Category Archives: random

Easy Beliefs

a stylized yellow and orange sun over a patchwork green field

It’s easy to believe:
that this is it
it’s all over.

Optimism foolish,
and hope a meager meal.
Seeing a pattern of life defeated:
prevailing winds all sailed.

Much harder is the challenge
to recover, to rebuild
to end the cycled brooding
where harvests never yield.

And it surely doesn’t help
that complexity seems fraught
little nooks and crannies
that only seem to rot.

Yes, simplicity is charming
like an easy winning smile.
It can seem a deft decision
to prune away denial.

But shutting off and shutting down
just mimes an early death,
barely meeting definition,
of fire taking breath.

And it would also be mistaken:
to paint a happy-lucky wash
grimness has its uses
to avoid perspective lost.

Oh, but it’s overwhelming
the grinding of this wheel
scraping skin and breaking backs
under boots of steel.

Which is all the reason
to keep the bridges open
to bind and knit the friendships
that soothe us when we’re swollen.

Because there are no saviors
no single points of success or failure
instead its threes and fours of us
that move this stubborn glacier.

No, it’s not quite the end
not this partial apocalyptic;
we humans still have centuries
despite naysayed insistence.

Hope is still the worthwhile choice
with meaningful resistance
neighbors helping neighbors
mutually aided persistence.

Ever Famous?

Reach for the starrrrrrrs, pardner!Ever Famous?

I overheard an interesting conversation earlier, but it wasn’t really all that interesting for its content. It was interesting because of what it made me think of. Snippets of some other life are like that. A lot of the time they inspire more than they intrigue.

Anyway, the thing I overheard made me think of topic I think about fairly often. I was sitting at a coffee shop, of course, and scrolling through random online media. Also of course. I was lending half-an-ear to the surrounding people. It was busy. Being a payday weekend, everyone was out shopping and perusing the wares of a strip mall I dropped into in search of house wares. I needed an airtight container where I could seal my cereal in defense against stale flakes and bugs.

The people at the coffee shop were also busy and moving fast to stay busy. Most weren’t sticking around long enough to strike up a proper conversation with their companions. They waited for their drinks with an impatiently cocked hip or with the kill-some-time swipes through their phone. Most of the snippets of conversation were about where to go next, the latest political nightmare, or how many calories some drink had.

There was, however, one group of friends that had taken up residence one table over. As friends do, they were making fun of one another for random things.

One didn’t understand the difference between a normal bank and a credit union. They were declared to be ignorant, stupid, and “Haven’t you heard of Google?”

Another was surprised to learn that you were required to have insurance to own a car. That resulted in less insults and more bitter agreement that such a rule was a terrible inconvenience.

But for the most part, whatever they said, as soon as one of them spoke up about something, the others made fun of that something.

One of the friends mentioned a hobby of collecting quarters. For non-Americans, or perhaps those Americans that don’t look at their coins, she was referring to the quarters with specific designs on them. It’s a campaign by the U.S. Mint called “America the Beautiful” that releases new quarters every year for states and notable places throughout the United States. They’ve been in circulation since 2010 and have 54 distinct designs on the backs of quarters.

The response to the young woman’s hobby was mostly negative. There was one friend that offered a generic, “That’s kinda cool.” The remaining reactions ranged between “That’s dumb.” and “That’s useless.”

Useless was the keyword that got me thinking.

Now, granted this is a group of friends that seems to have fun with making fun. They were all smiles as they insulted one another about trivial things. Maybe they don’t even believe what they’re saying. Some people like saying things for the sake of a laugh or to get a rise out of someone. So, the content of their conversation was mostly fluff. Not all that important.

But, it got me thinking.

My hobby, though it’s probably clear in some fashion, is writing. I like to write. I like to create things in general, but in particular I like to write. The main thing I write are fiction stories. That’s fun. One day, maybe, I’d like to publish one of my stories as a book.

Though, I often ask myself a question of little value. At least, I don’t value the question that much because I’ve come to believe that the question doesn’t matter. I only still ask it because part of me frets over stupid things. It’s difficult to stop yourself from fretting over stupid things.

But, how many people read a book? Not like, how many people buy the book. Not even how many people open the book to look at it. But how many people actually read it? The whole thing. The people that turn every page. Whisper every word. Hang on the end of each sentence and rush into the next.

Now, every book has a different audience, and every reader is not necessarily reading for the same reason. But, let’s pretend that we’re talking about those that want to read it. For whatever reason.

There are people, websites, organizations, that analyze this kind of thing. Of course there are. There are a billion sources of data in the world these days. We’re all little bits of someone else’s tracking system, right? And yet that data isn’t so easy to get at most of the time. Or it’s not very easy to digest. And so we often rely on nice bite-sized tidbits that give us the approximation of an idea. As usual, the curse of simplification is that it obscures the truth.

We like narratives. We like a story. We like an idea that’s been honed and sharpened and whittled down to something clever and pretty. Even if it is a repeat of a repeat.

For instance. Physical books are continually declared dead, alive, reborn, or somewhere in between. Zombie books seem to be doing well.

But what about the data? Well take some American Pew Research for one data point. Reading is declining! There are people that haven’t read a book all year! Well. Yeah. Not surprised. But what does this measure? How do we measure reading anymore in a world of content? These studies focus on the term “book” in a way that doesn’t account for other things that involve reading. What about online serials? What about in-game content for MMORPGs and games in general? Does it count if people only read screenplays? Or if they read magazines, or comics, or pamphlets, or zines, or whatever else by the dozens?

Data is meaningless, after all.

And The Long Tail continues to lengthen. Niches can forever get more specific. And that isn’t any kind of surprise. Between self-made bubbles, social media bubbles, and good ol’ cognitive bias, the easiest path is selectivity.

We do tend to focus on the things that interest us. Fortunately, now we can actually find more of whatever interests us with minimal effort. We’re not trapped to some localized version of the world. The town we live in no longer controls our information flow. Gone are the days of monoculturism and all hail the rise of globalization! Now everyone will be the same!

Right? Well. Maybe not.

Really, our neighborhoods, our communities, have moved to the cloud. The borders and walls between cultures have gone digital. Now we can just ignore the pieces of the world that we don’t care for.

We can each be uniquely more individual than ever before.

So. Collecting quarters. Useless? I dunno. What’s useful? A skill that brings about profit and a livelihood? Since when has that mattered when it comes to hobbies? Does something have to bring an eventual goal of wealth to be pursued? That doesn’t seem very fun.

I mean, don’t we all do something as a “day job” that’s useful so we can do the useless thing at night?

So, how many people read a book? How many people will read my book? My stories? One?

Zero?

And if it is zero, should I care?

Nah. After all. I wrote it to fill my own special personal niche space of preference.

Tropes: Everything is Done Did

Take it on down to Troperville.

No really. Take it down.

Oh man, don’t do the Tropes! Except, do the tropes, because not doing them is such a trope. And make sure you don’t do any subverting of tropes, because that’s getting old and I’m so tired and bored that I’m yawning already just thinking about it. But dang. Tropes! What the heck are they? Don’t write them, but do. Keep them in mind so you can understand the reasons they were used! Write them in a new way! Go to TVTropes and die from starvation and dehydration as you click the next rabbit-hole link.

But yeah. Tropes are a thing. Like, they are a noun that means something. The ol’ online dictionary describes them as literary or rhetorical devices, and yeah, that’s what they are. But I guess they mean more now, or at least they have connotations surrounding them with the gravitas of dark and stormy nights.

And really, that makes sense because culture is ever evolving. And in our global society of sharing everything its easier to transmit ideas in condensed form. Its like powdered milk in a box that needs a little added water. Or Ikea furniture where you see the display model and then you go find the boxes that make the thing you want. Some of those parts are interchangeable and can be used for multiple final forms. It’s an adult form of Lego except there’s a lot more screwing involved.

The greatest part of assemble-it-yourself furniture is that you could make it however you want. Do you want to paint all the stuff before you put it together? Sure, go ahead! Maybe you don’t like that headboard that the assembly guide suggested. Get another one instead and somehow make it work. Customize and reshape, reimagine and carefully build. The end product becomes something special and you’ve also got something to sit on. Yet, you don’t have to do any of that if you don’t want. Maybe you really do just need a decent chair. Get the parts, align the holes, and tighten the nuts and bolts. That’s perfectly fine. It’s functional. It’s nothing pretty or unique, but it works.

Weirdly enough, there’s an odd shifting perspective on what’s cool to customize. Cars are well-known art projects, and custom woodworking is pretty nicely received. Yet, some hobbies are seen as somewhat useless or maybe only for the highly trained. Like, model rocketry is fun. Plenty of people try it once or twice. They go to a store and buy a box and put together some kind of kit. Then sometimes people feel a hook sink deep into their skin. Then the kit isn’t enough. There are modifications that must be made.

At some point any hobby can become a sometimes negatively-associated word: obsession. Except, often enough, for those that are highly accepted like sports or cars or money. Isn’t that strange? Why is it so easy to point and laugh at someone’s drive? Why do we get to pick and choose what gives joy to someone’s life? Shouldn’t we just let people find their niche? Well, except murder and sexual assault and other types of violence. Those are bad and I don’t care if it gives someone a surge of excitement.

Seriously though to find a niche is a meaning of life itself. We all want to find the place we specifically fit. No general purpose user cares what computer they use. But, the gamers and the coders and the developers want a special machine at their fingertips. And to them there’s a purpose to that selection. There’s a reason for the choices they make. A hammer is a hammer if you just need something heavy to swing. But delicate taps to shape metal need a ball pein’s specific hit.

Speaking of smashing and hitting. Now’a’days tropes have started colliding and combining with memes. Ideas are fun to exploit and explore. It’s a pleasure to express that ideal version of a repeated dream. To me that raises the question of whether or not that will dull the senses. Will people get so used to blunt concentrated thought that subtlety will be a novelty?

Nah. We’re too adaptable. And instead of adaptable it’d probably be okay to say forgetful. The things we find popular today and tomorrow will be the next generations cool new thing. That’s the way of history. Cyclical thinking is… well. It keeps coming around.

So, certainly, everything’s been done before, but that’s probably just fine. Because, really, the creation of something new shouldn’t be the goal. The creation of something that speaks to you or to a reader is more important. Remember that book you read as a child? Or that movie or cartoon? Whatever it was, at whatever the age, it affected you deeply. It changed your life.

Someone out there hates your favorite thing. It doesn’t matter if it’s a show, a story, a comic book, or a cake. Your tastes are not the same. The stuff you think is dumb or pointless? Someone else loves that too.

I guess, then? Do the tropes. Do whatever you want. But do it well.

-J.A.