It's been a long time since I posted here. Nearly 6 years, based on that last published post. But I think I need to start blogging again...
I've been listening to audio books lately. Need something to occupy me on longer drives, especially when I'm driving by myself. I love listening to music, but sometimes I need something... more to keep my brain engaged.
I started with Fevre Dream... one of my favorite vampire novels. Set on the Mississippi river, on a 19th century steamboat, it's one of the best vampire novels I've read. Written before Twilight and its ilk, it doesn't suffer from the need for a tragic vampire love triangle and instead settles for a bloody battle for supremacy between a pair of alpha vampires. A great read, and the audio book treatment was most satisfying.
Next up was It. I'd just seen the movies (part 2 this past fall) and, being one of Kings books I've never read, I figured it would be a good choice. Another excellent audio book treatment (gone are the days, I assume, where something like the unlistenable Neuromancer audio book gets released... trust me, spare your ears.) But what I've realized, more than a third of the way in, is that It is a most unpleasant book. Not the horror, which is as horrifyingly good as King always writes... But the mundane, human evil that permeates the book. Child abuse, wife-beating, bullying and other terrestrial terror abounds, and makes for a hard listen at times.
This became most apparent to me on a recent drive, as I was listening to a passage describing the nearly mindless drive of one character bullying a slightly younger, significantly weaker character. As I listened to the lunacy, I suddenly experienced a blinding rage... it would not be inaccurate to say I saw red. (Might I also observe that blinding rage driving down an LA freeway in rush hour is QUITE the experience.) It only lasted a few moments, but the feeling generated was visceral, and terrifying, and disturbing.
I changed what I was listening to and pondered the experience. To be honest, it wasn't completely unique... I've had similar experiences before, but there was something more unnerving about it this time. I realized I must be bottling up staggering amounts of anger and frustration to generate this feeling.
Which leads me to why I think I need to start blogging again. My past posts were all over the place... books, movies, TV, politics and often just a simple rant over whatever was annoying me that day. But they were an outlet for the things bothering, puzzling or simply interesting me.
I haven't availed myself of the outlet recently. I would kid myself and think I could use Twitter to accomplish the same thing. But if you've stuck with me this far, you can see brevity is not my strong suit. Even with 280 characters, there's few times I can truly express myself there. (I'll have to live with the TL/DR mentality and just embrace my need to vent.)
'Cause god knows, there's enough out there to get me going. The state of US politics, the ignorance driving so much of what passes for discourse today, the stupidity of Star Wars fandom, the short sightedness of Star Wars production teams (sensing a theme there?), public buffoonery in general... I have no doubt I'll have source material.
So if you're still here, buckle in and keep your eyes peeled. I'll hopefully be as productive here as I'm convinced I'll be, so it should be fun. (At least for me, that is.) And maybe I'll see less red.
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