My Plea For You To Watch Sons of Anarchy

Sons of Anarchy is a meditation on violence; it is a passion play where the cross of crucifixion become the very road that society's outlaws once believed led to freedom. Sons of Anarchy is a modern day Hamlet. But besides all of that, it's just a great effing show!

When we first meet Jackson Teller, he is a young and handsome man in his 20s with a baby problem; his old lady is shooting up heroin and she's late in her pregnancy. We also learn that he is Vice President of an Outlaw Motorcycle Club named the Sons of Anarchy. The first scene of show is not the drama that unfolds around Jackson's ex-Old Lady Wendy and his soon to be born premature son Abel; the opening drama is the sabotage and explosion of a warehouse holding the illegal automatic firearms that the Sons relies on as its primary source of income, an explosion set off by a rival biker gang, The Mayans.

This explosion sends the Sons President (and Jackson's step-father) Clay Morrow into a battle rage, which likewise puts Jackon's mother Gemma Teller Morrow into a protective flurry of activity, one of those actions potentially being delivering the very heroin that may have just killed Jackson's baby. It turns out Gemma doesn't really like any of the girls Jackson hooks up with, leastwise his “junky whore” of an ex-Old Lady.

But luckily, Jackson's true love Tara has recently come back to Charming to settle her dead father's affairs and she just happens to be a pediatric surgeon who is on-duty when Wendy and the baby are brought in. Tara is able to save the day, successfully separating both baby and mother (who will live to tell her tale, maybe) and Tara and Gemma start clashing immediately while Tara and Jackson pick up where they left off so many years ago, when Tara broke Jackson's heart because she was either going to get away from Charming and the Outlaw life or she was going to become another of its casualties.

Jackson's best friend Opie is also dealing with drama balancing his Outlaw roots and the wife and two children he is charged with protecting. Opie just got out of prison, doing time for the club out of deep loyalty, which is all well and good but a promise to his wife that he will leave the life forever is causing major heartache as he gets drawn back into the drama of the club and the lure of fast (but not easy, nothing's easy about that kind of gun running) cash.

Also, the White Supremacists are teaming up with that same rival Mexican gang The Mayans to drive the Sons of Anarchy out of Charming so they can set up selling meth and heroin in a city where the Sons and the Police force have joined together for years to keep relatively wholesome. This Devil's Bargain amounts to keeping the evil that men do in the circle outside charming while the police look the other way at what the cost is to make that happen.

And as  if all t his wasn't enough, Jackson found his father's old journals while looking for his baby clothes in his mother's storage locker. And in those journals is a manifesto his father wrote titles, “How The Sons of Anarchy Lost Their Way.” As Jackson starts to read his father's words about the intention of the club when it was created to live freely on the fringes of society and how it became corrupted when the violence of running guns took over that freedom, Jackson begins to change inside as it dawns on him that there are unanswered questions about his father's death, questions that may cause his loyalties shift as he ponders how Anarchy and Freedom may not be aligned on parallels after all . And of course, this leads to a meditation on the very violence that America finds itself enmeshed in this very moment like blood beaded barbed wire - How can we possibly get out of guns and find true freedom?

And that, my friends, is just the Pilot episode. Sons of Anarchy is a hell of a ride. What follows are seven seasons of escalating violence that details with horror, tragedy, and sorrow, the price that must be paid to back out of the darkness of violence when it is the only common language we have left as a society.

The Reaper only accepts one currency for payment and it bleeds red.

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JB Minton is the author of the upcoming book A Skeleton Key to Twin Peaks, and POETRYSEXLIFE. He lives in Ohio. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

The Redemption of Luke Skywalker And The Resurrection Of The Jedi Order: WHY THE LAST JEDI IS SO IMPORTANT

In 1977, a towheaded boy sits in a theater in Central Illinois and his uncle reads the words to him which appear on the screen. “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”

Fast forward 40 years and the man who grew from that boy is in another theater, hundreds of miles away from the first, his own children and wife sit next to him and he doesn’t try to hide the tears that stream from his eyes as two moments in time synchronize and the years fold into each other, creating a rare moment of transcendence through Art.

Like the rest of America in 2017, the Star Wars community is bitterly divided after Episode VIII: The Last Jedi was released in December. The Internet immediately exploded with opinions on both sides; some saying the film was a “dumpster fire” of needless side stories and gap-filled character arcs, others saying it was the greatest movie-going experience since Return of the Jedi. 

The Last Jedi is the most important film to date in the entire canon of Star Wars, because the mythological arc of Luke Skywalker's Hero's Journey has come to a successful completion. Since the original film was released in 1977, every character and plot line from Jar Jar Binks to the midichlorian prophecy of “The One Who Will Bring Balance to The Force,” has lead to the moment where Luke Skywalker walks out onto the salt plain battlefield of Crait.

George Lucas explains why Joseph Campbell's "The Hero With A Thousand Faces" was instrumental in finishing writing Star Wars.

In order to put the importance of Luke Skywalker's Hero's Journey in perspective, consider years ago, when George Lucas was struggling to finish the manuscript for Star Wars. During this time, he came across the seminal book by master Mythologist Joseph Campbell The Hero With A Thousand Faces, where Professor Campbell lays out the single story of the Hero told over thousands of cultures throughout history. From this commonly repeated cycle, George Lucas approached his protagonist through new eyes and created Luke Skywalker's Hero’s Journey, which would take forty years, nine films (and counting), hundreds of hours of television, and dozens of book to tell.

According to Professor Campbell, every Hero's Journey contains the following elements:

DEPARTURE:

1. The Call To Adventure (Luke standing looking at the Tattoine Suns, an empty feeling in his heart…)
2. Refusal of the Call (Luke tells Obi Wan, “I’m not going to Alderaan. I have to get home. I’m in enough trouble as it is…”)
3. Supernatural Aid (Obi Wan is going to teach Luke the ways of The Force so he can become a Jedi Knight like his father…)
4. The Crossing Of The First Threshold (Obi Wan cuts the arm off the criminals who try to kill Luke in the Mos Eisley bar…)
5. The Belly of the Whale (The tractor beam pulls The Millennium Falcon into the Death Star…)

INITIATION:

1. The Road of Trials (Destroying the first Death Star and then Discovering Darth Vader is his Father…)
2. Atonement with the Father (Luke rescues his Father…)
3. The Ultimate Boon (Luke and Vader together defeat the Emperor while The Rebels Destroy the Second Death Star…)

RETURN:

1. The Refusal of The Return (Luke fails to allow for the balance of Dark and Light in his star pupil, refusing to pass on what he has learned from his own father, and in doing so assists Snoke in creating Kylo Ren. Luke then passes into hermitage and seclusion in his shame and self-loathing, denying Rey when she comes to recruit him back to the Resistance…)
2. The Crossing of the Return Threshold (After opening himself back up to The Force, and palavaring with Master Yoda, who tells him his failure to bring balance is exactly the lesson he should have taught Rey, Luke confronts his own dragon of the shame of his failure. He summons all the power he can from The Force to project himself across the Galaxy and stands before Kylo Ren to apologize, giving what's left of The Resistance fighters the time they need to escape…)
3. Master of the Two Worlds (Luke owns his failure and forgives himself and Kylo, while informing him the war is just starting and the Jedi are reborn along with the Resistance…)
4. Freedom to Live (Luke passes from this life while also passing the torch of a New Jedi Order to Rey, who is taking the first steps in her own Hero’s Journey, one free from the Skywalker curse, balance restored to the Force as one powerful Jedi and one powerful Sith square off against each other in the battle to come. Perhaps Rey is humble enough to allow for the Dark and the Light to balance inside her as she seeks to bring peace and harmony to the Galaxy.)

When Luke Skywalker collapses in The Last Jedi, looking up at the Twin Suns of Tattoine burning in the sky of Ahch-To, a magic time portal opens up for every viewer, no matter their age. That towheaded two year old, whose eyes first fell upon that young man staring into those same twin Suns in Episode IV, pondering the Call to Adventure he felt in his heart, is also the forty-two year old man watching that much older hero take his last breath while staring into those same twin Suns, forty years later and a lifetime’s journey for all of them, the boys and the men, the women and the girls, each of us, alone and yet together. 

When Rey approaches Luke, his father’s blue light saber held out in her hand, a look of longing for a father figure on her face, Luke is a broken man who has shut himself off from The Force, a miserable hermit waiting to die, a lesser man than even his own master Obi Wan was when he and Luke met through fate in the Tattoine desert so long ago. But Luke's journey was not yet complete; there was one more dragon he had to face-the one inside his heart, where he would be forced to stare into the abyss of his own failure and, like those characters in Stephen King's greatest novel, to Stand in spite of his own fear and shame, to stand true in the face of his greatest enemy, the same one he fought in the cave on Dagobah all those years ago-himself. But stand he did.  

The author as a boy receiving Bossk the Bounty Hunter, the same look he has the first time seeing any new Star Wars film in the theater.

In the end, Luke Skywalker gave everything he had so the Jedi could be reborn, and so the Resistance against The Empire and it’s terrible child The First Order could be defeated with the hope that for the first time in a long time, the galaxy could be ruled by Democracy working in the interests of peace and the freedom of all people. Luke Skywalker gave everything he had to bring balance back to The Force, just like the prophecy proclaimed so long ago, his Hero's Journey completed in that moment where the Twin Suns became the final sight his old eyes would ever gaze upon, a moment that found that towheaded boy 40 years older but staring at the movie screen with the same wonder as when he first saw those Suns so many years ago. What a magical moment this is for every Star Wars fan, and for every human being, because it speaks to each of us in this time of great peril within our own civilization, as we are each being called to stand up in our own lives and make that same choice of facing down our greatest fear to defeat that which now threatens us all, what happens after we give in to ignorance, hatred, bigotry, anger, and apathy toward the suffering of those in need.

In the closing of The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Professor Campbell says this about the Hero today:

“The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for [their] community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. ‘Live,’ Nietzsche says, ‘as though the day were here.’ It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal—carries the cross of the redeemer—not in the bright moments of [their] tribe’s greatest victories, but in the silences of [their] personal despair.”

Luke Skywalker’s Hero’s Journey reaching completion is the most important thing about Episode VIII: The Last Jedi and all the other nitpicking negativity carries zero weight when compared to the importance of what happens on that rocky island at the end of this film, where A New Hope is born and finally an old promise is fulfilled, a promise that a nobody from nowhere can become powerful enough, by listening to their own heart and moving with love as a team doing what's right for everyone, to defeat even the mightiest and most cruel of empires. 

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JB Minton is the author of the forthcoming "A SKELETON KEY TO SEASON 3 OF TWIN PEAKS" and POETRYSEXLIFE, a collection of fiction, poems and arguments. Follow him on this site and on Facebook. 

The Redemption of Luke Skywalker And The Resurrection Of The Jedi Order: WHY THE LAST JEDI IS SO IMPORTANT

In 1977, a towheaded boy sits in a theater in Central Illinois and his uncle reads the words to him which appear on the screen. “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”

Fast forward 40 years and the man who grew from that boy is in another theater, hundreds of miles away from the first, his own children and wife sit next to him and he doesn’t try to hide the tears that stream from his eyes as two moments in time synchronize and the years fold into each other, creating a rare moment of transcendence through Art.

Like the rest of America in 2017, the Star Wars community is bitterly divided after Episode VIII: The Last Jedi was released in December. The Internet immediately exploded with opinions on both sides; some saying the film was a “dumpster fire” of needless side stories and gap-filled character arcs, others saying it was the greatest movie-going experience since Return of the Jedi. 

The Last Jedi is the most important film to date in the entire canon of Star Wars, because the mythological arc of Luke Skywalker's Hero's Journey has come to a successful completion. Since the original film was released in 1977, every character and plot line from Jar Jar Binks to the midichlorian prophecy of “The One Who Will Bring Balance to The Force,” has lead to the moment where Luke Skywalker walks out onto the salt plain battlefield of Crait.

George Lucas explains why Joseph Campbell's "The Hero With A Thousand Faces" was instrumental in finishing writing Star Wars.

In order to put the importance of Luke Skywalker's Hero's Journey in perspective, consider years ago, when George Lucas was struggling to finish the manuscript for Star Wars. During this time, he came across the seminal book by master Mythologist Joseph Campbell The Hero With A Thousand Faces, where Professor Campbell lays out the single story of the Hero told over thousands of cultures throughout history. From this commonly repeated cycle, George Lucas approached his protagonist through new eyes and created Luke Skywalker's Hero’s Journey, which would take forty years, nine films (and counting), hundreds of hours of television, and dozens of book to tell.

According to Professor Campbell, every Hero's Journey contains the following elements:

DEPARTURE:

1. The Call To Adventure (Luke standing looking at the Tattoine Suns, an empty feeling in his heart…)
2. Refusal of the Call (Luke tells Obi Wan, “I’m not going to Alderaan. I have to get home. I’m in enough trouble as it is…”)
3. Supernatural Aid (Obi Wan is going to teach Luke the ways of The Force so he can become a Jedi Knight like his father…)
4. The Crossing Of The First Threshold (Obi Wan cuts the arm off the criminals who try to kill Luke in the Mos Eisley bar…)
5. The Belly of the Whale (The tractor beam pulls The Millennium Falcon into the Death Star…)

INITIATION:

1. The Road of Trials (Destroying the first Death Star and then Discovering Darth Vader is his Father…)
2. Atonement with the Father (Luke rescues his Father…)
3. The Ultimate Boon (Luke and Vader together defeat the Emperor while The Rebels Destroy the Second Death Star…)

RETURN:

1. The Refusal of The Return (Luke fails to allow for the balance of Dark and Light in his star pupil, refusing to pass on what he has learned from his own father, and in doing so assists Snoke in creating Kylo Ren. Luke then passes into hermitage and seclusion in his shame and self-loathing, denying Rey when she comes to recruit him back to the Resistance…)
2. The Crossing of the Return Threshold (After opening himself back up to The Force, and palavaring with Master Yoda, who tells him his failure to bring balance is exactly the lesson he should have taught Rey, Luke confronts his own dragon of the shame of his failure. He summons all the power he can from The Force to project himself across the Galaxy and stands before Kylo Ren to apologize, giving what's left of The Resistance fighters the time they need to escape…)
3. Master of the Two Worlds (Luke owns his failure and forgives himself and Kylo, while informing him the war is just starting and the Jedi are reborn along with the Resistance…)
4. Freedom to Live (Luke passes from this life while also passing the torch of a New Jedi Order to Rey, who is taking the first steps in her own Hero’s Journey, one free from the Skywalker curse, balance restored to the Force as one powerful Jedi and one powerful Sith square off against each other in the battle to come. Perhaps Rey is humble enough to allow for the Dark and the Light to balance inside her as she seeks to bring peace and harmony to the Galaxy.)

When Luke Skywalker collapses in The Last Jedi, looking up at the Twin Suns of Tattoine burning in the sky of Ahch-To, a magic time portal opens up for every viewer, no matter their age. That towheaded two year old, whose eyes first fell upon that young man staring into those same twin Suns in Episode IV, pondering the Call to Adventure he felt in his heart, is also the forty-two year old man watching that much older hero take his last breath while staring into those same twin Suns, forty years later and a lifetime’s journey for all of them, the boys and the men, the women and the girls, each of us, alone and yet together. 

When Rey approaches Luke, his father’s blue light saber held out in her hand, a look of longing for a father figure on her face, Luke is a broken man who has shut himself off from The Force, a miserable hermit waiting to die, a lesser man than even his own master Obi Wan was when he and Luke met through fate in the Tattoine desert so long ago. But Luke's journey was not yet complete; there was one more dragon he had to face-the one inside his heart, where he would be forced to stare into the abyss of his own failure and, like those characters in Stephen King's greatest novel, to Stand in spite of his own fear and shame, to stand true in the face of his greatest enemy, the same one he fought in the cave on Dagobah all those years ago-himself. But stand he did.  

The author as a boy receiving Bossk the Bounty Hunter, the same look he has the first time seeing any new Star Wars film in the theater.

In the end, Luke Skywalker gave everything he had so the Jedi could be reborn, and so the Resistance against The Empire and it’s terrible child The First Order could be defeated with the hope that for the first time in a long time, the galaxy could be ruled by Democracy working in the interests of peace and the freedom of all people. Luke Skywalker gave everything he had to bring balance back to The Force, just like the prophecy proclaimed so long ago, his Hero's Journey completed in that moment where the Twin Suns became the final sight his old eyes would ever gaze upon, a moment that found that towheaded boy 40 years older but staring at the movie screen with the same wonder as when he first saw those Suns so many years ago. What a magical moment this is for every Star Wars fan, and for every human being, because it speaks to each of us in this time of great peril within our own civilization, as we are each being called to stand up in our own lives and make that same choice of facing down our greatest fear to defeat that which now threatens us all, what happens after we give in to ignorance, hatred, bigotry, anger, and apathy toward the suffering of those in need.

In the closing of The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Professor Campbell says this about the Hero today:

“The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for [their] community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. ‘Live,’ Nietzsche says, ‘as though the day were here.’ It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal—carries the cross of the redeemer—not in the bright moments of [their] tribe’s greatest victories, but in the silences of [their] personal despair.”

Luke Skywalker’s Hero’s Journey reaching completion is the most important thing about Episode VIII: The Last Jedi and all the other nitpicking negativity carries zero weight when compared to the importance of what happens on that rocky island at the end of this film, where A New Hope is born and finally an old promise is fulfilled, a promise that a nobody from nowhere can become powerful enough, by listening to their own heart and moving with love as a team doing what's right for everyone, to defeat even the mightiest and most cruel of empires. 

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

JB Minton is the author of the forthcoming "A SKELETON KEY TO SEASON 3 OF TWIN PEAKS" and POETRYSEXLIFE, a collection of fiction, poems and arguments. Follow him on this site and on Facebook. 

"Floating Somewhere" - A Short Story from the Upcoming JB Minton Anthology POETRYSEXLIFE

My dog died today and I’m feeling evil. I came to the bridge to think it over. This bridge is a manmade damn that covers an old town. I used to come to this town when I was a little and look in the broken windows. Something about this little ghost town always gets me. I used to stand outside those gray splintered buildings and think about the families that once lived here. I wondered what they thought, what they did. I wondered how they kissed their children good night, what they said to them, if they ever imagined a flood that would wash away and bury their world from sunlight, maybe forever, little beds and shelves floating in the deep water under gray Decatur, Illinois. There was a candy store and the word horehound was still visible in peeling paint on the cobwebbed wall.

I’m looking at the lake now and I can’t remember that little town like I once did. It’s under twenty feet of water in some places and the spider webs are long gone. A couple years ago, there was a drought here and old wooden caskets came floating to the top of the lake, floating bones knocking against the sailboat hulls. The park rangers corralled the corpses and disposed of the remains and no one I know has swam in these waters since. I think of the grandparents and the babies and children buried in that old drowned cemetery, brought back to life in the murk.

They used to have military training in the old town before the lake came. Jungle boys would camouflage themselves and play ambush, shoot out the windows in the houses, kick in the doors. I snuck down one time to watch and cried when I saw. I had come to think of the town as mine—Jim Frankinsonville. I was the mayor and the sheriff and any problem was handled by me—the only place I had control.

My mother died when I was ten and after the funeral I came to this town to say goodbye; that was two years before the lake. We thought they were going to revive the old town for a while, then the investors came in with their millions and turned it into a weekend camping resort with parasailing, boating, and eventually jet skis and wave runners.

I haven’t been back here in years. I feel tears in my eyes again. I’m trying to remember how I said goodbye to my mother and I can’t. I think about the body of my dog in the backseat of my car in a blanket and now I’m crying in frustration for no longer knowing exactly what the hell I’m crying about.

I think about what I have to do with the body of my dog and I’m scared. Someday I may end up floating twenty feet above someplace I once considered sacred and I’m tired of saying goodbye to people and dogs and dead and drowned old towns. I can’t give anything more away without giving all of it. I just want to stand still for a moment and breathe. I’m pulling myself together, wiping my eyes with my thumb and first finger. I throw my cigarette in the lake and think about what comes next. I watch my cigarette butt bobbing in the simulated waves, floating somewhere I have no idea where.

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I hope you liked this story. It creeps me out a little and I have no idea when I wrote it but I want to say it was right before the birth of my son, way too long ago. Also, if I can grab 60 seconds of your time, 

CAN YOU CLICK THIS PARAGRAPH AND HEAD OVER TO INKSHARES AND PRE-ORDER A SIGNED COPY OR EBOOK OF MY ANTHOLOGY POETRYSEXLIFE, WITH OVER 20 SHORT STORIES, 75 POEMS AND A DOZEN OF WHAT I CONSIDER THE MOST IMPORTANT ARTICLES I WROTE BETWEEN 1995 AND 2003? YOUR SUPPORT WILL LITERALLY GET THIS BOOK PUBLISHED.

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