I don’t quite remember when my dystopian state of mind sneaked in as a way of thinking. It was like a filter someone infiltrated into my mind over time, of course, partially of my own doing, I admit, and that I now deal with like a permanent pair of attached light and mood goggles, shading the world off and on oddly and darkly.
It’s the result of a formula, no doubt, something akin to:
Early 21st century social political upheaval + the democratization of personal artisanship + generalized apathy + a zombie / monster / world failure pop culture fascination + Appalachian fatalism + a mind in constant fictional writing mode = interpreting the natural world alternately as dystopian / post-apocalyptic.
It’s a state of mind you really can’t turn off once you’ve arrived it. Everywhere you go, especially as a writer, invites the application of this aesthetic template.
I was writing zombie and societal collapse stories well before falling in love with The Walking Dead. Add this to a fetish-like attraction to urban and rural decay photography, and you can image where my aesthetic eye and mind gravitated to for years.
I grew up with easy access to the coal boom and bust culture, so a dying mountain town or an abandoned cabin or house was just around the corner wherever you wanted to look. When I was writing stories about a world, either naturally unraveling or tearing itself apart, I was looking to spaces around me for the raw materials, for characters and mood. In today’s times, of course, all I have to do is look to the headlines for evidence of political sado-masochism and perpetual chaos.
Eventually, it was habitual to apply the template of disaster and decay over the mundaneness of everyday life. I knew something strange had turned when one normal day I was driving down a busy highway and wondered how I’d manage maneuvering through the traffic if all the cars around me were suddenly driverless or found abandoned on the spot. I was evaluating the road shoulders and medians and ditches in my head, laying it all out as a scenario for story plot, a man on the run, surviving, dodging through dead cars and worse. Or was I?This was how I was spending my daydreams apparently.
Maybe I was just becoming a dystopian. A proper definition, if we need one at all, of A Dystopian might be someone that expects the world to fall apart into misery, but I’m not sure that’s quite me. Yet. Perhaps I’m more of a psychological dystopian futurist, seeing the world for what it might become and not quite as pessimistic as one might need to be to give up completely on the world.
I want to hold on to some shred of optimism. I know that in many of my imagined scenarios and out there in popular culture, there's a limited roll call of heroes and the world is usually on fire, literally and metaphorically. Everyone hurts. Most perish. After all, everyone can’t play the main characters that survive in a good story. It wouldn’t be a plague then, would it? Zombies must consume. Vampires must drink. Wars must destroy. The world eats itself up.
I do a lot of antiquing in search of oddities. Some of the coolest items I’ve found are out of thrift shops and Goodwills, buried among the knickknack discards of a million lives both living and dead. I can’t shop in these places without hearing these voices, without hearing their fading steps in the stores.
People die. These widows and widowers, their children, empty their closets and out from under their beds and bring those heavy boxes of lives as donations. Out of sight, out of mind, right? It’s all spread out like ashes, across shelves, and the floors, on tables: shoes, suits, dresses, furniture, records, books, jewelry, figurines, brass vases, baskets, workout equipment, and quilts. And it sits, densely, waiting on a showering of skin dust of thousands of passers-by, browsed and evaluated for a second or third life. Or to remain in this limbo of suspended decay, just short of forgotten.
Some of these places look like our homes and business will after it all ends (apply "ends" as you will). Leave your house unattended for a year and come back. See if it doesn’t look like the shelves of a thrift store, waiting on someone to happen in and breathe life back into each and every item. Or perhaps it looks like an abandoned home, emptied of goods, ruined by the plague, everything left as it was when life was nice and tidy.
Maybe that’s why I love about hanging out in these places. It comes easy for me. It doesn’t require that imagined layer of dystopia. It’s here already. Whatever’s coming is past and here’s the evidence. There’s a new story in every aisle and I seldom go home without a new voice in my head from the world of the fallen, someone refusing to give up where the world feels given up on. I think they suspect I’ve not completely given up them, though only a thread of civilization hangs on.
It’s the result of a formula, no doubt, something akin to:
Early 21st century social political upheaval + the democratization of personal artisanship + generalized apathy + a zombie / monster / world failure pop culture fascination + Appalachian fatalism + a mind in constant fictional writing mode = interpreting the natural world alternately as dystopian / post-apocalyptic.
It’s a state of mind you really can’t turn off once you’ve arrived it. Everywhere you go, especially as a writer, invites the application of this aesthetic template.
I was writing zombie and societal collapse stories well before falling in love with The Walking Dead. Add this to a fetish-like attraction to urban and rural decay photography, and you can image where my aesthetic eye and mind gravitated to for years.
I grew up with easy access to the coal boom and bust culture, so a dying mountain town or an abandoned cabin or house was just around the corner wherever you wanted to look. When I was writing stories about a world, either naturally unraveling or tearing itself apart, I was looking to spaces around me for the raw materials, for characters and mood. In today’s times, of course, all I have to do is look to the headlines for evidence of political sado-masochism and perpetual chaos.
Eventually, it was habitual to apply the template of disaster and decay over the mundaneness of everyday life. I knew something strange had turned when one normal day I was driving down a busy highway and wondered how I’d manage maneuvering through the traffic if all the cars around me were suddenly driverless or found abandoned on the spot. I was evaluating the road shoulders and medians and ditches in my head, laying it all out as a scenario for story plot, a man on the run, surviving, dodging through dead cars and worse. Or was I?This was how I was spending my daydreams apparently.
Maybe I was just becoming a dystopian. A proper definition, if we need one at all, of A Dystopian might be someone that expects the world to fall apart into misery, but I’m not sure that’s quite me. Yet. Perhaps I’m more of a psychological dystopian futurist, seeing the world for what it might become and not quite as pessimistic as one might need to be to give up completely on the world.
I want to hold on to some shred of optimism. I know that in many of my imagined scenarios and out there in popular culture, there's a limited roll call of heroes and the world is usually on fire, literally and metaphorically. Everyone hurts. Most perish. After all, everyone can’t play the main characters that survive in a good story. It wouldn’t be a plague then, would it? Zombies must consume. Vampires must drink. Wars must destroy. The world eats itself up.
I do a lot of antiquing in search of oddities. Some of the coolest items I’ve found are out of thrift shops and Goodwills, buried among the knickknack discards of a million lives both living and dead. I can’t shop in these places without hearing these voices, without hearing their fading steps in the stores.
People die. These widows and widowers, their children, empty their closets and out from under their beds and bring those heavy boxes of lives as donations. Out of sight, out of mind, right? It’s all spread out like ashes, across shelves, and the floors, on tables: shoes, suits, dresses, furniture, records, books, jewelry, figurines, brass vases, baskets, workout equipment, and quilts. And it sits, densely, waiting on a showering of skin dust of thousands of passers-by, browsed and evaluated for a second or third life. Or to remain in this limbo of suspended decay, just short of forgotten.
Some of these places look like our homes and business will after it all ends (apply "ends" as you will). Leave your house unattended for a year and come back. See if it doesn’t look like the shelves of a thrift store, waiting on someone to happen in and breathe life back into each and every item. Or perhaps it looks like an abandoned home, emptied of goods, ruined by the plague, everything left as it was when life was nice and tidy.
Maybe that’s why I love about hanging out in these places. It comes easy for me. It doesn’t require that imagined layer of dystopia. It’s here already. Whatever’s coming is past and here’s the evidence. There’s a new story in every aisle and I seldom go home without a new voice in my head from the world of the fallen, someone refusing to give up where the world feels given up on. I think they suspect I’ve not completely given up them, though only a thread of civilization hangs on.
