Stepping Sideways

DIARY

The last week or two, I'd been meaning to knock out massive quantities of Urbàntasm, or at least to work on it extensively.

But then I fell upon the series of remeniscences that I outlined below: "rag doll." I've been sucked up (again) in Krynn and the Womwawas Drys.

For some reason, fantasy has always had great allure to me. When I discovered Tolkien, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, and others, when I picked up Dungeons and Dragons back then, it felt as if I had been primed for it.

It's strange to me that, with my obsession with industrial cities, I am easily drawn away by breathtaking unearthly mountain reaches, by forest and swamps unmatched on earth. It's strange to me that, given my fixation with unsolvable real-world problems, I'm so easily swayed by the whimsical yet ponderous conventions of fantasy: elves of noble mien, stately warriors, degenerate goblinoid races, corrupting magic and the like...

They, all of them... *all* of them... have the signature "evil" and/or "uncontrollable" magic artifact that must be destroyed/contained.

Sigh.

There are, I suppose, many reasons why I am drawn.

For me, however, the most compelling all have to do with inertia.
Here we live in a world with carefully enforced laws of Physics (yes, this is my "flourish" style).
Regardless of the theories we buy or do not buy into, inertia and the second law of thermodynamics are pretty necessary considerations, along with the equally necessary consideration that, all things told, the universe is a pretty lonely place, with millions of times much more cold and isolation to go around than warmth and companionship.

And it's only getting worse.

Sci. fi doesn't refute this... it augments it.

Fantasy fiction, however, with its equally regimented "laws of physics," it's demoniac world conquerers, its warrior women, its broken oath begatten spectres, its teeming humanoids and lofty immortals, always seems to exist within an implicitly life-centric, creature-centric, sentience-centric universe. In the worst circumstances, we'll be subjected to another decade/century/millennium of Voldemort/Takhisis/Morgoth. Heat Death?! Who ever read a fantasy novel featuring Heat Death?!

And how horrible and bleak and powerful and dark and eternal and *real* Heat Death is held up against the dark god Bane?

I need fantasy.

I need it for that part of me that is immature and childlike and timid and worried.
I need it to forget the horrors everwhere, everywhere, and always.
Sometimes, I need to forget.

As for Urbàntasm: it's more connected to the real.

I neglected it yesterday, yes, and the day before, yes.
So long as I don't neglect it tonight.

~ Connor