Prius pic, torn in half

When the world is being mean to us for no reason, is it actually trying to wake up our Inner Hero?

An Ode to my 2nd-Gen Prius,

… may she rest in pieces.

A few days ago, some lovely example of humankind made away with a piece of my car in the night. It wasn’t a pretty piece by any means. It didn’t play music or gleam in the sun or make my tires stay round. It was just a metal blob of environmental piping covered in road grime underneath. It also helped my little Prius not to sound like a Harley Davidson motorcycle.

Which it did when I started it up the next day.

Someone had cased my car, waited for darkness, jacked it up enough to get under it, and hacked away my catalytic converter. All within a few feet of my apartment.

I can only imagine how tough the job was for the poor criminal, on his back on wet gravelly asphalt in the cold drizzle of night, making all that racket sawing metal that should have woke the neighbors–or me. Just for a few hundred dollars in precious metal.

I almost feel bad for them.

No, that’s a lie. Despite my usual empathetic, compassionate nature, I cannot condone their sheer selfishness, taking away my hard-earned (and under-insured) mode of transport. I think it warrants a little ire. I think I could happily have squirted lighter fluid in their crotch and applied a burning match.

Allow me to savor that image for a moment before the guilt sets in…

Empathy and Other Lost Arts

Despite my vengeful imagery, Empathy is important to me. I personally believe that it is the one trait living creatures are gifted with that has the power to save this world. If only we exercised a little more of it.

So, the image of flaming nether regions will remain in my imagination for now (although I’m hoping karma will have its day with that person).

Instead of stepping on each other and one-upping each other to get ahead, we should be reaching out to pull each other up, so we can all get ahead together. I think we will get there so much faster that way, too. It’s a shame so many religions and governments seem to be bent on keeping that from ever happening.

Damage Done

This particular act of local selfishness won’t be passed on to an insurance company, sadly. Since I’ve been doing the starving artist thing, I unwisely decided not to cover my car for damage, thinking it too old and unvaluable. I should have thought a little harder on that.

Moral: If you own an older Prius, get comprehensive coverage. Don’t be an idiot like me.

Ten minutes of shady work turned my trustworthy steed into an overly large parking lot paperweight. A perfectly running car that can’t be fixed, because repairs would cost more than the car is worth. More than I’m worth at the moment.

It still sits out in the parking lot, all cute and curvy, hinting at a nice wash and wax for spring. But all I can envision for it now is being stacked in a junk yard with a few dozen others of its kind, all missing the same part.

I wonder if she’ll miss me. Ugh. I should never name my cars.

When Bad Things Happen for Good

It is a difficult exercise trying to envision something good coming out of this, as painful and undeserving as it feels right now.

But I know from experience, time has a way of showing us that it sometimes takes bad things to knock us out of the ruts and unproductive grooves we get ourselves coasting down for the sake of our comfort zone.

Comfort zones are nasty little life-eaters we think are so lovely, until we look back on them in regret.

Most of us hate change. And yet most of us secretly pine away for something to change. We’re just afraid to do it, or clueless as to what to do to make it happen in the right direction.

So, life steps in.

As a writer who often writes about life, if there’s one thing I’ve noticed it is that Life (substitute Universe, God, guardian angels, wombat spirits, or whatever form they take for you) doesn’t care about Things. Those will be dust in a blink of an eye, from its perspective. Life cares about You. And me. It cares about small actions that make big changes in our history, in our survival as creatures sharing this big blue rock.

It takes action to affect the path of living history. Usually uncomfortable, heroic action, like in the movies we all watch so much.

A Fun Exercise

Go watch any movie. It doesn’t matter which one.

Within the first 15 or 20 minutes, our hapless protagonist is going to have something taken away from them, like Indiana Jones, or Marty McFly, or Luke Skywalker; and this sends them onto an uncomfortable and unwanted path toward Change.

And it always seems to be the change they needed from the beginning.

Why do we love watching movies that do this over and over? I think it is because we all know deep down this is the way our life works. We identify with it. We want it, if only we can be as brave as our heroes on the screen to go for it.

Think about how many real life people they’ve made movies about, whose story started with a small tragedy that began their battle to become who they are now. Tell me on some level you don’t want that to happen to you, too, scary as it sounds.

I believe we all have inner heroes waiting to come out to make our dreams come true, to rescue us from living lives beneath those dreams. And this world we live in is trying its best to help, with nasty little Inciting Incidents, like mine, when we don’t make the effort on our own. I figure if I don’t do something about this one, it’ll be worse next time. Life can be mean when it loves you so much.

Wish me luck. I’m going to need it … and some lighter fluid.

My short answer to a recent writing site prompt asking, “What is the purpose of backstory.”

For me, there’s two flavors of backstory…

If the backstory is part of the story, then it is where the hero’s Problem lurks, the one they trip over in the inciting incident and must battle throughout the story, until they finally see it and stomp on it in the end. Although stories seem to be about a battle with the Antagonist, in the end it is usually winning the battle with some part of themselves that allows them to win against the bad guy.

If the backstory is not shown to the reader, then it’s often used as a bible of sorts for the writer to follow to inform who their character is as a three-dimensional, fallible–and often broken–person. It helps them know what their character will do and feel in any situation the writer throws them into.

It pays to get to know your characters from beginning to end. The more “alive” they are, the more they will bring your stories to life, too.