insert witty title

Seriously, how the hells should one come up with a title in the spur of the moment? It's not like my recent posts have been focused.

Writing this stuff is like a river, meandering, sometimes twisting back, only to move on. Can't really say forward, or backward, or any kind of ward, well awkward maybe, but other than that, there is no blog ocean, not even a blog lake, so whatever one writes might be set adrift in cyberspace, but will every blog post ever written land in the mythical Blogantic Ocean? I think not. And even if it did, think about it, yes there might be a kernel, a morsel of wisdom here or there, but there are way too many blogs out there, and judging from the statistics accompanying even this blog, I can see how many, or rather how few people read it. I admit, I'd rather have people reading my novel than my blog, I'm selfish that way, but I also do not feel the need to go on political rants here... this ain't goodpolitics, but goodreads (not that there is such a thing as good politics, bunch of lying, self centered sociopaths anyway, politicians, if that wasn't clear)

Maybe I should just start listing the books I like, oh, no, wait, my shelf here already does that.

So, what else? I could write about my day... fat lot of boring that, although I managed to watch a few episodes of Grimm on Netflix. Decent show, sure it ain't Penny Dreadful, but then again, very few shows come close. What I do wonder, however, is why nobody in fucking Germany came up with the idea?! I mean, it is brilliant in its simplicity.

German TV is like American TV, only with fewer commercial breaks, and the occasional option to switch to the original language. We get the talk show concepts from the US, most of the programming on the private channels is American, the public broadcasting stuff is so bogged down in bureaucracy that the only thing they can come up with is bogged down by almost universal blandness. Edges need to be filed down, unless someone upsets someone, it's ridiculous. Not that the private channels are that much better in their original programming... remember that lovely sitcom "Who's the boss"? Well, one of them private outfits, many many years ago, launched a clone, only in German, I believe they even used the original scripts.

Originality is lacking, then again, it's lacking in Hollywood as well. *cough* RoboCop reboot. Paul Verhoeven created a masterpiece, but now they need to neuter it down so that barely pubescent kids can watch it too. Verhoeven's mastery was in showing the effect of guns, he didn't hide the brutality, he shoved it straight in your face. I still cringe when they dismember Murphy. Now everything needs to be consumer friendly, everything except, well, you know, the world. The world is bleak, and won't get any nicer as long as delusional sociopaths run the show. OK, I have literally no idea how I made that circle, but here we are.

Consequences, we all need to deal with them, our actions bear results, some we might not notice, others we are prohibited from learning about. This is about books, bear with me. I believe art is at its strongest, most potent, when we see consequences. Yes, art, I hate saying this, especially about my own work, I just write, but in the grand scheme of things I guess even my typing can be considered artful. Not that I give a fuck, I just wanna tell stories. Back to the point I was trying to make, yes, reading is about escapism, same as paintings or movies are about escapism, for the watchers, or readers. But the reason we remember such images as the dead in Auschwitz being dumped by a conveyor belt in "Schindler's List" or the haunted feeling we get from reading about Middle-earth's Dead Marshes (I read part of the book, not all but I got there at some point) it shows us the horrors of what mankind is capable of, and we do learn a lesson from it, unless you are a form of idiot that also burns crosses, we learn that stuff like that is bad, and that's putting it nicely. Good prose allows us a look into the abyss without having to experience it ourselves, it can teach us the folly of one thing and the intelligence of another. But to be able to show the abyss, one has to go the full on R-rated way, not the PG-13, and while I realize that books do not have these strict guidelines, having a child learn that good guys die way more often than bad guys is something that should be a goal, not the sad exception. Yes, our world is bleak, but we will not improve it by shoving reality, facts aside.

Don't want Captain America to stand for a homicidal group of corrupt assholes? Considering that the USA did its share of genocide with the natives, who is to say he always did stand for a group of homicidal corrupt assholes? And considering how many people someone like Trump attracts, racists, bigots, misogynists (that he has female supporters at all does not speak in favor of those women's IQs) the reality is that there've always been a whole lot of racist motherfuckers in the US. Is it so wrong to shove that question into people's faces every once in a while? Criticizing society, maybe painting an overly grotesque picture of the world we live in, showing how monsters are created out of fear and ignorance (there's a lot of them at Trump rallies), that is what prose can only do if the muzzle is gone.

I write for myself, first and foremost, and most of the time I end up some place other than expected, but it's still worth the read.