A.R. Williams's Blog, page 9

Countdown: T-7

At least that sounds right.  A week until the book release party.

Nervous? Check.
Dress?  Check
Shoes?  Check
Still debating lipstick choice?  Check
Worried the music won’t be cool enough?  Check
Hyperventilating?  Check.
Best publicist in the world on top of all the details?  Check.

I guess I’d better calm down, then.

The Matrix

Katherine Otto is a relatively new addition to the blog.  We have had a comments discussion over on about entrope, and it has turned into something deserving its own post.

Trust in the institutions of American life are in the crapper.  My faith in the “system” is at an all time low.  You can go to Ms. Otto’s blog for her take on, for example, the tangled beast that is housing finance.  She and I seem to share an inability to distill it all out to a single subject per post.  Instead, I tend to bounce between interrelated points of wtf that seem related to me but perhaps not to anyone else.  There is a reason I’ve enjoyed going back and forth with her.

Anyway, let’s start with Congress being a cesspool of special interest money.  Wall street characters belong in Dante’s Inferno.  People claiming Christianity sell snake oil to old ladies in order to buy their second Benz.  The weather is going nuts.

I’m scared/horrified/angry too.  And when I try to think through all of the forces aligned against “normal” people…  people with jobs living paycheck to paycheck, hoping the roof doesn’t go or the lump isn’t cancer because we’re just barely holding it together and hoping for just a little more cushion in the bank account…  Hell, the beginning of a cushion would be nice.  And while we’re not even close to the 1%, we aren’t at the bottom of that continuum either.  It only gets scarier as the resources erode.

So what do you do? And what kind of life is there when you are consumed by the sense of helplessness?  I feel that helpless rage too, but that also feels like one more incursion, one more shackle in a system that is stacked against “us.”  A market that is stacked against “us.”  Laws that are written for anyone but “we the people.”  Aren’t we easier to manage when we are afraid and helpless/hopeless?  Who benefits most from the system?  Who benefits the most from a population that survives on a daily diet of anxiety?  Not you and me, that’s for sure.

News is paid for by advertisements.  Advertisements are purchased by companies seeking to sell you shit.  You buy the shit, advertisers pay the news.  Whatever tenor of news sells the most shit is the tenor of news you are going to see.  And guess what?  Scary news sells the most shit.  No one is going to go buy a new distracting gadget to feel better after a National Geographic special on unlikely animal friends.  You buy that distracting item because everything is horrible and you might as well distract yourself while you still can.  Honestly, I think the most revolutionary thing you can do is to refuse the fear that is being used against us.

Again: what do you do?  I think, I hope, you focus on the stuff that isn’t a commodity and can’t be exploited by those systems we most mistrust.  Joy in simple things.  Connecting to other people.  Volunteer with the elderly, or the homeless, or tutoring underprivileged kids.  Find a pet.  Take up a hobby.  Knit baby hats for the ICU.  Garden.  Watch the sunset.  Look for reasons to be grateful.  Do those things that don’t require someone else’s permission to make your little corner of the world a better place.

And refuse.  Refuse the fear and anxiety.  Refuse the value system that puts money above everything else.  Love with baked goods or time spent instead of plastic crap.  Hang out with your family without agenda.  Play board games.  Dance.  Sing in the shower.  And when you see an opportunity to function outside the system, take it.

I’m not saying let’s be all Pollyanna about this.  I’m saying don’t let them have your joy.

Two Weeks

…and there is still so much to do.  The Camellia Reckoning, here we come…

Please, pretty please, just let the books get here on time.

Binary Frameworks Fail

The tenor of politics concerns me.  Yes, politics are often interpreted as parties facing off over an election.  In the western world, it is liberals vs. conservatives everywhere you look.  But politics is misrepresented in that lens.  What we’re talking about isn’t locked into the coded language of conservative or liberal.  What we’re talking about is much bigger and much harder to define than that.

Predictably, I fall into the liberal camp.  I think there are more important things than money.  I think we could all do with a few more nice people hanging around.  I think what my neighbor does in his bed has nothing to do with what I do in mine.  And I don’t think the government serving as a mechanism to move money around is a bad thing.

My sister, who is one of the kindest people I know, is conservative.  I have relatives that mainline Fox News.  And too often, we deal with these conflicts in worldview by not dealing with them.  For those of you who use Facebook, you just quiet down voices you don’t agree with by excluding those posts from your timeline.  (Still think Facebook is the devil.)  We read news from sources that share our perspective.  We talk to people who agree with us.  When we know we don’t agree, we just leave it alone and talk about the weather or the Kardashian clan or home renovations.  Or whatever.

But it bothers me that we can’t talk about these things we disagree on without it turning into a conflict.  These are only ideas, they don’t have to turn into tears and hurt feelings, right?  Could we agree on some baselines?

The world is changing.  It feels like the speed of change is accelerating, and this is scary.
There is so much information.  We don’t know where to look anymore.  There isn’t enough news to fill up a 24-hour news cycle.  And there isn’t very much at all going on in the world that you can do something about.  Send some money to the refugees, sponsor a kid.  Everything else … how does the information improve your life?  How are you smarter/better/happier/more connected for having spent an hour watching CNN/Fox/MSNBC?
There are so many choices…  Even if you go to the middle ground between fast food and fine dining, like Noodles and Co., you end up standing in front of a silver machine that starts with four categories of beverage, and then branches out into further options from there.  Do we need to be able to choose from 25 different kinds of dish-soap?  Do we need 123 choices in toothpaste?  And those are just the inconsequential decisions.
We’re afraid, but the things we are afraid of are big and nebulous and they never go away.  Once upon a time, there was a direct connection between the thing we were afraid of and our fear.  Lion in view?  Fight or flight.  No lion? Keep looking for berries.
We all want it to turn out okay, first for our immediate connections to the world and after that, if it works out okay for everyone else, that’s good too.  We have ideas about how to manage the overwhelming nature of the change we’re experiencing right now, but we don’t seem to agree on what the priorities should be.
When it comes right down to it, we don’t know where to begin.
We’re too scared to access our curiosity.

Maybe if we could agree on that much, we might be capable of having a more productive conversation about everything that is going on.

Brightest Young Things

As it turns out, DC has an incredible number of events happening on any given Thursday night.  Of course, the Thursday night I’m concerned about is the 19th of November…

Brightest Young Things has a fairly comprehensive list of all the cool things you could do on the 19th, among them, you could attend a book release party for The Camellia Reckoning.  Just sayin’.

Politics and Writing

In my mind, writers are observers first.  You can tell what an author finds fascinating by what they write about.  Claire North wrote The First Fifteen Lives of Henry August.  If I were guessing, I’d say that Ms. North is fascinated by choice, the butterfly effect, and the way our experience of time is so linear as to be stifling.

Me, I’m interested in social interaction; the push and pull of individualism vs. social necessities; the way we think, not just what we think; and what happens when fear takes over a group of people.  There are other things I’m fascinated by, depending on when you ask…  But I write dystopia.  These are the things that I like to observe.

And right now, there is a lot to observe in the American political system.  Maybe the world’s political system too.  Our social structures feel turgid and tense, like something is on the verge of bursting…  it isn’t Democratic or Republican, liberal or conservative, socialist or capitalist.  Those are dichotomies and what works is usually indifferent to simple binary categories.

So I’ve been talking a lot of social/economic/political stuff.  I’ll probably keep talking about it.  The questions around how we encounter and experience the world, what role choice plays in our experience, and how we might push forward into a future that allows more opportunity, not for cold hard cash, but for connection and joy…  this is what I write novels about.  This is what I blog about.  This is what I think about on the train going home from work.  Not trying to step on any toes or hurt anyone’s political feelings.  Just trying to come to these questions with curiosity and intellectual integrity.

The Pinterest Water Closet

I don’t know who decided I graduated into adulthood.  Clearly, I have the numbers to justify being a grown up, but that’s about it.

See, the downstairs half bath started with old lady wall paper and a huge vanity that dwarfed what is essentially a toilet at the end of a narrow hallway.  Can’t have that.  So I jumped in with the demolition and wallpaper removal, only to discover that the wall is a mutant.  Somewhere along the way – a burst pipe perhaps – the bottom half of the wall got removed and replaced with drywall.  They hung the drywall and patched up the transition, and then applied wallpaper directly on top of it all without priming it first.

Don’t do that.

The wallpaper came off cleanly, at least from the top, plaster, part of the wall.  The bottom half?  Well, the wall paper glue didn’t want to come off of the drywall paper.  The proper solution?  Smash it all out and replace the entirety of the mess with drywall.

In other words, cash money Benjamins, thanks.

Or no thanks.

So I did what every sensible girl would do: I went to Pinterest.  My first plan was to cover up the inconsistent texture with more texture by way of those paper lacy doily things.  That didn’t work so well.  Pinterest had these terribly intelligent walls papered in Shakespeare.  Making a virtue of the vice, I went for the dictionary instead.  And thereby got to find words like “poop” and phrases like “muff diving” on the wall.  I also put up a bustle, different kinds of hammers, breeches, paisley, and ships…  And my favorite people’s names, at least the ones that were in the 1977 dictionary.  And some other naughty words.  (Hence the point about not really being an adult, in spite of the years that are piling up.)

As a chronic under-estimater (or optimist), I didn’t realize how long this project would take.  Two hours sitting there finding words and pictures, and I’m no where near done just yet.

But since this is headed towards being a wordy water closet, I figured I should top the dictionary with chalkboard paint, that way my friends can write inappropriate things on my wall without fear of getting in trouble.  Since it is my house, I get to lead the charge into immaturity…  See?

And this is what I’ve been doing instead of stacking up my blog posts for weeks ahead of time so I’m never behind schedule: finding dirty words to put on my wall.

Because, obviously.

That damned Pinterest.

Burning Down the House

I attempted to burn down the house tonight.  No big deal.  Just a little addled by the migraine meds and determined to address some of the house chaos by finishing the Crayola art.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, you know?  Michaels, sale, canvas, crayons.  That goddamn Pinterest.  I think Facebook is the devil, but Pinterest is looking like the Devil’s pretty daughter.  All those people doing crafty things, taking well-lit pictures of their pretty creations.  Whimsical crayon art with inspiring messages.  All that bloody whimsy.  And the hair tutorials.  Don’t get me started, because I’ll descend into hair tutorials never to return.

Anyway, here I am on a federal holiday, nursing a migraine and looking at the chaos and thinking I’ll do something simple to finish up the day.  I’ll get my whimsical crayon art completed and then I can hang it in the bathroom which is now officially 99% painted.  The one I started a couple of weeks ago needed a little more melting on the edges, so I had a bright idea.  I’ll put it in the broiler!

People, do not put the crayon art in the oven, or at the very least, don’t put it under the broiler.  It caught on fire, the dog very sensibly tried to evacuate the premises, and now the house no longer carries the whiff of previous owner because it smells like toxic crayon fire instead.

I think I’m going to go to bed now.

The Adventist Camellias

Interviewers have asked where my inspiration for The Camellias came from, and the answer is that the world of the Camellias is deeply rooted in being a 6 year old, standing on the front porch, looking for a cloud the size of a man’s fist in the sky.  That’s the cloud Jesus was going to be coming back on, and I was sure I would be the one to spot it, just as I was sure that Jesus was on his way back to earth in the immediate future.

While no one in the church would have said that you could earn your way into heaven, there was this zeitgeist hanging around that, if you were good enough and prayed faithfully enough, that you could control what happened to you.  One Aunt in particular was insufferably smug about how well things turned out for her because of her faith and her prayer practice and her tithing and her vegetarianism.

And the truth is that we don’t have control. Bad things happen, good things happen, and it isn’t because of prayer or tithe or taking the right thing to pot-luck.  It’s that both good and bad are important to our development as people.  You try to close yourself off to the bad and you also close yourself off to growth, the capacity for empathy, and a sense of interconnectedness that you only get when you look around yourself at rock bottom and discover there are people there with you simply because they want to help.  Or because they remember rock bottom and they don’t want you to get stuck down there.

So The Camellias started out as a defense of living.  The Ministry started as a way to talk about religion, one that is antagonistic to life in the same way my Adventist background was antagonistic to life.  Or at least antagonistic to real life, where bad things happen and people learn and grow and connect and make the best of it.  I say it started there.  It has since morphed into its own story with an internal logic and an endgame that is all about the narrative.  Obviously, those ideas are still running around, but so are new ideas.  The unifying thread is fear: what are we afraid of, what do we do to get away from our fears, and what happens when we decide that our fears no longer get to be in charge.

More Adventist

You will find more good people in the Adventist church than bad.  Earnest people who read the Bible and what to follow it.  Few, if any, spray-tanned mega-church shysters defrauding the elderly.  And there are a lot of elderly Adventists.  PBS did a special on Adventists and talked about Adventist longevity.  They live a long time.  They tend to be the kind of people to shelter those in need.  Feed them too, though the food is likely to be foreign to non-Adventists.

Gluten steaks.  Need I say more?

But they are also really out of touch.  It has been a while since I was immersed, but in my day, we talked about how secular humanism was of the devil.  Whitney Houston made devil music because “I believe the children are our future” is a secular humanist sentiment.  Christian rock was suspect.  Real rock was played backwards to illuminate the satanic messages contained within.  It wasn’t terribly uncommon for there to be no TVs in an Adventist home.  1950’s wholesomeness all the way.

Not to say all of that is bad.  I am deeply suspicious of the TV’s benefit.  For different reasons, but still.

Part of the problem with such an insular community is the lack of measures to judge belief and behavior against.  Weirdness is tolerated in that community, but not “oh, look at Sue and her peculiar fashion sense.”  There is that too, but I’m talking about teachers that shouldn’t have been anywhere near kids.  They went unchecked, inappropriate behavior and all, because critical thinking didn’t apply when it came to questioning someone in a leadership position.  Okay, you could feel free to gossip endlessly about who got their ears pierced, but a teacher asking a class of virginal 15 year olds if they thought anal sex was acceptable?  Well, that went uncontested.  As was a poster of a bikini-clad, dark-haired whore of Babylon hanging on the walls.  (True story).  And which was weirder?  The anal sex question in a room full of kids who had never heard those two words put together in the same sentence?  Or looking for subliminal sperm in Budweiser advertisements and bad words in Disney films.

Anyway.

It is impossible to overstate the role the end times and Revelation play in Adventist culture and thinking.  Or of how afraid they are.  Afraid of the outside world.  Afraid of their children becoming secularized (like me).  Afraid of change.  Afraid of questioning their own beliefs.

Like many other structures, when something goes wrong, they would rather look away than confront the issue of rot within the ranks.  Yes, Adventists have child molesters and creeps too.  Anyone (of any faith) who wants to be a youth pastor, is suspect as far as I’m concerned.

They also believe only Adventists will go to heaven, so that means they believe that, in the end times, everyone will convert.  Or at least everyone who goes to heaven will have converted first.  That means baptism and honoring the Jewish Sabbath: sundown to sundown, Friday to Saturday.

So aside from the Saturday thing, and the vegetarianism thing, and the pacifism thing, and the humility is serious business thing…  how are Adventists different than born agains or evangelicals?  In the essence, probably not that much.  It is a culture of introverts.  Not a lot of crying in the aisles.  Probably overall more concerned with substance.  Less inclined to want to tell non-Adventists what to do.  Reserved.  They walk the walk when it comes to doctrine that can be traced directly back to the Bible.  Which I respect.  Rapture isn’t directly Biblical, so while we watched the Left Behind series in high school, we were appropriately forewarned that the evangelical parts were to be ignored.

They do share the Evangelical mistrust of bodies like the UN, because of the promised new world order of Revelation.  IT is a little funny: they all want God to come back, but the things that would have to be in place for that to happen, according to Revelation, at least, they are totally against.  So for evangelicals who like the idea of an evangelical in the White House, Dr. Carson is a reasonable choice.

For those of us who aren’t so evangelical…  Do we want a President who believes that international governance is a part of the Devil’s plan for the earth and likely to bring about the return of Christ?  Do we want someone in the Presidency who has a deep-seated mistrust of anyone who follows a different religion than him?

The Presidency is a 7-day-a-week kind of gig.  What is he going to do from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, in the middle of a crisis where the Bible forbids working on the Sabbath?  Service professionals get special dispensation to carry on being Doctors and Nurses, but for everyone else, no TV, no shopping, no work.  This is a church that, at least in my memory, had serious discussions as to whether swimming is an acceptable Sabbath activity.  How does that work for the President?

I said before that the Adventists are huge supporters of the separation between church and state.  Primarily because they know that they aren’t mainstream and, were some branch of religion come to be merged with the state, their right to practice, to worship on Saturday, to eat gluten stakes, is at risk.  I don’t suspect that Ben Carson wants to write Adventist doctrine into the Constitution, but that many of the positions he takes and policies he must inevitably support are based in his conservative Christianity, not reason and not what is best for a nation that is made up of everyone, not just conservative Christians.  They must, because he’s coming from such a strong position of secular suspicion and reason-until-it-conflicts-with-the-Bible thinking.

How can you defend separation of church and state when you merge belief and policy?