By JIM CLAYTON/Staff Writer
I am often intrigued by the things that mold us as individuals. Our various external interests and curiosities tend to have a long-lasting impact on our developmental process, our intellectual chrysalis, if you will. I have a long list of influences. Family and friends. Music. Culture. Street tacos. The list is seemingly endless.
Perhaps my greatest influence comes from reading. I am an avid reader, and I read almost anything. Fiction. Non-fiction. Biographies. Poetry. The ingredients label on food packages (seriously…if you don’t read those things, you really should. They’re gross.). I love the written word, and while I stop down for almost any form of it, I do have a favorite author. This is the person who, while not the first writer I read in life, was the one who “turned the light on” for my literary hunger.
That person is…Stephanie Meyers.
I’m kidding. Really. That’s a joke. Could you imagine? Gen-X Jim reading Stephanie Meyers?
It’s Stephen King.
My go-to writer is Stephen King. He’s the voice of my generation, and his vampires don’t sparkle in the sun. I still don’t understand how the Hades Twilight books made any sense to anyone. I digress…
Anyway, without further ado, I give you the “Top 10 things I’ve learned About Life… Stephen King Edition”
‘Salem’s Lot
“There is no group therapy or psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night … The same lonely battle must be fought night after night, and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the
The Standimaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood.”
King wasn’t really talking about vampires, not the kind with capes, anyway. The “thing under the bed” is whatever keeps you up at 3 a.m. Regret, debt, or that weird noise your house makes when you’re alone. There’s no hotline for that. Childhood fears just grow up, get mortgages and change their names to “responsibility.” Adulthood is basically learning to sleep anyway. King understood that growing up isn’t about slaying the monster; it’s about living with it without losing your sense of humor. The cure isn’t bravery; it’s endurance. My generation figured this out early: no one’s coming to save you. Grab a flashlight, get a helmet, face the noise and hope it’s just the cat.
The Stand
“Show me a man or a woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call society.”
King’s post-apocalyptic epic proved that civilization isn’t built on ideals — it’s built on loneliness. We
crave connection so badly that we’ll invent rules, religions, and group chats just to avoid eating alone. And then we fight about them. Every society, from a plague commune to an HOA board, eventually forms tribes and schedules its own downfall. But King’s line cuts deep; isolation breeds clarity, community breeds meaning. We’d rather suffer together than go quietly alone. My crowd might joke about being antisocial, but even we know no mixtape sounds right without someone to hand it to.
Firestarter
“A little grunt of effort escaped her, and she bit down on her lower lip … No, there was no pain involved. It felt good to shove things, and that was another thing that scared her. Suppose she got to like this dangerous thing?”
Every adult knows that kind of temptation, the rush of control, the sweet burn of power. Charlie’s fire is just a metaphor for anger, ambition or revenge. It feels good to push back. It also scares us how much we like it. Gen-X grew up being told to “calm down” and “get over it.” Then we spent adulthood trying not to explode. Fire is necessary; it lights, cooks, cleanses, but play with it too long and you end up with ashes and a restraining order. Power’s fine. Just remember who’s holding the matches.
On Writing
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two
things … no shortcut.”
Every dreamer wants a hack. King’s answer? Work. No magic spell, no viral trick, no seminar — just repetition and failure, over and over. His advice extends far beyond writing. Whatever your craft is, you don’t earn it with wishful thinking; you earn it with calluses. Gen-X grew up on DIY — garage bands, zines, camcorders. We fixed things with duct tape and profanity. King’s rule still fits: talent is overrated; persistence isn’t. The Muse doesn’t drop by for tea — she shows up for the ones already sweating over the keyboard.
The Green Mile
“Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not. Time takes it all. Time bears it away, and in the end, there is only darkness.”
Time is the real villain — quiet, patient, undefeated. King doesn’t sugarcoat it. We can fight disease and evil, but not the clock. It always wins. Yet there’s hope in that honesty. If time erases everything, then kindness and love become our only rebellion. Every act of grace is sacred precisely because it’s temporary. Gen-X is old enough to feel this now — our parents aging, our playlists turning into “classics.” King reminds us the goal isn’t immortality; it’s decency. Time takes everything, but it can’t take how you treated people along the way.
Bag of Bones
“We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why.”
King’s haunted writer learns that we’re all ghosts in someone else’s story. Every choice echoes, even when we don’t hear it. The smallest kindness can change someone’s trajectory; the smallest cruelty can derail it. Gen-X was taught that influence means fame or followers. King says otherwise. True influence is quieter — and more dangerous. You can save a stranger’s faith in humanity with one decent act. Or shatter it with one careless word. So be mindful of the echoes you leave. The world remembers things you’ve already forgotten.
11/22/63
“You can go back, but you can’t go home.”
Anyone who’s ever gone to a high-school reunion knows this. The cafeteria shrinks, the music’s too loud, and your nostalgia has bad lighting. King’s time traveler learns what every Gen-Xer secretly fears: the past isn’t a refuge — it’s a museum with broken air conditioning. We wear nostalgia like armor, but it’s really just denial with better soundtracks. The world changes, and so do we. You can revisit your youth, but you’ll discover it’s been repainted — and the kid who lived there doesn’t live there anymore. The trick is learning to remember without trying to move back in.
The Outsider
“When you strip away everything — the lies, the science, the stories — what’s left is this: the need to explain what hurts us.”
Humans can’t stand chaos. We invent monsters, gods, and talk radio just to make sense of pain. King’s horror story is really about our obsession with explanation. We don’t want justice — we want closure, even if it’s fictional. Gen-X prides itself on skepticism, but we’re just as guilty. We turn heartbreak into dark humor, trauma into playlists. But King warns: explanations don’t heal. Some wounds don’t mean anything. Some hurt just exists. The hardest act of courage isn’t solving pain — it’s sitting with it until it stops screaming for definition.
IT
“Maybe there aren’t any such things as good friends or bad friends — maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you’re hurt and who help you feel not so lonely.”
Forget the clown. IT is really about friendship. The Losers’ Club survives because they share the burden. Real friendship isn’t tidy; it’s stubborn. Gen-X friendship looks like silence punctuated by loyalty, people you don’t talk to for years but would still bury a body for. King gets it: a true friend doesn’t fix you; they sit with you in the sewer and make you laugh about it. That’s what keeps us human. Not perfection. Not power. Just someone who remembers who you were before the fear set in.
Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption
“Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”
Hope gets a bad rap. It’s painted as naïve, soft, or delusional. King shows it’s the opposite — hope is rebellion. Andy Dufresne’s crawl through a mile of sewage isn’t sentimental; it’s defiant. Gen-X may roll its eyes at optimism, but deep down, we’re believers. We still buy records, vote, and plant gardens, even knowing how the story ends. That’s hope in action — not blind faith, but muscle memory. King reminds us that the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t a cliché. It’s a survival instinct. And no good thing, not courage, not friendship, not decency, ever truly dies.
Parting Shots from your old Uncle Jim
In this, perhaps most of all, I glean the most warning from the scribe King. Most of his work will touch on the themes of oppression in some fashion or another. Whether they are manmade or supernatural, they play to the chorus; if you’re going to beat it, you have to be willing to fight it. Win or lose, and make no mistake, you may lose, but fight you must. Otherwise, you resign yourself to whatever fate the system has chosen for you.
In the world of Stephen King, fighting is physical more often than not. In the real world, we tend to be a bit more mature and realistic. However, the fight is still every bit as important. If we are not willing to step up and participate in that struggle for what is right and what direction we want our country to move in, we lose the justification in arguing about the result.
The upcoming election is a significant one. Make no mistakes about it. Our votes and participation are vital to the nation’s future. We parallel Germany, circa 1933. If you know your pre-WWII history, that’s not a comfortable place to be. Don’t misunderstand, I’m not saying we’re repeating those mistakes, but there are a lot of similarities going on that ought to be paid attention to.
As for me and mine, we’ll see you at the voting booth, and I’ll keep kicking hornets’ nests online…just for giggles.
Until next time…
Be good to each other.
Take care of yourself.
…and don’t be a jerk.
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