Just a li’l head’s up: my computer has fritzed the fuck out. General consensus is, a failure of the logic board (a metaphor for this whole country, if you ask me) — but for our purposes let’s just imagine a robot whose square head is barfing sparks from every orifice, and then it falls into a bed, and then it shits that bed. (Relax, robot shit is just a sudden shotgun clatter of rusty gears. Embarrassing for them, but a mild curiosity for us meatbags.)

So, forgive me if you need something right now — I’m going to be a little slow to see and deal with. (I’m working on my iPad, which actually does surprisingly okay as a computer replacement, especially with Word on it. But it’s not all the way there.)

BUT BUT BUT

Hey, here’s a cool thing —

The cover to YOU CAN DO ANYTHING, MAGIC SKELETON, has popped up online at Rizzoli Books, if you care to see it. Having a hard time dropping in the graphic, but you can see the book cover and the description of it here. The words are by me, the art is by the amazing Natalie Metzger — really, my words are a very silly part of this book, but the art? THE ART. The art! I can’t wait you to see the various possums, or the sharks, or the wolf container? Seriously, don’t buy it for my shenanigans. You’re gonna want it for the art.

OKAY THAT’S IT FOR NOW.

More soon, when I’m less technologically hobbled!

Psst. PSST. If you were looking to get hold of a big-ass bison bludgeoner of a book but didn’t want the actual physical book with which to bludgeon bisons*, then I note that the book is available on Kindle today for a mere TWO BUCKS and NINETY-NINE PENNIES, except these are digital pennies, because real pennies are apparently in shortage. But at the very least, it’s an 800 page book, so you’re getting some narrative bang for your electronic buck. Epic sci-fi horror! Warning: may contain pandemic and also I may have accidentally predicted some parts of our future. (Kidding, the stuff I predicted was stuff we all knew was coming, because the call was coming from inside the house this whole damn time, which is why it’s particularly execrable that our “””president””” decided to undercut and undo every protection we had against coming catastrophe.)

Here’s the link.

Though of course if you still want it in print, there’s Indiebound and Bookshop.org.

Or, check it out through your local library.

There is a content warning, and I’ve concealed it behind a ROT13 filter so that those who desire the warning can simply unscramble it by c/p’ing the encrypted text into the window at rot13.com.

Pbagrag jneavat: fhvpvqny vqrngvba, fhvpvqr, gbegher, enpvfz naq ovtbgel, qvfphffvbaf bs zragny urnygu naq zragny vyyarff, tha ivbyrapr, naq n tencuvpny qrfpevcgvba bs Z/Z encr (sbhaq ba cc 434-435 bs gur uneqonpx, ng gur raq bs puncgre 50).

And now, a big bucket of praise for the book, because I am not above bragging.

*how many bisons could a bison bludgeoner bison if a bison bludgeoner could bludgeon bison?

***

A decadent rock star. A deeply religious radio host. A disgraced scientist. And a teenage girl who may be the world’s last hope. From the mind of Chuck Wendig comes “a magnum opus . . . a story about survival that’s not just about you and me, but all of us, together” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

NOMINATED FOR THE BRAM STOKER AWARD AND THE LOCUS

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • NPR • The Guardian • Kirkus Reviews • Publishers Weekly • Library Journal • Polygon

Shana wakes up one morning to discover her little sister in the grip of a strange malady. She appears to be sleepwalking. She cannot talk and cannot be woken up. And she is heading with inexorable determination to a destination that only she knows. But Shana and her sister are not alone. Soon they are joined by a flock of sleepwalkers from across America, on the same mysterious journey. And like Shana, there are other “shepherds” who follow the flock to protect their friends and family on the long dark road ahead.

For as the sleepwalking phenomenon awakens terror and violence in America, the real danger may not be the epidemic but the fear of it. With society collapsing all around them—and an ultraviolent militia threatening to exterminate them—the fate of the sleepwalkers depends on unraveling the mystery behind the epidemic. The terrifying secret will either tear the nation apart—or bring the survivors together to remake a shattered world.

Praise for Wanderers

“The book’s nearly 800 pages fly effortlessly by and offer both first-class entertainment and a clear-eyed view of the forces dividing contemporary society. As I finished this one, I found myself thinking: Where has this guy been all my life?” — Washington Post

“Wendig takes science, politics, horror, and science fiction and blended them into an outstanding story about the human spirit in times of turmoil, claiming a spot on the list of must-read apocalyptic novels while doing so.” — Gabino Iglesias, NPR

“This career-defining epic deserves its inevitable comparisons to Stephen King’s The Stand.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A suspenseful, twisty, satisfying, surprising, thought-provoking epic.”—Harlan Coben, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Run Away

“A true tour de force.”—Erin Morgenstern, New York Times bestselling author of The Night Circus

“A masterpiece with prose as sharp and heartbreaking as Station Eleven.”—Peng Shepherd, author of The Book of M

“A magnum opus . . . It reminded me of Stephen King’s The Stand—but dare I say, this story is even better.”—James Rollins, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Crucible   

“An inventive, fierce, uncompromising, stay-up-way-past-bedtime masterwork.”—Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Cabin at the End of the World 

“An American epic for these times.”—Charles Soule, author of The Oracle Year

“Wanderers is amazing—huge, current, both broad and intensely personal, blending the contemplative apocalypse of Station Eleven with the compulsive readability of the best thrillers.”—Django Wexler, author of the Shadow Campaigns series

“A riveting examination of America.”—Scott Sigler, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Generations Trilogy

“If you ever wanted to know what America’s soul might look like, here’s its biography.”—Rin Chupeco, author of The Bone Witch

“With Wanderers, Chuck Wendig levels up—and when you consider the high level he was already writing at, that’s saying something.” —John Scalzi, New York Times bestselling author of The Consuming Fire

“A tsunami of a novel.”—Meg Gardiner, Edgar Award-winning author of Into the Black Nowhere

“A defining moment in speculative fiction.”—Adam Christopher, author of Empire State and Made to Kill

“Trust me: You’re not ready for this book.”—Delilah S. Dawson, New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Phasma

“An astounding adventure.”—Fran Wilde, Hugo-, Nebula-, and World Fantasy finalist and award-winning author of the Bone Universe trilogy

“Utterly brilliant and frighteningly plausible.”—Kat Howard, Alex Award-winning author of An Unkindness of Magicians

“Beautiful and harrowing—and timely as hell.”—Richard Kadrey, New York Times bestselling author of The Grand Dark

“A harrowing portrait of an unraveling America . . . terrifyingly prophetic.”—Christopher Golden, New York Times bestselling author of Ararat and The Pandora Room

“A brilliant, Hollywood-blockbuster of a novel.”—Peter Clines, author of Dead Moon and Paradox Bound

“Approach Wanderers like it’s a primetime television series, along the lines of The Passage [or] Lost. . . . Make Wanderers a summer reading priority; you won’t regret it.”—Book Riot

“Wendig is clearly wrestling with some of the demons of our time, resulting in a story that is ambitious, bold, and worthy of attention.” — Kirkus (starred review)

“A powerful story about humanity, technology, and the survival of the world. Comparisons to Stephen King’s The Stand are warranted, as Wendig shatters the boundaries of speculative and literary fiction…” — Library Journal (starred review)

“It’s not easy to write the end of the world. With Wanderers, Chuck Wendig has mastered it.” — Bookpage (starred review)

“Wanderers is OUTSTANDING. Wanderers excites me. You want well-developed characters and complex relationships? Read Wanderers. You want grounded sci-fi that ranks up there with bookstagram faves like #Recursion and #StationEleven? Read Wanderers. You want twists and turns and edge-of-your-seat action? Read Wanderers.” — Jordy’s Book Club

“An imaginative and absorbing work of speculative fiction.” — Booklist

It is 1971. The fictional city of Bellport, Massachusetts, is in decline with an urban redevelopment project on the horizon expected to transform this dying factory town into a thriving economic center. This planned transformation has a profound effect on the residents who live in Bellport as their own personal transformations take place.

Sydney Stallworth steps away from her fellowship and law studies at an elite university to support husband Malachi’s dream of opening a business in the heart of the black community of his hometown, Bellport.

For Omar Bassari, an immigrant from Senegal, Bellport is where he will establish his drumming career and the launching pad from which he will spread African culture across the world, while trying to hold onto his marriage.

Della Tolliver has built a fragile sanctuary in Bellport for herself, boyfriend Kwamé Rodriguez, and daughter Jasmine, a troubled child prone to nightmares and outbursts.

Tensions rise as the demolition date moves closer, plans for gentrification are laid out, and the pace of suspicious fires picks up. The residents find themselves at odds with a political system manipulating their lives and question the future of their relationships.

***

MARRIAGE THERAPY DOESN’T HAVE TO INVOLVE A THERAPIST, JUST THE RIGHT KIND OF DOCTOR

My husband and I were having a tough time. I had been working on my novel for years, grinding out one draft after another, sending out sample pages to literary agents, getting no response, or getting the canned response email rejection or a few nibbles in which an agent asked to see additional pages and then would later tell me that my work wasn’t “the right fit.” I’d burst into tears, punch the sofa cushions and cry on my husband’s shoulder. At the same time, my husband was having a similar response from potential employers. He’d been out of work for more than a year and either got no interviews, interviews that went nowhere, or interviews that seemed to go somewhere…and then silence. In desperation to get my novel to sell, I scanned a list of “book doctors” who charged upwards of $100 per hour. Unwilling to spend that kind of money, I brainstormed until it occurred to me that I could get hubby to be the doctor. After all, he was a newspaper reporter for more than 20 years and did consultation for a fellow journalist whose book ended up on the New York Times bestseller list. My husband took the job, didn’t charge me a dime, and as they say, the rest is history.

THE BEST RESEARCH CAN OCCUR WHILE HOLDING A FORK AND KNIFE

Who says that research can’t be fun? It doesn’t have to involve poring over dusty old back breaking tomes at the public library, spooling rolls of microfilm onto rickety old projectors, or watching documentaries until you’re bleary eyed. Once I decided that one of my main characters was going to be a Senegalese restaurant owner and his nephew was going to be a drummer who’s very good at making Senegalese dishes, I took a trip into town to try the cuisine at the local Senegalese restaurant. The chef prepared the most succulent pork chops I’ve ever had and I still think about the lamb stew. Several trips to the restaurant helped me to realistically portray the meals in the story. I even prepared the lamb stew at home and it was nearly as good as the restaurant version.

BANGING ON A DRUM IS HARDER THAN YOU THINK

In my continuing effort to accurately portray my drummer, I signed up for a drumming circle led by a master drummer from Guinea. Even though I’d already taken an adult education course, I soon realized what a leap it was to take a master class.

Seventy-five-plus students showed up, drums in tow, ready to learn new rhythms from a musician they revered. The student seated next to me kept grumbling, “People who aren’t serious about this should stay home!” I wondered if he’d figured me out, that I was an imposter, not a real drummer. I could feel my shoulders slumping in a ridiculous effort to make myself invisible.

The room went silent as the master drummer played a combination of rhythms. He beckoned us to repeat them. On the beat, he slowly strutted around the large circle, inspecting our hands closely, nodding and smiling slightly when he was pleased, narrowing his eyes when a tone or slap was made without confidence.

As I feared, as he was making his rounds, he paused in front of me, raised a hand to get everyone to stop playing and worked with me one-on-one. After he tried again and again to set me on the right path I finally confessed in a weak voice: “I’m not a real drummer. I’m a writer wanting to learn to play to create a drummer for my novel.” He gave me a smile and continued circling the room. When he came back around to me, he paused again. Was I hitting the drum wrong? Apparently not. He gave me a flirtatious wink and kept going.

TAXIS AND MANUSCRIPTS DON’T MIX

I was on a business trip to a convention in Chicago and brought my laptop with me that had a copy of my manuscript on it. I was feverishly working on the manuscript whenever I had a chance—at the airport gate, the hotel room, on the airport shuttle. One afternoon after leaving the convention center, my boss and I took a taxi back to our hotel. I was so exhausted that it wasn’t until we were out of the taxi and in the lobby of the hotel that I realized that I’d left my computer bag in the trunk of the taxi. I was practically hyperventilating. The only copy I had of the manuscript was on that laptop. I hadn’t backed up the file. Keep in mind I wasn’t concerned about the loss of my work files. Of course, I hadn’t bothered to take note of the driver’s name or the taxi number. I did remember the name of the taxi company, however, but calls there didn’t help. Eventually, it occurred to me that the driver was likely making a continuous loop from the convention center to the hotel. I stood out front and waited. Sure enough, he eventually returned and I got my laptop back. Whew!

I COULD HAVE BEEN A DANCE INSTRUCTOR

Maybe not the kind of instructor who opens up a school, teaches ballet, tap, and jazz, and conducts recitals, but a halfway decent choreographer of fight scenes. In The Talking Drum I have a scene in which my drummer gets into a wrestling match of sorts with his wife. There’s a bowl of lobster stew involved, an herbal aphrodisiac in a jar, a wall-dial-style mounted telephone with an extra lengthy cord, and a pepper grinder. The drummer’s wife discovers that he is trying to insert some of the herbs into her bowl of stew and assumes he’s up to something sinister. They get into a tussle that involves a bear hug, squeezing of wrists, squirming, her using all of her weight to knock him against the refrigerator door with the palms of her hands, the jar of herbs flying out of his hand. I actually spent a good hour in my kitchen choreographing the scene, acting it out to make sure the two characters could actually go through those motions. In another scene, my drummer gets into a bar fight, pounces on the guy seated next to him and is eventually kicked out of the bar by a bouncer in a bum’s rush. That required some choreography on my part as well. I didn’t spend time in a bar going through the paces, but I think it nonetheless came out pretty believable in the published work.

***

Lisa Braxton is the author of The Talking Drum, published in June 2020 by Inanna Publications, and a recipient of a 2020 Outstanding Literary Award from the National Association of Black Journalists. She is a fellow of Kimbilio, a fellowship for fiction writers of the African diaspora, and an Emmy-nominated former television journalist, an essayist, and short story writer. She received Honorable Mention in Writer’s Digest magazine’s 84th and 86th annual writing contests in the inspirational essay category.

Lisa Braxton: Website | Twitter | Instagram

The Talking Drum: Amazon | Inanna Publications

EVERYTHING’S FOR HIRE. EVEN MAGIC.

If you need something done, Cloke’s one of the best; a mercenary with some unusual talents and an attitude to match.But when she’s hired by a virtual construct to destroy the other copies of himself, and the down payment is a new magical skill, she knows this job is going to be a league harder than anything she’s ever done.

***

Min/Maxing & Gaming Forums Work For Magic Too

I’m going to date myself immediately by admitting that the Atari 2600 was my first video game console. Since then, like many people that love video games, I’ve scoured the Internet for tips to get an edge in some of the games I play. This is known as “min/maxing” to some. In role-playing game terms for video games, this refers to the practice minimizing weaknesses while maximizing strengths.

In some cases, this also means finding exploits, glitches, or techniques that the game developers had never originally intended, but work out amazingly well if you’re willing to take the low road. I found I had the most fun with deploying magic into a cyberpunk world by thinking of it in those terms. Magic could have its intended functions, like hurling a fireball at an enemy, but when you’ve got it existing in a world with neural simulation and near-earth orbital space stations, there’s a lot of other stuff you can do with it too.

So I took the gamer approach to some of the magic applications, looking at particular combinations and applications. What happens when technology and magic interact, and now you’ve got new “rulesets” interacting with other rulesets? How can you break this? Is there an exploit you can use where one set of rules normally says something is impossible, but another can make it happen?

In the same way that people used unorthodox means to cheat in games, defeat copy protection on digital media, or just find ways to game the system, I tried putting magic and technology in the same room with some common goals to see how the two would fight or work together to achieve that goal.

I Think I’m A Carbon Fanboy

It’s not unusual for writers to go down the rabbit hole of research when it comes to novels. People writing historical fiction need to get those details right, and unless you’re already a master of quantum physics, engineering, rocketry, cybernetics, or programming, you’re doing to have to dig deep into a lot of areas if for some types of science fiction.

So for me, that ended up being a lot of materials research and getting embarrassingly excited about the future of carbon compounds. All the variants, like graphene, inorganic fullerenes, carbon fiber… it’s just amazing stuff. Who would have thought that the stuff you could theoretically collect from pencil shavings if you were patient enough was a miracle material? I’m still a little stunned that if I wanted some of the best combat armor in the world, all I’d need is a pocket knife, a couple of decades and several metric tons of pencils to get the raw material I’d need to survive a direct shot from gunfire.

Naïve Characters Don’t Have To Be Average

I think I first heard the term “naïve character” while listening to an interview with William Gibson. The naïve character is a very handy device in genre fiction. This is the person that is a stand-in newbie for the reader, and gets to ask all the questions the reader has like “What’s that? Who’s that? That thing the Evil Queen just said that made everyone gasp, what does that mean? How does your tech/magic/psychic eggplant work?”

In some cases, the naïve character is also the protagonist, so there’s a certain amount of “averageness” that’s built in to make sure this person is relatable. Neo in The Matrix is a naïve character who constantly repeats, “I have SO many questions.” Ellen Page, as Ariadne in the movie Inception, is another good example.

For The Chimera Code, I was already tossing readers neck first into an existing cyberpunk future, which would have been disorienting enough on its own. But then magic had been integrated into that world a few generations prior, so they were already getting the hang of this, and it made for some odd intersections of culture and commerce. That’s a lot to take in, and so I knew that functionally, I’d get a lot more room maneuver by having my naïve character to ask Cloke all the questions that needed asking.

But I didn’t want someone average and relatable in a world already as weird as this. Enter Zee, the nonbinary hacker. Zee ended up being so interesting that an automatic promotion to protagonist status became unavoidable. What once was strictly Cloke’s show became the Cloke & Zee act, and the fact that Zee had an agenda, a background, and all kinds of issues to deal with became a major highlight of writing. Zee was no longer just there to say stuff like, “Explain to me how this magic stuff works in today’s global economy,” although that stuff gets asked. Zee had agency, goals, and things that needed doing. So my naïve character ended up being anything but average, and in some cases, totally stole the show.

The Abyss Is Liberating

This novel is my debut, but it’s not my first book. It’s actually my sixth. I’d had the idea for this book forever—or at least since the 1990s—but I kept putting off writing it. At the time, I was really attracted to the idea of writing a cyberpunk book, but William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer and Godfather of the entire cyberpunk genre, was my gold standard. I wasn’t sure I could live up to the bar he’d established.

So over the years, I wrote a lot of other books instead, with fantastical elements in familiar settings. Urban fantasy was my way of getting my feet wet with weird shit, without having to create all of it from the ground up. I still love those books, and my very first novel still holds a special place in my heart, but none of them got published. They all helped me to find my voice, though.

So after many years of unsuccessfully trying to get a book in print, I stared down the barrel of considering that it might be time to kill the dream. I figured if I was going to quit, I might as well make my last book the one I really wanted to write. With that idea of making a kamikaze jump off a cliff, I finally committed The Chimera Code to the page. Believing that it was the last book I was ever going to write made a pretty big difference to how I approached it.

Does this mean I think I hit the bar I set for myself with regards to the brutal, beautiful, dense prose of Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy? I probably didn’t. But now I was willing to at least try for it. I was willing to finally make my own world from the ground up, instead of putting small bits and pieces of it in an established framework. And I was willing to take all the crazy moments I’d seen in comics, games, movies, and even anime, in addition to novels, and just throw them all into this one book. It was going to be my last book. May as well go out in style.

And now, of course, it’s not my last book, at least not for now. So I guess sometimes when you set your sights on ending with a bang, that’s really just the precursor to even louder things.

There Is No Shame In Not Drawing From The Classics

As a Generation X nerd, I did my time as a kid in the library looking at the giants of the SF genre, so I read my Clarke, my Asimov, my Heinlein, and of course, my Herbert. But I was also utterly blown away by things that, at the time, weren’t classics, like the upstart William Gibson, and Neuromancer novel.

More to the point, though, as a Gen X kid, I was also there when the damn broke, and all kinds of other non-SF-book influences came to the fore. Marvel’s Dark Phoenix saga in comics? Blew my mind. Blade Runner, Aliens, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn? Will be with me forever. The first bootleg, 12^th generation copies of Japanese cartoons that people were calling “anime”? I devoured Akira, Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind, Bubblegum Crisis and so much more. And video games were like falling through the wardrobe into Narnia. You could do stuff here! You could interact! I got the Babel Fish in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure! What manner of sorcery was this?!

That’s all my way of saying that when I’m writing something now, I’m just as likely to pull from Haikyuu!!, a volleyball sports anime, as I am from Horizon: Zero Dawn, or Blade Runner 2049. It’s a much bigger world now, and while I still adore the stuff, I find in books today and will happily lose myself in the worlds of Charlie Jane Anders, or N.K. Jemisin, or even go back to Asimov, Clarke, or Gibson, I’m not letting them be the sole influences on what ends up on my page.

***

Over the years, Wayne Santos has written copy for advertising agencies, scripts for television, and articles for magazines. He’s lived in Canada, Thailand and Singapore, traveling to many countries around South East Asia. His first love has always been science fiction and fantasy, and while he regularly engaged with it in novels, comics, anime and video games, it wasn’t until 1996, with his first short story in the Canadian speculative fiction magazine On Spec that he aimed towards becoming a novelist. He now lives in Canada, in Hamilton, ON with his wife. When he’s not writing, he is likely to be found reading, playing video games, watching anime, or trying to calm his cat down.

Wayne Santos: Website

The Chimera Code: eBook

And so we continue with another round of effervescent microblogs, which are too big to be tweets, too small to be blogs, so they’re mostly just here, a meal of content appetizers.

There’s a We Bare Bears movie and you need to watch it. I know, I know. You’re like, “But Chuck, why begin your post with something so controversial, so important?” And yet, you joke, but it kinda is? We Bare Bears has always been a wonderful cartoon, but as I understand it, Daniel Chong intended for the series all along to be a goofy bear-shaped analog to his experience as an Asian-American, touching on (if not explicitly and not exclusively) a non-white and immigrant angle for the bears. Well, the movie definitely puts that into sharp focus — without giving too much away, it (in its adorable way) looks at family separation, border camps, border crossings, bigotry, and the like. And yet, it’s still fun and cute and weird and I’m sad the show is now over. Because it’s really great.

If you also need something that feels both very escapist and very now? Then look no further than Palm Springs, the Andy Samberg / Cristin Milioti time-loop movie. Do not accept any spoilers going in — just turn it on and watch it. It’s like an acid-trip hangover version of Groundhog Day.

The greatest trick as an artist right now is making something I think that is both escapist and topical. That’s a gift if you can pull it off. You certainly aren’t required to — I don’t mean it as a mandate. I only mean, both talking about The Now while also having fiction that feels like The Way Out is a masterful slalom. It’s the narrative epitome of “spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” I think some of the best fiction, particularly in genre, does exactly this.

No, I haven’t seen The Old Guard yet. But I’m excited to?

Paul Tremblay is still a monster. I did however finish Survivor Song and boy howdy that Paul Tremblay continues to know how to make you breathlessly descend into his monstrous playground where you excitedly run up to him and he stabs you in the heart with a knife made from the bones of one of your pets. He’s a bad person made all the more evil by the fact he’s so damn good at this. One of the best horror writers around. Also, rabies even without super-sizing it, is fucking scary. Imagine what he does with it. You’re not imagining hard enough.

The election is now single-digits away. It’s 98 days, I think. I said this to my wife this morning and her response was, “It’s like when the Super Mario Brothers music gets faster and faster and everything gets more and more dangerous.” Which uhhh. Y’know. Yeah.

It’s hard to know what the fascist federal troops thing is all about. I mean, it’s obviously about a lot of things — bigotry, control, fascism under the guise of patriotism, and most likely, just people getting paid. I just don’t know the endgame of it. I have a hard time believing it’s popular for anyone other than the most reduced turdsauce that is Trump’s Base. Though maybe I underestimate Americans in general? It just seems, during an already-botched coronavirus response, it’s amazing to see someone continue to try to divide the country before a major election. Unless he thinks this is his ticket to not having to have that election. No matter how you shake it, it’s fucked up. But I’d also argue it’s not working. I hope that it’s dinosaurs squawking at a meteor. But it could also be the meteor.

Speaking of that old coronavirus… haha, what a goddamn fuckshow. I mean, it just amazes me at this point that there are people living full, unfrightened lives in this bullshit. It makes me feel like I’m on crazy pills. I mean, we’re still pretty locked down? Loosened up a little bit, where able, but generally we don’t go many places, no restaurants, no gatherings, no vacations. Masked up all the time if we do go out, social distanced, too. But there are people who just gotta do the dumb shit they gotta do. They gotta have XYZ vacation, they gotta go to this restaurant, they gotta put their kids in sports, and it’s all — like, couldja just cool it? A not-unreasomable percentage of new cases in our county (rising once again) are from Pennsylvanians who just had to go to Myrtle Beach, because if they didn’t go there, they’d just die. Meanwhile, we maybe had a shot to control this. We locked down already. And it was all for… nothing, really. Not for shit. Because we’re a nation with oppositional defiant disorder.

Of course, the real breakdown isn’t just in selfish Americans. I mean, it is in the sense that at the individual level, there are people who are like LOL BUT I NEED BASEBALL AND BARBECUES P.S. THE VIRUS IS FAKE, but the real failure is in leadership. We’re all getting salty at governors and school admins for either not opening up enough or offering too limited options, and people are concerned about working from home or not working from home and what their kids will do — but all this is because we have a gormless narcissist fuckwit at the helm, one surrounded by a gaggle of vampiric bleach-white Skeksis happy to urge him to deeper and deeper lows. There’s no safety net to catch anybody, so instead all they do is keep throwing people into the wood chipper. Your kids aren’t going back to school because of education and their need for it, no matter how much they claim it is — they’re going back to school to feed the economy. Of course, throw enough of them in there, and that machine will break down anyway, and the economic damage won’t simply be a slower machine. It’ll just break. And when it breaks, that’s when it crashes.

Think of it like running on a busted leg. You pull a hamstring or something, you just have to take it easy. You can walk, but you can’t run, much as you want to. But if you try to run, you won’t just keep the injury — you’ll aggravate it. Make it worse. Maybe make it permanent.

I’ve said all this before, haven’t I? Person, woman, man, camera, TV. There are four lights.

Summer Camp Island is nice. So is Infinity Train. Cartoons are good. Anybody who tells you they’re not hasn’t watched Avatar: The Last Airbender. Did I mention we got HBO Max?

HBO To The Max, Dude. It’s both a really great service and a shitty one. Can’t get it on Roku, which sucks. It has a variety of shows, but sometimes only a season of that show? Like with so many streaming services, what it offers is often frustratingly incomplete. And it’s not 4k yet, either, I don’t think? Oh! But I’m enjoying Perry Mason, though jesus fuck it’s dark.

Game on. The newest Superhot is pretty bad-ass. The Oculus Quest is fun, and even more immersive now that the hand-and-finger tracking works. (Meaning, no controllers necessary.) What’s a comfort video game for you? One you return to again and again? I’m thinking of jumping back into the Bioshock games. Or maybe Fire Emblem? Mmm. Fire Emblem.

Are you writing? Anything? How’s it going? Sound off. Check in. How goes the wordsmithing, cohort penmonkeys? Harder now? Easier? Getting any words down or is it just a lot of screaming into various jars and yard holes?

Here is a bee. Also a secret caterpillar. And a not so-secret caterpillar. And birds! You can find more pics and nonsense over at Flickr or Instagram.