There’s very little to say. All things considered, I’d rather drive nails into my eyes than write a lick of descriptive prose about the many, niggling annoyances that weight down my so-called Real Life and keep me from writing anything…descriptive or no. Since Wednesday, at least.This Wednesday was a bitch for no particular reason I can name. I would’ve mentioned this in real time if I’d had anything worthwhile to say about it…beyond, “Today was a stone-cold bitch,” that is. Bad form, that. Vague, profane, and not at inspiring. That’s the kind of blog entry stoned teenagers would write before going on to complain about that damn girl in the front row who never says more than five words to them at a time.
I could launch into similar complaints, which similar net results (i.e., zero). Because life really can be high school at times. Or, to be more accurate, high school has grown into a toxic mimic of our lives. Ten years ago I was the maligned freak in the back of the class, alternatively annoying my fellows (with my inept attempts at socialization) or frightening them (with same).
Flashback to my deepest childhood. I’m watching television, because that’s what I did. Fox’s long-missed X-men cartoon series, to be exact. Much better than the movies. On my screen the mutant time-traveler Bishop falls through a temporal portal into his own, dystopian waste of a future. New York city is a ruined no man’s land of shattered buildings, twenty foot tall Sentinels and mutant concentration camps. “I’m back in the future,” Bishop says (odd, considering this is supposed to be his present). His voice is thick with loss, regret and shame as he realizes, “Nothing’s changed. It’s all just like I remember it.”
There’s a lot of pathos in that line…especially when you consider that, under any other circumstances, the line would be paradoxically silly. Witness the fact that a decade later it’s still playing through my head. Bishop’s line is the plaintive cry of a man who’s done everything he could to better his own world…and found out he’s made little-to-no real difference.
That’s how I feel. That’s how I’ve felt (I should say) for going on a month now. It’s what keeps me from writing. My feelings on work, school, relationships (or lack thereof) are all combined and summed up in that haunting phrase. “Nothing’s changed. It’s all just like I remember it.”
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2 comments:
I've read your movie reviews on and off since about the time Armageddon came out. They aways have made me laugh and have shaped the way I go about writng my own reviews (I'm the Arts and Entertainment editor for my school newspaper). I kniow what you're talking about, seems like I'm still in high school too, complete with a lack of getting ass at any point down the line (my parents sent me to an all male school, funny enough). Anyway, my point is I hope things cheer up for you. Peace
Now there you’ve gone and done it. Completely invalidating my point…even in the midst of getting it.
Because life is no high school. It is not a contained space. It is not an island prison in the stormy waters of the Atlantic. It is not (as the creator’s of Grand Theft Auto so often remind those who listen) a game and the only constant is change. Bishop’s plaintive cry reveals (among other things) his own ingrained insecurities, his lack of pragmatic imagination. Of course the being that calls itself Apocalypse (or whatever) still reigns supreme over the Earth. Of course Sentinels still patrol the desiccated streets of Manhattan. Of course every dead person whom Bishop ever loved is still just as dead.
Yet the fact remains that Bishop’s temporal interventions always (always) make a difference…to the X-men and their present, certainly…but to his future as well. All such interventions have this power. Especially the ones we make in our presents…and our futures.
Let it never be said there is no hope, and that it cannot be better. It can and it will, if you want it bad enough to make it better. Your decision to write this comment, now—out of all the many times written a piece of self-involved gutter tripe and self-reighteously pasted it in this, the most public of place—will henceforth effect the decisions that I make. Not consciously (sorry…have to comment twice for that…no really) but no less importantly. It will affect them in the same way that everything I read, see, hear, smell…that everything ever processed by this six pounds of fatty tissue between my ears affects all of my decisions. And will continue to do so, until the day my heart ceases to sent it oxygenated protein water.
That is the power and glory of simple human interaction. Of communication. My troubles are largely troubles of communication. Old networks, ones I thought I could rely upon, are breaking down. It is seemingly beyond my ability to repair them. But I could be wrong. The chance that I am is the thing that motivates me to keep at them. To do less would be to surrender and make no mistake, we are in a time of war. There are those who do not wish us to speak, to communicate. They’d rather we sat in front of these glowing, humming boxes all day, absorbing negative ions until our molecules fly apart and never ever hearing a bit of human expression. Ever
Yet we do. And then we win. Then we make things better. So thank you, Andrew, for doing that. Thank all of you who take the time to communicate, something I don’t do nearly enough of myself. If I were still trapped in high school I’d use this space to tell you how unworthy of it I really am. But I’m in the “really real” world now. So I will just say, thank you.
As the cybernetic pacifist gunslinger said, “Love and peace.”
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