When I was a kid, we started going to Star Trek conventions. I loved them. You got to meet the actors and just drown in Star Trek all day long. But then, my last year of high school, when we were at the big convention in Pasadena, I realized… I didn’t care. I still cared about Star Trek, but actors were just actors. We skipped out on the end of the convention to go visit the college I was thinking of attending.
After college, I discovered sci-fi conventions where the writers congregate. Finally, I realized, this was where it was always at. The writers make up the stories. They’re where the real magic comes from. And I still do kind of believe that… But also, 22 years later — years I spent meeting and hanging out with other writers — I know they’re just people.
Actors are just people. Writers are just people. So where is the magic at?
It’s in the stories. It’s in the characters who we love. We can chase pieces of that love here on Earth in the real world, but it’ll never fully manifest here. It lives in words and videos; things written down and recorded, made perfect by a single person with a vision or a whole team working in concert. Either way, it doesn’t matter — the magic isn’t in them; it moves through them.
You can catch pieces of it, like touching a bubble and watching it pop. Or you can blow the bubbles. Either way, they’re perfect and beautiful, and you will never be like them; never find them hanging out together, chatting and laughing and willing to invite you in. Because that’s what people do. And people aren’t sublimely perfect like a bubble — opalescent, spherical, and floating. We’re messy bags of meat and water, sloshing over with feelings and opinions. We’re exhausting.
I’d rather blow the bubbles and watch them float away, hoping a few other people will see them too. We’ll be looking at the same bubble like two mice, both looking at the same star and singing about it with a song by one of my favorite song-writing duos. I’d rather try to create my own enduring bubble like “Somewhere Out There” than meet the people who wrote it already. Sure, maybe we have something in common, but mostly, people are a mess.
And I prefer the bubbles.