Gray Men of Horror

As I buckled my preschooler into his car seat, we had a brief conversation:

Him: When Uncle J--- comes back, I want him to sit next to me in the back.
Me: Well, sure, but that's not going to be for some time.  He lives really far away, you know.
Him: Is Uncle J--- yours father?
Me: No, kiddo.  My father is dead.  Uncle J--- is my brother.

At this point, his eyes filled with tears.  He's familiar with the concept of death as a practical, if not philosophical matter: we had two cats, and one of them died of heart disease some months ago, so he knows that death is a permanent state.  I didn't feel good about telling him about my father's death, but it's something we've discussed before.  It often takes several conversations for certain concepts to sink in.  The tears he shed over his grandfather suggest that he got it this time.  This time, it made sense.

Him: Yours father died?
Me: Yes, kiddo.  He was very, very sick, and he died a few years ago, when you were a baby.
Him: *crying now*: Did I sit on his lap?
Me: Yes you did.  I have a picture of it.  He really liked you, kiddo.  It's okay to be sad about it.

I hugged him in the car seat, wiped off his face, and he was fine by the time I fastened my own seat belt.  His resilience is an enviable thing.

Death is an aspect of human experience like any other, but too much emphasis on it is unhealthy, like an obsession with certain bodily functions.  So my little boy knows about it.  As someone who reads, watches, and writes horror, I consider it in ways that few people do as a matter of course.  After all, death is one of horror's most central themes.

I write about death and unspeakable horrors, but you wouldn't know it to look at me.  When I worked in the publishing industry, learning about self-defense, combat shooting, knife fighting, and similar subjects, one topic that came up from the more competent instructors was something called the Gray Man concept.  The best way to win a fight is to not be there when it happens: to be aware and avoidant.  A Gray Man doesn't wear BDUs and an NRA Life Member T-shirt to go to the 7-11.  He carries, but he blends in.  He trains in personal defense techniques but avoids fights.  He's unremarkable.  You just look past him.  That's the Gray Man.

Many horror fans aren't Gray Men (or Gray Women).  You know it to look at them.  Goths and metalheads, two subcultures that typically embrace the horror genre, select their appearances so that you know what they're into.  I attach no judgment to this: people like what they like and do what they do and that's just fine.  It's reasonable to make assumptions about a Goth's interest based on his appearance, as much as we're told to ignore judgment based upon experience and refuse to judge a book by its cover.

What of the Gray Man of horror, then?  How much horror can one consume without it coming out in the pores?  In large part, I suspect horror fans all come to the party for different reasons.  Some of us enjoy the vicarious thrill of terrible danger.  Others groove on how justice is so often meted out to the deserving in most horror stories (or, conversely, how the bad guy sometimes wins).  And yet others really like death.

What do I like about horror?  I'm a Gray Man.  You'll never know until I tell you.

Shirtgate: Four Things to Consider

Everybody knows the story by now: Matt Taylor, a British scientist, was part of the team who landed a probe on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.  In a recent interview, he wore a shirt that made some people very upset, subsequently apologized for it, and is now more famous for the shirt than the remarkable scientific achievement for which he is responsible.  Here are some takeaways from the story.  If they offend you, ask yourself why:

• The shirt was designed by Elly PriZeMaN [sic] and it depicts women in skimpy outfits holding guns.  If you click the link, you'll see that Ms. PriZeMaN is a woman.  Also note that the shirt itself doesn't show violence against women; indeed, if holding a firearm is an implicitly violent act, then the women depicted are themselves engaging in violence.  The shirt is in poor taste.  But Dr. Taylor obviously wore it because he very much liked it and wanted to show off his female friend's work.
• There's very little difference between radical feminists and small children. One thing you learn early on with small children is that you get the behavior you reward most frequently.  Small children act out.  They can't help it.  But you don't reward them for acting out: you use the appropriate tools available, including ignoring the bad behavior, removing the child from the situation if he or she becomes destructive, or distracting the child with something else.  To a radical feminist, the best thing that can happen is getting attention, even negative attention.
• Dr.Taylor wasn't forced to apologize.  He didn't have to apologize for wearing a shirt that a tiny group of very loud people found offensive.  The only reason why this became such a big deal is because he apologized.  He rewarded bad behavior, and as a result, not only failed to mollify an extremely angry subgroup of individuals whose very existence is predicated on anger, but also brought scorn on himself from people who would otherwise have supported him.  Had he stood up for himself, or, better yet, ignored the screeching, he would have been known for his achievement, not his sartorial choices.
• This story hits the bullseye on two important issues: a misplaced sense of proportion and political correctness.  If this guy's shirt elicited so much anger and tears, it's clear that radical feminism no longer has any major issues to address, and should be relegated to the dustbin of history the way John Birchers have.  Also, everybody hates political correctness, but nobody wants to take responsibility for it.  Apologizing to the eternally offended increases political correctness.  

Some questions remain.  I added the leavening adjective "radical" to feminist in this piece, but are the people so offended by this shirt actually radical feminists, or do they represent the mainstream of feminism?  If not, why not?  Will Dr. Taylor have a career after this?  Does an attention-seeking subgroup of a subgroup have a right to tear the spotlight away from people with actual accomplishment to further an agenda supported only by them?  How many times will this have to happen until someone gathers up the courage to fight back?

Forbearance and Who We Are

I'm going to wade into the ugly lake of politics here, but not in the way you might think.  What follows might upset you.  If it does, ask yourself why.

I was lucky enough to find Sonny Bunch's essay on the concept of forbearance in the Washington Free Beacon.  If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it as an incisive piece, something that you can find yourself nodding along with as you absorb it (or, as my little boy says, "think about it with your brain").

There's a lot to it, but one takeaway is this: just because someone throws you a pitch, you don't have to swing at it.  Even on social media.

I'm as much into politics and current events (the two are inseparable) as anyone, and more than most.  My political/philosophical viewpoint has been honed by personal experience, research, and careful reflection.  Regular readers of this blog know that I like to strip away euphemism to get to the heart of things.  To dig deep.  You grow when you're made to feel uncomfortable.  I like to write fiction, but I won't live it.

One of the reasons I write this blog is to stretch myself, to write about things I hadn't before, like short stories/flash fiction, or war stories from my past employer.  But I'm also here to create that all-important writer's platform: a place where people can find me online and learn about my books.  The dirty little secret nobody in writing wants to tell anyone is that the vast majority of writers don't want to blog, Facebook, or get involved in any kind of social media.  They just want to write their books, and they want you to buy them.

Honestly, I can't stand Twitter.  I loathe it.  But it's a social media box to check, so I'm there and I participate.

With all that in mind, I have strong, informed opinions about the issues of the day, but I won't communicate all of them here. This blog, first and foremost, is about building a relationship with you, my readers, and if I tell you exactly what I think about, say, the recent election returns, half of you will be turned off.

So despite that I want to talk about what's going on with Ebola in the US, what happened a week ago on Election Day, and other such things, I can't.  I shouldn't.  I...forbear.  Even though controversy and disagreement get attention.

See, I'm not this guy:

Huge amounts of snow in Maine yesterday! Republican voters should probably stay home tomorrow, safe & dry! HAHAHAHAHA.
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) November 3, 2014

As jokes go, it's weak sauce, and even King himself saw that, hence the HAHAHAHA.  However, I'm quite familiar with his other non-fiction pieces, and I know for a fact that he thinks that people to the right of him politically are not only stupid, but actually evil.  He's allowed.  Just as I'm allowed to find my horror literature elsewhere.

I understand that it's very difficult to forbear when you're certain that the people who disagree with you are actively trying to destroy the world.  It's like making friends with a murderer.  The idea, however, that refusal to invest in failing green energy businesses means that you're in favor of ruining the planet with global warming is a false equivalency, and descends into the lack of a sense of proportion that I already talked about.  Achieving that sense of proportion and combining it with forbearance create a grace we used to have before instantaneous, semi-anonymous communication changed us into, well...take your pick of rude words.  We've changed as a culture, and not for the better.

Just because we disagree, even on the important things, it doesn't mean one of us is an evil idiot.

Forbearance is very much a prized quality, more so for its rarity.  It's something to work on, because it inspires grace and civility, even in the most heated communications media.