Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 5

MY WEIGHT LOSS JOURNEY: PART III

Addition by subtraction" is a phrase used in sports coaching and other areas of life to describe the idea that removing things can lead to improvement. In sports, it can mean that a team can improve by removing players or practices that are hindering their success, rather than adding more talent. In other areas, it can mean that removing things you don't want or need can create space for the things you do, leading to clarity, efficiency, and a renewed sense of purpose. This principle can be applied to many areas of life, including: Physical possessions, Time, Energy, and Space.

I'm not sure precisely how it happened, but at some point in the last eight years I let this blog become a little more than merely a place to shove my unsolicitied opinions about everything into the ether. It has evolved (devolved?) into a kind of annex to the private journals I have kept since 2006, a place where I can discuss aspects of my life which I feel might possibly be of use to others. If this sounds pretentious, well, it probably is: on the other hand, I am someone who is quite literally compassionate for a living. As an advocate for victims of crime, it's my job to do whatever I can, however little it may be in the moment, to help others, and while nobody is ever entirely free of selfish or otherwise unworthy motives even for their noblest actions, I refuse to diminish the actual good I do in real life because I possess, like everyone else, dark corners in my heart. So you will forgive me if I add a third chapter to this particular story, the story of how I am, at the age of 51.9 years old, reclaiming my fitness, my health, and some of the self-esteem I now realize I was missing when I let myself go.

The year was 2023, June 19 actually, and I stepped on my just-purchased electronic scale, the one I got so I could record every detail of the weight loss journey I had just decided to take. I'd recently been to the doctor, and their scale read 196 lbs, which was not terrible given my unusual muscle density, so you can imagine my shock when the verdict was...207 lbs.

I was incensed. I'd just paid hard cash for this scale and clearly the fucking thing was not working properly. I was so goddamned mad I bought an analog medical scale, calibrated precisely with a dumbbell, weighed myself, and found out was in fact...207.5 lbs.

Maybe it was that last .5, the final insult heaped upon the injury in question, but I'm damned if I didn't have a temper tantrum right out of the spoiled rich kid playbook. [Note for the literal-minded reader my people were never rich] I lost my shit. In my life I had never weighed more than 205 and even that was a freak instance brought about by heavy drinking and a careless diet. And that was twenty years ago, when I knew nothing at all about nutrition or how the body processes food. It was painful and humiliating, not the leastwise because I'm someone that prides himself on staying active and maintaining a tough discipline, and not conforming to the stereotype of the writer as a broken-down drunk whose breakfast consists of cold cheeseburgers and stale beer.

So the journey began. I enlisted a nurse who specializes in coaching weight loss to remind me of the basics and add a few pointers, and over the next half-year or so I managed to lose seventeen pounds. My goal was to hit the mid-high 180s and stay there, but I found I could not break the barrier of 190 no matter what I did. I came close more than once, sometimes to within just a few ounces, but 190 presented a barrier that just refused to yield.

Nature, nurture heaven and home
Sum of all, and by them, driven
To conquer every mountain shown
But I've never crossed the river
Braved the forests, braved the stone
Braved the icy winds and fire
Braved and beat them on my own
Yet I'm helpless by the river
Angel, angel, what have I done?
I've faced the quakes, the wind, the fire
I've conquered country, crown, and throne
Why can't I cross this river?

Whenever you're stalled before your goal, especially if the stall is a long one, you tend to lose your edge. At least I do. And over the next few months I noticed my weight creeping up slowly, very slowly, but steadily nonetheless. By June of this year, a year after I'd started almost to the day, I was 197 and a quarter. Trends are everything in life: it's not the peaks or the valleys that matter, the steps forward or sideways or even back, but the general direction in which you're headed. And the direction was wrong. So I decided to double down. Instead of throwing another tantrum, I took a deep breath and considered the words of David Goggins, who is always reminding everyone that 40% of effort will not yield 100% results. And while I don't know if I was working at 40%, I sure as hell knew it wasn't much farther than that, so it was time to up my game. I stopped cooking lavish meals for myself simply because I have learned to enjoy cooking as a kind of Zen exercise; I fed myself a lot more protein and fat and a lot less carbohydrate; and I began to add 30 - 60 minute calisthenics drills, four times a week, to my almost daily regimen of hiking for one hour regardless of the weather. And lo, the direction changed. And not merely on the scale. I found that embracing the discipline of which I so often speak in these pages (from my comfortable office chair), made me more courageous in my personal life and more aggressive in my professional one. I started pushing boundaries and doing things I had never or rarely done before, at least not consistently: I have seen some results already. Not tectonic results, but measurable ones. I asked the doctor the embarrassing questions. I told the girl I loved her. I knocked on Hollywood's door again, and I pushed the writing in every direction. On and on. In short, I started acting on my desires instead of brooding over them. Whether any will actually and ultimately be satisfied is another matter, but as the cliche goes, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

This morning, August 3, just five days short of my 52nd birthday (and how in the fuck did that happen?), I stepped on the scale and bang, there it was: 189.9. The barrier was broken. It may reassemble itself tomorrow, but that doesn't matter. Once it breaks, I know I can break it. I want to shed five more pounds and then stabilize, afterwhich I'll set a new goal: more muscle, perhaps. The point is that I didn't do what I've done in past lives, which is let discouragement trick me into quitting entirely, or perhaps even worse, accepting mediocrity as an outcome. That's growth. We can always learn to grow, at any age and any time and any place in life no matter how bleak it might appear, but we have to humble ourselves first. We have to accept that sometimes we are not enough and need assistance, whether it is moral or physical or intellectual. We have to shrug off the albatross of egotism that weighs us down. That takes emotional honesty. If you're fat, don't say you're overweight, say you're fat. Don't blame your schedule, blame yourself for not carving out the time -- admit that you're lazy and don't want to do the work. Humble yourself. The results will amaze.

Pay no mind to the battles you've won
It'll take a lot more than rage and muscle
Open your heart and hands, my son
Or you'll never make it over the river

Of course life is nothing if not tireless when it comes to throwing 100 mile curveballs directly at your head. I recently had a whole slew of blood tests at my physical and my cholesterol levels were terrible, worse than the year before and the year before that. I know why, of course. I've spent a year eating huge amounts of proteins and fats, so even as my body slimmed down and my muscles hardened up, my veins were filling with sludge. I was dismayed to say the least to see the numbers, but instead of indulging in my favorite pastime of past times, bitterness, I took a deep breath and said, "Fuck it -- you'll just have to change your diet, starting now."

And that's what I'm doing as of this morning. Just trying to adapt and overcome in the face of frequent and lively discouragements. Just trying to set aside the pride that prevents growth, and the bitterness that threatens to choke me absolutely dead when people, when life itself, lets me down. I share this not because I'm deluded or egotistical enough to think anyone cares what I weigh, but because it's a cold, cruel, capricious world out there, and it's easy to feel alone in your struggles. People in my place of work sometimes look at the totality of my life, the time in Hollywood, the time in law enforcement, the travels, the books and writing awards, the martial arts journey, and say, "What a life you've led!" They don't understand that I like most people tend to view my existence merely as a series of defeats and lost opportunities, missed marks and broken connections. I give in to despair more than anyone, and in my despair tend to isolate and thus deepen the gloom. That's why I'm here. If I can set a goal and achieve it in the face of all my weaknesses and stupidities, goddamn well anyone can do it, but goddamn well anyone can't do it alone. In other words:

Open your heart and hands, my son
And together we'll cross the river.

BOOK REVIEW: CARLY RHEILAN'S "ASYLUM"

Cabdi knew that after the world finishes there are those for whom time goes on -- beyond the moment of catastrophe, into the jagged shadowland that follows, where thin flames burn across chaos and emptiness, revealing nothing except that everything is lost. And he knew that for some there was even a time beyond that -- a time when the world reforms itself, into another thinner life, composed of fragments all wrongly put together, with moments of unexpected pleasure and satisfaction, as in a dream -- though at every step, the breaking of the world remained in the heart, like an arrowhead that can never be removed."

ASYLUM is the debut novel from Malta-born British writer Carly Rheilan, and it is quite the achievement -- a thoughtful and profound book about a stranger in a strange land. I bought it on a whim, having "encountered" Ms. Rheilan on Twitter, but didn't have any particular expectations as to its quality. I was soon drawn in, however, and -- I confess this with no shame -- finished the book with a hefty crop of goosebumps.

I should begin by saying that, for reasons you may already know if you read this blog, I am hard to move. I am not bragging when I say this, quite the opposite. Like one of the villains in this book -- an enormously memorable and terrifying villain whose internal monologue I now paraphrase: "very occasionally, [I] feel the hollow inside of myself where some faculty should be, and remember how it felt, long ago, when I was whole....perhaps it was the ability to ache that I had sacrificed." The things I have seen have cauterized me emotionally to a degree not many people can comprehend, and they should perhaps thank God, or their lucky stars, for that incomprehension. There are times when things happen, and I know I should be moved, and I want to be, and I am not, or the shallowness of the affect is soshallow that I wonder if I surrendered my membership card in the human race a few years back without realizing it (I suppose this is why Hemingway's DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON did, in fact, affect me; it spoke to what is wrong with me, held a lantern over my broken places). In any event, ASYLYM did move me. There is pathos in this novel, but no bathos; it is written with that coolness of purpose which even German literature cannot quite reach, showing the reader suffering and nobility without telling them "look at the suffering and nobility!"

ASYLUM isn't an easy book to break down for a review because there are many moving parts, and in any case I leave it to the perspective reader to discover the intricacies for themselves. Taken as a whole, this is a novel about East African refugees living under the rather Dickensian-style supervision of British social workers in the UK, which is a surprisingly fascinating subject in itself, but that is not where the drama comes in. ASYLUM is a book that, under the guise of a mystery-suspense story, probes the darkest corners of the sex trafficking trade while simultaneously offering some wonderful insights on the nature of social work, culture clashes, the subtleties of bigotry (African and European style), and the complexities of the human heart. And it does all of this without the kind of gratuitous detail that might make it distasteful or unreadable. There is a kind of deft subtlety to the prose that prevents this from happening, and it's one of the reasons I try to remind myself to read female writers more often, because sometimes even the ablest male writers sometimes lack this sensibility (I am probably one of them).

ASYLUM has a number of POV characters. The most interesting of these are Cabdi, the mutilated, socially isolated East African refugee whose arm was hacked off by Somali soldiers, and who lives mostly within his own head, experiencing Britain through the eyes of someone who may as well be from another planet, and Christmas, the Moriarty-like head of a human trafficking ring who deals exclusively in young boys, especially "disposable" African refugees. Though the two characters never meet, they are the opposing moral poles of the story, which Cabdi struggling to come to terms with his grim new reality -- one-armed, mutilated, thousands of miles from home with all of his family dead and only a feeble knowledge of English or English customs -- while the brilliant sociopath Christmas tries to manipulate all and sundry to facilitate the needs of his perverted criminal empire. Both characters are very well-written, and to some extent share the "outside" view of existence: Cabdi literally, Christmas morally. In addition, there is Helen, a well-meaning but not terribly likeable social worker who is having an affair with her boss while she juggles her many responsibilities, and Mustaf, another East African on an obsessive quest to be reunited with his adoptive sister Semira. All of this weaves together gradually into a comprehensive narrative that ends neither in Shakespearian tragedy nor the tacked-on, thumbs-up Hollywood ending so many editors demand. Like real life -- and this novel is nothing if not grittily realistic -- it is not trying to please or to injure. It simply is: a thing-in-itself.

ASYLUM is a grim story but there is also humor in it. Rheilan has some tart things to say about bigotry, about the well-meaning yet cruel system by which refugees are housed and supervised, and most especially about Britain and its culture as seen through the eyes of an African refugee (he describes Santa Claus as a "red demon" and Halloween as "a festival of skeleton gods"). In terms of social commentary she wields a long whip: unlike most white writers she is fearless in discussing slavery in contemporary Africa, as well as the caste systems and ancient ethnic and racial-religious hatreds that pervade the region, and transfer to some extent to British soil. The novel is in a sense an attack, and a principled one, on all the systems and forms wherever they may be found, and whether good-natured or evil, which cause human beings to be moved around like herd animals or even worse, like commodities, and provide justifications to treat others cruelly or indifferently. As a former parole officer and correctional specialist, who works now as an advocate for victims of crime, I can relate to this -- boy, can I relate to this.

Before I part I should like to share one of the many passages from this novel which moved me deeply:

"Perhaps all bereavement is a mourning for dreams. What has really happened can never be undone. The dead never leave us. What torments us is the loss of things that never were -- the years of life unlived, the things not said or done, what might have been, what wasn't, what couldn't be."

Like this passage, ASYLUM is not easily forgotten. I highly recommend it.

AS I PLEASE XXVI: LIFE LESSONS EDITION

Next time ain't always gonna happen.

A few short weeks ago -- weeks that feel, now that I consider them, like months in terms of both pain and personal growth -- I decided that it was time to level up. In every aspect of life, I wanted to find myself one full rung higher on the ladder, whether it was fitness, my writing career, my day job, my personal relationships, all of it. If you read this blog, you probably know that part of the motivation came from tragedy, actually multiple tragedies, which intersected with my life (I won't say "happened to me," because they happened to others, souls I cared about). The root causes, however, are less important than the effect, which has me working every day, to some degree or other, toward all my various goals. I now work out twice a day four times a week (and work out once a day, every other day), restrict my calories, eat better foods, no longer drink alcohol at home, and have cut way back on television and non-writing computer time, so I can devote more to writing, editing, submitting and so on. I have stopped wasting energy trying to appear "all right" for the benefit of others when I am far from it, and am more vocal -- or confrontational, when I deem it necessary -- than I used to be. In short, I embraced a much tougher self-discipline than I had previously imposed upon myself, and while it is not as much fun as, say, drinking a 12-pack of beer while playing video games, it is producing a definite effect.

Now, at the core of all discipline lies pain. Discipline, it has been written, is the way civilized man maintains contact with that pain and keeps himself hard for life's challenges. Probe deeper, however, and you will find that beneath the pain is fear. When we pass the half-century mark, it is high time we also quit kidding ourselves about a great many things, foremost among them is that we have unlimited time to do all the things we were planning to do "someday." For as that catchy motorcycle ad once read:

MONDAY. TUESDAY. WEDNESDAY. THURSDAY. FRIDAY. SATURDAY. SUNDAY. THERE IS NO "SOMEDAY."

In order to make this more than a passing fad in my life, it was necessary for me to sit down and do some really painful, actually almost excruciating, self-analysis. You will note that all really deep looks within ourselves are painful, unsettling and sometimes deeply humiliating -- which is why, of course, most of us don't perform them, or at least don't do so very often, and also why most of us change very little over the courses of our adult lives unless acted upon by an outside force. We get along, as David Goggins said, on forty percent effort, and usually convince ourselves that the forty is really seventy, or eighty, or even one hundred percent. When I looked at myself objectively, I found it was necessary to begin the almost inconcievably intimidating and laborious process of rewiring my brain, my heart, my entire being, so as to operate differently. This was not to be a software update, but rather a hardware overhaul, and would take years to achieve the desired results. So I combed through all the profound thoughts I've had, epiphanies I've experienced, and inspirational words I have heard, and came up with some rules for living. And yes, I've done this before, and yes, I've done it in this very blog, and yes, I stand by what I said before, too, but that was, in essence, blue belt level thinking, and now we are at the brown belt level, or at least trying to attain same, and that means making changes when changes are necessary. So every day, I read these thoughts aloud, and really try to consider what they mean in the moment I'm living them, and how they can be applied:

* Anxiety is energy. It will only hurt you if you don't use it...but it will definitely hurt you if you don't use it.

* Jealousy is desire.It's a signpost that directs you to what you want. Now go get it.

* Success has a moral element. All real triumph is indivisible from some element of nobility. If there is no nobility there is no victory. You just got away with it, that's all.

* Resentment is a great teacher. Its lesson is either "man up and move on" or to identify the bully in your life in deal with him...even if the bully is you (especially if it's you).

* Average men get average results. The outcome is a reflection of the effort. If you put in the work, that will show; if you didn't, that will show, too.

* Whatever you are ain't good enough. You can always be better, and the moment you stop trying is the moment you start dying. It is said that perfect is the enemy of the good, but it is equally true that the fact perfection is unattainable is no reason not to look for it: the very act makes you better.

* Emotions are not problems to be solved. They are teachers to be respected. Learn from them. This is an especially difficult lesson for men.

* You can' get skinny by hating being fat. It's good to recognize a bad situation, but just being angry won't change a damned thing. Too many of us get stuck in anger and never move.

* You will never outperform your belief systems. If you think you're a loser, you are. If you think you're a winner, then you already know where the prize is, you just haven't collected it yet. This sounds like New Age rubbish but it is actually the mentality of ever winner who ever lived.

* You have a role in your own suffering. This moment is the end product of ten million decisions big and small you've made in your life. It's easy to blame God, school, your parents, your -ex, you junior high school bully or "society" for all your woes. And they may in fact be responsible. But they aren't entirely responsible. The common factor you have with every failure in your life is you. Take responsibility, look for the patterns, change your ways.

* The mountain is not your adversary. It lifts you up. It assists you into the sky. There are a lot of theories on the value of discipline, hard work and suffering, but they tend to ignore the fact that some suffering in life is only suffering if you regard it as such. I used to look at certain things in an adversarial way; now I try to see them as trying to ease my difficulties. The mountain wants you at its peak.

* The universe doesn't hear “please don't,” only what follows it. Replace “I want” with “I am,” and "I want" with "I will." You may not succeed but if you fail it won't be for lack of trying.

*Don't seek happiness in the same place you lost it. Vices are not painkillers. They are the producers of pain.

*You must sacrifice the worst of you to become the best you can be, and only you know to what degree you're in love with the worst of you. What is it you hate most about yourself as a human being? Now ask yourself truly: do you want to give it up? The answer will surprise you and probably upset you, but in the answer, hard as it may be, you find the starting point to becoming a better person.

* If you viewed yourself as kindly as you view those you love, you would love yourself, too. Like most people, I am my own cruelest critic. I negate my accomplishments. I devalue my abilities. I look at compliments with suspicion, or even worse, cynicism, and often attack my own motives even after carrying out good works. I do few or none of these things with the people closest to me in life -- but who is closer to me than myself?

I realize a lot of this sounds like fortune-cookie wisdom of the sort Mr. Miyagi might utter in one of the more inferior Karate Kid sequels, and there may be people who are insulted that I even try giving life lessons because who the hell am I? But it is working for me, demonstratably working, and I feel as if I'd be cheating my own growth somehow if I didn't at least try to share it, Daniel-san.

WOKEISM VS. ART: AN ESSAY

Art is the daughter of freedom. – Friedrich Schiller

I really don’t like writing that passes as entertainment when it’s really propaganda. I want to hear a human story. – Alan Alda

A hundred years ago there was a titanic worldwide struggle between art and ideology. In both totalitarian and democratic nations, creative forms were subjected to ideological litmus tests. The works of Shakespeare, the short stories of Jack London, the art of Picasso and Dali, the films of D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin, the music of Mendelsohn and Irving Berlin, the poetry of Ezra Pound and W.H. Auden, the novels of Remarque, the philosophy of Tessanow, Nietsche, Kant and Hegel – all were viewed from the perspective of whether they were hostile to, or in accordance with, the principles of fascism, communism, or capitalist democracy. By which lens they were examined, of course, depended on who was examining them, and what they were allowed to enjoy or expected to hate was a natural outgrowth of which side of the fence they stood on.

It is unsurprising that totalitarian states would take an interest in art, because it is in the nature of totalitarians to wish to control everything, and art is by its very nature an expression of freedom, the fearless sharing of one's inner being with the outer world, which is the one thing a totalitarian can never allow of the ordinary citizen he means to control. However, and as I stated above, it would be a mistake to say that America, Britain, France and so on were immune from this sort of thinking. Those in power in capitalist democracies were hardly less assidious in trying to find messages in movies, radio programs, musicals, etc. which they deemed “patriotic” or “subversive” depending on their content, and either lauding or damning them accordingly. Long before McCarthyism, everything from comic books to moving pictures to music and Broadway plays were scrutinized not only for obscenity, indecency and violence, but for political messages which threatened this or that tenet of Western democracy or of the often constrictive societal fabric which held that democracy together. In America – for example – it was not permissible for films to overtly attack segregation, or employ certain minorities in roles other than that of slave, servant, waiter, or comic footman, or to present women in a way which actively attacked assumptions about their place in society. Sex was never or only very gently touched upon, nor mental health, nor poverty in any way which might find blame within the system itself rather than the individual. In short, it was an age when all creative arts were under attack – in dictatorships openly, in democracies by virtue of boycotts, blue laws, censorship, social pressure and other more nuanced but fairly effective means.

George Orwell, writing at the time, noted with alarm that one of the curious effects of totalitarianism specifically, and ideology (and even religion) generally, was that it had a destructive effect on literature and creative thought. Artists, whether they use a pen, a chisel, a brush, a baton or a camera, represent a serious threat to those in power. With their art they can attack, sometimes boldly, sometimes subtly, policies and personages they dislike. A totalitarian government cannot tolerate criticism any more than it can tolerate freedom of expression, and so must suppress artists by sanctioning only narrow, state-approved forms of art and abolishing everything else. It is unnecessary for me to explain what “being abolished” meant under Hitler or Stalin, except to note the chilling effect the “abolitions” of various comedians, singers, painters, directors, playwrights, and so on would have on those practicing art as a career, or considering it. But as Orwell noted, the overall effect was to either drive those with creative talents away from art entirely, or otherwise to turn them into hacks or, to use his phrase, “literary prostitutes” of the stripe of Alexi Tolstoy: individuals who cut, sand, and polish their “art” to fit the demands and whims of the regime. A few decades of totalitarian rule were probably sufficient, he believed, to suffocate the existence of art in a nation-state as we understand it: but it would not, he stressed, mean that songs, paintings, films, radio programs, music, and even comedy routines would cease to exist. They would simply become state-approved products produced by said trusted hacks or committees, and prove either harmless to the regime or exist solely to sing its praises. Art would be reduced, not merely to the level of entertainment, but to mere propaganda.

In contrast, a capitalist, ostensibly democratic government cannot use such drastic methods to crush artistic opposition, but it is well within its ability to use the churches, police and courts to make art difficult to disseminate to the masses, especially when it questions the social order. There are many examples of artists crushed by the power of the state because their comedy, art, cinema or what have you violated ideas of propriety or was considered radical or revolutionary. As I noted above, art requires imagination, but it also requires a certain fearlessness, the sort of moral courage which is required to tell truths as one personally sees them regardless of consequence. Imagination and moral courage are not qualities encouraged by governments, political parties and religious leaders as a general rule wherever they may exist: authority prefers docility, apathy, conformity and obedience from the masses. Anyone who believes otherwise is at best naive.

Now, this war between authority and art is a permanent one, and like all permanent wars, it undergoes periods of both dormancy and frenzy. No government, no matter how liberal or conservative in its outlook, is immune from this conflict: the idea that only the “right” burns books is as stupid as trying to find some moral difference between the Communist gulag and the Nazi concentration camp. In every nation there is a “right” and a “left” of some kind, and both do everything within their power to suppress opposing ideas, especially as they manifest in popular culture. All art is propaganda, and if we accept that as an axiom, it follows that the powers that be are right to look at art from the “opposing side” as nothing less than enemy weaponry. And since it is natural to wish destruction on the weapons of your opponent, we have the interminable “cultire wars” which rage in every nation but most especially, of late, within the United States. Pop culture, viewed through an ideological or even a religious lens, is nothing more than a means by which one influences hearts and minds to one's own specific world view. What we call “conservatives” in America have traditionally fought to suppress anything in this arena which challenges what they call “family” or “traditional” values – meaning, of course, their own personal values. What we refer to as liberals, on the other hand, are equally if not more intolerant of anything which runs contrary to their own value system, though as a rule they attack using different means. Conservatives tend to use the power of government, while liberals favor popular culture, and with very good reason, for right-wingers in any country often exhibit a startling lack of creative imagination. (One should definitely listen to Jordan Peterson on the subject of why, viewed scientifically.) There are of course right-wing playwrights, directors, poets, novelists, comedians, etc., but they are often either appallingly bad at their respective arts, or come at their art from a more religious than a political angle – C.S. Lewis, for example, or Orson Scott Card. Speaking anecdotally, after spending four years at a conservative Catholic graduate school for writing and twelve and a half in Hollywood, I would say that in America anyway, the “the liberal” outnumbers “the conservative” in creative endeavours by a ratio of at least 3:1 or even 4:1, and that those on the left tend to produce better art than those on the right. I personally attribute this mainly to a difference in outlook. Art is often rooted in discontent, and tends to question the existing structure of society and the way we look at reality: it is especially fond of slaughtering sacred cows, those political, religious, aesthetic, and societal assumptions we hold most dear. Perhaps by accident, these are also liberal-progressive traits. On the other hand, conservatism is rooted in caution, a desire for order, a reverence for the past, and an intense dislike for change. Such roots definitely support traditions, but they do not encourage innovation or rebellion.

There is no doubt that during modern right-wing administrations there have been attempts, sometimes fairly well-coordinated, to propigate a value system on popular culture and art which corresponds to the conservative or Republican worldview. No one could seriously argue that Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, or Donald Trump were sympathetic to (modern) Hollywood's value system, or encouraged schools to examine, via literature, ideas anithetical to “traditional values.” But speaking from a place of objectivity, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that in the last half-century, it is not from the right but from the left that the most serious challenges to artistic freedom have been mounted. Indeed, since the early 1990s, there have been two significant campaigns by the left to influence not only popular culture in its artistic guise, but the general fabric of society through art: in other words, to completely weaponize it. The first of these was “political correctness,” a movement designed to attack freedom of speech under the guise of civility and compassion. The second, more recent and more focused, with its motives more openly on the table, is “Wokeism.”

Wokeism is defined as “being alert to racism and societal hypocrisy,” and on that basis, one would think everyone would want to be “woke.” Like most words minted nowadays, however, “woke” has come to mean something entirely different in practical context. “Woke” in connotes the advancement of a specific political agenda through artistic means, most commonly films and television. Wokeism, in relation to art, has certain core themes which reveal themselves by repetition. These themes can be divided into the positive and the negative, i.e., that which wokeism stands for, and that which it stands against.

Wokeism stands for female empowerment. It differs, however, from the female empowerment espoused by a pre-woke feminist show like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" in that it stands against male empowerment -- especially "straight white male" empowerment. In other words, it views power among characters as a zero sum game: empowering a female character necessitates weakening the male characters, again, especially if they are "straight white males." This hostility is definite, and it is deliberate. In a woke film, the white male is either a villain, a victim, a foil, or a clown. There are no other categories. What's more, women in woke films and TV shows are generally Mary Sues all the way around. They have few if any recognizable flaws or weaknesses, and already seem to know everything and need not be educated or mentored. The hero's journey for a woke Mary Sue is not a journey at all: from Captain Marvel to Rey Skywalker to the live-action Mulan, what we see is not the evolution of a character but a series of usually successful actions performed by that character. They really don't learn, or change, or grow, and if they are taught anything at all it will never be by a man. (This dynamic can be applied to all characters of color and all LGBTQ characters as well, though there is a complex hierarchy of gender, sexuality and race here that can be somewhat comical in its effect.)

Wokeism stands for SJW messaging. In "The Last Jedi" the God-awful character of Rose Tico exists to facilitate the political education of Finn, and never mind that Finn is literally a victim of human trafficking impressed from childhood into an army he hates. Rose treats him as if he spent his whole life in silk pajamas, eating strawberries off gold plate, and for some reason, he takes it without complaint or demur. Presumably she is free to do this because in the wokeist hierarchy (see previous remark) a female is always going to outrank a male on the moral scale, even when the male is "of color." This character, if you want to debase the word by calling her that, is not a character at all: she is walking lecture on social justice, delivered with intolerable smugness and arrogance.

More than that, however, wokeism has sought to change the very nature of art by eliminating those artists who do not agree with or propound woke ideology – deplatforming or “cancellation.” Wokeism is therefore not only advocating a political view, it is actively seeking to destroy those who hold opposing views, by preventing their art from coming into existence, or, if it already exists, by destroying it, or perhaps even more nefariously, by remaking it in “woke” form. A common exclamation of Wokeists when approaching the reboots or remakes of films or television shows is "we are going to fix it." In practical terms this means recasting the story to be more diverse and inclusive, shifting away from the use of straight white males (except as villains), and loading the dialog with wokeist messaging. A list of pre-existing intellectual properties and franchises which have been subjected to this mutilating and emasculating process would include Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Witcher, Willow, Cowboy Bebop, Ghostbusters, Scooby Doo, and Doctor Who, though this list is by no means inclusive. There are truly Orwellian echoes in altering a story so that its orginal themes and meanings are brought forcibly into line with the prevailing wisdom, because in this way the message of a story can be changed into the exact opposite of what was originally intended by its author, while retaining its label and, therefore, some aspect of its credibility.

One of the more terrifying aspects of Wokeism from an artist's point of view is the speed with which it has infected and perverted storytelling. Just a very few years ago it was still possible for television and movie scripts to reflect the creative vision of their author and nothing else: whether they ever got produced was another matter, but the scripts themselves, the stories the writer wanted to tell, remained pure products of imagination. Sometimes, of course, budget restraints or commercial considerations would color the writer's execution of his or her vision, but the basic story itself was a product of the fearlessness which exists when a writer is free within their head. This is no longer the case. Every movie, every television show, every “event series,” graphic novel, comedy special and cartoon, must now run through a dual filter of both diversity-inclusiveness and wokeism, rather like meat through a sausage grinder, the result being that the final product not only bears little relation to the original vision of its creator, but now has a strong resemblance to every other sausage emerging from the grinder. This product is not merely mediocrity, but genericism: all of these end products taste the same, no matter how different their packaging might be. And this raises the question as to whether any kind of artistic greatness is possible when art must be filtered, homogenized, pasturized, packaged, and rendered “safe” before the public can even lay eyes on it.

As a writer, I have had a number of encounters with Wokeism. I have been told that a WW2 novel I wrote must be subjected to a "sensitivity read" because the Holocaust-themed subject matter might upset some readers (word to the wise: Holocaust stories are supposed to be upsetting.) I have been warned, when writing historical pieces which involve bigots, not to use racial and ethnic slurs -- as if it were possible to convey an accurate picture of racism without doing this. I have been instructed, when writing nonfiction scripts set in the antebellum era, to leave out figures who fell into the "white savior" category, as if American slaves freed themselves. What's more, I have attended meetings in which "diversity and inclusion" czars from studios or networks would look at a proposed series or film, and say, "Is this role open to ethnicity?" This was code for, "There are too many white people in the script." This last statement is not necessarily objectionable if the logic of the story demands otherwise: nobody would claim that a TV show set in 1930s Harlem with an all-white cast would make any sense. But left out of the question is the fact that whether we want them to be or not, our race, ethnicity, and sexuality have the deepest influences on who we are as human beings. It is not possible to change these dynamics in a character without fundamentally changing the nature of the character and their entire backstory. And thus the process of forcing the writer to alter his vision for the story begins, with the endgame often being that the tale he intended to tell is lost in all the reshuffling.

Now, in regards to these last points, one could point out that Hollywood has whitewashed everything for generations and that the present push for greater representation merely represents a spirited attempt to belatedly balance the scale. This is objectively true, and I would push it even further and say that characters and storylines geared for an LGBTQ etc. audience are just as long overdue. Hollywood long ignored, stereotyped or marginalized anyone who didn't fit their idea of what an American was supposed to be, and it has much in the way of atonement yet to perform. People who are angry about this are either bigots themselves or simplty reactionaries who long for a whitewashed past, where the woman was in the kitchen, the gay was in the closet and the black was in the back of the bus. As the cliche goes, it's a big tent: there is no reason, not even a justification, for anyone to be excluded. My issue is not with greater diversity in casting or storytelling: it is with the the one-size-fits all approach, the forcible ramming of ideas and quotas into the afformentioned sausage grinder. It is with poorly written hack propaganda masquerading as entertainment and, even more grotesquely, as art. It is with the idea that story, character, dialog, and craft are far less important than checking diversity boxes on a hiring form. Is it really necessary or logical to cast a black actor to play a Norse god, an East Indian as a Knight of the Round Table, or a woman of color as Anne Boleyn, especially when the people forcing such absurdities upon us are the same ones who use phrases like "culture vulture" and "cultural appropriaton?" There is a time and a place for everything, and artists should be allowed to choose that time and that place and not have their ideas defaced so executives can virtue signal on Twitter, to people - if they are people, and not bots -- who do not even watch the material in question anyway. The first commandment of anyone endeavouring to tell a story is that the story be good. And it is not possible to tell a good story if one must jump through political, sexual, and racial hoops before the project has even begun. Art requires intellectual and emotional freedom, not a checklist drawn up by idealogues and censors.

Speaking for myself as a writer, I know that when I sit down to begin a story, my only objective is to tell it well. I may have a point I am trying to make about life, or human nature, or anything you care to name, but ultimately my goal is to engross, to immerse, to entertain. In the whole of my life and career, nearly all of my literary failures -- stories I consider weak, obvious, poorly executed, or just plain lousy -- failed because I was preaching to the audience. Because I did not trust them to think for themselves or draw their own conclusions. Because I created archetypes rather than characters that I could use as loudspeakers or punching bags depending on my state of mind.

Consider the words of Hemingway:

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. ...For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature.

If one looks at the characters in films and television shows which can be objectively described as "woke" in theme, we see that they are indeed caricatures. They lack any depth or dimension; they do not live but merely preach. This is because the writers are doing precisely what Hemingway described: placing his or her own "intellectual musings" into the mouths of characters who feel and sound fake because they are fake. They are like the Inner Party members in Orwell's "1984" who are little more than tape recorders attached to loudspeakers, endlessly preaching "truths" which often palpably lies. And the strange thing about such characters is that anyone who is not under the spell of the ideology they are spewing instinctively grasps their two-dimensionality and rejects them out of hand. And there is something else to consider as well: a character will never be more intelligent than the writer who created them. The greater the intelligence of the writer, the greater the potentiality of the character. But wokeism being an ideology, and indeed an ideology whose ultimate demand is that "you ignore the evidence of your senses and say that two plus two equals five," it ultimately must cripple the intellect of anyone who embraces it. There can be no other outcome, because ideology by its nature rejects the existence of objective reality and fact if those realities or facts clash with party dogma. The party says collectivized farms work better than private ones, and millions starve in consequence...and still the party maintains that collective farming is more fruitful, and shoots anyone who argues otherwise. This is ideology in its most extreme but also its inevitable form. All ideology is a road and all roads have destinations and the ultimate destination of any ideology is that "the party is always right." This is what differentiates ideology from politics or philosophy. Ideology is a religion, and like all religions it claims not only the power of moral sanction but infallibility. And it rules by fear. This fear can be produced by the imposition of a physical terror, as in totalitarian dictatorships, or it can be imposed by spiritual terror, as in most religions, or it can be imposed by societal and economic consequence, as in democratic societies; but it must be imposed for the structure to hold together.

As a novelist, my best work always -- always places character and story well ahead of any underlying message. Such messages can exist -- it is folly to pretend that a person's politics and prejudices don't or should not enter into their writing -- but they must not exist as a substitute for storytelling. We are writing fiction, not political tracts. But to make art rather than propaganda, it's necessary that I be entirely free of dogma and cant, political correctness and wokeism. I must stick to philosophy and avoid ideology like the plague. And above all, I must be unafraid. The story must be all, and to be all it must be true.

This brings us to a crucial point, which is that the creation of objectively good stories is no longer the goal of Hollywood. Indeed, it is not even a priority. By placing the political cart before the artistic horse, Hollywood has effectively wrecked storytelling as an art. Their objective is to "awaken" the audience, not to entertain them. Thus art has been sacrificed to propaganda, which explains the appalling fall-off in the quality of most films and television shows nowadays. Anyone who has suffered through some of the franchises I mentioned previously, the ones which have been "fixed," can testify to this. Where are the classic lines of dialog, the blistering performances, the brilliant plot twists? Why does everything feel so flat, forced, stale, derivitive and unimaginative? Why is it so easy to forget the "content" pouring out of studios nowadays a few hours after one bears witness to it? In large part this has to do with the fact that progressives, unlike liberals or center-leftists, seem to have no imagination at all. They are even worse at storytelling than the most hidebound, dull-witted conservative, because they themselves are so blinded by the need to preach, to lecture, to inject, to infect their audience with their worldview that they cannot see that what they are producing is shit. Their own ideology will not permit them to. The power to not draw conclusions from specific evidence is one of the most astounding aspects of wokeism. Again and again we see these reworked I.P. projects fail, and again and again we see the same mental rigidity from the people who created them. And rather than reconsidering their approach, they adopt the double-down strategy, which this only serves as further proof of their incapacity to reason, for as Satayana noted, fanaticism is the process of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim -- and these are fanatics. They have even taken up the dubious and disturbing tactic of actively attacking their own audience as racist, homophobic, ableist, etc., whenever their propaganda is rejected at the box office. In reality the logic of their position demands this otherwise bizarre response: since they are the sole repositors of merit, fault must by necessity lie elsewhere.

Like political correctness, Wokeism is difficult to combat head-on, because anyone who objects to it is immediately labeled a bigot, racist, misogynist, homophone, reactionary, or sell-out. When I originally voiced my thoughts on "The Last Jedi," I hesitated to criticize Kelly Marie Tran, even though she is easily one of the worst actresses I have ever seen on the big screen, because defenders of the film deemed all criticism of her performance either racist or misogynist or both. Indeed, while writing this essay I found myself occasionally wondering if I ought to say that I found Moses Ingram's character of Reva in "Obi Wan Kenobi" a sham, lest it be used against me out of context at some future time. And this sort of anxious second-guessing is not a side-effect of Wokeism: it is the intent. Wokeism is not, as it claims to be, an awareness of racism and societial hypocrisy: it is a preconcieved attempt to hijack art in the name of ideology, and to make sure nothing gets produced which takes on differing views. Probably the most common sentiment expressed by people when discussing everything from "All in the Family" to "The Office" is, “They could never make this today.” And sadly, this is true. The atmosphere of intellectual and creative freedom which is necessary to create a character like Archie Bunker or Michael Scott is gone: it has been deliberately banished from writers' rooms everywhere. Even a mere womanizer of the Hawkeye Pierce type on "M*A*S*H" would be almost unthinkable today. Likewise, if Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy were greenlighted now, it would have been vandalized in precisely the same manner that Bezos' "Rings of Power" is vandalizing Tolkien's legacy as I sit here and write these words.

But what is more sad is that people accept this fact as just that, a fact, unchangeable, rather than an odious temporary condition, like a rash, which ought be treated with all the medicine at our disposal. No one, or almost no one, prefers art which has to run through ideological filters to that which comes directly from the artist's creative mainspring, yet we all accept, explicitly, that the age in which artists were free to make great art is now over. And the reason for this, as I mentioned above, is fear. Political correctness and wokeism represent diabolical genius because they contain within themselves all the self-professed moral high ground. If you are against political correctness, you are for “hatespeech.” If you are against wokeism, you are “slept” – a bigot, a reactionary, a cultural ignoramus. Proponents of both offer no third alternative: either you're with us or against us, on the right side of history or simply evil and stupid. And of course no one wants to be called a racist or a misogynist or “phobic.” So the big public, the broad masses, tacitly accept that while they may wish television, film and comedy were not emasculated by ideology, they keep these wishes largely to themselves, and rather than openly attacking wokeist trash, simply don't watch it. Wokeist movies and TV series have bombed or sputtered out of existence one after the other after the other because audiences rejected the injection of wokeist ideology and forced diversity into storytelling. They reject it not because they are necessarily in disagreement with it politically, but because while political agendas can certainly be part of art, they cannot substitute for storytelling. The Nazis learned this the hard way at the beginning of their rule in Germany, when they made a series of films about their struggle for power. The majority of these were box-office duds. Germans, even ones sympathetic to the Nazis, had almost zero interest in seeing Nazism infiltrate cinema. What they wanted, when they sat down in the theater, was to be entertained, not brainwashed, and the Nazis quickly realized this and, for the rest of their tenure, produced films which, while untheatening to the regime and its ideology, were almost completely free of political content. As vicious and dogmatic as they could be, they quickly came to understood that only good storytelling sold, and good storytelling required a very light political touch. "There must be opinion," propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in a memorandum in 1935. "But opinion does not mean tedium." And here we come back to the crux of the problem.

When one looks at classic television shows of yesteryear, one sees very clearly that left-wing political thought drove the writers almost from beginning to end, yet none of these series suffers in the least from this fact. This is because the writers had the right end of the telescope. They understood that regardless of the messages they were trying to send through their scripts, characterization, dialog and story had to be first-rate and internal logic had to hold, and the opposing view had to have a reasonably fair hearing. The political messaging was secondary to the integrity of the story and the characters moving through it, because a good yarn is a good yarn regardless of its ideology or whether it has any ideology at all. Wokeism up-ends this model and makes narrative agency – plot and character – almost irrelevant. What matters is the message, or as it is sometimes referred to online, THE MESSAGE. And the frightening thing about THE MESSAGE is that it seems to become louder and more strident the more Wokeism fails at the box office. It's as if the arbiters of culture believe that if they simply take over all forms of entertainment and keep spewing out the same content in slightly different packages, audiences will lower their standards and regard thinly-disguised propaganda films as art. And the really terrifying thing about this is that they might succeed. The ability to discriminate between filet mignon and a cold McDonald's hamburger becomes much more difficult of filet mignon no longer exists.

One of the things I loved so much about the original versions of Star Wars, Star Trek and Doctor Who was that they each possessed a clear-cut philosophy which appealed to the decency that exists somewhere in every human being. They stood for the little man against the big man, for the slave against the oppressor, for peace against war, for tolerance and understanding against aggression, and for moral courage -- standing up for what they felt was right -- at all times. The heroes of these series could appeal equally to people of any race, religion or political belief, because the virtues they possessed were timeless and transcended borders and differences of race, ethnicity, sex and national origin. Being largely free of politics per se, they could create terrific drama, because their writers were free to test the viewers' assumptions (whatever they might be) and sometimes present problems which had no clear-cut solution. They could raise moral questions which had no definite answer. They could even imply that both sides could be wrong in a conflict. In short, they could provoke discussion and dialog as well as entertain. And they could do this without being identifiably in sympathy with any wing of political thought. They were truly "inclusive" before that word took on a somewhat more sinister meaning.

Alas, this sort of storytelling is rapidly becoming extinct, because philosophy, which "refers to looking at life in a pragmatic manner and attempting to understand why life is as it is and the principles governing behind it," has been replaced by ideology, "a set of beliefs, doctrines that back a certain social institution or a particular organization." And as various totalitarians have discovered, while it is possible to muzzle artists and to pervert their work into mere propaganda or polemic, it is quite impossible to make anything of truly artistic value after subjecting it to a process of ideological scrutiny. When Jeff Bezos released his "woke" trailer for "The Rings of Power," outraged Tolkien fans trolled the bejeezus out of it, with many writing in the comments section to the effect that in Tolkien's vast and complex universe, it was established from the very beginning that evil could not create anything, it could merely distort and pervert that which already existed. And this is in fact what is happening now. Wokeists, in their clumsy attempts to "fix it," have in fact "broken it." They have managed to hijack and ruin every major and many minor intellectual property they could get their hands on, and seem perfectly content to keep their vandalization campaign going until there is nothing left for them to despoil. But any of these casualties could be endured if only we knew that this was merely a phase, a sort of temporary cultural insanity, like McCarthyism. Unfortunately, "go woke, go broke," while largely correct as an assessment, does not seem to have dissuaded the proponents of wokeism from their objective of telling us what to think, and how to think it.

BOOK REVIEW: "GOETHE: CONVERSATIONS AND ENCOUNTERS"

If I love you, what business is it of yours?

This forgotten little book, edited by David Luke and Robert Pick, is a gem in the almost literal sense -- being both valuable and having many facets. In the former sense, it is a great introduction to one of the greatest writer-artist-philosopher-thinkers of European history; in the latter, it is a treasure-trove of insight and quotation. You may think it a bit scholarly-sounding (or just plain boring) by way of title, but you'd be wrong. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was eminent polymath, one of the great thinker-creators of all history, and a true savant, standing somewhere beyond genius in the power of his thinking and creativity: he was also a very colorful and deeply flawed man who becomes all the more interesting for his vanities and caprices, laid bare here in this editorially-assembled collection of firsthand encounters with the man as recorded by various friends, admirers, relations, rivals, acquaintances, colleagues, and enemies. Presented in chronological format, they trace Goethe from his preciocious childhood in which he embodied the German concept of the Wunderkind, all the way to his deathbed.

To understand the range of Goethe's interests, it's worth noting that one of his least-known efforts is still held in awe 214 years after it was published: THEORY OF COLORS (1810) "disputed the Newtonian view of the subject and formulated a psychological and philosophical account of the way we actually experience color as a phenomenon." [1] Werner Heisenberg later commented, "Goethe’s colour theory has in many ways borne fruit in art, physiology and aesthetics," while noting that Sir Isaac Newton's work was the more influential, being more scientific in nature. This is undoubtedly true, but rather misses the point that even when acting as a scientist, Goethe's view of life was not really scientific, but consisted of brilliant "intuitive schema" which spoke more to those very arenas of which Heisenberg referred -- art, physiology, aesthetics. Goethe's was not only a brilliant but a profoundly restless and unconventional mind, and a man who seems to have deeply influenced many other great men of his era: "His poems were set to music by many composers including Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, and Mahler." [3]

The author of FAUST was born in 1749 and lived until 1832, and in that time numbered among friends and acquaintances such people as Mozart and Napoleon, Mendelssohn, Schopenhauer and Schiller, not to mention innumerable politicians, artists, poets, and noblemen from all over Europe, including Talleyrand and Lord Byron. Holding court at his estate in Weimar, he frequently regaled visitors with his thoughts on every aspect of life, and it is these conversations which make up the book -- a selection of Goethe's views on everything from art and politics to music and science; religion, immortality, writing, poetry, science, the creative process, critical acclaim...you name it. And this is what makes the book valuable, for Goethe, while eccentric and often moody, was an immensely wise and quotable man with a lot of insight. I marked down literally dozens of quotations which I found inspiring, arresting, or simply too provocative to forget:


"When a writer can find no more suitable development for his theme, he kills his hero."

"Each man should sacrifice himself to his own conviction."

"Maximum possibilities are realized if the impossible is demanded."

"A monk is a refugee from life; a man buried alive."

"The essential thing is to love truth and to be receptive when one finds it."

"At least there is some character in hatred."

Somme of the anecdotes are just amazing -- the time, for example, when a young Felix Mendelssohn was at his house, and Goethe handed him some sheet music to play for the guests...music which turned out to be hand-written original drafts by Mozart and Beethoven. Goethe pointed out that Beethoven's "looked as if they'd been written with a broom dipped in ink" while Mozart's were picture-perfect, lacking even a single correction, as if dictated directly by God. That would make a great scene in a movie (provided Milos Forman directed it, of course). The point is that in an age very heavy on technology and very light on wisdom, GOETHE: CONVERSATIONS AND ENCOUNTERS is wisdom-heavy...without being a heavy read. I must emphasize this because you couldn't be blamed if you felt your eyeballs hardening just reading the title. I assure you, like most oral histories it moves very swiftly, interweaving somber and in some cases tragic moments with extremely funny, deeply thought-provoking conversations about every aspect of life. Goethe could be a wonderful and considerate man, or an arrogant, cold-hearted jerk, and seems to have been both refreshed and exhausted by the regard in which he was held. Some of this comes off in the different ways he handled, or was handled, by those who met him.

In closing I should admit I knew almost nothing about Goethe when I decided, based on a glimpse of what was inside, that I would read through it, and while this selection of conversations and encounters is by no means a biography, and only touches glancingly on most of his diplomatic career, published works and scientific studies, it is a very excellent portrait of the man himself and his mental processes...a man who was one of the towering artistic and intellectual figures of the 19th century, but almost unknown in America except by a handful of scholars.

SECOND THOUGHTS ON 70s DISASTER MOVIES

Disaster movies do us the psychological service of forcing a quick march through the worst that could happen. At the end we see that you win a few, you lose a few, some cars are up in trees, and only the most attractive of the young people have survived.

I recently completed a highly enjoyable marathon of 70s-era disaster movies. For those of you who weren't around for Hollywood's "disaster craze," let me tell you, it was something. For years, audiences drank thirstily, almost insatiably, from a well of spectacular, cinematic destruction. In modern times the closest analogs would be the vampire or zombie crazes of the last twenty-five years. Like all crazes, it eventually burned out, but while the mayhem was in swing it was highly entertaining.

Disaster movies were what Charlton Heston, who starred in a number of them, referred to as "stories of an event." What he meant was that the script's did not allow for a great deal of character development, but rather thrust swiftly-developed (or totally undeveloped) characters into extraordinary situations, and drew its entertainment value from watching how they coped with the catastrophe. Suspense was maintained by killing enough of them that there was always doubt as to who would live to the final credits: enertainment was provided by watching things crash, explode, burn or otherwise meet doom in spectacular fashion.

A simple search for films of this type from that era yielded about 30 results, of which I myself would eliminate a small number for being dystopian or post-apocalyptic in character, such as DAMNATION ALLEY and Heston's OMEGA MAN. I would also a trim a few which are plainly horror movies though they certainly present themselves as disasters: DAWN OF THE DEAD, for example. And of course there were a few I did not see or want to because of appallingly bad film quality or reviews (or both). I was left with fourteen films, three of which I managed to catch in the theater (at a triple feature at the Aero in Santa Monica).

The China Syndrome - One of the better actual movies on this list, and only marginally a disaster movie in the sense that it threatens catastrophe without bringing it, TCS is a virulently anti-nuclear story with a good script and fine actors delivering very good performances. Jack Lemmon plays a high-strung worker at a California nuclear plant so obsessed with what he believes are sloppy safety procedures that he ends up holding the reactor hostage.

Gray Lady Down - The aformentioned Chuck Heston stars in this gruesome flick about a nuclear submarine, the Gray Lady, which is accidentally rammed by a freighter and promptly sinks to the bottom of the ocean, necessitating a daring undersea rescue by an experimental craft skippered by David Carradine. As a kid I was traumatized by some of the drowning scenes, which are graphically depicted. While hardly the greatest movie ever made, it's pretty suspenseful and heavy with acting talent.

Kingdom of the Spiders - While KINGDOM is really a monster movie, it's sufficiently massive in scale to qualify as a disaster film. William Shatner is a rugged rural vet brought in to investigate some mysterious animal deaths, only to discover they were caused by a mutated strain of poisonous desert tarantula which is fast spreading toward the nearby town. I got a big kick out of this movie, which develops some very likeable characters and puts them through absolute hell. The ending is a real shocker.

The Towering Inferno - This is probably the acme of diaster movies, a "cast of thousands" epic which sees Paul Newman as the harassed architecht of a mega-skyscraper on the West Coast who discovers, too late, that wicked Richard Chamberlain has cut so many corners the building is nothing but a vast deathtrap. And indeed, when the inevitable fire breaks out, it slaughters so many famous actors you'll quickly remember that these folk really do love a good death scene. This is a tremendously fun movie, which features everyone from from Steve McQueen to O.J. Simpson.

The Swarm - Many consider this movie to be one of the worst of all time. This is nonsense. THE SWARM is indeed utter rubbish, but it is also a great deal of fun. The moronic premise is that a swarm of African killer bees terrorize America, causing far more destruction than you would believe possible, including a nuclear explosion. Michael Caine leads a star-laden cast in this piece of laughable nonsense, which kills most of the characters with an abandon bordering on homicidal mania. You'll never look at bees the same way again.

Two Minute Warning - Charlton Heston is once again at the helm in this surprisingly excellent thriller about a mysterious gunman who sets up shop at a pro football game in Los Angeles, and the cops (Heston and John Cassavettes) who try and stop him before he can initiate a massacre. What distinguishes this film aside from its excellent cast, which includes Jack Klugman playing a desperate bookie with a bad combover, is that the cops know exactly where the gunman is but can't quite get to him, and have to make a series of tough moral decisions while the clueless characters in the crowd go about their soon-to-be-disrupted business.

Juggernaut - This forgotten gem is a first-rate British thriller with an excellent cast, including Richard Harris, Anthony Hopkins, Omar Sharif, Ian Holm, Freddie Jones, Julian Glover, Jack Watson, Ian Holm, and Simon McCorkindale, most of whom were at the near-beginnings of their careers. It's about a disgruntled bomb expert code named Juggernaut who remote-hijacks a cruise ship plying the stormy North Atlantic, and the bomb disposal expert flown in to try and his plan. Harris plays this disposal expert as a cocky, know-it-all bastard with nerves of steel who comes to the horrible conclusion, midway through the movie, that the hijacker knows more about blowing up bombs he does about defusing them, and begins to fall apart at the seams. The suspense is murderous and the performances superb and often touching, especially Roy Kinnear as the ship's social director, who tries to keep morale up on the possibly doomed ship by any means necessary. And the "which wire do I clip?" scene at the end is a masterpiece.

The Cassandra Crossing - This movie has one hell of an opening, and if it had maintained that breakneck pace it might have been a damn good film. Alas, THE CASSANDRA CROSSING, though full of talent (as all of these movies are), is a weird, rambling, periodically boring tale about a European passenger train which picks up a terrorist infected by a virulent form of man-made plague. The government decides the train ought to be shunted over the nearest cliff rather than risk a pandemic, placing Richard Harris, Sophia Loren, a young Martin Sheen and the ubiquitous O.J. Simpson in very grave peril. I rather enjoyed Bert Lancaster's performance as the weary American general who struggles with the morality of sacrificing the few to save the many, but this film sorely needed a better editor. Way too much of nothing happens for way too long, and by the time something does, it's hard to care.

The Poseidon Adventure - This movie is a nasty piece of work, and all the more pleasurable because of it. All disaster flicks roll the dice by trying to introduce a large number of characters in the shortest possible time, and then hoping we care if any of them survive. THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE gets around this by smartly employing actors like Gene Hackman, who could play a week-old tomato and still be riveting. The Poseidon is a cruise ship traveling the Mediterranean which is capsized by a rogue wave on New Year's Eve: the few survivors, led by Hackman, are trapped on the sinking, upside-down vessel and must try to reverse-engineer an escape through fire, water, and their own fear. A punishing film, but a good one.

Earthquake - Chuck Heston once again takes the lead in this highly fractured, silly, but rather enjoyable exercise in massive destruction, which was largely shot in my old backyard of Burbank-Toloca Lake, and depicts Los Angeles getting positively assholed by The Big One, a superquake that first levels, and then floods, much of the city. Victoria Principal, pre-DALLAS fame, struts around in superhuman gorgeousness, while Marjoe Gortner chills as a psycho whose National Guard duties give him ample means to get even with some neighborhood bullies. Heston must ultimately decide between saving his alcoholic shrew wife played by Ava Gardner, or the young babe Geneviève Bujold, who wants to run away with him. One thing I'll give this messy movie is the relentless way it pummels the characters with fresh disasters.

Airport - Mocked mercilessly by satirical takes like AIRPLANE, AIRPORT was also reviled by its star, Burt Lancaster, who hated it so much he trashed it at every opportunity for the rest of his life...though I'm pretty sure he cashed his paycheck. But this is a quite enjoyable and effective thriller with more than a cup of soap opera thrown in for good measure. The plot, such as it is, revolves around a mad bomber who hijacks an airliner which is already headed for trouble due to a massive snowstorm sweeping over the Midwest. One reviewer described it as "a blizzard, a bomb, and a stowaway" and that's accurate enough, but it's still great fun.

Airport '75 - A surprisingly enjoyable sequel to the original 1970 flick, "'75" features -- you guessed it -- Chuck Heston, as a hotshot pilot who has a hell of a problem on his hands. See, an airliner chock full of innocent people has been rammed by private plane in midair, killing the airliner's pilot, co-pilot and flight engineer, but not downing the plane. From his office down below, Heston must find a way to get the airliner out of the clouds and safely on the tarmac without a crew, and without much of an instrument panel, and with a liner full of panicked passengers. It's a helluva problem, and some very ingenuous means are used to solve it.

Airport '77 - You'd think the second sequel to a movie hated by its own star would be absolutely terrible, but marshaling a lot of talent, including Jack Lemmon and Jimmy Stewart, actually gets this sucker off the ground...and into the ocean! Yep, the latest disaster to strike a flying machine is that it crashes at sea and sinks to the bottom, while somehow retaining (mostly) watertight integrity, oxygen, and electricity. A rescue operation is naturally initiated, but this being a disaster movie a lot of people are going to die anyway, except George Kennedy, of course, who is in all the AIRPORT films and always comes out unharmed.

Concorde: Airport '79 -- This lengthy final installment was a crass attempt to kick a few last coins out of the exhausted pinata that was the disaster genre, and the AIRPORT franchise generally, which by this time was a pastiche of itself. I remember watching it on TV with my older brother when it aired, and we had great fun mocking the dumb plot, trash effects and campy writing, so I guess we enjoyed ourselves after all. The main appeal was crusty old George Kennedy, who seems to have showed up mainly because he wanted 100% attendance in the franchise. Or possibly to pay a gambling debt. According to Wikipedia: "It is also listed in Golden Raspberry Award founder John Wilson's book The Official Razzie Movie Guide as one of The 100 Most Enjoyably Bad Movies Ever Made." It's about a crooked arms dealer's attempts to blast the Concorde jet from the sky to rid himself of one of its passengers, a bit of overkill if ever there was. This oaf expends so much money and effort trying to annihilate the feckless news reporter that he begins to resemble Wylie E. Coyote, but fuck it, nobody watches the fourth movie in a disaster franchise for the plot.

Meteor - "It's five miles wide and it's coming this way!" If ever a tag line invited ridicule, this was it. The worst film on this list by some distance, far worse than THE SWARM or CONCORDE could ever hope to be, is METEOR, a cinematic atrocity that should be erased from human memory. The movie's unfortunate star, Sean Connery, later apologized for its existence by noting that, "The film's success depended very heavily on its special effects. When I saw the final cut I was appalled. Shit flying around instead of meteors." Shit is right. METEOR is about a gigantic space rock which threatens to destroy the Earth, but unfortunately does not, at least not before it stupefies its audience via two hours of pointless dialog (in several languages, no less), time-consuming sub-plots that go nowhere, fake-looking disaster scenes randomly distributed throughout the movie, and some of the worst acting by the best actors you'll ever see: Martin Landau's performance is so bad I burst out laughing. But there is nothing funny about this miserable chunk of space shit. The last half an hour actually features the entire cast slogging through mud, and that is exactly what watching this movie is like. Fuck this film. Seriously, fuck it.

So much for the movies themselves, most of which I found quite engaging, if often somewhat mindless and certainly very repetitious in construction and theme. Now comes the important question, one which should concern any reader or teller of tales: what is the appeal of the disaster story? They lack well-drawn characters, employ a fractured narrative, and the antagonist is often a literal force of nature rather than a person: even when the adversary is human, he tends to be a mere catalyst for events. So again I ask: what's the appeal?

In his rambling but brilliant book DANSE MACABRE, Stephen King analyzed not only what he felt made horror work as a genre of fiction and film, but also why people enjoyed being scared. In his now-famous essay which has retroactively been dubbed "Keep the Gators Fed," he explained the need many feed to toss red meat to the beasts within themselves, a thesis I fully support; in a different part of the book, however, he tackled THE AMITYVILLE HORROR, a film he described as an economic horror movie, in which the supernatural elements pale, in King's mind, to the financial disaster the accursed house presents its crumbling hero and his family. The audience is presented with a slow-motion act of destruction, and cannot look away, in large part because the movie articulates, in a stylized way, their own fears about economic ruin. Well, in a disaster film we get plenty of destruction and ruin, and very little slow motion. Indeed, there is a sacrificial quality to these stories: the setting is always presented as either beautiful, idyllic, luxurious or high-tech; something safe, something which stands for human aesthetics or genius; and then it is thoroughly and cruelly sacrificed, like a gorgeous virgin to dark, bloodthirsty gods. We satisfy the beasts within by feeding them freezers full of red meat: toppling buildings, crashing aeroplanes, derailing trains, out of control fires, raging whirlwinds, towering waves, massive asteroid impacts, swarms of killer insects. At the same time we offer them the classic car-wreck-as-entertainment, the spectacle provided by someone else's misfortune. The homey small town, the famous big city, the cozy mountain resort or plush luxury liner, all familiar to the audience and all regarded as more or less safe, are suddenly visited by Biblical plague. We know many of the people involved are going to die, but not all of them, and that at the end, while the physical destruction may be complete, the message will be the same in every film: humanity survives.

The disaster craze more-or-less ended with the seventies themselves. Oh, disaster movies were still made here and there, but the public's appetite for them had finally been satiated: a new obsession was required and, I suppose, found. It was not until computer generated animation became a workable prospect in the early-mid 90s that we began to see a modest renewal of interest in the genre with movies like TWISTER (one could certainly argue that JURASSIC PARK and its sequels fall into this category). And this is the way of Hollywood, and literary, crazes. The public is insatiable until it isn't. That however in unimportant. What interests me is the Why of things, and what our passion for tales like this says about the human race is intensely interesting, if at times quite depressing, but I have come to understand it. We live in a civilized society. Climate changes and proximity to geological fault lines notwithstanding, the ordinary Westerner, whether he is a German or a Spaniard, a Canadian or a New Zealander, lives a life of ease and comfort. Even the dirt-poor, and even the homeless, live comparably better in some ways than most of our ancient ancestors -- or even many of our grandparents five generations back. Nor do most of us interact with nature or wildness in any fashion which is not at least partially controlled and therefore safe. In short, the very things we were designed to do by virtue of evolution and genetics -- to live in the raw, at the mercy of the elements, constantly on the move, constantly fleeing danger or facing it head-on -- are the things we seldom or never actually experience in our lives. Our ancestors were weaned on cataclysms: floods, fires, famines, droughts, plagues, wars. We were weaned on sugar, saturated fats and air conditioning. And let's face it, sometimes even the most optimistic of us, even the happiest-go-lucky sumbitch out there, the human champagne type who sees the glass as entirely full even when the glass is laying shattered upon the ground, will be stuck in shit-impacted gridlock on the 405 freeway on a hot, hazy, ozone-stinking morning, look at the shimmer of downtown through the haze, listen to the doom report on the radio, think about all the bills they have to pay and how little they enjoy their job, and say, "What a fucking mess we've made of this world." And because this is so, because so many of us are merely viewed as consumers, as drones, as soulless digits whose purpose is to pay taxes for 50 years and then die quietly out of sight when our time comes, it's natural for us to long for our civilization, so-called, to be blown to bits. Just smashed all to fiery fragments. A clean sweep to free us from the rat race, the 9 - 5, the boss, the taxman, the doomscroll. In fact, if one looks at the literature of the last century and beyond, it is easy enough to see how this feeling has obtained as long as people have been bound by the accident of birth to spend their lives in coal mines, factories, hardscrabble farms, and lonely dead-end jobs without prospect of excitement or release. How many men have willingly marched off to war, have risked crippling injury, mutilation, and death, simply to get the hell away from the endless, soul-starving drudgery of "civilization?" Some maintain that war itself is a sort of fever-reaction to civilization itself, that war releases the frantic energies trapped by a safe if grinding, dull, and adventure-free existence which is at odds with our wild and violent nature. I certainly believe this at least to an extent, and I believe that things like horror and disaster stories not only trigger our seldom-invoked but hardwired fight-or-flight responses, they also appeal to our sense of morbid curiosity. One slows down passing the car wreck to see the spectacle, but also to experience a feeling of relief that "at least it wasn't me." Not a very noble thing, but mankind was not meant to be inherently noble. He was meant to survive, and disaster movies are ultimately about survival. They allow us a cathartic but vicarious release of that self-same energy that finds very little other release in our neatly-kept, 21st century lives. Because, after all, we really don't want our civilization to die. We're far too addicted to its comforts. But we dislike it enough to want to see it burned in effigy, and disaster movies provide this precise service...without depriving us of our air conditioning.

THE CHARMED ONE: THOUGHTS ON THE DEATH OF SHANNEN DOHERTY

Have you ever felt like a phone call that's been disconnected?

I never met Shannen Doherty. I never worked, to my knowledge or remembrance, on any project in which she was even tangentially involved. A great deal of what I remember about her is from gossip magazines and entertinment news shows of the 90s, who frequently crafted hit pieces based on secondhand information and spiteful rumor. In recent years -- the last ten, it seems -- she was on my personal radar because of her fight with cancer, and her ongoing and seemingly never-dying feud with Alyssa Milano. And now she is gone, a victim of the cancer she battled relentlessly up until the day it killed her. That is not a great deal to go on by itself, but there is, of course, more. There is always more.

I arrived at college in 1990, which coincidentally was the same year BEVERLY HILLS, 90210 debuted on Fox. I had "encountered" Shannen before, as a child actress on various programs I'd seen, but I doubt I had even a faint remembrance of her. Playing Brenda Walsh, the tempestuous other half of the Walsh twins, Doherty made immediate waves with the show's fast-growing audience, but she was a polarizing figure on the show. Was she hot or just weird-looking? Was she a likeable fish out of water or a mere social climber? Was she sympathetic or something of an antagonist? This was the sort of thing fans, and people like myself, who pretended not to be a fan but watched it anyway, would argue about, sometimes almost seriously. In regards to Shannen the human being, however, Shannen the actress, there was little debate: she was the quintessential Hollywood Bad Girl, the spoiled child actress semi-grown up to be a full-blown set siva, bitch, and monster. When she finally left 90210 after four seasons, it seemed to be one of those situations which walked the line between "I quit!" and "you're fired!" Shannen was the girl everyone loved to hate -- in part, I think, because of the complicated, paraodoxical relationship Americans in particular have with celebrity. We seem to both want and need celebrities, and were are often as entertained by their off-screen doings as whatever they bring to the television or theater or stage, but at the same time we love to hate them, and to pass judgment on their lifestyles. There is a good deal of envy at the core of this, but that is not important, anymore than it is important whether everything that was said about Shannen was true or none of it. What I myself know after almost thirteen years grinding in Tinseltown is that nobody, and I mean nobody, who isn't actually there on set will ever truly the know the story. TV shows, like films, are hermetically sealed communities in which very little escapes which is not intended to escape: the code of silence practiced by the ordinary crew member is far more rigidly observed than the Mafia's omerta: he will talk shop with fellow crew, or with relations with no connections whatever to the industry, but never to celebrity gossip rags whatever they choose to call themselves. Hell, when I was working there (2007 - 2020), it was taken as an article of faith that if you'd worked for TMZ, even as a 23 year-old production assistant, you were unhirable in any other field: nobody wanted a rat on set.

But at the time I believed all of it, every bad word. I believed it because I wanted to believe it, because I'm no different than anyone else -- rather, I wasn't then, before my own time in the industry -- and had fun mocking the bad behavior of the young starlet.

The next time Doherty came on my personal radar was when she was cast as Prue Halliwell on CHARMED, another Aaron Spelling show, and one which turned out to be one of the unexpected hits of 1998. Doherty had "reconciled" with Spelling sufficiently to head up this new series about three sisters who discover they have inherited magical powers, but this time her run was even shorter than on 90210 -- a mere three of CHARMED's eight seasons. Having directed the cliffhanger season finale herself, Doherty and her beau were on vacation -- in Canada I believe -- when they got the news she'd been unceremoniously fired for "bad behavior." Although I didn't watch CHARMED at the time it was on the air, I had to laugh at history repeating itself. I believed every word of the gossip rolling out of the online magazines, and simply accepted that it was her jealousy of the popularity of her co-star, Alyssa Milano, which had short-circuited this precious second career chance. Divas gonna diva, after all.

It was quite a few years later that friends of mine from the industry let me in on the fact that Doherty's departure from CHARMED was in many ways a raw deal, a sort of cold-blooded assassination carried out by the producers to appease Milano, "who wanted to move up one place on the call sheet" and thus disposed of the series' titular star rather than face a lawsuit. As I said above, nobody who wasn't there will ever know the whole story, but I've heard enough from "knowledgeable sources" to believe that as guilty as Doherty had been on 90210, which was largely but not entirely, was how innocent she'd been here. The fact the entirety of the cast ultimately and publicly sided with her over Milano is sufficient proof for me to believe this is substantially true, and that she was a wronged woman.

Why does any of this matter? As the cliche goes, it's complicated. Doherty was a staple of the 90s. Between 90210, MALLRATS, HEATHERS and CHARMED it seemed you couldn't escape her for good or ill, and then -- bang. It was over. A lot of actors get fired off shows and return after a period of career purgatory, or what my friend Mark calls "film jail," but almost nobody gets a third bite at the apple. Doherty's career never recovered. She became more famous for her feuds than she was for her work. And this is why it matters.

90210 is something of a sentimental favorite for my generation, a teen soap opera which was somewhat ridiculous even when it was on the air, but possessed an undeniable charisma and the kind of strutting self-confidence you sometimes see if free spirits who don't give a damn, or a fuck for that matter, what you think of them because they know they're cool. (Hell, I freely admit I had Brandon Walsh hair and sideburns for several years.) But CHARMED, whatever you think of the series (and maybe you've only seen half of one episode because it was on the television in front of the only available treadmill at the gym), was something a hell of a lot more important to millions of girls and young women. Like BUFFY, it was not only an inspiration, providing not one but three role models, each of which appealed to a different sort of viewer, it also tackled a lot of the real-world issues that young women encountered in everyday life. CHARMED was about sometimes painful family dynamics; it was about work-life balance; it was about loneliness, lust, love and sex; it was about fashion; it was about music; it was about job hunts and aggravating co-workers and workplace dating and hangovers and rivalry and stealing your sister's clothing and makeup and how the hell do we pay the gas bill and are we going to die alone? It was, in short, about everything the twentysomething female was dealing with in the late 90s, the difference between that time and now being that the women of CHARMED were depicted as being liberated but also suffering the price of liberation, and trying to decide whether the strong-and-independent-girlboss or the traditional marriage w/kids life was the way to go, which is something you would never see on television now. In short, despite its fantastical premise, tongue-in-cheek delivery and often quite deliberate silliness, CHARMED actually had something to say about real life: it was relatable -- moreso on this in a moment. And if I had a penny for every woman I'd met who gushed over the memory of the series, I'd have as much money as Musk. But never mind Gen X and Millennials: there are young women I know who were barely alive if even born when the show debuted who binge-watch it regularly. And Shannen Doherty was at the center of that. She played the big sister Prue with a combination of bossiness, bitchiness, tenderness, and humor: she, the matriarch by default, had to be as much a mom as a sis and sometimes resented it, just as her sisters, played by Holly Marie Combs and Milano, sometimes resented her. The frictive nature of the relationship lent it a lot of credence.

But I mentioned relatability, and this is another thing CHARMED had in common with BUFFY and so many other superhero stories going back to Spider Man and before: the superpowers of the ladies in question did not make their personal and professional lives easier. It made them harder. It stress-tested and often destroyed their romantic relationships and cost them jobs and time and money and worry -- plenty of worry. It burdened them with the weight of a double life, and sometimes it threatened to end that life. And to circle back to Doherty directly, this paradox, this powerlessness by virtue of power, applied to Shannen herself. She was a child actor: you can find her on LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRARIE and T.J. HOOKER. She did not have what we call "a normal life." When she became a star she did not know how to cope with the superpower of celebrity and it played out in fights in makeup trailers, in nightclub brawls, in impulse marriages, in accusations and arguments and rumors and gossip, much of which was founded. She didn't even want to do CHARMED when the opportunity arose -- a TV show about witches? Come on. But it worked. Improbably perhaps, but that is the nature of magic.

Doherty struggled mightily in her post-CHARMED career. Her rhetorical remark, "Do you ever feel like a phone call that's been disconnected?" is probably the saddest and yet at the same time the most illuminating comment anyone has ever made about what it's like to be cut off in mid-career as if by an executioner's axe. Nor would she accept Milano's alleged attempts to gaslight what had occurred, replying to the charge that was merely set drama with the cry "what you call drama I call trauma." And I use the word "cry" specifically and not for dramatic effect: Doherty was obviously devastated by what had happened, by the consequences to her career and life, and being Doherty, wasn't inclined to be terribly quiet or polite about it. The extent to which she ultimately accepted her share of responsibility for her troubles, whatever that share might have been, is to some extent documented on her podcast, LET'S BE CLEAR, but the rest of it was known only to herself and her intimates. As I said above, at the core of all Hollywood feuds is a secret, and that secret is both open and remarkably well kept.

When I heard the news of Doherty's death, I was as they say "shocked but not surprised." I subscribed to her podcast, and she had released new material as recently as a week before her demise. Of course I knew she had supposedly incurable cancer, but nothing is incurable until it actually kills you, and she had lived with the disease so long that I regarded almost in the way I regard Magic Johnson's HIV+ status: a mere factor in a complicated life, and not one that required much commentary, or even thought. But now she's gone, and I find myself grieving almost as if I had worked with her or known her socially. Of course I know why, and so do you: pure selfishness. She was one of the pop-culture stars of the 1990s: in a way she encapsulated the decade. From her debut as Brenda in 1990 to her exit as Prue in 2001, her hair, her clothing, the way she carried herself on screen, the slang she dropped, all of it was the description of an arc: the twentysomethings. And like Doherty herself, the twentysomethings are now fiftysomethings, if only barely, and feeling dismay that they -- like the surviving cast of CHARMED -- no longer resemble their twentysomething selves. Hairlines have receded. Skin has wrinkled. Muscles have softened. The scars of living show plainly on faces and bodies. The styles, the fashions, the technology and the music of that time, as much as we all might still love it and cherish its collective memory, now feels definitely and unmistakably dated, part of another time, another era, the pre-9/11 world which everyone who was privileged to experience misses like all hell whether they admit it or no. To lose Shannen is to lose an icon, a piece of ourselves, our past, our collective history. It is to stare mortality in the face. It's a body blow, a gut shot, a kick to the balls. It hurts in a raw sort of way. A cruel way.

And yet the magic around her remains and perhaps strengthens in death. It casts a glow every time she shoots that look over a bare shoulder, or flashes that impossibly perfect smile, or deliberately evokes that smoky, flirty tone she was capable of summoning and dismissing at will. I honestly don't know how I'd rate Shannen as an actress, but as a presence, a charismatic force, a self-conscious icon of a time and a place and mood and a theme, she gets supernatural marks indeed. And is that not the nature of charm?

BOOK REVIEW: MARTIN CAIDEN'S "BLACK THURSDAY"

And there is the sound, the one that grates deepest against the nerves, that is hellish and hated, that knifes into the brain and makes a man wince through and through. A scream, metallic, thin, and high, a slender file blade cutting through the nerves. Above all else there is this cry of the fighter racing in close, sounding a scream that can be none other.

BLACK THURSDAY achieves something rare in any field: it is at once an amazing piece of research and also an eminently readable book. Martin Caiden takes us through the disastrous raid on Schweinfurt by the U.S. 8th Air Force in late 1943, the so-called "Black Thursday" battle which saw 60 American bombers shot down over Germany -- around 20% of the attacking force. No dry history this, but an almost novel-esque work which layers history, tactics, strategy and a blow-by-blow account of the raid, while simultaneously taking the deepest possible dive into what it meant to fly a B-17 in combat -- the mechanical wonders, the physical effort, the psychological strain. I really cannot emphasize how swiftly this book moves or how frightfully well it conveys the horror and confusion of a bombing raid carried out under continous attack by flak guns, rockets, aerial mines, and hundreds upon hundreds of enemy fighters. There are many touching and some tragic, and even a few funny, stories about how pilots, bombardiers, navigators, and gunners coped, or failed to cope, with the horror.

I should note here that I have read a number of memoirs about fighter and bomber pilots in the Second World War, but little or nothing about the air war as a whole. I know the basic history, the objectives, some of the top personalities, and some of the more glorious or notorious incidents: but I do not claim even an enthusiastic amateur's knowledge of the war as a whole. So I was grateful for the layout of the book. Caiden takes a brief broad overview of the history of the air war over Europe, and America's participation in same. The British had tried to carry out daylight bombing raids over Germany, but the losses they sustained were so prohibitive they eventually gave up resorted to heavy night attacks. America, establishing bases in Britain, took over the burden of daylight operations, flying gigantic formations of what were initially largely unescorted heavy bombers over Germany and Occupied Europe, in the face of tremendous opposition. The purpose of the raids was primarily the destruction of German's sprawling war industry, and the now-infamous Schweinfurt raids were meant to strike a fatal blow to the Third Reich's crucial ball-bearing industry and thus cripple the Nazi war machine. To achieve this goal, a force of about 300+ B-17s was mustered for the strike. This is their story.

The structure of the book is interesting. Caiden was a veteran pilot and understood fliers and flying and machinery, and he wants the reader to understand what it means to move through the air in 30 tons of aircraft -- the work involved, the physics, the technical expertise and the cold courage. So he breaks down the chapters into the overall strategy, the tactics, the logistics, the everything involved in carrying out a 300-bomber raid over a hostile nation. This is an immense task but he handles it as deftly as a bullfighter, making his mark on each subject but never lingering.
Then we get the real action. Caiden makes extensive use of firsthand accounts and official records to record the event from the POV of those involved. He makes us feel it, the successes and failures both, and tries to cover all aspects of the battle -- for example, one entire chapter is devoted to the improbable escape to Spain, through Germany and France, of one airman shot down during the attack; another takes the experiences of a single minute of heavy combat as experienced by a series of bomber crews. At the same time, he explains the tactics and strategy of the Luftwaffe, praising their courage, ingenuity and determination at every point. While Caiden is obviously partisan, using "we" and "our" when describing Americans and the Air Forces, he does not make the error of presenting the Germans as mere foils for American greatness. The Germans won this battle, and while they paid a steep price to do so, Caiden does not let us forget that Schweinfurt was a bloody mess that failed to achieve its objective despite shockingly accurate bombing. The scenes where American ground crews wait in vain for bombers that will never return, the times when accidents kill as many Americans as a lost battle, the pathetic image of the lone survivor of an entire squadron staring through tear-blurred eyes at row after row after row of empty bunks never again to be filled by their former occupants, will stick with you forever. Like many people, I always assumed the Air Forces had it easier than the infantry, that they fought a "clean war," but this assumption does not survive contact with BLACK THURSDAY. Aside from being in the first wave of an amphibious invasion against a hardened beach, I can't imagine anything as terrifying, and nothing more terrifying, than being stuck in the ball turret of a B-17 when 200 German fighters are attacking you from every direction, flak is pounding away all around you, one engine is on fire, and you know you've still got 3, 4, 5 more hours of this hell to go through before you can get home.

If you get home.

If the book has a weakness, it is that Caiden uses German records only for the purposes of recording losses and measuring bomb damage. There are no interviews with Luftwaffe fighter pilots who flew against the raid, or the Luftwaffe commanders who directed the battle. He does not tap into official histories from "the other side of the hill" except to give us some statistics. By doing so he would have greatly improved an already amazing piece of history and research, and given us a broader and deeper, and also a more balanced, account of the battle. However, I realize this was probably not his objective to begin with. As I said, Caiden is a partisan writer: he wrote this book to impress upon us the courage of the American airman and the tremendous struggles and sacrifices he had to make to win the daylight air war over Europe, not to tell both sides of the story. Still, I consider this a pity. I have read enough German accounts of what it was like to fly against the dreaded "boxes" of B-17s, each bristling with hundreds of .50 machine guns, to want to read more. And I confess I wondered if Caiden was uncomfortable with the idea of opening up, in the reader's mind, what happens when hundreds of tons of high explosives rain down on factory workers and civilians of all ages alike. When the air war is disussed by historians, I have found it often omits describing this fundamental horror as a way of keeping the "Greatest Generation" clean in their own minds. The national myths of any nation require a certain amount of this sweeping-dust-beneath-the-rug approach: however, a moment's worth of inquiry satisified me that he was doing absolutely nothing of the kind: he tackled that subject in excruciatingly horrifying detail in A TORCH TO THE ENEMY, about the firebombing of Tokyo. So I believe his motive here was to tell a complex tale in the most efficient and arresting manner possible, and keep it lean and mean.

In short, I loved this book. It reads almost like a novel and it has none of the overly technical, burdensome discussions of metallurgy, aerdodynamics, and what-not that made what many consider his seminal work, THE FORK-TAILED DEVIL, impossible for me to read cover to cover. That book has terrific anecdotes and exhaustive research, but -- in my opinion -- it gets in its own way with all the nuts and bolts: BLACK THURSDAY does not make that mistake. It's one of the best WW2 histories I've ever read, and I strongly encourage anyone even slightly interested in history or aviation to read it.

BOOK REVIEW: ERROL FLYNN'S "MY WICKED, WICKED WAYS"

I have been in rebellion against God and government ever since I can remember.

In his own autobiography, IN AND OUT OF CHARACTER, Basil Rathbone wrote of Errol Flynn:

"He was one of the most beautiful male animals I've ever seen...but I think his greatest handicap was that he was incapable of taking anything or anyone else seriously. I don't think he had any ambition beyond 'living up' every moment of his life to the maximum of his physical capacity, and making money. He had talent, but how much we shall never know; there were flashes of talent in the three pictures we made together. He was monstrously lazy and self-indulgent, relying on a magnificent body to keep him going, and he had an insidious flair for making trouble, mostly for himself. I believe him to have been quite fearless, and subconsciously possessed of his own self-destruction. I would say that he was fond of me, for what reasons I will never know. It was always 'Dear old Bazzz,' and he would flash that smile that was both defiant and cruel, but for me always had a tinge of affection in it. We only crossed swords, never words."

The extent to which Rathbone, who worked closely with Flynn on CAPTAIN BLOOD, ROBIN HOOD and DAWN PATROL, understood and did not understand the paradoxical, enigmatic, what-you-saw-is-not-necessarily-what-you-got Errol Flynn will be revealed to anyone who spends the money and takes the time to read his surprisingly thick, surprisingly deep, often amusing and occasionally appalling autobiography, MY WICKED, WICKED WAYS.

Now I freely confess I am one of those fiends who folds back the edges of book pages I consider to contain important quotations. I also confess I bought this book expecting that Flynn would have little to say aside from endless recounts of alcoholic and sexual debacheries and perhaps some amusing gossip from the Golden Age of Hollywood; in other words, I expected to be entertained, but I did not anticipate folding many pages. As to the former, my expectations were met. As to the latter, I confess I was dead wrong. Errol Flynn was indeed a degenerate, libertine, almost completely amoral man, one who lived his entire life either teetering on the edge of, or completely beyond, both the rules of civilized behavior and occasionally, of civilization itself. The smile that Rathbone described as "defiant and cruel" was just that, for Flynn was defiant by nature -- defiant of everything -- and his pleasures often took an exploitative form that bore no regard for the feelings or dignity of others. He lived for those pleasures, and adventure, and laughed (literally) at the idea of consequences. He seems to have scarcely understood the idea of guilt, conscience or remorse, and he did not take himself any more seriously than he took the women (sometimes girls) he seduced, the husbands he humiliated, or the many people of all races he ruthlessly conned out of their money and their dignity. On the other hand, he was far more than the sum of his sins: Flynn was highly intelligent, extremely resourceful, deeply curious about life and human existence, and in his later years, a surprisingly self-critical and philosophical man who came to regret many of his choices. If he was ruthless, he was also without self-pity.

Flynn takes us from his improbable childhood -- he was the son of a famous Australian scientist who rather doted on him, and an unloving mother with whom he remained at war his entire life -- to an even more improbable adolescence. Born in Tasmania, which is quite literally the end of the earth, he took on the characteristics of that island's most famous animal: the devil. He was a curious, wild, nearly fearless child, always up to mischief, and even at a very young age obsessed with the female of the species. Gifted with extreme good looks, he collected sexual experiences (and veneral diseases) early, and his teens and twenties were spent on a series of adventures. At different points before he was accidentally discovered by Hollywood, Flynn sailed the South Seas, tried his hand at running various kinds of plantations, dabbled in the slave trade, panned for gold in New Guinea -- the most dangerous place on earth at that time -- and eventually learned to live as a vagabond con man. While guiding a documentary crew up the deadly Sepik River in New Guinea, he was noted for his looks and charisma and cast in a movie called THE WAKE OF THE BOUNTY, which opened him up to the film world but did not deliver him from poverty or give him purpose. Indeed, Flynn is 179 pages into his memoirs before he ceases his life of wandering, hanging out with street thugs in Australia, running cons from Hong Kong to the Phillippines, and sailing around the Pacific with a fellow con artist named Koets, and joins the Northampton Repertory Company in England. This act set the course for the rest of his life, for it was here he learned how to act, and more than that, became interested in acting as a craft. Indeed, in his later years he remarked that the happiest times of his life were the two years he spent "trodding the boards" with this theater company. And therein lies one of the book's many moments of tragedy. Flynn's talents as an actor, which were considerable, eventually became overlooked because of his physical appearance; his handsomeness and devil-may-care smile are what got him to New York and eventually, Los Angeles, and the genuine passion and deep-soul satisfaction that a life of theater acting might have engendered in him were traded, before he even really understood what happened, for a life as a movie star: a life that fed into all of his surface passions and animal lusts, but did not ultimately leave him fulfilled, satisified, or even in possession of his self-respect.

Flynn's Hollywood career started with a bang with CAPTAIN BLOOD in 1935. He rapidly became one of "the" leading men in the motion picture industry and pictures like THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER, ROBIN HOOD, THE SEA HAWK, and SANTA FE TRAIL cemented his status as a "swashbuckler" -- the 30s-40s equivalent of an action star. His fame and money allowed him to indulge in all of his favorite pastimes, and gave him a reputation as a womanzer nonpariel, but his marital choices cost him dearly in divorce court and plagued him for the rest of his life. Indeed, it could be said that Flynn spent much of that life working in films he cared nothing about simply to feed the insatiable alimony demands of his first wife. He could not enter military service during WW2 because of malaria, tuberculosis and veneral disease picked up in his "adventures," and he unfairly suffered reputation damage by being associated with a taste for Fascism (an absurdity when you consider Flynn's centralmost desire in life was for personal freedom). His taste for hijinks and low farce hamstrung his efforts to land meatier acting parts, as did his penchant for making enemies, which fed a growing disillusion with acting generally. However, it was his trial for rape in 1943 which he regarded as the most significant moment of his life. Indeed, he qualifies the incident by stating his life can be divided into "before" and "after" the trial. What happened, in extreme brief and according to Flynn, was this: Flynn's reputation as a ladykiller with a taste for young flesh made him the subject of a number of extortion attempts, one of which led to a highly dubious rape prosecution in Los Angeles which deeply humiliated him and seems to have left him permanently traumatized. Indeed, he devotes an entire act of the book to the trial (which he believed was a frame-up) and its aftermath, which badly damaged his career and both public and self-image. Acting no longer meant anything to him, and neither did money or even sex. He speaks freely about contemplating suicide on many occasions, and writes with palpable anguish about the decline in his fortunes: "All my life the one thing I feared was mediocrity -- and my whole living effort was pitched to oppose ever becoming a mediocrity. I did not wish to live in a mediocre way, nor to be regarded artistically as a mediocrity. This to me was the cardinal sin: to be middling was to be nothing."

I must pause here to say that MY WICKED, WICKED WAYS, despite its salacious fascinations, dry wit, and often appalling amoralism, comes dangerously close to becoming tedious at a certain point about 3/4 of the way through. This is not due to any deficiency in Flynn's writing style: he is actually quite a cracking good writer, and it's easy to see why Hemingway disliked him so much, and for other reasons than that Flynn shared more than one woman with him: Flynn led a life that in many ways eclipsed Hemingway's, and had he doggedly pursued mastering the craft-and-art of writing in the same way he did young women, he might have produced some fiction to put the literary world on notice. No, it is simply that Flynn's penchant for sleeping with other men's wives, his taste for sophomoric pranks and crude humor, his love of the con, the tinge of cruelty and complete lack of remorse he had for all the damage he caused...it all becomes tiresome after a time. Tiresome, and a little disgusting. Yet just at the moment I was beginning to get sick of all these tales of seductions, pranks, parties, debaucheries, fights, disastrous vacations, sailing expeditions, financial problems and irresponsible shennanigans, Flynn abruptly changes course. No longer content with listing his victories and defeats, he spends the last 100-odd pages in a deeply philosophical quest to discover where his life went wrong, what he has learned from his mistakes, why he made the choices he did and how he came to be so disgusted with surface attractions that he refused to look in the mirror. He contemplates life and makes powerful observations about himself, some of which may have startled his friend "Dear Old Bazzz":

"I know I am a contradiction inside a contradiction...you can love every instant of living and still want to be dead."

"I have a zest for living yet twice an urge to die."

"If I have a genius it is a genius for living. And yet I turn many things into shit."

"I hate the legend of myself as a phallic representation, yet I work to keep it alive. I portray myself as wicked, yet I hope not to be truly regarded as wicked."

"Praise Mama. Damn her too."

At the time he wrote the book, he was acutely aware that his looks were going, his health was slipping, his bank account was void and his career was in chaos; he had become somewhat acclaimed as an actor again, but only for smoothly recherche portrayals of characters who were very much like him in that moment of his life: aged-out Romeos engaged in losing struggles with the bottle, such as he portrayed in THE SUN ALSO RISES, a performance so good even Hemingway respected it. Yet his incapacity for self-pity makes his self-explorations truly interesting and slightly tragic and even sympathetic. In the end, Flynn, who seemed to be missing the capacity to grasp the collateral and sometimes deliberate damage he had inflicted on others, is unsparing in looking at the wreck he made of his own life. To his credit, he does not blame a rapacious ex-wife, controlling studio mogul Jack Warner, his mean-minded mother, or any other person or set of circumstances for his dark night of the soul. He knows he has led an extraordinary life, and he knows it was not the life he should have led, that he might have been much more than an actor known for standing with a sword in one hand and a garter in the other. As he put it: "I had no greatness, only a deadly fear of mediocrity."

In the end, MY WICKED, WICKED WAYS is a much subtler and deeper book than I was expecting, about one of the most notorious movie stars of all time, for whose sexual rapacity birthed the vulgar phrase "in like Flynn," which is still in use 75 years after his death. Many readers will be put off by his amoralism, sexual rapacity and taste for all things facetious, sophomoric and irresponsible. Some will be outraged by his cruel con artistry and his dabbles in the modern-day slave trade still rampant in the South Seas. Others will regard his life as Rathbone did, as a rather self-indulgent waste of talent. Neither would be wrong. But I think even his bitterest critics would agree that in the end, there was much more to Flynn than his wicked, wicked ways.

YOU LOOK LONELY

It was a few weeks ago, late at night, and I was at the keys, working hard on my latest book, lost in the imaginary world I was in the process of creating. My apartment was dark save for the red lamps and a single, flickering candle. I had put on music as accompaniment, nothing with lyrics that would distract, just beautiful, solemn music that was playing under the collective heading of "You Look Lonely."

I had been at the bottle. It's an old writer's curse and not one I am going to complain about here, but yeah, I was probably in the bag. Sometimes it helps me access my thoughts. Sometimes it liberates me from my inhibitions. Sometimes it ignites feelings that, for me, are all too damned difficult to get at or perhaps gone altogether. But at some point I sat back, and, needing a break scrolled down in the comments section beneath the video. I don't normally do this. Comments on YouTube, while no where near as horrible as they were 10 - 15 years ago, are still usually vulgar and stupid enough to make me regret even glancing at them. But this night was different. Very different. Perhaps it was the sort of music the video played; perhaps it was merely the title, but the comments here were cut from different stone, true stone. And for what seemed like hours I read the private, pain-filled confessionals of complete strangers, people whose faces I couldn't see, whose voices I couldn't hear, who I will never meet in real life. And it shook me deeply. As I recently noted somewhere else, I see a lot of tragedy in my line of work. Robbery, rape, overdose, suicide, murder, all of it. It's gotten to the point where it's hard for me to experience a genuine emotional reaction to anything, hence the whiskey. But not that night.

Loneliness is a constant in my life. In bars, in cars, on the streets, in stores, everywhere. There is no way out. I am a single man.

I been alone for 35 years, nothing can fix that.

Is it weird to feel lonely even if you have a good social life? I just sometimes feel so lost, lonely, not aiming or seeking for new challenges in life. One day having a good laugh with friends and the day after or even the same evening it just hits you... "That" feeling. Thinking about doing great stuff in the future... but then never really starting to work towards it. I sometimes really question myself in every single way. Am I going to be succesfull one day? Am I going to make my parents proud of me one day? Am I going to stop stressing about everything one day? Am I going to be loved unconditionally one day...?

6'1" 185lbs Exercise regularly, stable job. Living on my own. No diseases. No kids. No criminal record. Still not good enough I guess and still single forever. Loneliness is the only thing that ever embraced me...

In the old days of the internet, I can remember "logging on" and having the most meaningful conversations with strangers about almost any topic imaginable. Now I feel like you can't post a picture of a sunset without somone hijacking or vandalizing the conversation to service their own anger or loathing or smugness or narcissism. All the roads lead to ugliness. But not this time. There was this weird democracy that comes with anonymity. Everyone became equal in their loneliness, and the confessions unfolded, page after page of bare-laid souls:

Yeah, I want to have someone to love. But every time I do I ask myself: "Am I good enough?" I give up. Sure I can love someone but for someone to love me is just a fake reality. For me, everything in life is just a straight line. When I get good and bad grades, when someone in my family dies, when someone insults me, I don't feel anything, just emptiness. I think I'm like this because I've been through a lot of bullying, I ignored them, closed myself from others and always put up a straight face. Every smile is fake, only lasts for a few seconds. So anyway that was my story. Thank you for reading.

i don't fear being alone I fear being lonely

I wish there were nice people. But hey, the world is not nice

I died years ago I am simply existing until im not, days and days go by, repeating over and over and i feel nothing im empty i can laugh and i can smile and joke and play but in the end im left with this emptiness that never goes away, sometimes i wish the night i died was really my death i wont take myself but this thing im living isnt a life its miserable and im secretly waiting for the end

Without you, there's nothing here for me.

And here i am in my bed crying because no one can fix me.

I can smile. I can laugh. I can be happy. But no one knows that truly it's an act. It's a manipulation or an easy way to deceive everyone. Let's be honest. You can buy anyone with a fake smile. And yes, im lonely...

I sat back in my chair in the red-lit darkness with the music brooding and the sound of the summer rain on the windows. I was drunk. Keenly aware that I was living a cliche as old as the typewriter -- probably as old as the quill. There was something so Film Noir about the crimson light, the sad soul-tugging music, the endless outpouring of anonymous pain. About the way the ice clinked and rattled in my glass when I sipped the cold liquid fire that makes me more human. About the way my own thoughts turned inward.

Thought i was getting better but today all the memories just hit me like a ton of bricks, i miss her voice and laugh and cute smile so much....she was my whole world and ill never forget you

I don't feel anything anymore and Idc...

i hate myself, i hate the decisions i made. i hate my life, im so depressed.

I've been in self isolation for five years. Hardly living , clinging on to every day, every ounce of hope just so I won't commit the Act . Worst is, I'm living with my fam who don't understand me at all. No matter how much I've cried Infront of them. I have no control in life, I can't even finish myself. When will this end!

I simply give up. I've been alone all my life, loneliness is now part of me. Three years of psychotherapy got me nowhere and now I'm back on antidepressants. I will accept the fact that I am not made for this world

The only thing missing was a cigarette so its smoke could curl in the neon light. It was all so perfectly atmospheric, so poetically sad. I was even in a cotton undershirt.

Probably ending it all soon, thank you for the final few fleeting moments of clarity this music gave me.

I pass by her house…it’s like we never met before. It feels like I’m the only one who carries the memories. Sometimes I see her car pass by and wonder if she feels the same.

Every night, before I close my eyes I wish, I beg even don't wake up again, I want quit this, I'm not enough

I feel nothing anymore. There's absolutely nothing I want to do, only things I have to do. Nothing brings me joy....

dark hours, cacophony of multicolor lights, alcohol and tobacco smell, wrong feelings, contradictory, glimmer of hope, suffocated in filth...but it s kind of...ok this way....the cold...the only constant in your life....get used to it

I was moved. Profoundly moved. One could argue all pity is self-pity, a projection of one's fears, or a recognition of one's own hurts, but I don't buy it. Not all the way. Statements like that are never more than half-truths, and those who utter them always have their own hidden motives for leaving out the other half. In any event what I felt was a need to engage, to join the confession. Writing is a solitary pursuit, after all, and the dividing line between solitude and loneliness is often indistinguishable.

"Show me your relationship to pain," I wrote, quoting one of my favorite authors. "And I will show you who you are." And then I added my own spin, which when you are already spinning is not difficult to do: "Show me your relationship to loneliness and I will show you who you do not wish to be."

Eventually a reply came. Someone quite rightly asking for a clarification. "I feel like this is a quote that I kind of understand on the surface, but there’s a deeper meaning I don’t get. Could you go into more detail?"

I was embarrassed at having been so deliberately vague and mystical, so after a lot of thinking I answered, with apologies:

"Our ability to withstand pain is accepted as a measure of our strength. But the degree to which we can endure loneliness is in some ways a measure of our weakness...we habituate ourselves to a state we despise and would do almost anything to escape from. We begin to pride ourselves outwardly, in a perverse way, that we are 'strong enough' to walk alone, meanwhile secretly longing to walk hand in hand with someone else. In other words, the more we can stand up to loneliness the more we hate it, and the greater our desire to escape it becomes."

Re-reading this now, on another night where the lamps are casting their glow, I see that I had spoken truly, which is hardly always the case when talking with strangers under the influence of the True. Anyone who reads my blogs - or my fiction, for that matter -- knows I have an abiding romance with pain, and this too, is a cliche. The half-starving writer, whose melting glass of ice cubes and whiskey sits atop a heap of unpaid bills and parking tickets and rejection slips, whose trophy cup for Best Novel of 20XX is full of cigarette butts, who gets more respect from strangers who have read his work than friends who never will, is almost a caricature, and when you throw in the fact that all writers are liars who speak more truly with their lies, as Hemingway sort-of said, than other people speak with their truths, I could perhaps be accused of telling a creative fib here: but I am not. These strangers bared their souls and in my own way, more pompously perhaps, but nevertheless truly, I bared mine. I was caught up in a peculiar sort of moment, when a person who has difficulty feeling things, or at any rate often has difficulty feeling what others would deem the right things, forgot the double ring of calluses over his emotions.

The next day I did a lot of thinking about loneliness, and whether the age we live in has led to an epidemic or merely exposed its existence. A lot gets blamed on the internet, in many cases justly, but if we are honest with ourselves, we often heap upon it the same guilt which fell on television in the 70s - 80s and video games since the late 90s, only a smallish part of which was rooted in verifiable fact. Technology has become a kind of whipping boy for our societal ills, and loneliness, unlike, say, mass shootings, is not a newish phenomenon. But I confess that I do believe that this condition, initially soothed for so many by the creation of chatrooms, instant messaging and the like 25-plus years ago, has now become horribly exacerbated. Instead of facilitating human contact, it has allowed humans to live without for years at a time. An entire generation has grown up considering text messaging to be a more normal form of communication than talking over the phone, and "ghosting" as the preferred means of dismissing someone from your life rather than a painful but cathartic confrontation in person. People sitting opposite one another at restaurants, even people outside in the sunshine, like as not have their faces buried in their mobile devices, isolating themselves even when surrounded by others. Humans are gregarious animals and suffer according psychological damage when isolated from other humans. Alerts on a phone are a poor substitute for intimacy, and it is starting to show.

I know I have a reactionary, even a hypocritical attitude toward a lot of technology. I use it and I don't really want to live without it and yet I despise it all the same. Even now, sitting here alone in the dark listening to a sad playlist ("They Moved On Too Fast"), I am rejecting human society in favor of connecting with a scattering of people I'll never meet. And perhaps that why it hit me so hard, that outpouring of loneliness, of grief: because I see so much of it in myself. There is something curiously and horribly seductive about it, something romantic, and that brings me back to the beginning of this note, to the atmosphere that loneliness brings with it. Loneliness is a feeling, and under certain circumstances we've all experienced can even become a condition; but it is not meant to be a lifestyle. It should never be normalized or accepted, as so many people in the comments section accepted it, as something all-encompassing and inescapable. My own, pre-internet generation saw it as a shameful condition never to be admitted, but this in retrospect was hardly the high ground, moral or otherwise, and my words to the stranger on the subject are the ones I truly hold with: to measure ourselves by our ability to endure loneliness, or to find some virtue in it where none exists, is a fool's errand. And with that in mind, I am pushing away from the keyboard and leaving my apartment to mingle with my fellow humans. I sincerely hope you do the same. For the solitude there is always time.