On Ewoks

Tonight I got home with the intention of working on some story stuff. Instead I wound up playing a lot of the sequel to Defense of the Ancients with my friends. When we finished I felt like the creative juice had somewhat flown from my body. However, every writer I've ever read has stressed the idea that you have to write even when you are not feeling inspired or ready. I've decided to split the difference and type some dumb shit on the Internet.

Specifically dumb shit about ewoks. And probably a lot of shit about Star Wars in general.

First, I want to say up front that I love Star Wars. I love it un-ironically, wholeheartedly, and dearly. I know that these days it is a bit cooler to be into "nerd" stuff like Star Wars or Star Trek or whatever. I know a lot of people enjoy deconstructing Star Wars and talking about stupid shit like the second Death Star's fallout over Endor or how Luke kissed his sister because George Lucas didn't actually have some great uber-plot encompassing all of the movies. So fucking what? Neither did J. K. Rowling but no one calls her out.

Anyway, my point is that all that shit is not what I'm talking about. I'm also not talking about the prequel trilogy--which isn't as bad as some people make it out to be. It has several gems shimmering in the darkness that is the three movies, but for the most part they're not great. But forget about that, I'm not talking about the prequels, the deconstructions, the pictures of Chewbacca with sunglasses on or any of that shit. I'm talking about the feeling you get when this shit blasts the fuck on to the screen all brass and drums and big stupid 70s letters and the stars and everything. If you don't understand what I mean when I say that feeling, then you and I have very different ideas about what Star Wars is and you are probably not someone I want to talk to.

Now, before I get to the meat of this entry, which is the ewoks, I just want to mention that I don't think it's super cool to be cynical about Star Wars, especially the first three movies. Are there plot holes, cliches, silly shit and bad costumes? Yes, and we could spend all day pointing them out and feeling smugly superior to all the silly Star Wars fanboys, but, as I said in an earlier blog, you shouldn't waste your time doing that and if you are the sort of person who enjoys that, well, this entry is probably going to annoy you and you should leave.

Alright, now, let's talk ewoks.

To start talking about ewoks, one has to talk about Return of the Jedi. People say this movie the the worst of the original Star Wars movies, or sometimes they say shit like it's the "weakest" of the three or whatever. I think this is a recent development spurred on by the Internet and everyone needing to hate everything, but I may be wrong. Maybe people have said for years that Return of the Jedi is the worst of the original Star Wars films. Whatever, my point here is I don't think that Jedi is a weak film. It think it's a great film. Never once when I was watching it and taking in only my own opinions did I ever think of it as weaker or less than the other two movies. I never found any of the original movies weak, they were all equally great to me, at all times. If anything it was the much beloved Empire Strikes Back that I didn't like. Granted, this was because I was a kid and it was the only Star Wars movie we had when I was very young (my dad had recorded it with our VCR off of ABC or something) and I watched it so many times that I just got sick of it.

One of the main complaints people have with Jedi is the ewoks. They say the ewoks are designed to appeal to kids, to sell toys, to make it into a Disney movie or whatever the hell else you want to say about the little teddy bear bastards. They say it was a glimpse into how Lucas was already starting to lose his shit and the first step on the road to Jar Jar Binks (another character I didn't think was that bad).

I say nay, to these men and women. I say that, in their haste to be derisive and coolly cynical they have missed the entire point of the ewoks. Which is sad because it is a glaringly obvious point.

That point, stated plainly, is that appearances are deceiving. Not only is this a great theme, its the central fucking theme of almost everything in Star Wars, from Luke and Leia to Han Solo and the Millennium Falcon, to Darth fucking Vader. Everything in Star Wars is about certain points of view.

The ewoks look like cute little animals, their language is chirps and gurgles and shit like "nub nub". The Empire saw them as animals that were no threat at all to their operations, and so-called fans of Star Wars see them in the same light despite their obvious proofs otherwise.

What proofs? Well, when they first find the rebels on their planet they capture them, tie them up and bring them to their village to fucking eat them. Yeah, not to make friends with them, not to ask them to help their poor village or show them the power of love or whatever, they want to roast them alive over a fire and fucking eat their tasty human flesh. They obviously know that Luke and Han are sentient beings since they have Leia in their village as a guest but they don't give a shit. Even when their god tells them to let their prisoners go they ignore him and continue to prepare to cook them. It isn't until C-3PO "levitates" to display his anger that the ewoks relent and release the rebels.

So what does this first encounter tell us? That the ewoks are not what they appear to be. They are not cute, friendly animals. Sure, Wicket was nice enough (even though he did totally brandish a spear at Leia) but he was just a kid, not a hardened ewok warrior.

And are the ewoks hardened? Fuck yes. Even ignoring the ewok movies, which I do, they're shown to be capable fighters when they join the rebels to assault the shield generator on the moon.

So people get mad at this fight too because, I guess, the ewoks are not all slaughtered wholesale by the stormtroopers and hit them with rocks which knocks the elite legion soldiers over and they kill AT-STs or something.

Well guys, shit like that happens in real life too. You don't get to see the ewoks piling onto the felled stormtroopers to rip off their armor and stab them to death because it's a Star Wars movie and not Saving Private Ryan, but we can imagine that shit happened. Did the ewoks outnumber the stormtroopers? Probably. They also had the terrain on their side and several elite rebel soldiers on their side. Even without these advantages they nearly lose the battle. It isn't until Chewbacca and a few ewoks are able to take an AT-ST and use it to fight off the Empire that they win the battle.

Is this goofy and stupid and an attempt by Lucas to sell toys? I say no. I say that the ewoks helping the rebels and revealing themselves to be vicious fighters who PLAYED DRUMS ON THE SKULLS OF THEIR DEFEATED FOES not only fits into the logical world of Star Wars but is totally in step with the whole rest of the entire saga by being things that appear to be one thing and then reveal themselves to be something different.

So, the next time someone takes a smug shot at how stupid the ewoks were, yell "yub nub" and stab his stupid fucking face with a wooden spear and then tear off his head and use it to play sweet, sweet victory music.

Or maybe just tell him he's dumb and use this blog to illustrate that. Either one works.

Of Things to Come

So when I started this blog thing I'm pretty sure I made references to the fact that I would be writing it when the urge to write something overtook me but I didn't want to actually put any real thought of effort into what I was writing. Hence the title, right? So writing this blog became a way for me basically to procrastinate from working on things that I actually wanted to be writing.

Despite this I am pleased to say that I have finished what I was writing when not wasting time on this blog--all the stories for the first book I'm ever going to actually publish (self published, yes, but so what) are done and 90% edited. Not only that, but a very talented, awesome, lovely, and generally fantastic human being named Re has been kind (or foolish) enough to actually take time out of her life to draw me a cover for the book. Earlier today Re sent me a very rough sketch of the book's main character, Christopher Prometheus. I was so taken by her work that I asked her to let me put it up here so that 1) people could see how cool it looked and 2) maybe a few people might start to get as excited to get the book as I am to finally, finally get it out where people can purchase it.

So, for your viewing pleasure, here is the very first ever drawing of Christopher Prometheus!

I don't know about you, but I have seriously been staring at that little sketch all god damn day. I can't get enough of it. Re got his face so right that even I wouldn't have been able to tell her how to draw it before I saw that. If you dig what you see here from Re, which you should even if you have no intention of ever reading anything I ever write again, then she can be see and followed and whatever else people do these days on Instagram here. Also I need to admit that before this very moment I have never, even once, been to the Instagram website in my entire life and going there made me feel very old and out of touch.

But wait, there's more!

In case you were not excited by the mere prospect of having your imagination set aflame by the visual representation of my book's hero, I have decided in my infinite wisdom to actually post a small sample from one of the stories here in an EXCLUSIVE look at Christopher Prometheus and the Dead City which has never been seen before ever anywhere! (unless you're a friend of mine who I've sent the story to and begged you to tell me what you think of it, then you're probably sick of it)

So! TWO EXCLUSIVES! The picture above, and this story excerpt below. Enjoy, and I hope to see you all when the book uh, launches? Is released? Whatever books do, when it does that.

“What are we waiting for?” Emily asked, he could hear fear scratching at her words.

“I'm thinking,” Chris said. These 'Gunners' were not just some random gang. He was starting to doubt Emily's story about them coming after her for a shotgun—even one from Before—but this was no time to interrogate her. It seemed they were checking each floor, and he had seen enough of them outside to think there were more than the two or three he could see in the elevator shaft.

“We can't go this way,” he said.

“So we'll take the stairs or something!” Emily was grabbing at his sleeve.

Chris shook his head, “I don't think that would work.”

“What do you mean?” Emily was almost shouting now, “We can't go down here, we have to take the stairs, there's no other way out! Let's just run down the stairs, shoot the ones in the way, and get out of here!”

“We're fewer, we should be able to evade them, and we're weaker, so we need to be able to evade them.”

“What? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Sun Tzu.”

“Sun who?”

“Nothing, this way.”

Christopher jogged back down the hall they had come from. Emily's panic was starting to infect him, and the sounds of the men in the lower floors were getting louder. His mind was racing for a solution. Things seemed very dire, but there was always a solution. He just needed to figure it out.

Chris stopped, staring at one of the maps that were attached to the inside of each room's door. Without much thought he yanked the plastic holder out of the door, it came easily from the rotted wood, and slid the map out.

“Now what are you doing?” Emily asked as he studied the map in the dying sunlight.

“Looking for a way out.”

“Paper is going to tell you how to get out?”

“No it's a map. I'm—” he looked up at her as he spoke, her face seemed almost as blank as Cat's, who was standing next to her.

“Yeah, it's going to show me the way out.”

The map showed that there were four stairways, and the elevator shaft. Chris was willing to bet that the Gunners had men in all of the stairwells, probably one standing guard while others searched the rooms, moving up methodically. They might not, but he was not willing to risk running in to three or four armed men alone.

There was a covered driveway at the bottom of the map, on the opposite side of the hotel that Chris had come in through, a valet area. Chris thought valets were servants or something, but whatever the map meant, it looked like there was something there that he might be able to run along without being seen by people beneath it.

Now he just needed to get down to it.

"I say there is no Darkness but Ignorance."

You know what is an amazing and incredibly fun thing to do? Learning something.

I feel like this fact has been put in our faces so much by faded old posters on the backs of dusty library doors that people have forgotten how true it actually is. When you approach something you don't know anything about, or very little about, and are able to actually learn how to do it or what it means or how it works--well, the feeling is like nothing else is the world. At least to me, maybe you like feeling stupid, I don't know.

I think that as children we all find learning very easy, and why not? Our brains are as plastic and mercurial as they will ever be. They're begging for input like Jonny Five in a bookstore. We can learn without even trying as kids, whether it be walking, speaking, smiling, whatever--our brains learn instinctively so we don't even have to try.

It is a great tragedy that we as a society don't try harder to nourish and encourage that type of easy and free learning forever. I mean we do, sort of, see the aforementioned shitty posters. Bonus points if there's an apple or some equally trite crap on there. But our system of education is not geared towards learning, just instruction. Memorization. People say you should go to school so you can get a job, so you can get money, buy things, have a mortgage. They don't say you should go to school to learn. They see people who major in art or theater...or English and scoff at them. What a waste of money, a worthless degree. They casually disregard all of the knowledge and learning a person gains from that sort of education, immediately calculating about what material wealth the learning will give them and then callously mocking the person.

And fuck me, they're probably right. I'll probably live the rest of my life working shit jobs doing manual labor or telling black kids to behave or making wealthier people food. And that sucks, because money is great. But I have to wonder, in a world where wanting to learn for the sake of learning is a "waste of time" and all of life has to be focused on profit and loss and getting paid, are people like me the ones who are wrong? Maybe the world should try to be more like us, you know? I think a world where everyone learned art and poetry and network programming would be a better world for everyone.

But I'm getting off subject here. I don't want to whine about how unfair it is that no one wants to pay me to read Lord of the Flies to them and talk about the metaphysical properties of the conch. I'll probably write that blog in a month or so. What I want to talk about is the actual experience of learning and how fucking great it is.

I mentioned the ease with which very young children learn. We all know as time goes on it becomes harder to learn. The brain becomes less elastic. Patterns get worn into our ways of thinking, we struggle to change or add even simple things. One way to combat this, I think, is to always be learning something--be that through reading lots of books, listening to lots of music, watching lots of movies, anything where you're actually engaging your brain, not just staring at some brainless reality show or listening to some by the numbers song. It keeps your mind a little more agile, a bit more adaptive.

The other way, I think, is to meet someone who is really good at something or very passionate about it.

I have two friends who are DJs. They play at clubs I'd never go to and dress with more style when they roll out of bed than I'd manage if I spent five hours trying to pick out cool clothes at the Cool Clothes for Cool Cats store. I've heard the music they make and it's fucking phenomenal. It's so totally outside of my understanding or capability that I'd never hope to actually study it and understand it--but talking to them about it I feel like I am gleaning some small bit of the obviously massive knowledge they have built up over the years about musical theory and even just the computer programs they use to create the stuff. It's a heady feeling, a great feeling, meeting someone that knows so much about something they obviously love so much.

But let's not limit these thoughts to this wishy-washy liberal arts bullshit. My girlfriend's brother is a student learning computer programming. He's got more brains in his occipital lobe than I do in my whole nervous system. I know pretty much jack shit about computer programming. I know it has lots of different "languages" and that's about it. But when I hear this guy talking about writing code I'm always super interested, learning what I can even in simplified moron talk is absolutely fascinating to me. It makes me sad that I can't reset my life at like 18 and start learning this stuff, then reset it again and learn how to DJ, then reset again and learn about drumming or sky diving or neurology or sculpture or any of a million other things that a person could spend forever learning about.

It's a depressing reality that I often don't get to have as long and involved conversations with these sorts of people as I'd like. People don't always like talking about this stuff with weird guys like me, and it can be awkward as hell trying to tease out this sort of information for people. Still, when you can get someone who obviously loves and is knowledgeable about something to talk about it at length I encourage you to pick their brains as long as you can. You'll find yourself learning things in a way that reading a wikipedia page just cannot compare to.

And then you'll get that sweet, sweet knowledge high.