That there is some snake skin.

I remember seeing my first snake when I was a kid — I was maybe six, wandering through the woods and fields behind my house, and my father was nearby but out of sight. I stumbled upon a rotten, hollowed-out stump, and sitting in the middle of that stump was a garter snake. I lost my shit. I fucking screamed like I had just seen someone get murdered. But I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed with fear. That, or TRANSFIXED BY OPHIDIAN HYPNOSIS. Either/or.

Regardless, by father came running, certain that I was about to be eaten by a Yeti or something, but turns out, nope, just a li’l ol’ garter snake. He picked it up and showed it to me and it was of course harmless, and I wasn’t scared of snakes anymore. My kid has none of that fear that I possessed — because the other day, when I lifted up a stone, I found this fancy fellow:

It’s a milk snake.

(insert “my milksnake scares all the boys from the yard” joke here)

Folks around here tend to confuse them for copperheads, but we don’t get many (or even any) copperheads in this part of Pennsyltucky. We do get snakes people think are copperheads, like milk snakes and water snakes, and then they flip out and behead them with shovels or dispatch them with rifles because people are unnaturally scared of snakes, even though snakes are amazing and do a lot of good pest control work that would cost you a lot of money if you asked a human being to do it. (Sneks don’t care about your capitalism, yo.)

Anyway, this little snakey-fella or snakey-lady was underneath the stone, and B-Dub was like, oooooh, and he wanted to get close and look at it. So we did, within reason, without spooking the thing too terribly much. I got off a pic and then gently replaced the rock.

Days later, we found its skin.

(Another snap:)

And B-Dub kept the skin in a jar that also contains about two dozen cicada skins and some dragonfly and butterfly wings, and if he were an adult it would look like the kind of thing a serial killer keeps, but it’s a pretty cool jar. You can rattle his creepy cicada jar and it makes a sound:

THE WHISPER-RASP OF DEAD FLESH.

WHAT PRECIOUS NECROMUSIC.

Point of the story is, what? I dunno. Don’t be scared of snakes, I guess, because SNEKS BE COOL.

Also, though, there is a transformative element to a snake shedding its skin, and that leads me into the next question, where I ask you about THIS VERY BLOG.

The blog numbers here are waaaaay down.

This is not an exaggeration when I say November of last year (cough cough election time) came and went, and after it, my views went over a cliff. My purely anecdotal feeling on this is that it has less to do with what I’m posting and more to do with what’s going on in the world. People, to my delight, seem to be reading more actual articles and fewer ding-dong bloggers (cough cough like me), and given that humans only have so much reading time in them in a given day, one suspects that some more casual reading (cough cough terribleminds) may have fallen sacrifice to that. Plus, sometimes I’ll post something I think is cool, and ten minutes later, it’s all BREAKING NEWS: EL PRESIDENTE SEEN HIDING IN VLADIMIR PUTIN’S UNDERWEAR DRAWER or BREAKING NEWS: REPUBLICANS GATHER TOGETHER IN SECRET SORCEROUS CEREMONY TO SACRIFICE THE LAST UNICORN IN ORDER TO DISMANTLE THE FINAL SACRED PROTECTIVE LOCKS OF OBAMACARE, THUS DOOMING THEIR CONSTITUENTS TO WORSE AND MORE EXPENSIVE HEALTH CARE. Or just BREAKING NEWS: SHIT’S ON FIRE AGAIN. Eyeballs naturally flit toward the news, which these days is effectively a stock ticker that doesn’t track stock prices, but rather the highs and lows of our collective social anxieties.

So, it leaves me feeling like — well, what the hell do I do?

Seems I have a handful of options, and I’m happy to hear your thoughts on these, so feel free to swing your way down into the comments and add your two pennies:

a) Fuck it, blog less, turn this into a mostly promotional vehicle.

b) Fuck it, blog the same as I do now, because ultimately I don’t blog for eyeballs but because I cannot contain the stupid thoughts that exist inside my head so I might as well purge them here — even though I kinda pay a bit of a premium to host this sucker.

c) Turn it to a Patreon-kinda-gig.

d) Change the blog material — less writery stuff, more othery stuff (recipes, rants, whatever).

e) SHUT IT ALL DOWN

f) I dunno, cat pictures or something, even though I don’t have a cat.

Admittedly, some of my reduced blog numbers are because subscriptions are strong — over 6k subscribing means those people don’t need to “hit” the blog everyday to see what’s here. And guest posts seem to be holding their numbers, which is nice. Still, I get the overall feeling that engagement here is lower, and that coincidentally happened right around November.

If you have thoughts, pop ’em below.

OKAY BYE

Your job this week is easy-peasy, oh-so-sleazy–

(Okay, not that sleazy.)

Go into the comments, come up with a title* comprising five words.

Not four.

Not six.

Not one.

Five words exactly.

Pop that sucker in the comments, and next week I’ll grab ten of them and that’ll form the basis of the challenge the following week. Get it? Got it? Good. Due by next Friday, noon.

Ramblers, let’s get ramblin.

* a title = one title, not several, thanks

The post title alone is one of the greatest things ever. Great in part because it’s true. I think of what I Google for research every single day, and I’m sure I’m currently being surveilled by drone. Laura Lam kicks ass here in this guest post talking about the research that went into her newest — Shattered Minds — and why she should probably expect SWAT to come kicking in her door any minute now.

* * *

In retrospect, I have no idea why I wrote a near future corporate espionage hacking thriller when I myself knew absolutely nothing about hacking. I used to be pretty good with computers back in the early 2000s. I created my own very tween pink and sparkly websites with HTML code typed into Notepad and uploaded via FTP. There’s a few broken remnants scattered on the internet via Wayback which I will never show a living soul. But I let those skills lapse, which is a shame.

When I sold False Hearts in a two-book deal I proposed Shattered Minds, a companion novel set in the same world, a dream drug addicted serial killer thriller with a large emphasis on hacking. I knew lots of books and films are famously bad at depicting hacking realistically, but I also knew I wanted to weave in interesting visuals using VR to hark back to older cyberpunk (and make those scenes more interesting to read about than a few people in a room typing frantically). I’ve researched loads of things outside my realm of experience. This is my fifth published book. I got this, I thought.

Ahahaha. Ahaha. Ha.

Shattered Minds is, to date, the hardest book I’ve written. My protagonist, Carina, is a serial killer addicted to dream drugs who wants to murder everyone around her. I don’t do drugs and I save spiders and take them outside. Not wasps though. Fuck wasps. I hate those things so much that I put them in my VR interface as the AI bugs that swarm and attack anomalies in the code. My love interest (and secondary viewpoint character) Dax is a Shoshone/Newe trans man doctor—again, nothing like me. This book has the most twisted villain, Roz, I’ve written yet. Think Rachel from Orphan Black and you’re not far off. I’d like to hope I’m nothing like her, as she’s pretty damn horrible.

Craft-wise, it was also a new challenge. It’s the first book I’ve written in third person, and it has three viewpoint characters plus two different flashback narratives threaded through. While writing, it felt like a puzzle with a hell of a lot of pieces that wouldn’t fit no matter how much I mashed them together. At about the halfway point, I wondered what the hell I’d gotten myself into and if I should just give the money back to the publishers.

What got me though it? 1. Chocolate. 2. Throwing myself even further into research. Write what you know means drawing on your own experience, but it also means going out and learning a bunch of stuff so you can lie convincingly about it. As a result, I’m probably on a bunch of government watchlists.

Here are some things I googled while writing this book (typed into full sentences rather than Boolean operators etc):

• Female serial killers (with a lot of focus on Aileen Wuornos, even though she’s different to Carina). A couple books I read as a result:

Kelleher, Michael D. & C.L. (1998). Murder Most Rare: The Female Serial Killer. Praeger.

Vronsky, Peter (2004). Serial Killers: The Methods and Madness of Monsters. Harvard University Press.

• Espionage (government and corporate). This led me to a few nonfiction books:

Greenwald, Glen (2014). No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt.

Isaacson, Walter (2014). The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. Simon & Schuster. (Espionage: SM)

Javers, Isaac (2010). Broker, Trader, Solider, Spy: The Secret World of Corporate Espionage. Collins Business.

• Virtual reality hacking

• How long does the heart keep beating after being cut out of a body? (usually just a few seconds)

• How many litres of blood in the human body (1.2 to 1.5)

• How hard is it to slit someone’s throat? (It always seemed really easy on TV/film, wondered if it was—it is better to stab through either side of the throat to hit the carotid artery than slit, but alas, my character didn’t realise this and made a mess)

• How to break into an encrypted company server

• Motivations for blackmail

• Wikileaks and other government leaks

• Corporate leaks

• The difference between sociopaths and psychopaths

• How to choke someone with a sleeper hold (watch your carotid artery, folks)

• Effects of drug addiction on the brain (not good)

• Effects of drug addiction on memory (bad)

• Video of open brain surgery (gross)

These are just the ones I remember off the top of my head. How many watchlists am I on? Probably all of them.

However, some of the best research was done without the magic of Google. I grew up in California but moved to Scotland eight years ago. In 2015, when I was in that halfway-oh-God-it’s-all-broken stage of drafting, I flew back and took a research trip to Los Angeles, wandering around the areas where I’d set scenes in the book and scoping out others. And in terms of hacking, I have a cousin who owns an IT security company with offices in Hawaii and San Francisco. I skyped him a few times and picked his brains and he gave me examples of how well known corporate espionage examples were pulled off and general approaches my characters might take. A lot of it was theoretical as the tech in Pacifica has moved on a lot from how we’d do things now.

The main thing I took away from our conversations was his phrase “there’s no patch on human stupidity.” You can have the best technical system out there, do everything right, but you can’t control a lazy human who writes their password down and hides it in their desk, or can be blackmailed with patriotism, sex, or fear. That’s the approach I took for a lot of the book. Have all the cool sci fi trappings, but focus on the people and their weaknesses and fears rather than the tech. The result is a book with a lot of blood, a fair amount of hacking that hopefully comes off relatively plausible, and a broken group of people just trying to do the right thing. More or less.

Every writer has researched something fairly dodgy. What Google search has likely gotten you on a watchlist?

(Dear NSA and other government officials: we’re writers. Promise.)

* * *

Laura Lam: Website | Twitter

Shattered Minds: Indiebound | Amazon

Scarred by war. In pursuit of truth.

Army veteran True Brighton left the service when the development of robotic helicopters made her training as a pilot obsolete. Now she works at Requisite Operations, a private military company established by friend and former Special Ops soldier Lincoln Han. ReqOp has embraced the new technologies. Robotics, big data, and artificial intelligence are all tools used to augment the skills of veteran warfighters-for-hire. But the tragedy of war is still measured in human casualties, and when True makes a chance discovery during a rescue mission, old wounds are ripped open. She’s left questioning what she knows of the past, and resolves to pursue the truth, whatever the cost.

“…a thrilling novel that lays bare the imminent future of warfare.” —Publishers Weekly starred review

Some novels are hard to write and some novels are really, really hard. The Last Good Man was the latter type, hard-fought from beginning to end. It was also my fourteenth novel. You’d think I would have learned how to do this by now—but every novel presents a different challenge. These are some of the lessons I picked up from The Last Good Man.

Don’t look too far ahead.

I’m a plotter. Before I start a novel, I’ll create a rough (really rough) outline that includes some way of ending the story. So when I say, “Don’t look too far ahead,” I’m not talking about the bare bones of plot, but rather about all the shiny details that will put flesh on those bones.

This is a lesson I have to relearn with every novel. I think for some novelists, the great blank canvas at the start of a project is thrilling in an anything-is-possible way. But for some of us the knowledge that the blank canvas needs to be filled in with great story, compelling characters, and scintillating descriptions is overwhelming and intimidating. So I try not to look too far ahead. I try not to think too hard about all that will be required of me between the beginning and the end because that will only conjure fear: the fear of not living up to the project’s potential, of not being up to the task of bringing to life the work I want to create… and fear is debilitating. Far better to focus on the immediate task, the simple day-to-day accumulation of words.

That’s easy to say, of course, but often it’s hard to do. That’s why…

Sometimes it helps to lie to yourself.

My persistent lie as I was writing The Last Good Man was that this novel was going to be 100,000 words, no more. That’s a good length. Not a doorstop, but plenty of room for story. It’s also easy to measure progress—10,000 words? Hey, I’m already 10% done! (Wow, now that’s a lie so extreme—ignoring all the revision to come—that I shiver.) Still, if bogus cheerleading gets the job done, then cheer away! That’s my philosophy, even though, deep down, I knew this novel was destined to shoot right past that handy 100K mark.

It’s possible to start over while still moving ahead.

Hard-fought, remember? From the start, I was scrabbling through literary badlands, hunting for good words, gathering them up into paragraphs and chapters—but it all felt thin, inadequate, and bland. So, thirty thousand words in, I started over. Sort of.

I’d been writing in past tense, but one day I shifted to present tense and decided I liked the energy of it. So I stuck with it—and that meant I needed to rewrite everything that had come before. In other words, start over.

But I didn’t start over at the beginning. Instead, I spent my mornings writing the new parts in present tense, and then, at the end of the day, I dropped back to the most recent past-tense chapters and rewrote those, working backward toward the beginning.

Why did I work backward? I have no idea! But it worked, and I was far, far happier with the tone of the novel.

Escaping the clutches of the past takes time.

Writing a novel is an emotional process. It’s like being in a relationship. You think, this one is special. You give it your all. You just know it’s all going to work out. Your early readers agree. The reviews come in and it’s all great. Maybe you write another book or two, make it a series. But at some point, it’s over. You have to let go, you have to move on, and that’s not always easy.

My project prior to The Last Good Man was the Red trilogy and I was proud of those books. For a while it looked like the trilogy would be my breakout work…but somehow that didn’t quite happen, and like a bad breakup, it took time to really accept that and to move on, and to let myself connect emotionally with another project. I was over 65,000 words into The Last Good Man before I reached that point. So keep going! It will happen.

Every novel is different, so be prepared to break your own rules.

Every writer is different, for sure. We all have our own methods, our own rules. Since the beginning of time, one of my rules has been don’t show a partial draft to anyone.

Okay. I admit that when required—and it’s been rare in my career—I’ve sent a synopsis and maybe a few thousand words to editor or agent. But I don’t think I’ve ever shared partials with writers groups or critique partners, partly because I’m shy about my unfinished work, but more importantly, it’s my belief that an early draft is a fragile thing. Sharing it is a risk. If an early beta reader tells me that the-story-so-far is boring, or silly, or incomprehensible, or whatever, there’s a good chance I’ll believe them. Self-doubt is always lurking, ready to grow more powerful with the least encouragement. So my philosophy is to finish the story first, then face the beast. Er, I mean my very helpful beta readers.

But with The Last Good Man I reached a point where I was stuck. I’d been struggling with it for months and though I had over 70,000 words I also had two contending protagonists and I still didn’t know whose story it really was—which meant that I didn’t know how to end it. So I broke my rule and sent what I had to my freelance editor, Judith Tarr, who’d worked with me on the Red trilogy. Judy did a terrible thing. She read and responded to the partial in about three days when I wanted to take at least a week off! But her feedback proved to be the turning point. It made me consider more deeply what the novel was about and what the ending might be, and from then on I made swift progress through to the end—which I reached just shy of 140,000 words.

* * *

Linda is a Nebula and Locus-award-winning writer, best known for her high-tech science fiction, including the Red trilogy, a series of near-future military thrillers. The first book in the trilogy, The Red: First Light, was a Nebula and John W. Campbell Memorial-award finalist, and named as a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2015. Her short fiction has appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Nightmare, and several anthologies.

Linda has lived most of her life in Hawaii, where she’s been a writer, a mom, a programmer of database-driven websites, and an independent publisher. She lives with her husband in their long-time home on the island of Maui.

Linda Nagata: Website | Twitter

The Last Good Man: Amazon | Kobo | B&N | iBooks

They say it’s not the fall that kills you.

For Josette Dupre, the Corps’ first female airship captain, it might just be a bullet in the back.

On top of patrolling the front lines, she must also contend with a crew who doubts her expertise, a new airship that is an untested deathtrap, and the foppish aristocrat Lord Bernat, a gambler and shameless flirt with the military know-how of a thimble. Bernat’s own secret assignment is to catalog her every moment of weakness and indecision.

So when the enemy makes an unprecedented move that could turn the tide of the war, can Josette deal with Bernat, rally her crew, and survive long enough to prove herself?

* * *

Math, It’s Not Just for Science Anymore

I’m a scientist, so I already get to use math for all kinds of cool stuff. From multivariate dynamic regression models to a simple count of how many intelligence-boosted rats escaped from the lab this week, math is an essential part of my research.

Until I started The Guns Above, however, I didn’t realize how useful math could be for my writing. With the power of math, I was able to estimate my airship’s carrying capacity, her top speed, the rate of buoyancy lost from various types of battle damage, and the distance to the horizon at any given altitude. Trigonometry even allowed me to draw carefully scaled sketches of airships, people, and other potential targets, so I could stand in my apartment and see them as Mistral‘s crew would, at any arbitrary distance.

Math! Who knew?

Love Is Hell

I love to write. A lot of you love to write, I bet. But, as with any love, there are days you hate it. Some days, writing feels like endless toil. There are days when writing acts distant for no apparent reason, because writing can be a passive-aggressive jerk. Writing is the sort of lover who breaks up with you, then slinks in naked while you’re taking a shower, like nothing happened. You’ll stay up all night with writing and regret it when you have to go to work in the morning. There’ll even be times when you’re trying to focus on something else, but writing won’t stop talking to you no matter how politely you ask.

Simply put, writing is an asshole. Writing steals your money and spends it on stupid things, like another gimmicky book on how to write better, and then it acts like it bought that book for both of you. Writing will take you to heaven and back all day long, but the next morning it’ll be gone without even leaving a note.

Because writing is love, and love is hell.

The Secret to Reader Immersion

In the course of writing The Guns Above, I discovered the secret to keeping readers immersed in a complex, unfamiliar fantasy world. It requires two steps:

1. Research or invent every single possible detail of every single aspect of the world you can think of.

2. Put the absolute minimum of that detail into the book.

For example, I didn’t just research steam engines when I was working out the mechanics of Mistral‘s powerplant. I also considered the history of steam power itself, and what economic and technological forces might have resulted in earlier development of an efficient, powerful steam turbine. I eventually settled on a history in which spitjacks—an obscure, 500-year-old kitchen gadget used to turn meat on a spit—were adapted to power a whole host of convenience and industrial items, such as ventilation fans and powered spinning jennies. The drive to improve power output led to a better understanding of the aerodynamics of fan blades—sadly absent in our world, where we were still mucking about with the piston engine at this point. This understanding hurried the invention of Mistral‘s powerful “steamjack.”

Almost none of that can be found in the final novel, because, while I’m sure it’s absolutely fascinating to the rest of your nerds, you don’t want a page of it interrupting your action scene.

Writing the Damn Thing is Just the Beginning

I started writing The Guns Above in 2013 and finished in 2014. It took until 2017 to see it heading to bookstores. I put more time, work, and effort into the book after I finished it than I did while writing. I suspect this would have been true even if I was one of those freaks of nature who can write a perfect first draft, because there was still the question of publishing, production, and promotion. I knew these would be a big part of the job going in, but I had no idea how big.

This Is What I Want To Do Forever

For the past year and a half, I’ve been sorta-kinda living the life of a pro writer, and there’s a lot to hate about that life.

I know that’s a weird way to follow such a heartwarming heading, but stick with me here. As I write this article, I have no idea how well my book will do. It may be a humiliating failure. This year may prove to be a stain on my resume, forcing me to explain why I neglected my career to chase after a silly childhood fantasy. Or my book may be a success, the opening chapter of a prolific new career as an author. My entire future stands poised over the abyss, ready to fall or fly. Worse still, I may not know whether it’s falling or flying for years, because it can take that long for a debut author to build an audience large enough to pay the rent.

Indeed, with the industry as it stands, many authors are destined to live at the quivering edge of financial viability forever. If I end up in the lost souls room with them, every launch and every reprint will leave me wondering whether I get to continue as an author or be forced, hat in hand, back to a day job. Between sweating sales of the current book, preparing for the launch of the next, trying to get a deal on the one after that, and writing the one after the one after that, I’ll be lucky if I have two days a year that aren’t spent in terror, waiting to see if I still have a career in the morning.

But, then again, wouldn’t it be worth it? Because it would mean I’m a writer in love with writing, and there are few things as wonderful as that.

Robyn Bennis is an author and scientist living in Mountain View, California, where she consults in biotech but dreams of airships. She has done research and development involving cancer diagnostics, gene synthesis, genome sequencing, being so preoccupied with whether she could that she never stopped to think if she should, and systems integration. Her apartment lies within blocks of Moffett Airfield’s historic Hanger One, which once sheltered America’s largest flying machines. The sight of it rising above its surroundings served as daily inspiration while she wrote her debut novel, The Guns Above.

Robyn Bennis: Website

The Guns Above: Indiebound | Amazon

Nobody wants another hot take on yesterday’s marginal-yet-special-yet-still-marginal elections, and yet here I am, with a take as hot as a plate of cold fajita meat. Just the same, I use this space to spout off mouthily — or mouth off spoutily? — and so here I am, doing exactly that.

A thousand things vex me about politics today, and that’s right, I said vex, so you know it’s fucking serious. Politics in America is a mess. There aren’t two Americas — there are three, or ten, or twenty, and it’s made all the worse by having only two parties to represent them. (And no, this is not a plea for more third-parties, because at this point, we can’t figure out two of these groups much else accommodate another gaggle of assholes.) The GOP side is — well, listen, I have no idea what’s going on there. I feel like I’m watching a train barrel down one track toward a cliff. A cliff whose valley below is full of biomedical waste and werewolves. They’re doing this all so ineptly, so indelicately, without any awareness or fear. It’s like I’m witnessing adults running around town hitting babies with hammers and we all know it’s happening and we all know it’s bad — and in theory there will be punishment for the baby-whacking monsters, but they seem to be doing it so brashly, so brazenly, that you’re afraid consequences may not be forthcoming? “Who will save those babies?” we ask. “Will anyone demand justice for the hammerstruck children?” And all of us stand around shrugging. “Hopefully? Shit.”

I’ve posited that the GOP either is:

a) stupid

b) compromised / kompromat

c) greedy

d) aware of something we aren’t, like, say, secret vote hacking

e) in possession of a secret moon base to which they will retire

f) some untasty combination of the above flavors

Because they just keep going. They’ve got Trumpcare, which is somehow less popular than anal cankers, and yet they’re like, YEP, WE’RE FUCKING GOOD, WE’RE GONNA PUT THIS OUT THERE AND WE’RE GONNA VOTE ON THIS GURGLING SHIT BUCKET AND I’M SURE IT’LL BE FINE. Further, they continue to tie themselves to Trump again and again, which feels a lot like trying to ride an elderly bison through quicksand. It’s sinking. The old-ass bison is sinking, get off the bison. Get off the bison, you guys. But they whistle and ki-yaa the bison further and further into the muck. Blissfully ignorant.

So, at this point, I dunno what to think about the GOP, except that it’s fucked up and I’m pretty sure at this point they hate us and will rip off their faces to reveal the reptilian Visitors from the ‘V’ TV show. And even there maybe I’m being too optimistic.

On the other side, the Democrats.

The heart and soul of the Democrats are up for renewal.

They need that, some kind of revival.

Problem is, nobody can agree what that means.

Shit, I don’t know what it means. I have no real answers.

Do the Dems move further left? Maybe, but remember, “left” is less a direction and more a gaggle of subjective principles. Bernie is super liberal, until you realize he’s soft on guns and soft on women’s rights and grouses about identity politics, which makes him economically progressive but not socially progressive. So, do the Dems move away from social and identity politics? Sure, if they don’t mind alienating a fantastic chunk of human real estate called everybody who is not white, cis-male, straight. Do they stress Medicare-for-All instead of Let’s-Make-The-ACA-Work? Do they stress Free College despite that sounding like Dreaded Socialism? Where do they focus their efforts? If they move to the middle, to where much of the country reportedly sits, we view them as too milquetoast, too easy, too middling meh bleh poop noise. Do they focus on climate change? It’s essential, mighty essential, because literally nothing else matters if the seas are boiling and the skies are made of lightning, but climate change isn’t sexy, either. “We need to save our increasingly doomed planet” is starting off on a broken foot. Essential as the message is, hey maybe we won’t die, wow, what a sexy-sexy message, god, I’ve got such a voting boner now that I am reminded that we’re sprinting merrily toward our own extinction!

So then, to the soul of the party —

Not the topics, but how they approach those topics —

Do the Dems embrace a more populist approach?

Do they fight dirty?

Do they finally take the low road?

I see that again and again, this plea to the Democrats, do more, do more, fight more, get nasty, break the rules, fuck the system. And I feel that, too. One day I want Kamala Harris to walk into Congress with a shipping container full of bees that she opens like in that essential Oprah GIF (referenced so neatly at the fore of this post). I want them to throw batteries at Santa. I want to hear, Tammy Duckworth sends her regards just before some serious shit goes down. (Never mind the fact that the problem with this all is, asking the Dems to “do more” before we’ve voted them into power is dishonest, at best.)

At the same time, maintaining decorum and walking the high road is… kinda why we like them, isn’t it? At least a little? We like that they’re the adults in the room. It’s kinda part of their brand — it didn’t used to be a thing you had to say, “Hey, I’m not a diaperbaby who will sell the nuclear codes for a handjob by a winking Russian,” but now, maybe you need to say that. Getting down in the mud with the pigs just makes you another pig. On the other hand, politics has become — or perhaps has always been — a nasty pig-wrestling contest, and you don’t win it by sitting in a nice chair two miles from the mud-hole. You win it in the mud. With the pigs.

And that really is the only thing I think that I know:

Government is complex and full of nuance. Like life. Like most things.

And politics is complicated, too — it’s a filthy, overgrown pubic tangle. It has lice. It has an old lollipop stuck in there. It has early, sinister, truly Satanic drafts of the Constitution tucked up under its snarl, along with the bones of Nicolas Cage from National Treasure.

But people are fundamentally dumb.

I don’t mean individual people.

I just mean people-people. The collective. The aggregate.

An ant colony is as good as its best members. But humanity is only as good as our worst, and we will always have the worst among us. Those people are loud and dumb and they vote.

Politics needs to look simple, for the simpletons. And it needs to look simple even for us smartletons, too, because sometimes we don’t like nuance. Sometimes we want to pretend that everything really is Black and White, Good and Evil.

We don’t want nuance. We don’t want all the fiddly bits.

It comes down to this, I think:

The Democrats are playing a chess game.

The Republicans are running a carnival.

Only problem:

Nobody likes chess, and everybody loves the carnival. I don’t want to watch Knight to Fuckface 4, I want to eat cotton candy and ride the Gravitron until I vomit on a small child. I want to eat fried foods until I shit my pants. It’s not smart. It’s a bad instinct.

But chess is dumb and the carnival is fun.

Trump is a carnival barker.

He gets up there, and he yells and he claps his hands. Clap, clap, clap, yaaaaaay. Look at me, look at me, he says. He tells us, this way to the great egress, and we follow, doo-dee-doo.

The Dems are telling us about their chess moves. They’re explaining to us, in great detail, the many moves they could make — they’re strategy nerds. Min-maxing D&D players. They’ve got decks of Magic cards and deep thoughts about Excel spreadsheets.

And we tune out.

(Okay, I don’t tune out, because I once had a red-blue deck that was aces, man.)

But here’s the trick:

We need that.

We need smart people running this government.

We don’t need carnival barkers. A carnival barker doesn’t run anything. He just looks like the guy who runs the carnival, but really, he’s the guy who convinces you to spend your money at the Games You Can’t Win booth. The carnival barker is a con-man. We love him even as he cons us.

And yet, we also need carnival barkers.

To win elections.

That’s the twofold fuckery of this process — we need someone to both win elections and then run government. Clinton didn’t win the election (though to her credit, she, uhh, won the entire popular vote), but could’ve run the hell out of our government. Trump won the election, but runs the government the way a baby runs a diaper: which is to say, he just cries and fills the white sack around his hip with shit. Trump can’t read a memo that isn’t written on a fridge in magnetic letters, for fuck’s sake — but he could talk, and he could lie, and he could promise the sun and the moon and the sky, all delivered on the backs of coal-crapping taco-bowl-eating bald eagles. Ossoff didn’t win an election because he didn’t have that carnival-barker hook*. Handel did, or at least, had more of it — and the circus of PAC propaganda bought around her filled the gap.

We need someone who sounds like a carnival barker, but who is really a chess player. I don’t know who that is, mind you. I know that Bill Clinton was that guy: a car salesman but also a strategist. Obama was that guy: he had the cadence of a preacher but the mind of a Star Trek captain. I think someone like Kamala Harris has that. Cory Booker, too, maybe. And here I’m not even getting into their politics or their platforms, only who they are and if they have that right sausage mix of charisma-and-cleverness. I don’t know. I don’t know a damn thing**, honestly, except that I’m ready to find a cave to live in until either the world blows up or voters come to their senses. I do know that all of us, of each party, is looking for the heart-and-soul of who we are and where we want to be, and until we find it, until we find both unity inside our groups and unity between the groups, this train is gonna continue toward the cliff. And if we’re not careful, we’ll all be drinking biomedical waste as we’re getting mauled by werewolves.

Good luck to us all.

Fight on. Find our heart, find our soul.

Resist.

* okay, Ossoff also didn’t win because of gerrymandering and dirty tricks, which is to say, more con-artist chicanery, and we need to address that shit post-haste, lest it keep on happening — and maybe this speaks to the ace that the GOP have up their sleeve — they can continue to play dirty and we expect it and worse, we allow it.

** I know nothing, Jon Snow, except the fact that if you were only able to change one thing ever about our political system, the biggest thing is not climate change, but rather, Getting Money Out Of Politics — the moment you stop money from literally purchasing the affections of our politicians and the system, the sooner we can start having uncorrupted efforts to make things better for all and not just better for the selfish motherfuckers holding the biggest checkbooks.