reverse schrodinger’s cat

I had this in my notes about the nature of “alternative facts” and how conspiracy theories, no matter how insane, can go viral and I thought: that’s exactly the mentality the right takes towards reality.

Schrodinger’s cat is basically a thought experiment where if one puts a cat in a box, so one can’t see or hear it, one doesn’t actually know if the cat still exists.

The idea is that the fact of the cat’s life or death is entirely unknown, until the box is opened and facts are gathered. Until that point, the cat is neither dead or alive, but could simultaneously be either.

In right wing land, the opposite is true. As facts are revealed, the right wing becomes increasingly convinced that the entire proposition, whatever it is (the economy tanking, concentration camps, the illegality and immorality of masked men abducting people off the streets in the name of “law”), is entirely false.

However, the fewer facts there are, in this land, the more likely a right winger is to believe a thing is true (Haitians eating dogs in Springfield, the Bowling Green Massacre, 2020 election bullshit).

Basically, in a right winger’s mind, the fact that you can’t see the cat is proof of its existence – the cat must be alive. Ironically, opening the cat and showing it as it is, either way, dead or alive, is proof that the cat does not, in fact, exist.

I mean, it’s not a perfect theory, but you get the gist.

The stupider and less proven a conspiracy is, the more likely it is to be true, according to the right wing. See: Pizzagate.

The more logical and factually proven a conspiracy is, the more likely, in their minds, to be utterly untrue, a total cover-up, entirely fictional: see, Trump and Epstein, or any of the various grifts that piece of garbage has run on the American people.

One can only hope at some point that reality asserts itself, but the reality of their unreality is currently shaping the direction of the rest of our reality, creating an insane cognitive dissonance between where to draw the lines of real and unreal, which is what they want.

You can’t fight insanity with logic, and you can’t fight bullshit if you don’t know where to draw the line of truth.

I mean, we all know where the line is, and what’s bullshit, but we’re not the ones that need to be convinced.

Reality will come for us all, but whether it’s the reality of reality crashing down on their heads, or their unreality going scorched earth on our disbelief, either way, it won’t end well for somebody.

Or anybody, really.

Fuck.

Target: 1300 words
Written: 1349 words, novel: Bad Neighbours

Read: Magician: Apprentice, Raymond Feist
Comics: The Sacrificers 12-13, Grommets 6, Napalm Lullaby 7
Music: evermore, Taylor Swift (stop, listen, wait, I can explain!)

hangover

Haven’t had one of these in a while.

I guess draft beer still has its kick when you drink a half-dozen heavies.

Well, back to bed then, and a good dose of aspirin.

Target: 1300 words
Written: 1607 words, novel: Bad Neighbours

Read: Magician: Apprentice, Raymond Feist
Comics: Grommets 4-5, The Sacrificers 11, The Holy Roller 8
Music: The Everly Brothers Essentials, The Everly Brothers

hipfest

I mean, I had fun, but I wanted it to be so much better. The others were going on about how great the guy was, but I found the band super loose, and the singer was mucking up lyrics (and moving around entire verses) wholesale.

I’m not sure the hangover is worth that.

Sorry, dude, Gord Downie, you ain’t.

Target: 1300 words
Written: 1127 words, novel: Bad Neighbours

Read: Magician: Apprentice, Raymond Feist
Comics: Napalm Lullaby 5-6, The Sacrificers 10, Grommets 3
Music: Everlong, Foo Fights (like, three separate singles - I'm mildly obsessed)

falling over

I feel like I’m about to collapse.

It’s been thing after thing after thing, and trying to find time to write anything has been next to impossible. I’m stealing sleep to do it.

Fuckin’ hell, I don’t know why all of a sudden, everything, for months, is so fucking busy.

I hate it.

Target: 1300 words
Written: 1496 words, novel: Bad Neighbours

Read: Magician: Apprentice, Raymond Feist
Comics: The Sacrificers 8, Napalm Lullaby 3, The Holy Roller 6, Grommets 1
Music: Even Flow, Pearl Jam (ahh... palate cleanser - Dirty Frank)

thirteen again

Would that I was. Fresh off reading the Bible all the way through, about to have my first drink, my first drug, my first real make-out session (my first kiss happened in grade one with a girl named Jessica, who ironically, was not my childhood sweetheart – that was Shelley, who my parents tell me is now some kind of super junkie, so, uh, I guess I had an early type), my first summer love, my first experiences with weed, mushrooms, acid and sex (not all at thirteen, of course, though it was a close thing).

I was told how smart I was; they made it sound like natural talent, so I never felt like I needed to learn how to put effort in. Things came too easy, and that fucked me later on, when they didn’t, and I didn’t know how to buckle down and study.

Classic fixed mindset, that didn’t shift until my mid-thirties.

I backed up that insecurity with bluster and bravado.

With bullshit.

Thirty-five years later, I still fight the demons of youth.

I’m not a junkie, not yet. I’m quite possibly an alcoholic, though I’d disagree with the sentiment, given that I’m rarely drunk and don’t actually have more than about a six-pack in a week.

I just like it, okay?

Leave me alone, dad.

Fuck.

Labatt 50 was my first sip of beer, and goddamnit. It sucked.

Target: 1300 words
Written: 1140 words, novel: Bad Neighbours

Read: Magician: Apprentice, Raymond Feist
Comics: Napalm Lullaby 1-2, The Holy Roller 5, The Sacrificers 7
Music: An Evening With Neil Gaiman & Amanda Palmer, Neil Gaiman & Amanda Palmer (I know, I know, furthering my assertion that there is absolutely no correlation between skill and the relative moral quality of a particular human being - see Spacey, Kevin)

mary, mary, quite contrary

I’m a contrarian. I don’t do it on purpose. There’s just something in my brain that hears an opinion or a thing accepted as fact and can’t help but play devil’s advocate and ask: what if it wasn’t?

It’s an absurd desire to see the other that I can’t quite avoid. I used to call it opening worlds, and that’s a good an explanation as any, but it comes down to this. Whatever the view is, I want to see the other one.

Or another one. There’s rarely just two. It means constant growth, and it avoids dogma, but it does tend to put one on the outs with everyone else.

Always asking the question: what are the other ways to look at this? What if it’s not?

What if there’s another way?

What if there’s a hundred?

What about a thousand?

What if it’s infinite?

It’s taken me a long time to get used to the idea that this will never end, that there can be no end to perspective and questions.

And if puts me at odds with humanity, well, so fucking be it.

Target: 1300 words
Written: 1026 words, novel: Bad Neighbours

Read: Hammered, Elizabeth Bear (finally, enjoyed it, but too much interference)
Comics: The Sacrificers 6, The Holy Roller 2-4
Music: Even If And Especially When, Screaming Trees

oh, exhaustion

Our little pup still isn’t pooping. On top of that, we’ve had non-stop storms all night, which scare the shit (not literally in this case, because that would solve one problem), so she’s been freaking out and keeping us awake.

Nice to come home to – an exhausting week away followed by a night of three hours’ sleep, before you have to go back and pretend like you wanted to come back to the office.

I’m too tired to pretend.

Target: 1300 words
Written: 1928 words, novel: Bad Neighbours

Read: Hammered, Elizabeth Bear
Comics: The Sacrificers 3-5, The Holy Roller 1
Music: Euphoria Mourning, Chris Cornell (god, I miss that voice)

home again

I was praying for peace, but, uh, yeah. Nope. Sofi’s not well (hopefully overkill from the week gone), and coming home to no Isis, and Raiden (her twin) being weird.

It’s hard.

Why does everything suck so much all the time?

Target: 1300 words
Written: 1344 words, novel: Bad Neighbours

Read: Hammered, Elizabeth Bear (finally, some progress)
Comics: A Righteous Thirst For Vengeance 11, Deadly Class 56, The Sacrificers 1-2
Music: Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, Various

introspective return

Being up north, as frustrating as it can be at times (family, am I right?), always leaves me introspective, and as we wound back down highway 11 toward home, I could help but think:

Has chastising someone for saying something politically incorrect ever actually worked?

My mom said Indian; my sister-in-law barked INDIGENOUS at her, with vitriol, like my mother was some raging bigot who wasn’t just stuck in the habit of saying Indian for over seventy years.

I see this all the time online and every time, I think, and you wonder why people radicalize away from you?

One could say, “I think they go by indigenous now,” in a nice, non-condescending tone, thereby sparking a conversation and education that ends amicably with at least one party elevated with an updated viewpoint, to hopefully, do better the next time around. If that party still resists at that point, and won’t listen to an updated viewpoint, well, then, yeah, okay. Maybe you got a bigot.

But most people aren’t that bad, and by escalating so quickly, and implying that they are horrible people right off the hop, well, you’re invalidating everything they are in favour of a label of bigot, fascist, whatever other horrible thing you’d like to use, over something that more often than not, is more micro than macro-aggression.

Think of it like this: you probably don’t think you’re a bad person. You likely don’t think you’re perfect, you might even think of yourself as being flawed or broken or screwed-up, but you probably don’t think you’re evil. You might think you make everyone’s lives worse, but that’s because you’re a fuck-up who can’t get their shit together, and not because you’re, you know, Hitler.

But let’s say one day that you use the word (and let’s keep it kind of ridiculous here) “ginger”.

And maybe a family member immediately turns to you and escalates, labelling you an absolute bigot, and telling that they go by “rouged” now, and that using ginger makes you a horrible racist and probably supportive of all the anti-trans, homophobic, sexist nonsense out there, and a Republican while you’re at it.

Now, you, even thinking you’re kind of a loser, probably don’t think that of yourself. And so, how do you respond?

Like pretty well everyone does when they feel they’ve been unjustly accused – defensively.

You get your back up. You get defensive because this person is trying to invalidate all the good parts of you,. And no matter how screwed up you are, at your core, you know you’re not that, you’re not EVIL, but still, they reduce you down to this one thing – rougephobic.

And with that, all the other nonsense gets conflated with that level of bigotry. If you’re transphobic, you must be anti-gay as well. You must hate lesbians and black people and Latinos and women. If you’re a women, you must be a TERF and probably pro-life as well.

Of course, you know you’re not that, so even if you don’t say it out loud, you push back. You internalize your indignation and all of a sudden, all these disingenuous assholes talking about the elitist left looking down their nose at you, start making a bit more sense. And you’re sucked in, a little more each time it happens, until you’re a full blown Trumper (I mean, hopefully not that far, but imagine this isn’t just one person doing this to you – it’s a million people, a literal million, in some cases, online, constantly, without cease. How far down the rabbit hole might you go in your anger at being unjustly labelled Evil).

And all this is knowing that if they’d just said, “I think they go by rouged now” in an informative and non-judgmental way, sparking a brief, but important conversation, you might have avoided any of that, avoided the defensive trigger response and even possibly, gained an ally.

Education, not condemnation. These are the keys to winning back those on the edge, those that just maybe need a little bit of knowledge, rather than vilification.

These are the things I think about as I drive.

And they’re the things that are killing the left – why we get smaller every day, while the lunatics swell in size.

Target: 1300 words
Written: 1256 words, novel: Bad Neighbours

Read: Hammered, Elizabeth Bear
Comics: A Righteous Thirst For Vengeance 10, Deadly Class 54-55, The Scumbag 14
Music: The Essential Weird Al Yankovic, Weird Al Yankovic (sometimes, absence makes the heart totally forget how awesome something is)