by Matt Herron
A Reality Stranger than Fiction
These days it is hard, with a reality so insanely captivating, to imagine a stranger fiction.
Suppose a particularly sensitive and perceptive man emerges today from a three-month sabbatical in seclusion. Suppose also that someone has taken the time to gather together all reports of important events, stories, decisions, and disasters since the first of this year, and then delivers them to him. Our man was away studying, perhaps, or living in a Tibetan monastery, searching for enlightenment. In any case, he has not seen the news or heard anything about the outside world since his departure.
Would our man, freshly emerged from his peaceful life in seclusion, not be completely overwhelmed by what he learns in this compilation report? The revolution in Egypt alone is enough to inspire intense disbelief, learning that so much of significance happened while he wasn’t looking. Add in Charlie Sheen, war in Libya, and every strange thing that happened in between, and it would be perfectly reasonable to suppose that a clever someone is pulling an elaborate prank on a man that has simply taken a little break from the world.
“Ha, ha! Joke’s on me!” our man would say. And the person delivering the report would frown and respond, “No, sir. I’m afraid this is real.” —Read on »
by Matt Herron
The way the modern world has panned out is that everyone has to make a living somehow. It’s safe to say that most of us have worked a job we don’t enjoy in order to pay some bills. Many people, myself included, are still doing that job, or one of a series of unenjoyable jobs, to pay some bills. Money, it’s a gas, as Pink Floyd once sang. But you try living without it. —Read on »
by Matt Herron
At this moment, there are eight books in my room that I have started and not finished. That, if nothing else, is a testament to my character.
Do not look at the dirty clothes strewn across the floor. Or my unmade bed. Or the colorful photographs I found online and printed and taped on the mirror so I don’t have to wrestle with my reflection every time I walk past it. —Read on »
by Matt Herron
Ah, Winter. The time for colds and overcoats. The time for holidays. Have you started buying presents yet? Only 24 days until Christmas, if you don’t count today. It passes quicker than you think it will. I’m always one of those people who shops for gifts last minute. I want to buy the gifts, but I never know what to get them. I want it to be something they’ll use, not something that collects dust on a shelf. The perfect present takes time and planning and, above all, insight. So I think about it, and the days pass, and suddenly it’s the 20th and I haven’t got them anything. Inevitably, I am pushing against the crowd in the mall, trying to find something, anything, really. By this time it doesn’t matter that it’s perfect. Just that I got them something. Because they’ve already got me something and I don’t want to be that guy, the person who just couldn’t find the time to go shopping. At least that’s what you tell them. OH! I tried so hard but I just didn’t know what to get you. Here’s fifty bucks, spend it on whatever you want. Here’s a Barnes and Noble gift card worth $25 dollars. And what’s that get you, these days? A book and a half?
When people first ask me what I want for Christmas, my instinct has always been to say, “Nothing. Don’t get me anything.” I am never prepared to offer others gift buying options for myself. But they persist, and I give in and make a wishlist on Amazon. A bunch of books and one expensive electronic. Books are always a good choice for me.
But truly, the thing I want more than anything else, no one can give that to me. No one can afford to pay off my student loans. Or get me a better job, as a writer, please, and not writing technical manuals or marketing campaigns. Oh, no. Please get me a job as a novelist or a short story writer. I’ll live up to it, I swear I will. Just give me the shoes and I will step into them and fill them. But these are clown shoes. Do you see how big they are? They have round bulbous noses. No one’s feet are this big. Shaq would have to stuff the toes. They simply don’t fit. I tried. I did, really. But I tripped over the cord running to the lights on the Christmas tree and bashed my head on the coffee table. There was blood everywhere. It stained the Christmas tree. In my delirium I thought, how pretty. Red and green, just for Christmas. We had to spend Christmas morning in the ER. Fifteen stitches.
See? No one can give you what you truly want. It would end in disaster. What you truly want cannot be given by another. So you provide them with a list of stuff. Stuff you don’t need. But all the same, it’d be nice to have that new iPod touch. It’s so neat with the touchscreen, and all those games, and it takes excellent videos. Just excellent. Winter is the season of comfort. I feel so warm inside, curled up on the couch with that Norman Mailer novel I ripped out of it’s wrapping paper this morning, with a cup of hot tea steaming on the window sill. It’s snowing outside. Everyone wants a white Christmas. I take a video with the iPod touch. Ohh, look at that. Such good videos. You can see the individual snowflakes as they fall past the window sill. You can see the steam curling out of the top of the mug.
Did you get what you wanted? Maybe you got what you asked for. Or maybe Grandma sent you another hideous knitted sweater. Maybe this one has reindeer on it. She probably spent weeks knitting it. She’s had plenty of practice for Christmas. She probably started knitting it back in August. You thank her over the phone, practically gushing with fake gratitude. Then you put it in the bottom of the bottom drawer in your dresser and forget all about it.
No one can give you what you truly want. That’s the lesson of Christmas. Winter is the season of comfort, and Christmas is the day of giving comforting gifts. Maybe you needed new underwear and socks, or a new toothbrush. Maybe you were, in fact, out of reading material. But don’t lie to yourself. That’s not what you really wanted. That’s not what would satisfy that burning desire in the deepest part of your gut. But no one can give you that. And soon it’ll be time to make New Year’s resolutions. I think that’s why we have New Year’s resolutions. To tighten our resolve for the year to come. This year, we tell ourselves, I won’t want anything for Christmas.
There’s no harm in making your wish lists. I’ve made mine. If nothing else, they’re good for figuring out what you truly want. That one thing you didn’t list? That one thing that couldn’t be listed? That one thing that no one else could give you, that one thing that you have to give to yourself, that you have to take for yourself? That one thing that resonates with the ache in the deepest part of your gut? That’s what you truly want. And now you know what your New Year’s resolution is going to be.
Ah, Winter. The time for colds and overcoats. The time for holidays. Have you started buying presents yet? Only 24 days until Christmas, if you don’t count today. It passes quicker than you think it will. I’m always one of those people who shops for gifts last minute. I want to buy the gifts, but I never know what to get them. I want it to be something they’ll use, not something that collects dust on a shelf. The perfect present takes time and planning and, above all, insight. So I think about it, and the days pass, and suddenly it’s the 20th and I haven’t got them anything. Inevitably, I am pushing against the crowd in the mall, trying to find something, anything, really. By this time it doesn’t matter that it’s perfect. Just that I got them something. Because they’ve already got me something and I don’t want to be that guy, the person who just couldn’t find the time to go shopping. At least that’s what you tell them. OH! I tried so hard but I just didn’t know what to get you. Here’s fifty bucks, spend it on whatever you want. Here’s a Barnes and Noble gift card worth $25 dollars. And what’s that get you, these days? A book and a half? —Read on »
by Matt Herron
Video games. Used to love them as a kid. Couldn’t get enough. I would sit at my computer or in front of the television with a controller gripped in my sweaty hands for hours, end on end, like a chain smoker burns through cigarettes, not even bothering to take a break, just lighting a new one off the dying embers of the previous fix. Now, when I buy a game, it keeps my attention for a day, or a couple weeks at the most, and then I lose interest. I forget all about it. Maybe I still buy games because I like the trailers for them, or the artwork on the cover, or both. Mostly I buy games because they’re a continuation of a series that gave me thousands of hours of enjoyment as a child, like Starcraft 2 or the Mario Bros. Wii, both of which I saw in the store and just had to have on impulse; both of which I have ceased to play over a month ago and now collect dust on my shelves. —Read on »
by Matt Herron
I’ve been on pub tours before, but never one that fired my imagination like this.
Twelve of us were led through the cobbled streets of the Old and New Town’s of Edinburgh on a Literary Pub Tour. It began at the Beehive Inn, a large pub with an appropriately aged appearance, just off the Royal Mile.
—Read on »
by Matt Herron
“Throughout history side effects have proven more dangerous than direct effects. If, for example, global warming makes digital technology’s side effects irrelevant, our concerns will have been obliterated by the side effect of a much older technology: industrialization.” Neville Holmes, Side Effects of Digital Technology
It seems that the more technology we invent the more likely we are to be the cause of our own extinction. Unlike the dinosaurs. They had it easy. Blame it on the asteroid, blame it on the ice age. Where have we to lay the blame? Only on ourselves.
Because if global warming doesn’t kill us first, obesity, laziness, diabetes, and a supreme lack of foresight surely will. —Read on »
by Matt Herron
In a welcome break from the political spectacle, I bring you a personal narrative. Consider yourself warned.
I used to get the strangest ideas in my head when I was a kid. For instance, I worried that human beings would soon overpopulate the world. Where would we live? Sure, there was enough space now, but what happens when we build on all of it? When people call dibs on every piece of land available? And when there’s ten times as many people?
I could have sworn there wasn’t enough room for all of us. I asked a trusted grown-up and he told me that there was, in fact, plenty of space, more than I could possibly realize. The world is bigger than you think, he said. Some reassurance that was. How can he know how big I think the world is? —Read on »
by Matt Herron
Here’s a fun fact.
My dentist told me that flossing your teeth is the oral equivalent to wiping your ass. Then he described, with liberal hand gestures, the terrible things that happen when they have to surgically remove your sphincter; and the necessity for colostomy bags, despite their frightful malfunctions.
We really bonded.
by Matt Herron
My neighbor has a three-year-old son named Leon. He was playing with a train set while all the stuffy grown-ups talked and drank coffee the other night. I can’t speak much German, so I watched Leon build his train track instead.
He started with the three-way split piece in the middle of the kitchen floor. Then he added one piece to the left, and another to the right, jumping between the parts so that the track grew organically. If he ran into a wall, or things didn’t connect like he wanted them to, he would adjust the pieces or move the track so that it fit better.
I was surprised because he didn’t start at the beginning, as I would have. He left his options open. If he ran into trouble, he adjusted the track to fit to his idea, instead of adjusting his idea to fit to the track. His only limit, then, was the extent of his own imagination.
Just watching him build his track (I was certain not to interfere with the little genius) taught me that things don’t have to be perfect, or proper, or even done in the right order. There are a million different ways to build something, and you are better off following your gut than anyone else’s instructions.
As a person with a strong affinity to order, I’m certain that learning to apply some of Leon’s liberal building habits to my writing would help me to improve.
Of course, things rarely turn out right on the first try. When Leon decided he didn’t like what he had built, he broke it back to pieces. No remorse or frustration, just kaput! and he started over. And he seemed to enjoy breaking the train track to pieces as much as he liked building it again.
