Heroics

I think that the idea of a hero is an important one for people to have. My whole life--as long as I can remember anyway--I have been enamored with the idea of a "hero" as a person someone can respect, look up to throughout life.

I'm not talking about the "every day" heroes of real life. I recognize the sacrifice and bravery of the single mom working to make ends meet so her kids never realize the delicate thread their lives hang on--the daily struggle that a cancer patient goes through every day to continue living, the millions of people who wear smiles to cover their misery and pain every day. These people are brave, heroic even, and should be admired and supported.

But when I talk about heroes these aren't the people I'm talking about. I'm talking about the Hero. With the capital "H". I don't know if these sorts of heroes really actually exist in the real world. They probably couldn't.

The real world is a messy place, it's full of questions and doubts and people asking about what's right and what's wrong. That's not the sort of world that heroes like this can survive in, because people would doubt that they were doing, would say that they were wrong to do what they did. Our world is a world where Rikki-Tikki-Tavi would be criticized (rightly so) for murdering unborn babies.

BUT THE BABIES ARE EVIL SNAKES!

That's the sort of world that you need for heroes, the ones I want, to exist in. You need a world where you can point at a person and say "This is evil, this needs to be stopped." And the stop it. You don't have to stop it with force or strength or violence, but you stand up to it, resist it. A hero in this sense, in that perfect world of fiction, is the guy who does the resisting, who stops that evil and saves the good people of the world.

The allure of being that hero resonates with incredible strength to me. I don't know why, for sure. Maybe it's the simplicity of it, the fact that you can know, for sure, that you're the good guy, the guy trying to protect and save people and that the ones you're fighting are the bad ones. I hear words about protecting people, about being heroic, I get a total rush.

Maybe my fascination with heroics is immature. I know that I've certainly told myself that many times. I'm not a fool, I know that the real world is no place for these sorts of black and white stories. I realize that the people who still think in this kind of way in the real world are probably the really bad ones, who'd dismiss all of some group or organization as "evil" and want to just kill all of them without understanding why they do the things they do.

I know all of this, but I still feel the pull of heroics, every damn day.

And I don't think that's such a bad thing. Shouldn't we have stories about people who can do truly amazing things, who can fight for what they believe in and win and defeat forces of evil? I think so. I think that we all want to see the good guys win, and I think it helps us all much more than it harms us to have the concept of a hero to look up to, to want to emulate, even when we know that a person like that could never exist in the real world.

I often feel ashamed of my infatuation with the idea of being a hero. I'm not sure why. I suppose it's because I realize what an immature and foolish idea it is. It's why people hate on Superman but love Batman, why everyone wants to be Wolverine instead of Cyclops. It's why the Romans dug Achilles so much more than Odysseus.

But I think there is a place for this mythical hero, even in our modern days of cynicism and jaded sensibilities. I think that having a person who can show us that we can fight back against the bad, whether that's through physical combat or just believing in yourself is a good thing. The world is a cruel and dark place, even nature itself is concerned with nothing more than pure, simple survival. The only good that we have in the whole universe is the good that we create--and the same can be said of evil, of course.

So why not embrace the unabashed heroes of our fiction? Should we not encourage people to follow their examples? I think we should.

I think the reason that I've spent so much of my life playing video games and, especially, role playing games, is because they allow me to portray that sort of fictional hero that could never exist in the world we live in. I always choose the good options in games that allow me to, and I've never really felt the urge to play an "evil party" in Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder or whatever. I get a genuine thrill from reading about or pretending to be a hero.

I think often in fiction these days people will try to subvert or deconstruct the classical hero of fiction. I think there's nothing wrong with that, but I also think people have gone overboard with it. In this (post?)post-modern world we live in people are deconstructing their subversive deconstructions of heroes and fiction. No one seems to want to have just the heroes of old anymore, they're not "edgy" enough, not "real" enough. I'd argue that people don't always read fiction for the hard hitting reality they so many people want to push (or for sex and vampires or whatever else. Sex paired with something is certain to sell, unfortunately.)

And, like I said earlier, stories about heroes don't have to be simple mind floss. Even things like Avatar can show us heroes being heroic while also teaching lessons we all should know and remember.

So don't be jaded, don't be a cynic. Don't say there are no more heroes any more.

We can all be heroes.

We just have to try.

Bump in the Night

So there's this game out right now that I've been playing called X-Com: Enemy Unknown. I've been playing it more than I really should, like putting off writing either my fiction or this blog or anything else that would make me feel better about myself if I did it.

It's a good game, though, pretty different than the standard games being released these days and I hope that it can start the ball rolling on the gaming industry at least moving a bit away from Modern Warfare clones.

However, I don't really want to talk about the state of the video game industry here, or even too much about the game X-Com. Just hang on, I'll get to the point eventually. I just need to get some details out of the way first.

So in X-Com you're the commander of a secret organization called "X-Com" (shocker.) You spend your time alternating between decided what sort of research and development to undertake in your base and then commanding a squad of soldiers to fight against aliens on the ground.

The ground fighting is the part of the game that takes up most of your time and it's the part the we need to focus on for this entry.

The game is surprisingly tense, scary even. The soldiers you control are pretty vulnerable and can be taken out in one or two unlucky shots. Combine that with the slow pacing of searching for unseen aliens, sometimes just hearing them scuttle around the outskirts of your visual range, and by the end of the harder missions your nerves will be pretty frayed.

Now, when I was a child--and really still even know--aliens were my particular boogieman. Some people are afraid of ghosts or demons or zombies. Some people are afraid of serial killers or cancer (much more reasonable fears) but I have always been scared of aliens.

I know aliens aren't abducting people--don't think that I consider this a rational fear. Fear is rarely rational at all.

As a child, probably from ten or eleven up until seventeen or so, I did think aliens really were coming to Earth and snatching people up from their homes in the night. You have to realize that this was right in the middle of the X-Files decade and before the Internet was really around to allow a young kind unlimited resources with which to research the idea of UFOs flying around in the night, striking people with beams of light and taking them away for all sorts of horrific shit. My sources for understanding aliens and how they interacted with the people of the planet were limited to movies like that, the X-Files, book with titles like UFO Encounters and late night specials on the Discovery Channel (this was back when Discovery seemed like a pretty reputable source and only played their crazy alien shit late at night when most people didn't see it.)

I realize that these days the idea of being actually afraid of an alien is somewhat laughable. Even in the 90s when aliens were more like zombies in terms of popularity people treated them, in general, as more like a joke than a threat. People sold stuffed  "grays" and wore t-shirts with UFOs on them. 

But to me, in those younger years and even to a degree today, aliens were never a cute thing, or a joke or something. I would read the accounts of people who claimed to have been abducted and feel chills. Even now when I listen to that stuff I get freaked out. Even though I know it didn't really happen, even though I know there aren't aliens creeping around my door or looking through the windows of my house.

Just imagine. Try not to let your popular concepts of aliens interfere with your perception of it. Imagine lying in bed at night, imagine awakening and seeing the bedroom door ajar with something that is not a man standing in it--someone tall and impossibly thin, looking at you with flat, doll-dead eyes. Really stop and think about that realization, that you are not alone in the house, and that the thing standing in the doorway, looking down at you is seeing you, knowing where you are.

Don't look away from the screen, don't look behind you.

Imagine the thing moving towards you, imagine not being able to move, even to scream. Imagine that flat, emotionless face looming over you, inhumanly long hands wrapping around your mouth and pulling you from the bed. 

Imagine how the skin on your neck would prickle up if that thing was in the house now, moving around, watching you from behind, staring through a window. Looking at you the way you might look at an animal in a zoo.

That's fucking scary, isn't it?

Even now I still can get pretty freaked out by alien movies as an adult. I still sometimes have nightmares about them getting into the house. Hell, I even really liked the movie Signs just because the aliens scared the shit out of me.

I think most people have a thing like my aliens, something, either a monster or a type of person (or a specific person) or even a concept or thing that they get scared of just even when they know there's nothing to be afraid of.

I've always been interested in fear, of the feeling of being afraid. When I was young I'd seek out the alien stuff just to give myself those tingles. I devoured Stephen King books, Lovecraft books, even old issues of Creepy and Eerie that my older cousin had lying around. When I realized I wanted to write things my first thought was to write scary stories. I've moved away from wanting to be the next Stephen King (that is a lie. I'd love to be as successful as him--I'd be happy to be half as successful as Dean Koontz) but the idea of writing scary stories still fascinates me.

I often wonder why people enjoy the ghost story so much. Because that's what the aliens, the demons, the zombies and the vampires are in the end--just ghost stories, people gathering around and saying "this is real, something evil is out there, be afraid of it." I think maybe it's a kind of survival mechanism originating from the caveman days--stay near the group, fear what is different, here there be dragons. A way to keep people in the tribe or whatever close to home and away from all the incredible dangers of our ancestor's world.

I mean, prehistoric man actually did have monsters to fight. Not imaginary ones. Things like smilodon are scary no matter how advanced you might be. So maybe our fear, even our enjoyment of fear, has evolved from the times where we needed fear to survive. Maybe the thrill of fear even came around as a way for us to seek out things to fear so we might better survive them when they came seeking us.

Either way. Aliens.

They're scary.

Scientific Literature

I enjoy learning things. Anything at all. My girlfriend has recently been on a baking kick, everything from sandwich bread to pecan pies. I've enjoyed her experimentation in baking because it means I get to eat lots of tasty and (according to her) healthy breads, but I've also enjoyed asking her about what she's learned from delving into the science and art of bakery. She's gotten more books on bread and baking than I can count from our library in the last month or so and reads them whenever she gets the chance, so I've been able to ask her about things she's read--sometimes about the mechanisms that make bread rise and sometimes about why you should use a specific brand of oven mitt to take your bread out of the oven.

But my interest in knowledge goes beyond just bread questions. I ask my girlfriend (a biology major) about things like telomeres all the time. I ask my friend in nursing school about the spinal cord, I ask my friend in IT about bits and bytes.

I like hearing all of these things, they're all usually at least passingly interesting to me and I try to remember as much as I can about them.

This thirst for knowledge unfortunately sometimes lead me into doubts about my chosen discipline in school and what I want to do with my future. I love reading, and writing, and talking about literature. I even love learning and understanding the mechanics of the English language, and how they are similar or different than other languages. But literature doesn't deal in many hard facts. Even the mechanics of grammar are fluctuating things; they are more in flux now than ever before with the rapid, lose forms of written communication provided by the Internet and cellular phone texting. I have no doubt that within fifty years the difference between "your" and "you're" will be totally forgotten and "your" will be the only form of that word.

I'm serious, people will literally forget that "your" ever was "you're". Think it couldn't happen? When was the last time you said, "let us" instead of "let's". Do you even type "let's?" I bet you type "lets".

The lack of hard facts, though. It bothers me. Not because I demand that questions should have a straight answer. I love arguing about the interpretations of a story, of the actions of the characters in a book or play, what a poet felt when he wrote a stanza.

I worry, though, that this sort of thing doesn't actually help the world in any way.

I'm a big fan of science and all the amazing things that it has done for us as a species. Science and the scientific method has freed us from superstition and ignorance, given us insight into how the world works and helped us to understand how we can fit into it. So many times I'll look at the cold realities that science can show us and compare it to the ephemeral, shifting ideas about literature and language and fear I've wasted my time and energy learning more about iambic pentameter than protons.

Because, well, people don't read. I don't know if they ever really did, but now they certainly don't. All things need to be condensed into bite-sized morsels of information, preferably fitting onto an iPhone screen. Newser's motto is "Read Less, Know More." Can you read less and know more?

Maybe you can.

That's what fucks with my head so much, you see?

Sure, you can't be a scientist or a computer technician or a doctor without lots of reading, but that's not really reading, it's just studying. You're just drilling information into your mind for later retrieval. Reading literature isn't like that. Literature is a journey you take, seeing the sights the author has lain out for you and recalling them later to understand the story's meaning (or its lack of one.)

But what good does that do anyone? Why waste your time learning about Beowulf when you could be learning Oracle? I struggle so much with that question, and often cannot defend it, even to myself. I look at my friends and loved ones and see them all maturing into adults with jobs, careers even, using skills learned at schools where they had to deal with real things, computers or corpses or mechanical objects.

I struggle to even find the right way to explain my self-doubt and frustration and this problem.

I can't really explain why I love the study of literature and stories, some of them hundreds or thousands of years old. I can't explain it to myself and that's what scares me. Is it just because I'm good at it? Because I'm good at reading and that makes me feel good, feel superior to people in some way even if they know more about musical timing or mathematics or something? I don't know. I hope not.

The joke about liberal arts majors working at Starbucks or whatever is a stale one, but I fear it has a lot of truth built into its foundations. I literally know liberal arts majors who hold college degrees that to this day, as we push further into our late twenties, work, literally, at Starbucks.

Is this a problem with learning about art or music or literature instead of science or medicine?

Is it a problem with our society?

This is the only reason I can sometimes use to defend the "liberal" education to myself, sometimes. The society we live in is a very materialistic one. And I'm not a guy who uses terms like materialistic very often. Until I was maybe seventeen the only thing I thought of when I heard someone claim someone was "materialistic" was materia and I hoped they'd start casting spells around. But yeah, the materialism of our society is vast and permeates everything from school to jobs to entertainment.

So you know what? Fuck that.

Maybe studying literature won't cure cancer or find out how we can turn lead into gold (or rocks into gasoline I suppose) but there has to be more to life than those things. Science tells us that humans are just animals with highly evolved cognitive functions. We probably evolved the ability to predict the future to be better hunters and as a side effect became self-aware and were able to aspire to more than just chasing down an antelope or digging up some seeds. As far as we know we're the only beings in the entire universe with this power of total sapience. I'll grant some animals probably have self-awareness, but none of them have it at the same level as humans do.

So yeah, I think we do need the study of literature. Because stories tell us who we are. Science can give us the tools for our life, but the stories we tell give us the direction, and learning about those stories, learning to think about them and what they mean, will make us better people.

This is something that people have lost sight of as college becomes devalued by all the people attending like our parents did. They go to a university not for a "universal" education, which is what they system was created to provide, but instead for a skill and the promise of a better job. In the past people with college degrees would be hired for better jobs because the idea was that they had proven they were able to think and not just learn. That's what college is about, and not many things can teach you to think about things as a good argument about Hamlet can.

Okay so debate about nearly anything could lead to better thinking, but I think that arguing about whether or not Sooki should be considered a whore or a slut leads to less revelation than talking about stories crafted to have real meaning.

Colleges shift more and more into high schools, with a rote list of broad classes and perhaps a few more specific ones. Tests are standardized, multiple choice questions and thinking is downplayed for the fact that you're just here to learn what you need to learn before trying to get a better job. Eloquent communication is cast aside. People confuse the terms "their" "there" and "they're" and claim anyone correcting them is a grammar Nazi.

But how many of those people honestly don't know which of those words is the correct one? A shockingly large amount, I'd bet.

I feel like I'm rambling off onto a different subject here, so allow me to try and reign this all in with some sort of conclusion, even as my mind itself struggles with the argument I'm trying to make.

Studying literature makes people better. There. That's my claim, and I believe it. I think that people who study literature and read good stories and really try to understand and think about what they read will become better, smarter people. They can think, they can comprehend.

I once had a teacher who tried to teach me Latin. I don't know if I really retained much of the Latin (not because she was a bad teacher, she was one of the best teachers I've ever had--I was simply a terrible student) but I'll always remember a quote she told the class when we were talking about something similar to what I've been rambling on about in this blog post.

She told me that a person thinks about things, and an educated person thinks about ideas.

So, why don't you just think about that idea?

Average

People say that practice makes perfect. More and more I view this blog as just that-- a writing exercise I can undertake whenever I want with whatever parameters I think would suit it. Because writing is something that takes practice. I realize that more and more as my life slips past me and I stare down the terrifying prospect that is being a thirty year old man.

I realize that, on the whole, being a thirty year old man is not actually a terrifying thing. There are many worse things I could be than a thirty year old man. I could have cancer, I could be a black man in the early eighteenth century, I could be dead.

But it's still quite scary being on the 20 side of 30 and not being where you imagined yourself when you were on the teen side of 20. Not that I ever gave it that much thought, if we're being honest. I really never thought about my future in any real concrete terms when I was a kid. Even when I was in high school I wasn't concerned with the idea of my future. No one ever really talked to me about going to college in anything but the most basic and abstract terms, like, "Oh I guess maybe your dad put away a bit of money for you to go to school with or really anything at all." No one ever said that I needed to go to college, even that I should, until my senior year of highschool when I was basically told I had screwed up so badly with scheduling classes the last two years that I'd be repeating another year of highschool and I responded by dropping out.

My mom took me to see a therapist and he said I should go to college.

The guy also had a light that he claimed could "heal" you with certain frequencies of light strobes and listened to whale-song while I was in his office. Take that how you want it.

So I thought, yeah, sure, I'll go to college! I was eighteen at the time.

I didn't go to college until I was twenty-two.

I still haven't graduated as I approach my twenty-seventh birthday.

You may be starting to notice a pattern, huh? Like perhaps I have trouble finishing things?

Let me tell you something--that is like the absolute shittiest thing to have when you want to be a person who writes things for other people to read.

Writing takes a lot of self control. Especially if you're not writing for a company or for a book deal or something. When you're just writing something you want to write and hope that people will like it or be willing to print it or even (in my wildest dreams) give you money for it but none of that has come to pass it takes a serious commitment and self confidence to force yourself to not only slap the idea down on the page, but then to edit it, to fix the errors and logical problems and slice out the bad parts and try to come up with the good parts. You're doing all that in your spare time with no promise of reward or recognition and-- at least in my case--with this annoying little voice in the back of your head reminding you how crap everything you're writing is, how there are people out there writing better things more quickly than you and you can never ever live up to even half of what they're putting out with apparent ease.

It's hard for me to form an objective opinion on my own writing for obvious reasons. I think it's good, okay maybe. I don't know how good, though. I really have no idea if it's even remotely interesting for people to read any stories (or blogs) that I write. People like my girlfriend tell me they enjoy my stories, but I can't help but hear that same voice telling me they're just saying that so as to not hurt my feelings, or they mean it but can't look at the writing objectively because they're close to me.

I'm sounding like a whiny kid, though, and I'm going to take a step back.

Okay, better.

The point I was trying to make before I was side-tracked by my own self-doubt is that writing on your own is very hard--even for a person with serious drive and self-motivation and I am the least self-motivated person that I know in the entire world. I'm so lazy that sometimes even when I know I'm supposed to write something that actually matters (like a midterm paper or something) I'll sit and watch the deadline sail by me, waving as it goes.

My laziness and ability to procrastinate shocks even me sometimes. I've gotten so bad about it that I have over two-hundred hours logged playing Team Fortress 2. Now, I like TF2, it's a good game, but probably not 200+ hours good. Why do I spend so much time in it? Because it's easy for me to start it, join a sever, and play for however long I want. I've evolved so far into procrastination that   I even procrastinate my procrastination activities. I'm not willing to summon up the wherewithal to start playing a single player or story driven game where I'll actually have to commit to the game so I just play TF2. I've caught myself thinking about other games to play while playing TF2 but procrastinating switching to those games--a process that would take maybe thirty seconds and involve nothing more than slight movements of one of my fingers and my wrist.

All of this is happening as I procrastinate doing something more important like cleaning, or homework, or writing.

Writing is important to me. Not this blog thing, as I said, this is just practice. Something to keep my writing muscles from atrophying totally away. The real writing I do (occasionally) matters very much to me. It's just scary to do it. There are ways of getting the stuff I've written out to people now, even to make some money off of it (maybe) and I've taken steps to allow myself access to these systems--but I'm scared. More scared now that I could be on the cusp of putting my real work out into a seriously public place. 

Is it because I'm afraid people will say it's bad?

Sure, partially, no one wants to be told their work sucks. You want people to say nice things about stuff that you put yourself into, because you want people to say nice things about you. Creating something--whether it's a story or a song or a painting--is putting your mind into a physical form and saying "Look at me under my face, under the personality I have created to interact with others, look at the things I think and don't say." And that's scary, sure.

But it isn't my biggest fear. If people say my stories are bad, well, that's depressing--but at least now I have something to go on. Now I can say "This was bad, I can fix it." Or even say, "No fuck you, you have bad taste, this is good."

I'm afraid I'll put this stuff out there.

And nothing will happen.

This blog is a perfect example of that fear. I post stuff on here, link it to my Facebook, and what happens? Not much. I didn't expect it to, of course, and I'm hardly "promoting" my blog--but there's always that little part of you that wants the things you invest in to do well, even if it's the very small investment I've put into this blog.

But yeah, a few views, no comments, just...nothing.

I'm terrified that will happen with my stories. I'll slap them up for download and maybe five or ten or even twenty people get them and then nothing. No one saying "An amazing tour de force! Incredible debut!" (notice people only use those words when reviewing things? And not even everything, just, like, books and some movies), and no one saying "This is utter garbage. I'd rather read Fifty Shades of Gray fanfiction than this shit."

No, just those few downloads and then nothing, just a casual indifference to the stories--lost among the clamor of a hundred other things trying to get people's attention my stories won't amount to anything but the smallest blip possible on their radar.

I'm afraid that all the work and care and thought I put into my stories--that all of myself that I put into them--will amount to nothing more than something that is painfully, pathetically, forgettably...

average.

Let Go

The day before yesterday my nephew came over to spend the night. We spent the evening playing videogames that were far too mature for a six year old to play and then woke up at a disgustingly early time (like at six in the morning--I've had jobs where I'd still be at work from the day before at that time) to go swimming and then head to the park.

My nephew is the son of my only real sibling, my younger sister. I love my sister whole-heartedly, but we don't get along at all. We're about as different as two people can be, starting from our respective sexes and moving all the way up to taste in music--which I have been assured is the highest form of personal expression. My nephew is a kid who's had it tough his whole life and I doubt it will ever change. When he was about three his father was killed in a car wreck and only a year or so later he was hit by a car and dragged about twenty feet by it before the fucking moron driving the thing realized he hadn't hit a squirrel. Both of his legs were broken and he had most of the skin torn off of his stomach and the right side of his head.

Fortunately my nephew, like his mother, is a tough bastard. He recovered fully from the accident and now, at age six, has more scars than I do with twenty more years of life than he does.

I say all this to set up how rarely my nephew gets to be a normal kid. His home life isn't great, his body is already marked with the permanent evidence of the rough life he has and his education has fallen behind without a doubt. When he comes to see me... well, I think it's a taste of normality for him, or at least a break from the chaos that makes up a lot of his day-to-day operations. So when I have him I at least try to do fun things with him, even if that falls to my personal vice of playing games where you shoot zombies with him.

Anyway, that's not what this entry is really going to be about. I want to talk about swings and swinging.

After a very ill-advised trip to the pool at nine in the morning and a thirty minute swim in freezing water (the temperature was a very un-Louisiana like seventy degrees that morning) we went to the park and found the swings. Like all children everywhere on the planet, my nephew loved them. I demonstrated the procedure of swinging to the maximum attainable height and then releasing one's self from the swing to fly through the air and hit the ground with enough force to injure one's self.

After that it was all we could do to keep up with his endless leaps through the air. He obviously weighs a bit less than I do, and so was able to get a whole lot more air than me.

Seeing my little nephew swing on the cracked old swings in the cracked old park out behind our apartment complex awoke old memories in myself about when I was a bit younger (and a lot skinnier) and swung five days out of the week in my middle school.

My best friend is a guy I met in elementary school, like second grade I think. We've been friends throughout all of school, college, and beyond. When  we were in middle school we didn't share many of the same classes, but we could spend time at recess together. In my middle school there were really awesome swings with chains that went up like twenty feet. It was probably actually more like ten, but in my time and size diluted memories of them they seemed to go up forever.

The swings were the most valuable resource on the recess field for kids who didn't play basketball or football (my friend and I were squarely in this camp) and I remember running at top speed from my class before recess to make it to the swings and reserve one for my friend so we could swing together and talk about Raziel or Zombies (this was before the internet was really a thing and so zombies were not as utterly beaten to absolute parody levels of doneness along with bacon and ninjas and other 'random' stuff.)

Leaping off of the swing was a thing we did not do lightly, because once you were off the swing any of the hundreds of other predatory swingers could snatch that thing up and you'd be stuck without one. There was a sort of loosely enforced system where a kid could stand in front of you and count each swing when you swung towards him. When the kid got to 10 swings you were supposed to get off of it and go to the back of the line for them (if there was one). This didn't always work out, some kids just told you to fuck off. I personally never did because I'm usually a pretty passive guy and realized it was fair for people to take turns on the swings. Sometimes if we were lucky my friend and I could swing for most of recess without anyone trying to boot us off. I remember one time in particular where a guy was trying to boot me off of my swing and my friend parted with half of his precious rice crispy treat to bribe him away. Much love, bro.

So I wondered yesterday about what it is about swings that kids love so much. Once I had taken my turn on the swing I remembered very quickly--it's the height.

As a kid you're so small and the world can seem so big. Everyone is taller and stronger than you--especially if you're a particularly scrawny, small kid like I was back in the day (somewhere in highschool I filled out and put on about fifty pounds, but even today I picture myself as a scarecrow.) Swinging is a way to rise above the huge world that surrounds you and see over the tops of the buildings, to say nothing of the tops of the grown-ups. And it's something you can do yourself. I was pushing my nephew, but he could have swung himself up and up until the chains went slack.

And it isn't just something a kid can experience. Go out, right now, and find a swing set and then swing yourself as high as you can. Now try to frown why you do it.

Okay you probably can frown while swinging through the air on a cool Sunday morning, but if you are then you're just a buzzkilling douchebag.

My point is that in this day and age of zombie killing videogames and sharing online when you take a shit in 140 characters it's refreshing to remember that you can still grin like a moron when you swing on a swing set.

The most vital part of the swinging is the dismount, though.

Letting go of the swing at the apex of it's arc and sailing through the air to land on the ground is an amazing experience--I know some people are too scared to do it, and other's rightfully claim it's really super dangerous and can end in broken bones or worse. Hell, during our outing yesterday there was one time when my nephew hopped off the swing and landed totally on his face. Like, his cheek was the first thing to connect with the wood chips around the swing set and the rest of his body just sort of lazily followed suit. For about half a second he didn't move and I thought for sure he was dead.

He wasn't, of course. He shot back up laughing his skinny ass off and wiping dirt off of his face to do it again and my heart started beating again.

I let him do it again, and again. Not everything has to be safe in the world. He knows that better than some adults.

Swinging as high as you can is exciting and fun. Letting go of the swing is exhilarating. The way you sort of hang in the air for just a moment, an eternal moment of weightlessness were you feel like you're swimming in thin air. You can feel your clothes rippling around you, your organs floating in their viscera, your whole body twisting totally free of the shackles of the Earth.

That moment is one where you really cannot frown.

You can't smile either, of course. You're most likely going to just pull a stupid face as you try to make sure that at least most of your lower body hits before your upper body.

There are lots of metaphors or comparisons I could make to letting go of the swing with letting go of concerns or life or worry or whatever the hell else, but I don't really want to do any of that.

I just want you to go out and swing.

We Weren't Soldiers

Not so long ago I worked as a security guard at a shopping center in my home town--something normal people would call a 'mall cop.'

I've had several very different jobs over the course of my life. I've worked as a valet, a dry cleaner, a landscaper, a store stocker, a waiter, for one horrible day I even worked with an extremely shady group of men and their two Mexican employees (neither of whom spoke English) planting grass in a river along the Louisiana-Texas border. I ended that job faster than any other job I've ever had.

The mall cop job was probably my least favorite job, though, even if it wasn't as objectively horrible as the grass planting one. People seem to be pre-built with a hatred of mall cops. I know I was. I grew up going to the same mall I would later work security at and more than once I had seen a mall cop in his crisp white shirt and silly hat and scoffed or laughed at his silly self importance without a second thought. When I, a few years later, found myself in that same uniform being laughed at by the teenagers I had so recently been part of, I couldn't help but reflect on the reasons for why I and so many others despised the mall cops of the world.

I realized with some surprise that I had no reason to dislike or mock mall security officers. I'd never had any sort of trouble with them what so ever (not that I was a particularly rebellious or naughty kid, especially at the mall--the worst thing I ever did there was get a blowjob in the parking lot once,) never even known anyone who'd had problems with the mall cops at my mall. I just didn't like them. I just laughed at them.

So why? I asked myself this question a lot as I strode around in my worn black shoes and thick leather belt (people saw the belt and thought I had a gun, even when I plainly didn't. I think it was the shiny black leather that did it, it evoked memories of police so strongly that the people's brains provided a weapon where there was none) and ignored the occasional scowl or giggle during the weekends.

Jesus Christ, the weekends. We'll talk about those later.

After a few months of mall coppery I realized that I had an idea of what a mall cop was in my head--formed from a few skit comedy shows and vague understanding of a security officer's powers, responsibilities  and the  laughably serious uniform they wore.

The figure I had half-heartedly constructed in my mind was a man who craved power and authority but lacked the drive, wherewithal, or possibly the courage to join either the armed forces or a police force. Here was a person who thought himself important, the king of his own little castle, but was really just a paper tiger. He had authority, but was pathetically unaware of how meager and unimportant his authority was. Doubtless this man heard the mocking japes of the teenaged customers of the mall and totally missed the sarcasm and cruelty of them--hearing only their words without understanding their meaning because he was so wrapped up in his own importance.

I feel here I should mention I never actually thought that much about mall cops before becoming one, all these complicated impressions and colorful metaphors were realized later either while walking around or--God forbid--crusing around on the mall's Segway.

I think many people have similar ideas about what mall cops are, whether or not they actually put them into words like that. I think the vast majority of people see mall cops as sad, pathetic little wannabes who are hardly worth their time.

Lately I've been having some serious employment issues and they have caused me to reflect on past jobs I've had. The one I spend the most time thinking about is my time spent as a mall cop. I'll say up front that I absolutely hated the job. Every time I had to go to work I'd be filled with very real dread and loathing. Just putting on the uniform made me angry. It was undoubtedly one of the worst jobs I've had in my life--but upon reflection I'm glad that I did it and I'd like to clear a few things up for my fellow mall coppers, on the off chance that you, Gentle Reader, even find yourself wanting to scoff and laugh at them.

The first thing to be said about our typical security officer is that he's a man, probably somewhere north of 30 years old. I was 23 when I started mall coppery and was unusually young. Only one officer in the two years I worked there was younger than me, and she was a woman which was pretty unusual itself.

In terms of race, the officers at my mall were pretty evenly split between white and black, with 2-3 Hispanic officers thrown into the mix as well.

During my entire career as a mall security officer I worked with only 4 female officers, half of them were my superiors, however.

Your average mall cop is not a man who couldn't make it in the army of the sheriff's office or whatever--in fact he's probably either an ex-cop, a veteran, or a currently serving member of the armed forces. My immediate supervisor when I started working at the mall was a sergeant in the army, had served two tours of duty in Iraq and spent the another year there while I was still working. I eventually took his place as supervisor until he returned home for the third time to see his newborn baby. Three marines, a sailor, and a national guardsman rounded out the rest of the men in the office when I started working there--about a year later we were joined by another marine and two soldiers from the Army. There were three retired policemen on our team as well, including the woman who would eventually take over as our Director once the company that we worked for sold our contract to another, competing company. When I first started I was asked many times what branch I served in and my answer, that I was not and had never been in the military or police force and was attending college to get an English degree (as opposed to Criminal Justice or something similar,) was met with confused chuckles and nods.

So what about the mall cop's sense of self importance? Do they really picture themselves as the final authority and the king of the mall?

Of course not, don't be stupid. The phrase I heard most as a mall cop besides, "Fucking kids." was "Call the cops." I personally loved calling the cops for whatever problems were besetting us in the mall, calling the cops meant that we didn't have to deal with the problem anymore, that we just had to hold it together long enough for the real cops to show up and deal with the problem. None (okay, all but one) of my fellow officers would readily admit that we were little more than ornaments with legs, patrolling the mall to save face and occasionally jump a car with a dead battery, and little else.

And this brings us to those hats I was mentioning earlier, and the Segway. The uniforms are not something that we chose to wear. Indeed, many times we begged to be allowed to wear less idiotic clothing. Some officers, myself included, would fight over riding our singular patrol bicycle around the parking lot on the weekends even thought it was a horrifically grueling way to spend eight hours simply because it meant we could wear a polo shirt and cargo pants with a baseball cap. The uniforms were there so that people would see us and notice us. Even if it meant they were laughing at us, it meant they weren't stealing things, starting fights, or trying to fuck in the bathrooms. Our silly clothes did half the job for us.

The average mall cop was a decently nice guy, most of them probably voted republican and liked to watch football, but they were all nice guys. And I'll be honest, a few of them were legitimately brave.

I'm not trying to exaggerate the dangers of being a mall security officer--90% of the time our job involved walking around the mall and scanning cleverly hidden bar codes with a PDA was had to carry around to prove that we were actually completing patrols and not just sitting in the office all day. And some of the officers were not something you'd call brave at all--I knew one who was to afraid to tell teenagers to pull their pants up if they were black--or smart.

Some were, though, and sometimes the job was more than scanning bar codes.

Once a young man stole a woman's purse from the food court and ran outside of the mall. Two officers chased him all the way across the parking lot and tackled him on the sidewalk to retrieve her purse. The young man had a knife on him. He didn't use it, but he could have.

I feel I should mention that the mall I worked at was not in the safest neighborhood. Lake Charles is hardly a large or dangerous city, but it's also not Plano and violence does occur.

The second week I was working at the mall--before I even had a uniform and was going to work wearing a button up shirt and slacks--a man came into the parking lot of the mall and robbed two other men at gunpoint. He then walked into the mall and started strolling around. The two victims of the robbery reported it to us and two mall cops followed the suspect and his two friends through the mall--knowing he was armed and at least somewhat violent--until police officers came and arrested him.

Every weekend at the mall, specifically Saturday nights, was a war, a battlefield with us--about 10 mall cops--against a hundred or more local teenagers. This wasn't a war of pranks, they kids weren't spraying silly string on each other. I was involved in over ten violent fights during my time at the mall--and countless scuffles. I categorize the "violent" fights as ones where people wound up with bodily fluids somewhere other than their bodies. I had to hand cuff two girls who were throwing chairs from a nail salon at one another--I responded to a call of "10-10" (a physical confrontation in progress) outside of a mall entrance only to find the broken and gasping body of a 27 year old man who had been savagely beaten by five over young men for reasons I'll never know. I helped this guy up and sat with him--at his request--until the ambulance and police arrived. He asked me to stay with him because he was afraid the people who had done this to him would return. I'm still glad that they didn't.

Two people were stabbed when I worked at the mall, thankfully I was not working for either. One of the stabbings resulted in an officer being fired, since he didn't stop the girls who did the stabbed from returning to the property once we'd removed her.

And one little girl was shot dead.

She was fourteen years old and visiting the mall on a Saturday night, a battleground night. She shouldn't have been there, of course, it was well past eleven when it happened. She should have been at home--either her's or a friends. The unfortunate reality of my old mall, though, was that many of the children we struggled against were there because they had nowhere else to go. They were the poor and ignorant, they expressed their feelings through violence because it was all they knew. We tried to stop the symptoms their wretched home lives, but we were just mall cops.

Anyway, the girl. She was with a large group of teenagers who had been causing trouble in the mall for several hours. Eventually we told them to leave and had to physically corral them out of the parking lot and off property with lots of screaming and shouting and people throwing things at us.

Once they'd been moved off of the property it was my turn to switch positions and work dispatch, sitting in a nice comfy office chair and controlling the cameras around the mall, safe from the chaos of the movie theater parking lot at midnight.

I had just sat down when the mall manager claimed she had hear gunshots past the fence that surrounded the mall. I trained cameras back there and saw the little girl sprawled in the grass with her friends surrounding her. Three of our officers ran back there to help her--something I'm not sure I could do--until the police arrived.

It was too late, of course. The little girl had been shot in the head. She was brought to a local hospital and died before one o'clock that night. Men in a car had driven past the group she was with and fired at one of the other men. They had missed and hit her instead.

She was fourteen.

They told me her name--but I have forgotten it.

The police later caught the men who killed her, although I don't know whether or not they were punished for it.

Often times I wonder what would have happened if we hadn't chased the group the girl had been part of off the property. Would she still be alive? Would the assailants have seen their target surrounded not just by little girls but by us in our insane hats and crisp white shirts and decided they didn't want to attempt to murder anyone? Or would they have laughed at the idea of mall cops protecting anyone and fired anyway, would they have hit me or one of my fellow officers instead?

I don't know the answer to any of those questions but they bother me. They bother me a lot.

A good ending to the story of my time as a mall cop would be to say that after the little girl died I couldn't take it any more and quit, but that wouldn't be true. I kept working at the mall for at least another eight months before I quit--and that was because I'd gotten a nice big grant to go to school and felt I could finally focus my efforts on college without working a full time job.

When I left the mall I felt happy, incredibly happy to be free of that place and it's endless Saturday nights. But sometimes I miss the people, the other officers, the men and few women I'd go to work with every day--some of them whom I fought and bled next to. I was as unlike those people as could be, a young, liberal college student who'd never imagined joining the military. If I'd met them on the street I'd have called them hicks or stupid conservatives or assholes.

But they were none of those things to me. They were, like me, mall security officers.

We were mall cops.

And we did what we had to do.

The First One

The first time I ever wrote something that could be considered a blog was in 2004, right after I signed up for the newfangled 'myspace' thing that all the other kids were talking about. I didn't think of it as a blog then, and for the next year or two I continued to not think of it as a blog. I primarily considered MySpace as a tool for meeting and engaging in sexual activities with young and attractive females I would not have otherwise met or had to courage to talk to in person, as I've always been better with written words than spoken ones.

Even as I moved beyond this stage (Which is actually a god damn lie, I was trying to snag girls on MySpace up until I forgot my password to it and stopped thinking about it--Facebook was the new hotness) I still didn't really want to consider the things I was writing on MySpace constituted a blog, they were just things I wrote. I actually wrote and entire serialized short story on there, a pretty horrible one with bleach-blond assassins and Irish swordsmen in suit jackets based on a series of pictures my Polish friend and I took in the seriously limited amount of alleys that Lake Charles, my home town, has.

I haven't spoken to my Polish friend in years. Often times I wonder how he's doing.

The thing I was doing on MySpace quickly became a blog once a girl I liked stopped dating me--an awfully cliche way to kick off the serious blogging I suppose, but with good reason. When people become emotional they seek to vent that emotion in whatever way possible, some with drink, others with violence. Some write songs or draw pictures. I was always to lazy to develop any sort of real skills in my life, so I would write things. Not poetry or music or anything like that, just rambling block paragraphs of mental dross that would take time and leave my hunting-and-pecking fingertips numb from the hard hitting of keys on my keyboard. My entries on MySpace then were angry, hurt, and confused--the writing of a child losing his childhood and becoming more and more adult. Eventually I got over the girl and the blogs became less angry, and--with the move to Facebook and severely limited number of characters there--my "blogging" days ended with very little fanfare.

So now here I am again, typing thoughts into a space where people I've never met, seen, or even considered could someday read them for whatever insane reason they may have for doing so. I suppose that, since I am writing under my real and actual name I should be careful about what I write, since employers or assassins could look me up and take me out with whatever sort of horrible embarrassing information I post here, but somehow I doubt that will be a problem.

The question for now is, why blog? Why after four or so years would I start this all over again? I'm not looking for internet girls anymore, I'm living with one of them and that can make finding new ones hard (being in love makes it hard too, but that doesn't really sound very sexy.) The honest truth is I actually sat down at my computer about an hour ago or so with the intention of writing something--something that is not a blog but in fact a story. That isn't the point, though. The point is that while I wanted to want to write this story, I found that what I actually wanted to do was just write. I wanted to write the words as they came to me and not try to twist my thoughts into the story that I wanted to write, I wanted to just listen to music and tap the keyboard and look at what wound up on the screen and hit share and know that people could see it when they couldn't see the stories I wrote.

Because I'm sad.

Because I'm scared.

Because I'm so anxious and worried that my head is pounding and my guts feel like they're trying to punch their way out of my stomach.

I'm not that guy, see, I know these days a lot of people deal with a lot of stress. I know they take pills and go see therapists and have support groups or whatever. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that--and honestly this last year has me thinking more and more I should get to know certain people in these groups better and figure out why I've suddenly gone over to their side. I used to consider myself a very laid back dude, after all. I felt like I had a pretty decent handle on things, even when I was broke or heartbroken or whatever. Now it feels like its too much to deal with, like all of the troubles that I continually put off or avoid in whatever way I can have mounted up and up and up--a mile deep snow drift trembling against some small, crucial pebble just waiting for that small stone to slip ever so slightly and release an avalanche of chaos to crush the peaceful little town that in this metaphor is my sanity.

You might be able to see how this isn't conducive to the good writing of fictional material.

And that's really depressing, because doing that is something that I love very much. It's seriously one of my favorite things in the world to do.

But writing fiction is hard, harder than some people might think. Especially if you're trying to write good fiction. Or at least decent fiction. It's more work than art, certainly. The idea is the simple part. It's getting that idea all down on paper (or the hard drive I guess, this is the 21st century after all, and Egon's words about print have never been truer) without ruining it that's the hard part.

But this writing, blogging, that's easy. At least the way I do it is easy. I'm not an avid read of any blogs, I don't know the first 'thing' about them, and I'm sure many serious bloggers put plenty of time and effort into their blogs, and do research and proofreading and drafts and all that awesome cool stuff you get to do when you care about what you're writing and kudos to them. But I don't. Not when I'm writing like this. I mean, look the those two preceeding sentences, if you could even call them that; fragments starting with conjunctions! That's the worst kind of sloppy writing. But here I don't care (I did it again! I actually do it a lot,) here I'm just typing down whatever I'm thinking and following the thread of thought until it runs out.

Which means that this thing is going to be long and rambling and confused, and brings me back to the reason I'm writing this blog. Because I want to write, but I find that my current emotional and mental state allows me only to write. Because typing all of this stuff out into the 'cloud' makes me feel a little less insane for a moment. I could do it in my head, I suppose, but seeing your thoughts down on the page or screen or whatever has, for me at least, a calming, ordering effect on those chaotic thoughts. I could do it in a private word document or something and just go nuts, say fuck a lot and not worry about someone I don't want reading this stuff seeing it--but that wouldn't be the same either.

I said earlier I liked to write stories, that it was one of my most favorite things in the world to do. That's still true. But do you know what I love even more than writing those stories?

Seeing people read them.

I know there's this stereotype of a writer or person who wants to be a writer being some intensely private person like Emily Dickinson or something who just sits alone at their desk and writes all this stuff in their own little book and doesn't care what anyone else thinks about their writing.

I think that's bullshit.

I think people who want to be writers want to have readers. I have plenty of stories that I'll never try to write down, I'll just run them through my brain like my own private theatre and enjoy the hell out of them, and they'll always be better than anything I could actually write, because they can always change. As long as the stories are in my head they're totally mutable. If I don't like something I can just morph it around and make it new and the story is none the worse for it. When I write them down, the stories become fixed, they're down, they're written and they can't be changed (well they can, George Lucas shows us this every other year...but they shouldn't). I think most people have that mental story telling thing going on, it's the people who want to write that take the enormous risk of slapping it down in writing and hoping it works.

So what I'm trying to say is I like attention, and that's why I'm writing this sort of stupidity where people can see it.

Whether or not I ever put in another entry to this blog, or even publish this one, is not something I'm too sure of--but I think I probably will. Even if people don't read it, hell, probably more if they don't, then I won't feel to pressured.

In closing, if you've somehow stumbled on to this thing and for whatever crazy reason slogged through all of my words then let me just say a few things before we go forward: I misuse commas, a lot, and I won't be trying too hard to police that tendency in this blog so don't get annoyed by it. I cuss in writing too, but less than I used too and normally only for emphasis. And I like to use block paragraphs and to start sentences with conjunctions. Also I really like to eat meat, which I guess is a thing people care about these days or something.

Oh and I'm from southern Louisiana, I used in live in Lake Charles but now I live in Baton Rouge.

Finally, if you're an actual real life friend of mine that has stumbled onto this blog (possibly through Facebook since I'm considering liking it there) please don't get too concerned about anything I'm saying here, it's mostly thoughtless rambling. If I'm really in trouble I promise I'll ask you (probably for money or something). If you're not an actual real life friend of mine but you know me in person then you should probably just walk on by because I might say mean things about you, or maybe not. In either case you should just ignore this and we'll both be happier.

Also if you're an employer please know this is not actually Andrew Stewart, I just hacked his google+ account and used his pictures to render myself anonymous.