Well here I am, your trusty narrator.  I might sound like that guy whose pages you just skipped over since they weren’t part of the actual book.  I agree with you.  Who needs that dump, right?  That’s why I’m here.  We’re going to be best friends.  BEST friends.  So, that means I’m going to be telling you shit, and you, of course, have to listen up.  At least pretend to pay attention.  Sure, have your drink and phone handy in case things get rough, but don’t pull that fake phone call shit.  I invented that escape plan.

Besides, I’m pretty cool.  I know all.  I mean, I wasn’t there when a bunch of this crap happened, but I definitely recall everything fairly well.  If anything was hazy, I just embellished a touch, like a good gossip does.  Who doesn’t love gossip?  You can try not to gossip, but as soon as you get a nice juicy story, it feels so good to pass it on.  Gossip spreads faster than disease, a line I’m pretty sure is from Grey’s Anatomy, but I think I changed it enough that it’s not plagiarism.  Someone else probably unloaded that gem before though, right?  I’m sure.  It’s too good to pass up.

You should learn to trust me though; even if the beginning gets rough and maybe some names change, I’ll wrap it up neatly enough in the end.   Endings are my specialty, because if shit gets too dense and names are too long to understand and mentally pronounce, I’ll just kill off a few peeps.  You know, do a little weeding.   And if the story just gets plump boring after that, I’ll put in a little anecdote or two about myself just to liven things up.  Don’t want to get muddy in some overly constructed prose here.

Yes, prose.  As a narrator I am required to drop some literary terms once in a while.  It’s part of the job, for which I am being paid too little I might add.  Hint.  Am I right?  Bills, bills, bills.  Here are some more for you by the way:

Binary

Juxtaposition

Bildungsroman

Doppelganger

Genre

Verse

Archetype

Sestina

Paraphrase

Bibliography

Histrionic

Alliteration

Caesura (that one’s cool, right?)

Diction

I’m pretty sure I know what half of those mean.  The other half just act as fillers.  Meals have fillers, like that halfhearted house side salad made of 4 lettuce leaves, a cherry tomato and three slices of cucumber you eat before the steak comes.  Movies have fillers with all those commercials, previews and product placement shit they do these days.  Stories and thus narration (another good literary term, let’s add it to the list) also have fillers.  You’ve got beginning, middle and end, but there are different levels.  There is the beginning-beginning where you meet the main character.  Then there’s the introduction of the second character.  Some sort of journey or something.  Then there’s the middle where something bad happens, but not too bad otherwise it will ruin FINAL BAD THING BEFORE THE END, as I call it.  All that has some filler before first resolution and then the final resolution, which leads to the end and epilogue stuff.  Wow, resolution and epilogue.  Those are two words that are definitely not on that list.  We should add an addendum.  ADDENDUM.  Look at me.  I bet you’re impressed; I know I am.  These are just flying from my fingers, without a single Google search.

Literary Terms Addendum:

Narration

Resolution

Epilogue

Addendum

Now we have our terms and one hell of an awesome narrator.  All we need are some characters and shit.  I’ve got them all down, there’s just not much sequence to a collection of torn legal pad sheets, Post-Its and bar napkins.  Ever write on bar or coffeeshop napkins?  It’s totally the new trendy.  Screw that laptop!  Get some found paper, thickly framed oversize glasses and a worn dictionary, one that’s like from the 80s preferably, and you sit yourself down at a local espresso bar.  You’ll be so hip, man!  Totally hip.  It’s even better at a bar where most people go to socialize.  You’ll be that enigma in the corner near the piano that’s never used.  Try to say and do everything ironically too, without too much energy, just a lot a wit.  Like Diet Coke.  Yes, say and do everything as if you were Diet Coke.  None of the calories and all the taste!

You just got a life lesson from the Narrator.  See that capitalization by the way?  I just went with it.  That’s called selective capitalization and often places extra importance on the thing being capitalized, much like italicized or bold words would.

Is this too much for you?  Maybe I should slow down.  Besides, I can’t carry the load of dishing out all these life lessons, though there are plenty in my repertoire.  Is that the correct usage of that word?  I’m not asking you; I was asking myself.  Just sort of assume that most questions are directed toward myself.  Anyway, well, I used it that way so let’s assume it’s correct, as most things I do are.

Shall we?

Let’s

So, life sucks.

It does.  I mean there’s no getting around that.  You can kumba ya me all you want, I doubt it will change my opinion, even I’m feeling great that day.  Or drunk.

Actually, scratch that.  You could probably convince me of anything if I was drunk.  I tend to be one of those loud, laughing, happy drunks, swaying in my barstool to whatever top 40 hit is playing in the background, halfheartedly listening to the meandering conversation happening around me.  Okay, I try and listen, but only if it’s really interesting, like someone slept with someone they shouldn’t have slept with, or he’s gay now and oh-my-god would you look at those tight jeans I should be all over that.

Where was I?

Life sucks.  Right.

I mean think about it.  Most adults spend their time worrying.  What’s the weather going to be like today?  Did I shut the windows before I left?  Shoot, I hope that check doesn’t go through for another two days.  Did I pay the electric bill?  Why the fuck is that check engine light on…again?  They’re raising my rent.  The weather has been really weird this year, right?  A lot of storms.  And flooding.  Or when it’s not flooding, there’s a drought somewhere.  Traffic is going to be a disaster because of that construction.  That’s my raise?  Wait, she’s not coming in so I have to do her work?  Crap, I forgot to send those Thank You cards.  How do I print the confirmation email if my fucking printer isn’t working?  Why hasn’t he texted me yet?  I should get snow tires if this winter is going to be as bad as they think it’s supposed to be.

It inevitably comes back to the weather.

Why all the worrying?  I could probably spend several pages discussing the subject, but I really don’t care all that much.  The end result is Life Sucks.

I think for me, and, if I may be so bold, yeah I’m gonna be bold because that’s me, and for all of us, look at that collective right there, the only thing that stops the worry is a story.  I grew up reading books a lot.  Now, wait a minute, yes I was a dork through high school, but I didn’t just go home and read all the time.  I also watched TV and played video games.   So there.

They all have a common escapist element, though, through their stories.  Now you’re thinking that’s really smart and, hoo boy, here he goes.

Eh, I’m not going anywhere.  I haven’t had the energy to research and argue a topic in print since college.  Who wants to spend their time doing that?  Not this guy.

So, stories.  Stories take us away from all that worry, and we go to a place that is completely understandable.  Genres have structures we’ve seen before and can navigate or even predict.  Or if they don’t it’s interesting and, gosh, won’t you look at what this author is doing here.  Wow that’s smart and bold and cool.  But I’m never reading that book again.

It’s a book to read so you can say you’ve read it, right?  I mean, those are good and all, to expand your whatever.  But the best stories?  The ones we keep coming back to are often the simplest ones.  Girl/boy meets boy/girl.  Boy/girl becomes man/woman.  Piglet becomes horse because of a freak nuclear waste accident and spends his life trying to be accepted by true born horses.  That old yarn.

The type of story changes, and we all gravitate toward our favorites, but the effect is the same.  For a little while, we forget that Life Sucks and get to chill with some cool peeps.  And if minor character number 5 dies, it’s okay because it makes sense.  And we don’t know him.  I mean, he doesn’t even have a name.  Or if he does, hell, I don’t remember it.

I don’t remember where I was heading with all this.  I’m listening to the new Lady Gaga album for the first time, and I’m sort of getting lost in the craziness.  Lady Gaga is a crazy I love.  Also, I just spent five minutes on Facebook.  Facebook is the greatest time-wasting device ever invented.  I don’t care about half the people I’m “friends” with.  What?  I’m being honest.  I don’t.  But I read their updates and comment if something interests me.  The new age of the electronic “friend,” a person you often have maybe only met a few times in person, or just once when you were drunk at that off-campus party and, wait, did we make out?, irritates me.

The story.  That’s what I was writing about.

I guess I should get to that, huh?  This is just sort of that beginning thing that the teacher let’s you skip because it’s not really all that important, so just start on page 7, not page 1, she says.  And, you know what, I always did that.  Who cares what the author or his friends have to say.  Usually it was a total bore.  Bring a book, right?  Or sometimes, if it’s critical acclaim or whatever, they give away part of the story while discussing the craft.  And I’m like, at least put SPOILER ALERT at the top.  Jesus.  Even middle-school bloggers have the sense to do that if they’re writing their thoughts on the new Harry Potter movie.

I’m probably dating myself with all these references.  Hahaha, there’s a funny there.  Dating myself.  I should buy myself a drink.  Well, I don’t even have to do that.  I’m an adult; I have a liquor cabinet.  Sure, it’s 10:30 am on a Wednesday, but what else am I supposed to do.  If you think I’m joking, clearly we don’t know each other well enough yet.  You should Facebook me.

One of the most interesting courses I ever took in college was Literary Automata, a study of inanimate objects coming to life in literature and how the existence of these automata changes the definition of “Human” and “Real.”  We started out the semester with loose descriptions of what we all thought it was to be human.  To think.  To feel.  To love.  To show emotion.  And the stickiest of all (which, admittedly, we didn’t delve as deep into): to have a soul.  For every definition we created there was a story or an article to refute it.  Everything from children’s tales like The Velveteen Rabbit to Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” to Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the inspiration for the movie Bladerunner, disputed one of our definitions.  Stuffed animals cry.  Men fall in love with statues.  Androids think.

The impetus for this sudden reminiscence of a school time now long gone is the recent second completion of one of my favorite video games: Bioshock 2.  A full description of the game is unnecessary; however, I will chance a short background to support my thoughts.

The player in Bioshock 2 must deal with girls, dubbed “Little Sisters,” that contain a substance (Adam) necessary to advance through the game and acquire new abilities.  There are two ways to do this: to rescue the Little Sister, allowing her to return to a semi-normal (though scarred) life, in exchange for a little Adam or the player can harvest her, ripping out the sea slug imbedded in her belly to extract all the Adam she has.  The first time I played the game, I saved all the girls, and all NPCs (non-playing characters…like a supporting actor role in a movie).  This past time I killed everyone, for the purpose of fully completing the game, since, video games now usually offer multiple plots depending on your decisions and actions. And I felt guilt, remorse, sorrow.  Insert what sad, depressing emotion comes to mind, and I felt it.  When this outpouring of emotion occurs during books, movies or, in my instance, video games, we congradulate the crafters for creating a world so real it makes us feel.

But that’s the issue I’m trying to wrap my head around, and have been since I took my Literary Automata class:  How can we feel any emotion for things that are not only inhuman, but aren’t “real?”  Does my emotion validate these fictional characters, made up of binary speak and electronic pulses interpreted by my sleek and overpriced gaming system?  I should feel nothing.  My actions in this game have no consequence in my everyday world.  I won’t lose my job, be branded a killer, or be shunned from society because I chose to murder little children in a game.  Does the slightest twinge of guilt in a video game promote the status of its characters to that of animals?  Say hitting a bird while driving?  Does an even larger emotional reaction bring up a higher image in the hierarchy of pity, perhaps the death of a pet?  Can it be intense enough to remind one of human pain?  The deaths of a people stricken by war?  A loved one passing?

If I equate the emotion I feel during or after a fictional event has taken place with that of one in the “real world,” I must be blurring the lines between fiction and non-fiction, and I don’t see how I cannot.  We are inundated with death daily.  War in the Middle East.  Floods in Pakistan.  Fires in Russsia.  Hurricanes in the Southern US.  Famine in Africa.  I think there is a limit to how much we can feel before the sheer numbers and mass of people overwhelm our senses.  It becomes just another problem, another thing there isn’t time or money to deal with.  But fiction?  A movie that follows a few characters closely around for 2 hours, with enlarged views of their facial expressions.  A book that takes you into the mind of another.  A game that lets you experience actions through a proxy, though you view them as your own hands.  They feel closer to us, and thus are easier to understand.  A death in any one of these media feels more real than an article in my Sunday NY Times about global tragedy.

I wonder how much longer it is before the brain attempts to follow the heart.  Now, of course, I *KNOW* the death of a person, however remote it might feel to me, is worse than the death of, say, Dumbledore in Rowling’s Harry Potter.  But I don’t sob when I read the paper; I sure did when I read The Half Blood Prince. Does it not follow, though, that soon we will begin to equate importance in this fluid reality with an emotional hierarchy, a hierarchy built and based on the time one spends with beings and things, be they fictional or not?

As I finish these thoughts, I no longer know when to put real or fictional in quotation marks.  And, as a writer, for me that clinches it: when even punctuation begins to fail me, there can be no discerning  between the two.

I’ve taken up reading the paper again in the past month in an attempt to become more informed about the world outside of my service job and one bedroom apartment in a small, upstate New York town.  The information and tone has not changed since I left college and disconnected myself from the world at large (at one time even refused to read emails or update Facebook, let alone check the current headlines).   The politics of terrorism, oil and the feeble hold the United States has on the rest of the world cover most of my Sunday paper.  And it reminds me of why I used to write, read, watch and play (video games) so much fantasy.

It’s no wonder my age group seems to be known for video games, texting, blogging, tweeting, parties and an obsession with glam, fame, money…whatever you want to call it.  They’re all tools for escape, albeit perhaps less intellectually stimulating than reading (or writing) a book.  How can we not turn out neurotic, lacking a decent attention span, when not only are there hundreds of ways to divert our attentions, but good reasons to?  Who wants to think of a people here in our own country or abroad that hate us just for where we come from or what we are?

The world is far too complicated.  I crave for a time when there was black and white, evil and good.  Or at least one driven by plot, where actions, thought unpredictable and chaotic (if written well) always have a literary root and end.   Not a world where I’m scraping together enough money to pay the electric bill while corporate heads mandate a few decisions a week while flitting from hotel room to hotel room on private jets or in company cars.  Where industrial competition has allowed businesspeople to horde wealth and perks while manual laborers do their jobs (if they still have them) for seemingly less and less money.  Where, mathematically, the lower classes seem to pay more in taxes, that are then misused by crooked government overseers.  Where oil and gas companies have battled energy efficient technology to save their own corporations, while the common man pays continually growing fuel costs.

And when I feel and think all this, before the powerlessness sets itself deep upon me, I remember though I am but one, I can change it.  Easily enough.

Through tale and story.

There is background to this thought.  It’s unnecessary background, but background just the same.  I just came home from a bar that reminded me of being in college.  Granted, I’m 23 and certainly not at an acceptable “remember when…?” age, but that doesn’t mean I don’t reminisce like I’m 20 years older.

Captions tell a story in a way the super-supplements photos, especially on Facebook.  I’m not talking about “Massachusetts, March 19th 2008″ that marks only the time and place the photo was taken.  My photos on Facebook, for example, are often filled with private jokes and witticisms only a handful of people can completely understand.  Yet, why put them there in the first place?  They tell the shortest of stories without much exposition or closure; it’s little snippets of action.  And why should the words not be so?  They fit the pictures.  A brief moment frozen in quick time.  It’s a form of storytelling designed for the storyteller(s): the people in the photos.  It’s a play further removed…  We acted out a scene once, for ourselves, in front of a camera that we then narrate in a way that confuses the audience.  I’m recalling one where my friends and I shot each other acting out a fake romance/fight.

And yet…while we exclude 99.9% of the world from this story, the small percent, the people there, can be instantly transported back to that night through those little snippets, if the images themselves fail to raise a memory.  To call forth a complete and full recollection of a private moment, does the narration itself also have to be private, written in its own unintelligible text?

This blog is an effort to collect my thoughts (mostly incomplete, but thoughts nontheless), essays, poems and stories as I begin a new project, one quite different from the form my writing usually takes.

Lately, I’ve been obsessed with a topic that keeps surfacing among my friends and family: The Impact of New Technology.  Specifically speaking, it’s impact on my generation/age group.  I was born in 1987 and those born a few years before or after me are on a cusp of sorts.  We are people with a foot each in two different times.  I remember days before the internet, before a computer.  I even remember our old rotary phone, though I think it had a digital converter.  Or a touch tone converter.  I really don’t know anything about phones.  Not the point.   I come from those now technologically backward beginnings; yet, I, like so many teens and twenty-somethings in the U.S., am also technologically savvy, constantly connected to Google, Facebook and YouTube, not to mention the daily flurry of texts and instant messages I send out.

At least, I know more about technology than my parents.  My parents still use AOL as a gateway to their cable internet connection (which I hope to God they don’t still pay for), a connection they really only use to pay bills, check email and book trip reservations on.  My mother just started learning how to text in the past year.  And yet, I have a sinking feeling that I know less about our modern world than my brother or sister, 4 and 2 years younger than me, respectively.   I just got a smart phone (the new Motorola Droid) while my siblings have been plugged into the world with their Blackberries for much longer.   I find my fingers, so used to the now outdated T9/Word-complete method of texting,  stumbling across the miniature keyboard.  New applications both astonish and somewhat scare me (“My phone can become a compass!?!”  Then, quietly, “Can they find me?”).  When Facebook changes its format I’m one of the first to call for an uproar.  Two weeks ago a team of girls passed me on their way to the bars, and I heard one say to another “Yeah, she g-chatted him and he was all like-” Gchatted?  I know what Google Chat is, but I don’t use it, mostly because I didn’t think it was in enough circulation to.   Now there is an abbreviation for it?  Doesn’t anyone use AIM anymore?  Or even Yahoo?  I’m only 23.  By our organic standards I should be young, yes?  But, technologically, I have to wonder if my “age” is far older.  Have we become like the computers we’re so hooked into, outdated within a couple years unless we update, revamp and reprocess?  And if so, why do I begin to fight it, slowly buying new products and learning to use new programs, a slowly that may turn into grudgingly before I simply refuse the modern world altogether.

Since technology infects every facet of my life, it wasn’t long before I began to apply these thoughts to my own writing.  Now, I am an old world romantic at heart.  I wish I had been born in the 19th century, preferably in Jane Austen’s England, so that I might dance at balls, take 2 hours to dress, and fill my days with gossip and wild fantasies of marriage.  These sentiments find their way into my writing.  I adore old words and turn-of-phrases, fairy tale constructions, and heroic archetypes.  My mind constantly dwells on the past, so much so that I often forget to look forward.  But lately I wonder if my old ways of writing, just like my old ways of communicating, need to be shelved for something new and fresh.  Something that works.  Something that speaks to our times.  People prefer 160 character texts over phone calls and voice mails.  Emails over posted letters.  Perhaps it’s time to find the literary equavalent.  And so, I come back to where I started: the purpose of this blog and my project.

I’m searching for a format to tell my old stories in, the stories I’ve tried to tell in all the forms I’ve tried and treasured, possibly with a new language to match.  Though I’m sure nearly every teacher or professor I’ve had would scoff, I’m constantly struck by the music I find in texts, Facebook posts and AIM conversations.  The drama.  The hysterically, side-splitting inside jokes.  The storytelling.  All of it contained and synthesized into short, intense bursts.  ANGER and ENERGY are found in caps.  Sarcasm often in italics.  *Actions* are single verbs surrounded by asterisks.   There is a new wave of punctuation, a new wave of speaking that, yes, is often not grammatically correct, or structurally complete, but it satisfies the first and most important definition for communication: people understanding each other.

Can a fairy tale fit into a text message?

I begin to think so.