We'll See.

So I didn’t write a 50,000 word novel this month, again. It’s not the first time. I’d like to pull a Linus and close panel on the classic pose, shaking my fist at the sky – Just Wait ‘Til Next Year! But I think I’ll go one step wishy-washy on this one, and say instead, Just Wait ‘Til Some Time In The Future, Unspecified At The Moment But Definitely Inevitable In The Long Run! Because next year, I will be in school again, working my ass off to fulfill my potential as a student of journalism. And, with that in mind, I won’t just be doing homework and kind of working on studies, I will be throwing myself actively towards learning as much as I can, and, given the writing component of journalism, this means my writer’s-head will be getting plenty of exercise without novel-induced craziness.

But someday, and I don’t mean that vague “Someday,” as in, “Some Time In The Future, When I Make Time For It,” I mean someday as in “As Soon As I’m Done With College Even If It Kills Me,” I will write a novel. Fully, and working as hard as I can, and it will be a thing of beauty and I will make people laugh, and cry, the way I do reading about Harry Dresden. This is non-negotiable.

So I didn’t write a novel this year. A more cynical person than I might point out the fact that I’ve never finished a written work of any significant length. But I’m through being that person, and I’d rather dwell on the fact that I got farther into this thing than I ever have before. And if I can finish short stories (which I can, by the way), I can finish a novel. Just wait ‘til next time.

It Doesn't Have To BE This Way

There’s a website which I often fool around on called TV Tropes, which analyzes common themes found in different media; some of you may be familiar with it. One of the tropes discussed at length there is the “Crapsack World,” which is… well, exactly what it sounds like. Here’s one of the descriptions in the summary: “An immutable Crapsack World has corruption and pain Inherent In The System, both physically and metaphysically. Trying to fight this corruption will always result in it winning.”

So basically, this describes a world that is inherently unfair, a world in which good is not only useless, but often counter-productive. This is a world where the evil overlord wins. This is a world where humanity really is reduced to numbers, where the Daleks succeed because the universe doesn’t care; this is a world where a sonic screwdriver and a brilliant smile will get you killed, regardless of how clever or powerful you are, how strongly you want to save the world. This is a universe where the more unfortunate people of the world are taken into slavery to serve the whims of the culture on the other side of the world who doesn’t know or care about their plight. This is a world where an entire population can be decimated on a whim, once more to benefit a class more useful to the people in power, and no one bats an eye. This is a world where those born into poverty and disease and starvation are, more or less, thought of as deserving of such a fate; this is a world where Scrooge was right.

This is our world.

And speaking against any of that makes you a bleeding heart, an emotion-driven basket-case, and it pits you straight up against the power-driven universe, in a world where greed and oppression are rewarded and selflessness is mercilessly stamped out.

I’m not exaggerating. This isn’t hyperbole.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, and I will keep on saying it until the day I die.

THIS IS NOT RIGHT. I don’t give a used fig as to what your personal beliefs concerning the semantics and wordplay of “ethics” versus “morality,” or which political party you support, or whether you’re an independent or a moderate or on the fringes or outside altogether.

If you are supporting slavery, genocide, if you have nothing to say to this world we’re living in, if you don’t believe that there is something very, very, wrong with what’s going on in this world, get the hell off of my friends list. I don’t care if you're a conservative who believes capitalism is the only thing that will save this world from itself, or you’re an anarchist who believes capitalism is what’s killing this world. You should be fighting for the same ends right now. There are people being driven into slavery, not only in Mali and Cote d’Ivoire, but on this continent, in the cities and the suburbs and all around us. There are people dying on the streets, of malaria. A disease that was cured over a century ago. Not a lot of people know that. Mosquito bites are killing more people in this world than any other animal. Mosquito bites. Death. By. Mosquito. Death by a disease we cured. A disease that’s become a joke in this country. That doesn’t even touch the disease we haven’t cured, AIDS, which people are also dying like flies from.

That’s the one that makes me sick – people believe, somehow people allow themselves to be convinced that it’s not that important. They deserve it, right? Just like the kids born into starvation deserve to die before they reach adulthood, and the people being laid off from their jobs in this very country deserved that, and they deserve to be homeless on the streets with their families, the filthy savages. But not on our streets, no, how about the darker part of town, tucked away somewhere we don’t have to see them? This country makes me sick sometimes. I’m an American, that much is true. I believe in freedom, and I mean that literally. I believe everyone should be free. I believe that freedom is a human right, not an American right. I believe in liberty, and I believe in justice. I believe that no one should die because of a damned bug bite. I believe women who are raped are never ‘asking for it,’ I believe that in a world where there is enough food to go around, no one should starve to death. I believe that it is twisted, sick, and downright evil to refuse homeless men the basement of a church to sleep in on winter nights -- to let them freeze to death in their sleep -- because it brings them too close to the business district.

To be fair, not many people know the reality of all of this. (That's why it's important to do this. Because people don't know.) It’s mentioned in passing, occasionally, but rarely expanded on. We’re very careful, this country is, of tucking things that make our viewers uncomfortable out of sight. We wouldn’t want to lose our viewers. We wouldn’t want to make them too uncomfortable, to make them turn aside to somewhere where the view is a little more pleasant.

Don’t forget this. There is nothing – nothing – that makes you somehow innately more worthy of life than someone else on this planet. I’m a Christian, infinitely more than I am an American. That’s what I believe. I believe in unconditional love, and unconditional forgiveness. You were born (for most of you, anyway) in a wealthy country, if not a wealthy home. Your parents were able to feed you, because they’d worked hard, but also because they’d been born to a land of opportunity. That is why you are here, and not starving to death, or dying of malaria or AIDS, or being beaten to death in the cacao fields on the Gold Coast. Because you were born here, and not there. It doesn’t make you a bad person – but it doesn’t make your life worth more than theirs, either. A life is a life is a life. Please, please remember that.

This world has become a horrible, horrible place -- we don't have to leave it that way. We don't have to submit silently to what this world has become. I mentioned earlier that in this universe, morality is punished and powerlust is rewarded. I don't believe that's Just The Way It Is, I believe it's the way the human race has made it. And we can change that. It's not idealistic to believe that conscience should overrule politics.

Politics are supposed to be a way to follow your conscience; they are not supposed to subvert it for the party values.

I'll say it once again.

We don't have to take this. If you have a conscience, if you want to see this world become something other than a prison, do it. Don't wait for a signal. You ARE the signal.

And I don't want to promise, because I don't want to lie.

So I’m sitting here listening to If God Will Send His Angels, by U2 in Dunkin Donuts, after taking the written portion of my driver’s test. I can’t work on the novel I’m supposed to have done by December. I can’t think. I’m running over things in my mind, restless, upset, not understanding things. That’s how I roll. I worry, and I fret, and I think, and I pick things apart in my mind and analyze the pieces, and then I sit down and write about them. That’s why I want to be a journalist. That’s what makes sense to me. But that’s not what I wanted to say. That was this morning.

I deleted that little bit, this morning, because I wound up wandering off on life careening out of my control, of not understanding my own destiny.

My dad and I had this huge political argument. This time, it started with me telling him what my older sister, who had been in the Army, said about Fort Hood – that it reflected the state of the United States Military. My dad said it had to do with political correctness. I disagreed. We proceeded to argue from there about everything currently on the political plate; I scored a few points, he scored most of them, because he is good at verbal arguments, and I am not. I can write. I’m not good at talking. Anyway. The whole thing culminated with me saying something about universal health care, and him laying a pretty hefty guilt trip on me and then giving me a lecture about using analytical thought instead of following your heart, your emotions.

I cannot accept that. I cannot. I cannot sit here, at my desk at my laptop in this house in America, the United States of, and make imperious analytical judgments without conscience.

I have derided my conscience as neurotic. Maybe it is. But it’s still there. There is still a voice telling me that what I am doing with my life, most of the time, is wrong. I am doing almost nothing to improve the lot of the poor, the sick, the needy in this world. What am I doing to feed the fatherless, the widows? I cannot vote without my conscience. I cannot vote without my emotions. The two are tied, the two are more me than I am, and there’s a logic bomb for you. That is who I am supposed to be. Not who I am, no – I’m not happy with that person. I get angry when people talk about me being a kind or a conscientious person. If I was the person – half the person – who I should be, I would be vegan. I would be working my ass off, and then sending most of my paychecks off to Save Darfur or to pay for cures for malaria, or to combat the AIDS crisis. I don’t hold up to the standards. That’s fucked up. I am not a kind or conscientious person.

My dad gets angry when I talk about this stuff. I don’t phrase it like that – that would be trawling for pity. (I phrase it like that here because I don’t have anywhere else to talk about it. I have to get this off my chest somewhere, and this is the only blog nobody connects with me.) But when I talk about ONE, (Red), Save Darfur, Fair Trade, hell, if I mention the word ‘hybrid,’ I get a death stare. Those, you see, are causes Liberals use to make themselves feel good about themselves. (Sometimes I wonder if he knows that is almost exactly the same thing anarchists say about them.) Those Damn Liberals, they’re so smug about what they’re doing to help the world. That Bono, he’s so smug about trying to fix the world. Don’t they realize that they’re being led around by the nose because they listen to their emotions instead of their minds?

Fuck. That.

After he left, I sat here thinking, wondering, trying to make sense of it all. I have a conscience, you see. It’s neurotic, probably from not being listened to, but it’s there. And, thanks to Slacktivist, I’m starting to see more about the world, viewed through a Christian’s eyes. An evangelical, no less! And someone who’s disgusted by the evangelical scene today, someone who hasn’t forgotten that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord thy God, and the second commandment is to love thy neighbor as thyself. And someone who is consistently calling evangelicals out on it. But I bring any of these points up to my dad, and I get called out as a Liberal, smug in my own false sense of conscience.

I listened to If God Will Send His Angels, and I cried, and I shook my fist at the sky and begged for a sign, and I knelt and pleaded for a sign, and I despaired of there being any hope in this world, any true way to live for a Christian, anything to cling to. And I walked out and sat in the woods, and cried and stared at the sky and was accused by my conscience of praying to Bono, and defended my Not-A-Prayer by saying “at least he’s here, in this world, tangible and real,” and then had to admit that God is more real than anything tangible BUT ANYWAY. I don’t need a sign. I want a sign. I saw a cross, white and lit up, that I’d never seen before, on a hill, just visible behind some houses in the trees. Struck me as odd – I thought I knew that neighborhood backwards – but I desperately went to where it looked to be, and it turned out to be a flagpole.

Really, I should’ve seen that coming. I don’t need a sign. That, I guess, would make things too easy. But God, oh God do I want one. Something – anything – to make it just a little bit easier to believe that there IS a right way, always a right thing to do. I walked home. I sat down. I watched Jon Stewart, I listened to If God Will Send His Angels again, I cried a little more, and then I glanced at Twitter, saw Bono had just tweeted a few seconds ago (if it’s him; not a verified account, but I can be pretty naïve in my desperate hopes sometimes, and I’m willing to believe), and told him in a message he’ll probably never see that he’s a hero. My hero, anyway. Someone who actually gives a damn about this world, someone who’s working to do something about it, and someone who wrote a song pleading for a sign. A modern-day psalm. God, I want that sign. And it’s never given, you know?

There are all these stories, they tell them in Baptist churches, about the diver who’s been an atheist all his life, and one night he’s late at the pool, and he spreads his arms, about to dive into this pool, and perceives that the shape is like a cross, and he gets this spiritual moment of just… I don’t know what, and he walks down into the pool and discovers that there’s no water in it and he would’ve died, and he repents his sins and gives his life to God. It’s one of those posters you see in foyers, like the footprints poster… oh, the footprints poster. A friend of mine wrote on that:

“I guess what irks me about this, and other sentiments, which try to make life's hurts "better" is the implicit message hidden in them. They say, no matter what, there's comfort in knowing God is with you. No matter what, face life with the eternal hope and optimism of Christian life. God will protect you. God will make things better. Your life before Jesus: :-(. Your life after Jesus: :-).
…
So not only did I have issues, I suddenly had a religion that was smacking me across the face with, if you believe in God, it won't be as bad.

So it was bad, so what did that mean? It obviously meant I didn't believe in God enough.

A Good ChristianTM lives in the Grace of God. The reflect the Peace of Christ in everything they do. They walk with the joy of the Lord. They're happy and live happy lives. This was the positive side of religion presented me as a convert. I felt like, simply by being depressed, I was failing at being Christian. My unhappiness and troubles and self-hatred were because I just wasn't good enough.
…
Most importantly what happened was, by slow degrees, by example and prodding and (most important) just figuring it out for myself, I left the world of platitudes and inspirational posters and beaches at sunset and turned to the Cross.

Which, in most churches I frequent, features an emaciated man dying in agony. At some point in the process he, God and most beloved of God, looks up and says, "O God, O God! Why have you forsaken me?"

A man in abject helplessness, incapable of optimism (because optimism is thinking things will turn out okay) but still, in the depths of his despair, with the hope that this suffering will accomplish something. A man who carried his cross though in agony, but who--still--didn't soldier on, ignoring the pain; he fell, grew weak, needed help.

This, I recognized. This was me.

I think, sometimes, we are a little too afraid of pain. We are a little too anxious for everything to be over. We are a little too addicted to neat, clean, pat answers. I'm not advocating drawing things out unnecessarily, but honestly. Can we stop saying, "It's okay," when it isn't?”

So I guess that’s my point, after much rambling and whining and whatnot. It’s not okay. I’m not going to get a magical vision that shows me a clear path, gives me the willpower to follow it, and makes it impossible for me to fall from that path, whether into self-flagellation or apathy or wallowing or whatever the case may be. All I can do is follow what I perceive to be the right path, do what I think His plan for me is to do, and pray that if and when I delve into self-flagellation, apathy, or wallowing, He sends either a friend or a musician or a hero to slap me upside the head and put me back on track.

And that I always remember to write when things stop making sense, and maybe the words will bring me back to where I need to be.
…Amen.

It’s pretty cold in my room; cold enough to make it significantly harder to type. I should, by all rights, be at the DMV right now, standing in line. I screwed up a la priorities again, and decided to wait on going out of town to get my license test because there was a chance I’d be needed for work. Part of this is because, yes, I need more hours. But part of it is because I have this idea that if I make myself really available, then when full time hours are available, it’ll make sense to put me in that spot. Selfish? Yeah, probably. But I think at some point it kind of becomes necessary to think of yourself.

Which is actually funny to see typed by myself, who has been barely even bothering to battle (like the alliteration? yeaaaah) with the voices lately on the point that I am a worthless waste of space. I don’t even know how to respond. Part of it is that this is coming from inside of me, it’s a thought that I had, so how do I respond to it? I can rationalize and enforce logic and reason and thought all day and night, but that doesn’t lessen the iron conviction of the thing. How do you reason like that? It’s like trying to rationalize a dream. Doesn’t work. (People run over with a giant tractor on a game board made of fallow land would not be thrown into pieces, like wood chips, they would ooze from underneath. But that is hardly the strangest thing out of that dream. Maybe I should start putting together a dream catcher.)

Anyway. This year I’m participating in NaNoWriMo, trying to write a novel of 50,000 words in thirty days. So far, it sucks. The novel, I mean, not the competition itself. It feels good to be writing again, I’ll admit that. But the book? Ugh. I kind of want to burn it and start over. I’m being just nitpicky enough to slow myself down and stay under the limit, and just careless enough to write complete and utter shit.

But at least it’s writing. And maybe, just maybe, if I get all the shit out of my system, when the month is over and I go to write something actually worth writing, it’ll come out better.