Stephen King Knows Darkness

One of the things I'm very fond of telling people when trying to persuade them to start watching The Walking Dead - and I'm always trying to persuade cine-, tele-, and bibliophiles with taste to do so - is that the series would work even without the zombies. Take the same characters and put them into any other critical, apocalyptic scenario (pestilence, war, drought, famine, holocaust), and the story still works. Why? Because we're basically watching a microcosm of society stripped down to a bare visual, beaten and broken down, and still fighting based on an intrinsic moral code. It's like the idea of archetypes and inherent fiber. In the end, all we really want is to meet the baseline of Maslow's hierarchy of needs: we want to eat and to drink and have a place to go to the bathroom; we all want love; we all need a little air.

I'm finding more and more that 'salem's Lot is very much like The Walking Dead or The Grapes of Wrath or Boogie Nights. These are all masterpieces that would still like if you changed the setting or the period or the industry. In the end, people are all generally the same no matter where they've been or where they're going. Stephen King has a definitive understanding of this, especially here in this, a superlative work of art. His flip-flops between Ben and Susan and Mark and The Town as a whole all work together to show us that these are just people, everyday people, who are (sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly) finding themselves in what we, the readers, find to be extraordinary situations.

In my nightly reading, I am discovering that King is, in fact, the master.

     "Her mind felt dazed into unreality by the swift turnaround things had taken. Less than two minutes ago they had been discussing this business calmly, under the rational light of electrical bulbs. And now she was afraid. Question: If you put a psychologist in a room with a man who thinks he's Napoleon and leave them there for a year (or ten or twenty), will you end up with two Skinner men or two guys with their hands in their shirts? Answer: Insufficient data." - Susan articulating her own thoughts on everything she has just been told by Matt Burke; discovering that she may very well be only entering the story en medias res.

     "These are the town's secrets, and some will later be known and some will never be known. The town keeps them all with the ultimate poker face. 
     "The town cares for devil's work no more than it cares for God's or man's. It knew darkness. And 
     darkness was enough." - the town of 'salem's Lot on itself.

More Quotes, Less Creative

For whatever reason, I just can't seem to get motivated to create these days. Both my writing and my painting have slipped by the wayside in favor of whatever it is that I do to waste time and procrastinate. I really ought to be preparing for my presentation on step three that I'll be doing this weekend at the Highland Club.

I could be balancing my checkbook or going through that mountain of bills or doing any one of the innumerable items on the list of accomplishments with which Ryan has most recently taxed me. I have a ton of my things in my life for which I am grateful, I have tons for which I need to work diligently to keep.

Instead of adhering to daily schedules of reading and working out and creating and all those things that I blog about wanting and needing to do for sanity, I get stuck in games of Words With Friends and downloading music on Spotify and uploading new movies and shorts into my Halloween 2012 playlist on YouTube. I always swore I'd never get a smart phone because I always thought they make you stupid. In reality, they only make you lazy.

I swear that some better posts are coming, just as I swear that I'm going to get further (farther? is this equated to distance or time?) in 'salem's Lot than I do only reading for the few sparse moments before bed.

I keep picking up great quotes in my nightly reading, and I continue to consider this King's first, most literary work, but I don't dare mark them since the copy I'm reading is the expanded edition that I borrowed from David's bookshelf in lieu of the ratty paperback copy that I read my first go-round. So, I forget what they are and where they are, but maybe I'll take them time to pick them up and get them uploaded onto this little wall the next time I actually make the time to have a little more follow-through.

Oh - by the way - I met a dude.

Maybe that has something to do with my unwillingness and inability to spend more time on other things that matter just as much, only differently.

Stephen King on EVIL, evil, and (evil)

At the rate I'm going, I'm never going to get through every work from Stephen King's bibliography in 2013. But that's no reason to keep slacking on posts.

Tonight, we have something that I seem to remember posting about a couple years ago when I originally read this (the second?!?! I'm only on the second?!?!) particular work:

"But there were no battles. There were only skirmished of vague resolution. And EVIL did not wear one face but many, and all of them were vacuous and more often than not the chin was slicked with drool. In fact, he was being forced to the conclusion that there was no EVIL in the world at all but only evil -- or perhaps (evil). At moments like this he suspected that Hitler had been nothing but a harried bureaucrat and Satan himself a mental defective with a rudimentary sense of humor -- the kind that finds feeding firecrackers wrapped in bread to seagulls unutterably funny.

"The great social, moral, and spiritual battles of the ages boiled down to Sandy McDougall slamming her snot-nosed kid in the corner, world without end, hallelujah, chunky peanut butter. Hail Mary, full of grace, help me win this stock-car race."

                                                          --Father Donald Callahan, on the presence of evil in 'salem's Lot.

The Focus for the Week

is to read and to blog. We'll see...

Notes From 18 Days Ago

In getting organized and ready to roll tonight, I'm going through the notes I have saved in my phone so that I can delete them.

Excerpts that have stood out to me in my reading, making impressions that I don't want to lose:

"It was a moment he remembered for years after, as though a special small slice had been cut from the cake of time. If nothing fires between two people, such an instant simply falls back into the general wrack of memory." - Ben Mears on connecting with Susan

"Later he would have the chance to think how easily this had happened, how smoothly. The thought was never a comfortable one. It conjured up an image of (gate? - that's what I have), not blind at all but equipped with sentient 20/20 vision and intent on grinding helpless mortals between the great millstones of the universe to make some unknown bread." - I don't know from whence this was collected. Most likely, some thoughts from Ben Mears.

"Plot was out, masturbation in." - Definitely from Ben Mears. On his discontent thoughts toward the current status of his career and acceptance as a writer.