The World's Still Here. I'm Mildly Dissapointed.

Hmm.  I haven't posted here in a while (I've actually been using a blog-space connected to a fandom message board more often because I happen to be popular enough at that board that sometimes people read it and I feel generally informal there).  I have a short story / experimental novel chapter I could post, but I'm not sure it's very good, plus I'm trying to bring together more of the ideas I have for the greater story in my brain.  I shared the little chapter I have so far with a friend and she "wants to know more about how the world got that way" - and, frankly, I do, too... I'm waiting for the details to come to me. 

A lot of news going on in the world. You could say it's part of the reason the world dissapoints me by still turning, but that's sort of dark. The short story/chapter I mentioned had a mention of gun nuts vs. people who actually use guns to hunt because of when I was writing it...  I could use this space to say something about the woeful state of mental health care in this country, but I'm all ranted out from responding on news sites and serious blogs by people who actually count in this world.  Besides, who wants to listen to a crazy person?  As for the gun issue... I quipped to my guy "I think we should have a compromise.  We keep the 2nd Amendment on the grounds that civilians are only allowed to have guns of the models that were around when the 2nd Amendment was drafted!  Imagine how rampages would go if someone had to muzzle-load a musket between shots!"  - Okay, so that's not a real solution to anything, just a joke.  Take it as an interest in historic weapons.  I have relatives who know how to hunt with powder-rifles, so you know, it *does* happen as a sporting and meat-getting thing in the modern age.

 I wasn't expecting the world to end on the Solstice.  I did what I'd planned to do that day: Whipped out "The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask" and started playing a new file.  For those of you unfamiliar with that videogame, its major theme is Apocalypse, in that you play a child-hero character who gets trapped in an alternate world (of his homeworld, it's a sequel to "Ocarina of Time") and must save it from the machinations of an angry child, a demonic mask that wants to make his darkest desire come true and a falling moon that will crash into the world on a "three-day" time-limit from the start of each gameplay session. Every Legend of Zelda fan I know was making references to Majora's Mask and the 21st.  I also remember playing a bit of MM during that May 2011 end of the world claptrap.  It's a beautiful game, too... you cleanse corruptions, ease the regrets and pains of the dying (seriously, you comfort dying people in this, it's how you partner with their souls in form of masks that give you powers) and, of course, you meet The End of the World and kick its ass!  It's all basically what I describe as a "whimsical nightmare."  If one wants me to get philosophical about the game, I sort of see the villain of the game (Majora's Mask) as nihilism personified and Link (your player character) fighting against it for all he's worth - because people and the world (even when it's not his own) are worth something! 

Which brings me to something I saw today... some comment on an article about the "Mayan Apocalypse" with someone talking about how the end of the world nuts will just move on to the next fad... we survived Y2K, we've survived the end of the last Ba'ak'tun (spelling?) and the person was wondering "why" about that.  I think the reason why is that these "End of the World prophecies" are distractions from the real problems going on. If you're stocking up for "doomsday" you aren't as likely to be worried about today, are you? I seem to vaugely remember a passage in one of the letters of Paul in the Bible's New Testament where he was basically rippinig into his fellow Christ-followers who'd decided to give up their jobs and sit around waiting for the Second Coming.  If more self-proclaimed spiritual leaders of today had that kind of wisdom...a lot of people wouldn't be distracted from their solid real-world work. Then again, a favorite blog of mine wouldn't be nearly as popular if it didnt' have a certain apocalyptic book series to rip into...At least I know that's how I found out about it.

We have a lot of problems in our world that are essentially "destryong it" - making it an unfun, dangerous place to live (not that it hasn't always been), but we have some major things going on now, in our interconnected age.  The spectacular pronouncements of "The world is going to end on this day!" or "on this year!" priming people to expect some major cataclysm perhaps serves as an mind-catching distraction from the "slow path" things that are happening every day and whittling away peace and justice by increment. I don't even mean a vague "belief in Heaven," either, because I know a lot of people who believe in somelace nice to go after they die who care about here and now *more than anything* (myself included).  It's the whole idea that the world is going to end in some kind of sucidial bang and it's going to happen on this date, this hour that's the distraction from the problems of the world that seem ordinary, but are still problems.  It entertains people, nothing more.  The idea of the world's sudden death probably hurts less than the slow death.  I know that I react to a lot of news these days with sheer, staggering apathy, and that scares me.  The Conneticuit shooting... I saw something blip online about it and thought "Okay, another one" and thought it was something that had happened a month or so ago with only a couple of deaths.  It was only when I turned on the news and saw the mass death - and child deaths - that I cried.  Before I knew the magnitude of it all, my attitude was sort of "ho hum" because what was once and should be EXTRODINARY has become ORDINARY. 

Ordinary evils and dangers tend to be met by apathy. Only the dramatic and the cataclysmic catches our attention anymore. 

The moon is falling slowly.  Are you going to fight the darkness, free the good?  Is the world worth it?

A Post Full of Crazy

A Post Full of Crazy

I’ve been analyzing why I like certain themes – in fiction and in life. 

On the heels of last night’s nutty post about things I want to believe in, but feel weak for doing so, I’ve realized… that yes… there are reasons that go well beyond fluff-bunny and sentimentalism and other things of “weakness.” 

I think I really want to believe in the duality of the soul / the existence of the “soul” because I fear conformity.  Yes, I am aware that sounds crazy, but I really have analyzed it out, mulling over my thoughts, and that’s where they lead back to.

Whether or not a “soul” is even “eternal” is beside the point, ultimately, I just want there to be *something* beyond the chemicals and the meat.  Even if a person’s “soul” is merely “the sum of their experiences” I want there to be *something,* *anything* about us that the world *cannot get its grubby hands on.* Ironically, my desire to believe in an esoteric “something” inside of us, or about us that’s “more than the dance of flesh, fats and acids” comes from how little material evidence for there being anything more than that. 

I know more intimately than most just how chemistry can affect the brain, moods, personality.  I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder (mixed type) at the age of 26 after a lifetime of “trying to figure out what was wrong with me” – being bounced between teachers, school staff, child and adolescent psychologists, getting an “avoidant personality disorder” diagnosis and a “clinical depression” diagnosis (bipolar is notoriously tricky to pin down) and getting put on Paxil (a medication that has been found to make bipolar symptoms WORSE).  When I was first diagnosed (apparently properly, finally), I started taking Lithium and it was like night and day.  I remember being on the phone with my family telling them that I “finally felt like myself again” – more “in control than I’ve been in years.”  Its’ not a cure-all, though. I have to remind some people in my life when I get “uppity” or “antsy” that “YES, I TOOK MY MEDICATION TODAY, DAMMIT!” 

I also occasionally take an anti-anxiety medication, sparingly, as-needed as it has an addiction-risk associated with it.  It doesn’t always work.  If I’m presented with something like acute physical pain or a fear of mortal danger, that stuff will burn off quicker than lightning, but it has helped me through a few of the periods I’ve been in of constant “grinding” anxiety.   

I recently watched an episode of “Dark Matters” on the Science Channel (I love that show… it deals with some of the darker and weirder experiments in scientific history, some of which lead to breakthroughs)… the subject of the recently-aired show being the man who invented the frontal lobotomy.  Apparently, his first victim (patient) was a severely bipolar woman whom no one cared about because she was just one of the many poor creatures locked away and forgotten about in a mental institution because people just didn’t *care* in those days.  (Before anyone thinks that Science is a pure shining good of holiness that has never been used to justify anything “bad” – take a look at the breakthroughs and backups gained from a history of experimenting upon the vulnerable – mental patients, prisoners, the poor, Black people…)   Anyway, seeing that, (and, well, anytime I watch or read something about lobotomies)….scared the poo outta me.   People were made “calmer” and “easier to manage” through the procedure… before it was found to be barbaric.  I remember a Cracked.com article on the subject describing it as “people getting their souls cut out.” 

The fact that we are so vulnerable to changes in the physicality and chemistry in our brains makes me really *want* there to be more of “we” there… deep inside, or made of our experiences or some other thing that, no, cannot be touched by a lobotomy, or by someone giving you a cocktail of drugs, or by the ravages of age, or even by yourself as you try to take the edge off.   

Whenever I read about or hear people talk about the quest to understand the Brain and to figure out just where and how consciousness arises, on one hand, I think it is a noble pursuit because we, as a species, are curious monkeys who want to understand everything and because a lot of the motivation is “helping people.”  (Even the guy who created the lobotomy was motivated by trying to help his patients).  However, the idea that “all that makes us people” can be understood makes me wonder just how long will it be between the understanding and the manipulation?  It seems to me that everything Humankind has begun to understand has been something we have tried to *control,* and if you think that those of us who live in “free” and “civilized” societies are tolerant, accepting, diverse and totally into at least the illusion of free will enough that we’d totally respect it and never create the land of ye olde goose-stepping, think again.  It seems to me that most, if not all of us, if we had the power, would mold people and the world into *our* image and “force people to be better” than we think they are.

From what I’ve read/heard, lobotomies, in their heyday, were once used to try to cure everything from homosexuality to “uppity wives.” 

It’s not so much that “we are only meat and carriers of genes” scares me for its “robotic coldness” – it scares me for the idea that someday, people in high places might be able to *program* us like robots.  I’ll happily be an unaware meat-puppet for my genes, but not for “The Man.”    

(I actually explored this in one of my bad stories here… in a magical world, no less… once people of a certain culture learned the secret to controlling people’s dying dreams/near-death experiences, they started sending people to a contrived “Hell” just for the fun of it, because they thought “certain people” deserved that kind of torment).  I think it would happen… because, while my views on individuals vary and can be quite optimistic, my view on Humanity is quite dour. The character in that had “something in him” that escaped from that brain-manipulation.  He did not know whether or not his experience was “real,” but he still had the “override,” something in him that the horrible people and the world in general *could not touch,* even as he didn’t have full control over it, either.   – The story is “Overriden” for anyone who wants to search for it here.

A lot of my stories are like that – isolated characters, non-conformist characters, people who stand apart and/or must face the pressure of the “world” around them, suffering for it and/or defying it… Or else, the world has ended and they are quite happy to be alone… as the case may be.  In other words, “World, get your nasty hands off my soul. I don’t want to be “one” if I must imagine only want you want me to imagine!”

Which brings me to another theme:  I recently blurted on a comment on Slacktivist that I’d realized why I was able to read the (first half of) the Left Behind books and be a genuine fan for a while, despite the unlikable “heroes.”  I also expressed a desire to tour Pripyat, Ukraine.  I’ve always liked apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic settings… Heck, I got to walk around in a disaster area – aka, my neighborhood – just after weather events.

Analyzing my love for this particular theme, I first go back to my childhood.  I grew up in Arizona where many a school and family trip was spent touring ancient ruins left by extinct Native American cultures.  – Anasasi ruins, Sinagua, Hohokam… Also, Old West ghost-towns with their mining-tails left.  I’d always wondered what it was like to be one of the people living in a high cliff-dwelling back in ancient days. 

What I go to in further analysis is … dark. To but it bluntly…dark, as in I think I may just be a little bit evil.  When I was reading LB, it was just after I’d gotten out of high school.  Now, as I said above, I was a kid who had “something wrong with me” without being able to pin-pointed.  Everyone knew there was “something wrong with me” and acted accordingly – that is, as beasts do when they find out someone in the herd has a defect. Frankly, I didn’t have a whole lot of attachments to people and thought “yeah, the world can totally go to Hell / Hell can happen around me and caring for only my own and maybe not even some of them because, honestly, some of my family and church-family sucks, will be the only thing on my mind.”  It’s been years since I read any of that series, and even then, I thought the protagonists did turbo-jerk things, felt sorry for some in their “party” (poor Hattie…), would skim through protagonist chapters to get to the Antichrist chapters because he was a more interesting character, and was generally “reading for the explosions.”  Looking back while reading the eviscerations on Slacktivist has me wondering why I put up with such horrible “heroes” for so long and, yeah… I think I was coming out of an “angry at the world” time that a worldwide-revenge-fantasy tale really fed. 

I like to think I’ve gotten kinder, but the fact that I love watching “Life After People” on History Channel and think “Land devoid of Humanity, what a paradise!” I realize that I still don’t have much love for the majority of my own species / my species as a whole.  Caring about people in the abstract (as in, I hope there’s a “God” who really does ultimately love us and we all get “Heaven” in one form or another, wanting an ending to war and disease…blah, blah, fluffy-fairytales…) is a lot easier than caring for people in the concrete (“You cut me off in traffic!  *Middle Finger! Middle Finger!* Crash into a ditch!”).   Or even, (“Lookit that tree that fell on that stranger’s garage! Keer-poosh!”). 

I read a self-help article about betrayal today… it made me realize that I’m so used to it in my life (between actual betrayals and people trying to “edge away from me in the nicest way possible because they cannot deal with my crazy”)… that I just kind of expect it to happen and have this notion that most, if not all people (including you and me) “hide fangs behind our smiles.”  The novel I’m trying to get published now is one that I’m not sure I actively set out to write “trust no one” as a theme, but it turned out that way… In the end, the two main characters do learn to trust each other and they have each other, but… everyone else is gone. Everyone else has either betrayed them, was against them from the beginning, or cannot help them. (A friend of theirs who was genuinely good?  Too busy holding his own severed head in a criminal’s grave by the end).  They wind up “just having each other, but maybe that’s enough” and feeling damn lucky for it, because “if you only find one person you can trust, you are fortunate.”  It’s not even complete, either, as some earlier events rocked their trust for one another…

Meh… who needs healing from the crazy?  It leads to some entertaining themes to write.  I currently have an idea I’m mulling around involving mind-uploading to an Internet-type system, the possibility of it becoming “eternal life” for some people who don’t mind being inundated by cat-macroes, but the “powers that be” who created the system are vastly disappointed that all attempts to rewrite and “cure” the mind-patterns of crazy people who’ve been uploaded have failed, and run a danger of infecting all in the system… eh. If I do it, I think it will be a tale of philosophy, flamewars, and random annoying cats.

Zed.

A short, atmospheric piece.  Also, it's as dark and bitter as boiled black coffee. 

The last human survivor of some unclear end of the world event determines himself to bury as many of the dead as he can. 

Why? Becuase I'm weird. That's why.

_________________________________________________

Zed.

The world had finally become more honest. 

Zed had always wanted more honesty in the world.  He couldn’t fathom that the result would leave him the last person to survive in it. 

How many times had he witnessed arguments between people only to keep the secret sentiment that if some were truly put out by the simple existence of some folks that they should stop pretending to be “generous” and act?  It was a cruel and dangerous thought, but one he had often when he saw the heat of spoken hatreds.  The old man knew that idle complaining and indignation were the favorite pastimes of many, many people.  The majority of his countrymen could have made it the national sport if they had not already had a beloved “national pastime.”   

At the same time, all the complaints he’d heard that “the world will be a better place,” once people of one broad kind or another were gone grew tiresome.  Even when it was proposed in a “kind” way – “No one wants to kill you, you’ll just die out eventually” – it struck him as obnoxious.  As far as he was concerned, people who had too much pride could find all kinds of creative ways to refuse to admit to themselves how cruel or condescending they were. It seemed to be a problem however people saw the world.   If there were as many versions of the truth, in the end, as there were people, Zed figured that he was finally the Emperor of Right.  It had come with a price, though, even as he’d taken no active part in making the world he now ruled happen.  He did not want his empire, no matter how free it made him feel.

“Is it a better world now?” he muttered ruefully as he looked down at a body. 

In his time, Zed thought that he was more equitable.  He was sure the world would be better if there were fewer people in it.  He did not focus his ideas of a die-off to any particular “kind.”  His thoughts of potential extermination were not directed at any race, creed, culture, and class, level of skill or intelligence.  He just thought the population couldn’t get much higher for the planet to sustain and had something of a phobia of crowds.   

He, however, did not want to live in a post-plague world, nor in a ruined post-war one. 

You don’t always get what you want in life.

Zed put the blade of his shovel into the moist earth.  He stroked his beard before digging in.  Everyone needed a purpose in life, even if one wasn’t entirely sure what one’s purpose was supposed to be.  If a man found no meaning in life, he had to make one.  Humans were obsessed with such things by their nature.  As the last human (at least the last human that he knew of), Zed had set himself to a purpose.  It was not to search for other survivors.  Zed did not care to find any, as he was fed up with his species by now.  Zed’s purpose now was to bury the dead.

He walked barren fields littered with corpses.  Closer to the target-centers, all flesh had been destroyed.  Even now, the poisons left from the Ultimate War were seeping into his system.  Even though Zed knew that he would not have the honor of a proper burial, he could give it to others.  It was easy to have respect for the dead where one lacked it for the living. 

He dug deep and wiped the sweat from his brow.  He looked to the well-dressed corpse behind him.  “You lived fine, mighty fine, didn’t you?” he said before resuming his labor.  “Mighty fine, mighty fine,” he clucked, almost singing the words.    

After Zed finished the rich person’s grave, he rested and walked some more, paying no mind to scavenging dogs that panted and staggered.  They were affected by the lingering shadow of the war, as well. 

Everything in the past world had been “kill the poor” and “eat the rich.”  The poor dogs were left to eat everything that was left. 

Zed smiled a wicked yet warm smile when he saw a man and a woman holding hands.  He’d known these people personally in life – not well, but they’d been his neighbors.  He couldn’t muster a profound sense of grief over them, but that may have been a simple matter of his sorrow having been already sapped past its limit.

He’d always found a point when he was laughing when he’d start crying.  It seems he’d found a point in crying when he’d start laughing.  Zed did not know if the amused bitterness with which he was regarding everything now was a sign that he was desperately keeping sane or if it meant he had no sanity left.

Dead fingers were intertwined in an embrace Zed would never have seen in life between the two.

The old woman wore a gold-plated pendant around her neck that was in the shape of a cross.  Zed’s a-religious aunt used to wear a big turquoise cross with a star-shape around it because she’d bought it on a trip to the American Southwest for the sake of beauty. The symbolism of the piece neither was meaningful to her nor offensive, because it merely symbolized the Southwest for her.  Zed knew, however, that unlike his aunt, that the old neighbor-woman’s adornment had been very meaningful to her, a tribal identifying mark and a bit of soul-devotion.   He’d met her at his door with literature from time to time.  He learned to pretend to be in the bath whenever he heard her distinctive three-rap knock.

As for the man, not much younger than the woman was, his obsessions had run counter to hers.  The dead man, in life, had been arrested for vandalism for the time he’d placed padlocks on all the doors of the local church.  He could not change what was in people’s hearts as much as he may have wanted to, but he could inconvenience and frustrate people he didn’t like and make his general protest known.  At least he didn’t go door-to-door…but he had gotten into a conversation with Zed once at a local café’ that Zed had just gotten bored with and walked away from.  

The two had seen the end coming and held hands.  The obnoxious clucking hen and the crashing bore were together as cold flesh.  Zed looked down at then and laughed.  “Where’s the pride now?” he asked.  “So proud of your big brain?  The same goop as hers.  So proud of your big heart?  Rotting in a still chest just like his.” 

Zed set to digging again.  Perhaps it would be just to bury them together since they had reconciled so sweetly? 

Ol’ Zed was just too cynical to be a humanist or a true humanitarian.  It seemed to him that whenever he talked to people who’d claimed to have love and cuddles for all Humankind, that “certain kinds of people” were always left out of the human family.  He’d found that people who talked big about their own equal-mindedness were inclined to include those they disliked as worthy of “love” only on the grounds of the idea that “those people can change.”  Zed had wondered if the “You’re are worthy of living or just being left alone because you might someday become like me” model was really the love, cuddles and equity that people seemed to think they were so great for crowing about.  Even when the most idealistic of persons was confronted with the idea of forgiveness and understanding issued to criminals and sociopaths… oh, it was fun to watch those smug smiles turn into constipated frowns! 

In all honesty, the people of the world had wanted each other gone for far less serious matters than criminality.  Zed had a few relatives who would smile and be polite to everyone they met on shopping trips and the like only to let their racist ideas slip out among “safe” company.  Having become quite familiar with this, he suspected that this kind of thing went on in every household on the planet, save for a few particularly idealistic families.  People always seemed to slip out of the masks they wore whenever they felt safe.  Conversely, some people felt free to let their bile flow free only when they were safely behind a mask. 

Zed sat beneath a blighted tree.  Its skeletal remains provided no shade, but he was strangely comforted by it, nonetheless.  He stretched his hurting back against its flaking bark.  People and pieces were scattered over the ashen hills before him. 

Zed had really not much cared for people.  He’d found them too irritable and too proud.

The world was pretty quiet now.  He couldn’t complain about his life as long as he had something meaningful to do.  He held the handle of shovel across his knees. 

END.