On Criticism

With the release of Michael has come a storm of reviews, all this past week. Michael garnered two five-star reviews, Airel took down one of those plus a couple of one-star scorchers, and I’ve heard back from various people and fans through unofficial channels on some of my other works, like K: [phantasmagoria]. All of it has combined into a critical wave that has given cause for pause. I took a walk last night, reflecting on all of it.

I want to touch on the subject of Bad Reviews here. It’s something all published authors have to deal with, and it’s something arguably made worse by technology—anyone and everyone that wants to can leave poisonous black barbs in the creative part of the author’s heart, and at a whim. I’ve seen quite a lot of it. One of my favorites was a young lady’s one-star review that must have been ten paragraphs long, poorly written natch, at the end of which she basically said she was on her period in finals week so she probably shouldn’t be writing reviews while she’s in a bad mood and isn’t it funny, lol! Yeah well. Pardon me for not laughing. And perhaps I used the term “lady” too loosely. I’ll leave that to you to judge.

I’m not bitching. That’s first. I’m not. I can take the bad with the good. I have to. And while I wish there weren’t so much bad and so much eagerness on the part of readers (or jealous authors?) to launch it at me and others like me, I have a right to say something about those bad reviews. For my fellow author, I have a responsibility to address the elephant in the room, because nobody tells you how to deal with bad criticism when you’re setting out on your journey. Too often, we authors set out on that journey with rose-colored glasses anyway, only to have them ripped from our faces at various points as cold reality shoulders its way into our lives.

Here’s the thing: I know I still have a lot to learn about writing. Perhaps some of my one-star reviewers think I’m haughtily earning millions as I scourge the market with tepid mass market drivel. “Get an editor!” they say, not realizing that I devoted more than two years of my life to the project, not realizing that me and my family made sacrifices to be able to afford the $4k+ bill our incredible editor sent us. It was all worth it, by the way. My critics may not realize that I sat at book signings skimming the print version of the First Edition, finding errors, resolving to go back through and find them and fix them for the Second Edition, which is already on sale. Perhaps my more disaffected reviewers are just pissed that I’m able to make a living as a writer, full time. Maybe they’re jealous, though I can’t imagine why. Truthfully. I’ve seen my life. It’s not ready for prime time. I’m not going to be featured on MTV Cribs anytime soon.

Nevertheless, I’m in a bit of a storm here, and I’m trying to figure out what makes the one-star critic tick. Let’s play devil’s advocate for a sec: Usually, at least on Amazon, for some magical reason all the five-star reviews are some kind of conspiracy against True Art. In other words, they’re meaningless because obviously, the author has a huge network of minions who do his bidding in regard to reviews. This gang of indiscriminate five-star reviewing superfriends boasts perfect Tom Selleck moustaches, you can bet, and they are well supplied with three dollar bills by us rich author types, so that they can buy our eBooks again and again and again, thus sending our crummy unworthy books up the rankings undeservedly. Anyway, if all this were true, and the five-star review should be ignored because it’s so obviously skewed, then all one-star reviews ought to share the same fate. Hell, we learned about bell curves and means and medians in junior high, for crying out loud. Why not apply it here.

There’s been a lot of assumption in our culture, too, about what “Mainstream” is. On the conservative side, there has been name calling. Conservatives label the traditional powers in the press the MSM, or Main Stream Media, but that’s a misnomer. NBC and CNN aren’t mainstream. Hollywood tree huggers aren’t mainstream. Eco-terrorists aren’t mainstream, and “artists” who defecate into jars and then display it in galleries aren’t mainstream. What’s mainstream in America is by and large a Biblical sense of morality, a Christian outlook on how the world should work.

As that relates to our stories, that means we like the kinds of books and movies where the bad guy loses and the good guy gets the girl. Why do you think Princess Bride is a classic? Because that’s what most people want. The best criticism I got about Airel this year was this: “A good light read.” Why? Because it means I’m on target to reach the largest audience, giving me the best chance for success and giving my art the widest distribution. Some people resent that. Some people possess a morality that goads them on to fight against the actual mainstream; they resent most of us as backward, rednecks, gun-toters, religious nut jobs, evil conservatives, or just plain old intolerant and uneducated idiots. But I think it’s plain to see who’s really intolerant.

Their kind of morality demands that they fight in shrill tones against any mention of God, any writing about Biblical scripture without some kind of apology or prequalification. Their view of true art is exclusive, it must be edgy, it must be “realistic” (i.e. hopeless and self-serving), it must contain ever more gratuitous sex, foul language, denigration of women, attacks on traditional values, and it must be a crutch to ever more extreme splinter groups and radical factions of our society—in short, they don’t believe all of us were created equal, their morality insists that we be forced to be equal. My writing is decidedly outside that mold.

I think that could be one reason why I must suffer the attack of the one-star review from time to time.

But what else might have filled my one-star reviewers with such angst, God love them? Allow me to posit another theory, based on how most of these are composed, because probably about 80% of all one-star reviews are filled with spelling and grammar errors. I submit to you the idea that they’re not themselves authors, or even writers. How many critics of literature have historically been writers? How many food critics are chefs? How many motorjournalists, who eagerly criticize the iron they test drive, have ever worked the manufacturing lines, have ever set foot in a design studio, are able to engineer a car? I think it’s reasonable to say that it’s easy for a connoisseur of food to criticize the chef, especially when he doesn’t know how to cook the dish. I’m not trying to insult you, one-star critic, but I think it’s a fair question to ask: have you ever written and published a book? If not, do you think it’s intellectually honest for you to ask again and again, “Howe does this carp git pulbished?” I think it’s a question that begs an answer.

All my books have errors in them. I am trying to find them all, but it’s difficult to ferret them out from the hundreds of thousands of words in which they’re buried. For example, I just read Rainbow Six, by Tom Clancy this past week, and I found errors in it. I found turns of phrase that I would never use. I came across bits of writing that struck me as awkward, but I loved the book. I realized that it took Clancy probably a couple of years to put that one together. Lots of people had their hands on it, trying to make it all work right. It does. All that work, and I digested all 738 pages in a week, easily. It’s striking to the point of filling me with reverence for the man. And though my tastes as a writer are different than his, I won’t be blasting him with a one-star review on it. No way.

I have to admit something. If I’m hurt by one- and two-star reviews on my own work, I should be more careful criticizing others’ artistic expressions. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I should be more careful. If I’m standing before a work that doesn’t speak to me, that doesn’t mean the work is crap. It just means it doesn’t’ speak to me. I should move on. It may not be a case of bad art. It may be a case of bad taste. Or at the least, missed opportunity.

I humbly state here that I am not finished. I am still learning how to write. I love that I have loyal fans, I love that there are people out there who get what I’m trying to do, that I’m able to connect with somebody through my art. I know I won’t be able to connect with everyone. My art won’t speak to all to read it. Some won’t get it. Others will be repulsed by it. The reaction will be different every time. But what momma taught you, or should have taught you, about not saying anything if you can’t say something nice, holds true here. If you’ve got a negative reaction to the work, don’t hold the worker responsible for your reaction. A truly free society needs no police.

In the end, I write because I choose to, and I write about what I want to write about. And how. I take all the risks on publishing it, too, knowing full well that I will bear the wounds of the critic’s arrows. I could hide my work under a rock, but I don’t want to. I want to share it. I have to give some weight to the criticism I receive, but I also know what I’m trying to do here. If I were swayed by these breezes, I wouldn’t be worthy of the mantle God gave me. There’s probably nothing worse than a man who abdicates his life’s pursuits to the whims of popular sentiment. Bill Clinton was that kind of president. I’m not that kind of man.

So, to my fans: fear not. I will continue to write what you love. I will continue to learn my craft and hone excellence into all that I do. Thank you for your undying support.

And to my critics: I humbly thank you for your input. You’re entitled to your one-star opinions. All I ask of you is that you remember and consider, as you criticize me, that I’m an artist who takes my work seriously, who labors over it, who tries to make it as good as I can, not only for my fans, but also for little ol’ me. As such, please consider how you’d feel if someone said those things about your work. If you indeed have any work. If you do, please feel free to send me the links to it, so I can read it in turn, and give you my unsolicited opinion on it. I do believe that’s what would be considered “fair.”

Stirrings on Storytelling

It used to be, not so long ago, that I lived a dull existence. I would read stories quite passively; I would watch TV and movies as a spectator. Not that it’s possible really to be anything other than a spectator while doing that, but I think it’s possible to sit on the forward portion of the seat a little, if you know what I mean.

In other words I was just along for the ride, never thinking ahead of the story in terms of plot. Now that I’ve had a little practice constructing such things myself, I find I take in stories differently, whether in print or on the screen. It’s not that the surprise and delight are both gone; far from it. It’s that I’m a more active and aware participant in the stories I digest. I can appreciate a good subplot.

I recently had two bits of feedback on my own writing that jumped out at me. One was for Airel, and it’s been a sort of ongoing criticism of that book for about a year; that it starts slowly. Aaron and I have always responded with the idea that, yeah, it starts slowly, it’s the beginning of a pretty big story and we needed to take our time setting it up a little. But I also recently heard back from a Twitter friend about K: [phantasmagoria] and that it, too, started slowly. I suppose I can see where he’s coming from on that score, because while chapter one in that book does have a bit of a shocker in it, it’s not as explosive as what happens, say, about a hundred pages later, on I-84, which was the original beginning of that book. I felt I needed more context when I was revising. What can I say.

But that brings up the subject of Explosive Beginnings, or the somewhat tired and a little well-worn Attention Getter at the front of our contemporary stories. I’m having trouble thinking of a single movie I’ve seen or book I’ve read lately that didn’t have something big and shouty at the beginning of it. While these are cool from a certain point of view, and they probably make for better sales and better reviews to boot, the artist in me resists. I don’t want to be required to write to a formula, and I think it could be true that the Big Bang Beginning we’re seeing in our storytelling of late is a passing fancy. Well. One can always hope.

Jane Austen didn’t seem to feel the need to write that way, and her stories are intensely satisfying to read. Sure, a guy could argue that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote his Holmes adventures with some manner of an explosive attention getter at the off. Certainly Stoker’s Dracula starts off with a hair-raising first three chapters, so it’s not like grabbing the reader by the collar is a late phenomenon. But those stories have a certain kind of class to them. Most pop storytelling tends to follow a formula, and it’s so exciting that it’s boring. I’m not saying explosions up front are a bad thing. I’m saying that a slavish obedience to the Big Bang Beginning is, well, a little mindless, and I’d like to push both myself and my readers to something more.

So while it’s true that we authors have got to give the reader something to bite into right up front, I think it’s also true that we don’t need another end-of-the-world CGI tour de force kind of story. I’ve grown tired of that kind of thing. Much like the villain unseen is far scarier than the one described in exhaustive detail, the spare and trim beginning of a story, at least if well written, should entice the reader even more by the information it denies him. The trick is to make him want it. That, my friends, I’m still trying to figure out, and I can imagine I’ll still be trying to perfect it when I die.

Convenience Store Rage: A Fantasia

With a name like Gideon Ernest (the surname need not be mentioned here), he would either turn out to be a wimp or a ladies’ man. There could be no middle ground; that much we know and we’re sure of. That he was small of stature placed him firmly, by the hand of the all-powerful author, in the camp of the former, where all the kids prefer to stay inside on hot summer days, in the air conditioning. It’s safer. The big bad world outside occasionally jumps up to bite you, unlike the softly upholstered innards of the prototypical suburban house.

But appearances can be deceiving. Good authors know this; that’s why we put characters like Gideon Ernest into the word processor and hit frappe.

Gideon Ernest, for instance, may have looked like a dweeb, he may have tipped the scales at just over a hundred and twenty pounds wearing his birth control glasses and his trademark white button-down shirt and black polyester trousers…but he was a killer.

They say clothes make the man. But a real man makes his clothes do whatever the hell he tells them to do, even if it means broadcasting a certain image that doesn’t quite line up with the truth. In Gideon Ernest’s case, he had a reason for looking like a total nerd. And for working at the local Seven Eleven hawking Slurpees from noon to night. It is a reason no one will see coming.

Appearances can be deceiving. We’ve said that before. But that was precisely why he had been written into life: to confuse the crap out of the reader for as long as possible.

Because that’s what good writing means.

Take this, for instance: Gideon Ernest walks to work on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and sometimes Sundays. Why? Because he’s selling you something. You the reader may think he’s selling you pseudo-cute nerdiness and the occasional chilled beverage or Slim Jim. You may even snap into all that. But what he’s really selling as he walks innocently into the Seven Eleven for the millionth time is the idea that he’s just your average innocent pantywaist. Mister milquetoast is selling you the idea that his shirttails are connected to his white cotton sock tops by way of elasticated stocking garters that keep everything just so. It’s a uniform he wears. It’s always the same, day in and day out. Why? So that authors can deceive readers so thoroughly that eventually the readers are so taken with the ruse that they actually want to be deceived.

The change occurs. It begins skillfully, so that the reader does not perceive its germination. A customer, one of the regulars, is at the Slurpee kiosk, self-servicing sloppily, getting some Coca-Cola flavored slush all over the machine, and it drips onto the floor. This sort of thing has happened millions of times before. This selfsame customer has also, many a time, strolled right up to the register and then held up the line by ordering a different brand of cigarettes, preferably ones that Gideon Ernest has to search for, each and every time. But today, the customer suddenly remembers that he wanted to buy five different kinds of Lottery tickets, insisting on paying in cash—using all his loose change. Most of it is nickels and pennies.

And when that happens…

BANG!

Gideon Ernest turns out to be Billy Badass. He appears to be a freak of modern science. His white button-down shirt begins to rip asunder, revealing mountainous slabs of tanned and bulging muscle. His polyester trousers were designed to have “a little give” in the seat and thighs, and God knows as Gideon Ernest his body never availed itself of such a textilic engineering marvel, but as Billy Badass the fabric begins to show signs of strain. Indeed, as the metamorphosis progresses, the trousers inexplicably shed their lower extremities, now appearing to be a sort of beachcomber gentleman’s capri, complete with jagged hems just at the top of his now bulging and shapely calves.

His glasses remove themselves from his face as his rapidly growing—and tanning—body rips his white shirt into miniscule shreds that fall away and disappear without a trace. The glasses, having barely escaped their own kind of doom, now transform into a shiny black male robot hawk. The hawk cock swoops around the room shrieking its fury at the various convenience store patrons, wide-eyed customers holding Twinkies, bad coffee, useless newspapers, and the odd half case of piss water domestic beer. The mechanized black bird returns to its master’s now prodigiously wide shoulders, spreads its wings, lowers its head, and shrieks once more.

Billy is now fully manifest, an awesome replica of the perfect Tom Selleck moustache now perched upon his upper lip. Billy Badass then reaches beneath the counter for what one can only assume will be the sawed-off 12-gauge. But ah, dear reader, thou dost assume too much. The author is still ahead of you by a mile, and this will be a cliché of an entirely different sort. From under the mild and unassuming Seven Eleven counter, Billy Badass, purveyor of fine low-cost dessert wines and certain smutty periodical publications, produces a gleaming custom made masterpiece of weaponry.

At least five feet long, as much for the visual effect as anything when this story goes to print as a graphic novel, his weapon is a Gatling gun with five barrels, already rotating with electric whir, ready to fire, fed with belted ammo. Only the ammo, naturally, isn’t ammo. No, to satisfy certain requirements for irony, the belts that feed this monster are linked to the change drawer in the cash register.

Billy Badass, who is now incidentally glistening with sweat and covered with grime from the pyrotechnic explosions that just went off in the cigarette case overhead, stands under a shower of sparks and winking fluorescent lights as he lowers the pentapotent muzzle of the weapon into the face of the regular customer.

Again, the reader expects Billy Badass to speak his lines a certain way by now, now that the author has established certain cliché criteria. But that’s where dear reader is wrong again.

You see, Billy Badass isn’t a man at all, and the robot cock isn’t what, certainly by now, you’ve assumed, is a sidekick. No, in fact, the ungainly eyeglasses-cum-transforming bird is the master, and Gideon Ernest-cum-Billy Badass is his wee little pet. Therefore, when he speaks, the language is garbled and unintelligible by all but the most rabid fan of Battlestar Galactica.

Yes: Billy Badass is a Cylon drone.

And all of it conspires to produce the Everest of accomplishment for any author: the moment when the reader says, “Whoa. Didn’t see that one coming.”

And then Billy, formerly Gideon Ernest of the Seven Eleven and now robo-puppet of the Cylon master race, speaks, his finger on the trigger of his Gatling money gun, his handy autotranslator dipping into the dank commonness of the English language of the Earthlings: His voice gnarled and metallic, his says with extreme prejudice, “Keep the change!”

We hear the ratatattat, we see the offending customer blasted by spare quarters and pennies, jerked up and back off his feet into the Hostess pies display case, everybody else dives to one side, Billy is standing there like Rambo blasting everything with his five foot long gun, holding it with one arm, screaming in rage. The robo hawk takes flight just as the ceiling gives way under a massive fireball caused by a supersonic dime slicing through an exposed gas main, and the whole place goes up in flames.

The robo hawk flies away to its mountain lair.

A new plan will soon be hatched.

And Book II will be out soon. This is how it’s done.

Capitalism and Ethics in the Web Age

I’ve become a regular customer at the local bicycle shop lately. I’m getting back into riding—I finally have enough free time to be able to budget an hour or so every other day so that I can take a good long ride. I originally stopped by the shop to see what new hardtail mountain bikes were going for—they had a few on special for five, six hundred bucks. Right in the wheelhouse, then, at least for my budget, and I thought seriously about buying one.

But then I got home and started surfing and Googling around, learning what was to learn. I wanted to replace my old banger; the fork was just done. I have a relatively late model Trek cruiser, too, the ones with the steel fenders and all that swoopyness going on, with a seven speed drivetrain. Being the ex-bicycle mechanic that I am, my gears were turning about swapping some of the good parts from my clapped out MTB onto the cruiser. A lot of that depended on the spacing of the rear dropouts, which, by the way, turned out to be identical. Long story short, I was able to swap everything I wanted to swap, and I only needed to buy new tires, tubes, and a saddle. I figured if I kept to the streets for now, I would ride more often if I didn’t have to drive half an hour to the trailhead every time.

I found some good deals for tires online, but you’ve gotta pay shipping, you can’t really look at the merchandise, and you’ve gotta wait for parcel post, especially if the item is bulky. So I walked on over to the bike shop. It’s only five blocks from my door to theirs anyway. I figured I’d see what they had.

Now here’s the thing: I shop online for plenty of stuff. I don’t think it’s bad to do that. Part of what makes capitalism work is the beauty of choice, and we have plenty of it in America. Coupled with that liberty, though, is the attendant responsibility to choose wisely, to inform one’s choices with some measure of propriety. I’ve been saying for quite a long time now that capitalism doesn’t work at all when it’s been divorced from Christian morality. If we don’t have an absolute right or wrong as a foundation under us, we can’t begin to allow the market loose; it would tear the world apart. I think we have plenty of evidence of that in current events right now, which I won’t belabor, but it’s in big biz and government aplenty.

I ended up buying my tires at my local shop, plunking down forty bucks a pop plus tax, which was a lot. But I was rewarded, and as it turns out, unexpectedly. First of all, I was “keeping it local,” something the granola-muncher North End hippies seem to be into, and something with which I agree. I was helping to keep the doors of my local shop open by doing business there. I was also sowing a kind of seed, because when I popped back in a week later with some stubborn axle bearings that needed adjustment, they comped me for the labor, happy to sell me a tool and some parts on top. They figured I’d be back, which I will. But I also got my stuff right now, which, fast as technology is these days, no online retailer can match (unless they’re selling downloads, natch). I got to look over the merch, make a good decision, and take what I wanted home without jacking around with shipping. Of course, there was the sales tax, but whatever. On top of all that, my local shop has a box of take-off parts—tires and tubes for like, two bucks each. They’re brand new, they just came installed as original equipment on some floor model and got swapped out for something different, spec’ed by the customer. Everybody wins.

Anyway, that’s all. Support your local biz every chance you get. The Web has enabled the illusion of more choice, more convenience, et cetera. But the trade-offs are real. Shipping can take forever, if there’s a screwup of some kind you’ll wish you’d never ordered the thing in the first place because returns are horrible online, and you don’t get to hold the widget in your hot little hands before you commit. Besides, one day you might wake up to discover the only choice you have left is MEGACORP OF CHINA and you’ll be completely screwed. So wake up to your Christian morality and ethics, America, and be proud of your heritage; do the right thing. Keep it local. 

Michael is on SALE, YALL!

ONE DAY BLOG TOUR! 
MAY 17th!

Michael, book two in the Airel Saga, is live on Amazon TODAY ONLY for a discounted price!!

To promote Michael I’m hosting a contest where you can win a FREE copy of Airel and win a free Kindle Fire.

To take advantage of this awesome deal, head to Amazon and check out the eBook version of MICHAEL at its promotional price, then see below to enter the contest. Also, leave me a comment on this post. The blogger with the most comments will win the Kindle Fire! If I win, I’ll also get the chance to be part of a special giveaway in the next few months.

Praise for Michael


"Move over Twilight! Here comes Aaron Patterson!" --Joshua Graham, bestselling author of Beyond Justice and Darkroom


"I was surprised by how much I really, really liked this book. I have not jumped on the whole "fallen angel" bandwagon, just as I didn't jump on all of the vampire stories that came out after Twilight. This is not your typical fallen angel story. It is one that has left me breathlessly waiting for the next one in the series. Hurry up please!!!" --Sandra Stiles

Description of Michael


Michael did the unthinkable to save Airel from death, but now he must live with the choices he has made--both good and evil. Tortured by his past and haunted by what he believes might be his future, Michael seeks redemption--but will the past prove to be too strong? How can he break free of it and be the man he longs to be for Airel? If only he had never...

Airel. Michael's one true love. He had forced her to drink in new life only to find that old wounds and deep scars do not heal overnight. Can she truly forgive Michael, can she truly love him? And can he accept that forgiveness? Or is it all for nothing, and has he gone too far already? As the darkness of past choices closes in on them, chases them, intercepts them, coming at them from everywhere at once, how can their love possibly survive?

Aaron Patterson is the author of the best-selling WJA series, as well as two Digital Shorts: 19 and The Craigslist Killer. He was home-schooled and grew up in the west. Aaron loved to read as a small child and would often be found behind a book, reading one to three a day on average. This love drove him to want to write, but he never thought he had the talent. His wife Karissa prodded him to try it, and with this encouragement, he wrote Sweet Dreams, the first book in the WJA series, in 2008. Airel is his first teen series, and plans for more to come are already in the works. He lives in Boise, Idaho with his family, Soleil, Kale and Klayton. His daughter had an imaginary friend named She.


Chris White has an award for reading 750 books in one school year — from the 3rd grade. So yes, he’s more of a nerd than Aaron. Chris loves history, Sherlock Holmes, and anything that’s not virtual, like old motorcycles and mechanical typewriters. He also doesn’t get why we have these things called “smart phones” when all they do is make people dumber. Chris recently celebrated 10 years of marriage with his wife, April, and has two boys: Noah, age 8, and Jaden, age 3, who inspired the Great Jammy Adventure series; the OK-to-color-in picture books. Chris is working on a short story called The Marsburg Diary that will further explore the prologue to Airel, and he is finishing up his first novel, entitled K: phantasmagoria, due out in 2011. Chris has a major crush on Audrey Hepburn, who is now dead. His wife is okay with all of this.

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Different is Good

I don’t mean that being different is good for the sake of being different. That would be like art for the sake of art; a ridiculous idea, ultimately, that, like lots of things these days, sounds okay on the surface but doesn’t stand up to any kind of analysis. Art for its own sake is emptiness and meaninglessness. It would be the same in regard to daring to be different for the sake of being different. In other words, what would the point be? If we don’t have a reason for doing something, we’re just flailing about.

Take a guy like Claudio Roditi, for example. A jazz trumpeter of Latin American descent (Brazil), he’s different. Dizzy Gillespie was different, too, but Roditi goes one further. Most guys play just regular old Bb trumpets. For Claudio, that’s not quite enough. He plays a German rotary valve trumpet; a design concocted by, you guessed it, zee Germans, and intended for Teutonic stuff written by Richard Wagner (pronounced Ree-khard Vog-ner), the operatic genius. No, Claudio decided to innovate and be different. Why? The rotary valve trumpet possesses a singular tone; it’s rich and powerful when you give it the beans, yet it’s dark and subtle in the hands of a skilled musician who knows how to use space as well as sound. Plus the rotors can contribute, with practice, to faster fingering, having a little shorter throw than comparative valves. In other words, Claudio Roditi dares to be different with a purpose, to bring to Latin combo jazz a little something unique, darker, more colored, more vibrant, more introspective, something that burns a little hotter.

Different is good.

I refuse to get on the hybrid car bandwagon, for instance. I don’t think driving a Prius is green at all. The batteries, the heavy metals, the massive amounts of copper and energy that go into producing a new Prius, considering its useable life span (tied to the battery pack, natch, which costs around $4k to replace), all of it adds up, tipping the balance against. It’s far greener to keep an old banger on the road. Hello, that’s recycling in action. Plus old cars are just cooler. That’s my opinion, but it’s based on my thinking on the subject. The Prius and electric cars have been really oversold in the mainstream areas of our culture. It’s not as if they are grown on the Magic Tree of Communal Love and delivered to your doorstep by friendly polar bears walked on leashes by naked hippies sipping on soy chai tea lattes. They’re manufactured by heavy global industries. I don’t see what all the fuss is about carbon dioxide anyway; I thought trees loved that stuff. I thought they kinda needed it to photosynthesize. Ah, but I ask too many questions.

And I dare to be different, not “just because,” but because of thoughtful consideration. There’s a reason I have my convictions. I’ve earned them. You might assume I am some backward pro-Nazi conservative elitist, reading what I’ve written so far. But no. I’m actually not. Believe me or no, especially given some of the commentary I’ve written about current events the past four years; I am not easily defined as a person. You can slap the label of conservative upon my chest if you wish, but all that will do is prove your own ignorance, your own rashness and eagerness to label people.

Truth be told, the facts are more…nuanced, to use a leftist’s politically expedient catch word. I don’t run with Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity. While I do agree with the conservative outlook mostly, I’m not fool enough to believe those guys are news outlets. They’re biased, just as sure as Chris Matthews and his lot are biased in the other direction. Media lives and dies at some point by sensationalism, and I’m not buying it anymore. I confess I did at one time, but I’ve grown past my Chicken Little stage. I’m all growed up nah. If I had to pick a box from all the political ideologies out there, it’d most likely be the one marked Libertarian. But it doesn’t magically fit every situation; that decision is revocable when things start to get ropy and fail to fit properly. I fall outside of the mainstream by choice. I reserve my final decisions until after most of the lemmings have passed by. Which, by extension, makes me extremely conservative, I suppose. At any rate, I’m different and proud of it.

And now that I’m on the topic of ideology, I might as well hammer it home by asking you a question: Will you be voting in November? Perhaps a few more questions: Are you going to abstain for the sake of total frustration? I’ve considered that myself. How about this: Will you be voting on the basis of some slogan? G.K. Chesterton said it best: “As an ideal, change itself becomes unchangeable.” In other words, slogans are just propaganda; they’re dead as soon as they’re minted. At any rate, I think it’s clear to anyone with a cogent stream of thought inside their head that the kind of change we’ve had to endure for the past four years is not the sort most of us wanted. I think most of us just wanted someone at the switchboard who had half a clue what to do to stop the hurting out here in the real world. Clearly, we’ve not yet found the right men and women for the job. This November, the search continues in America.

I still have faith in America, in us. Ours is the only nation on the face of the earth constituted as we are. We’re filled with individuals who love being different, who have deep conviction of principle, who have mountains of fortitude to draw upon as we go forward into the breach. We come together not under the coercion of some megalomaniacal wannabe dictator, but united by and under the duress a man like that has produced, and we unite so as to extract that poisonous barb from the fabric of our homes. And when that business has been tended to, we return to our many and various different enterprises. We go about our own business. Different, and we’re okay with all of it, because a body made entirely of heads would be really gross. A body needs a good thinking head, a neck to swivel on, a body to hold it, arms to help it, and legs to move it.

I don’t expect you to “celebrate diversity” by trying to fit inside some dictatorial state-mandated mold that looks like me. Neither then, should you try to force me to surrender anything rightfully mine under the auspices of fairness. This is America. We’re not even supposed to be the same. We’re supposed to be different. That’s part of what liberty is. I know what reasons I have for striving for my convictions. I don’t desire to force anyone to be just like me. Why would I want that? Then we wouldn’t be different anymore. 

Sunday Drive

Take a walk in the woods every once in a while. Feel the sunlight filtered through towering ponderosas, two hundred feet tall or more. Hear the rushing roar of rivers cresting rock strewn banks, swollen with snowmelt, pale green torrents of liquid ice. Walk paths overcast with whole trees crossing over, wend through the underbrush, see the ants scurrying, their body segments much larger here than in the city; here they look to be made of bits of juicy wild mountain blackberry.

Smell the earth. Breathe in the scent of freshness; clean, airy, light, woody, peppered with the spice of drying needles that crunch underfoot. Feel the river roaring nearby; shaking the boulders that stand on the sloping banks.

Be reminded of how we're quite small at the wrestling rapid riverside; under precipitous tree bough stabbing high at the winds in the air, where the eagles soar. And be reminded of how we’re also quite large as we stand high, stooping over the black ant, our head cocked to one side in curiosity as he goes about his business. Take time to stop along the way and see.

Drive your car on two lane roads. And slow it down, roll with all the windows open so you can smell the fragrances, feel the cool breezes, see the sheer sides of the canyon walls on which you ride. Don’t rush. The Sunday drive is an American tradition that’s older than cars. Imagine what it might have been like to ride in a horse drawn buggy. Take it slow. And when you see something amazing, pull off and stop. Get closer. Pause. Soak. Dip a toe in. You packed a picnic lunch, right? Good. And you brought the kids, too. Show them why their jaw should drop in awe, even now, even in this age of terminal boredom, when they behold the work of the Creator. Get up close and personal. See what’s to see.

Thank God for today, and trust Him for tomorrow. Live apart from regret by seizing the now; drink in deep, empty the cup today, for it is all we have. Life will keep happening to you until you begin to happen to it. Don’t sit at home. Get out and about. Take a drive in the mountains. Get right up alongside their roots, drive right up through the crevices, ride up their ramps into the heights, and behold the view from the summit. Feel the intensity of the sun up there and let it burn its warmth into your skin, and carry that into your next Monday. It will better you.