E
lena and I watched The Great Mouse Detective tonight. I used to idolize Sherlock Holmes. Not in a cool way, though -- I hadn't read really any of the original stories. Rather, I had been watching the Benedict Cumberbatch television show Sherlock, and in the vanity of my youth, endeavored to be like him. I was in college, and didn't have (at all) a sense of what the world was like, or how I was going to fit into it. I could only construct fanciful notions of how to become more like my fictional heroes, wherever I happened to pull them from.
So I fancied myself intelligent, and maybe I could become observant too. I used to play a game where I would sit in a coffee shop and attempt to construct as much of a person's life solely from their appearance as I could (which is actually a great game, I highly recommend playing with a friend). It seemed unlikely that I was going to be introduced to a great deal of mysteries to solve, but I convinced myself that these powers of observation and deduction could be used in "the battlefield", which was what I took to calling the "modern world". I was in a strange place, philosophically, and I couldn't help but conceive of society as a place of struggle and wickedness, in which, perhaps, I could live as a sort of genius hermit who could see through the illusions that others couldn't.
It's weird to think back and consider what a fantasy world I used to live in. I had an active mind, that just didn't have enough context to place itself, and so just started grasping at strange straws. It was better than a lot of things I could have fallen into in my youth, I guess. There is something so compelling about the character of Holmes, and his eccentric deductive abilities. He's much more practical than I am, as it turns out. I just spend a lot of time thinking about games these days. At least I'm going to have a child -- I've got Holmes beat there.