What Comes Next

I was going to write this in the style of one of my imaginary conversations, but elected to forgo the pretense.  Here's an old fashioned blog entry.

For the past two years I have felt a growing dread about our future as a democracy.  I have had people try to tell me that it isn't as bad as all that.  I've had my father say that he "lived through Nixon" and "this is just another terrible thing that will pass."  I've had people on the right laugh at me openly about my concerns.  I have listened to and read the words of people of color who have spoken to the racism they experienced their entire lives and their frustration with white people who are just now figuring out how fucked things are because we see it on social media.  They aren't wrong.  Maybe none of them are wrong.  Well except the right wing assholes.  They can get fucked. I dunno.

All I know is what I know and what I feel.  Here's what I know.  What I know is that the other day I saw somebody on Twitter sharing the tips their grandfather used when they were in the Resistance fighting the Gestapo.  And this list had lots of detailed points on what people in the Resistance did, what everyday people can do can muck up the works of a totalitarian government.  What I know is that somebody else who grew up in another totalitarian government shared their experiences and what they did to survive it.  What I know is that I took notes.  What I feel is that whether history repeats itself exactly or just creates a new spin on an old theme, things are happening now that ARE different from other things that have happened in the past 36 years of my life.  What I feel is that all of it: the anger over police brutality, the spread of social media, the crackdown in immigration, the oppression of minorities and people of color, the rise in mass shootings, the racist rhetoric on the right, the wealth inequality in this nation, the loss of jobs oversees due to tariff wars, and global warming, among a host of other issues that are happening all at once are leading to something...bad. I don't know what the bad thing will be.  I don't know if the bad thing will be another terrorist attack.  I don't know if the bad thing will be a civil war. I don't know if the bad thing will be nuclear annihilation.  I don't know if the bad thing will be a Fourth Reich.  I feel, deep in my soul, that whatever it is will be the end of America as we know it.

I don't know when the thing will happen.  I don't think this is a next year thing.  But it feels like something major.  Like something WW3 major.  Like something Napoleon major.  Like something French Revolution major.  Like something cataclysmic. I talk to my friends about this and it is shocking to me the number of people who are also in agreement that yeah we are basically fucked.  I have a few friends who remain optimistic about 2020, but I just can't.  I used to think that as soon as Mueller finished his report then it would be all over and this nightmare would be done and we could go back to how it was.  Lol look how that went.  I realized there is no going back.  I don't even know if there is going forward.  I really and truly don't know that if Trump loses the 2020 election he won't just declare the election illegitimate and make himself dictator for life.  I really, really don't.  Even those more optimistic people have trouble coming up with concrete answers to my questions.  I

The other day I was reading an article about disinformation campaigns and how bots were creating whole image composites of people in their efforts to sow discord and those images looked so real that I think I failed this test to spot who was the fake.  So like robots are posing as people to influence our democracy and spread hate and are we living in a fucking movie right now because if you say it like that it is legitimately insane.  Do we even need Terminator if we die by a thousand cuts?  Or warm our earth so much that our crops will start dying?  Apparently the administration is investing a lot into space now.  Of course they are.  Because the rich will gtfo this planet before it dies.  That's why they don't care about the rest of us.

I'm tired.  I'm trying to live a normal life and plan my wedding and help the kids with homework and go to Trader Joes and still live in this sense of utter and complete bewilderment whether the life I see as normal will be what life will be like 20 years from now.  I mean, I knew there would be changes, technological changes.  But just seeing how fast things have changed from the 90s to now makes me really wonder what 2040 will look like, whether anything will be recognizable at all.  I wish I had a time machine not to go into the past but to go into the future just to check to make sure we were still okay.  Just a peek.  Then I could come back. SOME kind of reassurance that we, and by we I mean this nation and the vast majority of people in it, will be alright.  I guess nothing is ever that easy.

The End

Here we are at the end, the last day, and I feel so empty. Used up. He came and he told us to hope.  He told us that we should keep hoping.  He came and he gave us this glimpse into a world that could be if we kept changing and hoping.  He didn't do it all.  He didn't do enough. He couldn't save young people shot by police, he ordered the deaths of people on the other side of the world, he didn't do enough. He came and he told us to hope, though.  He made us believe that leaders could be good and kind and worthy even when they don't succeed at all they tried to do. He made us feel that we were moving into a new era, that we were going to keep going, keep reaching, keep hoping keep changing and on and on until at last we had a nation that was truly equal and truly free. He made us believe.  He made me believe.  He made me hope.

 Maybe it will go on like normal.  This is what I hope.  I hope that I wake up in the morning and I make breakfast and I drop my daughter at school and I go to work and I help people.  And I hope that the child who told me she was worried that her mother would be deported doesn't have to worry anymore.  And I hope that people are healthy.  And I hope that if people aren't healthy they have people and insurance to take care of them.  And I hope that if people don't have friends or family to take care of them that charities really will step up and make sure they live.  And I hope people live.  And I hope people have clean water to drink.  And I hope that people have food on the table.  And I hope people have families who love them no matter who they are or who they love.  And I hope businesses do right by people and make products that don't harm the environment.  And I hope that businesses do right by their employees and give them medical leave when they need it or parental leave when they need it or even just time off to see a child's play because they are good people who care for their employees and want them happy.  And I hope that there are no more wars.  And I hope that people stop killing.  And I hope that all the nukes are destroyed.  And I hope that everyone can get a quality education.  And I hope that nobody is judged by the color of their skin or their religion or their gender.  And I hope that people stop hating.  And I hope.  I hoped.

 I hate him for it, a little.  I hate that I got to see what we could have had if we only knew what we had when we had it. I hate that all this hoping made me believe a lie that somehow we were changing, when things are just as they have always been.  I hate that he made me hope for things that are not so.  I hate that we got so used to hoping, believing the impossible.  I hate that people are still hating.  I hate to hear my daughter cry how much she hates the new one, the asshole who comes tomorrow.  I hate that she sees such pain in the world and she weeps for us.  I hate that I am not strong enough for her.  I hate that I cry in front of her.  I hate that I can't promise her a future.  I hate that I am finding it hard to lie.

I try to hope.  I try to hope that tomorrow is the way I wish it would be.  That it isn't so terrible, it isn't so bad.  But for me it feels like hope is leaving me, is on his way out the door. I look around me and I see our natural world dying.  I see our schools dying.  I see our people dying.  I see our nation dying.  I used to hope for a wondrous future full of possibility.  Now I hope that there is a tomorrow.  Now I hope that bombs don't fall and people don't die.  Now I hope there is an America at all when I wake up in the morning.  Now I hope that things are terrible but not that terrible.  That isn't any kind of hope at all.  It isn't the kind of hope that he promised us when he stood there on stage all those years ago.  I hope the asshole doesn't kill us all.  That is no kind of hope to pin your dreams on.  I used to dream of fanciful things and now I dream of death.

It is foolish to put faith in a man.  To believe.  It wasn't really him though: not the man, the president. It was the idea, really.  The idea of hoping.  For 8 years, 9 really, almost 10.  From the moment he announced he was running and gave us the notion that such a thing could be.  And he won and it was as though all things were possible, that we had entered a new world.  It was into this new world that I gave birth to a daughter.  It was in this world that she grew.  She never knew anything else.  She never knew the Berlin Wall.  She never knew presidential scandal and impeachment. She never knew 9/11.  She never knew a world where a Black man didn't live in the White House.  She has no memory of a time when gays couldn't marry.  She doesn't understand people who hate.  She is confused by people who don't love.  She grew up in the generation of Hope.

So what do we tell them, this new generation, Generation Hope, children born or raised in past 10 years.  What do we tell them now at the end of an era?  How do we protect them?  How do we help them grow?  I see teenagers today, raised in this world where hope and change were possible, grow to be more socially aware, more progressive, than any generation before it.  These flowers could blossom because the world was fertile for their imaginations, the land was full of hope.  What will become of them in the new world?  What will become of us all?

It is the end.  It is not the end of all hope, but it is the end of an era where hope was the norm.  Maybe someday we will return to that world if we all make it out the other side.  I know we won't all make it, though.  Some of us will.  Some of us. How will those of us who make it out remember this time?  What will we say? How will history look at us? Are we in Berlin in the 20s?  Are we something new?  Will we take the stories of resistance we have worshipped in our popular culture to heart?  Will we fight?  Will we be able to?  So many questions.  So much uncertainty.

This I know: it is the end.  Tomorrow will be something new and what that new thing is we cannot yet know.  It will be bad.  That much is certain.  We have received the call from our physician and we wait anxiously in the lobby. Will the doctor tell us that the disease has spread, is inoperable?  Or will the doctor tell us that the tumor can be removed.  I believe, I have to believe, that this cancer is treatable, that this malignant festering thing can be destroyed.  Perhaps the treatment of the disease will make us feel sicker than we were before.  Perhaps the treatment of the cancer will be long and painful.  Perhaps we may not make it even after all the treatments.  But perhaps it can.  And this is what I hope.  This is what I will continue to hope.  Because I have to.

He told us to hope.  He told us to be the change we wanted to see in the world.  Now we must live by his example without him to lead us.  We owe it to him, to the memory of this era, to try.

Things That I Read

This Week: The Gunslinger by Stephen King [audio read by George Guidall]

Grade: H for Huuuuuuuuh?

I have never read any Stephen King books before. There, now that's out of the way. Therefore, I really had absolutely no idea what to expect when I sat down to listen to this book. Based on the movie versions of many King books I've seen: Shawshank Redemption, Carrie, The Green Mile, The Shining, etc, I knew that King had sort of a dual personality; he can be both terrifying and also very lyrical and sad. The Gunslinger was something else entirely. It caught me completely off guard and made me actually think while I was listening, which was entirely unexpected. I consciously tried to avoid reviews or blurbs about this book before I started it, specifically because I wanted that element of surprise, and I'm very glad that I did. I am going to try my best to not reveal any major plot points in this review specifically for that reason, so I apologize now if this is too vague.

First thoughts when I start listening: Holy Cow! Ian McShane is reading this book! Oh... huh... its not Ian McShane. Weird... I wonder if Ian McShane is related to George Guidall. Is George Guidall a pseudonym for Ian McShane? No? Huh. Part of what made this book for me was the reading. The guy really really does sound like Ian McShane which made it work for me since I love Deadwood so much. When I went on the Freedom Trail tour in Boston our tour guide sounded EXACTLY like Paul Giamatti in John Adams so maybe these actors just purposefully put on voices that are approximations of other people. Who knows. Anyway, I definitely recommend listening to this book for a couple of reasons. First of all, the guy gets it just right with the voices, and second, its the kind of story that might be told over some whacked out post apocalyptic campfire, and just sounds better aloud. Anyway... on the review.

The Gunslinger is a post apocalyptic fantasy. I guess. The genre is really hard to pin down. Most of the book feels like a Western with a scifi bent, typical end of the world wanderings. Then there are elements of the story which are very traditional for high fantasy stories, specifically flashbacks to the gunslinger's childhood which takes place in a sort of pseudo-medieval castle where people use guns instead of swords. Last year I read Lamentation by Ken Scholes which is also sort of post apocalyptic, in that the bulk of the story takes place after this major city is destroyed and people are trying to pick up the pieces, etc. But that book made it very clear to the reader that you were reading about a fantasy-type place after a disaster. The Gunslinger on the other hand, throws in references to things in our own Earth's past mixed in with the fantasy stuff. Example: the "old tune" someone is playing on a piano is "Hey Jude." This was very disconcerting. Later on, the character of Jack is introduced, who is this boy who somehow ended up in this barren landscape. He can only vaguely remember his own past, but it seems almost identical to our own. This poses a lot of questions also. How did the world get from how it was in the gunslinger's childhood? How did the boy get there in the first place? Is there some kind of metaphor I'm missing? Are we in Hell/ Purgatory? I'm assuming that some of the answers come in the later volumes, but I can tell you that this book ends without any clear sense of what year it is, what sort of alternate reality these characters are living in, or what the heck everybody is doing.

But the thing I liked the most about this book was the uncertainty. Things genuinely surprised me because I had absolutely no idea where the story was going to go. A similar post apocalyptic story, like The Road by Cormac McCarthy, can only go so far in terms of its storytelling. Roving bands of marauders who kill people? Sure why not. Cannibalism, desolate landscapes, fragments of lost civilization? Naturally. Zombies? Ok, not in The Road, but certainly World War Z has done the whole zombie-pocalypse thing. But The Gunslinger includes all the traditional end of days tropes in addition to some seriously strange, mind bending fantasy. That means that at one moment characters can be walking along in the traditional desolate nothingness and come across a talking crow for some reason. Or, they could encounter people who have been raised from the dead or possessed by demons. That stuff is kinda odd. The moment I'm convinced that the story just takes place after the classic Christian apocalypse (i.e. The Stand), there's another flashback to Roland's childhood and I think "what! ok, this is so not normal Earth we are talking about." Oh, the gunslinger's name is Roland, by the way. You don't actually find out until the second disc on the audio, and I'm not sure what page that would be equivalent to in the actual book. I liked that off the bat. The story starts out and he is just "the gunslinger" like Clint Eastwood in Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

Anyway, bottom line, this book is really really good. I hear that the version I listened to is the revised one, but I can't tell you how it differs from the original. Apparently The Gunslinger is the shortest of all the books in the series, which I'm actually happy about. The sparse language worked to jump me right into the story, but I couldn't help but wish there were more descriptions of things, more background information, more plot. Plot actually was the weakest thing in this story. Roland chases this Man in Black across the entire country for reasons that never make themselves clear. He wants to find this Dark Tower apparently, but why does he need the Man in Black to find it? Reading/ listening to this book is definitely like watching the first season of Lost. You have some of the major pieces in play, but you haven't even met Desmond or The Others yet. Remember when the Tailies came? Why the heck are there polar bears?! Looking back as Lost starts its final season, you take a lot of knowledge for granted, even as questions remain unanswered. That John Locke used to be in a wheelchair was such a revelation. Seeing the smoke monster for the first time was really crazy, not to mention the first time the gang jumped through time. I have a feeling that reading the Dark Tower series is going to be a similar experience for me. I really hope so. Oddly enough, there are some of the same themes, both science fictional and religious in both The Gunslinger and Lost, in particular the Man in Black himself, who is much like Jacob's nemesis/Other-Locke. I wonder if in reading/ listening to this series and watching the final season of Lost at the same time will give me any additional insight. Or maybe I'll just have twice as many WTF moments.

On to The Drawing of The Three

Afterword: Started listening to Drawing of the Three on audio and its a different guy who doesn't sound very good at all. I have a few other books on my plate right now, but I'll get around to reading it in actual book form soon.

Things That I Read

This week (or rather last week): The Gates - by John Connolly

Rated: E for End of the world-hilarity

This review is going to be a quick one since I actually finished it over a week ago and the specifics have started to crawl away from my brain like [insert witty simile here]. Yep, I'm that lazy. Anyway, this book tells the story of Samuel Johnson, a little boy living in a tidy English village, who becomes unfortunately involved with demons and all the end of the world type things that they do. It turns out that his unassuming neighbors accidentally assisted in the opening of a portal to Hell, or rather, a particularly hell-like dimension which bears a strong resemblance to the Hell depicted in Christian mythology. The whole "gateway to Hell" business has been done before, but what I found interesting about this work was how Connolly attempted to explain the phenomenon by connecting the the "magical" creation of the portal to a malfunction of the Large Hadron Collider, and the formation of a sort of black hole/Einstein-Rosen bridge hybrid thingy. At this point you can tell that this girl has never actually taken a physics class in her life. Moving on. The book actually spends a remarkable amount of time on real hard science, which is not really expected in a fantasy novel. Should we then reclassify this thing as science fiction instead? Eh, I mean there are still dragon-like beasties and undead hordes and such, not to mention the semi-magical elements, so I'm going to say no. Still, its pretty different stuff, and I wouldn't mind seeing more science things that I don't understand in fantasy books so I can sound smarter. Science aside, what you have is a pretty straightforward lets-stop-the-end-of-the-world tale written with a lot of tongue in cheek humor and extremely snarky footnotes. If you were looking for a book to compare it too, the easiest would be Good Omens by Terry Pratchet and Neil Gaiman; if you were looking for a movie, then definitely Shaun of the Dead. Except, ya know, with kids. Comparisons to Shaun are particularly apt in the bit where Samuel and his friends fend off these flying demon things with a cricket bat, and of course the part with the actual zombies. I also felt some notes of Hot Fuzz when the semi inept police force is trying to combat the hellspawn. Great stuff that. I particularly liked the character of Nurd, a demon who isn't very good at being terrifying and only sort of good at being good, who gets mixed up in the whole business. I recommend this book to just about everyone. Hard scifi fans are going to like the bits of semi-factual science, fantasy and horror buffs are going to enjoy the magical/ demon stuff, and anybody who likes the absurd will enjoy the ripping good writing. The only other Connolly book I read was "The Book of Lost Things." This book is very different from that, but shows the same talent for storytelling. I wonder whether his hard-boiled crime fiction is as well written. Maybe I'll check it out some day.

Final Word: Definitely the best book I've read this year. Ok, so it's the first book I read this year. Sue me.