From the Academy Award winning actor, an unconventional memoir filled with raucous stories, outlaw wisdom, and lessons learned the hard way about living with greater satisfaction.
I've been in this life for fifty years, been trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me.
Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries. I found stories I experienced, lessons I learned and forgot, poems, prayers, prescriptions, beliefs about what matters, some great photographs, and a whole bunch of bumper stickers. I found a reliable theme, an approach to living that gave me more satisfaction, at the time, and still: If you know how, and when, to deal with life's challenges - how to get relative with the inevitable - you can enjoy a state of success I call 'catching greenlights.'
So I took a one-way ticket to the desert and wrote this book: an album, a record, a story of my life so far. This is fifty years of my sights and seens, felts and figured-outs, cools and shamefuls. Graces, truths, and beauties of brutality. Getting away withs, getting caughts, and getting wets while trying to dance between the raindrops.
Hopefully, it's medicine that tastes good, a couple of aspirin instead of the infirmary, a spaceship to Mars without needing your pilot's license, going to church without having to be born again, and laughing through the tears.
It's a love letter. To life.
It's also a guide to catching more greenlights-and to realising that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too.
Good luck.
Jason Onyimbo –
1984 addresses totalitarianism. We are taken on a journey into a world where it is the only system of rule. We learn that the people under such a rule feel powerless and too divided to fight back. So, they simply accept whatever they are told.
Their lives are pre-tailored to suit the system, and it is how they must live until they die. Such a system creates soulless or broken people with zero identity or independence, which keeps the ruling class ever – powerful. Totalitarianism is gross oppression and must never be allowed to take hold in any system, whether a nation, a classroom, or a family.
A government such as this feeds off the submission of the masses and assures itself of more control by instilling fear through scare tactics and mental domination. Such a system operates on lies, a subversion of truth and history to keep the populace in check. It is a perversion to the usual way people are supposed to express their rights to have freedom, facts of history, and truth.
Totalitarianism makes a clear distinction between the rich and the poor. The poor believe that such a lowly status is the best they can get in life. Their reality is warped; rather than focusing on their financial lack, they instead work against each other.
This style of government is targeted at the public’s psyche as it seeks to control them without applying physical pressure. Instead, it breaks down individuals from the inside out, robbing them of the will to question, rebel, or harbor any thoughts that aren’t sanctioned or informed by the ruling class.
Chief, the NuriaStore bookseller –
If science fiction, sociology, political fiction, and dystopia are literary bread for your teeth, then the number one title is undoubtedly 1984.
In a post-atomic scenario that to say disturbing is an understatement, the superpower of Oceania is governed by a totalitarian party headed by the so-called Big Brother. Shivering down my spine.