Once More Unto The Breach, Dear Friends…

Today, I write my grand and final opus in my ongoing crusade against the great tyranny of our time. Well, maybe it won’t be quite so grandiose as I want it to be, and it sure as Hell won’t be my final word on the subject, but if I’m lucky, I might just begin to chip away the smallest microscopic grains of sand and dirt and mud that make up my ever-growing monument to despair. And, if I’m really lucky, I might just manage to breathe a faint and throaty whisper onto the swirling winds of change and provoke some of you into action. Maybe not many, but a few will do for a start. The right few, anyway.

The tragic few of you know who you are. You’re the stubborn bastards who, despite being beset upon all sides by the cretinous assault of imbecilic minds, refuse to yield to the seductive allure of apathy in the face of apparent hopelessness. You remain steadfast in your defiant struggle to continue swimming upstream against the brutal current of an angry river filled with the churning whitewater rapids of stupidity, and I need you. Humanity needs you. You are the last, best hope for the future, and I want to hear from each and every one of you. Maybe things can still turn out all right. Maybe we can hold back the tide of idiocy just a little bit longer. Then again, maybe I’ll just get a lot more hate mail. It could go either way, really.

The tyranny to which I refer is, of course, the enforcement of functional illiteracy by the mindless, vapid agents of the culturally ignorant and the willfully stupid. We live in a world where being intelligent ranks right up at the tippity-top of the Great List Of Sins, and where those who are not among the helmet-wearing, intellectually challenged mob must hide their true faces to simply fit in with the great, gyrating crowd of the mindless. It’s either that, or be forced out into the harsh glare of the spotlight, to stick out like the proverbial sore thumb on a delicate hand of otherwise respectable phalanges, where the only comfort to be found in life comes from sticking that plump little digit directly up the rancid asses of the ignorant, whenever the opportunity presents itself. Fortunately – or perhaps, unfortunately – with so many stupid people in the world doing so many stupid things, opportunity is never far away. Which kind of person are you? A sneaker in the crowd, a mask-wearing saboteur, an apathetic yes man? Or are you the sore thumb, the unappreciated and ugly reminder to the hand that you’re the only thing separating it from a monkey’s paw?

There are many threats to intelligence in today’s world, but right now the single greatest weapon in the arsenal of the inane and the foolish is technology. For all of its glittering promises and dubious claims, the rise of technology has not ushered in a new age of enlightenment, peace, and harmony. Instead, it’s unleashed the horrors of text messaging and smart phones and bluetooth headsets onto a world filled with people in constant communication, talking all the time and saying nothing. It’s brought us the great, equalizing meritocracy of the Internet, where the merit part of the -ocracy has proven to be earned by simply being a louder, more obnoxious asshat than the guy sitting next to you. It’s given us the ultimate in fantasy wish fulfillment through the bleeps and bloops of polygonal, texture-mapped video games, where the meek and the week can escape the terrible realizations of reality by fleeing into the virtual world, where they can become the strong and the mighty – and where they can finally have a turn at the other end of the bully’s stick. In short, the thing that was supposed to level the playing field and even the odds, to raise the bar and spread universal knowledge – the thing that was sold to us as the great, empowering savior of mankind – has proven to be nothing more than a fanciful pipe dream for the True Believers, and the ultimate source of control for those who wish to keep you stupid. So go, if you’re of that persuasion. Go away from here, and ignore me and mine even as you ignore your wives and husbands by clicking your way to some fantastical porn-filled wonderland or discount online shopping center. Go start a blog and become a movie critic or a literary critic, and reinvent yourself as an authority on matters you know nothing about. Go stand in front of a webcam and do something stupid. Get famous. Get rich. Get anything – just get gone!

For those of you still with me, let’s take a moment to remember the fallen and curse their names. I make no apologies for not having the desire to tolerate the stupidity of small minds. I just can’t stomach their witless presence. They move about in colonies like cockroaches, you know. They move about to survive and subsist on the most vile and disgusting minutiae of life experience as is humanly possible, and still be considered human. They breed like cockroaches, too. Or mice. Rats…

They meet online, they meet at bars, they meet in coffee houses and shopping malls, and on bikes and in cars. They meet and they greet, and they text and they sex, they break up and move on, and they flex and write checks. But in the end, no Seussian rhyme can contain the hideous consequence of all the sheets stained. They fuck and they fuck, they get knocked up and give birth, and with each shrieking child, they increase their net worth. And, if you’ll pardon me now and let me get back to the prose, I’ll stop all this rhyming about assholes and hos.

I’m…not…sure what just happened. It just sort of came out. Let’s not dwell on my temporary burst of rhythmic insanity, and instead get back to the bitching at hand. Where was I? Oh yes, the breeding. The stupid breed like rabbits and rats, as if there’s no tomorrow to worry about and no yesterdays to deal with. Always thinking only in the moment and only of themselves, their incessant fucking results in a constant and unending stream of children – children they don’t care about. Children who will grow up learning what their parents know, and then go to restart the cycle anew by birthing even more inanity into a world already filled to the brim with the dull and the boring. They will never have anything to offer the world, aside from their capacity to consume. To shop. To buy.

The stupid are the target demographic for *Insert Derogatory Reference To International Retail Megacorp Here* , and the worst part is – they’re happy about it! They love to want things they don’t need, and to need things they don’t even want. Your (below) average stupid person is a blank slate, eagerly waiting to have his hopes and dreams and desires chiseled into his soul by greedy and unseen, uncaring hands. In time, this strange tabula rasa army will blitzkrieg across the nation, over its airwaves and along its wires and through its fiber optic cables. Already, villainous and wicked forces manipulate, contrive, and control an increasingly silent vox populi, and we let them get away with it! They get away with it, and the people beg for more.

Terry Pratchett once said, “The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.” This is a good thing, when in the context of education and alongside the idea of filling your head with knowledge. Children are blank slates, but they don’t stay that way. Well, they don’t have to, anyway. Sure, there are always going to be people who are naturally more or less intelligent than other people. It’s down to genetics and upbringing, and things like the quality of the education they receive. The problem is, we’ve allowed the State to dig their bloodied claws deep into the guts and viscera of the educational process, and they’ve eviscerated, disemboweled, and neutered any positive effects it may have once had. Under the terrible guises of “standardization” and “performance measurement” the powers-that-be have reduced education to a mere product. It’s pre-packaged, pre-processed, and shipped to your local public school for consumption. Where it once had nutrition, it now has filler. Where it once had dedication, it now has featherbedding. And, where it once lured noble individuals with the sacred calling to teach, it now has technology and so-called artificial intelligence teaching software.

Education is not a product to be weighed and measured, priced and sold. It is a great and powerful process, at times tedious and soul-crushing, but always worthwhile. A good teacher is brilliant and inspiring, and motivates his students to develop an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, and encourages them toward understanding. Unfortunately, we no longer have very many good teachers. Oh sure, we have plenty of employees who stand at chalkboards and cluck their tongues – but there’s something to be said for quality over quantity. I don’t blame them, though. I think it still takes a special sort of inspired insanity to want to walk into a classroom filled with idle minds resistant to challenge, and try to help them work toward their potential. We need all of the (good) teachers we can get! However, until we wrest control of the education system back from the clumsy hands of government, there isn’t much that even the best teachers can do. They’re simply not allowed to teach anymore.

Instead, we work toward turning our children into little drones. We program them, rather than teach them. And, as with all robots, we train them on how to memorize, and how to regurgitate facts like so much vomit on a ScanTron form. It doesn’t matter that they develop a love of knowledge and a passion for learning. We only want to think they’re intelligent, and for them to think it of themselves in return. What nobody seems to want is actual intelligence, because along with it comes troubling things like critical thought and ideas and independent thinking. Children who can actually think cause problems in the mind-killing classrooms of America, and are best dealt with by crushing their spirits as quickly as possible. It’s sad, it’s offensive, and it’s a horrifying effrontery to those who actually care about leaving the world a better place than we found it – but it’s the truth. The reality. The sickening, ghastly reality.

I’m going to leave you today by echoing something I began earlier in the week, only this time I hope it sticks. I believe that the most important thing for us as human beings – the most important damned thing – is our ability to communicate. Mathematics may be the language of the universe, but down here on Earth it’s pretty hard to carry on a conversation using arithmetic and long division. No, we use words to convey our ideas. We use words to create the myths that bind our societies together. We invent concepts like love and hope and justice, and we invoke these myths into being through the power of our words. Without our nouns, verbs, and adjectives, we’re nothing more than hairless apes with opposable thumbs and less colorful genitalia.

We need words. We need to be able to understand them and use them. The more we have, the more refined and exact our communication can be. Words allow us to think in higher resolutions, with more detail and clarity possible with every new word we learn. The more of them you know, the clearer you can see the wonders and the horrors of this world, and the better armed you are to either fight or defend them.

With that in mind, I close out today’s essay with an excerpt from Lonelyache, by Harlan Ellison. This is the opening paragraph of a short story that I’ve loved for years, long before I’d lived enough to fully appreciate its meaning. Still, even as a young teenager who’d never experienced the wrenching agony of romantic betrayal and loss, I could read his words and feel the loneliness and the heartache behind them. And later, after I’d grown a little and been damaged a little, I could read the story and smell the necrotic stench of loss, and taste the rancid flavors of a broken heart. My experiences helped me appreciate the message behind the words, and the words helped me understand my experiences.

It’s a powerful story written by a powerful talent, and it’s important that you know who he is. It’s important that you know others like him, all of whom craft words with the delicate exactitude of a surgeon and the inspired vision of a masterful painter. It’s important, because what Ellison and others like him do is a dying art. It is being lost even as you read this. In a world too wrapped up with instant and trivial communication and the transient fads of a jellyheaded pop culture, powerful words saying powerful things seem to have little place.

Characters are created and birthed on the page for a reason, and even though a good story must be entertaining, its meaning transcends simple enjoyment and demands critical examination. The writer chooses this word over that one, or puts this word in front of this other one, and he massages and adjusts and calibrates each tiny nuance of a sentence until it does exactly what he wants it to. Some words may be big, others small. Some sentences may be long, others short. Some stories may require three novels to properly tell, others only a few paragraphs. A good writer is a craftsman with his pen or his typewriter or keyboard. He knows that how you say something is as important as what you’re saying, because it all works together. Like a culinary masterpiece, every word, every comma, every period – they all work together to create the smell, the flavor, the texture, and the nourishment of the story.

When I asked Harlan if I could use the following excerpt, I asked that he also agree to one slight caveat. I wanted to show how important words are by contrasting his original work with a version of it as it might be written today in the fumbling hands of an inept but popular writer. Like any true craftsman, he’s very protective of his work and I didn’t actually think he would agree to let me hack it to pieces, but he did. Maybe he knew that, once it came down to brass tacks, I couldn’t really do it. I wanted to be really clever and show how witty I am by transforming his tragic portrait of loss and bitterness into something barely recognizable and hilarious in its ineptitude, but now that I have the opportunity, I just don’t feel like it.

Here then, is the opening of Lonelyache. Read it properly, or I’ll come over there and smack you a good one, wherever you are.

The form of habit she had become still drove him to one side of the bed. Despite his need for room to throw out arms, legs in a figure-4, crosswise angled body, he still slept on only one side of the big double bed. The force of memory of her body there, lying huddled on the inside, together cuddled body-into-body, a pair of question marks, whatever arrangement it might have been from night to night – still, her there. Now, only the memory of her warmth beside him kept him prisoner on his half. And reduced to memories and physical need for sleep, he retired to that slab of torture as seldom as possible. Staying awake till tiny hours, doing meaningless things, laughing at laughers, cleaning house for himself with methodical, surgical tidiness till the pathology of it made him gibber and caper and shriek within his skull and soul, seeing movies that wandered aimlessly, hearing the vapors of night and time and existence passing by without purpose or validity. Until finally, crushed by the weight of hours and decaying bodily functions, desperately needing recharge, he collapsed into the bed that he loathed.

To sleep on one side only.

To dream his dreams of brutality and fear.

And that, my friends, is how you communicate to others the strange and terrible lunacy that befuddles the minds of the heartbroken. If I haven’t proven my point to you that intelligence is something sacred and rare, and that it must be cherished and nurtured and fought for, then I’m afraid no amount of my tampering with his words would change your mind. Sure, it might get a laugh – but the expense is too great. I really don’t want to mess with what’s already there, lest I feel the dark guilt of someone who would throw fistfuls of watery shit globules onto the Mona Lisa for a lark. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to be That Guy.

I usually close my essays with some sort of joke or some other hit-or-miss stab at humor, but today feels a little different. I’m a little exhausted from pouring out my anger and bitterness about the world, and I’m feeling a little reflective about just how far I’ve come in the year or so since I started this blog. It’s been a curious trip, clawing my way out of the pit I’d sunk into – and I don’t think I’d have made it without the writing. The ability to digest or to purge via these essays has been a strong tonic for what ailed me, and I hope they’ve helped out some of you along the way. I’m not sure where the roads of the future will take us, but I thank you for coming along with me this far. It has been…Interesting.

Want some books? 'Course ya do!

NOTE:  I know times are hard and yeah, I need to make a living too, but if you want to read any of my books but can't afford to buy them right now, hit me up.

I'll take care of it.

Humor | Nonfiction
Available now from the following retailers

Have you ever lived through an experience that was so humiliating that you wanted to die, but when you tell it to all your friends, they can't stop laughing?

Have you ever made a decision that seemed like a good idea at the time, but you're still living with the hilarious consequences years later?

If so, then grab a snack, get comfortable, and prepare to have all of your own poor life choices seem just a little bit more bearable.

You're welcome.

Short Stories
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The nine stories of rage and sadness collected here range from the most intimate of human experiences to the wildest realms of magic and fantasy. The first story is a violent gut-punch to the soul, and the rest of them just hit harder from there.

Those who tough it out will find a book filled with as much hope as despair, a constant contradiction pulling you from one extreme to another.

Life might knock us down, over and over, and will the beat the ever-loving snot out of us from the time we're old enough to give it attitude until the day we finally let it win and stop getting up.

Always get back up.

Gaming | Nonfiction
Available now from the following retailers

This isn't just a book. It's a portal to other worlds where there be magic and dragons and hilarious pirates. Okay, not really. But this book is about those portals, except they're called video games.

The Life Bytes series of books take a deep dive into one man's personal journey through childhood into kinda/sorta being a responsible, competent adult as told through the magical lens of whatever video games he was playing at the time.

Part One starts way back in 1975 and meanders down various digital pathways until, oh, around about 1993 or so.

If you're feeling nostalgic for the early days of gaming or if you just want to understand why the gamer in your life loves this hobby so much, take a seat in your favorite comfy chair and crack this bad boy open.

I'll try to not be boring.

Horror
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What you are about to read is not a story. There is no beginning, middle, or end.

What follows is nothing more than a series of journal entries involving shadow people, sleep paralysis, and crippling fear. It’s not pretty, it doesn’t follow story logic, and nothing works out well in the end.

You've been warned.