I’ve spent my entire life obsessed with trying to figure out where stories come from, how they work, how we can make new ones and better ones. When I was little, I wanted folks to think I was smart and believed you proved yourself smart by being funny. I dressed as The Unknown Comic from The Gong Show for Halloween when I was in kindergarten, all the other children were done up like He-Man or Barbie, they had no idea what was wrong with me. Still don’t. I still don’t. But I knew a good tale was the best way to be funny, so I spent my life researching.
I majored in screenwriting and minored in world religions at college, for Christ’s sakes. When fortune and shame eluded me, as it does for all without trust-funds yet too much conscience to commit terrible acts, I ended up working in my home-town’s library. A search still continuing.
I used to think the first stories were explaining why nature happened. Why our sun is gone at night, if the stars are pinpricks in a quilt God throws over the light, so we can rest. It seems a decently logical origin for making things up when you’re a child. I don’t believe it, anymore.
Folks often say sex work is the world’s oldest profession. But I don’t believe it. I do not doubt sex was traded for food or protection, animals do it, why not us, but I don’t believe we should refer to anything as a profession in a world without structures of power or organized means of exchange. Our first professional was the thug who took payment from a fraud hoarding things, calling himself a king, killing folks who opposed the king having so much for no good reason.
The first profession was a cop. The second profession was the bard, who made up stories that justified why kings should have so much when so many knew only poverty. That’s where our first stories came from, and that’s where our worst stories still arise today. Fabricated history. Entire religions, the economics department of every college on Earth, it’s all the wordwhores confabulating stories to justify injustice. From Egyptian hieroglyphic scribes to the jesters of Gilgamesh’s court to the sellouts who make movies that pretend Michael Jackson didn’t rape those children or the talking heads on television news pretending Donald Trump did not rape those children. Our very first stories invented gods, so that rich men could construct an Earth where they are treated like those gods and their horrors systematically forgiven, I am certain.
All you have to do is look around and see it true? Childish myths and lies to keep us in line.
And I’ve come to understand it’s not my commission to be funny, the real proof of intellect seems to be to make new stories so good, so right, they burn those old power-stories down.
Or, at least, die in our glorious acts of attempted ideological arson.
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