Good Bones

I'm writing this as I sit in my nice comfortable chair in my warm apartment with air conditioning and electricity and an internet connection and my wife asleep and safe in the bedroom down the hall. The door to my apartment is locked but I could probably leave it open without much fear of anyone nefarious coming through it.

But as I write this there are people far away from me who are dying in a war that I don't know nearly enough about to have an opinion about. There people don't sleep in nice safe beds or get the luxury of staying up during a calm night--they need whatever sleep they can get I am sure.

And as I write this other people are standing, sitting, marching in airports around my home country. They are protesting the executive order that the new President of the United States put into action earlier this weekend, an order that bans people from certain countries from coming into the states. Even if they are already legally allowed to enter.

It is hard for me to express how angry I am.

I'm angry at this man. Donald Trump. To treat people like this, to see suffering, need, desperation, fear, want--to see all of these things and to see a threat, to see an Other...It disgusts me. I'm not being hyperbolic. I feel a deep, primal seething disgust for this man. Perhaps some of this is from being too far in a liberal bubble? I do live in Baton Rouge after all--a haven for all things liberal. Perhaps I'm over reacting. It's just Muslims! It's just 90 days, just 120! Calm down, we're just trying to get better vetting processes in place, what about Obama her emails blah blah blah

The truth is that I don't care if I'm over reacting, Those arguments are so foul, so loathsome that I cannot even form a coherent argument against them right now. Plenty of smarter people than I have and are forming excellent, cogent reasons for why the people who think like that are idiot cowards. I can't, though. All I can see is the racism, the unbridled hate behind it which makes me furious and, even more so, the craven cowardice of these old, weak white men. They fear this change, they fear the loss of the power they've had for two-thousand years. They fear black and brown people, gay people, women, everything Other and to them everything IS Other and it makes me want to scream to know that the world is this evil and this cruel to allow people like this to have power and to control the fate of these poor people who suffer and starve and are raped and beaten and murdered. For what? What is the great evil that these cravens are protecting the people of this country from? What could be worth telling a five year old child to turn back, to return to certain death?

I'm angry at myself, though, too. These things make me feel weak, useless, and as cowardly as these disgusting men who ruin lives by staining white paper with ink as black as their hearts. What am I doing to help people? What have I ever done for someone else that really mattered? How dare I sit here in my position of such absolute privilege and talk about how angry these things make me feel? How can I even have to gall to complain about wanting to complain? I know the response to this feeling is to get off my ass and do something but I feel like there's nothing I could do anyway. I'm not a lawyer, I'm not a soldier, I'm not a teacher. I'm a 31 year old white guy who's read too many fantasy novels and pitches a fit when he's forced to admit that the world is so far from the ideal that it's nearly unrecognizable, And that makes me angry. Angry at myself, angry at my fellow Americans who helped this loathsome man take power and sweep into our highest office with such hate and abject fear.

I don't know what will happen. I hope things change. I hope the world turns and things get better. But I fear that they won't. I fear that what I've always thought will turn out to be true. That the world is a grinder that runs on hatred and terror and uses it's hard, hard teeth to crush the good and the kind and the weak and the innocent into grist for the rich and powerful and cruel and strong. I hope I'm wrong.

But I don't think I am.

Books and Why We Keep Them

Like most young(ish?) people, I tend to move every few years, from apartment to apartment to house and back to apartment. I'll be the absolute first person to tell you that I hate moving. I'm disorganized at the best of times, so even the most basic step of moving--putting everything in boxes to be carried away--stresses me out to no end. Every time I have moved, from when I was 18 leaving my mother's home to the last time I moved from Lake Charles to Baton Rouge I feel like I've thrown more things away than I've packed. Yet with each moved it felt like I had more and more things to move. Furniture and appliances and oh god the never ending piles of clothes than I never could have possibly worn in my entire life. Everything seems to multiply and flood out when you move, like the hex in Belatrix's vault. It's maddening, especially for a guy like me, and I'm always willing to just take huge armloads of things and throw them in the garbage rather than bother packing them.

Without a doubt the worst thing in the world to move are books. They are basically paper bricks, after all, dense little pages all clumped together between hard, heavy covers. They do pack into boxes nicely, but their weight is so great that not even big awkward couches can compete with the difficulty of hauling a cardboard box filled with fifteen or twenty paperbacks up a flight of stairs. And I have many more than fifteen or twenty paperbacks. Hell, I have that many role playing books alone. Every time I move I load up my ten or twenty or thirty boxes with books and haul each heavy, smelly load in and out of trucks and rooms and halls even as I am throwing clothes and hangers and food and beds out of windows and into streets.

These days ebooks are rapidly replacing these proverbial albatrosses, people can move their whole home library as easily as they could move a single slim novel. It is hard to argue with this logic when I'm sweating and cursing over a third box of these fucking books and knowing that I still have five more to get out of the truck back there. Even once all the boxes are in the new abode, one still has to move in bookshelves and open the boxes up and line all the books back into their proper places and be careful not to bend the covers or break the spines anymore than one needs to.

But I can never bring myself to throw away my books, even the ones I don't really like that much.

Why not? I know I could get them all on a Kindle or a Nook, or even my phone. There are old, cliche arguments like "Books smell like books!" or "I like to turn pages!" (both of these are true, and I believe in them whole-heartedly, but I can absolutely understand that the ebook crowd are tired of hearing them. Even I am. Sometimes.)

The truth is that, for me--for many people, I think--books represent something more than simply the text printed on their paper. When I lie on my bed and look over at my bright orange book case I'm not just seeing the spine of The Truce at Bakura, I'm remembering sitting in the backseat of my mom's van as we drove to Houston. I'm feeling the thrum of the road under me, smelling the McDonald's we ate on the road, and remembering Luke Skywalker struggling weightless through the Ssi-ruuk capital ship while trying to save Dev Sibwarra and himself from the raptor-like aliens.

Each of my books is a snatch of my life, a memory made concrete--imprinted by me even as it imprinted its story on to me. I'll always connect Wizard and Glass with the musty old couch in my older brother's house where I found it and devoured it. Watership Down will always remind me of clouds scudding across a beautiful star-shot night as I read it under the pale light of a full moon. Dealing with Dragons, Sabriel, and The Passage will all remind me of various lovers anytime I see them or feel their pages.

For me, and I suspect many people, my books are much more than just the stories they hold. They're the stories of me. Each crease, each stain, each ragged page--they're all part of my life, like old scars that remind us of adventures or tragedies. My books hold and tell the story of me, more than my clothes or my bed stand or my microwave. I could never willingly give away these things, anymore than I would be willing to part with my memories of my past--be they good or bad--because ultimately all that I am is my experiences, and I want to remember who I am and why I am and these heavy, cumbersome, space-consuming books are the representation of my own mind in the physical world.

Plus, hey, they smell like books.

A Time to Write

So it's been a little while since I sat down at my computer and started typing things into this webpage so that other people could read what I'd written. In the time since my last post and this one I went ahead and published that book I'd been working on, I got it out on the internet, and the day I hit the publish button was one of the most exciting of my life. Going to the actual Amazon website and seeing something I'd made (with a lot of help of course) right there for people to purchase was a thrilling experience. I plotted out more books to release and stories to tell and felt all tingly.

But a strange thing happened after my book (I feel weird calling it a book. I've never liked calling anything I write a book. People would ask me what I was writing and I'd just say it was a story. Even now when the stuff I've written is literally collected in a physical, actual book, I hesitate to call it that) got out. A week or so after I'd hit that Publish button I began to feel bummed out. Depressed, even. At first I couldn't figure out why. It's taken me a very long time to understand why and I'm going to try to explain it without sounding whiny or ungrateful--so I'm sure I'll sound exactly like those two things.

To date I've sold 26 copies of my book, some physical, some electronic. That made me enough money to cover the price I paid the artist to draw the cover and a little bit extra. Honestly I'd been realistically expecting to sell maybe ten copies of the book so that part made me happy.

I realized as time went on, though, that even though the book was selling (a little) it didn't seem people were actually reading it. The people buying it were just friends and family of mine, not people interested in the story. Of course I am forever grateful for those friends and family who bought the book, it is awesome to think of people buying something I wrote and I can't say thank you enough to everyone who did. But while everyone was letting me know they bought the book, very few were telling me about what they thought of it. And I realized that, more than money, I wanted people to like what I was writing. The lack of feedback on the stories themselves started a subtle but powerful wave of doubt in my mind about the shit quality of my writing that resonated with destructive harmonics through the circuits of my brain and made me doubt, more and more, my writing.

After the book was out I planned to write more, obviously. I had a whole slate of Christopher Prometheus stories lined up to write as a sequel, an old story of mine I'd planned to clean up and publish for cheap and a whole new story with swords and dragons and everything.

I wrote one, really bad, Christopher story and nothing else.

I would stare at the computer screen and let the white blankness of the word processor burn into my eyes and write nothing. I'd pull up my old stories and read over them and see how ugly and bad they were. That undertow of doubt, which at the time I wasn't even really aware of, pulling away the foundation of my confidence. I wrote nothing, and felt bad about writing nothing, which made it ever harder to try writing again.

All of this was really my own fault. For awhile I wanted to blame the people who'd bought the book, I didn't want to admit that I needed to shake off the malaise that had overtaken me, but it can be hard to face the fact of your own fear. The fear, I've now come to understand, isn't that people didn't like the book so much as (like I said awhile back) that my stories just wouldn't be noticed at all.

The fact was that, deep down inside my most secret of hearts, I had been convinced that this was it. I'd worked so hard on these stories and I was finally going to bust out. I'd put them on Amazon and people would notice and word would spread and I'd finally be able to be a real, honest to god Writer. But the reality is that there's a whole lot more work to be done. I see now that it's not just a single perfect shot into the darkness, but a long and hard construction of a whole goddamn bonfire to light up that dark. Coming to grips with my own foolish expectations and disappointment has been hard and taken too long, but I think I've done it now. This blog is the first thing of any consequence I've written since the fateful Pushing of Publish and it should not be the last.

I want to reiterate how grateful I am for everyone who did buy my silly little book. You are not the reason I fell into despair, rather you are how I am able to find my way back to confidence. Without you reading what I write (and I suspect the readers of this blog and the purchasers of my book are two groups who's Venn diagrams overlap very closely) I would just spend all of my free time playing Dota 2 instead of only too much of it.

So. Going forward. Work on stories will recommence. Stories about Chris and Cat and the Council will begin to be churned out. The Cthulhu Mythos love story will be edited and published. Anwynn and the Dark Knights of Mab will be written about and I'll get to narrate sword fights again.

And I'll write more here, it breaks off the rust, it gives me the numbing tingle in my fingertips that feels like work well done. And I'll write and I'll work and I'll try to make this dream a little something more.

My Funny Valentine

When I first became a vegetarian I think more than a few people had some assumptions about the reasons I was becoming one. And when I say reasons, I mean reason. And by reason, I mean they thought that my girlfriend was making me become one.

Imagine, a guy like me, wanting to become a vegetarian on his own? No, what my friends and family thought (and some still think, I think) was that I was the henpecked guy, "Yes dear, if you want to be a vegetarian I'll do it too. Anything for you, dear."

I think I've made it clear before that I became a vegetarian for reasons originating entirely within my own mind and at the chagrin rather than the charge of my girlfriend. She loves meat, loved cooking it, and even if she didn't she would never demand, ask, or imply that I should do something so drastic with my life choices.

So it's totally untrue that she forced me to become a vegetarian, but I'd be lying if I said she didn't make me one. She didn't make me one by telling me, she made me one by allowing me to be one.

That sounded more poetic in my mind. Let me try to explain.

I never would have had the self discipline to manage to be a vegetarian alone--I never even would have made it to the point of trying it, I'd have been embarrassed, I'd have felt stupid and hypocritical. What my girlfriend did was give me the strength to do something that I wanted to do with my life, she never judged me or doubted me and wanted only to help me to achieve my goal.

Without her, I never would have been able to do it. She is the reason I was able to stop eating meat.

Because she loves me.

And man, do I ever, ever, ever love her. It's not the doe-eyed love I used to crave when I was younger, not the weird, confused, misunderstanding of love I had when I was a kid. It's the love that gives me the strength to do something as hard as becoming a vegetarian after a lifetime of loving meat. It's the way that I can lie in bed next to her and talk to her about videogames or Pathfinder or some stupid article I read on the internet about how bees can talk by dancing and she never complains or ignores me but listens and remembers and hears what I say.

And it is a love that makes me want her to tell me about how to cook lintels. To tell me how to mix icing and water and food coloring to make cookies that pop with color and brightness. It's a deep and firm love that lets me look over at her after a day of work when she's tired and worn down, with her hair hanging in limp strands around a face with streaked makeup and want nothing more than to kiss her and stroke her chin with my hands and remember how incredibly smart and funny and sexy and exciting she is--this girl who deserves a guy I can never be but who gives me the strength and the confidence to try to be him without ever doubting me or wanting anything other than for me to succeed in anything I'm trying to do.

She's an incredible girl, this girl of mine. I cannot begin to say how strong she is, what she deals with and how she faces it with such dignity and humor. I am proud of her every day, and always, always striving to be the guy she thinks I am (I think she's crazy). I keep waiting for her to see in the mirror what I see in her face every day--a girl who's the best in the world--and for her to tell me to get lost, she has bigger fish to fry. But she won't, because she loves me just as much as I love her.

I don't know why she does, but as long as she does I know we can face the world and do all the things we want to do, together.

And in love.

On My Belief

As a child I believed in God.

I believed in God with a child's faith--I never doubted it or questioned it. I also believed in Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, alien abduction, ghosts, demons, psychic powers, astrology, and spontaneous human combustion. I believed in magic and thought the world was a magical one, that there were dark secrets and incredible powers that people could and did unlock. I looked forward to the day when I would encounter these strange and supernatural things.

Because of my fierce interest in all of these things I sought them out. This was before the Internet was a thing that could be used by a kid at home, so I was limited in my ability to learn about the monsters and magic I was sure populated the world. I would find books about werewolves and ghosts in the library and beg my mother to buy me magazines about monster sightings or dragons. Every weekend I would go to Bible school and hear about all the miracles and goodness of God and all that stuff.

My Bible study group was called Sparks or something like that. All I can remember about it is there was a weird little white puppet the teachers would use to talk to us about God and we had plastic crown pins that we got to put fake gems in for memorizing Bible verses or something. In these classes we would pray, of course, and the teachers told me that by praying I would feel God's presence and would know how to deal with problems. I prayed when they told us too, as earnestly as I've done anything in my life. I would call out to God and thank Him for everything I had and ask Him what to do about problems in my life or how I could help my mother and father love each other more when they were separated.

Never did I ever feel the presence of God, despite my wanting it more than almost anything. I felt like there was something wrong with me. I lied to my teachers in my Sparks class and told them that I could feel God's presence, that when I asked Him for advice I would hear Him telling me what to do. I decided perhaps I wasn't faithful enough or that perhaps God thought I was doing well enough and didn't need his help.

In the meantime I continued to peruse all the written things I could about the supernatural. The X-Files was probably the biggest show on television when I was a kid and it reinforced my belief in the fact that there was more to the world than met the eye. We moved into a house without my dad and got cable television and I added shows like The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Night Gallery, and In Search Of... to that list. Everything I consumed told me I was on the right track, that supernatural things were just around the corner and I would encounter them soon--I already had friends in school who claimed to have seen ghosts and aliens and whatnot, I was sure I'd find the same things soon enough.

But I didn't. I never found a dragon egg or a ghost's ectoplasm, or felt the presence of God when I prayed. My father began to teach me about scientific forces like surface tension, centripetal force, and gravity. These things fascinated me as much as the supernatural things of my much younger days and I was ecstatic to apply them to my beliefs. I had grown frustrated with the lack of evidence of the magic I knew existed. Eyewitness accounts were great, and there was some physical evidence of course, but never enough. I'd grown old enough to understand the concept of a hoax and nothing made me more angry than reading about proof I'd thought was real turning out to be hoaxes. I became skeptical of the accounts I read not because I didn't think the things the people claimed to experience didn't exist, but because I was afraid to believe another hoax.

I began to apply my rough understanding of science to these things and they always came up lacking. Logical thoughts seemed to always hedge the monsters back further and further from what seemed possible. The Loch Ness monster, I thought, was a plesiosaur or a colony of them. But what were they eating? A predator that large needed more food than a lake in Scotland could provide. Where were the corpses, if it was a breeding population then how could there be no dead animals washing ashore? No droppings or anything other than a few fuzzy photographs and iffy eyewitness descriptions.

Reluctantly I began to think perhaps there was no Loch Ness monster, or Bigfoot. I consigned these and other monsters to a category of disbelief with the possibility that I might change my mind sometime in the future. I became, I suppose, a kind of agnostic in regards to giant monsters.

I still remember the first time someone suggested to me that God might not be real. My cousin was watching me and I said something about God, he said, "Maybe there's no God at all," to me. I was absolutely blown away. I very concept of God not being real had never entered my mind. At the time I was only vaguely aware that there were even other Christian religions besides Baptists. The idea was too big for me to wrap my young mind around and I pushed it to the back of my mind and rarely thought about it.

As years went by and I continued to see no ghosts, no aliens, and no angels I began to move more and more ideas into the "probably not" column of my mind. I would return more and more often to the words of my cousin and would consider the idea that God did not exist. I couldn't stand it--because if there was no God, then what would happen when I died? Even as a very young child I was terrified of death. More than once my mother would find me crying in my bed or the tub because I was thinking about her or my father or sister or myself dying.

If God was not real, then what happened when you died? If God didn't exist then how could Heaven? When you died was it like sleep, but much deeper? The thought made me terrified. I would think back to my earliest memories--confused, blurry recollections of a trailer and wooden toys and my father hugging my pregnant mother. And beyond those memories? Nothing. Was that what death was? Oblivion? No thoughts, no feelings, no anything?

It was too much, I couldn't accept it. I was too young to realize that now it was fear that fueled my belief in God and not faith.

One day, I remember it vividly, I was swinging on my neighbor's swing set and mulling these thoughts over in my mind. I had worked myself up into a scared frenzy, thinking about God and whether or not He was real or made up like Santa Claus. I leaped out of the swing at the same time that I made a decision. God might not be real.

I went up a believer and came down an agnostic.

As I grew older and information became more easily accessed and I learned more about life and myself, I dropped the rest of my beliefs about aliens and ghosts and psychic powers one by one--always sad that the world was becoming less magical and more material, but unable to lie to myself about what I saw. It wasn't until my mid teens that I became a true atheist and committed to the idea of a fully material universe, and my youth made me more than a little bit of a prick in regards to my new "beliefs". I think back to my highschool/late teen self and shudder.

Now I still devour stories of monsters and aliens and possessions. I still want there to be ghosts, I still want there to be a kind and loving God--but I know there isn't. My youth of belief has led to a lifetime of skepticism.

And I'm a better person for it.

Celluloid and Pages

Recently The Hobbit came out in movie theaters which made me think of The Hobbit the came out a few years ago which in turn made me decide to read The Hobbit again. That last link was really hard to find, by the way, buried under tons of shit about the most recent movie.

I might not have mentioned this before, but The Hobbit, as in the book by J.R.R. Tolkien, is one of my favorite books ever written and might be my favorite fantasy novel ever. I certainly think it's the best thing that Tolkien ever wrote, before he started becoming obsessed with his own mythology and forgot he was writing books to entertain people and started using them as an excuse to make up fake languages. The Hobbit, to me, has everything needed in a fantasy novel--adventure, friendship, horror, action, and a pretty decent message about greed and people's priorities.

It has no women, of course, which I suppose will bother some people. I can't defend the fact that there are no women except to weakly offer that none of the character's masculinity is really important to the story. If Bilbo and all the dwarves had been female the story would've been the same. Yeah, I know, it's a shitty excuse. The dude wrote it in the 1930s okay? Give him a break.

There's also no romance in it. Which is spectacularly awesome, a fact that the movie people seemed to have missed.

Alright so let's talk about the movie version of The Hobbit, huh? The second part I mean, the second of three parts. We can take a moment to appreciate the irony of slicing a book that is shorter than any one of the Lord of the Rings books into three movies to increase profits when the book itself could be seen as one very long argument against greed.

And yes, the book was made into three movies for profit. Don't try to tell me the creators wanted to capture every nuance of the book and needed three movies to do it because that is obviously false. Not only do they add a ton of extra stuff, only a fraction of which is even hinted at in the book, but they still cut out shit from the book and change it to go faster. It is absolutely mind boggling that with nine hours of screen time--half of the time it takes a narrator to read the entire fucking book, they still cut out stuff from the book.

But I'm not here to pick apart every difference between the movie and the book. Plenty of people can already do that, and just because something is different than the book it is based on does not automatically mean the thing will be bad.

I want to talk about one specific part of The Hobbit, which is Flies & Spiders, the eighth chapter in the book and my favorite part of the whole thing. It is a incredibly important chapter in the book because it is the turning point for Bilbo as a character, he goes from a reluctant passenger with the dwarves to a active force in the story--he rescues the dwarves, he fights and kills the spiders, and he keeps the dwarves going long enough for them to stumble into the elves and be captured which is pretty much the best thing that could happen to them since they were poisoned and starving to death.

What I'm saying is that the real story of The Hobbit is, shockingly, about the hobbit himself. His journey isn't just across Middle-Earth to the Lonely Mountain, but through himself, across the Baggins side over to the Took side. From the contented, lazy rich man to a genuinely brave hero. Flies & Spiders is where that turn becomes most apparent. It isn't sudden, because Bilbo has already shown his willingness to act when he has too, especially under the Misty Mountains when he was going to go back in to find the dwarves and Gandalf, but also during their encounter with the trolls. But in Mirkwood he finally has the opportunity to act since all the dwarves are captured and Gandalf is gone. His killing of the first spider that tried to take him away galvanizes him and he expresses this change by naming Sting.

When he rescues the dwarves, Bilbo doesn't just cut them down and run. He sees the spiders and formulates a plan, shaky as it is, he bravely taunts the spiders and doubles back to free the dwarves, then leads them in a running battle against the spiders--fighting and killing many of them and distracting them long enough for the exhausted, poisoned dwarves to escape with their lives. Without Bilbo the dwarves would have been eaten, no doubt.

So now let's compare this excellent chapter with how it is portrayed in the movie. If you haven't seen the movie and care about spoilers you might want to stop reading because I'm going to discuss the finer points of these scenes here so, you know, look away?

So in the movie the dwarves are in Mirkwood for like three hours before they wander off the path and get confused. Bilbo climbs and tree to look around. The spiders ambush the dwarves and Bilbo goes after them. He sees them tying up the dwarves and puts on his devil ring, which allows him to understand the spiders. He frees a few of the dwarves and they take over the battle, fighting the spiders while Bilbo cries about the ring which fell off of his finger and landed on the ground. He chases after it and then KILLS A BABY to keep it.

Yes, it is a baby spider, but still. BILBO BAGGINS HACKS A BABY FROM A SENTIENT RACE TO DEATH TO KEEP HIS RING. So instead of a transformation from a passive character to a truly active and dynamic character, Bilbo is reduced to a plot device to show how bad and evil and corrupting the Ring is in the most hamfisted and obvious and bullshit way possible.

But okay, sure, they need to establish the Ring is bad because they're trying to make the movie more like a prequel to the Lord of the Rings instead of a story all its own, right? So after Bilbo finishes killing his baby then he probably snaps out of it and leads the weary dwarves to safety, right?

Well, no, in fact the dwarves are pretty much fine and kill a lot of the spiders (including all of of them grabbing one by the legs and pulling it apart which struck me as needlessly gory) but then even more spiders come and then... well then the elves show up led by Legolas and some girl elf who's there to be a love interest for the...pretty dwarf? (By the way, he dies at the end. Almost like they want you to like the dwarves who don't make it)

So what we have is a scene where Bilbo does not really demonstrate a lot of nerve. Yes, he does chase down the spiders and free the dwarves, but he doesn't really have time to consider what he's doing. In the book he has to wander around and watch the spiders from afar, in the movie he listens to the dwarves screaming all the way to the spider lair. Bilbo only has to free one or two of his companions before they take over for him, they never begin to look to him for leadership, and his brave rearguard fight against the spiders is transformed into an incredibly cheap shot to make the Ring seem sinister and foul.

Obviously, I did not like the movie much at all, and there are more reasons than this one for that, but I think  this scene in particular really was a turning point for me and the real reason I dislike the movie. Taking the focus away from Bilbo's self growth so that we can watch an Orlando Bloom who seems to be straining the edges of his CG/makeup youthificiation shoot a bunch of CG spiders while he surfs really does not sit well with me. I hope you enjoy the movie more, of course, more enjoyment is always better than less enjoyment.

But maybe instead you should just read the book again?

"Print is Dead"

Lately I have been thinking a lot about books and reading them. I haven't been reading books lately, instead I've been listening to them on my iPhone after buying them from Audible which is a pretty legit website, they have a good selection and customer service. I would get my audio books from the library but my phone is too old to use their app. It seems strange to me that a government agency is using technology too advanced for me, but it's true.

Anyway, I've been burning through audio books pretty fast, "reading" things from Mary Roach's cleverly titled books to books about that dude I'm always talking about to a series of novels about a poor man's John Constantine (not that the current one is that great, moving old John from Vertigo to DC proper was a bad idea, but that's a very different blog post.) Basically anything I can find that looks even remotely interesting I'll get. It's how I used to read maybe three years ago, before I hit some rather rough patches in life that took me away from reading. It's been great to get back into the swing of reading, even if someone else is doing it for me, and I've gotten back into reading printed books as well, which I still prefer, but are much less practical.

Listening to books that I purchased and downloaded from the internet got me thinking about books in general though, as did being able to sit at work at four in the morning and watch very internet things on my pocket computer device that we're still calling a phone for some reason. It made me wonder--were books only ever popular because there was no other alternative? In this day, when anything and everything can play a YouTube video or stream music or let you update your friends on how that bulge on your left nipple is doing, do people have time for books? And more poignantly, should they?

I struggled with that question. Especially when I was in the depths of my interlibrum. I spent the time I'd normally spend reading watching Netflix or YouTube or whatever. The ease of pulling out my little glass window to the internet was infinitely better than needing to crack open that paper book and reading it. Was my love of books something that was born only out of my being born before the ease of watching cats do cute shit in my hands? And if so, who was I to encourage people to read? Why should I tell you to read Catch-22 when you can watch the movie on Netflix without getting out of bed?

After a lot of thought, and getting back into books with a vengeance thanks to the very same device that brought those doubts down on me in the first place, I've decided that none of the above is true. I love books as much now, if not more, as I did when I was ten and reading Stephen King books that weighed as much as I did. The ease of watching videos or tweeting or whatever doesn't make them better than books, it only makes them easier.

During my lapse in reading I was having a tough time in life on multiple fronts. The details are unimportant, what is important is that I was looking for escape. Books are, of course, excellent means of escape--but I needed something easier. I needed to be able to tap my phone a few times and have someone else do everything for me, the explaining, the acting, the thinking. I needed to be the guy from the cartoon who's staring into the television with a slack face and whirlpool eyes. I didn't want to engage my brain for anything at all. I just wanted to stare into bright, flashy entertainment and not think.

Books require thought. Not just a running visual of what's happening based on the descriptions, but remembering what has happened, who's speaking, what a comma means. They require much more engagement from their audience than videos of someone playing a videogame. I think this is one of the greatest things about books, if they're fiction, they pull you into the story not just via good descriptions or characters or plot or whatever, but because you are involved intimately with the author in creating the scenes. The author has sent his thoughts out into the world in the form of text and you are connecting with him or her and translating his or her thoughts into your own. It's really a pretty remarkable experience when you think about it--a shockingly intense and close connection between two people who may never have even met.

I sure hope you're now thinking about how you totally let me into your head.

So is this a good thing? Should people bother? I think so. Obviously I'm biased, I like to read. And obviously there are connections to be made with creators through things other than books. Movies, videos, paintings, songs--all of them can provide that connection. Some are even more intense and personal than a book's can be, although I'd argue that a novel's connection is the most intimate. The one where you have to maintain that connection with the author for the longest time. There's more to books than the connection, though. All the thought I was talking about wanting to avoid when I was sad is a good thing. Your brain is strengthened by those thoughts, you become more adept at thinking around corners. I'm not shockingly intelligent, but I'm not stupid. Any intelligence I have I attribute entirely to reading voraciously. There's a reason that we refer to smart people as "bookish". The effort one puts into reading a book pays out in dividends of knowledge and understanding.

So, read. Don't just read news blogs or tweets or email blasts (do people really say that?) Read things that stimulate your mind. Remember that even today with all the money and CG and shit that the Avengers or The Hobbit deploy you can still see much better effects in a good book and you'll be smarter after experiencing them as well. I'm not saying you have to stop watching the Epic Fail of the Week videos, but maybe cut them with some good books?

And if you do, let me know, I love talking about them.

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.

Like the Things You Like to Like.

I really dislike the idea of a "guilty pleasure." What is a guilty pleasure, anyway? Something you like, but are ashamed of liking. It doesn't make any sense to me. Why be ashamed of something you like? Why should something that makes you happy be a source of guilt or awkwardness?

There are a few things, I suppose, that could legitimately be called guilty pleasures--killing people, for example, that's probably something you should be a little guilty about enjoying. I am sure, though, that you could probably wrangle that into some sort of career if you really wanted to.

Less extremely I guess maybe eating unhealthy food might be a guilty pleasure in that you know eating a gallon of ice cream while you sit on your ass and watch shitty television is not something you should be doing. I would argue, though, that eating that gallon of icecream is okay as long as you do it moderately.

Did you notice up there how I called The Voice shitty television? That was totally bullshit for me to do; I've never seen an episode of The Voice in my life. I have only the vaguest idea whatsoever what that show is about, I make an instant judgment about it being bad with no knowledge of what it actually is. This is the source of guilty pleasure. It's not something that you really feel guilty about because it's bad for you or hurts people--you have that guilt because someone else says that what you like is shitty.

I think there are two problems with that outlook on things. First there's the person saying something is shitty. I am guilty of this, probably the most guilty of all the people I know. The internet has made this problem about a quadrillion times worse than it was when I was a kid. There's a whole goddamn culture of dismissiveness and elitism and arrogance about what to like and what not to like that staggers the mind in it's vehemence and venom. People get together and enjoy talking about how much they hate things that, honestly, don't matter one fucking bit--television shows, videogames, presidential elections. They brutally tear down whatever thing they don't like and treat the people who do like it like utter shit.

It's a terrible way to be. As I get older I realize this more and more. I struggle with my habits to sneer at things I don't like or understand--and it is a habit, an automatic reaction to belittle and insult. It is not easy to overcome. When I was younger I often had to deal with shit from other kids because I was an unmitigated loser, so I became sarcastic, dry, and quick to disregard anything that I didn't like. I still do it, much more often than I would like and more often than is even funny. I'm sure my friends would agree--but I've realized that life is much more fun when you're enjoying things that you like rather than trying to enjoy hating things you don't.

The second problem here, and the more severe one I think (or maybe just the one I think we can fix more easily) is people giving a shit that people mock them for what they like. As I write this I'm listening to a song about Liu Kang. Is it a goofy song? Sure, it was made a really long time ago, the only things even known about Liu Kang then were his name, his nationality, and that he could throw fireballs and The Immortals made it into an awesome song. Some people might feel that listening to that song should be considered a guilty pleasure, but I don't. I'm not ashamed to say that I really, seriously like the Mortal Kombat album, I really like Mortal Kombat and I think the music on that album is totally inappropriate for the game but still really kickass, fun music you can dance to.

My point is that if you like something, you should like it. You don't have to run around throwing it in people's faces, that can be annoying, but if someone doesn't like what you like, if people say that you shouldn't like Nickelback even if you think How You Remind Me is a cool song (which I do) well, fuck those people. If you really like something then it shouldn't matter what people think about it. If they talk down to you or make fun of you for something you genuinely like then those people are shitty people.

I'm referencing a lot of music here because when I write I listen to music, but this applies to pretty much everything out there. If you're way into football or tennis or lumberjacking then get the fuck into it. Personally I enjoy nothing so much as someone who not only has something they enjoy, but gets into it and can tell you all the sorts of things that only a true aficionado can. It's harder to find people like this in a time when you can become an expert on something with half an hour and an internet connection, but there's a difference between the Google crammer and a real fan of something--be that the Legacy of Kain series or sixteenth century architecture.

I've wondered lately if maybe some attributes of guilty pleasures have led to this recent trend of liking things "ironically." I absolutely despise this trend or fad or whatever the fuck it is. I really don't understand why you'd waste time claiming to like something that you actually think is stupid or whatever, just as a joke or something? It's god damn maddening to even try to consider for me. Why waste your time? I seriously can't get it.

I suppose it means I'm just getting older. Maybe liking things ironically is a younger man's game? I don't know. Just don't say you like things you don't like. Just like them, and like them in spite of people saying you shouldn't like them. And don't like things just because people say you should like them, if you don't like Star Wars then that's fine, don't like it. But don't like it because you think it's dumb--not because lots of people do like it and you want to be super cool and not like the popular thing.

Basically what I'm saying is you should endeavor to find things in your life that you like based on the enjoyment you get out of liking them and not base it on anything anyone else has to say about it. Life is vanishingly short--don't waste it not liking things.

ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY

This is how I think most people understand all of human history:

God makes the Earth (or the big bang happens and the Earth pops out of it, I think to even most non-religious people the formation of the planet is still pretty mysterious)

There are cave men.

There are the Romans or Greeks or something.

There are a bunch of knights with swords and they all are dumb and can't read or brush their teeth.

Shakespeare happens. Some people probably imagine this was at the same time as the knights and the castles.

America happens and everyone is introduced to democracy for the first time.

The Americans save the world from Germany in some black and white (I mean like the pictures are in black and white, not like there was an obviously good side and an obviously bad side because whichever side the US is on must be the good one. Or the bad one, depending on if you vote democrat or republican) war.

Vietnam and hippies happen.

Then you're in modern times. Or possibly if you're a young teenager then after the Vietnam thing some big buildings in New York got destroyed by some middle eastern people (or the president depending on how much internet you read.)

This incredibly simplistic view of history is compounded by an intimidatingly massive amount of shitty movies, books, comcis, ect... all based on various "historical" stories or whatever they want to call the fiction they create to frame human history and it makes me really sad. I don't have time to come up with a cogent argument about why history matters (I'm already going over my lunch break,) but I really wish more people would the the incredibly complex and involved series of events that link humans and our modern day society all the way back to pre-history. We don't exist in a vacuum, everything about the way the world is right now happened for a reason. I think if more people could see and understand where we've come from, we might have a better idea of where we're going, and how to get there.

Or at least I'd spend less time being annoyed at people's weird understanding of history.

A Thousand (and sixty four) Words

I've never had a job that I liked to do.

I've had jobs that I hated, working as a mall cop for two years were some of the absolute shittiest working years of my life. I actively dreaded going to work every night, literally anything seemed preferable to putting on that smelly white button-up shirt (the buttons were fake, it was actually a zipper up the middle. I cannot think of a more succinct way of explaining everything there is to being a mall cop than that; the zipper under fake buttons) and spending eight to sixteen hours in the mall.

I've had jobs that I didn't mind. Being a valet was pretty good, I was young and healthy and made a lot of money. Working as a line cook in a tennis club was all right, I got to eat a lot of bacon and hamburgers, sure I wound up gaining about thirty pounds and made barely any money, but it wasn't loathsome.

But none of those jobs did I really like, I certainly didn't love any of them. Because none of them had anything at all to do with what I love to do.

Which is write.

It strikes me as paradoxical, then, that I have such a hard time doing it. Writing I mean. When I'm doing it, when it's working, when the ideas are coming hot and fast and I'm watching the story happen without even trying it is the best feeling in the world, it's like being high, like everything in the world is swirling around me into some sort of raw material I can drink in with my eyes and ears and mouth and nose and take it into myself and shape it and change it and set it free from the tips of my fingers.

When I'm writing like that my fingers go numb because they're hitting the keyboard so fast that the blood gets driven out of them, I'll write whole pages without even looking up at the screen unless I feel that I typed something wrong.

But I find it hard, maybe harder than it has been in the past, to get to that point. Some of it is work, I imagine, my job is a physically demanding one, and not a very mentally stimulating one. When I finish after long days I often feel like I should just drink a beer, watch television, and sleep. I usually don't do those things, but I don't write either.

It isn't all work, though, because I spend time away from work and still don't write. I took most of this week off of work to spend time with my girlfriend for her birthday and I didn't write a goddamn thing. I thought about it a lot, I wanted to, but I didn't.

I think there's a few reasons for my not writing. First of all, it's scary. I think I've said before here about how, when the idea is in your head, it is perfect, everything works out exactly how you want it, the moments you see so clearly in your head and the character's voices and faces and everything else--they're all crystal clear and you know it's the best idea you've ever had and it'll be absolutely fantastic.

Then you write it down and things are lost in the translation. To reuse a metaphor, you see the story in the wood of your imagination, and when you whittle the shape free with the blade of your pencil or pen or word processor, you make mistakes, miss things, or maybe cut a bit too much away.

The thing you wind up with might still be good, it might still be great, but it isn't what you saw, not exactly. Even the best things I've written aren't exactly what I saw in my mind. Maybe that's even a good thing, but the fear of getting it wrong makes me wary of even trying it.

Then there's the difficulty of showing off.

I realize it's vanity to want people to see and appreciate my writing, I know I should just be writing for myself, and I do, but I'm human, and like any human I like attention. I like to be told what I create is good, or interesting, or thought provoking. The difficulty with writing is that it isn't something someone can glance at and appreciate. I can't slap a page from a story on Facebook, tag some people in it, and then get likes or comments or whatever.

Sometimes I wish I was an artist or a photographer or a musician or something.

I'm not saying that those people's creations are somehow lesser than things that are written--just easier to take in--something longer than a line or two requires a bit of an investment, not much of one, but in today's world of 140 character limits and "Reading Less to Know More", it's an investment most people don't want to make.

C'est la vie. So what, who cares? I endeavor not to. Really, I do.

So the final, and biggest, thing that stops me from writing is this sensation I get in my chest, a real physical feeling right in the middle of my sternum that trails down into my guts. It's a weight that grows with each day that I don't write something, like an imaginary blockage in my chest. A tension, a growing ball of anxiety and self-defeating rhetoric. I tell myself terrible things, about how bad my writing is, how I can't even type properly, bad spelling, worse grammar, and far, far, far too many commas.

When I write, that blockage persists for a while, slowing my thoughts and making my fingers into dumb, clumsy logs that slap at the keyboard like a metaphor for something that slaps clumsily. The block lifts, though, after thirty minutes to and hour, and I remember that I like writing, that I love it, that I am passionate about it. I'd talk all day every day about writing if I could. I don't because I like having friend and don't want to annoy them out of the door, but I really would if I could.

It's the block that makes me not write, because it makes me forget that I love writing, makes me hate it, makes me fear it and loathe it as something that is burdensome and anxiety-inducting, instead of what it is.

Beautiful...and liberating.

Let him eat Vegetation

Over the last month or two I've been thinking about becoming a vegetarian and, as of yesterday, decided to enact those thoughts. By next week I will have stopped eating all of the meat that I think tastes so good.

I'd like to say here that I'm going to use this entry to explain at least some of my thought process behind the reason I'm becoming a vegetarian and that I don't want to sound judgmental or preachy or anything. I'm well aware of the deliciousness of meat and that many people enjoy consuming it. I wouldn't want anyone reading this to think I thought less of them because they aren't a vegetarian or whatever, I'm not even certain I'll be able to maintain it--but I aim to try, and I'd like to say why here.

There are some obvious benefits that come to mind when talking about not eating meat. Humans are capable of eating and digesting meat--indeed I believe we crave it (as we crave sugar and salt) because it provides a huge amount of protein and energy dense fuel that would power our hunter-gatherer ancestors as they roamed the plains or jungles or whatever. Humans that didn't want to eat meat no doubt died out pretty quickly, as did humans who didn't like to eat salt. Humans that didn't want sugar were probably okay, but no doubt lived sad, lonely lives.

All that being said, humans did not evolve--I believe--to consume to enormous amounts of meat that are available to us in the modern era. Throughout history meat has been a sign of wealth and power, while the lower classes subsisted on bread and vegetables the nobility would feast on meat and wine. In medieval times even hunting on lands was illegal, the ruling classes knew that meat was as much a status symbol as a delicious meal, and they couldn't have the unwashed masses just snatching all the animals and cooking them up for themselves.

As the modern era progressed  people had more money, and they wanted what the haves had. Cars, makeup, education, and meat, of course. The insatiable demand for flesh has created an insane, bloated, and frankly inefficient mass production of meat to feed the bottomless gut of the so-called first world in its voracious desire for meat.

My sort of rambling point here is that the human body isn't really built to eat meat every day for every meal. Meat is supposed to be a boost, a treat every few weeks or so, not a staple.

So health is a legitimate reason, I think, to start eating less or no meat. But if I'm being honest it had little to no bearing on my choice to switch to vegetarianism. The two biggest factors on my choice were Superman and shit that lives on windows.

I might not have mentioned here before how much I dig Superman, despite the general idea that he's boring or dumb or whatever, I think he's pretty much the bee's knees when it comes to superheroes, and literary characters in general (there's probably a future blog post dedicated to Superman and how awesome he is, look out for it!) Anyway, there's a particularly good Superman comic called Birthright (I linked to Amazon there and not Wikipedia because I want you to purchase and read it, not just skim the synopsis on Wikipedia, and I know you can't do that if I don't give you the link) that's about the origin of Superman. In the comic he mentions being able to see an aura around living things and how it fades when they die. For some reason that touched me. I've always known that meat was the result of dead animals and never was too bothered by it, but seeing Superman marveling in the life of lions and zebras and every other living thing made me pause in a way that my logical knowledge never had. I can't explain why, but it really made me face up to what the hard reality of meat production was, the result of raising and slaughtering animals for something I wanted but did not need.

The other component, probably the bigger one, comes from cleaning windows.

I know, it's fucking weird. Just bear with me.

When I'm cleaning windows I see a lot of really nasty-looking insects that live on the windows or in the corners of them (I looked around the internet for some sort of site listing organisms that like to live on windows but all I could find were screensavers.) Mostly spiders and beetles. Lady bugs are strangely attracted to windows too for some reason, and of course there are plenty of grasshoppers and mosquitoes on there too, sometimes I even see a snail or a lizard or a slug, but those are rare.

Anyway, I realized that, as I clean windows, I always do my best to avoid killing these nasty things whenever I can. If the spider has a nest in the corner of the window, I'll try to judge if the nest can be seen from inside or easily seen from outside. If it can't, I'll just leave it where it is. If it can be seen easily and it's obvious that anyone looking at the window will know I didn't get rid of it, I'll smack it around with a squeegee until the spider and/or its babies flee the nest and I can destroy it. If a snail is sticking to the side of the window, I'll gently ease it off and try to find a nice place to deposit it on the ground, out of the footpath so no one crushes it. I'll even slide slugs off of the sills of the windows to the dirt or nearby leaves so I don't crush them with my strip-washer.

Sometimes I don't notice a mosquito on the window until I've crushed it with my tools. As I pick the crush corpse out of the bristles of my brush I'll feel actual real guilt. I can't explain why it bothers me so much. I hardly believe that a fucking mosquito can feel pain or experience fear or anything. I doubt the damn thing even has a brain, I probably have more neurons in my Enteric nervous system than that little bug has in its whole body--yet I still feel sad that I killed it. It wasn't hurting me, it was just chilling on a window, taking a break or whatever, and here I come with my big wet mass of fiber and crush it to death...for what? So that some people can look through a window without seeing dirt or whatever? That seems to me a pretty awful reason to kill something, even something as simple and insignificant as a mosquito or snail.

Once I really thought about all the trouble I went through to avoid killing vermin while cleaning windows, I started thinking about the animals I was consuming. I was killing them, much more indirectly than I killed the mosquito or spider, of course, but my demand for meat was contributing to the death of animals much, much more complex and sophisticated than the little ball of action and reaction that is a beetle.

I thought of my girlfriend's two cats, who obviously have different personalities and desires. I thought of an old friend who had a pet goat that would always rub against her and try to headbutt me. I've been around cows and pigs and all other sorts of livestock and I know they can be just as varied and aware as these pets.

And I realized my deep hypocrisy at struggling to spare the lives of window dwellers while going home to eat steaks. These are living creatures who very obviously can experience pain and fear, and I was taking their lives, erasing whatever experience they were able to have in this world forever and ever, so that I could consume them. I'd tell myself I had to do it, that if I didn't eat I would die--but I wouldn't die if I never ate meat.

I told myself that only eating plants was just as bad, a plant is alive, it can die--and that's true, but a plant doesn't have to die to feed a person. Indeed, some plants have evolved with the intention of having parts of themselves consumed in order to spread their offspring. There are no multi-cellular animals (that I know of) that have evolved to have a part of themselves consumed. With an animal it's all or nothing, you can't just slice off a chicken's leg and fry that up (or I suppose you could, but that would be even more horrific than just killing the damn thing.)

Now, if I stop eating meat, will the animals that die to supply the world with meat stop dying? Will they be set free to live their lives as best they can? Of course not. I doubt meat production will drop any amount at all, in fact I suspect it will continue to consume the surface of the earth (eight billion acres) in a desperate attempt to keep up with demand. Animals will continue to suffer and die and people will profit from that suffering.

But that doesn't matter. I will be at peace with myself. I will know that I have done some small thing to halt the pain of so many living things--things that are, as far as we know--totally unique in the whole universe. Pain and death inflicted on living things just so that I can enjoy something, not so that I can survive, not so that my loved ones don't die, pain for pleasure, pain for leisure...it's something that I can't stand by and accept anymore.

Now I'm not going to go join ELF (that is a link to their website which has nasty pictures and will probably make DHS start following you if you go there), or PETA or anything like that. I won't start saying that animals should be raised over humans in terms of what limited resources should be focused on or anything like that, but I will endeavor to limit the suffering and pain of everything and everyone in the whole world whenever and however I can.

It's certainly what Superman would do.

Keys and Locks

So it has been a significant amount of time since the last time I wrote a blog here, and that's primarily for two reasons.

The first one is that my last post was that rather iffy short story about Planetside 2, a story that wasn't finished. When I write something I find it incredibly difficult to write anything that isn't that until it is finished. Especially if people have read the unfinished thing. Of course, I'm also incredibly lazy so when faced with the choice of finishing a story or whatever so that I can write something else I want to write or try to grind out my quiver I'll usually pick the latter.

The other reason is that I work a lot these days, and while around ten or eleven o' clock in the morning I'll be struck with a powerful inspiration for a blog post--imagine an outline, clever one line paragraphs and all that stuff--I then wind up working until six that afternoon and by the time I get home all I want to do is eat, read, and sleep.

It pains me, not writing when I'm tired. I know if I ever want to actually really be a writer I need a schedule and the will to stick to it. But that's a discussion for another time.

Today I want to write a few thoughts about a saying I've seen floating around the internet for a while. I haven't heard it in real life thus far, and I'm thankful for that, but the saying makes me furious everytime I see it and I feel like this is the best place to vent my feelings--into more or less an empty void.

The saying is, "If a key opens many locks, it's a master key. If a lock opens to many keys, it's a shitty lock."

In case you need some context, the saying is a metaphor for male and female sexuality. Obviously the key is a penis and the lock is a vagina.

At first glance the metaphor actually seems like a good one, and since all the internet cares about are first glances, I imagine that's why it has become widespread. The reality is, of course, that the metaphor doesn't make any kind of sense at all. It just reinforces the disgusting misogyny and ignorance that seems so widespread among many corners of the internet. It should be stopped.

The idea is obviously that a woman is a lock that has to be opened by a man. The woman is stripped of responsibility here--a lock can't try to escape a key--its a question only of whether or not the key is "strong" enough to overpower the lock's defense. It's based on the most basic understanding of sex; a cock penetrates a pussy, that's sex, right? That's all there is to sex in this metaphor. I wonder if this is another reason this saying is so popular with young men who use the internet a lot?

(I can say this without indicating myself these days I think--I might not be quite to middle age yet, but I'm shedding the last vestiges of "young" too.)

Anyway, women are not locks, and men are not keys. A woman can enjoy sex, I imagine most do, probably as much as men. Women can search out sex, just as men. Hell, women don't even need men to have and enjoy sex--I wonder how a lesbian that has sex with many different women would fit into this metaphor?

The realities of how and why people have sex are far too complex and involved for any sort of saying to encapsulate them all, especially a saying as gauche as this one.

So why do I care? People might say that I'm writing this just to "white knight" women, that I'm being nice to try to get laid. I am, of course, in a more or less stable relationship and, not to brag, could have sex pretty much whenever I wanted with as much or as little effort as I wanted to exert.

Other, more cunning detractors might say that I'm buying into a culture of misandry and being taught to hate myself because of all these evil women trying to take over the world.

(A word of caution, that site I just linked to is pretty goddamn awful and hateful, so you probably shouldn't click it.)

The reality is I care because I genuinely believe in equality whenever it is possible, and females and males should be held as sexual equals just as much as they should be intellectual and physical equals (and yes I realize that absolute equality isn't possible, the strongest person in the world will almost certainly never be a woman, but it also won't be you.)

This saying brings me back to what will probably be a recurring theme in this blog, that words affect the ideas people have. These days people say that it doesn't matter how a message is given, as long as you understand it. I think this is totally false, the words we use couch an idea with flavors and textures than will change how we internalize this information into our lives. I have no doubt that there are young men reading things like this on the internet and honestly believing that women are comparable to locks, inanimate objects, obstacles to be overcome and owned. We as a society have to be more careful with the ideas that we form and release into the world, ideas are dangerous, deadly things--more than ever with the incredible speed with which they can be disseminated thanks to the damned internet, with no time for cooler heads to prevail or reasoned discussion and thought.

So don't replace your thoughts with phrases, don't use quotes or jokes or whatever to express how you think about things--think about them, express them with your own words, move beyond memes with bold text and stupid pictures.

And have as much or as little sex as you want, without judging how much or how little sex other people are having.

And now for Something Completely Different

So this is a work of boredom, and, I suppose, more procrastination. It's the first part of a story that might never be finished based on a free to play massively multiplayer online first person shooter called Planetside 2 and written without any consideration for grammar, spelling, or character development. It might appeal to two or three people I know personally, and other than that has very few redeeming qualities.

Basically what I'm saying is if you read this blog normally or something, this is not a normal entry and can be skipped without missing anything.

I still remember the day that I first met the Vahn brothers. These days it's hard to ever imagine not knowing Edo and Desfend, and the stories people tell about us and Bann make it sound like we all came through the ranks together, but there was a time before the Clan, a time when I was just a combat medic coming off of a three day R&R session after a two month deployment on Hossin. I'd been attached to the 207th heavy infantry platoon, serving on the front lines against a massive Vanu force who'd been dug in like an Indarian tick-spider. We'd rooted them out after four weeks of siege with a final desperate push led by the 207 in two sunderers and a lighting tank. 

I'd seen a lot of good men go down on Hossin, men I hadn't been able to get to in time to reconstruct.

That was what it was, what my nifty little white medical gun actually did. I was no doctor, I'd failed out of med school back on Earth, why would any doctor have volunteered to get transported through the wormhole to Auraxis? I'd done it because I owed too much money to too many people and Auraxis was a chance to get out of it all. I'd had enough basic medical training to make it as a mine medic, but nothing else, and that training became less and less relevant as the incredible advances the Auraxian tech allowed us to make. The nanomachines--nanites--that were uncovered on Auraxis changed everything. Now you didn't need to know how to fix the human body, you just needed a medical applicator with a blueprint of human anatomy and plenty of nanites and batteries, the little alien machines would swarm into you and right any wrongs detected. Even death could be reversed if you got to the corpse soon enough, nearly the whole body could be reconstructed as long as you knew where to put the beam.

After the wormhole collapsed and we were all trapped here, after the VS started fighting the Republic and the miners formed the Conglomerate no one cared what training I had, they just wanted me out there fighting, keeping the soldiers going, trying to finally free ourselves of the oppression Terran Republic and the madness of the Vanu Sovereignty.

But that's all beside the point. The point is that on my last day of break I was walking across a courtyard on Sanctuary when two MPs flagged me down. I was informed the Suits wanted to meet with me in NC headquarters, and was then told to follow the MPs.

I'd never met the Suits, the heads of the New Conglomerate, men who had once been mine managers and shift supervisors, now doing their best to work as generals. Against the intelligence of the Vanu and the training of the Republic I'm amazed they did as well as they have. 

Inside of NCHQ I was efficiently moved through old mining offices and told to wait in a cramped room with two chairs and faded carpet. I was wearing my fatigues and the office was hot. Sweat beaded at the back of my neck as I stood staring at the door I hadn't come in through. I was nervous, and unsure of whether I should sit down or stand.

After what seemed like hours, but was probably five minutes, the door opened and three men walked through it. Two of them were soldiers wearing Reinforced Exosuit Armor--what we called ReXo suits-- and armed with  EM1 machine guns. Typical heavies. The third man was a Suit. I was stunned to see he actually was wearing a suit, a nice, black on black thing that looked like it had just come off a ship from Earth.

"Ericksson?" He asked, looking me up and down.

"Yes, sir," I responded. The Terrans claim we're anarchists in the NC, but we have discipline when it's needed.

"Combat Medic, yes? Served on Hossin with distinction?"

"I was just doing my job, sir."

The Suit smiled. He produced a tablet from somewhere and his eyes flickered over something I couldn't see.

"Your commanding officer claimed you were the best combat medic he'd seen, said you'd run into plasma streams so thick you couldn't see the ground to pull men out."

"Yes, sir." I said, "My job, sir."

The suit nodded, "Well, I think you'll do just fine for this job then, son."

"What job is that?" I asked. I was feeling incredibly confused at this point.

The Suit motioned to one of his heavies. The soldier crossed the room to open the door I had come through and two more men walked in. They were obviously brothers, with the same black hair and jawlines. One was taller, slender. The other was just slightly shorter but powerfully built, with shoulders that looked about five feet wide. They weren't wearing armor, but did have the thick canvas fatigues of the NC on.

"This is Engineer Edo Vahn and his brother Sergeant Desfend Vahn," the Suit said, the two men nodded to me, "they're going to be accompanying you on a very important mission, should you choose to accept it."

"Mission, sir?" I asked.

The suit motion to the other heavy that had been with him, who walked to the wall and flipped the light switch off. The Suit pushed something on his tablet and it projected a map of the continent of Indar against the far wall in flickering blue and red light.

"Recognize the map?" the Suit asked.

The three of us did.

"Good. Then you should know we've been locked in a stalemate with the Terran Republic on this continent for the past three weeks. They have pushed us back from the north and western regions of the continent, and now we're barely holding on to a few key regions around our warpgate."

As he spoke, the Suit motioned to the map with his hand, the map reacted, hexes lighting up in red to mark the TR's advance and blue to show our few remaining positions.

"If the Republic gets us to the warpgate there will be nothing between them and Sanctuary."

None of us said anything in response to that, Sanctuary was the only place on Auraxis that the New Conglomerate could call home, it was where our few children and non-combatants were, where what passed for families these days were kept, a place to retreat from the never ending war and feel like you were more than a machine made for fighting, held together by hardly understood alien technology.

"Now," the Suit went on, motioning so that the map zoomed in on a specific region west of the NC warpgate, "this is Tawrich Tech Plant. The Republic is using the facilities there to crank out Prowler main battle tanks as fast as the nanites can assemble them. It's those tanks that are pressing us so hard. We cannot spare soldiers to attempt a counter attack to any less defended regions because every man and woman on Indar is working to keep the tanks from blitzing into the warpgate and destroying Sanctuary. Air strikes against the plant have proven useless, the air defenses there are too strong for us to punch through."

The map swerved again and held on another region, farther west than Tawrich.

"This is the Regent Rock Garrison. A strongpoint for the TR's invasion of Indar. They took it from the Vanu four months ago but since they claimed Tawrich they've left it almost empty. We have an agent already on the ground there, and he's confident that he can take the base with some reinforcement."

The Suit motioned to the heavy, who flipped the lights back on. The Suit made the map vanished and looked at the three of us.

"You three are to be that reinforcement. Your mission will be to fly, undetected, to the Garrison, to rendezvous with Specialist Jackson and then to take Regent Rock Garrison and activate the spawning tubes. From there you'll travel east to Tawrich and open up a second front at their flank and hopefully be able to enter the base and blow the generators. That should break their production line long enough for our forces to rally and counter attack."

When he was done speaking, the Suit put his tablet away and crossed his arms.

"Any questions?"

"Sir," I asked, "the three of us are supposed to make it across over a hundred miles of battlefield, meet with some 'specialist', take over an enemy garrison and then assault a Republic tech plant that the whole New Army has been unable to take in over a month?"

"That's the idea," the Suit said, "it's a desperate move, I won't lie, but you three are all highly recommended by your superior officers and your action records. If anyone in the New Conglomerate can do this, it would be you three."

For the first time since they had entered the room, one of the Vahn brothers, the shorter, wider one--Desfend--spoke.

"No problem boss."