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.
Saturday, January 28, 2017
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
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.
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.
Monday, November 17, 2014
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.
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.
Friday, February 14, 2014
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
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?
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?
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
"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.
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.
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