Author: terribleminds (page 169 of 454)

Two years ago, I wrote ten things that I’d like to say to young writers, and I find that a lot of young writers — WEE TINY BABIES WITH HOPE GLINTING IN THEIR DEWDROP EYES — email me. They want to be writers but they don’t know if they can or if they should. And as I recently turned 40, that means I received from the doctor a booster shot of the Wisdom Vaccine, so right now I’m shedding wisdom like the flu virus and so you should all expect to get a little on you.

Vitamin C won’t help you.

Here are some more things I’d like to say to the YOUNGER WRITERS amongst you — though certainly a goodly portion of this might apply to those of any age and experience level.

Now please watch as I run circles in a meadow and yell wisdom at clouds.

You Can Do It

Writing is a hard gig, but it’s not like, botany? A lot of things in life are hard and require years of training and schooling. Writing isn’t that. Writing doesn’t require you know how the covalent bonds hold sentences together or the anatomical atomic rules of thematic narrative application. Writing obviously has rules, and you should know them. But those rules duck and feint, shift and change, and they’re just rules that someone made up. Writing is less an act of rigorous academic study and more a childhood act of riding your wagon down a steep hill and off a ramp and over a stream. Most times you’re going to fuck it up and break a limb, but at least you’ll have a good story to tell after. And once in a while you’ll get perfect air and score a gorgeous landing.

Point is, you can do it because others have done it. It isn’t an impossible thing. Especially at this stage, when you can separate career out of the equation. Right now, you can just concentrate simply on reiterating. Speaking of that —

Doing It Means Doing A Lot Of It

You write one story, you’re a writer. Hell, you write one page, you’re a writer.

You’re probably not a very good one, though.

Writing is this:

write write write write write write

write today

write tomorrow

stop writing for weeks

months, maybe — a year?

get back to writing, feels good, feels good

write a short story

write half a book

write ten halves of books, none of which match, all of which aren’t finished

write one book holy shit it’s finished

write bad stuff

write really bad stuff

course correct and write better stuff that’s still mostly bad but not like kill-your-momma bad

learn that oh shit you have to rewrite

rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and then you edit and you edit

feel bad because it just isn’t working and you repeat this cycle for one year, five years, ten years, and then, only then, do things start to click into place.

Admittedly, some of you are probably maestros of language and story the moment you begin — but even you, you precious moonstones, have to do the work lest your talent go fallow.

Enjoy Your Muddling Fuckery

Something I wish I would’ve realized earlier? You can enjoy the part where you don’t know what you’re doing. I think in a work-and-career-focused society, and one where choosing to write means becoming A PROPER PROFESSIONAL WRITER, you can early on lose the part where you have fun with what you’re doing. More to the point, it’s not that I don’t have fun now — but coming up as a newbie neophyte novitiate in the Ancient Order Of Ink-Fingered Penmonkeys (the AOOIFP, pronounced the AH-OOOOO-EE-FFFPPP), I was often frustrated and wanted my work to be MORE BETTER FASTER. And I forgot the part where I was doing this for kicks.

Moreover, you don’t only have the opportunity to enjoy what you’re doing, but you also have the chance to operate at a level where really, nobody is paying attention. You can do whatever you want. The page is your hallucinogenic wonderland. You own it. Nobody’s looking. It is an isolated bubble realm separate from all others, and in that, you have the freedom to take storytelling risks, to be super-weird, to experiment with language and character and motifs, to fuck around with the big questions that bother you, to mess with form, to explore straight up silly shit. This is a glorious time for fan-fiction. This is a wonderful time for breaking all the rules with nary a fuck left in the bottom of your gorgeously thatched fuckbasket. You do not have to care right now. You merely have to write.

So, do. And do so with great joy. Sing in the shower because nobody is listening. This is like a virtual simulation. You have minimal consequence and maximum freedom. As Beck once said: GET CRAZY WITH THE CHEESE WHIZ. … though I never really knew what that meant. Is cheese whiz a drug? Is he fucking the cheese whiz? It better not be hot whiz if he is, because ow, goddamn. Maybe he’s just slathering himself in Cheeze Whiz and running through a shopping mall. That could be fun. What were we talking about again?

Read Widely And Read Voraciously

The world is full of books. It is full of books good and bad. It contains books about dragons, birds, bees, sex, love, hate, government, parasites, parasols, alternate dimensions, alternate lifestyles, food, drugs, bugs, spaceships — I mean, really anything at all. It’s all out there, slathered into these glorious KNOWLEDGE SANDWICHES called books. Read fiction. Read non-fiction. Read things that the writer thinks is non-fiction but probably isn’t. Read things that are fiction but that speak to truth. Do not read in one genre. Do not read in only the genre you want to write. Paint with shotguns. Look beyond your comfort zones. Other readers can read for comfort.

You are not other readers. You want to be a writer.

And writing is very much about discomfort.

Read to enjoy. Read to get angry. Read to be challenged.

Read Lots Of Writing Advice, And Question It All, Then Question Yourself

This is the internet, and it contains mostly writers. I don’t say that glibly, I mean, a great deal of what exists on THESE HERE WEBS AND TWEETS has been fucking written down by people going tippy-tappy-typey with their keyboards. The internet is made of words. People — plus a few cats and robots — wrote those words down. Further, a great portion of the internet — at last count it was 22% — comprises writing advice. I should know, I’ve contributed at least one percent of it.

You need to read it. Not just what I say, but what Stephen King says, and Anne Lamott, and Delilah Dawson and Margaret Atwood and Neil Gaiman and — well, the list goes on and on. Any writer that exists has opinions on how to write. And they will probably write those opinions down, because, well, writers.

Read it all. Shove it greedily into your THOUGHT CAVE where it will be slowly digested by the shadow beings that dwell there. Consume. Absorb. And then —

Question every last bit of it. Writers have all these opinions and on writing and they don’t agree with one another. I frequently don’t even agree with myself on how to write. (Spoiler: most of it is bullshit. But bullshit still fertilizes.) My own advice is an impatient chameleon forever changing the color of its skin — and it’s not because I’m confused or seek to be confusing, it’s just, this isn’t math. This isn’t codified truth. This is drawing pictures in the dark. The day changes and so do the rules. Question what you read.

And then question your own questioning of it. The young are bullish with ego, which is good — you think you know everything, and you can seize that gallumphing confidence to get a lot of shit done. But at the same time, the wisdom of those who came before you is at least worth considering and not immediately dismissing out of hand. Question them. Then question yourself. Then question reality because none of this is real, and we’re all just holograms designed by a giant cat named Mister Tinkles who lives in the center of the moon.

Sorry, just seeing if you’re still paying attention.

Focus On Storytelling

How language works matters. Language is the lens through which we study and project story. You need to know how language works in order to be clear and concise and in order to sometimes go the other way — to fortify ambiguity and to fill the tale with oxygen and uncertainty.

But, but, but — language is just the mechanism. It is a middleman — a transformative middleman, but just the same, it’s the thing standing between THE READER’S BRAIN and THAT DELICIOUS STORY. We can’t eat story, we can’t drink it, we can’t insert it rectally in a story suppository (but one day the power will be mine). But story is why we’re here. It’s what we want. And so, story is what matters most. It is the reason we read and the reason we write. We don’t write just to hear language. We write to say something.

Focus now on what story is. Look at how story works. The stories you love unabashedly and without examination? Keep loving them, but start examining them. What moments excite you? What moments scare you? How, do you think, the storyteller articulates those emotions? How does one manipulate the audience so that they do not feel manipulated? Don’t just read stories. Listen to stories. Let your KOOKY OL’ GRANDPA JOE tell you about that time he fought the LIZARD PEOPLE on the RINGS OF KRANG. Listen to podcasts. Listen to drunk people tell stories. Listen to stand-up comedians. Don’t just passively sit. Actively take in what they’re saying and dissect it. Try to find the secret of the magic trick.

How are stories told? What makes them work? What makes them fail?

Find Your Process

Nobody writes the same way. It’s why writing advice is a dubious proposition to begin with — I can only tell you about how I do things, or how I’ve seen things done. I don’t know what you do. I’m not your Dad. NOT YET, BUT ONE DAY I WILL MARRY YOUR MOTHER AND THEN WE’LL SEE WHO HAS TO CLEAN UP HIS ROOM. … uhh, sorry, what I mean is, you gotta do you.

Thing is, how you do you isn’t set in stone. Further, it isn’t a known quantity. You’re not a computer with a program, you’re a human being with lots of human foibles and peccadilloes, some known, some not. Your process is mysterious to you. It is a giant neon question mark hanging over your head. I don’t know how you do things. And neither do you.

A lot of being a writer is becoming a writer: a journey never completed.

Go on that journey. A writing life is the archaeology of uncovering your own writing process. Some people write a fair amount every day. Some people write a little. Or write a lot only one day a week. I write in the mornings. You might write in the evenings. I like to write while sometimes bathed in the heinous heart-choking gas that comes out of my dog’s butt. You might like to write with a cat on your head. I write drinking coffee. You write while guzzling antifreeze because you’re secretly an Alien Person from Krang-Ring V. I outline. You don’t. It’s all good. But you gotta try a lot of things to find out how you write, what you sound like, who you are on the page.

Then Forget Your Process

Find your process, then promptly fucking forget it. Or, more to the point, become very flexible about it. My process is ever-evolving. It evolves with circumstance (I have a soon-to-be-five-year-old, I have a writing shed, I have dogs that demand attention). It evolves with life and age and experience. It evolves with every book — I write outlines for every book I write, and I don’t think I’ve written those outlines the same at any point. Just as every book demands its own way of being told (POV, tense, chapters/no chapters, one protag or many, etc), your own writing life demands many processes. Finish your shit, but be flexible in how you do that. Discipline is good, until discipline becomes a prison from which you can’t escape.

Have Adventures

We are what we write and we write what we are, and your life is the fuel that drives your creative engine. Use it. And you’re young, so that means to go out and have adventures. That can mean whatever it can mean — a hike can be an adventure. So can a party. Traveling for me is always an adventure. Also an adventure: waking up in a casket in the Sonoran desert, wearing only rattlesnakes as a thong and a mezcal hangover as a hat.

Go, fill your sails with the wind of life. Which sounds like an overly gassy metaphor, so instead let’s maybe go with: we don’t write only what we know, but we definitely can and should write what we know. It is an opportunity, not a prohibition, and part of that opportunity is going out and EXPERIENCING EXPERIENCES. Whenever anyone questions your judgment or scrutinizes your choices, just say: “It’s for a book.” Then leap into the chasm, cackling.

Hang In There, Goddamnit

A creative life is a bucking horse.  The best thing you can do is commit to hanging on. It throws most people off, and right now, it seems to you like everybody and their mother wants to do what you do. But time will see them fall. The horse will buck and kick them into the fencerow while you still cling to the beast’s froth-slick mane. In writing, stubbornness is a virtue. The first and most important thing is that: just staying with it. Most won’t. So you must.

* * *

Miriam Black Is Back (In Print)

Miriam Black knows how you’re going to die. This makes her daily life a living hell, especially when you can’t do anything about it, or stop trying to. She’s foreseen hundreds of car crashes, heart attacks, strokes, and suicides. She merely needs to touch you—skin to skin contact—and she knows how and when your final moments will occur. Miriam has given up trying to save people; that only makes their deaths happen. But then she hitches a ride with Louis Darling and shakes his hand, and she sees in thirty days that Louis will be murdered while he calls her name. Louis will die because he met her, and Miriam will be the next victim. No matter what she does she can’t save Louis. But if she wants to stay alive, she’ll have to try.

“Fast, ferocious, sharp as a switchblade and fucking fantastic.” — Lauren Beukes

Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

ICYMI, I manifested the true power of the Internet and wrote an “open letter” to the intrepid reality stars of Tiny House Hunters, and I have only fallen deeper down the rabbit hole on this show since. I just can’t quit this shit, especially now that I found past episodes on Netflix.

And I thought, hey, if you really wanted to get just tore up, if you wanted to lubricate your soul with flagons of liquor, then you should turn Tiny House Hunters into a drinking game.

(There’s already one for regular ol’ House Hunters, by the by.)

First up, though, you’re gonna need some dranks.

I recommend the Tiny House Iced Tea, which is:

– 1 oz white rum

– 1 oz dark rum

– 1 oz vodka

– 1 oz ginger beer

– 1 oz triple-sec

– 3 oz Coca-Cola

Then pour it all into a 1.5 oz shot glass.

Most of it won’t fit, so you’ll have to slurp the rest off the table and floor with a straw.

Then when you’re proper crunk, barf it up into a composting toilet, and let one of the three dogs you keep in your tiny house drink from the dung bucket in sloppy, claustrophobic misery.

Or, you know, you could just drink hella wine. You do you.

And now, onto the drinking game.

The Rules

When you witness any of these shenanigans on the show, take a drink.

– Whenever someone says, as if totally fucking shocked they’re in a tiny house, “It’s really small.” Variations include: “It’s cramped,” or ironically, “It’s really tiny?”

– Someone bonks their dumb head

– They say they wanna: “simplify,” “downsize,” “save the environment,” or “travel”

– When they end up parking their tiny house on the lawn of some incredulous family member

– “It’s a great starter home,” they say, as if not realizing it’s not so much a home as it is a car, and unlike a house, that motherfucker is going to sink in value like a brick in a lake soon as the tiny house trend-bubble goes ‘pop’

– There is a toilet inside the shower

– The toilet is a composting toilet

– Take two drinks if there’s just a fucking spooky old outhouse

– No sink in the bathroom

– “Where’s the closet?” (answer: this house is a closet)

– Someone wonders where all the appliances are, or asks for a specific appliance (“I need a full-size fridge, a washer and dryer, and a walk-in freezer to store my racks of bison meat.”)

– They see a dorm fridge and stare at it like it’s a cancerous sore

– They ask for something entirely unreasonable for a tiny house, as if this is an episode of MTV’s Cribs and not jerks taking a tour of a 150 square-foot lawnmower shed (“I need an office,” or, “Where is the four-car garage?” or “Where will I keep and train my two Bengal tigers?”)

– For every child, take one drink

– For every pet, take one drink

– If the children or pets look extra-horrified, like they’re imagining being forced to live in an airless and oppressive cubby-hole like a bunch of trapped miners, take an extra drink

– One of the tiny house hunters cannot get down the ladder leading to and from their spacious funerary box SORRY I MEAN “bedroom loft”

– When they figure out that they’re going to have to use that library ladder whenever they get up at night to pee, and that they’re probably just going to pee the bed or try to stunt-piss and aim for the sink — which is doable, because really, it’s right down there

– When someone realizes that the loft bed is basically a chest-crushing, sarcophagal sex-free frottage zone and as soon as you put anything beefier than a ratty blanket up there you’re going to break your nose on the ceiling and then smother to death

– “I was hoping for steps,” because sure, that’s reasonable, why not also wish for a talking pony

– When one of the tiny house hunters is a really tall or wide person and they look like a giant stomping through a child’s playhouse and yet, they still wanna live here I guess

– The real estate agent looks at the camera as if she’s Jim from The Office

– Curtains instead of doors

– Someone says, “There’s no privacy in here,” as if they expect this birdhouse to have a quiet Zen garden or a personal sensory deprivation chamber

– Someone contorts themselves into an improbable and painful human knot trying to prove to everyone that sure, yeah, no, we can totally use this space as a living room or an office or whatever and no ha ha ha I don’t have a leg cramp right now

– HIPSTERS SPOTTED

– When one member of a couple looks like a hostage (“I don’t want to live here, Maureen” “OH WE’RE FUCKING LIVING IN THIS SHIPPING CRATE, BILL, YOU CAN BE SURE OF THAT”)

– Someone says the word “cottage”

– We all collectively realize the house is smaller than the pit Buffalo Bill used for his victims (“IT PUTS THE LOTION IN THE BASKET oh wait we don’t have room for lotions or baskets”)

– You realize you hate these people

– Finish the bottle when you wonder why you’re even watching this show

– Grab another because you just can’t quit AND LOOK AT YOUR CHOICES LOOK AT YOUR LIFE

What I like about macro photography is the ability not only to get close and see the microscopic rendered macroscopic, but also the ability to get so close that what you’re looking at becomes obscured, obfuscated by proximity, and what you get is instead something otherworldly. That is transformative and fascinating to me. And so, I thought, I’ll toss off a few shots at macros that look like they don’t belong on this planet.

BUT FIRST, some quickie-poo updates.

Today is the last day I’m running a sale on some of my e-books. The Gonzo Bundle, featuring eight of my writing books, remains $10 till the end of today. And both Blue Blazes and Hellsblood Bride are both $2.99.

Also, if you haven’t picked up Hyperion #2, well, dangit, it’s out. It features disgusting worms! And an adorable dog! And sinister body horror! And fun banter! And also the page of which I am the most proudest as a writer in comics yet, and really that’s only because Nik Virella did it so awesomely. Nik has done such an epic job on that book. Much love.

I feel like I haven’t mentioned here that Star Wars: Life Debt — the second book in the Aftermath trilogy — has gotten the special excerpt treatment at Entertainment Weekly. For bonus fun, read the comments! (Spoiler warning: don’t read the comments. It’s like looking into the sewer. Nearly all internet comments sections are perfectly represented in this single image.) Anyway! The excerpt has a SPECIAL GUEST, so go clicky clicky.

What else? I’m doing a Star Warsy-themed event in Cherry Hill, NJ on MAY THE 4th (get it?), and it’s a ticketed event, so peep it now while SEXY TIMES WITH ME ARE STILL AVAILABLE wait no not that kind of sexytimes ha ha ha what. But there are VIP tickets, so, you know, wink wink. You get to spend SPECIAL TIME with YOURS TRULY for MAGIC SEXYT… uhh, I mean, a “private catered reception.” Elbow elbow. Saucy pout.

And I think that’s all she wrote.

Time to take a trip to another world.

It’s macro time.

Your task this week is woefully simple. Go to the comments, and deposit into these comments a title for a short story — not the story itself, and nothing in fact beyond the title.

Then, next week, I’ll pick a handful of the best, and we’ll use those as springboards for the next round of stories. Dig it? Good.

You.

Comments section.

A title.

GO.

Due by next Friday, April 29th, noon EST.

[EDIT: Only ONE title per person, please.]

Jon McGoran writes a cracking thriller — I love the ecological spin his first two books took, books with murder at their heart but that also deal with biotechnology or honeybees. Original voice with an original premise. He’s back with a new Doyle Carrick book, and he wanted to jump in and talk about a real juicy subject: BAD GUYS.

* * *

There is a piece of writing advice I often hear, that your bad guys shouldn’t be all bad. This makes good sense. Nobody is all anything, and depicting them as if they were makes for shallow and unbelievable characters. But there’s a related dictum that bad guys don’t think of themselves as bad guys — that in their minds and in their stories they are the stars, the protagonists, the good guys. To this I say: yes, yes, and …maybe not so much.

When writing any character, no matter how minor or major or good or evil, it’s important to keep in mind their point of view, their motivations and justifications. But make no mistake, some people are just assholes. Look at the news. Look at any comment section. Look at human history. There are plenty of villains out there who are pretty unabashedly villains.

There are some very interesting antagonists in fiction who are conflicted and misguided, doing terrible things for what they consider justifiable reasons. And I love them, the sick, twisted, confused bastards. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of jerks out there knowing full well that what they are doing is wrong. And that doesn’t mean they’re twirling their mustaches and cackling while rubbing their hands together and contemplating “evil” (that’s “ē-vĭl,” not “ē-vəl”). Most of them simply want something, and they are willing to let bad things happen to other people in order to get it. They know the collateral damage is wrong, they just don’t care. Or they don’t care enough.

I write a series of biotech thrillers in which some of the villains are people in control of big corporations. Much of the wrongdoing in the books is collateral damage these characters are willing to accept in order to achieve the goals of the company.

I, personally, am not an bad guy (I’m pretty sure). But there are parts of my brain that think like one. I take great delight in coming up with dastardly and ingenious schemes (I don’t have a mustache to twirl, but I’ve been known to wring my hands and cackle). Every now and then, though, I find myself thinking: “That’s pretty harsh. Would someone really do that?”

And after a moment of reflection, I am plunged into an emotional abyss as I realize that yes, of course they would. That kind of wrongdoing goes down every day. Think Enron, the mortgage crisis, the daily willful and tragic violations of workplace safety regulations that get people killed to save a few bucks, even Volkswagen, doing its best to carpool us all to the carbon tipping point.

A few years ago, a book called Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children detailed how the lead industry worked to hide the dangers of lead paint. For fifty years — from the 1920s to the 1970s — they pushed back against regulations and forestalled the banning of its products. One expert says that, among other consequences, the lead exposure from that delay led to a five-point drop in the American population’s average IQ — doubling the number of children considered “retarded” and reducing by one half those considered “gifted.” But the lead companies made tons of money.

Maybe the best example of the worst was in the 1970s and 1980s, when companies like Nestlé marketed infant formula in developing countries by sending sales reps dressed like nurses into the maternity wards. Breastfeeding was “old-fashioned,” they explained to the new mothers, and infant formula was the “modern way.” Never mind that breast milk was free and infant formula prohibitively expensive, or that many of these mothers didn’t have access to clean water to mix the formula. The “milk nurses” would even give the mothers free samples to last just long enough so the mothers would stop lactating and were no longer able to breastfeed. Countless babies dies of malnutrition and parasites from unsafe water, but sales skyrocketed. Brilliant! (Nestlé continued to provide villain-fodder a few years back when Chairman and former CEO Peter Brabeck defended privatizing water supplies with the assertion that humans do not have a right to water.)

People sometimes ask me why I write thrillers about big food and biotech corporations. Partly it’s because I think it’s fascinating and important. But I also think it’s scary. Part of what makes thrillers thrilling is tapping into legitimate fears of real threats. Corporate malfeasance is far from the scariest threat out there, not compared to the likes of ISIS and Boko Haram. But I’ve seen some bad stuff done in the name of shareholder dividends, and I’ve seen it directly impacting more people than any terrorist attacks.

The people responsible for these things might be kind to their friends, loving to their families, and generous to their charities — as with all people, they are complex and multifaceted beings. But when they make decisions that hurt thousands or millions of people, they know they’re doing evil. In their minds, in their stories, they might think of themselves as the stars or the protagonists, but they know they’re not the good guys. They’re the bad guys. They’ve chosen to be, and they’ve chosen to be okay with it. And lots of times, that’s the biggest part of what evil is.

* * *

Jon McGoran is the author of the ecological thrillers Drift and Deadout, from Tor/Forge Books, and their sequel, Dust Up, is out now.

Detective Doyle Carrick is awakened in the middle of the night by frantic banging on his front door, followed by gunfire. Ron Hartwell, a complete stranger, is dying on his doorstep.

A halfhearted investigation labels the murder a domestic dispute, with Miriam, Ron’s widow, the sole suspect. Doyle discovers the Hartwells both worked for a big biotech company and suspects something else is going on, but it’s not his case. Then Miriam tracks him down and tells him her story.

Miriam and Ron had been working in Haiti and visiting her friend Regi Baudet, the deputy health minister, when they stumbled upon a corporate cover-up of tainted food aid that sickened an entire village—and was one hundred percent fatal. They were coming to Doyle to blow the whistle. Before Miriam can say more, they are attacked by gunmen and she flees, then disappears.

Doyle tracks her to Haiti, a country on the brink of political chaos. Working with Miriam and Regi, he must untangle a web of deceit and unconscionable corporate greed in order to stop an epidemic of even greater evil before it is released onto an unsuspecting world.

Jon McGoran: Website

Dust Up: Indiebound | Amazon

 

At the end of this week, I cross the threshold from cool hip dude in his 30s to decrepit antediluvian in his 40s, and to prepare I have already begun strongly investigating the fiber content of the foods I put into my body because if there’s one thing I know about being in my 40s, it’s that healthy pooping is king. I have also picked out a casket and decided which socks I will wear up over my knocking, withered knees. Soon I will begin properly grousing about those kids today, with their hoverboards, their mohawks, and their lazy good-for-nothing ways.

Okay, it’s not that bad.

But hitting 40 is narrowing my eyes a little more than when I hit my 30s. My 30s were fucking great and I kinda knew they would be. People overestimate how great your 20s are (also, how great high school is, because high school is basically The Hunger Games with yearbooks). Your 20s are spent bewildered and poor and navigating a world that everyone forgot to explain. But your 30s? OH SHIT. That is the decade when you — or, at least me — start figuring shit out. You get who you are. You stop caring about who you aren’t. You focus more on what matters and less on what doesn’t. I loved that decade. I will pine for its loss with great, blubbering dirges.

*blubbers*

*dirges*

But 40, oof. *whistles*

See, given the history of the men in my family, it is not likely I’ll live to 80, which means 40 is beyond the halfway mark — I’ve already crested the top of the hill and from here it is an uncontrollable skateboard ride down the aforementioned hill, and by the way, at the bottom of the hill is the giant mouth monster called YOU GONNA DIEZILLA and it has teeth like gravestones and a zombie’s hunger. That kaiju motherfucker’s gonna eat me, and being 40 confirms I’m closer to that point than I am farther from it.

At the same time, I feel pretty good? I’m healthier now than I was when I turned 30, and I’ve got my shit way, way, way more together now than I did then.

It’s happening whether I like it or not — I mean, unless I get eaten by a bear before then.

Fingers crossed for “no bear.”

So, for my birthday, I decided to come up with forty lessons (GET IT BECAUSE I AM TURNING 40 THIS IS CALLED “NUMERICAL PARITY”) of things that I learned over the years, and I’m passing them along to you under the implicit assumption that nothing I say is true and this is all bullshit and you should take all of it with not just a grain of salt or a salt lick but rather, a salt mine‘s worth of dubious shenanigans. None of this will be particularly enlightening, and a lot of it will be privileged horse-waffle, but what else is this blog for if not be pontificating and bloviating, breathily huffing my supposed truths all over you like a gassy dog?

NOW HOLD STILL AND RECEIVE MY OLD MAN WISDOM

[edit: warning, this post got fucking long and you’re just gonna have to deal with that because WHEN I WAS YOUR AGE WE USED TO READ LONG BLOG POSTS AND NOW YOU KIDS TODAY ONLY LIKE THE TWEETERS AND THE TINDERS AND THE INSTAFIZZLES.]

1. You Know Less Than You Know

Youth is about certainty. You pick a direction and run screaming toward it. As you get older, it’s good to realize you know less than you know. I constantly face situations where I have no answers. I don’t know the lead singer of that band. I don’t know what to do about a crisis. I am unaware how to answer complicated moral conundrums. I mean, I still make up answers and as a result? I’m wrong a lot. A whole lot. And sometimes I’ll find myself with that young, fiery certainty in my belly and then I’ll say the thing I’m thinking, PRETTY SURE AL BUNDY WAS THE SERIAL KILLER, and my wife will be like, no, you froth-mouthed cretin that is incorrect just like the last six things you were sure about. I’m coming more to terms with the fact that I know a lot less than I know, and I have more questions than answers, and not only is this okay, but it is in fact ideal. Because it’s a very good way to learn new things. Gazing upon the world with questions instead of answers is like looking through many windows instead of one closed door.

2. Nobody Really Knows Anything, Actually

It’s not just you. Nobody really knows a hot sack of poop about a hot sack of poop.

3. People Are Wrong A Lot, And They’re Wrong With Epic Confidence

I was at a preschooler birthday party and the parents at this thing were white and affluent and educated and one of these white, affluent, educated people said that, “AT LEAST 80% OF CALAMARI IN RESTAURANTS IS PIG RECTUM,” and she said this with great certainty and everyone nodded and blanched and agreed. It’s not true, of course. It’s nonsense. It’s horseshit of an epic magnitude. But it’s not this person’s fault, because that thing she said is not a lie, in that she’s not making it up: it’s a thing some people believe. And it’s vital to realize that people stumble about all the time just being wrong about shit. And they don’t know they’re wrong. They were told something or their minds invented a thing and now they consider it truth. And then they wander around and their jaws work and wrong information tumbles out of their faces onto other people’s faces. On a whole, people are probably more wrong about stuff than they are right. You too. Me three. And the media is wrong a lot, too, because in a way it is the media’s job to be wrong — they have to make money via advertising and that means putting information out there that grabs your attention despite the validity of it. Eggs are bad until they’re good until they’re bad until they’re the best until they’ll kill you. (Seriously though, eat eggs. Eggs are delicious. And cholesterol is probably nonsense anyway.) We’re all wrong, all the time, and it’s why Snopes exists. In fact, if I had to offer only one piece of advice to the world, it would be the word SNOPES written on a business card and slid silently across the table.

4. Most Stuff Is Just Stuff People Made Up

We have lots of ideas about things and ideas are just things people made up. We made up genres, we made up the three-act structure, we made up morality and religion and credit cards and scientific taxonomies and the concept of email and fashion trends and on and on. We just made a lot of it up. Out of nothing, probably. Some guy walking around somewhere suddenly decides how poems are supposed to work and there it is, at least until someone else challenges that idea with her own idea of poetry. Someone else says THOU SHALT NOT KILL and then advocates the death penalty because obviously they didn’t mean that guy. It’s not to say everything is subjective, or that everything is bullshit, but it is occasionally clarifying and humbling to realize that a lot of the stuff we believe, someone just invented. Possibly as a joke, or on a dare, or while on the toilet.

5. Doubt Is A Powerful Skill

Doubt things. Skepticism is useful. Someone tells you a thing — like, say, calamari is actually just a bunch of chewy buttholes — it’s worth stopping, squinting your eyes and asking, “Hm, really?” Scratch the paint off, see what’s underneath. Sometimes it’s good to follow that all the way down, too. Implicit in the fear of SQUID = PIG SHITTERS is that somehow, it is crass or bad to eat hog poopers, but really, if you eat sausage, you probably already eat hog poopers. By the way, I bet this isn’t how you thought this list was going to go, did you? I do feel like it’s been a little heavy on the “pig butthole,” but this is where we are and we’re all going to have to deal with it. What I’m trying to say, it’s good that when information is poured into your eye- and ear-holes you don’t just immediately take that information and slot it into the I BELIEVE THIS WITHOUT RESERVATION cubbyhole. You should instead put it in the bin marked LOOK INTO THIS MORE. Doubt is healthy, as long as you’re not a dick about it.

6. Logic And Empathy Are A Vital Tagteam

Logic and Empathy are like two power rings that, when pressed together, make you a better human. Have both. Don’t have just one. People who claim to be super-logical are usually just super-jerkoffs. And cleaving only to empathy means someone is probably going to take advantage of you. Do each of them. Make logic and empathy have sex, and be the progeny they birth into the world. BOOM. There’s a motto for you. Get that on a t-shirt and let’s make some MONEY.

7. The Truth Is Often In The Middle

Not always, but often, the truth of the thing is somewhere between the two sides angrily urinating on each other. (Which means that yes, the truth is often urinated upon.) We’re very good at polarizing topics and making everything hyper-binary, but often, the truth is roving between the two perspectives like a drunk ping-ponging between two of his favorite bars. It’s not to say we shouldn’t have strong beliefs or principles. And some things — like human rights — are non-fucking-negotiable. But a lot of other stuff isn’t about right or wrong. People like feeling right because it makes them feel righteous, but so many of our big topics and moral challenges are the kinds of things philosophers have gnashed their teeth bloody over for centuries. We want things to be easy and to have simple answers, as if all things are like the moral decisions you face in video games. LOOK, HERE IS A BABY. YOU CAN FEED THE BABY SOME PUREED PEAS OR YOU CAN FEED THE BABY TO A CROCODILE WHO IS ALSO A NEO-NAZI CROCODILE. We want to feel like most of our challenges and decisions are all about righteous rightness and that the other side is over there feeding infants to racist water lizards, but things are rarely that extreme, y’know?

8. Everything In Moderation, Except Meth And Hatred

You are you and I am me and I can’t do the ascetic lifestyle denial thing. I have to have a life with ice cream in it. Or gin. I also need to exercise and — what’s the phrase you hear? “Eat right.” Or “live right.” The problem with those phrases is, as noted above, the truth is in the middle and most things are just things people made up. Plus, we learn the things we hold true about living right are right today and wrong tomorrow — diet is better than exercise until exercise is better than diet, and social media is bad NO WAIT it’s good now. And then we get judgey about it because we think we know how to live right, which of course means other people live wrong, and then we’re just a few bad decisions from burning people at stakes again. I dunno. Point is, you can’t live life doing ALL ONE THING ALL THE TIME. You can exercise to death. You can eat ice cream until you die. My advice is, don’t push the pedal down and accelerate in a single direction. Do a little bit of everything. Hedge your bets. Find the balance. The sages of Greece had it right. Have fun, but not all the fun. Live right, but not so right you forget to live. Also don’t do meth.

9. Learn To Cook And Buy Good (But Not Great) Cookware

This is a hard switching of gears, maybe, but we kinda talked about food, so here we are. Don’t just consume. Learn to cook. It’ll help you manage your eating if you know what goes into food. And buy good cookware. Not shitty cookware, not great cookware, but solid, middle-of-the-road, dependable stuff. Don’t buy cookware sets, either — just pick and choose the CULINARY WEAPONS you will need. A good Chef’s knife, a good skillet, that sort of thing.

10. The Best Thing To Buy Is Rarely The Cheapest Or The Most Expensive

YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR is sorta true and also sorta not. Usually the cheapest thing is the shittiest thing. Whatever it is, it’s probably full of lead paint and rat hairs. (Or pig buttholes.) But the most expensive thing is often too expensive and not justifiably so. In a lot of things there’s THE CHEAP SHIT, and then you can only go so far with quality before what you end up paying for is a brand name or a trend or some snazzy color. Let’s say you want like, an apple. You go and the shittiest apple is an apple you can probably buy in bulk in a garbage bag. It’s the apple they feed to old, dying goats. You can eat it, sure, but it’ll taste like sadness and goat mortality. But if you go to the store and say, BRING ME THE FINEST APPLE HERE, THE APPLE OF RICH MEN, THE LUXE APPLE OF THOSE WITH FOIE GRAS IN THEIR BLOOD, they’ll have to invent an apple to give you because apples only get so good. You’ll end up with an apple where the tree is massaged by monks, with the skin of each apple misted with gold and complimented by professional fruit-talkers. Pappy Van Winkle is a very expensive bottle of bourbon, and I’m sure it’s divine, but I also know that most mid-range bourbons are amazing. Wines, too. Hell, you can probably cook a steak as good as you get at most restaurants (excepting quality steakhouses) and pay considerably less and have way more control. Try not to pay the least. Try not to pay the most. Did I mention the truth is usually in the middle? Here, too, as it turns out.

11. Eat Your Vegetables, You Squawking Manbaby

I know grown men who won’t eat their vegetables. And here you’re like HASHTAG NOT ALL MEN AND ALSO WOMEN and yeah okay whatever, except I’ve never known a woman not to eat her veggies, but I know way too many dudes who refuse to eat their veggies. So. Grow the fuck up and eat your fucking vegetables. Vegetables are super good for you. Stop being man-babies. Your masculinity is not so fragile that you have to eat hamburgers all the time but not, say, asparagus, or broccoli, or butternut squash. Butternut squash is fucking amazing, by the way. Vegetables are nearly all amazing. Though artichokes are kind of bullshit. They’re like armadillos, those things. The juice is not worth the squeeze. (I don’t mean that literally — I am fairly confident artichoke juice does not exist and would be barfworthy if it did.) Whatever. Listen, if you’re not sure about vegetables, have them roasted. Roasted vegetables taste like fire and lightning and conflict, and they will make you feel manly because you punished them with heat. Now shut up, grow up, and eat your greens, manboy.

12. Pie Is Better Than Cake

Go ahead. Fight me. Actually, don’t fight me. You might like cake more, and good for you. BUT LET ME DEFEND MY CHOICE: pies can be savory or sweet, can be healthy or not, whereas cakes are often far less versatile a dessert. And so by their Swiss Army Knife-like nature, I consider pie to be dessert that would survive natural culinary selection. I mean, I still love fucking cake, though. Wait, I don’t mean that I actually fuck cake. Though that might be nice, too. Cake is moist and spongy. That American Pie kid maybe had it wrong. Maybe pie is for eating but cake is for fucking. I feel like we’re really off-track, suddenly. Something something pig sphincters.

13. Do Not Live Your Life Only For Your Retirement

My father lived life for two things: his children and his retirement. The first is nice, even though I was probably a shitbird and rarely made it worth actually living for me (sorry, dad). The second, well. He got a year or so into his retirement and then just fucking died. My advice is: plan for retirement, but live for today. You are guaranteed no days but the one you have right now.

14. Give The Proper Amount Of Fucks

So much of life’s more meaningless problems are mitigated by “give less of a fuck.” Not “give no fucks.” But also, don’t give all your fucks. Spread your fucks around. Know that many problems are less important than we feel or fear that they are. We’re bound up with social anxieties or weird feelings or fears and so much of that gets pushed aside by saying, OH WAIT THIS MATTERS LESS THAN I THOUGHT. It’s like calculus in high school. Calculus, for me, was worthless, and initially I of course wanted to do well and yet I wasn’t very good at it and I realized, I was giving too many fucks. Calculus didn’t matter. My life was not a life that was going to need calculus. My life merely needed not to fail at calculus. So, I needed to give some fucks — the minimum quantity of fucks! But if I gave all my fucks there, then I would have too few fucks to devote to the things that truly mattered, like hiding in my room and writing Ultima fan-fic.

15. On The Subject Of Fucking, Actually

LET’S TALK ABOUT SEX. BREAK OUT THE LUBE AND THE POMMEL HORSE AND THE CHIMP MASK AND THE UNICORN HORN DILDO. Hey, don’t run away! I don’t mention “pig butthole” at all in this one. Anyway, here’s my sex lesson at age 40. Sex is awesome and it’s more about giving than receiving. And it’s not about the orgasm, it’s about what you do to get to the orgasm. Something something blah blah blah, it’s the journey not the destination. It’s like life that way. Also, sex is better when you’re older because you actually know what you’re doing and what you actually want. And they do, too. Ideally. We have a lot of puritanical hang-ups about sex, and the sooner you can boot them to the curb, the happier your heart, genitals and brain will be.

16. You Got To Get Schwifty

Find the sex you like, but don’t be afraid to try new shit. I know, I know, nobody wants me to keep talking to them about sex, BUT HERE WE ARE AND YOU’RE DUCT-TAPED TO THE CHAIR. What I’m saying is, get freaky. Or try freaky. Sex is like food, you gotta try new things to find what you like. Eat everything on your plate. Pick from the back of the menu. Which is maybe a butt-stuff metaphor, I dunno? Whatever. Be a cake-fucker if you want, is the thing.

17. Masturbation Is Great

I had a more intelligent thing here initially, something about rejecting fundamentalism and eschewing polarities, but then I was like, man, masturbation is great, and I think people are still occasionally weird about it, and maybe if more people tickled their fiddly bits and worked their own sexual levers-and-flywheels, maybe we wouldn’t have so much fundamentalism and so many polarities because everyone would be like, no, no, it’s fine, I masturbated today, I’m in a pretty chill mood, let’s go eat some Chinese food and watch We Bare Bears.

18. Early On, Say Yes — Later, Say No

I have found this to be true in my writing career, and in many ways, I have found this to be true in life, too. Early on, buy the ticket and take the ride. When people say DO YOU WANT TO TRY THIS THING, you say yes, as long as it’s not heroin or a hate crime. You go on the adventure. You take the opportunity. You close your eyes and jump because you don’t know differently. But as time stacks and responsibilities mount — and even better as you figure out just who you are in this life — you start learning to say NO more, and you learn to take time for yourself and you learn to consider opportunities before just leaping pantsless into the chasm. (I’m still sans pants, because pants are a tool of the oppressor, but I just do less chasm-leaping in this manner.)

19. If You Want To Do It, You Have To Do It

There comes a point where it’s just YOU and THE THING YOU WANT TO DO. For me it was writing, but it can be anything that scares you, anything that’s difficult, anything that’s important. Career or marriage or some adventure you want to have or some skill you want to learn. We want our support system, and it’s vital to have a support system, but they can only crowdsurf us to the stage — we still have to climb up on it, grab the mic and scream ARE YOU READY NEW YORK CITY and then start in on our set. It’s advice that is simple and obvious and yet, for me, very hard to conquer: if you want to do the thing, you have to do it. Nobody can do it for you. Or really, even with you. We’re still alone in our bodies and, well, you either kick down the door and go through, or you stand there wondering why you never left this one room.

20. The First Step Is Often The Hardest

The thing seems hard, but really, it’s the first step that sucks. I dunno why. Maybe I do know why? Maybe it’s because we imagine for ourselves the whole journey, and because we’re fools we imagine the string of failures and terrible consequences that unfold naturally from that first step, as if any movement we make will knock over dominoes and set off a Rube Goldberg machine whose end product is our humiliation. We envision the worst and it’s often easier and more romantic to talk about the thing we want to do than doing the thing we want to do. But that first step is the most important. It lubes the gears (and originally by the way I mistyped Rube Goldberg as LUBE Goldberg and it made me laugh for like, two minutes straight). Look at it this way: you want to clean up your desk or a room, it feels overwhelming. Part of you just wants to soak it all in gas and fling a match and walk away from YOUR ENTIRE LIFE rather than clean up the kitchen. FUCK THOSE DISHES, I’M CHANGING MY IDENTITY. But you clean one thing — a dish, a countertop, that squirrel who died in the oven — and it all gets easier. You’ve moved one stone and the scree starts to fall. It was like that for writing, with me. Writing the first book is the hardest. But you do one and the rest are ready to come. Writing the first page is the hardest, too — you stare at its snow-white oblivion, fearing how badly you’ll mess it up. But then you tromp into it and write your name in the snow with pee and oh well too late THE WORK HAS BEGUN.

21. Embrace The Success Of Failure

Failure is a success. School poisons the value of failure for us (in many of the same ways school poisons the joy of learning new shit). Failure is a no-no, school tells us. Don’t fail. Don’t do that. Only succeed. And that’s nuclear horseshit. Every failure is a rung in the ladder toward success. Failure is an indication that you’re doing it, that you’re trying to do it. Most people are spectators. They’re pretenders. They’d rather talk about the thing instead of doing the thing. Or worse, they’d rather just get online and spray their urine into some comment section somewhere. We mock failure, but my lesson to you is: embrace it. Learn from it. I have said it a hundred times and I will say it a thousand more: failure is an instruction manual written in scar tissue.

22. Know The Difference Between Failing And Quitting

Note: quitting is not the same thing as failure. Quitting is giving up. Failure is following through and missing the mark. Knowing the difference is vital. You learn less from quitting.

23. Also, Know When To Quit

But also, sometimes you need to fucking quit some shit. And I don’t mean this in a glib winky-winky YOU NEED TO QUIT BEING AN ASSHOLE way. I mean, there is value in recognizing when you’re heading in the wrong direction so you can turn around. You don’t need to follow through on everything. I have been at jobs where I knew in my gut something wasn’t right. Either I was stepping on a path that put me into a future I didn’t want, or it was a place where I was going to be exploited. Any time that happened, I just got my stuff, turned in my one-minute notice, and then hauled tail out the door. I’ve quit some writing projects, too, because the choir of my colonic flora sang me a jaunty tune about how I was very clearly writing something that wasn’t working and wasn’t ever going to work. If you quit a lot of things, that forms a pattern, and you should narrow your eyes at that. But sometimes? You need to just run screaming into the woods.

24. Work Hard, But Always In The Right Direction

My father always told me to work hard, work my ass off, dig this ditch, hammer this nail. It’s a good work ethic, but it missed the component that hard work for the sake of it is not that clarifying. Hard work in the right direction is smart work. Don’t work hard at stuff that won’t get you where you want to go. Life is too short to build bridges to nowhere.

25. Other People Are Not Mirrors

Don’t look to other people for how you should act. Or to compare your success. Or to see who you are. People aren’t mirrors. PEOPLE ARE INSECT MONSTERS IN SKIN SUITS AND YOU ARE ALL ALONE IN THIS WORLD EXCEPT FOR YOUR TALKING COFFEE CUP WHO UNDERSTANDS ALL YOUR PROBLEMS AND whoa hey sorry guys, had a little peyote there.

26. People Are Also Not Stepladders

Also, people aren’t there for you to step on to get somewhere else. A lot of career advice seems predicated on networking and glad-handing and all of it smacks of using human beings as ladders so you can climb up over them to greater heights. Be among people, not above them. Do not make friends in order to “get somewhere.” Make friends so that you can kill them and eat them if the shit goes down. … I mean, make friends because friends are cool, not because you intend to use them as footholds. Also, seriously, eat them. HANNIBAL4EVA

27. You Do Not Control Luck, But You Maximize It With Work

We want to believe that luck isn’t a thing, but it totally is. The existence of you is luck. The existence of all of humanity is luck. A confluence of atoms, a lucky governance of molecules, one paramecium gets drunk and has sexy-time with some amoeba. You are a person acting upon the universe, but luck is the universe acting upon you. You can’t create luck, but you can be ready for it. Seize on it. See opportunity in things. You can only find a four-leaf clover by walking in the grass. The more you work, the more you put yourself out there, the greater chance that luck will happen along and tuck a little fortune in your pocket.

28. Privilege Is A Thing

In my 30s, I didn’t even know privilege was a thing, and if you told me about it, I probably would’ve been a dick about it. Because sometimes it’s hard to see past your own limitations and experiences. Empathy is a necessary component for seeing this, I think, which is funny in a way because even empathy is ultimately selfish (I CAN ONLY UNDERSTAND YOU WHEN I PRETEND I AM YOU). Sometimes privilege is just looking outside yourself and your experiences and realizing that other people have it harder, and that can because of their gender or their sexuality or the color of their skin. And you see it more clearly, I think, when you do some MARTIAL ARTS EMPATHY REVERSAL shit — you look at your own problems and then realize how those problems would worsen if happening to someone more marginalized. SUCKS MAN NOT GETTING A JOB, you think, but then you realize how much harder it would be for someone disabled, or elderly, or of a different skin color or culture. Recognizing privilege is 101 stuff, and it doesn’t mean you’ll always get it right, but it feels like a vital human realization if we’re all gonna survive together.

29. On The Subject Of Shame

Shame feels right. It feels productive. I HAVE DONE A BAD THING, you think. You ate a whole pie. You didn’t exercise. You didn’t reach your Goal to do the Thing. Shame feels like a way of getting back on track — IF I FEEL BAD ENOUGH ABOUT THE THING I DID OR DID NOT DO, THEN I WILL RIGHT THIS SHIP AND GET TO WHERE I’M GOING. But it never seems to happen. We don’t learn through shame — and shaming others won’t teach them, either. Negative energy rarely yields positive outcome. Shame is a shovel. It digs a pit and as you go deeper, you feel like this is good, at least I’m heading in a direction, but the only direction you’re going in is down.

30. Be Kind, And Not Because It Will Repay You

Be good, not because it’ll get you anything, but because it’s what you’re supposed to do. Kindness is what will ensure that when the zombies come, the story that emerges is not The Walking Dead, but rather, “Hey, remember that time we all banded together and shot a bunch of zombies? What a weird year! Let’s go, I’ll buy you a smoothie.”

31. Fuck Perfection

You can’t have it. It doesn’t exist. Perfection is a paradox rubbing elbows with Zeno’s. I’m at a point where in most things I aim to be strongly good. I let others judge if it’s better than that. And nothing I do, ever, will be perfect. Except my abs. My abs are perfect because they bring all the girls to the yard OH MY GOD THESE AREN’T GIRLS THESE ARE SQUIRRELS SOMEONE GOT THE SONG WRONG THEY’RE BITING ME PLEASE SEND HELP

32. Profanity Is Cleansing For Your Soul

Your goddamn mileage may fucking vary, but I love this shit. I could go into some piffle about how profanity helps reduce pain and how smart people use profanity and how profanity is just a circus of words that some people have identified as forbidden, but instead I’ll say this — go outside where none can hear you, or walk into a room where your sound will be muffled, and at the top of your lungs just yell FUUUUUUUCK. Feels good, doesn’t it? Then add words to it. FUCKPOSSUM. PUDDINGFUCKER. Make whole new words up. FUCKOLOGY. SHITPLASM. Yell it. Yell it loud. Let it be the coarse carbon filter that removes impurities from your soul.

33. Let People Be Who They’re Gonna Be

As long as who they want to be isn’t total assholes, I think this world is plenty judgmental about who people are and who they should be. It’s as if the vision of others we possess in our head should be canon, and unconsciously we decide that they should fulfill that vision so we don’t have to deal with the discomfort of cognitive dissonance. Man, fuck that.  Let people be who they are. And that goes for yourself, too. Earlier I said to be kind? Well, be kind to yourself. You be you. I’ll be me. Let’s be us together in maximum identification mode and then we will be a bunch of awesome individuals who form a self-actualized VOLTRON. Because giant robots, that’s why.

34. Pop Culture Is Not A Religion

Only religion is a religion and frankly, that can be a big problem, too. Dogma and fundamentalism are things I not only distrust, but fear. Trust me, your favorite TV show or movie or comic book is not worth engaging in a holy war. We got bigger issues to deal with. Like climate change, like the post-antibiotic age, like how STAR WARS IS BETTER THAN STAR TREK YOU MOTHERFUCKERS *burns your house down, steals your pets, stabs your grandmother*

35. We Are All Very Poor At Risk Assessment

I became afraid of flying at one point after 9/11 and not because of terrorists but because of imagining this tiny fragile plane crashing into something. And turbulence in particular began to bother me and it gave me grave anxiety, and really, for nothing. The reality is, we’re terrible at risk assessment. I look at the imagined end. I behold the worst outcome and forget to think about the steps it would take to get there. I don’t think about the plane ride, I think about THE FIERY DEATH AS WE SLAM INTO A MOUNTAIN. Our hell-fucked risk assessment — and the fear it leads to — stops us from asking someone to dance, or going for a job, or trying to do something. We stop taking risks, even small ones, because we behold a false consequence. It’s a fear-based life and I think it stops us from actually living life.

36. Don’t Write Giant Lists On The Internet

I’m just saying, this thing is 5500 words long so far. I made a mistake, you guys. I don’t even know who’s still here. Anybody? Am I alone? Well, if I’m alone, then I’m taking these pants off. *takes off pants* *burns them in a barrel* *performs sinister NECROPANTSOMANCY using the smoldering denim vapors and trouser embers*

37. You Actually Have To Like, Do Stuff

You can’t just talk about it. Less talk-talk. More do-do. … wait, that came out wrong.

38. Run

Nobody believes me, but running clarified a lot of things for me. I’m not good at it and I do not “run” so much as I “fling my lumpy ragdoll body at top speed down the asphalt,” but it helped me feel better, helped me think more, and eventually I got that weird runner’s high people talk about. For you, it might be some other EXERCISE-SHAPED ACTIVITY. I tried an elliptical for years and it felt productive, but then I ran one time and I was like, ohh, so this is what exercise feels like. Running for me is painful. I hate it. It opens me up. It wears me down. I love it. Try it.

39. Eat Tacos

What? Shut up. “Eat tacos” is a perfectly good life lesson, you heretic. Tacos are delicious. Don’t sass me. They’re like the perfect food. The tortilla can be flour, corn, lettuce, old newspaper, new diaper. You can put anything in them: meat, veggies, fruit, ice cream, leftover Chinese food, murder gloves to get rid of evidence, whatever. Tacos are the most versatile food. They are a transformative shapeshifter. Eat tacos. Best life advice ever. I SAID DO NOT SASS ME.

40. Share Love

I am wont to say that life is short, but in a lot of ways, life is long. (Almost, in fact, as long as this post.) Life is long and boggy and weird, and why let it get anchored to the ocean floor with all the weight of what you hate? They say that complaining changes your brain chemistry, and I don’t know if that’s true, but I will say that both love and hate have a kind of momentum — you hate on things enough, you start to hate on everything. It feels good even as it feels bad. For me, it’s more interesting and more powerful to share what you love. Because those who take that thing and find love, too — you’ve just improved their lives. Hate is a short game of bandminton against an angry badger. But love is a long-con of light and unicorns and peyote. Or something. At this point, I should stop writing, but thanks for reading, and I love all of you for reading. And I love tacos. And profanity. And pie. And I even love pig buttholes.

SEE YOU KNEW WE WOULD GET BACK TO HOG SPHINCTERS

WOOOOOOO

HABBY BARFDAY TO ME

*drunkenly throws up in your lap, runs in the other direction, puts a Chuck-shaped hole in the drywall, keeps on running forever until he’s gone*

* * *

Chuck Wendig is an author who says things like, “Hey, like, buy my books and stuff because that’s how I won’t die.” Surely you don’t want him to die. OR DO YOU, YOU MONSTER.