Category: The Ramble (page 40 of 460)

I feel like I’ve lost my goddamn mind, but we’ll get back to that point soon. Let’s start with this. Two things seem to be true at this moment in the pandemic:

First, that our numbers are higher than they’ve ever been, in most cases not just by a hair’s breadth, but often by two, three, even four times their previous peaks.

Second, that we are doing less now to mitigate cases than ever before.

This happened alarmingly fast. Delta took a couple months to simmer here. Omicron, the dominant variant, boiled as soon as it hit the stove. It rolled over us in a matter of weeks, not months. Hey, we flattened the curve — just in the wrong fucking direction, as our leap in cases is now a billionaire’s rocketship, launching straight up and into orbit.

With this new variant came the assumption that it is a milder form of the disease, and from that single assumption arrived a number of decisions. The CDC changed all its policies in a sudden, confusing barf of protection reductions. (Though in fairness, Carl Bergstrom notes on a Twitter thread that, despite the piss-poor communication, there might be some value in these changes.) The CDC’s head, Rochelle Walensky, offered a (correctly) maligned soundbite, explaining that “the overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least 4 comorbidities. So really these are people who were unwell to begin with and yes, really encouraging news in the context of Omicron.” Never mind the fact that comorbidities such obesity, diabetes, depression are not uncommon, particularly as one enters middle-age (and never mind that were they uncommon, it is not actually encouraging to be told that you are unwell and will be the ones to bear the brunt of the disease that nobody is protecting you from). The Biden administration has relied on vaccines and mandates, but not fully — they refuse, even still, to make vaccines a requirement of domestic flights. And the current business mandate is being challenged in the Supreme Court, with a not-unreasonable chance for it to fail. There are supposed to be tests coming to us by mail, though I’m not sure when, and we’re not even sure how well the home tests detect Omicron, particularly in its early stages. There exists little clarity on what anybody is doing, which mostly means, nobody is doing anything.

From this, you can feel the lack of leadership and the loss of focus and good communication cascading out through the populace like a wave of surrender. Masks? Fuck ’em. Gone! Gone. I mean, to be clear, they were gone mostly when the CDC botched that communication early on, but here, now, I go out and I don’t see a mask on a face. Not from anybody. Not even as our cases are triple where they were in this county. Vaccine mandates? Temporarily gone, and probably full gone soon enough, with no seeming plans to introduce them. Testing? Quarantine? Isolation? Contact tracing? Can’t find tests, and the CDC has changed who should get them. Quarantine and isolation is already limited now, and for the most part here, parents and workers are subtly encouraged in schools and in jobs to just… casually not test at all because if you test, you might find it, and then your kids might not be in school (THE HORROR) and you might not get to come in to do your job (OH SHIT) and so maybe, y’know, I dunno, don’t go looking for COVID and you won’t find it. (This, a particularly Trumpy echo.) Contact tracing? Hahaha. Haha. Hahahhahgaaaaaaah yeah nobody is tracing shit anymore. It’s on you if you wanna do that. Good luck.

And from all this has cascaded a particular attitude, even among people who were once maybe careful, who are vaccinated and are not necessarily thoughtless people —

The attitude is, I give up.

It’s, “I don’t like this anymore, so I’m not going to do it.”

It’s, “Well, we’re all going to catch it anyway, gotta live my life.”

It’s, “I don’t want to hear anymore about how the bridge is out, I’m just going to accelerate the car and assume they’ll put the bridge back up before I get there, or at the very least, I’ll just jump the ravine in my Toyota Camry.”

They are bored with the pandemic.

They are tired of it.

They don’t want restrictions.

They don’t want to stop or even slow down.

And it has led to this peculiar, troubling moment —

Cases are worse than they’ve ever been.

And people are done caring.

If you ask them, they will say — to go back to the beginning of this — oh, I hear Omicron is mild. Is it? Is it mild? Maybe. It may be milder. I know a lot of people who have COVID — more now than cumulatively throughout the entire pandemic — and they’re all vaxxed and boosted and experiencing a relatively mild sickness. Of course, when you realize that before now, there was Delta, and vaxxed/boosted people did not catch Delta easily, it starts to feel like it’s weird to call Omicron — which is kicking down the doors of your body’s protections — milder. Is it mild? It’s mild in that it doesn’t seem to lead to as much hospitalization and death, though that’s not the only metric by which we live. A lot of the people I know who have or had Omicron experienced a rough ride, even if it didn’t include an ambulance ride. Hospitalizations have not yet made the epic leap with the case rates, though hospitalizations are usually a couple-few weeks behind, and deaths behind that. And even still, hospitalizations are boiling over (yes, even with kids) and our healthcare system is wobbling toward collapse, and none of this even seems to consider the unknown potential of Omicron to lead to Long COVID, which would be a mass disabling event that would create some of those pesky comorbidities the CDC is so eager to dismiss. Does COVID significantly increase the chance of developing Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes in children? Seems like it does.

If you’re starting to feel like, “Hey, maybe this doesn’t sound good,” check this out:

Let’s go to Buzzfeed, where they asked experts to clarify some of the questions about kids and COVID. (Please, no jokes here about Buzzfeed — they have a pretty robust journalistic wing, and have at times done some fantastic reporting.) In this article, you will find first this:

‘“You don’t want colds passed around schools either, right?” Rutherford said. “But on the other hand, one of the reasons we have preschools is so parents can go work. That’s a benefit of it. And if you send them home every time they sneeze, you’re going to have a lot of unhappy parents.”’ Rutherford said it makes sense for schools to continue to follow whatever pre-COVID sickness policies they had in place, with an added layer of COVID testing for children with more severe upper respiratory symptoms. But he said this testing should be rapid, not PCR, which usually takes multiple days to deliver results.

Because, ha ha, yeah, exactly, you can’t be too STRICT with this shit, right? But then:

‘About 20% to 40% of teens who get infected may develop long COVID, said Blumberg. “In younger children, it’s less, but we don’t have good numbers on that.”’

Wait, wait, what? Fucking what now? Twenty to forty percent? Uh, first, that’s a huge unknown gap between those two numbers, but even on the low end, that’s one out of five teenagers.

But we’re just like, nah, fuck it? Ha ha, eat shit, teenagers!

Now, I want you to go check out the CHOP guidance for the new year — Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, a generally reputable source on all things children-health-related, yeah? They begin their piece by noting how COVID has pushed the healthcare system to its limits and how dangerous it is, yadda yadda yadda, but then they land on their actual guidance, which begins with:

‘With evidence that COVID-19 is becoming a milder infection in most children, and at a time when all adults and youth in K-12 settings have been offered vaccination, our PolicyLab experts and CHOP clinical leadership have reached a consensus that preserving as much in-person schooling as possible outweighs the risks of infection to children and school staff at this stage of the pandemic.‘

To translate: keeping kids out of school for any period is a sickness greater than COVID.

And here, again, is where I reiterate:

I feel like I’m losing my mind.

Am I losing my mind? Are you?

I sure feel that way.

I feel like someone just told me 2 + 2 now equals 22, and a lot of people seem to agree with that, even though we all know math doesn’t work that fucking way.

I feel like I’m seeing and hearing how bad the pandemic is presently, how the systems are straining, how teachers and healthcare workers are quitting in droves and are pushed to their limits, how friends and family are seeing workplaces and schools hamstrung by all this shit, and then, at the same time… I’m seeing nobody do anything about it. Like, not a fucking thing. In fact, less is being done.

We’ve given up.

We’ve surrendered.

This is the Great Surrender.

(Credit to Twitter user @caedsmama for giving it that unofficial name.)

We acknowledge, oh yeah it’s not good, and then we just keep doing what we were doing. No slow down. Only acceleration. We will violently shoulder our way through this pandemic, because we are so done with it, even as it is clearly, clearly not done with us. Schools are open because jobs are open because the economy must be fed. And people defend it. Like they’re people who know they’re in the Matrix and they defend it. Everybody’s Cipher from the first movie, YEAH I LIKE THE TASTE OF THE STEAK, FUCK YOU. Long Covid? Ennh, fuck it. Masks? Fuck it. Restrictions, lockdowns, any mitigation efforts? Fuckity fuck it all. We give up. Game over. Get COVID. Who cares. ISN’T IT TIME WE ALL GET IT, says Agent Smith as he coughs into your mouth.

It feels like gaslighting not from a single-source, but in a miasma that surrounds you. It’s area-of-effect gaslighting. You feel like you wanna say, “Hey things seem really bad right now, maybe we should give things a pause,” and then you get a look like, WOW LOOK AT MISTER LOVES-THE-PANDEMIC OVER HERE, CHECK OUT THE PLAGUE FETISHIST, THE MASK-HUMPER, THE GUY WHO REALLY LOVES HURTING CHILDREN BY SUGGESTING THEY NOT GO TO A SCHOOL WHERE HALF THEIR PEERS ARE OUT, HALF THE TEACHERS ARE OUT, BUT THAT’S FINE IT’LL MAKE THEM TOUGH. It’s like we’re trying to John Wayne our way through a global pandemic, like we can bootstrap it. I mean, sure, kids are barely vaccinated. But jobs! Jobs. Jobs jobs jobs. Gotta churn that crank. Gotta turn out the widgets, and you can’t churn widgets unless your kids are in school. Feed the beast!

(Here I recognize that yes, some kids do need to be in school, not just for education and social development, but also for food. But it’s also worth recognizing that these are systemic failures, in part, and punishing them by forcing them through a boiling pandemic comes with its own obvious deleterious consequences.)

It’s like we’re done with the finding out part and want to get back to the fucking around part, even though it’s not usually supposed to go in that order.

We just… deflated.

I don’t have any great conclusion here. I only write this because I want it written somewhere that I feel like I’m losing my mind. And maybe I am. Maybe I’m the wrong one.

It’s just — what the fuck.

I am blown away. Once we celebrated our healthcare workers and teachers, once we at least tried to band together and flatten the curve (if in our limited way), but now we’re like, nah, fuck it. Nah. Just nah. I mean, sure, other countries are addressing the problem. Sure, if we had just cooled our heels for two, maybe three weeks, we could’ve taken this sharp rise and spiked that volleyball back to the ground. But this is America. We do everything bigger and better. We’ll make this the biggest spike the world has ever seen. We’ll never let it go. We learned to stop worrying and love the COVID.

Mission Accomplished. That’s the banner COVID is hanging right now.

It won.

And we are good with that.

And now imagine:

Just wait till climate change really gets going. Every day is already a new story about how FIRE AND SNOW HAD A BABY AND A NEW ATMOSPHERIC RIVER IS DROPPING A BOMB CYCLONE OF HUMID HELL WASPS ON BOTH COASTS, and already we’re like, ennnh but fuck it. But I’m sure it’ll be fine. We’ll develop renewed patience just in time, I’m sure. Any time now. Any. Time.

(As a PS, I apologize if this feels like a bummer. But I honestly feel pretty anxious not just about the pandemic, but also about our sudden acquiescence to it, and I really wanted to talk about it somewhere that wasn’t just Twitter. It required unpacking and so here I am, unpacking. I will get back to fun writing advicey stuff soon. Buy my books or I die. Bye.)

Last year, my writer’s resolution was about healing and growth.

This year’s will be simpler, more visceral, and dare I say, more selfish.

To preface this, I remind folks who are new here (though is anybody here really new?) that every year I like to do some kind of authorial resolution, and this is more for me than it is for you, but mayyyybe, hey, it’s also for you, too. This resolution, like any piece of writing advice, is intensely personal and is something for you to pick up, hold in your hand, test its weight…

And either put it in your toolbox or chuck it into the dust.

This year, I’m resolving to find the joy in the work, and to embrace that joy the way a person in the ocean would cling to a piece of floating debris.

It’s like this:

I think in the midst of the chaos, which is considerable, I am reminded that nothing is promised, nothing is guaranteed. We are owed nothing but what we owe ourselves, and it is exactly that compact, that contract, that I want to cleave to this year.

Because what I owe myself is to find joy amidst that chaos.

Which for me is about finding the joy in the work.

Perhaps you owe yourself that, too.

I want to be clear: I don’t mean that every moment of writing must be done with a rigor mortis smile staple-gunned to your face. Writing is work. It can be an act of moving earth, sometimes. It can hurt. It be wearying. Joy isn’t on a conveyor belt, fed to you automagically.

I also want to note that joy as a metric is a hard one — you can’t really measure it, and sometimes joy is a giddy, lunatic moment, while other times it’s a slowly-spreading satisfaction. The easy warmth of a nice moment, or the electric thrill of success and surprise.

What it is, is this:

I think we get caught up in the process, in the product, and we forget to identify and embrace those parts of writing that bring us true satisfaction and happiness. We started writing for some reason or another, and it’s easy to lose a hold on that reason. We create content. We get on a treadmill of words. We try to churn out word count, tallying numbers as if the numbers matter in a sense more than just measurement. And I think it’s easy to lose the reason you write in there. I know at certain points I’ve lost the thread, for sure. And maybe you have, too.

Too often too we get caught up in the joy of publication, as if that’s the summary of the work. As if publishing is the reason to write. It’s not. It can’t be. It’s too uncertain, too unstable, to make that the thing that brings us satisfaction. That’s giving the world too much power over you. You’re taking your heart, and ripping it out of your chest, and plopping it bloodily into the hands of, who? A publisher? An audience? A reviewer? Some rando on Twitter? Yes, eventually that’s what happens, I get it — that heart of yours is going to end up out of your chest, served on a plate. It is, perhaps, inevitable. But before you get there, you can take a bloody bite for yourself.

Not just a bite.

The first bite.

In a year — or, hell, years — where things feel uncertain, where the very air around you feels taut like a strangling wire, it’s all the more important to go back to the basics. To seek joy. To just get a goddamn breath. If the chaos ensuing reminds us time to take a moment, to reflect, and to go back to the reasons why we started writing in the first place, then that to me is a considerable win. There is something you love about writing. I don’t know what it is. Maybe you love those serendipitous character moments, or the construction of unique turns-of-phrase, or engineering twists in the story. I love creating metaphor, I love chapter titles, I love finding the rhythm of a sentence. The things in which I find joy, I will pursue doggedly this year. Teeth out. Greedy hands, searching. I’ll make it happen. I’m also going to seek opportunity in writing to make myself happy first and foremost, to find something in every day’s work that gives me true, even if small, joy.

Something for me, not for you.

The first bite of the heart.

I hope you’ll do the same, if it suits you. I think it’s a noble pursuit, the joy in one’s work. The good news is, I think this suits not only you, but the work, too. The myth of the suffering artist is just that, a myth. It can make the work suffer, too. Let the work sing. Let yourself sing in the work.

So, in 2022, that’s what I’m doing, and maybe that’s what you’re doing too.

Seek joy in the writing.

Be selfish.

A little bit, anyway.

Have a great one. Let’s all agree to make this year dance for us, instead of us dancing for it.

This is going to be hasty — I have an utterly broken memory of what actually existed in 2021. It’s curiously difficult to pinpoint this year as a year, to find its walls, to see its ceiling and its floor, to know what exists in this temporal room, this time-based structure. Because I barely acknowledge it as a structure at all. It is, in fact, more like a free-floating miasma.

Still, something happened in this sinister vapor. Let me try to suss out the stuff I liked this year.

Pop culture stuff, I mean. Media. CONTENT. Mmm. Chewy, granular content.

Again, this is by no means comprehensive or exhaustive. It’s just some stuff I really liked this year. If it’s not on this list, I may still have liked it — even loved it! — and forgot it existed in 2021, or forgot it existed at all, because that’s just how my brain is faring these days.

Albums:

Indigo de Souza, Any Shape You Take

illuminati hotties, Let Me Do One More

Hus KingPin, Portishus

Halsey, If I Can’t Have Love I Want Power

TMBG, Book

CHVRCHES, Screen Violence

Deap Vally, Marriage

Bo Burnham, Inside

Olivia Rodrigo, Sour

Or, for some good songs: Jenny Lewis, “Puppy and a Truck;” Margo Price, “Red Temple Prayer;” Japanese Breakfast, “Be Sweet;” Jack White, “Taking Me Back;” Moon Taxi, “The Beginning;” K. Flay, “Four Letter Words”

TV:

Only Murders In The Building, Ted Lasso, Hacks, Sex Lives of College Girls, CentaurWorld, White Lotus, did I mention Only Murders In The Building??, I Think You Should Leave, What We Do In The Shadows, Mare of Easttown, Midnight Mass, Reservation Dogs, Arcane, Owl House, Kid Cosmic, Maya and the Three

Movies:

Watched… surprisingly few actual movies this year, so let’s see how this goes?

Matrix: Resurrections (my initial review was me scratching my head, but I’ve revisited it and it has stuck with me more than I expected), The Mitchells Vs The Machines, Dune, Lost Daughter, The Green Knight, The Night House, Summer of Soul, Suicide Squad, is Bo Burnham’s Inside a movie or a show or what I dunno whatever just put it on all the lists, The Harder They Fall

Games:

It’s basic, but Halo: Infinite is deeply satisfying; Deathloop; Psychonauts 2; the new Outer Wilds expansion; Townscaper; Mass Effect: Legendary Edition which I know isn’t really a 2021 game but shut up; I really want to play Inscryption and Wildermyth but I don’t have a PC

Special shout-out to Root, by Leder Games, which is a truly delightful boardgame

Books:

God, this one is really hard, because a lot of stuff I read is from years outside 2021 — including coming out in 2022?

Catriona Ward’s Last House on Needless Street; Sarah Gailey’s The Echo Wife; Razorblade Tears, SA Cosby; Cassandra Khaw’s The All-Consuming World and Nothing but Blackened Teeth; Premee Mohamed’s Annual Migration of Clouds; Hummingbird Salamander, Jeff VanderMeer; Apples of North America, Tom Burford; Annalee Newitz’s Four Lost Cities; Amanda Montell’s Cultish; Samira Ahmed’s Amira & Hamza; Cina Pelayo’s Children of Chicago; Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke by Eric LaRocca, Chistopher Mims’ Arriving Today

Right now I’m reading and loving David Perry and Matthew Gabriele’s The Bright Ages.

Plus I’ve read some really great stuff coming out in 2022: Alex Segura’s Secret Identity; Delilah S. Dawson’s The Violence; Kiersten White’s Hide; Alma Katsu’s The Fervor; Rob Hart’s Paradox Hotel

I know I’m missing things! I’m sure of it. Brain like a sieve in a year of fog.

BUT, hey, this gives you some stuff.

Also I wrote books this year, which may or may not have been any good at all:

You Can Do Anything, Magic Skeleton (with Natalie Metzger!)

The Book of Accidents

Dust & Grim

If you liked any of those, a review somewhere would be gosh darn delightful.

KAY BYE

(You should of course feel free to share your own Favorite Things in the comments.)

I… thought maybe this year was going to be different. Upfront, let me say I don’t think this year was all bad, per se. Certainly it wasn’t as bad as 2020, though that is a thing I have to remind myself of constantly, because 2021 certainly feels like it’s a real piece of shit on par with the last real piece of shit. Then again, this year was not the start of a global pandemic where everyone was quarantining their mail and bleaching their vegetables and washing their hands to raw nubs, all under the (not-so) vigilant gaze of the Traitor-in-Chief, Mister Big Lie Himself. I mean sure, the insurrection was this fucking year, somehow, inexplicably, and sure, this was the year of Delta and now, Omicron, not to mention a cascading series of climate change emergencies —

I dunno, maybe 2021 was just as fucking bad. Who knows.

Point is, this felt like the Year Of Almost. Like, 2020 sucked moist open ass, and we all hoped inevitably for a better 2021. Which, I think, we got, but it it was better in the way that getting shot in the leg is better than getting shot in the head. It’s still not amazing. It’s just, everytime I thought we were almost to a better place, a better thing, then… we didn’t quite get there. Almost!

We stayed in Almost.

We knew Almost intimately.

We lived in the fucking Almost.

I entered this year thinking, okay, we got a new president, that’s great, whew. But then there was an insurrection (seriously? the insurrection was this year?? are we sure about that?), and then there was Manchin and Sinema, and then Joe Biden has been a good president but not a great president — a paper plate pressed over a sucking chest wound.

I entered the year thinking, great, I’ve got three goddamn books out this year, and surely I’ll get to tour for at least one of them — by which I mean, go out into the world, not simply live yet again trapped in the digital interstices of Fucking Zoom again. But then, nope, that didn’t happen. I remained, as most of us did, in our Zoom Prisons. The digital Phantom Zone. Pressing our faces against the prismatic dimensional glass as we all floated away from one another.

I entered the year thinking we at least understood this pandemic and sure, it’d still keep on going, but we’d have some control over it and then, haaahahhaaheaayeaaaaah not so much. We thought the vaccines were what we needed, and they were, but only in part. We figured people would slowly get on board with that whole Science and Medicine thing, but then you had jabronis eating horse-dewormer and trying to suck out the vaccine with snakebite kits. I know people who had COVID, who had it badly, and who still won’t get the vaccine. What the fuck? What is wrong with you? There were always people and will always be people who have scrambled eggs for brains, but it definitely feels like the GOO-BRAIN ratio has gone way, way up.

I entered the year thinking, well, at least we can spend time outside, and that’s true, but then there were also two rounds of tornadoes here in Pennsylvania — first time, one hit a half-mile north of my house, and another hit a half-mile south; second time, a tornado had a little jaunt through my sister’s backyard. So “outside” became a little bit more treacherous, didn’t it?

It was one thing after the other.

There was a really sweet spot in May and June where the clouds parted, the sun started to shine and I thought, here it is, here’s the moment where it’s all going to turn around. The numbers looked good. COVID was fading. A lot of us had our shots. We were venturing out of our caves to enjoy the sunlight. Then the clouds went the other way again like the stage curtain closing on that Spider-Man Musical, and Delta rocked up on us. And just as we got boosters and got our kids vaccinated, here comes Motherfucking Omicron.

It feels like, hey, here’s the good news: we are no longer sinking in quicksand. And yet bad news, we’re still somehow in quicksand? What the shit?

It’s not a great feeling. Like I said: paper plate pressed onto a sucking chest wound. It’s better than nothing. But that doesn’t mean it’s enough.

God, this is fucking depressing, isn’t it? I don’t mean it to be! It’s not hopeless. Things are better now than they were, and with some effort on our part, it could get even better still. And I really do think that 2021 was better than 2020, if… uhh, marginally so. I’ve definitely clawed back some parts of normal life. (And some people in this country never left normal life at all, eating weekly at Applebee’s even as their lungs filled up with fluid! Sorry. Depressing again. Mea culpa.) It’s fine. It’s fine.

Everything is PERFECTLY FUCKING FINE.

I guess maybe I’ll focus on the personal stuff. Yes, let’s do that.

Personally, it was a year with many nice things in it.

I had three books out, which you can buy at the links below because I am not above trying to pay my mortgage and feed my child:

You Can Do Anything, Magic Skeleton (with Natalie Metzger!)

The Book of Accidents

Dust & Grim

This is after 2020, where I had 0 (zero) books out in the world, so three in relatively short order was a big shift. I think they were successful. The first was always a bit of an odd release, so I never expected it to hit huge, but I’m glad that TBOA and D&G hit a lot of year-end lists and people’s favorites — and I don’t know how well D&G has sold, but I can say with authority that TBOA has done very well, and I’m pretty thrilled with where it’s at and the attention it has been getting.

I had a hard time writing in 2020, but with 2021, I came roaring back, writing and finishing the sequel to Wanderers, called Wayward, coming out in August 2022 (preorder here).

My family is good. Kiddo was in school for this new school year. None of us got COVID (er, yet). We’re all vaxxed. My wife and I are boosted. We see more people, go more places, but carefully, smartly. Creeping about like little mice who don’t wanna get eaten by the owl.

Things happened? We existed? It’s all a blur.

Normally I’d go through and tell you about all the STUFF what I read and watched and played this year but I’ve tried to keep you up to date on that as I go, so I’m not gonna rehash here. And I barely remember what came out this year, anyway. (Plus, half the books I read are gonna be 2022 releases.)

It’s fine.

It’s fine.

What will 2022 bring?

HaaahahahahahaaahaaaaAAAAAAAAHHHH I mean, uhh, I have no idea. I have plans for two in-person book tours that at present are utterly uncertain.

Wayward comes out, and I’m hoping people like that. I’m editing it now. It maybe doesn’t suck.

I’ve got one book to write, maybe two, and potentially a comic? More on that when I can say.

I’ve mostly stopped trying to guess at what will happen for me personally, and I’m definitely letting life just be a river that I’m floating upon — if a rock gets in my way, I’ll try to paddle my ass around it, but at this point any map I attempt to construct is outdated the moment I finish it, so I’m just going with the flow and will respond to the bends and dips and sudden rapids accordingly. This is probably a bad plan. But it’s the week between Christmas and the New Year, so I hope you’ll forgive me this floating in the void sensibility. We’re all merely hovering this week and that weightlessness has perhaps infected my overall attitude.

I hope for a better world in 2022. I think we’ll get one, but no promises.

And in that, I don’t think we can just go with the flow — to get that world, we need to fight the flow and fight for the world we want. (Just not this week. This week is cookies and naps.)

Hope you’re doing well.

Hope this year wasn’t all bad.

And hope the year ahead is better.

Claim joy for yourself. Make art. Be weird.

See you on the other side of 2021.

(Flickr is giving me fits, so I’m gonna sequester my Favorite Photos of the Year to a separate post. KEEP YER GRAPES PEELED.)

I think that art and story are products of a conversation, perhaps many conversations. Sometimes it’s the result of a conversation between the artist and their audience. Other times it’s can be a culmination of the conversation that the artist has between their own experiences and their own influences — and in both of these cases, artist and audience, or experience and influence, it’s a kind of battle between self and anti-self, which now that I’ve said that out loud is clearly a sign I’ve already crawled up my own ass with this very pretentious argument.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let’s talk about The Matrix: Resurrections.

The Short and Sweet

If you want the brevity review, without any kind of spoiler, it’s this: I did not always love The Matrix: Resurrections, even as I loved many things about it. The script is strong. The worldbuilding is wonderful. The emotional core is throbbing. It cuts away from a lot of the squirrelly academic philosophical claptrap that mired the two previous sequels, shedding them for something that is ultimately less about mind and more about heart. Feeling over fact.

It’s also got action scenes that feel airless and disconnected from their stakes, has an over-abundance of shiny-sheen CGI, and is unusually style-free and sexless — it projects a Silicon Valley version of Sexy, an imagined video game product of it divorced of Actual Sex, creating a PG-13 movie that is mysteriously R-Rated. Some of this is, I expect, on purpose, but it is occasionally jarring for a Matrix film to feel wholesomely generic in its design and style. (Exception to this: Neo-Morpheus, who wears some of the sexiest, baddest-ass shit. And Bugs’ sunglasses. I want those.)

Still, I’m thinking about it even now.

I keep thinking about it.

I keep wanting to talk about it.

Which is not nothing. And that leads me to:

The Value Of Being Interesting

The best thing I can say about this film is that it’s interesting.

This sounds like a low bar, but I assure you, it’s not. When I say that word, I mean interesting in italics — it’s interesting, I say, my eyes squinting a bit as I focus on the middle-distance. It also sounds like it could be a back-handed compliment, or a way to say I actually hated it without upsetting anyone, but that’s also not true, not at all.

What it is, is this: most Big Films these days don’t bring a lot of emotional or intellectual umami — that is to say, to me, they’re missing complexity and depth, lacking a measure of thoughtfulness that is reflected in art that allows itself to be a bit messy, a bit complex. It’s far more fascinating to have a story willing to be contradictory, to have a vision but to challenge that vision, and that’s definitely on the menu here. And that’s wonderful —

Because it isn’t always on the menu.

The 800-lb Hulk in the room here is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which has essentially become the cinematic water we’re all swimming in. I delighted in, for instance, Shang-Chi, and don’t brook anybody their love of that movie. It had some of the greatest fight scenes in Marvel movies. It was a blast. (It also, like too many movies, has a floppy third act predestined by its own format.) When I turned it off, I also didn’t really think much about it. It was like a fancy fuckin’ marshmallow. I ate it. I enjoyed it. I’d eat it again. But it was puffy, happy sweetness and not much else.

But Resurrections… you know, there’s some puffy, happy sweetness in there, but it’s also weirder, gnarlier, not as easy to get your hands around. It’s willing to be complicated. I don’t mean to suggest that you’re going to find something here on par with The Lost Daughter or The Power of the Dog in terms of that emotional and narrative chewiness, but I just mean, this isn’t your standard blockbuster franchise film. It’ll give you some marshmallows, but it’s also got some texture there I didn’t expect to find. And part of that texture is watching a franchise, and a filmmaker, grapple with the legacy of that franchise. Part of that texture is in the conversation the art is having.

The Conversation Of Which I Speak

As I said at the fore, the conversation a story has — both before it ever reaches an audience and then, the one it has after — is really interesting to me. I sit down to write and I inevitably feel like that story is the conversation had between all the things I’ve experienced and all the other stories I’ve subsumed. I’m not unique in this. I think this is standard operating procedure, even for writers who refuse to believe it. I think some writers probably try not to have that conversation, and try to escape it, and I believe those writers are creating art that is worse for that rejection.

Films can be a little trickier, TV too, because they’re not the product of a single voice. Again I hesitate to cleave to too much haughty pinky-out nose-in-air pretentiousness, but we don’t have as much authorial (“auteur”) presence in film and TV as maybe I’d like. That’s not always the worst thing, and some of the strength of film and television is that, in the right circumstances, the agitation of smart creative voices working in chorus can make some fantastic storytelling. But there’s also the reality that such chorus is only as strong as its shittiest voice, so someone can fuck up the whole song by screaming a series of off-notes before falling off the stage, drunk.

Franchises end up trapped by this because they’re often shepherded forward not by voices but by companies. This is very basic, droll bullshit, and a softball of a critique, I know, but you get story-by-committee that is crafted out of formula and geared toward brand — that’s not to say you can’t get some truly interesting stories out of that process. You can. We have. We will again. But you also end up with a whole lot of narrative vapor-lock.

Franchises get so big, so insular, that they end up having conversations only with themselves. It’s the ants-in-a-death-spiral circuit. A big franchise chases itself, round-and-round, getting bigger and bigger but never really changing its shape. It’s just a larger circle, a bloating loop.

And in this particular era, where we have franchises that have been around for 20, 30, 40 years, the pattern is becoming well-established. They want to keep a franchise going, but don’t just want to continue it straightaway, but also don’t want to reboot it, so you get something that is half-ass reboot, and half-ass continuation. You get a non-committal story that says, “Well, we need the OLD CHARACTERS to come back for the OLD AUDIENCE, but the KIDS TODAY don’t wanna watch the OLD CHARACTERS hobble their way around, so we need NEW CHARACTERS TOO, but also, that story that worked the first time worked again, so let’s bring back THE DEATH STAR ZUUL MICHAEL MYERS SPIDER-VILLAINS so we can lean on all that old stuff, and we’ll shake up the puzzle pieces a little and then, ta-da, movie made, pattern affirmed, back up the money truck.”

It’s not that this is all bad, or creates only poor art, but it’s getting a little predictable. “Oh hey the kids are going to find the ancient mcguffin and then a new evil rises but it’s actually the same evil we saw before and then at the end the old character, who we’ll call Indiana Venkmanwalker, shows up (maybe CGIed if the actor is dead) and nostalgia swells with the music and ta-da they beat the new-old evil with the power of narrative sentimentality and a cool new weapon.” It’s fine. Sometimes I’m a sucker for it. I’m only human. No harm no foul if you are, too.

But ennnh.

Ennnh.

Enh?

There are a few movies that break this.

Mad Max: Fury Road gives zero fucks if you know anything about Mad Max and isn’t going to bring back the Old Actor or an Old Story and is just going to do what its own protagonists do, which is hard-charge forward through the oil-soaked nuclear sand because fuck you, that’s why. Witness.

Into the Spider-Verse remixed the Spider-Man formula so much and so well that it truly felt like a new thing — it felt more like art that was having that conversation between experience and influence, and because it used characters we’d never really seen before on a screen, it didn’t worry so much about everything else. And all the references were incidental, more curious than critical to understand. (I’ve not seen Far From Home, to be clear, so I have zero idea how this plays there. No spoilers on that, if you please.)

And then you have The Matrix: Resurrections.

It too, is in conversation with itself as a franchise, but you can also feel it in conversation with itself as a story, as a filmmaker, as actors. It wants to both grapple with its own impact and try to leave it behind. It’s self-referential in ways that are both cheeky and profound. Yes, it’s still kind of doing the pattern of TROT OUT THE OLD CHARACTERS, BRING IN THE NEW ONES, THE BAD THING IS BACK BUT WITH A TWIST, GO. But it also seems to know it. And wants to fuck with that — and you — a little bit in the process.

The result is a story that becomes altogether more thoughtful and emotional than I expected. The first movie amped me up. The second and third left me cold — I like parts of them a lot, love some other parts, but they really fell in love with ideas more than story. This new one, though, feels smaller. More intimate, more personal. You could do away with the fight scenes entirely (and should, because again, they mostly don’t work). It has things to say about the internet, and society, and itself.

It doesn’t always work. But when it does, it really does. And I admire something that reaches past the formula, climbing up and over the walls of its own franchise, to try to do something different and more… peculiar. This is that. It’s worth seeing just to experience that. I’ll be thinking about it a lot.

The Spoilery Bits

This is just disjointed stuff I liked or maybe didn’t like about the movie.

It will contain spoilers. Stop reading now if, well, you don’t want those.

I liked the synthesis of machines and people, and think that’s part of the synthesis of the conversation this movie is trying to have.

Niobe? WTF. Okay? I guess? Sure?

Swarm mode, bots, a society willing to believe things based on feeling? Incisive stuff, if a little quickly-handled. Just the same, I dig it.

Neo is mostly a tourist in this movie. Turns out, that’s for Reasons, I suppose, but sometimes it felt like he was mostly shuttled from one place to another. He did not have, at any point, the urgency of a character like, say, John Wick. Again, this is on purpose, but still. I did really, really appreciate a man at odds with his own reality, feeling trapped in it, locked into it, while seeing beyond it and feeling the madness of being so out-of-sync. As a human and an artist. This rang really true, given our current Pandemic Reality, which itself feels like a modal we can’t escape.

I also like that Keanu is a little looser, loopier in this. He’s more… well, Keanu.

Fuck yeah, Trinity. God Carrie Anne Moss is great.

Neil Patrick Harris owns again.

Groff, too, nails it, though he sometimes leaned into a Smith-like cadence, but then by the end of the movie seems to have forgotten it.

I’ve had some people ask me about the queerness or transness of this film, and I am 100% sure I am not the person to be deciding that. I am glad for Lana Wachowski and her vision, is what I can say.

They all wear sunglasses and it’s really obvious and I think that’s the movie literally making fun of itself, which both works and also feels clumsy.

I cannot stress enough how much the action scenes left me bored. Punches didn’t feel like punches, bullets felt like… I dunno, spitballs, it all felt weightness both narratively and in its impact. The fights in the first film are impactful, visceral, and this has really lost that. On the one hand, it showed me you can do a Matrix movie without any of the fight scenes, but also, the first three films are often predicated on having the DNA of Kung Fu movies, and this… did not, so it felt jarring.

JFC that Merovingian scene, one of the more irritating characters from the sequels shows up again? And is also annoying? And his exiles look like they’re from Spielberg’s Hook. Another huge fight scene that felt random and more like an obstacle in the narrative rather than something with necessity and urgency behind it. Obligatory. Almost an uncanny valley version of a fight scene.

Fuck yeah, Neo-Morpheus. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, baby. Those suits! Those suits.

David Mitchell, Lana Wachowski, and Aleksander Hemon created a helluva script.

Anyway.

That’s it.

YMMV.

Merry happy holidays. Buy my books or I die.