A Club Where You Don't Want to Be a Member

 I recently purchased a major purchase, and it was a bit scary. It was a computer, and though I have yet to regret it (it’s been several hours), I have had a bit of buyer’s remorse in that I didn't know if it was the right decision. You see, when my Chromebook died (RIP) after 3 years, I just…sort of…didn’t buy a new one. I didn’t see the need. I hadn’t been writing, really. I hadn’t been writing and though it was breaking my heart, I was getting pretty resigned to it. I was understanding on a wholly new and fundamentally depressing level that I was about to turn 40 and I hadn’t written anything I liked in years, years, years!

It was a dark time. I had long ago reached the conclusion I wasn’t going to write the great American novel, I had compromised with myself that I was not going to be interviewed by the New York Times for my opinion about Stephen King’s legacy to millennials. I had walked up to that door that says “Cheesemonger” instead of “Writer” and walked through it, letting myself be okay with that fact, letting myself believe it was going to be all right. But I had also met a beautiful person that made me think that I wasn’t insufferable, that I was worth trying to be with for long periods of time. She loved me, and suddenly life was okay. It wasn’t just her, it was my getting older, less angry, less outraged at the developments of my little piece of the world. Things seemed like it would be okay without the writing. Things could move forward for me without carving into the wall every childish idea about pop culture and art and whatever skittered across my cerebellum.

But then, after about two months, I started to itch way back inside of my skull where the thoughts grow and flow, fester and boil, tumble and toil. I started thinking about all those stories from my past that I had left drying in the sun along with the cut-too-short grass that feels like hard spikes when you lay on it. The itching got worse as the sun began to slide under the horizon earlier and earlier in the day. The itch got bad enough to try and write something on a tiny pad of paper during a beach visit with my girlfriend. It got bad enough to try and patch together a piece on google docs on my phone, hacking it out with swipes and thick fingers that changed every third word into something totally wrong (who sucks a duck?). By the time Autumn (well, Late September I guess—it was 70 degrees, but the sun was down by 7pm), I was actively complaining about not writing and everything else. I had no release for it, not artful content, no one who wanted to hear it (“how about coming up with solutions?” my girlfriend asks of me). I had to do something.

And then my Aunt died, I turned 40, and my grandmother died. It’s been an ugly year so far, though it had its happy times, it’s seemed to end with abrupt confrontation that all those things that made me feel that I would be fine without writing become like so much gravel on the soft shoulder of life. My Aunt died suddenly, unexpectantly, and though I don’t think I handled it well, it allowed me to reach some sort of understanding with her husband, my uncle, who I had been somewhat estranged from for years. We didn’t talk much, we didn’t really have the gift of gab when it came to conversation yet, but we connected a least a little over the tragedy.

My grandmother was a different story—we had known she was beginning to loosen at the seams a few years ago, and talking with her at the end didn’t get traumatic until the very end, but something about her passing combined with my aunts made the itch grow. It had grown in pressure, the needle starting to get into that orange space before the red. That she died on my birthday didn’t help. I did what I needed to, I called my cousins and brother, talked it over with them, cracked a few morbid jokes, and went to dinner with my favorite person. We stopped at an apothecary and then walked home in the cool dark air, laughing and loving and reveling in the beauty that the season can give you in the city when it’s still too warm to hate the outside and still cool enough to walk holding each other. I thought of my grandmother and my aunt, who had seen their last sunrise, seen their last dark sky, had finished. I thought of how my Aunt had taken me to the movies, made me dinner when my homework woes had led me to the house she and my uncle shared, quietly loving me and caring for me when I had become too much for my parents. I thought of my grandmother reading my first real story, my first published piece, and her congratulating me for being a “real writer,” and looking at me with that strange proud love that costs so little but feels so good. I remember the practical love she had for my cousins and I as we shared beers in her kitchen, helping where we could, but mostly dodging her as she whipped up dinner in the way only someone who knows every inch of a place can.

I think of them now, the last two members of the secret club of people who cared for me and hoped I did good and knew me enough to want to see it. I don’t want to think of the club, and all those people left to join it, but it’s getting to be a longer list than I think I ever anticipated. And though I can’t say that their passing led me to get back on the wagon train of Writing (and this always has it’s spurts and sputters) but shit man, I’ve got to at least admit that it made me realize that I had to at least try. 

So here I am, trying. I'll keep going as long as I can, I don't believe they'll know it, but if I can keep trying, maybe it'll show somewhere in there that I loved them, I love them, and will love them as best I can.

How I Learned to Like Blade Runner

Forgive me, I'm a total movie person, so I'm about to geek out pretty heavily on the subject of Blade Runner.

I'm sure no one has ever talked about it before

So I was reading something by Philip K. Dick (This, actually) and suddenly, on a whim, decided to watch this "Science-fiction masterpiece" again. Now I already had very specific ideas and opinions about this movie, mainly about how much I hated it. It was slow, it was talky, it pretended to be Noir, but really wasn't, it pretended to be a mystery, but was really just a stupid action movie. Not to mention whenever anyone talks about it, all they can do is say how groundbreaking the special effects are. Not the plot, not the acting, not the ambition of ideas, not the reinvention of science-fiction priorities, just the special effects. 5 years after George Lucas dropped the weak-assed-plot-wrapped-in-eye-candy Star Wars, all people could talk about was how pretty the lights looked on the screen. But that's the whole thing. After watching Blade Runner again, I realized that the visuals (even by Star Wars standards) are okay, but the true merit of the film lies somewhere in the real meaning behind the movie, and not the movie itself.

For those unfamiliar who might still be reading, I have to spoil a part of the film to really talk about what I find interesting. The film involves androids who are true mock-ups of humans and only differ from us in that they cannot feel emotions. However, since the computers are so advanced, there is a theory that they can develop emotions naturally, and the androids in the film truly do. A set of four escape from a mining planet and sneak back to Earth (where they are illegal), and set out killing those who work in the company that actually built them.

Perhaps you're wondering why they're killing their makers, and I'm pretty sure I wondered this every time I watched it. Why would you want to kill your creator? What did he ever do but give you life, the ability to experience everything you do, every flower you smell, every steak you taste, every moment you ever live through can be sort of traced back to your creators responsibility (other than yourself, really [this isn't necessarily true with humans, but as an android, it is more so]. So why the hell would Roy Batty want to take on his creator?

Seems like a perfectly rational guy to me

Well, you see, Replicants (their name for the androids [assuming because the word Droid is Copyrighted by Lusafilms LTD. Really, go look at an add for the new Verizon smart phones and read the tiny print) can only live for four years. So he does what anyone would do when they find out they have a limited existence: he flips the fuck out. He tracks down his creators, kills them one by one, and then finds his "father"--the president of the Tyrell company--and drives his thumbs into his eyes while simultaneously crushing his skull, after it is revealed that he only has 4 years--no more.

Perhaps this seems a bit reactionary--after all Tyrell did nothing but create robots and make a slaying in the profit margins (to the point where he has God-like control and monopoly over the creation of fake people). But that's the catch, isn't it? Because Tyrell didn't create fake life--he created a consciousness that might one day learn emotions and can handle complex problems and fake a human life pretty easily. So in effect, Tyrell created non-biological life. But as an adult, shouldn't Roy Batty go through the normal 5-step process that most adults go through when confronted with grief? Well, no, after all, he's only 4. He is more intelligent, sure, than a 4 year old, but he hasn't reached an emotional capacity beyond anger, as revealed to us when he kills everyone he comes in contact with. Not only this, but he was built logically, his consciousness was built upon ones and zeros--the ultimate logical plane. So now that emotions have been developed after time, it throws those ones and zeros out the windows, or at the very least scrambles them quite a bit. So his only natural response is to kill and destroy.

[Stephen King Moment] Also, In Pet Semetary, Ellie, the oldest daughter, reacts pretty angrily when she finds her pet cat Church has died (based on a real reaction of SK's daughter when her own cat died) throws a bit of a temper tantrum (I think SKs daughter smashed some stuff in the garage), screaming "Church was my cat, let God get His own cat!" Showing even little girls don't react very well when the tenents of mortality leap up and smack us in the face. [/Stephen King Moment]

But what does that say about us? If you went to God tomorrow and said, "Look man, this Heaven place seems fine and dandy, but I'd really like a couple more years down there--I've got some shit to take care of. After all, I never made it to Ireland, I never found a woman to share my life with, I never got to see a live football game, etc," and he said "Sorry, Mate, but I've got bigger shrimp on the barbie than you," (for some reason God is Paul Hogan of Crocodile Dundee II fame in my fantasies), I'm pretty sure I'd be pissed. Maybe not drive-my-thumbs-into-your-eye-sockets-while-simultaneously-crushing-your-skull pissed, but maybe spray-paint-your-car-like-a-wife-with-an-adulterous-husband pissed.

Probably not, that's going to cost at least $350.

I guess the only real difference is that Tyrell, in his god-status to the replicants can't give everlasting life (or hell, a new battery) to Roy Batty, the story with us and God is...well, what exactly? That he won't? That we won't need it? That maybe he can't? The ambiguousness is the real lesson, as it usually is when Science Fiction takes on religion.

Anyway, these aren't my concerns (I'm cool with my beliefs as they are and aren't), but these are the concerns of the film, and somehow on this last viewing, I finally saw it. Wikipedia says this movie is multi-faceted, and I can buy that, but usually there are movies out there that mean nothing to me upon frequent viewings and then suddenly POW I get it like a lightning strike through my head, and I get the way I can think about the movie in a new way that makes it interesting whereas before it was shitty. Now if I could only do that with The Departed, I can die happy.