Cynicism - gift of my generation?

On my way to work this morning, I saw a sign that got me all fired up, but not in the way it was intended. It said "Lower gas. Vote Cannon."

I sat, disappointed in the people who actually believe that a single congressman can have any kind of an effect on the price we pay for gasoline. It's one of those possibly comforting lies that our government representatives try to sell us. How many people actually believe in those signs? And in this election year, we're getting a lot of promises for change, assurances that life will be better under one president than another, but I'm highly skeptical.

Don't get me wrong, I think that things will probably be a little different than they are and different from if the other person is elected instead, but there are so many forces that affect a society's development and health that one person in the government isn't going to have that big an impact on me. Or any other citizen. I kind of feel sorry for George Bush, because he's going to be a scapegoat for a number of things that were products of our own hubris and greed. He's got a lot to answer for, himself, but I'm not sure that he's really accountable for all the things that have happened during his presidency.

This distrust of The System, I think, is one of the strengths of my generation. The trouble is, we don't care enough to try to fix it. I'm staring at my desktop wallpaper picture of Solid Snake and have come up with a parallel. The kids of Generation X are a lot like Solid Snake. We feel like watching the fight break out and sneaking around the side to do what we want while everyone else is focused on the gunfight. We don't join a side permanently, just long enough to get back to what we were doing. But maybe that's just me. Maybe I'm the cynical one and I'm an anomaly. I still don't think a politician has my best interest in mind all the time.

Back to gas prices, though. While I would definitely not mind having cheaper gas, we're still not paying as much as other countries for gas and this gives us a good incentive to think about living more sustainably. I mean, think of the Dutch settlers who saw all those dodos and shot them for fun, or the settlers of the American West shooting as many buffalo as they could. With the benefit of hindsight, we look at that and go "What were they thinking?" I think that in about a hundred years, future generations will think the same thing about us and our consumption of gasoline and other natural resources.

And now you're wondering what this rant has to do with my writing. Well, if you're one of those people who feels that history or economic influences shape art and literature, this is some good background towards the ideas I'm compiling. Just another brick in the foundation of the mind creating a story about people who don't exist, as far as I know.

Teenagers

Walking around the bus stop in the summer and watching the teenagers is an interesting study. When I was a teenager, I remember feeling like I was so grown up and could pretty well blend in with a bunch of adults and I can see that same feeling in them.

The funny thing is that they're so wrong. I was so wrong then too. They almost all look so young, and the ones who don't look as young as they are give themselves away when they start interacting with their friends. I don't know what it is that fixes that in the space of just a few years, but something changes that inexperience for most people. Maybe we all have different experiences that make us older. I think mine started with frostbite. I don't know where this is going, so I'll end it there. Just part of the WASTE system.

The big plunge

I've been putting it off for years. They've been sitting on the shelf the whole time, staring me down, daring me to take them off the shelf and take them on. Up till now, I've looked away and faced down other intimidating books, ones that many people have heard of, few people start reading, and an even smaller percentage of people actually finish them. I've taken on Gravity's Rainbow, Ulysses, and A Brief History of Time, read them and put them back on the shelf. My egotistical trophies that wave to those in the know, saying, "Yes, I'm here and I have been used." Very few books in my house have escaped being read front to back, but this one has. I'm the only one in the house who can read it.

I finally decided to pick up and read my copy of War and Peace, which is daunting for anyone, but my copy is a souvenir of my time in Ukraine and is just how Leo Tolstoy wrote it--in Russian, French, and German. I read two of those languages, and fortunately, there are Russian translations of the French in footnotes. It's spread out over two volumes. I've noticed there are words that I never learned, since they're artifacts from the days of the aristocracy and I'm guessing there will be a lot of words from the Napoleonic-era war culture I won't know either. The rate I'm going, I'll be reading this book for a long time. But I'm determined to finish it. I'll let you know how it goes. If I remember.

More on the big changes

This picture pretty much sums up the big change in my life. He's brand-new and he's mine. The first boy of mine, which means there are going to be some interesting new developments to go along with that in the next couple of years.

I've been working on a book with my brother to take the place of the Dad Handbook my dad kept citing as how he knew so many useless things. We never saw the book and started doubting its existence, so we decided to write all the manly stuff down. This is related to the big changes because it's information that will be vital for the boy as he gets older. Things like Batman lives in Gotham City and Superman lives in Metropolis. And it's not the same city. So I'm happy and proud and excited for the fun new experiences.

Big changes

There are big changes on the way for me soon. More later.

Consistency

I'm finding it difficult to write in this blog consistently, but that doesn't mean that I'll stop trying. I console myself with the thought that about three people read this blog and I'm writing it primarily for myself anyway. I feel like Alice, who gives herself very good advice that she doesn't follow.

The last little while, I've made a couple of decisions about the way I want to live my life. I'm making a concerted effort to stay engaged in the conversation with people I like instead of spending all my time with the totally cool electronic gadgets I have. I try to remember that the gadgets can wait and people may not. Besides, I don't want to turn into one of those people who, like many of the younger generation, don't know how to interact with people in a way that doesn't involve a cell phone or a computer. There's something to be said for that face-to-face conversation. It's so much more complete.

The other related decision I've made is that I want to regularly spend time outside so that I'm not one of these pasty white guys who spends all his time inside with his electronic toys. Besides, I want to make sure I don't forget how to do all those nifty outdoorsy things I spent
years learning and honing.

So why am I telling you all this? If you want to be different or make some changes, start now. Know that you won't be perfect at it, but keep at it because something's better than nothing.

Movie wrap-up

I had mentioned being excited to see Indiana Jones and Iron Man, both of which I've seen now. Here's what I thought, not that anyone cares.

Of the two, I'd see Iron Man again. Iron Man was fantastic! I'm looking forward to a sequel. I'm not into spoiling things, so if you haven't seen it yet, you'll have to sit through the credits to see the real ending. As a former comic book geek, I almost wet my pants.

Indiana Jones was fun, but I'm not sure if I'd watch it again. After the Star Wars prequels disaster, I was pretty sure I didn't want to see another George Lucas movie. So I was hesitant to see Indiana Jones until I heard that Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford had looked at previous scripts and rejected them as crap. Figuring that their input would help temper the recent downhill trend of Lucas's storytelling ability, I saw the movie. It was fun, but just like the Star Wars prequels, he tried to use dramatic computer graphics to take the place of a compelling well-told story. When we got to the end of the movie, I thought "There better not be a sequel." If there's another Indiana Jones movie, I'm not going to see it. Again, I'm not going to spoil the movie, but there's the possibility of another one.

Having written about those, there are a couple more movies I'm looking forward to this year. The next couple are Get Smart and The Dark Knight. I'm really excited about Get Smart, which is next.

Studying body language

The other day, I was on the bus and then the train with a young married couple, and although I couldn't hear what they were talking about, I could tell they were fighting about something. More accurately, the young wife was annoyed with her husband.

I could see by their body language what was going on. He had done something or had failed to do something which had annoyed her. She sat, leaning on her elbow, leaning away from him, while he kept trying to point things out outside the window, looking for some topic that would engage her in the conversation, which would have nothing to do with what he'd done. He kept trying to make her laugh, and she gave him a token laugh every now and then, but her brow never gave away that she was still annoyed. As the husband got more desperate to pull her into the conversation, his motions became more emphatic, he started resorting to cheaper humor until he was finally acting like a complete idiot, embarrassing himself so that she'd have him stop. It was all sadly amusing.

Fixing my problem

I think I've pinpointed a solution to the problem I feel like I have in writing a novel. I may have talked about it before, but this is my blog, so I'm going to talk about it again. As I look through things I've written before, I realized that I usually have a fun idea or an interesting scene I want to fill out a little more, but as I get into it, I realize that I don't have a point. It doesn't usually go anywhere, so I get bored or burned out. And then the work gets filed away in some electronic repository for months. Maybe even years. Every now and then, I'll pull it out and think about where that story could go, and then I get annoyed that I didn't leave myself a clear destination, and I put it away again.

I've thought about outlining a story, but I so rarely outline anything on paper that I fight against that idea. I don't want to stifle my spontaneity, feeling like I've doomed myself to follow a map I've already laid out. On the other hand, Kurt Vonnegut mapped out Slaughterhouse Five so many times and for so long that when he actually sat down to put the words on paper, he just had to fill out the story that he'd already streamlined in his head.

I'm already working on just writing things and leaving them less-than-polished while I press on to write more things, and that's a challenge for me. I tend to edit and polish things while I write, so this is a difficult move for me.

But I think that the solution to my problem is to come up with the climax and the falling action first. Rather than writing the story in order, I need to start with that section and then build out the story from that point. Kind of like a Toni Morrison novel. She always starts with a peek at the climax and then backs up and shows how the characters got there. I think I should probably start taking that kind of approach, but possibly not giving the climax as the opening of the story.

I'm sure that the two of you who read this blog don't care, but this is about me exploring my own process. And who knows? Maybe this'll be highly informative for future generations when I've published something.