anyways

I’m thinking a lot about dead people today. Mostly, I think about how many people have come before me, and how many will come after, and how every single one of them will die, and maybe people remember them and maybe they don’t, for good reasons and bad, and there’s tragedy in that.

There’s tragedy in loss, but there’s also tragedy living a life in mourning.

It can feel like a whirlwind, like a pit, like a maelstrom rising out of the earth below your feet.

And yet, we still must live. It’s a wonder anything survives, for any length of time. The only joy is in childhood.

Target: 1500 words
Written: 1504 words, short story: Skeleton Park

Read: The Shooting Party, Anton Chekhov
Comics: Fables: The Wolf Among Us 21-24
Music: 23 Live Sex Acts, Against Me!

snow day

I’ve clear about ten centimetres off the deck already, but an hour later, you’d never know it. My footprints and my dog’s footprints both erased from history.

Let that be a lesson to you.

Mother Nature can wipe your ass out, and no one would ever even know you existed.

Target: 1500 words
Written: 990 words, comic: The Stuff 5

Read: The Broom Of The System, David Foster Wallace
Comics: Fables: The Wolf Among Us 1-3, Fables 147
Music: February 12, 2006, Durty Nellies, Local H

so yesterday was weird, eh?

I’m not religious by any means, but I do believe in a realistic spirituality.

There’s more in heaven and earth and all that. Of all of the religions I’ve studied, Taoism seems the most logical and least formal, as well as the most in line with my beliefs.

Buddhism is, as well, but there are formalities and sexism and dogma with that, which are all things I try and stay away from.

Meditation is something I do; not a formal belief system that requires me to behave a certain way.

Ursula Leguin inspired me to study more into the Tao; that last contained notes I made on the opening passage.

I thought I might share them over time. People can bite back, discuss, suggest, casually realign my thought process by pointing out where I’m mistaken, what I’ve missed, or perspectives I haven’t discovered yet.

Personally, I love that.

Perspective and presence are what it’s all about, really.

All that is good – empathy, compassion, the enjoyment of life – stems from such things.

And who knows what’s beyond it?

Target: 1500 words
Written: 817 words, comic: The Stuff 5

Read: The Broom Of The System, David Foster Wallace
Comics: Fables 141-143, Fairest 27
Music: Veni, Vidi, Vicious, The Hives (FUCK.  YEAH.)

we are all going to die

I mean, probably. Well, definitely. The question is really when and how.

Is it when Trump starts the end of the world? Is it a pandemic exploding through us because morons think vaccinations are somehow worse than the disease they’re designed to protect against?

Is it climate change?

When I write, I’ve often dreamed of it as being read still hundreds of years hence (I imagine that’s true of many artists). At this point though, hurtling toward climate collapse at least, I’d be happy if we still had books at all in twenty years. Or if anyone was around to read them.

Maybe someday, aliens will settle our barren, self-destroyed plant, and find those written and using supercomputers we haven’t dreamed of, translate them and think, Jesus, what a bunch of fucking assholes.

And then they blew it all up.

Damn, dirty apes.

(A story, as told by a fatalist, using cultural references aliens probably won’t get, because I don’t think we ever beamed Charlton Heston to space. We are the monkeys, man! The monkeys are us!)

Target: 1400 words
Written: 1071 words, novel: Bad Neighbours

Read: Tesla: Man Out Of Time, Margaret Cheney
Comics: Fables 40-43
Music: 06.27.01 Peel Session, The Strokes

guilt

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

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: We Built This City, Closet Monster

that’s a lot of rain

Nothing like going on vacation and having it rain inches for twenty-four hours straight.

We did get to the space museum, which was kind of neat, although I’m still conflicted about SpaceX and its association with Musk.

Also, they removed all references to the Challenger and Columbia. Why?

Because it was bumming people out.

Personally, I don’t think ignoring or erasing history is the way to go, and that honouring these brave sacrifices would be a better option, but the U.S. is getting more and more Orwellian every day.

Seriously. It’s like you can feel the people around you getting stupider.

Target: 400 words
Written: 1033 words, novella: The Mungk

Read: Unlimited Power, Tony Robbins (I have lots to say about this, but I also have a whole book planned around the idea, so you know... no spoilers)
Comics: Nailbiter 1-4
Music: John Coltrane Essentials, John Coltrane

cape canaveral

A short haul with Delta, a bad book to read, and a cold, chilly day capped by a pretty good dinner at a surprisingly empty restaurant along the port.

Sadly, there will be no launches this week. That’s always cool, even if it touches on my irritation with Elon Musk and how it conflicts with my admiration of space travel in general, and how cool reusable rockets are.

I am assuming at this point they succeed in spite of him, and certainly not because of it.

Target: 400 words
Written: 408 words, novella: The Mungk

Read: Unlimited Power, Tony Robbins
Comics: Hunter Killer 12, Fusion 1-3 (ugh, what a shitpile mess that was)
Music: Jesus Of Suburbia, Green Day (like 3 separate singles)