Gateway

My dad, when he was my age, decided he would go to the library, look at the sci-fi section, start at the upper left hand corner and work his way right and down. So he did.

Now, every now and then, randomly and out of the azure emptiness, he'll stick me with a book and say, "Hey, read this." I'll take it and say, "Yeah, okay, sure." And he'll go on to sort of say why he's chosen it, if not what wending mind-work and/or external triggers led him to this choosing. Hefty napkins-full of time I've spent wondering if this book was brought to his mind by a movie he'd seen recently, or if that one was inspired by his Russian boss who cusses like a couple sailors. But I haven't been able to figure it out.

Anyway, one day he gave me Gateway, an most ancient classic by Frederick Pohl. He said, "There is surprise at the end, m'lad. Read on."

He said the same thing about The Dispossessed. When I finished that one, I went and asked him what he thought the surprise was, because I missed it. He couldn't remember. After talking on it for a while, we still couldn't really figure it out.

So I had some skepticism about this Gateway surprise. It took me something like seven months, off and on, but I've just finished it. Hurrahz! And there was a surprise at the end. And it really surprised me. But it was in the last effing paragraph, which was, additionally, terribly short, which also annoys me. Up to that paragraph, the book had no meaning to me. Or very little. Almost none. Close to zero. Maybe a level four meaning.

And I could almost feel frustrated. Except that having finished, I really liked the ending. That last paragraph and its meaning-inducing brevity.

And so, though I was bored in reading it, and though the ending seemed to have next to no indication that it was coming, there seemed no probability that the plot was what the ending said that it was...even after all that, I'm glad I read this book. It felt like time wasted, and now it does not.

The book had a moral: life is fucking complicated.

Wobble and Emphasis

One thing that I don't miss about wearing glasses is the wobble. The phenomenon that occurs when I wag my head--too look to my left, say--and the things I see are crunched a little in the edges of the lense. Thereby the swift moving of the head simulates a wobbling or wavering in what I see, because the oddity isn't apparent except when I'm moving.

I've just noticed that I reflexively blink every time I shift my gaze from the screen to the keyboard and vice versa. I wonder if I might have developed a sort of reflex to not see this wobble. An odd sort of testament to us humans trying to keep the world from appearing strange because it unsettles us, if one develops a reflex to block out an odd visual imput.

One thing that I do miss about glasses is the range of emphatic gestures that they include. Taking them off with the sternness of stern looking, for instance. I never utilized my glasses in the emphatic gesturing as much as I now wish I would have. I did do the incredulously looking over the top thing. And I would take them off and rub my eyes tiredly, then leave them off to give weight to my fatigue thing. But such avenues as the poking myself in the eye twice because not everyone noticed my humiliation the first time move I never managed.

Glasses.

Attitude Begets Legitimacy

This is awesome.

Villainy Visited

"What makes a good villain?"--Jenny

"You ever danced with the devil by the pale moonlight?"--Joker

"A great villain is one you like despite yourself."--Ali

"What kind of punchline is that?"--Joker

"When the villain is introduced, it's up to the storyteller to paint this individual as an adversary worthy of the hero."--Iron John

"What are you going to do? Put me in the loony bin? I'm already here."--Joker

"I think the best conflicts come when the villain and hero are two sides of the same coin,"--Deb

"We're two faces of the same coin, you and I."--Joker

I like what Ali and John said. Deb too. Deb makes a good point. Here's this fourth and related take that I'm taking. John said "has chance of slaughtering hero!" Ali said "we see in heem thing that eez relatable. Yeees, I am Slowpoke Rodriguez, and I don't know why." Deb says, "Same coin, different faces."

I think these are all true. Why is the Joker scary? He's like all the things that Batman is not; entirely untethered. Why reavers frighten we? Same reason. Why does this untethered nature of these creatures frighten us? We see somewhat of ourselves there; the potentiallity for absolute psychotic loopiness.

So here's another thought. Why is it that when Danny DeVito, as directed by Tim Burton, played Penguin, we have a scare? What changed? He was still recognizably the short, three fingered, bird-resembling, pudgy, umbrella-wielding, super-powerless guy. What changed?

Well, I think he was more realistic. More complicated, with Danny DeVito playing him and Tim Burton putting it together. His plight more sympathetic; his thinking more accessible.... And because of his psychosis, this frightens us. We don't really want to empathize with psychotic penguin guy. It's unpleasant.

But it's fascinating.

I think villains derive as much of their fright from the same qualities that heroes get their coolness from. Qualities like humanity, emotion, perseverence, overcoming adversity.

Which has, like bolty lightning, got a thought in my head! Joker, he is not always happy. Is not always laughing. He laughs at inappropriate times and inappropriate thing, which is frightening certainly, but he isn't always laughing. But when he is sad, he is very very sad. And when he is angry, it's heated and volcanic.

He feels with far more intensity than anyone else. At all, ever. Everything. Fast, and completely, his emotions strike him and control his everything. The antithesis of poker-face Dark Knight, certainly; but he's us without inhibition. We relate to emotion, and Joker's emotions are off the richter.

I'm so smart.

Propagandist Reality

For a little while, I thought that I did not exist.

I had lost my birth certificate and my sociel security card and my voting registrating and all the receipts I got for any paycheck I ever got and all my school information. And for the longest time I wondered...did I, then, not exist? I mean to say, without a social security number, no birth certificate, would America admit that I was even here?

The state of mind made me think about myself a great deal. How would I really feel if America would not admit that I existed? It felt odd, this state of mind that this homeland country had no connection to me, and I none to it. None to anything. Paper, words, lists, are important for our social reality. Not being on this paper, in these lists, would make one, I think, more real, almost. A less metaphysical, and thusly more tangible blot in space-time.

Jason Bourne, for instance, has no social security number.

Fortunately, I found all my information. I exist again.

Macaroni and cheese is hard to eat with chopsticks...

Of all the stuff I've ever eaten with chopsticks, mac and cheese is making my hand hurt the most.

I have recently resolved to carry a pair of chopsticks with me whenever I go out to eat. Partly because I like the idea of chop stick jujitsu saving my life some day--I know no jujitsu, so this is unlikely to happen--but mostly because eating with chopsticks is a little slower and a little more difficult than eating with a fork. I think I eat too fast. Food is hard to enjoy in fast forward.

It's strange, but food actually tastes different off chopsticks. I've eaten my share of macaroni, and I tell you it's never tasted quite like this. I've been thinking, therefore, about taking things for granted, like the taste of forks. Metal has a flavor, plastic has a flavor. I don't know what forks taste like because I've never used anything else. Like water--I can't really describe the flavor of water because I'm immune to it. And bamboo has a flavor which is different than forks, and so I can taste it. So it changes what the food tastes like.

Writing this, I've begun to wonder... If I become more accustomed to the flavor of chopsticks, will I begin to taste forks?

Some people may have realized this about me, but I sometimes have issues with concentrating. I like to center my thoughts. Eating is a solid, incredibly tangible thing to do. In making it a little more present and thought provoking, it has become a little meditative and centering. My thoughts get some straightened out because of these chopsticks.

I once read somewhere somebody saying they had asked some Chinesey why they still used chop sticks. And this Chinesey said that it was more civilized. And being the guy I am, I said, "Ah, I see what you mean. Yes indeed." And thought, "That makes precisely no sense." But I think I may begin now to see what this Fu Munchulia was getting at.

Okay, time to go finish the mac. I just needed to rest my hand.

Klingons have almost all the right parenting ideas

My brothers are yella. Yellow bellied. Why is this? Because they have been taught to value fairness and--oh my god, Paul McCartney is barefoot!

Sorry, lost my train of thought. To resume: Because they have been taught the value of fairness and cooperation. What the hell use to them are those values, I ask you? What use? I shall tell you now why they are of no use: because they assume the unity in community. Something that cannot be assumed. Fairness and cooperation necessity everyone being on the same page. We learn from sci-fi on the subject of utopian society that everyone being on the same page is not only really creepy, it's indicative of an underlying insidiousness which is invariably too terrible to be believed.

Fairness and cooperation are ideas that one believes in, but many must act in motivation of the same for them to come to pass. If an individual is taught fairness and cooperation he will expect it of society, and act in its interest only loosely. If many individuals do the same we are left with what?

Yella bellied hosers, that's what.

To improve society, values must be changed. We must look inward and rediscover honor and integrity. Know one ever really says honor anymore, not in a serious way. It's sad, it's insidious, and it's unfortunate. Because we can only ever really control our own selves. And if we all have integrity, if we all respect and hold honor dear, then fairness will follow, and cooperation will come. And we won't be yella.

Oops, forgot my soap box. I'll be back in a second.

Blah blah blah, and why I blog

Phenomenon: I have started probably six blogs since my last blog. The much disputed grifter commercial blog. I got the tee-shirt. It is cool. It says, "Mind is Power. Body is Tool," and has a fire and ice yin-yang on the back, all printed around with Chinese characters. Not Naruto. He's Japanese.

I did. I started at least half a dozen blogs. All about writing. And I got a ways into them all, and decided to myself, these aren't relevant to anyone else. They were all pretty good; I had lots of thoughts in them, they kept a cohesive point. But I didn't finish all of them, and I clearly haven't showed any of them to you. I know why I wrote them. I wrote them to succumb to peer pressure. It's especially easy to see this in retrospect. In which case, I pause to wonder why I didn't publish them to you people. I've proven myself not especially bashful to expose people to what I might find banal. And I've already decided these blogs weren't banal. So why do I keep them back?

After wondering, I've come to this conclusion: I blog to keep my ideas coherent. In blogging, I'm forced to at least attempt cohesive ideas, linear thoughts, A to Z logic, and clearly worded sentences with only one subject. In succumbing to peer pressure I'm forced to choose a subject to attempt to explore with clarity. And in attempting this clarity...I attain it. But my conclusions rarely have worth without context, and in general I withhold the context because I don't want to ruin a whole bunch of surprises. I do love surprises.

It's like Dirty Bess Cash said: They're in some sort of code. They are. I leave out parts, because really they're for me.

So you don't get to see all of my blogs, and I really don't mind all the poking. Because occasionally I have inpired thoughts about women civilization.

Plus, I'm working on this story, and it's going really good. It's freaking awesome. All the pieces are falling into place--all the tools I've ever learned are actually helping me put it together.

To conclude: anything you heard about a black sheep and a waffle iron and my old shoes is a lie.

Survival and Civilization

We were talking about the human condition in my literature class tonight. I was thinking about desires to survive ruling out desires to propogate the species. Food is scientifically provably more desirable than sex.

I was also thinking about women brains and men brains. They actually did a study to discover: do men and women think different? With exceptions, obviously, this study they did suggest they do in fact think different. Women think in sort of webs: their thoughts go all over the place, connect together, and centrally have a goal. Men think in lines: see a deer, kill a deer, eat a deer, live till tomorrow. Which implies this: Women drive civilization, culture, society; lasting things. Men drive survival from today till about Tuesday. We don't usually think past Tuesday. Wednesday doesn't matter that much.

Which makes sense to me. The first novel was written by a woman. In Japan, no less, back when women were denegraded to a really shameful degree. My opinion is the novel is the highest expression of cultural initiative. By that I mean that providing a cohesive and lengthy piece of fiction is by far mankind's most impressive act of intellect. Writing a novel is the heighth of communication. Communication is one of the things that makes us intellectual, and not just instinctual, creatures.