"Even if all the trees come back, it won't be His forest anymore."

For some reason, I've spent a good majority of the last month or so watching stories dealing with the death of God: the final season of Lost; Hayao Miyazaki's anime masterpiece Princess Mononoke; and Toy Story 3. Plus Neil Gaiman's Sandman continues to head the list of my favorite pieces of literature. What attracts me to these, I wonder? Maybe it's the fact that I'm a teenager, and its well known that Nietzschean rejection of Judeo-Christian values is an essential adolescent experience. But more likely it has something to do with their quality being as high as a deadhead on 4/20. Lost ended on an amazingly high note (although I've noticed that this means I'm writing for the minority), while Princess Mononoke and Toy Story 3 are my favorite offerings from people who seem constitutionally incapable of making bad films.

This awesomeness probably stems from the fact that DOG stories have pretty much every element that contributes to a good story. They are at once as epic as the works of JRR Tolkien and as emotionally intimate as the works of Raymond Carver. In addition, its not a stale, 'been there, done that' archetype. Every story is different, because just as everyone has their own unique relationship with God, they each have their own views on God's death and just what the hell that means. The story of two starcrossed lovers pretty much reached its apex after Romeo and Juliet's double suicide, but DOG stories are still going strong 150 years after Zarathustra first came down from the mountains.

Honestly, it's pretty hard not to like dog stories. After all, they celebrate human strength and ingenuity. In a world devoid of absolute meaning, it's up to us to subjectively grant it meaning. As the title of this post, a quote cribbed from Princess Mononoke, states, even after gods death, the great world he created continues to spin. The gods die and Asgard burns, but humans continue to inhabit the branches of the reborn Yggdrasil. DOG stories are not about epic battles between good and evil (although they do have plenty of that) so much as they are about human resilience, even in the face of the greatest of threats.

I suppose DOG stories are powerful because they're always relevant, especially today. When the Soviet Union fell in the 90s, some people liked to say that we were witnessing the 'end of history,' the emergence of a new world order of peace, prosperity, and universal democracy. The last ten years have taught us that there's still plenty of pages left in the book, but it's undeniable that we've reached a point where classic worldviews are starting to collapse. Tactics used to fight communists and fascists don't work so well against terrorists and insurgents. In addition, central authority is finishing it's downward spiral into complete farce. How can a man be infallible when he allows pedophiles to run amok? How can a man lead the free world when he is incapable of either a) keeping his fucking pants up or b) utilizing the English language better than a sixth grader? The closest thing we have to objective truth in the modern, Fox News-tinged world is Wikipedia, and its well-established that Wikipedia is slightly erroneous (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_in_wikipedia if you don't believe me). To answer the question time posed years ago, god most certainly dead. But the forest will grow back, if us resilient humans have anything to say about it. It won't be His forest this time, though. It'll be our forest, imbued with our own values. A final farewell to objective truth.

That's why Toy Story 3 kicks ass.

Fucking Water

After two years of waiting, I finally got a short story published in Menagerie, my high school's literary magazine. That piece, "After the Flood," was about a teenage boy wandering around in a flooded, postapocalyptic Chicago. When the magazine was published and I got a chance to read the piece again, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it held up (usually I hate my stories; I look at them the same way Richard Nixon looked at those incriminating 'Smoking Gun' tapes). I found that the piece had good voice, a decent plot, and a message that was subliminally meaningful without being obtusely in your face. However, whenever people approached me to comment on the story, all they could talk about was the story's excessive use of swearing (the title of this post happens to be the first two words of the story).
My view on it was this: if you were trapped in a flooded, postapocalyptic Chicago, you wouldn't try to censor yourself in your expression of how you felt about that. I didn't use the swearing in order to intentionally provoke uncomfortable feelings among my readers, but rather to build a realistic voice for the story's narrator. Swear words are a part of our colloquial dialect, and they shouldn't be ignored. Granted, they shouldn't be used gratuitously (and I don't think they were in my story), but they also shouldn't be outlawed altogether.
In addition, talented writers can also make beauty from swear words. This isn't a horn-tooting implication of my own greatness, mind you, but rather a recognition of the potential of swear words to sound lyrical. Here I'm thinking mainly of graphic novels-particularly Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan, Garth Ennis' Preacher, and Brian Azzarello's 100 Bullets-but I'm sure there are books out there wherein authors have achieved the same level of awesomeness with swear words.
So don't hate on the swears, please. Just treat them as part of the piece.