Tag: fiction

Point of Origin

The cloud-cover seemed constant but it was probably less than half the time.  Or maybe more.  I tried estimating from memory how many days were actually overcast, but it seemed impossible to get a realistic number because each overcast day felt like five.  If I cared enough for accuracy I’d record the days without sun, but the truth is I cared more about how it made me feel than what was going on in the atmosphere.  Besides, what would knowing do?  There wasn’t anyplace reachable with a higher likelihood of sunshine, at least not without other drawbacks that made it worse.  I was here.  We were here.

Here was a planet that consisted primarily of two things: rain and dust.  You might imagine the one would put an end to the other, but it didn’t.  They both flourished and little else did.  We lived here, but we didn’t flourish in the way old books use the word.  At least not yet.  This planet was the cradle of human life in the universe.  Then it nearly put an end to it.  Now we’re back – some of us anyway – to reclaim our ancestral orb.  It’s different than the pictures from ancient human history.  But it’s also different from accounts of its apocalyptic end.  This murderous ball of mineral, plant, and animal matter has its cycles just like the rest of us.  The rage is over and a new calm has emerged.  I feel a bit like I imagine tenants of the Ark felt stepping foot onto an unrecognizable land, cleansed of its previous inhabitants by an ill-tempered earth.  It’s familiar, but not by sight.

Unlike Noah and his family, the human species hasn’t been floating aimlessly during the tempest.  We’re comfortably settled on three planets in a distant system, evolving and progressing as always.  After brief but painful pioneering and adapting there was an exponential boom that rivaled earth’s industrial revolution.  Humans as a species have never been better.  So what are we doing – what am I doing – back on the planet of origin, so long unfairly criticized and unrealistically romanticized?  I’m not entirely sure.

You could call it archaeology, though traces of our former occupation are all but non-existent.  You could call it research.  You could call it curiosity.  It is all of these things but with more attendant apathy than the words evoke.  It’s mostly restlessness and boredom that drove me here, and the bizarre human obsession with connecting the future to the past by way of the present.

A few hundred of us came.  We’ve been here for almost an earth year.  We have the resources to return to our system if need be, but we came to stay.  We followed that most human and inexplicable impulse; the mythical journey home.

Lies Are Boring

Ego & Hubris is the story of Michael Malice, told by American Splendor author Harvey Pekar in graphic novel form.  It’s an incredibly entertaining read because Michael is incredibly honest.  Most of us tell lies most of the time, and they make for lives and personalities that appear far more boring than they actually are.

Some of the reviews I read for the book treat Michael as some kind of heinous person.  After all, he can seem vindictive and rude.  Like the time when his boss was being a jerk about him spending time with his grandmother who had cancer.  Malice later discovered the boss’s wife got cancer and thought it served him right.  Sounds horrible when you read it.  But it’s a very honest expression of a feeling many people would have in the same situation.  The difference is most people would lie about how they felt – to themselves and certainly to someone writing their biography.

If you watch interviews with celebrities, no matter how different the people’s lives, the interviews are all quite similar.  They’re boring.  Safe answers are given that keep up an image that will offend the fewest fans.  Fans pretend to want these lies.  When a famous person is honest, everyone feigns offense.

When politicians talk during campaign season, the mutual lying reaches absurd heights.  Imagine the shock – shock! – if a candidate for office said, “Yeah, I know there’s some charity event to raise money for poor children tonight, but frankly I’m just too tired to go.”  Or, “You know, my opinion on Sub-Saharan Africa doesn’t really matter because there’s not much I can do about it.”  Honesty like this would be branded callous, and make a lot of people uneasy.  This despite the fact that every reasonable person would agree that it’s OK to be tired and not feel like going to an event, even for a good cause.  Every would-be voter knows that Sub-Saharan Africa really doesn’t matter all that much to them.  So why do they pretend they want it to matter to a candidate?

There’s a lot of lying going on.  Public figures lie about who they are, what they do, and what they feel.  If they slip and let a little honesty through, the public lies and pretends to be offended.  It makes for a pretty boring spectacle.  It’s one of the reasons I don’t read or watch the news.  It’s so phony and everyone knows it but no one dare admit it.  If we’re all gonna play pretend, I’d rather follow professional pretenders in well-crafted pretend stories in the movies, novels and TV shows.

When people let their real questions out, and public figures give their real answers revealing their real feelings and thoughts it’s pretty entertaining and enlightening.  The more honest radio interviews, for example, are usually done by people called “shock jocks”.  Sure, they say some silly stuff just to be different, but they tend to also ask the type of questions most people actually want to know.  In the giant lying game of public life, we have to dub them “shocking”, because nothing is more shocking than honesty.

We see it in celebrities but rarely in ourselves.  Part of the reason we don’t talk honestly about ourselves is because we don’t know ourselves very well.  We know the self we wish we were better than the one we’d actually be happy being, or the one we actually are.  Self-knowledge precedes self-honesty.

Sometimes I meet one of those rare people who, like Michael Malice, knows who they are and doesn’t pretend to be otherwise.  It’s refreshing.  They can be a little intimidating because they are used to honesty and can see through BS in others as well as in themselves.  It’s also intensely interesting and challenging.  It reveals how shallow most human interactions are.

Our actual identities are far more interesting than the lies we tell about ourselves. The narratives and carefully constructed biographies we publicly project are boring and second rate compared to the fascinating truth of who we really are.

Learn the truth about yourself, and don’t hide it.  We’ll all have more fun.

Old, New, Borrowed, Blue

Old

An imaginative and captivating read, Screwtape Proposes a Toast was C.S. Lewis’s follow-up published in the Saturday Evening Post to his popular book, the Screwtape Letters.  Screwtape is a fictitious correspondence between a senior and junior devil about how to damn men’s souls.  In the follow-up, Lewis has poignant insights into the nature of modern society, and in particular the way in which equality and democracy can corrode all that is good and sturdy in humans.

The text is posted here.  You can also read a PDF version of the original magazine publication here.

“Now, this useful phenomenon is in itself by no means new. Under the name of Envy it has been known to humans for thousands of years. But hitherto they always regarded it as the most odious, and also the most comical, of vices. Those who were aware of feeling it felt it with shame; those who were not gave it no quarter in others. The delightful novelty of the present situation is that you can sanction it — make it respectable and even laudable — by the incantatory use of the word democratic.”

New

Jeffrey Tucker absolutely nails it in this piece for The Freeman.  Jeff is one of those guys that gets freedom on a real gut, rubber-meets-the-road level.  He also gets it on an intellectual level.  He can pull from a treasure trove of work done by great thinkers on why liberty trumps central control, and he can also pull from keen insights on every day life and apply it all to present ideas for living free, here and now, and fighting to free the future.  Tucker talks first of the intellectual journey to anarchism, then the practical journey; the part that really transforms your outlook on life.

“[L]et me admit that my anarchism is probably more practical than ideological—which is the reverse of what it is for the most well-known anarchist thinkers in history. I see the orderliness of human volition and action all around me. I find it inspiring. It frees my mind to understand what is truly important in life. I can see reality for what it is. It is not some far-flung ideology that makes me long for a world without the State but rather the practical realities of the human struggle to make something of this world though our own efforts. Only human beings can overcome the great curse of scarcity the world has imposed on us. So far as I can tell, the State is, at best, the great annoyance that slows down the mighty project of building civilization.”

Borrowed

I borrowed this story from a friend’s Facebook feed.   She rightly pointed out that this research has pretty significant implications for the social sciences and might alter the current direction of sociology, psychology, and behavioral economics.  What I find interesting is how common-sensical the findings are.  The fact that this work will shake up these disciplines reveals just how silly and prone to trendiness academia can be.  I’m also willing to wager that, should this and similar work start a new trend in the social sciences towards more context-dependent theories, the pendulum will swing absurdly far and another counter-revolution will happen a few decades later reminding us that, yes, some elements of the human mind are universal.  The paper posits, in short, that institutions matter, a lot.  They shape our worldview and affect everything from how our brain processes spacial relations, to our sense of fairness.

“The potential implications of the unexpected results were quickly apparent to Henrich. He knew that a vast amount of scholarly literature in the social sciences—particularly in economics and psychology—relied on the ultimatum game and similar experiments. At the heart of most of that research was the implicit assumption that the results revealed evolved psychological traits common to all humans, never mind that the test subjects were nearly always from the industrialized West. Henrich realized that if the Machiguenga results stood up, and if similar differences could be measured across other populations, this assumption of universality would have to be challenged.”

Blue

This excellent book review by Anthony Gregory is depressing, or “blue”, upon first reading, especially if you’re new to revisionism.  The patriotic myths of war heroes and cunning statesmen are shattered, and with them a sense of American identity.  It takes some time.  You have to stand back and look at the facts and alternative narratives free from nationalistic impulse.  Then you grasp that most history books are little more than propaganda favoring the powerful status quo.  It hurts at first. With time, it is liberating.  This book review is an excellent appetizer for this way of examining the past.  Open your mind and give the revisionist view a try.  Let it sink in before you reject it.  See what happens.  I’m willing to bet you’ll develop lingering suspicions about mainstream histories.  That’s a good thing.

“The Founding Fathers are the first official heroes targeted, appropriate in both chronological terms and in considering the civic mythology of the United States. And so who were the true heroes? According to Russell, it was the rabble. John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Sam Adams, John Jay and the rest of them looked upon the common American people, populating Philadelphia where they were holding their conspiratorial meetings, as “vicious,” “vile” and otherwise unsavory folk. “But what the Founding Fathers called corruption, depravity, viciousness, and vice, many of us would call freedom”

The Pursuit

This was written in response to a challenge issued among myself and some good freinds.  We wanted to see who could write the best short story using only 200 words.  My attempt clocks in at 200 words exactly.

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The crinkling of the paper bag brought hope and tension…thankfully there was life inside.  Shep did not hesitate to pull out the store-bought mini pie, half eaten though it was.   They split it.  Any sustenance the two could get was welcome, especially in weather like this.

Until tonight Tad had enjoyed the thrill of the chase.  An outlaw.  Free, yet a slave to stealth.   Their faces were posted everywhere, they were wanted, and for no small reward.  Many days practicing the art of evasion were catching up to the old friends, and they felt it in their lungs and stomachs.  Both had thoughts of turning themselves in and ending the whole thing…not after coming so far.

Neither spoke; neither rested well, both constantly wondered when the other would suggest they continue on.  Both knew they soon must.  It was difficult to think of trading the shelter of the highway bridge for the cold rain.  A moment of daydreaming was broken…Tad’s muscles tensed as he saw light not fifty yards away…

As they fled their shelter the sound of voices echoed behind them, reminding them how close they were to caught:

“Tad! Tad! Shep!”

“C’mon boys, c’mon…”

“Good hunting dogs indeed!”

A Pure Duality

It has come into my mind that you’ve grown frustrated, or confused as to why I have not been in any real sense present in your life. I will not pretend to have an answer sufficient to settle your uneasiness and feeling of loss, but I can perhaps provide a fuller perspective.

I don’t know exactly where I am, or rather where all of me is. Have you ever been two places at once? I don’t suspect so, as I think it is rare among the healthy on earth. Maybe I should start from the beginning…

Late in the fall some twenty years ago I awoke on a typical morning and left for work. I left a wonderful family and a great house, and headed off to a promising job. I don’t remember giving much thought to my life during that short car ride, but I felt somewhere that I had led a good one.

Something happened…blackness…I don’t remember much for a long period of time-like when you know you’re asleep, but you’re not dreaming or thinking, just blackness. This felt like weeks, or months.

As if my eyes were opened, there I was. I was suddenly in a great green field, surrounded by multitudes of rejoicing people. It was a magnificent celebration, and we seemed to be in some beautiful valley on a beautiful sunny day. It was unlike any landscape I’d seen before, unreal in its beauty, yet more real than any solid object.

A wise old man, who seemed one thousand years of age, yet looked not fifty and healthy, stepped out from the crowd and greeted me warmly.

“Welcome! We have been waiting for you for quite some time!”

Thinking I was dreaming I didn’t respond, but just watched and listened.

“Come, walk with me; you have many choices before you.” He said, “You have come here because you are greatly needed…your gifts make you extremely precious in these times, and those to come no doubt. I can assure you it will all make sense eventually, and your every need will be met, you have only to choose whether you are willing, or not.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Not many are given this choice you know.” He replied.

“What choice am I given? Am I dreaming? Given the choice to wake or continue dreaming, I would gladly wake, and remain sensible.”

“You are in no way dreaming!” He shouted, not seeming in the least amused, “I took you for smarter than one who thinks this is a dream!”

Not wanting to further offend him, but still unsure of the nature if this experience, I did not attempt to defend my statement.

“Now, your choice?”

“Explain to me what choice you refer to, and I will gladly tell you my thoughts on it.” I replied.

“Your thoughts on it? Your thoughts? This surely will not do! This is not a choice but to muse on, or some hypothetical presented for mental exercise or sport! This is The choice! The choice!”

Still confused I was forced to ask again what now seemed a stupid question.

“What choice?”

“Sit down son.” He said, “I can see that you are still fresh in your logic, and your time in the darkness did not cleanse you from your confidence in what you know and have taught yourself to react to. Impressive mind indeed, very impressive.”

Not knowing what kind of statement this was, but choosing to take it as a compliment, I felt proud of whatever it was that my mind had done to slow this process, and necessitate further explanation.

“Your ignorance, at least, is a result of much discipline and so being is quite consistent, and finely tuned, so I shall paint for you a simpler picture, in your undeveloped language.”

I think he sensed my pride after his previous statement, and simply had to let me know that whatever plane he operated on was one higher than mine. At first I grew resistant, but this lasted only a minute, as my curiosity soon overtook my dual senses of dignity and defensiveness, and I listened to what he had to say.

“Here in this realm, let us call it X, for I can only assume by your look that you are comfortable with mathematical terms, there is a great movement occurring in the great war that is ever raging. Though I cannot explain it without giving you references to what you know as ‘time’, try not to focus on the sequential order of these events. Our enemy has hit us with something so twisted, so divisive and confusing, that we petitioned our superiors for an exception. This exception was sought so that we might bring you here, for we knew that to overthrow this plot of our foe, you were our only choice. An exception was granted. Which is what brought you, after a long time in the darkness for purposes of ‘unlearning’, (though now I see perhaps not long enough) out of what we shall call subordinate X, and into X.”

Though not understanding all of this, I moved on to the original question, and repeated it. “Yes, but you have still not told me what this choice is?”

“As with any exception, it is only granted on the condition that you are given the choice of whether or not to accept. You see, without this choice your presence here would be counterproductive and even fatal. By denying you choice, the enemy would have already won, and our need of you to combat his attack would no longer exist. Thus, I have been given the authority to grant you your choice.”

“Yes, yes but again, what is the choice! I cannot see any choice at all, for I am here listening to you speak whether I want to wake up or not!”

“You are incorrect! Even now you are choosing. You do not have to be here, but your willingness brought you, and now your curiosity keeps you here. Do not so underestimate your will. However, I need not go further into this. You are correct to seek an explanation of the choice. You have been pulled, temporarily, from subordinate X to be presented with the situation we are facing in our war, and our need of your gifts. Your choice is, quite simply, whether you want to help us, or return to your family and all that you previously knew (in the simplest sense of the word ‘know’ that is) in subordinate X. “

It suddenly occurred to me that I had a family. Three young children, a beautiful wife, a life that I loved….it suddenly sank in that I was indeed in another place, away from all of that, and that this wasn’t a dream.

“You mean, I must choose whether to stay here and help you, and never return to my family and my life as it was…or to go back, and leave you without whatever of me you are in need of?”

“Precisely.”

“And what of you, if I choose to go back?”

“I know not. I only know that things were desperate enough for me to be granted an exception. This is evidence enough of the nature of our situation for me to implore you with all my heart, please stay! But in any case, please choose soon, for time, as you know it, though not passing here, is growing short in the place from which you come.”

I felt, for no reason I could identify, an urge more pressing that any I’d felt before to stay with this wise stranger and to fight. I knew almost nothing of what I was needed for, or what would ensue, and yet never has my heart desired anything more than to stay and accomplish it. It was what I was made for! I almost shouted out with all my soul that I’d stay, and fight! But suddenly I saw my family again, my three children, my wife, my friends, all that was depending on me for provision, for love, for support and strength….I could not choose!

“Surely there is another way!”

“There is no other way!”

“But I cannot, and will not, abandon my family and my life for this! Yet I cannot and will not run from this place, where I know deep down I was made to serve and fight! No, there is another way, and I choose it!”

“But I tell you, there is not!”

“You? You who tell me all that is unbelievable, all that is profound, you who tell me that you yourself sought and were granted and ‘exception’, now say that there is no way?!?! I don’t believe it! There is another way, and I choose it!”

Suddenly another voice spoke, and thundered with all the urgency and authority in the universe…

“Granted!”

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I have been here in X since that one word was spoken. Yet somehow, in some way I know I am also somewhere else. I am two persons, not just one split in half, but two, somehow the same, but entirely different. Neither complete, both lacking something, but each existing where each is needed. I cannot tell you what this means, yet I know, somehow, that this was the right choice. I am here, fulfilling my destiny…yet I know, somehow I am there.

I am sorry you do not see me nor hear me as I once was. But I implore you, do not give up! I do hear you! I do see you! And what you see of me, whatever may be lacking, is me, and yet, not all of me. I am here….and I am there.