Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2001-12-13 - 3:42 p.m.

Undue Influence

It's weird, the way things seem to influence me these days.

I've been re-reading an old Stephen King novel. I like King, and I often re-read my favorites. This wasn't a favorite; in fact, the reason I picked it was because I'd only read it once, so it was almost like reading something new, in the way that buying a shirt at Goodwill is getting a new shirt, and if you don't get THAT you probably don't re-read your books, either.

But anyway, the reason I had only read it once is because it's rather a depressing tome. Not much in the way of good-and-evil here - it's mostly just evil. Even the "good guys" are there so we can watch them decay into their baser natures. Everything eventually goes to hell, and the book is the tedious journey there.

And I realized my LIFE was starting to feel like a tedious descent into hell, and fragments of this book were appearing in my dreams, and bits of this corrosive attitude were leaking out onto my non-reading hours. Weird.

I used to read and watch and listen to anything I liked, and I did fine with it. I had a resilient filter. Maybe it's clogged over the years. It seems that just as I can no longer eat hot links with impunity, I can no longer be completely cavalier about what I feed my brain. Bleak books, demotivating movies, melancholy music - it's more of a garbage in, garbage out system now.

So I put down that novel unfinished, and went and re-read some of Anne Lamott's essays for Salon, and that helped a lot. (Bless you, Ms. Lamott, for your eternal glimmer of hope.)

I don't like the thought of having to limit my mental diet. I like the thought of reading, watching, and listening to everything voraciously, and trusting my own processes to deal with the information. I don't support any forms of censorship.

But I also don't like the thought of channeling a Stephen King novel.

Maybe it's another one of those hormonal shifts. I remember during my first pregnancy, I could not watch those Sally Struthers photo essays of starving Ethiopian children. I mean, I don't LIKE watching them now, but I don't suddenly spout torrents of tears and start howling "Turn it OFF, oh God, turn it OFF!" (Ms. Struthers' charity, by the way, is entirely financed by huge checks from hysterical pregnant women.)

It speaks of a certain amount of fragility, and I don't think of myself as fragile. (Unstable, maybe, but never fragile.) I much prefer to think of myself as the type who can swerve around that dead possum on the road and then take another chomp of my corned-beef sandwich. I HAVE to think this way, because I live in a semi-rural area, and anyway life often seems to hand me a plethora of pulverized possums. I don't admire squeamish.

But it seems I'm becoming impressionable, in my middle age. You know, that thing we're so afraid our children are, and THEY'RE not; perhaps Tipper should have been worrying about ME instead. Maybe there needs to be a whole different set of warning labels: "Moderately depressing", "Contains graphically hopeless scenes", "Irredeemably tragic". I think it would be very helpful. I just won't pick up anything rated NC-43.

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