Rick Wayne's Blog, page 100

An Awareness of What is Missing

 The other day I mentioned Isaac Asimov’s (and my) agnosticism-qua-atheism and how it’s different than a militant atheism (in The Proper Use of the Pitchfork).

Whenever it comes up, I invariably get asked to join an atheist group. I never do.

Atheists, I’ve found, are very poorly fraternal (although I’m sure there are exceptions). Like an eternal opposition coalition, doomed forever to sit on the back bench heckling the speaker, they are a cobbled mass of interests with no common goal — kind of like the Tea Party now that I think about it — because they’re defined by what they’re not rather than by what they are. They’re defined by an absence of something.

Whenever I say this, there’s always the guy — and it does always seem to be a guy for some reason — who says that atheists do have shared values, even if they don’t know it, because to be a REAL atheist means such-and-such particular thing.

Yes, there are fundamentalist atheists, and yes, they’re just as dangerous as their theist counterparts.

If you stop to think about it, an atheist discussion — properly labeled (that’s important) — is all about how wrong the other guys are. And that’s about it.

Yes, you can also talk about science, or humanism, or moral philosophy. But so can other people. Christians and Jews and Muslims and Buddhists talk about science all the time, and completely separately from their religious beliefs. It’s almost like they’re normal people!

Atheism is not science, or humanism, or moral philosophy, and it doesn’t have a monopoly on those things. Atheism is also not video games, or professional sports, or politics, or the weather, or anything else you might talk about other than a-theism — the absence of belief — and how wrong the majority party is.

But this is a problem. Those of us who think about such things often develop, as even Jürgen Habermas has lately acknowledged, “an awareness of what is missing.”

“No, what’s missing is not God” I say to my religious friends as I thank them for coming, and for the delicious pie, and show them to the door. Nice to see you again! Do keep in touch!

Religion does many things besides provide a structured worship of the divine. That’s one of the reasons I find it so fascinating. It’s rich with meaning and intention, just like the architecture it produces — an altar and a castle and a political haven and a school and a library and a publishing house and an art gallery and a tax station and a civil services station.

Somewhere in there is a fundamental reconciliation. Most religions, for example, claim that this world doesn’t really count. It’s only the qualifying round. The real show comes later, after we die.

Your rank-and-file goosestepping militant atheist will tell you this is to discourage political action and enforce the status quo. And I freely admit that in the worst cases — the Catholic Church until just recently — that does seem to be going on.

But to stop the analysis there is to look down on most of humanity from the warm, comfortable privilege of life in the 21st century West, where your chance of death by violence or infectious disease or starvation is the lowest in the history of our species.

The belief in an afterlife — beyond its patent tangibility to many people, beyond its ability to inspire incredible art and music — reconciles two opposing truths: a person’s dignity and their treatment at the hands of the world.

Personally, I doubt there is such a thing, but I won’t go so far as to say someone is stupid for believing it. Among other things, it commits one to the belief that Plato and Isaac Newton and Gandhi were idiots, and that you know better than they do.

But that still leaves us with our awareness of what is missing, which these days can only be filled by the creation of your own coherent myth.

A myth is not a falsehood. A myth is a story that reveals something about the world, something that is believed for reasons beyond proof. A myth isn’t right or wrong. That dichotomy simply doesn’t apply.

Myth-making happens whenever the myths received from our nurturing society are inadequate for our circumstance — which is a near universal condition in the modern age. We’ve obliterated them all.

Most people seem to believe myths are old fashioned things about dragons and witches and children with poor decision-making skills, as if a plot is a myth.

The myth is the “meta” story, not the direct narrative but the one revealed about the world and how it works, and therefore what you should expect of it and what is expected of you as a person thrust into it at a time and place completely outside your control.

For example, one of the most common myths of our era, repeated over and over in every movie and TV show, is that the world is fundamentally fair. Luke Skywalker defeats Darth Vader. Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts get together in the end. The quirky TV family resolves their drama in 24 minutes, plus commercials.

Now, almost no one admits to believing the world is fair. It’s such a blatant lie. Almost everyone tells you, if not themselves, that “life’s not fair, man.”

But almost no one’s behavior actually follows. (Again, a myth simply doesn’t address truth or falsity.)

Where in the old days we had a complete myth, a coherent, sensible one with both the narrative of fairness and its mechanism, today we’re schizophrenic. Today, we believe only one half of the story, and so we’re left frustrated at every slight and bereft at each catastrophe.

“That wasn’t supposed to happen.”

“My one and only life deserves to better than this.”

This is part of our awareness of what is missing and why you must understand it enough to create your own coherent myth and why your average atheist rant is so wholly irrelevant to anything other than a battle of facts.

Superpowers and Quantum Biology: Origins of The Minus Faction

According to Stan Lee — or at least to one version of the story he told in an interview — he came up with the idea for Spider-man after seeing a fly in his office and realizing that animals served as the inspiration for many superheroes (Batman, anyone?) but that insects were underrepresented.

In fact, the first superhero ever was a character from Japan called Golden Bat. And if we go WAY back — assuming the oral traditions of preliterate cultures are any guide — the very first superhumans ever imagined had powers gleaned from animals. Tribal myths are full of stories of animal-spirits granting a wandering hero their “essence” with which to perform stupendous feats.

It’s not hard to see why. Nature is full of almost unbelievable abilities beyond even things like flight, which is amazing despite its ubiquity, but also things like the ability to change color or generate a bolt of electricity or navigate flawlessly across oceans or continents (or both).

When creating the superpowers for THE MINUS FACTION, I, too, looked to the animal world. To make the kind of story I wanted to tell, the powers I created had to be realistic — or at least more believable than that variations in a single “X” gene could give all the X-Men their crazy abilities.

At first, realism seemed a burden. The Hulk, for example, runs smack into the immovable Laws of the Conservation of Matter and Energy. When your foot swells after an injury, or a snake bite, it’s because the tissue “dilates.” Your body shunts fluid into the wound from somewhere else, which gives your immune cells space to move around and clean up the mess. But your total mass remains the same, and if Stan & co. were being realistic, then when Bruce Banner swells to the size of his counterpart, punching him should really be like punching Jell-O.

On the other hand, there is such a thing as a superpower being too realistic. At some point, as a writer of “hard SF” you’re simply inserting some (often drab) dialogue into the cobbled-together pieces of four different science textbooks, because when science is a hard constraint, story and character must by necessity climb into the back seat. (They’re not absent from hard SF, but they do suffer.)

Now, that’s not “wrong.” But I’m not particularly entertained by hard SF, and as a writer I’m looking to entertain you first. I prefer to put the story first but keep a healthy balance of realism with which you can easily suspend your disbelief. In effect, I’m looking to create the illusion of “hard science” while leaving enough room for “hard fun.”

After some initial difficulty, I found this is not hard to do with superpowers for the simple reason that Nature is so incredibly diverse. She offers more gems than you could ever hope to mine in a single writing career. Some of them are obvious and you need only reach down and pick them up. My villain Deadbolt, for example, extends the natural abilities of the electric eel.

Others are a little more obscure and required a great deal more thought. Take Xana’s strength. While a mutated gene cannot give you the ability to heal instantly — Wolverine has the same “missing mass” problem as The Hulk, by the way — or shoot laser beams out of your eyes, it could theoretically make you inordinately strong. Evolution is not “done” after all, meaning it hasn’t hit upon every conceivable protein configuration. And modern materials science tells us that polymers, which proteins are, can be highly contractile and also extremely strong (like Kevlar).

The problem would be that any creature so afflicted would also need concurrent mutations that strengthened its skeletal system and connective tissue, which would otherwise snap under the strain, leaving the animal immobile and in pain and unable to find food let alone pass its mutation to the next generation.

Strong muscles also don’t necessarily bring large size. In fact, to the degree such muscles would be denser, requiring greater mass and more energy to make, it’s likely that such animals might actually grow to be on the low range of normal per a given amount of nutrition in childhood.

I don’t dwell on it in Episode Two — at some point you start to tilt away from a balanced story — but this is why I coupled Xana’s ultra-rare mutation with gigantism, which really does put inordinate strain on a person’s body, as indicated in the story. People with gigantism, like Andre the Giant, almost universally die young, which, in addition to solving one of my superpower problems, also creates some compelling tension in the character’s backstory.

Of course, that still left Xana’s bones as a limiting factor, a problem Wink solves with her next gen exo-frame, which the big woman wears under her armor and that will actually get broken…

Finally, some of the superpowers I came up with reach to the very fringe of our understanding, such as John Regent’s ability to “hitch”. I foist this on a phenomenon called quantum entanglement based on two (arguably) reasonable justifications. First, as smarter people than me have noted, some kind of quantum processes are almost certainly involved in consciousness, which remains for me the greatest “superpower” of the animal world, of which humans are a part.

Second, there is mounting evidence that living cells and even specific organs in certain species utilize “spooky” quantum effects (to use Einstein’s word), which are just as much part of the natural world as gravity and sunlight. For example, something called quantum coherence seems to be crucial for photosynthesis, which I would bet is going on right now somewhere very close to you.

If you can’t tell, my primary training is in biology, so I was tangentially aware of some of the ideas presented in the following TED talk, but if “quantum biology” is new to you, and if interdisciplinary science interests you at all, it’s worth 15 minutes of your time.

The lesson for writers is: Nature is vast. And cleverer than you.

How quantum biology might explain life’s biggest questions

The Proper Use of the Pitchfork

I am an atheist in the same way that Asimov was. In an essay late in his life, he said he had always referred to himself as agnostic, that the grand mystery of existence — why there is something rather than nothing at all — was just that, a mystery, and that when it came to God, he could no more prove the positive than the negative condition.

But Asimov’s agnosticism, he argued of himself, was philosophical ornamentation. In as much as God had no bearing on his life, Isaac was an atheist in practice. That is, the structure of his life, his behavior, his relation to the divine, and so on, were all completely indistinguishable from an atheist’s, and so at some point he decided to simply drop the linguistic slipcover.

I think this probably applies to a lot of people. It does to me. Yet for most of my life I was reluctant to self-apply the label “atheist” (or “feminist” for that matter) because that term had become associated with Dawkins-esque militant atheism, a proselytizing atheism, which is different than Asimov’s thoughtful and reluctant atheism-qua-agnosticism.

I hold this Truth to be self-evident: The most dangerous people in the world are The Righteous. It doesn’t matter what your beliefs are. Anything can be perverted, from feminism to Islam. Militant atheists can be stinking assholes. So can evangelicals. And whether or not one group has the greater proportion is something upon which we must remain agnostic — because we can never measure it. And in any case it misses the point.

There are always times to take a stand, of course. But just because you don’t think you’re righteous doesn’t mean you aren’t. Almost no one thinks they’re righteous.

They just think they’re right.

For me, the key has always been, do you believe that you could be wrong? Not about your Holy Mission — such things are unassailable — but rather in your application of it to the little circumstances of life.

And please note, this is not the same as acknowledging you could be wrong. That’s different. That is, like Asimov’s agnosticism, a verbal window dressing that has no practical bearing on your behavior. Begrudgingly acknowledging there is some infinitesimally small chance that God exists is never going to stop you from doing anything horrible.

You have to believe that, however much the Holy Mission (feminism, libertarianism, atheism, antidisestablishmentarianism) is timeless, flawless, and eternally correct, your application of it to these specific circumstances is not. YOU can be wrong – right here, right now, in this case – without your entire Holy Mission being wrong.

It’s something to consider whenever there’s a popular call to grab the torches and pitchforks or otherwise gather in righteous groups and go be angry at The Others – a retailer, a restaurant, a government agency, a church group — because they did something that contravenes the Holy Mission.

It’s something to consider after feeling the flush of ego-validating satisfaction that comes when such gatherings succeed in bending The Others to your will – as if it’s ever enough, as if you’ll ever stop, as if you can cure an addiction by taking more drugs.

(Every great psychologist from the Buddha to Dr. Ruth will tell you that most of the time your behavior has little to do with the evil of the world – there is plenty of evil that doesn’t so much as elicit an eyebrow raise from you – and that what you’re doing here is perpetrating your unresolved traumas on the rest of us rather than dealing with them yourself.)

People who accept that their application of their Holy Missions might, in any one case, be flawed tend to act thoughtfully and remain open to criticism. In most cases, they act defensively rather than counter-offensively. And that’s HUGE. In political terms, it’s the difference between patriotism and nationalism, although “patriot,” like “atheist,” has been lately co-opted by a militant (in this case conservative) extreme.

But I don’t want to be just a different kind of preachy asshole. The point is not to criticize so much as offer an alternative.

At each affront to the Holy Mission, or call to grab your pitchfork, ask yourself first,

Has a real person been harmed? Can I name a single victim? Do identifiable people face an immediate threat? Or am I simply worried about what might happen to someone somewhere in the future?

If the former, act swiftly! Genuine evil is afoot.

If the latter, ask further,

Is there solid empirical evidence that this affront to Nature will lead directly to harm, such as yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater? Can I name or otherwise identify a real person as potential victim, or am I instead worried about the “environment” this creates or its pernicious effect on other people (e.g. “young minds”)?

If no evidence of direct and immediate harm exists, then this is a “crime” of thought, of appropriateness — your sense versus someone else’s — and you are merely policing other people’s fantasies, acting as backseat driver to their lives, worried about their ability to control themselves as well as you do, and you should, quite simply, STFU.

Lycanthropy, Apples, and Utahraptor: How societies reflect fear

Just as chefs innovate for a repetition-weary palate, so too I try to offer today’s sophisticated readers something novel for their money. Turns out entertaining you all is hard when everything’s been done.

When inspiration fails — which is most of the time (don’t wait for it) — my weapon of choice is INVERSION. I take something you know and turn it on its head.

Like Vernal Wort, my scoundrel from FANTASMAGORIA. (Yes, his name is a play on venereal wart. Because that’s what he is.)

We’re all familiar with the basic werewolf story, which, like its analogs Jekyll and Hyde and The Invisible Man, is an adventure-study of the beast within. So here, a fair man gets bit by a foul creature, becomes infected, and carries out wanton acts of lust and barbaric revenge.

As an aside, good Victorians in the time of cholera were both fascinated and terrified by two great evils: contagion and sin, which they believed were synonymous — sinful acts could corrupt like disease.

This belief is the origin of the aphorism “one bad apple spoils the bunch,” which came about in the days before refrigeration when apples were a key foodstuff, particularly in the country, because they would keep through winter.

However, the mold that ruins them spreads by contact, so each apple had to be inspected before being put away for the season. Otherwise, as the saying goes, one day you would open the larder to find that one bad apple really had spoiled the bunch. (And you couldn’t just run to the store to get more.)

In a world full of contagion and sin, you can see where there would be a kind of constant, low-level anxiety about “bad people,” and how you wouldn’t want your son or daughter (but let’s be honest, particularly your daughter) to hang around them lest some of their wickedness spread. Like wearing dresses that revealed her ankles.

We see remnants of this belief today in the popular fear of homosexuals in places of worship or positions of authority (camp counselors, troop leaders) because if there’s too much contact then little Jimmy might contract the gays.

(As an aside to my aside, you can blame the advent of refrigeration and the freewheeling 70s — Donny and Marie in particular — for popularizing the reverse phrase “one bad apple doesn’t spoil the bunch,” which, while philosophically palatable, is technically complete horseshit. Don’t get your wisdom from pop music, kids. Get it from me.)

The werewolf, then, is a wonderfully Victorian fear, namely that a good, sexually repressed man (because women were angels, you see) might contract an erection– I mean lycanthropy and lose control to the sinful beast within.

Thankfully, the Victorian worldview is in decline (although still not dead), and few contemporary readers will find that fear very compelling. Hence in popular literature the werewolf has morphed into a kind of uber-human, like a vampire-hunter. Or a pet.

I think today the problem we have is not keeping hold of the beast but rising above it — the anxiety of not measuring up, of feeling we could always be better.

Enter Vernal, who contracts a form lycanthropy where laughing (instead of a full moon — Oh, wretched sign of woman!) triggers his erectio– I mean, change. But instead of a basically good man becoming beastly, Vernal is a bad apple who becomes benign. He’s a scoundrel who turns into a unicorn, and, whilst afflicted, is “filled with pleasant thoughts!” The beast is his noble self, let loose by mirth, the release of anxiety.

I only bring it up because ol’ Vernal came to me in the shower this morning. I had a vision of him running through a fern-filled jungle holding a precious artifact — Indiana Jones-style — while being chased by a tribe of razor-toothed cannibal cherubs wearing cloth diapers and hurling spears from the backs of blue-and-red-feathered raptors.

He, of course, betrays his companion to her death in order to secure his own escape from the jungle-covered back of the mountain turtle.

He thinks.

Anyway, back to Episode Four.

Dead Men Eat No Peaches: An Interview With a Cretin (and a new release!)

The first volume of The Minus Faction Omnibus is now available. It collects the first three episodes of the series (for less than the cost of buying the three individually) and includes some bonus art and additional materials, such as the following interview by my friend and colleague LJ Cohen, who asked some wonderfully insightful questions!

The Minus Faction is all about people with special powers and abilities. What would your superpower be and why?

I grew up on Batman and X-Men. I mean, I read a lot of comics, but those two more than anything else. As a boy I was always fascinated with Wolverine’s and Bruce Wayne’s seemingly painful indestructability.

Superman is indestructible, as is the Hulk, but they are inhumanly indestructible. Batman on the other hand is completely human, and even where Logan is technically not, he still feels every bullet, every stab, every punch, just as you or I would. He simply has, like Bruce, learned to suffer through it.

That to me is the essence of epic heroism: someone who absorbs pain that would otherwise fall on others, and who does so consciously (and often repeatedly) with the hope it will make the world a better place. It’s why every religion has its revered saints and martyrs, those who sacrifice themselves in the fight against evil.

I am not a hero. As much as I am fascinated by superhuman endurance, I unfortunately have to live in the real world, where the pain of repeated beatings and burnings and stabbings and shootings would take an enormous mental and emotional toll. But as archetypes, both Batman and Jesus can do what none of us can, which is suffer forever.

I am, however, always in a hurry. I’m restless. I’m the type of person who says, “Just tell me how it ends.” At this point I my life, I think I’d like the ability to travel back and forth in time, just to see how it ends: my life, the current era, the history of man, the earth, the stars, and everything. But I’d always want the ability to come home.

Um, Wayne, have you not watched a single episode of Doctor Who? Seriously, man, that never ends well . . .

Maybe that’s why I haven’t been able to get into that series! I enjoy it. Some of it is absolutely brilliant. But there are times where it can get a little bleak for me.

But you write about some intense experiences. What are you afraid of? What scares you?

Well, shit. That’s a tough question.

Like everyone, I have some very pedestrian fears. I’m wary of heights. I’m not particularly keen on spiders and snakes, although my primary training is biology, so I am comfortable holding them once I know there’s no threat. But a few years ago, for example, I was watching TV in the basement. It was dark outside, and I had the lights off, and I noticed something moving across the carpet. When I turned on the light, I discovered a large brown recluse spider crawling toward one of my dogs. I’m not sure I’ve ever freaked out that much about anything. I must have killed that spider twenty times over, and I was screaming loud enough that my two 120-lb. canines tucked tail and went for the corner.

Blood and gore, on the other hand, have never really bothered me. I went to medical school, after all, and had to dissect a dead human. It was fascinating.

I think my biggest fear is probably the existential one: that somehow I’m wasting my one and only life, that there’s something else I should be doing, that all of my work will amount to naught and I should have stuck with medicine. That kind of thing.

I’m not sure it’s something we can ever really shake, which is one of the reasons I don’t enjoy literature that plumbs those depths. I have enough of it in my day-to-day life. I don’t need it in my fiction as well. I want to get away.

As a reader, I really appreciate the way you go to dark places, yet bring us back to some semblance of hope and humor. You’re not the only one who needs something to counteract the bleakness.

Well, thanks. A little bit of despair really goes a long way. In fact, it’s at the darkest times of our lives that humor becomes so important, and any recognizably human character should reflect that.

I think it’s also important to respect the reader’s time. As a writer you’ve asked them along on this journey. It needs to amount to something. That’s not to say every story needs a happy ending. But there should be a point. Otherwise you’re just a sociopath relishing the meaningless suffering of your characters.

How would your characters describe you?

John would say I’m not much of a fighter. He’s probably right. I don’t have a particular talent for advocacy. I’m not even that good at advocating for my books, and my livelihood depends on it! But then, I’m pretty sure most writers would not be beloved of their bad ass fighters. I know Scottish author Ian Rankin has said something similar about his character Inspector Rebus—namely, that if they met, Rebus would say Rankin was something of a pencil-necked wanker.

Vernal Wort, my shape-changing scoundrel from Fantasmagoria, would say I’m an easy mark, that I’m too trusting because I choose to assume the best in people (until proved otherwise). But I’m going to stick with that anyway. It inevitably leads to disappointment—people are often shitty, as Vernal would be quick to remind you, either directly or through his actions—but it also creates far more lasting connections than any practical alternative.

Harriet Chase, the ass-kicking monster-hunter from the third book of The Heretic Arcanum, would say I had a healthy imagination, and that therefore I might actually survive the creeping tide of occult evil that swarms under our feet. Although she wouldn’t bet on it. And could I spare some change?

Pretty harsh for your own imaginary friends!

Why should they care about me? I’m nobody. :)

Okay, so if you could be the character in any story (yours or someone else’s), which would you choose and why?

I’ve been creating hero-versions of myself, in my head, since I was a teenager. Not fiction, mind you. Personal adventure-myths that would make terrible books. In fact, only since my divorce—after which I had to face my life baldly and without shame—has that myth-making impulse subsided. (It hasn’t disappeared, but I find myself indulging it considerably less.)

I was never unsatisfied with my life. And I’ve been lucky in that I’ve never had to wrestle with suicide or severe depression. (So far.) But we all dream of more, and it’s only lately that I’ve felt my life is uniquely worth living, something one might actually choose versus the series of default options it had previously become.

That’s not to say my life is better than anyone else’s. It’s not a competition. It’s just that I no longer appreciably aspire to be the hero of a different story. I think a lot of that simply comes from experience and the realization that the scope of realistically possible stories is far more constrained than we expected as young adults, but that that diminishes nothing, that our lives can be every bit as magical as we had hoped, just not in the same way. And that’s okay. None of us should be slaves to our sixteen-year-old selves.

But I will add, if I had the option of living in a fictional universe, I would want it to be a simpler one where the monsters were always out in the open and I owned a fleet of giant mecha.

I found it interesting that my questions specified ‘character’ and you answered in terms of heroes. So here’s a follow up question: what aspects of your characters’ selves have an analogue in your own self?

Well, there’s two aspects of ‘hero’ there. In my youth, it was definitely the traditional sense. Like most young people, I wanted to be a victor. But even as that immature desire fades, as a rational adult, I’m still the central protagonist of my own life. (How could it be otherwise?) And I’ve come to see my story, my life, as one that’s actually pretty unusual: traveling the world, eating insects, falling in love, hammering chunks off the Berlin Wall, dissecting a cadaver, feeling the blast of a bomb, getting married, getting divorced, writing books. I’ve come to the point where I don’t want to be a character in a different story—I’m finally the “hero” of my own. And it only took forty years.

But I wish I could pass your question to my loved ones. I’m not sure there’s much of any of my characters in me, to be honest. The closest is probably Ian—his fascination with hentai and his somewhat selfish need to have his death count for something. That is, he’ll sacrifice, but only where the benefit approximates the cost. Such a requirement isn’t necessarily wrong or bad, but practically speaking it demands a lot from the world. Things wouldn’t be nearly as good as they are today if folks in the past—your average WWII vet, for example—had set such a high premium on their participation in history.

But then I think we share that trait with almost anyone raised in the suburbs of North America.

There are attributes in my characters that I value and aspire to—Xana’s dedication to her son, for example, is something I hope I could approximate. And I definitely wish I were more like Harriet. I wish I could just not give a fuck about anything, or wake up one day and just decide I wasn’t going to be afraid of anything. But I’m a normal, average, everyday cretin.

There’s that famous quote from Red Smith, often misattributed to Hemingway, that goes something like “There’s nothing to writing. Just sit at a typewriter and open a vein.” If that’s true, then I suppose I am a very bad writer. I always prefer to imagine richer miseries than my own.

But honestly, my family and friends might give an entirely different answer. Now I’ll have to ask.

Another of your stories, The Heretic Arcanum, features an occult, reclusive chef. What would be your most perfect meal?

As a retired foodie, I can legitimately boast that I’ve had quite a few world-class meals. But haute cuisine, like any couture, is built on ephemeral tastes and so I’m not sure there could ever be a single perfect meal, at least not one that could hope to last for more than a fashionable season.

I tell people that Etude—the shaman-chef of The Heretic Arcanum—is one part Sherlock Holmes, one part Doctor Strange, and one part Ferran Adria. Since I’ve not experienced a meal by Adria, that opportunity might be the only one in the world capable of bringing me out of my self-imposed retirement.

My two favorite foods—outside of the typical Western stand-bys like pizza and ice cream—are nigiri sushi and foie gras. Both are disgusting if done poorly. If done well, there is little to compare. Honestly, not even orgasm. Orgasms are awesome, and I wouldn’t want to stop having them, just like I would never want to stop eating pizza, but orgasms don’t have the depth or complexity of either of those foods. But again, that’s only if handled by a master.

Although to be fair, I suppose some people would say the same thing about orgasms.

Really though, any of the meals I’ve invented for Etude would be mind-bendingly awesome—if anyone could pull them off. My favorite is probably the first, mentioned in the first mystery in the series, Agony in Violet, which also happens to be the first story I ever published. Now I want to read it real quick.

So, I don’t want to take us off track, but to give you an example of the man—and remember, I didn’t know any of this when I met him—you should know about one of his more outlandish dinners, the Safari Gastronomique. Even if you haven’t heard of it, you probably saw the pictures because they went viral. There was one in particular that even I had seen: wildebeest tartare ground with turmeric and tapioca, covered with a goat’s-blood foam sweetened with freshly tapped acacia sap and served with a side of wild beet, mixed legume, and alligator succotash all in a woven bowl of edible leaves soaked in orange essence and tamari. It was dark when the picture was taken and a fire (not in frame) lit the foreground, including the basket and the strong black hand that held it. At the back, you could see the silhouette of a few sparse trees along the horizon of the African plain, stark against the fading glow of the just-set sun. The rest of the picture disappeared into darkness. In fact it was surrounded in darkness. The whole thing seemed to evoke the red-clawed mystery of the Dark Continent. You could almost hear lions rustling impatiently, preparing for their nightly hunt.

I love well prepared food, but my tastes run to the very simple. Right now, the first taste of a fresh picked tomato straight off the vine is enough to make me drool. A piece of dark chocolate. A bite of a ripe peach. Though I think I wouldn’t turn down a meal by Etude. No. That would be something.

Well, you said it exactly. I believe, following Joseph Campbell, that people aren’t so much looking for the meaning of life as the rapture of being alive—the affirmation of life.

Fantastic food, like fantastic fiction, or friends, or any of the rest of it, is a path to that rapture and if we’re mindful of it, it can be as simple as eating a peach.

§ § §

Thanks to LJ for allowing me to share part of our ongoing conversations! Check out her young adult space opera Derelict, the first in the Halcyone Space series.

DERELICT and ITHAKA RISING, side by side

One of the stupiderest things I’ve ever done

Hanging out with my friend Mark in Boulder a couple weeks ago, I was reminded of one of the stupiderest things I’ve ever done.

You see, I was never a wild child. In fact, I didn’t really come out of my shell until a month or two before my seventeenth birthday when my parents packed me off to the former Soviet Union. For a comic book-reading suburban loner from the Midwest, four weeks in foreign country living cheek-by-jowl with fellow teenagers seemed like, well, a gulag.

It wasn’t my first trip overseas, though, nor can I say I was overly sheltered. The previous year, my parents took us all to Europe on the occasion of their 25th wedding anniversary. I saw an “adult show” in Paris. I hammered pieces off the Berlin Wall, already covered in graffiti. It was a touristy kind of thing with enterprising Germans, mostly from the poorer east (apparently), waiting around to rent you their hammer and spike. I learned that concrete is hard to break and that everyone is a capitalist.

I also learned what the words Oma and Scheiße meant and that some kinds of German porn are fucked up. I managed to smuggle a couple magazines back (of the nubile variety) without my parents knowing — at least, I don’t think they did, although looking back that seems insane.

But the Soviet Union at the end of its life was a weird place. There was a sense that things were opening up, but no one was quite sure what you were allowed to do. As Americans, we were something of a novelty, and as sixteen year-olds, we were not a threat, which is a fine position from which to observe.

I had an amazing cup of coffee from a street vendor in Leningrad. It was served in one of those glass cups with the ornate metal holder, which, while pretty, was inconvenient. It meant you couldn’t take your drink with you and had to stand their awkwardly sipping your beverage until it was gone. And then there was the matter of who had used it before you.

I remember the goats braying in the cargo hold underneath me while I clutched my seat, eyes closed, for the duration of what is still the most terrifying flight I’ve ever taken, courtesy of Aeroflot. I bought art and old communist propaganda, including a cloth banner that still hangs in my office, from the hawkers on Arbat Street in Moscow. I wandered Gorky Park alone. I refused an offer of sex from one of my fellow students and ended up being accosted by her.

I also did my first real drinking. I was never a big drinker. (I’m still not.) And while I’d had the occasional sip of beer or whatever, since alcohol wasn’t explicitly forbidden in our house, it never seemed like a big deal. It helped, I suppose, that neither of my parents were big drinkers either.

At one point a group of us were gathered in a compartment on a train — I think we were heading to Kharkov — and one of our colleagues had managed to mash some fresh strawberries with the ubiquitous vodka. (Russians really do drink that shit like water.) None of us pussy American kids could really handle straight liquor, especially non-drinking me, so having it cut with fruit was the only way I tried any at all.

It was only later that someone thought to ask how our enterprising friend had mashed the strawberries on a train with no dining car. I’ll let you figure that one out.

All that to say, six years later, I was entirely too ready to follow a man I’d never met into a backstreet bar in London where literally anything could have happened to me.

His name was Pedro, and he was a short, stocky Puerto Rican Jew from New York. (He’s actually where I got the idea for Cerise’s professor in The Red Dagger for those playing along at home.) I was in the UK with three friends, but near the end of our trip, we all had different aims, so we split. One friend took the ferry to Dublin. One friend — my buddy who lives in Japan — went to Aberdeen, where he would later spend a semester studying. One friend ran out of money and flew home.

I went to St. Ives — God knows why — and quickly back to London. I think I was somewhere near the West End when Pedro stopped me on the street with the words “Are you American?”

I guess I looked the part.

My simple affirmative answer was enough for him to gently grab my arm and pull me into the bar, where he proceeded to buy some very expensive liquor by the bottle and get us both very drunk.

I know. Stupid, right? And not ten days earlier I’d been in Manchester looking for a Pizza Hut when an IRA bomb exploded just down the block. The shove of the blast nearly knocked me down, and as I stumbled, I felt pebbles and tiny debris bounce off the back of my legs. Windows shattered. My ears rung.

And if that wasn’t enough, at the beginning of the trip, while waiting for my friend to call home from a phone both, I saw a drunk man stumble off a curb in a packed Trafalgar Square, get hit by a car, and die. A wiser man would have listened to the whisper of the Fates.

Pedro told me he was a tradesman from Brooklyn — although the latter was clear based on his accent and mannerisms — that he had never married, and that he saved all his money from working until he had enough to travel overseas, where he would blow through it all, only to return home and start all over again. He must have dropped a grand, easy, just on what I saw.

After a couple hours yukking it up together in a dark, high-backed booth, a man came to get us. Pedro paid, and we were escorted to the BACK where a limo was waiting. Inside were two beautiful and impeccably dressed working girls. Apparently they wouldn’t double-up, which was why he needed a wingman. And he simply took the first American dude he could find.

I told my buddies what had happened and I don’t think they believed me. Some twenty years later, I still don’t think they believe me. It has all the marks of a tall tale. Certainly it’s also not something you talk about in polite society, such as the professional offices where I spent much of the next twelve years.

Furthermore, I learned as an adult that when one has lots of stories, sharing them liberally in conversation can come across like one-upmanship (and sometimes is). So I had largely put the whole episode out of my mind. Sometimes it’s nice to be reminded.

It ended extremely, extremely awkwardly, but, man, that was a helluva night.

art by Geoff Darrow

The Two Ways of Getting It Wrong

I enjoy teaching people about statistical reasoning, but it does get tedious trying to get them to apply it. That is, people do reasonably well with the abstract case (raw numbers) or an illustrative example (incidences of renal failure, HIV tests), but their success rate drops dramatically as soon as the conversation turns to anything that’s genuinely important to them.

In my world, the topic of indie versus traditional (“trad”) publishing comes up often, as it did yesterday pursuant to this biased blog post. Talk to them long enough and eventually trad supporters will mention publishing companies’ valuable role as “gatekeepers” — people whose job it is to let the good folks through and keep the riffraff out — and how that serves a vital function for readers.

The detection of “good” books — for now let’s skip trying to define “good” — like the detection of HIV, is a binary (pass/fail, true/false) measure. That makes it seem like there is only one way to err: you are either right or you are wrong.

Right?

Turns out on any binary measure there are actually TWO ways to fail, and in statistics those are called Type I (alpha) or Type II (beta) error, and although the expert will note some very slight nuanced differences, these are basically false negatives and false positives, respectively.

Most examples you hear about come from published writers talking in interviews about how long it took to get their books published. Every big name has this story. Frank Herbert’s Dune, which is probably the greatest work of fantastic fiction of the 20th century, was rejected by publishers some 20-odd times.

Think about that. How easy would it have been to give up after the tenth rejection in a row? or the fifteenth? or the twentieth? This is why I have said many times that success in writing requires an almost messianic belief in yourself and other people’s opinion of your work is not diagnostic of anything.

(Some writing really does suck, but diagnosing that requires a two-pronged test. Rejection — even serial rejection — proves nothing.)

Herbert’s example, and all the others like it — Stephen King will tell a similar tale — raises the important question: if trad publishers are such good gatekeepers, how come they’re always getting it wrong?

In reality, the situation is actually much, much worse than that little thought experiment would indicate, and that’s because it only addressed one of the two ways to fail.

Estimations of publisher accuracy are hampered in this case by something called Survivorship Bias. The victims of the publishers’ Type I and Type II error are not equally represented in the media. You’ll hear from King and Herbert but you’ll never hear from the Type II folks (authors of rejected “good” manuscripts) because to the media such a person is just another schlop unpublished wannabe.

But that’s exactly what’s required for an accurate, non-subjective estimation of publishers’ worth as gatekeepers. Take this example from Wikipedia and replace “diagnosed bowel cancer” with “publishable manuscript.”

Publishers’ subjective sense of their rectitude is wholly confined to the ‘Condition Positive’ column — books they accepted and published — because that is the only column for which they have any real knowledge of outcomes.

So a publisher might say “Most of the manuscripts I designated ‘good’ in the submission process were published, and most of what I published ended up being ‘good’ per the estimation of the marketplace, 2/3 in fact. Only 33% did poorly. Therefore, I add value as a gatekeeper.”

But look at the numbers. That conclusion is literally based on only a tiny fraction of the truth because published books, which is the entire population from which this informal analysis is drawn, only account for a tiny fraction of all the manuscripts on offer, which is the total population of study! (In this example, 30 cases versus 2,000, but of course the real numbers are in the hundreds of thousands and millions, respectively.)

When publishers tout their value as gatekeepers, they are not only touting their sensitivity but also their specificity, but then they omit the latter entirely from their “proof.” It’s like doctors telling you how good they are at curing a disease but basing that only at the subset of people who got well.

Of course your success rate is good!

Because there are so many more unpublished manuscripts — a lot more than 2,000 — a completely theoretical specificity of 85% (which is astronomically high for a human decision-maker and almost certainly much higher than their actual rate, whatever it is) still omits a huge number of people — 15% of every manuscript in the world.

That’s a whole lotta bad decisions being swept under the rug.

Note for simplicity’s sake I am leaving aside any gold standard base incidence of “good” manuscripts,” which adjusts the true error rate down, but I’m trying to keep this short.

Now, in indie publishing, obviously there is a very low barrier to entry and there are pretty much no gatekeepers at all, save the doubt and fear of heading off into the wilderness alone, which means that, although many more “good” manuscripts are turned into books (almost all?), a great many more bad ones are as well.

We all know this. But it’s not a problem endemic to indie publishing. There is always a trade-off between sensitivity and specificity and tests that improve one will usually degrade the other, whether in security screening at the airport, spam filtering in your inbox, or the detection of ghosts and ESP!

Being genuinely, measurably good at something is damned hard. Welcome to life.

Now, you may look at the indie market and decide you prefer the trad system, which uses biased decision-making and insider connections to artificially reduce noise. I can’t argue the preference for the exclusivity of a walled garden. Some people prefer gated communities and private schools and quinoa over bacon.

But given the actual state of the world, what is that preference really but a wistful, nostalgic plea?

“I miss the simple days of yesteryear, before Netflix and tablet PCs. I miss Andy Griffith and print magazines and tube socks.”

Well, okay. But regardless of your personal preferences, those days are gone. As Gomer would say, “She ain’t comin’ back.”

More to the point, you cannot argue that the reason you prefer the good ol’ days is because “Publishers are good gatekeepers.” That’s bunk. They’re shoddy gatekeepers who’ve convinced you of their value by excluding most of what matters from their subjective estimation of their own accuracy. (And of course it’s no surprise that it’s in their economic interest to do so.)

The fact is, lots of people were getting screwed by the old system — and not just unlucky white dudes. Minorities, women, anyone who didn’t go to an Ivy League school, authors who wrote transgressive material, or made books with an unusual format, or who wrote in a tight niche (anthropomorphic dinosaur erotica, anyone?), or basically anything that didn’t easily fit the publisher’s legacy production assembly line have all been missing or under-represented.

If you’re one of the winners, particularly if you’re also ignorant of statistics, then it’s easy to convince yourself you got in because of merit. Here’s the deal: I’m not saying you didn’t earn it. I’m saying lots of other people did as well and were still left out. Therefore your merit was not the determining factor of your success. (I will skip the discussion of Confirmation Bias and the Ratcheting Effect, which can explain both your initial and continued success. You’re smart enough to look those up on your own.)

By the way, all the same arguments apply to music and film. As a whole, indie media is democratic. Telecomputing has cut a tunnel-to-market right under the castle walls. That will not change, and if trad producers are unwilling to change or adapt, I ask them, how will you handle the next disruption? Or the one after that?

Or did you think technology was done changing things?

The Doors of Timur by Vasily Vereshchagin

My Idea for a Reverse Tentacle Rape Erotic Romance

Recently on social media, I teased some folks with my (now longstanding) idea for a reverse tentacle rape erotic romance. On a whim I checked my frags file to find that I had NOT recorded it anywhere. So I'm logging it here this morning and going back to Episode Four.

Just to be clear, I have actually read a few romances -- even a gay erotic novel -- in the early 2000s, but I can't say I'm a fan. Nothing against it. I just prefer my porn to be visual.

I also know a little about the market. Romance and related genres are the largest category in print. They account for roughly half of all dollars spent on books, although accounting for it that way makes a fetish out of medium. The male analog is really porn, and when you realize that, it's not surprising at all that romance/erotica is so huge.

Interestingly, number 2 is religious/inspirational, so after you get yourself off, then you think about God and how sorry you are. Or something.

Romance/erotica is also a very mature category and so fiercely competitive. Many of the big name imprints feature authors whose name is a brand and who are actually an entire team of people cranking out book after book, often recycling nearly identical plots and characters.

I'm not knocking it. 95% of all porn is: quick foreplay, oral one way, oral the other, fucking up top, fucking down below, money shot. We keep watching.

And it's actually a good business model in fiction, as Patterson and King well know. Once you find something that works, all you have to do is tweak your characters (maybe give them a new name or swap genders), put the book in a different setting (maybe the bayou instead of the rural northeast), and *BOOM*. Another million bucks. Because ya'll eat that shit up.

But I digress.

The point is, I have respect for anyone who competes in that space. The margins are slim and most of the women writing in those teams don't make enough in a year to fully support themselves from their fiction. One article I read suggested many have part time jobs, or are full time moms, and use the income to supplement whatever their partner brings to the household.

As was brought up in the other thread, there is a bias towards female authors in romance just as there is a bias towards men in some of the smaller genres, so it would behoove me to write under a pen name. It also makes sense to distinguish this project from my other works. Hence I was thinking Scarlett Flowers -- with my tongue only half in my cheek -- but I'm open to suggestions.

In hentai, as most people on the internet know, there is a thing called tentacle rape where a multi-limbed creature, often an alien or demon, is armed with a gaggle of phallic-shaped appendages with which it secures (in bondage-like fashion) and "seduces" one or more women, often penetrating them orally, vaginally, and/or anally all at the same time. Magically, these tentacles shoot a glittery kind of mana, which the women can't seem to get enough of.

This is not, as most people think, an invention of geeky 20th century chauvinists. It goes back a loooong way in Japanese culture. (So it's an invention of pre-modern chauvinists, I guess.) Hokusai even did a woodcut of a woman making love to an octopus, where all these major elements are present, in 1814, and it wasn't new even then.

It's not hard, for me at least, to see why this is popular, especially in Japan. Sea creatures figure prominently in Japanese myths, and there is hardly anything quite as alien as an octopus. A fish at least has a recognizable body plan, with a backbone and flippers and all that. But an octopus is wholly different, alien, inhuman. It speaks to our bestial nature, and in Japan, also to the deeply cultivated sense of shame and tabu.

Then of course there are the multiple appendages, which can be co-opted by the fantasy and turned into phalluses, allowing the bearer to please multiple women at the same time, which is an egregiously (but not exclusively) male fantasy. And before you start to wag your Victorian finger, recognize that women produce one egg a month (in the textbook case, which no woman is) whereas men produce 300 million sperm in every single ejaculate. I would argue there's something deeply biological going on.

Most of you know this already, but I don't think there's anything wrong with perverse fantasies. We are animals, not computers, and I believe -- following Jung -- that indulging them is what allows us to remain rational, cogent, moral, civilized people the rest of the time. By shining a spotlight on the little imp inside our lizard brain, we always know where it is. It's only when we repress it, when we pretend it isn't there, that it is free to wreak havoc on our lives.

I read an undergraduate textbook on Media Psychology last year, and one of the lessons for me was that, after 40 years of research, there is still no strong evidence that perverse fantasies *cause* crime. There are many reasons why people commit such crimes. Sometimes they're just insane. But the evidence suggests that having dark fantasies doesn't lead to crime any more than playing violent video games (or RPGs) leads to violence. Psychological studies show that even children understand that when Roadrunner whacks Wile E. Coyote in the face with a frying pan, or drops a safe on his head, that's not something you do in the real world. That is, they understand what your average finger-wagger does not: normal human brains ceasily distinguish between fantasy and reality, and having perverse fantasies does not make a brain perverse.

But again, I digress.

I've long wanted to replicate the male-centered tentacle rape fantasy for women -- 90-some percent of the erotic fiction market is female after all -- and I think prose can do that in ways visual art like hentai cannot. Prose does a better job with psychological states, with ambivalence, with uncertainty.

So the idea is that an alien life form from another dimension has crossed over into our world and is simply carrying out its biological imperative to grow and reproduce, but in the process threatens to eradicate mankind (a la The Thing).

This creature is parasitic, and like the xenomorph and the common ocean hydra, it has a two-stage life cycle. In the first, it infects the male organ, driving the bearer to insatiable lust so as to impregnate as many females as possible. Think incubus.

The second stage begins as a larval form, growing in the womb and, as it grows, extruding its tentacles from the vagina. But it needs to feed. And being a kind of archaic design, it does not utilize carbohydrates and lipids like we do. It lives off (and is primarily made of) nucleic acids, the latter only abundant now in genetic material.

(Evidence from biology suggests the original life forms were replicating strands of nucleic acids, and that some of these strands served metabolic functions as enzymes do today, which is why nucleic acids code for proteins -- the one took over function from the other.)

In short, in the growth stage, THE BEAST CRAVES SPERM! And through the secretion of mimicking hormones, drives women to insatiable acts of lust -- think succubus -- often involving multiple men, where the tentacles appear from her vagina to restrain her victims and, with their lubricated, vaginal-esque suckers, coax out the monster's "food."

During this process, the female host is orgasming, one on top of the other, constantly. What's more, she would feel what the symbiote feels: the men's muscles, the stroking of many hard members, the simultaneous penetration of multiple vaginal-esque tentacle "caps" both big and small, the feeling of power, the constant orgasm, the sense of satiation at the conclusion.

I envision the protagonist being infected by her ex, becoming aware of the "invasion", and trying to find a way to stop it and remove the thing inside her -- without taking a weed whacker to her womb -- before it pupates. And I imagine how hard it would be to lop off tentacles coming from your own vagina whilst locked in successive orgasm. (Have you seen those videos where women find it hard even to read a book while orgamsing? Now try fighting an alien!)

There will have to be a love interest of course, a striking man who was once himself infected and who is bewitched by our protagonist's courage in the face of the invasion and her own infection. But that's really as far as I've gotten with it.

Of course, all of this is completely ridiculous, but then that's why fantasies are fun.

Attack of the Green Vampire Worm!

it so happens that there's no way an author can include every single bit of backstory, every tiny morsel of world-building, and still manage to tell a well-paced tale. there are always crumbs after baking and bits of batter clinging to the bowl.

i sweep all that up and dump it into a "frags" file, which, if you were to attempt to read it, would make me seem mad -- well, madder anyway -- like the scratchings on the wall of the lifelong prisoner.

ninja shoes
the correct way to mount a tiger
mocktopii make their shells from the detritus of the city
ha!

if i think an unused fragment is particularly juicy, i might move it to my junk drawer, sort of like an all-purpose idea cabinet (which is also where i house all the untamed ideas i post here from time to time).

but mostly my frags end up as the burnt runoff at the bottom of the pan: inextricably tied to the project in question, where they had not found a home, and so never seeing the light of day.

i thought i might air one out. here is an unused scrap from FANTASMAGORIA:

Around the room were basilisk toads, several species of wyvern (small, flightless dragons), flying foxes, golem sloths, little hulking bridge trolls, siren fish, and more. There was even a single, large unicorn skeleton with broken horn. Some specimens were poorly preserved in fluid and barely recognizable. Some were represented by a single organ. Some were mere piles of bone.

But despite the amazing diversity, the monster in the center was clearly the prize. Gilbert read the inscription again.

Verdus Vestidiae. The green vampire worm.

It was related to a group of smaller species, most of whom were invasive and infected large ungulates like cattle and horses. As the name implied, vampire worms lived off the blood of their hosts, a fine strategy for a small parasite, but not even a saurus could play host to the giant green.

In fact, it wasn’t until Diogenes Grippa, a naturalist living in the Gallegos Archipelago off the coast of the Savage Land, found a small population of the beasts that much of anything was known of their life cycle. What he described in a series of long, rambling letters left the scientific community in severe doubt as to his sanity.

He explained how the creatures lived, lying dormant in mud, water, or underbrush until prey approached; how they were all hermaphroditic, carrying both male and female organs, presumably since encounters between individuals were rare; how the gaggle of young, once born, burrowed into the body of their parent -- a whole line of them wriggling into a long groove on their parent's underbelly, literally forcing their way into the flesh -- and there fusing symbiotically in a sort of reverse birth until they were large enough to fend for themselves.

He also described how they fed. The green vampire worm, when it attacked its prey, opened the slit in its underbelly, where dozens of squirming young -- mouths agape -- latched onto the unfortunate passer-by, dragged it inside the parent’s body, and doused it in an analgesic, antibiotic mucus that both prevented infection as well as numbed the prey animal, leaving it partially inebriated yet still conscious. With their hook-like faces buried in the victim’s skin, the young would then live off the animal, passing nutrients back to their parent, for days or even weeks as the unfortunate victim slowly starved to death before finally being ejected as a dry, desiccated carcass.

Gilbert knew all of this because he had read the letters, or copies of them, in a book of cryptozoological errata his father had found at a flea market. It was a gift for his twelfth birthday, and it was that book more than anything else that had piqued his interest in cryptozoology. But several years later, just as it was becoming an obsession, Gilbert had to choose a vocation, and Carl Tubers explained to his son there was no future in cryptozoology and sent him to engineering school.

Gilbert stood in front of the enormous specimen, admiring its perfect condition. Since it was an ambush predator, it could not be certain of it’s next meal. Diogenes had explained how the creatures could go into deep stasis, a complete metabolic remission, awakening only by the scent of blood, to which it was highly attuned. No one had believed him, of course, but then neither could they give any reason why he was wrong other than that such a thing was unheard of . . .

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Anything Other Than Another Law

One of the reasons I tend not to have political discussions anymore -- and there are many -- is the prevalent assumption that if you are critical of something, you must be advocating legislative action against it (because clearly bans and legal restrictions are our only weapons).

Such acts may succeed in curtailing an activity, but more often than not they merely drive it underground, where it's less visible and harder to combat. There have been prohibitions against murder and prostitution for as long as there have been laws. Neither have stopped.

And in fact, those who study such things for a living will tell you that any reductions in the murder rate have nothing to do with a sudden respect for the law and everything to do with the kind of non-legislative action I am advocating.

It's not that laws aren't important. Of course they are. Rather it's that they're not the solution to everything, and in fact they rarely work as well as the lawyers and legalists would have you believe. Rape is illegal. It still happens entirely too often.

People are funny that way. We're refractory to rules. Most of the time, whether or not we believe what someone tells us has more to do with our assessment of their character than with any facts they might marshal.

And it doesn't matter what you are banning or restricting: abortions, drugs, guns, beliefs, pornography, tobacco, fatty foods. Society is big and complicated and pressing down on one end of the balloon, more often that not, forces a new bulge somewhere else.

You cannot squeeze us into submission. Change -- genuine change -- has to come from within. And that's a lot harder.

But then doing the right thing is always harder.

Photo by Philip Toledano