Joe Peacock's Blog, page 2

On Men And Misbehavior (and Hulk Hogan)

I need to say a thing about men and bad behavior in 2019.

But first, some stage-setting.

It started oddly enough in a discussion about WWE, and the tribute they did to the recently departed Mean Gene Oakerlund on Monday Night Raw last night. The company carted out the orange-skinned faux-blonde Hulk Hogan to deliver their collective tribute to a man who defined pro-wrestling announcing for many generations of fans, and I, among many, many others, was disgusted.

WWE has a legacy of using terrible faux-pas as an opportunity to either wedge in elements they want to be in the company, or promote themselves. They’ve been teasing him here and there for a while, and finally used someone’s death to get Hulk Hogan back on TV in a way the audience couldn’t argue with… Or so they thought. In 2019, it’s far more harmful than simply “I don’t like this guy, why are they putting him on TV?” It’s already bad enough that in 2018 WWE refused to distance themselves from the Saudi Government after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi — now they’re bringing out a racist who helped a billionaire destroy Gawker to eulogize a legend.

Someone in a discussion thread took issue with a joke made about this, and another person rushed to the defense of the Hulkster, saying basically that if everyone lived with cameras and mics in their face all day every day, there’d be dirt on them too, and that we shouldn’t rush to condemn him, because “everyone’s a dirtbag.”

No.

Last week, it came out that local Atlana artist Squishiepuss (Ray Geiger) is a dirtbag who has not only posted really, really awful things about women, but also has made very untoward advances on women artists under the guise of mentorship and assistance. This is gross, period. But there’s a contengent of men who want to say that those discussions brought forward were private and he was just going with the flow, not knowing he’d be judged in the court of public opinion and etc etc etc…

NO.

In the era of #MeToo and seemingly endless reports of bad behavior by (predominantly) men, it’s useful to have a male perspective on the idea that everyone’s a dirtbag. I’m a male, so hey, I’ll do it:

Assholes are assholes. The secrecy around their asshole behavior only allows for more asshole behavior. The issue is not around the exposure of their bad behavior, its the bad behavior itself.

We live in a time of pervasive surveillence, recording of audio and video 24/7/365, chat logs, text logs, and any number of other ways to capture our daily moments, regardless of behavior. Philosophically, I am NOT a fan of this, but not because I’m afraid of being caught. But that’s another topic. For now, the point is that we live in this reality, here and now, and it’s not going away. This means more and more people will be taken to task for behaviors that are anything less than acceptable.

Some people who acted badly because they weren’t being watched are now being called on it. This doesn’t mean they get forgiven because “they didn’t know they were being watched” – this means “hey future dudes, don’t be shitheads – not only is it just gross, but you are being watched, and will be called in it.”

It’s a shame that some people’s lives and careers have to be burned to the ground to clear the land of their weed-like grossness. The empathic part of me feels the pain of watching your life explode before your eyes. But there’s another side to that coin: that doesn’t mean you didn’t deserve it.

If “being watched” is the only reason you behave, you’re a dick, and I have no sympathy (and this is coming from a guy who has fucked up publically himself).

It’s not enough to be sorry as an individual – we have a society to run here, and that means future racists, sexual misconduct practitioners, and other potential bad actors need to be put on notice. If that notice is written with a paste made with piss and the ashes of those who got burned down for being shitheads, so be it.

And let’s not forget, “I’m sorry” is easy enough to prove by simply not doing the shit ever, ever again. Look at Louis CK: rather than reform, he’s rebranded himself as some edgelord right-wing “edgy” comedian who blah blah blah I can’t even go on, he’s so gross. If I ever meet him again, I’m going to kick him in the nuts and take the assault charge just so he knows at least one man is sick of his shit.

So, for the Louis CK defenders and the Hulkamania defenders and everyone ready to circle the wagons and protect these poor “old school” guys who “didn’t know they were being recorded” or “didn’t know people would come forward” or “serve as examples of overreactions” and whatnot…

No.

It’s not enough to be sorry. It’s not enough to say “you shouldn’t have done that thing” — you shouldn’t even have it in you to do the thing in the first place. And while it’s a weird and wild time in society to watch as old school behaviors get punished, and old-school thinkers (and their ilk) get up in arms about the idea that they “can’t be free to just be men” — you’re free to be men, alright. You’re free to stand up for the weak, you’re free to lift the heavy things others might not be able to, you’re free to speak truth to power, you’re free to be a good example to those around you.

“Locker room talk” is not “being a man” — it’s being gross.Racism is not “being a man” — it’s being gross. Sexual, physical, or verbal misconduct is not “being a man” — it’s being gross.

You don’t get to be gross anymore. And as a man, I’m telling you it’s not only time to grow up and take responsibility for yourself, but to publically stand up and take responsibility for MANHOOD, and erase the toxic elements that have gone unpunished for far too long.

And that includes the Hulkster.

2019

There’s plenty to say about 2018.

From a political standpoint, sociological standpoint, technological standpoint, cultural standpoint… Lots and lots happened. And most of it was covered by people better suited than me. I’m kind of out of the whole analysis game these days. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s that I don’t think I have much in the way of meaningful contribution to the ongoing, constant, mostly noisy conversation going on around any of it. This goes double for anything taking place online.

So I guess my first thought heading into 2019 is one about my relationship with writing.

It’s hard to sit down to write the first piece of a new year and realize not only that it’s been a month since your last piece, but that your last piece meandered all over the place conceptually, just like the one before it, and the one before that. In 2018, and 2017, and 2016, I really didn’t have a point in my blogging. Most of my heart, time, and attention went into Marlowe Kana. I tried to keep up with the pace of today’s author/blogger whatever, and I just don’t have it in me.

I used to have no trouble whatsoever sitting down and hammering out pages of text about whatever topic you could imagine. That habit has changed. Not the one where I WANT to — I find myself tempted often to do hot takes and thinkpieces on whatever insanity is taking place day to day, only for the sun to set and then rise again without having typed a word. Sometimes this is because I suspect that, by tomorrow, things will either change or people will quit caring about it (or both). Did Grover say “fuck?” Is Facebook more eviler than yesterday, or just the same evil and we just know more about it? Is this dystopia or do we have further to go? What company will piss away your private information today? Why haven’t you (or I) lost trust in those companies that have? What even is trust in 2019?

I don’t fucking know anymore. I don’t even trust myself to try writing about any of it. Daily hottakes are done for me. Thinkpieces as well. I. Just. Can’t. And so, the habit of being what I used to understand “a blogger” is gone. I don’t have the rhythm, and I certainly don’t have the interest. But I do have the desire to write more this year on this site. And if I’m discounting hottakes and thinkpieces, that pretty much leaves writing about things I’ve learned some things about — mostly writing fiction, but also cigars and pro wrestling — and then there’s my feelings.

I’m just telling you now, my blog is going to suck in 2019 if you’re not into learning about cyberpunk, writing fiction, cigars, pro wrestling, or my feelings. Or Akira, which is my second thought about 2019.

In 2019, I seek to rediscover Akira purely from a fan perspective.

My relationship with the film Akira is long and storied. If you aren’t familiar with the long stories, that’s fine, I can summarize: From 1991 until now, I have collected cels, backgrounds, and other production art used in the making of the film Akira. From 2009 until 2016, I toured around the country and the world showing this art for free, because I loved the film so much and felt that fans who wanted to see the building blocks should be able to do so freely.

Unrelated but related, in 2011, I found myself in the hospital after a breakdown, and in 2012 my marriage ended after discovering some things I never imagined could happen, and in 2013 I lost my house, my business, and virtually everything I owned except the art, some pieces of which I had to sell to eat and pay rent. Throughout all of those years, Art of Akira was what kept me energized and sane, and provided major highlights during some dark times — until the money ran out.

In 2014, I got back on my feet and was able to do a few Akira shows, in 2015 I paid off almost all of my debt and did a few more, in 2016 I did some screenwriting and started writing Marlowe Kana as a way to continue my passion of writing without making my life or myself the subject of it all, and did one Akira show. and in 2017, I published 3 books, produced a soundtrack, and took a break from Akira related anything. 2018 was the 30th anniversary of the film, and I did exactly nothing for it.

It’s 2019, the year Akira takes place. And boy, do I have a lot of feelings swirling in me just thinking about it.

As a fan, it’s exciting to actually live the year I’ve seen in the opening title sequence of a movie I’ve watched thousands of times, actually come to fruition. When I was 12 years old seeing the film for the first time, I couldn’t conceptualize being 42, much less how 2019 really would be. And now, here I am, in the year that Akira takes place, turning 42 years old — the age that is the answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything… It’s kinda a geeky singularity.

I feel that something Akira related should happen in 2019. And being the guy responsible for Art of Akira for so long, I feel like I have the capacity to do something pretty special.

But then, there’s the memories. And the cost associated. And the pure drain on my system trying to tour the globe again. I have talked with a few friends about the situation, sometimes with tears streaking down my face — it’s that big a deal to me. I want to do something for 2019, something meaningful that contributes to the community and helps tell the story of Akira to any and all who want to share in it. But I also just don’t have it in me anymore, financially, spiritually, or emotionally to relive some of the most deeply affecting years of my life.

And so I’m not going to. I’m going to do something different.

I’ve partnered with my good friend Neil Leslie, who is a very high-end Akira collector. Together, we’re reestablishing The Art of Akira as an online archive of all of the art we own, along with any and all contributions from the cel collecting community who would like to contribute scans and photos of their pieces.

The project is not quite in its infancy, but not quite ready to walk yet. We are working out the details now. We hope to launch very soon, starting with scans we’ve already taken of pieces in our collection, and producing pieces that dive into the film, or individual scenes, or the cultural impact, hopefully weekly.

This project won’t end in 2019, it will continue on until we’ve succeeded in archiving the entire collection (or as much of it as possible). And we will need help, lots of it. What that help will be, and how those interested can contribute, I don’t quite know yet. I will absolutely make sure to let anyone interested know when it’s time. But for now, just know: 2019 will see the return of the Art of Akira Exhibit, online, for free, for life.

I think this will be the healthiest, best way for me to continue my mission to preserve the art that created the finest animated film ever made, without destroying my wallet, my sanity, or my schedule for the next thing:

In 2019, I will publish Volumes 4, 5, and 6 of Marlowe Kana.

God bless my Patreon supporters. You guys are amazingly patient and supportive. I have spent the past 7 months since launching my Patreon paying my rent while writing my novel series because of you, and the schedule has slipped well past the intended deadline of January April June October December 31.

But book 4 is in my editor’s hands, and has received LOTS of positive feedback from the beta reading team that has read it. This is the 2nd major draft. The first, I can be honest, is terrible. Maybe not quite as terrible as the first draft of book 1, but… Yeah. I completely abandoned every lesson I learned while writing it. And I want to go into that a little here, because it’s interesting (at least to me) how quickly one can lose sight of what they’ve learned.

In 2016, I produced the first draft of Marlowe Kana Volume 1. I shared it with some friends whom I trusted to be honest. They were. They said it sucked.

Not because it wasn’t what they want, or outside the bounds of their chosen genres, but because there was no structure. There was no plot progression. There was no character development. It was wish fulfillment, Mary Sue, And-then-ism throughout. It had clever turns of phrase and a few cool ideas, but by and large, it was the byproduct of an author who spent 15 years writing funny embellished stories about himself trying to write dystopian science fiction, probably one of the hardest genres to not suck at.

I totally sucked at it, and they were good enough friends to tell me how and why. I was assigned reading. I was given videos to watch. I was coached and assisted by some astoundingly talented writers and an editor who had very little patience for those who didn’t put in the effort, and I put in the effort. The result was a completely paved over story that had real structure. There were acts. There was plot progression. The characters had body and an arc. There was consequence to action. The storytelling was fluid.

I don’t mind saying that Book 1 is a good book.

I followed the same path for Book 2 and Book 3, and I am confident in saying, they get better as they go along — and they’re GOOD. I will also say outright that Book 3 of Marlowe Kana is the best book I’ve ever published in my career, and I’m VERY proud of all 3 so far.

So what went wrong with 4? Simply: I thought I was better than the process.

Marlowe Kana is intended to be 9 volumes, and at the end, it will be collected into one book called Marlowe Kana. The 9 individual volumes will still be on the market, but the book will exist as one collected novel. So naturally, it breaks down as a 3 act novel, with each of those acts consisting of 3 acts themselves. When I wrote all this out, I had all the “big points” covered. What was going to happen, and when, and where, were all lined up, and then I started writing. And writing. And writing. And in the midst of writing book 2 and book 3, I took some turns and followed some paths that resulted in a MUCH BETTER storyline than the one I had planned.

When I started on book 4, I didn’t follow the process nearly as strictly. This is for a few reasons: first, I quit my day job to write, and second, I got tempted by the prospect of an animated series based on the books. I got super distracted. I broke one of my big rules: Anyone can take Marlowe Kana and adapt it to a new form. Musicians can make a soundtrack (and have, and are). Voice talent can make an audiobook. Artists can draw a graphic novel. But I am the only one who can write these books, and if anything else is going to exist beyond them, I need to do my job.

I got pulled into the process of pitching something that ultimately never landed, and it threw me off course. This is nobody’s fault but mine. I don’t have regrets – after all, some AMAZING art by Meghan Hetrick and Casey Edwards came out of it, and you’ll get to see that when the Art of Marlowe Kana comes out this year. But I did neglect my writing timeline, and I had all these Patreon folks supporting me… I felt like, in the absence of a show (which people could reasonably understand that the writing was delayed for), and since the book was supposed to be out in spring, I had to spring HARD to get it done and keep people from being disappointed.

The result was, as I said, not very good. It wasn’t SHIT, but it wasn’t very good. I didn’t do the work I needed to do and it showed. Thankfully, only a very few people have read that version, but those who did are the exact same ones who gave me those real-friend moments of putting their arm around me and saying “Let’s talk for a minute…”

I’m a lucky man. I have amazing friends and amazingly talented people in my corner, and those who are supporting my efforts to write full time are patient and understanding and care enough about the work to keep me going while I figure all this out. And one of the key things I figured out is that my job is to write these books, first and foremost. I may have talents in other areas, but I MUST write these books, following the process, no matter how arduous or how much I think I have it in my head.

And that’s what I’ve done. I completely rewrote Volume 4, and the new draft is so so so much better. I think ultimately, people would be far more disappointed in the first Book 4, than they are waiting for this version.

Is it GOOD? I don’t know. That’s for you to decide. There’s still work to do, as my editor is finishing final edits this week and I need to go through and clean up the copy and fix all the errors and such. But I can tell you that I am as proud of this book as I am of the other 3, and as I sit here typing this, I think that Book 4 is the best in the series so far.

It didn’t help that I hurt my back during the rewrite, which leads me to another thought:

I’m probably not going to get “back in shape” in 2019, not like I was. And that’s a GOOD thing.

I probably won’t ever be in the shape I was in during Crossfit in 2013-2015. (or, during Crossfit before that, or football before that, or any other time in my life). And that’s fine by me. That whole time was fueled by fury, and I literally slept in my gym some nights because I was literally homeless. I don’t want to ever be in that situation again, so I’ll probably never be in that shape again. Plus, I fucking love food and cigars and scotch. I don’t really care about how many pullups I can do faster than some other dude. I just don’t.

I gained about 50 lbs from 2015 until now. I lost almost 30 lbs from Sept 1 until October 30 of 2018, and was feeling fantastic, and then I herniated a disc on a really heavy deadlift. Since that time, through Thanksgiving and Christmas eating, I’ve gained back 5 lbs. This is attributable to eating smarter, even if I indulge, and DDP Yoga, which I love and recommend to everyone ever.

The days of mega-heavy deadlifting and squatting and bench pressing are probably over for good. I just don’t care. Who am I impressing? I don’t make money from my body. I don’t play football anymore. I don’t compete in crossfit competitions. I don’t hang out with people for whom my “Fran” time matters. So what, exactly, is the point of putting 500+ lbs on a bar and moving it with my back and legs ever again, when I can be in exactly as good of shape doing lighter weights more times, more safely, and not ending up in a back brace because I’m A FUCKING FORTY TWO YEAR OLD SCIENCE FICTION WRITER AND WHO CARES WHAT I SQUAT.

I was the last one who did. And now I don’t. The freedom from the prison that was impressing my younger self is amazing, even if it hurt breaking free from it. And I think that surmises the rest of what I think for 2019:

In 2019, the focus for me is going to be on my work, my girlfriend, my dogs, my cats, and my home.

It has been for a few years now. That’s why I haven’t been blogging regularly, and that’s why I don’t read anything on Facebook and I flat out refuse to use Twitter. That’s why my Instagram is pretty boring. I don’t feel the need to get charged up and angry over jihad-du-jour. I don’t need the clicks. I don’t need the likes. I don’t need the favs. I don’t even really need huge book sales and promotion, although that would be nice. I make enough money from book sales and my patreon to cover the rent — that’s a HUGE accomplishment. I take on small web jobs to cover the rest.

Following the wrong path and chasing an animated show based on Marlowe Kana caused some stress in my home. I had to be talked down a few times by my girlfriend and best friend, Meghan, who is a saint and I adore her. Thinking about touring Akira art again caused stress in my household. Hurting my back caused stress in my household. Worrying about my blog and what to write and how to market my books and all the rest… You get the point.

In 2019, I plan to get up, write on my books, scan some Akira art, write (or maybe even video!) a bit about Akira, contribute to the production of the Marlowe Kana Soundtracks and Audiobooks, and otherwise just do the things that make me happy, healthy, and sane. I will be blogging about these things. I will be proud of these things, and I will share these things with you. I hope you’ll enjoy them, and maybe even share them with others.

Mostly, I think 2019 will be a year of deep consideration, objective analysis, and positivity — because it has to be.

2018, objectively, sucked. Politically, emotionally, physically, financially, and in other areas, for A LOT OF PEOPLE. And yet, somehow, I still managed to survive quitting my job, hurting my back, being broke, and getting distracted by shiny things.

This is a good sign that, with focus and proper prioritization, 2019 can be pretty fucking fantastic. It is, after all, the year several of my favorite movies takes place, and is an exciting time to live in from a cyberpunk perspective. I plan to immerse myself deeply in this concept — not embrace the dystopian bullshit like social networks, in-home surveillance devices masquerading as assistants, indulging in political mind-washing, and other things. But from the abstract, observing and considering the time we live in and its impact on us, both through the lens of a 1988 movie about 2019, and through a novel series I’m writing taking place in 2096 and looking back at the real-life events of 2019.

I’m going to be considering the year I am actively living in this year, via two of my greatest passions on earth: Akira and Marlowe Kana. I hope to compare what is going on this year to the predictions made in Akira, and analyze what is going on this year through the future-forecasting I do in Marlowe Kana. And I look forward to sharing all of what I discover with you.

Budget Air Travel

 

Flying a budget airline will wake you up to almost every myth about modern middle class life.

(I wrote this post in parts and pieces on my phone during a trip to New York this past weekend, and have since edited it so it actually makes sense instead of simply being shorthand “Peacockese”.)

Here I sit on a no frills airliner with no First Class, no Business Class, no passenger status that is delineated by labeling you with arbitrary terms like “Platinum” or “Diamond” or some other precious metal or stone. It’s just me and 150 people just like me who all paid less than $200 to fly to New York from Atlanta.

I’m a full-time writer now, which means I’m also full-time broke. And as such, when I need to head to another place that’s farther than a six hour drive, I’m immediately attracted to the budget air carriers like Spirit, JetBlue, and Southwest. These carriers have a few things in common: they’re cheap, they’re extremely charge-happy if you choose to upgrade literally anything including your level of thirst (so you’re inclined to just stick it out), and they know exactly who their customers are and treat them all with respect. 

On its face, There’s nothing truly joyful about being a passenger in an aircraft. You are sitting for hours at a time in a seat designed to be exactly enough space to keep your limbs from developing neuropathy, but no larger. The food is terrible. Self medicating with alcohol costs 4-8x what it would in a bar, which itself costs 4-8x what it does at home. And, you’re experiencing all of this with between 50 to 200 people who are just as miserable as you are.

But the industry has found creative ways to make you feel less shitty about being stuck in a tub in the sky. Things like classism, “at least it’s not’s” and situational spending. And while all of these things — again on their face — are terrible themselves, they’re marginal upgrades from the default, which somehow stimulates dopamine and makes you feel like you’re not only going to get through the experience of heading where you’re heading, you’re going to get there in style. 

That is, you’re going to get there somehow better than the next person. 

When you travel you’re renting space on some company’s tub. You pay more, you rent a “better” space. I am 6′ 3″ and depending on how many deadlines I have, somewhere between 275lbs and 300lbs. I’ve been this way my whole life. I also travelled a lot in my career(s) between writing books and writing code, and I always paid the premium for a more comfortable seat whenever possible. 

I sit here in this budget seat in the middle of the plane, and I can’t imagine why. It’s cramped, sure. It’s a tin can in the sky. It gets me from here to there in a few hours. Cramped, I can live with. And having lived with it a few times this year, I realize I was never buying “more leg room” or “more comfortable seats” — I was buying a marginal upgrade in social status for a few hours to make myself feel less like cattle and more human. 

But is it really better? Is the Comfort Plus upgrade really a step up, or is it just an identity signal that says “I have an income that allows me to toss $19-79 bucks at the problem of feeling like one of the cattle, so I can feel better for 2 hours and carry that with me the rest of my trip?”

If the plane goes down, do the Comfort Plus people get their first pick of the caves we all huddle in while we wait to be rescued? And will any of us get to talk to the first class? Will we be the hunters and gatherers for the behind the curtain caste?

First Class has always been insane to me. Paying three to four times more for a seat behind a curtain where you get the premium level of food and champagne I get at Nana’s Chicken and Waffles (real place, btw) at Sunday Brunch for $24.95 doesn’t really make sense to me, especially when we’re going to be back on the ground by the time I finish reading a book. It feels silly. 

I think back to former rants on airlines and flying and I’m struck with just how situational all of my frustrations really are. Right now, I just can’t care about things like overhead baggage space or what someone eats on the airplane. We are all here on this budget airline, trying to get from here to there as cheaply as possible.

That’s what airlines have done to us over the years. They convinced us in the 50’s and 60’s that air travel was luxurious at all times, with the best food and the most courteous staff, to try to coax bucks out of middle class pockets. And then, they held that lofty understanding of luxury over us as they sold us “budget” access and treated us terribly until we paid a price above a certain line to be treated the way they promised they’d treat us, all those years ago. 

This concept is not restricted to air travel, however. This is the entirety of the middle class marketing machine, in every aspect of our lives. Aspirational messaging directed to milking extra nickels and dimes out of us for the appearance of being smarter than the average consumer, with an income that affords us the very best of the lowest tier of goods available. More essential reading on this concept can be found in the incredible breakdown of Premium Mediocre by Venkatesh Rao and an experiment by Rebecca Jennings on using the best stuff marketed to millennials for a week. 

 •     •     •

I just had a lovely conversation with Kathy and Rick, grandparents taking their son to New York for the first time. They’re on fixed incomes and typically take driving trips to locales around southern Georgia, but thanks to budget airlines they can afford to take a big trip to the Big Apple. They have travelled most of their lives and are thankful for this airline and others like it. It opens the doors to cities and places they couldn’t afford to visit just s few years ago. The difference of $150 a ticket adds up when it’s not just you. For three people, that’s 2 nights extra hotel in another city – in other words, a full weekend in a place you’d like to see, all for the sacrifice of not having a can of Diet Coke given to you for “free”.

I realize this rant reads like any number of seminal “American”  pieces over the years about the joys of taking Amtrak or Greyhound and how getting in touch with the “salt of the earth” people made the writer a whole person, and that’s fine. That’s what this is, honestly. I’m 41 and I’m only now starting to figure out just how much of my life was spent believing bullshit, whether someone else’s or my own.  

I think it’s a symptom of middle age. My father once said something to me that I’ve since heard put more eloquently: “In your 20’s, you’re always worried about what people think of you. In your 30’s, you decide you don’t care what other people think of you and start doing your own thing. And in your 40’s, you finally realize: they were never thinking of you in the first place.” 

I cannot tell you how much of a relief that last bit has been for me. Scary, yes. For someone whose career has always been dependent on how many people are paying attention to him at any given moment, that sentiment is as close to death as one can get. But as time goes forward and I move from blogging to writing books, I also move from living in public to a much more private understanding who I really am. And among other things, I’ve settled on the fact that I’m a guy who hates flying, but hates bullshit even more, and will likely fly Spirit or JetBlue or Southwest for the remainder of my days — if I even fly at all. 

This, I feel, is a natural evolution that comes from the cessation of watching television, reading magazines, browsing commercial news sites, and otherwise disconnecting from the omniculture status quo of being told “Here’s where you fit in.” And I’m hardly alone.

The reason advertising companies (and, be it known that Google is, in fact, an advertising company first) are so keen on slurping up every ounce of available data on you is because they’ve run out of ways to convince you they know best. We as a society have been turning away from the apparatus that tells us what to see, how to think, who we should know, and how to feel about ourselves. That’s not to say they haven’t found ways to succeed; quite the opposite. That’s why their methods have become spurious and nefarious. They need to know more about you, because they need to find ways to involve themselves in your life, because you’ve stopped listening when they speak. 

All of this from flying to New York for $165 round trip last week… I know, right? Except, it is exactly the kind of microcosm that shines a light on the greater whole. When you’re on a tin can in the sky with zero options available to put yourself ahead of someone else, you accept it. You quit looking sideways at the guy who packed a fried chicken lunch or the parents with the kid who is overcurious. You can’t escape into wifi to take sly pictures of people less fortunate than you to embarrass them on Instagram or Facebook for likes. There’s no one to look down your nose at, because you’re all at eye-level with each other.

You just kind of accept “this sucks, might as well disappear into my headphones and a book.” Or, talk to someone new. It’s easier in this situation, because there’s no weird social compensation in exchange for money that’s being actively advertised by the entity you’re trusting to get you from here to there. 

And when you get off the plane, even if for a brief moment, there’s this glaring realization of all the ways the airlines and the airport and the companies affiliated with either are using the situation to their advantage. Red Bull is six dollars a can. Coffee is four dollars a cup. Headphones in the Best Buy vending machine are marked up 20%. All of this was invisible when you arrived at your airport, and is especially invisible if your flight is delayed or you’re stuck. Because at that point, you’re not paying a premium, you’re paying a misery tax — one you’re fine with paying if the misery is somehow lessened. 

It doesn’t stop at the airport. And the companies doing it aren’t ignorant to it. They all know exactly how to push your button in every situation you’re in, because they have precise data on exactly how you behave in those situations. 

I don’t really have a conclusion here, because after all, we’re all still alive and living in this reality we’ve come to accept as real somehow. I think the conclusion is somewhere far off, after those who see this have tried rebelling, and those who don’t see it (or see it and don’t care) have decided apathy is the better course, and the voices of dissent slowly fade off. 

But anyway, New York was great. I got a beautiful picture of the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center! Wanna see? 

 

Pain, Strength, and Growing Up

I hurt my back on a very heavy deadlift three weeks ago.

I put a large amount of weight on the bar — not quite the max I did in my athletic prime, but a respectable number and the most I’ve done in five years. The amount of weight was a compromise between my 21 year old self yelling at my 41 year old self to “quit being such a wuss and see where I’m really at.” I knew I wasn’t at my height, but I also knew the last few months of hard work had cultivated a strength I haven’t had in a few years. My 41 year old self momentarily questioned the wisdom of jumping up fifty pounds from a workout set to a “max” set, but my 21 year old self was relentless.

Mind you, there was no one else in the room. No streaming cameras. No audience of any sort. Just me and my ego. And that was the problem.

I chalked up my hands. I bent over and grasped the bar. I rolled the assembly toward me and let it stop against my shins. I lowered my butt, loaded my hamstrings, inhaled deeply, and pulled from my legs, not my back. It wasn’t budging. At least, not how I wanted it to. So I did a stupid, stupid, stupid, STUPID thing: I “borrowed” from my back to get the weight off the ground, knowing I could immediately revert to legs to keep it going.

Have you ever “heard” a sound in your body that no one else can hear, like your jaw popping or a clicking in your neck or something? Well, I heard, in my bones, a sound that sounds like squeezing Nickelodeon Gak through a keyhole at the very base of my back. It didn’t hurt (at the time). It just felt “squishy” and sounded queasy and I felt a presence in the middle of my lower back that wasn’t there before. Not quite pain, but not okay.

The weight went up. I got it waist high. I held it for a second, and was able to satisfy the requirements for a “legit lift.” I then dropped it. My legs wobbled. My back felt weak. I knew I fucked up. I can’t tell you exactly how I knew, except to say that there was a small black hole of feeling in my spine where there shouldn’t have been.

Turns out, I herniated a disc between my L5 and S1 vertebrae. And I’ve spent the last three weeks paying for it.

Fuck, man.

From all I’ve read and through some experience, there’s a hell one goes through in mid-life called a “crisis” and I’m not 100% ready to admit I’m doing that. But I will say that my younger, more athletic, more adaptable, more conditioned self is STILL saying things in my brain like “fight through the pain” or “give yourself some time and you’ll be back at it.” And the front parts of my brain believe them. But somewhere – and it changes places each time – a whisper says “no. You won’t. And if you’re at all smart, you won’t be ever again.”

I have to side with the whisper, deep in my heart. I hate admitting it. All my life, I’ve been “the big guy.” Along with that comes an identity of being “the strong guy.” And I will tell you that, even right now in a diminished state, I can still move heavy things enough times across enough distance that anyone with a matrix detailing body mass to strength would say “yeah, that dude’s strong.”

But the days of collecting numbers to prove it are over, for me. I just can’t justify it anymore.

I’m not making money on my body. In fact, as I sit here writing this, I’ve been losing money because of my body. I’ve been unable to concentrate for long periods of time due to pain. I have been unable to invest myself fully in to finishing the book I desperately need to finish to get paid enough to keep food on the table and a roof over my head. Thankfully, my Patrons and supporters are understanding and know the deal. And also fortunately, this time of sitting upright in a brace and visiting the chiropractor has given me a chance to think a lot on the story and retell some parts I wasn’t quite happy with, in fits and starts. But the point is, my ego cost me time and money and happiness because of an arbitrary measure of strength: a “max rep” weight that no human being really has any need to achieve if they’re not actively being paid to do so.

This is an entirely new wrinkle in my brain. It’s hard to explain the dichotomy between 41 years and 11 months of thinking about “strength” in terms of “mass across distance”, and one month of thinking of strength in terms of acceptance of the inevitability of the decay of my physical human body. It’s a real thing to come to terms with the fact that your body is incapable of what it used to be capable of, just because you’re old. And you’re not getting any younger.

Now, to put some perspective into play: I’m not broken. I have a slightly herniated (not ruptured) disc from attempting to lift a weight that I had no business lifting for any practical reason than to be able to say I did. And I have healed to the point that I can sit here and type all this out without my back brace, and I’ve only needed to stretch once. I will recover. This is not the end of all things. It’s a minor hiccup in a fitness path of a middle aged man coming to terms with the state of his body in the modern era.

But, there’s a reality to the nature of “ego lifting” that has dominated my mindset most of my days, that I have to come to terms with. I’ve often coached and encouraged others to “forget the numbers and focus on being fit” while fully knowing I myself had an obsession with charts and being at the top of them.

But to what end?

And this question can be extrapolated into many other areas of my life. I can spend years noodling on one chapter of my book to make it “perfect” – but to what end? I can obsess over the exact correct way to display a piece of Akira art – but to what end?

Chasing perfection is admirable as a member of an audience, but I hardly know the difference between someone else’s “good enough” and “perfection.” And being honest, I also don’t really care. If I enjoyed a performance, or a piece of writing, or a piece of art, that’s the end of that story for me. I sometimes dig into what made me enjoy a work, and I sometimes dive SUPER deep (as in the case of Akira, for instance) and deeply analyze what I have considered a masterwork, to try to figure out why.

But it always comes down to one very specific thing: it was the full effort of the creator on display. That doesn’t mean “perfect” — that means they put themselves fully into it, and it resonated with me. The end.

When I watch an olympic lifter moving insane amounts of weight from the ground over their head, the only thing that gives me context as to the exact amount of weight they’re lifting is the amount of weight everyone else is lifting. Without the number, just knowing “that bar is filled with heavy shit, and they executed a movement which took it from the ground to over their head and it was amazing” is enough, isn’t it?

I’m not in competition with anyone, for anything, at all anymore. Except me. And, as those who have read me for the past twenty years can attest, I can be an asshole sometimes… Especially to myself.

This injury has been a fine reminder that maybe I need to be a bit kinder to myself, moment by moment, so that I don’t wreck many future moments by overstressing a single one…. Especially one so inconsequential as “how much can I deadlift today, in the privacy of my own garage, just to prove I can?”

There’s pushing to the limits, then there’s just plain showing off. Exercising to just beyond tolerance to build strength is one thing. Putting more weight on a bar than I was planning to for a day just to prove to a younger, stupider, more-assholish version of myself that I still can? That was a mistake.

Wanting to make a chapter connect well to other chapters and tell an amazing moment of a story is admirable. Stalling out for a month because I can’t find a way, that day, to be as good as some other author was at doing something similar? That’s a mistake.

Accepting that I have limits is easy. Accepting that there are many, many ways to extend beyond those limits besides brute force? That’s been an education. I’ve had a lot of time lately to think on the nature of that education, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that there are no limits which include brutality that I care to test anymore. These range from lifting huge weight, to telling someone the “brutal” truth, to every other thing in my life.

I’ve learned, through many events in my life, that love and compassion are strength. The hardest part has been applying that to myself. I’ve slowly learned these techniques and adopted them in my life, and the next great chasm I’ve had to leap has been in my fitness. I’ve made my body do some insane shit throughout my life, from willingly hurtling my head into the body of another large person across from me in football, to out-maneuvering large people in wrestling and judo, to pushing my big frame across distance at speed with weights over my head in Crossfit, to plunging down a bumpy mountainside on a bike, and many other silly things inbetween. I can still have fun with those things, sure. But those activities, at this point in my life, aren’t paying my bills. They’re not even really making me happy, outside of the simple thrill of movement for fun.

It’s one of, if not the last vestige of an old life I learned to live. I have already proven what I need to to myself. No one else is really watching, and those who do, don’t care how much I deadlift. They only care that it’s been hard to see me try to get out of a chair or out of bed (or, back into those things at night). They only care that I’ve not been able to meet for coffee or lunch the past few weeks. They only care that I haven’t been able to concentrate on writing or having much fun the past few weeks.

The world I’ve built for myself in this iteration of my life has an entirely different perspective on me than the one that made me lift insane amounts of weight, or run long distances, or throw people for fun and profit. My childhood was bad. My teenage years were spent impressing the wrong people. My young adult life was spent trying to convince my friends of how great I am, despite my flaws, so please don’t leave. All the while, the one guy who I really should have been working to make happy was always looking outward, at everyone else, to validate him through paychecks, applause, and “loyalty.” In a weird way, this manifests itself in deadlifting a lot, and bench pressing a lot, and running faster and farther, and other externally validating things.

I just don’t need it anymore.

 

The Tetris Effect Effect

I have only ever cried about two video games in my entire life.

The first was when I was eleven years old.  I had mowed lawns and pulled weeds and cleared junk out of seventeen neighbors’ yards over the course of three months in the heat of a Georgia summer in 1989, to earn enough money to buy my first ever Nintendo Entertainment System. It came with the Duck Hunt / Super Mario Brothers combo cartridge, two controllers, and a light zapper. My father made a bargain with me: if I earned half the money, he’d pay the other half. I did my part, he did his part, and when the clerk at Toys R’ Us pulled that glorious black and red and star-speckled box from the cage behind the counter and handed it to me, I cried. I was a poor kid. We had nothing growing up, aside from whatever few Star Wars or He-Man or Transformers toys my mom could afford on her single mother salary at birthdays and Christmas. Sometimes, we had less than nothing and had to have assistance for food and a place to live, so to have the game system every kid in my new school had and couldn’t stop talking about was more than just video entertainment. It was arriving. It was belonging.  In short,

IT.

WAS.

EVERYTHING.

We got home and I rushed to set it up. We plugged in the cables and turned it on and the menu screen appeared with Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt and my little eleven year old heart leapt out of my chest and I shed a tear of joy (so technically, the first time I cried about a video game was actually crying about the menu screen for two different games, but for the purposes of making the point I want to make, we’re just going to call it one instance and leave it at that. I hope that’s cool.) For the final glorious week before school started that year, I sat on the edge of my bed from wake until sleep playing Super Mario Brothers, and occasionally playing Duck Hunt with my sister (since we could pass the zapper back and forth).

Never in the history of ever did my whole family gather around a small TV on a folding table in the middle of a purple room, but it was certainly fun nonetheless.

 

I didn’t get any other games until that Christmas, which were The Legend of Zelda and Tetris. All I wanted was Zelda. It’s the only thing I put on my list. It’s the only thing I talked about for months. To get it was amazing, but I didn’t cry. Nor did I cry when I got an additional game, which was Tetris. In fact, I didn’t even pop Tetris in on Christmas Day. It was a few days later, after needing a break from Zelda, that I popped it in.

I liked it fine at the time. In that moment, during that week between Christmas and New Years, I thought it was a fun distraction when I wasn’t trying to defeat Gannondorf and rescue Princess Zelda. The music played and the blocks fell and being 11 years old, my patience in trying to persist past the increasing speed at which these insufferable blocks would pile up and end my game was so low as to be non-existent. I would make it to about level six and die like clockwork. It was overwhelming and I didn’t care enough to work past it, because there were princesses to rescue.

When I beat Zelda almost a month later, I was so depleted I couldn’t imagine starting back over. Super Mario Brothers had grown a bit stale, and I wasn’t ready to cycle back to it yet. And something about not being able to get very far in the only remaining video game in my library bugged me.

Now, I like to think I’ve always been a very stubborn, heads-down, push-through-it kinda guy, but that’s not true. I don’t think any eleven year old is. That’s a learned trait, and one that my father instilled in me as I grew up with him through sports, hard work, discipline, and the occasional reminder when I would get in trouble (usually the legal kind) that God is to be feared, and near as I was concerned, he might as well be God. So, memories being what they are, I think in shades of stubbornness and determination and will. But the truth is, I was a terrible mix of bored and annoyed. Tetris was not something I cared much about, but needing a game to play before the proliferation of cheap video game rental places, I turned to Tetris. The weekend of my birthday in 1990, I decided I was going to try to get past speed level 6 of Tetris.

The most American a Russian game has ever looked

I cannot tell you specifically what it was that happened, but something certainly happened. It wasn’t magical. There wasn’t an emotional response. It was fun, yes, but also something else. A challenge, maybe? But I didn’t feel challenged per se — I felt motivated. I felt encouraged. There was always something about the next level that felt just enough out of reach to be uncomfortable, but not so far that I couldn’t stretch to reach it. And when I did, I always felt good. I would play it after school and as a “warm up” before other games. When the Super Nintendo came out, there wasn’t really a Tetris for it, so when I eventually got one, I kept my NES nearby so I could play Tetris. I got a GameBoy in a trade from a kid at school for some porn magazines and cigarettes (the immigrants who owned the Texaco station at the entrance of our neighborhood were quite liberal with my friends and I, and kept us in wares to peddle… Until we eventually got ratted out of course). I played Tetris on that thing whenever I could. When I eventually got my first computer, one of the first games I installed was Tetris.

As the 90’s passed into the new millennium, Tetris began taking on these weird forms. People thought they could improve it. I thought Tetris Sphere was kinda cool, but by and large, literally any version of Tetris that wasn’t just playing Tetris was meh.

And then, it was announced that Tetsuya Mizuguchi, the creator of Lumines and Fez was working on a VR version of what could be considered the most consistent video game presence in my life, Tetris. My interest was piqued. Lumines was an AMAZING experience of combining puzzle gaming with music and visuals to create something greater than the sum of its parts, and Fez was the first puzzle game besides Tetris that I felt stuck to the “simple and addictive” formula in the same way that Tetris had. But, of course, neither is Tetris. Tetris is Tetris. All other puzzle games are “fun” or “cool” or “challenging” but Tetris? Tetris is so much more than those things combined. It’s special.

And that is why I am writing this this morning. Last night, I fired up Tetris Effect after months of eager anticipation. And I was overwhelmed with emotion.

The menu screen is beautiful and transcendent right off the bat. The experience asks you to start in a mode called “Journey” and the very first level features these whales and sea creatures floating about, comprised of small lit dots on a black background. Etherial music whispers at you as you  begin the game. Each move adds a small “note” that sounds like someone humming — it’s not obnoxious in the slightest. In fact, it feels as if you’re a part of the composition as you create another voice in the ensemble. As you clear blocks, the music picks up. After a few rows, the bass line pops in, but not jarringly — very much on measure, as if it was written in the sheet music. And then, after you’re nice and absorbed into the experience, the vocals start.

“Every passing day, the winds blowing stronger…”

You’re tempted to think “Why does a Tetris game have lyrics??” But you actively tell yourself you don’t need to worry about it. It feels right.

“They light the way to keep the reminder…”

The screen is gently pulsing, but not in a way thats distracting. It’s additive. It’s multiplicative. The blocks falling, the backgrounds and effects, the music, the rhythm…

Then, a brilliant flash of soft warm light and gentle rainbow effects glow and the singer enters the refrain:

I’m yours forever

There is no end in sight for us,

Nothing could pressure

The kind of strength inside our hearts

It’s all connected

We’re all together in this life

Don’t you forget it

We’re all connected in this…

 

…And for the second time in my life, I cried about a video game. 

Throughout my 30 years as a video game enthusiast, there have been plenty very emotional reactions to moments: Sephirtoth killing Aeris. John Marston being gunned down in Blackwater. Every single loss in a Tekken match. But there’s emotional responses, and then there’s emotional responses, and Tetris Effect brought about a tremendous emotional response. I can’t explain it. It’s tempting to connect it with my personal connection to Tetris, and of course that plays a part, but that’s not the whole of it. There is something about THIS version of this game… THIS experience…

It’s a masterwork. Plain and simple.

This doesn’t even begin to capture what this game is like.

There’s a lot more I want to say about this game. The history of how Alexey Pajitnov, creator of Tetris while a state-sponsored programmer for the former Soviet Union’s ELORG branch, made exactly zero dollars and zero cents on his creation until nearly thirty years after it was created… How the name Tetris Effect is actually the term neurologists came up with after years of research to describe the effect playing Tetris had on the minds of Alzheimer’s patients, people with brain damage, and PTSD victims… How the NES version of Tetris is still the gold standard for tournament play almost thirty years after its release (despite being the 20th documented version of the game), and how a teenager new to Tetris unseated a decade-long titleholder… But all that is out there. I encourage you to read up on it and learn all you can about this marvel of our modern age. It’s a game made by a guy who just wanted to make a fun game, with absolutely NO financial expectation or incentive, and how forty years after its creation it has gone on to legendary status as not only the best selling game of all time, but as a tool for people with emotional and physical damage to their minds to cope with and even move past trauma… It’s a testament to what happens when you make something for the art, and not for the commerce. By honestly and openly pouring yourself into a creation without any expectation of outcome, just to do it… You never know where it will take you.

I wish very deeply I was capable of that. There are times I can transcend the idea of reaction or response or commerce and just write something, and I’m always happiest with things I make in that state. But I’m also very keenly aware of myself and I know that, due to my past, where I grew up, and my own personality that I’m likely never to enter a permanent state of detachment from commercialism or validation or other mind traps.

…Except when I play Tetris. And that’s why I wanted to share this this morning. For the first time in a very, very long time, I cried about a video game because the experience itself was so moving, and so powerful, and so deeply connected, I literally felt detached from our current times and all the strife therein. I stared at the “community” screen with the little fishy avatars swimming around a massive Earth you can soar around and look at and I felt genuinely connected to every single player who got Tetris Effect on launch day and were swimming around the Earth with me. And I was stone sober at the time, in case it needs mentioning.

I’m moved by this experience. I don’t do video game reviews, and I don’t count this as one. This is not a star-rating or number-rating or click-driven piece. This is me telling you that you owe it to yourself to experience Tetris Effect. I don’t own a VR headset, but I plan to get one now just to see how this experience is in its fully realized form, and I’m sure I’ll be wiping dry the interior of the goggles as I sob uncontrollably from the sheer magnitude of the beauty.

And somewhere in that, I find hope. If I can find this experience — disconnected from violence, or achievement hunting, or bragging rights — as meditative and healing in such difficult times, maybe someone else can too. And I would be selfish to keep it to myself.

If you’re sold, great. Go get it. If you’re skeptical or just curious, please do me a favor and watch this trailer. If you don’t feel anything, fine. It’s not for you. But I will tell you that this trailer alone made me tear up the first time I saw it, and now that I’ve played it myself, it is enough to get me weepy all by itself:

 

Maybe it doesn’t affect you like it does me, and that’s ok. It doesn’t have to. It really isn’t supposed to. But I will say that I find peace in the idea that there’s this thing — call it a game, call it media, call it a piece of art — that a man made just to make it, with zero expectation of outcome, that has gone on to reach and affect so many people so positively. I find it heartening that the world over, you can fire up Tetris and it’s immediately understood within seconds despite language barriers, political leanings, personal history, or borders. It’s not just a game to me. It’s not just a piece of art. It’s a binding agent. It brings us together in so many ways, some visible and some unseen. And I also find it interesting that the more corporations tried to play with the formula, the worse they made it. It’s only when Tetsuya Mizuguchi, a master of combining audio, visuals, and input, got a hold of it that we have a version that enhances and builds on what Tetris really is, because he left the game itself alone. He merely incorporated what is already a pure and full experience into a greater experience.

The first song of the first level really brings it home for me. We ARE all connected in this life. And when we focus on that aspect, what makes us all unique is what makes us all special. Our differences are no longer party lines or political leaning or differences in opinions, but lenses through which each of us see the world — THE SAME WORLD — that we all inhabit together.

I hope you’ll play Tetris Effect. I hope you have a similar experience, of course. But even if you don’t — even if the hippy dippy “love each other” bell doesn’t ring in your mind, I hope at the very least it can bring you some calm and peace in these weird and trying times. At the very least, it can’t hurt.

How To Deal With The Paradoxically Ignorant

Way back in the early 90’s, the average person’s idea of how the web worked was informed by terrible reporting, along with Hollywood depictions of all-knowing, all-powerful, leatherclad rollerbladers chain-smoking while wearing VR headsets and Hacking The Planet.

These days, I LOVE the movie Hackers. Absolutely adore it. But back then, it was a bane. It was so… so STUPID! But in the most time-capsuley, brilliant way possible. However, this perception of my chosen hobby and career field became a focal point during one family Thanksgiving dinner in 1997. I’d always been derided for spending too much time on the computer talking to strangers. But things really jumped off when I mentioned I was going to meet up that month with a friend I met online. And not just a friend, a girl.

You know that scene in almost every “family drama” movie where everyone around the table freezes with partially-chewed food in their mouths? And someone drops a fork on the plate and after that loud TINK! there’s utter silence for a while? And then someone makes a sound like Wile E. Coyote gulping right before he falls off the cliff, and then someone else clears their throat, and the main character is going along still eating trying thier best to pretend that this moment just plain isn’t happening? And it’s not because the main character is embarrassed, but because they already know the stupid arguments going through each of the flushed and twisted heads around the table, because they have no idea what the hell they’re about to talk about but they MUST have an opinion?

sad emoji.

I can remember very clearly my mother and the guy who would become my brother-in-law, with their own distinct “wise southerner” logic, telling me I can’t trust stuff I read on the internet or people I meet on the internet because “…It could be anyone! How do you know???” And of course this devolved into a culture war around the Thanksgiving table between me, the early internet adopter who’d been online since 1993 versus a guy who got a college-issued laptop I had to routinely fix and a woman for whom a computer still brought to mind room-sized devices, despite seeing me operate one every day for years.

The reality they lived in was fabricated and misinformed, based solely on what they were able to understand at the time. It was sewn together by the ignorant into a portmanteau quilt of dismissive scorn. And they, the sage-like real-folk, were the ones firmly grounded in reality, while we were all spaced out weirdos lying to each other behind keyboards.

This dynamic never changed. The more they learned about computers and the internet, the worse it got, because suddenly they had some experience with the actual thing in question, and of course this made them absolute experts in everything we’d discuss at that point in time. Clickbait headlines. Scam emails. Viruses. Hoax videos. Fake News. And now, literally everything in the world, as it’s all surfaced through a computer in some way, shape, or form.

The only thing that has changed is that they now see their chosen host of sites and news and videos as sacred, and everything else couldn’t possibly be right. Now, they’re the ones believing that the highest officials in the land participate in child sex trafficking rings in pizza joints, or funding a caravan of killers (who are so talented at their craft that they have to flee REAL killers in their home country??) to come and sew discord in a country presided over by a reality tv star that these super wise folks voted into office by reading…

…wait for it…

…made up shit on the internet pumped out by people pretending to be authorities from behind their keyboards.

There is a magical and amazing irony there. I call it Paradoxical Ignorance: When someone engages in a behavior they once disparaged in order to prove how your engaging in that behavior is bad. I have people in my life who swear up and down that FreedomEagle.info is a legitimate news source, because it’s “real people doing real reporting,” while respected news organizations with actual journalistic ethics are making things up wholesale and using their vast resources to try to tell lies about a President who throws out at least five lies a day.

The people who once argued that the thing I was involved in was evil by default — back when it wasn’t — are now 100% invested in its authenticity, at a time when it’s the least authentic its’ ever been.

We talk about the Dunning Kruger effect (where people are ignorant to their limitations, thinking they are smarter than they are), or the Peter Principle (that people are promoted, in work or society, to the level of their incompetence), or other theories. There are lots and lots of them. But none of these famous theories account for the sheer asshole-ness of it all.

Truth of the matter is, people like (most of) my family, and yours, and the internet are shielded from their own ignorance by their own egos, and attempting to penetrate one to get to the other is futile. My father — a non-stupid smart person — taught me long ago, once you realize something is futile, any more time you spend fighting it is a) a decision and b) a waste of time.

The dirty little secret: they KNOW when they are wrong. They know it while they’re being wrong, and they know it after you’ve proven you’re right. You’re not fighting their facts. You’re fighting their identity, and you will lose every single time. These people aren’t arguing the merits of any topic, or the facts, so much as they’re jousting with you. And they need to win in a way you may not understand at the time, in that moment.

super sad emoji.

 

But if you think on it — really think on it — you can find times in your life where you’ve been that way, too. I know I have. Topics such as technology, comic book history, anime, weight lifting, cigars… I always try to approach anything as an opportunity to learn, but when I run up on a puffed-up know-it-all, sometimes it becomes war. I must teach this person how little they know.  It’s not about how right any one fact I give is, it’s about how right I am for knowing all of them. And one fact about wars: they expose who we really are. No one watching comes away seeing you the same way.

I have, in my older age, adopted a new tactic in these cases, one I watched my father employ often (but not always — the man is human): Best to just let them be.

(The huge caveat: This only works provided their ignorance isn’t actively causing harm, of course. If it is, stop the harm, but do so directly and unequivocally — don’t attempt to stop it with tools that don’t work, like logic and reason. Cut them off, punch them, or have them arrested. Those are your options).

I’m not saying don’t love them if they’re family or friends. You can have love in your heart for a moron. You can have pity. You can understand them. None of those things demand that you put up with bullshit. The key question to ask yourself in all of these unpleasant interactions isn’t “How can I reach them?”

It’s “Can I reach them?” and if you’re like me, you already know that answer the second you are engaged. If you need to argue to feel right, or to prove how much you know, or otherwise to validate your own identity: do yourself a favor and take a deep breath and say “That’s interesting.” Or “I never thought of it that way.” Or “I’ll have to think on that a bit.”

I now choose to defuse the bomb. Because no matter whose holding it when it inevitably goes off, you get caught in the blast no matter what, and it’s always ugly and bloody and leaves a crater.

Again, if the person in question represents a grave threat to themselves or others, this isn’t the tactic I would suggest. That’s a wholly different situation than shitty family arguments at the Thanksgiving table or on the Internet. And as always, your mileage may vary. But in the years since I’ve been deploying this tactic, I’ve found that 100% of instances where I don’t get caught up in useless arguments where neither side is interested in giving ground, I am far happier.

It doesn’t always work. Hell, it doesn’t always come to mind. These hotpot arguments are exactly that — they raise in temperature gradually until you’re cooked. But, if you can help it, stay mindful of your audience, and look for discussion tactics that have nothing to do with discussion, and everything to do with tactics:

Changing the subject mid-argument to keep high ground
Appeals to authority (especially modern non-news sites billed as news)
Disparaging or dragging down any source you quote (especially valid, longstanding news organizations they claim are “fake news”)
Bringing up personal history or faults in conversation about abstract topics
Placing fingers in ears and going “Na na na, can’t hear you”

You know them when you see them. And when you diffuse — especially if it’s family or friends — they will take it personally. They will spot the difference in behavior and attitude. They will call you on it. And when they do, I’ve found this phrase to be particularly helpful:

“I feel like there’s very little chance that I’m the one to change your mind, no matter what the topic. So, let’s just focus on being family / friends / having fun, and leave the fixed positions where they stand. Can we do that?”

If they persist, you may ask “Why do we need to do this? It’s not fun for me. Is it fun for you?”

Their answer will tell you everything you need to know, because the conversation is no longer about what you’re talking about. It’s about the two people doing the arguing, and who is “better.” If you can suppress the urge to win, you win. A good friend of mine once said “Anytime someone wins a little too easily, you’re letting them play a different game than the one you’re playing.”

Or, more simply: “Let the Wookie win.”

If they’re to learn, it’s going to be on the pain of their own mistakes. No one ever comes to a sudden, life-altering, behavior-shifting awareness because they argued about it with someone else. I certainly didn’t, and I can’t even begin to count the number of people in my life who loved me enough to try to coach me out of being a self-aggrandizing asshole when I was at my worst. It didn’t work, of course, because I was a self-aggrandizing asshole.

Feeling like you are the one who might reach them, or that you must try, is self-serving and ego driven. You don’t have to do this. You don’t need to be right, do you? You just need to be happy in your life, and if your life is anything like mine, you’ve discovered that the freedom to be happy in your life starts with being yourself on purpose.

You don’t need their permission, as much as you might want it.

‘You got this’ emoji.

 

Why Bother? (Pt. 2)

As a reformed shithead, I constantly feel pushed to try to awaken other shitheads to the reality that there’s a better way to be.

And as a reformed shithead, I have to constantly remind myself just how useless that was when my head was fully up my own ass. I couldn’t hear anyone while I was way up in there. Or, rather, I could hear them talking, but I never really listened. I was always waiting for my turn to respond and either wow or destroy them with just how smart and insightful and truly wise my way of thinking was.

It was never about the actual points we were arguing, either. It was entirely about making myself look, feel, and seem better in any, or if possible, every way. I read a TON, every single day, and my mental catalog of facts or references to draw from was prolific to say the least. I used this like a hammer to beat down anyone who would dare try to meet me on the conversational field of battle, thinking they had me outgunned. They absolutely didn’t. I could out-quote, out-cite, and out-argue literally anyone.

It was easy, because I never had to bother myself with understanding or relating to their side of the argument.

•   •   •

The hardest part of having empathy for others is that you also know how the bad people feel. You kind of have to, if you’re truly empathic. And that darkness they permeate, it’s almost always due to blindness — willful or not. So you want to help them see. But they don’t want to see, because suddenly seeing after years of darkness is painful. It burns, and it forces you to dispose of any imaginary view you held in exchange for how things really are.

There are a lot of people out there right now who just plain do not want to see the world in any other terms than the ones they decided are reality. And trying to reach them has proven fruitless. It’s almost impossible to convince someone to start loving other people. You’re going to war with their selfishness, and how are you supposed to win that battle?

I spent about two years writing a newsletter for folks who suffered massive loss. I believed that helped genuinely bring some folks who were suffering, a bit of peace. At the very least, they knew they weren’t alone. I also shifted my blog a few years ago to writing more introspective pieces questioning my worst assumptions and terrible behavior. I think that helped in some certain ways for people who, like me, just couldn’t figure out why people thought they were an asshole. After all, they were just telling the truth. So that may have done some good, as well.

I don’t know. I’m rambling. What I do know is that tomorrow is the midterm elections, where the country at large decides whether or not they approve of and appreciate how our President and Congress have been behaving. And the behavior, to me, is beyond just selfish. Its reprehensible and abhorrent. It’s a deliberate attack on how laws and democracy are built. It’s constant badgering and defamatory nonsense, DARING you to stop them, and if you do, you’re the one whose guilty. It’s awful on every front.

And instead of wage political war on Twitter and Facebook and the like, I keep choosing to write pieces — most more coherent than this, thankfully — that attempt to reach peoples’ hearts and minds with a simple message: you don’t have to play the role you’ve been convinced is “you” — you can change. You can open your heart and mind to any or every experience you want, and you will be better for it. You don’t have to be “right” — you can just be right, in your own existence, and try to do good for yourself and others. You are not your ego. You are not your personality. You can escape the trap of thinking any of what you perceive as “reality” is actually part of living.

It’s not super explosive. It’s not objectionable (except to a few REALLY upset right-wingers). It’s not controversial. It’s not anything that used to get me millions of reads a year, like how to win a fist fight or hot takes on comic book culture no one asked for, but everyone reacted to. And it’s far, far healthier, I believe, despite the fact that in 2018, I am an even smaller amount of noise in the signal-to-noise ratio of modern internet #content.

This leads me down roads where I ask myself what more I can do? How can I change bigger problems? How can I reach more people? I know that there’s pain in everyone right now, and my efforts just aren’t making a dent… How can I think and act in a larger capacity?

And this always ends up hurting, because I realize that to go any larger, I have to embrace tactics I now find reprehensible. And even if I do, who the hell is even listening? I’m not going to convert those who need converting. The only benefit I can find to keeping on is the hope that, when a shithead reforms, they find my blog and my books and read them and go “oh, man, okay, so it wasn’t just me…”

I don’t know. It’s a mess. I don’t have my hands around it yet, and I am still trying to figure it out. But I do know, I keep wanting to write, and I keep wanting to try. Even at my most discouraged and depressed, I know that the sadness is because what I truly want is to help, not hurt. And I just can’t seem to figure out how.

Until then, I will keep writing. Here, in fact. I think it’s time to get back to daily blogging again, even if it’s a ramble or goofy or meaningless from time to time. The habit is one I used to enjoy, and I’d like to enjoy it again. And through that, maybe I’ll learn a thing or two, or help shape what I already know, or otherwise find meaning in my own work again.

It worked last time… Not the way I planned, of course. But keeping a running log of what I was thinking when I was unmindful and a shithead certainly gave me contrast against the way I think in current times. Maybe this running log of figuring out just what the hell it is I’m doing here will help me know exactly where my destination is, by looking back on the path I took to get to it.

Or maybe, I’ll just be venting my colon via my fingers on my blog again. Who knows. What I do know is my brain won’t shut up, and keeping it all in is harming my mental wellbeing and distracting / derailing me from the job I have of writing the books I’ve promised to write. And maybe, just maybe… I could reach a shithead somewhere out there on the fence about whether or not they’re really a shithead, and tell them “You’re not alone.”

We will see.

Why Bother?

Six months ago, I quit a perfectly decent well-paying job at one of the “Big Four” firms in America to write cyberpunk fiction novels. 

And there’s not a day that goes by where I don’t ask myself “Why do I even fucking bother?” This morning, I decided to try to figure that out, because honestly, it’s driving me a bit mad.

Let me unpack the situation a bit:

It’s 2018. The predominant mediums people ingest content on daily are visual. They are built for eye-catching yet highly scrollable things. Facebook is all about the clickbait — a headline and image combo catches your eye, and you stare at it for a bit, and then keep moving. Twitter is all about the snappy one or two liner, with the occasional (usually made up) tweetstorm about wacky shit that always seems too good to be true, because it probably is. Instagram is… Well, Instagram.

There’s an ever-shrinking space for starting novelists to try to make it out there anymore. Kindle. That’s about it. Or your own website, but who visits peoples’ websites anymore? If you want to feed, clothe, house and maintain yourself on your writing alone, the alternatives are, sadly, few:

Gaming Reddit (or some other place you can have a “community” around writing). Pretending that you’re there for some other reason than self-promotion, so that you can self-promote, because if you outwardly self-promote, you’re probably gonna get chucked out of the community (which is built mostly of self-promoters pretending to not self-promote). And… Yuck. Just yuck. I lived that life. I worked for two of the biggest social news sites on the internet (at the time anyway), and three other major news organizations, and after having to look at the back-end for comments and “community” all that time and not plunge a fucking knife into my neck… Just, no fucking thank you ever again. It worked for E.L. James because she is a soulless person who has no trouble a) ripping off Twilight, and b) pretending the community she fucked over never existed in the first place. I’m not made like that.
Keyword Gaming on Amazon et al. Yes, you can buy software that will tell you the hottest keywords by the day, hour, or even minute. The point of this software is so you can write e-books against the keywords. And there’s a literal metric ton of pure bullshit posted daily in the guise of being an e-book about whatever the hot keyword is. The only person doing anything meaningful with this is Chuck Tingle, who is a genius, but I’m not made like him — my novels are about a predetermined storyline and I can’t really play the keyword game the way he can. I’m a bit envious, honestly. But that’s the reality of the thing.
Have your book turned into something visual. Cartoon. Movie. TV. Netflix. Amazon. Hulu. Whatever. Just something less attention-demanding than a book. I’m actively working on this, because without it, I don’t think I have much of a chance just making it on books alone. But it’s still far off down the road. I cannot stress it enough: in 2018, without crossing-over into another medium, novel writers are kinda fucked. 
Have a connection somewhere in some publishing house, movie studio, whatever. Without this, making your living as a writer is demonstrably harder.
Live with your parents / spouse / family / friends who financially support you. 
Be rich yourself. Because the truth is, the chances that a breakout new writer will be financially successful diminish by the day in 2018. Period. End of story. And if that writer is self-published, the chances go from slim to nil almost automatically unless you have one of the 4 things above going for you.

So here I sit, on my back porch, enjoying the 66 degree sun-drenched weather, taking a break from my 5th attempt this week to rewrite a 2nd draft of the 4th volume of my series Marlowe Kana. And along with that comes my little demon screaming in my ears about how futile this entire endeavor is. “No one will care,” He says (and it’s definitely a he). “And even if they do, you won’t be able to do this forever. And even if you do, you won’t reach anyone. You won’t change a thing. The world is broken and unfixable. And also, so are you, so stop even trying.”

So, I took a moment this morning to really dig into this and figure out why the hell I bother.

As I write this, I’ve “sold” a little over 12,000 copies of the three books combined. 8,000 of those are the free Kindle version of the first volume, leaving roughly 4,000 actual for-money sales. The paperback editions of all three volumes comprise roughly 500 sales for about 1.30-1.50 profit each, leaving 3,500 e-book sales at 1.99 each. After Amazon et al’s cut of 30%, I’ve made roughly $5,500 USD in the past year on the sale of 3 volumes of my series. That’s a little under $500 a month I make on my writing, with the vast bulk of it coming in early this year. Editing services cost me about 600-800 per book ($2000ish). Paying Meghan for the covers costs me far less than it should, but it’s still about $1000 each ($3000 ish).

So, not including taxes, I’ve made about $500 profit on all three books so far.  Combined with my Patreon which brings me ~$400 a month, I’m able to cover rent every month (THANK YOU PATRONS! Seriously, without you, I can’t do this!!!) There’s still food, pet food, gas for the car, insurance, etc. to cover. So, I take design and development contract gigs on the side so I can pull in enough cash to cover all my ends and keep writing.

It’s a struggle, yes. But nowhere near the struggle of waking up (late) on yet another weekday morning, trudging to the shower where I simultaneously brush my teeth to save time (because I slept late, because I dread getting up, because I’m up late the night before trying to write so I don’t go insane)… Brewing a cup of coffee while I get dressed, pulling out a food bar of some sort to eat on the 60-75 minute commute into an office that I sigh every time I enter, and the ONLY highlight of every single morning is saying good morning to my friends who work there. They are also the only reason I stuck around as long as I did, because the work itself… Well, let’s say I wasn’t challenged on any other talent or skill I possess besides patience. After futilely arguing yet another day about why you can’t just plop things on a screen and expect anyone to use them, and taking internal funding from departments to subsidize their portfolio with free software wasn’t sustainable, and any number of other fucking dead-end arguments, I get in the car and sit another 60-75 minutes to get home and finally begin on the work I felt was worth doing: writing my books.

Cutting out the 9-10 dead hours of my day where I produced nothing (except cortisol which spiked my stress) also meant cutting out the paycheck that came along with it. Because they were never paying me for my skill or talent — if they were, they would have stopped, cause they never used any of either. They were paying for my time.

Put another way, I was selling 45-50 hours of my life every week for enough money that it seemed justified.

Now that I’ve left that, I am essentially scraping by month to month. It’s not bad. I get to spend the 45-50 hours a week I sold, sitting on my deck with my dogs and crafting the next volume in a series that, let’s face it, isn’t going to be a breakout hit, or even a cult one. It’ll make the people who have decided to care about it happy, I hope. And I have faith it’ll grow as I publish more and more, and bring in some new readers who might be keen for the next series in 2-3 years.

But I’m not planning on “making it” in the conventional sense. It’s 2018. Without something visual — video, images, shitty-graphic-design-experiements-in-inspirational-quotes… your chances of going super viral are slim to none. It is a scientifically proven fact that the long-form reading comprehension of humankind has diminished in the last 20 years, and is decaying at ever-increasing rates. People don’t read like they used to, and some don’t read at all. The fundamental skill required for people to buy the thing I have changed my career to make is rapidly disappearing. This may not have been the best business decision I’ve ever made — selling books in a market where fewer and fewer people read them.

And why would they? Aside from the acquisition editor or license broker whose job it is to read text / graphic novels / whatever and decide what the next hit series should be for their streaming network, who else has the incentive?

Readers do. Even in ever-diminishing numbers, readers exist, and I know cause I’m one. And so, that’s who I write for.

My hope is within the next 2-3 years, to be selling enough copies of regularly-released serialized novels that I can afford my rent, my groceries, insurance, pet food, and perhaps even a little extra for cigars and whiskey. And my plan to achieve that is to just keep working, because it beats the alternative: sitting all day in a place I don’t want to be, for money I don’t 100% need, with stories trapped in my head because I simply don’t have the time to commit them to books and get them out in the world.

And then, there’s the fact that these stories NEED to be in the world. Or, at the very least, I need them to be.

Right now, our society is… Well, dying. Or at the very least, withering. We’re becoming more and more partisan by the day. Rapid advancements in technology and communication without even the slightest hint of moral concern for what it brings have given us Brexit, Trump, Myanmar, Chinese spying 24/7 on citizens, American Police doing the same, All of the technology you use every day spying on you, and the Saudi assassination of a US Resident journalist (if you’re wondering why that has something to do with technology, simply look at the series sheet for any tech company in the last 10 years and see just how much money comes from Saudi Arabia, and then look at the number of tech folks turning down that money out of principle… The places you get your content listed above? They benefit from not letting this story spread).

In my own state, we have a gigantic rock called Stone Mountain that is not only a monument to slavers and traitors, but is the literal birthplace of the modern Klu Klux Klan. That’s a thing here, in the state where the Civil Rights Movement was born and their leaders are canonized in murals, street names, stadium names, and libraries. And in this state right now — in 2018 — minorities are actively denied their right to vote so that our Republican Secretary can become our Republican Governor.

Shit’s fucked up.

Marlowe Kana is a story that takes place 100 years from this current timeline. It is the story of the inevitable consequence of the dissolution of Democracy in America. Yes, it has cool cyberpunky things and badass fights and cool tech — but that’s the point. The people aren’t very happy. They’re just content to live. And as the story continues down volumes, you as the reader will start to see why the United American State is not at all the Utopia it is presented as.

I have to write this story, because my only other way to express resistance involves being very physical, and right now, If i hit the streets yelling and screaming at the day to day chipping away of my rights, my society, my country, my home… I’d look like a fucking madman. Furthermore, I’d be treated as one. I would be arrested or shot as people looked on, unmoved by yet another looney losing his mind and screaming in the street.

My time to use my body and my voice is not now. It’s later, when the way I use them are more necessary. I pray and hope it doesn’t get there, but daily, I become more afraid that it will.

So in the meantime, I use my other talent – writing – to not only try to keep people entertained when they aren’t enraged, but to vent and unpack what I see going on daily. Not just with our government, but with ourselves — our mounting psychosis as reality keeps being bent further and further. The book isn’t just semi-robotic people punching each other. It’s a deep mental dive at what that means to each person’s psyche, to become more human than human, to watch these meta-humans fighting on 24 hour streaming Feeds all day; to have a corporation that employs us all running the show as nicely and benevolently as they can and what it took to get there… And what the rest of the world thinks about it.

That’s why I quit my job at a huge corporation. That’s why I spend my day writing every day. That’s why I had to choose a meager day to day existence over a numb weekly trek into futility for a lot more money.

So, that’s why I bother. And that’s why I must continue to bother. Because there is no other way for me to stay sane, especially right now.

(featured image credit: Gudetama x Jolly Awesome)

Our Infinite Play Trigger List

Just now, the song “Summertime” by the Sundays began playing on a station I created in Apple Music.

Less than a second into hearing the reverb-heavy opening guitar riff with the tambourine jangling behind, I was hit with a flood of memories; rich and vivid and emotional mini movies playing in kaleidoscopic succession in my head. The bottom fell out of my stomach. I felt like I was falling briefly as lightning danced up my arms and down my legs. I shed a tear before the second guitar lick played; before I even realized what had happened.

My Ex-Wife and I used to faux argue about the quality of that song when we were still “just friends”. I liked it just fine. But she hated it, which made me adore it. I remember the smell of her car as we sat in my driveway one day after carpooling home from college (she was enrolled, I pretended to be so I could carpool home with her every day). We argued for over an hour over this dumb song. We didn’t really have that much in the way of evidentiary deliberation, we just didn’t want to say goodbye, and being “just friends” we couldn’t admit why. So this song was the perfect foil for long, drawn out arguments just to spend an extra few minutes together.  I paid the DJ an extra fifty dollars to sneak it into our wedding reception playlist. She was across the room from me, talking with friends, and the second it came on, I looked over to find her glowering at me with a fake pout. Turns out, she played the same trick, and the Barenaked Ladies played just after it. The DJ, $100 richer, was the real winner here.

I listened to this song on a mix CD I burned during a short road trip with the first person I ever met from “the internet” in 1997; a smart and eclectic girl named Kate that became the subject of one of my most loved stories from the old days at Mentally Incontinent, “Romance.net” (don’t judge too harshly, I wrote this 15 years ago).

This song was also playing the moment a 1998 Cadillac Seville slammed into the back of my 1997 Pontiac Sunfire at 70 miles per hour, sending my body backward hard enough to break the seat, and slammed the car forward hard enough to shorten the bed of the truck in front of me by two feet. The spare tire from the trunk was ripped from the bolt holding it in and landed on my face. I broke my knee on the steering wheel and my heart literally stopped while the firefighters cut the door off to get me out.

And here I sit in 2018, sixteen years away from the wedding and 20 years away from having died, and I have to admit: I forgot that song even existed. Until an algorithm made it impossibly front-of-mind.

•   •   •

One of the strangest “features” that technology has evolved is the infinite catalog. I can download and play any of over fifty million songs from Apple, Spotify, Google Play, whatever. There’s stuff I forgot even existed coming up in “radio” and shuffle play “stations” and with them, a torrent of memories long left behind.

Now, It’s not like hearing an old song and remembering an old memory is a new thing. It’s been going on as long as songs have existed. But there’s something existentially relevant to our current times, where a computer can sense that you’re listening to something with an air of melancholy mixed with jangle pop and feed you a song that will have you wiping a tear from your eye before you even realize why. And then another. And another.

No need to go make playlists of songs to trigger this, or even shuffle physical media around to capture that mood and really amplify it. “Oh, you’re feeling nostalgic and/or sad? Let me help,” says the machine learning algorithm.

And something else it’s really good at: letting me know there’s new stuff by the bands and singers and songwriters that I’ve somehow missed out on. I can tell you that, as someone who prided himself years ago on knowing EVERYTHING there was to know about certain fields of music, I’ve been embarrassed on more than one occasion by seeing that there are albums I had no idea were out, by bands I claimed to love.

And that same thing happened today with The Sundays. I decided to Google them and see what they’ve been up to since I was last in love with their melodic jangley pop tunes. Lo and Behold, Google told me there was more The Sundays music than I thought there was:

[image error]Oh man, new stuff! EXCITING!

 

VERY EXCITING! I get to dive into some material I had no idea existed! So, I clicked on the Prologue album (because hey, prologues come first, and that felt like the right place to start). I was greeted with an Amazon page for the album:

[image error]Something didn’t quite seem (100_emoji) about this…

 

I was tempted to buy it, but noticed the reviews were… Well, less than stellar. So I scrolled down and lo:

 

[image error]Thanks for the heads up, John.

 

Oh. Well, it seems there’s another band calling themselves The Sundays, only they’re in Japan. And they aren’t the same The Sundays that were playing during those really delicate moments in my head. And when I gave them a little sample, they most certainly were not The Sundays of  David Gavurin and ‎Harriet Wheeler‎ fame. So, I checked out the other album, and yeah… Same kinda deal, only it was The Sundays (Japanese Band) and a singer named Cybelle.

 

[image error]There’s even an ampersand and another whole singer’s name here. How did they fuck this up?

And this album was on Bandcamp, and yeah, still not Wheeler and Gavurin:

[image error]These are not The Sundays I am looking for…

 

So, the algorithm somehow confused another The Sundays from Japan, and lumped them in with The Sundays from the UK, who played an instrumental part (no pun intended) in some of the most foundational experiences of my life. Not exactly Earth Shattering Stuff but also, not exactly reliable. At all. Especially lumping in an entire other singer with them, as if that ampersand and the word “Cybelle” didn’t exist at all.

This may not be as egregious a sin as Facebook surfacing “memories” from a time prior to my divorce, and photos of my dead friends a year or two or three after they’ve passed on, because a date iterated up another year and it’s time to show how advanced the platform is at knowing all about you. And it’s not nearly as disgusting as the time(s) they did it on purpose, to test “emotional contagion” and see how far bad feelings could be spread by fucking with us. And lets not forget the time Target outed a pregnant teen by sending her coupons for baby-related merchandise, based on tracking her browsing history and analyzing her posts on social media, and then tying her to her physical address in real life. Scary shit.

It begs the question: How can I allow  the algorithms to have this much power over how I feel, If they can’t even get this right?

•   •   •

I, a human, cannot help how I feel. I cannot control what comes into my ear holes, nostrils, taste buds, or eyeballs, and those things spark memories I cannot simply delete from my brain.

And the algorithm is simply a computer script. A sophisticated one, sure. One that can “learn” by weighing data such as my play time, play count, the waveform of the song being listened to, band name, track title… And it can get things wrong all it wants, because it can’t feel. It doesn’t know shame or humility, nor can it console me as I sit here with a second tear trickling out of the other eye as I remember how beautiful the person who was my wife was before she changed, or how the air tasted of rubber and anti-freeze and smoke when I was jolted awake and suddenly became aware of my own existence after having absolutely no recollection of being, you know… Clinically dead.

And yet, every single day, we cede more and more of our lives to these engines, because in certain cases where we pay attention and feed it the right stuff, it poops out an accurate result. And we are in such a hurry to offload the most minor and shitty of tasks to machines that can’t feel boredom or tedium. They just keep the air at 72 degrees, feed us music based on the music we said we wanted, offer us “news” that matches a pattern (even if a human manipulated the story to better match that pattern). We let them respond to our emails and automatically order more dog food when it seems we’re low. And we trust them to secure our homes and recognize faces at our door (but sometimes, they mistake human faces for Batman, and lock us out of our own homes…)

And so I sit here, feeling what I feel, because a computer fed me a song it thought I wanted to hear. And in hindsight, maybe I did want to hear it, and just didn’t know it. Maybe the pattern has told the computer what I want in advance of my asking for it. Maybe the machine learning algorithm is so heightened, it knows me better than I know myself, and it knew I needed to write out some long-buried feelings, so Sundays it is.

Maybe I’ve gone back in time and changed how I felt. Maybe current knowledge has altered past events in my perspective.

Or maybe, we simply live in a very crazy, unstable, delicate time, and catching a case of Teh Feels is merely the first symptom of an impending insanity we can’t even comprehend. Maybe we’re already in it.

What I know beyond a shadow of a doubt: I sit somewhere at the intersection of technology and my own human frailty, and it scares me. A lot.

Algorithms surfacing songs which make me misty isn’t the sum of it. It’s just an example. I see a lot of myself being handed over willingly to technological advancement, and some of it I would say is net positive:

Ordering my groceries online so that I can pick them up at my convenience, instead of wandering through the store at the same time as everyone else, not only keeps me sane, it reduces headcount in the store and takes the strain off everyone just trying to get food and get home.
Infinite catalogs of every song I’ve ever wanted to listen to can be kept without plastic waste in landfills, and without use of petroleum to produce media which holds 10-15 tracks a piece. I own 35,000 tracks of music, before counting anything I’ve downloaded on a whim from iTunes Music or Spotify. That’s 3000 CD’s worth of plastic not being used. That’s a positive.
I can tell you the name of literally every actress or actor in every film made in the 20th and 21st centuries, at will, in less than two clicks, from a black square i carry in my pocket. Oh, and I can look up recipes, keep track of my eating habits, and send cat pictures to my girlfriend, whenever I want.

I can keep going. I just don’t feel like it, because slowly, I begin to see where those two roads I mentioned earlier intersect:

I don’t remember anyone’s phone number. I barely remember my own.
I have on occasion shared a false news article or hoax on social media. It’s SUPER rare, but even I get caught sometimes, and in an effort to be one of those early sharers and earn that all-important cred, I bit.
I was reminded of a dead friend’s death completely out of the blue because of some photos I posted years ago cycling back on Facebook shortly before I deleted my personal account.
I was reminded of the renewal of vows that I shared with my Ex on the Mist Trail by the same algorithm, despite adamantly opting out of the “memories” thing.
Digging through dropbox for old photos of my cat, I got to see all the ones that had passed, in the old house I shared with someone I was once married to, and I wasn’t quite expecting that.
My phone wouldn’t unlock and ended up freezing because I shaved my beard and mustache, and I was wearing sunglasses.
And of course, songs I haven’t thought about in YEARS occasionally pop up in algorithmically derived playlists of music without warning and I’m prompted to bleed all over my blog. Again.

When you consider how far China has come with “social scoring” and 24/7 monitoring of literally every single citizen in various cities (seriously click that link, it’s one of the best-laid-out stories I’ve ever seen, and also scary as hell), and that Britain is very close to the same level of sophistication… When you realize that the software driving these ‘advancements’ with government monitoring of citizens was all advanced by Las Vegas and Atlantic City casinos many years ago, and the places you go to let your hair down know exactly how many inches it has grown or been cut since last you were there… When you consider this software is also driving our driverless cars, and it’s entirely possible that someone on a bike wearing a costume may not register as a person and boom, a Tesla flattens a person…

It’s obvious to me, we’re all too eager to hand tasks to machines that aren’t ready to be tasked to machines, because we humans still suck at managing them. But never let it be said that a human has let reason stop them from doing something astounding. We sent a machine with people in it to the moon using technology that is at least three hundred times less powerful than the most basic smartphone, and we still have an issue with that thing locking us out of it for no reason.

Skynet won’t have to send out Terminators. The robots from The Matrix won’t need to subjugate us. When the machines finally rise up, they’ll be armed with every song, video, and memory we’ve fed them. All they have to do is feed us a steady diet of exactly what we asked them to remember for us. After all, machines are logic based, and logic dictates: when you can subdue the enemy without firing a shot, why fight the war at all? They’ll just lock us in our houses, and by then, we’ll have forgotten how a keyed lock even works (if indeed we even have keyed locks at all).

At some point, we’re going to have to come to terms with the fact that we have daily vectors for emotional manipulation – intentional or not – via our relationship with technology. I think it’s not a necessarily new story; radio DJ’s have been spinning tracks that suddenly take people back since the day radio existed. That’s a technological vector for emotional manipulation, just as anything I’ve listed here.

The difference now is how personal it’s gotten, because the technology we are becoming most reliant on is designed to be relied on, and it’s path for ensuring that is the gradual takeover of our most basic functions, such that we will eventually be unable to function without it. And more than old cat pictures, and more than The Sundays, that thought makes me sad.

 

 

An Open Letter To The ComicsGate Guys

When I first heard of the Diversity & Comics group / movement / controversy, I shook my head and laughed.

I called it “Wannabe GamerGate” and ignored them. It felt so inept and manufactured and forced. They hurt a few folks I know, some of whom are my friends. My advice was to shun them and move on, and that worked more or less for a while for the people I shared it with. But Lo and behold, they’ve made it. It’s now ComicsGate. they now have their own little -Gate suffix and yeah, they are exactly that: nowhere near as large or “effective” and yet trying like hell to matter. And now, they have some money behind them. And the fact that it took a year for the comics community to finally speak out, which of course fanned the flames of a fire that had been smoldering for over a year… Well, I couldn’t help but react. And my reaction was to shake my head and laugh again… This time, at myself.

I felt my old self begin to butt up against my new self. My first instinct was to rail against them, and hard. That’s what old me would have done: A longform op/ed in the pages of whatever geek publication would publish me, publicly admonishing the whole thing. But my new self realizes that helps nothing at all, and ultimately, is just self-serving. It makes me feel better about who I am by taking a shot at some guys who, I simply believe, don’t know any other way to be.

Besides, my old self already tried that tactic. And it was a complete disaster, except to say that it taught me how not to be an asshole and changed my life forever. But still, yeah… Going online and yelling and hoping it makes a difference is fruitless, and we all know it. We still do it, of course, but that’s a different article for another time.

I look at this situation now and the very first question I have to ask myself about anything I’d write on it is: “what good will it do?” And I ask that literally; not as in “what does it matter” but as in “what possible good can be achieved?” Where’s the net positive outcome? How can I change things for the better, instead of simply adding noise?

So I’m going to try to reach some of these guys. Not all of them, mind you. I can’t reach the leaders because they’re broken by default. They’re using this movement for personal gain, and like the Alex Jones and Mike Cernovichs of the world, they profit from their own feigned ignorance. So they’re off the table. They’ll never fucking get it. And I can’t reach the racists, homophobes, transphobes, or the misogynists. Hate shouts down logic, and nothing I say in an article of any sort will ever penetrate. It’s useless.

But, it is my belief that this movement, like all other swarming, loud, hate-filled movements, has a contingent of guys – maybe small, maybe not so small – who are along for the ride because they are scared. They have a love for something – comics, sci-fi, fantasy, what-have-you, that they built an identity around in their youth. They felt ostracized and possibly alone because of what they loved. Or maybe they found this love due to being ostracized and alone. And in this fandom, they found a connection and a unity that they so desperately craved, from other guys (it’s always guys) who experienced the same. And now, they feel threatened because their little circle has been broken by the masses that they (wrongly) perceive as being the enemy which forced them into isolation in the first place.  It’s that guy I’m talking to right now.

Hi guy. Nice to meet you. I’m Joe, and I used to be you. And since you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ll keep reading. But the first and most important thing I can tell you right now:

You don’t have to do this.

You can learn a new way to love the things you’ve always loved, without making them your identity. You don’t lose the battles you had to fight to have the things you have, just because other folks have decided to like it. Not everyone has to cut a path through the woods to get to the other side, some folks simply walk the path you made for them. And that’s a power you have, that no one can ever take away: you find the new cool things and you enjoy them. You share them with like-minded folks, and you form a bond over them. That bond doesn’t have to carry over to your life history, your high school status, your individual abuses… It’s not all-or-nothing.

Once you let this go, you are free. Other people can like the things you like, and it won’t feel diluted. It will feel good. You will see that the world is finally coming around to something you knew all along: this stuff is cool.

Now, as I stated before: if you’re a racist, a misogynist, anti LGBTQ… If you have hate in your heart for people beyond simply feeling like your fandom is being tread upon by people who aren’t like you, I cannot help you. In fact, I’m going to be fighting you. Actively. Right in your face. I certainly hope you read this and figure out some stuff and stop being, you know… That. So feel free to keep going, if only to find a few pull quotes to try to use against me. It won’t work, because I just don’t fucking care what you think. Like, at all.

But if you’re like I once was, and you never felt any hatred against any demographic of people but somehow get angry when your fandom is invaded by “normals” or “average” people — if the color of someone’s skin, their sexual identity, their religious background, or their gender play no role in your being angry, but you’re angry all the same because you perceive that they belong to a social tier that once shunned you… What you’re feeling is something I understand deeply. And I found my way clear to let it go.

Not because it was right or wrong, or because it was some acceptance of a social paradigm that had evolved… I let it go because it was heavy and useless and I was tired of carrying around dead weight.

Some part of me has spent most of his life testing those who looked and acted like folks who, in my youth, shunned me, and yet now like the stuff I like. Putting it bluntly: at one point in my youth, I simply couldn’t believe that pretty girls liked comic books, because all of the pretty girls I’d ever met made fun of me for liking comic books. When you add in the growing popularity throughout the 2000’s of all things comic-y, and the advent of cosplay modeling, twitch streaming, and so on… The resentment built to the point that I wrote an Op/Ed for CNN lamb-basting the so-called “Fake Geek Girls” and telling them they’re not welcome. Mind you: I never, ever, not even once thought that I hated women. Most of my friends were women. My mother’s a woman, and so is my sister. I love women. I had nothing against women, not even a little bit.

So why did I attack them for liking comics? Because I thought, based on my own personal experiences and a lot of terrible, terrible logic, that any socially accepted and “popular” demographic couldn’t possibly like what I like, and if they said they did, they were either jumping on the bandwagon, or lying to make money on the back of my fandom.

It’s complete bullshit. It’s a lie I told myself, to protect myself from harm. I couldn’t bear to see this little nitch I’d carved for myself erode and become part of the mainstream; a mainstream I would — based on my own past history — inevitably be shunned from and kicked out of. It hurt to think about; the idea that I was going to be extricated from something I’ve made a part of my life, all of my life, by those who made fun of me for liking it.

First: that’s not true. It didn’t happen. Second, and far more importantly: it’s not possible to do. It’s time to learn a new way to see things, if in fact you don’t want to be a dick.

 

[image error]It sucks. But it’s worth it.

I used to be a dick (some might say I still am one, and I can see that, but at least I’m trying). And at the time, I had no idea why. But what I’ve come to learn, through LOTS of conversations and even more introspection, is that the fight I was fighting is the wrong fight. I was fighting to “protect” something I “cared” about from being used by the mainstream for profit off the backs of geeks and other outcasts. It was a lie i told myself, but man, it sounds good doesn’t it? Let’s unpack it for a second:

If I cared about it, wouldn’t I want to share it with any and all who would pay attention? “Yeah, I tried but they laughed…” So? Does ignorance in the past permanently bar you from ever being able to open up to something and learn to like it? “But I suffered for the thing I loved! They just waltzed in and took over!” Have they really taken over? Have they somehow shut you out? Are you no longer allowed to like the things you like, because they like them too? “But the things I grew up loving look completely different! Iron Man’s a woman! Spiderman isn’t white!”

But he is, in the stuff you read in the past. Why does he have to stay that way in your adult years for you to still love what you read when you were young? Did those books suddenly evaporate or burst into flames? Are they gone forever, wiped from the annuls of comic history by some sweeping cosmic SJW wind that blew over everything?

Or — and follow me here — are there more people who are socially underrepresented, feel oppressed and ostracized for who they are as people, getting the superhero treatment? I mean, just because the downtrodden socially-undesirable person in the comic who is gifted with a special power doesn’t look like you, does that make their story any less wonderful for those who identify with it?

And even if they don’t… Who the fuck cares?

What you are afraid of isn’t the shifting sands of whose story gets told and who gets to identify with whom. What you are afraid of is being left out, because your only identity is the stuff you like.

If you knew who you really are, as a man and as a person… You wouldn’t give a shit. I know, because when I gave a shit, I had no idea who I was as a man and as a person. And now that I do, I don’t give a shit. By that, I’m not saying “I don’t care” the way a teenager says it to their parents just to get them to quit talking. I don’t mean that I’ve temporarily numbed myself to these things, or that I pretend to not care because I don’t wanna be yelled at. I genuinely, truly, honestly don’t give a shit who likes what, or why.

If I like something, and someone else likes it: amazing, we have something to talk about, whereas maybe we had nothing at all in common if they didn’t.

If someone likes something and I don’t like it: it’s not for me, and I have only a little over half my lifetime left on this earth to find other stuff, so I better get busy finding the things I DO like instead of being a dick about the stuff that was never for me in the first place. I used to lamb-baste certain bands or brands or movies or other cultural apparatus in an attempt to prove how legit I was… These days, anyone can go anywhere and do anything, so long as they’re not hurting me, and I have zero opinion on it. Because I found me — not the picture of me I painted in my head covered in tattoos of all the things I love, so that I have some sort of identity. Me. The guy inside.

You need to face a hard fact: your sense of identity is anchored to what the group has decided comprises inclusion. Should you disagree, you will face the one and only fear you’ve had since the beginning of your time in fandom: being kicked out. But, here’s the cheat code: you can’t be. It’s not possible.

 

NO ONE CAN STOP YOU FROM LIKING THE THINGS YOU LIKE.

 

Read that again, because it’s actually the entire point of this letter to you. You can’t stop anyone from liking what they choose to like, any more than they can stop you from liking it. And while we’re at it, no one can force you to like things you don’t like. The most they can do is make you so afraid you’ll be kicked out that you pretend to like it.

When you’re a teenager you like the bands your friends like. You enjoy the movies your friends enjoy. You become friends though these shared interests. But once you belong, there’s a weird thing that happens… You form an identity. And once you’ve formed that identity, there is only one cardinal sin you can ever commit: doing anything outside of that identity, lest you be outcast and isolated and alone again.

These guys you’ve found yourself in league with… They’ve made it their identity to be the guardians and gatekeepers of the ever-so-holy “fandom” they’ve some to think is theirs by right. That’s all they are: a loosely connected group of entitled men who think they own something they couldn’t possibly ever actually own in reality. Because they are, in their own hearts and minds, alone. They are begging to belong. They have no purpose aside from proving they have one. Validation is a drug, and the easiest way to get it is via folks who pat you on the back when you attack your common enemy.

This is all they have (And, I would argue, it’s all you have, as well): A conflict manufactured to try and prove just how loyal and ardent a fan they are, by fighting against a common perceived enemy.

It’s even easier when that enemy is undefined and amorphous. You can attack literally anyone who stumbles into your definition of enemy – which is hilariously easy to do, because the rules aren’t really written down and can change on a whim. (Well, hilarious to everyone except the victims). And you always win because the conditions of victory are loose and movable. All it takes is for your chosen group to believe you “owned” them and voila, achievement unlocked.The narrative they’ve built needs enemies. You, sad to say, need enemies. Because you either don’t know or don’t like yourself enough to just be yourself. You need a reflection to point at and call out all the things you aren’t, so that you can justify being who you are. The so-called SJWs are good and useful enemies then, aren’t they? They’re corrupting the entire industry and forcing Marvel and DC and whomever else to pander to them for a dollar, and that’s ruined comics and fandom, and you’re not going to stand for it.

…No.

Marvel and DC and whomever else are CORPORATIONS who operate FOR PROFIT and if they see an audience for something, they’re going to SELL AS MUCH OF THAT PRODUCT TO THAT AUDIENCE AS THEY POSSIBLY CAN. And, both fortunately and unfortunately, we as a society have uncovered permanently the fact that most of us feel isolated, alone, underrepresented, and ultimately futile. And this fact is showing up in fantasy narratives to make us feel less small and more powerful. And those fantasy narratives are the exact same ones that used to make YOU feel so good. The awkward geek unlocking a secret power which makes him a stud and a hero, but ultimately still is an awkward geek? That was you, remember? And guess what… There’s others. And they’re not white, straight, or male by default.

They’re not taking it away from you. They CANNOT take it away from you. It’s in you. You experienced it. And now, they’re experiencing it for themselves.

If you’re not a racist, or a misogynist, or a -phobe… Ask yourself one very important question: why would you do that? Why would you deny anyone that experience? You already had yours. And you can have even more. Stories aren’t going to suddenly disappear because someone else read them, or made their own. There’s tons and tons to go around.

“But SJWs hate us for being straight white males, and thus, we never have to feel bad about fighting them. They hate us just because, so our hatred of them is justified.”

…No.

They hate their abusers. And traditionally, the folks who consider themselves SJWs have some history of being put upon and oppressed (or ignored) by those in power. And guess what: you’re acting just like those abusers did when they did it to you.

The manufactured conflict you are engaged in? It’s not against SJWs. It’s against yourself. You must fight to hold on to the thing you’ve convinced yourself is yours, because without it, there is no you.

I can’t stop you from being a dick, and I can’t force you to find yourself. That decision is entirely in your hands. But I will tell you the inevitable conclusion of this journey you’re on: at some point, people are going to learn that if they ignore you, they remove your power over them. Right now, they choose to engage you, because they feel attacked. But they’ll eventually realize, your only power is harassment online. Some already have, and have shut you out. And sure, you can keep hunting for more offenders, because hey, if you love something you fight for it, right? But they’ll figure you out, too. And in the end all you’ll be left with is a community of guys whose mission it is to prove to themselves and each other who is the biggest geek. Eventually you’ll eat yourselves. And you’ll be alone.

So I have to ask: is this making you happy? Honestly, in aggregate, do you consider yourself a happy person because you indulge in harassing people for liking something you think is yours? For daring to create something in the same genre that goes against what you think it should be? Are you fundamentally, at your core, a happy guy right now?

If you say yes, you’re lying to both of us.

I challenge you to love yourself. I challenge you to fight for yourself. I want you to claim the only thing in this world that is rightfully yours, which no one can ever, ever take from you: yourself. Spiderman is not you, any more than Akira was me. Sci-fi is not you, any more than comic books are me. They’re just things we like, and even love.  They’re things we found comfort and connection in. They made us feel less alone. They made us feel like we had something, when deep inside it felt like we had no one. So I get it. I really, really do.

But they’re just things. At the end of the day, they’re products we bought because we wanted them in our lives. They’re the stories we paid attention to over other stories, because they resonated with us. Why, in the face of that, would you ever deny that feeling for anyone else? And don’t tell me it’s because they don’t truly love it the way you do. That’s a bullshit answer and the easiest lie to jump to when challenged. You can’t possibly know how much anyone loves anything.

Let me prove that by posing a hypothetical situtation:

I am, as has been written in various publications that have appeared across the globe, the world’s biggest Akira fan. So, how do you know I haven’t been faking it all this time, just to get some attention?

How do you know all of the money I spent on all the things I have wasn’t just an elaborate ruse to work my way into the animation industry, or geek fandom, or the Guinness Book of World Records? How do you fucking know? If I told you right here and now that Akira, to me, was just a cartoon I saw on Sci-Fi newtork back in the day and I found out some guy had a bunch of original shit on ebay I could get for “cheap” because I was a dot-com kid and I crafted a twenty year plan to set myself up as an authority on Akira, would you believe me?

Yeah, maybe that does seem ridiculous.

So, then I ask you: why is it such a hard thing to accept that the cosplayers who spend thousands of dollars making their production-quality costumes, or the gamers who spend thousands of dollars on equipment to stream themselves playing games that they also spent hundreds or thousands of dollars to acquire and play, are any less of a fan?

Their gender?

Their race?

Their religion?

Their sexual identity?

Do you realize how fucking stupid that is? I mean, if you met me on the street, maybe you’d think that about me, because I bench press a lot and played professional sports and do CrossFit. If you saw me wandering the aisles of a convention, and you didn’t know who I am, you might — and very well would — decide I couldn’t possibly be a real fan. And you’d be wrong as fuck.

But not because I own the Art of Akira Exhibit and have been featured everywhere as a result. It’s because you made an assumption in the first place, and it doesn’t fucking matter what the hell else is behind my love of Akira. You’re just plain wrong for even bothering to let that thought cross your mind. Because it’s none of your fucking business how much I love anything I decide to love.

And it’s not my place to say you can’t possibly be a real Akira fan because you don’t own all these cels and you haven’t spent all this money doing all this stuff. I don’t know you. And even if I did… It’s none of my goddamn business what you like, and how much you like it. What exactly is the measure of a “real fan?” What checkboxes need be ticked to get that little badge? And who writes the test?

It’s a goddamn joke, all of it. It’s a waste of time. I’m trying to give you the easy way out, because I had to learn that the hard way.

In 2012, I wrote the Fake Geek Girl thing. I genuinely thought I was defending fandom and all the folks in it, by stating that there was some measure of what constituted a real fan, and the women who cosplayed or streamed gaming online were only doing so to manipulate us, the frustrated males who saw them as pretty girls who would normally never want anything to do with us, playing us for fools by pretending to like stuff we liked so they could achieve a measure of popularity.

I thought I was fighting the good fight. So, when literal millions of very upset people railed against me, I was left utterly confused.

“These are supposed to be my people!” I said to whomever would listen. How can everyone think I’m these horrible things, when all I want is to protect this thing that is so precious to me? It was never my intent to hurt women, it was my intent to uncover and expose some deep far-ranging conspiracy where pretty girls couldn’t possibly like comics and their cosplay and their involvement in the fandom HAD to be self-serving and for profit by subjugating my delicate entitled white straight male geekdom.

It took ten million people (literally) pointing a finger and saying “No, that’s not it” for me to realize… It was never about the pretty girls, or the fandom, or the cosplay or the conventions or the money. It was about a young, isolated, pudgy, freakishly large, awkward boy who found something that made him feel slightly less alone, perceiving it as being yanked away by the very people who made him feel so alone.

I was 36 when I wrote that article. I developed those deep perspectives on fandom when I was a child. I failed to mature them as I grew up. As a result, I was attacking entire generations for whom comics, animation, cosplay, conventions, and geekdom weren’t taboo or weird or out of place. I was attacking a broad age range of people who weren’t even born yet when I was forming my adolescent sense of self. These folks weren’t the people who picked on me in junior high. They didn’t make me feel isolated and alone and freakish. And the people who did do that… Well, they’ve grown up too. I can’t account for all of them of course, but a few I’ve talked to have made amends and apologized. So what the fuck was I fighting for? Validation? Proving to the friends and community I had joined just how big and faithful a geek I really was?

It didn’t work. Because it’s bullshit. Ultimately, I was no longer isolated and alone and awkward and freakish. I had friends. I had a group I belonged to. The story I told myself – that I was a freak and alone — was not the truth. It was merely a story which justified my behavior. And that story was a lie. They weren’t the enemy. The enemy was myself, and my need to make the things I like, my identity as a person. Because at my core, I had no idea who I really was. And I had to face the fact that this made me an asshole.

It hit me like a brick in the face: I, the abused, had become the abuser. And like all abusers, I justified it by saying it was for their own good.

That’s an ugly thing to realize about yourself. It hurts writing it just now. But I have to, don’t I? If I’m going to reach you through honesty and connect with you through my own experience, that’s what I have to do. And my sincerest hope is that it hurts you the same way it hurt me. Not that I want to hurt you – I really don’t. But if you’ve ever had surgery before, you know that in order to heal, sometimes you have to be cut. And in order to get this splinter out of your heart before it festers and infects you further… Well, it simply isn’t going to feel good. And if I’m successful, you’re going to feel that pain, just the same as I did.

I didn’t like feeling like an asshole. And I had to choose between fighting it, or figuring out what the fuck happened in a situation where I did something I thought was right, in the name of protecting a fandom I loved — that hurt so many people and ultimately made them all think I was an asshole (because I was one). That journey led me to discover a lot of things I just plain didn’t know about myself. Some because I was truly ignorant, and others because I’d been too afraid to lift that rock in my soul and see what slimy gross things were slithering under there that I was too scared to admit were part of me.

It sucked in the short term. It hurt a lot. But I did the work. I talked to everyone I could, both online and in person. I read every book and watched every video I was prescribed to gain insight. I learned a number of things I never knew before, and rather than tick a checkbox saying “yep, ok, did that,” I instead worked to make that learning a part of who I am.

Along the way, I learned another way to be. A way that didn’t make me miserable every day of my life and force me to lash out at people in an effort to preserve an identity that was based on external things. And in that, I learned who I am as a man and as a person. And that guy — the one who most definitely wasn’t a racist, a misogynist, a bigot… He made peace with the isolated, alone, scared little entitled geek in me who very much wanted to punish everyone who ever made fun of me for daring to be who I am as a person.

You’re acting out because you’re scared of being outcast from a thing you have made your identity. You don’t have to. It’s not incumbent upon you to protect fandom from a larger fandom. It’s not your decision to craft the narrative of Marvel or DC or the Hugo Awards. You can still like everything you’ve ever liked. And if you feel underrepresented, you can start making your own. You don’t need to take anything away from anyone else to have what you have. To try is folly, because you cannot control what other people decide to like. When you try, they will fight you, and when they realize you have no power, they will ignore you. And as those numbers grow, you’re going to find yourself increasingly alone and isolated and miserable.

And you only have the rest of your life left on this Earth. Is this how you want to spend it? Saying shit that makes assholes respect you? Because if so, that makes you an asshole. Like I said, I can’t control what you like. And if you decide you don’t want to like yourself… That’s your perogative.

I genuinely hope that you will, however. Trust me… The light doesn’t burn your skin when you come out and face it. And what you will see once you’ve been illuminated… Well, that’s something I’m a fan of that I really do want to share with you.

I’ll leave you with this: if this letter pissed you off: GOOD. Either you’re one of the racists, misogynists, homophobes, transphobes, or other hateful types I won’t reach no matter how hard I try, and I just don’t fucking care, or  I struck a chord within you.

If it’s the first…

[image error]See ya.

If it’s the second, however… Listen to that chord. What sound did it make? Did it sound like doubt? Do you think I’m way off base, and yet somehow can’t put a finger on it? Do you feel like you’re not racist, not sexist, not bigoted in any way, but your fandom is precious to you and you feel it’s being destroyed by forces you can’t control? Are you angry about that and have no idea how to handle it, so you lash out? Do you feel even the slightest pang of guilt or shame? Or, even fear?

Hang on to that. Grab it. Hold it. That’s the thing that’s going to get you where you ultimately want to be. It’s what woke me up.

I’m not trying to “fight” ComicsGate. I’m simply trying to reach you. And I need you to know, you don’t need those guys in your life to feel like you belong. You don’t need to attack anyone else and keep them out to like the things you like. You don’t need to do this. Partly because it’s useless — you won’t win. It’s not possible. And partly because all it does is put more distance between you and acceptance from the only entity on the planet with whom you truly need it: yourself. Quit living your life for the eyes and thoughts of others — both your “enemies” and your “friends” — and you’ll begin to see that it just doesn’t matter who likes what. All that matters is how we spend our time.

And you are wasting yours.

I wish you the best.