Mercury in Retrograde

My partner tells me that mercury is in retrograde. That explains why in the past couple of days, my imac pretty much died, the work laptop came down with that famous virus of the moment, whatever its name is, and I can’t seem to get anything else to work either. Earlier, I might have thought, what a load of crap. But now... it’s not so easy to dismiss it, because I’m sitting in the middle of the storm. Well – at least there wasn’t an unfortunate incident with the power drill that I was using quite a bit while setting up the apartment this weekend.

Been listening to a lot of music again – which really makes me happy. And as usual – it’s a pretty wide range of things. Never was a big fan of Elton John, but have really been getting into Tiny Dancer after watching Almost Famous last week. Recently got Sigur Ros’ important album, Ágœtis byrjun, which is just a remarkable piece of work (and was actually quite hard to find at the major chains... had to go, forgive me – what can you do when you have a gift certificate?). Also getting into Zeppelin – it’s amazing that it’s taken me this long. Found a cool site (sorta done in a hack job style, though) that brings together some of the major Tolkien references in Led Zep songs. After finding that gem, I decided to look a little more, and found the following, far far more extensive list of references in music throughout the years and the genres. I was amazed at what i found there. It’s remarkable how many people have used his work as a launching pad for their creative ideas. Some of the Scandinavian fantasy metal bands are truly scary in how they’ve based their entire catalog on his stories.

I guess the same can be said about most fantasy writers, for that matter. You know – that makes me wonder. Have there been any really good fantasy writers out there that have decidedly POC characters as the main protagonists? And when I write People of Color, I don’t mean AOC (Aliens of Color), because I don’t care how many Tangerine, Aqua, and Violet bi-pedes from another galaxy are in the plot, they still can’t make up for the oppression by The Man of people of earth tone colors (Shout out to TC) right here on the blue planet. I guess that’s why I’m still a big Star Trek fan. Even though it treats human race as a conquered issue (i guess I can afford it this, because it IS supposed to be way in the future + it’s science fiction, after all), it still deals with issues of oppression, hegemony, assimilation, conflict within the sphere of different species in the Universe. Star Trek may be a joke in a lot of ways, but the writing, when it was good, still broached many topics that were very tough for others to even begin to talk about back when Rodenberry’s saga first came to the small screen.