Do you have the time
To listen to me whine
About nothing and everything
All at once?
I am one of those
Melodramatic fools
Neurotic to the bone
No doubt about it
--Green Day, “Basket Case”
It’s a story that begins, I suppose, in 1994. Specifically, it begins on a Tuesday night in the Fireside Room of my old church. I know this because it happened at junior high youth group. My youth leader had decided to do one of those messages on the evils of rock music. The songs he chose to deconstruct in order to inoculate us from worldly evils were Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy,” Green Day’s “Longview,” and Offspring’s…um, whatever the big song was off of Smash.
We were all given lyric sheets with the swear words edited out. The youth leader sat up front with a boombox, hitting the fast forward button on the CD player every time one of those words came up in the song. We learned about the messages from those songs: sex is okay, violence and suicide is okay[1], and masturbation is a-ok.[2]
The whole thing made me vaguely uncomfortable. I liked all of those songs. That particular night came just a couple months after my first introduction to the world of alternative rock[3] and I already possessed a copy of Dookie and Ten.[4] I went home and stuck my copy of Dookie in to a little slot at the back of my RCA boombox. I didn’t want to be influenced by the evil rock, but I also didn’t want to just throw the CD out. It languished there for a while.
That night was the beginning of a ten-year war in my mind that had everything to do with music.
Do you the enemy?
Do you know your enemy?
Well gotta know the enemy
--Green Day, “Know Your Enemy”
Superpages.com Center is probably not the sort of place I’d spend a lot of time visiting. I’m more of a small club, 21 and older show sort of guy. Still, last Thursday I put on my RCPM Che shirt for indie cred and headed down to Fair Park. Green Day was in time and I’d grabbed a seat in the pavilion. I’ve never actually seen Green Day live and this seemed like as good an opportunity as any.
Apparently my indie snobbishness has insulated me from a lot in the world of concerts. And I’m not just talking about venues that charge $9.50 for a Miller Lite in a plastic cup. I don’t even go to the House of Blues much because they have too many all-ages shows. So I was shocked to find myself surrounded by tweens in skinny jeans and leggings and, um, the various other accoutrements that are popular with the high school and junior high set these days.
Overall it was a weird effect. There was a better than even chance that if I saw a member of the female gender I was then expecting the dude from To Catch a Predator to jump out of the bushes in a very special edition of the show or I quickly realized that she was there escorting her high school-aged offspring. It’s an odd thing, being 29 and single at an all-ages show.
I apparently totally missed the switchover that Green Day managed to make from the music that I grew up with to the music that thirteen year-olds listen to. I quickly dropped in to Grampa Geds mode and started putting up Facebook statuses about the damn kids with their skinny jeans and wondering if they even knew about Green Day’s history of writing songs about jerking off. It was certainly better than going to my seat and listening to AFI.
The rage and love
The story of my lfie
The Jesus of Suburbia is a lie
And screaming
Are we, we are the waiting?
--Green Day, “Are We the Waiting?”
I eventually removed Dookie from its randomly imposed purgatory. I added Nimrod, Insomniac, and International Superhits! to my Green Day collection. But then I, like most people, totally forgot that Green Day had ever existed. Then news came that they were releasing a new album and they’d be trying something different: a Tommy-esque rock opera. I was intrigued.
When American Idiot came out I loved it from the start. I named it my 2004 album of the year.[5] Mostly, though, I connected with the story of growing up and growing disaffected. 2004 wasn’t quite the beginning of the end, but the markers of discontent were there. 2005 would see one last, half-assed attempt to seriously follow-through on ditching all of my worldly music and listen only to proper Christian entertainment.
But, see, we’d been promised a revolution. Jesus was gonna show up and make everything happen. There was going to be revival.
But there was never a revival. Jesus kept obstinately insisting on not coming back. The Jesus of Suburbia was a lie.[6]
Here they come marching down the street
Like a desperation murmer of a heartbeat
Comin’ back from the edge of town
Underneath their feet
Their time has come and it’s goin’ nowhere
Nobody ever said that life was fair now
--Green Day, “Homecoming”
Billie Joe Armstrong has re-invented himself, just as Green Day re-invented itself with American Idiot. I’d seen the whole pseudo-Emo, heavy eyeliner and frosted hair shit, which I find rather annoying. But what I hadn’t seen was what he does on stage. Billie Joe has morphed in to a manic televangelist for disaffected youth.
But there’s a message in the whole thing that I’ve never really noticed before. The question is asked every once in a while, “Where has all the protest music gone?” We wonder why there is no Bob Dylan, no “Universal Soldier,” no “Eve of Destruction” for the endless War on Terror generation. It’s there. Green Day seems to have figured out how to do it. But no one takes them seriously because they were originally a three-chord pop punk band playing silly songs about masturbation and entertaining junior highers.
One of those thirteen year-olds is now twenty-nine. At first I was disoriented to find myself at a show surrounded by teenagers. But as the night went on I began to realize something. It was a good thing. Sixteen years ago my youth leader tried to warn me about the dangers of the evil rock music. I strongly suspect that a lot of the kids in that audience have heard that exact same message.
For three hours on a Thursday night Green Day made me extremely happy that I eventually ended up deciding to keep Dookie around. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that American Idiot wasn’t really a re-invention of the band, it was a re-invention of the idea of how the band presented itself.
I wanna be the minority
I don’t need your authority
Down with the Moral Majority
‘Cuz I wanna be the minority
--Green Day, “Minority”
When all of your songs are two and a half minutes long it’s pretty easy to squeeze a big chunk of the library in to a three-hour set. Even at that, I was impressed. They managed to work in most of American Idiot and Dookie, as well as several other old songs I like, not the least of which was “Minority.”
But there was also plenty of tagging. The band riffed in “Iron Man” and “Highway to Hell” and “Hey Jude” among many, many others. Everyone sang along and cheered.
It reminded me that rock music is a part of our culture, woven in so tightly that I can even sing along with and enjoy songs that I would never choose to listen to on my own and enjoy the hell out of myself. It also reminded me that we’ve seen this culture war of the Christian establishment against rock music ever since, well, rock music started. Elvis was too dangerous with his swiveling hips. The Beatles made young girls scream just a little too loud. Black Sabbath worshiped the devil.
Green Day sang songs about jerking off. It doesn’t seem like much of a statement to rally behind, but that’s not really the point. They had something to say beyond that. For the first time I really listened to “Minority” and realized what they were saying when they referred to the Moral Majority. I think I’ve always known they were referring to it, but I didn’t realize that they were firing an intentional salvo in the culture wars.
Last Thursday I realized something: the culture wars are over.
It might not seem like it, because we’re seeing a furious rear-guard action. But I can tell you a story about a thirteen year-old kid who put away his copy of Dookie because he’d been told it was of the Devil.
I can also tell you the story of a twenty-nine year-old who went to see Green Day sixteen years later.
--------------------------------
[1]Or something. I’m still a bit lost on how “Jeremy” really fit in to the whole motif. How the fuck you get any particular “rock is evil” message out of “Jeremy” is completely and totally beyond me. I mean, the song is a story about an abused kid who lashes out and eventually ends up committing suicide.
I suppose this is one of those INOUIITB (It’s Not Okay Unless it’s In the Bible) moments. If “Jeremy” had been a story about Demon possession or some other such BS from an appropriately Christian source it probably would have been a morality play set to the music of Carman. The fact that it involved a grunge rock band singing the evil Devil’s music meant it didn’t work that way because it would have blown the doors wide open on any number of assumptions.
[2]Thank Jeebus that “Brain Stew” wasn’t out yet…
[3]In an incident that involved Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” and a maroon minivan on the way back from the youth group’s Spring Break Work Trip. Yeah, I sold my soul to rock and roll that day. I think I got a pretty good price, too…
[4]This was in that weird sweet spot where I liked Pearl Jam because “Spin the Black Circle” had not been played every twenty minutes on Q101. Seriously, I hated Pearl Jam for about eight or ten years after that. Still can’t stand “Spin the Black Circle.” Also, I’ve never owned Smash and never will.
[5]Okay, there’s a non-zero chance that I gave that to Velvet Revolver’s Contraband, mostly because I was a fucking moron in 2004.
Okay, no. I just looked. I gave the number 1 to American Idiot, the number two to Contraband, and the number 4 to Local H’s Whatever Happened to P.J. Soles? In at number 3? Collective Soul’s Youth. What the hell was wrong with me in 2004? American Idiot and PJ Soles were obviously the best two albums on that list, not for the least reason that they’re the only ones I still listen to. This, of course, totally ignores the fact that RCPM’s Americano! came out in 2004 and isn’t even on the list. But the simple reason for that is that I wouldn’t become aware of RCPM until early in 2005. I also totally feel like I’ve sidetracked in to berating past me about the year 2004 in music at several points in the past on this blog. But that 2-4 is completely unforgivable, as is the rest of the list. Honestly, I’m embarrassed to mention any of the other albums I liked in 2004 save U2’s Vertigo. It wasn’t a very good album, but it had a couple of good songs and “Love and Peace or Else” is genuinely amazing.
[6]This isn’t exactly what the “Jesus of Suburbia” in American Idiot refers to. But it’s how I’m using it.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Sunday, August 29, 2010
AtF: Who's Buried in Raedwald's Tomb?
So, this week on After the Flood, we find out that things that have nothing to do with anything are deeply, deeply important. Let’s start this out.
Now, the Sutton Hoo burial ship was a fantastic archaeological find. We’re talking King Tut’s Tomb fantastic here. So let’s talk archaeology and what Sutton Hoo means.
In order to talk Sutton Hoo we can go with something people have heard of a little more about. Like, say, King Tut’s Tomb. Specifically, why King Tut’s Tomb mattered.
We all know about the Egyptian pyramids.[1] The lesser story about the pyramids is why they disappeared towards the end of the Middle Kingdom. Basically, they were giant targets for grave robbers. See, that was the crazy thing about the Pharaohs. They were gods on Earth, but they were also paranoid, and with good cause. They built giant friggin’ mausoleums out in the desert as a way of saying, “Hey, look at me!” They then filled said mausoleums with as much shit as they could stack inside.
Said shit then got stolen. A lot. And I’m not talking about the looting of archaeological sites like we see all over in the Middle East now. I’m saying that pyramids were getting looted during ancient times. That’s why there were all kinds of crazy traps and curses inside the tombs.[2]
So they moved to the Valley of the Kings, which was only marginally more successful. And by “marginally more successful,” I mean, “rather than being entirely looted, the tombs of the Pharoahs were only mostly looted.” This is why so many people know of King Tut. It’s not that he was a great ruler, it’s that he was the only ruler who’s tomb had been found intact up until that time. Period.
Let’s move two thousand years in to the future. Pretend that in between now and then the writings of every single President have been lost save William McKinley. Future historians know that there were a bunch of Presidents and have a general idea who they were, when they were in office, and what the fortunes of the United States were under them. But then they find a stash of letters written by William McKinley and all of the sudden they’re all, “Holy crap, we know something specific!” That’s what King Tut’s Tomb is all about.
William McKinley never makes the list of the best Presidents, nor does he make the list of the worst Presidents. Mostly we just kind of forget that he was a President. That’s basically where King Tut would have been in the list of Pharaohs. But we remember him because of something that happened three thousand years after he died and because of an awful lot of coincidences that happened in between those times. Such is the nature of archaeology.
This thought in mind, let’s talk Sutton Hoo. It was a major archaeological find in exactly the same way King Tut’s Tomb was.[3] It provided a snapshot of a bit of the Anglo-Saxon culture in England at the time of the burial. Most importantly, it provided a snapshot where an awful lot of things that had not been found together were all in one place. Of course this isn’t to say that we can learn everything about the East Anglians from Sutton Hoo. But it taught us a lot more than we knew before.
There are limits to what we can learn from pure archaeology, though. Especially if there is no language to speak of. Imagine if your house were suddenly to become an archaeological site, but for whatever reason your books and junk mail and recipes or whatever you have floating around with words on it disintegrated between now and whenever it was found.[4] So those future archaeologists have to wander in a decide who you were, what your social standing was, and how you spent your life based on a lot of circumstantial evidence.[5]
If you’re Bill Cooper, of course, you won’t think about Sutton Hoo quite like this. Oh, no.
Except that East Anglia never, ever, ever…ever, was in charge of all of Britain. Ever. It was – briefly and during the time of Raedwald – possibly the most powerful of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, but it never ruled all of Britain. The other kingdoms maintained their integrities and eventually knocked it down a peg or three again. Cooper’s own genealogy should show that East Anglia never, ever took over completely. So…yeah. Although I kind of wish I was a Wuffinga. That’s an awesome family name right there.[6]
It’s possible, as I mention in footnote [6], that the so-called “Wuffing Dynasty” is actually a bastardization of a Norse clan from Sweden. If this is the case -- which I’d consider highly likely, given the connections between the Sutton Hoo burial site and Sweden (also in footnote [6]. I’m being lazy about holding together complete thoughts tonight. Sorry)[8] -- then the fascinating thing about Bill Cooper’s use of Sutton Hoo is this: it totally blows his actual argument out of the water.
I love it when he makes my (self-appointed and booze-soaked) job easier, especially when he goes and digs that hole just a little deeper. This is a direct and egregious violation of the First Rule of Holes: When you find you’re in a hole, stop digging. Of course I suppose that you need to acknowledge that you’re in a hole and Bill Cooper probably gave up on that acknowledgment the moment he said, “You know what I should do? Write a book.”
See, the primary source of the Anglo-Saxon migration idea comes from the Venerable Bede, who lived and worked at the tail-end of the 7th Century. By that point the Germanic tribes had been in charge in England for between two and three centuries. That’s a lot of slack time. And that’s a lot of time for things to get confused.
So can we say that the primary migration came from the people we think of as Angles, Saxons, and Jutes? Yes. Probably. We’ve got an awful lot of evidence. But the Scandinavians were most certainly involved. For one thing, there’s some question as to whether or not the Jutes were actually Geats. But that’s just splitting hairs.
Basically, the idea is this: the Romans never truly conquered Britain. When they withdrew from the island it created a power vacuum that really wouldn’t be properly filled until Alfred the Great, although it’s possible to argue that William the Conqueror was the one who actually managed to do it. So you had the Angle, Saxon, and Jute clans looking across the water thinking, “Hey, that looks like a pretty sweet place to go.” But you also basically had the proto-Vikings of Scandinavia.
So let’s look at Raedwald and his East Anglian kingdom. Let’s say some Angles and some Geats showed up at roughly the same time. Somehow these people intermixed and we ended up with the Angles getting the place name and the Geats getting the dynastic name. This is not a hard concept to imagine, given the idea that we’re looking at a mass migration of people who had a loose cultural connection to each other to begin with.
Then, by the time they actually start writing down their genealogies and folks like the Venerable Bede show up, time has destroyed part of the memories. So they recall, vaguely, someone named The Wolf as a semi-legendary king, when “he” was, in fact, a Geatish clan known as the Wolf Clan.[9]
For the record, it’s no crazier than Bill Cooper’s theory. And it’s backed up by a minimal amount of real-world knowledge…
----------------------------
[1]Hopefully. If you don’t, then you really, really need to re-think your education.
[2]The most famous curse, of course, being the one in King Tut’s Tomb, which supposedly ripped through Howard Carter’s entire team. The second-most-famous was the one in Imhotep’s tomb, which very nearly killed Brendan Fraser on several occasions, but ultimately did not succeed due to merchandising concerns. Then Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson took over the franchise, in what I consider “the greatest idea ever had by anyone at any time, ever.” Other than, y’know, Kitten Mittons.
Also, you know what’s awesome about The Rock? He has, as best I can tell, zero actual acting talent. He is the epitome of the “guy who plays himself.” And he’s fucking awesome at it. He’s basically been parodying his own acting career since he first showed up as the Scorpion King and didn’t have a single line.
[3]Just without the curses and whatnot.
[4]Now that I think about that, though, it’s a crazy thought. I’m looking around my living room and there’s almost nothing that doesn’t have some words written on it. Basically, future archaeologists would get a look at my couch, loveseat, coffee table, rug, and dining room table. Also my random stuffed duck that sits on my left speaker. And my talking Kick the Cheat. But the point is that the ratio of things with words:things without words is quite high. Such is the nature of living in a literate society.
This is actually one of those places where we can’t understand what it was like to live in the before times, the long long ago. We take words for granted, to the point where we don’t usually notice them. Try to conceive of living for a day in a world without written words.
I honestly cannot.
[5]Many, many years ago, like when I was 12 or something, my mother got me a copy of a book called Motel of the Mysteries about a future archaeologist discovering a motel room and attempting to excavate it. My favorite prof at WIU used that same book to start out History 301 on ancient Greece. I loved that. This is also one of those places where it seems pretty obvious to say that parents should encourage their kids to learn and read. I suppose I was somewhat precocious, but by the same token my parents were constantly buying me crazy books and encouraging me to learn. Then one day I found my college prof using one of those books my mother had randomly gotten for me years before. And I enjoyed the book a hell of a lot more the second time around because I got what it was all about.
[6]Wuffa, said ancestor who started the Wuffings, comes from the Old English word for wolf. This is also one of those fascinating things, since the family name probably means that the Wuffings were an offshoot of a Geatish clan known as the Wulfings, who were mentioned in Beowulf and a few other Norse myths. On the off chance you’re thinking, “Wait, wouldn’t that mean that the Wuffings were actually Scandinavian and not Anglo-Saxon?” you’d be right. One theory actually holds that Beowulf was composed in East Anglia.
There were actually many items in Sutton Hoo that appear to have Scandinavian origins. Artifacts at the site are linked to artifacts found at a gravesite known as Vendel at Gamla Uppsala in Sweden.[7] This points to a much more complicated story of the settlement of Britain than the simple, “The Angles, Saxons, Jutes came over and set up shop,” that we usually get. This should be surprising to no one, save, perhaps, Bill Cooper.
[7]Gamla Uppsala was also the location of the Thing of all Swedes, which was a general assembly of sorts. And, yes, the word that we use to describe random items that can’t really be properly defined descend directly from that word. Considering the current state of affairs in Congress…
[8]Hmm. That sentence included a comma splice and parenthetical thought within a hyphen within a nested clause. I’m reasonably certain I just broke the English language with that one.
[9]I’m going to go out on a limb and assume they had BattleMechs.
During the summers of 1938 and 1939, there came to light one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the century. It was the Sutton Hoo burial ship of one of the great kings of East Anglia. It is commonly believed to be that of Raedwald (or Redwald) who became Bretwalda in the year AD 616 (his name appears on the genealogy).
Now, the Sutton Hoo burial ship was a fantastic archaeological find. We’re talking King Tut’s Tomb fantastic here. So let’s talk archaeology and what Sutton Hoo means.
In order to talk Sutton Hoo we can go with something people have heard of a little more about. Like, say, King Tut’s Tomb. Specifically, why King Tut’s Tomb mattered.
We all know about the Egyptian pyramids.[1] The lesser story about the pyramids is why they disappeared towards the end of the Middle Kingdom. Basically, they were giant targets for grave robbers. See, that was the crazy thing about the Pharaohs. They were gods on Earth, but they were also paranoid, and with good cause. They built giant friggin’ mausoleums out in the desert as a way of saying, “Hey, look at me!” They then filled said mausoleums with as much shit as they could stack inside.
Said shit then got stolen. A lot. And I’m not talking about the looting of archaeological sites like we see all over in the Middle East now. I’m saying that pyramids were getting looted during ancient times. That’s why there were all kinds of crazy traps and curses inside the tombs.[2]
So they moved to the Valley of the Kings, which was only marginally more successful. And by “marginally more successful,” I mean, “rather than being entirely looted, the tombs of the Pharoahs were only mostly looted.” This is why so many people know of King Tut. It’s not that he was a great ruler, it’s that he was the only ruler who’s tomb had been found intact up until that time. Period.
Let’s move two thousand years in to the future. Pretend that in between now and then the writings of every single President have been lost save William McKinley. Future historians know that there were a bunch of Presidents and have a general idea who they were, when they were in office, and what the fortunes of the United States were under them. But then they find a stash of letters written by William McKinley and all of the sudden they’re all, “Holy crap, we know something specific!” That’s what King Tut’s Tomb is all about.
William McKinley never makes the list of the best Presidents, nor does he make the list of the worst Presidents. Mostly we just kind of forget that he was a President. That’s basically where King Tut would have been in the list of Pharaohs. But we remember him because of something that happened three thousand years after he died and because of an awful lot of coincidences that happened in between those times. Such is the nature of archaeology.
This thought in mind, let’s talk Sutton Hoo. It was a major archaeological find in exactly the same way King Tut’s Tomb was.[3] It provided a snapshot of a bit of the Anglo-Saxon culture in England at the time of the burial. Most importantly, it provided a snapshot where an awful lot of things that had not been found together were all in one place. Of course this isn’t to say that we can learn everything about the East Anglians from Sutton Hoo. But it taught us a lot more than we knew before.
There are limits to what we can learn from pure archaeology, though. Especially if there is no language to speak of. Imagine if your house were suddenly to become an archaeological site, but for whatever reason your books and junk mail and recipes or whatever you have floating around with words on it disintegrated between now and whenever it was found.[4] So those future archaeologists have to wander in a decide who you were, what your social standing was, and how you spent your life based on a lot of circumstantial evidence.[5]
If you’re Bill Cooper, of course, you won’t think about Sutton Hoo quite like this. Oh, no.
The royal title of Bretwalda appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (MS. C - British Museum Cotton MS. Tiberius. B. i.) as Bretenanwealda, and means literally the one ruler of Britain. In other words, Raedwald was the supreme king to whom all the other provincial kings owed obeisance. Now Bede (4) tells us that Raedwald was born of the Wuffingas, as were all the East Anglian kings, and it is this title that tells us something of the seriousness with which the Anglo-Saxons kept their pedigrees.
Except that East Anglia never, ever, ever…ever, was in charge of all of Britain. Ever. It was – briefly and during the time of Raedwald – possibly the most powerful of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, but it never ruled all of Britain. The other kingdoms maintained their integrities and eventually knocked it down a peg or three again. Cooper’s own genealogy should show that East Anglia never, ever took over completely. So…yeah. Although I kind of wish I was a Wuffinga. That’s an awesome family name right there.[6]
It’s possible, as I mention in footnote [6], that the so-called “Wuffing Dynasty” is actually a bastardization of a Norse clan from Sweden. If this is the case -- which I’d consider highly likely, given the connections between the Sutton Hoo burial site and Sweden (also in footnote [6]. I’m being lazy about holding together complete thoughts tonight. Sorry)[8] -- then the fascinating thing about Bill Cooper’s use of Sutton Hoo is this: it totally blows his actual argument out of the water.
I love it when he makes my (self-appointed and booze-soaked) job easier, especially when he goes and digs that hole just a little deeper. This is a direct and egregious violation of the First Rule of Holes: When you find you’re in a hole, stop digging. Of course I suppose that you need to acknowledge that you’re in a hole and Bill Cooper probably gave up on that acknowledgment the moment he said, “You know what I should do? Write a book.”
See, the primary source of the Anglo-Saxon migration idea comes from the Venerable Bede, who lived and worked at the tail-end of the 7th Century. By that point the Germanic tribes had been in charge in England for between two and three centuries. That’s a lot of slack time. And that’s a lot of time for things to get confused.
So can we say that the primary migration came from the people we think of as Angles, Saxons, and Jutes? Yes. Probably. We’ve got an awful lot of evidence. But the Scandinavians were most certainly involved. For one thing, there’s some question as to whether or not the Jutes were actually Geats. But that’s just splitting hairs.
Basically, the idea is this: the Romans never truly conquered Britain. When they withdrew from the island it created a power vacuum that really wouldn’t be properly filled until Alfred the Great, although it’s possible to argue that William the Conqueror was the one who actually managed to do it. So you had the Angle, Saxon, and Jute clans looking across the water thinking, “Hey, that looks like a pretty sweet place to go.” But you also basically had the proto-Vikings of Scandinavia.
So let’s look at Raedwald and his East Anglian kingdom. Let’s say some Angles and some Geats showed up at roughly the same time. Somehow these people intermixed and we ended up with the Angles getting the place name and the Geats getting the dynastic name. This is not a hard concept to imagine, given the idea that we’re looking at a mass migration of people who had a loose cultural connection to each other to begin with.
Then, by the time they actually start writing down their genealogies and folks like the Venerable Bede show up, time has destroyed part of the memories. So they recall, vaguely, someone named The Wolf as a semi-legendary king, when “he” was, in fact, a Geatish clan known as the Wolf Clan.[9]
For the record, it’s no crazier than Bill Cooper’s theory. And it’s backed up by a minimal amount of real-world knowledge…
----------------------------
[1]Hopefully. If you don’t, then you really, really need to re-think your education.
[2]The most famous curse, of course, being the one in King Tut’s Tomb, which supposedly ripped through Howard Carter’s entire team. The second-most-famous was the one in Imhotep’s tomb, which very nearly killed Brendan Fraser on several occasions, but ultimately did not succeed due to merchandising concerns. Then Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson took over the franchise, in what I consider “the greatest idea ever had by anyone at any time, ever.” Other than, y’know, Kitten Mittons.
Also, you know what’s awesome about The Rock? He has, as best I can tell, zero actual acting talent. He is the epitome of the “guy who plays himself.” And he’s fucking awesome at it. He’s basically been parodying his own acting career since he first showed up as the Scorpion King and didn’t have a single line.
[3]Just without the curses and whatnot.
[4]Now that I think about that, though, it’s a crazy thought. I’m looking around my living room and there’s almost nothing that doesn’t have some words written on it. Basically, future archaeologists would get a look at my couch, loveseat, coffee table, rug, and dining room table. Also my random stuffed duck that sits on my left speaker. And my talking Kick the Cheat. But the point is that the ratio of things with words:things without words is quite high. Such is the nature of living in a literate society.
This is actually one of those places where we can’t understand what it was like to live in the before times, the long long ago. We take words for granted, to the point where we don’t usually notice them. Try to conceive of living for a day in a world without written words.
I honestly cannot.
[5]Many, many years ago, like when I was 12 or something, my mother got me a copy of a book called Motel of the Mysteries about a future archaeologist discovering a motel room and attempting to excavate it. My favorite prof at WIU used that same book to start out History 301 on ancient Greece. I loved that. This is also one of those places where it seems pretty obvious to say that parents should encourage their kids to learn and read. I suppose I was somewhat precocious, but by the same token my parents were constantly buying me crazy books and encouraging me to learn. Then one day I found my college prof using one of those books my mother had randomly gotten for me years before. And I enjoyed the book a hell of a lot more the second time around because I got what it was all about.
[6]Wuffa, said ancestor who started the Wuffings, comes from the Old English word for wolf. This is also one of those fascinating things, since the family name probably means that the Wuffings were an offshoot of a Geatish clan known as the Wulfings, who were mentioned in Beowulf and a few other Norse myths. On the off chance you’re thinking, “Wait, wouldn’t that mean that the Wuffings were actually Scandinavian and not Anglo-Saxon?” you’d be right. One theory actually holds that Beowulf was composed in East Anglia.
There were actually many items in Sutton Hoo that appear to have Scandinavian origins. Artifacts at the site are linked to artifacts found at a gravesite known as Vendel at Gamla Uppsala in Sweden.[7] This points to a much more complicated story of the settlement of Britain than the simple, “The Angles, Saxons, Jutes came over and set up shop,” that we usually get. This should be surprising to no one, save, perhaps, Bill Cooper.
[7]Gamla Uppsala was also the location of the Thing of all Swedes, which was a general assembly of sorts. And, yes, the word that we use to describe random items that can’t really be properly defined descend directly from that word. Considering the current state of affairs in Congress…
[8]Hmm. That sentence included a comma splice and parenthetical thought within a hyphen within a nested clause. I’m reasonably certain I just broke the English language with that one.
[9]I’m going to go out on a limb and assume they had BattleMechs.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Rule Number One
Down in Texas where guns and guitars
Are the friends that man loves best
You might feel like your spinning wheels
Are truly headed West
Someone said the best we can hope for
Is to make a beautiful mess
And I put my soul up for sale
And the whole world asked
Could you take any less?
--Over the Rhine, “Last Night on Earth Again”
Rule Number One of my life is pretty simple.
Don’t get too attached.
I say it’s “Drink Local,” but that’s really Rule Number Two, since Rule Number One always seems like one of those things not to say. Some of the worst things about this life we all are forced to lead can be summed up by looking at Rule Number One. Everyone and everything leaves at some point. This, I’m forced to admit, includes me. I hold on to things for far, far too long because I want to believe that I can, somehow, overcome the simple truth that everything ends. But in the end there’s that one rule.
Don’t get too attached.
---------------------
I’m supposed to go back to Chicago for the first time since I moved in a couple weeks. I’ve been dreaming about that return since, basically, the moment my Chevy and I hit southbound 55 out of Brookfield.
Now I don’t want to get on that plane and fly north.
I’d rather get in my Mazda and drive West.
I have no idea what I’d do when I get there. I don’t know where “there” is. I’m just assuming that at some point I’d run out of road. When you run out of road there are three options: you can go back the way you came, find a different direction, or keep going straight and see what happens.
---------------------
I shouldn’t be allowed in to animal shelters.
I fall in love with abandoned dogs too quickly. I just want to take them all home and hug them. Even if a dog that I want to rescue has been adopted there’s always another. Next week. Next month. Forever.
It depresses me. It leaves me feeling helpless.
---------------------
I’ve come to understand my tendency to fall for what I call “Crazy Girls.” It’s a specific neuroticism. On my part. I want to be the hero. I want to save the day.
At the end of the day, though, someone gets abandoned. I can never tell who abandons and who is abandoned, though.
I’m beginning to fear that it’s me who will always do the abandoning, though. Such is the nature of Rule Number One.
----------------------
It’s a strange thing, living my life. I suppose I’m successful. I have all the accoutrements that indicate success. I park that new car of mine outside of the apartment I’ve filled with gadgets and toys and books. I get updates about my 401(k) in the mail. I get a paycheck that’s more than enough to purchase all of the things I need and most of the things I want.
But that new car, that apartment full of toys, that 401(k), that paycheck all serve to create a life I don’t want, I don’t need. They trap me.
They trap me because I bought in to the idea that all of these things matter. They trap me because I keep thinking I can justify my entrapment by showing ever more success. But my life now has to follow me around on a truck. My things own me.
The life I never wanted forces me to continue living it.
----------------------
A wealthy man walked up to the prophet one day and asked how he could get in to Heaven.
The prophet replied, “Sell off all you have and give the proceeds to the poor.”
The rich man walked away unhappy, for he wanted his things more than he wanted Heaven. When he was out of earshot, the prophet turned back to the crowd and said, “It is easier for a camel to travel through the eye of a needle than a rich man to make it to Heaven.”
A murmur began in the crowd. For the crowd, you see, wanted Heaven, but they also wanted riches.
The prophet saw their discomfort and asked them why they complained so.
One man stepped forward and said, “But I need to put food on the table and my children through school. I have a cell phone bill and cable TV and that unlimited 3G data plan for my new iPad doesn’t pay for itself. All of these things are necessary for me to live here. I can’t be waiting for Heaven until the day I die.”
The prophet smiled, for he had heard all of these arguments before. “Were you not there?” he asked, “That day in the synagogue where I walked in and said that the Kingdom of God is here, now? Were you not here when I said that I was building it on this Earth?
“How can we build Heaven on Earth together if we insist on trapping ourselves in our own personal Hells?”
The crowd slowly melted away, even unhappier than before. For as much as they wanted to find their way to Heaven, they also wanted easy answers. Everyone else had promised them easy answers if they just had enough money or lacked enough sense.
So they went away and tried to forget the prophet’s words. They bought 58” LCD TVs that were as thin as a sheet of paper and were happy for a while. Then when that brief bit of euphoria wore off their new 58” TVs told them that if they bought a new BMW 5-Series they’d be happy, then the iPhone 5, the XBOX 720, that new mp3 player that could literally store every song ever recorded, every podcast ever made, and have enough room left over for all the porn on the internet.
But those things only temporarily made them happy. At night on their adjustable memory foam beds they lay awake and stared at their ceilings, unable to forget the words of the prophet.
So they bought season tickets and hoped that a championship season would satisfy them. They sought out gourmet chefs and the best wine in the hope they’d fill themselves to the point where they’d forget it all. But they never forgot the words of the prophet.
Every day the bills came. Every month they did the math, came up just short or with just enough. Every year they dreamed of that big raise, that big promotion, that new job that would finally provide them with all they needed.
All the while the prophet spent his days wandering on his single pair of sandals, wearing his single cloak, sleeping under the stars.
Every night while the crowd stared at their ceilings the prophet slept soundly.
------------------------------------
Perhaps I need a different Rule Number One. Maybe “Don’t get too attached to the wrong things” would have been better.
But I fear that I no longer know what the right things are.
I fear that there are no right things.
Mostly, though, I’m just afraid.
What happens if I reduce my life to the absolute necessities and travel about as I see fit, then one day find myself reaching the end of that road and wondering why I ever left my comfortable apartment and all my toys for a life of senseless wandering? What if it turns out that the things that seem like the right answers now just seem that way because I’m so tired of the answers I’ve always chased?
That other life always seems so shiny, so worthwhile, when your own is dusty and boring.
It’s why the new convert is a zealot.
It’s also why the new convert is always so damn annoying to the people who have been trudging along for so long.
Are the friends that man loves best
You might feel like your spinning wheels
Are truly headed West
Someone said the best we can hope for
Is to make a beautiful mess
And I put my soul up for sale
And the whole world asked
Could you take any less?
--Over the Rhine, “Last Night on Earth Again”
Rule Number One of my life is pretty simple.
Don’t get too attached.
I say it’s “Drink Local,” but that’s really Rule Number Two, since Rule Number One always seems like one of those things not to say. Some of the worst things about this life we all are forced to lead can be summed up by looking at Rule Number One. Everyone and everything leaves at some point. This, I’m forced to admit, includes me. I hold on to things for far, far too long because I want to believe that I can, somehow, overcome the simple truth that everything ends. But in the end there’s that one rule.
Don’t get too attached.
---------------------
I’m supposed to go back to Chicago for the first time since I moved in a couple weeks. I’ve been dreaming about that return since, basically, the moment my Chevy and I hit southbound 55 out of Brookfield.
Now I don’t want to get on that plane and fly north.
I’d rather get in my Mazda and drive West.
I have no idea what I’d do when I get there. I don’t know where “there” is. I’m just assuming that at some point I’d run out of road. When you run out of road there are three options: you can go back the way you came, find a different direction, or keep going straight and see what happens.
---------------------
I shouldn’t be allowed in to animal shelters.
I fall in love with abandoned dogs too quickly. I just want to take them all home and hug them. Even if a dog that I want to rescue has been adopted there’s always another. Next week. Next month. Forever.
It depresses me. It leaves me feeling helpless.
---------------------
I’ve come to understand my tendency to fall for what I call “Crazy Girls.” It’s a specific neuroticism. On my part. I want to be the hero. I want to save the day.
At the end of the day, though, someone gets abandoned. I can never tell who abandons and who is abandoned, though.
I’m beginning to fear that it’s me who will always do the abandoning, though. Such is the nature of Rule Number One.
----------------------
It’s a strange thing, living my life. I suppose I’m successful. I have all the accoutrements that indicate success. I park that new car of mine outside of the apartment I’ve filled with gadgets and toys and books. I get updates about my 401(k) in the mail. I get a paycheck that’s more than enough to purchase all of the things I need and most of the things I want.
But that new car, that apartment full of toys, that 401(k), that paycheck all serve to create a life I don’t want, I don’t need. They trap me.
They trap me because I bought in to the idea that all of these things matter. They trap me because I keep thinking I can justify my entrapment by showing ever more success. But my life now has to follow me around on a truck. My things own me.
The life I never wanted forces me to continue living it.
----------------------
A wealthy man walked up to the prophet one day and asked how he could get in to Heaven.
The prophet replied, “Sell off all you have and give the proceeds to the poor.”
The rich man walked away unhappy, for he wanted his things more than he wanted Heaven. When he was out of earshot, the prophet turned back to the crowd and said, “It is easier for a camel to travel through the eye of a needle than a rich man to make it to Heaven.”
A murmur began in the crowd. For the crowd, you see, wanted Heaven, but they also wanted riches.
The prophet saw their discomfort and asked them why they complained so.
One man stepped forward and said, “But I need to put food on the table and my children through school. I have a cell phone bill and cable TV and that unlimited 3G data plan for my new iPad doesn’t pay for itself. All of these things are necessary for me to live here. I can’t be waiting for Heaven until the day I die.”
The prophet smiled, for he had heard all of these arguments before. “Were you not there?” he asked, “That day in the synagogue where I walked in and said that the Kingdom of God is here, now? Were you not here when I said that I was building it on this Earth?
“How can we build Heaven on Earth together if we insist on trapping ourselves in our own personal Hells?”
The crowd slowly melted away, even unhappier than before. For as much as they wanted to find their way to Heaven, they also wanted easy answers. Everyone else had promised them easy answers if they just had enough money or lacked enough sense.
So they went away and tried to forget the prophet’s words. They bought 58” LCD TVs that were as thin as a sheet of paper and were happy for a while. Then when that brief bit of euphoria wore off their new 58” TVs told them that if they bought a new BMW 5-Series they’d be happy, then the iPhone 5, the XBOX 720, that new mp3 player that could literally store every song ever recorded, every podcast ever made, and have enough room left over for all the porn on the internet.
But those things only temporarily made them happy. At night on their adjustable memory foam beds they lay awake and stared at their ceilings, unable to forget the words of the prophet.
So they bought season tickets and hoped that a championship season would satisfy them. They sought out gourmet chefs and the best wine in the hope they’d fill themselves to the point where they’d forget it all. But they never forgot the words of the prophet.
Every day the bills came. Every month they did the math, came up just short or with just enough. Every year they dreamed of that big raise, that big promotion, that new job that would finally provide them with all they needed.
All the while the prophet spent his days wandering on his single pair of sandals, wearing his single cloak, sleeping under the stars.
Every night while the crowd stared at their ceilings the prophet slept soundly.
------------------------------------
Perhaps I need a different Rule Number One. Maybe “Don’t get too attached to the wrong things” would have been better.
But I fear that I no longer know what the right things are.
I fear that there are no right things.
Mostly, though, I’m just afraid.
What happens if I reduce my life to the absolute necessities and travel about as I see fit, then one day find myself reaching the end of that road and wondering why I ever left my comfortable apartment and all my toys for a life of senseless wandering? What if it turns out that the things that seem like the right answers now just seem that way because I’m so tired of the answers I’ve always chased?
That other life always seems so shiny, so worthwhile, when your own is dusty and boring.
It’s why the new convert is a zealot.
It’s also why the new convert is always so damn annoying to the people who have been trudging along for so long.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Update for the Sake of Updating
So I'm too tired to write about the Council of Nicaea. I'm also too tired to write about trickster gods, which is what I was kinda-sorta working on. I have another post worked up about the general awesomeness of storytelling and Neil Gaiman, but it hasn't really jelled yet.
Instead of doing actual work, then, I think I'll just write a quick update post.
Next Saturday. Lost Immigrants. The place is called Love and War in Texas and it's off of north bound 75 in Plano. Seeing as how the building seems to be actually made out of neon signage, I doubt you can miss it (Michael Mock, I'm looking at you. Also, it's right by the Fry's. And it's made out of neon signs).The band's website say they go on at 8 pm. And it's $8.
Either way, Big A says he may or may not be available later on, as he works at night. Michael Mock seems down. I'm hoping Fake Al Gore is, y'know, not going to be in Colorado.
Still, I'm thinking perhaps dinner and hanging out, if anyone is interested. Some time in the neighborhood of six-thirty-ish, I'd say. And this time there's about a 90% chance I won't get confused by the parking structure, so I might even be there when I say I'll be there...
Also, other random Dallas-area people who may or may not be reading this blog and enjoy really good music of the neo-traditional/Americana variety should also go. The Lost Immigrants are really quite good.
------------------------------
Meanwhile, on the list of things that kinda-sorta piss me off about not living in Chicago:
A Chicago musician named Matthew Leone was recently hospitalized. A shitload of Chicago bands decided to hold a benefit. Sunday actually marked one of my dream concerts: Local H and the Lovehammers on the same goddamn stage. Not only that, but they went on at the same time and played a cover of "Baba O'Riley."
Seriously. If anyone is willing to point me to a YouTube video of that, I'll be eternally grateful.
-----------------------
Also, on a totally unrelated note: I've resigned myself to the idea that I'll be spending my thirtieth birthday in Dallas. This kinda-sorta depresses me. Um, I'd like to be out of Dallas by early 2012, ideally. I've decided that if the world is going to end in 2012, I'd rather see it end from somewhere else...
I don't generally do birthday parties. I believe part of the problem is that I historically have not had a lot of friends and I don't like hanging out with large groups of people. However, I'm thinking of doing something different for 30. This is, admittedly, nine months away, but hey...
See, I got to thinking about this specifically because I went to see Local H on my 28th and the Lost Immigrants on my 29th. So I was thinking, "Hey, birthday concert. That'd be fucking awesome." Perhaps, y'know, invite Jessi Lynn on down, see if the Lost Immigrants were available or Seneca was over on this side of the pond in May.
Then I realized that I live in a two-bedroom apartment and do not so much have a venue for such things.
I can't tell you how much it sucks to not be excruciatingly rich. So, basically, if I win the Lottery (which would be tough, since I don't so much play the Lottery...) between now and then and find myself in a place where I'm stupid rich, I'm going to have a sweet party. Seriously, this would be my ultimate birthday lineup:
Jessi Lynn
Seneca
Lost Immigrants
Mike Doughty
Lovehammers
Local H
RCPM
Also, it's entirely possible that Idlewild, the Saw Doctors, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden would be involved in the Real Ultimate Power Birthday Lineup, but that would be one hell of a birthday Gedstravaganza. And even my imaginary Lotto winnings scenario doesn't have enough funds for that. And I'd need more hangers-on to really justify it. And if it gets too big the sets would have to be really short, it would have to be stretched over two days, or there would need to be multiple stages, which would kind of defeat the purpose. So that's tough.
And, now that I think about it, my musical tastes are really bizarre. But, okay, let me see if I can turn this in to an even more pointless thought experiment. There'd be three sets.
First, the singer-songwriter set, consisting of Jessi Lynn, Matt Nathanson, Over the Rhine, and Mike Doughty.
Second, the roots rock set, consisting of the Lost Immigrants, Saw Doctors, the Peacemakers, and Pearl Jam.[1]
Third, the rock goodness set, consisting of Seneca, the Lovehammers, Local H, Idlewild, and Soundgarden.[2]
Why do I get the feeling that if I woke up a billionaire tomorrow I wouldn't actually change much in the way of my living habits, but I'd get in to the habit of, say, paying Idlewild a stupid amount of money to fly over and throw a private concert?
That would be awesome.
Also, I literally have no clue why I just wrote this part of a post that was supposed to be a really quick update. This is apparently what happens when I feel like writing but don't have the brain power to write anything, y'know, worthwhile.
---------------------------
[1]Pearl Jam doesn't technically fit here, but of the major grunge acts they were definitely the folk-iest. And the rock goodness set is just too long as it is. Even so, I've seen the Saw Doctors and Peacemakers do two and a half hour sets and, although I haven't personally witnessed one, I know Pearl Jam will do up to three hours. So even at that it's a long night.
[2]At this point I'm thinking that there's only one thing that needs to be done here. Throw Flogging Molly, the Fratellis, Green Day, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Randy Rogers Band, Cross Canadian Ragweed, and Reckless Kelly in here and call it "Gedsapalooza." It'll be about a thousand times better than this year's Lollapalooza was. Plus it will have this bizarre Chicago rock/Texas Country vibe that literally makes sense to only me.
Why can't I be an eccentric billionaire? I'd probably leave random waitresses $100 tips for cups of coffee, adopt all the dogs in dog shelters, and engage in the creation of whimsically bizarre music festivals. I sure as shit wouldn't go out and destroy the Gulf of Mexico, create human centipedes, or talk about how I give to charity because, um, you should see my tax returns...
EDIT:
Holy mother of awesomeness. It's on YouTube. Except the cameraperson obviously did not understand that Scott Lucas was the most important person on that stage...
Instead of doing actual work, then, I think I'll just write a quick update post.
Next Saturday. Lost Immigrants. The place is called Love and War in Texas and it's off of north bound 75 in Plano. Seeing as how the building seems to be actually made out of neon signage, I doubt you can miss it (Michael Mock, I'm looking at you. Also, it's right by the Fry's. And it's made out of neon signs).The band's website say they go on at 8 pm. And it's $8.
Either way, Big A says he may or may not be available later on, as he works at night. Michael Mock seems down. I'm hoping Fake Al Gore is, y'know, not going to be in Colorado.
Still, I'm thinking perhaps dinner and hanging out, if anyone is interested. Some time in the neighborhood of six-thirty-ish, I'd say. And this time there's about a 90% chance I won't get confused by the parking structure, so I might even be there when I say I'll be there...
Also, other random Dallas-area people who may or may not be reading this blog and enjoy really good music of the neo-traditional/Americana variety should also go. The Lost Immigrants are really quite good.
------------------------------
Meanwhile, on the list of things that kinda-sorta piss me off about not living in Chicago:
A Chicago musician named Matthew Leone was recently hospitalized. A shitload of Chicago bands decided to hold a benefit. Sunday actually marked one of my dream concerts: Local H and the Lovehammers on the same goddamn stage. Not only that, but they went on at the same time and played a cover of "Baba O'Riley."
Seriously. If anyone is willing to point me to a YouTube video of that, I'll be eternally grateful.
-----------------------
Also, on a totally unrelated note: I've resigned myself to the idea that I'll be spending my thirtieth birthday in Dallas. This kinda-sorta depresses me. Um, I'd like to be out of Dallas by early 2012, ideally. I've decided that if the world is going to end in 2012, I'd rather see it end from somewhere else...
I don't generally do birthday parties. I believe part of the problem is that I historically have not had a lot of friends and I don't like hanging out with large groups of people. However, I'm thinking of doing something different for 30. This is, admittedly, nine months away, but hey...
See, I got to thinking about this specifically because I went to see Local H on my 28th and the Lost Immigrants on my 29th. So I was thinking, "Hey, birthday concert. That'd be fucking awesome." Perhaps, y'know, invite Jessi Lynn on down, see if the Lost Immigrants were available or Seneca was over on this side of the pond in May.
Then I realized that I live in a two-bedroom apartment and do not so much have a venue for such things.
I can't tell you how much it sucks to not be excruciatingly rich. So, basically, if I win the Lottery (which would be tough, since I don't so much play the Lottery...) between now and then and find myself in a place where I'm stupid rich, I'm going to have a sweet party. Seriously, this would be my ultimate birthday lineup:
Jessi Lynn
Seneca
Lost Immigrants
Mike Doughty
Lovehammers
Local H
RCPM
Also, it's entirely possible that Idlewild, the Saw Doctors, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden would be involved in the Real Ultimate Power Birthday Lineup, but that would be one hell of a birthday Gedstravaganza. And even my imaginary Lotto winnings scenario doesn't have enough funds for that. And I'd need more hangers-on to really justify it. And if it gets too big the sets would have to be really short, it would have to be stretched over two days, or there would need to be multiple stages, which would kind of defeat the purpose. So that's tough.
And, now that I think about it, my musical tastes are really bizarre. But, okay, let me see if I can turn this in to an even more pointless thought experiment. There'd be three sets.
First, the singer-songwriter set, consisting of Jessi Lynn, Matt Nathanson, Over the Rhine, and Mike Doughty.
Second, the roots rock set, consisting of the Lost Immigrants, Saw Doctors, the Peacemakers, and Pearl Jam.[1]
Third, the rock goodness set, consisting of Seneca, the Lovehammers, Local H, Idlewild, and Soundgarden.[2]
Why do I get the feeling that if I woke up a billionaire tomorrow I wouldn't actually change much in the way of my living habits, but I'd get in to the habit of, say, paying Idlewild a stupid amount of money to fly over and throw a private concert?
That would be awesome.
Also, I literally have no clue why I just wrote this part of a post that was supposed to be a really quick update. This is apparently what happens when I feel like writing but don't have the brain power to write anything, y'know, worthwhile.
---------------------------
[1]Pearl Jam doesn't technically fit here, but of the major grunge acts they were definitely the folk-iest. And the rock goodness set is just too long as it is. Even so, I've seen the Saw Doctors and Peacemakers do two and a half hour sets and, although I haven't personally witnessed one, I know Pearl Jam will do up to three hours. So even at that it's a long night.
[2]At this point I'm thinking that there's only one thing that needs to be done here. Throw Flogging Molly, the Fratellis, Green Day, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Randy Rogers Band, Cross Canadian Ragweed, and Reckless Kelly in here and call it "Gedsapalooza." It'll be about a thousand times better than this year's Lollapalooza was. Plus it will have this bizarre Chicago rock/Texas Country vibe that literally makes sense to only me.
Why can't I be an eccentric billionaire? I'd probably leave random waitresses $100 tips for cups of coffee, adopt all the dogs in dog shelters, and engage in the creation of whimsically bizarre music festivals. I sure as shit wouldn't go out and destroy the Gulf of Mexico, create human centipedes, or talk about how I give to charity because, um, you should see my tax returns...
EDIT:
Holy mother of awesomeness. It's on YouTube. Except the cameraperson obviously did not understand that Scott Lucas was the most important person on that stage...
Sunday, August 22, 2010
AtF: Wherein Geds Discusses Beards
So, as we covered last time on After the Flood, Bill Cooper’s prized Anglo-Saxon genealogy is a work of imagination and myth. It’s now time to figure out why Cooper thinks it’s a worthwhile pursuit.
By now we should all know exactly how I’m going to respond to this. In fact, now that I’m thinking about it, I’m going to let everyone else do the heavy lifting. Look over the previous explanation and ask yourself, “What would Geds say while bitching about this?” If it helps, pour yourself a nice bourbon.[1]
Anyway once you’ve decided what I would say, feel free to go down to footnote two. You’ll have your answers.[2] I’ll wait. I have delicious bourbon at my disposal. While we’re waiting, perhaps I should discuss facial hair.
See, I grew a beard several years ago. At the time I was in the habit of naming random objects in my possession, mostly of the computer and car nature.
Anyway, I was still with (for whatever definition of “with” you want to use) Her at the time. I don’t remember how, precisely, it came up. Either I said I needed a name for my beard or she asked if I was planning on doing so. Either way, I was immediately forbidden from naming my beard. This, of course, meant that it needed to be named, specifically the most absurd thing that came to mind.[3]
Right then and there I named my beard “Lorna.” It was not a well-received decision.[4]
Some time after I moved to Texas I decided I needed a change. You know, beyond, “Hey, I just moved a thousand miles away.” This was also before I bought a new car in a fit of, y’know, even more change. Either way, I switched from the full beard to the goatee. I promptly named my goatee, “Lorna, Jr.”
A few weeks ago tragedy struck. My hand slipped while I was trimming Lorna, Jr. and I was forced to go clean-shaven. The following day at work my co-workers were rather adamant in their insistence that I look better while clean-shaven. It also occurred to me that clean-shaven is actually much lower maintenance than a goatee.[5]
I was thinking of going with the porn ‘stache. But, um…no.
Anyway, where was I? Oh, right. I was talking about Bill Cooper and his somehow-less-edifying-than-my-stories-about-facial-hair bullshit. Also, that was a lot of hyphens. But I digress. His good buddy the Baron Waldstein continues:
Yuh huh.
In case anyone’s wondering, the Baron Waldstein was an eighteen year-old Moravian tourist in England. There’s about a 103% chance that he didn’t have the historical background to understand what he was seeing, assuming that he was even attempting to skeptically analyze the things he saw.
Cooper then goes to beat that most familiar drum.
I don’t generally include the footnote pointers, but that footnote number 3 points to a book called The Rise of the Evolution Fraud. It’s got two five-star reviews on Amazon! Also, it’s got two reviews on Amazon!
Anyway, this is tiring, really. I tossed in the facial hair stuff not because I thought it was interesting, but because I thought it was more interesting than, “Cooper sees anti-Christian conspiracies everywhere: film at 11.” Although it is kind of funny the way he seems to find it necessary to vary his attacks against, y’know, real historians. This time anyone who dares suggest that the Anglo-Saxons didn’t directly descend from Adam “delighted to call themselves Rationalists.”
First of all, if we’re talking Rationalists, um, they were around before the 18th Century. There was this guy named Descartes and this other guy named Spinoza, for instance. I’m just going to take a shot in the dark and say that this is a veiled shot at David Hume, which is kind of funny, since Hume wasn’t really a Rationalist and, in fact, was the one who influenced Kant’s thinking enough to lead to the writing of the Critique of Pure Reason. Hume was an empiricist and a historian who can probably be credited with an awful lot of the changes in British history Cooper rails against, however.
Second, “delighted?” Really? That particular word choice bugs me for some reason.
Either way, we’re just about to start having fun.
You know what’s really confusing? The question of why the Anglo-Saxons were recording their genealogies in Latin. Although I suppose we could offer the benefit of the doubt and say that it was later scribes recording in Latin. So…yeah. Let’s move on.
Um, yes. I am, actually, asking you to believe that the lists were made up. If we go back two weeks, we’ll see that actual historians have found that this is exactly what happened. The term “East Anglia” didn’t exist until the 800s. Northumbria was a kingdom that came in to being with the merging of two other kingdoms. And, in both of those cases, the “houses” are named after geographic locations and would, therefore, not have been the names of anyone or anything until well after the migration. And with the story of the genealogy of Alfred the Great of Wessex being stolen from Ida of Bernicia I introduced you to the Sisam Hypothesis, which introduced the possibility that, yes, the Anglo-Saxons stole genealogies from each other.
Either way, I’ll cut things short here. I’m just too damned sober to handle the next bit…
-------------------------
[1]The alcohol of choice tonight is Buffalo Trace. I also have Rahr & Sons Buffalo Butt beer at my disposal. I was in a very Buffalo-y mood during my last alcohol purchase. Also, Rahr & Sons was having some problems this spring after a storm blew their roof off or something. It’s good that they’re back up and running.
[2]First: Just because something was once common knowledge does not mean it’s correct. It was once common knowledge that there was nothing between Europe and Asia but unnavigable ocean. It was also once common knowledge that the Americas were a part of Asia. Also, there was a long period of time where people thought there was a flood that covered the entire Earth. But no one takes that seriously any…oh…wait.
Second: There is an assertion that the Anglo-Saxon genealogies were once common knowledge. Assertion without proof is useless.
Third: The Anglo-Saxon genealogy offered by Cooper as evidence ends in 899. Anglo-Saxon domination of Britain ends, by necessity, in 1066. A genealogy seen buy a guy in 1600 means next to nothing without corroborating documents. The fact that he saw it on a Thursday, meanwhile, means jack shit. That’s the sort of detail one adds in when attempting to bolster a bad argument with arguments that sound accurate.
Fourth: The diary entry, or whatever it was, doesn’t even say anything other than, “I saw this one thing.” It has no citations and offers no reproduction. So we can’t know if it even supported Cooper’s fanciful genealogy from just above it. Considering that I’ve seen several different Anglo-Saxon genealogies in the past couple weeks, I strongly suspect it mostly doesn’t.
Fifth: Once again, even if the genealogy is accurate to the Anglo-Saxon migration to Britain, that doesn’t mean it’s accurate to the time of Noah. Especially when you’re looking at a genealogy that only goes back SEVENTEEN GENERATIONS.
Seriously. Math. How does that work?
[3]I still haven’t really decided if this was a sign that the relationship was a turrible idea or that the idea of dating me is a turrible idea for, well, anyone.
[4]I once knew a guy who had a beard named Lorna. She had the worst gay-dar in history. But that’s a story for another day…
[5]At one point my boss asked if I was planning on sticking with the clean-shaved thing. I said I was going to for a little while, since the goatee is really the second-highest maintenance form of beard. She asked what the highest maintenance beard is. I said, “The beard of bees. I mean, you’ve got to keep them fed and constantly carry epi-pens around with you.”
There’s about a 90% chance I shouldn’t be allowed out in public.
To be fair, the Saxons do not seem to have brought over with them a detailed chronicled history of their nation like that possessed by the Britons or, indeed, the Irish Celts which we shall examine later. That is not to say that none existed, of course just that none has survived to the present day from that pre-emigration period. What has survived, however, is a detailed genealogy of the pre-migration, and hence pre-Christian, kings of the Saxons, and this enables us to take Saxon history back, generation by generation, to the earliest years after the Flood. But this is no new discovery. It was everyday knowledge to the historians of previous centuries. On Thursday 6th July 1600, for example, a certain Elizabethan tourist, Baron Waldstein, visited London's Lambeth Palace. His journal tells us that in one of the rooms there he saw:
'...a splendid genealogy of all the Kings of England, and another genealogy, a historical one, which covers the whole of time and is traced down from the Beginning of the World.'
By now we should all know exactly how I’m going to respond to this. In fact, now that I’m thinking about it, I’m going to let everyone else do the heavy lifting. Look over the previous explanation and ask yourself, “What would Geds say while bitching about this?” If it helps, pour yourself a nice bourbon.[1]
Anyway once you’ve decided what I would say, feel free to go down to footnote two. You’ll have your answers.[2] I’ll wait. I have delicious bourbon at my disposal. While we’re waiting, perhaps I should discuss facial hair.
See, I grew a beard several years ago. At the time I was in the habit of naming random objects in my possession, mostly of the computer and car nature.
Anyway, I was still with (for whatever definition of “with” you want to use) Her at the time. I don’t remember how, precisely, it came up. Either I said I needed a name for my beard or she asked if I was planning on doing so. Either way, I was immediately forbidden from naming my beard. This, of course, meant that it needed to be named, specifically the most absurd thing that came to mind.[3]
Right then and there I named my beard “Lorna.” It was not a well-received decision.[4]
Some time after I moved to Texas I decided I needed a change. You know, beyond, “Hey, I just moved a thousand miles away.” This was also before I bought a new car in a fit of, y’know, even more change. Either way, I switched from the full beard to the goatee. I promptly named my goatee, “Lorna, Jr.”
A few weeks ago tragedy struck. My hand slipped while I was trimming Lorna, Jr. and I was forced to go clean-shaven. The following day at work my co-workers were rather adamant in their insistence that I look better while clean-shaven. It also occurred to me that clean-shaven is actually much lower maintenance than a goatee.[5]
I was thinking of going with the porn ‘stache. But, um…no.
Anyway, where was I? Oh, right. I was talking about Bill Cooper and his somehow-less-edifying-than-my-stories-about-facial-hair bullshit. Also, that was a lot of hyphens. But I digress. His good buddy the Baron Waldstein continues:
Later, arriving at Richmond Palace on 28th July, he saw in the library there:
'... beautifully set out on parchment, a genealogy of the kings of England which goes back to Adam.'
Yuh huh.
In case anyone’s wondering, the Baron Waldstein was an eighteen year-old Moravian tourist in England. There’s about a 103% chance that he didn’t have the historical background to understand what he was seeing, assuming that he was even attempting to skeptically analyze the things he saw.
Cooper then goes to beat that most familiar drum.
Such genealogies were immensely popular, and as fascinating to the general public as they were to historians and other scholars. As tables of descent, they provided a continuous record of human history from the Creation, through the post-Flood era, down to modern times. But it was these very attributes that made these records unpalatable to certain scholars who delighted to call themselves Rationalists, and who sought from the 18th century onwards to replace such history with certain anti-biblical notions of their own. (3)
I don’t generally include the footnote pointers, but that footnote number 3 points to a book called The Rise of the Evolution Fraud. It’s got two five-star reviews on Amazon! Also, it’s got two reviews on Amazon!
Anyway, this is tiring, really. I tossed in the facial hair stuff not because I thought it was interesting, but because I thought it was more interesting than, “Cooper sees anti-Christian conspiracies everywhere: film at 11.” Although it is kind of funny the way he seems to find it necessary to vary his attacks against, y’know, real historians. This time anyone who dares suggest that the Anglo-Saxons didn’t directly descend from Adam “delighted to call themselves Rationalists.”
First of all, if we’re talking Rationalists, um, they were around before the 18th Century. There was this guy named Descartes and this other guy named Spinoza, for instance. I’m just going to take a shot in the dark and say that this is a veiled shot at David Hume, which is kind of funny, since Hume wasn’t really a Rationalist and, in fact, was the one who influenced Kant’s thinking enough to lead to the writing of the Critique of Pure Reason. Hume was an empiricist and a historian who can probably be credited with an awful lot of the changes in British history Cooper rails against, however.
Second, “delighted?” Really? That particular word choice bugs me for some reason.
Either way, we’re just about to start having fun.
The pre-migration records that have come down to us are in the form of genealogies and king-lists, and I have assembled the table of descent which opens this chapter from each type. That table shows the (sometimes simplified) descent of six of the Anglo-Saxon royal houses of England. The houses are those of Wessex (Occidentalium Saxonum); of Lindsey (Lindis fearna); of Kent (Cantwariorum); of Mercia (Merciorum); of Northumbria (Northa hymbrorum); and of East Anglia (Estanglorum). But it is the treatment that these records have received from the hands of modernist scholars that is as fascinating, and as telling, as the records themselves, and we shall here consider the veil of confusion and obscurity that modern scholarship has thrown over them.
You know what’s really confusing? The question of why the Anglo-Saxons were recording their genealogies in Latin. Although I suppose we could offer the benefit of the doubt and say that it was later scribes recording in Latin. So…yeah. Let’s move on.
We are commonly asked to believe that these six royal families concocted these lists, and that the lists are thus rendered untrustworthy and false. We are asked to accept that, say, the House of Kent concocted a list of ancestral names that just happens to coincide in its earlier portions with that of, say, the House of Northumbria, in spite of the fact that the two kingdoms lay hundreds of miles apart, spoke different dialects and whose people hardly ever wandered beyond their own borders unless it was to fight.
Um, yes. I am, actually, asking you to believe that the lists were made up. If we go back two weeks, we’ll see that actual historians have found that this is exactly what happened. The term “East Anglia” didn’t exist until the 800s. Northumbria was a kingdom that came in to being with the merging of two other kingdoms. And, in both of those cases, the “houses” are named after geographic locations and would, therefore, not have been the names of anyone or anything until well after the migration. And with the story of the genealogy of Alfred the Great of Wessex being stolen from Ida of Bernicia I introduced you to the Sisam Hypothesis, which introduced the possibility that, yes, the Anglo-Saxons stole genealogies from each other.
Either way, I’ll cut things short here. I’m just too damned sober to handle the next bit…
-------------------------
[1]The alcohol of choice tonight is Buffalo Trace. I also have Rahr & Sons Buffalo Butt beer at my disposal. I was in a very Buffalo-y mood during my last alcohol purchase. Also, Rahr & Sons was having some problems this spring after a storm blew their roof off or something. It’s good that they’re back up and running.
[2]First: Just because something was once common knowledge does not mean it’s correct. It was once common knowledge that there was nothing between Europe and Asia but unnavigable ocean. It was also once common knowledge that the Americas were a part of Asia. Also, there was a long period of time where people thought there was a flood that covered the entire Earth. But no one takes that seriously any…oh…wait.
Second: There is an assertion that the Anglo-Saxon genealogies were once common knowledge. Assertion without proof is useless.
Third: The Anglo-Saxon genealogy offered by Cooper as evidence ends in 899. Anglo-Saxon domination of Britain ends, by necessity, in 1066. A genealogy seen buy a guy in 1600 means next to nothing without corroborating documents. The fact that he saw it on a Thursday, meanwhile, means jack shit. That’s the sort of detail one adds in when attempting to bolster a bad argument with arguments that sound accurate.
Fourth: The diary entry, or whatever it was, doesn’t even say anything other than, “I saw this one thing.” It has no citations and offers no reproduction. So we can’t know if it even supported Cooper’s fanciful genealogy from just above it. Considering that I’ve seen several different Anglo-Saxon genealogies in the past couple weeks, I strongly suspect it mostly doesn’t.
Fifth: Once again, even if the genealogy is accurate to the Anglo-Saxon migration to Britain, that doesn’t mean it’s accurate to the time of Noah. Especially when you’re looking at a genealogy that only goes back SEVENTEEN GENERATIONS.
Seriously. Math. How does that work?
[3]I still haven’t really decided if this was a sign that the relationship was a turrible idea or that the idea of dating me is a turrible idea for, well, anyone.
[4]I once knew a guy who had a beard named Lorna. She had the worst gay-dar in history. But that’s a story for another day…
[5]At one point my boss asked if I was planning on sticking with the clean-shaved thing. I said I was going to for a little while, since the goatee is really the second-highest maintenance form of beard. She asked what the highest maintenance beard is. I said, “The beard of bees. I mean, you’ve got to keep them fed and constantly carry epi-pens around with you.”
There’s about a 90% chance I shouldn’t be allowed out in public.
Friday, August 20, 2010
Is Just Sayin', is All...
So the A.H.A.S.D.A.C. was woefully under-represented at my Six Months in Hell Party. However, there is an opportunity for, um, redemption? Yeah. I'ma call it redemption.
Next Saturday. Lost Immigrants are doing a show in Plano. I'm thinking of having a meeting...
Next Saturday. Lost Immigrants are doing a show in Plano. I'm thinking of having a meeting...
Thursday, August 19, 2010
The Beast, Part 3
Eventually, no matter how long it takes, the wait must end. We receive the hoped for, dreaded news, for better or worse.
The First Ending:
When I first told this story I felt it was a great, subversive tale. The damsel in distress was the monster. The brave knight won by not fighting. I had a lot to learn, then. But this ending is still about that thing which we hope for, that thing we should never stop hoping for.
Still, I began to wonder, one day, if the fairy tale ending made sense. If it was even possible.
The Second Ending:
Sometimes the end is fast, devastating. Even then, though, the end isn’t really the end. The story continues, just with different borders.
The Third Ending:
We do horrible things to each other on our way to that elusive happily ever after. Sometimes we don’t survive, but don’t realize that we’ve lost until long after we think we’ve won.
The Fourth Ending:
The fairy tale must follow its own inner logic. We must stop and ask a simple question: “Why did the princess become a vicious monster?” That question takes us to the most terrifying places of all.
The Fifth Ending:
Sometimes all the best we can hope for is that the scars have sufficient time to fade and we’re given the time we need to learn from our mistakes. In the fairy tale this is a disappointing ending. In real life, though, it’s usually the best one we can hope for.
----------------------------
I apparently wrote these posts on Halloween of 2008.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I did write two posts on Halloween of 2008. The first was the story, right up until the point where the knight kissed the beast. The second was just five endings. It was an early attempt to figure out how to differentiate between the spoken and written word, to say, “We can do this when telling, and we can do that when writing.”
But I never published them. There wasn’t really enough there to make it worthwhile. So they sat there on my old Toshiba laptop. And they moved to my new Asus (nicknamed, coincidentally, “The Beast,” which was also the nickname of my 1984 Chevy Caprice Classic. The story in question still doesn’t have an official title) laptop when I transferred my files over. But that was just a happy accident. I hadn’t meant to do anything with those two posts. Hell, I’d totally forgotten about them.
Then I found myself lying awake at one in the morning, my only company images of a Neil Gaiman story. It’s an interesting story, too. We find that the main characters are a big, strong man and a frail, weak woman.
In the end, though, we find that the woman is not as she appears. And that causes the man’s downfall.
It got me thinking about this old story. The beautiful princess, the terrifying monster. The way they’re one and the same. It had seemed so subversive at the time, a subtly empowering tale of a princess who was, most definitely, not a damsel in distress. A brave knight who could not solve problems with violence, but had to recall the innocence of youth instead.
That’s not, ultimately, what this story is about though, is it? The first time I told it I told it to Her. I was still hoping for that fairy tale ending, but aware of the fact that I would have to figure out a way to get through some dark places to make it.
I wrote the additional endings six months after it all ended. Endings two and four are the most honest assessments I can see of how she responded. Ending three, I think, is how I wanted to respond. Ending five was that Hail Mary that said, “Maybe it can still work.”
To all of those I think I can add another:
The Sixth Ending:
The biggest thing that surprises me, looking back on this story, is that no matter what ending I write, it’s always about the knight. It’s never about the princess or the monster.
They’re just characters, props.
Sometimes I wonder who the real monster is in this story.
The First Ending:
When the knight opened his eyes again he found he was not staring at a beast, but face to face with the princess.
The returned to the castle and went to the king, who was overjoyed to see that the brave knight had returned and overcome with wonder to see his daughter back, safe and sound. He turned the kingdom over, knowing it was in good hands.
The princess told her father that she had been with the army at the ambush all those years ago, but as she lay dying a witch had appeared and asked her if what she would give up to live. The princess had said to give up everything she held dear and the witch saved her life but placed a curse on her in the process. The knight had broken the curse with his kiss.
News spread far and wide that the kingdom was once again safe and the story spread of the princess who had been turned in to a beast and the knight who had, as a little boy, seen through the princess's masquerade as a knight and many years later seen through the princess's curse.
The princess and the knight lived long, happy lives and they and all their kingdom lived happily ever after.
When I first told this story I felt it was a great, subversive tale. The damsel in distress was the monster. The brave knight won by not fighting. I had a lot to learn, then. But this ending is still about that thing which we hope for, that thing we should never stop hoping for.
Still, I began to wonder, one day, if the fairy tale ending made sense. If it was even possible.
The Second Ending:
The knight's eyes never opened again. With a single great swipe of his claw the beast ripped open his chest and stilled his stout heart.
No other champions ever arrived at the border of the kingdom and the king soon died, leaving behind an empty, desolate land that was divided up among his neighbors and forgotten.
Sometimes the end is fast, devastating. Even then, though, the end isn’t really the end. The story continues, just with different borders.
The Third Ending:
The knight and the princess returned to the castle and for a time joy again reigned in the kingdom.
Soon, though, the knight-turned-king began waking up when the moon was at its highest point in the sky to find the princess-turned-queen's side of the bed cold and empty. When that happened he knew he would find her standing atop the railing out on the balcony that overlooked the forest. In her dreams she was tortured by the terrified faces and agonized cries of those she had killed while living as a monster.
One night while the moon was high in the sky he awoke to find the bed was cold and empty. Exhausted by the constant worry he decided that this one night he would not get up, would not go to her, would go back to sleep.
The next morning a servant found her broken body crumpled beneath the balcony at the base of the great keep.
We do horrible things to each other on our way to that elusive happily ever after. Sometimes we don’t survive, but don’t realize that we’ve lost until long after we think we’ve won.
The Fourth Ending:
The knight and princess were made king and queen, but the happy prosperous times did not return with them.
Monster slaying did not translate well in to governance and the new king was soon in far over his head.
The new queen took it upon herself to clean up her parents’ kingdom and cleared out the bandits and ruffians with speed, skill, and more than a little viciousness. As good and decent people returned she enacted tough laws with harsh punishments for even the tiniest infractions.
Many years later a witch moved in to an abandoned hut at the edge of the kingdom and the rumor passed around that it was the very same witch who had placed a curse on the princess all those years ago.
The king traveled to the witch's hut in secret and asked why breaking the curse hadn't returned the princess to the way she once was.
The witch laughed at him. All he had done that night in the woods was to return to princess to the way she had once looked, the witch told him. The curse was that the princess's true inner nature was revealed for all to see.
The fairy tale must follow its own inner logic. We must stop and ask a simple question: “Why did the princess become a vicious monster?” That question takes us to the most terrifying places of all.
The Fifth Ending:
Joy and hope returned to the kingdom, but it took a long time for things to return to normal.
The princess was haunted by her time in the forest for a long time afterwards, but the knight and the old king were there for her when the dreams returned.
The knight found the transition from warrior to administrator hard, but over time learned how to govern.
Nothing was ever the same again and happily ever after often seemed out of reach, but there was happiness to be had in abundance. And it was always more than enough to carry the kingdom through the hardest times.
At the very least everyone lived hopefully ever after.
Sometimes all the best we can hope for is that the scars have sufficient time to fade and we’re given the time we need to learn from our mistakes. In the fairy tale this is a disappointing ending. In real life, though, it’s usually the best one we can hope for.
----------------------------
I apparently wrote these posts on Halloween of 2008.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I did write two posts on Halloween of 2008. The first was the story, right up until the point where the knight kissed the beast. The second was just five endings. It was an early attempt to figure out how to differentiate between the spoken and written word, to say, “We can do this when telling, and we can do that when writing.”
But I never published them. There wasn’t really enough there to make it worthwhile. So they sat there on my old Toshiba laptop. And they moved to my new Asus (nicknamed, coincidentally, “The Beast,” which was also the nickname of my 1984 Chevy Caprice Classic. The story in question still doesn’t have an official title) laptop when I transferred my files over. But that was just a happy accident. I hadn’t meant to do anything with those two posts. Hell, I’d totally forgotten about them.
Then I found myself lying awake at one in the morning, my only company images of a Neil Gaiman story. It’s an interesting story, too. We find that the main characters are a big, strong man and a frail, weak woman.
In the end, though, we find that the woman is not as she appears. And that causes the man’s downfall.
It got me thinking about this old story. The beautiful princess, the terrifying monster. The way they’re one and the same. It had seemed so subversive at the time, a subtly empowering tale of a princess who was, most definitely, not a damsel in distress. A brave knight who could not solve problems with violence, but had to recall the innocence of youth instead.
That’s not, ultimately, what this story is about though, is it? The first time I told it I told it to Her. I was still hoping for that fairy tale ending, but aware of the fact that I would have to figure out a way to get through some dark places to make it.
I wrote the additional endings six months after it all ended. Endings two and four are the most honest assessments I can see of how she responded. Ending three, I think, is how I wanted to respond. Ending five was that Hail Mary that said, “Maybe it can still work.”
To all of those I think I can add another:
The Sixth Ending:
The knight opened his eyes.
Standing before him where there had once been a monster he saw the princess. He smiled, relief and hope filling his soul.
They turned from the clearing and began picking their way through the dark and treacherous woods. At first the knight worked on his plans for the future now that the kingdom was his and the princess he’d dreamed of since that day in the meadow all those years ago walked beside him. It would be wonderful.
But every time he closed his eyes he saw that terrible monster.
As the knight traveled back through the forest he collected the armor he’d left behind. When they reached the edge of the woods and found his horse the knight mounted the steed.
He never returned to the castle, never collected his prize. Instead he rode out of that kingdom.
As the years passed he would occasionally wonder what had happened, what would have been. In the quiet, dark moments of the night he would sometimes wish he had made a different choice. He would fall asleep hoping to dream of the princess.
But he never did. On those nights he dreamed only of monsters.
The biggest thing that surprises me, looking back on this story, is that no matter what ending I write, it’s always about the knight. It’s never about the princess or the monster.
They’re just characters, props.
Sometimes I wonder who the real monster is in this story.
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