It's very easy to get caught up in this kind of life consisting primarily of whirlwinds of phone calls, autographs, paychecks, and cocktail parties. You could easily forget who you are and where you came from, so I just want to tell all of you little people down there that if you ever make it to the kind of life I get to live, remember your roots. Keep it real.
For you people who have the privilege of knowing me, you know that I love fantasy. I love fantasy books. I read any fantasy novel I can find. I don't care if it's for children or young adults or simply, adults. I don't care if it's a graphic novel. Or manga. I don't care if it is badly written or if it'd Tolkien. It may influence my opinion after I finished the book, but it won't change whether or not I read it.
But, like people say, too much fantasy keeps you from living in the real world. If you read too much fantasy stuff, you'll distance yourself from everything that really exists, what you need to be focusing on. It's not real. My job, my new status of fame balanced with the future success that I once was? That's real. My Whataburger with cheese? That's what I need to be focusing on. Fantasy entertainment only serves as a distraction for people who don't realize any better.
This is very much unlike the world of regular fiction and nonfiction, which serves as a great role model to which I should live my wonderful life. I just skimmed through an old biography of Oscar Wilde I had sitting on the shelf recently. There is a legend about the origin of one of his quotes; there is this one part of his life where he is on trial because his former lover's father is accusing him of sodomy and shouts at Oscar Wilde that he (Oscar) is from the gutter and should stay there. Oscar replies, "We are all in the gutter, sir, but some of us are looking at the stars." That quote actually comes from one of his plays, a comedy: Lady Windermere's Fan: A Play About A Good Woman. However, I have read this quote several times as being cited from this trial-- unless he actually quoted his plays during trial, this legend doesn't make too much sense. It's a nice quote, though. And for a practical thinker like me, it presents a problem. Where is the line between fantasy and fiction, fiction and nonfiction?
Oscar Wilde died after suffering from an inflammation in his brain. That's a nicer, more delicate way of saying he drank himself to death after being released from prison in France and probably contracting syphilis. What does it mean, that some people are looking at the stars? Why do people quote this so often, when it comes from a homeless, broke, and drunk adulterer, and why do they seem to like attributing it to his real life, which sucked, instead of the character in his play who never existed and can be as idealistic as Wilde wanted to make him?
Maybe it's because this quote, as people see it, has nothing to do with the play it's from. If you've heard the quote before, raise your hand. If you've never read/seen the play (or, let's face it, if you've never heard of it), put your hand down. Now, if you think the quote still makes sense and you would ideally love to apply it to your life, seeing yourself as one of those rare and special persons who looks at the stars, put your hand back up.
That is the essence of fantasy.
If looking at stars is distracting, then I suppose fantasy is distracting. I realize that I don't live in the stars, I live on Earth. But the stars are still there-- no, here, in this world. If the stars try to distract me from my Whataburger with cheese, I won't let them. My new celebrity status is too valuable to sacrifice for the sake of distant stars.
However...I suppose I could enjoy them as long as they are here.
“I can believe that things are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen – I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”
ReplyDelete- Samantha Black Crow