Tag life

What It Means to Be a Writer

Dusty Leave a comment

Scrolling through my Twitter feed when I found a link to this piece.

I walk by accident into one of London’s über-bookstores to be taken over by a very familiar type of sadness—as a child I used to feel this way when thinking about the cosmos and my own insignificant place in it. This is London’s biggest bookshop: 6.5 km of shelves, the website proudly tells us, as if this particular length and not another were a reason to rejoice. Book after book after book thrown into this worded jungle—a hoard that could be a waking counterpart to a Borgesian wet dream. Fiction books and books on writing fiction. Photography and art books and books on photography and art. And so on: most forms of expression and myriad words of meta-dialogue, some of them even justified or at least nicely edited and with colourful covers. Nothing escapes this total library: no corner of the universe or the mind is left unaccounted for. It is a hideous totality for it is an ordered totality, filtered through the minds of who knows how many marketing specialists; it is effective as a selling platform but it is a desert of anonymity for the diminished names on the shelves. Were I ever to be asked for a writing tip, something born out of this experience would be my choice: walk into any gigantic bookshop and think whether you can face being one more name lost in this desert of words. If that ideal situation proves too much to bear do something else with your time (it is of course highly likely that if you go around asking for writing tips you will never make it on print).

Okay, first of all, that parenthetical comment at the end gets you a punch in your snooty little snoot with a fist labeled Fuck You. I presume you mean that true poetry, great writing, emerges from the soul as a fait accompli, like Athena cracking her way out of Zeus’s head fully-grown; if a would-be writer is too naive to recognize this immortal truth, and to think that one could simply ASK for a way to be a better writer, then that person is doomed to less than mediocrity. Or else it is the bourgeois feeling of the “writing tips,” the oversimplified, sanitized, pre-packaged saccharine packets that show up in ten-item numbered lists on the various clickbait websites advertised on Facebook. I am more understanding of contempt for those, as I am contemptuous of people who make a living on the internet by telling people how to make a living on the internet – by running a website telling people how to make a living on the internet, which is done (Spoiler alert!) by getting people who want to make a living on the internet to buy your secret to making a living on the internet; and the people who do this always seem to call themselves “writers.” But my contempt is for the people at the top of the pyramid: not for the people down on the ground, choking on dust and sand, dreaming of a way to climb. Those people who want writing tips because they want to be better writers deserve respect for their courage in trying to find a way to get what they want; and their desire to improve, whether or not they know a good path to improvement, is admirable and not at all an indication of their potential as writers. Fuck you in the snoot, sir.

Now let’s talk about the central issue here. You’ve got two problems with this bookstore and the despair it engenders in you. One is that your words will never be truly unique, because somebody out there will say pretty much the same thing you say – or in Borges’s universe that you reference later, with his infinite Library of Babel that holds all combinations of letters and thus every possible book, one of the other volumes on the shelves will say exactly what you say. And maybe Borges was right and it does repeat in a chaotic pattern for eternity, if such a thing can be said to exist. Right? All the kilometers of fiction books, the books about art and photography and writing; all been done before, nothing is new, nothing is original. Somebody get me a cigarette and a bottle of cheap red wine, and build a Parisian basement cafe around me for a tomb.

The second problem is that you will never be the one person whose words everyone reads, everyone knows, everyone talks about; because there will always be so many others putting words on the page, that it is impossible that your words would be the ones that capture every reader at once. Particularly not if you want to capture every non-reader as well. This problem seems to be the larger one, as you speak more of being lost in the noise than you do about repeating what has already been said.

The futility of writing is something I face up to every time I set pen on paper or hand to keyboard. Why am I doing this? My compulsion to write does not occlude the uselessness of filling pages with words. I know that what I do is pointless, one more message in a bottle in a moment when everyone else around me is also casting messages adrift.

This is a poor proof. Your message in a bottle being surrounded by other messages in a bottle does not make your message pointless. Not even in the metaphor: so long as one person finds your message and reads it, and – I suppose – comes to rescue you from your desert island of despair (Perhaps your bottle message is something entirely different, something like “If you let your eyes go unfocused, a Moen kitchen faucet starts to look like a snobbish sheep with a very long snout. But it’s hard to recapture the magic once your eyes go back to normal and the sheep turns back into a faucet, so don’t waste it.” In that case, you won’t be rescued, but somebody may spend a lot of time squinting at their kitchen sink because of you, which is pretty funny, really. I’d call that success.), then your bottle was a success. You won. You did what you set out to do. You made your point. Wherefore, then, does it become pointless? Is the idea that the thousand bottles around your bottle make it less likely that your bottle will be read? This is not true for the same reason your enormous bookstore should not lead to despair. Ready for the reason? Here it is.

There is more than one person reading. (Shocking, I know. Hold onto your snoot, Buttercup.)

Let’s start with the metaphor. There are a thousand bottles with messages in them, bobbing in the water by the seashore. If there was only one person walking by, and for some reason that person had sworn a sacred vow to read only one bottled message, then your chances of being read are a thousand to one. Agreed, and that would suck. But in the – ahem – “real world” of this fantasy, that one guy wouldn’t stop at one bottle: he’d keep opening bottles. Because if he was doing it out of curiosity, out of a need to see what was written on those messages; or if he was looking for the perfect message, the one that would speak directly to his soul, then reading one message would never be enough. He’d read another, and another, and another. He’d probably try to read them all. I would. Wouldn’t you? If you saw a thousand bottles bobbing in the water with message inside them?

And if it was more than one guy on the shoreline? If it was actually a crowded beach, with tourists, and beachcombers, and dogwalkers, and a tai chi group, and a bunch of hungover teenagers wrapped in sandy blankets and the stench of wet cigarette butts? The bottles would catch all of their interests. They would all want to open their own bottle, be the first to read a message. Then they would share the messages they found with each other. They’d be diving into the water, throwing bottles back onto the shore, shouting and laughing and waving their messages over their heads. The more bottles there were in the water, the bigger the spectacle would be, and the more those people would be drawn to where the bottles were. They might even come back the next day to look for more bottles.

Are you following me, sir? Those bookstores with the kilometers of shelves? They are not only filled with books, they are filled with people. People who read books. And those people never stop at just one book. I know: I used to frequent a very similar establishment, Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon. Five floors of twelve-foot-high bookshelves, covering an entire city block. I never expect to see so many books on display in a single place in my life again. I could spend the rest of my life reading (Ah, bliss!) and not finish a single floor’s worth of books. I went there every month for the ten years I lived in Oregon, to buy books, and you know what? That place was always packed with people. With readers. Never mind the kilometers worth of shelves: how many kilometers of people do you think go through those stores on any given day? 3,000 people, on the average. [source] Average front-to-back measurement of a person is approximately ten inches; I’m an American and we’re thicc, so let’s bump that up to a round foot. (Screw the metric system, though I’ll convert for your convenience, sir.) 3,000 feet of human every day, which is very nearly one kilometer of human flesh – around 915 meters, to be precise. And that’s not even lying down head-to-foot. That means that in a week, if the London store has a similar number of visitors, the people looking at those books outdistance the books they are looking at. And I can tell you that the turnover rate for the people looking is far higher than the turnover for the books on the shelves.

There are an enormous number of books in the world, and it grows every day. It is impossible for one person to read them all, and realistically impossible that one of them will be read by all people.

But that doesn’t mean that my book won’t be read. It doesn’t mean that your words will never be seen.

I think about selling my books, which I have not yet succeeded in doing. But let’s imagine that I do so: imagine if my sales, by every measure of the publishing industry, are absymal. Let’s pretend that I only sell one thousand copies of my novel about a time-traveling Irish pirate. So lame, right? I am – what was your phrase? – “lost in this desert of words.”

A thousand people bought my book. Presumably that means a thousand people read it. (Some surely would cast it aside in disgust or disappointment, sure, but I think some of them would like it enough to share with someone else, or else resell it. Let’s just imagine that one sale equals one reading.) Think about that. I have never been in a room with a thousand people who all know me: not in the way that a reader knows at least an aspect of a writer. I have spoken to thousands of people in my life, but I doubt that a full one thousand of them cared about what I had to say: cared enough to sit down, in a quiet room, and spend hours just listening to my words, thinking about my thoughts. Hearing me. If I could sell just one thousand copies of my book, then I could achieve that. So what if at that same time a million people were listening to Stephen King, and ten million were listening to Kim Kardashian? So what if the world is larger than I can speak to at once? So what if all I can have is one small corner –with one thousand people listening to me?

Isn’t that enough?

Think about it in terms of time. I don’t know how many hours it takes me to write a book, but the pirate book was finished in about a year, so let’s use that. It’s a pretty fast read, I think; someone could finish it in maybe ten hours of reading at a leisurely pace, maybe even less. If a thousand people spend ten hours reading my book, then the year of my life spent writing it (And of course the vast majority of that year was spent sleeping, working, eating, singing in the shower, watching TV, playing The Sims, et cetera) has turned into ten thousand hours of other people’s lives spent – on me. There are 8,760 hours in a year (And 525,600 minutes), so even if I had spent every single one of them working on my book, that time spent is balanced by time spent reading my book if only a thousand people were to read it. More than balanced.

So the question is, what more could you possibly want?

If the only thing that would make writing worthwhile, that would give this endeavor a point, is if every single person on Earth read your work, and only your work, then I agree that writing would be pointless. But I can’t fathom a writer, a real writer, being that childish, that selfish, to think that the world must revolve around your work and your work alone. I mean, the only cultural phenomenon with that impact is Wyld Stallyns. Granted, you’re not them, and neither am I. And that stings a bit, I’ll bet. Yeah, it does me too.

I’ll comfort myself just thinking about how easy it would be to get a thousand people in the world to read a decent book. Shit, if all I want is readers, I could offer it for free and get that many readers without even trying. You wrote this obnoxious angsty piece of snobbery, and I read it, and then spent – mmm – more than an hour responding to it. See? The time you spent on this crud then earned for you this time spent out of my life. Time I could have been reading, ya selfish bastard.

And honestly, I think this is enough time spent on you. I am sorry that your life is so empty and meaningless, and sorry that I threw a couple of hours of my life into your black hole of an ego. Do us both a favor: gain some perspective, will you? Thanks.

(I have to say: the rest of the piece has some valid points about marketing on social media, and about the democratization and banalisation [His word] of writing that has occurred through the internet. There is some good thought here. If there hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have read all the way to the end, and then taken the time to write a response. I don’t disagree with everything he says. Just the central premise. I dream of having a thousand readers, and I am absolutely sure that, even in a world inundated with voluminous writers of every imaginable quality and a limited number of readers with a limited number of books they will read, still: I will hit that mark. And it will be worth it.

(Thank you for inspiring me to write this, sir. Now pull up your fucking pants.)

Tied Down at the Edge of a Cliff

Dusty Leave a comment

We say we have to get me out of teaching. We say it often, laying in bed at night before we turn the lights off, when we usually turn to face each other, heads on pillows, and sort of put a punctuation mark on the day – sometimes an exclamation point, sometimes a question mark; but usually just a comma or a semi-colon, because the end of the day is almost never an ending, almost always a brief pause for breath before we go on with the next clause, the next day, separate from the last but still connected – always connected.

My life is a run-on sentence. And I don’t know how to stop it.

No: I know how to stop it. (And I’m going to leave this metaphor behind now, this navel-gazing grammatical pun. Jesus, Dusty. Get a life.) I could change my life quickly if I leave everything behind, including my wife and my pets, a sentence that took me several tries to actually write. I could change everything if I left everything. I do what I do so I can earn what I earn so we can live how we live: as we. But our bed, where we lay at night together, is actually the ground at the top of a cliff. Everywhere I go, I am at the top of this cliff. At night we lay together, our heads heavy on the pillows, and we look into each other’s eyes and I tell her how much I love her and she smiles at me and I love her more, and then we kiss goodnight, and roll over – and I stare off the edge of the cliff.

The cliff is the edge of my world. I don’t mean the end of life; I’m not talking about dying. I’m talking about where the place I am, the place I live, where it ends, abruptly, startlingly, dangerously. Honestly I have pretty much always stayed near that cliff’s edge, in various ways. But never too near: because I am a coward, I think. And though every night I look out into the open air beyond that cliff, to actually jump off that cliff and land somewhere entirely different – or perhaps instead of landing, take flight and sail across the sky, which is how I imagine it would feel to be a writer – I would have to leave behind everything I am now, everything that is this place where I live, this life where I live, where I sleep with my head heavy on my pillow and my eyes straining to look out farther but tired, so very tired, with the looking; but behind me (or no: before me, between me and the cliff, not to protect me but because she is even closer to the edge of that empty space that might hold a new life) is the best woman in the world, and at our feet lies the sweetest dog I’ve ever known, and nearby are a bird and a tortoise who need me, who are tied to me, who are weighing me down. And none of them – not even the bird, sadly – can fly.

Let me be clear: it is not my wife’s fault. She never asked me to get this job, never demanded a larger home, a larger paycheck, health insurance, stability, all the tethers of the modern world that tie me down at the top of the cliff, safe and immobile, able to turn my head and look out to eternity, growing and throbbing out there beyond the fall to the bottom. She doesn’t demand them of me now, never tells me when I talk of leaving teaching that I can’t do that because the family relies on my stable income and health insurance. She has never said that once. She never would. She lies with her head on her pillow, holds my hand, her fingers exploring mine as she imagines drawing my hands (as she imagines drawing everything), and says, with her eyes sad, “We have to get you out of teaching.” Now that she has tethered herself down right next to me – but closer to the edge of the cliff than I am – she says “We have to get ourselves out of this.”

Then we talk about how we can be free, mobile, able to pick and choose what we do with our lives, if we just buckle down and teach for three years and pay off all of our debts. Maybe four years. Maybe five. Tethered down right at the edge of this cliff, looking out into space, lying with our heads heavy on the pillow, holding hands.

I’ve never jumped off a cliff. I jumped off a swing into a river, once, but I landed flat on my back when I tried an ill-advised backflip; it hurt. I don’t remember if I went back on the swing again after that, but probably not; I’m a coward, and I always have been, and that’s why I’m still at the top of this cliff, near the edge but not on the edge. I’m looking out on this vista, this panorama, of wide open space, and I’m – I don’t know, shouting over the edge? Maybe whispering, blowing words like soap bubbles, glittering and evanescent as they drift pointlessly free? But I’m still here, on solid ground, holding on for dear life even though I am nowhere close to falling.

I should be falling. If I was a writer, I’d be falling; if I was falling, I’d be a writer.

Instead I am – yes, I know it. A spider. Remember the tiny ones at the end of Charlotte’s Web, how they spin out a single thread of silk and throw it up into the wind, letting the air lift and carry them away? That’s how I want to go out over the edge of the cliff; not free fall, not dropping down and just hoping that something will catch me, though I’m not sure now if that’s because I’m a coward or just because I don’t care for the thrill, never have, never liked adrenaline, never wanted to feel alive because I almost died. I hate stories that rest on that idea: that life is either risk or boredom, that everything that is lovely or pleasant or simple becomes blasé, because I feel like if I could live forever, I would just read all of the books that I won’t have time to read, and play all the video games, and walk over every inch of the Earth, and why would that get boring? I don’t believe that it would. And so I want to drift over the edge of the cliff, not plummet. So here I lay, throwing out single threads of silk, gossamer words, hoping that one of them will catch the wind and lift me free and sail me away through the sky – and my wife and our family with me.

I’m growing roots. I have been for years, though I frequently pull them out of the ground and let them wither and die. I don’t need the roots, though I don’t hate them; that’s probably why I let them grow, and maybe that’s why I haven’t gone over the cliff, because I don’t mind the slow growth, don’t mind drifting down into the earth instead of up into the sky. Maybe if there was a way to sink below the surface, grow a taproot large enough and deep enough and then pour myself down instead of drawing nutrients up, follow my own growth into the deeps, and then tunnel down through the cliff from behind its face, back behind the bones, down and down and down until I came to the bottom and then slid out from between the teeth, out with the breath of the earth back into the open air. Then I’d be in a new place, and not at the edge of a cliff looking out; then I would have changed, would have moved.

But I would have never flown. Never left the ground. Is that, could that be, what it would mean for me to be a writer? To move through the earth to new ground? Does that metaphor make sense?

Is this the thread that will lift me? Or the one that I can crawl down, like Dante down the leg of Lucifer, crawling down until suddenly he was crawling up, out of the depths of Hell to the mountain of Purgatory? But see, he was carried on that final voyage out. He was on a mission from God. All he had to do was hold on and wait.

I don’t think I can just hold on and wait. I think I need to move. I don’t know if I can fly and take my family with me – and I won’t leave them behind. There is nothing that would be better without them. I don’t even know why I say it, other than I know that most people who jump off the cliff, who make themselves suddenly into writers (or into flattened, shattered remains), go it alone. I don’t want that. I don’t think I ever have, but I know I don’t now. So the question is: do I keep throwing strands of silk into the air? Do I stitch them together into a single sail, and just wait for a wind great enough to lift me, and my wife, and our heavy heads from off of our pillows, and we can grab the bird and the dog and the tortoise in passing and carry them with us? Could there be a wind great enough to lift a sail large enough to carry us all aloft?

Or do I try to find a new way, this magic that will turn the earth beneath me malleable, let me alter the flow and the path of all things so that I grow in the wrong direction, turning the wrong into right? Honestly, I don’t even know what this metaphor means: would I write for the local scene, find local websites, write for the Tucson newspaper? Is that what it means to go down your own taproot, to go deeper into the earth, to become a writer by digging down? I don’t know. I want it to be magical, somehow, to be an alteration of the paradigm, a new path, a new alchemy that turns stone into water, just for me, so that I could swim through something that can’t be swum through – but though I can imagine that, I don’t understand it, I don’t know how I could do that, if it could be done. I don’t know if I’m creative enough to do it, if I have the wizardry to break the laws of nature. But since it took me four tries to actually type the word “wizardry,” I’m going to say the omens are bad.

Maybe I should try to climb down the cliff. Grind it out, slow and steady, keep working, keep writing, keep moving; no magic, just constant effort, every moment testing my strength to the limits, every moment hyperalert, looking for that next ledge, that next handhold.

I don’t know. I’m 42, and I haven’t started climbing yet. I might already be too tired just from lying at the top of the cliff. Lifting my head off that pillow every goddamn morning. Looking out at the expanse of sky and thinking about how wonderful it would be to sail away. Spinning my silken threads, my tenuous sails – watching them break and fall, or vanish off into the ether without me. And here I lie.

I don’t know how to fly.

Update.

Toni read this. We talked about it. And having talked to her about it, the answer is clear: we will be alchemists. We will swim through the Earth, and see where we end up.

I consider the metaphor of flight to represent getting published by a traditional brick-and-mortar company, selling books out of Barnes and Noble, the whole Best-Selling Author bit. I’d still like to fly. I’m going to keep sending up streamers of spidersilk, hoping that one will catch just the right breeze and lift me up into the sky. I would like that. For Toni, the same metaphor probably applies to suddenly hitting it big in the art world: becoming a name, being sold in galleries, getting commissions for public art, all of that. And that would be swell, too.

But that’s not the goal. Neither is the goal a safe and sure and trying descent.

No: the goal is to try something new. We plan to write and illustrate and sell graphic novels, and illustrated novels. I plan to go back to publishing a serial novel, which will be available as enriched and expanded e-books, featuring extra stories, back stories, side characters, and so on. Maybe we’ll run a book store. I will publish my novels, and she will sell her art – and we will see what we are capable of and where we can go. What new places can we discover, and explore? What exactly is down there, underneath us? Could it be even more intriguing, even more wondrous, than the sky above?

We will never jump off the cliff. And we will never leave each other behind. (Nor the pets.)

We choose – magic.

Take Your Time

Dusty 2 Comments

If I could pick the time I would live in, I would go back a hundred years, and live then. I would be born in 1874, and would now be in 1916. That would be my time.

I decided this a while ago, when I realized that all of my professional aspirations would have served me just as well in the early 20th century, if not better than now. As a schoolteacher then, I wouldn’t have been paid much better than now; but I would have gotten more respect, I think. And I could have paddled my students when they made me mad. More importantly, being a professional writer was, I think, easier then, as there were more people who read, and thus more room for people who wrote. I would be happy continuing on with teaching if I could also have my work published and purchased and read, and I think that would have been simpler back then. There’s also nothing that would have stopped me from owning a shop that sold books and coffee in 1916.

But there are other factors that keep adding to this. I’m healthy, so I don’t care much about the loss of modern medicine; I hate driving fast and I’m not a fan of flying – but I love trains and I would love to take a ship to Europe or the Caribbean. I actually like wearing suits, especially with vests, and hats; though I admit the nonexistence of air conditioning would be tough. I don’t use the telephone very much; I prefer letters. I’ve actually tried to get people to join a written correspondence with me, but nobody keeps it up.

Nobody has time.

I would like to have time.

That’s the main thing, actually. I mean, sure, I like writing on a computer. I like video games. I enjoy having reliable electric power, and recorded music, and broadcast television, and things made out of plastic. Knowing what I know about politics and history, I would not want to live through the World Wars or the Great Depression or the epidemics of influenza and typhoid and smallpox. Though I do wish that the wackiest political candidate now was Teddy Roosevelt, with all his crazy ideas about national parks and the value of exercise. I could not imagine my life without my wife, and if I were alive a century ago, she would not be; if she were, her life would be far more miserable, as a woman without equal rights, or the opportunity to get into art school and do what she loves (though knowing my wife, she would have found a way even back then to be an artist). And of course, she probably would have died in childbirth, as most women did, and I would give anything up to be sure that didn’t happen, including living today in this loud, fast, illiterate world.

But if we can step away from that reality – and since we are talking about traveling in time, we’d better – and just talk about the general shape of life, then yes, an argument could be made for the late 19th/ early 20th century over the 20th/21th. (A note: my word processing program didn’t recognize “21st” as a designation requiring the letters be turned into superscript; but “21th” was no problem. Technology.) And it’s largely because of time and speed. Here – I’ll try to keep it short, so it doesn’t take too much of your time.

I like to take my time. I like moving slowly, and being thorough. Even in the video games I enjoy, I prefer the ability to wander around and explore, the opportunity to re-do a task until I get it right, the power to decide when I go on to the next challenge; I prefer long strategy games and life simulation games because of that. I love puzzles. I like reading books more than short stories, though I enjoy reading an entire newspaper or magazine. I prefer walking or riding my bike over driving. I like the opportunity to think while I am doing other things, and so I like activities that I can pause to consider. It’s the biggest problem my students have with me as a teacher: we take forever to get through a piece of literature, because I’m constantly stopping them to talk about what we just read. They want to get through stuff, and I want to understand every little bit of it.

But that’s also what makes me a good teacher. And it’s what makes me a good writer, and a good reader/reviewer: I take my time. I think about things as I go. I don’t write a lot of drafts for most of my work, but it’s because I think about everything I’m going to say before I say it, and then while I’m writing it. I’ve been thinking about the general shape of this piece for a couple of weeks now, though it has morphed from a screed about Harambe memes, to a rant about Twitter, to this. Which I have started, stopped, and restarted once already.

I can go fast. And I can see the appeal of it. I’ve mowed a lawn using both a push mower and a motorized one, and the push mower is far more annoying; I was only able to do it because I could have music piped directly into my ears through an MP3 player or a radio with headphones. I love being able to write these pieces and then put them instantly in front of a potentially world-wide audience. I do like microwaves and hot water heaters and instant coffee machines.

But generally speaking, the appeal of going fast is to have more time for other things; and if those things are made to go fast as well, then life becomes one frantic screaming headlong tumbling rush. We turn into Alice falling down the rabbit hole: out of control, no idea which way is up or how much time is actually passing, and we never touch the sides, nor reach bottom. We get lost in the chaos, without anything to hold onto. There has to be something that we take slowly, something that we enjoy spending as much time as possible doing; then there is a reason to get through the rest of the day quickly, in order to spend more time doing that one slow thing. The problem with our modern world is that we seem to not have that slow thing, most of us: most of my students, children of their time, simply spend many many hours doing quick things: they scroll through Facebook and Twitter and Instagram; they text and chat and IM constantly; they play videogames all day long, frequently hopping between two or three different games at the same time, playing simultaneously on the computer and on the phone; they spend hours watching videos, everything from full-length movies to six-second Vines. While they are scrolling and chatting and playing games. They spend so much time doing things quickly that everything feels rushed, everything feels late, everything is done at the last minute and under high pressure. They don’t even take the time to sleep.

I would rather sleep. I would rather wait for things – give me a book, or a piece of paper and a pen, and I can wait forever. And in terms of doing things quickly to get to other things, I’d rather not do those things at all. My goal in life is not to accomplish everything when I am young so that I may have a long quiet time at the end of my life; my goal is to avoid or eliminate all of the things I don’t want to do, so I can spend all of my life doing things I want. I haven’t been able to do that yet. But I’m still working on it. I think I’m making progress. Slowly.

I’m not very good at going fast. So I do have a Twitter account, and I do Twit (If it was Tweeter, then the verb would be Tweet; but it’s Twitter. Hence.), and I enjoy it; but not enough. I only Twit once a day or so, most days, and so I don’t get a lot of followers. The same goes for this blog: I can’t find a subject worth talking about at length every day, and I don’t like posting short quick things, and so I don’t get a lot of followers. But that’s okay: because I would rather have readers. I would rather post something at length once a week or so, that a dozen or so people actually read, than post a new sentence every hour and have ten thousand people scroll past it and smile when they do. I’d rather have comments than likes. I’d rather have people come back to read more of my writing than have a post of mine go viral. Don’t get me wrong, I like the likes, and I’m grateful that there are people who think me interesting enough to actually follow on this blog or on Twitter; but if I could trade all of that for some published work, or a weekly column, even if it was in a small newspaper or magazine, I would do it in a heartbeat.

There: that’s something I would do quickly.

I had an interesting week on Twitter, which was part of the impetus for this blog. I live-Twitted several cracks about the debate between Clinton and Trump on Monday night, and that was fun. I do have some followers, mostly my students, and they get a huge kick out of me being on Twitter – which is an ego boost, I will readily admit. Though it sort of freaks me out that the response can sometimes be instantaneous: I have one student that, when she likes or retwits my twits, she does it within a minute of my posting it. It makes me nervous: because sometimes the speed of something like Twitter leads to bad judgment, or truly terrible typos and Freudian slips and malapropisms that may never be lived down. As we learned from the 3am version of Mr. Trump this past week, as well. I’ve been badly burned by my rapid writing, because the posts that nearly got me stripped of my license to teach in Oregon were done without much forethought, in the heat of the moment, and that ended up badly; too, the actual report that led to my blogs being discovered came from a Facebook post. So social media makes me nervous. I like the ability to write what I want to say, and then step back and think about whether it is a good idea to say it or not; there’s a blog post about Hillary Clinton sitting on my computer, where it will stay, because writing it got me too annoyed and I turned much too insulting. But there are no drafts for Twitter. I post things, and I have deleted things after I posted them; but if they already got retwitted, then it’s too late.

Then on Wednesday, one of my favorite authors, Christopher Moore, twitted a Trump joke: “Yo daddy so orange, they push his face in the dough to make jack-o-lantern cookies.” And I quickly twitted back “Yo daddy so orange they use his dandruff to make Tang.” I was ecstatic when I saw Mr. Moore liked and retwitted my post. For a moment I thought it might go viral, or that I’d get a whole swath of new followers; but really, the excitement was that Christopher Moore, whose writing and especially whose humor I have tremendous respect for, liked my joke. That was nice. So on Friday, when I saw one of my favorite comedians, Patton Oswalt, twitting back and forth with several other people about the Alt-Right version of Star Wars – jokes about the Sand People being illegal immigrants and Han Solo not being a real hero because he was captured, and so on – I thought of a good one, and I twitted it to Mr. Oswalt. Hoping for the same response.

But I didn’t get it, because, it turns out, someone else had twitted the same joke (Darth Vader: “You know, if Leia wasn’t my daughter, I’d probably date her”) ten minutes before I did. That person got hundreds of likes and retwits; I got none.

That’s too fast. In ten minutes, my joke went from funny and appreciated, to derivative and ignored. In other words, to make that joke and be successful at it, I would have had to be ten minutes faster – most easily accomplished by obsessively following Twitter feeds and looking at trends and hashtags. But that is not something I want to do. I don’t want to spend hours jumping from thought to thought to thought, cudgeling my brain into coming up with something funny or interesting, in less than 140 characters (Because you have to leave room for the hashtag!), faster than other people can come up with it. If I was already famous then I would have an instant audience and I could twit things at my leisure that they might appreciate; but then I run the risk of twitting idiocy and having all of my followers instantly know about it and spread it all over the twitterverse. Like Mr. Trump. Or Jaden Smith.

I would rather take my time. I would rather think of something original to say, or create a new perspective on an old problem, than follow trends. Particularly because: had I been the one who came up with the joke ten minutes earlier, and gotten the likes and retwits, I would have been forgotten ten minutes later, when the next person thought of the next funny joke. I don’t want to be that fast, and I don’t want to be forgotten that soon.

I think that’s the impetus behind the Harambe memes. Now, to be clear: while some memes are funny, I generally can’t stand them. They represent the lowest common denominator, which is why they spread so widely and catch on so quickly. Sometimes they’re genuinely funny – like some twits in the twitterverse – and frequently they are cute, because cute is one of the lowest common denominators; but they are always the worst form of the argument, when they are about serious topics, and they are always reductive and simplistic and generally obnoxious to one group or another. My favorite use of memes is in messing with my students: because they don’t expect me, their middle-aged English teacher, to use memes, so when I do, there’s a disconnect that I find more amusing than the meme. But for most meme-people, the humor is unpredictable: it’s impossible to say which meme will catch on and which will not. There are people whose lives online revolve around making memes; some of them are good at following and capitalizing on trends; some are good at making trends; all of them are stuck in an endless cycle of rapidity, catching onto jokes that rise and fall in instants, and the fame that comes with originating the joke following the same arc. A year or two ago it was a frog on a unicycle with the tagline, “Here comes dat boi – Oh shit waddup!”

Then it was another frog – no reason in the meme world – named Pepe, with a depressed look in his half-lidded eyes and his downward curving lips (He has had a recent resurgence when it came to light that Pepe is now popular with those who make vile racist memes, because they dress Pepe up as the minority they wish to denigrate. Yup. Funny stuff.).

 We have also gone through a caveman Spongebob, several images from a video of Shia Lebeouf, far too much of the wrestler John Cena, and recently a strange obsession with Rick Harrison, the star of Pawn Stars.

At one point it was Harambe. The gorilla in the Cleveland zoo who grabbed and held a child who got into his enclosure, and was shot and killed by zookeepers trying to protect the boy. It was a sad story that rapidly caught the attention of the country, particularly online, because it hit so many buttons: children’s safety and violence and the treatment of animals.

Harambe memes caught on partly because the biggest audience for memes is teenagers, and teenagers revel in mocking other people who take things too seriously, which is how the outcry over Harambe was seen – people weren’t concerned with the Syrian refugee crisis, or about the murders of African-Americans committed by police officers, they were concerned with the death of one gorilla – and partly because one meme-creator had an idea: a stupid and crude and absurd idea; and so of course, that’s the one that caught on. The idea? Men flashing their genitals as a tribute to the gorilla. The tagline was “Dicks Out For Harambe.”

Yeah: it’s kind of funny. Put in the right absurd context – a job interview, a political appearance, a Christmas special – the absurd notion is amusing. Because it touches on a taboo that people often find absurd anyway, the issue of public nudity, and also touches on the absurd obsession that most men have with their own genitalia, it got even more traction. And it had its usual run as the most popular meme of the moment. I’m sure whatever meme-maker came up with the line had a sharp uptick in followers or likes or reposts, and I’m sure he or she (Probably he) was gratified and possibly enriched by the increase in ad revenue. The popularity has ended now – thankfully – and I rarely see “dicks out” jokes any more. There was a brief resurgence when another great ape, the gorilla Bantu, died owing to a mistake in a medical procedure, but the slogan “Balls Out for Bantu” was apparently too derivative even for meme-fans, and it never caught on the same way. One of my former students twitted a picture to me, of a poster that some (probably apocryphal) English teacher had on a classroom wall that showed a gorilla’s face and the slogan “Books out for Harambe,” which he said I should put on my wall, but when I told him that there wasn’t enough No in the world (A dick joke AND a meme joke? Oh, sign me up!), another of my students took my side: evidence that the meme is largely dead. When even teenagers don’t think you’re funny any more, there’s no place left for you in the meme world.

But I still see Harambe memes. Now they have changed. Now they are about the gorilla being remembered; now the absurdity is in someone crying over the idea that Harambe’s death will be forgotten. Again, mocking people for taking things too seriously, or at least the wrong things too seriously – but now it is without the lowest common denominator. No dicks in this joke. So this one is less absurd, which makes me question why it is so popular.

So I wonder: how much do people who make memes, who spread memes, worry about the thought of being forgotten? How much of this latest spurt of temporary fame is about this genuine fear? In a world where the attention span covers approximately six seconds or so, where this week’s star is the “Damn, Daniel” guy and next week’s star is Rick Harrison and the “Damn, Daniel” guy is gone from people’s memories forever – what is the point of trying to reach the top? The second you do, you fall right back off, and you probably never make it back up again.

That’s exactly what I’m talking about. (And I realize now that I have gone on longer than I intended; I would apologize, but I’m never actually sorry for using a lot of words) When life is about going as fast as possible, then life, too, goes as fast as possible – which is really damn fast. And that may be exciting, but it also gets us to the end before we know it. And whatever that end is, whether it is obscurity or nothingness or even eternal paradise: it won’t be exciting, and it won’t be fast.

I would rather write than trend. I would rather be read than laughed at. I would rather read and consider than get through things. I would like to take my time.

Who Goes There?

Dusty Leave a comment

I am an atheist: start from there. There is no God, no higher power, no consciousness directing the universe. Everything that happens, happens because of random chance, multiplied by time. The essential symbol of my worldview is the Big Bang: everything that exists came from an explosion.

So then how do things make sense?

How does an explosion create a stable planet, in a stable solar system, at the Goldilocks distance from the sun, with liquid water and an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere? With a tilted axis and an oversized moon allowing for seasons and tides? How does an explosion, nothing more than energy added to matter, create life? How does that life continue to exist long enough for evolution to take place, which eventually leads to – me? How can I be sitting in my air-conditioned living room, next to my dog (who is lying on his back waiting for tum rubs [He gets a good skritch every time I pause. Like now.]), typing these words in English on my laptop computer, drinking coffee with half-and-half and stevia and and cinnamon-flavored honey – because of an explosion?

People of faith see the answer to these questions clearly: the answer is God. We are surrounded by miracles, and there is no clearer evidence of the existence of a benevolent creator. People have been reaching that same conclusion independently for tens of thousands of years, all the way back to the people who were buried with Earth Mother figurines, and those who raised Stonehenge or made the heads on Easter Island. We look at the amazing world we live in, and we assume it had to come from someone or something divine.

But there is no God: that is the starting assumption. So then how?

I hear people say, “Let go, and let God.” I mock it, because I find the idea of surrendering free will, of one’s own free will, inconceivable. I hate being told what to do. I hate trusting someone else to figure things out for me. If I could, I would grow my own food, fix my own car, whittle my own furniture. I have been struggling recently because in the upcoming school year, I have been instructed to use a pre-determined curriculum, one detailed and prescribed down to two-minute intervals, scripted and designed and carefully laid out in every way. Oh, I’ve been told that I can, and should, adapt it to my own preferences; but my preference is to chuck the entire thing out of a moving car, preferably into the midst of a brawl between switchblade-wielding badgers. I don’t want to teach what someone else tells me to to teach. I have never liked that, and I have never done it: other than some small things here and there, an idea for a lesson, a single handout, I have never followed anyone else’s plan for a class (Except for one: I taught David Schmor’s Speech class, pretty much start to finish; his assignments, his lectures, his grading methods. But that says more about how well David designs a class than it does about my predilections. We’ll call it the exception that proves the rule.). Whenever problems arise in my life, I handle them, either by myself or with my wife by my side: two of us against the world. I don’t like the idea of relying on anyone else: certainly not on God, whom I don’t believe in and wouldn’t trust if I did.

But how can I do that? How can I create everything I do as a teacher out of my own head? I was a terrible high school student – skipped or slept through many of my classes, never did the work, passed because of a good memory and a love of reading, and with the mercy of more than one teacher. I didn’t learn anything in my teacher-preparation program, except from the time I spent student teaching – which I largely did on my own; that is to say, I got advice and feedback from my master teachers, but I designed the lessons, I taught the material, I graded the work. I read pedagogical textbooks with an eye so jaundiced it’s nearly blind; whenever I take any teacher training workshop, I either don’t pay attention or I don’t do what I’m told. So how on Earth am I a good high school teacher? Where did that come from?

It’s nearly the same thing when I write. I have never really studied writing, other than as literature I have read; I’ve never had a writing mentor. I don’t edit: the first draft is pretty much the final draft. I don’t think much about what I’m writing in advance; I plan out my novels pretty extensively, but my blogs? I just pick a theme, think of an opening, and go. When I hit the last sentence, I post it On top of that, I’m generally pretty damned lazy, and unfocused: I am one of those people who pick up new hobbies and put them down again right away, because I’d rather be playing video games. How did I get to be a good writer? Where did this ability come from? Not from my parents, who are both intelligent but non-creative. I have writers in my family tree, but are creativity and writing acumen really genetic?

The miracles that surround us aren’t just natural: this morning as I stood in my shower, hot water streaming over me, sluicing away the shampoo and soap, looking at the tile walls, glass window, wood and brick house, electric lights, municipal water supply and sewers, I thought about: how could people possibly create all this? Particularly what has been added to our world, in terms of capability, of convenience, of complexity, all in the last century? A hundred years ago, if I had the running water (Never happen on a teacher’s salary then – but would I have been a teacher 100 years ago?), it wouldn’t have been hot, and I wouldn’t have had the electric lights, the coffeemaker, the refrigerator (Maybe an icebox), the computer, the dog adopted from the animal shelter. Just 100 years ago. My grandparents were there. How have human beings been capable of creating all of this? Did we have guidance? Divine inspiration? Can we create because we were made in the image of a creator? And if not (Not, indeed), how?

When one of the millions of the faithful “lets go and lets God –” what happens? Who goes there? Things don’t stop happening, and the lives of those who put their faith in God do not fall apart in a spectacular collapse; things often work out just fine. It’s like someone’s guiding them, making things work out. So if it isn’t God (And it isn’t. Spoiler alert: this writing is not leading to my spontaneous conversion.), then who is steering the ship? Starting from my basic assumption of atheism, of a universe without a creator; who or what makes things work out for the best?

My wife and I have adopted two dogs from shelters, one in California and the second here in Tucson. Both of our dogs have been absolutely lovely: very smart, very loving, almost no trouble to train and care for. In neither case could we possibly have predicted, when we chose them and brought them home, that those dogs could have been the sweet, wonderful companions they both proved to be. And we frequently ask ourselves: How did we get so lucky?

I’ve been reading The Watchmen, and one of my favorite moments in the book is when Dr. Manhattan, a man-turned-divine being who is trying to decide if he should save corrupt and fallible humanity, tells his former (and very human) sweetheart that he longs to see a thermodynamic miracle: an event so unlikely that is is effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously turning into gold. He says that he has realized, in talking to her, that he is in the presence of one such event: her. The chances of her parents coming together to make a child; of one particular sperm out of hundreds of millions uniting with one specific egg; of that zygote’s survival to become a child; of her upbringing and life experience turning her into the woman she is, and of her meeting and loving (and being loved by) Dr. Manhattan, a blue-skinned superbeing who can see neutrinos – that’s a miracle. Every human being is a miracle, Manhattan says; and he decides he will save humanity because of that.

I’ve used a similar example with my students. I met my wife Toni at Cabrillo Community College in Santa Cruz, California. She worked in the bookstore for her workstudy, and I had a job one semester taking ID photos, in the cafeteria upstairs from the bookstore. The IDs were $8, and so I always had to get change; I went down to the bookstore to get it. That’s how we met.

But look at the probabilities involved. Toni didn’t go to college right out of high school; like me, her academic transcript was spotty at best. She chose to enter the world of employment, where she did quite well for several years. She decided to leave a perfectly acceptable middle-class lifestyle, one that would have satisfied millions of Americans, and go back to school to study art. She decided to start her education at the community college; she decided to go full-time, and leave her job, which is how she ended up working in the bookstore. If she had gone to school earlier, or later, or if she’d kept her full-time job or gone to work in the registrar’s office instead of the bookstore, we’d never have met. Me, I wanted to go to UCSC because I wanted to study creative writing, and because my father, who worked at Stanford at the time, had a friend who taught physics at UCSC, who told my father, who told me, that they had a good creative writing program. He showed me the town on one visit, and so I decided to go there. But my grades were terrible, and so I couldn’t get in to UCSC. But rather than choose one of the thousands of other schools – rather than stay in Massachusetts, where I grew up – rather than join the Peace Corps or start a grunge-rock garage band, I decided to go to the community college in Santa Cruz, 3,000 miles away from the place where I lived, with no better recommendation for the university I had decided on than the word of my dad’s friend, for two years before transferring to UCSC. Except then my Cabrillo counselor screwed up, and my general ed. program turned into three years, instead of two.

I met Toni during that third year.

How did this absurd chain of events (And it goes farther: I had just ended a relationship about a month before meeting her. What if I hadn’t? Our first conversation ever featured me acting like an idiot, mumbling and stumbling through every sentence; what if she hadn’t wanted to speak to me again? What if, what if, what if?) come to pass, and lead eventually to my finding the love of my life, my soulmate? It’s no wonder people decide that fate is real, or karma, or God. What other explanation makes sense?

When people pray, and then hear the voice of God tell them the answer, what voice is that? Something tells them what to do, where to go, how to act; something gives them the solution to their problems, the inspiration they need to create something new and revolutionary, or the comfort to survive the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. If it’s not God, then what is it?

It’s not God. That I’m sure of. So you know what I’ve decided it is? What is responsible for humanity’s incredible accomplishments, and our unbelievable resilience, and adaptability? The reason we can handle anything put before us? The force that makes our world full of wonders, that brings long chains of coincidences into some kind of order?

It’s us. We do these things ourselves. Because we’re fucking awesome.

How can I teach well, without any resources other than my own brain? Because I’m just that good. How do I write well? Because I’m a genius, and because I read the writing of other geniuses, and I pay attention. I am standing on the shoulders of giants, but they are tall because they stand on others’ shoulders – not because God raised them up. Human beings made the miracles, not the other way around.

How did Toni and I get to be the couple we are? The actual meeting had some dumb luck to it, but mostly, we made it happen because we wanted to. She chose to speak to me, and then she chose to speak to me again; eventually, I broke through my awkward shell, and she saw how awesome I am.

How did we get awesome dogs? Because dogs are awesome, and we treat them well and appreciate them for what they are.

How can people handle whatever terrible trials that life throws at us? By being absolutely incredible, strong and determined and intelligent and resilient.

We are incredible. We can do anything. There is no God: we need no God. We are enough, and more. We are.

So the next time your life seems about to overwhelm and drown, remember: remember what humans have done, remember what humans can do. You can do it. You’re human. You’re awesome.

No better way to close this than with the collaborative work of several of my all-time favorite creative humans.