orrynemrys

Telling Stories About Nothing

I recently watched a video from music and production guru Rick Beato where he discusses the strange course of his life over 62 years and how much it changed in the later years of his life and career. Here’s the video if you’re interested:

One of the more interesting takeaways is the idea that one of his most valuable skill sets at this point in his career is probably his ability to tell stories. He does it a lot. Stories of his life and career and collaborators… he talks about songs and musical constructs like they’re friends or old business partners.

I pondered this for a bit, and I realized that it really is central to his appeal. I enjoy his channel and return and again and again; even when I’m only tangentially interested in the content of a video, I’ll tune in.

Now I’ve long understood how personality drives entertainment. My first career was in radio, and the bulk of it involved putting people on the air and providing them the tools and support they needed for success. In that environment it’s impossible to miss the fact that the only real difference between one radio show or another, most of the time, was in the personalit(ies) that drove the program. As a podcaster over the years I’ve relied on the same mechanism – I’m not saying a whole of things that listeners can’t find elsewhere, but I say it in my own way.

I tell stories.

As the years have slipped by, however, I’ve become more and more disillusioned with the stories I tell. As an interviewer, I always prided myself on being able to find “true” moments in a conversation, particularly by disrupting a person’s ability to rely on rehearsed and regurgitated answers. Not excessively, of course; you’re not going to get a lot of interviews if you routinely make people uncomfortable. But now I find that so many of my stories are the same. They’re starting to feel rehearsed and uninspired.

Is that because I’m not creating new experiences worth talking about? Is it because my perspective on life and my hobbies and interests no longer evolves with enough grit to create new context?

Does getting older mean having less to say?

How often have you visited with an elder just to hear them share the same story you’ve heard before. I think we often dismiss this as their inability to remember that you’ve already heard it. But what if it’s just that we have a habit of telling ourselves and the people around us stories all our lives, and that as we get older the stories become more inflexible? We literally have less to say?

Unless we continue to push ourselves to have new experiences.

The real obstacle there is that getting older invariably means having less energy to devote to the exploration. Rick mentions in the video above that he started his YouTube channel in 2016. He would have been 54 at the time, launching into a new adventure with very little idea what he was getting into. And that he’s so glad he did it then, because he doesn’t know that he’d have the energy to pull it off if he started at 62.

I turned 49 recently. Sometimes I still feel young – particularly if I’m not calling attention to aches and pains with any sort of locomotion – and sometimes quite the opposite. I still love so many of the things that I do: writing and running RPGs, writing songs, working on my next novel. You know… telling stories. It gets harder and harder. I still read a lot, absorb TV and movies, and listen to music and podcasts… to get inspiration. To learn from those stories. Trying to perfect the craft of telling a story.

But how important is the art of storytelling if you have nothing new to say?

I don’t have an answer. Yet. Here’s a picture of my cat.

Maslow’s Beard

I find myself wondering if Maslow ever grew a beard.

In 1943, noted psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote a groundbreaking paper humbly entitled A Theory of Human Motivation. (I’d link it here, but it’s not an overstatement to insinuate that the original paper could easily cure insomnia, and there are so many places online where you can review the important bits.) In this paper, Maslow explores his now infamous Hierarchy of Needs, easily graphed as a pyramid. Like so.

Essentially, Maslow postulated that a healthy human has various needs that can be arranged in a simple hierarchy, and that foundational needs must be met before a person can effectively explore items at higher levels. It’s notable, in fact, that every level of the pyramid below the top are what Maslow referred to as “deficiency needs,” indicating that meeting these needs does not in itself create a strong sense of accomplishment (arguable, obviously) but that their omission inevitably creates anxiety and distress (less arguable). Clever, right?

Over the past several years, I have noticed some unexpected trends in my life. When the Pandemic hit and many of us were forced out of the workplace, some turned isolation into opportunity: going back to school, picking up a new project or hobby, learning more about sourdough than anyone really needs to know, and so forth. I was no exception… I determined during this time that I would further my education and set out to earn a Master’s degree. That was rewarding, though by the time I was finishing up my courses I was once again struggling to balance a full-time job, school, homeschooling my youngest, and engaging with my hobbies, interests, and other business ventures.

During the Pandemic, I had time. Way too much time. And I assumed that I would parlay that into other achievements. Shadow of the Spire was published in 2018, and now six years later I still don’t have a completed draft of the sequel. I started penning songs for a new album, but lacked the momentum to get them produced. I started new podcasts and assumed I’d be crafting all sorts of cool content for my community… and I quickly started falling behind and my podcast schedule fell apart in my hands like broken pieces of pottery.

These projects and ambitions have waxed and waned over the last four years, and its easy to track that trend and put it into perspective. Because even when I have time to focus on things that presumably drive me, the energy, inspiration, and conviction just aren’t there. And that trend coincides neatly with another trackable phenomenon…

We’ve been through some difficult terrain in recent years. The Pandemic left us adrift for a while. Our savings gone, our retirement expended. Friends relying on us for any assistance we could provide. My mother passed, and we pulled up stakes a couple times trying to reorient our lives. Whenever our circumstances created undue stress on our lives – financially, socially, medically, what have you – my initiative became a casualty. It’s so clear in hindsight, but in the midst of the muck it was just impossible to see the picture very clearly. Frustration ensued.

I can see now that even partial solutions were ineffective. We could navigate a financial crisis with no realistic expectation that the same shit wasn’t just around the proverbial corner. Health issues inevitably crop up as you get older, particularly when navigating so much stress. We would make plans to orient our lives toward specific goals and repeatedly find ourselves failing at even the simplest benchmarks.

So anyway… I find it interesting that the difference between a well-groomed beard and a wild-eyed madman with a shrub on his chin is often just a couple days of not really caring very much. And as I get ready for my next job interview, the beard becomes an enormously important point of focus. I have several tools and implements at my disposal – combs, clippers, blades, salve, oil, special shampoo, et cetera – and it all explodes into action when the time is right. I’m hiding a double chin, but never hiding the real me, right? Sure, everything else needs to be in order as well, but people really do look at your face.

So many psychologists from the olden days never wore beards. I suddenly wonder if they could really be trusted to understand my problems, you know?

Kickstarter: Sanity Check

The TsunamiCon Kickstarter is always a bit of a nailbiter, and this year has been no different. The campaign closes tomorrow evening, and I am very concerned.

As Kickstarters go, it can be a weird one to run. With a more traditional product, the promotional ramp-up is kind of self-sustaining. You reveal details about the product, discuss new ideas and the production process, provide rewards that engage your community at different levels. And of course offer stretch goals that add cool additional value to the product once you’ve blasted through your funding goals.

Promoting an event, of course, is a little more direct, and your demographic necessarily includes almost entirely people who can be on site at the appointed time. The discovery process is focused largely on more localized geography, and the event itself is pretty well established. I’m promoting the same things every year, with the opportunity to push those boundaries (i.e. renting additional facilities, staffing events, and booking guests) requiring funding far outside our realistic expectations.

So I spend a lot of time focusing on what we do at the con: gaming and game-related activities, a vibrant marketplace for geeks and gamers, panels and live entertainment, and so on. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s a strange animal, a game con… as organizers we don’t really provide most of the content; that comes from the community of game masters, vendors, volunteers, and so forth. Basically, we rent out a big space, hang up banners, organize a small army of volunteers, put together a game library for attendees to check out, book some entertainment and guests when we can, handle licensing and liability issues for a large event, help GMs and organizers find their audience and places at the con, field a ton of questions from the community, and rake in dozens of dollars.

And we do all that because it’s fun. And it is! It’s enormously satisfying, and I spend a good chunk of every year laying down all the prep work for the event. And the team hits the ground running that Friday morning and no one really sleeps for the three days. Giving yourself to a project like this, which means so much to so many people in our community, is a gift.

But I hate this part. So many amazing people turn out to help fund the convention by buying tickets early and grabbing vendor booths, sponsorships and merch… but the cost of doing business is high. We’re at 77% of goal at this exact moment – which means we still need to raise 23% of our entire minimum capital requirement in the next 35 hours.

Like I said… nailbiter.

As always, I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to all of our current backers, to everyone who’s bought in to the con already, to everyone who has taken pains to spread the message. Pledges continue to trickle in, and that’s on you.

The worrying, the wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth, the no sleeping through the night and struggling to stay focused during the workday while this drama plays out… that’s on me.

Also, my cat got out of the house last night and hasn’t come back. Of course.

Love in the Hands of Children

For as long as I can remember, romance has comprised some part of every contiguous entertainment experience that has spoken to me. While certainly the values and nature of attraction and fulfillment changed as I grew older – as did my expectations in the nuances of my entertainment selections – romantic idealism has been with me from my earliest television and movie experiences. From amorous cartoon characters floating off the ground with a single kiss to reticent movie couples surrendering to mutual attraction that’s been beating them around the head and shoulders for an hour of on-screen hijinks, love has been a theme of so much quality family entertainment throughout my life – and for a generation or two prior!

Ted Danson playing the “Long” game in *Cheers* (1982-1993).

And I grew up in the 80s. We were a cable family, and my parents really didn’t censor what my brother and I consumed (until they thought it would be too scary, but that’s another blog), so it wasn’t just classic musicals and Saturday morning cartoons that taught us the intricacies of romance. I followed Steve Guttenberg through his Police Academy misadventures (complete with boobies!!), Tom Hanks mackin’ on a mermaid, and Molly Ringwald waltzing her way through one John Hughes flick after another. I fell in love with Princess Buttercup and watched nobody put Baby in a corner. And I subconsciously took notes from Sam and Diane’s toxic 80s relationship.

But while I figured out pretty early on that I longed for a romantic experience in my life – that perfect poetry of true love and whatever came with it – so many of the variables were beyond my reach. Let’s take Ghostbusters, for example.

1984 was a big year in entertainment, and particularly for me. I was 8 or 9 years old. It was the year of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (damsel in distress, anyone?), The Last Starfighter (save the galaxy, get the girl!), Revenge of the Nerds (talk about cringe!), Purple Rain (um… wow), Dreamscape (man, did I want to have sex on a train – whatever that was!), and The Terminator (no way I could get the whole we’re-all-gonna-die-so-please-do-me-now vibe, but it was something). It was also the year that Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz, Egon Spengler, and Winston Zeddmore saved New York, and – you guessed it – Venkman got the girl.

Dennis Quaid invading Kate Capshaw’s dreams for some on-brand, low-key
nonconsensual lip-lockage in *Dreamscape* (1984).

Now it’s important to note that these were not movies about romance… it was just part of the package. Like it’s part of life. By this point in my youth, I had received the message loud and clear. But you also have to understand how we associate information with strong emotional experiences – and a movie like Ghostbusters had grabbed my imagination and refused to give ground. I was enthralled. And again… saved the day, got the girl. That’s the perfect ending, right!?

But as a boy there was one really harsh lesson life couldn’t communicate with any clarity. And that was the lesson of Ghostbusters II.

No… not that lesson.

Bill Murray and Sigourney Weaver celebrating marshmallowpocalypse in *Ghostbusters* (1984).

A few years later, the anticipated sequel rolls around, and one glaring issue leapt from the screen with malice aforethought. After all that amazingness that culminated in the joyous finale of the first movie, Peter Venkman and Dana Barrett were no longer together.

While intellectually I knew that this was a thing – my own parents had even undergone a brief separation in the intervening years – it still felt like a betrayal. I couldn’t wrap my head around the central question of why. What had Venkman done to lose the girl?

You get that?! What had Venkman done? In the context of the story laid out in the film – and likely corrupted by my parents’ experience – I got that he’d been responsible. That his romance hadn’t been eternal, and that it was somehow his fault. And realistically, this was a theme that played out in a lot of similar tales in the entertainment world (particularly with any degree of confirmation bias); relationships were typically shattered by the irresponsible or outright treasonous behavior of the male counterpart. Like… if she was the prize for saving the day, then you had to deserve her to keep her.

Note that there’s a lot of uncomfortable constructs in that paragraph, much of it seeded by the hypermasculine bullshittery of the era: treating a partner like a trophy, absolving one person of responsibility in a failing relationship, and doubling down on archaic gender norms that sorely needed more disruption in the entertainment world at the time. But again, the lessons for a young man were driven home with abandon.

It was disenchanting, to say the least. It set a lot of expectations. Not just for young boys, but girls as well. Was the first 50 years of TV and its attendant cinematic offerings determined to reinforce gender stereotypes? Well… yes. In a way. Producers and filmmakers made stories based on what they knew. Even Star Wars with its one tough female protagonist started as a damsel-in-distress situation; George had started his personal journey with Flash Gordon and similar offerings, where the scantily-clad girl was always a pawn in the hero’s story. The viewing public wanted men to be men, women to be beautiful and demure, and they wanted their children to enjoy the same.

Carrie Fisher representing the feminine ideal in need of rescue in *Star Wars* (1977)

But my principal question is this: does youth-centered and family-friendly programming still carry the same messaging? Do our kids and grandkids fall in love as the characters do in their favorite shows? I know that we’ve come a long way toward dispelling the gender norms of yesteryear, but are our kids learning the right lessons? Do they even have so much romance in their stories? I genuinely don’t know.

From *The Transformers S2.E34: The Girl Who Loved Powerglide* (1985)

And yes, I know a lot of the shows I mentioned above weren’t meant for kids, but I don’t think that invalidates the experience of those that were. Even the second season of the Transformers cartoon had an episode with a girl falling in love with the Autobot that saved her life. And of course, I’m not referring to programming aimed at very young children; I don’t expect romantic messaging from Dora the Explorer or Dinosaur Train any more than we had in Sesame Street or The Electic Company.

My kids are largely past this age, and like my parents we don’t censor (but we’ve always tried to keep open communication going), so it’s something of an academic question to me, but I’m genuinely curious whether the urge for romance still thrives in the hearts of today’s youth.

More Than a Metaphor

Last week my family made the fateful journey back to the Great Plains. It is difficult not to feel like we’re retreating from the mountain home we had come to love, taking a huge step backward in life to the confines of our stormy homeland. And stormy it is – in Colorado Springs, while the occasionally snowfall meanders by, we are no longer accustomed to the moody bouts of rain and stormclouds that hover above the Kansas skyline. Where we landed in Manhattan it has now been raining for nearly 48 hours. Not storming for the most part, just persistent dribbling that comes and goes and leaves everything basically damp.

While Kansas boasts some lovely vistas and incredibly beautiful sunsets – and a night of rolling thunder across the prairie can be a comfort and sometimes electrifying (pun intended) – this gloom in particular seems to punctuate our move with an almost sinister intent. The drizzle coalescing on the window pane seems hell bent on sapping our will. And while the morrow may bring some modicum of sunlight, I know that we shall not see it this day.

We are moved. At this moment, my desk is one of the few places in the house that isn’t crowded by boxes waiting for their turn in The Unpackening. I have never loved moving – beyond the occasional bit of excitement in the adventure of landing in a new house and figuring out how to arrange your day-to-day life inside its rigid confines – and as I get older it becomes more and more challenging. We had to hire help this time to load and unload the truck, and the unload only managed about 75% of the inventory before I simply ran out of money. They did that much in 2 hours; it took us around 24 hours to vacate the remainder.

It’s sobering, to say the least.

But we are moved, our belongings safely ensconced at our new residence. We’ve set up shop a stone’s throw (well, if you’re a hill giant, at least) from our dear friends (read as “chosen family”) Jason and Julie, so at least we’ve had a safe haven amidst the madness. (Though they have a 9-week-old Pyrenees puppy, so safe may be a bit of an exaggeration…) And we know that the gloom will pass.

After all, this is Kansas; don’t like the weather? Just wait a minute.

Echoes

One month ago today, I heaved a big sigh of relief. After a difficult season of somewhat abbreviated paychecks, family health issues, a great time at the Wichita convention that cost us a chunk out of pocket to attend… our finances were finally moving the right direction. While we were heading into the holidays with a very limited budget, bills were being paid and we had a little breathing room. When Christmas weekend rolled around, my wife Jonikka and made the trek back to Kansas to spend the holiday with friends and family. We lingered for a time, ringing in the new year with camaraderie and a sense of relative contentment.

When we were on our way home on January 4th, we received the call. My wife’s contract with her employer – which should have given us another six months of rebuilding and finally being able to put money away – had been terminated. We were officially adrift, fluid enough to make it through the end of the month.

As often happens in our lives – so much so that it’s virtually a meme in our family – disaster accompanied opportunity. Just a few hours before receiving the call, a close friend had heard us waxing on about how much further my wife’s salary would stretch if we moved back to Kansas, and my sister-in-law had proposed that a new medication on the market might very well be the solution to Jonikka’s lower-altitude health concerns. Said friend offered to procure us a home, paying a rent that is only a fraction of our current commitment in Colorado Springs.

So with hearts a bit heavy, we prepare to bid farewell to our mountain home, with every intention of returning some day soon. The boxes are already starting to pile up around me as a write this, capturing the contents of our apartment with efficient cardboard sterility. We have two weeks to pack and clean, load our belongings into our cars and a massive uHaul, and make the voyage back to Kansas. Our coffers are dwindling. The cost of the move is staggering. Jonikka continues to look for work as I do my best to bring in a comparatively paltry sum. Our debts, while not insurmountable, are burdensome, and supporting a family of four beyond the next few weeks with our current resources is, in a word, unrealistic.

Invariably, things will work out. We have a seriously uncanny way of emerging from hardship with surprisingly few scars. That doesn’t make the interim any easier, of course, and while I want to be hopeful… well, it bleeds the energy right out of you.

A month ago, when I was heaving that sigh, I was staring at the arbitrary start of the new year with aspiration and a bit of hope. 2024 would be the year I finished the next book. I had plans for my podcasts and my Patreon supporters, and I was thinking about heading to Kickstarter with another gaming project. I was lining out ways to address the damage to our credit in the wake of the Pandemic, and we were starting to talk about buying a car and working toward a house.

That phone call was a serious kick in the teeth.

But we have each other. We have amazing friends and family that have helped where they can. We have games that bring us joy, and my projects – while on a temporary hold – continue to tantalize me with their possibilities. I am optimistic about the next adventure, no matter the hardship, because perseverance is inevitably the greatest tool in our collective utility belt.

And there’s one other thing I want to acknowledge. Over the years, my wife and I have striven to be the kind of friends who help anyone we can. We’ve opened our home and our pantry, our wallets when we could – sometimes even when we couldn’t – and the karmic elevation of that devotion to showing love and respect to those around us is paying off in dividends. It’s not a reward for good behavior – the reward, conspicuously enough, was caring for others – but rather a reminder that your kindness and compassion has a way of being revisited upon you when the need is there.

Good morrow, friends. Wherever you are, we’ll see you soon.

We’re All Part of a Neverending Story…

My friends and I from Exposition Street were discussing the tonal shift between The Neverending Story and its sequel, released some six years later with a completely different cast and crew. While I am typically very much a champion of most films, much to the amusement of my fellow podcasters, I know that this particular switch up was one that I responded to very poorly.

The movie was released in the US in summer of 1984. I was eight years old, and it was one of the singularly most influential events of my childhood. I was absolutely absorbed by the world presented in the film and the concept that it connected to me in my seat at the theater just as potently as it connected young Bastian to the realm he was reading about.

I read the book a few years later. It was originally published by German author Michael Ende in 1979, and I never saw a copy until a middle school librarian pointed it out to me. The hardback was cleverly printed in different colors to differentiate the reader’s narrative from Bastian’s narrative and the narrative of the novel he was experiencing in the story. It was trippy, to say the least.

I remember being drawn in but unable to wrap my ahead around key differences between book and movie. I was already old enough to understand that, in the way of these things, conventional wisdom provided that “the book was better.” I mean, that’s the way it’s supposed to work, right? But there were definitely things they did in the movie that worked better for the story, including changes like the English translation “Fantastica” to “Fantasia”, for example, or the original visualization of the Ivory Tower as a sort of swirly ice cream looking structure.

There were also a lot of things that they left out when they made the film. That happens. And most notably, the movie ended about half way through the book. So when they announced a sequel in 1990 called “The Next Chapter”, I definitely had expectations.

It wasn’t what I wanted. The new vision combined with a thinner budget and weird conglomeration of elements from the book and the first movie made me dizzy, and I didn’t want a new Bastian and a new Atreyu and a different Mr. Bux and all that. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. We have a whole movie podcast where we get into the weeds on that kinda stuff.

The central message of the The Neverending Story was that allowing banality and despair to take root in the world around us diminished the power of our collective hopes and dreams. Sure there’s a powerful allegory about childhood and growing up in that, and Bastian was struggling with grief and loss, but after absorbing that message as a child I became a writer, a game master, a musician and an entertainer. I became someone intent on using my power to bring joy and share the experience of life with my fellow persons. I became someone who saw the potential in everything, loved things created by people on their own merit.

I am a terrible critic. I try, but sometimes I am just so overtaken by the magic of creativity and human ingenuity in sharing a vision with others… I love books. And movies. And music. And art. And poetry. And dance. And. And. And. It makes me kinda the object of friendly ridicule by my friends and fellow podcasters, but I have a hard time trashing much of anything. I am constantly trying to convince them of the awesomeness of damn near everything.

Sure, there are exceptions… art is subjective, after all.

So who knows… maybe I should give The Next Chapter another chance.

“I Need to Do More of That”

My friend Jason calls this “a dark incantation that guarantees that I will 100% not do more of that.” Cynical, perhaps, but not inaccurate. It’s like a doomseeker circuit that’s always present in our psyche. We clearly have the power to recognize values that lie outside of our everyday behavior, but change is freakin’ hard. Even with little things.

Lately I’ve been buried. TsunamiCon is looming like it’s namesake against the horizon, an inescapable storm that requires a shit-ton of preparation. It’s a storm I know well; the preparations are rote, carved into the soft tissue of my brain and fueled with caffeine and determination. It’s worth it, of course, but it’s a solitary pursuit. Particularly since I moved 8 hours away from my support system. I navigate those currents with a deft hand, but the hand still grows weary.

I have other pursuits, of course, but many of them grow stale during this part of the year. At least once a week, I open my manuscript for the sequel to Shadow of the Spire and stare at the page. I pick up my guitar for a few minutes nearly every day, but I’m not writing anything new. About the only creative outlet I navigate successfully every week is prepping and running tabletop RPGs for me friends. Admittedly, that’s something I’ve done nearly every week for almost 40 years, so it’s kinda like breathing. I couldn’t shut that part of my brain off if I wanted to.

Creative endeavors can be heavily affected by exhaustion or depression. It is remarkably difficult to find the energy and inspiration to conjure new ideas and expressions from the ether when your brain just wants to curl up in a corner and ignore the world, and if you are a creative by nature then this failure perpetuates a cycle of failures that makes it even harder the next time. It’s a death spiral that can’t be easily abandoned, and even small bursts of creative expression have little effect on the overall conundrum.

So what we have is little things. Tiny behavioral efforts that may not feel like much but break away from your S.O.P. And they don’t have to be the same things… you have to avoid pressuring yourself to meet an impossible standard. It’s like cleaning out your closet or wiping down the kitchen counter suddenly becoming a New Years resolution. Do it once and be happy, then look for other opportunities to break the cycle. And if you can find a way to hook into something that inspires you, ride the high and see if you can create a new pattern of behavior. But keep it small. Don’t punish yourself if its falls flat… it’s a little thing, not an impingement on your character.

I had said to my friends: “Actually find blogging very therapeutic. I need to do more of that.” So here I am. Keeping it small.

Here’s a picture of my cat.

Dystopia

My friend Vanessa just shared this with our friend group, with the caption “I feel like this is the dystopia genre as a whole.” I laughed. It’s kinda true.

Then I realized something that tasted weird about that statement: the idea of “dystopia” as a genre.

Dystopian fiction has its roots in the very underpinnings of utopian science fiction. In the early era of sci-fi literature, authors imagined the future as an idealized state managed by political and social structures that reflected the author’s ethos. Dystopian evocations naturally portrayed the opposite, often with very cynical or subversive undertones. While utopian concepts celebrated mankind’s ability to transcend petty differences and transform their world into a realm of enlightenment, dystopian tales revealed the soft white underbelly of utopias built on corrupt and dangerous supports.

Needless to say, the latter evaluation is an outgrowth of the former and has become far more commonplace today. Which takes me back to the very foundation of the concept. Expressions of dystopia – corrupt power centers, inherent moral decay, the illusion of equality, and warnings about the trajectory of our social order – now pervade so many levels of modern entertainment. While initially developed as a means to provoke deep thought regarding the potential future of mankind, dystopias have now become an acceptable standard by which we measure the present. Even those of us who expound on a frightening look at the future we may very well be hurtling toward at terrifying speeds generally accept that our priority is to adapt and survive, that systemic change is a complete fantasy.

**Eloi** Yvette Mimieux off to be the **Morlock**‘s supper.
From *The Time Machine* (1960).

If you think about it, that is the polar opposite of the point of dystopian fiction.

I would propose that relegating dystopian fiction to “genre” status – which it certainly is! – marginalizes the art form. When it becomes passe and overwrought, we don’t actually see ourselves in the narrative. Sure, we see the extension of our society by proxy, but less as a thought experiment and more as a pickling kettle. We soak up science fiction and judge the story more than the premise. After all, we’ve seen nearly every plot structure and character evolution mulched over and again; the premise is either too far removed from the currency of everyday life or a foregone conclusion.

I grew up loving Star Trek. Roddenberry’s vision of the future of humanity was purely utopian. We lived in a world of peace and plenty. We had fought our wars and come out the other side stronger and ready to expand our personal horizons. We made giant space vessels for purposes of science and exploration. When we fought it was with violent cultures that had yet to achieve a similar state of enlightenment. As the franchise advanced the clock further, however, into the era of grunge music and the Gulf War, we saw increasing stories of subversion and human failing. The levers of power would fall into the wrong hands, and well-written episodes would often raise ethical questions with no clean answer.

Cpt. Benjamin Sisko investigates a coup attempt involving several Star Fleet officers.
From *Deep Space Nine* ssn4 episode “Paradise Lost”.

While Star Trek routinely held us to a higher standard from the very start – a position that has admittedly wobbled quite a bit from one entrant to the next – the lessons are now less visible to younger fans who no longer see the franchise’s alien warmongers, social stressors, profiteering, terrorism and intrigue reflected in today’s society. At best it starts to feel like an informed plot point we’ve seen a million times before, at worst it’s virtually satire.

And to my previous point… we are so inundated with dystopian story beats today that we no longer find as much value in entertainments that don’t have them. Corruption, manipulation, and inequality are part of our world, and stories that don’t reflect that are just unrealistic. I host a podcast where we talk about our favorite movies, and while sometimes we range into discussion about the implications of a filmmaker’s vision, our conversation typically rounds the maypole on performance, visual effects, and story choices that are made to move it along. I mean… why focus on the dystopia. That’s just normative.

We understand the inherent risk of the surveillance state recommended by George Orwell’s writings and the elements of social control we’re rebelling against in A Clockwork Orange and Hunger Games. We get the threat of totalitarian governments a la Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale or even Lois Lowry’s The Giver. We get it. And we rate it for it’s entertainment value.

Because crying ourselves to sleep at night f’ing sucks.

So, yeah. Dystopia is a genre.

The Citadel

I get a strange sort of exuberance upon first entering a shopping mall. I’m not entirely sure why. They somehow seem like a relic of a bygone age, indicative of a childhood spent living in small town America where the mall was a symbol of the big city and all the shopping opportunities that we didn’t have; an idiom made honestly more confusing because malls offer very little specific shopping interests for me, which I’m sure was just as true when I was a kid. But what they did offer – bookstores, music stores, arcades, and so forth – felt like a trip to f’ing Disneyland.

Admittedly, it’s a fleeting sensation.

Today I am visiting the Citadel Mall in Colorado Springs. I’m alone on my excursion; my lady wife doesn’t particularly care for buildings with people in them, and my kids demonstrated markedly little interest in shopping in meatspace. And to be fair, the exterior of this shopping complex promises little innovation for the excursion to follow.

One place that does still retain some of the magic for me, however, is the almighty food court. And this one is quite simply gorgeous. And immediately accessible to the outside! Like somehow the mall knows that the food court is what’s going to bring people in the door. And frankly, on a Sunday afternoon, it’s the only area of the parking lot with much in the way of business.

A walk around the most accessible section of the mall from this location reveals numerous staples like Hot Topic, Spencer’s, Claire’s, Bath & Body Works, a bulk candy store, and a Game Stop. Happily, I also found an arcade tucked behind the stair! It wasn’t a particularly fabulous selection of games, but it still conjured pleasant memories of a youth spent plunking quarters into machines and wasting hours with my friends.

I picked up some candy – they had a small variety of sugar free offerings, but nothing to write home about – and grabbed a couple of pretzel dogs on my way out, my curiosity largely sated. I kept my visit short so that there would be plenty of new things to see if I swing by again sometime.

Ultimately, that initial enthusiasm dims very quickly without willing it to stay alive. Shopping malls are fairly banal, and while I long to see the shine beneath the surface, I know very well that I’m looking at the possibility of it all from the perspective of a boy who had very little to compare it to in life. During the course of my adult life, malls have held little more than nostalgia for me, and while living in the city I very rarely partook. We had a small town mall where I spent my early adult life in Dodge City, and it was home to our town’s biggest movie theater and only arcade. But it wasn’t big enough to support a food court, so it didn’t count.

Although there was a steak house there for a while where my band would rock the proverbial house, set up on a stage in the mall corridor facing the restaurant. That was pretty dope.

I’ll talk a little bit about some of the other, more interesting shopping experiences offered by the Springs when I have some time.