You know the saying, "It could be worse," right? And I understand it. Hell, I live it! I am absolutely the last person you would call ungrateful. I feel blessed, for lack of a better word. But I wonder sometimes just how mental I really am. Maybe it's just American culture. I'm the bi-product of decades of televisional (did I just create a new adjective?) violence and heroism and drama and love. So I often wonder what the big deal with life is all about. Before I get too deep, I'll explain.
Via television or comic books or novels or whatever, only ghosts, robots, vampires, aliens and probably God exists. Here, in our reality, all of this stuff is science fiction. Well, that leaves a sour taste in my mouth sometimes. I mean, how boring is our reality really? While the cosmos completely make me rethink everything that I know and believe, here on Earth life is far from extraordinary. There are no men in blue and red tights flying through our soaring skyscrapers and saving us from villains. There are no space ships in our galaxy fighting for the survival of the human race from the icy-steel grips of robots (that we're aware of, I understand the limits of our telescopes). And there are no lingering undead in the foggy mists of our cemeteries (that I've encountered, at least).
What got me thinking about all of this is the fact that life is quite stagnant. Wouldn't you agree? I mean, since 1945 has there been anything to threaten the lives of everyday people here in the States? The Cold War was officially frozen in 1989 and averted nuclear war. Apparently astronomers haven't found that comet that would end life on Earth as we know it. And Satan seems satisfied lounging languidly in the pages of paper where he's been for two-thousand years... Life, when you look at it objectionably, is boring. And while the survivor's of airplane crashes, floods and hurricanes and genocide would tell me to fuck off, I'm just saying: When the hell is that giant spaceship coming to Earth? When are we going to experience something that just shocks us off our collective feet? I'm not looking for something catastrophic here. Just something that makes all six and a half billion of us expel a breathy "Wow."
And so, I write. And not very well, or not that much, but I write. Maybe this is the reason a lot of people become writers. Maybe some of us are just fed up with the boring throes of day-to-day living. I know personally that the daily grind is painful, and save for some really fun drugs, writing is the only way out. And with the finale of Battlestar Galactica, I've been left in a void. Wow, you probably said aloud, what a shame. Well, yes - television does mean that much to me. A very small percentage of it, anyway. And now I realize what an amazing story that it was is all over and what it did for me; but more than that, I begin to see that, even with my confidence in my own abilities, I may not have that talent to create amazing stories like that. And this is far from a bad thing. What this proves to me is that perhaps our world isn't as boring as sometimes I want to believe. I may have to come to the realization that I am lazy and that all the talent in the world isn't going to matter if I don't start writing.
Or, I just continue to watch lots of television, whatever.
