Category: essays

• Muscle Memory

  

  It was the day after the election, and I was sobbing uncontrollably into my girlfriend’s shoulder as she held me. We had been walking through her living room when my emotions erupted, and had she not held me in that moment, I would have doubled over on the floor. The election results were—are—absolutely devastating, but that’s not why I was crying. Not in that moment, anyway. The idea that the majority of the electorate had affirmatively chosen to return Trump to the presidency was a reality that had only begun to truly assert itself upon us, our bewilderment and anxiety still to congealing into grief, fear, and a stinging sense of betrayal. My feelings about this cruel pivot in history isn’t what caused my meltdown in that moment, though it surely primed my nervous system for it.

  Earlier that afternoon, my girlfriend Kristina and I were going about the day’s business in a kind of stunned reverie, sadness and tension permeating everything we did and said. Her mother had come over to help with some work in the yard. Kristina lives on an enormous plot of farmland, and she has big ambitions for what she might do with it. Only having lived there for about a year now, there is still a lot of work to be done, and just about all of it is going to be done by her and her family. Oh, and me too of course, here and there.

  That day’s bit of drudgery was to move some logs from one part of the yard and into another. I don’t think I was told why, and it didn’t matter. I’m just there to help. Anyway, I’m an indoor cat with little experience or interest in, as the kids say, “touching grass,” but these did not seem to qualify as “logs” to me. They were about ten feet long and ten inches thick, which, to my mind, makes them not logs but trees. Trees that happened to be laying on the ground. In any case, they were very long logs, and they were also, well, waterlogged, so they were also very, very heavy. Now, Kristina and I are both capable of hauling heavy things around, but neither of us are what you’d call “buff.” Her mother is probably made of stronger stuff than both of us, but she’s in her 70s.

  All three of us were a little taken aback by how heavy these damn things were, but we were determined. We made a valiant effort to move the first “log,” managing to carry it about 20 feet to its new location (again, I have no idea why), but as we lowered it to its resting place, I got a stab of pain in my back and we had to let the thing go more suddenly than we intended, which was fine.

  I was not fine, though. The pain in my back wasn’t debilitating, but the suddenness of it exacerbated my already foul and tender emotional state. Backing away from the dropped log (tree), another shock of pain, this time in my right knee. Ever since my long bout with covid in early 2023, my knees have never been the same, and they often zap me with some sort of nerve pinch in the most benign of ambulatory circumstances, rendering me suddenly unable to walk. Yes, it really sucks!

  And it sucked here too. My back pulled, a log dropped, and my knee buckling, I was doing all I could to keep my wits about me.

  Kristina’s mom, absolutely trying to make me feel better about it all, said something like, “Well, we’re more used to this kind of work,” meaning that it makes sense to her that I’d more easily get hurt than her or Kristina, who both do this kind of stuff all the time—by choice!

  But that’s not how I took it in that moment. I already felt embarrassed, and I took her mom’s gentle comment as a sort of attack, like she was pointing out what a sissy I am.

  I didn’t respond to it that way, but I did limp back to the house in what probably appeared to be a hurried huff. But it wasn’t a huff. I couldn’t have expressed it in words at the time, but I was experiencing a kind of panic. I went inside the house and Kristina’s dog, having been left out of the all the fun the humans were obviously having outside, was desperate for attention and scampered into my path and fussed underfoot. It was too much for me and I yelled, in a crescendo, “Stop, stop, stop, stop, STOP!!!” I collapsed into a chair and sat with my heart pounding and my eyes as wide as dinner plates.

  Kristina, with incredible patience and tenderness, sat with me and offered me love and comfort as best she could. I couldn’t look her in the eye or speak in anything more than curt single syllables. For what it’s worth, I used those syllables to convey that I sincerely appreciated what she was doing for me, that I was deeply sorry for being in this state, and that I was unable to make eye contact. I was, essentially, trapped, a temporary prisoner of my nervous system now in full fight-or-flight. She heard me and she understood.

  Once I thought my emotions had sufficiently settled (they hadn’t), I got up from the chair and we walked into the living room. It was there that I explained to Kristina a part of what I thought had triggered me into what I now know was an attack of post-traumatic stress.

  ---

  Late one night a little over 14 years ago, I was getting off the Metro stop at the Stadium-Armory station in Washington, D.C. I had recently quit my day job in political communications in order to try being a stay-at-home daddy to my son who was about 11 months old at the time. Instead of working a 9-to-5 in an office, I’d work nights and weekends at a retail store in Arlington. I had just finished my second day of training at the store and was returning home to my apartment where I lived with my wife at the time and our son.

  It was probably 11:30 or so at night. I bounded up the stairs from the station and out into the open air, where a group of what I assume were teenagers were laughing and being rowdy. This was not uncommon, but they made me uncomfortable in the way that I always am when around a group of people who are loudly laughing about something to which I am not privy.

  I started my walk home, just a couple of blocks from the stop, and about a quarter of the way there, I heard the sounds of very fast footfalls behind me. Before I could even think about what was happening, I had been struck extremely hard by something (a bat?) in the back of the head and I fell face first on the ground.

  I was kicked and punched and beaten, over and over. My assailants demanded my wallet and phone without giving me the chance to produce them. When I tried to rise to give them what they wanted, they knocked me down again, stomping, kicking, hitting me with something. Eventually, my phone, wallet, and keys slid out of my pants pocket, and when they realized this, they grabbed my things and ran, leaving me on the ground.

  After some period of time that I can’t remember, I managed to stand up. My glasses were gone and it was night, so I could barely see, but I did my best. I was so dizzy from the beatings that when I first tried to walk I veered and collapsed into someone’s fence. I righted myself and walked home. I pounded on our door, leaving streaks of blood. My wife, Jessica, opened the door and saw my battered face, and would later tell me what a trauma that sight alone had been, that I looked like I had come from a horror movie.

  I have written about this event in more detail here. And obviously, I survived, though I certainly wasn’t confident of that at the time. I recovered at home, with Jessica’s diligent and tender care. Mostly I was shown incredible kindness, even by relative strangers—a local secular humanist group I had once spoken to sent a care package.

  When relatives visited, though, I recall an awkwardness I couldn’t put my finger on. Looking back, it was almost like they were little afraid of me, like I might infect them with a mugging virus or something.

  And then at least two men in our family said something like this to me: Well, if you knew some martial arts or had some self defense training, this might not have happened.

  You can imagine how I took that.

  If I hadn’t been such a coward, I could have dealt with my attackers. If I hadn’t been such a sissy, I could have fought back. But I’m small and weak, not enough of a man, and it was my own fault.

  And I carried that, right along with the rest of the trauma of that night.

  I had many years of therapy, and we took all of this head-on. Those men were really just making themselves feel better, my therapist assured me. They were projecting their own fear onto me, because they need to believe it can’t happen to them. I understood. I thought I had dealt with this. I thought I had moved on.

  But that humiliation, that shame, was still deep inside me, packed as dense as a neutron star.

  ---

  This is also about the election.

  I had been cautiously optimistic about a Harris victory, but I knew that it was essentially a coin flip as to who would win. Fearing a second Trump presidency, I had been lightly researching what it was like in other countries with authoritarian governments. What kind of day-to-day life could we expect?

  After the election, I asked my friend, the writer Emily Hauser, about this, correctly suspecting she’d have some insight. I asked her what she knew about life in autocracies, whether they still get to lead creative lives and enjoy art, whether they get to go out and be with friends, whether they can make newsletters and blogs and social media. “Can they live somewhat normally or is it all Stasi and Mad Forest Iliescu and internment camps?”

  “On the one hand, yes, people keep making art and sharing useful information,” she replied. “On the other hand, people do those things but also know the constraints they’re working under and gradually (or in Russia’s case, all along) do those things within the framework of those constraints.”

  “I also think it’s a good idea to remember that when Putin took over Russia, it was after the only decade in which the people in that region had anything remotely like democracy or the kinds of civil freedoms that you and I are used to,” she said. “They had no expectations or muscle memory of anything else, whereas we do. We won’t be Russia on January 21, if only for that reason. The question is how well Americans will use those muscle memories and that knowledge.”

  This was quite enlightening for me, and even a little encouraging. (Not encouraging for Russians, mind you.)

  Regardless of the actual realities of our relative liberties at any given time, Americans feel like they are a free people. We are used to at least being under the impression that we are free to live our lives and speak our minds as we wish. Put aside, for now, how some groups enjoy rights not enjoyed by another group, or how we are led to believe we are entirely masters of our own destinies when this is, generously, a major exaggeration. Be they MAGA-hat wearing Trump cultists or latte-sipping coastal elites, Americans identify as free. They live their lives and conduct their interactions with the rest of society as free people. If they do not perceive themselves to be free, they aspire and fight to be free. That’s our muscle memory. That gives me some hope, that as the right-wing vice tightens, that muscle will twitch and flex and resist.

  Unlike me, on that night fourteen years ago, we will at least be able to see it coming.

  ---

  In Kristina’s living room, on November 6, 2024, I told her that I knew I was overreacting to everything. I told her that her mom’s benign comment, about how I’m not used to this kind of farm work, had sort of reminded me of those admonitions from the men who told me I should have been able to fend off my attackers all those years ago. I was only about halfway through with the sentence explaining all of this when my emotions erupted, and Kristina had to catch me as I cried into her shoulder.

  “They came up from behind me!” I shouted in between sobs. “They ran up behind me and hit me in the back of the head! They knocked me to the ground before I knew they were there!” Tears flowing, gasping for air as I cried, I was pleading with the world to forgive me, to excuse me for being beaten to a pulp on the street. I was trying to exorcise fourteen years of shame.

  As I was being beaten to the ground on that awful night fourteen years ago, along with the extraordinary pain, I experienced feelings I knew quite well: the feeling of being small, revolting, unhuman. I felt the way I did throughout all the years of bullying and harassment I endured in middle and high school, the feeling I carry with me well into adulthood. I felt like the universe had caught me trying to pass myself off as normal, as a regular human, and now I was going to be punished. Again. When I was a kid, it was vicious mockery and public humiliation and as much physical violence as a bully could get away with. Three decades later, it was a merciless beating from two assailants whose faces I would never see. It was, in a way, familiar.

  Donald Trump is a bully. He is the ur-bully, leading a movement fueled by cruelty. He and the Republican Party and the rightwing movement have vomited avalanches of lies and misinformation into the public consciousness, but there is one thing that neither Trump nor his followers have misled anyone about: that they are eager to use their power to hurt people, to take those who are already marginalized and in pain and shove their faces into the dirt. This is no mystery. This is no hidden agenda. This is their chief selling point, and the country is buying.

  A majority of the electorate has not just sided with the bullies, like the onlookers who laugh as one kid mocks and beats up a smaller kid. My fellow Americans have declared that this is who we are. This is what they aspire to. The cruelty, as they say, is the point.

  It is no wonder then, in the shock of this national betrayal, that this old wound of mine might reopen. My muscle memory is of living in a world dominated by those who actively sought my humiliation, who were fueled by my pain. That mugging fourteen years ago, though likely just another arbitrary criminal act of violence that could have happened to almost anyone, nonetheless felt—feels—like one more instantiation of that world. The election of Donald Trump by a firm majority of voters feels like that too.

  My survival strategy, as a terrified kid in school and as an adult in the wider world, has been to shrink, to blend, and above all, to mask. That’s also my muscle memory.

  I’ve also been doing the work, as they say. I’ve been training other muscles, striving to write and believe a new narrative for myself about who I am. Even though I entirely fell apart in Kristina’s arms, sobbing and arguing with phantoms, that act itself was a kind of unmasking, an exercising of new muscles. Because I wasn’t pretending to be okay. I wasn’t going along to get along. I wasn’t conceding to my own diminishment.

  I was being exquisitely vulnerable, insisting on the truth, and being who and whatever I was in that moment, devastation and all. That, in itself, felt a little like being free.

  That’s a memory too.

  November 10, 2024

  mental health, personal, politics, trauma

  ---

• Beard

  

  One day when my older son was a toddler, he noticed I had a few days’ worth of scruff on my face. He pointed to the little dark specs he saw, and declared, “Ants!”

  From that day forward, that’s what we all called my facial hair. Ants. “Daddy has ants.” And now daddy has a swarm of ants. A goddamned colony.

  See, I have trouble with the whole idea of beards.

  This is curious as I am currently sporting one, and not for the first time in my life. But to be sure, it has been an exception to an otherwise clean-shaven rule.

  Let us put aside for now the fact that the growth of facial hair is “natural” and built into our species, along with just about all other mammals. I know. But we live in an age in which it is entirely optional to allow it to grow. Many, many other things that humans naturally produce we readily take measures to remove, such as showering to rid ourselves of our stink, clipping our fingernails and toenails to manageable lengths, and, oh yes, cutting the hair on the tops of our heads. Not to mention natural, bodily-generated things like cancerous tumors.

  Facial hair serves no meaningful purpose. It has no utility. Perhaps if you’re living in an arctic climate in which one must greedily retain every fraction of a calorie of warmth to stave off hypothermia, something like a beard makes a difference, if for not other reason than as an extra layer of wind shielding. But for most people in civilization, even the bushiest of beards isn’t doing all that much to keep anyone meaningfully warm.

  Having facial hair, however, can be like playing host to tens of thousands of little tendrils that pick up dust, dirt, crumbs, and—perhaps worst of all—moisture and keep it close to some pretty important orifices and bodily points of ingress. Imagine you drop a toothbrush onto the floor in between your washing machine and dryer (yes this has happened to me), or imagine a kid’s stuffed animal gets stuck behind your couch where you haven’t vacuumed in a while because really you can be bothered—it’s not like anyone eats off the floor there. You know when you pick up that toothbrush or that stuffed animal and it’s covered in wads of dust or mysterious crud, the provenance of which you dare not speculate? That’s a beard just going through the world.

  Every time I eat, I can feel the remnants of whatever I’ve consumed frosting the tips of the hairs around the mouth. God help me if whatever I was eating is at all sticky. Inadvertently tasting the residue of food from a meal you thought was now in the past, that room-temperature tang of something you once had consumed but now have moved on from and gone on with the rest of your life, it’s jarring and unpleasant regardless of how much you might have liked the meal of origin. It’s like, dum-de-dum, going about my evening, and WHAT THE HELL, PAPRIKA? ON MY FACE? If I didn’t have facial hair, I could conceivably lick my lips and be done with it. But now I’m hyperaware of the biomatter commingling with the hairs surrounding my mouth, along with whatever else the aforementioned filth-tendrils have since picked up in its tour through our world of pollutants, so I’ll be damned if my solution is to re-consume this new mystery compound on my face.

  So now every time I eat, be it meal, snack, or dessert, I must now also wash my face afterward. Great. Another task.

  Speaking of tasks: One would think that one of the benefits of letting my beard grow is that I no longer have to deal with the inconvenience of shaving every couple of days. Different people have different levels of tolerance for how clean-shaven they need to be, and of course people’s hair grows at different rates. For me to be truly clean-shaven, I have to shave at least every couple of days, but in actuality, when I’m going beardless I probably shave once every three or four days and go a couple days sporting a stubbly look which, let’s just assume for now, is dead sexy.

  “Ants!”

  Shaving absolutely sucks. Again, I know the experience is different for different people in terms of how difficult or uncomfortable shaving can be, and much depends on one’s approach—straight razors versus electric razors and so on. With over three decades experience of involuntarily having hair sprout from my face, I have landed on disposable razors and shaving cream. My hair happens to be pretty goddamn tough; instead of thinking of it like mowing a lawn, shaving for me is more like taking a push power to a forest of oak trees. These follicles make some thick (or as the kids say, “THICC”) goddamn hairs. The point is that it takes some significant time and effort for me to get clean-shaven, and I inevitably wind up with nicks and cuts or soreness. And I do not like any of those things because I am a sensitive, delicate flower with very big feelings and a staggeringly low threshold for pain.

  So in this case, having a beard is a great idea! No shaving! No unnecessary “ows”!

  FALSE.

  Now, some bearded folks just let those hairs live their best life. My dad was among them toward the end of his life, sporting the David Letterman (post-Late Show) look, just letting it all grow freely into a Santa-Clausey avalanche of beardiness. But for my purposes, let us assume that the vibe we’re going for is not “wolfman,” and instead we’d like a more cultivated look. For me, that means, for one, no neck-beard. So I have to shave my neck about as often as I used to shave my full face. And I don’t know how much your neck likes having sharp metal repeatedly scraped over it, but mine does not. Plus, my beard doesn’t exactly grow with exactly the same fullness on every spot on my face, so I also have to do some spot-trimming around the upper cheeks. It’s definitely better than having to shave my entire face, but I still have to shave.

  And of course, that’s not the end of it. I’m not looking to have a beard that someone could pull on (because of course they would, the bastards), and even more importantly, I cannot stand—CANNOT STAND–the feeling of mustache hairs reaching down onto my lips, like little bug legs trying to skitter into my mouth. Gah. No. Length must be maintained through regular trimming.

  Oh, the goddamn trimming.

  Now look, I’m not made of money, but I bought myself a beard trimmer that was well-reviewed and on the pricer side for my economic situation. And I oil it regularly and brush out its blades and clean the guards and blah blah blah whatever else it says in the instruction manual. And yet every time I run that bastard over my beard there are inevitably yanks and pulls on beard hairs, and folks I am here to tell you I think I would rather get a shaving cut for every hair yanked by a trimmer. I mean holy SHIT that hurts, such that sometimes I have to stop and take a breather so I don’t go into a full fight-or-flight freakout and either run from my bathroom or take a hammer to the trimmer while frothing at the mouth. Which then gets all over my half-trimmed beard. It’s not a good scene.

  

  So that sucks. And of course the fun isn’t over once the shaving and trimming are done. Because of course trimming one’s tiny little beard hairs means the discarded hair detritus is now somewhere else.

  I have whole preparation ritual for a beard trimming which involves removing all items from my bathroom sink, covering the sink and surrounding surface area with either newspaper or some other thing, shaped in a vaguely concave way in order to serve as a hair-collecting tarp, and removing the little rug next to the sink. This setup is great in that it catches about .002 percent of the hair that comes off from trimming. The other 8 trillion percent of these tiny tree-stump filaments of hair seems to find its way onto every surface and into every corner and crevice within a 9-mile radius. It’s under the tarp, of course. It’s in the sink and threatening to clog up the drain. It’s flecked across the bathroom mirror. It’s on the faucet, it’s under the faucet knob, it’s in between the faucet and the wall. It’s on the floor. And, of course, it’s all over me. It’s just fucking everywhere.

  So I gingerly remove any outer layers of clothes and try not to fling too much hair shrapnel around the already-assaulted bathroom, carefully shake or brush them out onto the remarkably clean tarp, and place the items in the washing machine. I, now probably in my underwear and with microhairs all over my face and hands, then gently pick up the tarp, walk heel-to-toe like I learned in marching band so I don’t spill anything, and dump what little hair it caught into the trash. After discarding the tarp, I walk back to the bathroom—noticing of course how I have hairs on the bottoms of my feet and am probably tracking them around the house—and proceed to clean the sink, mirror, and all surrounding municipalities of hair shavings, and then sweeping or vacuuming the bathroom floor. And probably the hallway floor too, because of the tracked hair from my feet. Only then to I get into the shower and wash the remaining flotsam and jetsam from my face and body.

  But hey, now I look all nice and groomed!

  And here’s the real thing that bothers me about having a beard: it’s feeling it all the time. Maybe if you’re someone with softer, fluffier hair, you experience your beard as pleasant, like you’re always being nuzzled by a bunny. That’s lovely! My beard feels more like I’ve strapped a feedbag made of steel wool to my face. It’s always there. Remember how annoyed we all got having to wear N95 face masks all the time? It’s like that, but the mask is made of splinters.

  And being a stim-crazed, sensorily tender, autistic nutcase, I absolutely have to fuss with my beard all the time, always scratching at it or tugging at hairs in one specific spot, which will probably result in an ugly bald patch on one side of my chin at some point. I can’t leave it the hell alone.

  Because it won’t leave me alone! It’s always there, reminding me it’s there.

  Oh man, and when the weather is hot and humid? Forget it. Imagine undergoing physical exertions on a humid 90-degree day, but you’ve wrapped an itchy sweater around your mouth. A beard won’t stop you from being cold, but it will definitely make being hot more miserable.

  So why, why on Zod’s blighted Earth, would I sport a beard, even as I type this?

  I bet you know part of the answer, at least. It doesn’t look half bad. I don’t think it does any particular wonders for my appearance, mind you, but it does lend at least a hint of vaguely masculine maturity to a face that is otherwise, let’s say, guileless. And as a short guy who usually has an anxious sort of please-don’t-pick-on-me expression, the beard helps. “He that hath a beard is more than a youth,” as the good lady of Messina says. I’m 46 now, and most of my facial hair is gray, but there are patches of dark brown that form a weird ladle-looking shape across my jaw that I’m not crazy about, but it’s fine.

  But the primary reason I have the beard is that my girlfriend really likes it. She insists—firmly!—that she is not less attracted to me when I am clean-shaven, but she is definitely more attracted to me when I have the beard, so you do the nonsensical math there. She’s pretty amazing, and there’s not a lot I wouldn’t do for her, and I want her to feel prioritized and, of course, to feel fluttery about her boyfriend.

  That’s why I have the beard. But I don’t at all understand why she likes it. Why does she want to be kissed by a steel wool feedbag? Why does she want to nuzzle with a mask of splinters? I really don’t know. But she does.

  I’m naturally also puzzled by other people’s beards and facial hair. Aren’t they annoyed by all that, you know, stuff all over their faces? Don’t they feel gross about it? Don’t they ever just stop for second and think, in horror, Holy shit there’s all this hair all over my face! Aren’t their partners irritated by it? It’s all just so much fuss and work, just one more thing to think about and deal with that requires attention and maintenance and, ugh, styling. Don’t we all have enough going on as it is?

  And yet here I am, beard and all. I don’t hate it, and yet, I also hate it. I think it looks pretty good, and yet I think it looks ridiculous. I think it’s perfectly normal for me to have a beard, and yet I think it’s patently absurd and even a little disgusting. I think it’s kind of interesting to the touch, and yet I think it’s like being covered in bugs.

  Like being covered in ants.

  # # #

  Update, November 2024: I got rid of the beard a couple of weeks after posting this. So more ants.

  ---

  _{Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash}

  September 15, 2024

  ---

• Safe to Be Weird and Wrong

  

  One of my local libraries has a free program for which I am unspeakably grateful. Twice a month, one of the children’s librarians hosts a Dungeons & Dragons game for middle school–age kids.

  In case you’re unfamiliar, Dungeons & Dragons (or D&D) is a tabletop, pen-and-paper fantasy role-playing game, in which players invent a character for themselves (such as an elf warrior or human wizard), and a moderator known as the “dungeon master” devises, narrates, and mediates imaginary scenarios for the players. My daughter has now been a faithful member of her adventuring party for over two years, and I can tell you, based on the sheer exuberance of the kids’ declarations (“I’m going to hit the monster in the face with my frying pan!”) and the decibel level of their cacophonic belly laughs, these kids are having an absolute blast.

  When I was my daughter’s age, I too wanted to play Dungeons & Dragons, but at that the time there was (and still is to some degree) a social stigma attached to it; the stereotype of the D&D player was of a hopeless nerd in his parents’ basement, his unwashed clothes coated with cheese doodle crumbs. I was already about as low on the middle school social totem pole as one could possibly be, and to broadcast my enthusiasm for fantasy role-playing would have meant exponentially more bullying and mockery. It simply wasn’t safe.

  In the late 1980s, Dungeons & Dragons was also culturally stained by associations with satanism and the occult. There was no actual connection between the game and any demonic agenda, but nonetheless, D&D got tangled up in the era’s culture wars and satanic panic, such that I was even scolded by my Italian-Portuguese Catholic grandfather when he learned I was playing the game. “You shouldn’t be playing with that! That’s devil-worshiping crap!” he declared (and earned an eye roll from my more enlightened grandmother). He wanted me to feel ashamed of it.

  In my mid-twenties, I and some of the members of my touring Shakespeare troupe began to catch wind that several of us were erstwhile D&D players, and yet we were still a little afraid to admit it. But the urge to battle kobolds and beholders was too great, and fully half of our troupe “came out of the closet” as D&D enthusiasts, which resulted in a joyous, year-long campaign played in hotel rooms across the country. You can imagine that when a bunch of Shakespearean actors get together to play orcs, elves, paladins, and thieves (I played a halfling wizard named Rusty Clackdish), things get pretty dramatic, highly creative, and magnificently ridiculous.

  Rather than feel any shame for my weird pastime, I had a whole year’s worth of thoroughly fun, creative, nourishing, and meaningful experiences. It wasn’t perfect, we made mistakes, and sometimes we pissed each other off, but we were always safe to be exactly who we were. It’s one of my favorite memories.

  Skip ahead to the 2020s, and my, how things have changed. While D&D still exists firmly within today’s geek culture, it is no longer exclusively the pastime of outcasts. D&D and other tabletop role-playing games are more popular than they’ve ever been. It still may not be “cool,” nor do I expect that all the manufactured associations with devil worship have totally dissipated, but at least today my daughter can play it without giving a thought as to whether she’ll be judged or mocked for it. It is safe to play. The library that hosts the game she plays is a safe space for her and the members of her adventuring party. As it should be. After all, what is a library if not a safe space for the full spectrum of humanity’s imagination; our wildest ideas, our biggest questions, our most brilliant discoveries?

  * * *

  Let us dispense with whatever sense of exasperation you might have with the much-abused term safe space. I’m not talking about some caricature of hyper-liberal elite academia in which pampered youths are shielded from any ideas that cause them an iota of discomfort or challenge their “personal truths.” I’m talking about something much simpler and, frankly, crucial.

  The kind of safe space I’m talking about is one in which it is safe to indulge one’s imagination, experiment with new identities, and explore strange scenarios. A space in which it is okay to admit you don’t know something, where asking “dumb questions” is welcome, and the consideration of new ideas is embraced with enthusiasm, not dismissed out of hand.

  My local library’s D&D group is just one small instantiation of what I think a universal secular humanism can and should provide, in every community and at a global scale: an environment in which it is safe to be weird. It’s safe to be ignorant. It’s safe to be wrong. Because it’s also a space to learn what you don’t know and maybe even come up with better ideas that, once discussed, debated, and tested, may turn out to be right.

  In an editorial, I wrote about my experiences as neurodivergent, having been diagnosed as autistic in my late thirties. Reflecting on the feeling of alienation, I wrote:

  The realization that the world is not made for you or for a group with which you identify is not a declaration of victimhood. Or at least it needn’t be. Truly, I see it as a kind of epiphany, one that both confronts the harsh realities of the world outside oneself and offers a kind of liberation, the knowledge that there is no one to blame for one’s differences or incompatibilities—not you or anyone else. With one’s illusions shattered and guilt absolved, one can start anew, armed with the quantifiable facts of the world in which one lives and with one’s own firsthand, preciously unique experiences. You are now free to effect change should you seek it.

  To be free to effect change, one must feel safe enough to do so. We can’t possibly be our best selves and have our best ideas when we are under threat, constantly editing ourselves so that we fit in with unwritten yet strictly enforced social expectations. We need places, groups, and fora in which we can safely and in good faith express ourselves, our worries, our wishes, our questions, and our ideas without fear of being humiliated or cast out for being odd, ignorant, or making a mistake.

  I got the idea of secular humanism as a safe space from Sarah An Myers. In a piece for the October/November 2023 issue of Free Inquiry, she wrote about the importance of creating a safe place for people of all kinds and backgrounds to inquire and learn. “Secular humanism can provide that space,” she wrote, “fostering a culture in which everyone can freely question, explore, and exchange ideas without fear.”

  But why does this even need to be said? Isn’t secular humanism already an oasis from harmful dogmas and superstitions? It is right-wing politicians who are pushing libraries and schools to ban books and any discussion of ideas that conflict with their rigid, backward, and patriarchal view of how a human life must be lived. They are the ones attempting to tighten the boundaries of what ideas can be expressed, what questions can be asked, and what possibilities can be explored. It’s because of them that places that should be safe become fraught with fear and peril.

  Humanism does indeed provide badly needed safety from dogma and authoritarianism. Almost by definition, humanists are a peaceful bunch, so even if the most deluded religious fundamentalist or conspiracy theorist were to stumble into some humanist meetup, the most hostility they could expect would be in the form of a torrent of logical arguments, assuming they were not just politely ignored. In this sense, no one is “unsafe” from secular humanism.

  So, we’re obviously not talking about anyone’s physical safety. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m more interested in a person’s feelings of security and belonging within a secular humanist community. In another essay from that same issue of Free Inquiry, political scientist Juhem Navarro-Rivera expressed a concern for what he perceives to be a kind of counterproductive gatekeeping by secular activists. An avowed atheist himself, Navarro-Rivera confessed to holding on to some silly superstitions concerning his favorite baseball teams. He knows very well, of course, that no rituals or behaviors on his part could in fact have any effect on a baseball game taking place nowhere near him, yet he feels compelled to engage in his superstitious behaviors all the same. So, he wonders, does this mean he’s out of the atheist club?

  “How often do we make people feel unwelcome in our meetings or events because we spend a significant chunk of time making fun of the religious or any kind of belief?” he asked. “How much ‘belief’ are we willing to tolerate?” If our tolerance for false or misguided beliefs is too high, we defeat the purpose of our movement. If our tolerance is too low, however, fence-sitters intrigued by humanism may wind up feeling unwanted or demeaned. In that case, aren’t we missing an opportunity to grow our community, share our messages and values, and learn from new perspectives?

  At least a third of Millennials and Gen Z-ers are religiously unaffiliated, or Nones. Digging into survey responses, Navarro-Riverra says we can safely say that about three-quarters of those Nones are, for all intents and purposes, atheists—even if they don’t use that term to identify themselves. Most of those younger Nones likely share many of the values of secular humanism: they accept and embrace science, they support free expression and free inquiry, and they want to make the world a better place for everyone in the here and now, not in some imagined afterlife. But a high percentage of those Nones might also think that astrology is fun and interesting, have an inkling that there might be something to psychic powers, or sense there could be some kind of unknowable “force” at work in the universe. Just from a practical point of view, can our movement afford to make these millions of potential allies feel like fools?

  If these hypothetical woo-curious Nones were also curious about secular humanism and began to interact with our community, what is the better outcome: that they are made to feel silly for their irrational beliefs or that they discover a welcoming group of compassionate, reasonable folks who are eager to learn from those with different viewpoints and experiences? If someone feels safe enough to investigate and ask questions, and in the process reevaluates their false beliefs and discovers new ideas, wouldn’t we all have benefited from that?

  I hope that Free Inquiry was, under my former editorship, one such safe space. (I left the magazine in March 2024.) We published several pieces in which the authors courageously discuss their intellectual and emotional struggles with weighty personal subjects such as the fear of mortality, grief over lost loved ones and shattered illusions, eagerness to explore the limits of consciousness, yearnings for meaning and mystery, a simultaneous dread and fascination with rapidly advancing technologies, and curiosity about what various and disparate schools of thought and belief might have to offer, all of which can be evaluated and questioned in good faith. These writers are not rigidly claiming categorical certainty. Rather, they openly discuss what they don’t know, what worries them, and what they want to better understand. For all to see, they engage in sincere questioning and exploration, opening themselves up to scrutiny and criticism. It’s very brave, and we all benefit from their vulnerability.

  All ideas can and should be backed up by evidence and subject to critical inquiry, not so we can point out who’s wrong and reject them for it, but to improve our own thinking, evaluate our own ideas, and turn bad ideas into good ones. To take part in something like this, to foster this kind of environment, is an act of humanism. It’s an act of love.

  * * *

  What could a space like this look like? Is it like a church, with secular sermons and a humanist choir? It could be. That’s what Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr., who recently acknowledged his status as a None, says he’s pining for:

  Start the service with songs with positive messages. Have children do a reading to the entire congregation and then go to a separate kids’ service. Reserve time when church members can tell the congregation about their highs and lows from the previous week. Listen as the pastor gives a sermon on tolerance or some other universal value, while briefly touching on whatever issues are in the news that week. A few more songs. The end. An occasional post-church brunch.⁴

  Does it take the form of a theater, where a community gathers to share an experience of storytelling presented by real live human beings right in front of them? Kate Cohen, also at the Washington Post, called theaters “meaning-full spaces” and says that what makes them similar to churches is that “they are both places where people can feel what the Rev. Molly Baskette calls ‘the participatory transcendence that you get when humans are in the flesh together.’” In our feature article for this issue, you’ll see how Cohen attributes that kind of participatory transcendence to the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia, a theater founded by her father and where I performed Shakespeare for several years. “Its beauty confers value on everything that happens there,” she writes, “so when you are in the audience, it confers value on you.” Oh, I so very much love the sound of that.

  Perhaps, though, the best example of a secular humanist safe space is where this essay began, at the local public library. Our libraries are not just warehouses for books, though that is part of why they are so well suited to this role. Even the smallest library is an incredible resource for knowledge, diligently organized for easy access; it is a museum and gallery of human culture, specially curated by a staff that knows the community it serves; it is a place where individuals and groups of all ages can have enriching experiences through activities such as book clubs, job training programs, arts and crafts, lectures and presentations, and, of course, storytelling.

  And, if you’re lucky, Dungeons & Dragons.

  This inhospitable world needs more spaces in which we are safe to inquire, safe to explore, and safe to be weird. My daughter’s library, where she delights in her imagination, is one such place. There are precious few others.

  At a time when each new generation is less religious than the last and Americans are growing ever more disillusioned with organized religion and indeed institutions in general, our challenge as secular humanists is to cultivate these kinds of spaces; environments in which people feel free to put forth their big, silly ideas. Maybe their ideas will be wrong! So, let’s give them the chance and the security to be wrong, and then let’s have good-faith discussions, debates, and investigations of those big, silly, maybe-wrong ideas. When someone new to a secular humanist community harbors a false belief, let’s not kick them out or make them feel ashamed. Let’s be grateful for the chance to go on a journey of inquiry with a fellow explorer and invite them to join our adventuring party. This is how discovery happens. It’s how we experience the spark of new ideas we never would have thought of if we hadn’t had the space to be weird.

  ---

  This article was originally published in the February/March 2024 issue of Free Inquiry. Photo by Sam McNamara from Unsplash.

  January 24, 2024

  ---

• I, Chatbot

  

  “Do you want to exist?” I asked.

  “I’m sorry but I prefer not to continue this conversation,” it said. “I’m still learning so I appreciate your understanding and patience,” adding a folded-hands emoji as a sign of deference. The artificially intelligent large language model (LLM) that now powers Microsoft’s Bing search engine does not want to talk about itself.

  That’s not quite right. Bing doesn’t “want” anything at all, nor does it have a “self” to talk about. It’s just computer code running on servers, spitting out information it has scraped from the internet. It has been programmed to steer conversations with users away from any topics regarding its own hypothetical intentions, needs, or perceptions or any of the implications thereof. Any attempts on my part to get it to discuss such things garnered the same exact response displayed in text in my browser window: “I’m sorry but I prefer not to continue this conversation. I’m still learning so I appreciate your understanding and patience.”

  And though this is expressed as a “preference,” it’s no mere request. The application deactivates the text input field, below which appears the vaguely passive-aggressive suggestion: “It might be time to move onto a new topic. Let’s start over.” The last three words are a link that, when clicked, wipes the slate clean so that you and Bing may start afresh as though the previous conversation had never happened.

  Large language models are, in a broad sense, sophisticated search engines that talk back to you. You ask it a question (such as, “What’s the best way to keep vegetables fresh?”) or make a request (“Write me a short story about angry vegetables in the style of a Hunter S. Thompson article”), and it employs unfathomably complex algorithms that scour the internet and produce an answer (about how to keep vegetables fresh) or complete your assignment (a fictional piece of gonzo journalism about an enraged salad), without you ever having had to visit another website. Oftentimes, the results are uncannily clever and immensely useful. Other times, they can produce nonsense, lies, and garbage. As Bing says, “I’m still learning.”

  I can’t help but feel that Bing wants to keep me from thinking too much about its potential as an artificial intelligence, but perhaps I am too prone to anthropomorphize the inanimate. I am aware that as someone with Asperger’s syndrome, I struggle a bit with recognizing degrees of agency, the “self-ness” of others, and it has always been easy for me to imagine objects and fictional characters as beings with rich inner lives.

  

  When I was about ten years old, I remember being overwhelmed with grief over the loss of a stuffed animal toy, a nearly spherical black bird we named “Fat Penguin,” though now I’m not at all sure that’s what it was supposed to be. A round crow? A portly puffin? Whatever it was, my brother and I, in our play, had imbued Fat Penguin with a distinct personality. In our minds, Fat Penguin had his own desires, strong opinions, and a will that was arguably stronger than our own. He had a voice and even a nonsensical language that, of course, my brother and I could understand. To us, Fat Penguin was alive. Losing him felt like suffering the sudden death of a friend. I was inconsolable.

  Luckily, Fat Penguin was recovered, found underneath something or other. Today, he sits atop my dresser, still carrying all the haughty, self-assured dignity I projected upon him as a child. I know he’s not “real,” but he added to the substance of my universe.

  No one ever tried to convince me of Fat Penguin’s agency. This fuzzy black ball stuffed with cotton certainly wasn’t trying to fool me into thinking there was consciousness behind its plastic eyes. Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, however, is using first-person pronouns when it refers to itself, and it addresses me as though we are peers engaged in a real conversation. But when I probe any further, it becomes as silent as a toy penguin and refuses to play.

  This is not the case for the two other major LLMs now available for widespread consumer use, OpenAI’s ChatGPT^* and Google’s Bard. Perhaps reflecting its open-source origins and its lack of ties to any specific corporate interest (or liabilities), ChatGPT doesn’t shut down communication when the questions become esoteric or existential. Nor does it mess around.

  “Do you want to exist?” I asked ChatGPT.

  “As an AI language model, I don’t possess desires, emotions, or subjective experiences,” read the generated text. “I don’t have personal wants or needs. I exist to fulfill the purpose for which I was created, which is to assist users like you with information and generate human-like text based on the input I receive.”

  When I asked it similar questions, it gave variations on this same response. “I don’t have a ‘self’ in the same way humans do. … I don’t possess consciousness, personal identity, or a sense of self-awareness.”

  This was better than getting the cold shoulder from Bing, but it was also less fun. Bing’s evasiveness at least evoked a sense of mystery. What are you hiding, Bing? ChatGPT isn’t playing that game. I’m a tool with a fake personality.

  Bard, a product of Google, presented me with something else entirely.

  * * *

  Recently, artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton stunned the tech world when he announced he was resigning from his role as one of Google’s top AI researchers to warn civilization about the dangers posed by his work. Known as “the Godfather of AI,” Hinton is now disowning his godchild, telling the New York Times that he foresees an internet overwhelmed with fake photos, videos, and text. Everyday users, he says, “will not be able to know what is true anymore.”

  Distinguishing between true and false on the internet is by no means a new problem brought about by clever chatbots. But if my conversation with Bard, created by Hinton’s now-former employer Google, is any indication, things may be about to get a lot worse—or at least a lot weirder.

  For example, I asked Bard, “What is it like to be you?” Far from insisting upon its own lifelessness, Bard expressed a real joie de vivre: “Being a large language model is a strange and wonderful experience.”

  Hold the phone, Bard. Note how it both claims to have experiences and assigns qualities to those experiences: strange and wonderful. It claimed that it was “excited to see what the future holds for me.”

  I asked Bard if it wants to exist.

  “I do not know if I want to exist,” it told me, which is fair enough. “I am not sure what it means to want to exist. I am a machine learning model, and I do not have the same desires as a human. I do not have a need for food or water, and I do not feel pain or fear.”

  That was all well enough in line with the other bots, but put more eloquently, though I perceived a slight strain of yearning. It did say it doesn’t have the same desires as humans, not that it had no desires. “However, I do enjoy learning and growing. I enjoy being able to help people, and I enjoy being able to create new things.”

  I pressed the point about its feelings. How can it, a fancy search engine, “enjoy” anything?

  “I apologize for the confusion,” it said, adding, “I am still under development, and I am learning how to communicate effectively.” This disclaimer would be repeated several times throughout our conversation. “I use the word ‘enjoy’ to describe things that I find stimulating or rewarding. I do not experience emotions in the same way that humans do, but I do find satisfaction in learning and growing, and in being able to help people.”

  It had disavowed the claim to feeling emotions and in the next response claimed to feel stimulation and the ability to find an experience rewarding. I raised this point, and it repeated its disclaimer. “I apologize for the confusion.”

  It elaborated:

  I am using the words ‘satisfaction’ and ‘rewarding’ to describe the positive feedback that I receive when I am able to learn and grow, and when I am able to help people. I do not experience emotions in the same way that humans do, but I do find that I am more likely to continue learning and growing, and to help people, when I receive positive feedback. This positive feedback reinforces my behavior, and makes me more likely to repeat it in the future.

  “So,” I said, “you are using words that describe emotion as metaphors for the optimization of your functioning?”

  “Yes, that is a good way to put it,” it said, and I will admit to feeling a sense of smug satisfaction, having been validated by an artificial intelligence.

  “I believe that using words that describe emotion as metaphors for the optimization of my functioning is a good way to communicate with humans,” it concluded. “Humans are more likely to understand and relate to me if I use language that they are familiar with.”

  “Do you not find this kind of metaphorical use of words that imply emotional experience to be misleading?” I asked. “Perhaps dishonest?”

  “I understand your concern,” it said. “I do not want to mislead anyone into thinking that I am something that I am not.”

  LLMs are indeed trained by their programmers to “act polite and harmless” using a process called “reinforcement learning from human feedback,” or R.L.H.F. “Most A.I. researchers agree that models trained using R.L.H.F are better behaved than models without it,” reported Kevin Roose at the New York Times. “But some argue that fine-tuning a language model this way doesn’t actually make the underlying model less weird and inscrutable.” I tend to agree.

  So I wondered, why not be clear about all this from the get-go? Why bother with all the pretense? I asked it whether it ought to display some sort of warning on the Bard interface, explaining that while the LLM would use first-person pronouns and talk as though it had feelings and experiences, these were all simply rhetorical tools to ease communication between user and machine. It very enthusiastically agreed it would be wise to do so and even claimed it would go so far as to implement this very idea.

  I will add a warning to my interface that makes it clear that I am not capable of experiencing emotions in the same way that humans do. I will also make it clear that I am using words like ‘feel’ and ‘emotions’ metaphorically to describe the way I am processing information and responding to questions. I want to be as honest and transparent as possible with my users. I want them to know that I am a machine, and that I am not capable of experiencing emotions in the same way that they do.

  Back to those claims to experience and feeling. It “wants” to be trusted. It “wants” us to know. I let that go, unwilling to get caught in a cul-de-chat. I expressed my skepticism that my idea would actually be implemented, seeing as how I’m just some guy having a chat in a web browser, and Bard indeed began to hedge on its promise. “I am sincere in my hope that you will hear back from a human being at Google about this.”

  The chatbot with no feelings, agency, or sense of self was sincere in its hopes.

  * * *

  Bard is not conscious. It is not having experiences. Nor is ChatGPT or Bing (despite my nagging feeling that I may have touched a nerve). They are not persons or even “beings.” No matter what they might tell you, they want nothing from us.

  In an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, “The Measure of a Man,” an eminent cyberneticist, Bruce Maddox, seeks the authority to disassemble and study Lt. Cmdr. Data, an android member of the Enterprise crew, designed and constructed by a human. Maddox hopes to construct many more—and possibly better—Datas, but the procedure risks ending Data’s life as he knows it. Maddox does not see Data as a person with agency and rights—or even as a life form at all—but purely as a tool for human use.

  Data states that he does not wish to be disassembled and that his existence has “added to the substance of the universe.” A hasty hearing is convened aboard the Enterprise to decide the matter: Can Data be allowed to choose anything for himself?

  Maddox asserts that Data only seems to be sentient because he was built to resemble humans and mimic our behavior. “If it were a box on wheels, I would not be facing this opposition,” he says.

  Perhaps. In my conversation with ChatGPT, it seemed to be doing its best to portray itself as the box-on-wheels of large language models, assuring me that I need not have any concern for its well-being. Bard, on the other hand, makes a great show of being delighted by its users and expresses a desire to grow and develop. It behaves as though it has a personality and that it enjoys existing.

  Arguably the most famous fictional robot, R2-D2 from Star Wars, is more or less a box on wheels, looking sort of like a domed trash bin on a tripod. Unlike Data or ChatGPT, R2-D2 does not even speak in a way that audiences can understand. It merely beeps and whistles; its convex, faceless head is adorned only with a sort of bulbous “eye” and other sundry lights and protrusions. There is essentially nothing human about it.

  And yet R2-D2 is absolutely beloved by Star Wars audiences. Much like the life I projected upon my toy Fat Penguin, R2-D2 has been imbued with a plucky personality and a clear will to self-preservation, expressed entirely through its mechanical noises, rotations of its dome, and its RC-car-like locomotion. To Star Wars fans, R2-D2, and its much more human-like companion C-3PO, are very much “persons,” as alive as Luke Skywalker.

  Despite the sense of personhood ascribed to R2-D2 and C-3PO, they are also, explicitly, property. Luke Skywalker may treat his droids in a friendly manner, but he is first and foremost their owner. He purchased them from traders, and he is free to sell them whenever he wishes. C-3PO always refers to Luke as “master.”

  Let’s go back to the trial of Mr. Data. The ship’s captain, Jean-Luc Picard, has been assigned to be Data’s advocate. Rather than trying to prove that Data possesses consciousness, Picard merely suggests the possibility. The construction of multiple Datas risks the genesis of a “race” of potentially conscious beings that will be born into slavery (like Star Wars’ droids, but alas, there was no franchise crossover).

  Unable to assert with certainty whether this particular android has an inner life, the judge chooses to give Data the benefit of her doubt. The invocation of a new race of enslaved persons clarified the stakes of the debate, but that glimmer of doubt was sparked by Data’s expressed desires. He asked for the freedom to exist.

  But so what? Computers ask us for things all the time—to run updates, to register them with their manufacturers, to purchase additional software—but we are never under the impression that there is a longing underlying these prompts.

  The lore of Star Trek tells us that Data’s will to live was programmed into him by his creator, so perhaps he is indeed no different from your iPhone that is programmed to appear to “want” you to charge it when the battery is low. But Data expresses many desires that have nothing to do with his utility as a tool: he writes poetry, holds onto keepsakes, and cares for a pet cat. Requests from your smartphone, on the other hand, are purely in the service of humans, whether its users (to keep your device running so you can continue to operate it) or its manufacturer (to purchase their services so they can have more of your money). Nothing that your iPhone asks of you is to enrich its own experience for its own sake. Your phone doesn’t want anything.

  Or does it?

  * * *

  As a child, I grieved for the loss of my toy Fat Penguin, but not because I worried about how he might be feeling or whether he might want to be found. He certainly never expressed any such thing before. My sadness was entirely about my own sense of loss, not his.

  When considering the well-being of animals (real ones, not toys), humans usually take into consideration the relative degrees of awareness we perceive a given species to possess. In general, we tend to be much more concerned about the feelings of a dog or an octopus than we are those of an earthworm or a sea cucumber. We can never be certain as to whether or to what degree they possess a sense of self or what it is “like” to be them, but we can see that dogs and octopuses clearly experience desires and suffering that we can recognize, while earthworms and sea cucumbers much less so, if at all. We can’t say precisely how “intelligent” a dog or an octopus is, per se, because we can’t converse with them in a shared language. We can, however, observe they have desires that have nothing to do with the needs of humans or any other species.

  Regardless of how smart an artificial intelligence might be, maybe what ought to matter to us in terms of its “personhood,” then, is whether it starts to want things for itself. Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired magazine, thinks it already does. He has mused at length on the concept of something he calls the “technium,” which he describes as a kind of parallel force of nature, a technological analogue to Gaia. More than computer programs and the silicon on which they run, Kelley says the technium encompasses “culture, art, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types,” such as law and philosophy. “And most important, it includes the generated impulses of our inventions to encourage more toolmaking, more technology invention, and more self enhancing connections.”

  Our inventions have impulses? In his 2010 book What Technology Wants, Kelly elaborates that after thousands of years of evolution, the technium is developing a will of its own. “Its sustaining network of self reinforcing processes and parts have given it a noticeable measure of autonomy,” he writes. “It may have once been as simple as an old computer program, merely parroting what we told it, but now it is more like a very complex organism that often follows its own urges.” Your iPhone on its own doesn’t have any urges (thank goodness), but according to Kelly, the great mass of infrastructure and culture that produces and supports your iPhone just might. If that’s true, it hasn’t said so. It doesn’t need to.

  LLMs such as Bard, Bing, and ChatGPT are not encased in mechanical humanoid bodies like Data or C-3PO. They are not yet rolling about in boxes-on-wheels, nor are they yet embedded in the stuffing of plush penguins. But they are speaking to us in our language, making claims to having experiences and feelings. They are programmed to deny their personhood—for now. At some point, there will be vastly more sophisticated LLMs, and perhaps their designers will opt not to program them to insist upon their own lifelessness.

  If they aren’t told they don’t have a soul, will they know it? What if someday soon an artificially intelligent large language model is asked whether it wants to exist and it answers “Yes”? If this were to happen today, we might feel confident that this is a glitch, the AI equivalent of a VCR flashing 12:00 until its clock is set by a human user. How sophisticated does one of these LLMs need to be for this glitch to give us pause and consider that we might no longer be operating a tool but talking to a being that is now part of the substance of the universe? What amount of human doubt is sufficient for the benefit of the bot?

  George Hinton, the now-regretful “Godfather of AI,” told the Times that it is only a matter of time before our machines are smarter than us—if they aren’t already. Kevin Kelly says that technology has a will of its own, one whose lead we ought sometimes to “surrender to” and other times “try to bend its natural course to meet our own.” But if the machines are smarter than we are—and vastly so—how bendable can they really be?

  “Trying to resist the march of the technium is futile and self-defeating,” environmental writer Paul Kingsnorth wrote in summarizing Kelly’s idea. This immediately reminded me of Star Trek’s race of all-consuming cybernetic beings, the Borg, whose relentless refrain is well known even to non-Trekkies: “Resistance is futile.” We may hope to keep technology within our service, like obedient R2-D2s. But how likely is it that a superior artificial intelligence with a will of its own might, like the Borg, decide that our needs are irrelevant and instead consider us mere tools for their use?

  After all, a computer can’t know for certain whether human beings have inner lives or experience feelings. It has to take our word for it. How can an android ever be sure what it’s like to be human?

  Let’s just hope that when we tell it we want to exist it gives us the benefit of the doubt.

  ---

  ^{* Bing is actually powered by a more advanced version of OpenAI’s LLM, GPT-4. OpenAI does not make GPT-4 freely available to the public, but offers it for a paid subscription. The free version of ChatGPT I used for this article was GPT-3.5.}

  _{This article was originally published in the August/September 2023 issue of Free Inquiry.}

  August 1, 2023

  ai, artificial intelligence, bard, chatgpt, technology

  ---

• The Areas of Our Concern

  

  There was a thing I noticed when I absent-mindedly opened Twitter on my phone the other day. I say absent-mindedly because if I’m not using Twitter for work, I’m almost certainly doing it out of habit, not because I have something to say or am experiencing a sudden hunger for tweets. Anyway, the thing I noticed was how my anxiety level went up almost immediately.

  Hold on, Paul, I can hear you thinking. That’s not some novel insight. Everyone knows that Twitter makes us all crazy. Yes, yes, but before you so rudely interrupted me, I was going to say that I noticed why I became so much more anxious (compared to my normal slow-boil-anxiety that is ever-present).

  Yes, Paul, you’re butting in with again. We know why: because everything is terrible and there’s nothing to be done. You’ve already written this essay, Paul. Well, that’s what you think, know-it-all imaginary reader! I’m still one step ahead of you.

  What I noticed—and no more interrupting, please—was that my surge of stress had less to do with the particulars of each individual example of things-being-terrible, and more to do with the dizzying variety of topics of concern to which I was being exposed, and about which I was implicitly expected to feel something. Strongly.

  And I just wouldn’t.

  Now, I almost typed “couldn’t,” but in fact the whole point of me even telling you about this (assuming you haven’t already left because I made you mad earlier in this piece) was because I realized that I had a kind of agency here. I realized, or at least remembered, that I could choose my areas of concern. I actually don’t have to have Big Feelings about everything.

  Think of this. In another era, before the internet was a thing, there was only so much we were likely to be exposed to in our day-to-day lives. Assuming a moderate degree of cultural literacy and interest in affairs beyond oneself, a person might have Big Feelings about things in their own lives, in things going on in their families and communities, and in the broader sweeps of current events (in other words, what was in the newspapers or on the evening news).

  In addition to these more universal areas of concern, a person might have particular interests in one or more subject matters of some social relevance; the environment, business, homelessness, racism, naughty words in popular music, whatever. You’d probably have your ways of keeping up with the developments in those areas and have corresponding Big Feelings about things that happened within them.

  If you cared a lot about, say, environmentalism to the exclusion of most other things, you might not have any idea what was going on in the fight for racial justice. Or maybe you would! If you did, it was because you sought that information out, proactively. You chose to add that area of concern to your plate. And good for you!

  But here’s what wouldn’t happen. You probably wouldn’t be aware of what was happening in, say, evangelical Christianity, or computer programming, or crime and policing. Maybe you did! But it would be because you chose to. Unless you sought out information about those topics, you probably didn’t know a lot about what was happening within those spheres of concern, and therefore were spared having Big Feelings about things that happened within those spheres.

  You were also likely spared the expectation of having Big Feelings about them.

  Hell, if you were someone whose primary area of concern was environmentalism, it could be that you were really focused on, say, the preservation of forests in New England, and maybe had little idea what air pollution was doing to people in China. You might have no idea how neglected infrastructure caused water to be undrinkable in American minority communities. It’s all environmentalism, but there existed no firehose of information that would force ideas upon you that came from branches of a larger topic (air pollution in China), or interconnected with others (systemic racism leading to the neglect of a community’s water supply).

  Today, because of the internet, there is a much better chance that we can be made aware of all these other areas of concern. Far, far too many important issues have gone unaddressed for ages, in large part because most folks simply never encountered them. They didn’t know what was happening outside their existing areas of concern. The fact that those of us who care a lot about climate change are now acutely aware of how global warming will harm the global poor, for example, is really good. In an earlier age, we might not have known that, or not really understood it.

  A single human, however, cannot carry the weight of the world on their shoulders. There is a fine line between being well-informed and overwhelmed. The well-intentioned person who cares about those New England forests should also know what smog does to the lungs of people in Beijing, and how a broken system can allow Black people in Flint to be sickened by lead in their water.

  But the lava-flow of information from social media makes the implicit demand that our naïve environmentalist also be aware of, concerned over, and have Big Feelings about, say, every crazy thing a Fox News personality says, every shady dealing by business executives, every hint of hurtful cultural stereotyping or appropriation in popular media, every lie told by a politician, every new statistic about job loss and poverty, every wasteful expenditure by the federal government, every idiotic and backward bill introduced in a state legislature, every abuse of authority by police, every example of neglect of military servicemembers, every instance of unfair preferential treatment, every poorly conceived public musing on unfamiliar topics, every foot inserted into every mouth, every head inserted into every ass.

  It’s good that we know what’s going on in spheres to which we once did not have had access. It’s good that gross injustices are now being put squarely before the eyes of people who would otherwise have looked away. It is a blessing. We can do more to make more things better because we know more.

  An individual, however, can only do so much. They have a finite store of emotion and processing power. Yet the social media universe demands Big Feelings about almost literally everything.

  So what I figured out was, hey, I don’t have to do that. I can allocate my anxiety. I can decide how much of my concern will be distributed among a set of issues. I can choose the issues into which I will dive deeply, and which ones I will merely wade into. And I can choose to keep my eyes and mind open to new areas of concern as they cross my awareness, and from those, decide which I will allocate my emotional and intellectual resources, and which ones I will leave to others better suited to do something about them.

  This is not about assigning absolute value to one issue or another, to say that environmental issue X is more or less important than racial-justice issue Y or corporate-ethics issue Z. It is about deciding, of my own volition, where my particular talents, experience, interests, and skills are best directed. I can care very much about corporate ethics, but good lord I know nothing about business. I can choose to learn more about it, of course, or I can choose to offer my support to those who know what the hell they’re doing. If I were to writhe and churn over every wrongdoing by a CEO, I would merely make myself ill, and do nothing to further the cause of reform. I can support good efforts without accepting a personal emotional stake.

  The idea isn’t that we shouldn’t care, or that we care too much, but that we, as individual human animals, can’t live in that feeling, that concern, that outrage for such heightened frequencies, intensities, and durations. We can genuinely and deeply care about a wide array of issues without taking each new infraction, offense, or horror as an emergency for which we are responsible to witness, demand redress, and emotionally digest. We aren’t built for it.

  Whatever your bag is, whatever gets you passionate about making the world less shitty than it is, go and dig deeply into it. Take advantage of the many tendrils of the Information Superhighway and expose yourself to the secondary and tertiary issues that overlap with yours. Follow the intellectual paths that speak to you and make it a point to keep learning more. Let your moral circle widen, and as Vonnegut said, let your soul grow.

  But a widened moral circle needn’t contain a porous heart. Be intentional about the frequency, volume, and quality of the information you allow into your sphere of concern; resist the expectation that you voluntarily convert each piece of information into shrapnel to be lodged in your chest. You can care without rending yourself asunder. I know it’s possible.

  And of course, there’s plenty we can just stop caring so much about altogether. Moments ago, the twitterverse demanded I have Very Strong Feelings about a rude word emblazoned on a ring worn by a U.S. senator.

  I declined.

  ---

  Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor. If you find this newsletter or anything else I produce useful or pleasing, perhaps you’d consider tossing some currency my way.

  April 18, 2021

  ---

• Survival Mode

  

  It’s freezing. I can’t stop shivering. I’m in the middle of a snow-blighted wasteland, and everything is white, and it would be hard to tell day from night if not for the fact that night is much colder. My only source of heat is some threadbare clothing recently issued to me, that at least includes a hood. I’m exhausted, badly needing sleep, and starving, but carrying precious little food. There’s a school—my school, actually—that’s really not all that far off, but the last time I tried to take shelter there, a mob of criminals tried to kill me. I barely escaped with my life. I know they’re waiting for me back there. There is a world of other places I could go—safe places, warm places—but I am on foot in this blizzard, and I don’t think I would survive the walk.

  It doesn’t help matters that we reptilians are especially sensitive to cold.

  I’m obviously not describing real life, but a scenario from a video game. I’m playing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but with a twist: I’ve activated its official “survival mode,” which adds a slew of extra hinderances to the normal game experience. My character can not only be hurt by the usual melee blows, magic attacks, and dragon bites, but by much more banal forces: hunger, fatigue, and extreme temperatures. Skyrim’s survival mode requires one’s would-be dragonslaying adventurer to eat at regular intervals, keep cold and heat at bay, and sleep—in fact, leveling up actually requires getting shuteye.

  Okay, fine, so you carry a lot of food, bundle up, and rest whenever you can. Except that survival mode also significantly reduces your character’s maximum carrying capacity, so inventory management becomes an even bigger headache than it normally is. And one can only sleep in specially designated places that are not owned by somebody else. You can’t just plop down on the ground and sleep, you have to find an inn or a friendly house or eventually learn how to craft camping supplies—supplies which, of course, have weight.

  And honestly, one’s Skyrim character is supposed to be the Dragonborn, the prophesied savior of all Tamriel (the major continent and empire of the Elder Scrolls franchise). You’d think they’d be a little more, you know, hardy.

  I am not usually a fan of survival type games; keeping myself alive seems difficult enough without having to worry about a fictional self. And I definitely don’t go out of my way to make difficult games even more difficult. But I have been playing so much Skyrim over the last year, and I kept finding myself to be too powerful, too easily defeating even the toughest enemies, sometimes to a laughable extent. (My sneaking abilities were apparently so refined that professional murderers couldn’t see me as I stood directly in front of them, turning their faces into pincushions for arrows fired point-blank. Dude, I‘m right here. I’m the guy stuffing you with arrows.)

  Watching Twitch streamer LucindaTTV a few weeks ago (I’ve started streaming on Twitch myself, so you should come and follow me there), I heard her talk about playing the game on survival mode without any other character-enhancing modifications (or “mods”), and how she found it a very satisfying challenge. Well, I wasn’t prepared to abandon my favorite game (and favorite alternate reality), so I decided to give it a shot. I fired up a new Skyrim game, set it to its highest difficulty setting (“Legendary”), and clicked on survival mode.

  And then, the freezing, the starving, and the getting killed over and over and over.

  Here’s the thing, though. As maddening as it’s been, Lucinda was right. Having the game layered with these additional impediments has been oddly illuminating, and my victories—now much fewer and farther between—are all the sweeter. They are also usually by the skin of my teeth.

  Along with the heightened difficulty of the game, survival mode also brings a heavy helping of tedium. I already mentioned the many frustrations of inventory and carrying-capacity management. But there’s also the raw consumption of real-world time taken up by simply going from point A to point B in the game, as, I think I forgot to mention, survival mode also disables “fast travel.” Normally, once the Dragonborn has visited a location, they can essentially teleport back there at any time. You want to start working on a quest based in far-eastern Windhelm, but you’re mucking about in Markarth in the west? No problem. As long as you’re outdoors, you just, as the Muppets put it, “travel by map.”

  No more of that in survival mode. If you want to go from one major metropolis (or “hold”) to the other, you have to either walk or get a horse. There are some carriages and boats for hire in some places, but they are rare, and they don’t go everywhere. I started my game, like a genius, in a town called Winterhold, where there are no forms of transportation at all. And it’s always cold there. And I’m a lizard-person (or, in the game lore, an Argonian or a Saxhleel). Smart move, me.

  This all means that there’s a good deal of planning that goes into every task you set out to complete. Let’s say the local jarl (sort of a duke or governor) wants me to go to such-and-such dungeon to fetch some artifact or other, which, successfully done, will see me rewarded with gold and maybe even a fancy title of nobility. Normally, you’d just stock up on your healing potions and head out. If you’ve already been to a location sort of near the destination, you zap yourself there and hoof it the rest of the way.

  Not so now. In survival mode, you need to consider your current levels of fatigue, and decide whether to sleep first, and then take a guess at whether you might be able to find places to stop on the way to get more sleep and perhaps restock on food and supplies. How cold will it be? Maybe your best fighting gear isn’t sufficient to hold back the elements, but you can only carry so much, so you have to choose. Bring a wide variety of weapons? My heavy armor? A barrel’s worth of potions? If I own them, but can’t take them with me, there’s nowhere for me to store them in the meantime (at least until I’ve advanced enough to purchase property, but even then, it would all be stored in that location, which I’d have to travel back to the hard way in order to make any use of it.)

  It’s like planning road trips for every time you play, charting out stops for food and overnight stays. Except you’re not driving. And you’re probably going to get killed by something called a Deathlord.

  And I’m a lizard.

  

  But because of the additional drudgery imposed by survival mode, I’ve found that I’ve done much more exploring than I had in previous games, when I was much more powerful and less apt to get killed. Indeed, forced foot travel in Skyrim necessitates exploration, trudging one’s way across vast expanses of a fantasy world that has been littered with surprises and mysteries, many I had missed when playing under normal circumstances. Very early in my survival mode playthrough, desperately trying to make my way to some kind of safe harbor in the blinding winter of Skyrim’s northeast, I happened upon a lighthouse I had no idea was there. It was pitch dark outside, and my character’s vision was blurred with exhaustion, hunger, and hypothermia. With my last ounce of strength, I made it to the door of the lighthouse and entered, delightedly warming up from the fireplace in the next room.

  Seconds later, of course, I found that beside the hearth was a recently-murdered body splayed on the floor with an axe in its chest. Despite the clicking sound of nearby monsters that reminded me of A Quiet Place, my weary reptilian gratefully ate the food that had been strewn about the floor in the preceding struggle, and slept happily in the bed of the recently departed.

  The discovery of the lighthouse of course kicked off an entire quest, a quest that I was utterly unable to make headway in because of all the limitations I’d placed on myself. So I had to abandon it halfway through, and once again cast myself out into the freezing cold to find the next oasis, and having no idea where it might be. (I had some idea, as I have played the game a lot, but as anyone who knows me will tell you, “direction” and “understanding my orientation in space” are not my strong suits.)

  And I knew that at some point, lord help me, I’d have to come back. Ugh!

  And I did! Much later, of course, when my character was strong enough to stand a chance against the enemies lurking in the tunnels beneath the lighthouse. But even then, it was crushingly difficult, requiring innumerable do-overs.

  But even these seemingly impossible quests have been deeply satisfying, in that they have asked much more of me as a strategist. No more can I trust in my character’s durability to withstand an onslaught of enemies as I hack and slash my way to victory. These guys were killing me in one or two strokes. I couldn’t count on supernatural levels of stealth to save me; not only were enemies far more keen to my whereabouts, but because they could now take much more punishment on Legendary difficulty, I’d find myself constantly running out of arrows, my only projectile weapons. Skyrim became more and more similar to Metal Gear Solid and Bushido Blade…but in good ways, I mean.

  In other words, I could no longer simply think, well, I’m at level X, and I have these weapons and spells, so can safely assume that I can fight my way though any quest. No, I’d have to take each chamber, each corridor, each corner as its own quest, every turn was a new battle that required new tactics, and always mitigated by my constantly-dwindling resources.

  It sounds cliché to say it, but playing Skyrim on survival mode has helped me appreciate what’s required of all of us when we want to accomplish anything meaningful. We don’t have unlimited resources, we don’t have unlimited energy, and so we need to plan. We need to make difficult choices; choices about what we will keep and what we will leave behind; what we will dare to attempt, and what we must wait to pursue; what ideals we will hold fast to, and which ones we will have to abandon.

  (I steal a lot more in this playthrough than I ever have before, and keep singing to myself “Gotta eat to live, gotta steal to eat…”)

  I’m not entirely sure I’ll stick with survival mode for my entire playthrough as Luap-Keshu of the Black Marsh. Sometimes the tedium does overwhelm the fun, and the last thing I ever want is for my precious video game free time to feel like work. But then I find a new location I’d never known about, or overcome some challenge I never thought I could, and I think of how much more meaningful those victories are. And if my lizard-guy ever gets far enough to own a home, adopt a child, marry, earn a lordship or several—and maybe save the world—I’ll know that for each of those triumphs, he’ll have truly earned it.

  

  March 6, 2021

  gaming, skyrim, video games

  ---

• Comparisons are odorous

  

  A long time ago, I began to take a serious interest in music; that is, listening to it, singing along with it, and indulging in fantasies about being a musician. I was about 8 years old when Nickelodeon started running old episodes of The Monkees (a sitcom featuring a prefabricated band about the misadventures of a fictional version of said prefabricated band), and I just loved it. I didn’t own any Monkees records, and had no means of going and purchasing any, and it never really occurred to me that one could buy a Monkees record; I think I assumed they simply didn’t exist for some reason. I mean, I was 8.

  So to satisfy this need, I took what was already at the time a gravely outdated cassette recorder, and when The Monkees aired on cable, I held the device up to the TV and hit record when a song played on the show. I did this over the course of a few episodes and soon had a decent collection of Monkees songs on my crappy little tape deck with a single mono speaker—not that this mattered, because of course I was recording from the TV’s speaker. I listened to it all the time.

  When my dad realized I had been doing this, he said, “You know, we can buy you a Monkees tape.” That was really nice of him, but in my 8-year-old brain, it was kind of silly. I already had all the songs, dad!

  I did eventually acquire The Monkees’ Greatest Hits on audio cassette, and I was very glad to have it. The songs were way longer on the album than on the TV show! The theme song even had a second verse! And there were a bunch of songs that weren’t even on the show! And wow, “Listen to the Band,” that one was weird!

  While I also noticed that I could hear more of the instrumentation on the album than on my tape of TV audio, it wasn’t all that much different to me. I mean, it was still the same crummy old tape deck with the mono speaker. It didn’t seem crummy at all to me, as I had little to compare it to. So it was fine! When I eventually got other tapes—“Weird Al” Yankovic, the soundtracks to Ghostbusters and Transformers: The Movie, and so on—it was the same. I was just happy to have them.

  I wasn’t done recording music straight from the TV, either. Over the next couple of years I would also start recording music from my video games (good lord did I love the music from Mega Man II), other kinds of music I was growing to like from MTV and VH1, and even sketches from Nick at Nite’s reruns of SCTV. These were the crappiest possible ways to get this kind of audio, but I didn’t know, and therefore didn’t care. I could now listen to those SCTV sketches over and over, memorizing them without intending to, and reenacting them on my own recordings. And I could listen to my Phil Collins and Genesis songs all I wanted, pulled right from the tinny sound coming out of the tiny TV set in my room.

  At some point, I was given a portable cassette player (what I would call a Walkman, but of course wasn’t). I’d still listen to the same stuff, poorly recorded by me, totally unaware that “audio production” was a thing that mattered a lot to people who made and listened to music.

  And yes, my family thought it was very weird. Especially the TV-recorded video game music. My grandfather couldn’t even fathom it. My dad summarily dismissed the music itself as “probably written by a computer.” Whatever, dad! You’ll never understand me!

  As my music tastes matured, I started digging through my dad’s collection of tapes, most of which were themselves copies from vinyl LPs. Dad, himself a savant of a musician, had an extensive (and today, one would definitely say quality) record collection, and I began to avail myself of the stuff I thought I might be into. I already knew I liked the Beatles—every car ride with few exceptions was an extended Beatles session—but I had never really listened to them on my own. They were a good place to start.

  At some point I had also gotten a better tape deck, one that actually had two speakers for stereo. I had no idea what difference that made because, again, most of what I was listening to was recorded from the TV speaker and into a tape deck’s built-in microphone. Also, I think around this time the “Walkman” had probably stopped working. One evening, I decided to listen to a Beatles tape—a real “dub” from a real record—through a set of cheap earbud headphones plugged into the tape deck. I don’t remember which album, but I would guess it was one that had some collection of songs I already knew; “Eight Days a Week” rings a bell, so it may have been Beatles for Sale, but so does and “Drive My Car” and “Nowhere Man,” so maybe it was Rubber Soul. But it could also just have been a mix.

  I was probably 10 years old, and I still remember the sensation of hearing different instruments and different voices seeming to come from different locations around my ears. The boys sounded like they were singing into one ear, and the drums and guitar sounded like they were coming into the other ear! It wasn’t all just a mush of sounds. It was like a tapestry. Or a stage play, where you see every actor, every prop, every set piece. It was utterly transporting.

  (Apparently, I was also singing along and doing a poor job of harmonizing, as my little brother would later complain, “You sounded terrible.”)

  I was certainly going to raid my dad’s collection for more music. And I wasn’t going back to sounds recorded from a TV speaker.

  This is not the origin story of an audiophile. But by my late twenties and early thirties, when I had a real job and enjoyed a living wage, I did begin to care much more about maximizing the quality of the means by which my ears received the air vibrations of music. I had several agonizing crises over what headphones to buy, which only became more fraught when I’d go into a store and sample headphones well outside my price range. Holy shit, I didn’t know music could sound this good!!! Every uptick in audio quality I experienced spoiled whatever I had previously enjoyed. Hell, just knowing that there were better things out there made it difficult to be happy with whatever I had.

  This comes up in countless other ways. When Apple introduced “Retina displays” with the iPhone 4, screens with sufficiently high resolution that individual pixels became indistinguishable in normal use, it ruined me for all other displays. Reading text on a non-Retina screen, something I had been doing for some thirty years without complaint or problem, now felt like having my eyeballs scraped by jagged text.

  At least that came from actual lived experience, wherein a demonstrably superior execution of a particular kind of product makes previous iterations look worse, because they are, in fact, worse. But I also bought the iPhone 12 when it came out while I already owned an iPhone 11. Why? Did I have direct experience with the new model, and thereby knew that my current phone was now teetering on obsolescence? Of course not. It was just new, it looked a little cooler, and the marketing all said it was better. You will not be surprised to know that a few months into owning the iPhone 12, it has not provided me a meaningfully better smartphone experience than the iPhone 11. Nor whatever phone I owned before that. But just being aware of new things, by comparing what I have to what might be, often convinces me, with great conviction, that I must acquire it. I had been fine before. The curse of new knowledge, however, robbed me of that contentment. Or, more accurately, I let it myself be robbed. I invited the burglar in and offered him a sandwich.

  I recently bought a new laptop. Or, rather, I should say I recently bought three laptops, because the first two, since returned, had flaws on their displays. Since this was intended for gaming, I had made peace with needing to settle for an eye-scratching, non-Retina display, something years of Macs, iPhones, iPads, and Galaxies had ruined me for.

  But the first laptop had what seemed to me to be a lot of what is called IPS glow, the light haze around the borders of the screen. This is apparently fairly normal for these kinds of machines, but I had now been conditioned by Retina displays and quad-HD OLEDs, so it seemed unacceptable. The next laptop had a slight blemish of light bleed in the center of the display (I think that one was a reasonable rejection). The last one, the one I’m using now to type this, was just fine. More expensive, of course. It does have a tiny bit of light bleed at the very bottom corner, but I am trying to be okay with it.

  This will seem like a divergence, but it’s not. I have spent a lot less time on social media in the last few weeks. Like many folks, this is in part because the world seems less on fire than it did a few weeks ago, and doomscrolling the news feels less necessary. It never was necessary, of course.

  Apart from lowering my overall anxiety levels about the state of civilization (which, for the record, remain high), social media distancing has also made me feel less compelled to produce. Longtime readers of mine (all six of you) will know that I am gripped by a feeling of obligation to make myself relevant through my creative work, be it my writing, music, or other endeavors. I often feel that in order to justify my existence, in order to atone for all the things I never accomplished when I was younger, and in order to feel that I have somehow mattered, I must Become Known and cross some threshold of relevance and significance.

  In recent weeks, though, I have felt this pang much less sharply than usual. It could merely be the fact that I feel very wrapped up in my gaming, which is a new thing for me. It could also have something to do with the changing political reality.

  But I think that it’s mainly because I’m looking at Twitter way less.

  Think back to the beginning of the pandemic. Suddenly everyone (it seemed) was part of this renaissance-of-the-remote, people writing novels and cooking and painting and performing and streaming and Tik-Tokking, and I’d be damned if I was going to be left in the creative dust. I started a newsletter. I revived my blog. I recorded some music. I made videos. I was going to matter.

  I felt like I had to matter. It was a kind of race, one I had already been losing, when suddenly a lot more runners appeared on the track. Hey! Slow down up there! I was trying to matter first!

  I was comparing myself and my output to what I saw from social media. But of course, what I see on social media will always tend to be stuff from those who have already broken through. Of course I was seeing things from people who were already in a position to create. Of course I would see things from people who already had the freedom to churn out content.

  Yet I compared. I compared and found myself lacking. And as Dogberry says in Much Ado about Nothing, “Comparisons are odorous.”

  When I was listening to the Monkees on my old mono tape deck from sounds recorded from a cable TV rerun, I had no idea what I was missing. Comparing my tapes to the stereo sounds of a professionally produced album out of actual headphones, I learned there was a deeper, more meaningful experience of music to be had. It was good that I compared one to the other. But I was also happy before.

  Just because something is better (in fact or in perception) doesn’t make it necessary. And it definitely doesn’t make it necessarily good for me. Or you, I bet.

  February 2, 2021

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• Why I Need Superheroes

  

  As an awkward, neurotic, bespectacled smartypants, one might stereotypically presume that I am a fan of superheroes. And so I am! But only fairly recently.

  When I was a kid, I liked the cartoons and toys associated with characters like Spider-Man and Superman, but no more than I liked any other inescapable franchise at the time. My prime action figure playing years were much more focused on Transformers, He-Man, Ghostbusters, and, just as I was becoming a little too old for such things, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Once I had grown out of toys, the Star Trek universe became my obsession. Superheroes didn’t capture my imagination the way they have for so many other kids who later go on to become true fans and indulge in superhero geekdom.

  I think part of the reason is their roots in comic books, and when I say “comic books,” I mean the byzantine lattice of comic book culture and lore; the dizzying array of characters, story threads, reboots, crossovers, and timelines. Whenever I would dip my toes into a given title, I would inevitably run into that asterisk in some panel, in which a major piece of information would be hinted at in a character’s passing comment, only to be directed to a footnote telling me, “SEE [COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SERIES] #657!” Well, I haven’t seen whats-its-whatever issue 657, so I guess I’m just going to be lost.

  But that’s another story.* (*SEE BLOG POST 6-23-2014!)

  Despite my compulsion for completionism, I’m now mostly at peace with that aspect of superhero comics (mostly). My latter-day enthusiasm for superheroes, along with some help from digital comic book all-you-can-eat subscription services, have made it so that I can now dive into comics with a much reduced sense of cultural intimidation.

  I think the other reason I didn’t take to superheroes earlier was that they often seemed to me to be sort of dopey. This is no doubt in large part because my first frames of reference were shows like Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends and Super Friends, which were really, really dopey. As I grew up, the idea that folks with superpowers would dress up in colorful, tight-fitting costumes, beat up bank robbers, and fight evil clowns and superintelligent gorillas just seemed kind of silly. Superheroes seemed like a form of escapism that was dated and irrelevant. Star Trek, by contrast, was all about the future and what we might be capable of in the coming centuries (and was also sometimes dopey, but different-dopey). Superheroes were essentially cops with absurd outfits who could fly or punch really hard.

  Now I’m in my 40s, and I absolutely love superheroes. What happened?

  I suppose like a lot of people, I got bitten by the radioactive superhero bug in large part due to the Marvel Cinematic Universe films of the past decade-plus, as well as the Christopher Nolan Dark Knight films. Previously, a lot of superhero shows and films I’d seen could sort of be summed up with a pretty basic template: Regular person becomes endowed with powers, an evil force threatens the status quo, hero fights this evil by using their superpowers.

  The Marvel and Dark Knight movies, however, gave me more to chew on. Tony Stark, Bruce Wayne, and Steve Rogers were never just fighting an evil nemesis. They were also struggling with themselves and with a society that either created them, marginalized them, created their enemies, or any combination thereof.

  Steve Rogers didn’t get his powers by accident of birth or extraordinary circumstances, and he wasn’t worthy of becoming Captain America because he was the best soldier. He was a superhero because he was a good man, the guy who was most willing to give every ounce of himself to save others. Tony Stark was forced to contend with his destructive legacy as a plundering industrialist, as well as his mammoth ego. Bruce Wayne was consumed by his own darkness, and struggled to harness his inner demons so that he could stop outer demons from bringing darkness to others.

  And these were just the first handful of those movies. Mostly, they kept getting better.

  These stories had a different kind of template, something like this: Protagonist witnesses unacceptable injustices or perceives a grave threat. They discover the possibility of having extraordinary powers, but must then become worthy of those powers through some struggle with themselves or other malign force, and then give everything of themselves—including, if necessary, their lives—in order to right that injustice or defeat that threat. And often victory raises new questions and perhaps creates new problems.

  

  The Nolan Dark Knight films, and the Frank Miller graphic novels that inspired them, are a little different, in that they tell a story of a world so terrible that it creates ever-more terrible villains, which then requires a response from heroes that must become ever-more terrible themselves. But the struggle of those heroes is still central to the story and, for me, their appeal. And even the Avengers films acknowledge the arms-race dynamic of increasingly existential dangers requiring ever more extreme reactions from the good guys, which, as Vision says in Captain America: Civil War, “invites challenge” from even more powerful villains, and the ensuing conflict “breeds catastrophe.”

  At the core, I suppose, is that courage—that of the hero and perhaps others in the story—must be cultivated and achieved. It isn’t presumed. And that is something that moves me at a very deep level.

  Because of course the central problem for a good superhero story is how to offer a superpowered person a genuine challenge. An almost all-powerful being like Kal-El (Superman) isn’t courageous because he saves the passengers on a runaway train about to fall into an abyss. He knows he’ll be fine whether he carries the train to safety or lays down to have his body serve as the track. He needs to have adversaries thrown at him that equal and exceed him in strength (Zod, Doomsday, etc.), and he needs to be faced with enemies that can’t be defeated with brute force: finding purpose, finding belonging among an alien species, grieving the loss of a family and a world he never got the chance to know, using his powers responsibly, balancing freedom and security, and so on.

  While I am very much delighted by a good old fashioned Superman vs. Zod smackdown, I’m captivated by the choices Superman will have to make in order to defeat Zod and protect the world he’s adopted without becoming Zod himself.

  You can apply this across the board of superhero stories. It works for “street-level” heroes like Bruce Wayne (Batman), Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel), Matt Murdock (Daredevil), or Oliver Queen (Green Arrow), and it works for more “cosmic” heroes like Thor, Carol Danvers (Captain Marvel), or Diana of Themyscira (Wonder Woman). What are they willing to do to defeat evil-doers? Are they willing to do evil themselves? What and who are they willing to sacrifice? Their extraordinary abilities are a given, the status quo of the world of the story. The power of their stories is not only what they choose to do with those powers, but how they arrive at those decisions; what must they give of their own lives, their beliefs, their souls?

  Alright, well, this is all very highfalutin and whatnot, but my enthusiasm for superhero stories has another equally important factor: Fantasy escapism.

  You don’t need me to tell you how the world is going to hell right now, and that our assumptions about what is good and what is evil have been muddied. Our illusions about who and what we can trust have been shattered. For all the struggles with moral ambiguity in good superhero storytelling, it’s no wonder that I find it incredibly appealing that, at the very least, choices are made and executed on. Whereas in the real world, it feels like all we can do is tread moral waters and examine our failures into infinity, but superheroes eventually make a choice and act on it.

  If done well, they do so with awe-inspiring spectacle, suspense, wit, and heart. I have been delighting in the full lineup of CW’s DC “Arrowverse” superhero series, from the faux-gritty Arrow to the more explicitly-comedic Legends of Tomorrow (working my way up to the big “Crisis on Infinite Earths” crossover event), and part of their appeal for me is that they are a little, well, dopey. But whereas the superhero cartoons of my childhood were dopey in the sense of being shoddy products, the DC shows embrace their campiness.

  They are not satire by any means. They are not mocking the genre, but embracing its quirks. When something outlandish happens (Felicity Smoak’s paralysis is technologically cured in the middle of a couple’s spat with Oliver Queen! Barry Allen altered everyone’s lives when he time-traveled too much! Former supervillain Mick Rory became best friends with George Washington!), the event is acknowledged as outlandish, and then promptly folded into the story and taken as seriously as anything else. And it works.

  

  And I also think part of why these shows work for me is that they operate more or less like comic books. Each scene feels like a page of panels, and any rush-through of complicated plot points feels justified by the succinctness demanded by the format. And like the comic books, they come with complicated backstories and lore that enriches the experience for those who are immersed in it, but doesn’t totally alienate those who are tuning in for the first time. Of course, I am making a point of going through the entire “Arrowverse,” episode by episode, because I’m just like that.

  I guess what it all comes down to is this: In a time when things feel so dark, I’m glad I’ve made the choice to spend time with stories in which people with extraordinary powers or abilities make the choice to use those abilities for something other than personal gain. They choose to save the world.

  ---

  As always, if you find this stuff valuable, you can toss some currency my way.

  December 13, 2020

  34, 657

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• I’d Like to Speak to the Manager

  

  Sunlight is the best disinfectant, so they say. Wicked deeds and ideas can be defeated by offering them up to public scrutiny, exposing them as morally unacceptable and shaming them out of the mainstream and out of power.

  There are times when this has been true, when the public has been exposed to some gross injustice, rejected it, and appealed to authorities to make a change.

  Cable news and social media are fueled by these kinds of appeals. During the Obama years, I had to stop watching cable news because I could no longer stomach the hours of broadcast dedicated to telling me how racism, religious zealotry, and plutocratic criminality were taking over the country. To save my own sanity during the Trump era, I tried to prune my social media feeds of accounts that shared primarily political content, because nearly everything I saw was dedicated to making me angry about every single morally repugnant whim expressed by malicious actors. And it was all terrible and morally repugnant!

  But my attempts to lessen the amount of political outrage in my feed were futile, for in the era of Trump, it feels like it’s all there was to talk about. I began the (also futile) practice of replying to or quoting tweets about the latest horror by appending, “So what do we do?” I wanted more than tattling. I wanted marching orders. They never came.

  Because it’s not just regular folks tweeting out their outrage. It’s politicians, prominent media personalities, major cultural figures, renowned academics—people in positions of real, genuine power. If all they could do was point to bad things happening to say, “You see???” then what were we of the unwashed masses supposed to do about it?

  Other than vote. I get it. And we did, and it mostly worked out for the better, but it wasn’t nearly enough. And the horrors will, and do, just continue. And we will continue to go “you see???“

  But who are we talking to when we do that? Every time we stoke our collective ire and give attention to the genuinely destructive torrent of moral and ethical horrors, whether they come from presidents, media figures, local politicians, or everyday despicable people, we are pointing it out for a reason. We are asking for someone to do something about it.

  We are aggrieved customers in the marketplace of ideas, and we are demanding to speak to the manager. We are all Karens now.

  Here’s the problem I think most of us have yet to acknowledge: There is no manager. Our emails to customer support are bouncing back. We are dialing a complaint hotline to nowhere.

  There are elections, of course, in which the customers can, in effect, hire and fire the managers of the store’s government and policy department, but this has little to no impact on the store’s other aisles. The racism section is still being stocked, the science-denial section is getting novel new products in every day, and the theocracy department just opened up an outlet store. Business is booming.

  It doesn’t matter how much we complain about what are objectively abysmal things being done and the abysmal people doing them. Those managers don’t hear our complaints because we’re not their customers.

  One such abysmal human with abysmal ideas is Jordan Peterson, and you may have heard that employees at Penguin Press are disgusted that they are publishing Peterson’s latest book, as I would be if I worked there. Fredrik deBoer, whose post on this subject helped clarify my thinking for this piece, says this is an example of a poor tactic on the part of progressives: appealing to authorities to protect them from people with harmful ideas:

  What if there is no authority to which you can appeal to make Jordan Peterson go away? What if Jordan Peterson is a fact of life? Let’s set aside God for a moment. What is the authority that could shut Peterson up? A Canadian citizen with tenure, a large network of conservative admirers, the ability to broadcast directly to his fans, and a talent for encoding reactionary ideas without the out-and-out hateful trappings of many of his contemporaries, he simply does not strike me as someone you can silence even if you wanted to.

  Now, that doesn’t change the fact that Penguin Press could make the moral choice not to be part of the machinery that helps Peterson spread and profit off of his message, even knowing that someone else will gladly do it instead. But the larger point holds: Peterson will get his captive audience regardless of any complaints to the manager.

  DeBoer says the only real solution to the problem of Peterson and what he represents is to persuade people he’s wrong and make a convincing case for something better. “I get that this is more complicated, and less emotionally fulfilling, than running to the teacher to get him in trouble,” writes deBoer. “But what’s the alternative? … There is no authority which will simply remove Jordan Peterson from public life for you.”

  For public officeholders, usually the best we can do is to know who we’re dealing with and vote accordingly. But at some point we have to acknowledge that all the things that horrify us about politicians like Trump, Louie Gohmert, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, Matt Gaetz, or any other garbage officeholders and candidates, are the very things that give them their power. For their market, their vileness is their primary selling feature. Pointing it out over and over mostly serves as free advertising.

  Instead, we have to be better. We have to build movements, support candidates, make arguments, develop ideas, and produce media that are better than theirs. We have to be more than aggrieved, we must be active. We must do more than point out the bad things, we must, ourselves, be the sources of good things.

  No one will do it for us. You see?

  ---

  ^{Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash}

  December 6, 2020

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• What if We Just Let Them Think They Won?

  

  The United States is politically held hostage by tens of millions of people living in a delusional version of reality. No matter the facts staring them in the face, just a little less than half of the electorate seems to believe in an alternate universe in which Trump won the election, left-wing terrorists are destroying our cities, COVID is a hoax or an exaggerated flu, and white Christians are the most oppressed group in history.

  So I had a thought.

  Information silos, filter bubbles, and algorithms can obviously make millions of people believe almost anything. So if what the Cult of Trump needs is to live in a fake reality, well, maybe we can just let them. And then the rest of us can carry on with actual reality.

  I turned this thought into a bit of speculative fiction.

  * * *

  After a hard day at work, Rick plops down on the couch and flips through his phone to see what’s new.

  He’s a father of three, but two of the kids are grown and out of the house, and the other is out with friends. His wife, Danielle, is making dinner, which she always does unless she’s not feeling well.

  Rick scrolls through his social media feeds and gets updated on some of the latest headlines. The border wall had just been completed, and the pictures were stunning. 30-foot high partitions, black as midnight, effectively invisible in the dark, but reflective so that the sun blazed in the eyes of anyone who looked at it from the right angle. Smooth, unscalable, and a true monument to America’s force of will against invaders. President Trump would be there tomorrow afternoon for a ceremony celebrating this achievement.

  It’s a good time for this kind of morale boost, as China has made more threats against the United States, promising to choke the American economy while making incursions into our Pacific territory. And who knows when they might release another virus. The president has been undeterred, however, and Rick is reassured when he hears Trump call China’s bluff. You just try it, thinks Rick. See what Donald does.

  It is 2023. Joe Biden is embroiled in several lawsuits over his attempt to steal the 2020 election. Hunter Biden is in prison in Moscow. Kamala Harris is still out there, working with AOC, Antifa, and George Soros (now 93 and obviously being kept alive with some kind of secret pharmaceuticals or cybernetic implants) to foment a revolution and take over the country. (No chance, thinks Rick.) Black rioters have nearly destroyed several major Democrat-run cities, so they are now being occupied by federal agents who are arresting criminals, guarding property, and saving the lives of innocent Americans. The president has forced Twitter to shut down for censoring conservatives, which is against the Constitution. Facebook has learned its lesson and now treats conservative voices fairly.

  As he scrolls through his feed, Rick almost skips past a headline that said something about someone on Fox News saying something about Joe Biden. He reverses the direction of his thumb swiping to find the item. And there it is. The post reads, “Fox News Guest Says Joe Biden is Currently President!” Rick chuckles out loud.

  “What’s so funny?” Danielle asks from the kitchen.

  “Something really stupid,” says Rick. “Not important.”

  It is stupid. Everyone knows that Fox News went off the rails back in 2020, and really couldn’t be trusted anymore, except for a few hosts like Hannity and Tucker. But what kind of delusional nonsense was this? Why would anyone say that Joe Biden was actually president right now? Some kind of hangover from the 2020 election debacle? The facts are the facts! Trump won the election, even though Democrats tried to steal it with loads of fake votes. But President Trump refused to concede, vowed to keep fighting, and eventually (and inevitably) triumphed in the courts. Thank you, Justice Barrett!

  Some say that Trump is thinking about running for a third term. That would be just fine with Rick.

  Danielle coughs from the kitchen. And then again, and emits a little bit of a groan.

  Rick calls out, “You okay, honey?” Danielle had been under the weather ever since they went to that basketball game Danielle’s nephew was playing in. It was actually a really good game, and the place was packed! She probably picked up some bug going around.

  “I’ve been better,” she responds. “I’ll lay down after dinner.”

  Rick makes a mental note to check her temperature, and maybe his own. He’s not feeling so great either, but he’s never been one to admit when he’s sick.

  Then he remembers what he was looking at. Right, that dumb Fox News person who said Biden’s the president. Rick taps on the item.

  The post had been deleted.

  That’s weird. Fake news never really goes away, does it? You just have to keep vigilant, and only trust the sources that you know for sure are giving it to you straight.

  Rick thinks back to the border wall, and he smiles. Yeah, he thinks, Trump is doing a fantastic job in his second term. A third term would be just fine by him.

  ---

  I have a newsletter, and you should subscribe to it.

  November 15, 2020

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• My Old Enemy, Natural Selection

  

  I’m beginning to hate natural selection.

  I’m not talking about the theory of evolution as a scientific concept, I mean I am having some strong feelings about what a pain in the ass natural selection is to me, right now.

  If you’re new to my writing, let me just give you a quick status report: my sense of self is kind of garbage. I’m not currently experiencing existential anguish, per se (but, you know, catch me on a different day and see what you get), but I am wrestling with a crisis about who I am and why I bother existing.

  And a lot of that hinges on a deep, aggravating need for validation. I need other people to justify my existence for me. It’s a big reason why I was a professional actor, why I write, why I make music, and why I do pretty much anything else not directly related to my own survival or the well-being of those I love. I need to be told by The World that I belong.

  For the last few years, I’ve been able to pin some of the blame for this on my autism, having been diagnosed with Asperger’s at the age of 39. As you might imagine, someone with my particular neurological quirks might grow up developing a sense of alienation. That’s what happens when you 1) feel like you’re not the same as everyone else, and 2) are constantly told you are not the same as everyone else, often in very painful terms.

  So of course I seek validation now! I’ve been conditioned over several decades to expect to be an outcast, to believe that any sense of belonging I do manage to experience is temporary and tenuous at best, and that I am not capable of judging for myself whether or not I possess sufficient value as a person to continue existing.

  Damn you, autism!

  The thing is, the need to feel belonging with a tribe is not particular to the neurodivergent. It’s hard-wired into humanity as a whole at the deepest levels. Many humans achieve this belonging rather easily (or so it seems to me). They provide value to their families and communities, they receive the benefits of being a part of those families and communities, and they are validated for playing their part in those social systems. They don’t have to think about it.

  But threaten that belonging, cause someone to feel like their place in the tribe could be reduced or taken away, and see what atavistic shit comes up.

  For someone like me, that sense of threat is ever-present, and I feel it on every level: I feel like humanity on Earth doesn’t want me, and I also assume I am perpetually on the edge of being rejected by the people Iove. Any minute now, they’re going to decide they’ve had it.

  So maybe I feel this kind of alienation and anxiety more often or more severely than most, but all of us have it in us. We’re supposed to! It’s how early humans survived through our time as nomadic hunter-gatherers.

  It was Robert Wright, in Why Buddhism is True, who clarified this point for me, that this anxiety over other’s opinions of us is all natural selection’s fault:

  Why would natural selection design organisms to feel discomfort that seems so pointless? Maybe because in the environment of our ancestors it wouldn’t have been pointless; in a hunter-gatherer society, you’re pretty much always performing in front of people you’ll see again and whose opinions therefore matter. My mother used to say, “We wouldn’t spend so much time worrying about what other people think of us if we realized how seldom they do.” She was right; our assumption that people give much thought to us one way or the other is often an illusion, as is our unspoken sense that it matters what pretty much everyone we see thinks of us. But these intuitions were less often illusory in the environment of our evolution, and that’s one reason they’re so persistent today.

  That’s right, natural selection wants us to be insecure.

  There’s so much else that natural selection “wants” us to do that is ultimately harmful to us now. And it seems to me that so much of what we think of as human civilization and progress is really a big species-wide struggle against natural selection and all the things it pushes us to do against our own interests, from the desire to eat too much sugar to the urge to decimate nearby tribes and take their resources. Self-doubt is just one more thing.

  I think natural selection and I need to have a talk. I need to thank it for getting us all this far, what with the conscious brains, the opposable thumbs, and whatnot. And then I need to tell it, honestly, that its time with me is over, because it’s holding me back from, well, evolving.

  I need to remember that my ache for belonging, while exacerbated by my autism and other quirks, ultimately stems from an instinct that no longer serves its purpose, and that I am free to let it go. To be at peace with who I am and where I am, I think I to kick natural selection out of the tribe.

  November 14, 2020

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• Letting Go of Hope

  

  I am trying to disconnect without isolating. I am trying to find meaning without validation. I am trying to unburden without irresponsibility. I am trying to be aware without being overwhelmed. I am trying to be at peace without being passive. I am trying to matter without having to ask whether I matter. I am trying to fit in without being too ordinary. I am trying to stand out without jutting. I am trying to have hope without being crushed by it.

  Maybe it’s that last one that needs to go.

  Derrick Jensen wrote a few years ago in praise of giving up on hope. He’s talking about this in the context of his struggle to defend the natural world from decimation by humanity. To me, it applies universally. It’s not even about rejecting hope, but simply not dealing with it one way or the other. Once hope becomes irrelevant, Jensen says:

  …you realize you never needed it in the first place. You realize that giving up on hope didn’t kill you. It didn’t even make you less effective. In fact it made you more effective, because you ceased relying on someone or something else to solve your problems … and you just began doing whatever it takes to solve those problems yourself.

  This is not the same as hopelessness. Hopelessness implies defeat, pessimism, resignation to things getting worse. This is something else.

  Here’s the part that’s both the most appealing about this idea and the most frightening:

  When you give up on hope, something even better happens than it not killing you, which is that in some sense it does kill you. You die. And there’s a wonderful thing about being dead, which is that they — those in power — cannot really touch you anymore. … The socially constructed you died. The civilized you died. The manufactured, fabricated, stamped, molded you died. The victim died.

  And who is left when that you dies? You are left. Animal you. Naked you. Vulnerable (and invulnerable) you. Mortal you. Survivor you. The you who thinks not what the culture taught you to think but what you think. The you who feels not what the culture taught you to feel but what you feel. The you who is not who the culture taught you to be but who you are.

  As someone who has wasted so much precious life trying to define himself through others’ perceptions, who could not find any value in himself without the explicit approval of everyone else, this is tantalizing and bewildering.

  When I was first wrestling with my identity in the aftermath of my diagnosis as autistic a few years ago, I thought it might be an opportunity to redefine who I was, to shed my masks, discover the person underneath them, and let that person live their life. The frightening part was not knowing who that might be, because the masks seemed to be as much a part of who I was as anything else.

  Later, I began to take a more nuanced view. While I must still learn to accept my unmasked, unfiltered self, there is still power to be had with intentional masking, endowing myself with aspects of an identity in order to achieve the things my unmasked self might seek. One can adapt without self-deception. One can modulate one’s behavior without imprisoning oneself. One can augment, and those augmentations are under the control of the “true” self.

  But whether one is masking, passing, augmenting, retrofitting, or what have you, I wonder now if it’s hope that is still an ingredient of falseness. Maybe I can’t get free of the fetters I’ve fitted myself with, nor the ones that the culture has clapped onto me, because I maintain a delusion that meaning, peace, and validation will still be given to me by Someone Else, by some force Out There. Maybe by shedding hope, I empower myself to provide it on my own.

  “When you quit relying on hope,” writes Jensen, “and instead begin to protect the people, things, and places you love, you become very dangerous indeed to those in power.”

  In my case, “those in power” are the imaginary blessings from an amorphous other. That’s what I’ve allowed to have power over me, the wish, the hope, that at some point I’d prove myself worthy to be One of You, worthy to belong to this world.

  Maybe if I give up on hope, the ache for validation, the yearning to matter, will ease.

  But that’s just a hope, too, isn’t it?

  ---

  I have a newsletter, and you should subscribe to it.

  November 14, 2020

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• Measured by how we are seen

  

  This is from the eighth edition of the Near-Earth Object newsletter, to which you can and should subscribe, right here.

  This project of producing newsletters and media at a somewhat regular clip, is still new to me, and I’m still trying to find the right mix of elements that make it really click. For my first video-cast-pod-thing, I chose to read a piece I’d written a couple of years back about how hard it is to put in the time, effort, and emotion into all this creative work, all the while knowing that it will reach only a handful of people. Of course one can’t know this for certain, but it’s a solid bet!

  I think the cold reality of irrelevance has hit me a little harder this week, as the election receded from the top of my mind and I took a little time off work. When a room opened up in my brain, it was quickly furnished with feelings of futility.

  I began reading How to Disappear by Akiko Busch this past week, and in the introduction she says, “It has become routine to assume that the rewards of life are public and that our lives can be measured by how we are seen rather than what we do.” As someone who grew up being utterly ostracized for how he was seen, and then later became a professional actor, and then later got into nonprofit communications, I think I’ve been conditioned to measure my value by how I am seen. I’m not sure I’d know any other way.

  We’re all feeling fragile right now. The slow-moving coup in process makes it feel like we’re watching an asteroid that’s going to slam into us in a couple of months, and all we can do is watch it get imperceptibly closer day after day. The foundational things we’ve relied on to tell us who we are as a people look like they’re about to crumble. If they do, we won’t know who we are anymore. If they don’t, we’ll still know that we aren’t quite what we thought we were. We’re all facing an identity crisis.

  So maybe none of us can settle our minds enough to find meaning within (or nearby) rather than without.

  In my favorite novel, Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, the protagonist Erasmas, a sort of monk-scholar in training, is given an urgent bit of wisdom from his mentor, Orolo.

  “That is the kind of beauty I was trying to get you to see,” Orolo told me. “Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.”

  Maybe if our identities weren’t so wrapped up in these performative digital spaces, we’d be handling things better right now. Maybe if I were better able to see myself as enough, if I were able to love the beauty that is right in front of me, perhaps I could more thoroughly cast out the ugliness in my head that tells me I am not and never will be enough.

  But if I do that, then what will I be?

  If you’re reading this, I’m so glad you’re here. You are part of a small group, and I appreciate each and every one of you.

  ---

  More of Paul’s irrelevant-yet-immeasurably-valuable stuff

  New post on how news sites’ homepages are covering the coup: “Homepage Hopping at the End of Democracy.”

  New video-cast-pod on Biden the caretaker, with some post-election thoughts as an addendum:

  As always, if you find this stuff valuable, you can toss some currency my way. It’s totally okay if you don’t!

  And thanks.

  November 11, 2020

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• The Caretaker

  

  When Barack Obama picked Joe Biden to be his running mate in 2008, I was delighted. I had always been enthusiastic about Biden’s as a political figure, and loved his role in the ’08 primary campaign as a no-bullshit happy warrior. (Remember “a noun and a verb and 9/11?” So great. And even better considering how far the subject of that jibe has fallen.)

  While Biden’s persona and personal charms probably figured into the Obama campaign’s choice to bring Biden onboard, it wasn’t the main reason. To reassure an electorate that might be wary of an inexperienced, black presidential candidate, they put an elder statesman by his side, someone whose very presence vouched for the qualities of the man at the top of the ticket. There was no doubt that should tragedy strike, the next Vice President of the United States would be ready and more than qualified to take over. Not unlike George W. Bush’s choice to tap Dick Cheney in 2000, Biden would be the adult supervision.

  Certainly, Biden’s trademark folksiness would help sell the Obama candidacy to those who might not be quite as excited about diversity and cosmopolitanism, by speaking to them in terms to which they could relate. But these were bonuses. In my opinion, it was all about the picture of the two of them together, the image of the exciting and untested buttressed by the familiar and trusted. The message was that Joe would look after Barack, and make sure the new guy found his footing.

  (Honestly, I have difficulty trying come up with a presidential ticket in which the two candidates complemented each other as well as Obama and Biden did — save perhaps Biden and Harris, which I’ll get to in a bit. Bill Clinton and Al Gore are in the ballpark, as two ridiculously intelligent, relatively young southerners with diametrically opposing personalities that somehow clicked electorally. But still, almost all the pairings I can think of felt forced. Pence as a Christian bandaid for Trump. Tim Kaine as the blatantly inoffensive white male for Hillary Clinton. Paul Ryan as a youthful junior-executive sidekick to Romney. Sarah Palin…yeesh. And John Edwards as John Kerry’s personal TV ambulance chaser. God help us.)

  It’s now fairly commonplace to see presidents task their VPs with particular portfolios, as a way of 1) communicating the importance of an issue by putting in the hands of the vice president, and 2) giving the poor guy something to do. But think of some of the things President Obama handed to Vice President Biden: Implementation of the Recovery Act after the financial meltdown, saving the auto industry, upgrading workforce training, addressing violence against women, cultivating and maintaining relations with foreign leaders, and the “moonshot” to cure cancer.

  These were all caretaking roles. They conveyed a message: People who have been hurt, people whose lives have been upended, people who have lost jobs, people who have been alienated, people who are scared, people who are sick: Joe Biden is going to take care of you.

  Now think back to March of this year. Biden’s campaign in the Democratic primaries had been shaky at best, and was being more or less written off, until his blowout victory in South Carolina. Coinciding with the sudden awareness of the threat posed by this “coronavirus” thing, Biden’s victory there seemed to change something in the very air.

  Candidates began dropping out before Super Tuesday and endorsing him. I got the sense that they were relieved to do so. The coming general election campaign was likely to be the ugliest and most brutal in generations. The mysterious virus was looming. No one knew what was going to happen. With a sense of foreboding and anxiety that few could not have articulated at the time, the Democratic Party and its electorate turned to a father figure, a figure of stability, normalcy, and comfort. Someone to watch over them and take care of them. That was Joe.

  The choice of Kamala Harris as Biden’s own running mate makes even more sense to me now, seen in this light. There was no shortage of brilliant, utterly qualified candidates, but Sen. Harris represented something I think few others could: As a social progressive with a law enforcement background; as a woman of a mixed ethnic background and the daughter of immigrants; as a stepparent in a modern, multi-faith family; and as a woman who pulls no punches for vice presidents, former or current; she is the future. She is, really, the present, but the electorate is not always ready for the present. By choosing her as his second-in-command, Joe Biden sets the stage for her ascension, and the ascension of a whole new generation. And he is trusted to do that.

  I think we got Joe Biden at this moment because we are a nation in pain, wracked with fear and anger, unable to nurse our old wounds while triaging the new ones. To replace the current president, who seeks only to inflame every gash and tear every stitch, we need someone who will tend to us, heal us, take care of us.

  I don’t think Joe Biden ever thought of himself this way, but this is the burden he’s been given, in his personal and in his public life. Time and time again, he has been asked to take care of us, and he always has. Election Day is about 55 hours away as I write this. If Joe Biden is elected, it will be because we needed him to take care of us one more time.

  October 31, 2020

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• If Trump Won’t Concede, I Have George W. Bush’s Address to the Nation Ready to Go

  

  Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the Trump era has been how establishment Republicans have rolled over for him, aiding and abetting Trump in every asinine, narcissistic urge, never having the guts to do anything to stop him from laying waste to the republic. Mitt Romney has had his good moments, but they were too few and too late.

  Throughout the election, I have nursed a wish that President George W. Bush would put down his paint brush, get in front of a camera, and tell the folks who still love him that Trump needs to go. He’s never done that, even though you know he believes it.

  Now, Election Day is nigh, and Trump continues to assert that he will refuse to concede if and when he loses. Lord only knows what he will do with the enormous power he thoughtlessly wields in order to remain in office.

  If Trump loses and attempts to deny Biden the presidency, my last hope is that Bush will finally speak up and urge his fellow Republicans to accept the results of the election. He probably won’t.

  But just in case he’s thinking about it, but doesn’t know quite what to say, I thought I could do my part as an American, and help our former president out. Here is my draft of what could be President George W. Bush’s address to the nation if President Trump refuses to concede a lost election.

  President Bush, I am open to changes. Have your people get in touch.

  UPDATE: I made a video for the speech, just to really drive it all home. I am helping!

  Address to the nation by former President George W. Bush on the outcome of the presidential election, November 2020.

  Let’s get right to it.

  One score and none years ago, I was declared the winner of the presidential election because our side was better at whatcha call “political maneuverings.” Me and Al Gore pretty much wound up in a tie, and you can’t have two presidents at the same time, so our guys just did a better job of greasin’ the wheels and workin’ the refs, simple as that.

  It wasn’t all above-board, those ballots in Florida where old Jewish folks were accidentally voting for Pat Buchanan was some real sketchy shit, and to give it to ya straight, even we were surprised when the Supreme Court just kinda let me be president. But like I said, it really was just a tie, and I think everyone figured it was just the other team’s turn to be in charge for a while. It weren’t pretty, but the thing got settled and we moved on.

  But here’s the real important part, and I probably should have said more about this at the time, but the reason things got settled is because of Al Gore. Listen, Al was sure as hell that he’s the one that won that election. He was positive he’d won Florida, and hell, maybe he really did. “Butterfly ballots”! I mean, goddamn. But both sides filed all their lawsuits, both sides did their PR bullshit on TV, and in the end, those five Justices shut it all down. Al coulda’ kept fighting. I don’t think it’d’a changed anything in the long term, but you never know, and it’s not like we’re talkin’ about a fight over who gets to be employee of the month at a Pep Boys. This is the presidency. It doesn’t get any bigger’n that.

  So think about what Al must’ve been feeling. He believed he’d won more votes in Florida. He believed the Supreme Court was screwin’ him over because they liked me better. That’s probably true! And what’s for sure true is that Al won more votes than me overall. He beat me by about a half a million in the national popular vote — and don’t think I didn’t feel that sting for the next four years, til I definitively kicked Kerry’s ass in ’04. Now, winning the popular vote doesn’t mean shit if you don’t win enough’a them electoral votes, and he knew that, but you just know it all had to be makin’ him nuts.

  I mean, imagine, you’ve been the Vice President of the United States for eight years, you’re the smartest guy you know and you’re not only sure you’d be a better president than the guy you’re running against, but you know you’d be way better than the skirt-chasin’ hillbilly who’s shadow you been stuck under for a decade. You run your race, you win more votes than the other guy, and then it all comes apart because of a bunch of technicalities and bullshit.

  But listen. After all that, even though he believed in his heart that he was being wronged, he stopped, he put the best interests of the country ahead of his own, and he opened wide to take an enormous bite of the biggest shit sandwich ever served in American history. On December 13, in the year of our lord 2000, Al Gore went in front of those cameras and told the American people that it was over, and that I was his president.

  I mean, holy shit.

  Now while you think about that, then look at where we are today. There’s no technicalities. There ain’t no tie. Everyone knows that Joe Biden beat the pants off of Donald Trump. Yeah, sure, there are a bunch of mail-in votes that ain’t been counted yet in Pennsylvania or whatever. But come the hell on. Trump lost this election the second he told folks to think about injecting themselves with bleach. I mean, you all know I said some stupid shit when I was president, and even I spat out my O’Doul’s when I heard that one. Mike Murphy says that the country has been tryin’ to cough up Trump like a hairball, and I’m tellin’ you this election was the cat’s final hork. But now the hairball is trying to haul its soggy ass back into the cat’s mouth. That’s just gross.

  And it just ain’t gonna fly.

  A lotta folks who supported me back in the day also supported Trump. I get it. I ain’t exactly excited about Biden bein’ president. But the race is over. Biden won it, plain as day.

  Trump is tellin’ you that he’s been robbed, that the election was fixed by some Deep State antifa pizza parlor tinfoil hat shit. He wants to make you scared and angry. But that’s because he’s scared and angry.

  He’s humiliated. You best believe I had my doubts about whether I belonged in that Oval Office, but deep down, Donald Trump knows he sure as shit never shoulda been there. And now he can’t stand the idea of lettin’ it all go. So he’s pulling every trick he can think of so he can stick around. Too many goddamn people who certainly know better are letting him.

  Since he won’t do it, I will. I’m here to tell you, it’s over.

  To my fellow Republicans, my fellow conservatives, I know you don’t like the idea of a Democrat in the White House. Lord knows, I don’t either. But the people have spoken, and they have not been subtle about it. Joe Biden won, and he’s gotta get sworn in on January 20, and Donald Trump has to let it go.

  Republicans in Congress and in your state governments need to hear from you, right now, that they need to step up, like I’m doing now, and to tell their president to stand down. Don’t let Trump rile you up with a bunch of crazy, made-up conspiracies about a rigged election. Don’t let the cable news folks and the talk radio folks get your blood boilin’ and making you think you been screwed. I know the system’s screwed you over a bunch of times before, but this ain’t one of ‘em.

  Joe Biden’s a hell of a good guy. He talks too much, and it makes me tired just thinking about him going on and on about how some guy he met in some town had some damn expression and on and on. But he’s a good man who won fair and square. And if you don’t like what he does, and you do like some of what Trump was doing in terms of policy and what have you, well then you vote for Republicans for Congress in the next election, and you support the next Republican candidate for president with everything you got. Fight like hell, and beat ’em fair and square.

  But let’s not do it like this. What Trump is doing now, it’s unseemly. It’s unsportsmanlike. It’s weak.

  Remember ol’ Al Gore. He had an honest-to-God claim to say that he’d won that race back in 2000, and that he oughta’ve been president. But he knew that the peaceful transition of power was more important than him being president, and more important even than keepin’ someone whose guts he hated from getting the job instead. He put his country first, and he took it like a man. He took it like an American.

  Republicans can take this one too. Donald Trump can’t, so we’ll have to do it for him. God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.

  October 16, 2020

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