A breath of freedom

I went out on the deck with my pen and journal while the dogs did their morning thing and accidentally left the smartphone in the house. It was a little after sunrise and the deck is on the west side of the house, so the sun had not reached that far yet. The thermometer said it was 58-60 degrees out, but it was very comfortable. I thought about how I would be chilled and alarmed if the temperature indoors dipped to 58.

Not having the phone in my pocket left me with a vague sense of withdrawal for a moment, but I also felt a calming sense of “Oh, what a beautiful morning.” The world inside the smartphone is not very calming these days. Cut off from that world, even for the few minutes I sat outside in the morning shade, I felt strangely sane.

I often write about the nuttiness of cyberspace and the need to break free and live a life away from mesmerizing devices from time to time, but I very rarely take my own advice. There, in the crisp summer morning air, disconnected from everything except my senses, reality struck me between the eyes and called me home.

It’s called social media, but often people are anything but sociable towards each other. So many folks seem to get online so they can pick a fight — those folks even have a specific title: troll, an ugly word if ever I heard one. Out there on the deck, away from the possibility I might encounter a troll, I felt free, and I hope I don’t need to tell you that freedom feels great.

I get up every morning, check to make sure my post has arrived safely in this space, and go on Facebook to post a link. Most days I do a quick look around to see what else is happening; most days the trolls are lurking and eager to pounce. I think I may experiment for a few days with signing on, posting the link, and signing off again as fast as I can. In the cool, bracing summer air with the smartphone out of my reach, that idea feels quite inviting.

That novel I might write someday

Illustration © Dusan Kostic | Dreamstime.com

A long time ago I had an idea for a story, perhaps even a novel, that begins at the climax of most action thrillers, when the hero infiltrates the evil villain’s lair and one by one picks off various and sundry minions on his way to the final showdown. The story would then backtrack and review the last hours of each of the minions who died in the assault.

Who was the well-dressed man the hero met at the elevator and shot dead before he could react and reach for his own weapon? That fellow who was trying to enter the fray but was shot in the head when the assassin twisted his friend’s gun so it pointed at him? What did he have for lunch, who did he eat with, and what did they talk about? 

And that last minion between the assassin and his target — did he fight so ferociously because the boss may have been an evil villain, but he was the man who gave him a job when everyone else in the minion business had given up on him, how many years ago? I would tell the story of that friendship that ended with the top minion being a footnote in the good guy’s mission.

It wouldn’t be a novel in the traditional sense, more like a series of short stories, all of them with the same ending — a long life full of hopes and dreams that led to employment under an evil villain, which leads to a fatal encounter with the guy we introduced as the hero over the opening credits.

Life is not a video game. In real life, every human the hero blows away had a story of his (or her) own. My idea would be to convince the reader to look at the opening sequence in a different light and maybe cringe for each of the minions as they die, because now we know about the life that brought them to their final fatal encounter.

I should sit down and write that thing instead of thinking about it or describing it to you. If I don’t, now you have a sense of what I might have written if I ever got around to it.

Saved by the Beatle

Despite my very own admonition of two days ago, I was scrolling social media as I contemplated what to write in this space, and I was getting discouraged. Many people from my past, people I have always considered friends, were sharing political agitprop full of rage that is demonstrably false about other people from my past and other people I have always considered friends. Oh, the one set of friends was not specifically insulting the other set of friends, but they were saying horrible things about people and issues that I know the other set believe in, so they may as well have been personal insults.

It’s very discouraging, this tendency to frame political disagreements in terms of good versus evil, and after a couple of decades of this, a guy almost loses hope. Yes, I said a couple of decades. It’s gotten downright insane in the past 10 years because of you-know-who and the people who hate him, but this is just the natural evolution of what had been building.

As I’ve said before, I try to come up with things to say here that are encouraging, entertaining, enlightening, or a combination of two or all three. While browsing through the latest servings of seething hatred and anger, it’s nigh on impossible to concentrate on any topic that might be positive or optimistic. 

Fortunately, I also had Apple Music in the background playing the “Warren Bluhm Station,” where the algorithm spins a collection of random songs that I have shown an inclination to play more often than not. And suddenly I noticed Paul McCartney was singing about how “People Want Peace,” from his 2018 album Egypt Station.

Brothers and sisters, I beg you to listen,
I know that it isn’t too late,
For we as the people, the voice of freedom
And we’re open and clear, we don’t wanna wait:
People want peace

And I remembered that the world may have politics and government in it, but politics and government are not the world. McCartney’s surviving bandmate, Ringo Starr, always signs off  his public statements with “Peace and Love,” and there will always be more peace and love in the world than the politicians can foment the opposite.

That was close, though! I let the merchants of anger and despair get to me for a little while. I will try to remember this lesson.