Category: culture

sunshine and puppies

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And beer. The local Barks ‘n’ Brew, always for a good cause, and a good time.

Beats yardwork, which is all I did this morning, after editing. I could use the break.

Every day seems more than a marathon. It’s a car chase, a manic Daniel Radcliffe running around with guns taped to his hands, a sprint with obstacles that goes the full half-circuit.

I’m way too out of shape for it.

Target: 1300 words
Written: 1347 words, novel: Bad Neighbours

Read: SNAFU, Ed Helms
Comics: Tomb Raider v2 2-5
Music: Walk Among Us, The Misfits

shocker

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The shooter’s not a lefty. He’s a right wing nut for whom the man who wants to stone gays and take away women’s right to vote isn’t extreme enough.

Shocker. Colour me shocked.

And yet, still, MAGA rages on, vowing war and retaliation against the left, who, once again, had nothing to do with the violence.

That is, as it has been and will continue to be, exclusive to the realm of fascists and bigots.

AKA – the modern right wing.

Target: 1300 words
Written: 1402 words, novel: Bad Neighbours

Read: The Carpet People, Terry Pratchett
Comics: Tomb Raider 50, Monster War 1-3
Music: Waiting For Herb, The Pogues

rants that went the wrong way

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But were still somehow kind of right? Like, it’s the stuff you don’t want to say out loud, because it’s the kind of thing that a good and just society would never say or do, but ultimately, knows sometimes needs to be done?

I mean, I’m not saying anything in particular. In this case, it’s a part of Bad Neighbours, a peak point where things have gone off the rails and the main character has made a certain decision that ultimately, is the wrong decision, but also, kind of the right decision, in the way that we’d all like to ignore Nazis and let them have their little hate parades and such as long as they’re just out there playing pretend and don’t have any actual power and aren’t physically hurting other people.

But the second they do that? Well, I mean, I know how Jack Kirby would have seen it: see a Nazi, punch a Nazi, and certainly, the second there’s violence, it’s up to us to oppose it. I truly believe in the Tao concept of entering a fight like a funeral, with the same solemnity, and the intent to simply end it as quickly and peacefully as possible.

But then, what do I know? I’m a lifelong pacifist who has never actually been in a fight, beyond some wrestling with my older brother as kids. I don’t think I’ve ever been punched in the face.

Then again, maybe that’s because I’m not a Nazi.

Target: 1300 words
Written: 1826 words, novel: Bad Neighbours

Read: Captain Paul, Alexandre Dumas
Comics: Tomb Raider 33-36
Music: Experimental Jet Set, Trash And No Star, Sonic Youth (palate cleanser after Bette fucking Midler. Sweet fuck, why do I do these things to myself?)

reverse schrodinger’s cat

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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!)

mary, mary, quite contrary

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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

introspective return

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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)

isis

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I bottle fed you and your brother when you were four weeks old and your mother had abandoned you. Your brother suffered from seizures; I remember sitting up with him at night, curled in a blanket in my chest, hoping he would snap out of it, praying I didn’t have to do the thing the vet wanted us to do and put him to sleep.

You, you sat on my knee, head cocked, watching Woody Harrelson and Emma Stone battle the dead in Zombieland. You were hyper-focused on it.

Your brother made it, and so did you, and just like your other sibling, Magnus, whom several different vets told me to put down due to his heart murmur, your brother has persevered. Magnus made it to twenty. Your twin is fifteen and counting.

It kills me that you went first. Both of you were so malnutritioned. You looked like kittens in face, if not in weight, right to the end. Your eyes peered into me as we came to your final hours, in a way that Magnus, or Cassie, or Loki, didn’t, who seemed to disappear before their bodies did.

I can barely forgive myself, even though I know it was the right thing to do. I refused to let you suffer the way Cassie did, when we thought she was getting better, recovering, even as it became clearer and clearer that she was not.

Still, we waited as long as we could, gave you every last minute. Like with Cass, we pray we didn’t do that solely for us.

I’m going to miss you, beautiful baby girl. Your brother already does. He just about broke me, standing up on his back paws, his front paws reached out on the glass of the back door as he watched us lower you into the ground.

I’m not a spiritual man, preferring the Degrasse Tyson’s merging atoms to an ever-present afterlife, but your mother has always believed that souls return as animals to visit the people they loved. She talked about you meeting up with your beloved Cassie, with Magnus, now much nicer to you than he ever was in life, with Loki, your fellow white kitty and protector, and Nyka, mother of the brood, and gentle giant.

And as we dug outside, talking about what you might come back as, five freaking blue jays, FIVE OF THEM, came flying in, squawking and carrying on, flitting about our deck and tree, the roof and the fence.

When’s the last time you’ve seen five blue jays together? I don’t think I’ve ever seen more than two. They’re a bit of a lonesome bird.

In that moment, I believed. There is more to this world than dirt and stone. There is love, and pain, and hearts connecting in ways unexplainable by rational thought.

I’m going to miss you, girl, and I pray we’re not a long way away from another.

Target: 1300 words
Written: 1508 words, novel: Bad Neighbours

Read: Rocket Ship Galileo, Robert Heinlein
Comics: The Scumbag 1-2, Seven To Eternity 14-15
Music: Equal Strain On All Parts, Jimmy Buffett (fuck you, it's better than you think)

there was nothing good about today

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Nothing. I’ll write up a whole thing tomorrow about our baby girl and how much she meant to us, but I’m dehydrated from tears and the sweat of digging a grave in thirty-degree-celsius heat (not to mention lack of sleep), and I’ve got a pounding headache.

Suffice it to say, we’ve lost something beautiful today, and my heart hangs in tattered shreds.

People say they’re just animals, but fuck them. Anyone who doesn’t understand the love between a person and their pet is emotionally stunted.

You might as well take your heart and throw it in a river, for all the good it’s doing, you soulless jerk.

Sorry, I’ve never gotten over the comment about our first loss: “It’s just a cat.”

Fuck you, bitch. Fuck you.

Target: 1300 words
Written: 1048 words, novel: Bad Neighbours

Read: Rocket Ship Galileo, Robert Heinlein
Comics: Death Or Glory 11, Low 23-25
Music: Eponymous, R.E.M.

woo, doggie

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I’m playing in the land of metaphor this morning, detailing exactly where the left coincides with the right and the metaphors that bind them, in the context of Bad Neighbours.

Ironically, it ended being filtered through the judge’s verdict on the Hockey Canada sexual assault case acquittal, in which she posited that while we are all on the train of believing victims, doing so without examination essentially means applying the doctrine of guilty until proven innocent, when our system runs on innocent until proven guilty. There was enough conflicts, contradictions and assertions that didn’t agree with established facts in the case for the judge to reasonably decide that she could not say there was a crime committed, beyond doubt.

Reading the specifics of her verdict, I would probably make the same choice.

And it’s important, the distinction of innocent until proven guilty versus guilty until proven innocent. How many of us had listened to someone make assertions about the behaviour of their ex, or a coworker, or a friend or enemy that had no actual bearing in reality, even if we didn’t know it at the time? How many of us have had someone assert that their significant other was mistreating them, or playing the role of victim, or rationalizing away bad or regrettable behaviour on their part, because they didn’t actually want to take responsibility for what happened?

Most people don’t want to be responsible for their own actions. They live in denial. They falsely equivocate, they exaggerate, they outright lie, often to the point of deluding themselves as to what’s actually real, in order to avoid accountability for what’s ultimately on them.

You say you want freedom? You want truth?

You have to accept two things then: understand that total freedom comes with total responsibility – these are inseparable – and secondly, that reality is not what you want it to be, it’s what is, and if you want truth, you have to be willing to suspend your beliefs and the little fictions you tell yourself about yourself, or about the way things “should” be, and surrender your open, empty mind to what is, no matter the consequences.

Freedom is responsibility. Freedom is accepting consequence. Truth is what is, it’s not what you’d like to to be, or how you want to frame it. It’s what is.

So, innocent until proven guilty is the better way to go, because believing the accuser means automatically accepting their version of the truth, which we all know can be a highly creative, even self-deluding fiction at times. It can also be true, but that’s what the process is meant to find out (and admittedly, that depends on the competence and relative framework of the process, whether truly fair, fact-finding mission or kangaroo court). But guilty until proven innocent It’s not about what is; it’s about what’s asserted; it’s hypothesis without testing. You claim donkeys can fly, you have to prove that they can. The people you’re telling they can don’t.

That’s the way it works.

And that’s infinitely better than someone shouting, “Donkeys can fly!” and then having everyone that heard them run around scrambling to build wings for mules to make it true.

Target: 1300 words
Written: 2749 words, novel: Bad Neighbours

Read: Odds On, Michael Lange (John Crichton)
Comics: Low 22, Black Science 40-41, Deadly Class 39
Music: Endless Wire, The Who

martyrs and charlatans

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I once saw a chart that showed someone who worked super hard but made no connections versus someone who didn’t work, but made nothing but connections, and basically, it stuck them in two categories.

All work and no connection creates self-imposed martyrdom, while all connection and no work creates charlatans. Bullshitters versus drudge horses, with those that can find the balance (working hard and creating worthwhile things versus connecting with fans, with industry leaders and insiders, in a genuine, non-bullshit manner) as the true exceptions, the step above the rest. A martyr can find its work recognized and suddenly reach popularity, only to flame out over time (but still leaving behind good work).

A charlatan can become popular for nothing, and lose everything and be leave nothing behind.

I’m a martyr right now, that’s for sure.

May I never be a charlatan.

May I someday find the balance.

Target: 1300 words
Written: 1114 words, novel: Bad Neighbours

Read: Odds On, John Lange (Michael Crichton)
Comics: Deadly Class 37-38, Black Science 39, Low 21
Music: Endgame, Rise Against (palate cleanser after Don Henley)