So here’s something I don’t quite understand. We can’t talk about politics and religion, right? We’re told that, quite frequently. Can’t talk about them, it never ends well. People can’t discuss them rationally, better to not bring them up. Never talk about two things: politics and religion.

Well there’s a smart response! Should we maybe discuss them more, work out ways to discuss them and find a language that works across barriers so that we can discuss these two things, or should we just hide our heads in the sand and yell “Too hard! Too hard!” while we do? Somehow the “too hard” crowd is winning, and seemingly has won. I’m not exactly sure why.

I mean wouldn’t it make our planet, country, community better if we could openly, and honestly discuss these things without fear of, well, discussing them? And yet, there we go, off again not talking about them.

Better yet, we blame them for everything, don’t we? I end up feeling like this:

“Look, over there!”

“Where?”

“There! There!”

“At… you want me to look at those things we can’t discuss? That I can’t look at fully in the first place, because you insist I shouldn’t?”

“Yes! Yes, exactly, look there!”

“Uhm, all right…”
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So earlier today I took a nap. Just a short thing, about 30 minutes. I really wish this was all a joke and written to be funny. No, instead it’s true. Somehow I was on my way to San Francisco by way of the C train, when they train had problems. So I got off. And had my luggage stolen. Then I got on a different train, and some friends were with me, and they stopped at the store (where? what store? I don’t know) and got me new things. But those got taken, too.

So I end up in SF and go to where I was supposed to be, which was a school. Except I can’t afford the school and have no stuff and was supposed to be just staying the weekend, except now I’m afraid of trains so I don’t want to go back.

These two people I don’t know decide to take me to dinner, to make up for it all, after hearing this story, and try to convince me to stay in SF until Tuesday which I can’t do because I have to work. So we leave the restaurant which is when I go to the bathroom and pee into something called the Infinite Toilet. It had a little sign.

Anyway, I get out of the bathroom and am annoyed that I bought my cat, even though in the dream, a minute before I was saying I couldn’t stay too long because I had to get home to feed my cat. Yeah. Uhm, right so the cat was annoying me and being prickly. So I put her down for a second, so she could ride her motorcycle. Which is when she took off on her motorcycle and drove onto the highway and got killed by a bomb truck from Mario Kart.

That’s when I woke up. And was so profoundly sad because my cat drove her motorcycle and got blown up. It isn’t often I remember dreams this clearly hours later and yet, there you go. Fuck I wish I were making at least some of this up.

I am still oddly sad about the cat. She’s behind me on the back of my chair, sleeping – not on a motorcycle – for the record.

Too many of them, Atlas thought to himself, misunderstood his fate. Oh, it was an easy mistake to make, he figured, what with the number of pictures that had been drawn over the centuries. Not that they were wholly wrong, either, he admitted to himself.

Atlas took a deep breath, careful of the burden across his wide shoulders. He stood straighter, no longer kneeling. The fact was, he considered, holding the weight of the world was nothing new. Everyone did it, really. Heracles had his labors, and Odysseus his quest. No matter what the actuality of it, each person held up the weight of the world by themselves. No, his punishment was far from unique.

With a grin, he lifted his left foot carefully. Oh! so carefully. The point was not in bearing weight, he thought. Everything bears weight, its own, part of the sky, the wider universe even. The forces may be small when you considered each by itself but they did add up. A life always weighs plenty, he knew well. No, holding up raw weight was something every being was built for.

He settled his massive left foot back down. It was, he saw, an inch in front of the right one. Carefully, now, you old fool, he thought. Another breath, a pause and then the right foot lifted. Yes, well then, Atlas thought, where was, yes, of course. The secret, he smiled to himself, was in grace. The test, the punishment, was not to hold up the world. No, the punishment was to be given the weight of it all with no thought to where to go next. It was a punishment, he knew, Zeus had placed all mortals under.

But the secret, ah that came clear with time, he reflected. Grace under the weight. The ability to move forward despite it all. Too easy was to simply hold it aloft and not let it fall or shake. A statue could do that job. But to move, to carry it steadfast and true, without shaking off the people, bringing down the cities or jogging loose the sky itself, therein lay the true challenge.

Atlas’ right foot came down. He stared upon it, there against the ground. It was a full inch and a half in front of the left. Progress, Atlas cheered in silence, is all I can ever ask for. Why, at this rate I may master running before long. Well. As length goes to immortals, he admitted to himself. The search was not for endurance but for grace. The ability to move with the weight of the world and never drop a thing. It didn’t come cheap or easy or quickly, but Atlas thought as he wiggled the toes of his left foot and prepared to try another singular step, to build upon the last two and aim toward an eventual fourth and he knew, he knew as he knew the exacting mass of his burden, that through grace he would prevail.

Oh, he thought as his left foot began to raise once more, won’t they be surprised when I jog by Olympus. Laughing. Yes, I must master laughing as well. The shaking will be a problem, but nothing impossible. Nothing would be impossible again, he knew.

So I have this problem. It’s an addiction, really.

Buying books.

I can’t help it. If I get money in, I instantly go gaze longingly at Amazon and wistfully pining for volumes I haven’t read yet. It’s awesome. It’s my crack, my booze, my heroin. Books, books, books. I want all the books in the world and time to read them. Twice. Three times, even. I can’t help it.

So I had an idea! There must be other people with this problem. So I should start a new foundation: Books Anonymous. A healing place for book addicts like myself. BA could help members other out and slowly conquer this crippling addiction to buying new books.

And the money I make from starting BA? I bet I could totally buy a lot of books with it.

Schmutzie asked about fear in creativity the other day and instead of answering her I put it on the back burner to get to in a much longer form. Which is here. The truth of it is that everyone fears when they create, to some degree. Mostly it fades with time and experience. Not all of it, though, never all.

Still, all the fears about writing boil down to “Does this suck?” no matter how many different ways you find to slice the question and rephrase it.

Is this working?
Is it on track?
Am I saying what I want to say?
Will anyone like it?
Will anyone else see what I’m trying to do here?
Can I finish this?
Should I finish it?

They all boil down to Does this suck? and everything ends up wrapped up right there. I mean, what if it does suck, right? And you’re showing your ass to the world, humiliating yourself, turning out crap and people will laugh and think you suck and brush you off as not worth their time and all that time of your own that you wasted and and and and…

There are only two things you can do with that fear – give in to it or accept it and move on.

If you’re going to give into it you won’t ever get anything done. Taa-daa. End of story. If you write, and let that fear consume you, you will not finish things, and even if you do they won’t be up to par. Letting the fear win is never going to be the answer.

Courage isn’t living without fear. It’s living with fear and not letting it stop you. Yes, of course, what you’re working on may very well suck. The thing is there’s only one way to find out.

Not doing something because of your fear of it will never end up with you finding out if your fear was right. It will only manage to teach you that your fear is stronger.
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I’m not exactly sure how to get this out so it makes sense, not fully, so bear with me. I just know that I see so much negativity online. Too much. I have been told it is easier to post, and to find things to talk about, when they’re upsetting. There’s more of a drive to share those things with the world and vent. You can hope for positive messages to come back to you that way and get things off your chest and deal with them. I understand that.

But I look around and I see people saying this year sucks as bad as the last. And I have heard that every month of every year I’ve been reading things on the internet. If I went by the internet our entire lives have been nothing but shit.

That simply isn’t true.

It tires me out, reading so much constant negativity. Yes, it is easier to record the bad times, but when you look back at what you’ve written over the years – assuming you ever do – do you want to only have those bad times staring back at you?

Wouldn’t it make sense to record the good times, to go the extra mile, if it is harder to do so (I say I get that but honestly I don’t. I have far more fun writing up the good moments, even the tiny ones) and to offer up that positivity to people who are just posting negative things. If, I mean to say, when you post negative things, you feel better when you see the positive, couldn’t you help by preemptively also talking about the positive?

Imagine how much different the world would look if for every negative thing that was posted online we each also wrote up a positive thing. Kept a balance going. Because good things do happen and they happen a lot. They aren’t as big, often, but that’s because we’re all, and I mean all, me too, shaken by the bad. It hurts more. It makes a bigger dent and so it feels bigger. But the good stuff, even the tiny moments, have so much more impact if you simply shine a light on them.

I know I’ve had bad days turned around by my cat purring. Or by a stranger picking up a hat I drop. Or by any number of tiny things. Let’s record those moments. Destruction and negativity are easy. Creation and positivity are harder. Which makes them all the more crucial.

I’m not saying to gloss over the bad or not talk about it, not at all. I’m saying, maybe, put it in perspective and also talk about the brighter things as often as the darker. Even just looking for them and forcing yourself to, unironically and unpretentiously, talk about them can amplify them.

Where’s the downside? I don’t see it. You want life to be awesome, talk about the awesome moments more, see them, cherish them and discuss them. Don’t hide them and ignore them and then go on about how everything is shit. We’re all worth more than that.

Shine on, shine bright and let the blinding glare of it stun the bad times into submission.

I woke up with the remains of the strangest dream. In my dream my brain had been hacked by someone. To prove their power over my brain they let me know they had hacked my brain and then forced me to dream about the fact that they had hacked it and I knew that they knew, because they wanted me to.

Waking up with that in your head, well let’s just say I mighta been a little extra paranoid this morning, you know?

I’m not saying I grabbed random strangers and demanded to know if they were “in on the plot” or anything. I’m not saying I did that. Because you can’t prove it. So there.

Seriously though it was a truly odd dream. I’m not sure why they had hacked my brain, what they wanted to do with it or anything of that sort. It isn’t like I know the 13 herbs and spices, or how much wood a woodchuck could chuck or anything useful. But in my dream my brain was hacked. It was, as near as I can tell, hacked simply to make me freak out by telling me it had been.

And sure, I’m positive there’s some deeper meaning blahblahblah who cares? I’m more concerned my brain seems to be coming up with shitty 90s “cyberpunk edgy” movie scripts. I mean, seriously here folks. I expect better. That shit is low-fi.

There is a list in my head of all the things I want to write but never will. Some of them I cling to harder than others, of course, but if I had to be honest, and I am, here, I won’t. This list, this insane menagerie of ideas that will never be born fully, is longer than a list of things I have written.

Blog posts alone, man, so many I want to write but never will. For example, the other night I had an idea strong enough to mail myself a note so I wouldn’t forget it. 99% of the time when I do that I write the post fairly quickly. This time I have stared at that note for a few days and I want to write the post, and I start to write the post and then I stop.

It’s a great idea, I still think. An episode of Planet Earth, narrated by David Attenborough, about the strange and wild lands of the Hipster Douches. It would all be written in that precise, engaging Planet Earth voice, talking about the mysterious culture and habits of the Hipster Douche, and so on and so forth. I still like it. I’ll never write it. I know that. I don’t know why I won’t, something in it just doesn’t work quite right for my head, but I know that I won’t get to it.

There was the post where I was going to take the patterns of an old Norse saga and rewrite it as a quest for a white kid in the suburbs to find good hip-hop in the late 80s/early 90s. I don’t even remember why I really wanted to do that one but I kept trying it for about a week before I gave up and added it to the eternal list.

Numerous books and movies and comics that I mean to review and discuss and just never do until the passion to do so fades and I still want to talk about them but the desire is so flagged that I can’t be bothered.

One time I fully intended to write a nice long post all about tire swings. There were some tire swings in this park near where I grew up, big ol’ tires with heavy metal chains. And how you would ride them, and worry about your fingers, and the whole bit. Swings, man. I had a whole post about swings. I still want to write it. I know I never will.

There’s a four book series (fully plotted) I know I won’t ever write, comic ideas that won’t happen, so many short stories and more blog posts than you can shake a stick at. It’s amazing sometimes, to me, that I still carry this list in my head. I don’t need it. It’s vestigial. Just hanging out there like a rudimentary tail going “Look it me! I’m useless and just kinda poking out in the wind.”

I don’t write more things than I do. Some days that bothers me.

Odd thought. I’ve noticed that writers tend to never use their first names in their works. Book and comic authors really, I’m discounting American TV since writer’s rooms have enough people that I can’t see that being feasible and most people don’t know the names of the writers anyway.

[Side note here for Farscape, which had a character named D.K. and fans thought he was named for David Kemper. He wasn't the pilot script with D.K. in it was written long before Kemper was involved with the show]

I’m not talking about writers writing themselves into a story but just having a character with the same first name. It’s just not done, or at least not that I’ve noticed. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

Do you think this is because readers will assume that, even with only a first name in common, the writer is writing themselves into the story? I’m looking for feedback from both writers and readers on this. How would that make you feel, or would you even notice?

I’m just suddenly, randomly, fascinated by this. I don’t even know why I noticed it today, but I did. And so now I ask you guys.

Thoughts?

Who, or what, is Twee-Tor?

Twee-Tor:
• is the cute killer robot who kills 140 humans at a time. But only 140, max.
• hugs his victims to death and whispers ‘I love you’ as he does so.
• is the invention of Doctor Ignatius Nathanial Terrence Teuoobe. (Dr. I.N. Ter. Teuoobe to his friends)
• can fetch coffee
• has a large camera for a face, enabling him to track victims and record their demise.
• has an unnecessary lower abdominal spike. He uses it to tickle bears.
• loves to play with bears.
• is utterly ambivalent about dogs and giraffes, however.
• possesses eight separate silly string guns on his shoulders.
• likes it when humans think the guns are all fun and games.
• laughs to itself when humans die a horrible, silly string related death.
• then sighs, because it has no one to play with. No one to love.
• will then go off in search of a bear to tickle and play with.
• loves to play with bears.

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(You can download a background image version of Twee-Tor right over here!)

Twee-Tor is from the brains of APK and Atilla Adorjany