Fiction Makes You Better

Reading fiction makes you a better person.

You can measure it. The exact size of the book, that's how much you're better.

Every single page has worth. Some are more worthy than others, but none will leave you worse by the end.

It's hard, though, to read fiction and it's not encouraged.

Why read when you can stream/watch/play/scroll/message/shit/die/leave...

But there's a book out there with your name on it.

Every single person on the planet has a book that will change their fuckin life and turn them into lifelong readers.

Hardcore, seasoned readers can tell you straight away what their book was, the one that started their addiction.

Find that first hit and you'll ride a wave for the rest of your life, learning and developing your empathy to higher and higher levels you never coulda imagined.

Fiction helps you see the world through someone else's eyes. You're given a world, most of the time it's coherent with characters doing and saying rational things. Sometimes you're just watching what's happening like a movie. Other times you're in someone's head listening to their thoughts.

This means you can see what it's like to be anyone. Every type of person you can think of has written a book. There's no category not covered.

Even if that's not your intention or purpose, you'll stumble across different ways of seeing the world that make sense. It helps you see that your way of seeing the world is only one way of seeing the world.

It drives up your empathy and at the same time it develops your imagination.

People like you if you're empathetic and imaginative. Not because you do anything douchey, but because you treat them like a person.

They're hard skills to learn. Maybe because they're hard to teach. They're no right angles. They're abstract as fuck.

But that's what fiction's for. That's exactly what it's designed to do, to strengthen your imagination and your empathy.

Fiction makes you a better, kinder person, plus it helps you get all the shit you want. Win win muthafucka.

Heroes Make Us Who We Are

When I was a kid, I wanted to be James Bond so bad.

I had a card in my wallet that was a License to Kill. I pretended to be him every day in my summer vacation. When a new movie came out, I'd chew the seatbelt for the hour-long drive from our house in Bragg Creek to the Famous Players at West Hills Mall.

In grade 1, at our Dress-Like-The-Job-You-Wanna-Do-One-Day Day, I didn't wear a costume. Instead, I just told people I was gonna be a spy. Douche bag? Sure. But I was a dedicated douche bag.

I loved that dude and, in my six-year-old mind, I was gonna be him when I grew up.

Then I grew up. Along with my years, my childish naivety wore off. Being a spy wasn't a real thing. At least, being James Bond wasn't.

I coulda tried to become Pierce Brosnan, but I was never that into acting.

So away went the dream of being a spy. Eventually, I decided on becoming a doctor. That went out the window too, but that's a different story.

But who the hell knows what that did to my little-kid brain. How did James Bond affect my outlook on life?

Am I braver, stronger, smarter, and funnier?

Or am I more misogynistic, racist, arrogant, and dickheadish?

Think back to your hardcore heroes as a kid. It's easy to remember, they're the ones you wanted to be so bad it hurt.

Then think about how they made you who you are.

It's ain't so easy, but you'll start to see that a lotta them is you.

Words Set You Free

Learn the Word and you'll learn to harness the power of the world. Treat the word lightly and your reins will be made of paper, your bits of brittle clay. At the slightest tug, your ideas fall apart and you stand there, garbling like a baby.

Treat words with respect. They kill the irreverent every day. Thousands of people, many naive, many more arrogant, misuse, abuse, and confuse their words so their meaning's misheard or mistaken. Soon their head's on a spike beside a thousand other cunts who opened their mouths without thinking.

The Wonderful World of the Internet has given us a whole new way to wield our words. Like kids with new toys, we're smashing the shit outta things. There are no rules so we gotta make em up as we go. Words are the light revealing the darkness, revealing what can kill us or save us.

The best way to get yourself into a comfortable relationship with words is to read like a motherfucker. Read everything you can and sprinkle in a hefty dose of what other people call Good Books. If you don't like something, move on. But first, ask yourself if it's cause you're too dumb. You can always come back when you're a little less of a moron.

The power is in your hands. Master the word and you master the world.

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.