AS I PLEASE XV
I am writing this on July 4th, just as I hear the first of the fireworks popping off, probably over the minor league baseball stadium near my home. I am not joining the celebrations this year. I can't remember the last time I did: probably 2013 or so. This is not lack of patriotism on my part, nor is it a dislike of beer, picnics or fireworks. I consider myself a patriot (not a nationalist), I eat and drink too much as it is, and well, I love bright colors: so this day ought to be tailor made for me. But tonight I find myself reflecting on a whole slew of random matters, and when I am in such a mood, one of the few techniques I've developed -- or in this case, borrowed -- that helps to declutter my brain is simply to set them down in the As I Please format so kindly invented by Mr. Orwell almost a century ago. So, here we go.
* Yesterday I was sitting with a group of people I know at a local tavern which has a completely glass-enclosed patio. About an hour after we arrived, no more, I bore witness (through the glass) to the most savage, extended thunderstorm I have seen in three years, when I happened to be caught in one somewhere in Arizona or New Mexico. Living in Southern California for as long as I did, I had forgotten the savagery of the summer thunderstorm. But what really strikes me about them is how the sun usually comes out before they have actually stopped. In some cases they don't even reach peak intensity until the sun does appear. And then, just like that, they stop. There's no slackening-off period. Within just a minute or two you'd never know it had rained at all, except that the gutters are now overflowing.
* Today I drove through a second thunderstorm on my way to go hiking. The hike was not anything noble in conception. I was restless and wanted to work out some plot problems that I've been struggling with for my third CAGE LIFE novel. Driving through this downpour, I was reminded that from 1977 to 1992 or so, I watched the Fourth of July from the White House lawn. My dad was the White House correspondent for the Chicago Sun Times and had a standing invite for the occasion. In the early years it was a great deal of fun. We'd make a picnic of it and get a glimpse or two of the president, at that time Jimmy Carter. Actually, truth be told, never saw Carter. He walked right past me, but he was accompanied by a moving ring of Secret Servicemen, aides, and cameramen so deep that all I saw was the well-lighted ring as it walked across the lawn. When Ronald Reagan became president, he or his security people began to ban things like food, drinks, and eventually lawn chairs, so that attending meant laying on a blanket and going hungry for hours, often in very heavy thunderstorms, before the weather eventually cleared up and the fireworks began. My last attendance was in '92, when George H.W. Bush was president, and I mainly remember taking my girlfriend there. She was probably excited about it, too, until the boredom and hunger pangs set in.
* A year later I was at the White House again for a Christmas party my Dad had been invited to. Bush had lost the election and was marking time until the transfer of power, and he looked tired and defeated behind his obligatory smile. I hadn't forgiven him for the lack of hospitality the previous year, so I stole an ashtray from him and smuggled it past the Secret Service as we left. Actually, I did this to impress a different girlfriend, who was the ultimate recipient of this stolen property. I still cannot believe I did that. It must rank up there with the five dumbest, most irresponsible things I have ever done, but at the time -- I was twenty -- it seemed perfectly reasonable.
* Going back to being bored in fancy places: when I first began to work in Hollywood, at the age of 35, I was struck, as everyone in that business is ultimately struck, by how quickly the excitement of working in film, television, video games etc. turns to the same sort of clock-watching you'd see at any 9 - 5 cubicle job. The brutal fact is that nearly every profession perceived as glamorous or dangerous is, in fact, boring, at least most of the time, and even when it is not boring is often a grind of the worst type. Most people would think working in video games the absolute height of decadence, and they would be right. It is. You get paid to play video games, for Crissake, and eat like a king while you do it. On some gigs, you aren't even required to be sober (and believe me, when you weren't, I wasn't). What made the gaming industry so difficult was not the conditions per se, but the hours. Imagine sitting for 14 - 16 hours a day, in some cases seven days a week, in some cases for months on end. There is only so much stress-eating, conversation, book reading, music listening, bathroom breaking and whatnot to carry you through the 100-hour week, and of course 100 hours in M.P. bay means very little in the way of sleep. It also means heavy weight gain in a short period of time. There is nothing glamorous about the way you look, feel, and smell at 3:30 AM on a hot summer night when you just came off a sixteen-hour seige and 4,500 calories, mostly of fats and carbohydrates, knowing you have maybe five hours to sleep before you have to get in your car and do it again.
* Speaking of Orwell. He also made a remark to the effect that "any life, viewed from the inside, is probably just a series of defeats." Humans have a tendency to devalue anything we actually have or accomplish, and fetishize and romanticize that which we have not yet achieved: beyond that, we suffer from what Anne Rice called "vicious egotism," meaning not a refusal to believe that anything great could happen, but rather a refusal to believe anything great could happen to us. I sometimes have to remind myself of the extraordinary life I've lead, because like most other people, my day-to-day life is prosaic and unglamorous. I guess the moral here is that some interesting things are really more interesting to talk about afterwards than to do at the time.
* Speaking of Britons, someone of the British persuasion who read my previous blog, "J.K. Rowling and Frankenstein's Monster" rather acerbically asked me if I was ever going to pen a column that "has a go at at the Right for a change." The answer to this question is yes, absolutely yes. While I never intended Stone Cold Prose to mention politics at all, I concluded, as my spiritual mentor Orwell did before me, that it was naive to think I could escape them, and as a writer, I feel obligated to take up a lance in defense of art, freedom of speech, and freedom of thought, which are generally under attack from both sides of the isle simultaneously. So yeah, I will be "having a go" at the Right, too. No fear, no favor.
* I've got no segue for this remark, but yesterday I watched two quite good Korean-made movies about the Korean war. What struck me most about them was the fact that the South Koreans referred to their Chinese enemies derisively as "chinks." I don't know why this surprised me particularly. The historical animosity between Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese, etc. is not news. But in America, we have been so brainwashed to believe that racism is a fundamentally European concept, that when we see it in other parts of the globe, it sometimes comes as a mild shock.
I snuck away from the keyboard to watch the finale of the fireworks display over the ball field from my hallway window. It was, admittedly, spectacular and beautiful, the moreso because I didn't have to stand in a crowd of rowdy drunks to watch it. Some would say being fifty years old watching fireworks from a window in your one-bedroom apartment in York, Pennsylvania, with your arms full of hot laundry, is a comedown from watching them on the White House lawn. But hey, I'm not hungry.
* Yesterday I was sitting with a group of people I know at a local tavern which has a completely glass-enclosed patio. About an hour after we arrived, no more, I bore witness (through the glass) to the most savage, extended thunderstorm I have seen in three years, when I happened to be caught in one somewhere in Arizona or New Mexico. Living in Southern California for as long as I did, I had forgotten the savagery of the summer thunderstorm. But what really strikes me about them is how the sun usually comes out before they have actually stopped. In some cases they don't even reach peak intensity until the sun does appear. And then, just like that, they stop. There's no slackening-off period. Within just a minute or two you'd never know it had rained at all, except that the gutters are now overflowing.
* Today I drove through a second thunderstorm on my way to go hiking. The hike was not anything noble in conception. I was restless and wanted to work out some plot problems that I've been struggling with for my third CAGE LIFE novel. Driving through this downpour, I was reminded that from 1977 to 1992 or so, I watched the Fourth of July from the White House lawn. My dad was the White House correspondent for the Chicago Sun Times and had a standing invite for the occasion. In the early years it was a great deal of fun. We'd make a picnic of it and get a glimpse or two of the president, at that time Jimmy Carter. Actually, truth be told, never saw Carter. He walked right past me, but he was accompanied by a moving ring of Secret Servicemen, aides, and cameramen so deep that all I saw was the well-lighted ring as it walked across the lawn. When Ronald Reagan became president, he or his security people began to ban things like food, drinks, and eventually lawn chairs, so that attending meant laying on a blanket and going hungry for hours, often in very heavy thunderstorms, before the weather eventually cleared up and the fireworks began. My last attendance was in '92, when George H.W. Bush was president, and I mainly remember taking my girlfriend there. She was probably excited about it, too, until the boredom and hunger pangs set in.
* A year later I was at the White House again for a Christmas party my Dad had been invited to. Bush had lost the election and was marking time until the transfer of power, and he looked tired and defeated behind his obligatory smile. I hadn't forgiven him for the lack of hospitality the previous year, so I stole an ashtray from him and smuggled it past the Secret Service as we left. Actually, I did this to impress a different girlfriend, who was the ultimate recipient of this stolen property. I still cannot believe I did that. It must rank up there with the five dumbest, most irresponsible things I have ever done, but at the time -- I was twenty -- it seemed perfectly reasonable.
* Going back to being bored in fancy places: when I first began to work in Hollywood, at the age of 35, I was struck, as everyone in that business is ultimately struck, by how quickly the excitement of working in film, television, video games etc. turns to the same sort of clock-watching you'd see at any 9 - 5 cubicle job. The brutal fact is that nearly every profession perceived as glamorous or dangerous is, in fact, boring, at least most of the time, and even when it is not boring is often a grind of the worst type. Most people would think working in video games the absolute height of decadence, and they would be right. It is. You get paid to play video games, for Crissake, and eat like a king while you do it. On some gigs, you aren't even required to be sober (and believe me, when you weren't, I wasn't). What made the gaming industry so difficult was not the conditions per se, but the hours. Imagine sitting for 14 - 16 hours a day, in some cases seven days a week, in some cases for months on end. There is only so much stress-eating, conversation, book reading, music listening, bathroom breaking and whatnot to carry you through the 100-hour week, and of course 100 hours in M.P. bay means very little in the way of sleep. It also means heavy weight gain in a short period of time. There is nothing glamorous about the way you look, feel, and smell at 3:30 AM on a hot summer night when you just came off a sixteen-hour seige and 4,500 calories, mostly of fats and carbohydrates, knowing you have maybe five hours to sleep before you have to get in your car and do it again.
* Speaking of Orwell. He also made a remark to the effect that "any life, viewed from the inside, is probably just a series of defeats." Humans have a tendency to devalue anything we actually have or accomplish, and fetishize and romanticize that which we have not yet achieved: beyond that, we suffer from what Anne Rice called "vicious egotism," meaning not a refusal to believe that anything great could happen, but rather a refusal to believe anything great could happen to us. I sometimes have to remind myself of the extraordinary life I've lead, because like most other people, my day-to-day life is prosaic and unglamorous. I guess the moral here is that some interesting things are really more interesting to talk about afterwards than to do at the time.
* Speaking of Britons, someone of the British persuasion who read my previous blog, "J.K. Rowling and Frankenstein's Monster" rather acerbically asked me if I was ever going to pen a column that "has a go at at the Right for a change." The answer to this question is yes, absolutely yes. While I never intended Stone Cold Prose to mention politics at all, I concluded, as my spiritual mentor Orwell did before me, that it was naive to think I could escape them, and as a writer, I feel obligated to take up a lance in defense of art, freedom of speech, and freedom of thought, which are generally under attack from both sides of the isle simultaneously. So yeah, I will be "having a go" at the Right, too. No fear, no favor.
* I've got no segue for this remark, but yesterday I watched two quite good Korean-made movies about the Korean war. What struck me most about them was the fact that the South Koreans referred to their Chinese enemies derisively as "chinks." I don't know why this surprised me particularly. The historical animosity between Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese, etc. is not news. But in America, we have been so brainwashed to believe that racism is a fundamentally European concept, that when we see it in other parts of the globe, it sometimes comes as a mild shock.
I snuck away from the keyboard to watch the finale of the fireworks display over the ball field from my hallway window. It was, admittedly, spectacular and beautiful, the moreso because I didn't have to stand in a crowd of rowdy drunks to watch it. Some would say being fifty years old watching fireworks from a window in your one-bedroom apartment in York, Pennsylvania, with your arms full of hot laundry, is a comedown from watching them on the White House lawn. But hey, I'm not hungry.
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ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION
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