Greetings, Gid-Lovers, Gidciples, and Gid-Mongers everywhere! It is I, Gideon U. Eklund, coming at you with my words, from atop my jewel-encrusted Golden Pedestal. (I’m capitalizing ‘Golden Pedestal’ now, to make it seem more important. Also, I’m not getting down from it today. It’s a holiday weekend, and I’m not going ANYWHERE. You got a problem with that? You come up here and tell me to my FACE.) This time around, my post is going to be a lot of anecdotal rambling, and a little bit of a point at the end.
Today, I’m sitting down at my clackity-style retro-designed typewriter-style mechanical keyboard, because I haven’t used it in a while, and I like the noises it makes. I always feel awesome when I’m using it, because CLACKITY-CLACKITY-CLACK, but I also feel a little odd plugging a keyboard into a laptop with a keyboard already built into it.
It’s an Azio retro keyboard, for those of you wondering:
That’s right; drink in the majesty, kiddos. This bad boy is all mine.
I instantly fell in love with this keyboard from the moment I saw it at a Fry’s Electronics in Renton, WA., but decided not to splurge on one, because it was more fiscally responsible to purchase it when I wasn’t already low on funds. When I had the money and went back to buy it, it was sadly out of stock. It was then that I dramatically knelt down before the empty shelf, slit my palm open with a knife, and swore on the blood of my ancestors that it would be MINE the next time it was in stock.
Then, an employee came by and asked that I stop doing that every time something is out of stock, because apparently, cleaning up a stranger’s blood from the carpets is icky, and the video section alone looked like it had been perused by Jason Voorhees. Since there was now an employee standing nearby, I asked if they had any more keyboards in the back, like an asshole. Surprise; they didn’t.
Particularly Lengthy Author’s Note: I’ve worked many a retail job, and I will tell you this right now, dear readers: NO, THEY DO NOT HAVE MORE IN THE BACK. If you are at a store, looking at an empty shelf, it’s not empty because the store simply doesn’t feel like making money that day, and are hoarding products in the stockroom, never to be sold again. That’s not how it works. Sure; it could be that rare time where the item you seek has JUST come in, and hasn’t been put out yet, but the odds of you hitting that very specific window are slim-to-none, so don’t ask. Just accept that it’s gone for now.
The next time I was at Fry’s, I saw it was back in stock. So, I tightened my belt, bought it without a second thought, and haven’t looked back. This is my long-winded way of telling you that,
A.) I have an awesome keyboard I love to type on,
B.) I’ve learned that people like little windows into the lives of the writers they read, so here’s one for all of you,
C.) “Because I spent it on a keyboard for a computer that already has a keyboard built into it, so maybe mind your own fucking business,” is not a well-received explanation to a roommate who wants to know why your half of the utilities bill has gone missing, and,
D.) I go to Fry’s Electronics a lot, and they hate cleaning up my blood.
So that’s the story of the awesome keyboard I enjoy typing on. But, since I’m me, I’m not going to end this blog post on some weird keyboard purchasing anecdote and tales of blood loss. No, we’re going to do what I normally spend my day doing:
…Thinking WAY too hard about something trivial, and making it bigger in my head.
Ready for another ride, kids? Strap in for greatness!
Part of my love for going to Fry’s is my deep-seated passion for owning my movies in some physical format or another. Don’t get me wrong; streaming services are great, (hey there, Crunchyroll, Netflix and Hulu—how you doin’?) but I like to own the media I know I’ll watch over and over, because I always hate it when I think, “I really feel like watching _____,” and that movie is nowhere to be found online, and it’s NOT in my collection, so what the fuck do I do? NOT watch it? That’s some bullshit right there. I mean, I was in the middle of Jackie Chan Adventures when you got rid of that glorious cartoon, Netflix! You cut me! YOU CUT ME, JUDAS!
…So, I buy movies in a world where folks don’t do that very much anymore.
Another Particularly Lengthy Author’s Note: Could we maybe just keep a form of physical media now and stick to it for a few decades? Blu-Rays seem good enough, so stop trying to cram your 4K nonsense down my throat. That would be great. I only recently have started primarily purchasing Blu-Rays in the past few years after complaining that my DVD’s were going the way of the dodo, which was a similar complaint I had when switching from VHS to DVD’s. On a related side note, I am apparently very old.
I know at this point, a lot of you are thinking, “What does ANY of this have to do with ANYTHING in the title of this blog post, sir? WERE YOU JUST SELLING LIES TO GET US HERE?!”
…Calm your shit, people. I’m getting there. Jesus.
During a recent sojourn in Fry’s last week, I went to what used to be a glorious, three-aisle, double-sided spread of home video glory, only to discover that the magnificent breadth and scope of their home video section was whittled down to a single aisle. Gone were the spacious, densely-packed sections of film upon film, and show upon show, divided by genre, and sorted alphabetically for my convenience; hello to a lonely afterthought of an aisle where the genres were: “Here are the few outdated things we have left on Blu-Ray,” “Here’s what little we think of anime,” and “Hey—look at these full seasons of The Cosby Show you can get for five bucks, because Bill’s a rapist, and it’s uncomfortable to enjoy his stuff anymore.”
Author’s Note: Full seasons of “Bewitched” cost more, for fuck’s sake. …Yeah, you heard me—”Bewitched.“
What videos they did have were spread thin, as if someone was trying to make three sandwiches with the last spoonful of peanut butter. They were triple-spacing their essay to hit their page count, if you get what I mean. It looked as if it had been picked clean by looters during an apocalypse.
This, of course, got me thinking about the apocalypse. At the time of me writing this, the planet is basically being fucked into oblivion. It is a very real, very tangible fear that the civilization is going to end within my lifetime, and nobody likes to think about that.
Our resources are disappearing as quickly as our ice caps, and this is the kind of thing you don’t think you’re going to be writing about as an actual thing; this is the sort of stuff you write post-apocalyptic fiction about. You make up a ridiculous apocalypse as the jumping off point for your narrative about battling for gas in the desert wastelands of Australia, or… I dunno… sex lube in post-apocalyptic Amsterdam or something.
So, while I write this, hoard bottled water, and try not to think about the dumpster fire burning around me, I find myself distracted with this thought:
What will we write about after the apocalypse? What kind of stories will we tell? Will we dip back into the past, and tell our future fucked generations of how good life used to be? That feels like rubbing their noses in their situation. But, what sort of future stories do we tell? Tales of hope? Do we attempt to tell them we will be out exploring the galaxy, when they know we barely have the resources to fight off the mutants while traveling to the next safe zone a few miles away? (I’m assuming our apocalypse will have mutants, because goddamn it, I need to believe in something.)
Or, will the real mutant be our stories themselves; mutating to adapt to our new normal? Tales of everyday heroes out there surviving the apocalypse with bold feats of heroism and humanity? Will the new hero be the guy who goes on a quest to find bottled water at a burned out Walmart and brings it back to his people, or leads them to an untouched land of lush greenery, hidden from the rest of the world like an oasis?
Author’s Note: I just realized I’m describing many things I’ve done playing “Fallout 3.”
Maybe we’ll lead more toward the fantastic: other dimensions, or alien visitors who come to save us instead of invade our world, as before. Because as sure as I am that some of us will be out there surviving after the end, where do our stories go? Where do you go from the end times?
This is something that keeps me up at night. I have enough trouble with technology expanding faster than my manuscripts can get published, so I may actually have to update them to be accurate for our times, or date them in a specific year as if to say, “This plot takes place in 2010, when your smartphones were new.” But, I can’t fathom having manuscripts that don’t get published, because they lack the actual apocalypse in them, so they are now wildly outdated stories, and people can’t relate. (Also, I doubt they’ll be publishing much in the way of anything after the world ends, but Stephen King and Tom Clancy will still manage to get something out there anyway.)
Maybe our storytelling will change in a way that they’re told like myths and legends of old; we could talk about the fact that Bill Clinton was a 40-story robot that defended Texas from the world’s largest gila monster, and nobody born after the apocalypse could say boo about it.
All I know is this: if we don’t manage to pull the planet out of this nosedive, and society crashes like a parachute full of anvils, we storytellers will have to adapt ourselves responsibly. There may come a time when people will come to us for distractions from the latest mutant attack, because nobody gets cable anymore.
Whatever stories we tell after the apocalypse, one thing will remain: No matter how good it is, or how inspiring to the leftovers of the human race, I probably won’t be able to buy it on Blu-Ray at fucking Fry’s Electronics anyway.
I’m pretty sure we won’t be watching ‘The Cosby Show” after the apocalypse either, but I can tell you where to scavenge a pretty sweet keyboard. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be off retroactively capitalizing every use of ‘Golden Pedestal’ in my posts.