glitter_n_gore

In the Year of Our Lord 1987, two cult favorite vampire movies came out within a couple months of each other. One, you've probably heard of: The Lost Boys. It stars Corey Feldman and Corey Haim, Jason Patric, and Keifer Sutherland. It's funny, action-packed, kind of disgusting, and endlessly quotable. It's a summertime staple for me and probably will be until the end of time. The other was Near Dark. It's darker, weirder, leans more on horror than comedy, stars half the cast of Aliens, and is violent and scary in a way that modern vampires can't touch.

It is my very favorite vampire movie. Why? Bill Paxton.

The cinematic universe lost another icon this week. And I lost another hero. Although in this case the word "hero" doesn't exactly convey what I want it to. Paxton was a terrific actor who I still don't know as well as I want to, who always entertained me when I happened to stumble across him. The fact that this happened more often than not in horror movies, sci-fi thrillers, and superhero franchises is not lost on me. Mostly, I remember him as the deliciously sadistic Severen. If you still haven't seen Near Dark yet--go do that right now. I'll wait.

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I've been staring at this screen for close to two hours, wondering what I should say to commemorate a loss such as this. And I'm still staring. So I'm going to tell you a story:

Today, for no particular reason I can put my finger on, I thought back to a nightmare I had about a year ago, about the world ending. In the dream, I escaped, along with a handful of others, but we watched the world burning and there was nothing any of us could do to stop it. We were alive, but displaced and homeless with nothing but the clothes on our backs.

That was the dream.

I don't know why I was thinking about it today, but I wondered what I would do to cope once the shock and grief faded. In the end, I decided I'd do what I've always done: write everything down, everything I could remember, relentlessly and completely so it wouldn't be lost. I would keep the world as I knew it alive through stories.

When I first read Farhenheit 451, I knew going in one of the major themes was censorship and book-banning. But the thing that struck me the most wasn't the stifling of the written word. It was the way the characters ultimately discovered how to keep the great stories alive even after every book was turned to ash: they remembered them. Every word, by heart. The message that I took from that book was not that it's wrong to destroy stories, but that stories by their very nature cannot be destroyed. The medium for passing them on might change, but the stories themselves last.

I thought about all that today, and then I came home from work to find out the author who had put that idea into the world had left it. I can't help but wonder if the cosmos were trying to send me a message, seeing as I had Bradbury and his stories in my thoughts before ever hearing the news of his passing. Believe what you want about that, but know this first and foremost: nothing is ever really lost. As long as you can read stories, and pass them on, and remember them, they can and will last. And so will the people who gave them to us.