It is springtime, and the time of year when a young woman's thoughts turn to warmer channels. She turns off the Academy Award-winner, puts down the National Book Award-winner, and switches to KMFDM. She tosses off her blue button-down shirt with french cuffs and grabs the ratty Misfits shirt that has been recharging its troublemaking energies all winter long, deep inside the dresser drawers. Sure, it was snowing this morning, but now it is six p.m. and the final dregs of sunshine are still poking over the bleak rooftops down the road. She is not at work anymore, she is at home on a Saturday night--a night so full of possibility, she can't even begin to fathom it.
She almost hopes for a run-in with the cops tonight.
There's a good chance of that, anyway, as she has a neighbor who has called the cops on her three times for, variously, talking, watching television, and quietly playing a board game. That's right, no crack dealing, no prostitution ring, no meth lab. Talking. So KMFDM probably does not fit within her view of what is appropriate.
She turns it up.
The shuffle brings up They Might Be Giants--she skips them. Blind Guardian! Much better. Epic tales of dragon hunts and glory, won and lost. The lust of battle! The power of stories!
There's the stuff.
She's been thinking a lot lately, thinking about success and power, about approval, about compatibility. About finding inner reserves, finding talent and expressing it. How tragic it would be to find out too late what one's true gift is, what one is capable of. She thinks maybe society shields people too much, allows them too much safety. Exploring pulls safety away, and she wonders if safety would have such a high premium if people saw the true cost ... earlier in life.
A billboard she saw on the way to work this morning reminded her that pain is how we know we are alive. She thinks that's a dangerous wording. Too many people are hurting so much that it is killing them, and have no idea how to curb the pain. She doesn't believe anyone is pain-free. But she also doesn't feel alive when she's in pain. She feels like curling up and sleeping. She feels alive when the wind is in her face, when she's skimming along on some wide-open space. Be it a lake or the interstate system, she's completely in the moment there.
Alive.
Suffering's all right, but she knows well that her sufferings are paltry next to those who live in a war zone. Those who live with starvation. Those who lose limbs, who are crushed nearly to death, who have watched a loved one struggle with addictions--the wasting deaths. She thinks the tedium endured by most people could be ended with a little catharsis, a little punch in the kidneys. But most people, she knows, do not want their routines interrupted. Most people want meals, a bed, and companionship. Most people do not seek out intellectual stimulation, and most people do not live for that next trip to the art gallery.
And she wants to write.
Privately she thinks that books are falling out of fashion, that only the weakest pap makes it through the presses and onto shelves. Slap a big name author on the cover, add a misty picture that looks like fornication could be occurring there, and you've got yourself a book! Oh, right, and pages too. That would help.
She's a cynic.
Or that could be flattering herself. Cynics speak the truth, unpleasantly. Pessimists are just unpleasant.
This isn't just sour grapes, either. All she hears all day long is that authors don't write fast enough, that there just aren't any good books out there. She does what she can. She recommends authors who do produce a Good book. A book that has a strong story, told well. She agrees that there aren't enough. She reads continually--more than is considered polite. She scours the internet, yard sales, the library, her own bookstore, the other bookstores she frequents (they all know her by name, which unnerves her, sometimes), her friends' bookshelves. She reads many books that are Good, many books that are recommended to her. Sometimes she grabs one just because something about it intrigues her. She has found her favorite authors in various ways ... one was recommended to her by a foreigner with a penchant for dark books and science. One author befriended her on Myspace and two weeks later she had devoured all books he's written. One book she had to read for a university course. Another book she discovered in her mother's stash of yellowing literature. (Her mother has great taste in books, if she does say so herself.) She's never been told that a book was tremendous, and been disappointed. Well, except for that Da Vinci Code fiasco.
Right now she's ensconced with Harry Dresden and Uncle John, Ava and Inman, a hardboiled eco-thriller. She has spent some very satisfying time with Jacqueline Daniels, Becky Bloomwood (whiny brat, but at least she shapes up eventually), and Chuck Jones. She thinks about it, on this night for thinking and not actually doing anything (well, she might go for groceries later), and figures she's doing all right. Maybe she isn't reading Derrida and Leibniz as much these days, but she's seeing flecks of their influence in even the most humble tomes.
She figures ... that isn't half-bad.