Fast and furious

Fast in that the disease is determined to progress at a pace all too visible. I am the soil nurturing bamboo while I'd rather be poisoned water in a hydroponics pond killing off the greenery. I need quinine to settle my nerves (true) and strychnine to settle the ALS. I'm still working on the concoction. Furious is my state of mind and my pace. I battle each day between closing my world down to a level of security and convenience commensurate to my current level of function and pushing my limitations beyond my comfort zone, risking a fall, an embarrassment, maybe more. No pain, no gain they say- an extremely over used statement; stab me so I can walk better? What kind of bull shit is that?- now replaced with "It is what it is"- as astounding and intelligent as Yogi Berra's statement "Wherever you go, there you are". OK, that last sentence went exactly nowhere, the same final resting place as this post. I'm not in the least sorry that I gotta ramble. I gotta incite controversy. Here I go:

I read the first two installments of The Hunger Games and am crawling through the third. I saw the movie. My take on the writing is confusing to me. I mean, I'm confused. Kids killing kids within a totalitarian society, apparently post cataclysmic. Great concept. Poor writing. A 'tween style perfectly designed to draw in young readers. This is certainly no Lord of the Flies. A great, complex story weighted down to the lower book shelves to be read by 14 year old kids through simplistic structure. Maybe I'm too old and cynical. Maybe our youth has matured to the point where they can deal better with butchery and war. But maybe, just maybe, parents should read these books first and then decide if their kids can handle them. My suggestion would be to introduce them to the history books- plenty of killing there. Our youth are already exposed to enough mayhem. Make the movies as harsh as the realities in the books and give them an R rating. If parents take their 12 year old to the films, then they are just plain idiots. 

Does anybody remember Ayn Rand? She wrote "Atlas Shrugged", a socio philosophical fiction about a bunch of brainiacs sequestering themselves from society in order to prove their worth, watching the world delve headlong into massive dysfunction. Something like that. Previously, she wrote Fountainhead.

Why do I bring her up? I just watched an interview with her conducted by Mike Wallace in 1959. In the interview she said she was the most creative thinker in the world. Ha. Russian born, long time American. Bitchy, self important, self loathing, a philosopher in the sense that she could incite controversy by saying controversial shit. In my opinion, an expert at being an expert, nothing else. Any success she had was through fiction. As was her  life. Do you get the impression I don't like her? Why, I like everybody. Often it's what spews from their mouths that irks me.