I always assumed I would be a writer. In fifth grade I decided I would be a writer. So I wrote. Throughout middle school, throughout high school, and into college. One of my biggest regrets was not doing the student newspaper. I love journalism and journalists, and when combined with a weekly quota, achieves some epic ends. Instead I loved art and reading nonfiction books. I assumed I would write books about art and whatever else caught my fancy for the rest of my life.
In college I developed schizophrenia. I wasn’t diagnosed until after I graduated. Instead, I spent five strenuous years trying to hone my craft of writing while having my writings skills (of clarity, comprehensibility, cogency, and affect) deteriorate while my brain turned against itself. Instead of becoming a better writer and researcher in college, my professors wound up thinking I couldn’t write worth a damn. “Demonstrative of a disturbed mind” was one feedback I got on my junior qual.
I wanted to be a writer, a scientist, an artist, and so on and so on and instead of improving my skills disappeared. My professors rightfully thought I was an idiot, or lazy, or unqualified to be a PhD candidate. Because my grades were so dismal because of my undiagnosed schizophrenia, one professor wrote me that I needed to figure out what I wanted to do in life because the possibility of getting a PhD was so remote.
For better or worse, even today on invega sustenna I still struggle to write comprehensible prose. I write long convoluted sentences that twist in on themselves into incomprehensibility. I turn readers away due to my exhaustiveness in dense prose. I read all the time, yet write so infrequently that I am not in the habit of conveying ideas cogently. Nor doing proper research. Indeed, perhaps I never will be a writer. But I love books and want to create them.
I love books so much. There are few things that are so perfectly sized to entertain you with zero electricity. I can take a book off grid and still, as long as I can carry its heft, get some value out of it while it’s still light. In books, I love that I have to plan. I have to make sure I can fit it somewhere I can carry, without making the bag be so heavy as to be burdensome, and then find a way to provide lighting so that I can read it at night (usually the first opportunity after work to sit down and get some reading done). A book is, in itself, gamified. A book is, in itself, a fun video game. As someone who gets excited about lighting technology (I’ve been vying for LED lighting since 2003), I love trying to figure out how best to light a room for reading, or how much lighting costs, or how to make it cheaper or use less fossil fuels, or make it portable, etc.
Books are a fun subculture. You can be snobbish about reading because so few do it, yet you also want reading to be so commonplace that everyone in the world reads every day. There is pride in having saved up enough money to purchase a book. There is pride in having a bookshelf at home, a weighty and burdensome resource that takes up a lot of your space and makes moving difficult. There are people who spent all their god given money on books, and there are people who are always on the lookout for frugal deals. There are people who read for pleasure, and there are some people who every opportunity are searching for self embetterment by studying textbooks and vocational education. There is no set formula for being a reader. Just that you live a quiet enough life (maybe facilitated by noise canceling headphones!) that you are able to sit quietly and think and dream while looking at sheets of paper. It’s remarkable how few people are able to organize and prioritize quiet and solitude and creativity in the age of computers and on-demand streaming (new and improved television, as I call it). People have many hobbies, me included, that aren’t reading, but doing no reading without screens with nothing but a page and text, not reading any books per year, it truly unimaginable to me. I find reading a book to be a thrilling experience. Movie studios spend billions of dollars trying to make exciting movies, yet I find reading to be so much more exciting. For the cost of a ticket, I could probably buy ten books from my used book store. I get more excitement from reading than anything movie producers can create. I love sitting quietly (facilitated by noise canceling headphones), producing and consuming no noise, yet being neck deep in fantasy and adventure and excitement and creativity and seeing an author’s work of art unfolding whole doing nothing more than sitting in a chair reading the written word. No electricity beyond my ambient light, no unionized actors charging millions of dollars for star power, just a little simple stack of papers that fits in my hand and is bound together with some glue. It’s a real fuck you to everyone that says you must fork over gobs of money in order to be considered cool. My $2 book gives me eleven hours of entertainment and I don’t even have to leave my room. And the characters are totally unique to me, existing only inside my brain. There is no canon, just creativity.
Books are fantastic because they require that you cultivate focus. It turns out that focusing is what gives life import. When you are focused on a task you are indistractable and more creative. You accomplish things and feel accomplishment. You achieve goals that you set out for yourself. You realize who you want to be in moments of focus. Without focus, a day is a waste and depression starts to creep in on you. Focus can be achieved in many things that don’t require reading, bit it is a tautology that reading requires focus. By expanding your focusing power by reading, you are exercising your focus like a muscle. I might not be in an impressive body, but I have cultivated a reading hobby akin to a world class weight lifter by exercising and daily “working out.” It might not be exteriorably visible, but that focus muscle is expandable to work, art, chores, friendships and conversations, empathy, and crafting my life and meeting my goals and helping others reach their goals. I would like to think that when somebody talks to me, they are getting an experience unlike anything else i. the world. Just like running a workout with Usain Bolt would be an eye opening experience, I want working and studying with me to be eye opening. Not for my own aggrandizement (I have nothing left to accomplish), but for fulfilling other people’s goals and dreams. The best tactic for this, for that level of empathy, is frequent reading coupled with frequent conversations with people.
I want to be a little dweeb that reads a lot and has fun conversations with my friends. I don’t care how I dress (though I have fashion goals like androgyny), how much money I have (though I have financial goals like saving frugally for retirement), how I look (though I have health goals like exercising everyday), or even how “cool” I am (though I have social goals like having a smart group of friends I hang out with weekly). These values I have learned through books, I am willing to confess. If I am burned at the stake, it will because of what I learned in books (and zines). I am a better friend because of what I have learned i. books. I am a better partner because of what I have learned in books. I am a better family member or coworker because of what I have learned in books. Not for my own sake, but because I want to help others achieve their goals. Even knowing that I want to help people accomplish their dreams is because of what I have learned in books. Without books, I would be far worse as a humanist than my shortcomings even now. In the training and preparation for life’s work, books are truly the instruction manual. I hardly ever regret having read for a certain time, just like I hardly ever regret having just ran or exercised for a while. Some things are so fulfilling, so CORE to what gives life meaning, that you really do have no other descriptor than love. I love books (as an object). I love reading (as a dialogue with an author). I love talking about books and what I’ve learned in books with friends, and receiving their imbibed wisdom too. So much happiness and life fulfillment has come from these little books that the entire eleusian mystery of them can only be described as a deep love. I don’t expect you to understand all my loves, but they make me who I am. And I want to talk about it (“shout from the rooftops”). Touch grass has been a bitter war the past few years. But it’s 100% valid as a guiding principle. Spend as little time as possible on a computer. Use it only to write or acquire ebooks that you can read on an e-ink screenreader. “Touch a book” would be advice that, bitterness aside, would reflect an equally valid guiding principle for life. “Take a look, it’s in a book” to quote Reading Rainbow. To teach people with empathy that “touching grass” isn’t a slur but a nudge towards healthy habits. To read is to self-fulfill. To actualize your dreams. Without reading (an all the equally valid forms it can take: paper, ereader, audiobook, magazine, zine, newspaper, rss feed), you handicap yourself just a bit. A bit that might just MATTER. How will you know if it matters? Well, if you find yourself spending a lot of time on a computer versus reading or making art, then I would say it matters. In life, maximize reading and making art, and minimize computing. Compute only as a means to write and acquire ebooks. Anything else should be spent touching grass or taking a look in a book. I promise you it will make you happier. Cultivate your garden [curate your book shelf]. We are not doing this for any extrinsic reward, simply intrinsic goals like being the best human you can be on your ephemeral time on a welcoming earth in an optimized solar system.
I wanted to be a writer but an illness took a big chunk of that offline. Straight up kneecapped. But I can still make books with the resources I have (even at just my public library), and I intend to do just that. I find books and art even more emboldening when they are delivered with a Creative Commons license. It allows me to talk about books without the guilt that a friend will have to spend $15 if they want to share in the experience. I can share my epub, my pdf, my mp3s without feeling like a criminal for wanting to talk about art with friends. It removes the boot off our necks, the police state running rampant with the belief that any threat to profits is unadulterated terrorism. That critiquing or appreciating art doesn’t require not meeting your retirement goals. To allow that class doesn’t determine whether your imagination is full of exuberant art, creative music, and thrilling plots compared to the homogenous blue-grey monotony of decades of social media posts. To allow people to work less while still having a fantastic art life, the internal growth from experiencing art for free either at a museum, public library, or at home with a Creative Commons work. Removing class from deciding whether you can have a fulfilling internal art world is one of the most important projects of modern humanity. And we can do that by embracing open access, using these computers for public access to CC art and artists. We need to get people off computers and into the realm of experiencing and creating Creative Commons art. No other project is as important as eliminating class from the art world. Public access means more affordable reading and art appreciation to you. More time to focus and daydream while reading or looking at art, without costing you anything. When art becomes about how affordable it is to humanity, as inexpensive as possible, then art will have reached its eschatology. Instead art seems to be about profit, and that’s to everyone’s disadvantage. When we celebrate people who make affordable public access art, then we will have grown as a society into what’s truly important. Creative Commons permits copying and remixing so that it is not a crime. Iy also makes it free. What’s more important to a group of friends than reading the same book, seeing the same art together, at no cost. It’s the bread and (vegan) butter of life. Let’s make art copyable and shareable for all groups of friends by releasing our works with Creative Commons. The purpose of life is not profit (especially if you already have enough).
I love reading and one of my life goals is to promote literacy far and wide. If you do not read, treat it like exercising, starting small and increasing a bit in duration each day. Then increase the effort required by reading harder works. In time, you’ll be able to read complicated works. And hopefully with libraries, used book stores, $2 bookshop.org deals, Creative Commons works, and public domain works, you’ll find the hobby inexpensive. No matter what your primary hobby, reading a bit each day cultivates your focus to further improve your ability to craft or execute that hobby. And that focus is what I call love. I love that I can be alone a bit each day, my only interaction being the artwork produced by an author.
And then after that, back to hanging out with friends!
Have a happy new year! May you become a bit more the person you want to be.
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