The world is a closed circuit now. All the good people can connect. But that doesn't seem to be happening. In a world of lying, cheating, violence and drugs, I seem very much alone. It's sad to me how heavily I have to lean on fictional characters for guidance. I need people who aren't real to show me how I should be.

"Fiction is more important than history."

Fiction is more important than fact. Fact is ultimately malleable. If there's something about reality that we don't like, we can change it. We have to follow the guidelines of fact to do so, but with our ability to re-arrange our physical environment, anything is possible to us. Fiction is what allows us to do that. It's what gives us the vision we need to continue pushing forward. It directs us, inspires us, leads us, guides us. Technically it's philosophy that does those things, but fiction for me is the most meaningful vessel for philosophy, the most powerful.

Last year, when I moved alone to Vancouver, with no one here who knew me, it was fiction that guided me. Take me out to the black, tell them I ain't coming back. Everything that was hard about the trip was made easier by relating it to fiction, to characters, to principles illustrated by imaginary people. I looked at my move as a journey, as a pilgrimage, as an adventure. As a story made real. Vancouver itself is like an episode of Firefly. It's like walking through Sihnon. Asian characters are everywhere. My first week I bought detergent covered in Chinese writing, and even that small connection to the Verse made me feel better.

I take stories of fiction seriously. Their value to me as inspiration in life is massive, and nothing has ever driven me more than the right piece of fiction. Fiction can show human beings as they should be, it can show us a way of life to aspire toward. It can help us integrate the massively dissimilar elements of our existence, and it can make a large and confusing world seem clear and beautiful.

No piece of fiction in recent years has been as important to me as Firefly. I keep coming back to it, and it's an amazingly deep well. It's very satisfying to me when others recognize an achievement of this kind. It's far too easy to be humble, to avoid taking responsibility for the greatness of what one has created, and that renders a huge disservice to the work itself.

"We made something that I consider extraordinary, and that I'm as proud of as anything I've done. It really was a jewel, something that, when I think back on it, it shines."

The battle of Serenity Valley was a hard way to remember the show. The pilot was aired last, and the image that stayed with me was of that battle: Mal is looking up at the sky, watching the ships, and it's beautiful. But it's the wrong side. The browncoats lost. The war is over.

"God? Whose color is he flying?"

For me, there's an analogy here. I thought that my people were coming. The people who saw how amazing life is, who were honored and proud to be what they are, I thought they were coming soon. But those people are deep underground. There was a time when I actually thought that in my lifetime, the world would somehow be populated by those people. By my people. I thought that this message and these ideas would be so clear and so powerful that everyone would wake up. Things would all fall into place. I don't think I ever stated it explicitly to myself, but it was a feeling that I had.

People talk about the bubble world that teenagers live in, and I think that's true. They can't see the danger in the choices they make, they can't connect what's happening now to what will happen in the future. I lived in that bubble world, but for me, it was inside out. I wasn't blinded to how life would be better in the future. I was blinded to the fact that maybe it wouldn't be. I was blinded to the fact that in my single lifetime, there is no way the entire world could possibly change.

Now I can't tell the difference
Or know what to feel
Between what I've been trying so hard to see
And what appears to be real

I hate hearing bullshit lyrics like that and identifying with them. It sends a shiver down my back that takes a long time to go away.

I don't think you oughta be doing this to yourself, Andy. These are just shitty pipe dreams. I mean, Mexico is way the hell down there, and you're in here, and that's the way it is.

Fiction can't always be a guiding light. It can't always show you a better way to live. But sometimes it can refuel you, and that can be enough. Even after I've been shown the path to an improved life, something unbelievably inspirational that I never before thought of as a true possibility, it's still a long fucking road to get there. A lot of the time, spiritual renewal is what I need. In that respect, very few things have been as good to me as Firefly.

There are specific lines of dialogue that define certain characters in Firefly.

Mal lost everything that mattered to him. He told himself that he didn't care about anything. But he found that he still cared about his crew, and he still cared about himself. He is a good man almost despite himself. He hardly even wants to be, but he is. To me, that's the key to Malcolm Reynolds. No matter how far you beat him down, no matter how much you take away, on some fundamental level he will continue to be a good person. A man learns all the details of a situation like ours, well, then he has a choice. And Mal says, "I don't believe he does." He will only let himself slide so far. He will never give up entirely, he will always see the good in life. And because of that, he may save himself yet.

Jayne is the flipside of Mal. Jayne has a line that defines him. The focus of my last essay about Firefly was a line that Jayne said: "Make something up. Don't tell 'em what I did."

But that line defines Mal more than anyone else. It defines the spirit and moral compass of the show as a whole. Jayne would never have said those things or behaved that way had he not come up against a man like Mal. If he had never been pitted against Mal, he wouldn't face up to ideas of personal honor, of dying with dignity, of being remembered as a good person. For Jayne the true defining line is, "There's not people like that. There's only people like me."

Jayne might display admirable qualities on occasion, he might show some good once in awhile, but his overall life philosophy is the reason why he will never be a good person. Most people will never be good people, because Jayne sees the world the way most people see the world. They don't strive to be good, they don't strive to undo evils, because they don't honestly believe that it's a thing that can be done. They don't think very highly of themselves, and therefore cannot think very highly of others. To them the human race is a muddle, black and white smeared together into a mess of completely inseparable grey. Maybe there's good there, maybe there's bad, but they don't trust themselves to sort it out. They don't really think it's possible, so they avert their eyes, letting things slide, letting the world fall apart. To them, there's no other way for life to be.

I try not to hate people for having that world view. I know that for most of them, no other mental outcome was likely. But the enormity of this plague is hard to ignore. Jayne, seeing the entire world as grey, is the everyman. He's the every woman. As history stands, he is the human race. I am sure that his day is going to pass. But as it stands, the fucker is everywhere.

The character who continues to become stronger for me after every rewatching is Simon. Simon didn't lose what he had. He did not have it pulled away from him. He gave it up. Every day it gets further and further away, that light of civilization that was only ever a speck to begin with, a tiny dot against the blackness of space. Everyone looks out into the black and sees something different, and that's what Simon sees: His life, getting smaller, smaller... gone.

He can never go back. His life is over, changed, and he did not do it for himself. Not exactly. He did it for someone else. He did it for his sister.

The relationship between Simon and River always hit me hard, right from the first time I watched the series. The underlying reasons aren't hard to find. I wouldn't condescend to claim that my mother has had a bad life, but it hasn't been everything it could have been, and there's nothing I can do about that. I don't need to go into details. Almost everyone has a mom and a dad. I'm sure you know what it's like.

More directly related is the fact that I couldn't save my brother. I didn't even come close, because I didn't know where to begin. Whatever guilt I felt while he declined I pushed down. Excuses were easy to make, he was an easy case to reject. He was a self-made Reaver, mad on the edge of space, desecration of the mind until what was left was a savage, a shadow of what was there before. He rejected all salvation, and I hardly tried to save him. There was not even a remote chance that anything I did could have made a difference.

I don't really know that things could have gone any differently. Knowing the two of us, and knowing where I was at that time in my life, I don't know if the facts could have added up to anything but what they did. His mind is permanently changed by drugs, and it's now far too late for me to mend things. Total, absolute failure. This was before Firefly, so the example of Simon and River was not in time to help me learn to help someone else. But for a long time I ignored what had happened. I ignored the fact that I didn't help, and the character of Simon Tam helped open my eyes. He helped me understand something I was repressing, something I was trying hard not to feel or know.

At one point in my life, Mal was my most obvious cipher. He isn't anymore, because I'm not trying to save myself. I did save myself. I did it, the land burned and the sea boiled, but I came out alive. Mal is not my destiny, he's an echo. He's a path I've been down, he's a battle that I won. But Simon is something more. Simon is the path I have to take, he's the strength I still have to find. Simon gave up everything to save someone else. He saved a life, not just a random life, but a life he cared almost as much about as his own. A life he cared enough about to give up everything for.

I don't believe in self-immolation. I don't believe in aimless sacrifice. I don't want to save everyone, I can't save everyone. No one can. But one person might be able to save another person, someone they care about, someone whose life is truly worth saving. When my brother needed help, I hesitated. I didn't see how I could change things, I barely tried, and I don't think that was the right choice. I wish I had done more, but ultimately I know that I did not save myself just to throw my body on top of someone else's flames.

I can accept that situation for the loss that it is. But if this happens again, if someone needs my help to guide them through a bad period in their life, I hope I'll have the strength and ability to help. Most importantly, I hope I'll have the will to at least try. That alone would be more than I used to have. When that moment comes, when I'm casting about, looking for something to draw from, it may be from a tv show. It may be from a fictional character. But the inspiration that comes from that character will be real enough.

The line that defines Simon is actually something Mal said, right before he kicked the lid from River's cryo chamber: "Well. Let's see what a man like you would kill for." Because a man like Simon would never kill. He would never break the law, he would never do wrong, he would never go against the regulations of his society.

Except for River. For her, he would do anything. No one could stand in his way, no one would ever be able to stop him. Everything he held dear, every tenet he lived his life under would become null. I hope I'll be able to find that within myself. I hope I'll be able to throw away everything around me if someone I love needs me to. Because if I can't do that, then I really haven't saved myself at all.

"When you can't run, you crawl, and when you can't crawl, you find somebody to carry you."

I no longer think that in my lifetime the world will be changed. I don't think the human race at large will become something that I will recognize as true kin to me. But I do hope that I will reach a point in my life when there will be other people with me, truly good people to help me through hard times, to inspire me, to help keep my eyes steady on the horizon. I hope to reach a point when I won't have to depend on fiction as my principle lifeline.

I've redefined what my birthright as a human being actually entails. I'll only have a handful of equals, rather than billions. That was the bubble world, that was a pipe dream. Instead I'll find a few people worth carrying, and try my best not to ask them to carry me too often. I think one of the worst tragedies in life would be to die unhappy, feeling unsatisfied about your life. But if I can find my group of equals, I don't think I'll have to worry. I think everything will be shiny.

23-06-05