Adam Oster's Blog, page 21

Don’t be a Jerk; Get the Jab!

A year and a half ago, I was on a flight back from Las Vegas with my wife when we started discussing this little epidemic in China which people were concerned might become something bigger. I remember thinking little of it at the time. This wasn’t the first time we had heard similar mutterings. This wasn’t even the first coronavirus we were told could become a pandemic. It wasn’t even a month later when we would be shutting down the country in an effort to try to slow the pace of this incredibly virulent strain of coronavirus so our hospitals wouldn’t be overrun and therefore cause all the issues that happen when you simply don’t have enough hospital staff to take care of the sick people coming through their doors.

Even then, I thought we might be overreacting. Our news cycle has a habit of over-hyping things for us to be scared about in order to increase their ratings, and a not-small part of me thought this could be another one of those situations.

I was wrong.

Whether you want to believe this was a disease released by a lab or some crazy global conspiracy to do…something, people are getting sick and dying and a year and a half ago, we knew next to nothing about this disease. While we were finally shutting down our schools and non-essential businesses, people in Italy were suffocating to death on hospital carts because there wasn’t enough hospital staff or equipment to care for them. Nurses and doctors had their lives upended as they separated themselves from their families in order to keep them safe. All because we really had no clue what we were dealing with and all we could do to stop the spread was to completely separate ourselves from each other until we understood it better.

Yet, while people were dying, plenty of people saw this as an affront to their personal liberties, as opposed to an attempt to stop the flood of sick people, and, well, although we definitely lessened the curve, we got nowhere near stopping this virus. People protested on the streets against not being able to go to bars or because their businesses were being shut down. While we were being told that we should hunker down in our homes until there was a better understanding of what we were up against, people across the world fought to say it wasn’t fair.

Things got a little better when we learned that masks would help slow the spread. This was huge. We could start to open things up again. We could go out into the world again because we had a method by which to keep from spreading this sometimes-deadly disease to others. We could live our lives again, as long as we were willing to live those lives with a piece of fabric on our faces.

That still wasn’t good enough for everyone because it took away from our personal liberties. While I can’t go around town without pants because of public decency laws, people were protesting in the streets because they were being told to wear something over their mouths and noses. Heck, people started talking about masks like they were part of some tyrannical government conspiracy which apparently has the same business strategy as the underpants gnomes. Here medical science had given us an answer about how we might be able to safely go about our normal lives once again even with this disease spreading across the globe like a gender reveal party wildfire, and we got mad because it makes us smell our own disgusting breath.

Luckily, our medical scientists moved quickly and within a year of us even knowing that COVID-19 existed in people, we had multiple incredibly effective vaccines available and approved for use in humans. And although the people who were most vulnerable to the virus appeared willing to sign up for this protection right off the bat, it became apparent quickly that many of the people across the globe, but especially here in the United States, saw the vaccine as still yet too much to ask of them.

As someone who has a historical terror whenever the needles come out, I understand the absolute fear people might struggle with which could lead to them not getting vaccinated. I’ll reluctantly admit I’ve never gotten a flu shot. You see, I’ve always seen the flu shot as something to get to keep yourself from getting sick, which is definitely a part of it, but I had never considered how the flu shot is important for keeping other people from getting sick.

Like the COVID vaccines.

There has been no secret message about why we wear masks or why it’s important to get vaccinated from COVID-19. Yes, the hope is that these things will keep you safe, but it has ALWAYS been about how important these things are about keeping other people safe. Like my kids, who, as of right now, two out of the three of them are unable to be vaccinated because they are too young.

But let’s be honest here. None of this is really about the medical science, is it? I mean, if the doctor tells you that you have cancer and the best method for recovery is to go through chemotherapy, how many of you anti-vaxxers are going to turn down the poisonous chemicals they are going to suggest to use to clear your body of the tumors threatening to kill you. Sleep apnea masks are, from what I’ve heard, terribly uncomfortable, but are you going to choose to die in your sleep for your personal liberties instead of taking your doctor’s suggestion on how to help you deal with your COPD?

Either this is about how little you care about other people, verses yourself, or this is a purely political statement you’re trying to make.

Based on the discussions I see floating around social media, I’m not even sure many of you would deny this is a political statement. And that’s terrifying. When we’re deciding our course of action for public health purely on political messages, what does that mean for the future of humanity?

But is there a way we can look at this past the political messaging?

I mean, we could definitely battle this from the standpoint that Donald Trump was the guy who started Operation: Warp Speed. He’s the guy who threw all the money at the vaccines. We even saw Biden’s administration give Trump the credit for their work with getting the vaccines rolling. By all means, the political sides on this should be reversed. Yet, somehow the vaccine is seen as some sort of liberal propaganda.

But maybe there is some logic you’re working on past the political piece. Like, maybe you simply don’t trust the vaccines. I honestly wish you would do the research and see how this is medical science at its finest and how much the work, especially with mRNA, is going to make drastic positive changes for how we look at diseases in general. I have a cardiologist friend who has been telling me about all the amazing things they have been working on for mRNA vaccines for heart disease for years. This isn’t just some fly by night finding that we’re just now trying out for the first time. We’ve been working on this for years and lucky for us, battling COVID is something these types of vaccinations is perfectly suited for.

But, okay, fine, you’re still on the fence. I beg you to reconsider, but if you’re immovable on the subject of vaccines, I still don’t understand the adamancy against masking. I’ve been watching my friends and family argue about having kids wear masks in schools, even during the midst of the heights of the case and death counts, stating how unnecessary it is because of how these kids don’t get that sick if they get it. First of all, kids are still dying, whether or not they are the big case numbers. And the Delta variant is causing even greater issues for kids. But, regardless of whether or not the kids get very sick, schools are our number one way of passing diseases around a community. It’s why the schools were the first things to shut down back at the start of this whole mess. For as long as my kids have been in school, the second a cold or anything goes through the school, my entire household gets sick. All of us. And it passes on to our family members who come to visit. Do you honestly believe this would be any different with COVID?

By removing masks in schools, especially in areas with large outbreaks, we’re turning our kids into biological bombs. Consider briefly the math of having 300 kids in a school getting sick with a disease like this which passes rapidly between them because we don’t want them to have to wear masks. That’s at least 100 households (I’m giving an average of three kids per family per school, which is a high average) that now has this disease. And then those other family members pass it along to wherever else they are going without their masks. This is how the disease wins, folks.

As best as I can tell, there isn’t a single person in the world right now (outside, I guess, of this secret global cabal who developed this pandemic for some sort of extra secret profit) who doesn’t want the pandemic to be over. Everyone is exhausted by cancelled events and closed stores and all of the hundreds of others of non-sickness impacts caused by COVID and yet what it sounds like to me from those who are anti-mask and anti-vax is that we should just do nothing. Sweden did nothing and they’re still actively working to get their entire country vaccinated. Doing nothing does exactly that…nothing.

And the one place I’ve seen the do nothing message come through the strongest, it’s with Christians. Since day one I’ve seen folks posting the message of “God will keep me safe”. Isn’t the way that God keeps you safe through things like medical science, unless, I suppose, you’re a Jehovah’s Witness. We don’t walk into busy intersections with our eyes closed because we know that’s stupid and there is an expectation that God uses things like crosswalk signals to keep us safe. God asks his followers to consider their bodies as temples to him and to therefore be good stewards of this temple. That’s Christianity 101. God put a freaking tree in the Garden of Eden and said don’t eat from this tree. He didn’t say: “Oh, just do whatever and I’ll make sure you only have rainbows and lollipops in your life.” We can’t simply live our lives the way we want and expect God to make sure nothing goes wrong in our lives. His has an expectation for personal responsibility. And he’s also a big fan of caring for your neighbor. I don’t see how things like masks and vaccines don’t fall directly in line with the Bible’s message about how to live your life.

Yet, even with all of this said, I’m still incredibly hopeful that there are more people avoiding the vaccine out of fear instead of hiding behind their political/religious biases as a reason to not do something they don’t want to do. In other words, I’m hoping more of you are scared than are like the lady I saw at Kohl’s last spring telling the person at the door that they had a religious exemption to masks.

As such, I hope to give you a few reasons to maybe bypass those fears.

1. I hate needles. Although I get them weekly (because of my allergy shots and donations to the red cross), I still jump and want to cry every time I get pricked by one. When I received the Pfizer vaccine (both the first and second doses), I didn’t even realize I had been jabbed until after they were done. Now, this might have been due to the delicate touch of the person jabbing me, but the reality here is that it’s a small needle, it’s a small amount of liquid, and it’s seriously one of the least painful injections I’ve ever had, if not the least.

2. Although the mRNA vaccines have been studied at length for over a decade and were already nearly ready to be released for several different uses, I get that this is a new style of medicine with some information (whether it is true or not) that can be kinda scary. Lucky for you, the Johnson and Johnson vaccine is like those good old vaccines you know and love. Sure, I suppose if you’re a part of the old school anti-vaxxer crowd, you might still have fears of autism and whatnot, (which, honestly, then you should go for the mRNA vaccines, because they don’t have those nasty preservatives that you’ve been told to fear), but the reality here is that the reality of passing around a disease which has been shown to kill is far worse than the (disproven) fears that these vaccines could maybe possibly, in very small amount of cases, cause autism.

3. I miss the normal. My kids will be vaccinated as soon as they are able, but I miss taking them to the movie theaters and on plane rides, and to places where there are billions of people all coughing and breathing on each other. But I can’t, in good conscience, do that until they are safe to not be passing this disease around to other folks who aren’t vaccinated, whether for their own health reasons or fears or because they, like you, simply can’t get themselves to do it. If you have no legitimate reason to not get vaccinated, you should really get yourself vaccinated. So we can get rid of the masks, so we can be indoors together, so people can feel safe being around other people.

And finally, if you’re not vaccinated, wear a damned mask. And if you’re in a place with a current outbreak, wear one even if you are. The flu was nearly unseen in our hospitals this year because masking and social distancing guidelines work to keep us from passing diseases. At this point, if you’re actively fighting against mask wearing simply because you don’t like it, you are showcasing a severe disregard for the safety of others. None of us like wearing masks, but many of us also aren’t big fans of being the reason someone else gets sick and dies.

Look, I get it. The information about COVID has been difficult to keep up with. Things change on an almost weekly basis. First the CDC says masks won’t help, then they say they will. First we hear about how few people will be impacted by the disease then we hear how we need to shut everything down. First we hear that vaccination will almost completely protect us from COVID then we hear that there’s a Delta variant that causes an increase in breakthrough cases. Heck, even back at the beginning of this whole thing I posted an article on here suggesting we approach this disease like we did the chicken pox when I was a kid. Yeah, it was a tongue in cheek article, but I’ll admit I wasn’t completely convinced it was a terrible idea. But the truth is that even those chicken pox parties were dangerous. Kids die from the chicken pox and we were passing it around like weird little 80s kid petri dishes. COVID is far more deadly than the chicken pox. Sure, maybe you won’t die from it, but many will and have. And by not being willing to take some simple precautions to keep the disease from spreading, you could be directly responsible for someone’s death. All because you simple don’t want to do the things you’re being told are the responsible things to do.

If there is no greater good than to lay down one’s life for a friend, surely getting vaccinated (or wearing a mask) for a stranger has to be a pretty awesome thing to do as well.

Adam Oster: Adventure Farmer

One of the many reasons which kept me from writing over the past few years, especially with regards to the blog, was because I bought a hobby farm.

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Since before we had gotten married, my wife and I had long discussed the idea of having a farm. For myself, some of my earliest memories were of me dreaming about being a farmer. My grandfather was a farmer, meaning my dad also grew up on a farm, and that family history, plus my own interest in the concept of being self-sufficient and working the land and returning to some of the roots of existence all tugged at me throughout my life to want to be a farmer. I’ll also admit that the Chevy Chase film Funny Farm always held a special place in my heart, even though he didn’t find much success as a writer or a farmer and overall the whole thing ended in disaster.

But that’s all besides the point. Regardless of the reasons, my wife and I had long wanted a farm, and a little over 4 years ago, we finally achieved that dream. And for two years we had this amazing twelve acres of paradise hiding out in a valley in the middle of corn and soy fields where we could spend our nights outside watching the stars twinkle in the night sky as we listened to the cows mooing on the other side of the hill.

We had the freedom to do pretty much anything we wanted out there. We had upwards of a hundred birds, between ducks, chickens, turkeys, and guinea fowl. And I had my 4-wheeler which I would use to run our German short-haired pointer so he could get his energy out. That puppy could keep up with me for up to at least 20 mph. We had countless parties to watch movies under the stars while my wife made pizza in her wood-burning pizza oven. The babbling creek which ran through the property was overrun by weeds, but I had made it my primary focus to try to dig it out to create a swimming hole and to do some trout fishing.

Farm life was so different than anything I knew from my lifetime of living in the city. People from the surrounding areas, whose houses were the closest ones around, but were still miles away, would show up on our driveway and invite us over to their house at the same time as introducing themselves. We were offered countless free livestock from everyone. Even though we were outsiders to this very close knit community, almost every interaction felt as though we were considered a part of a really really old and close family. This was in comparison to the neighborhood we had come from where there were people two doors down from us whom we never even saw, much less met.

I loved it on the farm, and honestly, if it were just me, I probably would have never left.

But the reality is: my kids struggled to fit in at the school, we were isolated from everyone we knew by a thirty minute drive, which got exceptionally worse during the winters when we had to deal with the snow on our half-mile long driveway, the work in running a farm altogether was exhausting, as both my wife and I still had our full time jobs while we were trying to get the farm up to speed to do all the things we wanted to do with it, and honestly, it just felt like every single thing we did felt like it took ten times as much work as it did in the city…even getting take out, since no one would deliver out to the middle of nowhere, was at least a thirty minute drive there and back, meaning it was almost less work to just cook instead. The weekly grocery trips would take a full day because we would have to drive to the city in order to fulfill our grocery list.

We knew that the farm would take a lot of work and we were prepared to do a lot of work, but after two years, we realized we weren’t able to focus on some of the things we really wanted to be able to focus on…like each other.

And so we reluctantly made the decision to move back to the city. And we’re back. We’ve been back for nearly two years now. We’re just across the street from the public pool and a 9-hole golf course, which has a bar and an ice cream shop. We’re within walking distance of both the middle and elementary schools that our kids go to. And we have friends all around us.

In fact, if it hadn’t been for the pandemic, we probably would have spent the last year feeling completely overwhelmed just with all of the things we could suddenly do, as opposed to being locked down inside our house feeling reminded of the isolation of the farm.

There’s definitely a part of me who feels he’s still a country mouse and wishes he could go back.

But there’s another part of me who really loves that he can just pick up a phone and have any number of food items immediately delivered to his door without ever having to get up from his seat.

But, most importantly, my kids are doing so much better in the schools here. They all have so many friends, as opposed to in the country, and they are being allowed to excel in the schools. So, although I might miss the days of trudging through the fields and looking for ways to improve my land, I wouldn’t trade it for the happier kids I’ve got now that they have found a place where they feel accepted.

Losing a Friend I Barely Knew

This past winter, my kids and I decided to start a weekly tradition of helping out with the local Meals on Wheels chapter. At the start of the pandemic, we, as a family, had decided to try to find some ways to put some good into the world and the idea of spending an hour delivering meals was an easy hit. And it allowed my kids and I to get out of the house a little bit during these long periods of being stuck at home hoping the world would get a little less crazy.

It felt like a light and breezy form of volunteer work, until I started reading through all of the orientation paperwork and suddenly realized that when working with people who have aged into the Meals on Wheels program, there’s a very certain possibility that at some point you will have to deal directly with death. The documentation outlined situations such as what to do when someone doesn’t answer the door and how, if all other attempts to reach them don’t work, you should try the door and check in to make sure they aren’t, well, dead. I’ll be honest in telling you this was the moment in which I seriously considered backing out of this volunteering opportunity. I didn’t. And I’m glad I didn’t.

As of this point, we haven’t seen any dead bodies, but we did lose someone who was easily my family’s favorite food recipient. He became the highlight of the weekly trip on our first deliveries and was always the one my kids would ask about on the weeks they weren’t able to help out. He was always so eager to talk to us and was always prepared with a kooky anecdote to share. And he doted on my children because of their willingness to do good. I’m not going to lie, he was my favorite as well. There have been more than a couple days where I would be in the midst of a crap attitude when having him answer the door would immediately brighten my spirits.

He was a painter. And he had beautiful paintings, including the one featured in this post. He gifted that one to my kids one week, telling them how he wanted to give them a painting of butterflies because of how he saw them as being as pleasant of a surprise to his day as he did when seeing butterflies out his window.

He was a truly special person and gave us a lot to look forward to during this year of uncertainty.

A few weeks ago, however, when I stopped by to drop off the food for him and his wife, he wasn’t nearly as talkative. Where he usually had at least a five minute conversation prepped for us, that week he exchanged only the most basic of pleasantries before saying goodbye and disappearing inside his house. I had feared I had disappointed him the previous week with my non-committal response to how he and I should sit down and talk someday. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested, just that it had taken me off guard and I gave a crappy response about how we were already talking, as opposed to the words I immediately wished I had said which was “I’d love that”.

This brief, out of character, conversation I had with the man would be the last. The following week a woman would answer the door to take his food, a woman I would later realize to be his daughter. I wanted to ask about my friend, but simply didn’t know how to do so, noting there were numerous cars in the area around his driveway and just assuming he was too busy to come to the door.

The following week he cancelled his delivery, there being a note on my clipboard about how his daughter had said he was sick.

It was at that point I started checking the obituaries, fearing for the worse. It wouldn’t be until the following week, when I noticed his name was off the sheet entirely, that I knew I would never have these wonderful little chats again.

My kids responded to the news quietly, not really knowing what to say, but the way their bodies slumped told me everything. They were sad, but they didn’t even know how to be sad about this man they had only gotten to know through brief five minutes conversations.

I didn’t know him well, but it didn’t take much to see that this was a man who simply wanted to have people to talk to. He obviously loved people. And I would assume he was very much loved back by the simple joy he was able to bring into our lives.

I just hope that we were able to bring a little bit into his.

Here we thought we were going out to put some good into the world, but it turned out the world was actually just using this to put some good into us. We might be sad now, but that’s only because of how happy his very presence in our lives made us.

Just like a butterfly.

Locked Down… with Children

Obviously we’re still in the midst of a global pandemic and staring down the barrel of another lockdown if this delta variant (and its variant) doesn’t somehow manage to slow its roll (probably through, you know, vaccination). But, as a parent in this time of lockdowns, I can’t help thinking of how absolutely strange of a year this was for both parents and kids.

It’s not like this is the first time something like this has happened. Notably, the polio epidemic in Chicago caused kids to have school over the radio while staying at home. And, to have the kids home with a parent has been the norm for a great deal of our country’s history. But for my lifetime, it has been much more common for both parents to be working out of the house and the kids to either be at some sort of daycare or hang out at home without the parents.

Suddenly, both parents and kids were at home, both trying to get their stuff done in a way that was overall alien to them, while feeling incredibly stir crazy because the world was shut down and they were therefore cut off from all of the things they would normally do outside of the home.

I’ve worked from home for over a decade now, so being home all the time was relatively old hat for me when we came up on the first lockdown last year. I’ve even spent a summer or two with the kids hanging around, because we were unable to find daycare close enough to us at the farm to take in our horde of children. But at the farm, we had the blessing of space, so we could send them outside and have them explore the surroundings and just go crazy. There was definitely some boredom, but overall they were able to find ways to amuse themselves pretty well. Summer is great like that.

But in March of 2020, we were in the midst of winter here in Wisconsin and things were mighty cold when the kids were suddenly forced to be home. We didn’t really know what to do. My wife and I still had to work, and our kids were now here, all the time, looking for something to take their minds off the fact that they were suddenly cut off from their friends and family. Summer of 2020 was a little better because we could do things outside and we even managed to take a trip to explore some national and state parks to get out while still staying away from others. Yet, everything still felt off. A large part of that was due to how cut off we were from family and friends. Although we definitely scheduled some distanced social time, it simply wasn’t what we were accustomed to. And when winter returned, we were right back where we had been, even though the kids were now going to school two days a week. Cabin fever set in hard by then.

Spring of 2021 was super exciting though. Not only were we, as a country, getting vaccinated, but the death and infection numbers plummeted and the horizon looked a lot brighter than it had in a long time. We even started planning trips. Trips which would involve planes. Trips which would allow us to feel like things were normal again, at least a little. The pool across the street reopened. Friends became regular appearances in our lives again. And we even managed to throw a party or two, and would have thrown more, but we apparently forgot how to invite people over to our house during the previous year.

Although things are looking a little stark again as this new variant rips through communities, 2021 has been a breath of relief compared to the previous year. 2020 contained so much confusion and anger and, overall, a feeling of unknown for the future and whether we would ever return to normal. My family and I worked through some pretty intense emotions as we struggled to understand what the future would look like, and whether it would ever feel normal again. I believe working through these emotions together has made our family stronger, but I also think we’re all still in this state of shock where we’re still afraid of everything being ripped out from under us again. Although we were the ones actively working to follow the rules and separate ourselves from others for the betterment of the community, I think we all felt abandoned, as though everyone else had left us behind. And I’m not entirely sure we’re ever completely get past that.

2020 has left a mark on my family and me which I highly suspect will always be there. I’m also guessing this is true for many people around the world. This idea of protecting the community by altogether keeping the community separate from itself is an odd one.

But it’s my hope that by continuing forward and working toward the betterment of the community by following the best current information from those who have been studying this virus, that we can finally find an end to this overhanging fear which has many of us hiding out in our houses to keep from being the one who infects someone whose body simply can’t take it.

It’s also my hope that my two youngest kids can be vaccinated soon and further serve to help protect our communities from passing this virus around and get us even closer to that point where we can finally say we’ve reached the other end of this pandemic.

Until then, I’ve got plenty of board games to keep us busy again this winter.

What I’m Reading/Playing/Watching/Hearing

Book: DC Universe Infinite

A few months ago, I decided to check out whether or not I could actually enjoy reading digital comics, realizing that my tablet might be a nice way to do so, and I subscribed to DC Comics’ online digital comics portal. It has comics from all the way back to Superman’s start in 1937 to today. I decided it would be interesting to see if I could start all the way back at the beginning and read every book they have (there are over 25,000 of them). Short story: this has been some rough reading. I’m nearly through 1943 and I’ve come close to quitting this project numerous times already. The writing in these old comics is atrocious, and they filled their panels with text, meaning it can take hours to read a single book. And the stories are so heavily filled with government propaganda, especially now that I’m in the WWII years. The propaganda is so thick that I watch as superheroes get into union busting and I can’t help wonder whether I can actually love Superman anymore. It doesn’t help that there are some terribly sexist and racist depictions occurring throughout these early books. That’s not to say they’re all terrible. There’s plenty of great early world building going on, and some of the wonderful goofy fun that comics should have. And it’s definitely been an interesting history lesson to watch these characters grow and develop (albeit slowly) into the characters we know and love today. And you certainly get a good look at what the world (of the white man at least) looked like in the 1930s and 1940s. But…that doesn’t mean it doesn’t get rough from time to time to want to continue. I’ll keep you updated on my progress with that.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty on here worth reading. They have books all throughout DC’s history, up to and including books which were just realized last week. I just finished the Batman/Ninja Turtles crossover series last night and it was spectacular. I also recently read through a really weird crossover series featuring the cartoon characters of Hanna Barbera. Seeing Deathstroke and Yogi Bear team up to save Boo Boo (just seeing Deathstroke say the word Boo Boo) is worth the cost of admission.

Video Game: Firewatch

I’ve typically harbored a great deal of resentment toward video games which are really just interactive stories. Those choose your own adventure games which actually don’t let you do much choosing things outside of what clothes someone will wear or whether two characters will get into a fight later are not my thing. I like to feel like my actions do something in a video game. Otherwise, I may as well watch a movie and not have to push as many buttons.

But Firewatch is somehow different. It is 100% an interactive story, even if they like to market it as an adventure game. There’s maybe one puzzle in the whole thing, but most of it is just walking to the next spot so you can open up the next series of dialogue. It is an incredibly linear path from step a to b without any sort of action truly necessary from you, but I still found myself thoroughly enraptured by the game.

It’s set in the Shoshone National Forest and just walking through this forest with all the sounds and sights of nature has an almost ASMR quality to it. I felt almost like I was going through some mindfulness exercises as I hiked through the canyons and listened to these two people discuss the mysterious events happening around them. Maybe they should market it as a hiking simulator? Maybe I should seek out more hiking simulators?

The story is intriguing enough, but the reality here is that I just wanted to walk through the set pieces for as long as I could and feel the calm of being absolutely alone in the wilderness. And this game brought that to me.

Watching: Happy

Yes, yet more comics properties being made into popular entertainment that I’m sharing with you. Look, I’ve written two books that are homages to the comics, so it shouldn’t be that surprising what I’m into.

But here’s the thing, Happy is something so freaking incredible. First of all, it’s based on a comic series written by Grant Morrison, who is undeniably the best thing that has ever happened to comic books. Secondly, it has Christopher Meloni in the starring role, getting to do his best ridiculous character acting. Thirdly, it is just the most outrageous thing I’ve seen on television in a long time.

Now, I should warn you, this show is not exactly family-friendly. If you aren’t a fan of blood, guts, and sex, you should probably stay away. But if you don’t mind having some of that in your television watching, you’ll get to see Meloni eat the scenery in ways only he is capable while also getting to watch him act as a centerpiece to quite possibly the stupidest and most brilliant script ever written.

This show is like someone took all of the basic concepts of comic books and then just turned the dial way past eleven on each of them, allowing for this oddly bright and shiny toy surrounded by the darkest of storylines.

Oh, and Patton Oswalt plays an imaginary friend that happens to be a blue pegasus unicorn…so there’s that.

Hearing: August and Everything After – Counting Crows

This album is one of a few albums which defined my high school years. It came out when I was in eighth grade, but this thing was on repeat for years after it. It has this amazing quality of angst while still being hopeful about the future that even today I find myself being drawn into the emotional qualities of the music. Mr. Jones was my jam for years as I found myself wanting to be famous and loved after years of feeling like no one loved me. And Adam Duritz’s vocals will pierce your ear drums in a way that is somehow pleasant, each and every time. Well, as long as it’s not the final note in Long December, but since that’s from a different album, we can ignore it for this discussion. If you want an album that sounds like the mid-90s, I’m not sure you can get one more thoroughly situated as such than this.

Have you got any cool arts you’ve been enjoying this week?

Share your Flash Fiction!

Hey folks,

If there’s one thing I love most, it’s probably experimental fiction. I love to write it and I love to read it. There’s something so amazing about taking a concept and trying to pursue it in a way that is a bit outside the norm. I’ll admit I’m not the most experimental of writers. Most of my experiments are doing things like making an overweight superhero and seeing if I can make the story relatable, or telling a story about running and using music to try to build the energy that could easily not be there when someone is running long distances. I’ve written love letters to fatherhood through the zombie apocalypse, and put robots in medieval England, but most of my books only have minor experimentation, still hoping to use the standards of novels to ensure that people will actually read the thing to the end.

The real place for the best in experimental fiction is in the world of flash fiction. These are generally short little pieces, around 1000 words, often written quickly, which are really suited for trying out an idea and seeing where you can get with it, while also attempting to actually tell a completed story. It’s an amazing exercise as an author and can be a fun experience for a reader, if you’re willing to watch a talented author flex their muscles.

I write plenty of flash fiction, but rarely share it, mostly because I don’t take the time to polish them into something shiny for people to enjoy. However, I’ve been wanting to share more of it. But not only my own flash fiction. I want all of it! So, here’s my call to action for you: Would you, the readers, be interested in seeing flash fiction from writers who may or may not be me? And would you, the writers who come around here, be interested in having a place to showcase some of your more quirky ideas?

Here’s my thought: I’m thinking I’ll share a writing prompt on social media, both Twitter and Facebook, and we’ll all work to get something pieced together within a given time frame, and then I’ll just post a bunch of different takes on the writing prompt on that day’s blog post. It could be an amazing way to see how different authors play with ideas.

What are your thoughts? I personally think this could be a whole heck of a lot of fun.

The Impossible Weight of Aging

My wife and I recently celebrated our fourteenth wedding anniversary (and should, when you’re reading this, in theory be on a little celebratory trip) and I have to be honest here, I honestly didn’t expect to make it this far. I never intended to break my wedding vows, but I just assumed something would happen, whether death, my wife leaving me, or just the general Armageddon. The reality is I’ve never been one to look far enough into the future to actually see us making it to our golden anniversary.

On top of that, I’m just about to crest the terrible mark of having lived for four decades on this earth. When I first met my wife, I had it in my head that I would mysteriously die by the age of twenty-five and here I am a whole fifteen years past that age just going on like this is how things were supposed to happen.

In other words, this morning, I looked in the mirror (on accident) and realized that I somehow actually managed to get old.

Getting old is something which has always terrified me. It was why I had this age of twenty-five in my head for the extent of my life span. Sure, forty might not be that old, but I simply couldn’t imagine myself as a forty-year old. Now that I’m here, I still have a hard time seeing myself as one.

Look, I don’t feel old. Sure, my knees don’t bend the way they used to, and I’m definitely noticing some issues with my right elbow that I didn’t use to notice, and I’m tired a lot and I go to bed a lot earlier, and I get grumpy if I don’t have my dinner ready before 6pm and I watch a lot of court room television and…Okay, at least one of those is a joke, but the reality is that although my body is showing signs of wear and tear, my brain still things of me as being twenty-five. In fact, I still do a lot of things that I did when I was that age, thinking that I should be able to do them just as well as I did back then.

For example, for father’s day this year, my family got me a pair of roller blades because I like to talk about how much I used to love roller blading. I took them out for a ride a few days later, to take my kid out to his summer school fun times, and I immediately injured myself in such a way that it took over amonth before I stopped limping completely.

I’m old…and I’m not a fan.

I do a pretty good job of ignoring my own aging, but it gets hard to ignore when I see things like how much older my kids are getting. I’ve got a kid in middle school now. She’s almost as tall as me. It’s wild. I’ve got a niece headed to college this fall. My friends and family keep showing all these signs of aging which means I must also be showing those same signs, even if I try to pretend I’m not getting older.

The world is getting older and so must I be.

And I’m not a fan.

So…for today, I’m halting time, just for a few minutes, and living the dream of not getting older. We’ll see how long I can hold on to that.

Have fun out there!

Waiting for Alice Cooper to Save Me

Approximately 2 years ago, I made the decision to go back to school to finally finish up my bachelor’s degree, something I started back in 1999 and technically have spent the past 20 years just a few credits shy of completing.

Why did it take me nearly twenty years to finish something I only had about one year left to complete? Because the school I had attended college at was unaccredited and none of my credits transferred to any other school, and I just couldn’t find myself to complete my schooling at the school I had originally attended.

Not for a lack of trying.

After initially declaring my inability to finish the program at that school, I took off for about a year before deciding to go back and try to finish the program, just so I would have my degree that I had already worked so hard on. They only had one of the classes I needed for graduation available that semester, so I got just a little bit closer to the end goal by taking a class which was only a half-semester long course.

And that half-semester settled within me my inability to stay at that school, so I dropped out yet again, not to return to college until approximately three years later, when I would attempt to go to the fully accredited state school in town, where I had been told my credits would transfer beautifully.

They didn’t.

In fact, here I was, a 23 year old, stuck trying to group projects with 18 year olds in English 101 on bs topics which would have taken me less than half an hour to crap out, but because they were group projects, took days.

And so, after a single term, I dropped out of college for the third time, now feeling so much farther away from graduation than before.

A college education was never all that important to me. It was a means to an end. I never felt like I got much out of my college days, usually finding myself having to struggle far more with the general education requirements than with the actual degree-specific classes and overall finding the whole experience a waste of my time.

So, I didn’t feel all that bad about not finishing. Sure, it was something I would consider time and again over the following twenty years. I’ve talked with countless colleges about the ideas of getting life experience credits or doing deep dives on the classes I had taken at the unaccredited college and hoping I could somehow convince them to only make me take a few degree specific courses so I could get that piece of paper which told the world I was college educated without having to start over again.

In the end most of those ideas didn’t pan out, and I’d get distracted by the busy-ness of life. And since a college education wasn’t super important to me, I simply never put it as a priority for me to complete it.

The story changed somewhat about five years ago when I got hired for a new job. I put in my two weeks notice for the job I was transitioning from, built a basement office because I would be working from home, and got ready to take on yet another new step in my career.

And a week out from starting the job, I got a call telling me that there was an issue with my background check. You see, the company that had hired me was under the impression that I had my bachelor’s degree, and, as noted quite thoroughly above, I didn’t. Long story short, conversations were not even allowed to be had before they revoked the job offer.

I was suddenly unemployed, all because of a miscommunication I had no control over. And although I may have been able to recover from that situation quickly, having a completely new job within another two weeks, it felt like some sort of sign that I should probably just go about completing the effort on getting that piece of paper.

And so, approximately two years ago, I finally started back at college, with a whole 12 credits to my name out of the 120 (out of the ~100 unaccredited credits I had earned) I would need to graduate, feeling like I was starting completely over once again.

But this time, I had an ace in the hole. The degree just so happened to be in the exact field I’ve been working in for the past decade. I know this stuff cold. And for the past 2 year I’ve been struggling with getting through my general education requirements, because for some reason these classes require so much more of you than the classes which are teaching you the things you are paying the school to learn.

But I’m nearing the end. I have a year left. And I want so badly to be done.

I haven’t taken a break from school for these past 2 years. I’ve stuck with it. Because if I take a break, I can’t promise I’ll go back, and if I drop out this time, I’m pretty confident I’ll never go back.

So, I’m in school. And I’m so incredibly tired of being in school.

But I should probably get back to finishing my Spanish homework.

Diviértete ahí fuera!

The Right to Liberty

One of the things that I’ve been focused on quite possibly the most over the course of the past six years is my upcoming novel, currently titled The Right to Liberty.

I am so incredibly excited about this book, and really proud of the writing inside of it. While I love my previous books, they have always taken a rather adventurous approach to their narrative, allowing the excitement of the story to override anything else going on. This book is considerably different. It’s a folksy tale about an old man who lives out in the the Northwoods of Wisconsin who unintentionally starts a revolution.

This book started as just a simple concept, originally just a young drunken idiot who accidentally started a full fledged Revolutionary War-style revolution, but I found myself getting inspired by a few things when I finally sat down to begin writing it. Things like the adorable novel The Mouse That Roared while I was writing it. It’s no where near as silly as that book which was turned into a Peter Sellers movie, but similar in its concept of a small nation standing up against the power of the United States. And things like my father-in-law, who I thought could be an interesting perspective to frame a revolution around.

The book therefore became a lot less epic than was originally planned, but far more of a story that I think actually manages to say something. It’s about the power of the people and of community and about how much stronger we are as a people when we’re together instead of apart.

It attempts to try to take away the differences we hold because of our political beliefs and see what might happen if we merely needed to survive together.

But even more so than that, it’s about an old man and his dog, struggling to determine what to do when a few hundred people start showing up on his lawn and declaring themselves as the new country of Monrovia.

A year ago I sent this book out to my beta readers and got all sorts of love back, but when I looked through the book with the refreshed eyes of the notes I got from the readers, I realized there was so much more I could put into it. So, for the past year I’ve been slaving away at rewriting this thing to become far more than it was originally, while still keeping all of the same folksy spirit that I believe made the previous draft so much fun for readers. Although none of the actual plot points change, and the general activity within each of the chapters remains the same, I’d be willing to bet that only about 30% of the original words still exist in the book.

And because of that, I believe this book marks a significant increase in the quality of writing you may be accustomed to from yours truly.

In other words, I am so damned excited to show you want I’ve got.

And I’m so close to getting there. Just a few more chapters left of this extreme polishing I’ve been putting on the thing and then I’ll be moving on to some final drafting. And before you know it, this book will be bright and shiny and new and ready to find a cover and a shelf to be placed on.

This book may not be quite as adventurous as the previous books I’ve released, but it’s so much more than that, while still keeping that pioneering spirit that adventure requires. I think you’ll find that it shares many similarities with my previous stuff, while still being so very much more.

Have fun out there.

Validation as an Author

Although I’d love to use the excuse of being busy with life as the primary reason I haven’t been writing as much over these past six years, the reality is that six years ago I also finally reached a tipping point regarding my insecurity as an author.

I hold pretty high expectations for myself, and so whenever I would become aware of any failures in my own work, I would dwell on them. And while I know that art generally works because of the flaws in a specific piece, I’ve never been very good at recognizing that within my own work.

Part of my inability in achieving this feeling of zen has been that when you write books, there’s not much to go by to evaluate your worth as an author outside of how many books you sell. It’s not like making a movie or writing music where you can watch people experience your artform and see firsthand their emotional responses to it. No, you’re stuck getting the notes after the fact. When people have had time to think about it a little bit. When they’ve been able to fully dissect what you’ve crafted and come up with all of the holes that may or may not exist.

And books are notoriously difficult to sell. Not necessarily moreso than music or movies or other artforms, but considering this is the primary method by which to evaluate yourself, my incredibly low sales numbers have always caused me to feel this level of imposter’s syndrome. And when feeling like I didn’t deserve to call myself an author, I also caught myself questioning whether or not everything I was doing was an absolute waste of my time. And I hated the idea that I was forcing my friends and family to pretend to care that I was working on another book that they would have to pretend to have read and/or enjoyed.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m proud of my books. And I honestly enjoy them. Whenever I get around to rereading them to work on a sequel or for other reasons, I’m always surprised at the quality of my own writing. But at the same time, I am my own harshest critic and no matter how much I might be impressed with myself, I can’t help thinking it’s all in my head. That just because I appreciate what I’ve done, it’s still not good enough to be considered “good”. Even when people would tell me how much they loved my books, or the few times I’ve been told that someone was rereading them, or the phone call I got from a reader who had to seek out my number in order to ask about a sequel to Agora Files (it was a family member, not some random person in the world), or my daughter who tells all her friends about how much she loves my books, all of these, for some reason, just felt like people were trying to be nice, not really that they actually appreciated the work.

Right before the world shut down last year, my favorite local theater group stated their interest in having me write a play for them. It was a murder mystery dinner theater script they were looking for, where the cast interacts with the audience and the whole thing is really just about cramming as much sexual innuendo into the script as possible without flat out saying all the dirty things so the audience can giggle to themselves about the secret jokes that are in no way secret.

I was nervous about the idea of writing something so broadly comedic. Sure, some of my books have some pretty comedic things going on. The Defenders series has a “superman changing in the phone booth” moment, but with an overweight superhero in a port-a-john. It’s funny, and it’s broadly funny, but the whole book isn’t like that. It’s more tongue in cheek, not playing strictly for laughs, but breaking the narrative from time to time to allow for some silliness. This thing I was being asked to write exists purely to be as silly as possible, with the most minimal of narrative threads to hold the thing together.

And so I started with the simplest of things: names. And I said to myself, well, if this things is to be filled with sexual innuendo, let’s give these guys the names to match. And so we have Dick Burns, and Regina Burns. We have Justin Cider. We have Jennifer Swallows (nie Spitz). We have Anita Mandelay. And we have the fabulous Dixie Normous. This is the type of stuff I was writing, folks. The lowest brow of humor possible. Just writing to see how many laughs I could fit into 40 pages of dialogue and action. Just enough to give the actors something to work off of.

I knew these scripts. I’ve performed in these types of shows countless times. I was even a paid performer for a brief period in a traveling murder mystery troupe for this same theater group. And I did all I could to emulate those poorly written scripts as possible, while trying to insert a bit of my own goofy flair.

This past winter, they performed the show I wrote and I was allowed to watch it from the audio booth. And something happened where I suddenly felt as though I might not be as much of an imposter as I thought I was. These cast members brilliantly turned my 40 page script into something impossibly funny and, well, fun.

But what got me the most was this one moment in the show, where this one character, who, by design, doesn’t have much character development in the script, gets yelled at by this other character who is the jerk who ends up getting killed. It was designed to be a moment purely to give the minimally crafted character a reason to want to kill the future victim. And the audience let out a collective “aw” in empathy for the character getting yelled at.

In my years of performing and watching these shows, I have never once seen a single inkling of empathy from the audience for any of the characters and suddenly, it was right there. It happened. The audience cared.

And this may seem silly to you, but this is exactly the thing I had been looking for. To witness, firsthand, the emotional response to my writing. Sure, the script took a fraction of the time and effort to write than any of my books, and yes, it is not a piece that I’m incredibly proud of from an author’s perspective, but it gave me what I had been looking for in all my years as a writer. I got to see people actually responding to my writing as they were first digesting it. And it honestly changed my life.

And that’s why I was so excited when the theater group asked for a new script for this year.

I’ve actually got a lot of inspiration for plays I’d like to write moving forward. That doesn’t mean I won’t still keep a foot in novels, but I have to admit, it’s pretty awesome having an audience.

I still feel a lot of imposter’s syndrome, especially as I put the finishing touches on my current work in progress, but whenever it gets bad, I try to remember that moment and recognize that maybe there’s some semblance of worth to what I’m doing to people outside of myself. And that helps me move forward.

Have fun out there!