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February 21, 2011 / 36 Comments

Storytelling And The Art Of Sadness

Sadness is not a particularly jazzy topic, is it? It’s actually rather enervating. You bring up “sadness” and it’s not like — “Whoo! Haha! Fucking yes. Wendig is talking about sadness! Grief? Regret? Sorrow? Loss? Uhh, hello — yes, yes, yes and yes. Hot diggity dog! This is like an amusement park ride inside my brain!”

*rad guitar lick*

*fills pants with the effluence of joy*

Who the fuck wants to talk about sad shit? Blech. I don’t know what day it is in your house, but it’s Monday all up in mine, and on Monday, I’d much rather be looking forward to more delightful topics: “Yesterday, I had a wonderful spot of tea with a particularly irascible leprechaun and his wombat steed! The finger sandwiches were made of children’s laughs! Unbridled wonder and pegasus dreams!”

Alas. It just ain’t to be. Because today I want to talk about sadness in storytelling.

I’m going to say something now — a thing that is unproven and only barely thought of (shut up, it’s Monday, I can hardly feel my legs), but slosh it around your brain-mouth, see how it tastes:

At the heart of every good story lurks sadness.

I’ve talked in the past about a story’s “emotional core” (in a post where I also refer to it as the “narrative vagina”), but here I’m wondering if the emotional core has a core all its own — like the black cyanide seeds at the heart of an apple — and that core is composed of raw, unfiltered sadness.

I don’t mean to suggest that sadness lurks at the heart of only sad stories — to that, I offer an exclamatory “duh!” and I roll my eyes and make jerk-off motions with both my hands, to which you then say, “Chuck, both hands? That’s overkill, don’t you think?” And I nod gamely and then cry into my big heaping bowl of Frankenberry cereal. (This should at least explain why my beard is both pink and milky.)

What the fuck was I talking about?

Oh! Right. Sadness doesn’t merely lurk at the heart of sad stories, but rather, at the heart — the heart’s heart — of all stories. Or, at least, all good ones. The sadness needn’t be overt or outright. It doesn’t have to be the driving force behind a protagonist’s goals and desires, but it feels like it should still be there, behind the scenes. Let’s take two films that are not ostensibly sad and find the sadness in them.

First up: DIE HARD.

Die Hard is not what anybody would call a “sad movie,” unless you’re someone who gets choked up at the needless loss of yet another charming, smarmy German terrorist-thief. Ultimately, it’s a tense, kick-ass, high-octane and sometimes hilarious action movie. It is, in some ways, the Big Daddy of all actioners.

And yet, I posit that at the heart of the film nests a squirming knot of sadness.

Think about the motivations behind the protagonist: John McClane hasn’t seen his wife in a while because they are ultimately distant and estranged. They have children who are with her, not him. He’s a guy who’s too good at his job, and she’s a lady who’s too good at hers, and we get the sense that only some kind of cataclysmic movement is going to shatter their pride and get these two crazy kids back together.

Holy shit, that’s fucking sad, man. Isn’t it? Broken marriage? Disrupted family? The sadness is only exacerbated when their first meeting ends with a fight which is in turn interrupted by, ohhh, a bunch of cranky Germans with automatic weaponry.

Then you have Powell, who is a sad sack if ever there was one. He’s not pathetic, not exactly, but his story is tragic: he shoots a kid, ends up at a desk afraid to use his gun, gets fat, is played mostly as comic relief until we realize at the heart of this underdog is a goddamn police dog — loyal and ready to come off the leash.

Note that the story doesn’t have to end on sadness — I’m just saying that sadness has to be in there, it has to be in the mix, it has to live at the very nucleus of your fiction.

Second not-sad-but-secretly-actually-sad: STAR WARS.

Sure, sure, at it’s heart is a giddy yahoo space opera galactic romp across the Cosmic Wild West, but goddamn, you peel back the skin and you find a lot of sadness in there across both trilogies: in the “first” movie (A New Hope), we’re punched in the face by sad news time and time again. Dead father (who, okay, isn’t so much dead as he is evil machine guy)! Crispy aunt and uncle! Exploding Alderaan! Tortured princess! Sacrificial mentor! Porkins asplodes into bacon bits! The other films don’t lack for sadness, either: Daddy issues, dead Yoda, murdered children, lost limbs, executed Jedi, a mother who gets… I dunno, molested by Sand People, and so on, and so forth. Sadness runs rampant.

Shit, the very end of Return of the Jedi features what is ultimately a happy triumph over evil, but even buried in that is a deeply sad and common human experience: a son’s death-bed reconciliation with his estranged father. Yes, the reconciliation is ultimately a positive thing, but it is an event supercharged with the power of regret and grief. Makes you blubber and weep.

Sadness is a powerful storytelling component.

So. What does this mean for you, the storyteller?

I think it means this: when you embark upon a story, you should ask yourself, “What sadness lurks at the heart of this tale?” Find it. Dig for it. If none exists, create it. It’s a fucked up thing we have to do — manufacturing sadness — but it’s ultimately as necessary to good fiction as conflict. In fact, one might wonder if sadness is the secret impulsion that fuels good narrative conflict.

Find the sadness. And keep looking for it as you write, too. Nothing is more powerful to us than grief and loss — we then look to the storyteller to answer a fundamental question of, can we overcome it, or will it overcome us? What can be done with sadness? How will we ever reconcile grief and tragedy?

What I’m trying to say is —

Happy Monday, everyone!

(Feel free to throw more examples below in the comments — or, alternately, challenge the assertion. Is sadness really a necessary component to good storytelling? Or am I just talking out of my ass?)

February 20, 2011 / 43 Comments

The Carnival Of Pimpage Is Open

As noted yesterday in my missive of squawks and hoots, I think it’s important to use the Internet for good as well as evil. Here, then, is another expression of that.

Put on your pimp hat (mine is denim fringe). Whip out your pimp cane (mine is topped with a golden dodo skull). Slip on your pimp slippers (mine are made from the hide of a rare lavender ermine who, as a baby ermine, was fed a constant diet of smooth jazz). Because it’s time to do some pimping.

I want you to pimp somebody or something.

Not yourself. Not one of your own projects.

The work of another. A blog post. A book. A game. A tweet.

Or, if not their work, fuck it, just say something awesome about somebody. Regale the world with tales, tales about your pimp target’s kind ways, tremendous hands, humorous outlook, and truly magnificent genitals.

I will use my time on the pimp floor to point you once more to author Robert McCammon.

McCammon is why I write.

I won’t sit here and regale you with an obsequious soliloquy of why he will rock your eyeface because, frankly, I already did that shit (no, seriously, blog post right here).

I’ll merely note this: the man, once retired from writing because the industry tried to pigeonhole him, is back with new books that you damn well better pre-order.

First up: THE FIVE, his first true horror novel in a while, about a rock band? And an Iraq war vet? Not sure where it goes from there, but if it’s from McCammon, it’s going to get twisted. You can pre-order the book over at Subterranean Press.

Second up: THE HUNTER IN THE WOODS revisits the Nazi-killing werewolf spy, Michael Gallatin in a series of short stories and novellas. (If you haven’t read the novel featuring Gallatin, THE WOLF’S HOUR, do that immediately or be cast out of my drum circle.) Once again, you can pre-order this collection over yonder hills at Subterranean Press.

This is actually also a good time to note that Subterranean Press has an impressive list of other pre-orders, which features kick-ass writers such as Ray Bradbury, China Mieville, John Scalzi and Joe Lansdale. They are one of my favorite small publishers.

So, there you go. The pimp-doors are open.

Pimp-walk your ass inside and get to pimpin’.

February 19, 2011 / 15 Comments

How We Speak On The Internet Matters

Yesterday, Will Hindmarch — a writer, game designer and thinker I respect dearly — said something smart on Twitter (which for him is not uncommon). He said, “I think how you write something makes a difference, especially when you’re doling out writing and creative advice.”

This is somewhat perpendicular to another meme that’s going around, which is a question over the value of negativity on these here frothy Intertubes. Lots of questions abound: can critique find a healthy place on the Internet? Is there any value to negative reviews? Should negative reviews be constructive instead of destructive? Should we build up and not tear down? Should we be, as the saying goes, a fountain, not a drain? (Related reading: “Don’t You Like Anything?” At the Seven Keys of Ventoozlar.)

I say these two points are perpendicular because I think they hit an intersection point. (They hit this intersection point after dodging all the rampant pornography, Justin Bieber fan pages, Justin Bieber hate pages, political rhetoric, and funny YouTube videos where some skateboarder accidentally skateboards his way into the whirring turbine of a 747 airliner — this is, after all, the Internet and the Internet is home to 90% Alice In Wonderland-style nonsense and madness and maybe 10% of sane, semi-rational discourse.)

The intersection of those two ideas, for me, really ends up with: how we speak on the Internet matters.

It matters when you’re talking about writing or game design advice.

It matters when you’re offering critique or review.

It matters when you’re writing dumb-ass crazy person blog posts like I do, here.

It matters on Twitter. It matters on Facebook. It just plain matters.

At first I was going to say that all this remains especially true for creators: after all, our value is in what we create, and we can only give the world our creations if the world wants them, and the world may not want our shit if they think we’re just a gaggle of blustery fuckwipes. (“Blustery Fuckwipes” is not the name of my band, my album, my first novel, or my autobiography. It is the name of my pet ferret, who wears goggles and an aviator’s hat. “Blustery Fuckwipes,” I say, “Take us to to Mach Speed so that we may catch the Chartreuse Baron in his Sopwith Ultra-Thousand!” No, I don’t know. Shut up.) But it’s not just true for us. It’s true for everybody. Everybody is selling something. Everybody is looking for work. For friends. For loved ones. For something. And how we speak on the Internet has an effect on all of that.

In this day and age, the Internet isn’t just a reasonable facsimile of real life but rather, a substitute for it. People spend as much time online as they do off of it, and while that merits a whole other discussion, it doesn’t change the reality that a great deal of our social discourse is here. It’s not outside our doors. It’s on our computer monitors. The people online aren’t avatars or characters. They’re actual human beings like the same blubbery skin-bags you see at the grocery store or the malt shoppe or the dildo emporium.

Now, I think the knee-jerk response to this revelation is a kind of paranoid uncertainty (which I’ve felt keenly in the past) — “I shouldn’t present a strong opinion because then I’ll make people mad.” But that’s not it, either. Because our opinions are important. Whether it’s about a movie we saw or about labor unions or abortion or the publishing industry or whatever, our opinions frame us and tell the world who we are.

So no, I don’t think we should be afraid of critique or review, nor do I think we should be afraid of having opinions or giving advice. I just think that how we convey that matters. The message matters most, but what that message purports to be — what supposed truth it delivers — can’t matter if it’s poorly put forth.

Here’s an example, then, of how it matters:

Yesterday, Colleen Lindsay called me and said that she wanted to talk to me about taking a look at her Sekrit Projekt. She said, right off the bat, that she wanted to connect with me because she thought that I was funny and fairly upbeat and — well, wasn’t a constant wearer of Internet Cranky Pants. Now, I’ll grant that some of you might be furrowing your brow — after all, I’m the guy who says things like Why Your Self-Published Book Might Suck A Bag Of Dicks. Or, PC Gaming Can Punch A Baby Seal. I’m not Doctor Thumbs-Up over here. I’m not Joe Smileynuts. That being said, I do endeavor to put forth a certain attitude in even my most extreme rhetoric — an attitude that aims to be self-deprecating, imperfect, funny, and that allows room for me to be the wrong-headed asshole. I have strong opinions, but I do not try to present those strong opinions as if they are also bulletproof. Do I misstep? Sure. I strive to do better.

Anyway. Them’s my Saturday morning rambles. For a long time I kind of worried that strong opinions were the concern, but I’m coming to terms that having opinions isn’t the problem, but rather, it’s how we give those opinions out. We can pitch them at people’s heads like frozen shit-balls, or we can make some effort to deliver them so that they don’t put out somebody’s eye in the process.

This is all of course provided your opinion isn’t, “I like to stomp babies” or “I loathe Algerians and I think we should institute a pogrom.” Some opinions won’t hold water no matter how nicely you frame them.

(To go back to the beginning, I assume that Will was referring in some way to this post that asserts that game designers are somehow playtesting incorrectly, as if such a thing were possible. I read that article and to me, it’s very much an example of what I’m talking about. It felt pedantic and cranky. I found a few snidbits of wisdom in there, but I had to read it a couple times just to get past the bad attitude. It’s like hiding pretty little pearls in a bucket filled with thorns and snakes. Don’t make me reach in there to find your wisdom because that does nothing to earn anybody’s respect.)

February 18, 2011 / 9 Comments

“I Don’t Drink Anymore”

This is my own entry into the SHACKLETON’S SCOTCH flash fiction challenge I posed yesterday. You… are going to get in on this challenge, right? You know you want to.

She stands outside the brownstone under sodium light.

The bruises have begun to fade. The cuts – on her lips and chin, across her brow, on her hands – have long-crusted over. She’s going to have the limp for a while, but oh well.

The case in her hands is heavy. But worth it. Because it’s her way back in.

Jack answers the door. Is he happy to see her? Or just puzzled?

“Amanda,” he says.

“I know you love Scotch,” is the first thing to come out of her mouth even though she hasn’t seen him for years, and she thrusts the case up and hopes he’ll take it. “This isn’t just Scotch, though, this is the real deal, a, a, a really rare…” She’s nervous. She shouldn’t be nervous. Given everything. But she imagines the kiss—their first in a long time, the first since everything happened.“I went through a lot to get it for you.”

* * *

The spider monkey screamed and kicked her in the face, sending up a spray of sweat.

Another leapt onto her back, hooting and shrieking.

Amanda grabbed the one from behind, used him like a reaper’s scythe to knock the other monkey’s feet out from under, letting go as she completed the move so they both bowled into one another. They crashed into the corner of the courtyard, knocking over a terracotta pot of reedy Cyperus papyrus. The pair of gangly primates clambered atop one another, hissing, and in the deep of their throats she saw the winking red light.

“What is it you want?” Kebir said, stroking the fennec fox that stood on his bony left shoulder the way an angel might perch on a pin. The gun in his hand pointed at her heart.

“I want Delacroix,” she said.

Kebir crossed the space between them. He pressed the gun between her breasts.

“But you don’t know where he is.”

“I know he’s here. In Tangiers.”

Kebir smiled. His gums were puckered and pulled away from the teeth. “If only I would tell you where.”

His eyes went wide as he realized: Amanda had the khanjar knife with its camel bone handle against Kebir’s manhood. Kebir sighs.

“…Delacroix is beneath Benhaddou.”

* * *

“It looks… old,” Jack says. He doesn’t take the case. Her arms tremble.

“It’s not just old. It’s rare.” She smiles. “Rarest of the rare. Like you. Like us.”

* * *

She had Delacroix by his wife-beater, her knee in his pumpkin gut, his blubbering head held over a yawning chasm. Beneath him, giant stone gears boomed and growled as they turned. Stones tumbled into the abyss, swiftly pulverized by the hungry cogs.

“You know what I want!” she yelled over the din.

“I don’t have it! I told you! Please.”

Behind them, streams of sand whispered from above: a shard of earth tumbled and shattered. The bodies of the robot soldiers lay half-buried.

The whole place was coming down. All the trip-wires and trigger stones. Leading to this. But she wasn’t going to think about that now.

“Who?” she asked. “Who.”

“Krüger! I sold it to Krüger.” He wept. It gave her pause, this grown man crying so. It was all he needed. His pudgy hand shot out, grabbing a fistful of sand and throwing it in her eyes. Amanda toppled from his prodigious body, her vision watery, blinking away the stinging sand-born tears, and by the time she could again see, Delacroix was ducking down a hidden side-passage, the wall closing fast behind him.

It didn’t matter. She had a name. And it explained so much. The monkeys. The robots.

* * *

He isn’t taking it. She doesn’t understand.

“It’s really been a long time,” he says. He looks then over his shoulder. What is he looking for? She imagines making love to him again. How sweet it will be.

* * *

Krüger danced around the room with the eyedropper, pirouetting this way, waltzing that way. He tilted his handsome head back, extending his tongue, and then placed a drop of amber liquid there. Krüger was like a child catching snowflakes. He laughed.

Then: a tap-shuffle-slide over to his wall of super-soldiers. Nine of them. Each a Frankenstein stitching of flesh, plastic, and metal. Krüger grabbed the jaw of one, yanking it downward. He squeezed the eyedropper’s bulb and dropped a liquid dot in the soldier’s mouth.

Slowly, the cyborg’s eyes opened and focused. The half-man shifted in his bonds.

Krüger sashayed to the next in line, whistling.

But he didn’t make it. The butt of a rifle cracked him in the back of the head.

He looked up from the ground. Amanda eased the mouth of the .30-30 against his throat.

“You look like hell,” Krüger said.

She did. Split lip. Blood from a forehead gash. Worse, she still had the limp from escaping the collapsing tomb beneath Aït Benhaddou. Krüger’s tower defenses were top-notch.

“I’m taking Shackleton’s Scotch,” she said.

“Without it, how will I fuel my beautiful babies?”

She shrugged. “You won’t. I need it for someone.”

“Do I see love in your eye?”

That old romantic. “You do.”

“Then you may have it.” He laughed, but then suddenly yelled: “Kill her!”

The super-soldier puffed out his chest, snapping the metal bar holding him in place. The cyborg screamed, a metallic wail—

Bang.

Amanda put a bullet in his eye.

The cyborg fell like a stack of teacups.

Krüger looked crushed. “Sorry,” she told him, then kicked him in the face.

* * *

“I don’t drink anymore,” Jack says, retreating a step.

“No, wait,” she says, laughing because this suddenly seems so absurd. “This is Shackleton’s Scotch. Lost. Preserved in the Antarctic ice for 100 years. Nobody else is going to taste this. Nobody but you and me.” She feels her heart sink. “You love Scotch.”

The door opens behind him. A little girl no older than three runs out—all pigtails and footy pajamas and freckle-cheeks—and hugs his leg. “Daddy, Daddy, story-time!”

“It really has been a long time,” he says again, and she’s not sure if it’s an apology or an explanation or what. But then he retreats another step, and another, and he and the little girl go back inside and the door closes with a gentle, hesitant click.

“I love you,” Amanda says to the door. She leaves the case on the steps.

February 17, 2011 / 52 Comments

Shackleton’s Scotch: A Flash Fiction Challenge

This is the stuff that flash fiction is made of, kids.

Your reading material: “Explorers’ Century-Old Whisky Found In Antarctic.”

When Ernest Shackleton abandoned the trip 100 miles from its completion, he left behind his whisky. And they just found it. Someone’s going to drink it. They might even try to replicate it.

It’s an awesome story all by itself.

But seems to me that from this seed-bed of awesomeness can grow a kick-ass tale.

So, you’ve got 1000 words.

The story should be in some way directly or obliquely tied to the notion of “Shackleton’s Scotch.”

Doesn’t matter if the story is genre or otherwise. Just make it awesome.

Write it up on your own personal bloggery-spaces, then toss the link here in the comments.

No prize. No voting. Just write a kick-ass flash fiction tale because you want to write a kick-ass flash fiction tale. If you’re asking yourself why do it… well, nobody’s making you. But this is a good place to reveal your fiction and show off some skills. Also a good place to forge community and connections — not in a professional exploitation way but in the, “Hey, I’ve never read your stuff before, it’s awesome, I want to have your word babies” way.

You’ve got one week. We’ll revisit this topic next Friday (2/25), see what came up and out of your diseased little minds. Jump right in with both feet. Shackleton’s Scotch.

Go.

February 17, 2011 / 73 Comments

Time To Talk About The Thing About That Teacher

This is what I imagine it’s like to be a teacher in America:

It’s like trying to bring God to the apes. You don’t descend into their habitat but rather, ship the apes by bus to you. There, you try illuminate the apes — or chimps, or orangutans — and deliver wisdom unto them, but let’s be honest: apes don’t give a grunting squat about God or any illumination you aim to give them. They’re apes, for Chrissakes. They just want to fling shit and pick ticks and eat bananas and ball each other. Because they are apes. And so day in, day out, you try your hardest to “get through” to these ooking primates, and every once in a while you manage to connect with one and you think, “That one, that one may just evolve into higher creature.” But for the most of the time, you’re just scrubbing ape poop out of your hair and trying to remember exactly which one of them taught the others to play with matches. After a few years of this, you’re either a hardened cynic, a battle-torn skeptic, a who-gives-a-shit-laissez-faire pacifist or a twitching pee-stained educator with ape-caused Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I say this having been one of those apes.

I was a pretty good student and, frankly, not that bad of a kid. Even still, school kinda sucked. I didn’t want to be there. Few of my fellow students wanted to be there. Already that’s a barrier for the teacher: even your best and brightest students would rather be anywhere else in the world.

So, I’m sympathetic to teachers. I do not doubt that it can be rewarding, and I also know that some teachers in this area get paid pretty well (too well, if you read and believe all the angry “We Hate Teachers” signs), but even still, anybody who would paint for you a picture that teaching is some kind of joyous cakewalk has never washed chimpanzee vomit out of their knickers.

And so we come to this news story.

Basic gist: teacher writes a mostly anonymous blog about all kinds of stuff and sometimes writes about educational woes — she calls out (not by name) whiny, lazy kids and their buddy-buddy parents. Someone (a parent?) finds the blog, casts it far and wide, brings it to the attention of the school board and principal, and wham, the teacher is escorted from the building and may end up getting fired.

Do I think her blog was the best idea? No, I guess not.

Do I think she’s wrong? Ehhh. No, no, I do not.

I am not a teacher. I do not spend day in and day out with kids. But this teacher? She teaches at my old high school. I remember what we shitheads were like back then, and I wouldn’t blame the teachers for getting all frowny-faced about us. And for fear of sounding like an old man (kids today with their video music and their cocaine hoverboards!), I think kids today are a lot worse than when I was a brash young snotwipe.

I suspect that kids seem worse today because my generation of aforementioned brash young snotwipes are having kids, and given how most generations are watered-down piss-poor facsimiles of their elders, well, this isn’t good news. I go out in public too often and where once I saw parents being parents to their children — because they are children — I now see parents locked in weak-kneed negotiations. We were in Hawaii and we were at this lighthouse slash bird sanctuary and these parents come up with their poor little squalling toddler who is throwing an epic mega ultra shit-fit… and what was their response?

It was not:

a) To soothe the child by making parental soothing noises — “Shhh. Shhh.”

b) To be firm and disciplined — “Stop crying or I give your sister to the gulls.”

It was, instead:

c) To say, “If you don’t stop crying, we’re going to have to begin a timeout situation.”

What the fuck does that mean? I’m sorry, are you trying to use adult logic and terminology to calm a blubbering toddler? Has that worked in any universe? Are you negotiating? What the crap is “we’re going to have to begin a timeout situation?” Hell, that wouldn’t even calm me down, and I’m in my mid-30s. You tell me that, I will kick you into the ocean.

The toddler didn’t stop because the toddler had no idea what Daddy was even saying. No, the end result was that the toddler kept crying and the parents didn’t even make good on their vaguely-worded, generic threat — they just brought the kid to the lighthouse, tantrum-be-damned. Meaningless threat. Zero consequence.

It feels like some parents never want to admit their kids are, y’know, kids. Imperfect in many ways. They’d much rather spend time defending them (and by proxy, their parenting skills) rather than by correcting problems. When something went goofy when I was a kid, my parents did not rush to my defense. They wanted to know what the hell I did wrong. You know why they did that? Because I probably did some stupid shit. I did stuff wrong all the time! Because I was a kid!

A dumb, chimpy, hormone-addled lackwit.

I’m not saying that parents should be backhanding their kids down the cellar steps or that the only answer is tough love and no compassion — I think parents should stand by their children when it is called for and I think parents should be sympathetic to the fact that being a kid kind of blows. But that doesn’t mean defending bad behavior. That doesn’t mean kissing their ass. That doesn’t mean doing their work for them, or excusing their worst instincts or training them to be entitled little jerk-mongers. (Yes, a “jerk-monger” is one who sells jerks at the market. Shut up, you.)

Ten, twenty years ago, a teacher who called out her students like that would’ve stirred the same shit-bloom of shame, except some of that shame would be reserved for the kids who caused it. Parents would go to their kids and ask, “Are you giving Mrs. So-And-So a hard time? Are you? Is it you she’s talking about? Goddamnit, don’t make me slap the homework of your mouth.” Nowadays, parents see this and they immediately rush to bury the teacher because — let’s be honest — she’s telling the truth and they can’t bear the sting of reality carping on about their bullshit parenting.

Do I think the teacher’s attitude is totally awesome? No, probably not. But is it dishonest? Sure ain’t. And in teaching, and in raising our kids — and actually, in practically all levels of American discourse — the one thing we could use more of in our mouths is a fist full of honest medicine.

Then again, what the hell do I know? I am neither parent (yet) nor teacher.

Curious to hear your thoughts on this whole mess. Chime in if you so feel like it.

And no, I’m not talking about all parents, and I’m probably not talking about you, so don’t get offended. I mean, okay, you’re allowed to get offended, I wouldn’t be mad at you for that, but seriously: not worth it.