Flea Market Joy

(Jonathan Ryan posting for Jen Schlameuss-Perry)

This past weekend, my eldest and I hit a local Flea Market. He found some treasures, and so did I! I found a few Star Trek Next Generation collectables (a phaser, communicator and a Lore action figure that the guy threw in for free) and a Doctor Who comic book in excellent condition, in a sleeve, from 1981. It was the Fourth Doctor, who happens to be one of my favorites.

I usually only collect The Tick comic books (because I’m a lady on a budget), but I was psyched to find this one. It’s called “Doctor Who: City of the Cursed.” It’s about a society that lives under laws that forbid emotion of any kind. The reason is that, in the past, there was a lot of crime and violence and they saw the root of it as being emotion. Now they have a thing called the “Harmonizer” that you go into if you accidentally have an emotion and it removes it for you.

The Doctor needs to make a quick landing to make repairs to the Tardis and, naturally, shakes things up. But, he’s not the only one shaking things up—there’s a band of rebels who are trying to overthrow the big, brainy dudes on the cover. The rebels have each taken on one emotion, and have even taken that emotion as their name. So, there’s a guy named Very Angry, another called Half Daft, etc. There’s also a guy named Freddy Feel Good. He’s a clown who gets killed. But, he’s a clown…so I didn’t mind. The rebels have a prophesy that promises a “Great Emoter” who will have all the emotions and teach the rebels how to really feel.

By embodying only one emotion each, they have become almost as extreme as the Moderator General (head bad guy). The comic ends with the beginning of a battle between the bad guys and the rebels. So, I don’t know what happens next. That’s hard for me, but I’m coping.

This comic comes to me at a very interesting time in my life. I’m about to change jobs, a situation about which I have very mixed and sometimes extreme feelings. It’s also interesting because I have been stuffing a lot of those feelings as I try to muddle through the last days of my current job. Years ago, during a particularly difficult time in my life, I had developed the awful habit of trying not to feel anything negative. At some point, I suppressed my negative feelings so much that I became numb. Because, guess what? You can’t just suppress some feelings. You lose some; you lose them all. Or at least I did.

So, I was reminded by a flea market bargain (I got it for a dollar!), that the only way to feel properly is to feel everything authentically. You can’t preserve one emotion without honoring the others. Otherwise, you become extreme or numb—but you always lose a part of yourself—that’s not a battle in which you want to engage. And it’s not one that you’ll get to see concluded, because it becomes your life. So, I have to go to the Great Emoter—not The Doctor (although, if he shows up, I’m totally going with him), but the One who is the Originator of emotion. Nothing’s too big for God and if I allow Him to help me, I’ll find true harmony—just as I suspect The Doctor will help the people in City of the Cursed achieve.

Jen Schlameuss-Perry is a massive fan of sci-fi, cartoons and superheroes and loves to write about them in light of her Catholic tradition. She currently works for a Catholic Church and practices martial arts, cares for her family and pets and writes in her spare time. Check out some of Jen’s other stuff on her Facebook page or her website.