The need to get out
Thursday, 13 September 2007 07:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
carose59Sometimes That Happens To You--You Think About the Wrong Thing, So You Won't Have To Think About the Right Thing.*
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When it comes right down to it, when the entire world is falling apart and there is no reason left to go on living because it all hurts too much and there is no one left who cares, there is still one thing I can count on: my addiction to stories.
Not writing them. Reading them, or listening to them, or watching them on TV, or even going out of the house and paying to watch them in a movie theatre. Stories are the road out of my head, out of my life. It doesn't matter where they take me, as long as I don't bring back anything awful with me. (This is the reason I'm careful-ish about the scary stuff I subject myself to. Fear is fine, but I do not want to be grossed out to where the pictures or words in my head come back to keep me up night, or make me sick. It's happened before, and those images are still with me. I keep them back behind a lot of other things. I try to pretend they don't exist.)
Reading is a wonderful addiction. Not only do you get to get out of your own awful self, but you get points for it. People who disdain your addiction are the ones who are ridiculed by polite society, which is pretty cool.
Every time something falls apart, I find a story to escape into. The year Pat died, it was The Manchurian Candidate (followed closely by Panic Room, and Law and Order, which I watched compulsively). The stories themselves aren't comforting, but they're like big, fast boats that sailed quickly from the awfulness of real life to someplace compelling, someplace with other things to think about. Part of the key to denial is distraction; you have to keep looking away from what you're not looking at, you have to keep looking at other stuff, concentrating on it.
The summer Pat died, I listened to all the Spenser novels, in order. I also listened to all the Nero Wolfe books I could get on audio. I spent more time with Michael Prichard (who reads all the Nero Wolfe books, and a lot of the Spensers) than I did with everyone else I know put together. It was so incredibly comforting.
I still have the warmest memories of a book called The Stone Carnation. I was thirteen when I read it, and Michelle had stopped speaking to me again and I was bereft. And then I had this place to go, this escape that was mine alone; I was in a book. I was gone.
They called my grandmother Danny Dreamer (after a cartoon character) because she daydreamed so much. My mother's been telling me about all the stories that go on in her head, and my father used to talk about how, when he wasn't actually reading the book he was reading, he was thinking about the plot and the characters, and what might happen next. I've watched my uncle walk into a room, his eyes scanning for something to read, and the second he's sitting down, the book or newspaper or magazine is open and he's reading. Escape. Who wouldn't fly out the window, if they could?
Well, nobody in my family, that's for sure.
*Lauren Slater
-:- -:- -:- -:-
When it comes right down to it, when the entire world is falling apart and there is no reason left to go on living because it all hurts too much and there is no one left who cares, there is still one thing I can count on: my addiction to stories.
Not writing them. Reading them, or listening to them, or watching them on TV, or even going out of the house and paying to watch them in a movie theatre. Stories are the road out of my head, out of my life. It doesn't matter where they take me, as long as I don't bring back anything awful with me. (This is the reason I'm careful-ish about the scary stuff I subject myself to. Fear is fine, but I do not want to be grossed out to where the pictures or words in my head come back to keep me up night, or make me sick. It's happened before, and those images are still with me. I keep them back behind a lot of other things. I try to pretend they don't exist.)
Reading is a wonderful addiction. Not only do you get to get out of your own awful self, but you get points for it. People who disdain your addiction are the ones who are ridiculed by polite society, which is pretty cool.
Every time something falls apart, I find a story to escape into. The year Pat died, it was The Manchurian Candidate (followed closely by Panic Room, and Law and Order, which I watched compulsively). The stories themselves aren't comforting, but they're like big, fast boats that sailed quickly from the awfulness of real life to someplace compelling, someplace with other things to think about. Part of the key to denial is distraction; you have to keep looking away from what you're not looking at, you have to keep looking at other stuff, concentrating on it.
The summer Pat died, I listened to all the Spenser novels, in order. I also listened to all the Nero Wolfe books I could get on audio. I spent more time with Michael Prichard (who reads all the Nero Wolfe books, and a lot of the Spensers) than I did with everyone else I know put together. It was so incredibly comforting.
I still have the warmest memories of a book called The Stone Carnation. I was thirteen when I read it, and Michelle had stopped speaking to me again and I was bereft. And then I had this place to go, this escape that was mine alone; I was in a book. I was gone.
They called my grandmother Danny Dreamer (after a cartoon character) because she daydreamed so much. My mother's been telling me about all the stories that go on in her head, and my father used to talk about how, when he wasn't actually reading the book he was reading, he was thinking about the plot and the characters, and what might happen next. I've watched my uncle walk into a room, his eyes scanning for something to read, and the second he's sitting down, the book or newspaper or magazine is open and he's reading. Escape. Who wouldn't fly out the window, if they could?
Well, nobody in my family, that's for sure.
*Lauren Slater