Started watching Westworld, and man, am I stoked.
How do you feel about the naive folks of 2025 (or my time, for that matter) glitzing up the Old West?
To Coach
-
IamLEAM1983
- Site Admin
- Posts: 3709
- Joined: Tue Jan 08, 2013 4:54 am
- Location: Quebec, Canada
-
IamLEAM1983
- Site Admin
- Posts: 3709
- Joined: Tue Jan 08, 2013 4:54 am
- Location: Quebec, Canada
As Coach
"Well, I like to think boundaries play into it. Your interest, I mean.
See, the Hope I know now is in a time where even space isn't really what you'd call the final frontier. The great unknowns are right out there, ripe for the taking, but there's so much to it all, now, that you'll be lucky if you only really chart out one spiral arm in the darn galaxy. See one star, you've seen 'em all. See one alien planet, you've seen all of 'em. You'll get to galaxy-spanning and all, but that'll take time. 'Till then, it's just a lot of same old stuff, repeated every lightyear or so.
Now, Missouri in my time? The folks in the West wanted to make it East, the folks in the East wanted to make it West. Civilization for one, the great outdoors for the other. Used to be Cornelius Tanner wasn't known as a dragon, and the old man would conjure up crowds like nothing, talking about New York and London or how things got done in Paris or elsewhere, deeper in Europe... My old folks' idea of the boundary was out here, in the East - or across the Atlantic, even. Everyone from here, in the meantime, wanted my stories about cattle rustlers and stagecoaches, dusty roads and clinking spurs...
The West is everything you can't have. Everything the comforts of life took away from you. Rugged lifestyles and plenty of adventuring, dark spots on the map where there's still plenty of room for monsters to hide... Places where someone could disappear. You'd go up in the mountains in Colorado, over Telluride, and the snows could just swallow you whole. You could restart just as easy, too. Go someplace else, far and away, pick a new name and a new job, and your sins were good and done. Nowadays, sneeze wrong and it's on Facebook. You can wipe your history, change your screen name, have someone else change your password behind your back and all - it's all still there.
Why believe in God, when you've got your own Facebook feed and the town's worth of Curious Cathys to stand in? My restaurant's got a Facebook page, but I won't get one for myself come Hell or high water, I can tell you that much! Only Aspasia and my close, personal friends deserve to know about Silas Robertson; I'm fine with being Coach for everyone else.
It's funny too, 'cause us folks in the West thought we wanted your lot. Clean living, long health, guaranteed personal success... I mean, I'm happy enough as it is, considering what's happened; but I'm in a position shared by a lot of immortals, in that I can see through your post-Manifest Destiny schtick. There's a lot of things I like about the modern world, and a lot of things I don't like, like blowhards with a scrap of power who think their putting a suit on and looking good on camera gives them license to rule over or threaten people. Like how people's aspirations just seem to have shrunken down over time.
I was born to drive shotgun, keep people safe on life's roads in my own way. Most of everyone I know won't so much as ride those roads - they'd rather get beef that's already been killed and pumped full of preservatives; mosey on to a 4K TV and a reheated microwave dinner, maybe watch some other lives play out on the tube while they miss out on theirs.
The America I grew up in is in the history books now. It's romanticized, both on television and in my own damn head. The America I live in now?
I'm mighty proud of it on many levels, but the more freedoms we claw out, the more evil steps up. As a lich, I feel evil like few people could understand. Intolerance, greed, petty hatred... It's all poison in a skin suit to me."
See, the Hope I know now is in a time where even space isn't really what you'd call the final frontier. The great unknowns are right out there, ripe for the taking, but there's so much to it all, now, that you'll be lucky if you only really chart out one spiral arm in the darn galaxy. See one star, you've seen 'em all. See one alien planet, you've seen all of 'em. You'll get to galaxy-spanning and all, but that'll take time. 'Till then, it's just a lot of same old stuff, repeated every lightyear or so.
Now, Missouri in my time? The folks in the West wanted to make it East, the folks in the East wanted to make it West. Civilization for one, the great outdoors for the other. Used to be Cornelius Tanner wasn't known as a dragon, and the old man would conjure up crowds like nothing, talking about New York and London or how things got done in Paris or elsewhere, deeper in Europe... My old folks' idea of the boundary was out here, in the East - or across the Atlantic, even. Everyone from here, in the meantime, wanted my stories about cattle rustlers and stagecoaches, dusty roads and clinking spurs...
The West is everything you can't have. Everything the comforts of life took away from you. Rugged lifestyles and plenty of adventuring, dark spots on the map where there's still plenty of room for monsters to hide... Places where someone could disappear. You'd go up in the mountains in Colorado, over Telluride, and the snows could just swallow you whole. You could restart just as easy, too. Go someplace else, far and away, pick a new name and a new job, and your sins were good and done. Nowadays, sneeze wrong and it's on Facebook. You can wipe your history, change your screen name, have someone else change your password behind your back and all - it's all still there.
Why believe in God, when you've got your own Facebook feed and the town's worth of Curious Cathys to stand in? My restaurant's got a Facebook page, but I won't get one for myself come Hell or high water, I can tell you that much! Only Aspasia and my close, personal friends deserve to know about Silas Robertson; I'm fine with being Coach for everyone else.
It's funny too, 'cause us folks in the West thought we wanted your lot. Clean living, long health, guaranteed personal success... I mean, I'm happy enough as it is, considering what's happened; but I'm in a position shared by a lot of immortals, in that I can see through your post-Manifest Destiny schtick. There's a lot of things I like about the modern world, and a lot of things I don't like, like blowhards with a scrap of power who think their putting a suit on and looking good on camera gives them license to rule over or threaten people. Like how people's aspirations just seem to have shrunken down over time.
I was born to drive shotgun, keep people safe on life's roads in my own way. Most of everyone I know won't so much as ride those roads - they'd rather get beef that's already been killed and pumped full of preservatives; mosey on to a 4K TV and a reheated microwave dinner, maybe watch some other lives play out on the tube while they miss out on theirs.
The America I grew up in is in the history books now. It's romanticized, both on television and in my own damn head. The America I live in now?
I'm mighty proud of it on many levels, but the more freedoms we claw out, the more evil steps up. As a lich, I feel evil like few people could understand. Intolerance, greed, petty hatred... It's all poison in a skin suit to me."