Today is a gray day in my brain. There's a little cloud in my head, and it makes me feel vacant and non-emotive and flat. It's not a BAD day. Just a gray one. Nothing particularly bad or good has happened, and there isn't anything on my mind that's bringing me down. I just wake up, and I know, starting then, that it's going to be a gray day. These are the days where I'm just tired of everything and can't summon up the motivation to be anything but a useless lump. The days where I don't want to talk, I don't want to be around people, and I can't get myself to do anything productive, no matter how badly I want to. I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel to even get out of bed, and then I still have a whole day left to try and live. These are the days that have nearly killed me, over and over again.
For a while, these were the days where I'd put my latest emo kid soundtrack on repeat, write in my journal, and cut myself with the razor I kept clean and sharp in my wallet. I would go climb up into the hills of Palmer Park in the pouring rain and consider diving off a cliff, just so that I wouldn't be around to waste everyone's valuable time and energy anymore. There was nothing left of me on those days. Those thoughts and feeling weren't my own. They were just the things that came naturally when that mood settled in while I slept. I became this empty vessel, and then my mind would pour into me all the negative thoughts and feelings I carried around in the back of my head day after day. All my doubts and insecurities and everything that brought me down, all piling up and swirling around in one big cocktail of depression.After a year or so, I went for help. My mom took me to the doctor, and I was diagnosed with chemical bipolar disorder. It's an imbalance of the chemical rhythms of your natural biochemistry that causes your body to produce certain brain chemicals erratically, so that they interfere with the psychological happenings of your brain. Basically, there were periods where my body produced all the happy chemicals I could ever want, and then there were periods where it didn't produce enough, and the withdrawal caused a crash. I would feel great for days and days, on top of the world, like a superhero, and then I would suddenly slump and have nothing to go on, no life, no energy. Nothing at all.I had the option to try antidepressants and other medications, and I decided not to. The thing about my cycle is that it isn't all bad, even if it isn't all good. The medications would put a damper on the cycle and cut out those lowest lows, but at the cost of all the highs as well. I would never have the insane lows, but I would never have really great days either. I would just live caught somewhere in the middle, dependent on the medication to keep me there. At my age range, there was also a risk that taking the medications could cause my lows to get even lower, and press those thoughts of suicide until I acted on them. Going off the medication for a period could have the same result. Altogether, I just decided it wasn't for me. That I'd rather try and fight the gray days the best that I could without artificially changing my body chemistry.I tried B-vitamin supplements, which helped. I would be more energetic and lively on even my worst days, but it was only a cushion. I still wrestled with the gray days, and nothing ever made them stop being gray. I quit cutting myself not long after that trip to the doctor, and I haven't picked it up since. I can't say that the thought doesn't still cross my mind, but I no longer carry a razor in my wallet, and I don't even think I own a single blade anymore.
Skip back to today. The first time I can remember having a really gray day was almost eight years ago. That trip to the doctor was close to seven. I've carried on living with chemical bipolar disorder, week in and week out since 2008, and I'm only just starting to figure out this fight. I've tried a lot of stuff, been positive, talked with others, laid all my emotions out and had others carry me through. There have been some really great times, and some really great high streaks. But the lows always come back, and, as of late, it feels like they only get lower and lower. I've felt more dead within my own body the last six months than I have ever felt before in my life.But I realized something the other night. Despite all the gray days, and the bad days, and the really awful days that usually end with rage and tears, there's some part of me deep down that doesn't stop moving. It doesn't comprehend GOOD and BAD days, just days. It doesn't need motivation or rewards or discipline. It's an engine, and it just keep chugging on in complete ignorance of how I might feel. I noticed it after a week or two of some really hard days. I felt totally done and worn out and without a doubt the worst I've ever felt, and then I got up the next day and went to work and went to church and had an 18 hour day, and then I did it again, and again, and again. Good mood, bad mood, gray mood, whatever. I just kept moving.It's not like the moods went away. They were still there, wrapping up my mind and dictating all of my actions. It's just that I noticed this little piece somewhere in the middle of all the swirling emotional chaos that seemed out of place. I could be screaming and raging and crying and throwing things and completely unable to think or feel anything, and this little piece was just there, ticking away, completely apart from my whole mess. It took till last night or so to really put my finger on it.
I've always kind of felt like a robot in social situations. Like, I have this programmed set of behaviors that are all that I know. I can perform this certain set of actions, and everything I do comes from that set of possibilities. All around me are people, going about their daily life and interacting, and I see the things that they're doing, and I try to copy them. But from my limited set of behaviors, I can only manage a crude mockery of what comes naturally to everyone else, and I always feel out of place. Like I just don't quite belong, and everyone sees it and is amused by it, but understands that there's a difference between us that means that we will always be separate in one way or another. I can try to move like a normal person, but I'll never be one.It took me a long time to work out that metaphor, just by the way, but that's exactly how it feels. I've thought for a very long while that it was a bad thing, and I've tried really really hard to learn how to move and think and act like everyone else. I tried for so long to be who it was I thought everyone wanted me to be, and it never worked, and it always hurt. But after my realization the other night about this little dynamo burning away at the core of me, I'm starting to feel like maybe being a robot isn't such a bad thing.Yeah, I still feel like I'm on the outside of most social interactions. I still feel like there's something there that separates me from everyone else, and I still feel like there always will be. But the things about me that make me feel that way are all tied into this little dynamo that has carried me through every single gray day I've ever had, whether I felt bottomed out or not. The parts of me that make me feel so robotic are undoubtedly and irrevocably part of the same system driven by that powerful little engine. That engine that can't stop, won't stop, can't even comprehend the idea that there might be anything to life counter to motion. It just runs, and on my very worst days, it keeps me running.So now, when I wake up in the morning and I realize that today is going to be a gray day, all I have to do is rest on that little engine. I'll get out of bed, get dressed, and go about my day, knowing full well, that engine is somewhere deep inside of me, and that it can't be stopped. On my good days, I'll let it build up momentum and race me off to bigger and better things. On my bad days, I'll let it carry me through at whatever pace it happens to be running that day. I'll still feel gray, and I'll still feel like a robot, but I'll keep going, because there's some part of me built to do just that. To keep going, and nothing else. Nothing can stop it, including me, and I wouldn't dare try, even if I did know how.
I'm far from the only person out there experiencing life this way. Many have done it before me, and many will still be doing it once I'm long dead and gone. So here's what I have to say.It isn't the gray days that will kill you. It's the thoughts that the gray days open you up to. It's not the quiet moments, when you're all alone and no one else is around. It's the moments when you're completely surrounded and you feel like no one else wants you there. Those are the hardest to live through. Those are the days when it's the hardest to see the point in carrying on. And there is one. There's always a point to life. The gray days just keep you from seeing that.So my advice to you is this: Always remember that no matter how hard the day is, it won't kill you unless you choose to let it. The gray days don't hold the knife. The gray days don't tie the noose. The gray days don't pull the trigger. You do.And when all your emotional turmoil is swept aside, you can see that. You can see that they're just days, whether they're good or bad, and that there's so much more in life that matters. You can see that it's just a gray day, and that it's nothing to hurt yourself over. Gray days are temporary, but the scars you choose to make are permanent. Don't let something that will pass, that has no power over you, leave that kind of permanent mark on your life. Because they will pass.They'll come and go like the wind and the clouds and the seasons that change, and you'll still be there, living through all of it. Life is far too valuable and precious to throw away over something as fickle and changing as the weather. And I'm sure that somewhere deep down inside you, there's a little engine ticking away, just like there is in me. Just hold on tight to that powerful little dynamo and let it carry you through the day, and maybe tomorrow, you'll have the strength to carry yourself.
Friday, October 17, 2014
Tuesday, September 16, 2014
Depression: Let me paint you a picture...
It's kinda like this: I'm standing in a huge warehouse, all concrete and steel. The room is cold, and there's no light save for a small lamp that only burns brightly enough to illuminate a couple yards in each direction. I can walk around the whole interior, running my fingertips over the walls again and again, but I can't find a door. I can hear people outside, going about their daily lives; happy, sad, angry, excited, just interacting and being people. The hollow echoes of their lives ring hollow in the air, and nearly disappear entirely when I stand in the center of the room, surrounded by the inky black and the cold. Sometimes, I'm in here for a few days. Sometimes a few weeks. I know that the sun is out there waiting for me. It's just a matter of time before I find my way out again. But until then, it's cold and dark and quiet and I wish the noise from outside wasn't so hollow, or that I could just see the people outside and have them see me. Some days are better than others, but they all start and end in the same place. I either make it through standing tall, or I lose myself completely in the darkness and just pray for sleep to take me to a day when I can be outside again. It never gets any easier, either. Never has, never will.
Saturday, July 26, 2014
On People and Objects
I'm really furious right now, guys. I just had a long debate with a former classmate of mine who I've known since sixth grade, and it left me with a very bitter taste in my mouth. I don't hate the guy. I just can't understand how it is he can believe what he does and still sleep at night.
American society is sitting at a tipping point right now, and the topic is human rights. The last blog post I made over a year ago was about this very subject, and things have gotten better since then, but they're still far from good. The big topic this year is women's rights, and my predominant focus is the "Yes All Women" thing that has been floating around. It's a hashtag topic that surrounds the idea that all women go through regularly terrifying and stressful experiences out of a taught and, in some cases, learned fear of men. I've been reading feminist articles and blog posts and posts from men defending themselves against Yes All Women with the "Not All Men" tag. This one claims innocence of part of men because not all of us are scumbags who want to rape you or sexually harass you or even intimidate you with our oppressive manliness.
I want to apologize now for not taking stuff like that seriously. I'm not insensitive. I've never been aware of the fact that maybe women don't want to talk to me because they're afraid of what I might do, because in all honesty I'm about as innocent as a seven year old boy when it comes to women. I've kissed all of two girls outside of a dating relationship in my life, and one of the two was someone I ended up dating seriously for two years. I don't think about how I might come across to women because I don't have a sexual intention in my interactions with them. I don't think about how they might perceive my actions or my presence because I have no ill will toward them and never have. It's never a thought that has ever passed through my mind. Because of that, I have fit into a category of men that has been part of the problem all along without realizing it.
We live in a society where women (and men, a parallel but not currently focal concern) are ruthlessly and intentionally sexualized for the point of marketing products. Whether they're selling perfume, soap, deodorant, music, sandwiches, clothes, jewelry, cars, tires, chairs, tables, carpets, etc, you can be pretty darn sure that women are going to be part of the method. Someone discovered that people are more likely to buy something if there's a picture of a pretty girl on it, and then they started putting pictures of more than just pretty girls on everything. Now there's an implication of sex in most if not all ads concerning women. Stage performances by female artists have become about as softcore pornographic as HBO television AS A RULE. You can tell which female artists are actually talented, because people rave about how great they are DESPITE their being 'unconventionally attractive'. The fact that people give a crap about how the musicians look at all tell you how deep this sickness runs in the people today.
So, society set a precedent. Great. Why is this a problem? Because people are impressionable. We took the example they set to heart and made it a part of us. Children of my generation were raised to understand that girls were supposed to be pretty and that guys had no greater goal in life than to date a pretty girl. Now, I was always a small, loud kid, and for most of my school career, I was younger than everyone in my grade by 12-18 months. As such, I missed out on a lot of that up and coming female attention in middle and high school, and I never learned how to play the 'boys chase girls' game. Girls went from being my friends in elementary school to being my friends in high school, and nothing really changed in between. I guess that's probably what set me up to be as much of an outlier as I feel I must be in all this.
Now, the problem here isn't that society raised boys to be a bunch of idiots who spend their time chasing girls and nothing else. Boys have always chased girls. The problem is that boys in our society have been raised to think that girls exist to be caught and won, like a prize. And that's all that they're here for. We were taught that if you chase a girl, eventually you will win her and she'll kiss you. The problem is that boys were taught this stuff, and parents didn't tell them otherwise. They let the boys of our generation be raised by movies and television that planted these lessons in their heads so deeply that men in our country today feel disenfranchised by the female gender as a whole when a girl won't date them. So disenfranchised in fact, that one man made a video about how he was going to punish women for not wanting to be with him, posted it on the internet, and then went on to murder six women and wound 13 others.
Part two of the problem isn't that the Win-yourself-a-woman mindset that we were all taught poisoned us forever. It's that absolutely no one in any of the insane number of rape, abuse, sexual harassment, and murder cases involving men assaulting women saw anything wrong with what they did. It's that the men got away with that mindset for so long that they finally started acting on it. It's that the general public tries to defend these men by demonizing the women they victimized. It's that so many women have grown up thinking that an object to be won is all they are, and so they end up in prostitution or abusive relationships because they believe they're truly happy there. It's that every single day, men walk around in this world, looking at women, unconsciously rating them on a ten point scale, seeing nothing but a potential girlfriend or sexual conquest. More than that even, it's that none of these men think there is anything wrong with those thoughts. They probably know it deep down, but they justify it because everyone acts that way. Everyone has those thoughts. It's not wrong. Those women are sexualizing themselves. It's only right of me to take advantage of that. Right?
The third part of the problem is that no one wants to stand up and change things. Everyone tries to cover over all these rape and abuse cases. Everyone wants to pretend that everything is okay, and that these are just isolated incidents. That's what infuriates me about Not All Men. That hashtag is being posted by men who are trying to proclaim innocence in all this. They're trying to disassociate from the problem by saying that they aren't causing it. They're trying to be neutral in a very major conflict that goes right down to the core morality of every man, woman, and child living in our country. And that disgusts me more than just about anything else.
This isn't something you get to cop out of. This isn't something you get to pretend isn't happening. Either you're intentionally fighting to stop men from sexualizing and objectifying women, to stop the media from being allowed to turn women into objects, to stop society from treating women as nothing more than a prize to be won, or you're letting it happen. If you don't spend every interaction with women throughout the day being intentionally kind and considerate for no reason other than that everyone deserves kindness, then you're allowing those women to have a shadow of a doubt in their minds that you might be a threat. The best way to make it known that you aren't a threat is to be so non-threatening that there's no way you could be mistaken for one.
Next on the list of things you can do to help is quit talking about the bloody friendzone. That's the disgusting child of the women-are-to-be-won mindset that's causing this whole mess. If you like a girl as more than a friend, tell her. The second you realize it, you tell her. Let her know where you stand. Don't let her assume that you're just being a good friend. And by all that is holy, DO NOT BE NICE AS A MEANS TO AN END. Be nice because it's the right bloody thing to do. If she's not into you, don't recant all the nice things you've done for her like you were paying for the right to date her. I don't want to hear a bloody word about chivalry, because chivalry was founded by a bunch of self-important clowns who tramped around shouting about honor and glory and spent most of their time knee deep in horse crap and filth and literally stabbed people to death for a living. They were mercenaries who tried to pretend they were righteous and wonderful.
I'm done talking about women specifically now. The feminism thing is big right now, but it's not the only thing that society is struggling with. Religion is another part. Race is another part. Nationality is another part. The honest truth is that people have trouble with other people in general. Whether or not we're different.
We walk around every day of our lives, seeing hundreds of other people and looking right through them. We look them straight in the eye and all we see is an obstacle, or a means to an end, or an annoyance. We don't see another person who lives and breathes and feels and laughs and cries and hurts the way we do inside. We don't see someone with their own family and job and stresses and fears and concerns and dreams and goals and hope for more than what they have now. We see bodies, sure. We see potential girlfriends, or potential competition. We see things we hate and despise, things we covet. But we don't see the person behind all of that. The person that wakes up every single day and lives their life the best that they can in hope of being happy someday.
The real problem with our society, and with our world, is that we cannot physically consider all of the other people on our planet as people all of the time. We just can't do it. We can't care about every single person every single moment of every single day. We do turn others into objects in our minds. Every one of us does it, and some of us more than others. I'm especially guilty of that. In order to make this world a better place, we have to stop looking at others like objects. We have to start actively remembering that every single person we meet is just that. A person. A human being. They're just like us. They want love and acceptance and happiness. They want their parents and their siblings to be proud of them. They want to do something that fulfills them inside. They want to live a life that they can look back on someday and smile. They want a family and kids, or a good career, or just a really good friend.
We have to remember that they're people too, and that everything we do or say to them will leave an impression on them, no matter how small. We have to realize that one smile or one kind word can make a world of difference to them. We have to realize that all the things that we feel inside are mirrored in them, whether we agree with their lifestyle or not. Whether we like the same music or clothes or speak the same language. Whether they're as smart or as dumb as we are, whether they're ignorant of us or not. Whether they return our kindness and decency or not. We have to start giving everyone we meet the same common respect and decency, because it's what you do that defines who you are. I wish that every single time I did or said something to hurt or offend someone that the pain and hurt they felt was reflected back onto me. That I could feel the hurt I just caused them the same way that they feel it. I wish that everyone could feel that. Maybe then we'd start to realize just how much hurt we give out every single day of our lives. How much hurt we're pouring into this world. And then maybe, just maybe, we'd start to see each other as people.
American society is sitting at a tipping point right now, and the topic is human rights. The last blog post I made over a year ago was about this very subject, and things have gotten better since then, but they're still far from good. The big topic this year is women's rights, and my predominant focus is the "Yes All Women" thing that has been floating around. It's a hashtag topic that surrounds the idea that all women go through regularly terrifying and stressful experiences out of a taught and, in some cases, learned fear of men. I've been reading feminist articles and blog posts and posts from men defending themselves against Yes All Women with the "Not All Men" tag. This one claims innocence of part of men because not all of us are scumbags who want to rape you or sexually harass you or even intimidate you with our oppressive manliness.
I want to apologize now for not taking stuff like that seriously. I'm not insensitive. I've never been aware of the fact that maybe women don't want to talk to me because they're afraid of what I might do, because in all honesty I'm about as innocent as a seven year old boy when it comes to women. I've kissed all of two girls outside of a dating relationship in my life, and one of the two was someone I ended up dating seriously for two years. I don't think about how I might come across to women because I don't have a sexual intention in my interactions with them. I don't think about how they might perceive my actions or my presence because I have no ill will toward them and never have. It's never a thought that has ever passed through my mind. Because of that, I have fit into a category of men that has been part of the problem all along without realizing it.
We live in a society where women (and men, a parallel but not currently focal concern) are ruthlessly and intentionally sexualized for the point of marketing products. Whether they're selling perfume, soap, deodorant, music, sandwiches, clothes, jewelry, cars, tires, chairs, tables, carpets, etc, you can be pretty darn sure that women are going to be part of the method. Someone discovered that people are more likely to buy something if there's a picture of a pretty girl on it, and then they started putting pictures of more than just pretty girls on everything. Now there's an implication of sex in most if not all ads concerning women. Stage performances by female artists have become about as softcore pornographic as HBO television AS A RULE. You can tell which female artists are actually talented, because people rave about how great they are DESPITE their being 'unconventionally attractive'. The fact that people give a crap about how the musicians look at all tell you how deep this sickness runs in the people today.
So, society set a precedent. Great. Why is this a problem? Because people are impressionable. We took the example they set to heart and made it a part of us. Children of my generation were raised to understand that girls were supposed to be pretty and that guys had no greater goal in life than to date a pretty girl. Now, I was always a small, loud kid, and for most of my school career, I was younger than everyone in my grade by 12-18 months. As such, I missed out on a lot of that up and coming female attention in middle and high school, and I never learned how to play the 'boys chase girls' game. Girls went from being my friends in elementary school to being my friends in high school, and nothing really changed in between. I guess that's probably what set me up to be as much of an outlier as I feel I must be in all this.
Now, the problem here isn't that society raised boys to be a bunch of idiots who spend their time chasing girls and nothing else. Boys have always chased girls. The problem is that boys in our society have been raised to think that girls exist to be caught and won, like a prize. And that's all that they're here for. We were taught that if you chase a girl, eventually you will win her and she'll kiss you. The problem is that boys were taught this stuff, and parents didn't tell them otherwise. They let the boys of our generation be raised by movies and television that planted these lessons in their heads so deeply that men in our country today feel disenfranchised by the female gender as a whole when a girl won't date them. So disenfranchised in fact, that one man made a video about how he was going to punish women for not wanting to be with him, posted it on the internet, and then went on to murder six women and wound 13 others.
Part two of the problem isn't that the Win-yourself-a-woman mindset that we were all taught poisoned us forever. It's that absolutely no one in any of the insane number of rape, abuse, sexual harassment, and murder cases involving men assaulting women saw anything wrong with what they did. It's that the men got away with that mindset for so long that they finally started acting on it. It's that the general public tries to defend these men by demonizing the women they victimized. It's that so many women have grown up thinking that an object to be won is all they are, and so they end up in prostitution or abusive relationships because they believe they're truly happy there. It's that every single day, men walk around in this world, looking at women, unconsciously rating them on a ten point scale, seeing nothing but a potential girlfriend or sexual conquest. More than that even, it's that none of these men think there is anything wrong with those thoughts. They probably know it deep down, but they justify it because everyone acts that way. Everyone has those thoughts. It's not wrong. Those women are sexualizing themselves. It's only right of me to take advantage of that. Right?
The third part of the problem is that no one wants to stand up and change things. Everyone tries to cover over all these rape and abuse cases. Everyone wants to pretend that everything is okay, and that these are just isolated incidents. That's what infuriates me about Not All Men. That hashtag is being posted by men who are trying to proclaim innocence in all this. They're trying to disassociate from the problem by saying that they aren't causing it. They're trying to be neutral in a very major conflict that goes right down to the core morality of every man, woman, and child living in our country. And that disgusts me more than just about anything else.
This isn't something you get to cop out of. This isn't something you get to pretend isn't happening. Either you're intentionally fighting to stop men from sexualizing and objectifying women, to stop the media from being allowed to turn women into objects, to stop society from treating women as nothing more than a prize to be won, or you're letting it happen. If you don't spend every interaction with women throughout the day being intentionally kind and considerate for no reason other than that everyone deserves kindness, then you're allowing those women to have a shadow of a doubt in their minds that you might be a threat. The best way to make it known that you aren't a threat is to be so non-threatening that there's no way you could be mistaken for one.
Next on the list of things you can do to help is quit talking about the bloody friendzone. That's the disgusting child of the women-are-to-be-won mindset that's causing this whole mess. If you like a girl as more than a friend, tell her. The second you realize it, you tell her. Let her know where you stand. Don't let her assume that you're just being a good friend. And by all that is holy, DO NOT BE NICE AS A MEANS TO AN END. Be nice because it's the right bloody thing to do. If she's not into you, don't recant all the nice things you've done for her like you were paying for the right to date her. I don't want to hear a bloody word about chivalry, because chivalry was founded by a bunch of self-important clowns who tramped around shouting about honor and glory and spent most of their time knee deep in horse crap and filth and literally stabbed people to death for a living. They were mercenaries who tried to pretend they were righteous and wonderful.
I'm done talking about women specifically now. The feminism thing is big right now, but it's not the only thing that society is struggling with. Religion is another part. Race is another part. Nationality is another part. The honest truth is that people have trouble with other people in general. Whether or not we're different.
We walk around every day of our lives, seeing hundreds of other people and looking right through them. We look them straight in the eye and all we see is an obstacle, or a means to an end, or an annoyance. We don't see another person who lives and breathes and feels and laughs and cries and hurts the way we do inside. We don't see someone with their own family and job and stresses and fears and concerns and dreams and goals and hope for more than what they have now. We see bodies, sure. We see potential girlfriends, or potential competition. We see things we hate and despise, things we covet. But we don't see the person behind all of that. The person that wakes up every single day and lives their life the best that they can in hope of being happy someday.
The real problem with our society, and with our world, is that we cannot physically consider all of the other people on our planet as people all of the time. We just can't do it. We can't care about every single person every single moment of every single day. We do turn others into objects in our minds. Every one of us does it, and some of us more than others. I'm especially guilty of that. In order to make this world a better place, we have to stop looking at others like objects. We have to start actively remembering that every single person we meet is just that. A person. A human being. They're just like us. They want love and acceptance and happiness. They want their parents and their siblings to be proud of them. They want to do something that fulfills them inside. They want to live a life that they can look back on someday and smile. They want a family and kids, or a good career, or just a really good friend.
We have to remember that they're people too, and that everything we do or say to them will leave an impression on them, no matter how small. We have to realize that one smile or one kind word can make a world of difference to them. We have to realize that all the things that we feel inside are mirrored in them, whether we agree with their lifestyle or not. Whether we like the same music or clothes or speak the same language. Whether they're as smart or as dumb as we are, whether they're ignorant of us or not. Whether they return our kindness and decency or not. We have to start giving everyone we meet the same common respect and decency, because it's what you do that defines who you are. I wish that every single time I did or said something to hurt or offend someone that the pain and hurt they felt was reflected back onto me. That I could feel the hurt I just caused them the same way that they feel it. I wish that everyone could feel that. Maybe then we'd start to realize just how much hurt we give out every single day of our lives. How much hurt we're pouring into this world. And then maybe, just maybe, we'd start to see each other as people.
Friday, June 21, 2013
Creation and Storytelling
Hello again, audience, and welcome back to the Fox Den. I've had a lot of spare time in the last month, so I've been catching up on all the reading I haven't been doing in the last year or so. I also discovered that the fines on my library card were not high enough to have my account locked, so I've even been able to check out books with my own card. :D Exciting stuff, I know. What's important is that all this reading has gotten me in the mood to write, and with that comes enough thoughts to write a blog. So here I am.
When it comes to books, I'm a pretty discerning reader. Before I will even read a book, I have to A) find the title and the font on the binding pleasing enough to want to pick it up, B) find the cover art appealing enough to want to learn more, C) find the back/inside cover copy interesting enough to want to open the book, D) find the prologue or introduction interesting enough to want to read the first few chapters, and E) find the first 50-80 pages interesting enough to care about the characters, the plot, and be curious as to what happens next. As a result, I've started a lot of books and never finished reading them.
However, the books I do read cover to cover are the ones I end up owning and reading again in the future. Like The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer, which I read twice in the first week and at least three more times since then. My most recent discovery of that sort was The Wind Through The Keyhole by Stephen King, a direct extension of his Dark Tower series. This particular book is a story within a story within a story, which is a first for Stephen King as far as I'm aware. It takes place between the fourth and fifth Dark Tower novels, and tells of the main characters of the series taking shelter from a huge storm. Roland, the totally awesome gunslinger, is talked into telling a story to his companions. He decides to tell a story from his youth, during the course of which his younger self tells a Mid-World fairy tale to one of the other characters. Now, Stephen King's Mid-World is already one of the most interesting worlds I have ever read about, and getting to hear a fairy tale that the young children of that world would have been told was an interesting and incredible opportunity. It was around then that I went to the bathroom and came to a realization as to my personal philosophy regarding storytelling, and the act of creation in general.
As an aside, for anyone who doesn't know, the bathroom is actually the best place in the house to think. I have had countless incredible ideas while going about my various daily activities in the bathroom. It never fails to amaze me that the kitchen or the bedroom or the other rooms of the house fail to have such a magical enchantment about them that seems to emanate from the cold porcelain and laminate tile in the bathroom.
Whether you're a writer, an artist, or a musician, you're creating something out of thoughts in your head and expressing it through a tangible medium. There are thousands and thousands of musicians and artists and writers in the world who create things, and then present them to us consumers to hopefully trade our money for. Many of them are not incredible, but they sell anyway. Some of them are pretty amazing, becoming household names and making a decent living off of their creations. A select few are fantastic, blowing minds and impacting people for generations after they've created something, and even after they're long dead. And for all the writers and musicians and artists in the world, there are a very select few that I really love, and a slightly larger number that I even consider worth noting. Until the other day in the bathroom, I had never been able to figure out why that was. But now I've got it.
In music, art, or writing, what I really love and prize upon is finding things that I've never seen or heard before. One of my favorite bands these days is Periphery. I discovered them a year or two ago and I've been hooked ever since. What really got me about them is that their style comes from a fusion between the brutal, heavy feel of technical metal and the lighter tones and strong melodies from both the guitar and the clean vocals. Before them, I hadn't found a band that fused the two in such a way as to create songs that were both heavy and technical, and yet ultimately full of singable melodies and memorable guitar lines, while still keeping a groove that you can bob your head to. They were a unique gem among all of the progressive metal and hardcore bands that were plaguing my earholes. Between The Buried and Me's most recent releases, Parallax: The Hypersleep Dialogues and Parallax II: Future Sequence were interesting for a similar reason. They tell a complete story about two men dealing with self doubt and regret for past actions and eventually being driven to their own doom through technical riffs and melodic themes that sent chills down my spine. I'm proud to own a copy of the special edition lyric and art book from Parallax II, as it gave the meanings of the lyrics and the overall plot of the story, as well as the themes the group was trying to present in each song and through each lyric.
A similar trend exists in my taste in books. The Dream of Perpetual Motion is unlike any other book I've ever read, and it stole my brain away for a full five readings. Even now, I'm still pulling more thoughts and ideas and themes out of the thickly layered plot and ideas presented in an incredibly unique and interesting manner. I could write another two or three blogs about it (in addition to the one I already have, found here) and still not cover everything I've learned from it. Stephen King's Dark Tower is full of lifelike characters with all their own goals and ideas and plans that get totally thrown off track when they meet Roland, a man whose determination to reach the Dark Tower has left many corpses in his wake. My most recent series of fascination is Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, which presents a full, living world with interesting characters and a compelling story that binds them all together.
Looking at all of these ideas, I realized that the common theme among the presented examples (and all of their peers within my book and music collections) is that they all present thoughts and ideas in ways that I had never seen or heard used before. Each story told of a world unlike any other I had read about, full of interesting characters who did things and had to deal with problems I could never face, but were real enough for me to become emotionally involved in their story. Each song had a definite point and theme that was supported by the music surrounding it, music that was woven together in ways I had never thought of before. Melodies that still ring in my head, days and weeks away from my last listen-through of the album. Songs that I will love for many years to come and hope to be able to one day share with my children.
I can now define good storytelling as telling a story that no one has ever heard before in an interesting and compelling way. Teen Supernatural Fiction has become a specific genre at the bookstore, and it hurts my soul every time I walk by that shelf. Because every single one of those authors specifically wrote books revolving around the same three or four premises and then made money selling their crappy, overdone, trite, and overall uninteresting stories. They did it because Teen Supernatural Fiction is what was selling well (thanks to Twilight for helping push on that one) and they wanted to make oodles of cash selling books to teens. The Science Fiction/ Fantasy section is less polluted, but is still full of authors who took incredibly similar plot skeletons or story elements (like robot uprising, zombie apocalypse, dragon riders, schools for young magicians, prophesied heroes coming into their own, etc. ad nauseum) and then built their own world around it.
Tolkien will be remembered for many generations to come, not because he wrote fantasy novels, but because he created a fantastic world full of different cultures and characters spanning across hundreds and thousands of years that inspired generations of fantasy writers (and six big budget films, ahem ahem). Jack Vance created countless peoples and cultures and worlds that spanned his novels, while telling compelling stories with impressive vocabulary and highbrow wit. Stephen King doesn't just write horror stories. He creates living, breathing, thinking, feeling characters that we sympathize so much with that we can share in every single moment of their horror, or their descent into madness. Pet Sematary, IT, and The Shining are some of the best novels I've ever read. Not because they were terrifying and full of monsters. Because the stories revolved aroud characters that were more realistic than many others I've ever read about.
My point is that true talent in creation comes in creating something new and original out of what has come before. The Wheel of Time was definitely not the first fantasy story ever written, and it's far from the last. But it is one of the biggest and most creatively built of the genre. There are dozens of other fantasy series that surround it on the shelves of bookstores and libraries worldwide, but none of them will come close to touching its legacy, because none of them had that same uniqueness and creativity at their core. The Devil Wears Prada is at the end of a long trend of groups that descended from punk, and they were not the inventors of the newer hardcore scene. But, their playing style and guitar techniques set them at the head of their subgenre. In the years following With Roots Above And Branches Below and the Zombie EP, the entire subgenre morphed to sound more like TDWP, taking influence from their groundbreaking sound. Periphery has actually had a similar impact on the new hardcore scene in the last few years, interestingly enough, and now progressive metal has left its mark on hardcore. Now dozens of bands sound like bastardized versions of their sound, and it creates a giant field of sludge in the internet music community.
Musicians and writers alike 'take influence' from their peers and those that came before them, but a lot of times all that comes of it is a poor ripoff of the original. I'm one of those weird dreamer kids who wants to write fantasy and science fiction, as well as be a musician, and I could spend hours talking about writers and musicians who have influenced me. At the end of the day, though, I'd be most proud of my work if I didn't sound anything like my influences.
I'd be happy to relate back to the music I enjoy to listen to, or the books that I really love, but I don't want to be put into a category with those creators' names listed at the top, labeling my work as another Tolkien or Periphery copycat/wannabe. I just want to write like me, and make music that sounds like my own creation. I want to stand apart from my peers and my predecessors because I did something no one else has done before. Because I told a story that no one has ever heard before, full of sights and sounds and smells they've never experienced. Because I wrote a song with a combination of words and notes that no one else has ever used, with a unique melody that sticks in your mind and lyrics that really mean something to someone.
What songs or books do you really love, audience? What authors and artists stand out as the creators of something new and unique that no one else has done before? I'd love to hear what you read and listen to. Until next time, dear audience.
When it comes to books, I'm a pretty discerning reader. Before I will even read a book, I have to A) find the title and the font on the binding pleasing enough to want to pick it up, B) find the cover art appealing enough to want to learn more, C) find the back/inside cover copy interesting enough to want to open the book, D) find the prologue or introduction interesting enough to want to read the first few chapters, and E) find the first 50-80 pages interesting enough to care about the characters, the plot, and be curious as to what happens next. As a result, I've started a lot of books and never finished reading them.
However, the books I do read cover to cover are the ones I end up owning and reading again in the future. Like The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer, which I read twice in the first week and at least three more times since then. My most recent discovery of that sort was The Wind Through The Keyhole by Stephen King, a direct extension of his Dark Tower series. This particular book is a story within a story within a story, which is a first for Stephen King as far as I'm aware. It takes place between the fourth and fifth Dark Tower novels, and tells of the main characters of the series taking shelter from a huge storm. Roland, the totally awesome gunslinger, is talked into telling a story to his companions. He decides to tell a story from his youth, during the course of which his younger self tells a Mid-World fairy tale to one of the other characters. Now, Stephen King's Mid-World is already one of the most interesting worlds I have ever read about, and getting to hear a fairy tale that the young children of that world would have been told was an interesting and incredible opportunity. It was around then that I went to the bathroom and came to a realization as to my personal philosophy regarding storytelling, and the act of creation in general.
As an aside, for anyone who doesn't know, the bathroom is actually the best place in the house to think. I have had countless incredible ideas while going about my various daily activities in the bathroom. It never fails to amaze me that the kitchen or the bedroom or the other rooms of the house fail to have such a magical enchantment about them that seems to emanate from the cold porcelain and laminate tile in the bathroom.
Whether you're a writer, an artist, or a musician, you're creating something out of thoughts in your head and expressing it through a tangible medium. There are thousands and thousands of musicians and artists and writers in the world who create things, and then present them to us consumers to hopefully trade our money for. Many of them are not incredible, but they sell anyway. Some of them are pretty amazing, becoming household names and making a decent living off of their creations. A select few are fantastic, blowing minds and impacting people for generations after they've created something, and even after they're long dead. And for all the writers and musicians and artists in the world, there are a very select few that I really love, and a slightly larger number that I even consider worth noting. Until the other day in the bathroom, I had never been able to figure out why that was. But now I've got it.
In music, art, or writing, what I really love and prize upon is finding things that I've never seen or heard before. One of my favorite bands these days is Periphery. I discovered them a year or two ago and I've been hooked ever since. What really got me about them is that their style comes from a fusion between the brutal, heavy feel of technical metal and the lighter tones and strong melodies from both the guitar and the clean vocals. Before them, I hadn't found a band that fused the two in such a way as to create songs that were both heavy and technical, and yet ultimately full of singable melodies and memorable guitar lines, while still keeping a groove that you can bob your head to. They were a unique gem among all of the progressive metal and hardcore bands that were plaguing my earholes. Between The Buried and Me's most recent releases, Parallax: The Hypersleep Dialogues and Parallax II: Future Sequence were interesting for a similar reason. They tell a complete story about two men dealing with self doubt and regret for past actions and eventually being driven to their own doom through technical riffs and melodic themes that sent chills down my spine. I'm proud to own a copy of the special edition lyric and art book from Parallax II, as it gave the meanings of the lyrics and the overall plot of the story, as well as the themes the group was trying to present in each song and through each lyric.
A similar trend exists in my taste in books. The Dream of Perpetual Motion is unlike any other book I've ever read, and it stole my brain away for a full five readings. Even now, I'm still pulling more thoughts and ideas and themes out of the thickly layered plot and ideas presented in an incredibly unique and interesting manner. I could write another two or three blogs about it (in addition to the one I already have, found here) and still not cover everything I've learned from it. Stephen King's Dark Tower is full of lifelike characters with all their own goals and ideas and plans that get totally thrown off track when they meet Roland, a man whose determination to reach the Dark Tower has left many corpses in his wake. My most recent series of fascination is Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, which presents a full, living world with interesting characters and a compelling story that binds them all together.
Looking at all of these ideas, I realized that the common theme among the presented examples (and all of their peers within my book and music collections) is that they all present thoughts and ideas in ways that I had never seen or heard used before. Each story told of a world unlike any other I had read about, full of interesting characters who did things and had to deal with problems I could never face, but were real enough for me to become emotionally involved in their story. Each song had a definite point and theme that was supported by the music surrounding it, music that was woven together in ways I had never thought of before. Melodies that still ring in my head, days and weeks away from my last listen-through of the album. Songs that I will love for many years to come and hope to be able to one day share with my children.
I can now define good storytelling as telling a story that no one has ever heard before in an interesting and compelling way. Teen Supernatural Fiction has become a specific genre at the bookstore, and it hurts my soul every time I walk by that shelf. Because every single one of those authors specifically wrote books revolving around the same three or four premises and then made money selling their crappy, overdone, trite, and overall uninteresting stories. They did it because Teen Supernatural Fiction is what was selling well (thanks to Twilight for helping push on that one) and they wanted to make oodles of cash selling books to teens. The Science Fiction/ Fantasy section is less polluted, but is still full of authors who took incredibly similar plot skeletons or story elements (like robot uprising, zombie apocalypse, dragon riders, schools for young magicians, prophesied heroes coming into their own, etc. ad nauseum) and then built their own world around it.
Tolkien will be remembered for many generations to come, not because he wrote fantasy novels, but because he created a fantastic world full of different cultures and characters spanning across hundreds and thousands of years that inspired generations of fantasy writers (and six big budget films, ahem ahem). Jack Vance created countless peoples and cultures and worlds that spanned his novels, while telling compelling stories with impressive vocabulary and highbrow wit. Stephen King doesn't just write horror stories. He creates living, breathing, thinking, feeling characters that we sympathize so much with that we can share in every single moment of their horror, or their descent into madness. Pet Sematary, IT, and The Shining are some of the best novels I've ever read. Not because they were terrifying and full of monsters. Because the stories revolved aroud characters that were more realistic than many others I've ever read about.
My point is that true talent in creation comes in creating something new and original out of what has come before. The Wheel of Time was definitely not the first fantasy story ever written, and it's far from the last. But it is one of the biggest and most creatively built of the genre. There are dozens of other fantasy series that surround it on the shelves of bookstores and libraries worldwide, but none of them will come close to touching its legacy, because none of them had that same uniqueness and creativity at their core. The Devil Wears Prada is at the end of a long trend of groups that descended from punk, and they were not the inventors of the newer hardcore scene. But, their playing style and guitar techniques set them at the head of their subgenre. In the years following With Roots Above And Branches Below and the Zombie EP, the entire subgenre morphed to sound more like TDWP, taking influence from their groundbreaking sound. Periphery has actually had a similar impact on the new hardcore scene in the last few years, interestingly enough, and now progressive metal has left its mark on hardcore. Now dozens of bands sound like bastardized versions of their sound, and it creates a giant field of sludge in the internet music community.
Musicians and writers alike 'take influence' from their peers and those that came before them, but a lot of times all that comes of it is a poor ripoff of the original. I'm one of those weird dreamer kids who wants to write fantasy and science fiction, as well as be a musician, and I could spend hours talking about writers and musicians who have influenced me. At the end of the day, though, I'd be most proud of my work if I didn't sound anything like my influences.
I'd be happy to relate back to the music I enjoy to listen to, or the books that I really love, but I don't want to be put into a category with those creators' names listed at the top, labeling my work as another Tolkien or Periphery copycat/wannabe. I just want to write like me, and make music that sounds like my own creation. I want to stand apart from my peers and my predecessors because I did something no one else has done before. Because I told a story that no one has ever heard before, full of sights and sounds and smells they've never experienced. Because I wrote a song with a combination of words and notes that no one else has ever used, with a unique melody that sticks in your mind and lyrics that really mean something to someone.
What songs or books do you really love, audience? What authors and artists stand out as the creators of something new and unique that no one else has done before? I'd love to hear what you read and listen to. Until next time, dear audience.
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Human Rights (A Vicious Rant)
Hello, audience. Normally, I try to keep my political/social opinions to a more private setting, meaning face-to-face conversations and intellectual discussions, but all the raging and whining about the LGBT community and their rights this last year (and specifically in the last month) really has me on edge, and I feel like I should broadcast this particular opinion.
I was raised by my mother and father to treat everyone equally. Period. Regardless of color, creed, background, political choices, religious standings, intelligence, everything. All people are to be treated with the same respect and decency because they are all humans, just like I am. Treat others how you wish to be treated with no exceptions.
Now, I'm all for supporting groups that you believe in and expressing political opinions. But I can not stand all the flag waving that comes along with it. It comes across as begging for attention and affirmation for believing whatever you believe. It's silly and unnecessary and it irks me. I don't know where this 'red equal sign' stuff came from, but it immediately crawled under my skin and started making me itch. Here's why.
You don't get a pat on the back for believing the right thing. You don't get medals or awards or any recognition at all for believing that all people deserve the same rights regardless of how different they are. You know why? Because that's what EVERYONE should believe. You don't get rewarded for doing what you're supposed to at work. You get to keep your job. If you do less, you get negative consequences. I believe that everyone is entitled to an opinion, and I believe that everyone has lips so they can keep their trap shut about their opinions until it's an appropriate time to express them.
I don't care how many friends you have in the LGBT community. You can support them and their beliefs without shouting all over facebook about it and changing your profile picture and posting articles and essentially shoving your beliefs in other people's faces. That doesn't make anyone want to pay serious attention to you. It makes them want to walk away and find someone less pushy to talk to. I will pay increasingly less attention to people on facebook as the amount of opinionated crap they post increases.
News about LGBT related events or interesting articles is one thing. Posting inflammatory comments about people who disagree or telling everyone how wrong they are if they don't believe what you believe is entirely different. And changing your profile picture to the red equals sign turns your facebook from a place to interact socially into a political platform and lobbying scheme. It shows your support while alienating anyone who believes differently and instantly labeling you as 'one of those gay rights supporters'.
Let me say that again. One of THOSE gay rights supporters. There's a way to support things without drawing immediate negative connotations about what you believe. You have to understand that people will ALWAYS throw you into a box with the SINGLE supporter of a movement who left the biggest impression on them.
And before anyone starts up about 'freedom of speech', let me say one thing. You are entitled to your opinions, and you are welcome to speak out about them. But that doesn't mean that you're letting yourself be oppressed if you decide not to paste red equals signs on everything you own and get it tattooed over your heart. I'd rather someone know how supportive I am of the LGBT crowd by watching how I interact with them than by seeing my t-shirt or profile picture. Actions speak louder than words, and that includes any amount of junk you put online for others to see. It's easy to support something when a hundred thousand other people on facebook do it too, but it's a lot harder to walk it out in everyday life when you're faced with actual people and situations.
So, at the end of this VERY in-your-face rant, I'd like to say that your opinions are as valid as mine and you're welcome to tell me exactly what you think about all this. I'd love to hear what you think about the broadcasting of opinions on facebook and via other social media. And for anyone who I may have violently offended, shake it off. My opinion has absolutely no bearing on your emotional state. Don't give me that power over you, because making you angry was not my intention, and you're wasting your time being mad at me because I disagree with you. Take a deep breath, agree to disagree, and walk away.
And to anyone who says "If you don't like it, then don't go on facebook!", I say don't worry. I definitely won't be on facebook much for a while. I have better things to do than have people's opinions shoved down my throat for multiple hours a day.
Sunday, October 14, 2012
Getting Older (From the Mind of a Young Man)
Hello, audience. I've been thinking a lot lately during depressingly late nights brought on by fits of insomnia. The biggest topic of late has been getting older.
I was walking around Old Colorado City with Poncho the other day, enjoying the fresh air of a fall day in Colorado and looking at all the nifty hole-in-the-wall shops and restaurants. As we walked, we passed by some other couple who I'd never seen before and will likely never see again, and the strangest thing happened.
I have to make a quick interlude here for clarity's sake. I periodically have these moments of incredible lucidity, as if I'm seeing humanity through the eyes of a being from a higher dimension or something. This one time, it was during a commercial break, and there was some guy talking about some random thing I'd likely never buy. For the briefest second, I saw him as if I weren't a human and had never seen a human before. And I have to say guys, we look really freaking terrifying if you think about it. It's hard to see humans from an objective perspective, but for that one moment, I did. And we are ugly ugly beasties.
Anyway, I had one of those lucid moments walking by this couple. I looked the man in the eye, and I saw his face as if he were really 17 and was wearing make-up or prosthetics to make himself appear older. It was like he was wearing an age mask.
I'm coming up on my twentieth birthday here soon, and it has me thinking a lot about getting older and how we age. It's akin to that feeling you have every year on your birthday, when you think you should feel different now that you're a year older, but you never do. It just feels like another day in your life. Except that I'm about to have that feeling for the twentieth time. Two decades.
Poncho regularly remarks on how odd it is that she can remember specific events clearly up so some fifteen or sixteen years ago. I curled up in a ball and groaned about feeling old last time she mentioned anything to the effect.
I'm not a particularly astute observer, as you may or may not know. I tend to not notice things until they're right in front of my face, painted bright red and translated into layman's terms and then explained to me step by step by Mr. Rogers or Bill Nye with his cool little dinosaur explanations. I am however a highly intelligent person, and I notice things that aren't obvious without even paying them much attention.
As it is, I barely know other people exist unless I care to pay them specific attention. I don't do it on purpose, as in ignoring them intentionally. I just don't stop to consider other people unless I'm prompted to. This isn't something that everyone does, I know. There are many people that are highly conscious of other people around them all the time, and they notice a lot of things that I miss. I make sure to have at least one of those kinds of people around as often as is possible so I have a pair of eyes on my social blind spots.
So maybe I'm just slow or crazy for only just putting thoughts to this particular phenomenon, but who knows. Here goes anyway.
It's weird to think about other people from the perspective that they are also conscious, reasoning, and self-aware creatures who have lived many many years on this earth with their own experiences and interactions and relationships. I saw this couple with their age-masks, and I realized that this was another human being living life on the same planet, dealing with all the same needs as myself and having to face a lot of the same troubles I do. I realized that this man was once 19 going on 20 and seeing life with the same eyes I do now.
It's difficult for me to imagine getting older being any different because I have no idea of how life is going to change me or affect who I am now as I age. I'd like to think that I won't be too different. But then I'd just be 19-year old Mister Ludeman walking around with a 30/40/50-year old age-mask on, and that doesn't stand up in the face of logic. I may be very much the same person, but I'll undoubtedly be shaped differently due to all my time spent living in this fleshy meatsack of a body on this silly little planet in the vast expanse of our endless universe.
Do you feel old, audience? Do you look in the mirror and see yourself as the same old you, but wearing an age-mask? Or does the face in the mirror show you a different person entirely, this new creature you have become over the years, shaped by the life you've lived and the choices you've made?
I was walking around Old Colorado City with Poncho the other day, enjoying the fresh air of a fall day in Colorado and looking at all the nifty hole-in-the-wall shops and restaurants. As we walked, we passed by some other couple who I'd never seen before and will likely never see again, and the strangest thing happened.
I have to make a quick interlude here for clarity's sake. I periodically have these moments of incredible lucidity, as if I'm seeing humanity through the eyes of a being from a higher dimension or something. This one time, it was during a commercial break, and there was some guy talking about some random thing I'd likely never buy. For the briefest second, I saw him as if I weren't a human and had never seen a human before. And I have to say guys, we look really freaking terrifying if you think about it. It's hard to see humans from an objective perspective, but for that one moment, I did. And we are ugly ugly beasties.
Anyway, I had one of those lucid moments walking by this couple. I looked the man in the eye, and I saw his face as if he were really 17 and was wearing make-up or prosthetics to make himself appear older. It was like he was wearing an age mask.
I'm coming up on my twentieth birthday here soon, and it has me thinking a lot about getting older and how we age. It's akin to that feeling you have every year on your birthday, when you think you should feel different now that you're a year older, but you never do. It just feels like another day in your life. Except that I'm about to have that feeling for the twentieth time. Two decades.
Poncho regularly remarks on how odd it is that she can remember specific events clearly up so some fifteen or sixteen years ago. I curled up in a ball and groaned about feeling old last time she mentioned anything to the effect.
I'm not a particularly astute observer, as you may or may not know. I tend to not notice things until they're right in front of my face, painted bright red and translated into layman's terms and then explained to me step by step by Mr. Rogers or Bill Nye with his cool little dinosaur explanations. I am however a highly intelligent person, and I notice things that aren't obvious without even paying them much attention.
As it is, I barely know other people exist unless I care to pay them specific attention. I don't do it on purpose, as in ignoring them intentionally. I just don't stop to consider other people unless I'm prompted to. This isn't something that everyone does, I know. There are many people that are highly conscious of other people around them all the time, and they notice a lot of things that I miss. I make sure to have at least one of those kinds of people around as often as is possible so I have a pair of eyes on my social blind spots.
So maybe I'm just slow or crazy for only just putting thoughts to this particular phenomenon, but who knows. Here goes anyway.
It's weird to think about other people from the perspective that they are also conscious, reasoning, and self-aware creatures who have lived many many years on this earth with their own experiences and interactions and relationships. I saw this couple with their age-masks, and I realized that this was another human being living life on the same planet, dealing with all the same needs as myself and having to face a lot of the same troubles I do. I realized that this man was once 19 going on 20 and seeing life with the same eyes I do now.
It's difficult for me to imagine getting older being any different because I have no idea of how life is going to change me or affect who I am now as I age. I'd like to think that I won't be too different. But then I'd just be 19-year old Mister Ludeman walking around with a 30/40/50-year old age-mask on, and that doesn't stand up in the face of logic. I may be very much the same person, but I'll undoubtedly be shaped differently due to all my time spent living in this fleshy meatsack of a body on this silly little planet in the vast expanse of our endless universe.
Do you feel old, audience? Do you look in the mirror and see yourself as the same old you, but wearing an age-mask? Or does the face in the mirror show you a different person entirely, this new creature you have become over the years, shaped by the life you've lived and the choices you've made?
Friday, June 22, 2012
The Rest of Your Life
Hello, audience. For those of you who don't know, I got hit by a car last week. I was jaywalking and not paying attention and I stepped right in front of a car. After the trip to the hospital and all the scans and x-rays and such, it turns out the only real damage was the gash in my head. They closed it up with stitches and ten staples, and I got the staples pulled out yesterday morning. Doctor says it healed up nicely, but now I get to have a scar on the side of my head for the rest of my life.
That's a weird thing to say, the rest of your life. When you think about the rest of your life, how far ahead are you looking? Sixty? Eighty? A full hundred? Where do you draw the line for a vague amount of time like that? How long do people think they are going to live? It's a tenuous thread, this existence we have. Everyday, we walk a line between life and death, an incredibly narrow edge. That show, 1000 Ways To Die makes a lot of jokes about death, and that's interesting to me. That we created a way to entertain ourselves with ridiculous stories of other people's deaths. But the show is right. There really are an innumerable number of ways, everyday, that people face down the potential of death and never know it.
Don't get me wrong. My injuries are pretty mild considering my accident. Another guy came into the ER the same day from a similar accident. He had a broken collarbone and pelvis along with a veritable assortment of other injuries. I'm lucky that I got off with so little. I don't want pity or sympathy for my injuries. They're mine, bought and paid for. I get to deal with them, and I'm trying to do it without unnecessary complaint. I'm also trying not to be completely bullheaded and refuse help or sympathy when it's offered.
One of the things that weirds me out most is all the people who are super shocked and worried when they find out I was hit by a car. I'm upright and walking around on my own without a cast or neck brace and only the one bandage on my hand. Sure, I'm not in perfect health, but I'm obviously not dead. It's as if they immediately assume I should be on my death bed because of what happened.
It's moments like that that make me reconsider how normal the way I think must be. Should I be more in awe of how little I was hurt? Should I be super freaked out or weeping in thanks for my life? I feel like I should be considering my own mortality and rethinking my religious choices or something, but I'm mostly uninterested in that line of thought. It seems pointless to try and attribute what happened to fate or chance or the mysterious workings of some greater being trying to give me a sign or something like that.
My purpose for relating this topic to my accident comes mostly out of interest in how uninterested I am in the typical thoughts (or what I would consider to be the typical thoughts) one has after an accident like mine.
I was thinking to myself the other day about what it must be like to be dying and to know you don't have a lot of time left to live. To know that the clock is ticking down, that your life is definitely coming to a close. It has to be an incredibly surreal experience, one that is really hard to wrap your head all the way around. I can only wonder what I'd do at that point.
Life is long. I've probably only lived for about a quarter of what I can expect my full lifespan to be and I already feel old. I'm still only just getting started. I'm still unsure of where I want to go or what I want to do with my life. I don't now what the future looks like. I don't know how much time I have left. I do know that I'd like to travel. That I'd like to play music, and maybe to write seriously. I want to get married and have children someday. I want to have and adventure of a life that I can tell stories about. I want to live and breathe and experience and be in awe of this incredible world we live in.
There's a line in the song Polaris by The Human Abstract that sends a chill down my spine and leaves me breathless every time I hear it, or even think about it really.
"All the paths I've been down, I still have never found something lasting through the years but all these worthless fears that mean nothing. Compare your life, your love, to the vastness of the endless stars above."
This is my most favorite image ever. It's a picture of earth taken by the Voyager space craft as it left our solar system. For those of you who haven't seen this before, Earth is the pale blue dot in the middle of the yellowish beam of light on the right side of the picture. Here's a famous quote by Carl Sagan about it:
That's a weird thing to say, the rest of your life. When you think about the rest of your life, how far ahead are you looking? Sixty? Eighty? A full hundred? Where do you draw the line for a vague amount of time like that? How long do people think they are going to live? It's a tenuous thread, this existence we have. Everyday, we walk a line between life and death, an incredibly narrow edge. That show, 1000 Ways To Die makes a lot of jokes about death, and that's interesting to me. That we created a way to entertain ourselves with ridiculous stories of other people's deaths. But the show is right. There really are an innumerable number of ways, everyday, that people face down the potential of death and never know it.
I've thought about it a couple times, the potential to have avoided what happened last week. I thought about stopping to head back to the house and grab something ten or fifteen minutes into my walk before I decided it was too late and I should just keep going. I thought about how I could have scheduled the meeting I was on my way to on a different day instead. I thought about ho I could have just been a little more patient and just waited at the crosswalk. But none of that happened.
Don't get me wrong. My injuries are pretty mild considering my accident. Another guy came into the ER the same day from a similar accident. He had a broken collarbone and pelvis along with a veritable assortment of other injuries. I'm lucky that I got off with so little. I don't want pity or sympathy for my injuries. They're mine, bought and paid for. I get to deal with them, and I'm trying to do it without unnecessary complaint. I'm also trying not to be completely bullheaded and refuse help or sympathy when it's offered.
One of the things that weirds me out most is all the people who are super shocked and worried when they find out I was hit by a car. I'm upright and walking around on my own without a cast or neck brace and only the one bandage on my hand. Sure, I'm not in perfect health, but I'm obviously not dead. It's as if they immediately assume I should be on my death bed because of what happened.
It's moments like that that make me reconsider how normal the way I think must be. Should I be more in awe of how little I was hurt? Should I be super freaked out or weeping in thanks for my life? I feel like I should be considering my own mortality and rethinking my religious choices or something, but I'm mostly uninterested in that line of thought. It seems pointless to try and attribute what happened to fate or chance or the mysterious workings of some greater being trying to give me a sign or something like that.
My purpose for relating this topic to my accident comes mostly out of interest in how uninterested I am in the typical thoughts (or what I would consider to be the typical thoughts) one has after an accident like mine.
I was thinking to myself the other day about what it must be like to be dying and to know you don't have a lot of time left to live. To know that the clock is ticking down, that your life is definitely coming to a close. It has to be an incredibly surreal experience, one that is really hard to wrap your head all the way around. I can only wonder what I'd do at that point.
Life is long. I've probably only lived for about a quarter of what I can expect my full lifespan to be and I already feel old. I'm still only just getting started. I'm still unsure of where I want to go or what I want to do with my life. I don't now what the future looks like. I don't know how much time I have left. I do know that I'd like to travel. That I'd like to play music, and maybe to write seriously. I want to get married and have children someday. I want to have and adventure of a life that I can tell stories about. I want to live and breathe and experience and be in awe of this incredible world we live in.
There's a line in the song Polaris by The Human Abstract that sends a chill down my spine and leaves me breathless every time I hear it, or even think about it really.
"All the paths I've been down, I still have never found something lasting through the years but all these worthless fears that mean nothing. Compare your life, your love, to the vastness of the endless stars above."
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"That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
It's crazy to think about how tiny and insignificant we are compared to the entire rest of the universe we exist in. To think about the vast emptiness of space, the thousands of billions of planets and moons and asteroids floating endlessly around stars, titanic collections of plasma and gases that burn and rage with such unmatched fury and intensity and beauty that our minds can hardly conceive of their devastating power. I have a love of stars because they're so impossibly powerful and uncontrollable and immense.
My life will probably never make a huge impact on this planet, let alone the universe at large. I'm very likely going to be just another one of millions who were born, who lived, and who died here. I'll have some sort of impact, for good or for bad, on the people around me. But that's not really my goal. I'm not out to make a huge impact or to change the world or the way millions think or see life. I just want to have a life full of living, full of experience and emotion and thought. A life that burned with the fire and passion of even the tiniest momentary flash of heat from a star.
My life will probably never make a huge impact on this planet, let alone the universe at large. I'm very likely going to be just another one of millions who were born, who lived, and who died here. I'll have some sort of impact, for good or for bad, on the people around me. But that's not really my goal. I'm not out to make a huge impact or to change the world or the way millions think or see life. I just want to have a life full of living, full of experience and emotion and thought. A life that burned with the fire and passion of even the tiniest momentary flash of heat from a star.
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