I Bet Owning a Gun Is Awesome

Like everyone else, I'm somewhat shocked but mostly desensitized about the mass shootings in... you know what, I don't even have to name a city here, because there's just gonna be another one tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day after that. I don't understand why people can't see that all of these shootings are connected to the fact that guns in the United States are plentiful and unregulated and that we have a culture that worships guns. I can't see why the right to own a gun should be more important than the right not to be shot by a gun.

However, I think there might be an aspect to this that I've been overlooking. Because, like a lot of people who criticize gun culture, I've never owned a gun.

I mean, what if owning a gun is literally the absolute best thing ever? What if the mere fact of owning an automatic weapon is like the greatest high that a human being can ever hope to experience, like snorting a bunch of coke and high-fiving the Pope while riding a golden unicorn? And what if the sensual pleasure of gun ownership intensifies every time you leave the ammunition in, or store it out of its safe, or let your children play in the same room as the gun?

Pictured: a first-time gun owner.

Because that would explain it, right? If you take a group of rational humans and tell them that gun control will save hundreds of lives, if you tell them about Australia and some other stuff about Australia and also show them charts aplenty, then nearly everyone will be like "yeah, maybe we should get rid of some of these guns, because come on look at this shit." But maybe instead it's like telling a group of junkies about the dangers of heroin. Sure, they can rationally understand that heroin will kill them. Contrary to popular stereotypes, most addicts are not in denial about their preferred substances. They just can't stop.

And what if there's withdrawal symptoms? Maybe taking a gun owner's gun away is like going cold turkey on OxyContin. You get the shakes, you start hallucinating tiny European monarchs in your house taxing you without representation, shit like that. Man, I wouldn't want that to happen to me! Why do I gotta go through gun detox when I'd never shoot anyone? C'mon bud, just gimme one little Kalashnikov to get me through the end of the week. Maybe it's almost cruel to make gun owners give up their guns, although not as cruel as sitting around with our thumbs up our asses while hundreds of people die or anything.

In closing, based on no evidence whatsoever I believe that owning a gun must create a high so incredibly great that it makes you override your natural empathy and rationality to get a taste of that sweet, sweet steel. Therefore, I propose a new slogan for the gun control movement:

GUNS: NOT EVEN ONCE.

On Not Writing

Confession: aside from a few pieces of flash for a contest, I haven't been able to write or revise anything for the past few weeks.

This is moderately concerning, because in the past when I haven't written consistently I wind up basically quitting for years. While I don't think that will happen this time, because I'm not as much of a moron anymore, it still feels dangerous not to write. It's so easy to fall into the "not writing" trap, and quite difficult to climb your way out of it once you're in.

Comic books awaiting their epic journey.

A lot of the reason I can't write, maybe even all of it, is due to the upcoming move to Portland, which is now precipitously close. Less than two months away close. And while I am totally committed to this move and can't wait for it to happen, even good things cause a ton of stress and anxiety. Moving is right up there with divorce and job loss as a stressor, and this move will come packaged with job loss (with nothing waiting for me) and is clear across the friggin' country. We are literally moving as far away as one can from our current location without leaving the continental US. It's not a coincidence that this "writer's block" coincided almost perfectly with the finalizing of our timetable. There's just so much to do, and I feel like I can't carve out some writing time since I should be packing boxes or sorting out stuff to give away. Although I'm falling down on those tasks as well, truth be told.

People, including Rob, say to be kind to myself, to let the writing flow at its own pace and give myself some breathing space, but honestly? Fuck that. I need to be harder on myself, because when it comes right down to it, the only person hurt if I don't write is me (and maybe Rob, a little). There's nobody out there salivating for my precious words. Sure, it's "only" two months, but that's a hell of a lot of writing time to waste, and I was going at a pretty serious pace up until two weeks ago. (And there's always the possibility that it's not because of the move. I'd rather not think about that possibility.)

I'm sure it will come back in time. I signed myself up for another crazy challenge to write several full-length short stories at the pace of one per week over the next several weeks, and I'm still sticking to my deadline of having my novel reader-ready (if not agent-ready) by April 1, although I probably won't be able to deliver it to beta readers on that date since we'll probably be driving through Montana or some shit.

There's just nothing worse than having a huge block of writing time and not being able to do anything but stare at a blank screen because you're filled with existential dread. Well, maybe those big-ass spiders they have in the Pacific Northwest. I'd rather not think about those either.

***

To pull a total 180, my contributor copy of Spark: A Creative Anthology (which includes my story "Real Plastic Trees") came in the mail a few days ago. It's an astonishing 400+ pages long, and includes speculative fiction pieces from both established and new writers. The paperback book is gorgeous, but there's also an e-version if you prefer that. Pick it up!

Not Knowing What Else to Do, Woman Writes Blog Post

One of the things I hate whenever a tragedy happens (and I don't need to specifically name the tragedy here, because a) you all know which one I'm talking about; and b) it's going to happen again at some indeterminate point in the future, so this is a multi-use blog post, like a greeting card that says "I'm Thinking About You") is the refrain of "don't politicize it!" Because the only thing that makes survivors feel better about the senseless pain they are going through is if people they will never meet tiptoe around and never try to change the parameters in order to help prevent someone else from undergoing senseless pain.

I would agree with not politicizing tragic events if you're directly related to the event in question. If you're actually living in Newtown, you probably shouldn't be railing about gun control today. If you're taking a casserole to a grieving mother, it's best not to drop in a note saying "by the way, what's your opinion on mandatory commitment for the mentally ill?" If you do those things, you are a stone cold asshole.

But if you're on the outside? Yeah, no. It's okay for you to politicize events, and in fact it's your DUTY as an observer to politicize events.

So, here's the particular political axes I've come to grind:

1) Guns. We've had 223 years with free and open gun laws, and we've proven time and again that we can't be trusted with them. So it's time for those laws to be changed. Suckers act like the Constitution hasn't been amended multiple times. We change that thing all the time, whenever we decide that it's wrong to own other people or feel like nobody should have a drink or when we want to drink after all. The original ten amendments aren't unbreakable; in fact, we routinely break most of them all the time! Not that that's a good thing, after all. But it is curious that the same people who talk about the Second Amendment as a sacred right often don't have a thing to say about grand juries or military tribunals or capital punishment. Either that, or people just get bored around the Sixth Amendment or so and stop reading.

"But most gun owners don't commit crimes!" Yeah, and most people who drive drunk get home just fine. Running with scissors is a fun pastime that only very rarely puts out someone's eye. We make laws to protect us from the exceptions, not the rule. If most gun owners wanted to shoot people, the rivers of western Pennsylvania would run red with blood. Unfortunately, sometimes it is necessary to remove a freedom from law-abiding people when the public well-being demands it, and in this case, I believe it has.

And that Constitutional amendment you're all so hot for? Includes the word "well-regulated." Nothing well-regulated about buying a Glock with no waiting period at a convention from a guy with swastikas tattooed on his cheeks.

It's time to beat our guns into plowshares, or maybe small replica guns that we can use as paperweights.

2) Involuntary Treatment of the Mentally Ill. I knew -- knew -- that it wouldn't take more than a few hours for people on my Facebook feed to start posting links to editorials about how mentally ill people are more likely to be victims than perpetrators of crime, and "we can't know whether Adam Lanza was mentally ill or not" (because killing 25+ people isn't enough evidence to support it, ~*skepticism!*~). I am glad to say that my predictions did not disappoint.

Look, I have "issues" too, but I also believe that people are smart enough to differentiate a person with garden variety depression or anxiety from someone with a serious thought disorder or antisocial personality disorder (i.e. sociopathy, not introversion). Mental illness is a very, very wide spectrum/constellation and pointing out that Lanza or James Holmes or Jared Loughner are or were probably crazy doesn't reflect at all on my feelings about the rest of the 20% (this is probably a conservative estimate) of human beings with a mental illness.

And yeah, I agree with forced treatment, although before we can even start talking about that we need to have a system in place. There aren't enough resources even for the people who want and can afford to get treatment.

But when that system is in place? Then we need to start identifying people with serious mental illness, and implementing medical treatments, both for their good and for the good of others. What causes more stigma, forced treatment or a mentally ill person shooting up a school?

I believe in forcing vaccinations, too. This is no different, it's only different because people choose not to see mental illness as a physical, medical problem. And that's something I think current stigma-fighting rhetoric actually contributes to, not helps (but that's a post for another time).

In closing, The Onion says it best, as it often does.

What I've Been Doing

So, I've been pretty busy for someone without any real responsibilities, so here's a list of some of the shit I've been up to.

• We are moving into Baltimore City! Not only that, it's to the best apartment in the world! This apartment is really huge, at least 1.5 times bigger than everything else we saw. The living room is painted the exact same color of mint green that I would have painted it, if I'd chosen the colors of my walls. The dining room is bright blue, and the bedroom is reddish fuchsia! The kitchen is a yellow which I can only describe as "kitcheny," which is apropos. There is a dogwood tree in the backyard (yes! in the city!) and a small plot of land which I might use for a garden. There are tomato cages which I'd like to use because tomatoes are one of the few vegetables I actually like and the only one that would grow well in a backyard garden. There is a basement where I can park my bike and where we can store excess books. We are almost certainly inheriting a fourth cat from our landlord for convoluted reasons to be explained later.

Needless to say, I am stoked. The last year has taught me a very valuable lesson: don't live in the suburbs. As a non-driver (and one who is increasingly uninterested in getting her license), I can't handle it: the monotony of only being able to shop at chain stores and eat at chain restaurants, the utter meanness of townies who assume you're a student, the impossibility of getting a job because interviewers assume you're unreliable simply because you don't drive. (I've never had to call into work because I had to take my legs into the shop. Just sayin'.) When we moved to Towson, we thought it would be a lot like State College, PA, which is also a college town of approximately 50,000 people. Except that it's a lot easier to get to a big city from Towson vs. State College. But State College is very walkable/bikeable, and to some extent so are smaller PA college towns like Indiana or, hell, even California (which is where I went to college), and I don't think I would have had a lot of problems making friends or getting a job there. Towson is more like Monroeville, except with two colleges lodged in its bowels like nuclear bombs in a mixed-metaphor word salad. Also that reference will not make sense to you if you're not from Pennsylvania. Sorry about that.

• Working on short stories! I have two in the pipeline right now: one about evil cars, the other a Machine of Death story. I had been working on a novel in progress, but sort of abandoned it when my computer crashed and I lost the last five pages of writing. Maybe that doesn't sound too tragic, but it was only eleven pages overall. Perhaps it's for the best, I don't really have the attention span for novels. I've said it before: if I only ever write one novel in my life, that is totally fine with me.

• One of our cats was turned into a lamp by an evil sorcerer:

Rob wouldn't let me put the sweater on her. "It's too hot, she'll roast."
So you can blame him for this picture not being as awesome as it
might have been. It would have been on for ONE MINUTE
and cats are hardy little critters. Simply elucidatin'.

• Selling shit on Amazon. Now, it will be no surprise to people who have been to our house that we own A LOT OF BOOKS. (Although not an alot made out of books.) But we've been practicing Discardia, which means getting rid of many hundreds of our books. In the past, we'd always take the books to a used bookstore, which would maybe give us thirty bucks for four bags of books, if we were lucky. But then I had a brainstorm: why not Amazon? I've bought things off Amazon Marketplace in the past, because used CDs are usually much cheaper than new or digital download. Probably because hardly anyone keeps CDs anymore (although I do!). And yes, putting up hundreds of superfluous books is sometimes tedious, and sending them out is definitely tedious, but I've made several hundred dollars on there already, including over a hundred bucks for an out-of-print expansion board for Arkham Horror, the game of mind-numbingly banal Lovecraftian terror. While I don't want to bad-mouth my "customers," it constantly shocks me what people will buy, and for what prices. Granted, I am not into the mangas that the kids are reading right now, but $40 for a comic book? However, as this is the closest thing I have to a paying job right now, I am going to continue doing it until all the books are sold, or I get a real job doing something exactly as tedious for slightly more money.

(Aside: before beginning my extended period of unemployment, I don't think I realized how utterly useless I'd feel. I am someone who crashes and burns without a schedule, and while I do try to write lists to structure my days, it's easier to follow a schedule when it's imposed from without by someone who's paying you. I feel guilty for doing things that I don't consider my "job," i.e. putting items up on Amazon, going shopping for basic necessities, cleaning the house like a motherfuckin' adult. I don't consider writing my job even though I've been paid for it. It's hard for me to talk about this because it's such a first world problem; we can get along fine on Rob's income and I don't NEED to work. But I've realized that I WANT to, especially if I can get back into the only jobby thing I've ever been good at, medical research. Hello, Johns Hopkins University, soon to be within my reach/clutches.)

• Riding my bike, natch. As cycling has turned out to be the loose focus of this blog, I feel obligated to mention that, yeah, still at it. Last night I abandoned my old, broken BSO in my front yard for the first taker, because even though I did have plans to fix it up and teach Rob to ride on it, we all know I wasn't going to do that before moving and it would have just become more moving clutter. Also, it would have been way too small for him, and also a girl's bike. I feel guilty about this, even though I know that's dumb. I'll probably feel better when I see a lady riding around on my old bike, all fixed up shiny and newish. But right now I feel like a consumerist jerk.

"The Shallows" by Nicholas Carr: now available on Kindle!!

I've always been one for pop neurology and scare journalism, so this week I read The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. Equal parts communications history, neurological case studies, and screeching polemic, Carr's book promotes an interesting theory, but fails to prove the conclusion he is obviously trying to make: that the Internet is making us think more shallowly, and that literacy itself may be at stake as the result of this brave new invention.

The theory, in the micro-sense, is sound: the act of browsing the Internet makes us skim a lot more than we read, and the constant presence of ads, hyperlinks, etc. makes it hard to focus on any one article or blog for too long, since after all, why read a scholarly article about Latin cognates when Plants vs. Zombies is just a screen away, and Angry Birds is sitting uncompleted on your smartphone, stuck on that goddamn level with the stone train Jesus that level is frustrating. In addition, the fact that everything is available online is causing us to take our memories for granted, not allowing our memories to filter through our consciousness but instead relying too heavily on external aids. Of course, a book is also an external aid to memory, but Carr apparently gives books a pass. Because they don't have hyperlinks, or something. And that makes all the difference!

I have anecdotal -- and thus entirely scientific -- proof that part of his theory is correct. Earlier last year I worked as basically an Internet stalker. Without getting into the details, I'll just say that it's a job that required a lot of scanning, a lot of hyperlink clicking, and I never spent more than thirty seconds on a single page (more like ten). And after I finished the day's stalking, my distractibility was one bajillion times worse (actual number). I could feel my mind slipping whenever I tried to read fiction, refusing to stay on the page. And normally I like fiction, and don't find myself distracted when reading (TV, on the other hand...).

The book, though, kinda veers off its own path when Carr makes the bold claim that this newer, "shallower" way of thinking will mean the end of intellectualism, nay, perhaps even of Western culture itself. Who's to say that a restive, undistracted mind is automatically better than one that mimics the rhythms of the Internet? I mean, I sure prefer it for myself... but Carr doesn't prove that your brain is worse on the Internet, just different. He doesn't even seem to take seriously the (completely credible) hypothesis that our brains will adapt to new environments. Early on in the book he brings up Socrates' hypothesis that writing will ruin our memories and lead to intellectual laziness, and dismisses it, roundly. But by dismissing the potential positives of the "Internet mind," he is doing the exact same thing, and it's not even as good a dismissal as Socrates', since (I assume) he was not wearing a toga while writing this book.

The statistics were also faulty, I thought, because pretty much everyone included in these studies would have to be adults, due to the strict regulations re: using minors as clinical research subjects. Would Carr's theory hold up if he tested the attention span/reading speed/eye tracking of "digital natives," people who don't remember a time before the Internet? I mean, if you used a time machine and brought a caveman into the Renaissance, he would also show an immense failure to adapt to books, which again, Carr points as an example of technology that has been wholly beneficial to mankind. This part of the book honestly comes off as a grumpy old man not understanding kids these days.

In short, I think this is a worthwhile subject that needs to be studied further, perhaps next time by someone without so many preconceived notions. I also think it repeated itself a lot and could have been about fifty pages shorter, but hey! I am one of those easily-distracted Internet users. I sort of get the feeling that Carr is one of those people who thinks Idiocracy is a documentary.