Wow. I just a moment ago had three (3) Stephen King books in my shopping cart at Amazon. I had to do a double take. I keep bashing Stephen King as being literature for degenerates. What's sad is I don't even know how to read anything beyond Stephen King. I particularly get annoyed with how easily this world we live in - with movies, music, and beyond, all within reach in the comfort of our homes - can so easily be undone, all the progress we've made in the past 75 years. People like Stephen King seem to think these are essential to life, and he keeps inserting cultural references to them, as if he wants people to just read his books and forget about them later; no sense in writing a classic ey? Something that future generations don't need an encyclopedia to understand would be too ambitious I suppose...
And I guess it's rather unfair of me to generalize like I have been for so long, but I've long had the feeling that 80% of society is a pile of moron. At least some of that is probably because people talk without thinking and end up sounding like they were thinking, much like I do sometimes. You tell someone you make $700 a month and then they ask you "Why don't you buy an airplane ticket to visit your sister?" Seriously? You tell someone you work at night from 8pm - 6am and then they spend all day trying to telephone you. People will often deprive their own selves of sleep just to make an extra $3,000/mo as if their would-be income without sleep deprivation wouldn't be enough...I do wonder how much of that is spurred on by the people at the top though...my so-called friend in jr high & high school said he had to work like 8 hrs a day or else he'd get fired...and this was at Denny's...while he was still in school for 6 hrs a day. How is someone supposed to get a decent adulthood, much less a childhood, when they spend 14+ hrs a day working their tail off? That leaves just enough time to take a shower, brush teeth, give your loved one(s) a peck on the cheek and give ones self enough time to settle into bed before sleep.
So anyway...I've never been in the work force, so I guess I can't say too much about it, but I do know sleep is important and that not being Super(hu)man should not disqualify someone from getting a top paying job.
And this REALLY ticks me off; people make up their own rules in regards to medicine. The pill bottle will state "TAKE 10-14 DAYS" and then the user will stop taking it b/c they feel better. Why exactly? Under what institute of knowlege do people get the idea that just because one suspects they are cured means medicine should cease to be administered? Under that train of thought, germs don't exist do they? You can't see them, you can't feel them; why worry about them? Of course, that train of logic is probably quite prevelent actually; how many people vacuum their carpets and mop their floors? How many people do a beyond halfway decent job at washing dishes?
People will tell you it's none of your business if you confront them with this information, but that's bull. Pandemics and epidemics are much more probable when you live in a world where antiobotics no longer work like they should because the germs that cause illness have grown immune to the medicine b/c people let the germs win by backing off on the medicine.
Same thing with recycling. No doubt the overspill from the landfills will be distributed evenly as opposed to being dumped on the lawns only of those households who don't recycle. And what about the children of those households? "Go find somewhere else to live if you don't like it".
anyway...I guess it all started way before all that, actually. People - doctors, my mother, etc. - would always drag me off to some pointless activity because "I might like it". "How do you know you don't like it?" My mother almost made me go to the zoo. I probably would not have hated it. I would have hated being dragged over there, stuck in the car for 3+ hours while every good thing the world has to offer flashes before my eyes. I always hate that about long trips. You see a mall that you've never been to, or an eatery that looks intriguing and you never go back and like hellk the vehicle you're in gets stopped so that you can get "distracted". As if going to the zoo is why we as humans are alive. Maybe a lot of people feel that way, much like I feel about eating and shopping. I like malls. I like the combination of dim-lighting and neon colors, I like the pizazz and sparkle of it all. True, I rarely have enough money to go to the mall and actually make use of it. If I could save up $25 for three months, I'd have enough to spend at least a little bit through 3 different malls if I wanted to. AND eat at some eatery someplace. Obviously I wouldn't be able to buy a new pair of jeans or a CD, but maybe an ice cream cone or a decal for my window, since I don't and probably never will have a car.
As for the zoo, I know I won't like it b/c I know what a zoo is and I've never felt like "Oh, that looks (sounds) fun!". My grandpa felt that way about fishing it seemed like. How do I know I won't like fishing? Hmm...uh...what IS there to like about fishing? What about golf? Uh...no. Well, what about baseball? Baseball is sped up golf. No, it's not. Whatever; No. I don't like playing games - some wise guy from eons ago decided to make a map with a bunch of detours. Nothing about point A or point B or any of the detours offers any means for emotional stimulation. That's why I listen to music that's why I watch movies that's why I read books. Emotional stimulation. Where in the act of fishing/baseball/zoo-wandering does that happen? I might laugh a little bit depending on who I'm with, I might enjoy their company, but I don't need to have a fishing pole to do that, at least baseball is a means of physical activity...
I guess this put me at odds with civilization so when I became informed enough to know when stupidity was falling out of people's mouths, I took that as a bad sign.
Ulimately, all the "Real" art to be found in literature is beyond my reading level b/c I was a well-meaning yet un-tamable beast of a child, and couldn't be chained to a desk long enough to finish kindergarten w/o adjusting to my anti-psychotics which somehow mellowed out the un-tamableness and gave everyone enough time to talk to me and level with me before I could zone out and imagine I was somewhere else where no one was lecturing me...so I continued kindergarten in a classroom designed for kids with no future, since banning kids from school is against the law, unless they commit a criminal act that cannot be explained by an illness that the kid did not knowingly create themselves...
And since I am extremely stubborn, it took another five years from then before I even had any desire to make use of my time in school. By that time, everyone except me, my former-SED (Seriously Emotionally Disturbed) classmates and my then-current-LD classmates were leaps and bounds beyond what I was learning. My normal peers were learning algebra, but I was just starting to get the hang of basic division and I never got pre-algebra, which is weird b/c my teacher tried to sum pre-algebra up by a demo-type-equation, which she wrote on the chalk board and explained. And I was like "Oh! That's easy" Then came the non-demo equations, and I was stumped, like "what the..." If I ever filled out the paper, I didn't get any higher than a F. The following papers didn't show myself any improvement.
So anyway. My reading skills are as much as I am willing to learn and since I'm stubborn, lazy, and my eyes are starting to wig out on me (damn, I need eye glasses!!), I am probably never going to be able to read certain books. I tried reading THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, the one that the Martin Scorsese movie is based on, and could not for the life of me decipher what the author was saying, apparently because he was writing in some metaphore drenched method. My mother understood it, but she said she didn't like it for some reason I don't remember. I couldn't even watch the movie b/c I didn't understand half of what was going on. The conversation with Jesus and Judas was entirely comprehensible, but then there was some Roman Gladiator fighting scene and it looked like maybe someone escaped the ring or...I don't know. It wasn't very clear at all. Main thing I remember is some scraggly looking guy was walking very slowly forward with a grin on his face and I'm like "Who is this guy and what is he doing??
Ian McEwan's ATONEMENT I also couldn't get more than 20 pages through because he spent almost a page describing in very obscure language this water fountain. Don't ask me why.
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