Category: The Ramble (page 157 of 462)

I am in that rare place as a writer where I don’t know what to say.

I don’t have words. I have the feeling of someone at a funeral or a wake. A creeping numbness is there, punctuated at times by fits of genuine sorrow, anxiety, and a mad-eyed not-actually-funny sense of overwhelming absurdity.

I feel torn in two.

I don’t know how this happened, and yet I know exactly how this happened.

I don’t know how we were so wrong about so much, and yet, I know damn well how.

I know that I’ll be more okay than most, and yet, I know that I really don’t feel okay.

I know that I want to have hope, but right now, it feels pretty hopeless.

It feels hopeless because we let a bully into our hallways. We made him our president. It feels like being a child in a family where the mother has married an abuser, and there’s not much you can do about it except develop your hiding spots and your coping strategies and your eventual exit. All the while praying you don’t get hit, and your mother doesn’t get hit, and that the bully gets his comeuppance somehow or you get out before it’s too late. It feels hopeless because he rode to the Oval Office on a tide of white nationalism and brash sexism — deport this group, grab that woman, build the wall, you can do what you want to them. It’s that last part that perhaps best earmarks his campaign promise above all else: he can do what he wants to them. To us. To you. And he will. Because that’s what a con man and an abuser does.

I also have hope because I know a lot of you out there. We chide our echo chambers, and certainly in this election above all others those echo chambers maybe lulled us into a sense of complacency — or they helped us chase and share bad information. But at the same time, I see a lot of scared people, and amazing people, and I see friends and I see strangers and I see the kind of commiseration that you see after a disaster. I see people willing to stand up and fight for those who are marginalized and under-served and under-heard — meaning, those who will be hurt the most by the results of this election. Those who will be abused in the streets or deported or groped or told they aren’t equal. Those who will have their rights contested and challenged openly, boldly, cruelly. I’m proud of those who stand against that, a firewall of humanity who actually give a shit about People Who Aren’t Them. That is a good echo.

I know that we are stronger together. Even as it feels like we’re falling apart.

And then, I pinball right back to hopelessness. Because even together, those bonds are being tested. We have each other, but it feels like we don’t really have America, not the America we thought we had. The American Experiment may not be at an end, but it’s certainly at a stage where it’s producing unreliable, unlikable results. Democracy has always been subject to its tremors, but this time especially it feels like it’s been hijacked by a con man — a literal cipher who may have ties to Russia, who may be owned by Foreign Entities, whose lies and whose scams were obvious and so garish that I’m still floored that such an overwhelming number of people took the bait and got the hook. We’re in a country where almost literally no one of any substance or intelligence recommended this guy. We had conservative newspapers go hard for Hillary. We’ve been warned in our fiction: cyberpunk and dystopia and apocalyptic tales. We’ve been warned in our history: the fall of Rome, the rise of fascism in the West. We were told time and time again, this is bad, this will crater the economy, this will set back climate change — and yet, here we are. Mostly because, I fear, straight white people just didn’t like seeing so many people who Weren’t Them.

This morning, my five-year-old woke up and he came downstairs and we told him the results of the election. We didn’t really talk much about the election here until he brought it up — it was a topic at school because, of course, children were afraid of Donald Trump. (Take note: when your presidential candidate makes kids afraid, that’s a red flag.) And when we told him Trump won, he got mad. He growled at us, then at the open air, and then ran upstairs and wanted to be alone for a while just to be upset. And he was upset. We pursued him at first but then let him have his time, and eventually he came downstairs and we told him we loved him and that everything would be okay because, and here we inadvertently cribbed Hillary’s own slogan, we were stronger together. He seemed to get that. He was okay after that. He drew zombies and we talked about swords.

There, I think, is maybe the lesson.

Grieve as you must. Growl as you will. Get mad, be sad, accept fear. It’s okay.

Then, find a way forward. Draw some zombies and talk about swords. Find the things that help you cope. Find the people that help you cope. And any who don’t, let them go.

I don’t honestly know where America stands as a country. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe the idea of us as a nation is less important as the idea of us as people, as people who support one another and defend one another from wherever we are. It was never our borders that make us good. (As a sidenote, I see some folks talking about moving overseas or to Canada, and I won’t fault you for that and we are idly considering it ourselves, because I fear our finances will get complex and potentially unlivable under the next four years. Don’t chide people who want to move or who need to move, if they can. And don’t chide people who want to stay. Let people handle this how they need to handle it, even if they’re just talking it out.)

I also know that art will be our salvation, if we let it. I’m unlikely to come back here at the blog for the remainder of the month because nothing I say will feel particularly substantial against what’s actually going on. (Sure, sure, I’ll offer you NaNoWriMo advice while Rome burns.)

But I will say this:

Art can be our way forward. Our writing, our vision, our ideas put out there, our heartsblood put to whatever medium we choose. If ever there is a good time to let art be subversive, it’s now. Get weird. Don’t be safe. Have a message. Bring it forward and into and through the work. Some of the best art, the best fiction, is stuff that has teeth, that’s willing to bite the hand that takes away its food and its shelter and its rights. This is a good time — once you’ve mourned the country you thought you lived in — to hunker down and make something. To resist through writing. To occupy your world with story, song, game, and art.

Your voice is now more vital than ever.

(And then, when the time is right, use that voice to vote once more. Because if we were reminded of something obvious last night, it’s that votes matter.)

We’ll be okay as long as we remember one another, wherever we are in the world. Help each other get through this. It’ll be okay even when it’s not, if we’re here together. It’ll be okay as long as we push back against the normalization of the septic social ideas that have infected us during this election cycle. And once again I feel torn, because I am very afraid, but I also know that fear cannot rule the day, that fear cannot be how we move forward. Fear is how we move backward. Best to you guys, and thanks for reading, wherever you are.

Anyway hey here is an owl who is very cross right now. We are all this owl.

(Note: style of title shamelessly cribbed from Sara Benincasa, who is the best. Go read her article, I’m Voting For The Democrat In November Because I Am Not A Human Tire Fire.)

This is not news to anybody, but I’m voting for Hillary Clinton.

And I hope you do, too.

I’m voting for her first because I’m not a CHUD. I am not an irradiated creature who lives in the sewer, and I don’t want to become one, so I’d rather not elect the sentient orange patch of anal leakage to the Most Powerful Office in the World, because, as many have noted, if the guy can’t be trusted with a Twitter account, he probably can’t be trusted with the nuclear codes. He’d be the first (and last) president to start a nuclear war over a dismissive tweet from a world leader. He’s a sexist, racist Narcissist with skin so thin it’s like the frost on the outside of an ice cream container — it melts under a puff of hot breath. Would he destroy the world? I dunno. He’d crater the economy, at least temporarily, and spin us back into a recession or depression. He’d also send a message to pretty much everyone but white, wealthy males that they should expect to be dismissed, or even punished, for who they are and what they believe. And the moment the media backs up that narrative, he’ll punish them, too. Because Trump wants everyone to pay for his mistakes. That’s his life: a cascade of failures, a series of debts, none of which he pays for. He always sticks someone else with the bill.

That’s Trump. We let him be our president now, one day he’ll emcee the first Hunger Games.

But Clinton — see, you’re thinking that a lot of us are voting for her because she’s Just Not Him, and certainly, that would be true for me no matter who the candidate was. If the Democrats had as a candidate a bowl of tapioca pudding, I would vote for that bowl of pudding because at least I know the pudding hasn’t insulted someone’s disability, or their weight, or their skin color, and I am damn sure that the pudding would not suddenly develop pseudopods with which to enter in the nuclear codes in order to bomb the New York Times at 3:30 in the morning because of a dream the pudding had where the NYT editor called that bowl of pudding “a short-tempered, small-dicked glop of gummy treacle.”

So, sure, I’d vote for the lesser of two evils, because that’s sometimes how elections are, and I’m a fucking adult who lives in the real world and knows that shit is sometimes hard.

But I’m also an adult who is legitimately excited about Hillary Motherfucking Clinton.

I’m excited about Hillary because she is wildly experienced — she has held a number of roles at various levels of the Operating System known as the United States Government. She is a champion of children, and disability, and healthcare. She is pro-science. She is an advocate for women’s and LGBT rights. She wants to address systemic racism and inequality.

I’m excited to elect our first woman president.

I’m excited about how excited she is to see some balloons.

I’m excited because of how well-vetted she’s been — in part by a GOP who has wanted to destroy her for decades, and yet every time she’s all bad-ass and walking away from it all in a white pantsuit, refusing to flinch as the whole building explodes behind her.

I’m excited to see the panoply of pantsuits.

I’m excited because she’s devoted a lot of her life to public work.

I’m excited because she seems snarky, and also like she’d fucking shank you behind the schoolyard wall if you messed with her or her country, and I want her on our side.

I’m excited because of the way she baited Trump during each and every debate, leading him around like she had a finger up each of his nostrils, turning him this way and that way into every damn trap she put down.

I’m excited because her advice to deal with Putin was, “Snub him.”

I’m excited for someone to carry on Obama’s legacy, which has been on the whole a positive one for the American public, and again and again we’ve seen the metrics for a healthy country not only stabilize, but move in the right direction.

I’m excited for someone whose message is about how we work together, not how we build walls both real and figurative in order to isolate, alienate, and eliminate one another.

I’m excited for common sense gun regulation, and for someone to tackle student debt and college costs, and for someone who wants to protect animals and who correctly notes that “the way our society treats animals is a reflection of our humanity.” (This is all at her website.)

I’m excited for her shimmy.

I’m just excited, godsdamnit.

Here, I’m sure someone’s all like, no but wait, she’s not perfect, which is true. She is a politician, and on the whole, politicians tend to have blood under their nails. They also tend to play politics with things, which means her response to issues that are important to us (like, say, DAPL or climate change) is sometimes far less assertive than we’d like — but, that’s the great thing about our world leaders. They, at least in theory, work for us. We can urge her to do more and do better. (Good luck getting Trump to think he works for us. In Hotel Trumpmerica, we work for him.)

This is a fundamental election.

Tomorrow we either make history —

Or, we repeat it.

I’m sure nothing I’ve said here has changed your mind. Maybe it’s reconfirmed your biases and strengthened the walls of your echo chamber, or it’s given you new (or resurrected) reason to dislike me and not read my books. I hope no matter how you vote, you go and vote (or have voted already if you live in one of those great states that allow early voting, as mine does not). Participate in your democracy. And hopefully you also vote to continue our democracy by voting for Hillary. See you at the polls, America.

This election season has been about the most stressful in recent memory. And it’s hard, because we have two of the most corrupt candidates in recent memory, too — we have one candidate who was lacking on her email security, and we have another candidate who is made of weaponized gonorrhea and who would walk back every privilege that you possess as an American just to get one delicious blowjob from a Russian dictator. I DON’T KNOW HOW YOU WOULD CHOOSE BETWEEN THOSE TWO OBVIOUSLY EQUAL AND EVIL CANDIDATES.

Anyway. Like I said: stressful.

So! To relax, to calm thy soul, to soothe thine genitals, I am giving to you a series of macro waterdrop shots, because I find macro waterdrop shots to be very serene and very lovely to stare at. The first four shots are new, the rest will be some older photos. Please, stare at the baubles of water. Breathe in. Breathe out. Let the serenity fill you.

Let us begin.

When the Earth becomes a maelstrom of storms and rising sea levels due to catastrophic climate change, some want to give up and call it a day for humanity. Yet there are also those heroic few who are determined to take action and do something about the impending apocalypse. These are the geo-engineers—men and women of creativity, knowledge and drive—who will do whatever it takes to save the planet. They will take on the challenge of bringing the planet back into balance. They will fiercely protect their work from the belligerent navies of two large nations— even if this means risking life and limb in a major sea battle. And with a new dawn of artificial intelligence on the horizon, these valiant few may make the difference between a future of human and A.I. enlightenment or a dark age of never-ending terror.

Prophecy Comes from the Mistakes

You don’t just learn, you learn that you’ve already learned a bunch of things you didn’t know you’d learned. And now that you set finger to key you find out what they are.

Which means that you have to trust yourself and plunge in. That’s what heroes do, and poets have to do the same if they want to keep up. In medias res, in the middle of things, as Aristotle said. There is no excuse for writer’s block

In the case of Apocalypse, I’d written two earlier SF epic poems, The New World and Genesis, so I had had plenty of chances to make mistakes. And the big mistake I made was in thinking that the mistakes my critics had pointed gleefully out in my earlier epics were really mistakes. In fact they were just what made them interesting. They made people argue about them and look at things from a different perspective and remember them and keep reading the book to find out what the trouble was.

Now I was writing poetry, and epic poetry at that, and science fiction epic poetry to boot. So I was naked on stage, the royal nonesuch, and a lot of fruit got thrown at me, some of it delicious, some rotten, and some, like the durian fruit, disgusting to smell but delightful to eat. I loved being called barbarous, sentimental, reactionary, camp, “troubling.” The New World prophesied the current political civil war in America; Genesis was used in NASA’s long-range futures planning for the settlement and terraforming of Mars. Prophets are a pain in the neck: that’s why they throw prophets in pits.

So for an encore I knew I had to make trouble. I had to figure out not just the conventional wisdom, but also the conventional revolution against the conventional wisdom, and piss them both off. It’s only in the uncanny valley between the two that the future lurks, and not only the future but the meaning, the spiritual goodies.

The Uncanny Valley

A target-rich environment, or to change the metaphor, a hornet’s nest. I’d already violated the poetry workshop values of economy and the 17 line crafted free verse lyric, by writing poems of thousands of lines in voices not my own; told stories in verse when everyone knows the prose novel is the accepted modern way; gone back to outdated forms of meter and rhyme; mingled the nasty cheap pulp populism of sci-fi with the refined elegance of modernist verse; used a lot of scientific and technological words and thus desecrated the vocabulary of Dasein and authenticity; refused to lay at capitalism’s door all the evils of life; and gloried in the thrill of battle in a form that was the property of very nice antiwar people.

But now in Apocalypse I learned a whole lot of new crimes. The uncanny valley in between the rhetoric of conventional environmentalism and that of climate change denial is geo-engineering. Global warming deniers hate the very suggestion that anthropogenic warming may be responsible; like evolution, the fake moon landings, and women’s rights, it’s a liberal plot against God, the free market, and America. Environmental activists hate the idea that cheap dirty technological fixes might actually work, and heal the planet, thus derailing their deeper agenda: making everybody into meek green moralists, diagnosing heroism, adventure, glory, discovery, invention, contestation and fun as symptoms of ADD, and drugging us so that we don’t fidget. If I could get both sides to get mad at the book, I would know I was on the right track.

Likewise, I could mess up poetic diction by putting the most well-worn idioms into exact snapping pentameters and make them mean something completely different. I could use all the bits of language—grammar, subordinate clauses, logical inference, abstract terms from other disciplines—that are routinely cut out of beginners’ poems by conscientious poetry workshop teachers—and make them dance in an entertainingly ghastly way. The uncanny valley between the heartfelt amateur verse that good people write about a dead friend and that la-de-da articulate croon you hear in NPR book reviews—but rendered in the unmistakable pentameter of Shakespeare, Milton and Pope. Even in Genesis I had cautiously kept a certain traditional nobility of tone; now I was about making the messy language of now, with all its technical jargon and bureaucratese and media catchphrases, into something so neat, so cool, that nobility might not be far off. Maybe cool is the new beauty.

All Fiction Is Theater

I also learned some technical stuff that most writers always knew. Actors know it even better: whenever anyone says anything in a good play, they are trying to do something, they have what theater people call an objective. I found that the conversations only worked if each character already has an idea of what his conversational partner wants, and even an idea of what their partner thinks he wants, and is bent on altering what the other person wants, for definite ends of his own. This can obviously be a destructive process; but it can also be a way in which humans build each other into better versions of themselves. We owe it to each other to take this work on, and to allow others to work on us likewise. It’s our gift to each other. In Apocalypse there’s a character who is supremely good at this, and s/he isn’t even human in a strict sense. You’d like to meet hir.

This theatricality also implies that you can’t just be funny and witty and ironical in places. You have to be so all the time, even in the most horrifying and tragic situations, or the story will simply die, the air goes out of it, the iridescent colors fade, and people stop reading or watching the stage. Every word has to have ‘tude.

Change the Contract Midstream

All art is about expectations and anticipations, even ones that in a strict sense don’t change over time, like painting, sculpture, and architecture (the eye and the foot do the action, and the artwork changes in response).

The experiencer of a work of art comes in with a sort of ticket, an implied contract with the artist. OK art fulfills the contract more or less ingeniously, and gets rewarded by the experiencers’ satisfaction as they check off another item on their “been there, done that” list. Another summer blockbuster movie or romance ended with the car chase to the airport.

But really good art does something else. It takes its guest to a place where the original contract is suddenly or gradually shown to be a big mistake or silly illusion, and the real discovery/reward/goal now begins to materialize, something one hadn’t dreamed of. And when that goal does appear, it miraculously does fulfill the original contract, almost inadvertently, as it answers a very much bigger question altogether. The Odyssey changes exactly half way through from the Arabian Nights to the Iliad, but even nastier and more splendid—and then we see that the Arabian Nights part was not a fairytale but the inside of the Iliad part. The Ten Bulls of Zen starts as an orthodox parable of how to meditate, and then goes haywire when we realize that the goal was not the goal, and that goal stuff is not the point. Beethoven’s Ninth turns from a work of art music into a gigantic hymn.

In Apocalypse the change happens in Books 6 and 7. But the new contract is really the heart of the old. The Great Flood that overwhelms us all is Time. And how do we hold that back?

When All Else Fails, Get Yourself a Conflicted Narrator

And let the story also be a deep study of the narrator’s own personality. This way all the implications of the story can seep their way out, and the reader’s skepticism will have its own lively voice in the argument. And also you’ve escaped from your own voice, the very thing creative writing teachers tell you that you have to discover. Unless you can escape it, you’ll be plagiarizing that voice the rest of your life.

And Number 6, which was not in the contract

Get yourself a genius editor, like Tony Daniel at Baen and John Lemon at Ilium, and a brilliant agent, like Sara Megibow. Then you might also get a sort of publishing first, in which, for instance, the same work of fiction appears as a gripping hard-SF war story, serialized and promoted as an ebook, and at the same time as a classical epic poem, beautifully presented in a fine press library-quality book.

* * *

Dr. Frederick Turner is an internationally known poet, lecturer, and scholar, and Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. He is philosophically interested in time, evolution, and self-organizing complex systems in game theory and economics. Shakespeare is his enduring literary obsession. Dr. Turner practices Shotokan karate, has two sons and lives in Dallas with his wife and dogs.

Frederick Turner: Website

Apocalypse: Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy

I co-designed Bluebeard’s Bride, a tabletop horror game, with two other women. The last two and a half years have been a tremendous amount of work, but the Kickstarter is now live [note: 17 days left on the clock — cdw] and I finally have some breathing room to look back on what we created.

The original Bluebeard fairy tale is one of the darkest and most twisted fairy tales out there, which is probably why it has endured for so long. It centers around an aristocrat with a proclivity for murdering his wives and keeping the bodies in a special room. Yet the fairy tale isn’t about how terrible Bluebeard is — it’s about how he sets his wives up to fail, and then punishes them when they do. And it’s still their fault.

In short, the tale is really about the dangers of a woman’s agency. At some point, it was likely meant to be an object lesson for women: beware, or this could be you! But women know that it’s already us. At its core, Bluebeard’s Bride is about examining what it means to be a woman in utterly untenable situations. The game takes the narrative away from the establishment and creates a space for a feminine understanding of what it means to exist in an often-terrifying world. It is, in a word, feminine horror.

Feminine Horror is About What’s Inside You (Sometimes Literally)

There are all kinds of sub-genres in horror. There’s torture porn, campy comedy horror, psychological thrillers, and whatever the hell Tokyo Gore Police is. But feminine horror is an extra kind of special. It’s psychological. It’s biological. It’s surreal. It’s utterly maddening in how it can make you feel like the world is twisting around you and defeating your sense of reality. You can’t escape it. It hems you in. It impregnates you with itself. It conquers you from inside and subverts you. The thing is, it’s not even alien. It creeps through the everyday and twines itself through the most mundane experiences.

The thing that I love most about feminine horror is that it’s about women, not about what is done to women. It shifts the locus of agency. It doesn’t mean that agency is great. In fact, we were very conscientious in the design of Bluebeard’s Bride to not give players too much agency. The idea is to occupy that agency and grapple with it—if you dare.

It’s Cathartic as Hell

Horror as a genre is a means of unpacking the black bag of things that we keep in the unconscious or semiconscious places in ourselves. It’s a way to drag those things into the light, or sometimes, to drag ourselves into the black spaces with them.

I’m honestly not sure why we do this. I just know that I like horror a lot. When we were designing Bluebeard’s Bride we didn’t pull any punches, and many times we’d discuss a certain design element and say to ourselves, “Are we really going to do this? It’s so terrible!” Then we would cackle madly, put our heads down and continue working on it. There was a vindication happening. We were creating a thing we could point to, a container that could hold our many lived experiences of being silenced, undermined, coerced, and cornered. We were making the undefined effable, giving voice to a bodiless thing, and it was a great, great feeling.

It Was Incredibly Easy to Make the Game Too Scary

Bluebeard’s Bride is a horror game with a capital “H.” It’s not for the faint of heart. It’s sensual. It’s viperous. It’s pervasively malevolent. The tempo shifts precariously between subtle menace and inescapable monstrosity. The game doesn’t throw scary things at you, but rather pulls them out of you. As it turns out, this is an incredibly effective way of getting to even the stoniest horror lovers.

We had to make the game dance a very fine line, and that dance took two years to choreograph. In early playtests, we kept running into a problem: by the last third of the game, players were often too freaked out. People loved the roleplay and horror, but it was too much, too inescapable, and without respite. It was a great lesson in understanding the particular challenge of working in the horror genre: we had to learn to balance the terror to evoke more than a single note, while ensuring it remains an enjoyable experience.

Feminine horror is awesome because it’s just so goddamn petrifying. There’s so much in that box, and what’s in there is so rich that we had to actively restrain it through design. Many writers and designers find themselves in a place where they’re thinking, “How do I make this scary?” We never had that problem.

It Opens Doors to Powerful Conversations

Tackling horror through metaphor and fairy tales feels natural to me. Not because it shies away from “real” horror, but precisely because fairy tales capture the true essence of horror so acutely, and metaphor speaks in a language that hits us directly in our center of being. We weren’t looking to create a conversation trigger. We just wanted Bluebeard’s Bride to be authentic. What we discovered was that people who played it were so pricked by the content that they started having conversations almost immediately, without any prompts from us. The game drives fascinating discussions about violence, oppression, society and its structures, why we like being scared—all kinds of really deep stuff. The game gives players a fluency of thought through metaphors which they often feel compelled to unpack. It’s been truly amazing to watch.

We Haven’t Even Scratched the Surface

Feminine horror as a genre is a grand tradition. Movies like Rosemary’s Baby and Crimson Peak, and books like Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, are iconic and celebrated parts of the genre. We were shocked when we took stock of what had been made in tabletop RPGs and realized that this kind of gothic feminine horror had never been done before. Not ever. While Bluebeard’s Bride is indeed pretty awesome, one game cannot represent and carry an entire genre. It’s just not possible with so many cool and different aspects to cover.

Bluebeard’s Bride’s current success on Kickstarter has proven that feminine horror has an audience hungry for more games in the genre. We hope that it will help open the field to even more amazing and diverse perspectives in RPGs that will tap this bountiful well of really, really scary stuff. Personally, I can’t wait to see what other people come up with!

Dear Deplorables,

(Meaning, You Folks Who Might Be Planning On Voting For Trump.)

I’m already betting you’ve checked out of this post. You either won’t click or, or you’ll share it to hate on it, or you’ll just downright disagree with it. And that’s your right. I’m a nobody to you (and really, a nobody overall). Just an uptight creative with a head full of ego, who thinks what he says matters even though, mostly, it doesn’t. I’m squawking into the void. Maybe you’re listening, maybe you’re not, but I’d like to make one last-ditch effort to convince you not to vote for Donald J. Trump, that greasy taint-stain, that Tribble merkin, that handsy orangutan. I’m not going to try to convince you to vote for Hillary. (I won’t ask for two miracles, just the one.) Though I am unabashedly a fan of the HRC, and I legitimately consider her a hard-working, smart-as-hell-bad-ass, I don’t need you to agree.

I just need you to not vote for DORMALD TORMP.

I come from what I like to think is a line of Probable Deplorables. And I recognize it. I recognize in the country a special kind of anger reserved in part for a changing world where technology and globalization have left people feeling alone and unchampioned, and I recognize too the realities of a swath of the population who is only now just seeing themselves and their default status as being genuinely (and existentially) challenged. I see too that there is a strong educational gap here, and that’s not your fault. Education is increasingly necessary at higher levels, but education is also increasingly costly — and loans are unduly punishing when made to cover those demands and those costs.

Just the same, I think Trump is a bad candidate. For you, and for everyone.

I could pretty easily make this a case about his racism and sexism, but realistically, those are issues I assume you have considered and discarded. I could also go through this and populate it with links to click-through to that clarify or bolster my points, but honestly, I’m not going to do that, either. It’ll take time, and you don’t really care anyway. This is pure opinion coming from me to you. No great substance. Just some quick bits to chew on and spit out as you see fit.

Let’s talk why voting for Trump is a bad, bad idea.

Even for Deplorables.

1. The Russia Thing.

Trump has said he never met Putin. But he also said he did. Then there’s the server. And the spy who says he’s compromised. And Manafort’s Ukraine connection. And the fact Trump hasn’t released his taxes. And he also said he admires Putin and — okay, you know, listen. I grew up in the time of the Cold War, where Russia was the bad guy in a lot of our movies. And sometimes that’s overly simplistic but Putin? Not a good guy. We don’t want a president who admires him, or who wants to be him, or who is already in bed with him as Kompromat. These aren’t just red flags. This is the entire Red Army waving red flags down I-95. As they fucking invade us because we just put a Russian puppet on the Iron Throne.

2. The Economy Is Gonna Crater

There’s a reason the market takes a hit when bad news about Clinton lands — hint: it’s not about Clinton, it’s about the increase in chances for a Trump presidency. With Brexit, the pound collapsed. With a Trump presidency, expect our economy to again suffer under a pretty significant seismic shock, one from which it will not be easy to recover.

Now, I know, some of you are saying GOOD, BRING IT ON. THE RICH WILL SUFFER. Except, I got bad news. The rich never suffer as much as you do. They just don’t. They’ll be okay. Take half of a millionaire’s money way and he’s still wealthy. Take half of a middle-class person’s money away and it’s WELCOME TO DESTITUTIONTOWN, POPULATION YOU. Trickle-down economics is half-bullshit, but one part that does trickle down are economic woes. And they don’t just trickle. The rich pop their umbrellas and the shit slurry rolls right off them and onto you. That means reduced investment in America. It means fewer jobs. It means fewer benefits.

Remember the 2008 recession? That was bad. That was from the Bush era, by the way, not the Obama era. We’ve pulled out of that tailspin to great effect. Which leads me to:

3. Things Are Not Terrible Right Now

Actually, things are pretty good.

Poverty’s down by 1.2 percent. The middle class is finally growing again, at a better clip than it has in recent memory. We’ve got an improving job market, lower inflation, lifting wages. Even the worst-off Americans are seeing the improvement.

If you imagine we’re on a boat, and the boat is in calm waters with easier fishing, it seems silly to want to steer that boat into uncharted territory. Sure, sure, the part of the map labeled HERE THERE BE DRAGONS sounds really, really interesting, but maybe it’s interesting when it’s the stuff of fiction, and not the stuff of life. Calm waters are boring. But maybe we should learn to like boring. If you want to spruce things up, go to an amusement park or try light bondage with your significant other. If the trend is good right now, and it is, let’s keep the trend going.

4. The Guy Lies A Lot

Like, really. He lies more often than he doesn’t. Check Politifact — I won’t bother linking, you’re an adult, you can Google. But the guy maybe needs to have an intervention. Lies come out of him like diarrhea out of a sick pig.

Now, the thing is, some of you think that’s okay. We live in a POST-FACT age, I hear. But I want you to reframe it a little. I want you to imagine having a boss. You maybe have a boss at work, right? You ever have a shitty boss? One of the things that, for me, earmarks a shitty boss is a boss that lies a lot. Not just massages the truth, but who says whatever he needs to in order to grandstand and position himself as the hero while casting the rest of the world in and out of the company as a gaggle of shitbirds. A boss that lies — or a parent that lies, or a significant other that lies — is shit. Nobody wants to be lied to. And here you have a guy, Trump, who purports to tell you the truth while unabashedly lying to your fucking faces.

Which is a very good sign he doesn’t respect you one whit.

Or that he’ll do anything he says he’s going to do. He says he gives money to charity, but he doesn’t. He says he never said the thing he said, even if he just said it like, four minutes before that. It’s shitty. Maybe even fucking batty. Used to be, people like that, you didn’t need to see past their curtain of horseshit because all you had to do was give a few good sniffs.

5. He’s Got A Boner For Nuclear Weapons

I am a child of the Cold War, as noted, and so I am also a child of NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST FEAR. I saw the Day After. I knew to fear the mushroom clouds. I knew putting my head between my knees would not save me from the ghosts of radiation that would possess my fragile body.

For a long time, it was easy to put that fear aside.

Now, though, nnnyeah, we got a guy who can’t stop talking about nukes.

If that doesn’t scare you, well, why doesn’t it scare you?

6. Climate Change

We like to pretend climate change is a partisan issue, but it’s not. When an overwhelming majority of scientists say, HEY THIS THING IS HAPPENING, it’s happening. And it’s not something that’s hard to see outside our door — it’s there. Epic storms, epic temperatures, weather anomalies. Even if you want to maintain the line that this is not human-caused (it is, but okay), you can’t really deny that it’s still happening regardless of whoever is causing it.

And that means needing a president and politicians who will address climate change going forward. Someone who will respond to it and attempt to countermand it, again, even if you believe mankind as a whole isn’t responsible. It’s like this — the house is on fire, so we can worry about who set the fire later. We need someone willing to put the fire out instead of pretending it’s a Chinese hoax.

7. Freedom Of The Press Is Actually Really Important

He’s talked routinely about diminishing or outright destroying the freedom of the press.

That’s not presidential. That’s dictatorial.

Now, I’m sure someone will argue, he’ll sue those corrupt media outlets, and not the good ones, but remember, Trump fights with nearly everyone. Trump loves the networks who love him, and he despises those who don’t love him enough. And that can change literally day to day — he’ll slag a network for their bad polls, then trumpet them the next day when the polls are in his favor. The game is only rigged when he’s losing. And that’s scary. Because it means he will never, ever want to be held accountable for his actions. He’s that fragile. His fear of freedom of the press isn’t a thing he cares about as a larger issue — he only cares about it in context to him. Those who oppose him are corrupt. Those who stand with him are great, tremendous, just the best, big-fingered, big-dicked people. He has all the best people, until the best people aren’t doing what he wants. Then they’re the worst people.

8. Let’s Talk About That Fragility Thing Some More

I know, we’re not supposed to do the thing where we diagnose Trump psychologically, but it’s just you and me here, right? And I think we can all quietly agree that maybe, just maybe, he’s a raging Narcissist. Like, he’s so much a Narcissist he will one day die staring at his own reflection in a pool of water. (Or, the more modern version, he will die staring at a giant portrait of himself he purchased with charity money. He’ll sit there, idolizing his painted image, and the whole thing will pop off the wall because the heavy-ass painting was put up by guys who knew he would stiff them on the bill, so they used the cheapest anchors and the thing goes — WHOOM — and crushes Trump underneath.)

Thing about Narcissists is, they don’t get help. They can’t. Help is only available to those who admit they have a problem, and one of the chief characteristics of a Narcissist is projecting all his problems onto someone else. They are, in their own minds, bulletproof. They cannot be criticized because they are a routinely, unswervingly Excellent Entity, and anybody who says differently is wrong, and bad, and maybe the Actual Devil.

Trump has shown one thing over the course of this election — really, over the course of his existence — and that is, he cannot handle criticism. He can’t hack one ounce of it. We think of Hillary like a snake, but Trump is a shark — and not a shark in the way you think, not in the way where he’s driven and fast and predatorial. Well, he is predatorial, yes (especially with women), but I mean he’s a shark in the way that he is easily baited by a single drop of blood in the water. Chum the water and here he comes, mouth open, eyes rolled back, ready to bite, ready to fall into any trap you set for him. He’ll stay up all night tweeting about your criticism. He still can’t deal with the fact that Rosie O’Donnell, of all people, came at him. Any poll, any pundit, any politician who says boo to him — he blunders at them, clubbing his tiny fists in the air like an angry toddler. You could paint a face on a wasp’s nest and tell him, “That guy over there said you have a pinky dick whose smallness is only matched by the insignificance of your bank account,” and he’d run at it, mad as hell. (Well, he’d probably tweet about it first. “CROOKED WASP NEST. SHOULD BE IN JAIL. BUILD A WALL. BEST WALL. TREMENDOUS. I LOVE WASPS EVEN THOUGH THEY’RE ALL RAPISTS.”)

To quote Louis CK from his Conan appearance yesterday, “This guy, every time he’s criticized, everything stops, and he makes everybody pay.”

A fragile president is not… super-great. Putin will use him, then tear him up like he’s tissue paper. (Putin may already have used and torn him up like tissue paper.) Other world leaders will view him as, at worst, a Useful Idiot, or at best, a guy you can bait into showing his ass. He talks a lot about stamina, but what he’s missing is a more vital upgrade to stamina: Trump is missing fortitude. He has no (to use the dictionary definition) courage in the face of pain or adversity. He’s a raw nerve buried in a tooth made from rich, soft gold.

9. He Is A Successful Entertainer, And A Failure Everywhere Else

Trump is fun to watch, and that’s about it. Most of his businesses have tanked. Many have folded. He has, to put a Trumpian spin on it, THE VERY BEST bad TRACK RECORD IN BUSINESS. HE IS A TREMENDOUSly shitty BUSINESS PERSON, THE VERY BEST at bankruptcy, and so on. Sure, he’s good at making a show and we clap along. He has the right cadence and the energy to entertain us, even if what he says doesn’t make much sense when you actually write it out, word-for-word (or, rather, word-salad-for-word-salad). He says again and again he wants to treat America like a business, that he’ll bring his skillset there to the Oval Office. Only problem is, if he does that, then statistically we can expect him to be selling us off to the highest bidder by 2018 at the latest. The American Experiment will have ended, because he set fire to the lab and sold the burned husk to cover his debts.

Note, too, that he hasn’t even succeeded in getting many endorsements. Almost no newspapers endorse him. Very few economists or generals. Very few business people. I mean, sure, he has such high-value people such as Chachi and Curt Schilling pulling for him, but I’m pretty sure a presidential candidate should have a better at-bat roster, don’t you think?

Trump is a huckster, a carnival barker, a used car salesman. He talks a good game, puts on a good show, but at the end of the day, what he’s got for you is a beat-up Ford Taurus he sold as a Ferrari. He’s got smoke and mirrors, a house of illusions.

A guy who has to tell you again and again how successful he is is like a guy who has to tell you again and again how big his wang is. And, spoiler warning, that’s a sign of:

Methinks thou dost protest too much.

10. He Won’t Serve You

There exists this feeling that he is One Of Us, he’s the Common Everyman, the Populist Demagogue who Speaks Truth To Power. Problem is, he is power. I recognize that there’s a lot of talk out there about privilege — particularly the straight white male kind — but let’s go for a more generalized version. Trump is a child of very real privilege. He started out rich. He was given a huge loan — sure, he pulled himself up by his bootstraps, except his bootstraps were lined with hundred dollar bills. No, he doesn’t own a solid gold toilet, that’s a myth — but he sure likes gold. And he owns a mansion and a penthouse and private jets and yachts and —

Well, he’s rich. Really rich. Maybe not as rich as he says he is (again, braggarts brag to overstate and project, often to cover for their own weaponized inadequacies), but damn sure richer than you me.

Now, I don’t think that disqualifies him. Not at all. I think it certainly challenges the assumption that he’s a man of the people, or that he’s somehow a common man from common origins — but for me, I don’t need a president to be common. I don’t need to “get a beer with him.” I need him (or her) to to be quite uncommon, actually, in that I need a president who knows what it means to do things I’ll never know how to do — lead a nation, navigate global politics, be sensitive to the thousand moving parts that make up American society.

The problem with Trump goes much deeper.

The problem is how Trump treats people. Common people.

Trump doesn’t pay them. He stiffs them. He insults them. He sues them. Your common problems aren’t problems he understands or cares about. He cares about Trump problems. He has no interest in white supremacy. He has interest in Trump supremacy. He’s just telling you what you want to hear — remember, he’s a liar — to satisfy his own Narcissism. Your concerns are not his concerns. Watch him pick up somebody’s child — it’s like watching a giant praying mantis hold a puppy. He doesn’t know what to do with that thing. He has no idea what’s right or what’s common. He wants to fuck his own daughter, for Chrissakes.

A president is supposed to serve us. For better or for worse, it’s their job to work for the American people, and that’s the legacy they get. Trump’s legacy has never been about helping people. He doesn’t donate to charity (except when his feet are held to the fire). Oh, he shows up to charity events to make it look like he’s done it, he’ll say he’s done it, but he hasn’t done shit. He says he helped on 9/11, says he worked, gave money, but when? To whom? Where’s the proof? The events of 9/11 were a singular moment in recent American history — to exploit that for your own gain, wow. (He even boasted after the towers fell that now his building was the tallest in Manhattan.) That is about as far from the common struggle as you can get. That is vicious, that is selfish, that demonstrates the most vain and venal traits of the uber-elite you can imagine. This is a guy who would kick a baby for a hundred bucks.

That’s not a guy who cares about your bridges or your health care costs. He’s not a guy who thinks about water supplies or sick kids. He’s not a guy who gives one slick fuck about your 401k or your job. Those are human problems, and in his own head, he’s Zeus, motherfuckers. He’s on Mount Olympus and the pleas of the common prole are not his goddamn problem. He’ll fuck a goose and shoot lightning up your ass if you look at him sideways.

Or, to go back to the carnival barker metaphor —

We’re all rubes to him.

He’s a user. And we will be the used.

He’ll grab us all by the pink parts, he’ll kiss us where he wants to kiss us.

To Conclude

To segue a little, my father was probably what one might consider a “deplorable,” in that, you know, he was a blue-collar guy who loved guns and was more than a little racist and sexist because that was just how you were where we lived. I think about him often in an election like this, and wonder what he would’ve made of it. I think I know, because I remember when he died in late 2007, he was pretty damn grumpy about the rise of Obama — but he was just as grumpy, even grumpier, about the turn of the GOP toward the religious right. (My Dad was not a religious guy.) Palin had just appeared on-scene, not yet a VP pick, and the simmering of the soon-to-be-nascent Tea Party were in play, and it wasn’t the GOP he remembered. (He was a lifetime NRA guy, too, and the NRA had become something he didn’t recognize anymore.) I suspect now he’d be Libertarian. I dunno that he could’ve voted for Obama, but I don’t think he would’ve voted for McCain, either.

One thing I know is, he was pretty old-school in a lot of ways. He was never much of an uber-patriot, but he had a cowboy’s way of looking at things. He was a John Wayne fan, a straight-shooter, a tough guy whose hands were callused and who ran our farm and drove a truck and worked in a factory. And he could spot a bullshitter at a thousand yards, and I like to think he would’ve cottoned pretty quickly to Trump’s very special, very transparent brand of bullshit. (He certainly didn’t like Trump back when he was alive.) He sure wouldn’t like someone who stood up there and talked about the weakness of America and the strength of Putin. Who winks to Neo-Nazis (remember WWII, when Nazis were the bad guys?). He wouldn’t like someone who didn’t pay his people, because for my father, paying debts was how you had to be. You paid what you owed, goddamnit. He didn’t like liars, either. He caught you in a lie, boy — *whistles* You better get correct, quick. He was a tough guy, and we didn’t always agree, but he was a man of principles. Those principles did not waver, good or bad. And Trump violates those principles on the regular. And I wonder what guys like my Dad — ones who are still out there — are thinking about all this. I hope they’ve seen the bullshitter for what he is.

I hope you have, too.

Even if you think of yourself as a deplorable, whoever you are, whatever you believe, you need to take a long look at Trump and ask yourself if this is a guy who’s going to serve you. Who understands you. Or if he’s a spoiled Narcissist who will tell you whatever lie you want to hear in order to take the cash in your pocket and slide it into his — just so he can spend it on a portrait of himself, or blow it on another bad business.

I know I’m not swaying anybody with this. I get that. But it makes me feel better to write. And maybe, just maybe, I gave someone out there something to think about. Even in this supposedly post-fact age, even if you’re a self-styled run-of-the-mill deplorable, even then there’s pretty good evidence Trump isn’t your man. You’re just a pile of shit he can use to climb on. You’re fucking firewood to him. He’ll tell you what you want to hear to get him there. He’s probably somebody’s Useful Idiot. So don’t be his Useful Idiot. Don’t vote for Donald Trump, that oleaginous dysentery stain, that sentient pile of cantaloupe-colored chlamydia, that fake-bronze huckster, that bloated baboon, that leathery lie-filled liar-face, that gold-capped canker sore, that pompous puppet, that nuke-happy numbskull Narcissus.

You need to vote for Trump, hey, you do you. I can’t stop you. That’s your right, your freedom to do so. But here I’ll quote Louis CK again — “If you vote for Hillary you’re a grownup; if you vote for Trump you’re a sucker; if you don’t vote for anyone, you’re an asshole.”

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