friends.