Hey everyone!

I realize I have not yet finished the Move Fast and Break People series. I am often full of failures. However! There are reasons! And not just the totally bugfuck pinwheeling madness that is every single headline every single day!

On top of The Horror of It All, I am not just a Yeller of Swears, but a science fiction and fantasy novelist, believe it or not, and sometimes the Big Job makes Big Demands.

I appear to actually be near to finishing Nobody But Us, the near-future gender dys/utopia thriller I’ve been working on for quite some time, can’t imagine why I’d want to write about that sort of thing these days, total coincidence I’m sure.

I have not disappeared on you, I promise! But I will be a bit quiet for the next 10-ish days while I try to put this beast to bed. Trust I have many things to say and want to say them, but at the moment, I must attend to the world in my head, which is also on fire, only this fire I can fix. Writing books is nice that way.

Thank you all so much for your patience and support! The series will finish around the end of the month once the book is done and my brain can brain reality once more. Lord, I cannot fucking wait to see life on the other side of this.

See you all on the flipside, T-10ish days!

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Please excuse a brief pause in our series on the internet slowly absorbing and replacing all human life with yelling to…yell.

I just have some things I need to say. For my own health, because I’m pretty sure shoving all this what-the-fuckery down into my innards to rot with the absolute tonnage of reeking fucking trash I have to suppress my fury about every single day is bad for you. In fact, I’m pretty sure the entire reason middle-aged people are in such a sour little snit of a mood all the time is the crushing weight of years of bullshit, our own, others’, and most definitely the world’s, accreting directly on our lower backs.

AT SOME POINT, YOU EITHER KEEL OVER OR GET A STUPID SPORTS CAR ABOUT IT BUT WE’RE ALL BROKE SO BLOGGING IT FUCKING IS.

Oh, and this one’s going under a paywall. If you want to yell back at me about how super chill and cool the allegedly-lefty internet is being about Biden’s diagnosis right now, you gotta kick me a buck because oh my god, my back is killing me.

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Welcome back to your nuclear hellscape of infinite human torment already in progress! What a fucking beautiful day in the goddamned cursed-ass neighborhood of slowly-deflating dreams, in which the very concept of hope is being pilloried daily in every town square. King Friday just sent a kindergartner to a Salvadorean prison, then slept the guiltless, unperturbed sleep of a baby.

IT’S GREAT HERE. Did you know hell always had the option of adding more rings? That franchise opportunities for torment-expansion and new items on the Value Menu of Breathtaking Moral Putrescence was just…always on the table for us? NEAT FACT!

We last left our dingus century slowly burgeoning into a digital technocracy and blundering through the long process of kicking down fundamental pillars of civilization, replacing them all with apps, and expecting the overall structure to stay totally fine and cool and never, ever wobble despite no one taking care of it, at all, in any way.

But that wasn’t enough for us, oh no. We are such very clever, super rad, bold and edgy futuremonkeys. So we started kicking it, too.

Just a little bit. Not because we hated the basic structure of interconnected human systems. Because most of us never really understood anything about the basic structure of interconnected human systems. The particular pillars we were whacking on weren’t exactly obviously load-bearing. In fact, for quite a long time, a little vigorous boot-smacking seemed to improve things. And a bunch of people who confidently said they did understand those structures insisted it wasn’t kicking, it was industry disruption, and hey, who doesn’t love disrupting nasty fat greedy old industry? Yeah, fuck the system, give it a roundhouse this time!

So when, eventually, the janky societal stud-finder that is the American Electoral Cycle started coming up catastrophically empty, we’d spent so long saying fuck the system and getting rapturous, deafening cheers for it (and absolutely nothing but acidic disdain for maybe system good just need fix?) we never should have been surprised to find the system, well, totally fucked.

This essay concerns one of those not-obviously-integral societal pillars: trends in fictional televisual storytelling. OH WE GETTING HOT NOW.

No, but we kind of are. Everything we thought and taught about these two things was changing throughout the first quarter of the 21st century, converging on a new consensus at the exact same time as people slowly learning how much they genuinely enjoyed not having to deal with other human beings for every little thing and not thinking too hard about how the bedrock definition of society is human beings having to deal with other human beings for every little thing.

The thing is, the kinds of stories we take in on a daily basis and the professions we choose to pursue are enormous, broad-sweeping cultural movements. The issues this series is trying to address, concerning the dominance of the internet and digital living, are not uniformly experienced. How much or how little daily life has been made physically intangible varies from person to person, country to country. (And of course, all these thoughts are heavy on the American landscape because…well, the American landscape has been weaponized against both itself and everyone else plus I live here.) A large rural family, to whose address Instacart delivers only thoughts and prayers, does not have the same relationship with the internet, or daily direct human interaction quotients, that a single, WFH, recent college graduate living in a major test-market city does.

But they’ve all heard that Iron Man is a badass.

Here’s the lede, unburied above the fold: I’m not saying Tony Soprano ended the American experiment. That’s just silliness.

But I’m not not saying Tony Soprano ended the American experiment, either.

This whole digression started because a friend and I were talking about politics (it’s like doomscrolling! But you do it in person, and maybe there is whiskey, and maybe there is yelling, but yelling together, and at least probably also no one calls you a shitlib) and they asked: how could anyone think these assholes were actually going to be effective at solving any problems? I just don’t get how you can even trick yourself into thinking these are the guys, even if you’re a very devoted Nazi.

And I knee-jerk answered:

Oh, that’s easy! Because we’ve spent the last quarter-fucking-century consuming virtually infinite movies, shows, games, and books in which the Asshole Anti-hero is the only guy who can cut through all the bullshit and get the job done. Then we told everyone growing up or coming of age during that time not to study the humanities or they were a stupid waste of flesh destined to starve to death in a ditch, so they couldn’t think critically about any of it.

If you didn’t experience the pre-2K media environment in real time, it’s hard to express the size and depth of the sea change I’m talking about here. From the advent of mainstream televisual entertainment in the 20s and 30s up through the very late 90s, the heroes of major tentpole media units were many things, but they were almost always…you know…heroes. All narrative has a moral agenda, and while yes, a big part of the 20th century moral agenda was sit down and shut up if you’re not a straight white man or else, for straight white men themselves, the moral lessons of film and television was very much centered on a kind of post-doc Sunday School hey, I know you have this rage without form or focus inside you all the time, but have you considered being a good person about it? Here’s how!

The heroes of the stories America most liked to tell about its Golden Children were never screaming fucking sociopaths quipping the day away cleverly, clothed in the the tattered shreds of the lives they’ve carelessly destroyed, for whom everything more or less works out, even when they die, because when and if they do eat it, their worldview is almost always upheld, and their nihilistic dog-eat-dog death forms a supporting argument, or at least an emphatic underline, for their nihilistic dog-eat-dog way of life, Mr. I-Am-the-One-Who-Knocks SIR.

Before you hop on the comment section to note well, actually The Screaming Fucking Sociopath Show ran from 1971-1974 on CBS—look, there’s never 0% or 100% in media analysis, there’s always exceptions and outliers. GENERAL TRENDS, PEOPLE. Plus, on the rare occasion that an unutterable nightmare of human psychology was the protagonist of a movie or show, that was the point of the story, and they weren’t rewarded for it. For all Hollywood’s heavy breathing over the Italian mafia in the 1970s, Al Capone still dies in prison unloved and unmourned, and hubris was still a fatal flaw instead of a singularly required virtue. While the beginning of the douche-as-imperfect-but-semi-lovable-hero genre might have started with shows like The Simpsons or Married With Children or literally anything Martin Scorsese ever touched, Homer and Al are not effective at life, they aren’t right about very much, most people around them don’t really like them, and a huge number of plot points revolve around the Dipshit In Question learning some kind of basically pro-social lesson.

Pre-1999ish, monstrous, dick-swinging assholes and their tediously identical personal philosophies about how the whole system, whatever the system in question is, should be replaced with the hypnotic motions of that selfsame swinging dick, weren’t often presented, shot, or reacted to by others as attractive, or delightful, or highly competent, or posited as maybe actually a legitimate way to conduct yourself in real life. And the horrifying, violent, anti-social, hate-pickled soul-amputee didn’t regularly end up being pretty much right all along while regular people just moving through life trying to mostly do the right thing are lame suckers or even hateful bitches who exist only to be fodder for or obstacles to This Fucking Guy’s big plans because that’s a fucking crazy thing to embed in the brains of a traumatized post-two-different-world-wars population.

It might not seem important. It might not seem like it could really make much of a difference. But our brains crave stories and the stories those brains gorge on become the way those brains expect life to work, at least on some level. Millions upon millions of people spend more focused, intentional time with their favorite OMG SO BINGEABLE movie and TV show characters than they do with anyone but their actual immediate families, and for many, many more, the math may not actually come out in favor of family. That’s a tremendous amount of influence, whose hypnotic immersion doesn’t even break for commercials anymore. So when the most common archetype of the Successful and Effective HeroMan fundamentally changes, what people expect to find when they go looking for successful effectiveness also changes. Mr. Smith going to Washington starts to look like a gormless boring weirdo who doesn’t remotely understand what’s Really Going On and is defending a shitty system anyway so why root for him? Now, Walter White, Don Draper, Tony Stark, Patrick Bateman, Jack Bauer, Tyler Durden? Jaime/any Lannister, Jordan Belfort? Those guys are so fun—and they get shit done.

This isn’t a post-9/11 nihilism thing, either, though it ramped up a lot after that. I glibly blamed it on Tony Soprano, but that’s not really wrong. Oz has a real claim to starting the trend in 1997, but few shows have ever had the mainstream in the palm of their hand the way The Sopranos did from 1999-2007, and it was Ground Zero for the Age of the Rewarded Asshole.

1999-2001 saw an absolute supernova of televisual stories whose protagonists were dark, edgy, violent, cruel, angry at “the system” (always for denying them the status and rewards they’re clearly owed, never for the specific flaws of that system), totally without empathy, disrespectful and obnoxious to everyone around them, narcissistic, and 24/7 surly without for one second not being the absolute hero of their stories—Fight Club, The Matrix, Boondock Saints, 24, Boiler Room, American Psycho, Dark City, Memento, Snatch, Angel, even comedies like Pushing Tin, Futurama (don’t @ me, I love that show but they’re all assholes), Family Guy, High Fidelity, Black Books, The fucking Man Show…and yes, even my beloved Farscape. Because you could be pretty sure that if the hero wasn’t a complete dickwagon, the rest of the story was gonna work real hard to make you love the villain, think they’re WAY cooler than the heroes, and feel bad for their poor widdle hurt villanous feewings.

Suddenly there was a whole crop of assholes running around being pretty damned successful at solving problems, where before THE archetype of even the Complicated Hero was a basically decent guy put upon by life and doing his best to make the moral choice in an unfeeling universe.

And then, saints and ministers of grace defend us, there’s The Phantom Menace. George Lucas created from the definitional SpaceGood vs. SpaceEvil clear-cut heroic trilogy where decent people try real hard to make decent choices and it works, in the 70s, when nothing was clear-cut or very heroic. Then, before anyone had anything bad to say about Star Wars, spent the entire first decade of the new century spending hundreds of millions and bending everything he’d ever done into unloosesable narrative knots, all to make us love and empathize with Darth Ever-Fucking Vader because reasons. And then Disney built the sequels and almost all their sequel-merchandising around Han and Leia’s psychotic dirtbag homo/geno/patri/regi/avunculi/arguably matricidal son as some kind of “blood-drenched fascism is fine if you’re hot and tortured while you do it” brooding hero and it worked. (not to make a thesis out of it, but the only reason any of these brooding heroes brood at all is that people just inexplicably refuse to treat them with the deference and awe they’re owed by their very nature. Probably because people are bad and need to be punished into worshipful adoration. That sounds right, doesn’t it? It also sounds like a certain voting bloc’s bedrock policy complaint.)

And all those movies were ostensibly aimed at kids. Whose moralities were under construction, excuse the mess.

It’s like there was a meeting and we all just decided good people are boring and stupid and we wanted to hear way less of them for the foreseeable future.

There was another huge explosion of this in 2008-10, not coincidentally as Obama was elected, the shadow of Bush/Cheney, a decade of war, fear, and disastrous Wall Street auto-fellatio seemed to be lifting. A good dude was in the White House, so no need to push hard on stories about doing the right thing to attempt some kind of pressure on the powers that be to maybe think about not being shrieking beholders all the time. It was definitely time to shove our faces right down into Bad People Fiction like a pile of freesia-scented cocaine. Breaking Bad, The Dark Knight, Mad Men, Sons of Anarchy, Archer, Fringe, Luther, Iron Man, Sideways, Inglorious Basterds, Inception (and also everything Christopher Nolan has ever done), on and on.

Gen X had a lot going on. Just…a significant number of issues to work through.

And these heroes are literally all the same person. “Morally grey” always means the same guy is about to fart his way into your psyche.

SEE IF THIS SLUDGE RINGS A SHITBELL:

• Doing pretty solidly at life within the parameters of the socio-economic class to which they belong, but hasn’t gotten to the tippy-top of that class, either, for reasons the story insists are beyond their control.

• Either extremely physically attractive or conspicuously not attractive whatsoever, yet possessing a seriously obscene amount of weird, cruel charisma/affability that comes out most entertainingly during his worst actions

• A consistent garbage asshole to any wife, family, social circle, and co-workers, who gives nothing back for the mountain of love, grace, patience, time, money, and favors showered upon him, yet somehow the shower never ends because occasionally he shows reluctant affection to a child or animal or the memory of a dead wife. Maybe a sled, idk.

• Hates the system, man. What system? It doesn’t matter, he hates it and he’s gonna bring it down. And he’s not gonna do it by being a good boy, no way! Fuck you, DAD! He’s gonna do it with a bunch of crazy shit that looks suspiciously like just acting on your id 100% of the time but totes isn’t that, promise. Whatever plans he has to get rid of the old system or building a new one are nebulous at best, the point is SYSTEM BAD, SYSTEM DOWN, MAN AWESOME. He’s so edgy and cool! He says things you’re not supposed to! He’s above the law! You want him to be above the law because that’s the only way the story continues so FUCK YOU, LAW. And when he does his cool violence the audience isn’t supposed to have uncomfortable feelings about it the way they normally would if anyone else did them, because having uncomfortable feelings about things is just another part of the system, my dudes.

• Because it’s so entertaining, the story has now taught you to fucking hate anyone who stands in the way of this super cool swaggerboss, even if they’re doing that by committing such heinous acts as…asking any questions at all of Broody Mclotsadrugs or politely offering an alternative course of action to Bigjaw Gruntybear’s “fuck everyone who isn’t me” plan.

• Because, you see, the normal rules just don’t apply to this zomg so cool and fuckable and powerful lone rebel, vessel of dgaf masculinity and mechanism of applying irrationality to rational life that he is! Normal rules would actually be taking something ineffable away from him, damaging his soul, making him less of a man, nay, less of a human.

• Has zero hesitation about hurting people (physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, socially, etc depending on genre) to achieve their goals, in fact, profoundly believes their goals are unachievable without hurting people. The story itself usually revolves around incredibly vivid and creative expressions of that hurt, without depicting the aftermath. The story rarely presents any other workable means of achieving the protagonist’s goals, ultimately proving him right without having to say so and letting all the creators do a Dr. Evil pinky-smirk about how they never meant these characters to be attractive role models admired by millions.

• White dude, because obviously we get super uncomfy when any other kind of human acts like this. Straightness may or may not wobble, but if wobble, must wobble at a decidedly masc angle.

Now, it’s never been so concentrated in slower media like books and plays, other trends were also going on, and certainly, in recent years the trend has recoiled a bit in the face of this shit not turning out to be so thrillingly fun in real life, but the visual (i.e. easiest to consume) storytelling landscape of the 21st century was colonized by assholes to a truly clownshoes and their accompanying clownstockings degree. By the end of the aughts, the vast majority of stories committed to film involved some kind of anti-hero, and they were almost always proven effective at their goals in the end, often the only people who could accomplish them, and only by their chosen means. Those means might look insane at first, but they always prove more, or at least more quickly, effective than being good and moral. And then Game of Thrones premiered!

Even Michael Scott was repeatedly shown to be the best salesmen in the company despite his horrible behavior and clear idiocy. (So we get the “even an idiot asshole is more effective at the same job than a competent person” narrative in the most popular comedy of its decade) And Ron Swanson, much as I love him, was regularly a totally heinous shit to everyone around him, at times even approaching malevolent sabotage of the entire local government apparatus simply because it is the government apparatus. And the show made it, and his school of pug-nosed libertarianism, so endearing and cool people were actively disappointed when he grew and evolved. The Marvel movies are absolutely chock full of horrifying narcissists, now with SWEET BRANDING AND MERCHANDISE.

Of course, there’d always been bad people and complicated protagonists—noir wouldn’t exist otherwise. But usually, especially in the period betwen the end of WW2 and the end of the Cold War, when America felt the need to at least appear morally upright to contrast with those nasty communists, those guys got some kind of comeuppance. Citizen Kane still dies alone and unloved, no matter how sick his sled was when he was 8. Michael Corleone doesn’t exactly have a nice time, and his methodologies become obsolete almost as soon as the sequel rolls film. Most people involved in noir stories end up face down in a pool of their own consequences.

The difference wasn’t necessarily that obnoxious bullies were in media, but that they suddenly were the heroes we needed.

Because they always won, even though they had to suffer through one or two Good Person DEI Hires on the way. They always win even when they die in the end. Yeah, Walter White ate it…in the series finale, in very epic fashion, after accomplishing literally all of his goals, none of which were ever “be a nice family man people enjoy spending time with.”

And that’s without even mentioning Reality TV, the Skinnerian Box that disgorged Donald Trump’s final form, in which the villains very often triumphed, and the promise of cruelty meant a great episode.

The worst part is, nobody telling these stories was necessarily doing anything wrong or bad. This was a new(ish) way to tell stories to a massive worldwide mainstream audience in a world with precious few of those. It was exciting and fresh and so fun to write, to act, even more fun to watch and discuss. We liked watching it because it was made to be liked. We liked making it because it feels good to make art that feels challenging and dangerous.

Unfortunately, it also trained us, over the course of almost three decades, to see slick monsters as necessary heroes, victims as suckers, and the smashing of all systems as inherently moral and FUCKIN’ BADASS, no matter what the qualities of the system itself.

Which had also, not coincidentally, been the underlying message of most of the heroes of the previous generation—they were rarely out-and-out psychopaths and monsters, but almost all of them were edgy outsiders with contempt for “normie” life, who could eat 50 eggs, who couldn’t forget about Chinatown, who made offers that couldn’t be refused, who always wanted to be a gangster, as far back as they could remember. Boomer media is FULL of guys raging against the system and being totally unsatisfied with even the richest rewards of that system. That the system existed was enough reason to hate it and punch it in the face while laughing at the dumb rubes who just wanted to have an okay normal time in life and maybe a job. Right or left, it didn’t and doesn’t matter, the only unforgiveable sin, artistically and politically, for the last thirty years, has been to be seen as part of, beholden to, or standing up for any tiny sliver of, any kind of established societal system.

Was it really any wonder no one cared about defending the system by the time we crawled over broken glass to 2025?

After all, the angry, unpleasant, rude, anti-social, obnoxious, violent, capricious, sadistic, unrefined, swaggering, totally emotionally unregulated anti-protagonist who blasts through everyone else like a demented Kool-Aid man always turns out to be right, or at least, the very coolest one of us all.

At least, that’s what I’ve heard. FOR MY ENTIRE ADULT LIFE.

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Good afternoon, this is your very stressed-out captain speaking. Welcome back to the most depressing shit imaginable! We are flying at dangerously breakneck speeds above what appears to be a couple of hundred million Artaxes stuck teeth-deep in a nationwide Swamp of Mudsucking Sadness on our long-haul flight from Normal Fucking Life to the Inevitable Burning Wreckage of Ostensibly-Civilized Society. We hope you’re enjoying our in-flight Long Form Socio-Philosophical Essay service. Out the left windows, you can see just exactly where it all went wrong, but don’t worry, this is a non-stop flight, and we’re not going to do one even half-assed thing about it. We are expecting an absolute rustic pigfuck of a journey through the end of liberal democracy and anticipate noisily facedrilling into medieval fucking feudalism within the year.

Last time on I’m From the Government and I’m Here to Tell You to Get Fucked, Die Broke, and Worship Dear Leader, we talked about how, over the course of thirty or so years, we replaced every part of regular, everyday human life with the internet, and when we couldn’t quite totally replace something with various iterations of a live feed of people screaming at each other about politics, we just went ahead and stapled the internet onto the side of it, whether anyone wanted or needed that or not, we were not fucking fussed.

But we might have sort of kind of basically held together, with wishes, imagination, a lot of caulk and emojis, and people’s annoying habit of actually wanting some kind of social interaction aside from blood relations and toner relations work colleagues. After all, we’ve had malevolent dickvoids moaning over their weird ergot-dreams of total domination running things for pretty much always, in all places and times, forever.

They just couldn’t get us all in one place before. I’m not even specifically talking about the walled gardens of Facebook or X or TikTok, I mean the internet itself. A place whose points of ingress and egress they already controlled, and whose activity they could manipulate for, quite literally, less money and effort than it takes an average consumer to buy a new car.

And now it will become clear how a little musing about hey maybe we shouldn’t have relied on that whole “caring about other people” thing to get us through an election against Goblin Fascism, seeing as how we just got done rearranging all of society to discourage interaction with other people as much as possible and then just let that bin-bag full of trauma-diapers marinate in its own fetid juices for four years turned into a four-part series: it’s all just so much. Once you start pulling at the threads, it’s everything.

(And I swear by the ghost of Usenet I’m not just shuffling around the house being 45 and complaining about how much better everything was back in the time known colloquially as “my day.” A lot of this was not better. That’s why we replaced it with the internet. It was slow and clunky and annoying and unexciting. It sucked up all the extra hours of your day, and then a few more, like a gluttonous anaconda of time and energy. There were definitely nefarious schemes afoot from the earliest of digital days, but the most nefarious of all turned out to be that almost everybody is just a comfort-seeking human animal who would like things to just be a little easier and less scary than they were yesterday, to have just a few more minutes between work and sleep to exist, to be just a little more comfortable, have less on their mind, experience a little more of life. What a bunch of assholes, right?)

So how did we get here? Well, to put it plainly, without jokey profanity?

We tried to use technology to fix our very human loneliness and increasing alienation from the modern world and accidentally got close enough to making progress that way too many of us were all gathered in one place for way too many hours in the day, until it became so easy and convenient for the people in charge of that place to control public opinion that not doing it, to these edgelord minds, was not only lame and cringe, but approached fiduciary negligence.

Plus, being able to control how and what people think and not doing it really annoyed them. Some humans find pleasure in nothing so much as controlling other humans, and if you were that kind of person in the 90s tech boom, you probably gravitated toward the big shiny new thing with no rules that could reach right into the brain of those oh-so-controllable human toys and let you play.

We let ourselves get corralled. Brought in from the prairies and fenced off in one place, where it was trivially easy to get to all of us at once. And it’s just so unbelievably fucking sad that we did it, not entirely, but largely, because we were lonely.

Because, as the digital age ascended and the structures of the analogue world decayed, we went looking for a new third place.

I remember the first time I heard the phrase “third place,” meaning a place humans go to be human at each other which is neither home nor work. The loss of such places has been a subject of great distress, handwringing, and much scapegoating for most of my adult life, even before such places were really lost at all.

I heard the phrase first in 2001, but it was only coined in 1989, by a sociologist named Ray Oldenburg. Before that, such a phrase would’ve been mostly non-sensical, even apart from the fact that, for most of history, it would’ve had to be a fourth place, neither home nor work nor church. But we very intelligent, enlightened lefties only saw the (admittedly terrible) religious part so we already went ahead and ditched that useless thing where you had to go somewhere every week, dress vaguely well, look your neighbors in the eye, talk to them in a manner that wouldn’t get you ostracized from the entire town, hear about their problems, meet their children, let them witness how you treat your family, and be forced to at least pretend to consider stupid shit like hey maybe be nice to each other you leaky fucking bin bags, if you don’t someone’s gonna set you on fire forever, just saying.

The weird thing is, even in 2001, the context in which I heard “third place” was…a bunch of young people bemoaning that they were extinct, and that extinction was dooming humanity forever. The internet was the only third place left; it would be the lone hope of our generation. In the future, they said, the internet would be everyone’s third place.

The irony of this sentiment being uttered by a bunch of young people hanging out in an internet cafe, itself very obviously a third goddamned place, was completely lost on me at the time because I was a dork-ass child. But, in my defense, it was lost on everyone else, too. In comparison to 2024, in 2001, third places were absolutely bloody everywhere. Pubs, clubs, rec centers, cafes, bowling alleys, hell, even Grange Halls were still kind of a thing, if only for the olds. There was literally no shortage at all of places to go or things to do. And those places were packed and they were cheap, even for the young.

So what were we bitching about in our cozy, cheap, easily accessible by bicycle, third place?

Well, none of the third places available except internet cafes, and the internet itself, were meant for, or appealing to, people like us. People who were young or at least not 100% sold on adult conformity, weird, disinclined to participate in things “everyone” liked, maybe not the best at raw-dog socialization, interested in niche culture, not mainstream, possibly overly arrogant in our assessment of our own intellect, often traumatized and bullied or just ignored in real life, depressed or angry or shy or otherwise unable or unwilling to fit in, go along to get along, blend in with the other good workers with good futures, but rarely pretty or charismatic enough to make that an intriguing movie-script-ready personality trait.

You know, geeks. Only geeks weren’t cool yet. Geeks weren’t profitable yet. Geeks weren’t even a demographical term anyone with influence was talking about without a curled lip of disgust. And we found each other online, developed our own in-group lingo, rules for behavior, trends, fashions, ways to spot one another in the real world.

Unfortunately, so did a lot of other folks who weren’t very good at fitting into society before society learned to function without direct human interaction. I’m not talking about your average neurodivergent introvert. Your average neurodivergent introvert is lovely, and made pretty art online, or argued about Kirk and Picard, or got weirdly into reading long recaps of television shows they’d already seen. I am talking about people like Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg, Curtis Yarvin, Steve Bannon, Elon Musk, and all the C-Suite Children of Gmork whose names you don’t even recognize because they’re just sociopaths, not narcissists, and they don’t need constant adulation to serve the Nothing.

And those are the people, good and bad, optimistic and opportunistic, who set up the scaffolding for the way online life was going to work before the people who were pretty okay at offline life even knew what was up. They are also the people who have been able to live longest in the antiseptic world of not actually needing to wrangle with the radical concept of “other people” at all unless they want to. (VCs do not count as other people, obviously, the whole ecosystem is literally just a weaponized frat) Every app that kicked another societal pylon down in slow motion piloted in Palo Alto or Cupertino first, or somewhere very nearby.

Not for nothing, but that conversation about third places back in 2001 took place maybe thirty miles away from Palo Alto.

But back then, my age cohort was just a bit too young to have made fortunes in the 90s tech boom, and were, instead, rushing to a terminal in our spare time to take apart this new thing and see how it worked, or could work. We, and everyone else, still had to talk to another human being, in a minimally socially acceptable manner, to accomplish a majority of life’s necessities—and even when you didn’t, a lot of people still preferred to, and could, run their shit that way. Face to face or over the phone, with paper and pen or printed from a computer onto paper and notated with pen, slow as Heinz, exhausting, and yet a lot of people still pretty consistently chose it over the new digital world.

2001 was a seriously transitional time, even apart from 9/11. Conventional wisdom holds that the internet went mainstream in 1997, but the vast majority of people were still not very online at all four years later, and certainly not for daily logistical activities. Not just because the tech wasn’t there yet, but because “normies” vaguely, yet holistically, disliked and distrusted the internet on principle, if they took it seriously at all.

Most regular people were not very active online yet. Vanishingly few celebrities were. No one’s grandparents were—they were too busy having to sit the fuck down in an office with another human person whose demeanor, apparel, personal scent, and manner of speaking determined how much car insurance said gramps was going to buy that day. It was like San Diego ComicCon before it was OMG COMICCON. And that was why we all felt so comfortable being as raw and open and actually bonkers inappropriately personal on Livejournal or Diaryland or our own scattered and be-webringed blogs—none of which we called social media, because we did not yet consider it to be media. Because our parents weren’t looking. Our bosses definitely weren’t. Even most of our IRL friends weren’t. We were still writing emails with full and correct grammar, openings and closings, like 19th century letters, and Google wasn’t a verb yet.

Going online felt like a fucking miracle back then. And the real heartbreak is that most of the moving parts of that miracle were the exact things that, over the years, curdled into the poison we won’t stop chugging straight out of the bottle now, even though we know we could.

We young pioneers had to interface with the meatspace, all the time, in all its difficulty and pressure and how little it seemed to enjoy us, so we valued real life just about as much as famed documentaries The Matrix and Fight Club would lead you to believe. You didn’t even have to use your real name. No one ever had to know what you looked like. You could be whoever you wanted on the internet, which was both an almost knee-buckling blessing and a monstrous curse. It was both those things, but it still is, too.

And one of the biggest draws to that digital world was how obnoxious and separated the real world so often was. Maybe you find the one other kid at your school who has every line of Monty Python and Hitchhiker’s Guide memorized and maybe you don’t, but when you log on to your forum of choice everyone there knew the parrot sketch and where their towel was and someone was working on a full babel fish cosplay and someone else re-wrote the Galaxy Song with more accurate numbers and it felt like coming home.

So that’s where we went. To discuss our interests and relax after work and trade stupid jokes and gossip and learn cool facts and meet new people. A third place. Not work, not family. A new home.

And you trust your home, don’t you? You know it so well. It knows you. It belongs to you. It wouldn’t hurt you. It wouldn’t trick you. Not like the outside world.

The problem is, third places had always been the one realm where the Man, however you should like to define said Man in this, the Year of Depends Adult Undergarment, couldn’t quite get to you. At work, you were subject to management, the business day, pressures to conform and perform, the tension at whatever points in which government entities interacted with your industry. You had to look, act, speak, and deliver in certain stratified and expected ways order to not get fired. At home, you were subject to your spouse, children, extended relations, neighbors, the needs of the home, the need to model your values for the next generation, whatever they were, and television was super excited at all times, eager to sell you acres of useless plastic, convince you you were ugly, encourage you to imitate fake people in fake places doing fake things, and coax you into really committing to getting your whites their whitest. And church-as-third-place never helped at all with this one, because God could get straight at you there.

But at the pub, or the arcade, or the VFW, or the Rotary, or bridge club, or indeed, the internet cafe, you could simply exist, subject to yourself alone and the barest minimum of please do not piss directly on the ceiling, actively rob the place, scream uncontrollably into the face of strangers, or rip the larynx out of any of the other patrons in order to express dominance standards of behavior, for the price of a shitty beer, if that.

We didn’t think about that stuff then, at least not much. We were just happy to find somewhere we could build into a place to fit in. We couldn’t see that, if the internet actually became everyone’s third place, then the eternal abusive spouses that are the 1% would have the societal Triforce fully assembled in their pockets.

Anywhere you can be your own self alone without being constantly fucked with is going to feel precious, more than precious, authentic. You’re going to believe the things you hear there a little more, because they didn’t come from a random media figure, they came from Bob from the grocery store or Sarah who has a kid in your kid’s class. Value the thoughts of the other humans you meet there just a little more deeply, because they’re just people talking, and you trust that Regular Dude doesn’t have the kinds of ulterior motives Work Dude and In-Law Dude might. Get a little more personally attached to the way things work in that place, because it matters so very much to you to have a place like it. React a little more strongly to any perceived change, any possible whisper of a threat. Defend the owners who provide it to you just a little more strongly.

It certainly wouldn’t occur to you that Regular Dude chit-chatting about Star Wars at the pub is a fucking agent of a foreign government or an actual robot. That is nightmare fuel, when you imagine it happening in the meatspace. But online, we just accept that every time we talk to someone we don’t personally know, there’s a solid chance one of those is what’s up. And somehow we go about our day.

It was never possible to manage public opinion the way it is now because after Work and Home, there was a wide, varied field of wildly different places where people existed and formed their identities and found meaning and authenticity.

Slowly, over the course of this century, because everything got scary and expensive and weird and it was just so easy and cheap to log on instead of go out, because the new third place had dopamine on tap and seratonin shots on the bar, we moved toward one place. One place that could be owned. That could be shaped. That could be, at trivial expense and with trivial effort, made to serve.

Almost as soon as anyone whose job it was to notice such things noticed the premium desirable consumer demographics were beginning to put on a kind of DIY authenticity that rose from internet culture specifically because it was separate from, less gatekept, rougher and less stage-managed than mainstream culture, an arms race began among marketers, politicians, and all sort of media entities to repackage all their old shit into something that appeared as authentic as possible, appeared to be coming up from the masses rather than down from above. To very consciously trick a massive audience into believing anything, so long as it looked a little off and unprofessional.

Because the internet itself looked a little off and unprofessional back then, and that was where the people who understand money knew the future was hiding. It was a goddamned hamster-dancing mess of technicolor vomit. A million different fonts and colors and obnoxious braying auto-play songs and animated wallpapers and wonky homespun photoshop images. Which slowly, over time, became two or three fonts, standardized (and muted) colors, profile pics so small it’s difficult to tell who’s talking, and a handful of websites whose graphical layouts became the almost-unseen window through which we experience the world outside our neighborhoods, commutes, offices, and families.

I remember the first time I saw a commercial that put the standard ecstatic housewife belting out a Euripidean paean to laundry detergent inside a jank-ass old school YouTube frame. Other than that, it was a normal commercial. But it all took place inside the insnantly-recognizable grey toolbar and icons of YouTube. The young had already started valuing YouTube over other sources of information—and that simple frame was meant to trick our brains into receiving Big Soap’s buy-begging along the same neuro-pathways that it received the Vlog Brothers and Lonelygirl15 and fucking Dramatic Squirrel.

And it worked.

Thus began the Authenticity Wars of the early 00s. An arms race to be the most trusted bullshit-slinger, to reinvent the vibe of the internet into all other marketing and culture, until the hero’s journey in mainstream films, up to and including animated Disney features—looking at you Wreck-It-Ralph 2—involves having something go miraculously viral to solve all the protagonist’s problems.

Here in these godforsaken 2020s, God appears in the form of the view counter at the bottom of a viral video.

The problem is, when everything gets carefully re-skinned with the New Authenticity, it’s impossible to tell what’s real. When you scroll through a feed, there is no visual differentiation between an actual elected representative notifying their constituency of a legitimate emergency and eaglebazooka1488 notifying their followers that Ozempic is made from the tears of pure Aryan conservative children collected after they saw a trans exist, and no matter how evolved we might like to think we are, our brains receive those two pieces of information the exact same way, and lend it the exact same legitimacy, because they look identical, and both came at us out of the corners of our very precious, authentic, third place megapub where Bob and Sarah tell us the truth.

Ask yourself why the most unhinged accounts have anime profile pictures. IS it because that obscures identity and it’s easier for bots to be mistaken for people that way? Sure. It’s also because geeky shit became synonymous with authenticity, intelligence, and in-group coolness for about ten years and our skulls are filled with electrocuted meat that’s SUPER slow on the uptake. Why, the pink galactic fox with stars in her tail couldn’t possibly be trying to socially engineer liberal democracy into the fucking Sarlacc pit! That’s just so silly!

When the internet is everyone’s third place, that is a very, very big target. Once such a huge swatch of humanity, across country and demographic lines, is in one place, not only does it become trivially easy and trivially cheap to reach them all at once. For quite a long time, the buy-in to become Sarah down at the pub Who Knows What’s Up was fairly high: you had to be able to write interesting long-form blog posts, even if they were just about Julia Child or cats, or you had to be able to produce unique videos quickly, you had to be knowledgable enough to build an audience, to cultivate comment sections. And the second it’s possible to automate that hero’s journey—via AI or bots or fake followers or the utter pure unalloyed evil that is the engagement algorithms—it’s simply to easy to change what people think for the kind of people who like to control what people think to not do it all day every day.

Neuralink is so unnecessary. We’re already there. The neo-oligarchy that grew out of the tech boom got access to the one thing only religion had even managed to sip at before: the little voice in the back of our heads that we trust more than anything because it’s our own voice. The voice of our conscience. Of our most intimate selves.

And then COVID happened, and the last of us who weren’t Doing This Shit had the world reduced to a small glowing screen in their homes for a year. Everyone who’d held out got sucked in.

That’s why it’s working. And that’s why it’ll be almost impossible to put any of the china cups back on the shelves when and if this particular meth-addled fuckbull ever leaves the shop. Fiscal and governmental entities have rarely been able to access the most intimate backwaters of the human mind, much as they’ve tried. And once we all had to stay inside for a real expanse of time…we all logged on.

And they got to replace that little still voice of our genuine selves with an infinite feed of what sure the fuck seems like human beings, but only sometimes are, screaming and selling and fighting and monetizing and attacking and defending and going at each other as though there’s only one pint of dopamine left in the universe and it’s on fucking Twitter. It just hadn’t been possible to access the little voice in our own heads as a megaphone before. Not at scale. You’d have to go on one crazy road trip to seed even a simple idea in every pub, church, rotary, grange hall, barcade, sports stadium, book club, craft night, bowling league—anywhere people could be themselves apart from work and family.

That still little voice got replaced with Gmork. With The Nothing.

The internet will be everyone’s third place in the future! Oh, how optimistic we were, never once considering that “everyone” included Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin, all of whom used the adolescent internet to convince people who would never worship a craptastic programmer, a game show host, and a dictator as the risen gods of their world, that they were cool and authentic in a way they never EVER could in face-to-face real life.

You can be anyone on the internet. You’re not chained down by the old ways. But so could they. And neither are they.

Back in 1938, a large part of the nation tuned into the radio and heard a broadcast concerning an alien invasion. It was just Orson Welles reading The War of the Worlds, but people believed it. Because it came through the radio, whence all the other True Things came. Some people—many weren’t fooled. But many were. It took a a bit of effort to convince the fooled to join the unfooled, but it didn’t become a crisis. You could still look out your window and see a startling lack of aliens.

But in this un-brave new world, we live in 1938 all the time. In many more ways than this one. And when we look through the window of a social media site’s algorithmic authenticity-generating machine, we might see a startling lack of aliens…and we might see an AI-generated video of aliens landing. Or the President talking about how serious the alien problem is. Or the richest man in the world blaming the invasion on trans athletes. Or a famous man telling you to vote his way if you don’t want to get eaten by Martians.

And all of them sound as convincing as the voice in your head reading this sentence out loud right now.

Part 3 Next Week.

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This is just a note to say that I know I started this big giant series and a regular posting schedule plan and all and then promptly disappeared for three weeks, like a BOSS.

Welp, I got the flu. The bad one that’s been hopping around and takes forever to get its shit together. I’ve been so sick for so long it’s bordering on the ridiculous. Then my child got it.

Then I got it, or something just as nasty which I suspect might have been undetected covid because the brain fog is so bad, again.

Then we got hit with five snowstorms separated by a few days each time, and school more or less gave up because the ice subsumed us all.

And my instinct, when faced with many pressures and deadlines and guilt piling up and a body not co-operating, is and has always been to hide and say nothing so no one will notice the disappointment of me—which is a very good instinct I wholeheartedly recommend and has definitely never steered anyone wrong.

WELL, WE’RE ALL TRYING TO GET BETTER, AREN’T WE?

So: I am only just now wobblingly back on my feet, still coughing eldritch ichor out of my lungs, and will have Move Fast and Break People Part 2 up very shortly. (Just for this series, each part will go up under for paid subscribers only for 24 hours, then open to the public, as I mentioned in Part 1.)

Apologies again, we will resume our regular programming momentarily. Thanks for your patience.

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Happy International Bloodfeast Season, fellow shattered husks of thinking human beings! Here we are on the flipside of several deranged politico-cultural orgies of pain, and I don’t think it’s a terribly scalding take to say, details aside, in a holistic, big-picture, view from 10,000 feet sense, that shit’s not right.

Really not right. Surreally so. I’ve personally spent this dry-heave of a year so far feeling like Han Solo; not the heroic, dashing, man of action part, no, no, perish the thought. The part where he spent like a goddamned year frozen in carbonite hanging on a filthy bathroom wall while who knows what kind of 24/7 grotesque violent slime-n-crime worm-orgy went on around him.

No one wants to see any of that shit, but it’s happening anyway, it isn’t going to stop, it’s oozing and moaning right there in front of you, and you physically can’t close your eyes or move away or do anything about it until some unspecified time in the future that may or may not actually arrive, so you just hang there stuck in a timeless helldream limbo of unending horror while a fat slobbering barely-verbal rapist crime boss stuffs his face with garbage, shreds people for entertainment, and somehow stays in power despite visibly doing fuck-all to run a government.

HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY EVERYONE.

It’s hard to know what to say about it all. It’s hard to even know where to begin. It’s hard to keep up with the Macy’s Parade of “unprecedented” pit-sludge that may or may not end us all. Just getting through each and every gom jabbar of a goddamned day around here requires a level of dissociation and compartmentalization the human brain usually reserves for abuse, war, loss, severe injury. Only now we have to go all the way to deep trauma responses just to scan the headlines in the morning, or, occasionally, walk into a restaurant with the pure sadistic audacity to air the news on the TV behind the bar.

So I want to talk about something bigger than the Regular Morning Horror Breakfast that will be out of date by the time I finish writing this. Because really, it’s not just the crusty worm on the big murder-chair. Or his nasty little shrieking sidekick. A lot of shit isn’t right. It hasn’t been right for awhile. It’s easy to point to COVID, that massive unresolved trauma we’re not even allowed to talk about anymore, let alone remember or process in any infinitesimally small way, but shit, in the grand, Sagan-esque, universal sense, was upside-down in its mortgage on reality long before that. COVID just tried to cash a payment on that mortgage and found an account that long ago ran dry.

So what happened? Because it’s not actually Trump per se. Trump isn’t even just a symptom. He’s not the reason we’re so clenched up and angry and self-loathing and paralyzed and isolated from each other, he’s just the baseball bat with a nail shoved through it a bunch of folks grabbed to take it all out on someone. Anyone they can find. Even if they couldn’t tell you exactly what they’re taking out on everyone around them.

Babies, what happened to us?

Well, gather in, children: Granny Minnesota is here tell you another tale of the Internet Olden Times. And it’s a beast of a tale. Approaching a Grand Unified Theory of What the Fuck Happened. I started writing this six weeks ago, and it’s grown and grown until it was forced to become a multi-part series due to Geneva conventions regarding the length of self-indulgent, navel-gazing, insufferably meta blog posts on the internet about the internet.

So. Bear with me.

Once upon a time before the invention of the wheel, we had no choice but to watch commercials to get to our scheduled units of televisual entertainment. And they didn’t just air before and after the show! Goodness no! Repeated every 6-7 minutes, taking up fully one-third of the show’s timeslot! Nor were they specifically targeted to our interests and buying habits by a massive data-mining operation that inadvertently, or possibly advertently, ended civilized society! No, no, my pets, these were the same commercials, blasted out blindly to every household from Manhattan to Modesto, with minor variations for large designated market areas, taking up 23-28 minutes of every single hour of broadcast television. I literally grew up seeing ads for a particular fast food chain that had precisely zero locations in my home state, and dagnabbit that’s how we liked it! (Spoiler: no one liked it.)

But the upshot of all this marketing monoculture was that, every-fucking-body, down to the smallest child, knew the longer-running slogans and jingles by heart, and they became something like memes today, used as punchlines, shorthand, and socially-lubricating references signaling in-group membership.

One of the more famous came from the, at the time, very popular Folgers’ Instant Crystals. Not just plain old iguana-bile Folgers’ Coffee, mind you, but the even more demonically foul instant crystals, made by taking an industrial vat of coffee leavings drained out of the drip-grate below a 7-11 coffee dispenser on the banks of the fucking Styx and freeze-drying it into poop-crumbs of total despair.

I don’t know what to tell you. No one told Americans what a latte was until like 1994. Then Americans immediately said coffee that tasted good was a gay liberal plot. We’ve just…always been like this.

The commercial opened on a fancy restaurant full of linen tablecloths, wine glasses, candles, a rack of lamb served with those white scrunchees on the top bits, and young sophisticates, presumably talking about books or foreign films or whatever while they waited for podcasts to be invented. The announcer walks through a haute-cuisine kitchen, saying in an authoritative newscaster voice, as though we’re about to witness a cutting-edge social experiment: We’ve secretly replaced the fine coffee they ordinarily serve with Folgers’ Instant Crystals. Let’s see if they notice!

You’ll never believe it, but they do NOT notice! All the young professional folk rave about how amazing the coffee is, how rich and robust they find the taste, how they simply cannot believe it’s Folgers’ Instant Crystals omg you guys just empty that can of dry-ass caffeine sprinkles directly into my discerning patrician mouth! Screw the real thing! I just can’t get enough of bitter awful freeze-dried science-droppings!

So anyway, I’ve been thinking about the election a lot lately. CAN’T IMAGINE WHY. Not in terms of what’s going to specifically happen over the next many months and years, or what’s happening literally today, because I think it’s being made pretty resoundingly clear how little any of us down here in the vomitorium can do about that, but in terms of what’s been happening for the last twenty years that got us to November 5th, 2024. To a place where no one seems to particularly care about the concept of any kind of objective truth existing anywhere, accelerationism and nihilism are the Pantone colors of the year, and giving a shit about anyone else is regularly punished at the ballot box. To this carnival of shit in which we’re all now forced to live, an unending janky Gravitron Wheel O’ Chaos spun up to Intestine-Extraction speed and the only music is screams. Every few hours, the wheel spins, and the flashing neon arrow selects a different soul-slurping subterranean clown-wendigo to be in charge of some massively important part of all our destinies, just as long as they know absolutely nothing about that part specifically, and the only person seeing any kind of consequences for doing a chaos is the guy who denied a CEO’s claim to life on the grounds that being a fucking monster is a pre-existing condition.

As the children say, we’re cooked.

Though I’m not sure how many of the people obsessively over-using have considered that once something is cooked, it’s not exactly finished.

Traditionally, the next step is being devoured. With relish.

And that doesn’t exactly seem like a sustainable situation for humanity, but the general reaction to it all, not just post-election, but for awhile now, to a lot of events, even as things start to completely fall apart at the seams, seems to just be minor variations on the sentiment of Maurice Sendak’s Pierre:

And that old coffee commercial keeps popping into my head.

Because I think that’s what happened. The big gnarly rootball at the bottom of the many, many seemingly unrelated branches of what’s still happening. What has almost zero likelihood of slowing down or unhappening anytime soon. Slowly, inexorably, profoundly, thoroughly, and on purpose. We hunted down every part, down to the scraps, of normal human everyday life, down to the most basic social, commercial, political, logistical, financial, educational, parental, informational, psychological, romantic, religious, military, technological, artistic, and familial interactions, and secretly replaced them with the internet.

And for a long time, because it was slow, and because it did make that humdrum normal everyday life so much easier, so much faster, so unfathomably more convenient, and even, god help us all, more diverting and exciting and personally validating, hardly anyone noticed. When we finally did start to catch on, we all sat around raving about how much better it was than the old world, how rich and robust and almost exactly like real life it tasted, how excited we all were to make the switch, how young and urban and professional and haute we all were for taking to it so easily and just vigorously motorboating the future with such uncritical enthusiasm.

Come on, guys! It’s new! It’s Science! It’s fun! It makes everything fast and easy! There could never, ever, be any downside to this, or any, new technology!

Now, this isn’t about enshittification. At least, not exactly. It isn’t about the tendency of all systems to rot and self-corrupt in the presence of dipshits who look at human beings interacting and only see financial opportunity. Because…that’s what dipshits do. They’ve been doing it to every new system that pops up since Uruk and Jericho. Some percentage of humans are just born assholes. You can’t really stop that or change it beyond nudging the Rate of Asshole Production up or down a bit, which is why communism works so nice in your head and so horrifyingly in real life. The existential malfeasance of that problematic population of resource-greedy psychopaths is a problem, but it’s old news. It’s consistent. You can set the watch they sell you by it. And it’s practically boring in comparison to the voluntary wholesale replacement of human-to-human life with intangible digital gladiatorial combat.

We, as a species, simply were not ready for the internet. We, as a species, were not ready to spend our waking hours inundated with the interior monologues of billions of other beings piped directly into our brains as though they were our own. Especially when those thoughts, just because existence is hard and sad and fucked up and weird and no one really escapes that for more than a couple of hours at a go, are more often than not, the thoughts of beings in pain, facing the future with extreme anxiety, desperate to feel seen and loved, desperate to not feel helpless and lost in the face of vast forces, beings who felt invisible and alone for most of their lives, suffering in ways large and small, most of the time.

My first grader has mispronounced “screens” as “screams” since they were three. I’ve never corrected them because it was cute and they’ll say everything in the usual way forever soon enough. But…they’re not wrong. We are being screamed at all the time. We are screaming all the time.

And the screams are our major source of entertainment.

There’s a reason every TV show that does an episode about someone suddenly getting psychic powers depicts it as an absolute mind-shearing hell. It is, and now, that Sea of Screams is humanity’s home. Just trying to exist while constantly being mentally hammered with the cries and wails and bitchy petty complaints and narcissistic judgments and pleadings for love (in one form or another) of all mankind will literally make you fucking crazy and it will do it incredibly fast. At no point has anyone suggested having a shit-ton of voices in your head is a good and healthy thing for a happy, fulfilling life on Planet Earth, but these days we all have a shit-ton of voices in our heads 24/7 and they never, ever stop screaming.

We made a hive mind. We did it too soon and too fast, and it’s eating us alive. Back in the old digital days, people used to talk a lot about the Singularity—a future event or technology that would change the world so fundamentally and radically that it’s simply impossible to imagine life afterward from the vantage point of life today. This was often applied to true, sentient AI or other science-fictional concepts, but the truth is, while we early-adopting children of the computer age were having those conversations, it was already happening all around us, so truly transformational we couldn’t see the water for the ocean.

The mass adoption of the Internet was the Singularity. People still talk as though the Singularity hasn’t happened yet. That without flying cars and affordable interplanetary travel opportunities, we can’t possibly have arrived at The Big Future already. But we’re long past it, into the Previously Unthinkable Mess Beyond. Of course, as William Gibson said, it’s not evenly distributed, some of us are less online by choice or circumstance, but COVID took the last band-aid off by confining everyone in their homes, and the powers that be keep chipping away at the option to live mostly offline.

Think about what we’ve done with the 21st century. We took almost every job, every form of entertainment, every logistical task, every virtue and vice, every path to forming a personal identity, every simplest transaction between living beings or previously unavoidable reason you had to interact with another living being, every way of actually meeting and creating a connection with another living being as well as every method we ever came up with to maintain connection with other living beings, and either moved them entirely online or made the internet such a massive, mainstream sidecar to such units of social structure that trying to accomplish it all offline requires extra, dedicated, conscious effort or privation. And possibly a detailed mission statement just to underpin a personal philosophy of maybe putting your phone down sometimes.

You know, back in the time known as the Age of Folgers Instant Coffee Crystals, people used to be, generally, fairly concerned with how much TV everyone was watching when I was younger. Rots your brain, don’t you know. Makes you lazy and passive and stupid. Kill Your TV was a major movement. Bumperstickers, posters, the whole nine.

No one ever says Kill Your Computer, Kill Your Phone, Kill Your Internet Connection. Because we can’t. Our entire culture is tentpoled around internet access. It’s been inserted into even the smallest interactions, not just between humans, but between humans and everything.

At the risk of crumbling to dust before your very eyes, I do not know how to explain to any young person the sheer number of other human beings we used to have to interact with, on the phone or in person, in a baseline socially competent manner, just to get from one end of the day to another.

To deposit your paycheck. To pay a bill. To purchase anything. To get a refund on a product. To speak with any incarnation of customer service. To get a bit of advice on childrearing or fixing a leaky faucet. To address any sort of issue whatsoever with anything. To plan a vacation. To put gas in your car. To insure that car. To choose classes for the next semester. To get a nice family photo taken. To apply for a job. To excel in that job or ever hope for a promotion. To organize for a cause. To get food delivered, if you even could. To share your thoughts on recent elections or a new film with someone outside your immediate family.

You stood in a line and you waited and then you talked to someone, and if they didn’t like they way you handled any of that, if your social skills weren’t ready for prime time, well, you might just…not get what you needed. At all. And if you didn’t like the way someone else was behaving toward you, you didn’t really have to give them what they needed, either. You had to make it work using human psychology, rhetoric,

It all used to require human beings, face-to-face, or at least mouth-to-ear, and so most people encountered and had to learn to deal with, many, many different kinds of other humans in their environment. That was how, by and large, people met romantic partners, friends, that famous “guy who knows a guy.” Mutual connections, co-ed classes, and just…interacting with random strangers all day every day.

It was exhausting! We were thrilled to be able to do a whole heap of that annoying everyday crap automatically. IT WAS FUCKING GREAT. It saved so much time, so much energy that we could use for activities! I’m not a Luddite here, I’ve been terminally online since before we had a word for that. No one did anything wrong by cannonballing into the digital age before actually learning how to swim. That’s how tragedy works. Nor do I honestly think there was ever any real possibility that we wouldn’t embrace that gargantuan level of convenience. It IS easier to do things online, other people are fussy and difficult and there’s a lot of rules and even if neurotypicals don’t call use the word, they still mask, and it’s annoying to have to do it all the time.

We took to the internet like fish to bleach. But damn, it sure did look like water for a long time.

And then, having steadily, determinedly, removed or made voluntary so many of the tiny ways in which you were forced to behave yourself toward others, even so much as talking to your taxi driver to tell them where you wanted to go or checking out at the grocery store or ordering food at a restaurant, we stood back, very proud of ourselves, we liberal digital folk, and told everyone to care A WHOLE LOT about the person next to them. More than they care about themselves, in some cases. To protect those others, to value their issues, problems, and needs equally to our own, and to vote that way.

The problem was, as a great many people looked to one side and then another, there was no one actually, physically next to them anymore.

The internet has become the lens through which Other People can be seen, heard, understood, and interacted with, and on a good day, 78% of the internet is a goddamned Jacobean nightmare parade of lies, scams, rage, and a howling labyrinth of the opinions of maladjusted dopamine addicts who may or may not be 13 years old, or fuming after a fight with their spouses, or in the depths of despair, or a content-scraper, or addicted to conflict because they’re desperately lonely, or employed specifically to piss other people off as efficiently as possible, or a really nice person trying to have an intellectual conversation, or fucking AI, and there is no way for the human brain to tell the difference between any of these at a glance.

People are not good at caring deeply about abstractions. They are extremely bad at valuing others’ needs over their own wants, but catastrophically bad at doing that when they don’t actually have to physically see those scary, weird, oh-so-different others with their own gooshy corneas. This is a huge part of why cities are usually blue and rural communities usually not; because in cities you still have to acknowledge the existence of, and navigate through, millions of real, thinking, breathing, sweating, yelling people who are nothing like you.

Not only did we make a hive mind way too soon, but we also jumped several guns on uploading our minds to servers and abandoning the meatspace. Because we can’t abandon the meatspace yet, but we all went ahead and put our brains in digital jars anyway.

The internet turned most of human existence into a series of abstractions viewed through a 6x3 inch black rectangle with a heart of lithium and sadism. And the guys who have been able to live longest in a cozy bubble of convenience, instantaneity, and constant stimulation without the annoyance of having to deal other human beings or see them as anything but flashy lights on a fashy screen, are the malevolent, solipsistic Silicon Valley Smaugs who built the abyss in which we’re all drowning, brick by fucking brick, and are even now ransacking our government for virtually no one’s benefit, not even, ultimately, their own.

No one can care too much about things they don’t have to deal with pretty regularly, not even the best of us, which that tech most certainly are not. Unfortunately, by making it so easy to not deal with other people at all, we kicked the legs out from under the barest concept of society itself being a pretty good thing we should probably not set on fire for the clout.

Over the next several weeks, this series is going to look long and hard at what we’ve done to ourselves and why, exactly what the internet has and hasn’t replaced, the effects of it all, expected and unexpected, the little UI tweaks and algorithmic adjustments that might have fucking ended liberal democracy, and what the hell we can do about it now.

I don’t know about that last one. Maybe. I’m hoping. If we’re lucky. And I have enough Folgers’ Crystals on hand.

Because maybe the smartphone was humanity’s gom jabbar, and we failed by passing. Put your most vulnerable self in this shiny black box, connect to the person on the other side of it, and experience unfathomable pain, but also unfathomable reward. You’re only a real person if you keep your hand in the box. If you pull away, you might as well’ve never existed.

I doubt even Frank Herbert could have imagined Paul rocking up to the space nun the next morning and asking to have another go at Happy Fun Box. Let alone rolling over in bed and grabbing it first thing. But we got so used to the pain only the reward remained: the confirmation that we’re human, we’re real, we’re seen, we’re valued, at least by someone, somewhere, for something, even if it’s dark and awful. Once you have that, it does feel like dying to disengage.

And a little while after that, the weird fascists who made the box don’t even need the needle at our necks anymore.

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Hello, everyone!

I am getting ready to post my first multi-part series (!) but work has been severely curtailed by my child acquiring a movie-monster version of the flu that’s been going on for almost two weeks now. Tried school today and got sent home before noon because poor love is too weak to sit at their desk.

Aaaaaand my cat was sort of scarce over the weekend? Which is hard because he is a massive Maine Coon? So massive msall children have to ask if he IS a cat and not on loan from the zoo? Turned out the magnificent, majestic, and in all ways extraordinary feline Lord Byron, Stormageddon, was hiding and starving himself to death because he has a massive systemic infection that filled his ears with the most grotesque xenomorph pus-blood-foul-ichor fluids I’ve ever known about. Honestly I’m still traumatized from the vampiric theater bukkake of it all (the vet spread the ear open to look at it, the skin split, and pus flew all over her face and across the walls of the room. YEAH.)

In addition to that, my dryer broke, my 17 year old Facebook account was hacked and YOU CAN GUESS HOW EASY THAT IS TO FIX, you don’t even want to know about my water bill last month because I didn’t know a toilet was running for like five weeks due to SOMEONE who is SIX YEARS OLD but I would never SAY WHO, snapped off an Important Part and hid it), and I’m on a crushing novel deadline…with a sick kid and a sick animal both of whom basically need physical contact with me to continue existing at the moment.

IT’S ALL HAPPENING UP IN HERE. LIKE ALL AT ONCE.

So hold tight, I’ll be with everyone in a moment, I have way too much to say about literally everything that’s been happening. I just…am under several wailing bodies at the moment.

And, you know, awkward moment, but Lord Byron is in surgery as we speak, and cat surgery (not to mention dryers and apparently the gold-infused water a toilet produces when it is broken) is very not cheap, so if you were thinking or hemming and hawing over whether to sign up for a paid subscription (and get the extra spicy essays that accompany the main pieces), now would be an awesome time to do that, just saying, no big, totally idle comment you can feel free to ignore. That said, you know…we’re also 5 paid subs away from posting every two weeks on the reg.

Just giving you information. Definitely not feeling the cringe in every cell right now.

Anyway! I’ll see you Monday with part one of Move Fast and Break People: How the Internet Gave Us Everything and Then Took It All Away.

Lord Byron appreciates the support as he journeys through the mad dreams of morphine and wet food post surgery…

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It is the hush at the close of the year.

It always feels hushed to me, even if it's full of noise. The Northern Hemisphere in me, I suppose. There is always some flavor of excess dark, some flavor of excess cold, some sense of putting things away for the long white road of January. Even though New Year's Day is meant to be all new beginnings, December 31st has always felt like an ending to me.

I don't know too terribly many people mourning the end of 2024. It's been a strange, sour time. But as I've thought so often lately, maybe that's because I'm in my 40s, also a strange and sour (and sweet, yes) time when things start to wobble, even for those who did pretty well with the first act or two. Family starts to die, friendships and marriages fray and tear and shred, children and houses are either a constant responsibility or a swiftly-retreating option. Your health starts to whine, if it doesn’t scream. If not your health, at least your strength. If alcohol or its assorted dirtbag friends are going to be a problem, they often start becoming one in the late 30s and early 40s. Careers stall more often than they take off or wither suddenly on the vine. We 40s folk are acutely aware of politics; if we weren't before, because we're now at the stage of life where we need to think about the future, and if we were aware before, the effects of the politics of our youth come home to roost in middle age.

And if the world outside our hearts starts to go seriously corkscrewed around the same time these very normal crumblings tumble through our personal lives, it all gets jumbled up together into a ball of discontent without beginning or end.

There's a reason Dane's Inferno begins: Midway through the journey of life, I found myself in a dark wood, the good and right road lost to me...

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Well, that happened.

Followed by a simply wonderful fortnight of sifting through the ashes of the social contract looking for charred chunks of hope and decency and finding pretty much FUCK ALL. Also sifting through the WhAt WeNt WRonG hot takes of everyone from Bernie Sanders to Elon Musk’s ketamine dealer to the feral diaper-hunting meth-opossum prowling around behind my house who’s got all the answers.

It’s been a real treat.

There is a palpable, completely revolting sense excitement among the media. They got what they wanted—Hate Island is back on! All new episodes! Ooooh what hot little monster is Trump gonna couple up with this week? Time to get called heroes of the resistance for shitposting on the internet just like we were going to do anyway! But among regular goddamned people who didn’t want to actually set the world on fire to cook their horrible burgers and yuk it up with the other sadists in the Bad Uncle club, there’s a real well, fuck it vibe going around.

What else is anyone even supposed to say at this point? It’s gonna be real bad? Yeah, we’ve all been saying that. No one cared. Trump is going to fill the cabinet with whatever Spirit Halloween remote-controlled jump-scare ghouls he thinks will make out with him most enthusiastically or hurt the most people or piss off liberals or, hey, fingers crossed, all three? Yeah, apparently that was a plus. Nothing’s going to get fixed, rights will be lost, and every piece of the country that still works in any way is gonna get its teeth kicked in while a nation of aspiring Mad Max extras laughs and pretends it’s awesome? And all that’s assuming we don’t get into a war because Putin told his monkey to get dancing? I don’t know, man. Guess so.

I’m not a politician, I’m not an analyst, I’m not an economist—hell, I don’t even have a podcast, which means I’m barely a real person. I feel just as fucking defeated and cynical and scared and hopeless and holistically disgusted as everyone else who can define the word tariff without Google and doesn’t own a major newspaper.

But as the shock has begun to wear off, and the sadness numb, what’s left over?

Oh, Christ on a fully-fueled megayacht I am so fucking angry.

And finally, I get to say: IT’S BOTH SIDES, BABY.

And that’s why this particular primal scream of useless rage at the oncoming Snowpiercer baby-eating bug-train of the future is under a paywall, because EVERYBODY’S GONNA GET SOME today, and if you want me to fight with you about it, you gotta pay the troll toll.

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I have things I want to say, and swear about, you know I do. But today I just want to sit with all of you a minute and share something.

Fifteen years ago, I wrote a book, mostly, but not entirely, for children, called The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making.

Rather a lot of people liked it.

Over the years, that one book became five. Five, and two short stories. And then, in 2016...well. I don't have to tell you. And back then, devastated, not knowing what to do, I got very political online very fast. And I had to deal with a lot of entirely manners-challenged people online who sailed in to tell me how stupid and wrong I was and how much they enjoyed my fear. Because that's a normal thing to feel and do, apparently--and apparently still. But these people would take one look at my profile, see the word "Fairyland," and instantly assume they knew everything about what a dumb, flighty, empty-headed girl I was. Inevitably, they'd screech GO BACK TO YOUR FAIRY TALES at me like they'd just won the argument.

So I did, and I wrote a standalone prequel story called The Beasts Who Fought for Fairyland Until the Very End--and Further Still. As a way to process, and to help my friends and readers, perhaps, explain what happened to their kids.

In 2016, I didn't have a child of my own.

Now, I had to take that story down when the big anniversary Fairyland box set came out, Beasts was included in it. But several people contacted me this week to tell me how much the story helped them back then. And it would seem nothing matters and there are no rules anymore, so I don't really give a shit and I'm going to put it back up in case it might help someone else. It's not right for it to be unfindable right now without paying for a five-book set. (You do not have to have read Fairyland at all to read this story, it’s meant to be entirely standalone. The only trick is to know this all takes place long before the action of the novel, in which these forces are defeated by the usual rag-tag group of heroes. The big epic story everyone likes hadn’t even begun, and these characters couldn’t imagine something like that even being possible in their darkest hour.)

It's so fucking sad that, reading this story over this morning, eight years later, there wasn't any need to update it to speak to the present circumstances. Same as it ever was. We're stuck in a time loop, all of us. I was 36 when that man came down his golden escalator. I feel ever so much older than 45 now. And I'll be almost 50 by the time there's any path out. A sobering thought, to understate it rather dramatically.

Do I believe in the hope this story contains today, written when there was some possibility of believing it wouldn't be as bad as we feared, and that the country didn't actually want this? I'm not sure. I don't know what I believe right now.

Except that I do believe in stories. You gotta believe in something.

And I do think, even if you don't feel hopeful, maybe especially if you don't feel hopeful, you have to put on a good face and try to find it, and if you can't find it, fake it a bit, for those who need something to hold onto. We all have to give each other something to hold onto. And sometimes, if you fake it for a minute, it becomes real enough. A small magic the mind can do for itself.

So here is that story, and I dearly wish that it provides somebody out there with a little hope to lean on until their own homegrown is strong enough to stand tall.

The Beasts Who Fought for Fairyland Until the Very End—And Further Still

Once upon a time, three rather large and unusual creatures grew very tired indeed of fighting, day and night and day again, fighting the same overwhelming and unyielding enemies, fighting with all their large and scaly might, as well as their claws, teeth, flaming breath, and occasionally, walloping rune-carved giant’s hammers they found lying about where others had fallen. Because the sun was setting rosy in the sky, and because they could hardly bear to put one foot in front of the other, and because, at long last, their fates had been tucked firmly into bed and told to stay there or else, these three rather large and unusual beasts sat down upon a rather large and filthy hill in a country called Fairyland. The hill was filthy because a great battle had been fought there. Bronze and wicker and glass armor lay everywhere strewn about. Swords and axes and scissors and needles and a million thousand arrows turned that hill into a pincushion. Each arrow was fletched in feathers that once belonged to immortal birds so wise that if you asked them to tell you the meaning of life, they would have an answer, and it would be short, and easy to understand, and as true as tea. The three creatures sat carefully on their haunches inside a prickly prison of blades and bows and bucklers.

One was a tall man all in green, armored in a battered green breastplate and a battered green helmet and a green carriage-driver’s cloak and hardy green boots. One was an enormous Leopard with a curling green saddle on her back. The man smoked a long green pipe, and wherever he went a fresh green wind followed. This was not surprising, for he was the Green Wind, and his cat was the Leopard of Little Breezes. Together they brought storms and sighs to all the six corners of the world. The third creature looked something like a dragon. But he could not be a dragon, surely not, for he had no forepaws. His body curved back against his powerful hind legs like a capital S. He was the color of the very last embers of the fire, and his belly was the color of old peaches. He was graceful and gallant and gregarious and grim. His huge claws were very black, their eyes were very orange, their horns were fierce and sharp, they had long whiskers hanging from long snouts, and enormous wings like bats, if bats were far bigger than houses, extremely bony, and not in the least blind.

If you have not guessed it already, this dear and daring beast was a Wyvern. A Wyverary, if we are to be taxonomically accurate, for though his mother was a proper Wyvern, his father was a library. That only sounds strange if both of your parents were precisely the same sort of animal, which hardly ever happens, when you really think about it. He had been named for the family business, for a library has ever so many encylcopedias, and the beast was called A-Through-L. He knew just everything about everything, so long as it began with the letters A through L.

They were all very young, really, too young for all they had seen, but too old not to have seen it. They had only just met today, having fought on the same side, and after today, they would not meet again for a very, very long time. But they had become fast friends, for that is what three people who have survived something dreadful together always do.

The Wyvern looked down from their pincushion hill of swords and arrows into a long, deep valley. It had been very pretty down there once. Lots of blue stones and violet flowers and rabbits and foxes and minks who realized long ago that they all had soft ears and moist noses and hated hunters, and so, rather than fight each other, formed a collective for the Betterment of Us Who Gets Stalked and Shot At Just for Minding Our Own Business Whilst Being Fuzzy, and lived in reasonable happiness. None of that was down there any longer.  No flowers, no stones, no softness. A great battle had been fought in the Valley of Soft Ears. The last battle of the war, in fact. A stranger had come, an outsider, a mysterious girl with untold riches and untold fury. She had sent her armies screaming through the meadows and forests to seize Fairyland for herself.

It had been a ferocious fight, all against all. One side sent Witches and Magicians and Unicorns and Manticores and Gnomes, whoever would stand, whatever would serve, until, in the end, the last warriors had no more to hurl at one another but their shoes, and then they hurled those, too. The other side Pookas and Dragons and their own Witches and their own Manticores, but most of all they sent Redcaps, in wave after wave, some riding great beasts of the air, some charging on great beasts of the earth, stout and furious creatures who kept their hats red with the blood of those they hated. Stray flashes of spent magic still burbled and rumbled through the valley. Dragons, Wyverns, Sphinxes, Griffins and Harpies, the Flying Ace Corps, wheeled in long, exhausted circles, looking for stragglers to carry off.  Below, the fallen lay where they had lost their last struggles against the army of Redcaps, and even the clouds had begun to weep.

“We lost,” said A-Through-L. His strong voice went all funny in his throat.

“Looks that way, Ell,” said the Green Wind. He did not sound very concerned. “May I call you Ell?”

Ell nodded and sniffed in the cold autumn wind. “The Marquess is going to rule over all of us forever and ever, and she is…she is…terrible.”

“Suppose so.” The Green Wind blew smoke out of both his purple nostrils. The Leopard purred and said nothing. Cats are not terribly talkative.

“But how could we lose, Mr. Green? It’s not possible. All the Sirens and the Witches said we’d win as easy as supper and twice as quick. They said no one so wicked and cruel and so awfully angry could ever rule Fairyland. They said that sort of thing only happens in other worlds that are not so full of magic and wonder as ours. All the prophecies agreed on it.”

“I think I see a Witch in that cage by the big oak tree,” the Green Wind noted, pointing with his pipe. “Being menaced by a lion.”

It was true—down deep in the Valley of Soft Ears, a gargantuan blue lion roared into a silver birdcage, where a young man all in black cowered with his arms curled protectively over his cauldron. Witches brew up the future in their cauldrons, you see. They take up a wooden Spoon and boil a soup out of everything you did today and everything you did yesterday and all the days before, and everything anyone you ever met did, too, and that is how you get a prophecy. This is very much like what statisticians and journalists do in our world, only with less tasty onions and mutton and incantations. Neither of the Wyverns could hear anything over the din of the battle’s end, but I am a Narrator, and my powers of hearing are extremely keen, for I must listen through every closed door, every secret meeting, every whisper in every corner of a tale. I shall tell you what the lion roared. It roared: you will make a new future in your stupid bowl, and it will say all the things we want it to say and none of the things we do not! The new future will say that everything good in Fairyland is down to us and everything that goes sideways is down to our enemies. It will say that we are the best people, with the best plans, and the best words, and the best rulers in the history of bestnesses. Make it say the old King and Queen are liars and villains but the Marquess is a truth-teller and a champion who has released the world from sorrow forever. Make it say she is the only one who can fix Fairyland and make it great.

And to this the Witch said: But none of that is true! Fairyland isn’t broken! The Marquess lies and steals and cheats and snatches folk up for her own use and hates a great many more people than is healthy for a growing girl. Our old King was marvelous! The Queen just wasn’t very good at parties, that’s all. The worst thing she did was accidentally burn up a book of spells one time.

The lion snarled: if you say it, if you boil it up in your bowl, it will become true. Everyone believes Witches. You will be rewarded with gold and jewels.

And when the Witch still refused, the lion thrust a paw through the bars of the cage and swiped away the young man’s wooden Spoon, the great emblem of a Witch’s power. Then we do not need you, laughed the lion. We control the Spoon! Everyone will believe us now!

“But we tried so hard,” whispered the red Wyvern on the hill.

“Why should that make any difference?” answered the Green Wind, who was somewhat older and therefore somewhat more accustomed to things not going his way.

Ell frowned and stared at the churned-up dirt of the ruined hill. He scrunched up his orange eyes so as not to cry.

“Well, because….because it’s a bad story! Stories aren’t supposed to end like this. They’re just not! Things are supposed to get better. Things are supposed to make sense.”

The man all in green lifted one emerald eyebrow. “Oh? Did you never find a story in all of your Papa’s bookshelves in which a wicked dark lord rose up and put a crown on his own head? In which the cruel tyrant covered the land in night and ravaged the countryside, destroying and devouring and devastating the lives of people both gentle and kind? Did you never find one single tale in the corner of your noble father’s stacks where folk banded together and rose up against this terrible King, standing back to back and crying out: we do not look to be ruled?”

“Well, of course I did, Mr. Green! But in all those stories, at the end of all those stories, the dark lord was cast down into infinite nothingness or burnt to a crisp or at the very least sent to bed without supper, and everyone cheered and danced and had a party afterward. But the end of this story is that we lost and she gets to do whatever she wants to us forever. How shall we ever have parties again? How shall we cheer? How shall we dance? I don’t think the Marquess likes dancing. I think she only likes cheering if people are cheering her name and I think she only likes parties if they’re her own birthday and she gets all the presents.”

“Perhaps this is not the end of the story, then,” the Green Wind said kindly, though he wasn’t sure he believed it. It was important to say it to the brokenhearted, to the young, to everyone, even if he didn’t believe his own words. Especially if he didn’t believe it. If no one didn’t say it, it couldn’t even start being true.

“It feels like the end,” said A-Through-L with a strangled cry.

“It always does, when you lose.” The Green Wind took off his green helmet and laid it on the grass between two arrows. “But haven’t we had tyrants and fools and hobgoblins on the throne before? Haven’t we had rather a lot of hobgoblins? Aren’t hobgoblins rather more the rule than the exception?”

“Yes…”

“And haven’t we always patched up their mischief and gotten back to more or less living how we want to live and loving who we want love and making what we want to make and being who we want to be?”

“Yes…”

“Perhaps Fairyland is stronger than her goblins, my ravishing reptile. Perhaps, if you take a long enough view, we are all stronger than our goblins.”

“But this is different! Oh, I feel it in my bones! She is menacing the Witches and hunting down the Stregas who heal our wounds and she told the foxes and rabbits and minks that they deserved to be Stalked and Shot At Just for Minding Their Own Business Whilst Being Fuzzy and I have heard…I have heard she even wants to outlaw the study of Queer Physicks. How will we have magic without the queerest of all the sciences? Oh, I know all about Different, Mr. Green, for it begins with D. And this feels different.”

“It always does, when you lose.” The Green Wind stroked the Leopard of Little Breezes’ spotted head. Far below, a Griffin cried out in pain and ran terrified from the ruined battlefield, the ruined valley which once held so many soft ears. “But perhaps you are right. I have heard worse still, Ell. I have heard the Marquess longs to build a wall between Fairyland and the human world, so that no human children may ever come here and have adventures again. Though I may have some small thing to say about that, myself. The Marquess is certainly deplorable, and she lusts after deplorable things.”

“But if she is so deplorable, why did all those noble Dragons and Griffins and Gnomes and Centaurs and Glashtyn and Pixies fight for her? She has an army of dreadful, sneering Redcaps who love her desperately and want nothing more than to stain their caps even redder with the blood of her enemies. I suppose I understand the Redcaps. It’s their nature to hurt things. But the others? There must be something wonderful about her if they love her desperately. You cannot love anything desperately that does not have some tiny wonder buried inside it.”

The Green Wind stared into the darkening sky for a long time. “There is a dreadful sort of spell that certain people can cast, Ell. It is a very ancient and powerful spell, but difficult to pull off. All the circumstances must be just right. If you fall under the spell, you hear a story every night when you fall asleep and every morning when you wake up and you hear it twice at lunchtime. It is a story about yourself, a story that sounds so good and true that you fall in love with it. You want to hear it again and again. You snuggle up to it for warmth. You set a place for it at the dinner table. The story tells you that the world is an easy and simple place, and you—yes, you!—are the very center of it. You are a hero, the hero, and nothing beastly that has ever happened to you is your fault. Very soon you will be loved and treasured and celebrated the way you ought to be, the way you always should have been. Very soon indeed…if only those wretched…oh, let us say Satyrs. If only those wretched Satyrs were not taking all the good bits of everything for themselves and keeping your cupboards empty.”

“Why would the Satyrs steal from me?” breathed Ell, wide-eyed. “What have I ever done to them? Are all these frightful battles their doing? Let’s go and talk very sternly to them, at once! Anything, if only I might feel safe and warm and hopeful again!”

The Green Wind laughed sourly. He shook his head. Starlight reflected in his eyes. “No, my woebegone Wyvern. You don’t understand. The Satyrs have done nothing to you. They live in the forest and eat mulberries and moonbeams and dance at their Sabbats. What has that to do with your sorrows? It’s only the story.  You see what a good story it is! Why, it’s the story everyone and their auntie wants to hear! It’s the best story, the softest and coziest story every told! You began to believe it at once, and you have never had a quarrel with a Satyr in all your life. But the story is no good without a villain. It can’t feel true without a villain. Otherwise, everything would already be as it ought to be, yes? Someone has to be at fault. And if you are the hero, it stands to reason that folk who do not look like you or talk like you or like to eat the same things you like to eat must be the villains. After all, the world is easy and simple, is it not? And once people hear this story, once this spell is cast…they get lost inside of it. They cannot see anything but the story, and if anything comes along that might tear the tiniest hole in the story, they will hate it like a fanged toad, for the story has become more important than even themselves. That is what the Marquess did, only she used the foxes and rabbits and minks instead of Satyrs to finish her spell. And all those Redcaps and all those Dragons would rather die for her than let any harm come to the story that sings them to bed at night. Because the world is not easy or simple, and it is very, very hard to get to sleep when the dark is so deep and the cold is so sharp.”

The Wyverary twisted his claws together. “Maybe it won’t be so bad, then. If it’s only a story. If she only wants frightened people to sleep well and sleep soft. Maybe she doesn’t really mean any of it, and once she has her crown, she will be kind and good. People do all kinds of fearsome things for the sake of crowns. I’ve never understood it. Crowns itch.”

They looked down into the gruesome battlefield, now pale with mist and full of the sounds of weeping. A throng of Redcaps were stalking the wreckage, looking for anyone with wings. Whenever they found some poor half-dead Harpy or Ifrit, they pulled a long bronze chain out of a great rough sack and fastened down their wings, one to the other, with an extremely serious looking lock. Ell’s wings prickled with gooseflesh. The Green Wind said nothing. The Leopard of Little Breezes yawned, showing her teeth.

“I suppose you’re right,” Ell sighed. “It is rather silly to think the best of someone whose done all this to us already. I hadn’t much hope. But…” A-Through-L’s eyes grew very big in the dark, two enormous pumpkin-lanterns floating in the shadows. “But…oh, I know it’s a ghastly thing to say, but perhaps I might be safe, at least? You and I and your Leopard? We are not foxes or rabbits or minks, after all.”

“The spell grows and grows as people fall under its power. And to grow, it must always have new food. I cannot promise that the story will not start whispering in certain ears that Wyverns are lazy criminals who ruin the radiant city of Pandemonium with their dirty nests and fiery breath and loud crowing.”

“I’m not a criminal! I’ve never even been to Pandemonium!”

“It’s the story, my dulcet dragonkin. The story doesn’t care what is true. It only cares what feels true. And you are big and frightening to people who are neither reptilian nor capable of flight. Who knows? Perhaps the Marquess will even find a way to banish the Winds and we will be exiled, too.”

“Oh, I am so afraid! I am so sad I can hardly stand staying inside my skin! What are we going to do, Green? How are we meant to live? Is the Marquess’s story so strong that it can just stomp all over my story forever? They’re going to chain my wings and if I can’t fly, what am I? Who am I?”

The Leopard of Little Breezes lifted her spotted black-and-gold head and rested it on the Wyvern’s great red toe.

“Do you remember the first magic you ever learned, Beast?” The Leopard’s voice was soft and rumbly and rough as a mother cat’s tongue.

Ell did not think he knew any particular magic even now, except for the magic of being who he was. Yes, who he was was a very large, very red, fire-breathing lizard who could fly, which was a bit magical, but nothing out of the ordinary.

“The first magic anyone learns is saying No,” purred the Leopard of Little Breezes. “It’s how you know a baby is starting to turn into a person. They run around saying no all day, throwing their magic at everything to see what it’ll stick to. And if they say No loud enough, and often enough, and to the right person, strange things will happen. The nasty supper is taken away. The light is left on at night instead of turned out. The toy comes out of the shop window. It is such old magic, such basic magic, that most folk don’t even know it’s magic anymore.” The Leopard of Little Breezes rubbed her paw over her ear. “You can say No to that story. You can say No to the spell, to the Marquess, to the lions, to all of it. And if you say it loud enough, and often enough, strange things will begin to happen.”

“But that’s easy. I can say No all day long!”

The Leopard growled. “It’s very much harder to say No to a tyrant than to say No to a plate of beans or a dark bedroom. Harder still to do it while your wings are tied down and blistered. And you cannot stop saying it, even if it would feel so marvelous, so easy, so much less work to just be silent and hope it all comes out right somehow.”

Ell’s eyes filled with turquoise tears. “It does sound hard. So terribly hard. I don’t want to live through this sort of story. I want to live through one of the nice tales, the ones that take place between hobgoblins, the ones where you don’t have to spend every day blistering and saying No to horrors. Why couldn’t we just not have horrors at all? Then no one would have to say No.”

Oh, my dear, darling Wyverary. So do we all. But so few of us get to. Not even a silly narrator like me. The only comfort there can be is that very few sagas of bravery and wonder occur in the space between hobgoblins. Perhaps, my most beloved lizard, one will even happen to you. But that is not much comfort, I know.

“But then, of course, there is the other side of the apple. There is Yes Magic,” the Green Wind said gently.

“I like the sound of that better, even if it begins with Y,” nodded the Wyverary.

The Leopard of Little Breezes looked up at the Wyvern with enormous black eyes. She spoke in a very soft, very serious voice, the voice any cat uses when the time for yarn and nip is past and there is only the cold night coming.

“Every time you say Yes to anything, to anyone, you change the shape of your world. You agree to supper with a stranger, and now you have a friend. You say that you would certainly like to take a journey to the ocean, and now the ocean is in your heart forever. The Redcaps said Yes to the Marquess, and the world is very much changed. But we…we must say Yes to each other. We must say Yes to the needful, to the suffering, to the lonely, to those the Marquess punishes for saying No to her. We must band together, back to back, and say Yes to everyone who lost today, for we are all family now, and our loss is our new last name. If we must hide, we will hide. If we must flee, we will flee. If we must fight all of this all over again, we will do it and complain the whole time. We must say Yes to the story where, after a long battle, the dark lord is cast down into infinite nothingness or burnt to a crisp or at the very least sent to bed without supper, and everyone cheers and dances and has a party afterward. But most of all, we must say Yes to the truth and the speaking of it. We must say No to silence. And perhaps, one day, a long time from now, something new and extraordinary will happen and the Marquess will defeated, and she will blow away on the wind, no heavier than a memory.”

A-Through-L looked down into the Valley of Soft Ears. He could see the Marquess there, strutting through the ruined earth with a crown on her head and a smile on her lips, knighting her gloating generals and showering them with jewels and titles and kisses. He could see her men fastening bronze chains round anything that flew. He could see the trees drooping down in sorrow, their leaves just barely tinged with red, with autumn, with the coming of September.

“I understand what you mean,” Ell said finally. His whiskers whipped in the sour wind. He straightened his back and his scarlet tail. “You mean defiance. I know all about Defiance. It begins with D.”

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I know it's my job to be one of the people who Says Something About It.

I know it's my job to be one of the people who says something comforting, or at least insightful, or at a minimum cathartic. I'll try soon. I promise.

But I just don't have anything right now. I can't even look at the analysis, or the internet at all. Not yet. I don't even know how to describe what I feel. I would have to actually cheer up to climb my way through to plain old nihilism right now.

And when the post-mortems are all said and done and the numbers are crunched, that's what I think happened here. I'm not sure what Democrats could have done differently. In 2016 this country was fucking around thrill-seeking and wrecked the family car. I think now we're just openly self-harming and seeking the void.

But what the fuck do I know. I hope the media's happy. They got what they wanted and can pretend to be concerned while calling themselves heroes of democracy.

It all hits over and over, different angles of how dark this truly is. I didn' t have a child in 2016. I don't even know how to look at them now. I am so afraid. I feel so helpless and empty.

I don't know what's going to happen next. Neither do you. Neither does anyone, especially those who tell you they do. I know most of us are stuck dealing with whatever it turns out to be. Most of us don't have anywhere realistic to go, and there's no escaping America's reach, anyway.

So the only way out is through. This is the challenge of our lifetimes. How to resist and how to live. It fucking sucks. I have no answers. Not today. But I keep thinking about the old zen proverb.

Master, what do I do before enlightenment?

Chop wood, carry water.

Master, what do I do after enlightenment?

Chop wood, carry water.

So I suppose that's all I have in the way of comfort. So far. For myself or you.

What do we do before disaster?

Chop wood, carry water.

What do we do after disaster?

Chop wood, carry water.

We have to try. We can't give up. We have to take care of each other as best we can. We can't let ourselves be silenced. We have to circle up, backs to backs, and protect one another, especially those who are most vulnerable to this oncoming future. We have to find a way to hold on to whatever is nailed down well enough in America that they cannot steal it, whatever structures and bulwarks can take our weight. There will be some.

But for now, in these last three months of the era, we chop wood and we carry water. We hold our children and our loved ones. We try. Because there isn't anything else we can do.

We still have each other. We are going to have to make that enough.

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It’s almost over. One way or the other.

I think I’ve aged ten years since the first primary. Twenty since 2020.

A century since 2016.

And I do feel cautiously optimistic about tomorrow. Cautiously. Because I have SOME VERY REAL PTSD ABOUT 2016. When we were so sure. When, even with everything going on, we thought there was no way America would elect that guy. That we were on the verge of the first female President. When we were excited to see the oh-so-cocky MAGA camp meltdown in defeat. I painted my nails red, white, and blue. I wore suffragette white to vote, and a jewelry-version of RBG’s dissent collar.

And I will never forget watching everything slowly fall apart at the Democratic Party’s official event

And I’m…not real thrilled to see this same sort of sentiment floating around the day before this election.

Yeah, that Selzer poll was crazy surprising and injected hopium into everybody all at once like that scene in Pulp Fiction. Yeah, the early voting demographics and numbers look pretty good. Yeah, the vibe you and I feel, in our bubbles online and in real life, is that this is maybe probably gonna happen. Yeah, it should happen because voting against micro

I DO NOT TRUST THAT SHIT.

You know what I trust?

I trust Democrats’ deep, passionate, and powerful longing to not vote. I don’t understand it, but it’s as reliable as sunrise and the tide and white male comics complaining that their warmed-over take my wife, please jokes are being silenced to millions of views and dollars. Democrats FUCKING LOVE not voting. At the drop of the smallest and most irrelevant novelty hat, Dems seem to start celebrating, throw up our hands and joyfully not the fuck vote because…blue state so it doesn’t matter (yes it does, downballot dingus)/I got stuff to do and it’s a done deal (it isn’t, and we will all have a lot more shit to do if Elon Musk gets to Twitter our economy while RFK leaves the rotting carcass of public health in a park for fun and Trump sells the entire country to Putin for $599 and a kiss)/electoralism doesn’t work (oh my god hold my earrings)/my not voting sends a message to the establishment (they have no way of knowing why you didn’t vote, it could have been because Chipotle had a BOGO deal that day, your message is just a blank, subjectless email sent to no one)if Trump gets in it will accelerate us toward the revolution and people will rise up (he was already in power and there was no glorious leftist revolution, just the breakdown of society and suffering, also a revolution would not turn out with gentle loving progressives in charge)/the candidate isn’t perfect and will win anyway so I can stay pure (they won’t necessarily win anyway and not doing the bare minimum of saying please not fascism though is literally the opposite of political purity) or whatever reason seems fun that day.

It’s absolutely galling. And I’m so afraid we’re about to coast on vibes into another brick wall of assholes who get visibly excited talking about daddy punishing America for being such a bad girl. (And by the way, I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO, guys) running our entire lives directly into the core of the fucking earth.

I’m hoping, too. But it’s very easy to forget how much of this country doesn’t pay attention at all, how much of this country hates women and POC and have no reason to be shy about that anymore, how much of this country went through their most formative years before the Civil Rights Act, Roe, or women being allowed their own bank accounts, how much of this country was so traumatized by COVID they have just aggressively memory-holed the entire thing plus everything else we went through from 16-20, and how much of this country literally just doesn’t give a shit, wants to watch the world (just not their cute lil house) burn, and profoundly enjoys watching others suffer.

And that part of the country? Never miss an election. They turn out every time to vote for pain and anger and fear and repression of others. They fucking love voting, because they fully understand it’s how they can get their way whether there’s more of them or not, while the rest of us seem to have a real tough time with that lesson.

I live on a small island. I moved here on November 1st, 2008. A few days later, we elected Obama in a landslide, and it was one of the most special nights of my life. Everyone crammed into the local bar, watching it happen. We’d voted in Ohio before moving so that it would count more, and when Ohio went blue, you’d have thought my ex and I had done it just the two of us. We didn’t pay for a single drink that night. The joy in the air was so intense and wonderful.

All those people, so happy, feeling like we’d accomplished something real. That the world was about to change.

AND THEN TWO YEARS LATER NOBODY FUCKING SHOWED UP AND THE WORST REPUBLICANS MOVED ON INTO CONGRESS. And we were all surprised! I’m not exempt from this at all, either. I was young and dumb as a broken fencepost and I didn’t vote in the midterms. Have I learned my lesson? Yes. Has everyone else? I MEAN MAYBE BUT WHAT ARE THE CHANCES. Democrats just hate voting regularly. If all registered Dems voted, even Texas would be blue. But we don’t. We just refuse. Someone else will do the work, right? Someone else will make it okay. Someone else will fix it so we don’t have to pay attention.

And then we’re all shocked when SCOTUS is made up of out of three decent people, two out-of-touch old men, a seething frathouse rapist, a corporate lich, Serena Joy, and Clayton fucking Bigsby.

You can’t be shocked. We have to turn out, and at best, we seem to be able to manage it about once every other Presidential cycle. People keep whining that Democrats have been calling Republicans fascists for too many cycles, but we’ve been doing that because it’s literally just the same people over and over again. Reagan’s administration was half Nixon men, the first Bush’s was half Nixon and Reagan men, the second Bush’s was whoever was still breathing out of that ring of hell, Trump’s was half bonkers right-wing grifters and half whoever was left standing by the 2010s out of Roger Stone’s ancient shrieking goblin tribe of well-dressed national vampires. Who had mostly also been around since Nixon, plotting revenge. It’s been the same gang of Pennywise understudies slurping out of the public trough while starving the rest of us since my parents were kids, and yes, they are fascists. They just think it’s not fascism when they do it. It’s just the way things oughtta be, don’t you know?

THAT IS LITERALLY WHAT ALL FASCISTS THINK BUT FINE WHATEVER.

The point is, my heart is full of hope but my guts are full of dread. Not because of them, because of us. Because we have failed to protect ourselves and our neighbor so many times by giving up our voice and choosing not to vote. Because so many of us still want to vote for Jill Stein even though I’ve never met one single person who genuinely loves her and wants her in (funny how her not being perfect is fine with protest voters but the candidate with an actual chance not being perfect is intolerable), only those who want to use their vote to punish someone else. Because when optimism abounds, Democrats stay home.

Yes, it can be hard to get time off of work. It is also hard for Republicans to get time off, and early or mail-in voting is available in all but three states, only one of which is even close to a swing state (New Hampshire, because New Hampshire just HAS to do their own thing). Yes, voter suppression is everywhere, so yes, we have to try a little harder in some places. But we have to try. Please try. No, voting for Kamala isn’t going to end capitalism or fix Gaza or even make your groceries cheaper tomorrow, but what it does is make those things even remotely possible in the future.

The Democrats have been begging people to vote for 18 months now. I’m begging. Please don’t sell us to that creature and his rogues’ gallery. Please let us just try to get a little better every year, to fix more problems, to end more injustices, as best we can, within the law, as best we know how, within contemporary mores, as best we are able, given that America doesn’t actually rule the world. And if you aren’t voting because you think America is an evil empire—hold onto your fucking hats if MAGA wins.

Nothing is perfect. Everything sucks to a greater or lesser degree, most of the time. But that doesn’t mean we get to just nihilistically lie down and let these weirdos tell us who we are or how we can be allowed to exist. They don’t get to do that.

Everything hinges on tomorrow. Go. Vote. Speak. Say no to the last nine years of having to hear that man absorb and curdle every single part of daily life into his own stew of narcissism and sadism. If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for the rest of us, who want to determine our own lives and have a political party in power who can be persuaded to act for the people. Who, most of the time, try to all on their own.

Or do it for the next generation who cannot speak for themselves yet, but deserve to grow up to be whatever they can be, and not punished for not conforming to Gilead’s latest decree.

I don’t care who you do it for. I hope you do it for yourself. Just vote.

And if Kamala wins, if we escape this particular bad timeline, you have to keep voting. It isn’t ever over, because this push-me-pull-you between conservative control and liberal freedom has been going on for centuries. It does not end. Don’t you dare leave her hanging out to dry in the midterms. There is no permanent victory. And yeah, victory tomorrow doesn’t fix much right away. That work is hard and unlovely and takes so many years and so much arguing, so much compromise. But the needle does move. Toward something more open, something brighter. The first step is just not literally electing a supervillain.

There is and can never be any final repudiation of conservatism. You have to show up every time, forever, or there is no progress, on any cause you or I care about. And some progress is always better than losing progress.

It’s just one action a year. If my generation can finally learn to do that, maybe there is a future ahead that has room for all of us, and not just a few rich men full of hatred who think love, mercy, peace, kindness, and diversity are mortal sins.

Don’t get cocky. We can lose so easily tomorrow. Fill in the little bubble next to: I and my loved ones would rather not descend into a ravenous maelstrom of suffering today.

We don’t ever get to tune out again. Let’s get this done and start arguing over how to fix things rather than arguing over our right to continue existing with people who never wanted us to in the first place.

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I don’t know, man.

I just don’t know.

Was I surprised Donald “Art of the Happy Meal” Trump decided to round off an election bid that has been echoing through the last four years like a long, wet, deafening Dadaist fart in the fascist fucking wind machine by utterly mat-assing the dismount via one big ol’ Madison Square Garden Nazi struggle session full of ids let off the chain, smug gloating over their unstoppable supervillain plans, and absolutely crusted racist, sexist, and homophobic mouth-vuvuzelaing with a side of murderous rhetoric?

Come on. Not even a little bit. Last week he sad he wanted to be a whale psychiatrist super bad, you guys. It’s his passion. Can you even imagine how excited the staffer who got to book THE American Nazi venue for THE new American Nazis? (After making double sure it wasn’t Madison Square Garden & Lawn Care Emporium?) Oh, I bet he could hardly wait to send the dork army out to infest the media cycle telling everyone how stupid they are for making that very simple connection anyone would make, and that the Trump campaign 100% wants everyone to make.

This fucking clown-van full of wannabe Pennywises cannot hide their hideous flag-swaddled erections whenever they feel like they’re getting close to being able to kill everyone they don’t like and laugh about it on TV to thunderous applause. (That last part is key, though. Wholesale slaughter is just no fun if no one tells you you’re an awesome big strong handsome boy for doing it and throws you a big party to celebrate your achievement!) They giggle like schoolboys every time they say something naughty, coquettishly twirl their hair and wag their fingers at us, daring themselves to go a little further every time, then gasping at the audacity of normal fucking humans to…you know…take them at their word.

Was I surprised everyone got BIG MAD about a comedian calling Puerto Rico an island of garbage in the middle of a set that had far more vile and revolting racist-ass jokes lined up with which to bukkake that hungry audience Gallagher-style, opening for people who not only had worse and uglier shit to say, but people who are actually, publicly, loudly planning to liquefy our future and sell it back to us in leaky plastic bin-bags for millions a pop?

And that the media cycle hasn’t instantly buried that for them? (Don’t worry, they’re working on it. Very busy at the moment pretending Biden called all Trump supporters garbage, which he didn’t, and also it really wouldn’t be the same if he had, he called their comments on Latinos garbage, but no reason not to try to pull a Mortal Kombat fatality on democracy at the 11th hour, right, Fourth Estate? Honestly it’s so predictable and I’m so exhausted pitching myself into the cold and unforgiving sea is starting to sound pretty all right.)

And that this, this, of all the Tales from Beyond Cthulhu bonkers blood-drenched psychotically cruel 6000 pounds of hate and darkness in a 2.5 pound bag screeching murdershit Trump and his frathouse of D-list demons who failed to launch out of hell have pumped into this nation and the minds of all of us, this is what is making Latinos question whether to vote for him?

YEAH I’M PRETTY SURPRISED.

AND I WROTE AN ENTIRE BOOK ABOUT AN ISLAND OF GARBAGE FLOATING IN THE SEA.

WELCOME TO GARBAGETOWN INDEED.

Honestly, maybe I just don’t actually understand politics that well. Maybe I should scuttle this whole political essay thing entirely. I don’t get it. What? Why this? Because this isn’t even the worst thing Trump himself has said about Puerto Rico. My friends, he has hated you from the minute someone managed to get it through his hot buttered brain scramble that Puerto Rico wasn’t a fantastical land invented to flesh out the worldbuilding in West Side Story like Middle fucking Earth. This illiterate cousin’s uncle, who turns up every year to an intensely awkward Harkonnen Thanksgiving table cranked out of his diaper on ornithopter wiper-fluid has never said the words Puerto Rico without sounding like he just wiped something off his shoe.

It’s so hard to keep track of what I’m actually allowed to be angry about versus what I am commanded to instantly forget and not make a big deal of because FOONIE JOAKES.

I know remembering recent events is not exactly on trend these days, but…I mean…remember when he withheld aid because he though the mayor of San Juan was too mean to him? And threw paper towels at people after a hurricane? And repeatedly, repeatedly, as in, every single time the subject comes up, phrases his sentences in such a way that it’s completely clear that he either doesn’t know PR is part of America, doesn’t consider it to be despite reality, or thinks it should immediately stop? A guy who can’t put sentences together any better than he can put his shitty Spirit Halloween makeup on, but somehow, on the subject of this one place, is fully capable of cleverly crafting implicit rhetoric without slipping up and accidentally knowing the basic factual geography of the nation he wants to rule?

NOW we’re mad?

I don’t even want to get into whether it was funny, because that’s not even the point of conservatives saying it was a joke. I can’t express how disappointed I am in Jon Stewart for siding with his comedian-soul rather than his decency-soul and getting wrapped up in that part of the (barf) “discourse.”

Look: it wasn’t funny, it was stupid, tired, pointless, and even the set up revolves tightly around bringing up something important, that normal people care about, to a group of people the speaker knows don’t give one lonely windswept fuck, and only even understand the reference in the first place because it’s hysterical to them when normal people care about things other than themselves. It’s not even a joke, because that’s just what conservative edgelords actually think about Puerto Rico and the environment.

Have you ever seen one of this ding-dongs actually try to tell a joke? First, there’s only one punchline: I’m amazing, you’re a piece of human filth, and you deserve suffering while I deserve to watch. They almost always fall directly onto their faces and then blame liberals for not laughing. Dennis Miller, one of the funniest people ever, sent himself off to the hinterlands because even he couldn’t make conservative thoughts funny and relatable.

They also never say it was a joke when their attempts to comprehend comedy, an art form about catharsis, shared experience, speaking truth to power, and upending expectations to make people look at life in a different way, thus entirely antithetical to conservative ideals and goals, fail to get a callback. That would mean acknowledging their joke didn’t land and they’re the bestest at everything.

No, conservatives only bleat it was a joke when they’ve just said exactly what they mean and think, with a straight goddamned face, direct to camera, and a dim, flickering notion that they might get in trouble for it this time crosses their rage-dessicated brainpan.

(Ha ha they won’t.)

A joke relies on an unexpected reversal of expectations or upending of the audience’s everyday assumptions somewhere between the set-up and the punchline. But this specific audience never expected or assumed a set-up about a floating island of garbage in the sea was going to actually be about how we fucking created a floating island of garbage in the sea with all our consumerist hog-snorfling and short-sighted maritime policy. They assumed and expected it was gonna turn into some kind of insult at the expense of some group of people, because that’s their fetish, and no one turned up to Madison Square Fucking Garden on Discount Nazi Night to NOT get their fetishes seen to. They got what they expected, they just didn’t know which group of people, and were maybe mildly surprised it wasn’t Haitians, probably. That makes it a shit joke; the equivalent of yelling WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD in someone’s face and then blarfing back WE ALL FUCKING HATE CHICKENS AM I RIGHT FRIEND before they can say anything back, then expecting a Mark Twain Prize for it.

But hey, for once, I guess, we’re only sort of blaming the comic who said it, and mostly, correctly, pointing out that it’s all on the guy whose name is so grossly and obnoxiously in giant letters on everything. And it’s really no better to not vet what speakers plan to say at the biggest event of your campaign, in a place where SUPER-SPECIFIC PEOPLE HAVE SUPER NOTABLY SAID SOME SUPER-SPECIFIC TOP-TIER EVIL SHIT RIGHT BEFORE DOING EVERY LAST BIT OF IT?

Wait, what’s that? Oh, Hinchcliffe’s (which seriously sounds like Andy Kaufman’s new alter ego) set was absolutely vetted, because he planned to call Kamala Harris a cunt, and some poor intern squeaked out hey maybe not? Americans get pretty weird about that word? But A++ to taking a shit on Puerto Rico, bro! The part where you made everyone think you were gonna say something about the very real and very bad news great Pacific garbage patch but instead you switched it up and made a flaccid racist joke about your own country? Fuckin’ hilarious, bro.

I mean, first of all, at this point, why not call her the “c-word,” as the media is helpfully using despite being happy to print any other profanity these days, so that the right can pretend it stands for “communist” while, again, giggling and blushing and winking like a kid with a crush, and that crush is emphatically not on us. They might as well. The media would’ve laundered it for them with a smile and a backrub. They all think it. We all know it. If whatever gremlin-handlers are left doing actual campaign work were smart enough to balk at that, I’m not sure why “Latinos love having babies, they don’t care, they just come inside” was A-OK fun for the…well. Whole fuckin’ family, I guess. Maybe I just lived in Scotland too long, where cunt is a friendly greeting AND a floor cleaner, so I don’t care about that word anymore, but I can’t really see a comedian getting up there and being a misogynist prick moving anyone’s needle much. It’s kind of their brand.

BUT MAYBE I DON’T KNOW SHIT ABOUT SHIT BECAUSE APPARENTLY THIS IS STICKING WHEN “YES I WILL TURN THE AMERICAN MILITARY AGAINST AMERICAN CITIZENS IF THEY DON’T AGREE WITH ME AND IF YOU THINK I MISSPOKE HERE IT COMES AGAIN, WITH GUSTO” DIDN’T.

Is this actually finally generating the kind of rage every single thing Trump has ever said since sailing down a golden escalator with Resting Mussolini Face should have? Is it actually making Latino voters notice that this toad-souled witch’s curse we’ve all suffered with for a decade specifically, violently, and really, really openly loathes Latinos in particular?

Maybe? There had been some new endorsements and a lot of think-pieces, but the shock and unexpected attention span with which the media is treating this seems all out of proportion given the rest of what happened at that exact rally and also since 2015. No part of the media landscape seems to be able to focus on the detailed horror, privation, fear, and mayhem Trump and Musk are promising to deliver for more than two seconds after the third Betterhelp.com commercial break. But this one they’re holding onto. Not the part where Elon “I Am Good At Many Business” Musk is Trump’s new running mate, not the part where these two billionaires have apparently agreed between them to Thelma & Louise the economy straight into the screaming void, leaving all of the Americas as an island of trash floating in the sea, and certainly not that both of them have acknowledged on the record that their plans will do exactly that and they’re looking forward to it omg so fun guys!

Obviously threatening to kill anyone who disagrees with a guy who can’t remember what he said an hour ago didn’t even make a fucking blip.

Is the media finally peering into next week and realizing how holistically they done fucked up?

Maybe? But why? Scrambling to distract from that whole festive arrangement of broligarchs suddenly caring so deeply and authentically about journalistic neutrality that they just can’t endorse a candidate this year. And only this year. For reasons. Really good, double plus neutral journalism reasons. They don’t even seem to care much about the rest of the technicolor Nazi floorshow on display that night. They opened by playing fucking Dixie, for god’s sake. It’s all out in the open.

I’m not trying to make light of what a nasty fuckdumb thing to say about an American territory that’s been treated unfathomably poorly by us for pretty much always. I understand how big the PR diaspora is. It could make a difference. Many things could that haven’t gotten this oxygen.

Quite literally, two days ago, Trump got his carcass up on TV and said he and the Republican Speaker of the House had a “little secret” plan to secure the election for him no matter what the voting shows, and then, a few hours later, that same Republican Speaker of the House also went on TV and agreed that it was a super cool secret plan and he wasn’t gonna tell because you don’t tell secrets and as far as I can tell no one gives a fuck beyond lol what lovable scamps!

Is that it? Better to blanket the news with feigned pearl-clutching over a douchebag comedian with an inevitably douchebag podcast saying exactly what Republicans happily admit they think about Puerto Rico any old day, when they can be bothered to think about it at all, and pretend it’s some kind of October surprise that Trump is a huge racist who likes racists and hangs out with racists and is basically a make-work programs for racists everywhere, than to deal seriously with one political party has become a gargantuan blood-spattered all-devouring skull of flames nodding along and agreeing that yes, indeed, they are a gargantuan blood-spattered all-devouring skull of flames GET IN THIS GIBBERING HELLJAW, AMERICA, while the very part of our society that’s supposed to be in charge of revealing the truth and pointing out when the government is getting too twitchy did virtually nothing to stop them?

That’s really all I’ve got. Because this country seems to still think it’s some kind of FUCKING JOKE that we’re all voting between a future with problems, but more or less normal problems normal people can try solving, and the gargantuan blood-spattered all-devouring skull of flames, and the skull of flames is doing pretty well in the polls once the media gets done saying they just don’t know Kamala well enough yet.

We have the opportunity to say no to that, to that terrible future where JD Vance gets to decide what happens to our bodies, Elon Musk gets to decide what happens to our money, RFK Jr and his purple Thanos face gets to decide what happens to our food and medicine, Stephen Miller gets to decide what happens to our neighbors, and Donald “Your Favorite Monster’s Favorite Monster” Trump gets to decide what happens to everyone else. AND WE MIGHT NOT. BECAUSE EW LADIES I GUESS.

I can’t comprehend why anyone is still laughing. Why anyone thinks life will just continue normally after Tuesday if these carrion-eaters get back into power. Yeah, conservatives think Puerto Rico is trash. They think we’re all trash. Just compost to feed their growth. I will never understand why it’s just so much fun to hate and harm other people than it is to just…be rich in an advanced technological society full of comfort, entertainment, and possibility where anything you want can be had in a moment. Or not be rich but still be pretty okay plus same, as most Trump supporters are.

But this is a bad world getting ready to shoot its shot, telling us it’s bad and will feel bad, and we’re still sitting around making jokes. The millisecond Biden said the word garbage, legacy media informed us all Trump was fine now and it’s basically the same. Normal, often shitty, but still functional, life, or a vast hellscape of pain? BASICALLY THE SAME.

I don’t know what’s going to happen next week. I wish I even had a guess. So many things seem to be happening that we can’t see but the media could, if they tried, yet won’t. Please vote. Please do the minimum to not let us become the new Reich. Please see through all this noise to a signal we can hold onto. Please don’t let these goblin men write the history of this century. They’re not even offering anything in exchange for our everything.

See, the thing about carrion-eaters is that something pretty big has to die in order for them to feast.

If we don’t literally lay down and die for them, they will starve, and we will go on.

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I am a professional science fiction, fantasy, and horror writer. It is what I live and breathe. It is what I love. For twenty years I have stretched my imagination to tell the most out-there stories I can to as many people as I can. To imagine the future and the past, new technologies and philosophies and how to function within them.

So when I tell you people are getting really fucking weird about the line between imagination and reality, you need to believe me. It’s not ChatGPT that might end up putting me out of work, it’s the way we’re apparently just allowing millions of people to announce their personal epic science fiction spec script is reality, act on that conviction, still be treated as serious people to be taken seriously, and given influence and power. WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON WE DO NOT HAVE WEATHER CONTROL OR MEDBEDS OR CLONES AND JAY-Z IS NOT A FREAKING WEREWOLF.

Now, the way this Substack works is that each public post has a companion piece under the paywall containing all the things I wanted to say but didn’t want to deal with the usual horde of bad-faith concern trolling and screaming misinformation in the comments.

On top of that, this particular one is locked because I’m going to start off by telling a story about a family reunion I went to awhile back and the truly acid-addled-raccoon genre fiction presented to me, to my face in real life, by human beings I ostensibly share DNA with, as objective, common sense fact. To be completely honest, the last time I mentioned their worldview online, one of the relations in question popped up in the discussion and not only doubled down hard, but insisted on con-splaining how the sun works (spoiler: nope), not quite realizing that their version of Being Online and mine are very different. That person subsequently had no fun at all while fifty thousand people or so laughed at them and threw digital tomatoes.

I don’t totally know which I’m trying to avoid, that happening again and family members getting their feelings hurt/yelling at me, or my total fucking despair if it didn’t, because I can no longer be sure anyone on Twitter knows the difference between whatever they dreamed the last time they took Benadryl on an empty stomach and reality. God DAMMIT, Planet Earth.

But I’m going to unbury the lede and put the first rule for discerning What Is from What Is Fucking Squirrel Nuts above the fold. There’s a few other rules, but this one is just a simple and effective question to ask yourself when evaluating whether some stupid outlandish thing you heard is reality or JUST TOTAL GIBBON-SHRIEKING INTO AN INFINITE HALL OF NIGHTMARES. As a public service.

DON’T BE AFRAID, IT’S CRITICAL THINKING TIME. If the answer the following is yes…

1. Would life be massively easier, more fun and interesting, or at least massively more dangerous/exciting and interesting, than you’ve ever known it to be for one single second of your lived experience if this thing were even half-true?

THEN IT’S PROBABLY VENOMOUS DREAMPUKE EJECTED FROM THE SUGAR PLUM FUCKING FAIRY’S MONEY-SUCKING BILE-CLOACA, YOU CANTELOPE, STOP BEING SUCH A GORMLESS SUCKER.

Okay! All set? Time to talk shit about what my second cousins believe!

Let’s hop in the definitely-real Democrat-controlled time machine fueled by baby blood and straight men’s tears. Reserve yours now for 47 non-refundable installments of just $47.47! Product launch date: MAYBE!

I suspected something was about to shake dangerously loose in the collective American psyche around the summer of 2016, at a reunion of my maternal family in upstate New York, about six weeks after my maternal grandfather had died, a fact which will be quite important in approximately 35 seconds, the precise amount of time it took between getting out of my car and someone I’d never met before just bellyflopping with gusto into a Smilex vat of bugfuck nonsense…

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I suppose the bright side of, well, every goddamned thing I’m about to say, is that people finally seem to be noticing that the media, whether mainstream/legacy media, or the squalid chaos-bins of TikTok, Youtube, Twitter, and Meta, or even the atomized, janky self-checkout counter of news and commentary and commentary-on-commentary the rest of us have nailed together out of the last eight years’ worth of absolute fuckshit, is nothing like the orgy of liberal bias we were always told it was.

Wait, who told us that? Oh, was it conservatives? Like literally the whole time? Whenever the nasty, festering, soul-rotting hypocrisies and crimes and corruption and oppression they were gleefully pulling got so out of control the media couldn’t find any more ways to not report on it, and apologetically crafted mild-mannered weasel-worded headlines out of some new utterly heinous, deliberate and multi-pronged sadism? And we all just meekly bent our heads and accepted that everyone should just try to be a little more conservative in the future, after all, the poor things have it so hard, it’s so unfair to them that people don’t want to be their subjects and the crimes they commit to make themselves kings (or just for funsies) keep getting discovered, underplayed in the press, perfunctorily investigated, weakly prosecuted, and hurriedly forgotten?

Did you think I was talking about the COVID response? January 6th? Emoluments? Stolen documents? Fake electors? Bribing SCOTUS? Colluding with Russia to swing an election and undermining NATO to prepare for an antagonistic nation’s new war of land acquisition? Opening the entire treasury to the President’s friends without oversight and handing out billions in pre-forgiven loans (by definition, not loans)? Refusing to help their own state’s citizens suffering and dying in multiple storms, even so much as taking a phone call or voting for aid, because they don’t like the current administration and want to blame them for not helping?

My siblings in Christ, I was talking about Iran Contra.

Because it’s always been this way. ALWAYS. I don’t know what kind of roving, sentient, ravenous Memory Hole has taken hold of this world, but it’s eating REAL GOOD these days. Oh, is CNN shining up the conservative candidate with generous tongue-baths, weasel words, and strategic silences while breathlessly pointing and screeching at the liberal’s slightest ill-timed fart? Is the Wall Street Journal reporting on a speech in which the Republican suggested literally the worst economic ideas of all time as “nuanced and bold”? Is the New York Times publishing a whole lot of op-eds like they’re objective news and then you open the op-ed and it was clearly written by fucking Ungoliant?

I mean…yeah. They do that. They’ve always done that. Conservatives do not change, by definition, except to get more authoritarian. It’s kind of their whole thing.

Hey, remember when the New York Times knowingly ran fabricated stories just to get a cute lil head-pat from the Bush Administration, except without the head-pat part? Remember how fucking excited every single cable news network was to get their photogenic reporters artfully smudged with dirt and “embedded” with actual combat troops, with whom they would definitely never form tight bonds and feel reluctant to publish anything critical of? Remember how everyone involved with the Clinton impeachment was fucking someone, or many someones, other than their wives, with gusto, in office, and literally nobody said anything about it until years later when it didn’t matter anymore? And Trump having five kids by three wives, countless affairs, and pretty openly fucking a right-wing grifter on the campaign trail is not even worth clutching one lonely pearl about? And how hard the media mocked Hillary for saying there was a “vast right-wing conspiracy” to bring down the President and then said nothing when George Conway went around laughing about absolutely running a vast right-wing conspiracy to bring down the President (aw, he says it was so annoying to have to do that with fax machines and copiers! Poor guy!) twenty years later, and in fact, presenting that fucking guy as some kind of liberal rebel against his wife Kelly Ann’s conservatism because HELL IS EMPTY AND ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE? Remember when they all helpfully didn’t report on Reagan’s dementia? And stopped talking about Iran Contra as soon as humanly possible? How Carter is still thought of as some kind of uniquely terrible President despite being preceded by Nixon/Ford and succeeded by the infected root of the poisoned tree whose fruit we’re all still choking on to this day?

This is a minor sampling. You’d think people would at least remember 2016, when every NYT cover story was a sweaty, heavy-breathed, puff piece pretending to be Woodward & Bernstein “exposing” Hillary’s scandals while CNN just went ahead with the actual headline “Does Trump Transcend Truth?” while showing a live feed of his empty podium for hours, waiting for their bestest boyfriend to show up. Or how happily they all parroted the “migrant caravan” story and said nothing about how quickly it seemed to vanish after the election. Or any of the dozens of recent stories about Trump’s “resurfaced” background that didn’t resurface at all, the media just stopped talking about it and everyone forgot.

But I guess it’s more fun to pretend this bizarre eagerness to turn down the sheets of democracy for conservatives is brand new and everything before was somehow honest and fair—biased toward the left, if anything! Those sneaky leftists! Always maintaining a multi-generational united front to enact subtle, patient, incremental long-term plans to slowly win America to their side with the loyal cooperation of major corporations and without interference by systemic structures! YEAH THAT SOUNDS LIKE THE LEFT.

And it’s not about a “horse race,” either. That’s become the newest excuse for so many outlets sanewashing the fact that every time Trump opens his mouth what comes out is the elevator-blood from The Shining with some gobs of electrified shark and the fucking shards of Kristallnacht floating in it.

But it’s bullshit of the highest degree. Incredibly effective bullshit that allows people to acknowledge the problem and immediately shrug it off. It sounds right. It’s just cynical enough. It feels like it makes sense and fits with all our frustrations about capitalism and the media’s complicity in the rise of the new fascism. We can comfortably repeat it while still appearing cool and unfooled and smarter than everyone else. It appeals to our basic assumption that profit is the only motive for entities as vast as media conglomerates.

Still bullshit.

Honestly, I’m not even sure how the idea is believable to anyone for more than a minute or two. First of all, exposing Trump and honestly reporting on his enshittification of the modern world would bring in a whole lot of clicks, as would, you know, defeating the new fascism. That’s the kind of thing you break out the Big Boy Fonts for. Most of the country was literally dancing in the streets when Biden won—there would be zero loss of profit in uncovering Trump’s malfeasance and downfall. Not to mention, actual investigative digging would turn up some truly incredible stories. There is no reason not to investigate the ways the GOP has tried to set up cheating in this election, but it barely makes a blip in the headlines when yet another scheme turns up and is promptly not dealt with.

Second, when Biden was floundering in the polls, did the media go hard on Trump to maintain a close race and all those thirsty terrified eyeballs on their content? Fucking no. I was there. You were there. They ignored every insane thing Trump said during the debate and came together in an almost unprecedented unity to thump Biden out of the race and convince everyone he had Parkinson’s. Aaron Sorkin, of all over-blessed people on this dumbass rock, published an op-ed saying if the Democrats were actually serious about the threat of Trump, they’d completely non-democratically nominate Mitt Dog-on-a-Hot-Car-Roof Romney as their candidate the day before Biden dropped out. The media landscape was so unified that that was the creator of The West Wing’s solution: Well, if EVERYONE was conservative, we wouldn’t have all this division! Don’t like the new Hitler? Go with Himmler! See? All fixed!

Did the media go hard on Trump when Biden trailed him in 2020? No, they argued over who got to blow him first by cleaning up daddy’s messy speeches (oh those strategic broken quotation marks and ellipses have so much to answer for) and telling us all Biden couldn’t possibly win so get used to it. When the Butler shooting happened, did they finally start reporting on all the good Biden has actually done for the country to balance out the narrative that this clinched the whole thing for the party promising a new civil war? Not for one fucking second! You could feel the absolute thrill behind every outlet running that “epic!1!” photo as it suddenly became the only photo that had ever been taken in the history of the world, then the disappointment when the shooter turned out not to be the blue-haired trans immigrant communist abortion activist of the legacy media’s dreams. And every cable news outlet spent 2016-2020 swoonily reciting one now he’s finally becoming America’s President tone-poem after another, as though by the purity of their yearning they can make it so. I do not ever remember once seeing a pundit with moist eyes stare longingly at a Democrat and moan with pleasure that he had finally become our President, least of all because he managed to complete a State of the Union speech without ritualistically sacrificing a migrant worker on the floor of the House or dropped a giant fuck-off bomb on Afghanistan hoping it it would make him feel a big boy.

One half of our political establishment (and it’s not just the bleached Gibbering Mouther from Georgia) is openly discussing and disseminating the talking point that Democrats have a weather control machine that can create hurricanes (which they have not used to fix climate change because reasons) and direct them at conservatives. That, and I cannot stress this enough, is fucking crazy-ass wibbly-wobbly shit. Anyone who actually believes it is profoundly in need of powerful medication. Yet reporting on these completely out to lunch fans of radical science fiction, such as it is, has at best acted like this is funny, just another thing a Republican said and not completely disqualifying from anything but an in-patient treatment program, or reported it with wan, disinfected headlines like “Yes, They Can Control the Weather, Says Marjorie Taylor-Greene” while barely addressing multiple Republican governors refusing to save their own people as they drown and flee. We are now expected to just deal with pure moon-howling madness as a serious part of our national discourse.

Now, of course the media criticises Trump. They made billions doing just that. It’s the journalistic Eden they want back, so that they can copy/paste someone’s misspelled tweet and plaster Democracy Dies In Darkness above it. But they also carry water for him while offering nothing but scorn to any Democratic move or action, and super-gluing a megaphone to the lips of anyone with a grievance against them not fixing every problem instantly with a deadlocked Congress so that both sides look equally wretched. They insist on detailed policy from Harris while asking how Trump’s tummy is feeling today. Constantly ask how a Democrat is going to pay for programs to actually help people while never bothering to ask how a Republican plans to pay for infinite tax cuts, absurd tariff plans, and orgiastic military spending. Or if they do manage to squeak out a real question, most outlets turn right around and pretend Trump didn’t answer by rambling about nailing Haitian swans to lawnmowers or pledge to nominate Clarice Starling as Attorney General.

I’ve gone on and on, I know, and I could keep going until this is a 9-part series. This is where I’m going with it: what’s going on in the media is simply not about creating a horse-race, not only because it’s always been a race between a normal fucking horse and a geriatric centaur huffing that rage-drug from Firefly, but because no one seems to care what kind of race it is as long as the Democrat stays behind. Imagining it’s about money or ratings or both is just a lot easier to believe. That this craven, groveling behavior, not just from the media, but from a very uncomfortable percentage of this country, is about capitalism and profit and not genuinely preferring conservatives and putting their giant meat-paws on the scale for the daddies they never had.

America just likes conservatives more than it likes liberals. Over and over, time and again, this country bends itself into tesseracts trying to give Republican candidates a chance not to be the absolute fucking worst all the fucking time forever. They always are the absolute fucking worst they can get away with, and then everyone trips over their own children to forget and imagines that there was some kind of mythical “traditional Republican Party” that wasn’t like this and may one day return at our greatest hour of need like King Arthur with one divine hand in a hedge fund and the other in a meth lab.

I feel like I’ve spent most of my life hearing dyed-in-the-wool Democrats say they’d absolutely vote for a Republican who threw this or that sad little bone to the idea that maybe we shouldn’t all live in Gilead, only without the massive social programs, free food, clothing, and housing, or employment guarantees the actual clownshit evil Gilead had. I rarely see any Democrat not happy to say they liked McCain (don’t google the Keating Five, kids!) or whoever the new “welcome to the resistance” Republican is this month (before they inevitably yank off their fucking face and cackle that they were Old Man Fascism the whole time)

These days, I hear quite a few leftists saying Trump would be better because it would teach Democrats a lesson or accelerate the Rapture revolution or whatever idea was definitively proven to be a nihilistic mind-pit of wrong by the fact that the walking carcass was already President and all that happened was they got to hurt us and smile.

I have never heard a hardcore Republican say they’d give a Democratic candidate a chance under any circumstances whatsoever. Let alone a far-right Christian nationalist. In fact, the one thing the far right and far left seem to be able to agree on is that the absolute most disgusting and reprehensible, any, demonic thing to be in the history of the world is a regular old well-meaning liberal. Which definitely doesn’t come from having grown up listening to the entire media slowly morph liberal into a curse word no one even wants to say anymore and just sucking that shit down with mother’s milk.

There is just something dark and awful here, deep down, that wants a mean daddy.

America’s entire relationship with its two political parties (not to mention the “third parties” that only ever exist to carve off votes from Democrats and somehow never seem to harm Republican performance at the polls) is the grotesque acting out of an abused child, writ large. Generations have grown up with distant, authoritarian, or absent fathers as a romanticized ideal from Hollywood to the church pulpit, if not flat-out reality in so many cases. (Not all, tons of Dads are wonderful, tons of Moms suck and vice versa. This is about abusive patriarchal and maternal archetypes, don’t get upset, it’s a metaphor. This isn’t a gender thing, either, substitute Mean Mommy and Cringe Dad if you like.)

So America just keeps playing out this sick but classic pathology. Suck up to stern, angry, distant, uncontrolled yet controlling Dad, give him every chance to just stop being an asshole for five seconds; lash out at Mom because she’s safe and boring and will keep trying to help no matter what we do. If only she were better, if only she behaved perfectly, if only she loved him more, if only she gave him more, if only she gave us more, if only she weren’t so fucking annoying all the time!

But Dad? Dad is cool and strong! He’s a provider! He doesn’t need any of our shit! Cool Dad lets us do whatever we want! He’s not even here half the time because he’s so important and has so much on his shoulders! I mean, we can’t do anything Cool Dad doesn’t like, and he takes our lunch money every day and punches us in the stomach if he thinks the boys seem suspiciously gay today or the girls speak up or anyone asks where he was last night, he really seems to hate our foster-siblings and starts fights with our neighbors for no reason, and he thinks it’s Mom’s fault every time it rains, but we can play with guns and not pay for stuff and beat up other kids! Dad says school is stupid and we shouldn’t have to go! He lets us eat candy every day! He always gets his way and we want to always get OUR way too! He’s sooooo rad and funny and strong!

But Loser Mom can’t stop yammering about dumb crap like rules and decency and thinking of future consequences. She’s always making compromises and telling us we have to do stuff and be nice to others and get along and be patient and like, not drink from the awesome rusty fire hose because Dad takes a shit in the well every morning and use the filter pitcher instead. Or we hate her because she’s always cleaning up his mess and trying to placate him instead of (somehow) kicking him out in a superhero cape when Dad’s buddies run half the town and a whole bunch of the kids told her they’d go with him if she tried. IT’S SO CRINGEY AND WEAK. Ugh, Mom sucks so much. I wish we had a new Mom! But not a new Dad, because Cool Dad rules and he only beats us because Mom makes him so mad. And hey, it’s Mom’s job to take care of us, not Dad’s! She’s the one that’ll be judged if we fall apart; Dad doesn’t even want a family in the first place.

Americans love Cool Dad because he does not love them and never will, so we beg for crumbs, and hates Uncool Mom because she neither burns the house down with both of them in it nor will she ever stop allowing his abuse to seem less horrible by working to fix the problems he creates before they take us all down, so we can just call her a bitch and know she’ll still probably make dinner out of whatever Dad left after his last rampage.

Or if you’re a libertarian, I guess Dad going for a pack of cigarettes and never coming back is the goal.

And we just keep acting like this, over and over, forgetting what every cycle of Republican fuckup/Democratic damage control (conveniently leaving little time or funds for actual Democratic policy progress) should teach us: Lucy isn’t ever gonna let anyone kick that ball, and on the off chance someone managed to get a punt in, she’s filled it with catshit and TNT on the sly.

The media is made of people, it’s not a great eldritch beast of many eyes and mouths. And people have biases. They have fucked-up shit they’re working through. A lot of older people had Dads exactly like that because that was more or less how Dads were supposed to be until very recently: authoritarian, disciplinarian, distant, uninvolved in day-to-day household affairs, and primarily concerned with enriching himself, which riches would then trickle down to the rest of the family. Parental figures and the entire structure and cosmology of dominant Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions which have God as literally an absentee or punishing Father at their core, scald ideas about authority and its use into our tiny baby brains. The planet is still being run by very old people whose baby brains learned that fathers knew best, and the biggest, strongest, most authoritarian ones got to dole out the hurt and not get hurt themselves, or any consequences for acting that way—and quite a few rewards. It just hasn’t been that long since, minus actually beating his wife and children (and sometimes even then), this was considered the order of the natural world and the hereafter.

And then there’s something darker and uglier down there in the mess: choice and agency and the modern world are hard and scary. Being an adult is weird and crazy different than it’s ever been and living in the future isn’t exactly super fun. When people are scared, they retreat behind walls, behind whatever they perceive as strong, even if it’s cruelty, and jam their heads directly into the sand. I think a lot of people just kind of want to give up, give in, say fuck it, why try to be responsible for each other and accept those who aren’t like us and mind our stupid manners all the time and work together to keep this house standing when it needs so much repair? Why not just take a wrecking ball to it, or let that businessman with a briefcase who definitely has normal teeth and not fangs and super definitely isn’t drooling with anticipation, take charge so we don’t have to think about what’s right anymore?

There is this strange nihilism floating around about how close Trump is to winning. A this might as well happen apathy I cannot comprehend. None of this is inevitable. Even the reddest states have massive blue voter bases that still vote, and more that don’t turn out. We do not have to descend into this madness. It will be worse, not better, than anyone is imagining. We do not have to accept Garbage Daddy (and Trump is LITERALLY that Dad to his own kids and us) just because the neighborhood gossips would rather seriously discuss weather control, translate Dad’s drunken rambling like the priests at the Oracle of Delphi, and fume about how Mom hasn’t gotten the neighbors down the road to stop setting each other’s houses on fire while getting kicked in the head in her own kitchen all day every day, all the while some guy plasters every house with flyers saying weather control is totally real, but vaccines aren’t, and Terrible Mom is an Atlantean hell-dolphin hungering to eat us all (while hiding the tell-tale hump of a fiery fin on his own back under a techbro-casual bomber jacket).

IT’S FUCKING NUTS AROUND HERE. And we’ve just gotten numb and learned to live with it for nine years.

I don’t want to do this anymore. That’s always the downfall of the liberal voter base: we just want to go about our lives, so we do, and the shadows close in while we’re not paying attention. But we will keep doing it, even if Harris wins, and may the Atlantean hell-dolphins help us if she doesn’t, America (and wouldn’t it be nice if it were only America) will go right back to pawing at the trouser-leg of the patriarch who doesn’t love them in 2028 and 2032 and so on. People want to believe in the Good Conservative. They’ll grasp at any straw that lets them. The fight is never over, because it’s with the broken psyche of this nation, which is not actually that preciously unique in any of this, and that healing is measured in centuries, if it’s even possible.

Conservatism and progress have been at war since Uruk and Jericho—this one is our battle, it sucks beyond the telling, but we can’t just give up, no matter how determined the legacy media and the new online political ecosystem are to coddle full theocratic fascism into life—the truth isn’t that hard to figure out.

Democrats don’t control the weather.

And Republicans don’t control our fate.

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Not everything has to be politics.

Some things are all-consuming fires from the primal depths of time and the void.

Last Friday, in my usual bleary, resentful early-morning delirium, I followed a link in the comments section of an article about something beyond completely unrelated to the treasures hidden by that blue text (oh, concerned piece about long-term effects of America's increasing marijuana use, who knew you came bearing such gifts!) and pitched headfirst down a long rabbit hole, at the bottom of which, somehow, turned out to be a molten ancient nuclear reactor I feel just unreasonably affectionate toward now.

Obviously I immediately went to tell the internet about it, which is REALLY NOT THAT EASY ANYMORE since I guess we've all just given up on APIs and cross-posting apps because billionaires hate nice things.

Problem is, I get SO FUCKING EXCITED about learning something new (and this one is a DOOZY), and then EVEN MORE EXCITED about teaching others something new, that it's all I can think about for several hours on either end, and I don't quite know what book I'm going to DEFINITELY USE THIS IN yet, and work still must be done while the child is in school, so...I want to expand on what I wrote on the annoying micro-blogging websites here, where I can use BOTH primate tool-usey wiggle-parts.

So this is the bigger, grander, more in-depth, more accurate, and more ADHD EXCITEBIKE version, all in one place and much longer, just for you fine folks who support me here and over at Patreon*.

*The nine o’clock show is completely different than the seven o’clock show disclaimer: This essay and the Patreon one are not quite the same, so that everyone on each site feels they got their money’s worth of something special**. (Only 96 paid subscribers left to commit to a biweekly posting schedule!)

**Plus I learned more in discussing it over the weekend.

Look, there's a reason I became a writer, well, many reasons, but one of them is definitely that it's a great way to just be in graduate school and writing a thesis all the time, because research thrills and excites and absorbs me like little else. That is extremely stressful. It is also extremely stimulating! Another reason is that being a professional writer is a fantastic way to force other human beings to love and care about the obscure, irrelevant-to-daily-grindlife things you love and care about. I literally get short of breath learning something new and fascinating, and then, sadly for all of us, also literally, run around spinning in delighted circles like Maria in The Sound of Music singing loudly to the hills so everyone has to listen to my latest nonsense. It's deeply embarrassing, and I feel sorry for my friends.

But THIS ONE is the coolest thing I've learned about in a hot minute--both adjectival puns intentional.

When I first started reading about this, I wondered if maybe this was a thing everyone already knew about and I just missed somehow. If so, WE CAN GEEK OUT IN THE COMMENTS. If not, WE LEARN/FEAST TOGETHER. But I gather from reactions (heh) to the initial thread that it's not terribly well known to the general public, so AHHHH LET'S JUMP INTO A LIBRARY AND COVER OURSELVES IN BOOKSMELL.

SO. It turns out that, under the precise right (or very wrong) conditions, large natural deposits of uranium can develop spontaneous nuclear fission chain reactions identical to the kind we make on purpose in modern nuclear reactors.

This has already happened at least once. About 1.7 billion years ago in Oklo, Gabon.

How do we know a spontaneous natural nuclear fission reactor formed in Africa 1.7 billion years ago?

Well, in 1972, a bunch of French chemists were quality-testing reactor-bound ore from Gabon, and it turned out a LOT of the local uranium was already markedly depleted, far more than any previously-found Happy Fun Rock, some of it by over 40%. Which meant, at the end of the day, this lab's till was short a whole lot of radioactive isotopes that should have been produced by processing that Gabonese ore.

This being the Cold War, people were pretty uptight about accounting for and tracking all fissionable isotopes in or out of any given civilian facility because, you know, big boom bad, so somebody was in trouble and they needed to figure out pretty quick how this could possibly have happened in a fairly new mine, or someone was going to get real aggressive about who stole the doomcookie from the doomcookie jar.

SCIENCE TIME.

Turns out the specific type of depletion in this ore told the story. In artificially processed and/or depleted uranium, the big players, U234, U235, and U236 are all affected. In the Oklo deposits, U235 showed the same type of depletion we find in spent waste materials left over from light water reactors. All the expected "product isotopes" and "daughter nuclides" that get churned up during fission reactions were present. But in our reactor waste, U234 and U236 are still present in small, altered amounts, because those isotopes are both consumed when neutrons merge and produced by fast neutron reactions happening during the fission process. So most of them get burned up, but the burninating process also makes more, so there should be some leftover at the end of it all, if not as much as the deposit started out with.

But in the Oklo materials, U234 and U236 were totally gone, because, you know, even at the crazy half-life of all this crap (250 million years, give or take), 1.7 billion years is plenty of time for it to fade to black. So this wasn't uranium humans had used to make anything go (reactors) or stop (bombs), it was ore that hadn’t been doing the VERY fiery splits for a long, long time.

The French team announced their findings: around 2 billion years ago, a self-sustaining nuclear reaction had occurred naturally within this pile of West African rock. And over the next many years, other sites, all near Oklo, showed the same markers, all part of the same extreme, widespread event.

It doesn't mean anything and it's not important, but it made me smile: that announcement took place on September 25th, 1972, which is my child's birthday, forty-six years before they were born.

So here's where it gets (more) interesting.

The Oklo reactor started doing its thing around 1.7 billion years ago, which is a very specific number. That puts it during the Paleoproterozoic era, when life on Earth was a loose gentlemen's club of sea algae and a few early eukaryotic cells. Before anything. Before dinosaurs or mushrooms or bacteriophages or even your mom.

Atmospheric oxygen was pretty damned new. It came from cyanobacterial photosynthesis...probably, and maybe a big comet or meteor hitting the Earth like Santa's gift bag, full of funkadelic outer space molecules.

Thus, the oxygen content of our atmosphere had only recently gentrified the joint & ticked up to a perky 2%, which is not perky at all considering our current atmosphere is 21% oxygen. DON’T JUDGE HER, EVERYBODY'S GOTTA START SOMEWHERE.

But Our Problematic Friend Uranium can only dissolve into water in the presence of oxygen, and the oxygen in water doesn’t count because, well, if you use that up it’s not water anymore. So all this uranium was lying around being a mountain and hills and ground, probably constantly inundated with groundwater for who-knows-how-long, until the oxygen in the atmosphere was thick enough to allow uranium to do what it does. The groundwater seeped into a uranium lode and moderated the neutrons being produced by natural nuclear fission into a self-sustained chain reaction just the way the rods & pools of a man-made reactor do.

Long story short? The Oklo reactor burned & cooled on a THREE HOUR CYCLE for HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS until all the fissionable material was used up.

Yep. Three hours. Concentrations of the gases produced by fission trapped in the Gabonian ore fields allow us to actually know the time intervals of the reaction cycle from 1.7 billion years ago (which, what the fuck, we are amazing sometimes) and it's BONKERS.

30 minutes of mega-Chernobyl-style criticality that boiled away the Super Helpful lightly-oxygenated groundwater, then, once it was gone, without a moderator to slow the excited neutrons down (don't worry too much about it but there's a weird counter-intuitive thing where water cooling and slowing these neutrons is what makes the chain reaction stable enough to keep going, without it, the critical reaction itself slows down even though the neutrons are moving faster I DON'T REALLY GET IT EITHER) the chain reaction went through 2.5 hours of cooldown until the water could seep back in & the whole thing started all over again.

FOR HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS.

So to recap, 1.7 billion years ago, when life was basically just Spicy Algae, there was an open, bleeding, unfathomably, incandescently hot wound, spreading for miles around curve-in bit on the west coast of Africa that ooze-ploded underground every three hours for several hundred thousand years, hurking out radiation, intense heat, & all kinds of xenon, iodine, caesium, & barium into the air, groundwater, soil, nearby sea, & very, very early photosynthetic organisms.

All this happened about 3km below the surface, which would seem safe enough shielding, except…that particular basin was once home to a shit-ton of geysers, unstable volcanoes, and still-antsy plate tectonics moving geography all around. Any one of these could have churned radioactive material to the surface, not to mention the possibility that the primeval geography was still very much in flux. Portions of the reactor may have breached the surface all on their own during portions of these hundreds of thousands of years of earth, sea, and everything else figuring out what they wanted to be when they grew up.

Now, I'm not remotely a scientist, but on reading about all this I immediately wondered if the Oklo reactors, and others, if they occurred elsewhere & we just haven't found them yet, alongside ultraviolet radiation, could be a pretty significant factor in Spicy Algae mutating into Spicier Bubbles & Piquant Fungi, and so on all the way up to us. Radioactivity doesn’t behave like it does in comic books, but it does create mutations when it doesn’t kill the thing whose DNA its shuffling like a shitty Reno card dealer whose favorite relaxation technique is meth. Most of those mutations won’t be useful or survivable, but some will, and will be passed on to the next generation, and the next, if they give anybody a leg up in the local environment.

See, 1.7 billion is a very neat number in terms of Earth's timeline: the evolutionary party started popping off not long after that. It would explain why so much of everything came from Africa and its extreme biodiversity despite lots of other fertile and temperate zones all over the place. It might imply reasons why the next earliest stage of life was indeed primitive fungi, mushrooms being things that spring up often in areas of high radioactivity because many can consume or otherwise process it.

A Primeval Splash Park of radioactive slag interacting with a few Floaty Cell Bois for hundreds of thousands of years, longer than all of what we would even recognize as human civilization has been around, slinging wrecking balls of recombinatory chaos into everything around it. Maybe all of us came from this Devil's Threeway of seawater, light, and magic rocks, slouching toward sentience, their hour come, well, maybe, someday, if we're lucky.

Maybe our mother is a stone in Africa. Maybe that's our home.

So I Googled it, & that was in fact the very next hypothesis made by actual smart scientists. QA techs may well have discovered the origin of life. This is a very real theory about the origin of the vast biodiversity of our Mutation-Happy Planet. Can we prove it? Not really. Are hypotheses that feel right and pretty and neat around the edges often wrong? Boy howdy.

And yet. Reading about all this felt almost religious to me. Which is the root of much misinformation, but we take what feelings of connection and purpose we can these days. Because not only all this *gestures wildly at the above*, but the glorious poisonous underground psychotic finger-painting that was the Oklo reactor was only possible because natural uranium deposits of uranium had much higher concentrations of U235 1.7 billion years ago than they ever would again. This could never happen now, not the natural fission of uranium or the groundwater reaction. Nor could it happen before it did, and very soon (on a planetary scale) afterward, it couldn't happen ever again. There was a tiny little window in which the deposits had enough U235 and the water was oxygenated just enough. Sure, a coincidence. Sure, a dumb-luck geological pimple-pop that may occur so rarely in the universe that life's apparent sparseness amongst trillions of star systems makes nothing but sense.

If God is a word you’re comfortable with, perhaps a way of thinking of such a force lies in the confluence of light, water, and stone, touched by the finger of time at just the perfect moment, then never again.

Maybe Plato was right, and those gods did split us all apart at the beginning of the world. Over and over again.

So whenever you feel like everything is terrible because mostly everything is terrible, remember that we are very likely just a runaway nuclear reaction that found a way to outlive its power source, get up out of the ground, walk around the place, screw everything up, make some really beautiful art, unscrew a couple of things, screw way more up even worse, have a lot of existential crises, leave the planet completely and venture out into the fucking stars, get bored of venturing out into the fucking stars, create sitcoms and pop music and Doric columns and fascism and religion and acid-wash jeans and musical theater and combustion engines and antibiotics and love and grief and hate and joy.

And also sometimes that ambulatory runaway nuclear meltdown became tigers or dragonflies or horseshoe crabs or bananas or the leather in a leather jacket or the hibiscus in an old lady's garden or a grey cat named Mystery limping up a strange human’s porch hoping for help, tomatoes in your salad or the General Sherman sequoia or your mother's piano or the olive in a martini or the pages of a book. It was dinosaurs for awhile. It was whales. It was Lucy, the little girl in C.S. Lewis's imagination or the skeleton in Ethiopia, and then it wasn't either anymore. The inferno even got fancy enough to figure out that it was a walking, talking, feeling, anxiety-riddled nuclear meltdown still-in-progress, and yet kept on going, on and on, out and out, more and more, maybe just trying to be, in aggregate, just a little better every cycle. On thirty minutes of real productive criticality every three hours. Every thirty minutes, another chance to escape a closed loop and make a new world.

And real talk, thirty minutes of actual productivity every three hours feels just about right these days.

So, honestly, it's okay to be a hot mess. It's what we came from. It's our birthright. It's our mother and father. It’s a miracle, if ever one has occurred. And it's beautiful, even as it's terrifying. It's us. An endlessly cycling fission event and all its horrifying, glorious byproducts, all confined in the bodies of trillions of organisms. We are all one. It's just that the thing that unites us is a catastrophic vivisection-by-flame of our every cell and deeper still, which really makes everything make so much more sense, when you think about it That crack in the Earth up there is a picture of Mom. Mom did her best. Sometimes your kids get away from you. Sometimes they don't call. The molten stone of the beginning of us is still inside, all the time, and it's just chemicals and minerals, it doesn't know or understand why your marriage didn't last or you lost that job or why dinner out is so stupid expensive now or who will win an election. It's just fire. It wants to burn. It wants to warm. It wants to move.

It wants to grow. It wants to breathe, and to live.

I think we've all done extraordinarily well for a bunch of broken, wet, rocks slowly cooling over eons in the middle of a void.

I think you've done amazing, sweetie.

And so did Mom.

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Hello, fellow Garbagetowners!

I’m working on a new pair of essays, slowed temporarily by having had very painful surgery on my hands, which do tend to be helpful when it comes to typing letters into machines in satisfactory order. But also slowed by the flurry of activity that goes along with publishing a new novel.

Yes! It’s true! I do not actually make my living yelling creative profanities at American politics and/or the internet at large! I’M NOT LIVING THAT $400K A MONTH PUTINBESTIE PLATINUM TIER MLM LIFE.

Nah, I’m a science fiction, fantasy, and horror novelist and short story writer. In fact, “Garbagetown” in “Welcome to Garbagetown” isn’t just a reference to how rubbish this world truly has become, but also a reference to my climate dystopian book The Past Is Red. I’ve been doing this thing for twenty years, and book #49 is coming out next Tuesday.

There she is, looking all shiny and new! Space Oddity is the sequel to Space Opera, the most elaborate result of an idle Twitter dare ever, and one which rather a lot of people turned out to be very fond of. Both together are possibly the most ridiculous things I’ve ever done—Eurovision in space, but also political commentary, and then also gonzo comedy on top of that. Look, it’s easier to show you. Here is how Space Oddity starts:

Wait! Don’t run away! Yes, if you follow me elsewhere (Mastodon, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook) you’ve probably already seen posts like this and BELIEVE YOU ME, I get that they’re annoying in just precisely the same way as PBS pledge-drive breaks, but it’s my job and I have to, so let’s get through this together and we’ll all move on to the bar.

So, ya know, anyway, ahem, you should definitely pre-order (or regular order if you’re reading this after 9/24) the ebook or hardback or amazing audiobook performance, because of how much I and my 1st grader and my animals enjoy eating and being inside when it rains. And honestly, if you like the way I write here, this book will definitely be your jam, baby.

If you’re reasonably local to Portland, Maine or NYC, I’ll be having a bookstore launch party this thursday, 9/27, at 7pm at my extraordinary local indie bookshop, Print: A Bookstore here in PWM (and anything of mine you order from them you can get signed for free before shipping), a Eurovision karaoke book party Friday night (9/28) at 8pm here where I live on Peaks Island at the American Legion (hush, it’s rad) though I don’t expect many islanders are Garbagetown readers, then reading at Brooklyn Books & Booze in…uh…Brooklyn, on 10/15. Come if you can!

And finally, as I mentioned before, I’ve set a casual sort of stretch goal here, in which I offered to commit to a regular posting schedule if we could get 500 paid subscribers (to which number I’ve included new Patreon patrons who told me they got there from here as well) and I’m thrilled to say we’re up to 401 all-inclusive as a result of that, so only 99 to go! Double digits! If you were waffling, now would be a great time to sign up. Paid subscribers here get access to a companion piece to every public essay, in which all my too-spicy-for-me-to-want-to-deal-with-sea-lions opinions wait to yell even louder.

That about wraps it up for admin business for the moment! New pair of essays next week! Swans everywhere! Let’s get back to cathartic swearing! If nothing else, we have all of us had a better week than at least one guy in North Carolina!

In conclusion, this is Fiona. She is a very beautiful and intelligent border collie. She has fetched herself a copy and would like treats. She thinks you should also have copies. Just saying.

Fiona is just saying, obviously. I would never. I am very quiet and unobtrusive. But border collies? FULL OF BEES AND INSISTENCE.

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I’m finally about to get CUT ON!

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Hello…um…Garbagetowners?

It is your friendly local yeller of things here.

We’ve been doing this for about a year and a half now, and as I mentioned before, it remains commented upon to me privately that I do not post enough of the essays you all come here for.

As I said in that post, this is about my fourth job (I write books! One is coming out in September!) and it doesn’t make me a huge amount of money, unlike many folk you’re certainly aware of who make a whole living here.

But as my post frequency or lack thereof keeps coming up, and I do deeply enjoy and value the community and commentariat we’ve grown here, and this is a really intense time politically, but…I’m a single parent with a small child and many animals to feed as well as, occasionally, myself, I thought I’d make a suggestion/offer:

If we can get up to 500 paid subscribers, of any type, I’ll commit to doing a pair (one public, one for too-spicy-for-prime-time hollering under the paywall) of WtG-brand long-form essays every month instead of…whenever I can while not going broke.

That’s a fair jump, but not impossible, and I know the economy is hard…but the economy is hard and I have to balance this against my paying work somehow. And you’ll get the fresh new essay from today plus all the other treehouse club posts from the last 19 months.

I have no idea if it’s possible to make that jump, but I guess we’ll see. I feel embarrassed even suggesting it, so that’s super fun for all of us!

I will also count any subscriptions of the same monthly/yearly amount to my Patreon if you message me to tell me that’s why you’re subscribing. I know many people have issues with Substack, and I’ve made it a policy to cross-post any paywalled essays here over there 24 hours later as long as someone actively asks to see it. (My Patreon is a much cozier place, dedicated to art as this place is to politics and cultural screaming. I like that separation, but one or the other is and should be fine.)

So there’s my offer for making WtG a fixture. Hopefully this place has value to you—if not, that’s fine too and we’ll keep on as we can and current events inspire.

Please register to vote and vote Harris in November!

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I’m incredibly happy to see people here, there, and everywhere embracing Kamala Harris and rallying to elect a woman of color to the Presidency. Not only that, but by and large resisting the tired old wadded-up wet pants middle-school knee-jerk ha ha what a stupid slut, am I right, fellow excellent gentlemen who definitely aren’t still mad their English teacher was a woman and/or a girl rejected them and taking that out on all of society because I can’t handle my big feelings attacks that this country just instinctively projectile vomits in the direction of any woman who commands even a bit of authority. Especially one using that authority to say something beyond tee hee I make granola shirts from scratch while worshipping my conspicuously absent husband and that’s more than enough identity for me so I DEMAND IT BE ENOUGH FOR YOU now give me money to hear more of me speaking about how women shouldn’t speak!

I’m also….pretty damn surprised. And extremely concerned it isn’t going to last. Because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the general vibe has gotten really fucking weird when it comes to gender over the last decade. Famous people and regular people and every sentient podcaster mic in between have spent years now happily spilling bilge that would make even the rankest 1950s misogynist blush, right out loud with their own government name attached, and without the courtesy of even so much as a flaccid Al Bundy punchline.

Has the general vibe when it comes to gender always been extremely weird and like unto an ourobouros cooking its own tail to serve to her husband in silent adoration? Of fucking course it has. In some ways we’re only just now speaking about how truly demented the treatment of half this species by the other half has been, for how long, and at what cost. But for a minute there, it wasn’t just completely socially acceptable to talk about women like cattle the way a whole bunch of ALLEGEDLY NORMAL people have gotten super comfy doing. And honestly, it’s been a couple of centuries since it was cool to just get out there and YELL ABOUT WOMBS ALL THE TIME WHAT IN THE MEDIEVAL HALLUCINOGENIC BOSCHIAN BUTTSCAPE OF HELL, YOU GUYS.

I’ve talked about how much I value my little cusp micro-generation before, the cultural transitions being born in 1979 has let me witness first-hand—and this is one of them. Because I remember when it changed. There was a part of my childhood when I distinctly remember the main question adults asked me was how many kids do you want when you grow up? And I remember when it changed to what do you want to BE when you grow up?

A terrifyingly large portion of the population wants to change it back. Maybe they always wanted to change it back. But for awhile, they were at least quiet about it. Now, punishing women for not having children is the stated position of a major party’s Vice Presidential candidate, and he’s not even close to alone, or even the worst peddler of egregiously garbage opinions on how tight to cinch the leash on women being treated as human at all.

And a world where some of the most popular podcasts, politicians, and media content regularly lays out how fundamentally worthless women are and intently discuss methodologies for abusing and exploiting them for the pleasure and profit of men without any real consequences, even social consequences…I have a hard time believing 100 days isn’t plenty of time for America to find a way to justify choosing full fascism over a woman in charge again.

The 2016 election is a huge part of how we got here. And while the relationship might not be obvious, the rise of TERFs and their absolutely unhinged hatred of transwomen is a very real by-product of the steep rise in acceptability a scorchingly radioactive brand misogyny has enjoyed since Hillary Clinton got up there, dared to breathe in the presence of power, and spooked the shit out of everyone who hadn’t already lost their ever-loving minds because a black man got elected twice.

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