The Novel That Never Will Be

(Note: This is an obligatory first paragraph, because Facebook in its infinite wisdom has decided to preview only the *second* paragraph of linked blog posts. I'd imagine there's a reason for it, but instead attempting to divine that reason, I'm going to include these words so that your first look isn't quite so confusing.)

Do you ever have that dream where you go to your local music store (and here I'm assuming that you know what those are) and find a trove of rare, possibly imported, material that you've never heard of by one of your favorite artists? Have you ever experienced that thrill?

Well, that's how I felt -- and I assume I will feel again when it actually happens -- when I heard that Twin Peaks was going to return to TV in early 2016. As fraught with peril as the idea of a continuation of one of my favorite televised stories may be -- even though it will be helmed by many of the same artists that created the original -- I can't help but be excited by it.

At the same time, it's also stuck a pin in a project that I had been amusedly musing since the original show went off the air in 1991... my imaginary sequel novel. You see, Twin Peaks, while enjoying immense success in its first limited-run season, really fell off in the second. It was canceled twice, brought back through some of the earliest fan protests that utilized the fledgling Internet, and eventually was scheduled for final demolition at the end of its second season. At that point, original creators David Lynch and Mark Frost -- who admittedly had stepped back somewhat and bequeathed the wheel to other creative minds -- returned to steer the project back into the harbor, and left us with a confounding series finale that included explosions, demonic possession, adventures in other dimensions, and left no less than six major characters in unresolved mortal peril. Not only that, it took a break in the middle so Little Jimmy Scott could sing a slow jazz number.

It was material just begging, if not outright daring, to be continued. After a decade of thought, I felt I could bring a unique resolution to it. And so, now that the actual conclusion is pending, I thought I would put down some of what my novel would have entailed. This way, my theories can either be proven right or wrong by the minds that the source material sprang from. Bearing that in mind, be aware that spoilers abound in what follows.

Let me say a bit more about why I liked Twin Peaks: it gets rhapsodized over time and time again, but it really was unlike anything that had been on TV before. It was a prime-time soap opera, yes, but instead of focusing on how even rich people are messed up (Dallas, Dynasty, Falcon Crest, etc.), it dealt with a small town and the lurking horror that lies underneath its all-American veneer. Its pioneering skill as a show was in juggling a multitude of tones and genres at once. It was sad, surreal, funny, sexy, and frightening, often in combination. The central mystery of the murder of prom queen Laura Palmer was brutally raw and tragic at first, and then got weirder and weirder, descending first into the dark secrets of the town's denizens, then into a neo-Lovecraftian mindbender of worlds beyond.

But the thing that was truly mesmerizing for me about Twin Peaks -- what made me tape it and re-watch it relentlessly -- was that everything seemed like a clue to a deeper mystery, and more often than not, everything was. It all hung together with the same kind of logic that a dream seems to make perfect sense right after waking. And the atmosphere, thanks in great part to Lynch's odd creative choices and Angelo Badalamenti's haunting score -- gave the whole thing an simultaneous sense of the alien and the familiar that really sucked you in.

Now, when we left FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper at the end of the series, he had solved Laura's murder and had gone on to grapple with his nemesis, a rogue fellow agent named Windom Earle. Together they had gone into that space-between-worlds called The Black Lodge, where they confronted Laura's killer, a demonic spirit named BOB, in its lair. After witnessing BOB kill Earle and becoming possessed himself, Cooper came back into the real world. In the closing moments of the finale, no one seemed the wiser that he wasn't quite himself anymore. The third season I invented in my head centered on defeating BOB once and for all, and recovering the real Cooper from the Black Lodge.

In my story, the possession doesn't remain a secret for long. It's clear that Cooper is not himself. The real challenge for Sheriff Harry Truman and his team is not letting Cooper know that they know he's not really him anymore. This is tough, given that they have new investigations to make at the hospital. There are many new patients, including Audrey Horne, who survived the explosion in the bank, thanks to the fact that she was chained to the vault door at the time; Benjamin Horne, who survived getting his head bashed against a fireplace mantel by Doc Hayward, but who now has a full-scale freak-out when a chest of drawers with many pull-knobs gets brought into his room; and Leo Johnson, who is being treated for multiple venomous spider bites but miraculously regains his speech because of them.

Annie, the third person in the Black Lodge with Cooper and Earle, lies in a coma. Cooper (BOB), after being reluctantly left alone with her by the sheriff, utters some cryptic phrases about how he'll make sure that she is eternally held between worlds so as not to warn everyone about BOB.

Cooper returns to the home he recently bought at Dead Dog Farm, and Deputy Hawk is sent to observe his behavior. What he sees is Cooper walking through the house obsessively, following a curved path that often causes him to bump into walls. Over the course of several days, he manages to break through them, and eventually carves a perfectly circular path through the interior of the house. When completed, he continues to pace this circle obsessively, stopping often to scream up toward the sky.

Meanwhile, Harry and Andy are doing research, and find in the town archives that Dead Dog Farm used to be called Dead Wolf Swamp before it was drained in a logging effort by the Packard Saw Mill almost a hundred years before. It was considered to be an especially haunted place by the local Native Americans, who believed it was the location of a Sounding Stone, which as close to a real-world location of The Black Lodge as there can be. Hawk believes that it is actually below the foundations of Cooper's house, and because BOB is in Cooper's body and thus unable to cross over and get back home, he is in torment.

But why is BOB so weak, when he was formerly so powerful a threat to the town? The answer is provided by Major Briggs, who knows more about BOB than he has let on. Thanks to his work on Project Bluebook, Briggs has inadvertently discovered clues to the existence of both the Black and White Lodges. (Remember, he is the only one who has glimpsed the White Lodge itself, during the period of three days he went missing in Season 2). He takes on the role of consultant for Sheriff Truman and his team now, telling them what he knows...

In the Black Lodge, as we've seen, time is mutable. In general, though, it tends to run backwards. Every time we've seen a spirit speaking in the Black Lodge, it's been in reverse. So while BOB has been haunting Twin Peaks for centuries, he is actually quite young by now, and relatively inexperienced. From this point of view, BOB's power has gradually been decreasing, especially since he killed Teresa Banks, which was the case that initially put Cooper on his trail. With this in mind, Major Briggs suggests that the best way to destroy BOB... is to *create* him.

Here's where my plotting got a little fuzzy. All things coming in pairs in Twin Peaks, I know there would be a White Lodge sounding stone mirrored on the other side of the titular mountains, most likely at One-Eyed Jack's, where the spirit named JUDY (I added the capital letters myself, to match BOB), who just might be the light side of BOB, has been trying to break through into our world to stop her evil twin.

It all ends with a group of people from the town (roster to be determined) breaking through the gateway into the Black Lodge, confronting their own dopplegangers, and JUDY finally combining with BOB to become the entity they had started out being in the first place.

Of course, along the way I planned to make a bunch of other stops... there's still the fact that Leo will want to kill Bobby Briggs for hooking up with his wife Shelly. Audrey will have to decide what to do when John Justice Wheeler comes back to town after hearing of her brush with death, even as she still has feelings for Agent Cooper. Ben Horne will reveal exactly what he saw in his vision the night the doorway to the Black Lodge opened for Earle, and what he knows about Josie's ultimate fate (was she really reincarnated as an end table?). I also wanted to see James ride his motorcycle all the way to Buenos Aires and find what strange portal Philip Jeffries discovered there (my guess is that it would lead back to Twin Peaks somehow. Or Philadelphia.). I also wanted to delve into the history of The Bookhouse Boys, that secret society that protects the town from evil. Cooper will have to figure out how he can keep part of himself in the Black Lodge so that he'll be there with JUDY to lead Laura into the White Lodge, when she arrives, after the aforementioned twenty-five years... And, of course, I'll want Ed and Norma to get their happy ending, finally. Because who wouldn't like to see that?

Epically Alluring

If you've read some of my other entries ("Big Book Love", for example), you'll already know that I have a soft spot for epics. And recently, I seem to be taking them on even more often than usual. I don't know, there's just something about huge, multi-part sagas that I really enjoy. I used to think that, being a more introverted person, I liked the feel of achievement that comes from finishing them. It might be the same feeling a person finds at the top of a mountain, or the finish line of a marathon. But now I'm thinking that it's not quite as analogous an experience, that's there's something additional that draws me to the epic form. Especially when they're put together in the ways that the three artists whose works I've been experiencing lately have done.

It started when I decided to listen to Wagner's Ring Cycle of operas ("Der Ring des Nibelungen", officially). I had heard a lot of peripheral stuff about it for a long time -- how it influenced The Lord of the Rings, how its use of "motifs" has changed how we listen to music ever since, and of course the Bugs Bunny cartoon "What's Opera, Doc?", which I've seen probably a hundred times.

So over a course of weeks, I listened to all twenty hours of its length. I enjoyed following the story and recognizing where it has been echoed by other fantastic works, most notably how it all comes down to gods, dwarves, giants and men fighting for possession of one magical ring that gives the wearer nearly unlimited power.

But what struck me even more as I followed along with the translated libretto was how ambitious the whole thing was. At the same time, I had to keep in mind that this was all coming from the mind of Richard Wagner, a racist egomaniac who seemed to be fine with twins falling in love and having children together.

What he envisioned for his operatic cycle was to pick a small town, build a massive theater, stage four epic operas on consecutive nights, and conclude the whole festival by *burning* *the* *theater* *down*. It makes sense from a story point of view -- the story does end in a conflagration that destroys Valhalla, the home of the gods, after all -- but from a safety standpoint I have no idea how the whole thing would be pulled off.

But that's what grabs me most about the whole thing. This one tale, that encompasses generations, and presents locales from the underground kingdom of the dwarves all the way to the rainbow bridge that leads to the dwelling of the Norse gods, has been brought together by one man's uncompromising artistic vision alone. And now, there are people who spend their careers researching both the mythology and musicality of it.

Second, this summer I started listening to all seven Harry Potter audiobooks during my commute. I started a little before Harry's birthday (July 31), and heard Jim Dale read the last book's epilogue from disc 99 on my own (Nov. 14).

Again, you have to marvel at the scope and subtext of the whole thing. If the stories are true, J.K. Rowling wrote the first book in coffee shops while caring for her infant child. And as far as I can tell, there is nothing inconsistent in the magical world that she created during those humble beginnings that doesn't perfectly match with the events of the seventh book, which she wrote when she was a renowned world figure and a multi-millionaire.

There's such a clear thematic progression through the books as Harry and his friends mature and the threat to the wizarding world grows, and that clarity only becomes magnified when you go right from one book into the next. Every question you have gets answered, and many things mentioned in passing have payoffs three or four books later. Either Jo had an unbelievably detailed idea of this world when she first started jotting the story down on a legal pad at a coffeehouse, or she is the world's most adept plot-juggler, tying things together and making up magical rules and backstories on the fly that make perfect retroactive sense. Either way, I'm in awe.

Of course, it's almost pure luck that America really grew to love the HP books in the early 2000s, at a time when they felt threatened by dark outside forces, and had to back a government that wasn't entirely trustworthy, which is exactly what happens in Harry's world. But even if such strange real-world parallels hadn't happened, clearly the series will stand for generations as the right way to tell a human story set against a massive, fantastical backdrop.

The third artist I experienced was one that I've been following for a long time, although until recently there's been very little known about him. His name was Henry Darger, and he lived around the turn of the twentieth century in Chicago, By all accounts, he was a grumpy, eccentric hoarder, who worked as a janitor at various Catholic institutions most of his life. When he passed away and his one-room rented apartment was cleaned out by its owners, they found massive works of art, including three huge, handwritten novels (30,000 pages in all) and hundreds of watercolors and collages, some twelve feet in length.

The longest of the novels (at 15,000 pages) is called "The Vivian Girls in the Realms of the Unreal" and details a sort of parallel-universe version of the Civil War. In his retelling, seven young sisters are the leaders of a massive army leading a revolt against a nation of child slavers. The work is expansive and visceral, never shying from violence despite the innocence of its heroines. Some of the paintings depict the strangling and evisceration of children. This, along with the fact that the little girls are often depicted naked and with penises, led many to believe that Darger was sexually naive at best, and a homicidal pedophile at worst.

The truth, it turns out, makes much more sense. In the book "Henry Darger: Throwaway Boy", author Jim Elledge delves into the artist's past, and finds a cruelly mistreated boy, left alone by a deceased mother and alcoholic father, sexually abused and needlessly institutionalized for most of his childhood, compounded by confusion about his homosexuality. The novels and paintings, it turns out, were his way of working through all the things that happened in his life. It's no surprise, then, that the little girls have boys' bodies, or that "Sweetie Pie", a tornado in the shape of a child's face, spends thousands of pages obliterating most of the locales that Henry knew growing up.

He had been working on these projects secretly for decades, which is what I find so astounding about it. This endeavor made up nearly his entire life, and took his entire life. He did find love eventually, but never lived with his paramour in the thirty years they were a couple, and the relationship ended when Whillie (as Henry called him) moved south for health reasons. But of course, multiple versions of the couple appeared in Henry's books, always depicted as younger, stronger, and working together to help the oppressed children.

And that's what makes me think that there's more to epic storytelling than just weaving a complex, consistent story. Henry's tale is the most obvious example of how art can be a device to help you work through issues, to come to terms with your past and, hopefully, direct your future. If done right, they make it nearly impossible for the author to stop telling them, at least until they're done. And sometimes -- as you can see with Rowling's occasional Potter stories in the years since she concluded the series -- not even then.

That's what makes epics so fascinating to me: it's impossible to tell such a huge, sprawling story without putting more than a little of your true self in it. That's the kind of connection I find with these artists; even if I don't agree with or fully understand them, I can tell that there's something running profoundly deep under the surface. Whether it was Wagner's twisted ideology that cautioned against both foreigners and the lure of power, Rowling's boy wizard hoping to live up to expectations he doesn't really believe he can fulfill, or Darger's fractured psyche trying to make sense of itself, what impresses me about all three of these artists is the scope of what they committed to. You can't fake that kind of passion. They felt compelled to tell these stories, and would not stop until they were completed.

What It All Comes To

My father passed away just over a month ago. For a while before and a while since that day, I haven't had all that much to talk about. This regrouping time is natural, I suppose, but still weird to go through. I had been trying so hard to write regularly and keep momentum, but I was still disoriented by my lack of need to keep going. Now, however, I think I'm back to blather on about whatever's on my mind.

I did write down a few things about my dad, and I'll get to those in time, but I think the first thing I want to talk about on my return to the page is something I'd actually been thinking about for a while, and with this new sort of perspective that I have, I think I can now make enough sense of it to share.

It sort of came around through watching my dad go through his final phases. His passing was in no means sudden or unexpected, and I suppose it was as peaceful as we could have hoped for. But it made me think about the course of his life -- first off, he dealt with multiple sclerosis his entire adulthood. When he was first diagnosed in his twenties, he and my mom were afraid that what they were facing was a death sentence. That didn't turn out to be the case, but the disease did gradually wear away at his physical and mental capabilities over the following decades.

Eventually, medical science found something that seemed to help slow the disease's progress, but it also might have made him more susceptible to the type of lymphoma that he was diagnosed with early this summer. At the same time, other relatives of his generation are growing older and more infirm, and it leaves me looking around, and wondering what the point of old age really is.

Is it really supposed to be like this, this slow accumulation of aches and pains and breakdowns, until there's really nothing else to talk or think about other than the imperfect workings of your own body? What kind of purpose does that serve? And if there's no purpose to it, then what does that fact in itself mean? Whether you believe in a higher power or not, does this eventual inward-turning of the psyche make sense?

Similarly, for a while now I've been trying out ways to articulate something about my new perspective of being in middle age -- which, by any measure, I pretty much have to admit I am now -- and how it compares to the one I had when I was younger.

Young people, at first look, seem to be the ones who are really experiencing the world. They're out there every day, drinking in the newest thing that's come over the horizon. They're socializing, going places, doing things. They have their hands and feet in the stuff of Today. Nothing escapes their insatiable need for the New. Their biggest complaint to the older generation is "You don't know what's going on Right Now! You're living in the past!"

But what I think they fail to see -- I know I definitely failed to see it when I was younger -- is that older people see everything new through a lens that's informed by what's already happened in the last few decades. While the young think they're living in a bright spotlight of NOW and that's all that matters, those of us who have been around longer are equally aware of everything that's outside that spotlight. We've lived through what came before, and learned more about the context of the modern world than they hope to can comprehend, at least not until they've learned that there's more to the world than just what's going on at the moment.

And I'm not just saying that because I'm prejudiced toward the world that I've lived through... there's more to it than that. If you're doing it right, your own storehouse of human knowledge and history keeps expanding in all directions, all throughout your life. But what I didn't realize when I was younger -- and which I think younger people *shouldn't* know -- is that your world is so small without that understanding.

Again, I say that younger people *shouldn't* have this perspective, that what they know is merely a small fraction of what the world is really about. If they did, they would be so humbled and bewildered by it all that they would never do anything, never blaze any trails because they'd already know that there are well-established ones that they could much more easily stick to. The only reason I even state this fact here is that, even if they read it, they'll never believe that it's true.

So, I've now got a better understanding of the world and how it works, what's come before. I know that's it's a much more inclusive, less insulated, and altogether more *right* than the way I thought when I was younger. And then I look at what I said before, about how old age can make us turn inward, necessarily make us obsess about our own thoughts and bodies. And I have to ask myself... who's to say that I'm not just standing in the brighter center of an even bigger spotlight, still unaware of things that it would be impossible for me to be aware of until I go through them?

The strange thing is that, while writing this, I just might have answered my own original question. I was asking, back at the beginning of this, what the purpose of all this end-of-life suffering could possibly be for. And perhaps I stumbled across it while thinking this through. Maybe the answer is this -- every day is a gift.

Let me back up such a thudding cliché with a little explanation. And mayhap you'll get a little view into how I view the world in the process... Everything breaks down. It's the nature of the Universe, the second law of thermodynamics. The instant any living thing stops actively trying to prevent itself from decaying, it falls apart. We don't think about it much, but we're assaulted from all sides by other living things that are trying to destroy us every day. They're incredibly tiny, but if our bodies don't repel their advances, then we're finished. It's a battle that happens every day.

Today, we've been able to use our collective gray matter to help our bodies fight this fight. Medicine and an understanding of how the enemy works has brought us to the point where the ultimate breakdown of the body tends to comes from its own internal structure. More and more, we're living long enough that it's the faults in our own DNA that are causing our ultimate downfall. Because the longer we live, the more likely we are to develop cancer, dementia, and all the other fatal illnesses that naturally grow more likely over time.

So maybe, when you're old and reflecting back on things, dealing with the everyday aches and pains and doctor visits, it's to give you a perspective on how glorious life is, even when you're no longer your young, healthy self. Maybe it's a transition from living a physically-based life to living a mentally-based one. The bill finally comes due on the wonders of the life you've been given, whether they've been big or small. It's the preservation of balance.

Maybe that's the lesson that will come nearer to the end of life... and I say that knowing that I can't (and probably shouldn't) fully appreciate it. Maybe all those around us who seem old and infirm know things that we younger folks just can't grasp yet.

And, of course, if they were to tell us, we wouldn't listen.

Seven Billion Nudges

There are holes in Siberia. I’ve seen countless postings of people asking what possibly could have caused them, but it’s quite clear to me: the Russian permafrost is thawing, thanks to climate change. This releases large amounts of methane gas (which we know has been locked up in the ice for eons), which is building up in underground pockets, and increases in pressure until the least resistant thing holding it in is the ground above it.

I really hope this will be another nail in the coffin of climate change denial, but it drove home to me how we are continuing to alter, perhaps forever, the biosphere we live in. It’s becoming more clear – at least to me – that the search for a balance between humans and the rest of the living things on this planet is just beginning, and there is no end to it in sight. Short of a massive human die-off, this is going to be our permanent job from now on – trying to keep ourselves from permanently altering the world we’ve inherited.

Of course, there’s no cause to say that the changes we put on the planet will necessarily be bad. But the main trouble with humans is a matter of sheer numbers; as we can see now, when some of us start benefitting from our technology, soon everyone will be adopting it, no matter how small the environmental impact could be. Seven billion times tiny nudges in any direction could be cataclysmic. We could put millions of cars on the road that expel only water as exhaust, but then we’d have to figure out whether we’re ruining entire ecosystems by putting so much extra water vapor into the air.

Is this self-regulation really a job we can, or even really want to, take on? Should we just keep putting greater and greater amounts of work and money into preserving species that are on the verge of dying out, if the only reason we’re doing it is to keep them around so that we can save them again? I understand that there’s something to be said for trying to preserve the world the way it was before we started completely influencing every part of it, but in my worst moments I wonder if it’s worth it.

This question was brought up in an especially poignant way after Hurricane Sandy hit the NYC area in 2012. In low-lying areas of the coast that had been flooded, I heard stories of people wondering whether the government should monetarily assist people to rebuild their homes in low-lying areas that were now susceptible to being hit by another equally destructive hurricane in a few more years. How important is it that we not give up these pieces of land that nature is starting to reclaim? It’s the same thing with wildfires in California and Arizona… they’re a natural part of the cycle of the Western biome, but we suppress them and suppress them until the dry scrub builds up and when the fires finally do come, they’re devastating.

It seems like a similar problem to me. Maybe we should concentrate our efforts on sustaining creatures that directly affect our livelihood: Bees, pigs, cattle, basically anything that we either eat or that creates things that we eat. The trouble is, these are creatures that we’ve basically created through the process of domestication. Not only that, we don’t fully understand where the immediate family of creatures we rely on ends. If every part of the food chain is integral, we’re probably already chipping at a weak link and don’t even realize it.

On the other hand, it’s unrealistic to think that we have the resources to control a living, growing process like the Earth as a whole. Add an element of chaos? Sure. But even if we could figure out how to actively point these vast natural processes in the right direction, should we try to hold it in stasis, corral it into a simulation of what it was like when we first got here? Or do we find a way to let it evolve as it would have without our technological influence? And if that’s the option we take, how will we know if we’re doing it right?

Clearly, I’m in a bit of a pessimistic mood. Because preserving/saving the planet goes against every basic human instinct of survival. By this I mean that, in every instance, mankind survives by putting priority on its own short-term goals. That's how we've survived all these years, and we do it regardless of how that affects our long-term goals, never mind what we can do for the good of the planet as a whole. Ironically, this tendency is hardwired into us by nature itself.

But maybe there’s hope for progress… I look back at what humans were doing fifty or a hundred years ago and see how hopelessly naïve we were. Not only did we think that the world was indestructible, we thought that we were pretty much indestructible too – not only were smoking and drinking given no kind of social or moral stigma, but we drove around with no seatbelts and saw smog as a necessary nuisance; we tolerated abuse, sexism, homophobia and racism; we thought depression and psychological trauma were things you could just “get over”.

Maybe in another fifty or hundred years we’ll look back and think the same thing. Maybe we’ll be on well on our way to solving our current problems and have a whole new set of runaway issues to deal with. I’m pretty sure that’s the signpost to look for… a culture that looks back and says, “Yep, we figured it all out a hundred years ago, and we’ve been doing it the same way ever since” is pretty much doomed. It’s a good rule of thumb to keep in mind on a personal level too… there’s a quote I’ve seen on the Internet – attributed to Morgan Freeman, as most things are – that says that a person who believes the same thing at 50 as they did at 20 has wasted 30 years of their life.

Whether we like it or not, we've become directly responsible for the fate of every living thing we share the earth with. And we're changing things faster than we can comprehend the result of our actions. There are even factions of our society that are actively championing ignorance about this new role of ours. But when has anything good ever resulted from ignorance, in any aspect of life? True, this isn't a job that any of us want, but we've at least got to acknowledge that it *is* our job. That's the first, crucial step to deciding what to do with the power we now wield.

What I Don't Know About Ferguson

I woke up this morning full of righteous anger -- apparently at the entire world -- that I couldn't readily explain. There simultaneously seemed to reside in my mind a bedrock-solid belief that there is unimaginable untapped potential in us as a species, and an equally strong belief that we are utterly going to fail in fulfilling that potential.

It's been building up over the last few days, and I guess it all starts in Ferguson, Missouri. Now, I should say up front that I'm not going to espouse any particular stance on what's happening there... because I honestly don't have one. Save from what I can glean from headlines and overheard anecdotes, I know nothing about what's going on. This is for several reasons:

The first reason is that I want to see what kind of opinion gets formed by a person who only hears headlines and anecdotes about a significant event such as this -- because I think that's how the majority of people actually get their information. And here's what I do know: a young black man, who may or may not have been under the influence of marijuana or even harder drugs, was either robbing or shoplifting from a store (bit of a distinction there, eh?), and when confronted by the police, was subsequently shot and killed by said police for failing to comply with their orders. This touched off days-long rounds of rioting, which resulted in people being hit with rubber bullets and tear gas, and members of the media being harassed and arrested for filming on-duty police officers.

That's it. That's the sum total of what I know at this point. I have no idea whether I've got the details right or not, because the wide world of Interweb news is keen on nothing if not positing conflicting information using as few words as possible. Which brings me to the second reason I'm consciously not following what's going on... It's impossible to look very deeply into a controversial news story like this without being instantly mired in a swamp of opinion, conjecture, racism, and slanted reporting.

Most people I've seen post opinions about what's going on quite clearly believe they know what happened. The worst part of this is that, by publicly announcing your opinions and facts immediately before having time to assimilate and ruminate, you make it that much harder to change your mind on any given situation as it evolves. Since you've already declared how you feel about something to everyone you know 10 minutes after something happens, doesn't it make it that much harder to do anything but more deeply entrench yourself in that conviction?

I felt much the same with the Trayvon Martin case. Within an hour of the story breaking, it seemed, everyone was taking hooded selfies of themselves in protest. At this point, we had next to no information on what actually happened. A member of Neighborhood Watch had shot and killed a 17-year old. That was all the confirmed facts we had at that point, and yet everyone had already declared whose story they believed. Let me say flat out, I think Zimmerman acted wrongly and killed someone in the process. A young man should not have died in that situation. But would I have changed a hoodie-selfie profile photo when I heard about the injuries Zimmerman had sustained, and if I had, would my decision be based on what would my fellow hoodie-selfied friends would have thought? How tempted would I be to just hold to the opinion I had already stated so boldly, even as more evidence rolled out? What kind of contrary evidence would it have taken to get me to publicly state that I was rethinking my status?

*That's* why I'm not following Ferguson closely. I refuse to participate in the inevitable, endless debate about what facts are true, which were reported in error, which ones are planted by the media, and which ones are being perpetuated by local police/the military-industrial complex/the federal government. If I am going to make an informed decision about the issues that have been raised -- whatever they turn out to be -- it will be when passions have had a chance to cool, and a consensus of basic facts agreed upon. I will not decide how I feel about something that's happening hundreds of miles way until I *know* what's happening.

In a world where we all have the potential to be immediately connected, I am appalled that can't figure out how to accurately determine facts and agree on them. I think the problem may be that we (and by that, I mean anyone over thirty) spent the first half of our lives being indoctrinated into the belief that someone in authority who states something as truth has checked their facts, and is not just playing a 21st century version of the telephone game. Or maybe it's the rush to be the first to present information, truth behind it be damned. It's like we're not using this wealth of information we have it our disposal to get to the truth of things; instead, we're extracting from it the bits and pieces that fit the story we've already concocted in our heads.

Look at Trayvon Martin again. We still don't know exactly what happened that night, but what we do know is that there are two diametrically opposed sides to who was at fault. Not only that, both sides have provided exhaustively documented facts, evidence and diagrams precisely detailing why they are right. If you belong to either of these sides, you're fooling yourself if you think you formed that opinion based on the evidence presented and the cases argued... because it's impossible to. No, you're most likely to still believe the exact same thing you announced to everyone ten minutes after it happened.

The news media isn't doing itself any favors, either, by itching to jump in and try to splash facts together before they verify them. One journalist announced on Twitter that they saw a dead body in the street, about the most incendiary thing they could have said at the moment -- it later turned out that it was merely debris (thankfully, non-human) from an unrelated car crash. That's the problem with yelling things out before you really know what they are in an attempt to be first. The hyperbole you tweet in the heat of the moment actually has greater weight than the reasoned conclusion you tweet hours later after you have a chance to figure out what's actually going on, simply because it's a) first and b) more exciting. And there are countless examples of legitimate news agencies picking up such ill-formed reportage and passing it on, making it seem even more real.

So without even the media to trust, we're left floundering in this churning mess of arguing, sniping, and accusing that passes for public debate. The worst part is that I know if I even dip my toe in it, I'm going to end up with a roiling stomachache and my faith in humanity being chipped away a little more. In the end, the truth will end up lying somewhere in the middle, and sadly, none of us are going to know exactly where.

We've got to get better at this. We've just got to.

The Height of the Matter

Every year on my daughter's birthday, we mark her height on the doorjamb of her room, although if it were up to her, we'd mark it every few weeks. It's astonishing to look at all those marks further down the woodwork and think about how much I didn't know back then, and what I hadn't even guessed at yet about who she (or I, for that matter) would come to be.

It's got me thinking this week about height. When I sat down and started making notes about it, it really became shocking to me about how prominently height and size influence cultures around the world. And, frankly, about how surprising it is that it's shocking. We come into this world so much of a smaller size than just about everything in the world around us. The people that we're closest to tower over us, and the impression never leaves us that we have to literally "look up to" those who are stronger and in control of our lives.

I think this is probably why people look up to the sky when they think about their concept of God, and the power He represents. We're looking for the ultimate parental figure, to care about us the way our parents had (or perhaps the way we wish they had), and the heavens are the only place that is forever bigger than us. And part of most religious rituals is to kneel or supplicating in prayer, becoming even smaller and lower before whatever power you’re praying to. Even when we attempt to elevate people and other gods to greater-than-human status, the best way to do that is portray them in larger-than-life ways... Sometimes these representations are intended to inspire awe by magnification (Michelangelo's David), to deify (the statue of Zeus in his temple at Olympia, the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.), or can sometimes be seen as symbols of subjugation (Mount Rushmore?), but in all cases, size equals power.

This trend even continues into fashion. Think of all the things people do to make themselves appear larger than they are. You can immediately tell the hierarchical status of a Catholic priest, Egyptian king, or French chef by the height of their hats. When women first started coming into the white-collar work place in force, they augmented themselves with extra-high heels and shoulder pads, trying to make themselves as physically present as they grew in boardroom power.

The simplest sign of humility before someone of greater authority is to literally make yourself shorter by bowing or curtsying. The elaborate Japanese custom of ojigi takes this into the realm of art, with correct posture and form conveying fine levels of meaning. It’s similar to the Islamic religious postures of ruku (bowing) and sujud (prostration). Even when the humility is mostly for show -- such as performers bowing to their audience, even though they've been the center of attention for the duration of the performance -- it still forms a connection of a particular sort between people.

This distinction is so woven into our cultural fabric that people still consider it when choosing partners. Women will think twice about dating a man who is shorter than them, and men will do the same about a woman who is. Of course, this is only a tendency. Still, I can't help but notice that cultures who on average tend to be taller also have more freedom in choosing who they marry... those where the decisions are made more by arranged marriages, or with regard to familial and political alliances – basically, things other than physical attraction -- seem to have men and women of about the same average height.

Physical size, and height in particular, is perhaps the one true universal human trait, which has been noted and woven into all of our cultures in an amazing myriad of ways. As much as we’ve changed, these traditions have persisted because they derive from our common physical form, and the process every single one of us goes through as we move from childhood to adulthood.

Aaron's Top 50 Shades of Grey

Every now and then, there are pop culture phenomena that we somewhat grudgingly partake in, just because we just want to see what the big deal is. We don't want to be the only one at the party who doesn't know what all the others are talking about. That's how I came to read 50 Shades of Grey.

I had heard a whole lot of things about the book before I had even cracked its spine: that it was fantastic/terribly written, that it was a huge step forward/backward for feminism, that it was harmful/liberating to the mental states of women/men, that it was the true dawning/deathknell of the ebook. It's not often that some work of art comes so quickly, fully, and multi-controversially into public view, and even less when that thing is a book. So I felt that I had to give it a try.

I don't think it's my place to tell you here whether 50 Shades, in and of itself, is good, bad, sexy, or offensive. It's one of those things that personal beliefs and taste figure into even more than usual, so for me to attempt to tell you what you're going to think is kind of pointless (I felt the same way about The Passion of the Christ, which is perhaps the weirdest comparison you’re bound to hear someone make about either of these things). I also realize that, being a man, I'm not even in its target audience. But what's really intriguing for me is the way it's made me address a dichotomy in my own head that has been there for a while, and which I wasn't even truly aware of.

When I was a kid, my mother owned a bookstore. If I'm remembering this correctly, there were a pair of shelves that were dedicated to Harlequin romance novels. I think the order-seeking part of me liked the way they were set up... all the same color, all the same thickness, so different from the riot of colors and sizes that were in every other section. It was as if hundreds of copies of the same book had been neatly lined up. I had only a vague idea of what these books were about, or why they all looked the same, but the thought was implanted that they were just as they looked -- nearly identical, completely interchangeable.

This stereotype was perpetuated when I worked at the local public library during high school. There, we had an alcove where the romance novels were stored. While there was a little more variety in their color and size (this was in the late 80s), they still weren't managed the same as other books. There was no order to the way they were shelved, and when the patrons checked them out, we didn't even keep track of which titles they took, just the number of books. There was at least one woman who, every week or so, would faithfully bring in a shopping bag full of them, only to leave with it filled again. The lesson was consistent: these are disposable. They barely even qualify as literature.

I remember telling one of my fellow Borders employees how so many romance novels seemed "predatory" to me -- I actually used that word. It's hard to argue that books with titles like "The Oil Tycoon's Secret Love Child" were created by people doing anything other than looking for women who wish that some rich, powerful man would fall helplessly in love with them just for being exactly who they already are. I saw it as a completely unrealistic view of adult love, and not only that, but it might actually damage the person reading it. Wouldn't some women, after immersing themselves in such a fantasy, I thought, end up closing off to real-world love and affection, just because it couldn't hope to live up to the dreams concocted for them during a Harlequin board meeting?

So this is the prejudice I found myself fighting against when reading 50 Shades. But then I realized something... you could make (and I have actually heard) the same argument against pornography. While I realize that I'm starting to speak in generalities, it seems to be for men what romances are for women. At their worst, both forms of entertainment gravely underestimate the intelligence of the sexes. In truth, these two genres really are means to the same emotional end, and play out surprisingly similar fantasies: someone suddenly appears and sweeps you off your feet, who exists only to provide intimacy to an idealized avatar of you, removing all your worldly cares, allowing you to live in the moment, and making you feel alive.

What it's taken me over 200 pages into this story of dominance and submission is to figure out exactly how the story does what it does. And, to my surprise, I've found that it's really not all that far from what romance novels -- and pornography, for that matter -- have been doing all along. It's a clever melding of the two, in fact.

To figure out what the reception of 50 Shades really has to tell us, let's take a look at how that new sensibility is used in this book, as well as the flurry of BDSM-themed romance novels that have come out in its wake. In a traditional romance novel, you've got to find a way to get your characters together and realistically build their relationship, in both the physical and emotional senses. Now, If BDSM is the backdrop you set your story against, you can effectively drop all pretenses. No meet-cute is necessary, nor any extraneous plot devices. As an author, you can take the quickest short cut to the reason romance readers come back to the genre time and again: intense relationship moments between characters. Issues of trust immediately need to be questioned, insecurities revealed and worked through. In this sense, 50 Shades and other BDSM novels are like a concentrated distillation of other romances. They skip nearly all the preliminaries and kick in with a starting gear of what usually amounts to two months' worth of relationship.

The really fascinating part is that I never even realized that I still unconsciously look down on this whole genre of literature. But when I compare this new, more hardcore style of romance with the identical, disposable Harlequin romances of yesteryear, I've got to say the new stuff at least feels more honest in its intent. Really, it’s just like any other kind of “genre” fiction: it puts real, accessible feelings against an unrealistic background in order to draw attention to them and help us process them in our everyday lives. And when it comes to learning the landscape of such a tricky, complicated landscape as ourselves, that's not necessarily a bad thing. So here’s my formal apology to the romance readers/writers/lovers out there… I’m sorry, and while I’m still not going to start reading it regularly, I think I’m closer to understanding it now.