Disenchantment, A Riff on Fantasy

Disenchantment is a new comedy animated show written by Matt Groening (Futurama, The Simpsons) and Josh Weinstein (The Simpsons). The show is about a princess who's friends with an elf who loves her and a demon who's possessed her for life. Its a fantasy inspired show with Futurama artwork. Not only do we get the characteristic Futurama style artwork, we also get the humor, albeit much dryer in the first couple episodes. 

Characters
Bean is an alcoholic bad girl princess to a terrible King who beheads and kills his subjects all the time. She's no saint herself, accidentally sending people to their deaths and such. She is a bad egg, a misfit, which might be because her mother was turned to stone when she was a kid and she's longed for her ever since. Likewise, her father is hell bent on getting the Elixir of Life, in order to restore his ex-wife, even though he remarried and even has a son with the new wife, an heir to the throne. 

Elfo is an elf who's completely ignorant of most things. He left his elf kingdom and almost died before he met Bean. Bean's father, King Krog keeps him alive because he believes he needs elf's blood in order make the Elixir of Life. 

Lucy
Lucy is a demon that possessed Bean when she opened up this bottle in the castle. He's the devil's advocate in every way, causing Bean to make horrible mistakes, ruining her relationships even more. Everyone thinks he's a talking cat. Despite being a terrible person, he's one of the more likable characters, joke-wise. 

The early episodes are slow and have almost rocky starts. This isn't a show that immediately envelops you in laughs. Rather, it makes you work for it, like a art-style science fiction novel, I'm thinking of Neal Stephenson, that kind of thing. Where you might enjoy the writing style, but its so dense that it takes you a long time before you get to the meat and potatoes of the story or what the writer intends to say. Same thing with Disenchantment. 

Slow early episodes
Things don't really start to become interesting until episode four, with each episode being 30 minutes that means you have to sit through almost two hours before things get rolling into a comfortable drama with jokes. In a way I've come to expect this, especially as a modern literary device, where writers can spend forever building up one idea, only for it to come to fruition and finish in two seconds. 

There are certain episodes where Bean does just this. She's put into a confrontational situation and she panics and we are wondering what she will do. Instead of something interesting or grandiose, she instead comes to a conclusion in two seconds, the plot is finished, episode done, fin. 

Now, I can certainly be critical here and say this is a result of lazy writing. It could be for all we know, we weren't there when they wrote it in their work room. However, it might not be lazy writing, perhaps they saw the easy way out and just went with the easiest solutions. Either way, I don't see it as entirely bad. Its just a cartoon after all. 

One of my favorite episodes was this one where Bean gets exorcised by a creepy guy who imprisons Lucy, and plans to throw him in a volcano at the top of a mountain, think Mordor. Turns out he had tons of Lucy's demon race people and he was throwing them all to their deaths! Bean almost falls into the volcano in order to save Lucy from death. Quite the surprise because we are given an understanding that none of these characters care about anything. When the old creepy priest is throwing demons to the fire, a female demon shouts out,"I possessed your aunt and she loved every second of it!"

End of season thoughts
The show takes a surprising twist near the end of the series when they get the actual Elixir of Life, and Bean uses it on her mother's stone corpse, which reanimates her to life. What will begin in season 2 will be a much different altogether piece of work, where Bean isn't at the beck and whim of her father, where she will be able to drink with her mother, and who knows, go on a quest and become a real warrior? They've been nudging Bean unto the warrior path a little bit. Which brings me to my next point. 

Is this real Fantasy? 
Have any of the writers of this show every read any real fantasy novels? Perhaps they have, and perhaps they haven't. I certainly haven't read any comedy fantasy novels, although I'm certain they exist. This isn't your high fantasy like Ursula K LeGuin or even low pop fantasy like Game of Thrones. In a way its just a fantasy skin, other than the fact that the time period is like the Middle Ages, albeit with swords and sorcery, this isn't like CS Lewis or Tolkien come to cartoon. Its video-gamish at times. There's a scene where the gang is flying atop a griffin, which is stereotypical of World of Warcraft fast traveling.

Critics of the show say it isn't fantasy enough, it doesn't satisfy fantasy fans. I say its okay, but that it needs to supercharge it fantasy credentials into high gear for season 2, otherwise I would say its pandering to the nerdy, intellectual, female, fantasy crowd. 

Female Lead
I've talked to friends about the show and some of them can't get into the female protagonist perspective. He said,"I don't find her funny." I think that's sexist, but perhaps this is a trend. By making progressive shows about female lead characters, TV shows are having an influence on gender politics and such. I think its great. In fact, I can relate to Bean in many ways, not because she's a girl but because of her alienation, which could be a symptom of being a woman in this universe. If the female protagonist is going to become a trend, I think its a good one because women aren't main characters much on TV (I mean this loosely, as the show is a Netflix exclusive). Its a nice touch. 

The verdict 
Although this show isn't as great as Futurama or The Simpsons I'm sold. I found it so good that I finished season 1 in three days, which is pretty fast for me because I don't watch TV shows too much. I see the entire first season as a slow buildup for more hip and happening fantasy-driven plot in season 2. I think that will be what brings in even more fans, and we'll see if the writers can 1) write better 2) write real fantasy 3) do more interesting things with the characters. I think if they do these things the show will not only become more popular, but develop into a cult classic, a new part of the geek culture, although in some ways it already is. Check out the show now, its on Netflix. 

Science Fiction, An Important Genre

Science Fiction (and Fantasy) is a hellova genre. Its what got me into reading a lot, turning me into a hardcore book worm. I used to read a lot of the classics around 2011, back when I was a college student. I was into things like Shakespeare, Moby Dick, Walden, and The Sound and Fury. Once I dropped out of college I stopped reading altogether for a while. Then around 2013, I started reading again, mostly inspired by science fiction.

I've read a lot of science fiction novels and short stories since then. Phillip K. Dick, Ursula K. LeGuin, William Gibson, Issac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Alfred Bester, Octavia Butler, Douglas Adams, Neal Stephenson, you name it. I began to build a love for ideas through these writers, at first enamored with the video game-ish ideas that can come from science fiction but eventually coming to an understanding that ideas from science fiction can help me to form ideas about real life. From Dune I learned about sociology and ecology. From Ursula K LeGuin I learned about anthropology. From Robert Heinlein I learned how conservative values can impact ones' writing. From Alfred Bester I learned that writing doesn't have to be fanciful to make an huge impact. These things are important.

Science Fiction is one of the most important genres today. Sci-Fi movies and novels help shape people's ideas and development of ideas when it comes to AI, automatons in the work place, consciousness, etc. This is an important ethical dilemma. Which is where science fiction has led me.

One day I was bored and typed in on google "oldest science fiction novels". It brought me to a Wikipedia page that listed Sir Tomas More's Utopia, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, Margaret Cavendash's Blazing World, and Kepler's Somnium.

I read Utopia and New Atlantis and didn't look back (although I want to read both of them again). At first the archaic writing style of the 1500s was super difficult to understand. However, I kept reading and reading until it eventually made "more" sense, which took quite a while and a lot of google dictionary searching. The ideas of Utopia and New Atlantis were very utopian, socialistic, and communistic. From there I read The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels, which I found on a pdf through google.

That's not even the end of this quest (thumbs up fantasy nerds). After I read up on some socialist/communist ideas I went even farther back to Thomas Hobbes' political economy-Leviathan, which I'm almost done with. From there I read Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, a collection of essays in which he aims to prove the existence of God, quite an undertaking! For a while I became influenced by his writing, and even started to live a more holy life as a result. Holy as in being a nicer person, not fucking up at work, occasional prayer, diet and exercise. However, I am by no means religious. But the writers from the 1500s and 1600s who inspire me were mostly highly educated men from the Catholic schools.

Once my dad saw I was reading all of this without a context he recommended a great primer for me, which was Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy. This book has everything, as in every great idea of man and their originators from early man all the way to Marx and Engels. Russell is not only a philosopher who understands ideas but he's also an engaging writer that knows how to write in a highly educational way without being too technical, meaning anyone can understand if they put in the time and the effort. He's a mathematical person, this is very rare to find in people who are overly mathematical. The Russell book gave me a context for all the philosophy I was reading and will continue to read. If you read this book you will know more about ideas than most of the people you will run across in the general public. It was a great feeling once I finished it, its an 840 page book.

I also read classicist Madeline Miller's two novels Circe and The Song of Achilles, two books based on Greek mythology. From there I learned that I don't have to read fiction/nonfiction standard prose. I started reading the actual Iliad and from there started reading epic poetry of the Western canon. Now I'm reading Milton's Paradise Lost and Dante's Inferno. Although Miller's work isn't science fiction, not quite fantasy, it might as well be because its so highly unusual. Poetry is something I want to explore more of now.

Now we've completed the quest and earned some experience points. The point here is that science fiction has led me to the important things in Western literature. Its one of the most worthy genres out there despite what some people might say. A reader I was conversing with told me, "Science fiction gets a lot of shit but its done much for literature." I couldn't agree more.

My Name is Albert Ayler

My Name is Albert Ayler is a fantastic record, sounds of the new thing (I first heard that term from Amiri Baraka's book Black Music), as it appeared early in 1963. This is saxophonist Ayler's debut record, recorded in Copenhagen and first released on the Dutch Debut label. 

Personnel

• Albert Ayler - tenor saxophone (tracks 3-6), soprano saxophone (track 2), voice (track 1)
• Niels Brosted - piano (tracks 2-5)
• Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen - bass (tracks 2-6)
• Ronnie Gardiner - drums (tracks 2-6

The album has only three stars on Allmusic but what does Allmusic know? The fact of the matter is that although the band of Europeans (the two Niels) and the one American (Ronnie) is quite the typical straight ahead band, what Ayler does over the usual jazz construct, is create his own sound, playing himself, and creating a wondrous lyrical blues, a shout, a cry, a whisper if you will. This seems to be a response to Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, similar to Archie Shepp and Pharaoh Sanders, other great sax players of that revolutionary musical era. Its great that he went to Europe to play free jazz because his fame wouldn't have gone as far if he stayed in America.

What makes the record especially engaging for me is that well, I love jazz standards. I've heard most of the standards way more than a few times so when he plays all these tunes there's a certain legendary aura to them. I know all the melodies, all the chord changes, and when he plays what is unexpected I get quite a kick out of it, he's playing the standards we all (jazz fans) know but ultimately doing something different with them. That's the genius of this record. 

The Tunes
Bye Bye Blackbird
Billie's Bounce
Summertime 
On Green Dolphin Street 
C.T. (Ayler composition) 

On quite a few of these tunes a typical jazz fan who knows all these standards might say, "Well, this is a good band but the saxophonist isn't really playing the melody." In fact, what Ayler does on a lot of these tunes is use the basic harmonic framework (chords) for the tunes for improvisation of his own melodies, playing himself. His harmonies speak for themselves, sometimes shrill, a cry, this is what Baraka means when he says that free jazz is only spectacular when it stays close to its blues roots and doesn't get all intellectual. Of course I disagree because a lot of my free jazz heroes (The Art Ensemble of Chicago and other AACM musicians) are quite intellectual, even to the point of studying modern classical composers, serialism, etc. 

In a way you can only see the genius of this record is you're a free jazz acolyte. My favorite tune here is Billie's Bounce, a Charlie Parker tour de force. Even I know the head (main theme) to this tune on guitar. Here Ayler gets more straight ahead, and you can see the John Coltrane influence in his sheets of sound, long winded riffs played very fast. Its quite stunning.

As much as I like Bille's Bounce here the number one tune here would have to be Summertime, the Gershwin classic. The opening is such a blues, a wail.  I can assure you you've never heard Summertime like this before. Its a haunting, shrill cry of a saxophone sound. It sticks with you once you hear it. This is the blues. 

Another tune I dug very much was On Green Dolphin Street. I've heard this tune a million times and it always delivers with its driving melody. Here Ayler goes to Mars, almost like Coltrane's latest period stuff, he mixes 50s, early 60s style bebop phrasing with the new thing. Its my cup of tea. This particular tracks reminds me of Eric Dolphy a lot. Some of Ayler's phrasing doesn't even sound human, it sounds like an animal, like a bird, with the rhythms of frogs jumping in and out of pond.  

The Ayler original is pure free jazz at its best. No melody, no theme, mostly just call and response from the musicians. Given that this was his first original tune on a record, I would say its quite a great introduction to his music. This is where some people would scratch their heads and say,"What?"  In a way you either get it or you don't. For most jazz fans there is a fine line between straight ahead jazz and free jazz. In 1963 that line was very much quite apparent.

The rhythm section on the record is quite good. They play in a typical 1963 jazz fashion. It wasn't until later when Ayler teamed up with American musicians like Sonny Murray, Milford Graves, and Gary Peacock, that he started to develop more of the free jazz thing with a rhythm section that was more hip to his personal sound. But what can I say? These Europeans did a great job playing with an innovator. The drummer keeps time throughout the album. 

I recommend this album to anyone interested in the so-called new thing or free jazz. Or if you like Albert Ayler and never heard this particular record. Its on YouTube, and its quite good.

Thoughts on Literature

Hello, what's up? I've been reading a lot lately and finished quite a few as well. Here I'd like to jot down some thoughts, impressions of the readings.




Bertrand Russell A History of Western Philosophy
This is an excellent primer and I recommend it to well, anybody interested in philosophy really. Russell starts with the early civilization, pagans, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, thru the Christian period, to Renaissance, and 1600s through late 1800s.

What makes this book so great is in fact learning about the great ideas as they've developed through the ages, but its also Russell's writing style. His voice isn't your typical textbook philosophy book. He seems to speak to the reader in a much more personal way, making the 840 page book a lot smoother than it otherwise could've been.

I was interested in reading this because I read Sir Toms More's Utopia and Francis Bacon's New Atlantis. These books came up when I typed in "oldest science fiction novel" on google. From there I read Descartes' Objections and Replies, and I'm reading through Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan as well. Not light reading, but at the same time I read it because I find it fun and interesting.

This book helped put a context for a lot of the things I read. I can understand where the writers are coming from what I learned here. Its a great beginning to philosophy. Of course I still have a lot to learn, and in fact I would like to never stop learning, for it is a fun as well as enlightening endeavor.

The Iliad
I just started reading this epic beginning story of Western Literature. I'm in Book 2 in the translation I'm reading. I find the lines to be quite beautiful, describing every detail in excruciating detail. One of the things I love about the Iliad is that there are some lines that end with exclamation points. With these you always get a sense for the voice of the story, of the characters, plot, and subplot. Madeline Miller's two novel prepared me for these epic poetic legends. I plan on finishing it soon.

Black Music by Amiri Baraka
This book is a collection of essays by Amiri Baraka (Formerly Leroy Jones), a black poet, musician, and writer from beat era. I know a guy that said he used to hang out Baraka when he came to LA. The book is quite fascinating, we see a jazz critical perspective from a black artist himself. What I find great is that Baraka seems to understand the so called new thing, or free jazz when it first appeared. He spoke highly of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy, late period Coltrane, and Don Cherry. He knows whats up musically, artistically. Baraka's writing style is interesting, descriptive, and sometimes captivating when you realize he knows what he's talking about. Worth a read if you love jazz.

Also on my reading list is Dune, Tales From Earthsea, Seduction and Betrayal, Paradise Lost, and Dante's Inferno. A wide range of stuff, some fun, light, serious, classical, and captivating.

As I think back about all the great stuff I've read since spring to pre-fall, all the things I've learned, about words, reading, and writing,  I feel a great sense of wonderment. Reading has really enriched my life, and time seems to be very pleasant when I spend it in this manner. Finding the time to read is difficult for most people, that's why I'm grateful that I can even do all this, lol. Its a good obsession. 

The Song of Achilles

The Song of Achilles is Madeline Miller's debut novel, released in 2011. It took her ten years to write. The novel is a modern retelling of the Iliad that focuses on Achilles' friendship with his friend Patroclus. Miller was inspired by Homer's story from the Iliad. She wanted to explore who Patroclus was to Achilles, and in this case Patroclus is Achilles' best friend and lover. This idea is quite old as Miller says she stole the idea from Plato. The actual Iliad doesn't explicitly say they are lovers, but its sort of implied. The book won the 17th annual Orange Prize for Fiction. Homer would be proud of  her! 

Before I go in depth here I want to say that this is an amazing novel. After finishing the novel I was riding a high for nearly two days straight. Its only 360 pages but it feels like it was a 1,000 pages, 1,000 grand pages of beautiful prose. It was like falling in love in a way, like how I am with music. I was so into it that I finished it in nearly 4 days, forget the two week library rental. That being said, lets talk about what makes this book great. 

The prose. The fact that Miller worked on the novel for five years, but completely scrapped everything because the narrator's voice wasn't developed well enough shows you the depth of her writing powers. The writing style here is very much a la Homer, like the Iliad. Its a modernized version so its all complete sentences and full thoughts, a little less poetic because of these fully thought out sentences, but it still has a poetic beauty, albeit a modernized one. Like her second novel Circe, The Song of Achilles has a young adult novel feel to it, in the sense that the story is about two boys who grow up together and fall in love. Miller really knows how to describe young people in love, I learned this from Circe as well as this book. If there's one thing I learned from Miller its that one can never underestimate young love, its one of the greatest and most powerful things in the universe. 

The story is told from the first person point of view, from Patroclus' point of view, Achilles' lover and best friend. Patroclus is somewhat of a loser, he was exiled from his Princely happenstance after he killed a boy by accident. He becomes a somebody when Achilles wants him to be forever by his side. In addition, Patroclus becomes a hero in the Trojan War when he kills Serpedon, a son of Zeus, a god. This makes Patroclus a hero in the Trojan War. 

Next, lets talk about the story. So the story is sort of slow until the end, then it builds to a climax and ends on a high note, its fantastic. It begins with Achilles and Patroclus meeting in their youth, they begin a friendship, and then eventually a romantic, sexual relationship. The boys meet each other as young as 10 or 12. They get trained in the art of war as well as other things men should learn by a centaur, that Achilles' mother, a goddess named Thetis, is an associate of. 

From there Achilles gets asked to fight in the Trojan War, to save Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, "the face that launched a thousand ships." This is where the novel really takes off as something else, not just a loving relationship. Its interesting to note that the war parts of the novel are very graphic and gory. However, the sex scenes here are all polka dots and moonbeams, like softcore porn. Miller is willing to describe men's guts hanging out of their stomachs but won't go near the physicality of gay sex, interesting choice, can't say I blame her. But we as an audience know better than that. 

Inspiration. This book is inspiring to read. There's something about it that sticks with you for a long time. Its only been two days since I finished reading it and not only do I have a great sense of accomplishment from reading it but I also realize that this is something I will remember for a long time because a) its terrific writing b) its a great story and c) its inspirational. 

By inspirational I mean that the novel got me reading the actual Iliad, of which I have two different translations. This book prepared me for the epic poetry of the Iliad, which was indispensable. I have read epic poetry before. I've read the Bible in its entirely about ten years ago. I've read Shakespeare. Now I'm finding myself reading more of that kind of material. The interesting thing to note is that I bought two different copies of the Iliad, a hardcover and a paperback, but I never read any of them until now. Now is the time. This is what I call a great inspiration. 

If a writer can get you to go back and read what is arguably the beginning of Western Literature you know that's a great writer. This is a novel fit for young adults, adults, anyone curious and sophisticated enough to appreciate fine literature.

Artemis

Artemis is the 2017 follow-up to The Martian, written by Andy Weir. Here Weir attempts to replicate the success of The Martian in a sophomore effort. Weir is already a writing superstar as The Martian sold 5 million copies fast even before the movie came out in 2015. Weir has a background in computer science, even working the infamous Warcraft II game with Blizzard back in the day, pretty rad. Because of his computer skills its easy to see where Weir gets his technical and scientific expertise, which is where the genius in this novel lies. 

Artemis follows the life and struggle of smuggler, porter Jasmine Bashar, Jazz for short. She's a twenty-something Saudi Arabian woman, who if not for the fact that she reads Saudi blogs, could happen to be any race. She lives in the space the size of a closet, shares communal baths, and eats algae with no extra flavors. She's po. Her dream is to become a tourist guide and make big bucks so she can live a great life. Oh, and all of this takes place on a colony on the moon called Artemis. Jazz gets involved with some criminals on the colony when she's offered a million slugs to sabotage some resource harvesters.

The book is told from the first person, from Jazz's perspective. This is interesting because the last novel I read (Circe, check out the review here) was also told from the first person. Seems like there might be a trend for novels in the first person that I wasn't aware of, the more you know. Jazz is an sweary, original, protagonist and narrator but the other characters are sort of generic. Good guys that help Jazz. Bad guys that want to hurt Jazz. The brainy tech ally. The millionaire ally. The muscle. Etc, etc.

When it comes to dialogue the book is simplistic. I'm not sure if Weir really knows what twenty-year old women really think, how they think, let alone what they think of sex and their bodies. Although these aspects are disappointing there is one saving grace-science and detailed explanations of action scenes. 

Artemis shines in explaining things. Particularly geeky things that I will never, ever hear about again. In that sense the book is a great once-in-a-lifetime affair. Things like how to get into a vacuum-sealed double hull from the outside get thoroughly explained. 

The science gets hammered in more and more towards the end with "little lectures on why the spaces between the inner and outer hull of Artemis’s domes are pressurised at 20.4 kPa, 10% less than the pressure inside the dome itself, or laboriously listing all the MacGuffin’s technical specifications (“I checked the core’s index of refraction: it’s 1.458, a little higher than fibre optics usually are, but only by a tiny bit … a typical attenuation for a high-end cable is around 0.4 decibels per kilometre … the precision of my OLTS is 0.001 decibels per kilometre." (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/15/artemis-andy-weir-review-the-martian)

Some people might not like all this laborious scientific explanation but for me that is the charm of the novel. The dialogue and characters needed more work but these scientific freakouts are what made the writing interesting. A great comment I saw written about the book in a review is that its like a juvenile Heinlein sort of thing. If Heinlein is mentioned in a review about your book, then you know you've done something right.

However, the science doesn't make everything else good. After finishing the novel (I listened to it in audiobook form, narrated by Rosario Dawson) I had a great feeling of satisfaction, from listening to eight discs' worth of narration and finishing a new science fiction novel. However, the plot to Artemis isn't something I'm going to think about two months, two years, or two dozen years from now. Its okay, and that's fine. 

Why there's no excuse for stupidy in 2018

I've gone through a vast reeducation, learning about everything from jazz music history, to philosophy, to ethics, politics, journalism, propaganda, and government. My friends aren't interested in any of that stuff and they don't want to hear about it. I have a friend who is even against reading in and of itself. The rise of anti-intellectualism has been timed perfectly with the rise of Trump. With anti-intellectualism comes racism, and prejudice, like the neo-Nazi rally last year in Charlottesville where one person died to to a neo-Nazi driving a car into the crowd. However, in today's modern technological golden age, there's no excuse to be stupid, uninformed, or uneducated. You don't have to go to college to be an intellectual. But it sure helps to go to school and come from a rich, educated family.

First of all, because the internet is pretty cheap (or free if you go to the library or a coffee shop), that means that everybody has constant access to free information. This free information is indispensable right now. I wouldn't be able to order the books I want to read without being able to look titles up through the library's servers. I wouldn't know whats going on in government if it weren't for the news websites. Its a given that you can learn a lot because of the free information on the net. Use it or lose it. Don't use it just for Instagram and Twitter. The modern thinker uses the internet to strengthen his wits and to engage discourse in ideas, art, and culture. Most of the music I listen to is on YouTube for free. That is how I know so much about music, by listening to it online for free.

Next, the archaic media known as books. Reading wasn't something I was attracted to for nearly twenty years. I did two years at the University of Wisconsin system and the entire time I was there I dreaded reading and preferred to play guitar in the guitar club and hang out with my buddies in the computer science club. It wasn't until the ripe age of twenty that I began my reading career. Technically I'm behind my peers, some of whom already have Bachelors, Masters, and even PhD's. When my dad was my age he had already read most of the best that science fiction had to offer whereas I'm still somewhere in the beginning of it.

Reading isn't something you can force yourself to do. You have to learn to enjoy it, to enjoy the process of prose, and gain intellectual understanding of the text, as well as empathy within the narrative. Its a powerful force. Literature may be more important to mankind than music, and I love music dearly! To finish on this subject there's no excuse to be stupid because books are free and you can learn about nearly anything and everything, provided you have a library card and dedicate the time to improving your mind. You might find that you have a greater appreciation from the world after you've read a lot. I've found that my thinking has become more linear, concise, and forward. It also helped me to become a better writer, something I strive for, especially because I have aspirations of becoming a writer.

Lastly, your peers, friends, co-workers, bosses, and even customers at your work affect you in some ways. Sometimes they can change you for the better, to become smarter by giving you advice, sometimes even when you didn't think you would need it. This guitar player customer taught me a lot about jazz guitar comping when he told me I should play the chords with the pick and fingers rather than just using the pick all the time. Such a simple thing but I never figured that out on my own in my ten years of playing the guitar. Its not rocket science but its helped me a lot.

The more people you know the more advice you'll get. Most of this you can take it or leave it. However, I find that when I look into things that people tell me to do or look up I find myself enriched by that said thing, even if its something small like,"you should write everyday", "look up this political writer", "listen to this classical composer", etc, etc. The list is endless. At the end of the day something your peers or customers tell you isn't going to change your world but it may help you somehow.

These are the reasons why there's no excuse to be stupid in 2018. Maybe instead of lurking on Facebook or Instagram or playing video games you should finally crack open that novel that you bought but haven't started yet. Your mind will thank you later.