Resolution

Posted on December 26, 2011 by C. Patrick

New Year’s is coming up but I’m not going to make any resolutions this time. No, you see, I’m tired of doing all the work. Every New Year’s is the same: it’s up to me to be healthier, to get more creative work done, to meet various goals in my professional and personal life.

Nope. Not going to do it this year.

Instead, I’m going to make a demand of everyone else. It’s about time that the world steps up and does something to make itself a better place. So here’s the resolution I want the planet to make:

Stop being mean to one another.

See? Not so hard.

That's just mean. Or possibly it's something I saw on the SyFy channel. Not sure which.

Don't be mean

Sure, that guy over in cubicle 19-b may have horrible breath and a penchant for using your stapler without permission, but that’s no reason not to be nice to him. He’s got it bad enough, what with working in a cubicle and having chronic halitosis. Go ahead and let him use the stapler; it’s not that big of a deal.

And sure, I know that traffic can get those angry juices flowing, make you want to pound on the steering wheel, yell out the window, and lay on the horn. But honking isn’t going to get the light to change. Yelling isn’t going to do anything but make someone else mad. And pounding on, well, anything at all isn’t going to do a bit of good. Plus, you’re most likely going to tear up your hand and/or car.

Oh, and if you’re young enough to still be in high school? Guess what? Being cruel to any of your fellow students may get you a few laughs from your clique, but in the end (ie: your twenties), your peers won’t remember that you were on the yearbook staff, were the quarterback, were whatever; they’ll remember that you were an mean-spirited person. I know this is true because I’ve watched several movies and After School specials on this subject. In these, it’s the good-hearted people who always get the bestest boyfriend/girlfriend/vampire. The cruel students have houses dropped on their heads or, worse, end up old, alone, and with blotchy skin.

And finally, I don’t care what religion or philosophical philosophy you follow, if your holy book or spirit guide or manifesto or cow entrails is telling you to be mean to someone else for any reason whatsoever, then you’re reading it wrong. Ditch it and page through some Dr. Seuss, instead.

Get it through your heads that regardless what any given person’s nationality, sexual preference, race, or eating habits are (especially in the case of zombies in this latter instance), you trying to change them is likely to fail and certainly isn’t going to do a whit to make you a better person (and in the case of zombies will just get you eaten). Being someone who is preachy, judgmental, and–darn it–mean, isn’t going to make the world a more pleasant place to live in for everyone.

Here’s how it works. If you have power, be it money, influence, good looks, or the ability to fire laser beams from your eyes, don’t abuse it. Using your power (especially the laser beam one) in ways that benefit you but hurt others may sound good, but it doesn’t work, even if you do find yourself wallowing in a pile of cash for a few days or possibly weeks. Eventually you’ll wind up in jail. Or you’ll annoy the wrong person and find yourself scrounging for scraps in a dumpster somewhere, fighting with a mangy stray cat named Rollow over a greasy McDonald’s Happy Meal lid (trust me on this one). Or your nemesis will realize that your superpowers can be negated by the swift application of either kryptonite or a year-old fruitcake and you’ll be wide open to being kicked harshly in very sensitive areas of your anatomy.

If everyone were nice to one or even two more people a day then they are normally nice to, pretty soon the whole world would be being nice to one another.

So there’s that.

Hmm, I have some space left. Alright, while we’re on the subject of resolutions, I have one more thing I’d like to bring to the attention of certain people in the world–particularly the broadcasting world.

Once upon a time, I could turn on the television and go to the History Channel and learn about history (true, it was mostly history about World War II, but still, history), I could turn to Discovery and learn about science (“Science!”), I could go to TLC (The Learning Channel) and learn about, um, stuff. Heck, I could even flip over to the SciFi channel and watch science fiction.

Now, although there’s nothing inherently wrong with ‘reality’ shows that follow sleazy pawn shop owners as they buy up forfeited storage lockers, it’s not exactly what I think of when I think of A&E (Arts & Entertainment). And the World Wrestling Federation, although it could possibly be argued (just saying ‘possibly’ here, people) that it’s fiction, it’s not ‘science’ fiction and doesn’t belong on Syfy. There’s a difference.

If you’re going to have a themed cable network, then stick to your theme. It’s not that hard.

Those are the resolutions I’m asking of everyone else. Please stick to them. We’ll all be happier for it.

Now I’m going to go bake some cookies, because that’ll make the world a better place, too.

Have a very happy new year!

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The Zombie Occupation

Posted on November 18, 2011 by C. Patrick

I’ve written about the coming zombiepocalypse before in these pages. If you missed it here, then you’ve probably seen something about it on television or at the movies. There are so many TV shows and movies about zombies that it’s hard not to think that the walking dead are going to overwhelm our cities, suburbs, towns, farmsteads, and campsites at any moment.

Hollywood, in their wisdom, has been preparing us for the zombiepocalypse for years. And it’s paid off, because the z-poc is now!

What, you haven’t seen the supernaturally-reanimated traipsing around your local shopping arcade and/or Farmer’s Market? Well, true. No comets appeared in the sky shedding strange cosmic dust to reanimate the recently deceased. No secret government mad science experiments have gotten into the wrong hands (not that we know of anyway). No aliens have hovered above our cemeteries, raising armies of the dead to use in world conquest. And, as far as I know, no Nazi zombies are currently harassing any ski bunnies on the slopes in Colorado, Switzerland, or elsewhere (zombie Nazis + snow + snow bunnies = the movie “Dead Snow”).

Yet the zombiepocalypse is upon us anyway, in the form of the Occupy Movement.

This is a comparison pic. Hmmm, does anyone read this alternate text? Ever?

Left: An Occupier occupying St. Louis; Right: A zombie.

Now, just wait a minute. I don’t mean what you think I mean. For those of you nodding your heads and saying, “Yeah, bunch ‘o hippie zombies, that’s what those no-goods are!”, no, I don’t mean that. And for those of you saying, “How dare you compare those agents of change, those crusaders of righteousness, to mindless, shambling zombies,” that’s not what I mean, either.

From Hollywood, independent filmmakers (especially here in Springfield, the Middle West, which I firmly believe is the independent films about zombie capitol of the US), books, comics, comics-made-into-TV-series, and History Channel documentaries, we know a great deal about zombies. From Fox News, CNN, and other media coverage, we don’t know quite as much about the Occupiers, other than that they carry signs, like tents, and are fond of math, but if we scour the intertubewebs, the newspapers, and our Twitter feeds, we can still put together a more-or-less comprehensive composite.

So let’s take a look for a moment at the Zombie and the Occupiers and see if we can find a convergence.

The greatest single defining trait of zombies is not that they are dead. That’s a misconception. There are a number of movies (“28 Days Later” and, erm, some others) wherein the zombies aren’t reanimated corpses, but rather people driven to a rage by some form of external influence (Oh! “The Crazies” — that’s another one). No, the single defining trait of zombies is that they want to eat brains. Not cow brains, which is a dish called sauteed cerveaux in French and can therefore be found at the more upscale French restaurants and other like-minded places where you won’t find me. No, zombies want fresh human brains.

Well, apparently so do the Occupiers. They claim to want people to think about the system — how it works; how it fails — and figure out how to fix the parts that are failing. They also want the people who are part of the overclass to rethink how the failures of the process affect the populace at large. So, okay, maybe the Occupiers don’t want to actually eat brains, but they do want to possess other people’s brains and get them to think differently about, y’know, stuff.

Hmm, speaking of rage induced by some form of external influence, I’d say we can call that a match, too (the banking system, anyone?).

Zombies infect those they come in contact with, thereby increasing their numbers exponentially. As for the Occupiers, well, they started out occupying Wall Street. Then their ideas began to spread (infected, depending on your world-view) others around the country. Soon enough there was Occupy San Francisco, Occupy St. Louis, Occupy This and Occupy That. At this rate, it can’t be long before there’s an Occupy Fargo and an Occupy the Grand Canyon. Occupiers everywhere.

Zombies are considered mindless (even though the only way to kill them is by destroying their brains–which seems a bit ironic). Listen to any Conservative talk show outlet for very long and you’ll find that there are certainly those out there who consider the Occupiers to be ‘mindless’ as well (although I believe “idiots” is the term actually used). But, beyond that, one of the primary indictments of the Occupy Movement is that it doesn’t seem to have a plan, other than a vague “We need to effect change” kinda plan. Without a plan, the Occupiers can easily be seen as a (zombie) horde, mindlessly seeking destruction without consideration for what needs to be erected in the face of that anarchy.

So the zombiepocalypse has arrived; it just isn’t exactly what we were expecting. After all, if I saw some of those George Romero zombies shambling toward me, I’d know for sure I needed to run away from them rather than sit down and have a chat over some tea or Starbuck’s coffee.

Oh, by the way, let’s be clear here: I’m not advocating that you go out and hit an Occupier over the head with a spiked baseball bat.

But if you see a zombie Nazi in the snow? Go for it.

[Some people claim that the author became zombiefied many years ago. Despite this, he can be contacted via the Comments section, below or you can follow his Twitter feed @parablehead]

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In Defense of Television

Posted on November 17, 2011 by C. Patrick

The speculative fiction author Harlan Ellison referred to television as the “glass teat” in his book of essays of the same name. The implication, of course, was that television is a pacifier of sorts and that in sitting mindlessly in front of it and allowing it to feed images and often inane commentary into our heads, we are often kept from doing anything substantial with our lives.

There are lots of internet pages (like this one) dedicated to the idea that television is evil and keeps us, as a society, sedated and thereby keeps us from marching in the streets and demanding whatever it is we happen to want to demand of our governments–local, federal, feudal, or the just and righteous governance of our robot overlords.

Well, maybe not that last one. Yet.

There have been claims that television is bad for children, making it hard for them to distinguish between reality and fiction. There have been claims that increasingly violent programming on television increases the level of violence in our society. There have been claims that television is a giant lizard created by atom bomb testing and is coming to eat our cities and burn us all with radioactive flame.

Okay, maybe there hasn’t been that giant lizard claim. Yet.

Don't judge me

It's waiting. Waiting. Waiting.

But is television really all that bad?

Back in the 1990s, I was a television addict. There was a time when I would come home from taking or teaching a class and plop down on the comfy couch with a soda and some chips and just flick through channels, watching three minutes here, one minute there, killing time by means of the remote until the top or bottom of the hour came, whereupon I’d continue flicking through channels, hoping that now that the programs had changed there would be something worth watching.

Next thing I knew, it’d be three hours later and if you had asked me what I had been watching I could honestly have said, “Nothing, nothing at all.”

Except dreck.

I eventually overcame my addiction by moving to Mexico, where we didn’t have a television for several months and when we finally did get one, it only got one channel that had any programming in English and would spontaneously turn itself off and remain in self-imposed isolation for days on end. True story.

Television’s evil, for me, as an addict, was that it was a time suck. As a writer and a photographer, I ought to spend a great deal of my time, y’know, writing and taking pictures. It’s hard to write or take pictures when you’re watching television. It’s also hard to have conversations with your friends, go hiking, do science (“Science!”), meet new people, be a contributor to your community, or hunt for proof of the existence of the chupacabra.

Wily, wily chupacabra.

But guess what? None of that was the television’s fault. It was the programmers’ faults for not putting on entertaining, educational programming. It was the writers’ faults for not creating thoughtful, witty, complex stories that could then be programmed. Most importantly, it was my fault because I forgot the Golden Rule — no, not that we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us (or even “Do unto others before they do unto you”), but rather “All things in moderation.”

Too much food–high cholesterol and blood pressure.

Too much partying–bad health, no sleep, and meeting guys named Bubba in the lockup.

Too much television — the almost certainty that you’ll accidentally watch an episode of “The Jersey Shore” and be scarred for life.

Now that I’m back living in the States, I watch television on a regular basis again. But I’ve found that my tolerance for the dreck has decreased considerably and I’ve found that, lo-and-behold, moderation is a good thing. I no longer just flip through channels for hours at a time hoping that something good will be on. Instead, I use my television to watch shows that I know I want to watch (usually, with the help of el DVR, whenever I want to watch them)–the ones that are well-written, witty, insightful, and/or mindless escapism (yes, escapism is okay, too, in–you guessed it–moderation). I use my television to watch movies. In these days of technological wonders, I also use my television to watch independent programming from the internet, play video games, and learn what my Wii age is on Wii Sports (28, if you were wondering).

The television, like all tools, is what we make of it and what we make with it. A hammer can crush your thumb, or help you build a birdhouse. A pipe wrench can help you get that diamond ring out of the drain, or be the weapon of choice in Clue. A television can make you the mental equivalent of a Caesar side salad, or it can open your mind to a sweeping world of creativity and challenging thought.

Your choice.

Now, excuse me, please, I’m going to go watch some…no, you know what? I think instead that I’m going to go see if I can hunt down a chupacabra.

Wily, wily chupacabra.

[There have been times when the author has almost been eaten by his television and not just chupacabras. It’s a very large television, after all. If your television is showing signs of sentient evil, you may contact the author for advice in the comments section below or via his twitter feed @parablehead]

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