When You're Caught Betwixt Charibdis and the Krill

I drove down the highway today; the midnight moon was bright in the sky. The sky was a much lighter blue than I expected and the streetlights shone along the rim of the road. It was an empty road and I traveled toward the lights. I wondered what I was coming home to and what I would write when I got there.

The highway was an extension of myself; it stretched out far in each direction. I could have gone any way I wanted. But, instead, I headed home. I blinked, perhaps more then a few times, at the brightness of the road, the brightness of my dashboard. I knew this car was taking me from one place to the next. And I wondered, “Where am I taking myself?”

Am I walking down a long road headed to the highway? Am I destined, by the stars, to do something I barely understand but that can be explained quite clearly? Am I free to choose who I want to be and be that? And I laugh, also, because I think it’s funny.

I’ve thought too much about Ayn Rand today. Her horrifying empty cliché’s she calls people, just empty symbols for “righteousness” and “arrival”. The pain I felt upon reading that conjecture was magnified so much by her complete and utter lack of understanding of what a human is. God, what a foul creature. And I had to think all day of the sort of denial it takes to be able to read that and claim that it is based on even the vaguest understanding of humanity. Am I free to puke all over myself? Why yes, yes I am.

Fiction is as little known a thing as how to actually live a life. People don’t realize that fiction is a means of expressing what life actually is and, therefore, in order to understand something about fiction you have to, in turn, understand something about how a person lives a life. It is rather difficult to make a person and prove he lives a life, a real life, and make his life real to others. It is perhaps one of the most difficult things. But it is amazing because those people you make, they live. Sometimes, they live more than the author does. And all the people we haven’t made, they live inside me so soundly, so simply, sitting so still and waiting so patiently to be made into someone. George Barnes just wants to go home and we will not let him, to spite ourselves. James will always live with the shadow of his foot crunching a cigarette and then, walking away. Edeline will, forever, wipe her nostril on her mothers’ coat, unless we choose to make her grow. And I suppose that’s what’s best about fiction, you can make people grow at the rate that you, yourself, are capable of understanding how it is people do grow. Fiction is not molding a bunch of plastic people to fit your ideals and your philosophies. Fiction is about making people come to life through words. Making real people come to life through words.