Category: politics

three down

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That’s it. The villain has been shanked, the prison’s a riot, the mayor’s fled the country.

All of this will make sense.

None of it will make sense, because it is about nonsense.

Our current nonsense.

LET THEM EAT LAW.

(Sorry, don’t know why I went all Dredd there for a minute – speaking of which, who saw the Karl Urban version? Fuckin’ terrific! I love Lena Headey! Something tells me she’s one of these people who plays an incredible villain, but is an absolute sweetheart in real life. Or so I hope. I honestly hope everyone is sweet in real life.)

Target: 1300 words
Written: 1408 words, novel: Bad Neighbours

Read: The Time Machine, H.G. Wells (better than I remember, but I'm still icked by the classism)
Comics: Tomb Raider 43-45, Tomb Raider: Arabian Nights 1
Music: Welcome To The Drama Club, Everclear (underrated band, for sure)

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 ever, beyond some wrestling with my older brother as kiss. 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: Welcome To My Dream, MC 900 feat. Jesus

guilt

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I mean, I’ve got a lot of it.

I try not to have it. I know people that look like me have done all kinds of horrible shit, and indeed, due to stupidity or selfishness or ignorance of the world around me, I’m sure I’ve done more than my fair share.

I haven’t been a great man. I’m still not, as far as I know.

My life has been defined by trauma – not real trauma. I was never beaten or raped or witnessed a horrible crime. I have PTSD from bad employers, but who doesn’t?

My trauma seems inconsequential; it’s not warzone PTSD or survivor’s guilt.

It’s knowing that every day, things get worse. Brain beaten, bit by bit, until my brain feels like a hockey enforcer with CTE, even if it might not look that way.

But it’s all excuses, or so I’m told. Avoidance. I should feel guiltier, they tell me. I should feel the weight of two thousand years of straight white male oppression.

And I do.

I don’t know how I stand it.

I don’t know how anyone stands it. I sit at the bottom of this world, like Atlas without the muscles, squished, guts oozing out my sides, eyes literally popping out of my skull like a sausage being run over by a Mack Truck.

And yet, somehow, still alive.

I feel it. I feel it all.

I feel the world’s pain, its anger, its suffering.

And I’m not sure how much longer I can stand. 

Target: 1300 words
Written: 2287 words, novel: Bad Neighbours

Read: World Of Ptavvs, Larry Niven
Comics: Tomb Raider Journeys 5-6, Tomb Raider 23-24
Music: Weezer (White Album), Weezer

edited out

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I’ve noticed a weird trend among my extended family over the years.

For whatever reason, they edit us out of their public lives. I’m not really sure why; it’s not like we’re over here spouting off Trumpisms or committing acts of wanton criminality.

Still, somehow, we never seem to make it into the pictures. If you searched online and tried to find me or my stepdaughter in any picture with my granddaughter (that we didn’t post ourselves), you’d never know we’d even met. Similarly, though pictures of my nieces are routinely posted with friends and other family members and friends of the family, we, despite having spent far more time and energy on the girls, are noticeably absent. These pictures are often accompanied by comments about how great that person is for the kids.

The suggestion, by way of omission, is that we are not good for the kids.

Indeed, at both nieces’ graduations, in which we were present, we weren’t mentioned at all. Well, technically, the second one, no one got thanked at all, it was more about musing on being empty nesters, but in the first one, well, every rando from birth to that day got mentioned, no matter how little time they spent with or on the girls, except us, who were with them more than anyone, except their own parents.

My youngest niece and my wife have a ridiculously close relationship and yet, for some reason, even she can’t make the cut.

It’s a gripe I’ve had for a while, but I just can’t figure it out. It’s not like we’re embarrassing white trash, out here spouting QAnon and JK Rowling.

I’m pro-equality, anti-racist, anti-bigotry of all kinds, anti-fascism, pro-free health care, pro-basic income and taxing the rich (in fact, let’s just do away with billionaires altogether), and I believe all people should be evaluated based on the things they actually do, not whatever random defining fact, like who they’re into or skin colour, happens to be one part of their make-up. Assuming that’s all there is to a person (even if that person is yourself) is such an injustice to people as they are.

We’re all so much more. We contain multitudes, and the only thing we should really judge by is action.

Anyways, not complaining, I get it. People curate their social media and they don’t want people they consider “lesser than” ruining their carefully crafted social images. I personally want my reputation to be based on what I do, not the fucking fluff people put on Instagram.

We all know that shit’s B.S. anyway. Your performative liberalism is better than being a Trumper, for sure, but it’s also shittier than being, you know, a good fucking person.

Disingenuous is better than evil; that doesn’t mean it’s good. Same with hypocrisy. If your hypocrisy is getting people killed, obviously, that’s worse, but if it’s just stalling real progress because the only thing it does is serve your reputation by being part of the collective (and socially and mentally toxic) online outrage?

Well, shit, dude. That sucks too, just not as bad.

It doesn’t help anyone.

And shouldn’t we aim to be better than, you know, not as bad as the other guy?

I mean, I know that’s what I’m aiming for, even if I fall short quite a bit. Being a good person, a happy person (something I’ve not entirely given up on, despite the last forty-eight years of evidence), that’s all I’ve ever wanted. To write me off as an alcoholic redneck and ignore every other aspect of me and the rest of my family (and I suspect a great deal of this is rooted in ableism, even if it’s unconscious), well, then, fuck.

That’s pretty shitty, and it doesn’t feel good.

Maybe we strive for better, yeah?

Target: 1300 words
Written: 1203 words, novel: Bad Neighbours

Read: World Of Ptavvs, Larry Niven
Comics: Tomb Raider: The Greatest Treasure Of All 0, Tomb Raider 19-20, Tomb Raider Journeys 2
Music: Weezer (Teal Album), Weezer

maybe found it

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I think I just found the mistake I made in not turning my bad guy into the ULTIMATE bad guy (meaning in this book, not in general – hard to beat such sons of bitches as Kevin Spacey in Se7en or Lady deWinter, not to mention Davey Trauma in Tokyo Ghost or Donald Trump in real life).

But I’ve got the secondary bad guy (who had eclipsed my main at points) building up the primary now, and if I do it right, it will be grand.

I hope.

Target: 1300 words
Written: 306 words, novel: Bad Neighbours

Read: World Of Ptavvs, Larry Niven
Comics: Tomb Raider 12-14, 0
Music: Weezer (Blue Album), Weezer

funny or sad

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I don’t know what I am anymore. I get angrier the more I work on Bad Neighbours, but ultimately, it’s a satire. A comedy.

It’s meant to be funny.

I’m worried it’s coming across hostile.

Or too skewed toward being hard on liberalism, even though that’s kind of the point of the satire, how ridiculous it is to be so hard on the sanctimonious that mean well, versus the actual assholes who mean evil.

Shelley is almost benign; Walter comes across as a monster at times.

It’s a reflection of the times, but I worry it will be misinterpreted as actually being the way it is.

Certainly, MAGAts don’t know the difference. Their inability to understand Gavin Newsom’s Twitter (yeah, fuck you, Elon, it’s Twitter) parody is pretty clear.

I don’t want this son of a bitch to become an icon, misinterpreted the way my bad guy was in Get Back Again, from several of the places I’d submitted or published it. Wattpad outright banned it, saying it promoted hate, which is really only evidence that they either didn’t read it, or have read too many bad boy romance stories, and thus, have lost their ability to understand metaphor and context.

So, stating this, for the record, before it ever sees the light of day.

Walter Lemon has his problems; he can be problematic at times, but he is ultimately, a good person who wants justice and fairness.

Dennis Shelley (and those who enable/use him) is a fucking monster. HE IS NOT THE GOOD GUY.

Target: 1300 words
Written: 1507 words, novel: Bad Neighbours

Read: The Deadly Streets, Harlan Ellison
Comics: Tomb Raider: Origins 1, Tomb Raider 6-7, Witchblade/Tomb Raider 0.5
Music: We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank, Modest Mouse

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: We Built This City, Closet Monster

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)

i’m probably going to take some heat for that

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Yesterday’s post, but I truly believe that innocent until proven guilty is the way to go. I don’t know the reality of what happened that night but what was presented in court (and I’ll fully admit to reading only the final verdict, because I always like to withhold judgment until I know enough facts to make a decision), but I do know that those boys were convicted in the court of public opinion way before there was even a trial.

Before anyone even knew anything beyond the broadest strokes of the allegations rendered.

And that’s not right. If they were guilty, fuck ’em, but as a society, we are beholden to be better than this. We need to be better toward the victims, less instantly assumptive about the presumption of guilt.

An accusation does not equal guilt. It doesn’t guarantee innocence.

It’s a statement, like a hypothesis in science. We believe this is what happened; now let’s check the facts and parse the logic to see if that adds up.

The law must be dispassionate; I know we’re all into victimhood these days, and certainly, underserved communities and minorities are due a major review and reconstruction of the social contract.

But innocent until proven guilty is not one of them.

If you don’t understand that, if you would rather presume guilt and refuse to change your mind, no matter the evidence against, well, then, I’m sorry. We are going to disagree.

And for that, I will be crucified.

Target: 1300 words
Written: 1838 words, novel: Bad Neighbours

Read: Odds On, John Crichton (Michael Lange)
Comics: Black Science 42-43, Deadly Class 40-41
Music: Endtroducing, DJ Shadow