"Previously on 24..."

Last October my roommates and I were introduced to 24—it’s FOX’s anti-terrorist show starring Kiefer Sutherland. Each episode is independently entertaining, but there is a deepened satisfaction in seeing events unfold through the perspective of knowing everything that has led up to and contributed to the present situation. So, in an effort to keep the viewer up to speed, each episode opens with the words, “Previously on 24…”, and the first minute or two of footage is a recap of what took place the week before.

Well this first blog posting is not so much intended to catch your interest, rather to catch you up on where I am in life: These are the kind of things you would hear my own voice narrate in the prologue of a movie where-in by the end of the film I emerge as the hero who has powers once unimaginable, but in the beginning I’m just your average no-body.

“Who am I? You sure you want to know? The story of my life is not for the faint of heart. If somebody said it was a happy little tale... if somebody told you I was just your average ordinary guy, not a care in the world... somebody lied.”

Heath Thomas Bryant: born the 28th of December, 1978—just in time to earn my parents all the tax breaks of having two dependents, even though I was only around three days before the end of the fiscal year. I was named by my father, who determined at the age of 14 that his first-born son would be named after two of his favorite TV cowboy heros: Heath Barkley (Lee Majors’ character from ABC’s The Big Valley) and James T. West (Robert Conrad’s 19th century secret-service agent from CBS’s Wild, Wild West).

Mom was pretty open minded about the name, but insisted that the middle initial, ‘T’, stand for something normal that I could defer to if I didn’t like the name Heath. Well, I love the name—it’s normal enough that few people have a hard time reading or pronouncing it, and unique enough that hardly anyone ever has any preconceived notions about what kind of guy a guy named Heath would be—as they may have with names like Butch, Adolph, or Carlton.

"Seven."
"Seven Costanza... You're serious?"
"Yeah. It's a beautiful name for a boy or a girl. Especially a girl... Or a boy."
"I don't think so."
"What, you don't like the name?"
"It's not a name. It's a number."
"I know. It's Mickey Mantle's number. So not only is it an all-around beautiful name, it is also a living tribute."

Born and raised in the Seattle area, I grew up loving superheros, sports, and Saturday-morning cartoons. Not much has changed in the past 25 years—within the past month I’ve bought a Spider-Man web-slinger toy (it straps to your wrist and shoots silly string when you close your two middle fingers), completed a city-leage soft ball season, and watched about 3-hours-worth of classic Donald Duck cartoons.

I was raised a Mormon and I believe every ounce of doctrine associated with the LDS church, but I sometimes find it hard to appreciate the sub-cultures found within the church’s membership.

My marital status is single, as it has been all my life—I have memories as early as the first grade of my wrestles with romance and most of the conflicts in my life surround the always unexpected adventures of exploring the frontier that is dating.

“The time-traveling is just too dangerous. Better that I devote myself to study the other great mystery of the universe: women!”