I used to be a voracious reader. As a kid, it was escaping into fantasyland, blah blah blah. As an adult it was more about smoke breaks, of which I had a lot - I was up to 2 packs a day when I quit.
My jam has always been old-school sci-fi and mysteries. Jules Verne, HG Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Mary Shelley... Also Stephen King, but everyone reads Stephen King. Later I got turned on to Kurt Vonnegut Jr and fell in love. It was the first time an author truly spoke my language, aka "weird".
When I got my first smartphone, books almost immediately went out the window. I had other things to read! Current things! Written by living people! All of a sudden my dusty used book collection started collecting even more dust. Every once in a while I'd pick up a book and re-read it. Rarely did I try something new. Now they just sit there, moving from apartment to apartment to house, put on display for no one to care about.
Fast forward to the first of several pandemic lockdowns. I was bored out of my mind and decided to pick up a book I hadn't read yet: Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Lost World". It was... fine. I mean it was good, but didn't age well with its gentle racism. But there was a phrase that stuck with me, it was part of the narrative describing the tribal drums being played by the natives as the explorers drifted along the river... the drums beat the message over and over: "We kill you if we can... we will kill you if we can...". At the time, I was reading this, people the world over were super pissed about racism, and I was seeing a lot of angry white people with golf shirts and tiki torches yelling and screaming about... family values? Anyway it got me thinking about Homo sapiens' inherently protective mean streak and the phrase "We will kill you if we can..." began playing in a loop inside my head. It was literally making me crazy. So I grabbed my guitar and went out in the woods and wrote a kickass song called, wait for it, "We Will Kill You If We Can". At least now there was a melody to the chant inside my head... and there you go, reading a book was great! It kickstarted a stalled songwriting "career", filled me with fuel and helped me explore a new songwriting voice. Now, in addition to my usual novelty songs, I have an equal amount of songs about death and killing and destruction and the end of the world. A nice balance, I think.
I didn't read another book until this week, aka 3 lockdowns later. This time the circumstances were different. It was partially to escape boredom but more to escape anything that might trigger a negativity landslide inside my head. The pandemic really got to me, and now I'm kinda fragile as shit. I also have to give credit to my daily cannabis use, which has the delightful side of effect of exacerbating depression and anxiety. I was too scared to stop smoking it because weed was (so I thought) the only thing keeping me sane, but it kind of ended up being the thing that made me insane.
I love weed, don't get me wrong, but it's common knowledge that you can't smoke it all the time or the high stops being "fun" and starts being "normal" and every sucks without it . I willed myself to take a January break, and stick to beer and whisky (responsibly). The effects were almost immediate - I was so full of piss and vinegar I didn't know what to do with myself. But at the same time I started getting tired of my go-to time killer - playing dumb games on my phone (Candy Crush and the like) was really starting to annoy me. I would get mad every time the game cheated, every time I fucked up, every time I encountered a level that was just too dang hard... I know it seems silly but that would be enough to trigger me into a rotten mood that would spiral quickly out of control. Normally when I'm in a rotten mood I can just go smoke some weed and it's magically gone. Now that's not an option, and I didn't know what to do. Reading the news makes me sad, playing stupid video games makes me mad, and then I remembered "Hey! Books exist". I went downstairs where my books are hiding, with the intention of re-reading something again, but nothing jumped out at me.
So I grabbed a book from my wife's shelf. It's great! I mean the book itself is great too, but I mean the act of reading is great! I'm enjoying just sitting on the couch, drinking a coffee and reading in silence. The world has gotten very loud, and the quiet of reading is speaking to me right now. I look forward to reading more, this time for real I think.
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