Brain freeze: in praise of magazine articles

It was like climbing out of bed to discover that sometime during the night the sun had come out, melting just enough of the snow to reveal something you thought you had lost.

In this case, a magazine that featured articles.

Not factoids, text bites, or quick hits.

Actual, honest-to-God articles that sprawled across glossy page after page, the words unwinding like bird tracks across a field of fresh, downy flakes.

What delicious warmth in the long winter of my discontent. I sat back and started to read, and as I did so I felt my brain beginning to thaw, the sweating ice cracking and falling away in noisy chunks to reveal the succulent pink flesh of contemplation.

Good God. What was I doing? Text messages needed sending, e-mails answered, blogs posted and TV shows DVRed and videos edited and games played and songs downloaded and .. and. …

Screw it. I was reading. Wasting half an hour of my life on the thoughts of another. As the storm of technology howled unanswered, I basked in my snuggly oasis and allowed my mind to slip away from the present.

What an unaccustomed wonder this was and how sad I had ever set it aside – except I hadn’t set it aside, at least not in spirit. As my thoughts turned from reading to not reading I began to realize I had been stupid and lazy. I had seen this technological nor’easter approaching many years ago and did nothing to prepare. Now I was stuck.

Was it fear? I asked myself. Fear of being left behind by those immaculate creatures on park benches, their laptops humming with stock trades and pirate videos from the Beijing biterati? Would I never babble into a cell phone and bark orders to the car stereo, or sit in a restaurant wearing a Bluetooth-enabled earpiece and ignore my dinner mates to chat with Sophie in Bucharest? Would I become the source of pitying stares, like the “old people” I know who cannot customize a MySpace page or attach photos to their telephone contacts?

Would I become irrelevant?

Or was I merely seduced by all the talk and glitter – buy this device, go to this Web site, join the 21st century and multitask, or your life will no longer hold meaning?

My life is not meaningless but I think it odd and somewhat ominous that I clearly remember events from my unwired youth but, were it not for my blog, cannot recall much of what I did last year. I know that my days began around 6 and ended at midnight.

I know I was online.

I know I was not very happy.

When I was a kid I read – books that promised a future of flying cars, labor-saving gadgets and a race of poets and philosophers who would no longer discriminate or persecute or fight wars.

It hasn’t worked out that way.

The future has become a place where people no longer think because they have no time to think. They are busy doing more with less, grimly slogging through the demands technology has placed upon us, economic and cultural. The time people spent preparing dinner, meeting their neighbors and, yes, reading to their children, has been replaced by “customer care” live chats, inscrutable documentation, and the insipid prattle of wireless and online “dialogue.”

To paraphrase Garrison Keillor, technocracy has bestowed a profound ugliness on the land, and it would make you ugly too.

I am tired of hearing that people no longer read. I am tired of watching newspapers fail and turn to America’s inner 12-year-old for salvation. I am tired of buying a magazine that publishes nothing meatier than three paragraphs.

And mostly I am tired of hearing people ask: What has gone wrong?

Isn’t it obvious? We grapple with issues like crime, addiction, war, illiteracy, and turn to Big Brother for answers. Yet it is Little Sister, corporate America, that pimps and sells and tells us to click here for solutions.

Stupidly, and lazily, we click.

The written word is an art form. More importantly it is a discipline – to produce and consume. It requires cognitive shoveling, and that is the very thing that cannot be done when one is distracted by every little blinking, blaring, pulsating thing.

As we frantically scrabble for some hint of Warholian worth in this wired world, the distraction never stops flying.

We have turned on, tuned in and dropped out, but Timothy Leary must be tripping in his grave. Our grip on this world has become a fat wallowing in narcissism encouraged by the people who give us concealer and star status on YouTube.

Meanwhile, it’s a damn cold day outside. But I am warming myself by a fire, about to throw on another log, maybe a collection of essays or even a book.

As the freezing white pixels swirl around me.

About the author:

Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”

Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.

As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .