Rediscovery

I rediscovered something about myself the past two weeks. Right now I’m outta work, at a crossroads of various uncertain paths, with no common consensus among my closest circle of advisors. Physically I’m iffy. My endurance levels are low. I’m falling back into old unhealthy patterns for dealing with mounting stress. Stress of my own creating, as well as all those monocled Monopoly men pounding on my door wanting a piece of the action – what little there is – in my wallet.

In a fit of manic depression I began reading Ouspensky two Mondays ago. Kind of a middle finger to God, I suppose. But that didn’t last. Still, though, I need a cure for these blues, one that isn’t going to put me in a premature burial plot. So, a week ago, I spotted Harry Harrison’s book Planet of the Damned on my bookshelf with about twenty other ancient SF novels, and I said, “LE, there’s no redeeming value in reading this. It ain’t good literature. It ain’t going to make you a better writer. It ain’t going to make you a better man. It’ll just be a waste of time.” Maybe true, maybe not, but right then, I just wanted some distraction.

I read it, and enjoyed it. I moved on to the next novel, The Man Who Fell to Earth. Yes, that one. It’s the original source material for that creepy and somewhat indulgent 1970s David Bowie movie, snippets of which I vividly recall stealth watching as a young boy.

Anyway, someone recently pointed out that this blog is my therapy. To a small extent, yes, but my real therapy, I realized and rediscovered, is reading these strange and fantastic books. I love everything about them – from the physical texture and smells of an old paperback to the psychedelic visual cover designs and “futuristic” lettering to the men and women and aliens and monsters that populate them and all the craziness they must overcome with all their space ships and ray guns and teleportation devices and psychic abilities. It gives me a blessed release from the everyday demands and frictions. Thirty years ago I climbed the roof of my house to read a book in peace; now I hide in the basement or in the bathtub or in my car to read. Pathetic or resourceful? You decide, but I know it’s necessary and healthy in an odd way.

Perhaps by the fall I can finish off my SF shelf. A pair of non-Dune books by Frank Herbert. Classic stuff by Philip Wylie, Greg Bear, Gordon Dickinson, Fred Hoyle, Roger Zelazny, and Arthur Clarke. And one of my all-time favorites, a sports dystopian work by Gary K. Wolf. End up with a lengthy Terry Brooks novel (I’ve never read him). Yes, it looks like a very exciting summer for LE, at least in one-hour-a-day increments.