Jimmy Garland and the Temple of Doom (March 1, 2007)

March 1, 2007

Jimmy introduced me to Indiana Jones back in 1980 he said it was the best movie he ever saw outside of Lawrence of Arabia of course.

I didn't know it at the time how much it fit into a mythology that Jimmy had been selling for quite some time, about the concept of who Christ was and the Christian history.

Jimmy knew about the Nazi search for artifacts long before it became popular knowledge. He had been researching that for years just the way he researched climate change – perpetually pestering me with promises that the world would end soon as put us all out of misery.

He hated the second Indiana Jones movie as much as I did and understood just how much it had ripped off old cliffhanger movies and those dance movies from the 1930s that seemed so risqué at the time.

But when the Last Crusade movie came out Jimmy was fully in his element, having research all of that long before – even though he knew the grail wasn’t really cup of Christ at all.

It with smug satisfaction Jimmy understood that the world had finally caught up to where he had been all along and how people were finally waking up to understand some of the more interesting aspects of World War II.

Since our teens, Jimmy kept telling me that the Nazis had been obsessed with religious mythology and spent a good portion of the 1930s in a desperate search for icons they could use as weapons.

Recently, Jimmy was both pleased and disappointed when The DaVinci Code came out -- partly because he knew the end long before the author probably did having, spread that stuff to us about the Grail being the descendants of Christ not the cup in which held His dying blood.

For years, Jimmy used to pull books off a bookshelf at the Haas house on the lake to explain what was really going on in history, informing us the back stories from the Templar Knights in

He understood it all.

Even now, I am still his unwilling student to whom he feels the need to impart his knowledge, before the world comes to an end or modern media bastardizes it into something too slick to be real.

I got a number of private sessions up at Ginger's house in Towaco where Jimmy would refer to some of this historic data while we both got stoned and played Mastermind.

He is an Irish Catholic heretic much like Graham Greene and is convinced that I had the makings of one as well

 I'm not sure I do but I certainly found the whole game entertaining.