Conscious Television. Or Something.

A couple of times a month, Best Beloved, the earthling, and I will go out to breakfast at a locally renowned diner-ish place. It has a shelf by one of its windows where people can set out free literature: brochures, yes, and also the Skeeviest Postcards You Ever Did See, but mostly magazines and catalogs. These catalogs and magazines are divided into general categories:

1. Gay: It's Not a Lifestyle, We Just Like Built, Pretty Men with Huge Cocks
   
   
2. Marijuana: It's Not Even a Drug, It's Totally a Lifestyle, and If You Happen to Be Using Any, We Are Sure It's for Entirely Legal Medicinal Purposes That We Can Definitely Provide You with a List of, in Case You Accidentally Forgot What Those Purposes Were
   
   
3. Whackmobile-o-rama: Now with a Free Ticket to Lemuria

The earthling loves this area, because the shelf is located maybe a foot off the floor, meaning he is free to browse through the publications and make selections that he carries to us. This is how we got my favorite ever "GLBT" magazine. I put "GLBT" in quotes, because in my experience, what that actually means is "We're only putting cisgendered gay men on the cover, and we're only writing about gay men and circuit parties and Dolce and Gabbana, but you LBT types are also welcome to read us. If you want to." My favorite "GLBT" magazine has, of course, a shirtless, six-packed (white) man on the cover. His head is carefully positioned so that, in the subheader "for the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered community in Southern California" he obscures "lesbian, bisexual" completely, and most of "and transgendered" as well. It's not really a visual metaphor; it's just truth in magazine covers.

Anyway. We are generally at least mildly interested in the publications in the first two categories, or we pretend to be while the earthling is watching us, but the third is obviously the superior one. And my favorite example of this is a brochure for the Los Angeles Conscious Life Expo. I mean no offense to any of you living Conscious Lives (I am sure you are not, personally, insane) when I say that, to a person who lives a plain old mundane (unconscious?) life, this thing is hysterical.

Some of the offered panels and classes are relatively normal-sounding ("Optimal Thinking for Turbulent Times" could just as easily be offered at a management seminar, not that I am suggesting that those are bastions of sanity), but then you get things like "Nibiru, 2012, and You" (no, I didn't know what Nibiru meant, either, but you should really go read the Nibiru Collision Wikipedia entry, if for no other reason than the, um, "photographic evidence") and "The Government Response to '2012' and What Obama Knows." (I really don't think you can cover what Obama knows in a three-hour workshop, but I'm getting the sense that there's something major on the whackmobile horizon for 2012. Excuse me, I meant '2012.' Apparently it has to do with Interdimensional Communications and The Shift, judging by other panels, but I'm really hoping it has no connection to the Unleash Your Secret Healing Microbes thing, because interdimensionally communicating shifting secret microbes in a government cover-up - I don't actually want to live a Torchwood plot.)

My point about this, though, is that in this brochure, I have found the Well of Lost SG1 Plots. Or maybe not lost; it is entirely possible that the entire show was written from previous Conscious Life Expo brochures. (You can't tell me they don't also have Conscious Lives in Vancouver, and apparently when you have one, you want to exhibit it.) Check out these seminar (Workshop? Panel? Shouting contest? Whatever.) titles:

• Ascension: Masters of Immortality. Hi, Daniel! And, you know, Oma. Plus the Greek Chorus of smug folks of questionable morality.
  
  
• Legacy of the Gods: Keys to Our Cosmic Past. Goa'uld. Obviously. In my head, this panel thing is hosted by a completely raving version of Daniel who never got recruited by the Stargate program and went irretrievably insane in that Cassandra-ish way. I picture him with long unkempt hair and an old car with a lot of bumper stickers on it, many of them in hieroglyphics. He probably hosts an AM radio show.
  
  
• Freedom's Gate: America's Temple of Ascension. If this is not the stargate, I don't know what it is. And, for the record, I don't want to. Some things should not be googled.
  
  
• The Sound of Light. I've, you know, never actually seen the show, but wasn't this the episode that had that sequence with Daniel on the balcony and Jack hugging him that you see in all the vids?
  
  
• Claim Your Second Life Now!!! (Yes, all those exclamation points are in the original. Please tell me you don't think I would do that of my own free will.) Actually, Daniel's claiming his seventeenth life, but then I would expect him to be leading the pack. Of course, I can claim a Second Life right this minute by visiting a website and registering. Maybe they're talking about that.
  
  
• The Future of People. ...As beings made of energy on a different plane, one assumes. Or maybe they mean as Soylent Green, but obviously the Stargate showrunners thought more in terms of energy bodies, which is exactly what is wrong with SF on TV these days, if you ask me.
  
  
• Regenesis: 5th Dimensional Light Bodies. And again with the ascension. It's a theme. I just - reading this, I worry that there are people who watch SG1 and SGA and think they're documentaries, in which case - oh, god, I just want to hold them and tell them it isn't so. Although I probably can't. Strong incense and patchouli make me wheeze.
  
  
• Proactive Manifestation of Future History. I have no fucking clue what this means, but I'm pretty sure Merlin knows. Also, after a lengthy pause to parse this, I have concluded that it maybe means making the future happen early? Maybe? In which case NO PLEASE DON'T DO THAT. I have read that story. It never ends well.
  
  
• Galactic Awakening. This is the Ori, or I will eat something. Not a hat, mind you. Maybe a cookie. But, still, I am pretty sure that late in the run of SG1, the writers were flipping through a Conscious Life Expo brochure and saw this and exclaimed with joy.
  
  
• Ascension Panel: The 7th Golden Age of Humanity. Do I even need to say it? No. So I'll just say - we've had six previous ones? When? And, um. If ascension is anything like it is in the Gateverse, I would not describe it as a Golden Age of Humanity. Maybe a Golden Age of Assholes. That's as far as I'm willing to go.

If I had known free publications were all I needed to write for television, I'd've chosen that career path. (I am assuming the people who read the gay magazines wrote for Queer as Folk, but what do the people who read the marijuana stuff write?)

But my real point is, maybe we should be grateful SG1 and SGA were canceled when they were, because I think the showrunners had run out of useful workshop titles, and for future seasons they'd have had to mine, like, the Tantric Love Energy workshops. Or the ones about Optimal Thinking and Money Management. Or the one about vaccines. I - I am glad I didn't have to witness that, even secondhand.