Second Variety

“Second Variety”

-- Philip R. Dick

            As the Tassos reached for him, a last ironic thought drifted through Hendrick’s mind.  He felt a little better, thinking about it.  The bomb.  Made by the Second Variety to destroy the other varieties…They were already beginning to deign weapons to use against each other

            Never have I ever read before this one, a more powerful ending.  I am almost twenty-one years old and I know my time to walk the surface is not the length of my elders.  Thankfully, I have not endured much sadness universally as those who have been here before me.  But if I were to make a relation between myself and someone twice my age, I think the term, “war” and “fighting” is something that any generation is able to relate to, whether it be personal, regional, nationally, or universally.  Here in Dick’s story, Second Variety different countries are fighting against each other for what?  More power?  Freedom?  Money? People are dying because of disagreement.  To be able to read an outstanding story on machinery, the ideal war tactic tool to be used in defense against the enemy, and how it achieved not only want Hendrick and the others wanted, but also went beyond.  It doesn’t have to necessarily be a breathing soul to end up all the same.  Do we end up all the same?  To watch two sets of people or things in this situation turn against one another speaks so much more than just a fight in beating the enemy.  It makes a statement for merciless, brutality, motivation by rage in terms of wanting more power, wanting superiority, wanting to the ones feared of.  And this whole time, to show through person or machinery, that betray is one of the most effective tactics in getting what you want.  To build that trust, to build that loyalty and defense together and learn to be honest with a stranger you only just met only to find out in the end that they were the enemy makes me laugh cynically.  Because if this were to be the case, who can we trust?  Who can we tell all of our secrets to?  And if you hesitate on any one of those questions, consider this:  can you trust anyone?

The Dangerous Game

“The Dangerous Game”

-- Richard Connell

“…Hunting, remember, had been my life.  I have heard that in America businessmen often go to pieces when they give up the business that has been their life”

           

            I know when I was younger and I used to think how people, for example could be prejudice another, I was naïve in the sense that I didn’t reason with how they came to be like that.  When something is apart of your life for an extensive amount of time, and suddenly it’s gone, it’s like a sudden void has become aware and you will do anything to get it back.  For the people who were prejudice, they continued their beliefs.  For the man hunting animals, he began hunting humans. 

            Why?  Sure, when something I once loved starts to become a bore, I try to reinvent it to where it becomes challenging again in a fun and harmless way.  But how far is too far?  I came to discover my own sense of hunting other beings.  Not just Rainsford and General Zaroff but including all hunters in general lacks a sense of sensibility for their prey.  And I’m not saying we shouldn’t not kill animals.  Many people eat meat on a regular occurrence; I eat meat on a regular occurrence.  But at what part does it become inhumane?  When we start killing and hunting our own race?  Does that make us prejudice toward animals themselves?  It’s interesting to think about this in a light of different perspectives.  Literature has always taught me to try and open myself up and peer into the mind of the author, and to go even further, into the mind of a character, specifically the antagonist in this piece and see things from the way he saw them.  He was beat by his own game in the end.   Does that matter in terms of how things would have turned out if he had let the game of hunting animals continue to bore him to a point where he would no longer have any passion for it?  I look at his continuous hunting cycle as a void he was trying to fill in life.  Who lives on an island by himself with a giant dummy?  And kills for fun?  Must he have had no family, no loved ones, no friends prior to this lifestyle?  Hunting fed his emptiness.  And to feed any kind of emptiness with lesser things other than the core root of what’s causing it is a sad, sad, thing to do.  You can’t win that one in the end.

An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge

“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”

-- Ambrose Bierce

            He stands at the gate of his own home.  All is as he left it, and all bright and beautiful in the morning sunshine…Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of Owl Creek Bridge.

            Upon reading this story, I was struck by a previous conversation with someone who had lost a loved one and was telling me about the chemical released in the human body just as that person is about to die.  It allows the soon-to-be deceased to gently reflect back on their most happiest times of an event, or occurrence that maybe has not even happened yet and they wish to fulfill mentally before they pass away, or so I’ve been told.  An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge reminded me of that in the sense that the entire story of Peyton was the last final minutes of his life reflecting on the last thing he would have wanted to do should he have had the chance to escape, was to see his family.  Peyton never left the spot where he was executed by rope hanging.  “…Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek Bridge”, I mean he never even broke away.  He was there the entire time and I think this has made me realize that death itself is not just something tragic, but something beautiful as well.  In a time of guilt, a time in which he wish he had more of to be with his family, in the sense to anyone who wish they had more time as they stood before the grave of their own death, was beautiful.  I say this because the mind of Peyton Farquhar took him to exactly where he wanted to be.  Dying alone and without his family in reality, but given a second chance to be with them in the world beyond, is the most beautifully tragic thing that could have happened to him, especially now.

God of Love

God Of Love

-       Short Films

You can’t control who you love, you can’t control who loves you.  You can’t control how it happens or when it happens or why it happens.  You can’t control any of that stuff.  But I can.  Look, I’m just a guy; I have good aim, that’s it.  You’ve seen me I’m basically an idiot.  I guess that why’s love doesn’t make as much sense as it should because, well, I’m the God of love.

            One of the most common phrases I’ve heard other women say is, “I can’t help that I’m in love with him!  I just am.”  It’s confusing, mind bottling, perhaps frustrating.  Or maybe you’re one of those really obnoxious couples who’s perfect, super sappy and who’s life is content with the world’s hardest conversation ender, “I love you,” and, “No, I love you more,” etc.  But, the point that is open to interpretation is that sometimes, love just doesn’t make sense.  In the short film, God of Love, the audience is able to feel the frustration of Raymond Goodfellow when he does everything possible, including stabbing random love darts into his crush’s hand, Kelly who is actually in love with his best friend.  Though over dramatic, situations like these occur and at the end of the day you sit and wonder, “Out of everyone, why him,” or “why her?”  And so for Ray to remove himself out of the equation of selfishness, he finally allowed his best friend and Kelly to be together as a romantic couple.  And that’s what love is all about.  It’s about being selfless.  Even though Ray didn’t get the girl he wanted, he allowed many other couples to come together, and it’s better to spread love than it is to take it away.   

Happy Endings

Happy Endings

-       Margaret Atwood (1983)

John and Mary meet.  What happens next?  If you want a happy ending, try A.

            It’s funny because upon choosing to read A first not only because it was placed at the top of the page under the title, but also because the author took the time to deliberately point it out should have been enough to sustain me between the couple, John and Mary.  Everyone wants a good beginning, middle and end like the one in A for John and Mary.  Heck, we even want that for ourselves.  But it was too perfect.  It was, “too happy” for me to be anywhere near satisfaction, and so I kept reading.  I read all possible outcomes a few times actually, until I realized what it was that I was doing.  I was deliberately looking for something malicious to happen to them.  I was looking for that resistance between John, and Mary, I was looking for that malevolent part of the story that would sickly spice things up for me.  The affair, the overdose, all of it satisfied my needs much more than the beautiful happy ending in A.

“That’s about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.  Now try How and Why”.  I took that statement to heart in all of its truthfulness.  Everyone as their own individual being has the opportunity of making the “right” choices at a chance to be in forever happiness.  Does that happen all the time?  No.  And the answer is “Why” does that not happen?  And “How” do we let happiness slip away from our fingers like that? 

            My interpretation of this story was that the very answers to both of my questions revolve back around to us.  Because just as I was searching unknowingly for something bad to happen to make this story my definition of a good story, I, along as others in this world, do that within my own life.  Countless amount of times have there been issues that were so small and minuet that shouldn’t have mattered and yet I let it ruin the entire day for me.  And so I pose a question going beyond the reading, are we born imperfect, or do we choose to be it?  That’s what I think the author was trying to indirectly convey.

Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

-       Ursula Le Guin

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.  Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.

            The “happiness as something rather stupid” kind of makes sense to me in a weird and distorted way.  When I sat back from the reading and thought of all the wonderful times I had on a particular day, and then thought of that one bad moment that almost triumphed all of the many good moments within an instant, I thought, why?

            The more I think about it, the bad moment lingering over my head like a diffused gloomy cloud that had snuck up on me, made me question why we even allow such things to get to us in a way that could potentially ruin the rest of the day. 

            This child, living in its own excrement’s, having been fed minimal food, constantly crying out for someone to save “it” represents all the evil in the world in one human being everyone can come to look at.  Come to pity.  Come to be saddened for.  And come to be appreciative for.  Guin mentally answered a question I had lingering in my mind through much of the reading:  why doesn’t someone retaliate and help save the child?

            It’s simple,  “it is because of the child that they are so gentle to children”  (Guin 82).  It is like though experiences are able to make a person either more bitter or more gentle, this child acts as a punching bag to all people of Omela and is a living reminder of the greatness that they have in their life simply by being exposed to the filth, wretchedness and degrading treatment of this one little human being.  When we feel pain, it is only then that we are more likely to better judge something should a similar situation come back around in our lives.  Experiences shape us to be the people we have become on this present day.  Because Omela is a type of Utopia, pain, guilt, and evil doesn’t exist.  They’re unable to register or associate any kind of pain to themselves except for the pain they feel for the child.  And it’s dehumanizing to think such a thought.  Why is happiness stupid?  Why do we let pain overtake our days on those blue kinds of times?  What about pain is so much more emotional-worthy that we allow it to linger longer in our hearts, on our minds, and in our thoughts than happiness?  Why can’t happiness be as interesting as evil?  What kick are we getting out of something tragic and terrible?  I do not know.  Perhaps Guin has an idea.  Maybe the ones who left Omela have an answer to that question. 

This Is What It Means To Say Phoenix, Arizona

This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona

-       Sherman Alexie (1994)

I remember I had this dream that told me to go to Spokane, to stand by the Falls in the middle of the city and wait for a sign…I stood there for an hour waiting.  And then your dad came walking up.  What the hell are you doing here? He asked me.  I said, Waiting for a vision… Your dad was my vision.  Take care of each other is what my dreams were saying.  Take care of each other.

            The body of this story represents many things for me.  In specifics, it represents the difference between innocence and corruption: purity and impurity.

            Thomas stands for a friend of complete sincerity and occupies genuine traits that include him being able to remain true to the kind of person he really is, a storyteller.  Through his upbringing, never does he once change the kind of boy and eventually man he has become because of what society deems acceptable and unacceptable.  Victor on the upper hand, represents the opposite.  He represents a child’s innocence and naivetés to what is strange and what is not.  He knew no better of the kind of person Thomas was as a child until he grew old enough to realize that people categorized Thomas in a file outside of the social norm.

            This quote for me stands out in its own meaning that no matter how a recipient treats another, no matter the crude remarks they’ve made or things they’ve done in the past, taking care of one another is the utmost important thing anyone can do for one another.  If we were on our own always, we’d have no chance at survival.  No one person can be one hundred percent independent and have help from zero outsides.  It’s inevitable that someday, randomly or not, we’ll need the hand of another to get to that next step in our lives. 

            Victor has been treating Thomas poorly ever since they were teenagers and yet Thomas holds no grudges, holds no anger or bitterness.  He is who he is and knowing that he has not one friend to listen to him and his stories, he continues being “him.”  Victor, even after everything with the father and the traveling to Phoenix makes a remark to himself indicating that he knows he will not be able to publicly befriend Thomas in fear of “the shit” his friends will give him.  He is the typical socially inclined figure of a community and as long as he remains apart of “the rest of the crowd”.

"A Diamond Guitar"

“A Diamond Guitar”

--Truman Capote

                               It was strange, for he must have known he would never play again.

 I liked this story until the ending.  I didn’t feel an all around moral seizing my thoughts like other stories have done in the past.  I felt like it ended in a free falling way; gradually and then all at once leaving me uneasy and unsettled.  Truthfully, I didn’t understand the meaning of the character Tico Feo until I reread Capote's reading again.  With the way Mr. Schaffer and him got along and their immediate connection between one another, I had assumed some type of life changing event would have happened but instead all there was, was the escape of the young Feo who had yet to become “a grown man”. 

But nothing had really come of Schaffer, except the lingering thoughts Feo had left him in the end, which in return I took as a form of hope in Schaffer’s life that just because he was sentenced ninety-nine years and a day in prison doesn’t mean that life is over. 

It was that his friend had revived the brown rivers where the fish run, and the ladies with sunlight in their hair.

            Schaffer had mentioned this statement in the pages prior to meeting Tico, except the context I noticed had changed between the pages.  It was now, that instead of saying  he could no longer see, feel or imagine the way things used to be outside of the prison, because of this young prisoner, because of Tico and his boyish ways, life was revived back into him.  A small amount of thirst for living melted inside of him and Tico showed hope for the days left on Schaffer’s life.  It was something to look forward to, something to keep the spirits alive.  I don’t think Tico realized what a significant impact he had made on Schaffer, especially at the end when he watched him as he struggled in the ground, but it was although Tico had abandoned Schaffer, he left something behind that was much greater than the escape itself.  That is the guitar and the music strummed on it. 

            I have always been fascinated in the way music is able to manipulate a mood or feeling in the room by the simple change from one song to another.  Play a song on the Hip Hop Top 40 and everyone’s in a cheerful mood swaying their hips back and forth to the uplifting beat.  But switch it to a slow song, say, Adele, Someone Like You, for example and the entire vibe has been altered.  The memory of a past love, relationship or some failed experience heightens inside your mind and your'e no longer shaking to the catchy beat, but reminiscing about what's already done in the past.  Your steps get softer, slower, and you get softer and slower.  And I think that is what Tico’s guitar music had done, maybe not substantially but in some aspect for Schaffer.  He altered not only the vibe to music, but also the vibe to life.