Fewer Words, More Feeling

Lemme tell ya a story.

Late in my young development - probably later than most - I began to realize that systems of deep-seated belief remained so only by tenuous virtue of masses of people remaining heavily and personally invested in their continuation.

This did not excuse me from explaining physical systems; planes do not fly because people believe they do, but it brought into question social machinery; organized patterns of behavior, starting fairly early, with reading.

I read as a child. I read now. I don't know why I do it, other than to learn that which would be painfully slow or unbearably laborious to learn in practice. History is a fantastic example of a lesson better learned by written analysis than by structured re-enactments.

And, I read for enjoyment; every Sherlock Holmes story, the Sprawl books by Gibson, a few by Stephenson, a few by Clavell. Catch-22. A bunch of others. They melt like wax now and combine and get on my fingers and it feels weird.

But something then - and now - ate at my brain as I ate at the books.

What if this isn't the best way to learn? To enjoy myself? To gain insight?

Part I: Don't Know Much About Science Book

As a young man in school, I knew that sitting on this fear would be the best thing to do. To attain any hope of scholastic success, not to mention respect from adults (whom I already knew were my only chance of gaining any influence over the course of my young life) I knew that demonstrating a lifelong fealty to reading was paramount.

I knew that to survive, I had to tow the party line and insist in lockstep with my peers that "books equal knowledge", that the publishing mechanisms that brought us bound and set type were the wellsprings of human evolution and greater good, and that the defense of every piece of printed material sanctified by a publishing mark was my overriding and irrefutable life directive.

Certainly the only option for a young man struggling through the public school system and trying to attract the attention of an erudite crowd was to be literate. After all, if you're not literate...you had might as well be illiterate.

It was stressed as well that readers had better capacities for abstract thought. The goal, of course, was to attain powers of imagination and visualization. I think. Nobody ever said outright that the goal was to try to get to the point that you could levitate stuff with your mind and get psychic powers, but you kind of got the idea that's what everyone else was hoping would happen if they read more than the kid across from them.

Even in my perusal of children's TV, the particular self-righteous tone of Baby Piggy from Muppet Babies is still vivid now as I recall her speaking proudly of her i-mag-i-na-ci-on before diving through the closet into another matted clip of French Dadaist pie fights.

And if I thought I was going to be safe discarding the standard talisman of scholastic achievement and stubbornly go my own way - learning minus the University system (shocking!) - I was wrong. Apparently, there is no autodidact in anyone's memory that has ever survived more than two seconds in open air without a book. They shrivel up or get a rash or something, I don't know.

I couldn't escape. One way or the other, I had to merit any successes I had to books. Reading them, writing them, lauding their authors, collecting them, comparing them, analyzing them, spending my life worshipping them. Words. On pages. Printed out, stuck together with glue, jammed between cardboard. Like it or not, this was to be my religion. I liked books. But this was a cult. And I wasn't a believer.

I went for years agonizing over which track would cause me less pain. College, or surviving on my own. I was in grave danger of spooling out the rest of my teenage probationary years without clinging to either liferaft: books, or severely overpriced books. Textbooks, I think they call those.

An Aside

I mention this because it's now over a decade later and I remain very skeptical that there is any God-planted flag in the ground that declares every victory in the war of human progress as belonging to the Nation of Books. I scrapped and climbed up to the current ladder rung I inhabit now watching system after system declare itself self-evident, much in the same way books do.

Every system had the same thing in common. A group of people, several million truckloads of resources, and a mountain of money, all sworn to protect a continuously paying investment.

But what kid ever figures that out? Back then, there was no fighting. There were no great epiphanies that tore open the shroud hiding the grand machine. There was only acquiescence if you wanted your freedom, A's if you wanted your allowance (or your Nintendo).

There was no reward, no personal profit in declaring a tautology a tautology, nothing behind the door of great discovery of the whirling cogs and escapements of the world's massive, silver-age clanking mechanica than another dismissal for being "young and passionate".

So.

Having not declared my allegiance to either the staunch collegiate or independently didactic track, there was despair in everyone's hearts as I took to my first few years of highschool unsure of myself or my future as a someone-who-has-to-start-thinking-about-paying-for-his-own-Nachos-Bell-Grande (hey, the concept was a lot more frightening back then).

But something was changing. Something about the way I was going to receive, send, and process what books were all about: information. A change in information was playing out that would lead to a new path for me and for people like me, stuck in the middle.

It began the first day I heard the crackle and shriek of a healthy modem reaching out to touch an open circuit, thousands of miles away.

Jesus. If only my mother knew the long distance phone bills she was about to receive.

To Be Continued...