Day 15

Saturday, February 3, 2018

Soldiers came to the door today and took our TV. They gave us money for it, but it wasn’t enough not to make my dad mad. He loved that TV. It was a huge flat screen thing that my dad said made it so that he never had to go out to the movie theater again. And made him feel like he was right in his football games. He’s been spewing about the super bowl all day and how was he going to watch it now. Not that he could have watched it even with the TV since the TV isn’t good for more than watching static.

After the thing with the Statue of Liberty message on the TV channels – lots of them, evidently – Trump decided it was better for “people” not to have TVs. They are, according to the soldiers, too much of a risk for receiving Chinese propaganda. Or anti-Trump propaganda. Something. He doesn’t want us to see anything he doesn’t want us to see. So only certain places will have TVs, and people are urged to go to these gathering places for his daily messages.

Thankfully, I’ll be in school. Thank God for the little things, right?

Not that I think I believe in God, not anymore. Not the God they talk about at church, anyway. Any god that was any amount of good would not have let someone like Trump be president. The fact that so many people at church like Trump because he’s getting rid of “the gays” and “putting the niggers in their place” just proves that that god, if he exists, is not a good god.

But I was talking about the soldiers…

They had to restrain my dad while they were stealing the TV. He screamed and cursed at them the whole time. At one point, when they were taking the TV off the wall, he pulled one of his arms loose and tried to go for the guys taking the TV down. Two of the soldiers tackled him to the floor, and one of them punched him in the face and told him if he was smart he would stay down.

Mom cried.

As they walked out the door, they gave my dad $200. He threw the money back at them, yelling, “I don’t want your fucking money! I don’t want your fucking money!” When they just threw the TV in the back of their truck with all of the others, like a piece of junk, my dad ran out in the yard at them, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? Do you know how much that cost me?”

One of them pulled a gun and my dad stopped so fast he fell down. I might have laughed if I hadn’t been so scared. I don’t like my dad very much, right now, but I don’t want someone to shoot him.

Two more soldiers came up with another TV and threw it in on top of all the others, then they pulled the truck down the street a few houses, and I saw soldiers all over the street coming with TVs and throwing them in the truck. My dad stood there watching them for a long time even after they were gone. He stood in the yard and stared at the corner where the truck had turned off on when they left.

He left the money on the porch when he came back inside. He doesn’t know I picked it up. I don’t think anyone saw me get it, and it hasn’t been mentioned again. It’s in my hiding box now. For California.

My dad spent the rest of today fuming about football and the super bowl. He’s already been complaining about football since we lost the internet. huh That’s probably why he’s been so desperate for an antenna for the TV. I guess that won’t be a problem anymore.

I don’t even know if football is still going on. Not that I care. I hate football and how stupid everyone acts about it, like it’s the most important thing in the world. I can’t even talk to Dad when football is on. I think the house could burn down and he wouldn’t even notice until he was on fire.

So maybe that will be a good thing, not to have football in the house, even if I do miss being able to watch TV. Not as much as I did right at first, though. I’ve found some other things to do, even reading. I got Fahrenheit 451 from school, and it’s pretty good. I wanted The Hunger Games, but all the copies are gone, so my teacher said I should Bradbury, instead, because that was more real. I don’t know what she meant, exactly, but I saw the movies of Hunger Games, and I guess I would say Fahrenheit is more real than that. I mean, they did come take our TV which is kind of like burning the books in 451.

That’s a scary thought.

Confusing the Message for the Medium

Back in the 1950s, Ray Bradbury wrote a little short story called "A Sound of Thunder." It's the one about the dudes going back in time to hunt dinosaurs, and you should already know it. If you don't, go read it now before I spoil it. Look, it's a short story, it won't take you that long.

Anyway, the dudes are sent back in time to hunt dinosaurs. There are all of these precautions set up to keep them from disrupting the time line, and they are supposed to follow them explicitly. However, at one point, one of the dudes steps off of the designated path and, when he picks up his foot, finds he has crushed a butterfly. But it's just a butterfly, right? You'd like to think that but, when they return to their own time, they find that everything has changed.

I know! Trippy, right! That's, like, SO deep and meaningful and shit! The dude stepped on a butterfly and changed, like, EVERYTHING! Duuude! And only those dudes knew anything had changed! That's so weird, right! Duuude!

Oh, like, dude! maybe they could go back in time again to before the one dude killed the butterfly and stop him from stepping on the butterfly and fix everything. That's so trippy! Like, duuude!

The problem, though, is that the story is not about the time travel or that everyone in the group who had traveled had kept their original memories intact. That's just the medium to deliver the message, the message that even little things can have huge consequences.

However, this idea has become a staple in science fiction and time travel stories, the idea that the person who travels in time can change the past and yet retain their memories unchanged. It's bullshit, and it wasn't Bradbury's point and, frankly, I'm sick and tired of seeing it done, because it's one of the most ridiculous logical fallacies in science fiction. Probably more than anything else, it is the thing that makes me hate time travel stories, and I can almost say that unilaterally because virtually every time travel story out there uses this idea.

Probably, right about now, I'm stepping on some people's toes, because time travel stories are very popular, and people seem to love this crap.

But here's the other thing I hate about time travel stories and, for this, I'm going to use an example...

Recently, I've been watching The Flash with my daughter. (The boys have no interest in the DC TV shows (and for good reason!).) Because we watch everything after the fact, we're working our way through season two, right now. Now, as a character, I like the Flash -- If I could have a super power, it would be super speed. -- but I haven't much liked this version of the Flash. Sorry, the character in this show is NOT Barry Allen. However, it's been okay enough to watch with my daughter because she does like it. (She prefers Marvel, but she can't watch the Marvel TV shows, yet.)

It has been "okay enough" right up until we got to the episode "Flash Back." They've already done a few time travel episodes, but those were episodes -- see if you can follow this -- where time travel happened but were not about the time travel; "Flash Back" is about the time travel. And it turned a show which was "okay enough" into a show I am currently hating for its blatant and utter stupidity.

So let's break this down:
1. Barry Allen is supposed to be a brilliant scientist. To say that another way, he's incredibly smart.
2. Barry Allen already went back in time to the murder of his mother, and he refrained from saving her, something he desperately wanted to do, because of the danger of changing the past.
3. In "Flash Back," before Barry leaves for the past, they give him that whole speech, "Don't change anything, because you will be the only one who remembers how things are actually supposed to be."

So...
1. Barry is super smart, so he should know better than to tamper with the things that have already happened.
2. If Barry could withstand the temptation to save his mother, he should be able to withstand any other temptations about changing the past.
3. Bullshit!

But...
Of course, Barry can't resist and purposefully affects the past at least three times in the episode, not to mention all of the accidental/unforeseen changes.
Wait a minute...
Knowing the danger of messing with the past, Barry goes ahead and purposefully makes alterations to the timeline for which he cannot know the ramifications.
But the writers expect us to believe that
1. Barry is smart.
2. Barry would succumb to the temptation of fiddling when he didn't save his mother.

This is just... bad writing. Bad writing. Horrible, stupid writing. And it's the kind of thing that makes me hate more than 90% of time travel in popular culture. Not to mention that this particular example of it undermines the entire Flash TV series. We can now no longer trust anything in the show because the writers can just do whatever the fuck they want at any given moment and blame it on Barry having changed things in the past.

And the bigger problem?
Once you've established that your hero can time travel, you can't have him not do it without that being equally as stupid as having the time travel. Either way, the show can't move forward, now, without being dumb.

Maybe I should go back in time and explain to Bradbury the horror he is going to unleash on the world with his one little short story.

Fahrenheit 451 -- A True Dystopian

This is not the first time I've read Fahrenheit 451, but it has been, oh, about 30 years, and you can forget a lot in 30 years. I had. In fact, I had forgotten what a wonderful book it is and, actually, how relevant it remains, now, 60 years later. It's also amazing to see all of the foresight Bradbury had into the world that would be, which is now the world that is. [It was not amazing to see how much of Fahrenheit made it into Snow Crash and not in a good way. Not in an homage way. In a "I really like this and am going to take it and use it in my book" way. Like the mechanical dog. I didn't think it was possible for my view of Snow Crash to fall any farther than it already was, but Stephenson surprised me yet again. Not in a good way.]

The thing that stood out to me most is the true nature of the dystopian world of the Firemen. I'm not a fan of dystopians, but that's because I'm not a fan of current dystopians, which are not dystopians at all. Almost across the board, they are post-apocalyptic. The Hunger Games is not a dystopian story; I don't care how it's marketed or what publishers say or whatever. [And the distinction and where it went wrong is a post unto itself, so I'm not going to go into that now.] But Fahrenheit is in no way post-apocalyptic (although you could say it's pre-apocalyptic, I suppose). It's not even a government imposed dystopian. No, the Firemen and the book burning is something that came from the people, and that's what makes the book so scary.

And, possibly, real.

There are so many things in our current society that Bradbury was only glimpsing when he wrote the book, but they are so much worse, now, than then. I'll focus on two things:

1. We don't like to make people feel bad. About anything. This has been a growing trend over the past few decades with our movement toward positive thinking and making everything "politically correct," but it doesn't stop there, because we've started to stop allowing kids to experience losing. Losing feels bad. Over the past few years, there has been a growing trend in kids' sport teams (like my daughter's old softball team) to not have any losers. No scores. Just two teams of kids who are all winners. And many schools have begun adopting grade-less systems, because bad grades make kids feel bad.

In Fahrenheit, one of the reasons that people don't read is that reading makes them feel bad. As a society, the people want to have fun, and they can't get that through reading.

2. Thinking is hard work. And it makes people feel bad. If they read, they will think. If they think, they will realize just how not very special they are and how much they don't have and that makes them sad. Thinking about anything for too long becomes a bad thing; it's thinking they're really trying to get rid of, not the books. And I'm not talking about the government; I'm talking about the society. Books get shorter and shorter because no one wants to think (and we all know about the current TL;DR crap). Eventually, books become anathema to the society, so they start burning them. They burn them until it becomes a law.

I was looking over a survey recently dealing with people and whether they like to have "intellectual conversations" and 80-90% of people responding say no. I think the numbers where slightly higher for women, but that could be cultural (men want to appear smarter and women want to appear less smart than men). The most common response to the question was, "I don't like to think that hard."

That Bradbury was tackling these topics back in '53 (actually earlier, because Fahrenheit was based off of a short story he wrote in the 40s called "The Fireman") says a lot. It says that we've been struggling over the loss of books in our society for much longer than we normally think. It also says that, although these issues have grown in the decades, books, even if not physical, are still a strong force in our society, and that's a good thing. Of course, the metaphor that Bradbury is making is that the loss of books, the loss of knowledge, the loss of thought will lead man to his doom (a fiery apocalyptic doom in Fahrenheit), and I don't think that he was wrong. His warning is still as applicable today as it was then, just before the greatest wave of censorship the United States has ever seen would was across the country (something the Tea Party would like duplicate, I'm sure).

All of that aside, the language of Bradbury is superb, his language exquisite. Things like, "...under an ancient windmill that whirred like the sound of the passing years overhead." I can hear that sound in my head when I read it, and it gives the passage a weight that just isn't found in a lot of modern books. And my favorite passage:

She had a very thin face like the dial of a small clock seen faintly in a dark room in the middle of a night when you waken to see the time and see the clock telling you the hour and the minute and the second, with a white silence and a glowing, all certainty and knowing what it had to tell of the night passing swiftly on toward further darkness, but moving also toward a new sun.

It's full of foreshadowing and beauty. Very evocative. And the book is full of that stuff.

There's a reason this book is considered a classic, but many books that are no longer relevant are classics. This one surpasses those in that it is a classic and still relevant. I'm quite sure this is a book that more people should still be reading.

"I don't try to describe the future..."

One of the very first "real" science fiction authors I read was Ray Bradbury. It started with a few short stories from a literature book in middle school, stories we weren't even assigned to read and, then, Farenheit 451 which came off of our reading list but which, also, wasn't assigned. This was around the time we were studying World War II and the concentration camps and Nazi book burning and all of that stuff, so that book had a pretty big impact on me. It's the book that molded my belief that government (or other organizational) censorship is pretty much always bad. Just because I don't believe or like what you have to say doesn't mean I get to tell you not to say it, and I really believe that. Thanks, Ray Bradbury, for helping me to understand that.

He has a great quote that fits really well with 451: "I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it."
I wish there were more science fiction authors writing today that were still trying to prevent the future.

You know, I went to see him speak once. Okay, you didn't know that, but I'm telling you now. It was something like 20 years ago at this point. Well, almost. It was at Centenary College in Louisiana in the gym. Packed. He just sat out in the middle of the gym with a mic and talked for a couple of hours. Even though I don't really remember what all he talked about, he was fascinating, and I remember being pretty enthralled by it all. There was one thing, though; he talked about the story "Besides a Dinosaur, Whatta Ya Wanna Be When You Grow Up?" which is one of my absolute favorite stories by him, because I was that boy. I wanted to be a dinosaur when I grew up, and, failing that, I wanted to be a paleontologist, which I also failed at, because I found out you had to learn about rocks, and I hate rocks. I did, however, fail to get anything signed by him, because I didn't know they were going to allow signing after he spoke (especially considering the whole thing was in  the evening to begin with, and it was, like, 9:30 by  the time he finished), so I didn't take anything with me. I didn't have any editions of his books that I would have considered worthy of a signature anyway.

My favorite of his is The Martian Chronicles. And, now, I want to go read it again. And Farenheit, which my younger son just started reading a few days ago, actually. I figured I'd introduce it to him around the same age I was. I tried with my older son, but he felt it was too weird for him or something back when he was 12ish and wouldn't read it.

There have been a lot of stories I've loved over the years. A lot. But, even if I love them, most of them don't impact me at all. Don't change me. Bradbury was not one of those writers. He wrote stories that have hung around in my mind for three decades. The image of the boy and his sharp teeth and the dog being scared of him will always be in my mind. The weird reproduction of the House of Usher in Martian Chronicles has never faded. And, most of all, my belief that censorship (a fireless form of book burning) is wrong has never been brighter, but Bradbury struck the match that started that flame.

He may be gone, now, but, at least, the things that he wrote will continue on, and he can continue to light those fires in new, young minds. In my own writing career, I think, that's the very most that I hope for, that something I write will be worth going on after I'm gone. Not a Bradbury, but, maybe, just a shadow of him.

In case you don't know, he had a lot to say about being a writer. One of those things was that you jump off the cliff and figure out how to fly on your way down. It makes me wonder if that's where Douglas Adams got that idea, but that bit about flying in Hitchhiker's has always been my favorite part.

And here are a few more quotes to leave you with:

"I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true - hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don't love something, then don't do it."

"I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves - you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories."

"My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off."


And, possibly, my favorite:

"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them."

The Dream vs The World

I didn't grow up wanting to be a writer. I grew up wanting to be a paleontologist. I saw my very first dinosaur sometime around the age of three, and I was instantly captivated. It was on a gas station of all places. I'm not sure if it was meant to be ironic or not. It's hard to know those kinds of things at three. My mother has told me, though, that I was hooked from that moment on. Everything was dinosaurs. In many ways, I learned to read by reading about dinosaurs.

In first grade, our teacher asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up and, then, went around the room letting everyone answer that question. All of the usual answers came up. Fireman. Policeman. Doctor. Someone may have even said scientist. I know all of the other answers were normal because the teacher would nod and go on to the next person. Until she got to me. I said paleontologist. She told me I was making that up. We had an argument. She said if it was a real thing, then, I should I write it on the chalkboard. I'm sure she thought that there was no way I could spell a word that long even if it was a made up word. But I put the word on  the chalkboard spelled correctly. I won the argument.

All of my science fair projects while I was in elementary school dealt with dinosaurs in some capacity or another. Well, except for that one year where they actually told me I couldn't do dinosaurs again, so I did my project on the solar system. Generally speaking, I knew more about dinosaurs than anyone else at any school I was ever in, including the teachers.

Typically, kids' ideas about what they want to be when they grow up change quite a bit. I don't remember the exact numbers, but I think most kids change their minds a couple of times a year before adolescence, meaning that the typical kid has had anywhere from 6 to 12 things s/he has firmly wanted to be as a grown up by the time s/he hits middle school. I only ever wanted to be one thing: a paleontologist.

Ironically, it was middle school that changed that for me. Two things happened: Earth science and Careers class. In Earth science there was a unit about rocks. I  hated it. Absolutely hated it. And the test on rocks at the end of the unit? The test where we had a bucket of rocks on the table, and we had to name them. No, not things like Bob and George. We had to identify them. That was my only non-A grade all year. I'm not talking about just in that class, I'm talking about all year. All of my classes. Everything except the rock unit. I hated rocks. And, thus, my Dream came face-to-face with the reality of the World and the World won. Between that and a project I had to do in Careers class about the profession I wanted to go into, I realized that no matter how much I loved dinosaurs, I would never enjoy being a paleontologist.

I first dreamed of being a writer sometime in high school. It had to do with Shakespeare, whom I didn't like, at the time, but that's another story. You can blame it on Romeo and Juliet. At any rate, I remember thinking about how cool it would be to write something that people were still reading, even studying, hundreds of years after I was dead. I mean, really, how cool is that? That was the dream... to write something that people would be still be reading and enjoying, maybe even learning about in school, after I was dead.

At some point, there was a new dream. Wouldn't it be cool to walk into a book store and see a book that I wrote sitting there on the shelf. I mean, how cool is that? Right? I'm sure we all have that dream. Just like I'm sure that, at some point, all guys dream/wish they were great poets. Usually, right around the time they fall in love for the first time. For most guys, though, that's just a brief phase. heh

So, here I am, 20 some odd years later, staring that dream in the face. Just like I had to stare that dream of paleontology in the face. Because dreams are great, essential, but, often, not realistic. Or, even worse, not what we really want.

When I was a kid, paleontology was not really my dream. Dinosaurs were my dream. I was like the kid  in Ray Bradbury's excellent short story, "Besides a Dinosaur, Whatta Ya Wanna Be When You Grow Up?" Not that I actually wanted to be a dinosaur, like the boy in the story, but I thought I wanted something that I didn't really want.

After I finished my novel, I had this same sort of experience. I was grappling with the replacement dream, the dream of "wouldn't it be cool to walk into a book store, or, even, a Target or Wal-Mart, and see my book sitting there on  the shelf?" I think as writers, most of us start out with that dream somewhere in our heads. Possibly, that's the only dream we're having. The cool factor of being a name on a bookshelf. But I started delving into the data about the publishing industry to work out all of this how to get published stuff, and I didn't like what I was finding.

Now, I already knew about the huge amount of waste that publishing industry produces every year in conjunction with book stores, because I worked in a used book store when I was in college, and the owner used to rant about people bringing coverless books to him. But that was just the tip of ice berg. And all of this is a topic for another post, so I'm not going to go into it, now. As I found things out, I would comment on them to my wife. In a, um, negative way. That way she takes as me complaining when, really, I'm just commenting. She knows in my mind there's difference, but it affects her the same either way. Anyway...

Don't tell her I said this, but my wife is a smart woman. At some point in there, she said to me, "Well, what is it you want? Do you want to be published [i.e. have my book in bookstores] or do you want people to read and enjoy your books?" That's really what it comes down to, in the end: does your dream, the dream that drives you, match up to what you really want? For me, the dream of "being published" was at odds with what I really and truly actually want, that other people will read and enjoy my books.

Yes, yes, I hear you. "But being published is the way that other people will get to read and enjoy my books!" Except that's not true. I'll concede the point that it used to be true, but, now, today, there are so many other options. And most books that go through traditional publishing (and when I say most, I mean almost all), never sell 5000 copies. At this point, we could get into the huge debate over traditional publishing vs, well, whatever else, but that's also not the point. I will say, though, that, I think, we often defend traditional publishing not because it deserves defending but because we're defending our dream of being on a bookshelf in a book store.

I had to look at that dream and evaluate it. Is that what I really wanted? To be published and be able to walk into a store and point and say, "that's my book!" That would be so cool! I get it. It would be. But is it what I really wanted. No, it's not. What I really want is for people to have the chance to read and enjoy my book. On top of that, I don't want to support an industry I feel is wrong in so many ways. My Dream came up against the reality of the World, and the World won. Again. But it's okay, because that dream... it's not what I really wanted, anyway.

It's great to have dreams. We should have dreams. We need them. They fuel us. They give us goals. They keep us striving to achieve. However, we shouldn't just cling to dreams because they're our dreams. We need to evaluate those dreams on a fairly consistent basis so that we know if they are worthy of still being our dreams. Do they match up with what we really want? Do they align with reality? Which is not to say that, even, having impossible dreams is not okay. Some great things have been accomplished due to the "impossible" dreams of some people. But it's a pretty horrible thing to achieve a dream, to get there, and find out that, although you reached your dream, it wasn't what you wanted.

Here's what it boils down to: I see so many blogs from people striving, reaching, investing everything in the dream of being published, but I have to wonder if that's really what all these people really want. If it is, that's great. But when confronted with the question, and looking at it honestly and objectively, I couldn't say that that is what I really wanted. And, if it's  not what I really want, why pursue it so single-mindedly? I'll admit, that dream of being published still worms its way around in my head causing conflict, so I have to, pretty constantly, remind myself about what I really want. Make my work available for people to read and enjoy and do my best to let them know it's out there. After all, it's the same work I'd have to do even with traditional publishing. Maybe I'm the only one that this is true for.

This whole thing about evaluating our dreams isn't just for writers; everyone should remember to do this. I need to remember to do this more often. Is the dream we're pursuing, whether it's growing up to be a T-Rex or having a book published, actually the dream that we want? With all the changes in the publishing industry, right now, though, I think this is an even more important question for writers to be asking themselves. What is it you want from your writing? Does your dream of being published actually fulfill what you want?