Leaving

Time to see the old place again. 

It’s rather sad that I’m leaving just before the Blacknet series of post are over.   To my chagrin, the series was uneven, but like any good uneven thing, it ends in a rather bizarre note that reminds that the whole phenomenon of west coast science fiction writers were never in comparison to the schools of fiction that come from the other side of the country.  Those few guys are still around, let’s just say that they are as good as they have ever been, and that I might one or two of those guys on a relatively frequent basis from now on.

            Yes I’m writing this as I wait for a plane at the LAX airport to JFK.  Five years later is a long time to be angered at the old town, and Los Angeles treated me well enough to become a truly nice place that was more than just Hollywood, and the horrible people that habit it.  This was different.

            But the reality was that I was still running away.  I was still running from the idea of falling into tears every day after finishing writing.  Because writing is what she was good at.  And what she wrote was about life.   The life in the five boroughs, with its loud Greek restaurants, vintage stores, dive bars, and coffee shops.  That’s what she cared because that place saw her born, and saw her live.  And now? Now I just continue.  I don’t move on.  I just go forward.

Changing Tastes

(People are also into fancy ice creams now too!)            

I’m grabbing coffee in the Castro district in San Francisco when the waiter brings me an iPad so I can read the morning papers.  It seems that it is mostly standard issue today, when something suddenly grabs my attention, as I were a bull and I just got grabbed by the horns to hear all this gloom and doom that is somewhat, well, disappearing.  It’s an odd conclusion to hear on this day and age when everybody is cynical to the bone, or at least looks like.  The article written by one Adam Dominguez believes that this country is suddenly becoming “happier”, and less depressed with itself.  Dominguez cleverly mentions that not so long ago, science fiction had become all the rage in the west coast literary scene, and that it was those writers who wrote about that gloom and doom who suddenly are struggling to sell.  Just like week, the most read and talked about book in the country was not this, instead it was a book called of all things, Paradise, which was written by my very own ex-girlfriend Amy Sherman, and whose plot simply revolved around the quirky lives of quirky people living in a quirky town. Scary it was not.

                So how did this happen?  In my opinion, it probably was because the whole sci-fi phenomenon was a fad.  Quirky people living in quirky world can be a tiresome subject, but the difference now seems there are only so many depressing Blade Runner-like stories that people can stomach.  Also, books like Paradise can be brilliant escapism in a way that does not require an emotional toll from the reader,  and of course, there’s only so much genre fiction we can in an era of flying cars. And you know what? I can't complain about that.