not 19

My mom told me I wasn't old enough to read Stephen King.  This is how a life long fan is made.

It was the Eye of the Dragon, that I read first.  Some obscure novel with a scaled cover that only the ardent Kingites would know.  I just picked it up off my mother's bookshelf because I liked the texture of the cover and the gleam in the dragons eye.  Don't even remember much about the book but I loved the feel of the cover.

You need to understand something about me and my mother.  In the time which we lived together (not terribly long because once she got remarried to my step-father I pointed my nose west and ran towards a dotting father that I only really knew through spoil-ridden summer vacations.) I was her baby.  The youngest, and a boy.  From what I've seen of the world (limited) mothers get along with son's better, while fathers find their daughters irresistible.  Now I'm not saying that there is anything sexual in this.  I mean it's not like the whole meaning of the universe is wrapped up in gametes making zygotes...is it?  Whether it is or isn't is a question left to those hapless BS'er's also known as Theologians and Philosophers.  For the rest of us let's not splice this bit of pie so thin that we lose all the flavor.  Boys like girls and girls like boys, its just a healthy way to keep the race running.

What I'm getting at is this, my mother dotted on her son.  So when she brought the hammer down, even if the hammer was one of those great big blow up hammers you occasionally see at Ringling Brothers, it knocked me for a loop.  And she brought the hammer down on Stephen King.  I was absolutely, positively, under no circumstances what-so-ever allowed to read that sick and twisted pop-fiction pulpist. She promptly moved all her Stephen King novels (quite a few) up to the top shelf of her bookcase.  Much too high for a seven year old to get at.

Except parents rarely appreciate the ingenuity of a child.  Much less our monkey heritage.  I climbed that bookcase without a hint of remorse and brought down the thickest tome with the name King on it I could find.  In my mind I figured if I was only going to get one chance at reading this guy - and my odds decreased every time I took a new book, I understood this intuitively - I might as well go big.  Which is how a seven year old finds himself reading through a thousand page novel.  And how a fourteen year old finds himself rereading that very same novel, The Stand, a fourth time.  I read every bit of fiction that man wrote.  Quite a lot I might add.  And reading him got me reading other people too.  First Anne Rice, the Robert Heinlein, the next thing I knew I was tracking down Mark Twain, and Papa.  Hell I even dabbled in those Russian depressives Tolstoy and Doestovesky.  Which is really just bragging.

But in all that reading I discovered what authorship really is.  It is an attempt at intimacy.  A guarded and utterly stoic attempt, but an attempt nonetheless.  You see when you write a novel, whether fiction or fact, the inner scape of you is mapped out for all to see.  Or, an analogy Stephen King might prefer, we get to look through someone else's eyes at the collective lake of unconscious creativity we all go fishing in from time to time.

Another bit the King might appreciate: 19, the last blog I made.  I haven't posted in so long because 19 is one of those depth-charge numbers for me.  Why is it a depth-charge number...by that I mean its a number that for nothing better than superstitious mumbo jumbo that any science-fearing believer is ashamed to admit, it's a depth-charge number because I find myself dusting off the cobwebs of all the scattered nonsense I know of numerology when that number comes up.

anyway thanks for listening while I moved past that.