What is Electric Sheep?

You.

Me.

All of us.

The data swarming inside our heads. The electrical impulses firing across your synaptic gap right now, now, and now.

The electric sheep is the dream of an android in the mind of a writer on a planet called Earth.

The electric sheep is the tweet, pic, and post of eight billion people eight trillion times every day.

The electric sheep is the idea sparking off that will never be read, heard, nor seen.

The electric sheep watches you while you sleep and while you wake.

The electric sheep has been here forever and will be here for always. It was here before we oozed from the mud and will outlive our ash on the wind.

The electric sheep is here to make you feel better.

The electric sheep, my friend, is love.

Imagination is a Superpower

If you want to live long and prosper, make sure you get a goddamn good imagination. You'll die without one. If your imagination's weak, others will eat you.

Imagine your imagination is a wolf in a brain-sized cage. You gotta let it run or else it'll chew the bars.

There's plenty of trainers out there, pros from the past who've created exercises for the imagination. Read books. Watch TV. Look at art. Listen to music. There's a shitload of content out there that we can use to strengthen our imagination.

Or do it on your own. Next time you walk outta the strain station, imagine a fifty-foot praying mantis is coming round the corner. Next time you're waiting for a bus, you're actually CIA and the little old lady beside you's KGB.

Do whatever you gotta do to let your imagination run wild. It'll make everyday life awesome. You won't do it all the time, but the more you practice, the better you get.

Spend time strengthening your imagination and you'll see a whole new world.

A shining, shimmering, you know...

Drinking with Hemingway

One of the best things I learned from Ernest Hemingway was how to drink.

He taught me a lot about writing too. His prose is some of the best. He's one of the writers that all subsequent writers try to imitate, and to which all the readers compare, either consciously or subconsciously.

He wrote a lot about war and hunting. That shit's good if you like violence and death and men doing manly, patriarchal things. He also wrote books about young artists in Paris that were thinly veiled stories about him and his friends.

I got lost in these books when I was 20. These books are about the Lost Generation and I felt, and still do to a certain extent, that 100 years later we're living through another generation like his.

Drinking plays a major part in these books and Hemingway spends a lot of time writing about people making and drinking drinks as well as describing the flavors and smells and colors of cocktails, wines, beers, and straight liquors.

One of the lessons about drinking that Hemingway's characters taught me is that there's an alcoholic drink for every occasion. Not only that, but drinks can themselves be the occasion.

I love savoring the moment while I'm decanting the golden liquid from bottle to glass, cracking ice cubes out of their trays, mixing in bitters and syrups, slicing juicy lemons and limes. I love having a different glass for different drinks and a whole bar full of shining bottles.

Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein and the other badasses living in Paris in the 20s saw the best and the worst in drink. Most of them died alcoholics.

I used to think I needed to drink like the characters in Hemingway's books. That's a stupid idea cause they're cynical drunks. But they're fun, pretty, and interesting to look at.

Part of that prettiness, a lot of it, in fact, comes from their appreciation of the moment. The drinks they are drinking mark an occasion, the occasion of being here now. They're all rich and lazy, so wasting time is their job and their hobby and they've made it into an art.

Next time you want a drink, pick up The Sun Also Rises or A Moveable Feast by Hemingway and learn how to drink like a pro.

How to Library

For those of you who don't know what a library is, it's a place you go and get free books.

They've also normally got a lotta 90s shit like huge computers, fax machines, and those old school computers that magnify newsprint and nobody uses.

But they've also got shelves full of these things called books. Words printed on paper and bound together in book form. Normally there's a picture on the front with the name of the dude or chick who wrote it.

The library uses a fucked up, but I imagine super useful, system to arrange their books with. It's made up of letters, numbers and decimal points and it's confusing as fuck. But forget that for a second, we don't need it.

Look instead at the genre signs. Just like TV shows and movies, books are arranged in genres. There's horror, mystery, romance, adventure, shit like that. And there's also history, biology, business, architecture, shit like that.

All you gotta do is walk around and look for the signs. They're normally on top of, or at the end of the shelves.

Pick one you like.

Maybe you enjoyed physics in high school. Maybe not but we're going with physics.

Now you're face to face with a wall of intimidating-ass books. Each shelf is an impenetrable wall. You're stuck reading the nonsense code printed on a label. Stop doing that and let your eyes unfocus and drift around.

Anything stand out?

Any colors or single words cry for attention?

A purple spine with the words “History” and “Galaxy” looks kinda interesting, so you grab it but it actually isn't the picture-book you'd hoped for but a boring text book.

Back on the shelf it goes.

But don't worry, now you're looking at one book. You've narrowed all the thousands of choices to one. Good job.

Look at the books to the left and right. Anything good there?

Chances are something will strike your interest. If not, turn around and look on the shelf behind you.

I've found tons of awesome books just by randomly looking at a shelf, picking one book and moving on from there.

Physically picking a book is the easy part.

Having the mental balls to actually pick a book off the shelf is another thing.

How many times were you told as a kid you weren't interested in something or not to waste your time on something? Even when we're being told we're good at something, we're being told we're not so good at the others. Over time our field of view narrows.

Libraries offer an opportunity to see everything. Or at least a decent chunk of everything. I once used the library of Three Hills, Alberta, a town of 3,000 people. Even there, I had access to more books than I could ever read.

Libraries offer us a way out of the echo chamber. Downstairs in the Adult Fiction section you can pick up a copy of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Upstairs in the Sociology section, you can pick up On Palestine by Noam Chomsky.

Unlike the internet, you get to see the whole library at once. There's no suggested next reading or autoplay. Total user freedom.

So figure out where your closest library is. Take your driver's license and a bank statement or something that shows your address cause you'll need them to get a library card.

Then forget everything everyone's ever told you and introduce yourself to one of the greatest achievements of all goddamn time: the Public Library.

It Ain't War Out There

When I look out my window, there's no war in the streets. No one's running around waving rifles or machetes. There's no bloody rubble or burned-out cars. There's no explosions or smoke in the sky. I can go outside any time I want.

How lucky are we who live peacefully.

But what should we do, enjoy the spoils and get comfy?

The thing about war is that we know that it's coming. If we can learn one thing from history it's that war is inevitable. Peace is a mere pause between battles. Peace is the in-breath. War is the out.

We are no different. That's what we should assume.

So what should we do?

Prepare. And I don't mean dig a shipping container into your yard and fill it full of beans and semi-automatics, you freaks.

Arm yourself with ideas. They're the real armor, the real defense against war.

Lack of good ideas precipitates and exacerbates war. Let's make the next war as painless as possible.

You in?

Love,

Ben

Fuck Lit Fic

Lit fic, or literary fiction, is the reason no one likes reading anymore. Apart from a few nerds who dig ruffles and skirts and glances across the parlor, no one reads books anymore cause they all suck.

We can trace the origins all the way back to Modernism. Or further back, all the way to the first Sumerian dude or dudette who put chisel to stone and tapped out his or her thoughts five thousand years ago.

Writers got super into depicting the 'true' experience of being a human, what it is like to be alive. And they got really good at it. An Englishwoman called Virginia Woolf and and Irishman called James Joyce got really good at depicting existence, but it nearly killed them. Virginia Woolf ended up filling her pockets with stones and walking into a river. But they wrote some dope ass books where they're trying to show what it's like to be in your head, going through your regular day.

That was in the 1920s. A couple decades later, an American guy called Ernest Hemingway was killing it with his seemingly simple writing about hunting, fishing, bullfighting, war, drinking, fighting and fucking.

His writing looks simple. He doesn't use many descriptive words and uses lots of short sentences. His dialogue is killer, and his way of describing things made it seem like you were watching a movie in your head. He had a crazy skill of choosing the exact right word to make a clear picture in your imagination.

These were the main ideas to come out of writing in the 20^th century, and they were awesome. They were such good ideas that people haven't felt like they needed to find any new ones since. Describing what it's like to exist in the real world is a pretty worthwhile goal, ain't it?

No.

It's been done. You see, those names I dropped, Woolf, Joyce, Hemingway, are not only the creators of the biggest styles in the last hundred years, but they also did it the best.

Every writer since is writing in the shadow of these giants. Everyone's imitating them, and some come close while others miss by a mile, but they're all following in someone else's footsteps.

Fuck that.

Fuck Literary Fiction.

Let's find something new.

Love,

Ben