Is this me?

The madness that is mornings for me. Madness as in the cylinders of mind all fire at once in the wee hours of the morning burning brightly and bringing all sorts of wild and wonderful thoughts. Sometimes the intensity threatens to short-circuit me.

And like Kerouac…

“[…]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

 

So this book arrived yesterday:

I was reading through the intro this morning (which is where the opening image is from) and all sorts of synapses fired off. The first being, why the Hell am I attracted to cult fiction or stuff that would have been previously a part of the counter-culture (I say previously because of course, the counter-culture is now the over-the-counter culture, packaged and marketed like any other mainstream item).

Anyway, I digress…

When I was a kid, I was massively into heroic fantasy – the sword and sorcery genre mainly – where it’s good versus evil and there are clear heroes and villains. I was compelled by the hero, but secretly attracted to the anti-heroes that populated these works – the anti-hero usually being the lone warrior who isn’t interested in saving humanity but gets forced into it by circumstances. Their actions weren’t governed by love or morality or duty. They were guided by their own self-interests – a force onto themselves.

So when I read:

Modern man no longer looks to brave horizons, his view in introspective. Identity is fractured and uncertain. The best our anti-heroes can offer is assertion of the self at worst angst-ridden dismemberment. Cult fiction is what young men read at a time when they can no longer harbour great expectations or offer grand actions…

I was sad.

It also made me think that maybe it’s time to deconstruct Clay, see what I’ve become. I don’t think I’m as bad as Harry, but maybe not far off. ?

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