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.