250 Words on the Examined Life

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.” –Bertrand Russel.

It’s a truism of both fiction and life that everyone is the hero of their own story. Few villains consider themselves evil. In their minds, they’re doing the right thing for the right reason. They think they’re the good guys.

So do the good guys.

How can you tell which you are?

I try to weigh my actions and motives using three questions: Who does it hurt? Who does it help? What if the situation were reversed?

The last first: What if they were a woman instead of a man, poor instead of rich, white instead of minority, liberal instead of conservative? If the other team were doing the same thing as mine, would it be right and fair? It’s a good hypocrisy test. 

For example, If you don’t object when your party’s politicians betray their oaths, take bribes and commit felonies, but would raise hell if another party’s politicians did, you might be a hypocrite. Reverse the names, see if you feel the same. 

Who do I want to hurt? I’m like Captain America that way: I don’t want to hurt anyone, but I don’t like bullies. When I see bullies targeting the weak and vulnerable, that’s who I try to help.

I think those are good guides. I use them to check myself all the time, and have actually changed my own mind on occasion. I recommend them.

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SerioComics Interview

NEW INTERVIEW! 

Graphic novelist, writer and publisher Dave Cowen has done a nice review of A Fire Story and a good interview with me for his SerioComics Substack thingy (also posted to LinkedIn and Instagram, but I don't do those). The mission of SerioComics is to "make serious comics fun and take fun comics seriously." 

Dave has done 70 weekly reviews of nonfiction graphic novels and managed to land interviews with many of their creators, including some pretty big names, so I was honored to be asked. We focused on A Fire Story but also touched on Mom's Cancer, Expressionism, trauma, and advice for storytellers. 

Thanks to Dave for the thoughtful questions!

View-Master Synchronicity

The View-Master with three of its reels. The red stamp reads "Defective: Not For Sale," which may be how they wound up at a state hospital.

Synchronicity. My sisters have been doing some very deep cleaning, including going through things of Mom's that haven't really been looked at since she died in 2005. My sister Brenda, who some of you know as Nurse Sis, brought a box to me today that included a very early View-Master with a dozen or so reels.

Wonderful! I love 3D toys. But how old was it? Whose was it? What was its story?

We found a clue on the back of one reel, a stamp reading "S.D. State Sanatorium." In 1944, when Mom was 4 and 5, she and her brother, Cal, contracted tuberculosis and were quarantined to a sanatorium near Custer, South Dakota. They were the only children in the facility. The stamp told me that the View-Master was one of my Mom's very few permitted pleasures during the year they were confined to the hospital. 

The tell-tale clue: a stamp on a single reel.

Mom as a girl at the sanatorium. I have just a couple of photos like this and looked for the View-Master in them. Didn't find it.

Looking through the reels, they're typical travelogues and fairy tales: the Grand Canyon, Mt. Rainier, Niagara Falls, Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White (non-Disney). And then there was one that made me gasp: the New York World's Fair of 1939.

The New York World's Fair!

Long-time readers will recall that the first chapter of my graphic novel Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? took place at that fair. Some of the sights Mom saw through her View-Master in 1944 were nearly duplicated by me 65 years later when I drew them for my book (which she did not live to read). She and I were unknowingly enchanted by the same event two lifetimes apart. 

The Avenue of Flags. On the left, I did my best to photograph the tiny View-Master slide using a light box; on the right is how I drew the same scene for my book. Note the triangular Trylon and spherical Perisphere in the background of both images.

The Circle of Life sometimes unwinds in mysterious, delightful, and slightly chill-inducing ways.

(BTW, if I ever tackle another big work of graphic medicine, it will be about Mom's time as a child in that sanatorium. It's a good story.)

250 Words on Falling in Love with Reading

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

I saw a Facebook post asking people about the first book that made them fall in love with reading. I liked the question but didn’t have a good answer.

I don’t remember a time I couldn’t read. Family lore says I read the names of gas stations at age 2. Mom, thinking I’d simply associated the brightly colored signs with words I’d heard on TV commercials, printed out “Conoco,” “Sinclair” and “Standard” on a piece of paper, which I read back to her. Freaked her out a bit. 

Comics were very important in my development as a reader. The combination of words and images drew me in, and continues to. It’s a powerful medium. But I don’t think that answers the spirit of the question.

Children’s books influenced me. I’ve written before* about You Will Go to the Moon by Mae and Ira Freeman, which I love despite the cruel lie in the title. But I don’t think that answers the spirit of the question, either.

The first book I can recall drawing me into another world and which I couldn’t put down until I found out what happened next was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. No idea how old I was, maybe 7 or 8, but those characters and scenes branded themselves on my brain and have stayed with me since. 

Good books feels like telepathy between authors and readers. I’ve been honored to have a few readers tell me my books have done that for them.

* On my blog: https://brianfies.blogspot.com/2009/07/you-will-go-to-moon.html?m=0

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250 Words on Heaven

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

Putting my cards on the table, I don’t believe in Heaven. I’m pretty sure that “you” are the thoughts and memories contained in your brain and when your brain is gone, so are you. There’s beauty in that. 

Still . . .

There’s a “Twilight Zone” episode starring Sebastian Cabot as an angel named Pip, who welcomes a crook named Rocky into Heaven. 

Rocky can’t believe his luck! He gets to live in a penthouse suite, drive fancy cars, romance beautiful women, and win every bet he places in the casino. A month later, Rocky is bored out of his skull and going mad, and begs Pip to send him to Hell.

The twist you saw coming is that Rocky was already in Hell. More recently, the TV series “The Good Place” took a similar idea and ran with it.

My deepest theological insight is that an afterlife where souls get everything they want could be both Heaven AND Hell. They could be the exact same place. An evil soul would be tortured by it, while a good soul would find contentment and bliss. All the books you could read, all the entertainment you could enjoy, all the fascinating people you could talk to, all the urban excitement or wilderness solitude you could desire.

The beauty of my Heaven/Hell is that it would give evil souls a chance to redeem themselves. All you’d need to do to transform Hell into Heaven is decide to want different things.

Maybe like life?

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PLEASE SUBSCRIBE! I am sharing these little "250 Words On" essays via Substack, which will email a new one to your In Box every Tuesday morning. Just follow this link and enter your email address. It's free, and I promise to never use your address for evil purposes.