karma

I realized this morning that though I knew the idea of karma as justice was incorrect, I realized just to the full extent how much I was this morning.

It has nothing to do with what is just and right, and everything to do with what is, and the entirely predictable flow of cause and effect, given knowledge of all contributing factors.

Start someone in life as a rich, spoiled, over-entitled brat and the arc of their life is karmic; they may be miserable and unsatisfied, because they never learned how to relate to the world and themselves in non-transactional terms, but that doesn’t mean the hammer of justice is going to come down on them.

It might, but who knows?

Karma is far more about the natural effects of understandable causes, and the sooner we realize that karma (effects) can be created by our actions (causes). Justice is served when we take the actions that lead to it.

Left to some mystical karmic “justice”, what will happen will only be the result of whatever random causes create whatever effects.

Target: 1100 words
Written: 294 words, novel: Bad Neighbours

Read: Enchiridion, Epictetus
Comics: Velocity 3, Ripclaw v2 2, Cyber Force True Stories - Heatwave 1, Devil's Reign 1
Music: Instruments Of Action, Forget Cassettes

lottery

It’s a silly thing, isn’t it?

Miniscule chances for the possibility of something for literally, almost nothing?

Like, what? Twenty bucks and the time it took to go to the store?

Or, we could just work, and focus on doing what we love for way less money, but a way happier life. Are lottery winners that happy? Or are they harangued, losing money left and right because everyone’s at them and they aren’t business people, they’re journeymen, stay-at-home moms, office pools.

Folks whose lack of discipline has them working jobs they hate (or not working at all for various reasons, some of them completely legit) aren’t buying lotto tickets because they’re happy with their situation.

They either just don’t know how to move into a more fulfilling life, don’t know what that life looks like, or past decisions/social setup has them trapped into something less desirable, and this long shot is the only way out.

I don’t generally buy lottery tickets, but hell, if I don’t fantasize sometimes.

Of course, as I get older, I’m far more interested in stability doing something I love, and spending my time and money on experiences than things. Things are nice, but you only buy what you need.

And you don’t need most things.

But experiences? Priceless.

Target: 1100 words
Written: 1805 words, novel: Bad Neighbours

Read: Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain
Comics: Cyber Force v2 17-18, Velocity 2, Ripclaw v2 1
Music: Instrumental, Linkin Park (not sure where this came from, but it's instrumental remakes of Linkin Park songs.  Weird, right?)

conflict

It makes a good plot device, and in real life, is entirely unavoidable. As much as we’d like to eliminate conflict, the best I think we can do is minimize its impact on us, which means learning how best to handle it.

I’m filled with conflict these days – my desire to fight oppression, my desire to avoid people who suck, my own internal resistance to doing what it will take to actually take all these thoughts and dreams in my head and start shaping the world to them, instead of the other way around.

Then again, the Tao teaches doing-not-doing, so forcing the world into a shape it cannot be may be counterproductive.

Would that those would not listen break, and find the plugs in their mind falling free.

Would that we all fall free.

Would that we all love.

Would that, would that.

Target: 1100 words
Written: 1733 words, novel: Bad Neighbours

Read: Proof Of Collusion, Seth Abramson
Comics: Shadownhawk 0, Shadowhawk v4 13-15
Music: In God We Trust, Dead Kennedys

integration bill

I know Quebec continues to get a free pass, but come on. This is some racist shit.

Quebec is very much turning into a xenophobic state; its leadership is not compatible with the values of Canada as a whole.

I hate that men like this (and by extension, Trump, Putin, Musk, Farage, etc) are allowed to freely sow division. We as humans have been through all this.

We know these lessons.

Why the fuck do we continue to let pieces of shit like this lead?

The world needs purging of demagogues.

Target: 1100 words
Written: 1629 words, novel: Bad Neighbours

Read: The Personal MBA, Josh Kaufman
Comics: Shadowhawk 1-4
Music: In A Car, Meat Puppets (yeah, this was terrible)

original sin

I don’t believe in original sin. I think it’s fucking ridiculous.

Only a deluded soul could believe that anyone is born evil. Babies are babies; they just are.

Evil is not born. It’s bred.

It’s influenced and created, it has supervillain origins. Origins often tragic and relatable, but it doesn’t ultimately matter because the evil is so ingrained as to overwhelm any compassion one might hold.

It’s a henchman created by an overbearing boss, a desire to please, a fear of independent thought, or whatever.

It’s selfish, narcissistic, and considers no one’s needs but its own. It feeds and feeds and feeds, growing larger and larger, until someone cuts off the damn trough (or it empties its own and starts feasting on everyone else’s, which is when true evil begins).

It needs a slap in the face.

And sometimes, it’s so far gone, so committed to its story of itself as hero, itself as victim, itself as the only character in the story whose needs need to be fulfilled, that there’s no chance of turning back.

There’s only awful behaviour, and ultimately, exile or death.

If, in your story, you are the only one that matters, or you think your needs are more important than anyone else’s?

Fuck you. You’re the problem.

You weren’t born that way; circumstances pushed you a certain direction and you didn’t bother to course correct once you knew.

And ultimately, you started making the choice to be evil, all on your own.

So, fuck you, overentitled pieces of shit, bigoted assholes trying to pretend you love freedom and not just hating on others.

Fuck you, snooty pricks staring down your noses at people for not having the “right” views or the “right” look or having read the “right” books, when the extent of your engagement with justice is a fucking social media post to mask the fact that all you care about is status.

Fuck you, too, people who stand up and say, I’m decisive, I’m advocating for myself, I’m a strong person, but are, in actually, just assholes who treat everyone else like shit over the pettiest bullshit in order to prop up the fiction that they’re somehow worth more than everyone else (your insecurity is showing). Your obsessive need to prove yourself, your obsession with validation, it’s destructive – to you and everyone around you.

And it’s led, time and again, to the same choice – grow, change, be a better person, or close down, stop thinking and fuck everyone else.

Otherwise known as, you know, evil.

Target: 1000 words
Written: 3085 words, comic: Western Cradle #1

Read: The Art Of Asking, Amanda Palmer
Comics: Chu 9-10
Music: Not The Actual Events, Nine Inch Nails

friday the 13th

Thank the universe, finally a day I can get behind.

I’ve always had luck with this number, probably being born on it (and its opposite, seven), so I feel like my entire life is a good luck, bad luck story, but with most of the luck actually being supplied by my own decision making and the unfortunate decision making of others.

Plus, you know, random fate.

We control our response, our decisions, our behaviour.

When we talk of freedom, this is what we mean.

Total freedom isn’t freedom from responsibility or consequence.

It’s giving in absolutely to the knowledge that total freedom means total responsibility.

We are responsible for the consequences of our choices, our actions, our words, our behaviour.

Sure, we can have neuroses and trauma and all that informing it, but we are not helpless.

Don’t believe anyone who says you are, or that you just have to snap your fingers and you can move past it.

It’s not easy; but not impossible. Total freedom means total acceptance of what is, and making the decisions and taking the actions that you want to take, and understanding that if you make poor decisions or demonstrate shitty behaviour, there will be consequences for that.

That’s what Republicans and Conservatives don’t seem to understand: freedom is not freedom from consequences. It is not a license to behave as irresponsibly as you want without any fear of retaliation or judgment.

Guess what? You can say whatever your want, and act however you want, but you live within the world; the world can (and probably will) push back.

Target: 800 words
Written: 530 words, novella: The Mungk

Read: Hilarity Ensues, Tucker Max (I recognize the irony of this blog post versus this book)
Comics: The Magdalena v3 1-4
Music: The Unraveling, Rise Against

/end rant

I guess I should apologize. I hate to rant like yesterday, that shit needed to get off my chest.

Not only for the release, but because we know, ultimately, we can’t do anything about it.

What are the options? Fight back, get fired? Lose our second income? Go to court for probably years in order to either lose or get less than we deserve, and not enough to pay the bills?

Quite frankly, any system that allows this is not just.

One should never silenced solely because the other person, the clearly guilty other person, has more money than you.

A system that doesn’t protect its least powerful can never be a just system. A system that allows the threat of having to engage in the system as a means to silence dissent can never be a just system.

Our system is broken.

Target: 800 words
Written: 144 words

Read: It's Just A Thought, Thomas Sterner
Comics: Ain't No Grave 1-2, I Hate Fairyland v2 14-15
Music: Uno, Muse

ride on

I’m not ready for the forgiveness conversation. Not yet. I know what I want to say, up in the head, but for now, suffice it to say that a better slogan would be this:

Don’t ask permission; don’t need forgiveness.

Show us you’ve thought about the consequences of your actions. Show us you’ve thought about the people and world around you. And if the gatekeepers are still unfair, still blocking creation, still blocking joy or sustenance or the application of basic human decency, well, then, fuck ’em.

Fuck ’em all.

Target: 800 words
Written: 1633 words, novella: The Mungk

Read: Grimm's Fairy Tales, Brothers Grimm
Comics: The Me You Love In The Dark 1-4
Music: Even More Live Crap I Have Lying Around, Pearl Jam

how do i sell myself to you

It’s a question I’ve wrestled with since the day I decided I wanted to be a writer.

I want to be authentic. Open. There should be nothing between you and my thoughts but the desire to keep other people’s secrets secret, because they’re not mine to expose.

Of course, we all present ourselves through a filter, either by intentional omission or unconscious deceit (or vice versa – intentional deceit and unconscious omission.)

I don’t like to do either, but at the same time, I don’t want to be a martyr anymore than I want to be a charlatan. I’d like to write for a living, but there are two non-negotiables:

First, what I write is what I want to write. I hate the idea of being tied to a particular genre, and I don’t want anyone else to dictate the content of my stories. No Hollywood motherfuckers who think they know better or need to “sex it up” (although I am heavily fixated on sex, so that seems like it might not be an issue), or publishers/editors who want a happier ending or something more “clever”.

Save me from clever art, as Palahniuk would say, while being weirdly over clever, yet somehow, managing to hold that instinctual, emotional raw nerve. (It is a brazen and wondrous talent, those who can do this, and I am in awe of it.)

Secondly, I don’t want to be someone I’m not. I’m not perfect; if anything, I’m terribly broken, complex and boring, typical and atypical simultaneously; unique, in the worst and most generic way.

I am a work in progress. I’m an ugly piece of granite, in the process of seeing what’s underneath.

It might be a toad.

It might be Psyche.

I don’t know, but I know what I’m trying for.

How on track I remain will determine whether I’ve the smooth and incredible detail of a Cellini or the clumsy stack of a inukchuk (although, given the spiritual connection to the land and to honouring what is, in nature and spirit, that is totally cool). Maybe shattered gravel would be a better metaphor.

Or a pile of crumbling mud.

Anyway, how to tell the world of what I’ve written, while not compromising my self into something I don’t want to be?

I want to be honest, in work and in life.

Anything else isn’t worth it, and bullshit.

Target: 700 words
Written: 98 words, novella: The Mungk

Read: The $100 Startup, Chris Guillebeau
Comics: Saga 49-52
Music: Outcesticide, Nirvana

nothing finer

Than to be in a v… wait. No.

There’s nothing finer than a cup of coffee, a mix of David Bowie/Rise Against/Nine Inch Nails in your ears, as you finalize the edits on the fourth draft of your novella.

Thirteen scenes I hope to combine to six.

I know you can’t sell a novella. I’m hoping to package it as The Mungk & Other Bullshit, which I realize will be a tough sell on bookstore shelves, but it’s also an eyecatcher. It was suggested to me to call the book The Little House In The Country, but that sounds fucking boring and generic.

The Mungk is a weird name. And people love swearing.

You see the word Mungk and ask, what the fuck is that (although you might be one of those people who don’t swear like longshoremen, so you might say, “what a strange looking word, perhaps I should inquire as to its meaning” and then drink some tea with your pinky out and adjust your monocle, you fucking weirdo), and then pick it up.

Pick it up and maybe buy it. And then maybe that money goes through the various systems of skimming off the top from the store, the distributor, the publisher, agents, managers and probably some grifting professional organization that claims to advocate for authors, but actually keeps them poor and begging, like the RIAA and MPAA do to movies and music, and then finally, that pittance will arrive in my bank account, where it’s probably already been paid out in an advance and I’ll actually get nothing extra for it at all.

But if enough of you do it…

Well, shit.

Break out the fucking tea.

Target: 700 words
Written: 302 words, novella: The Mungk

Read: Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter
Comics: Saga 21-24
Music: Out In L.A., Red Hot Chili Peppers