Totally Awesome
(a story in two parts)
by Cally Phillips
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: When it comes to defining awesomeness, you need to begin by separating fact from fiction – if you can...
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Part one. Can you get your ethics in a twist?
In the history of history it’s a well known fact (if you believe in facts) that some things are awesome and some things aren’t. I find myself thinking about buttons. It could be many things but buttons are the first thing that spring to mind when I’m casting around for an analogy. And because people will expect me to talk about books. I’m a writer and I write books. Sometimes I write about them. But not today. Today I’m writing and thinking about buttons.
But before I tell you about buttons I’m going to show you how this story came about. The backstory, if you want to think of it that way. I want to try and take you into the creative process. Or give you the facts. You are about to go googling in my mind. Hold onto your buttons and here we go…
What is a fact? Turn to dictionary: A thing that is indisputably the case. I wonder whether anything is indisputably the case. I have found in my half century on this planet that people can dispute everything and spend an inordinate amount of time and energy doing it. One in the eye for ‘facts’ then. It’s a ‘fact’ that in other fictional writing I have said ‘what is a fact except a fiction we choose to believe.’ It’s a fact that that’s a quotation but whether it’s a fact in and of itself… well, for me fact and fiction are bedfellows. Sometimes comfortable, sometimes not. Usually strange. And often opposites attract. Or repel. Look around your own mindbed and draw your own conclusions. What do you think of facts? Where do you find them? How do you recognise them? Is it a question of value? We’ll come back to that. (I’m building suspense).
A new word hoves into view. Awesome. Because the story of the buttons is about awesome buttons. Don’t forget the buttons, they will become important again all in good time.
For the moment I think: What is it to be awesome? What does it mean? Head for the dictionary again. The place where the meaning of things is written down as fact. Facts are in the dictionary. Even the word fact is in the dictionary as we saw above. How awesome is that?
Awesome. Unlike ‘fact’, which is a noun, awesome claims to be an adjective. That’s a fact. And some people even know what adjectives are as well as what they mean. I don’t. I must have missed school that day. I missed a lot of school.
Well, awesome is defined as:
1. Extremely impressive or daunting; inspiring great admiration, apprehension, or fear.
2. Extremely good; excellent.
So what does it mean to be awesome? Back to the dictionary:
An adjective modifies a noun or a pronoun by describing, identifying, or quantifying words. An adjective usually precedes the noun or the pronoun which it modifies.
Modify is just a posh way of saying ‘describes’. Now that’s an opinion, it may or may not be a fact.
So you could say he or she (or I) is (or am) awesome. But you might say ‘that’s an awesome book’.
So far so good. I wonder, though, is there a difference between being awesome as a person and attributing awesomeness to an object?
Or is it all about the value? Remember, we put value on one side before, just so we could take it off the shelf now at the denouement. Suspense over. It’s time. Now. To ask about value.
This is the problem with thinking (some might call this philosophising but that’s just a longer word for thinking) it’s like searching on Google. You can get horribly lost when all you wanted was to find a button to keep your trousers (or American pants) up.
My question now becomes: What is value? Is it created by people or is it intrinsic?
Do people make other people or things awesome by calling them such or is the awesomeness a property already there, and it’s just something which (some) people recognise? And if so, what people? And why is it some people do and some people don’t?
This is quite a difficult question. And one which can lead you into political philosophy, which is a place lots of people don’t want to go. Most people just want to be entertained. That’s why they invented bread and circuses.
All of this philosophising might explain to you why it is that I write stories. Because at this point in my thinking I realise that I’m going to lose (if I haven’t already lost) my audience, and possibly my will to live and certainly my interest in speculating ‘fact’ or ‘theory’ any longer. It gets boring, right? Whereas stories are more interesting. Easier? Nicer? More user friendly?
Well, that’s why I’m writing a story about buttons. An awesome story about awesome buttons. It’s because I can. Because I have to. And for a bunch of other reasons which you can speculate yourself. Reasons may or may not be facts. That’s another story entirely.
Part Two. Buttons are awesome.
Once upon a time there were buttons. I’m not describing them yet because it just matters that they existed at this point in the story. Take it from me. These buttons existed. People saw them. Some people admired them. Many people wanted them. Everyone needs buttons, right?
Someone once said ‘these buttons are awesome.’
And other people looked at the buttons and agreed. Some disagreed. One even said ‘is that a fact?’ But over time, more and more people looked at the buttons and more and more people talked about buying the buttons, though lots of them just talked because they were more button browsers than button buyers.
Then one day one person asked ‘where were these buttons made?’
And others laughed, wondering why it mattered where the buttons were made.
‘The right question is, is do the buttons do their job?’ someone asked.
And that got a whole big argument started about what was the point of buttons and this led onto an argument about how one could say that buttons were awesome. ‘What are the relevant criteria,’ someone said. And other people snorted and sniffed at them for being so up themselves as to bring words like relevant and criteria into the conversation party.
(Note that all someone’s are nameless here to protect the identity of the individual because some of the someone’s may be fictional and some of them may not. You can create your own characters to fit the someone’s – that’s something for you to do in this story. I’m just telling you about the buttons, not about the someone’s. Or it might be someones’ – curse that greengrocer and his apostrophe. I was definitely off school the day they laid down that rule.)
‘These buttons are awesome,’ someone said.
And because they said it pretty loudly, and a lot of people were listening who hadn’t really bothered to think about how you form an opinion, or even what might be the criteria of an awesome button (because, hey how tedious is that right, we just want to be in with the in crowd and if a button’s awesome we want to be right there owning that button whether we need it or not) and basically what happened was that word got about that these buttons were awesome.
So now they had a value. A currency as well as a descriptive property. Awesomeness. These were now marketed and sold as ‘awesome’ buttons and that meant people stopped each other in the street saying things like ‘where did you get those awesome buttons from?’ and ‘how much did you pay for those awesome buttons?’ because people like nothing better than to chat with each other socially and well, there has to be something else to talk about than the weather, right?
And as these things did, the whole thing snowballed. People who didn’t have the ‘awesome’ buttons began to feel second rate. People who had ‘awesome’ buttons felt pumped up with pride even though no one could really describe what it was about these buttons that made them so ‘awesome’.
And it was time to find out a bit more about the buttons. A time for answers not just questions. Time for you to join in. Can you answer these questions:
Was it their colour? What colour were they?
Was it their shape? What shape were they?
Was it their size? What size were they?
Did they do their job? What is the job of a button?
Who made them? What brand were they? How many other people have them?
So many questions. Just about buttons. They are just buttons remember. Just buttons.
Well, people had loads of answers to the questions and, you know, war broke out over what it actually was that made these buttons so ‘awesome.’ Some people thought it was ‘just because’ and others appealed to the ‘aesthetic’ quality and some people said it was because ‘everyone who is anyone has them.’ And we are none the further down the line really, are we? Because they are just buttons. And I’m not sure describing buttons as awesome really helps anyone at all.
They are blue buttons. They will/won’t match your fabric.
They are small buttons. You need big buttons.
They are made of cheap plastic and will break when you try to fasten them.
They are made of gold and you’ll get mugged the first time you wear them out.
These are the properties of buttons I think we should consider. But awesome? It’s not like they are people or anything now, is it?
And we seem to have come full circle again and are back to thinking rather than storytelling. It might be that his is a story with a moral. It might be didactic. It might be an awesomely didactic story, if such a thing exists. So I leave you with the following thoughts:
What is the value of a button? What is the value of awesome? What is the point of questions and how do you ever establish a fact? And what do you do when buttons become a currency? What if the buttons were books?
What if the buttons were ideas?
What if?
What?
?
Swearwords: None.
Description: When it comes to defining awesomeness, you need to begin by separating fact from fiction – if you can...
_____________________________________________________________________
Part one. Can you get your ethics in a twist?
In the history of history it’s a well known fact (if you believe in facts) that some things are awesome and some things aren’t. I find myself thinking about buttons. It could be many things but buttons are the first thing that spring to mind when I’m casting around for an analogy. And because people will expect me to talk about books. I’m a writer and I write books. Sometimes I write about them. But not today. Today I’m writing and thinking about buttons.
But before I tell you about buttons I’m going to show you how this story came about. The backstory, if you want to think of it that way. I want to try and take you into the creative process. Or give you the facts. You are about to go googling in my mind. Hold onto your buttons and here we go…
What is a fact? Turn to dictionary: A thing that is indisputably the case. I wonder whether anything is indisputably the case. I have found in my half century on this planet that people can dispute everything and spend an inordinate amount of time and energy doing it. One in the eye for ‘facts’ then. It’s a ‘fact’ that in other fictional writing I have said ‘what is a fact except a fiction we choose to believe.’ It’s a fact that that’s a quotation but whether it’s a fact in and of itself… well, for me fact and fiction are bedfellows. Sometimes comfortable, sometimes not. Usually strange. And often opposites attract. Or repel. Look around your own mindbed and draw your own conclusions. What do you think of facts? Where do you find them? How do you recognise them? Is it a question of value? We’ll come back to that. (I’m building suspense).
A new word hoves into view. Awesome. Because the story of the buttons is about awesome buttons. Don’t forget the buttons, they will become important again all in good time.
For the moment I think: What is it to be awesome? What does it mean? Head for the dictionary again. The place where the meaning of things is written down as fact. Facts are in the dictionary. Even the word fact is in the dictionary as we saw above. How awesome is that?
Awesome. Unlike ‘fact’, which is a noun, awesome claims to be an adjective. That’s a fact. And some people even know what adjectives are as well as what they mean. I don’t. I must have missed school that day. I missed a lot of school.
Well, awesome is defined as:
1. Extremely impressive or daunting; inspiring great admiration, apprehension, or fear.
2. Extremely good; excellent.
So what does it mean to be awesome? Back to the dictionary:
An adjective modifies a noun or a pronoun by describing, identifying, or quantifying words. An adjective usually precedes the noun or the pronoun which it modifies.
Modify is just a posh way of saying ‘describes’. Now that’s an opinion, it may or may not be a fact.
So you could say he or she (or I) is (or am) awesome. But you might say ‘that’s an awesome book’.
So far so good. I wonder, though, is there a difference between being awesome as a person and attributing awesomeness to an object?
Or is it all about the value? Remember, we put value on one side before, just so we could take it off the shelf now at the denouement. Suspense over. It’s time. Now. To ask about value.
This is the problem with thinking (some might call this philosophising but that’s just a longer word for thinking) it’s like searching on Google. You can get horribly lost when all you wanted was to find a button to keep your trousers (or American pants) up.
My question now becomes: What is value? Is it created by people or is it intrinsic?
Do people make other people or things awesome by calling them such or is the awesomeness a property already there, and it’s just something which (some) people recognise? And if so, what people? And why is it some people do and some people don’t?
This is quite a difficult question. And one which can lead you into political philosophy, which is a place lots of people don’t want to go. Most people just want to be entertained. That’s why they invented bread and circuses.
All of this philosophising might explain to you why it is that I write stories. Because at this point in my thinking I realise that I’m going to lose (if I haven’t already lost) my audience, and possibly my will to live and certainly my interest in speculating ‘fact’ or ‘theory’ any longer. It gets boring, right? Whereas stories are more interesting. Easier? Nicer? More user friendly?
Well, that’s why I’m writing a story about buttons. An awesome story about awesome buttons. It’s because I can. Because I have to. And for a bunch of other reasons which you can speculate yourself. Reasons may or may not be facts. That’s another story entirely.
Part Two. Buttons are awesome.
Once upon a time there were buttons. I’m not describing them yet because it just matters that they existed at this point in the story. Take it from me. These buttons existed. People saw them. Some people admired them. Many people wanted them. Everyone needs buttons, right?
Someone once said ‘these buttons are awesome.’
And other people looked at the buttons and agreed. Some disagreed. One even said ‘is that a fact?’ But over time, more and more people looked at the buttons and more and more people talked about buying the buttons, though lots of them just talked because they were more button browsers than button buyers.
Then one day one person asked ‘where were these buttons made?’
And others laughed, wondering why it mattered where the buttons were made.
‘The right question is, is do the buttons do their job?’ someone asked.
And that got a whole big argument started about what was the point of buttons and this led onto an argument about how one could say that buttons were awesome. ‘What are the relevant criteria,’ someone said. And other people snorted and sniffed at them for being so up themselves as to bring words like relevant and criteria into the conversation party.
(Note that all someone’s are nameless here to protect the identity of the individual because some of the someone’s may be fictional and some of them may not. You can create your own characters to fit the someone’s – that’s something for you to do in this story. I’m just telling you about the buttons, not about the someone’s. Or it might be someones’ – curse that greengrocer and his apostrophe. I was definitely off school the day they laid down that rule.)
‘These buttons are awesome,’ someone said.
And because they said it pretty loudly, and a lot of people were listening who hadn’t really bothered to think about how you form an opinion, or even what might be the criteria of an awesome button (because, hey how tedious is that right, we just want to be in with the in crowd and if a button’s awesome we want to be right there owning that button whether we need it or not) and basically what happened was that word got about that these buttons were awesome.
So now they had a value. A currency as well as a descriptive property. Awesomeness. These were now marketed and sold as ‘awesome’ buttons and that meant people stopped each other in the street saying things like ‘where did you get those awesome buttons from?’ and ‘how much did you pay for those awesome buttons?’ because people like nothing better than to chat with each other socially and well, there has to be something else to talk about than the weather, right?
And as these things did, the whole thing snowballed. People who didn’t have the ‘awesome’ buttons began to feel second rate. People who had ‘awesome’ buttons felt pumped up with pride even though no one could really describe what it was about these buttons that made them so ‘awesome’.
And it was time to find out a bit more about the buttons. A time for answers not just questions. Time for you to join in. Can you answer these questions:
Was it their colour? What colour were they?
Was it their shape? What shape were they?
Was it their size? What size were they?
Did they do their job? What is the job of a button?
Who made them? What brand were they? How many other people have them?
So many questions. Just about buttons. They are just buttons remember. Just buttons.
Well, people had loads of answers to the questions and, you know, war broke out over what it actually was that made these buttons so ‘awesome.’ Some people thought it was ‘just because’ and others appealed to the ‘aesthetic’ quality and some people said it was because ‘everyone who is anyone has them.’ And we are none the further down the line really, are we? Because they are just buttons. And I’m not sure describing buttons as awesome really helps anyone at all.
They are blue buttons. They will/won’t match your fabric.
They are small buttons. You need big buttons.
They are made of cheap plastic and will break when you try to fasten them.
They are made of gold and you’ll get mugged the first time you wear them out.
These are the properties of buttons I think we should consider. But awesome? It’s not like they are people or anything now, is it?
And we seem to have come full circle again and are back to thinking rather than storytelling. It might be that his is a story with a moral. It might be didactic. It might be an awesomely didactic story, if such a thing exists. So I leave you with the following thoughts:
What is the value of a button? What is the value of awesome? What is the point of questions and how do you ever establish a fact? And what do you do when buttons become a currency? What if the buttons were books?
What if the buttons were ideas?
What if?
What?
?
About the Author
Cally Phillips was born in England of Scottish
parentage. Now in Turriff, she has lived most of her life in various
parts of Scotland, urban and rural.
Cally works for Ayton Publishing as series editor and also promotes the work of “Scotland’s Forgotten Bestseller” S. R. Crockett through his online literary society, The Galloway Raiders www.gallowayraiders.co.uk
Cally works for Ayton Publishing as series editor and also promotes the work of “Scotland’s Forgotten Bestseller” S. R. Crockett through his online literary society, The Galloway Raiders www.gallowayraiders.co.uk