Are there other world's than this?

"Now he could, and too often did, scan through the thousand pictures, a record of his life, in minutes. All he had to do was keep his finger on the leftward arrow. It was too easy. It was not good. It kept him in a dangerous stasis of nostalgia and regret and horror."*


             I've been in and out of the world lately. Two jobs and I went back to school and a stack of books that I'll never let get any smaller. I think more than any of my obligations or responsibilities the Dark Tower books have distracted me the most. I like Roland. He's my kind of guy. He describes himself in the first book as being, "the last of that green and warm-hued world" which has long since moved on. Yet he's still out there searching...hunting down his ghosts and (I haven't gotten to the end yet) the Dark Tower. Stephen King admits to modeling Roland's character off Clint Eastwood from The Good the Bad and the Ugly, and you get that wide-screen, dusty western feel from the books. The lonesome hero. The search. We all know the story, but The Dark Tower adds an element of nostalgia and also magic that those westerns  were missing. Roland talks about destiny and I listen, although I have no idea what mine is, or even if I believe in it. There's also the sense of decay in the books that I feel all around me, the sense of winding-down, that the world's moved on and moving away. 
              Dave Eggers just came out with a new book, A Hologram for the King, which struck me as uncannily similar in the sense that it is also about a world that moved on, and left a protagonist wandering around a different desert (in Saudi Arabia). The New York Times book review described it as kind of a "Death of an American Salesman" and it left me feeling like there isn't much to look forward to, as a country, because we've been totally sold out. Not just sold out by the government, but by each other, capitalism, a big bold ETC. We're just at the end now. A winding down. Watched in conjunction with the new HBO series Newsroom, you get the feeling that other people are picking up on it too. The lack of American imagination has become the lack of progress, which makes us a wasteland not just for artists but for everyone. In A Hologram for the King the main character describes watching the last NASA launch, it's heartbreaking, and its terribly similar to what Aaron Sorkin writes about America on Newsroom (bottom line, we're getting played, hard, by a lot of different people). 


                I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the national crisis of imagination or tolerance, passing moments of panic maybe, but instead spend my time reading and getting lost in fantasy novels where the great times have past, the heroes are already gone. Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, the Dark Tower Series- all worlds where the heroes are long dead and the battles are over, until the next story starts anyway (and who among us doesn't secretly wish for their chance to be a hero, for Aragorn or Roland to ride up on their horse and say, time to fight? It's my favorite daydream) I only thought it was interesting, and worth writing down, that this similar feeling that "the world's moved on, and I with it" (courtesy of Roland) is seeping into other stories and coming from other writers. 
                 
                I've got looks of other books to write about. And soon.


*Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

thoughts not worth thinking

"This was the interior work of his current life. He thought about himself and then cursed himself- his thoughts were not worth thinking. He was negligible and deserved no pity. He wanted only to help the people he loved, right? But he wasn't doing that, either. He was growing harder to penetrate. A half-dozen inexplicable injustices and you're a cynic. Ten premature deaths and you went crazy or barren. You couldn't care the same way each time; a certain point it was just absurd. The words dead inside presented themselves to him occasionally, but was that it, was that him? He cared, and deeply, about so many things, didn't he?"

I went to a show to see a band I like a lot. I think everyone else would like them too, but they've become an example of A while everyone else wants so badly to like B. The shortsightedness of friends irritates me. I feel like a fence walker and then I start acting like I'm living off lemons and salt, too sour for my own good. I ride my bike home in moonlight, cruising under big oak trees at three in the morning and I started getting worked up over snobbery, weighed down by wanting everyone just to lighten up a little. If I expressed these thoughts I'd sound like an insane person to rational society, "YOU LIKE JAPANESE HARDCORE BUT YOU CAN'T APPRECIATE CURRENT AMERICAN HARDCORE? IDIOTS! POSERS!" you know, the kind of person people don't make eye contact with on street corners. I know I have friends out there who know what I'm saying. They'd say, don't spend so much time thinking about other people. I wish I could stop too. Dan's been my partner in suffering lately, and he told me pretty simply, "you can't change how people act, only how you react to them." I know. I've gotten better and I still have a lot of work to do. Sometimes when I feel overwhelmed I drink to the point of oblivion, or sometimes I stay at home for hours, reading comic books or currently- listening to American Gods on tape. The rest of the time? I can honestly say I know how to enjoy myself. I like being alone, I also like going out, but I like walking both sides of the line (the one I refuse to draw in the sand).

I bought a movie the other day at Video Rodeo because I used to watch it A LOT and I can't rent movies from there anymore anyway (a rough estimate of how much I owe them is more than I'll make in tips tonight). I watched it last night with red wine and a good friend and I felt a little embaressed at how sad the movie was. I remembered, with an air of real dissappointment in myself, that I used to love movies like this. I stopped because every time I loved something like a movie, or a really great record, I'd want to talk about it, and no one would pay any attention. So I gave up. I started watching romantic comedies (which I do genuinely like) and action movies and the jokes I could make about that were better than the actual comments I'd make about "better" movies et. all. Somewhere along the line I really started liking all the crappy blockbuster movies I watched and cared less and less about the good ones, especially if I had to listen to anyone talk about them. Currently, everyone keeps getting me to go see Melancholia at the Hippodrome, but I'd really rather go see Shark Night in 3D. I don't know how that shift happened exactly, but I like my tastes now. Just last night though, I got reminded of that itching feeling, that intense discomfort to tell everyone about the movie, how they just have to see it, really watch it, and really pay attention. I feel like that way still when I read books, even mainstream comics like Grant Morrison's Superman, and especially things like the first chapter of the new Eggers' book- I can't just enjoy it, I need everyone else to see it too.

Maybe at the bar tonight I can shift conversations away from Tim Tebow and more toward Alejandro Inarritu, but if I can't, hey, I'll put on ESPN with the sound off and turn up Sisters of Mercy on the stereo. Lead a horse to water, and all that.

*Dave Eggers, Chapter One (from his forthcoming novel, title unknown, release date unknown. Chapter One can be found in McSweeney's quarterly no. 38)