Full Circle

As a response to my last blog---regarding the new amp part not the stolen iPod---Paul the Pirate (Yar!) asked if I felt like I had come full circle buying that amp at South Shore Music since I had bought my first guitar there.

I thought about it for a while last night. My first impression was to say no, because to my mind that initially implied an ending. Started here, ended there. But if I can interject math for a moment, that’s a line, isn’t it? Not a circle.

So after some more thought, I think it does feel like it. For I had indeed bought my first guitar there. Or, more correctly, my parents had, under the stipulation that I had to take lessons for at least a year. That first guitar was a Mako something or other and at the time I thought it was cool because it looked like the guitar Reb Beach played in Winger’s “Magdalene” video. (In retrospect, probably the only actual cool thing about that guitar is that its brand name shared the name of a type of shark.) And now, 18 years later I’m buying top of the line, grade A equipment. For probably five times the price at that. The type of gear South Shore Music probably didn’t even sell back then; they’ve actually developed into quite the respectable little store with some really good gear. Back then I didn’t know thing one about playing; nowadays I do OK for myself. Oddly enough, my guitar teacher still works there, and without fail I see him every single time I walk in there, even if it’s only for two minutes to buy strings.

So, yeah, I guess a full circle has been drawn as far as that’s concerned.
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So in a somewhat related matter, I was probably just slightly younger than the age where I first started playing guitar when I first started reading horror novels. And, like how before I started playing guitar, I was playing a tennis racket as a faux guitar, before I really settled into horror authors I liked, I just would buy anything on the book rack at Curtis Farms that looked like a horror novel. It was my start, sort of a prelude to feeling out the genre. I remember stopping specifically buying “The Devil’s Touch” by William Johnstone there. I believe that was my first horror novel. It was about a Satan worshipping cult that took over a small town, and my first night after reading it, I put a crucifix on top of it before going to bed.

Years later I’ve read more horror novels than I can remember. There’s little that seems new or noteworthy to me in the genre, and I’ve moved on, to some extent. Which is not to say I don’t read them anymore. I’ll still go out looking for new stuff (which I’m usually disappointed by), and I still like and re-read my favorites.

One of whom is of course that undisputed master of horror: Stephen King. I remember buying my first King book. It was in a bookstore at the Lincoln Plaza the next town over. I had ridden my bike over and spent probably a good 45 minutes looking over all the King titles trying to figure out which one to buy. (I ended up deciding on “The Shining” which, in retrospect, was probably not the ideal choice for my first King novel, only because it was one of those that I enjoyed much more after I had some other King under my belt.) But, I always felt that moment as being my first real start into horror, probably because everything I had read up until that point had been a matter of convenience, this I actively sought out. Everything else had been a prelude, this was legit.

But I bring it up because I’m currently re-reading a novel which has long been my favorite book, and upon this current reading is shaping up to stay in that position: “It”.
Even just on the surface I believe it’s King’s horror masterpiece. Plenty of scares, plenty of gruesome. I’m sure I loved it just for that when I first read it as a kid. But upon subsequent readings (this is either my 4th or 5th, I believe) there is so much more to it than that. To keep in the theme of full circle, there are things to be enjoyed with this book that you might only pick out as an adult (or at least as someone with more reading experience under their belt) that you might not get as a kid.

There’s the characterization. I’m only about 100 pages in right now, and at an epic 1,000+ pages, the first 160 are pretty much still the prologue. But already we’ve met all seven of the main characters as adults and as I’m reading this, and remembering from past readings, what these characters were like as children, their adult selves seem perfectly logical, following paths set out for them by their childhood environments.

Then there’s the theme of the magic of childhood. This theme is the foundation upon which the house of the story is built upon. And although my own childhood did not contain any real monsters, weaponized silver dollars, or acid spewing asthma inhalers, as a story “It” captures that essence of childhood that I never really thought could be put down in words. There is a lot of magic in the mundane when you’re 11 or 12 years old. Point in fact: new sneakers. At that age, with every pair of new sneakers your parents bought you, you could definitely, undeniably, without a doubt run faster. I would put those new sneakers on and immediately head out to the front of my house and run sprints from one side of the street to the other, and damn if I hadn’t shaved a few seconds off my best time. Looking back at it, I have a nice nostalgic chuckle, but back then it was absolutely true. King captures that perfectly in this book.

This was also one of the books where I found his writing to be effortless. Or, I should say, “seem effortless”. I’m sure there was a great deal of effort on his part. But it was so smooth to read, word to word, sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, almost like the entire story was fully formed in his mind, beginning to end, before he even sat down to write it. Like a grocery list. You know what you need, and no actual thought is required in writing it down.

Finally, and I just caught this one on this current time around, although I’m sure subconsciously from a previous reading it’s colored my opinions on reading through the years. Bill Denbrough stands up in a college writing class and asks: “Why does a story have to be socio-anything? Politics…history…culture…aren’t these natural ingredients in any story if it’s told well? I mean…can’t you guys just let a story be a story?” That has always been my take on reading. I read for a good story. Everything else—themes, edification, super nice la-di-da writing—is all frosting on the cake if I like the story, and aren’t enough for me to reread anything if I don’t. And this lends itself back to the beginning of the circle, when I was probably 13 years old. Young kids (and later adults) battling a timeless shape-shifting monster that lives in the sewers? Fuck yeah!