- Blog
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American Nightmare
It was sort of like a nightmare, in the sense that time seemed to both slow to a crawl and flash by in the blink of an eye all at once. I was at first distracted, playing a video game, the president’s upcoming address to the nation up on our television. I didn’t really want…
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Biden’s Promise to Pick a Woman VP: It’s 2020 and it’s the Right Thing to Do
From the mainstream press, progressives, and the broader reality-based community, most analysis centered on how the pledge, and the individual woman chosen to fulfill that pledge, would help or hurt Biden’s electoral chances. In both cases, it is presumed that the Biden campaign is making a calculation, reaching the conclusion that a commitment to putting a…
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Twenty-Fifth Fantasy: Which Cabinet Officials Might Vote to Remove Trump from Power?
I loathe Mike Pence with every fiber of my being. I vehemently oppose just about everything he stands for, and have dedicated most of my professional life to fighting back against that which is made manifest by the unremarkable brain stored within the stony ahead that sits atop the thick neck of Mike Pence. And…
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The Truth Behind My Face Mask
On the old He-Man and the Masters of the Universe cartoon show, the small, hovering wizard called Orko—the comic-relief sidekick to the muscle-bound warriors—never revealed his face. Floating in a red robe, with no discernible limbs below his torso, his head was covered by a large, floppy, pointed hat, through which his pointed ears protruded. If he…
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Self-Loathing in the Shadow of the Unfinished Work
A couple years ago, I had the chance to be a real writer, and I blew it. Way back in 2017, I was asked to spend two weeks in October at a writers’ retreat in Northern California. This had nothing to do with any books I had written (for I had written none) or high-profile publications…
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Losing Dora: We Might Be a Little Too Invested in Animal Crossing
“Daddy, I have bad news.” I awoke to find the boy in his pajamas, standing in the doorway of my bedroom. Though I hadn’t put my glasses on yet, I could still see he had gone pale and was shocked with grief. “What is it?” I garbled. “Dora is leaving.” Confused, I squinted with my…
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Animal Crossing and the Joy of Bucolic Drudgery
Why did I play Animal Crossing for four hours today? About a month ago I became one of the bajillions of people of all ages enthralled with Nintendo’s bucolic-drudgery simulator, Animal Crossing: New Horizons. I never expected to be. When the game was announced, having no frame of reference for the previous iterations, I was…
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Neurotypicals Keep Feeling Things At Me
Here’s how Stephen Colbert helps explain how I, as someone with Asperger’s syndrome, am in a constant state of anxious bewilderment at this current moment. The introduction of truthiness to the American lexicon by Stephen Colbert in 2005 was something of a cultural watershed, the moment when we all finally had a way to describe…
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I maybe oughta blog more.
There was a time when I tried to make a point of writing at least one blog post every day. Today that sounds like some trite advice from a self-help article on Medium, but I wasn’t doing it in order to “gain 50,000 followers” or what have you. It was a good habit to keep…
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Nothing to be done
The part of all of this that most fills me with despair is the fact that those with the power to do something simply won’t. My experience of Twitter right now is one of being told over and over to be outraged about every offense committed by the president, Republicans, right-wing media, or their followers.…
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An Actor, an Introvert, and a Universe of Possibilities
People tend not to believe me when I tell them I’m severely introverted. It’s understandable, as the persona I put forward is usually that of a quirky, agreeable smart-aleck. I am animated and expressive in conversation, I engage in overtly silly play with my kids, and of course, I’m an actor and musician. To many…
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Oh Crap We’re Living in “Final Crisis”
Here’s a panel from the big DC Comics event, Final Crisis, in which a fictional President of the United States laments his state of affairs. You see, a god-like alien, Darkseid, has begun reprogramming the minds of the Earth’s population, causing them to submit to utter subjugation. In this scene, a man with the president…
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The Unexpected Plausibility of Mike Bloomberg
“I am getting really sick of all these Bloomberg ads!” This was spoken by my 10-year-old son who watches shows on Hulu with his mom and has therefore been exposed, repeatedly, to ads for the presidential campaign of Mike Bloomberg. When Bloomberg formally entered the race for the Democratic nomination last year, I railed to…
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Suicides Are Not Car Accidents
When trying to make a point about the troubling rise of suicide rates in America, the statistics are often compared to other modes of fatalities, and understandably so. In order to understand the scale of the problem, it helps to compare it quantitatively to undesirable things we feel more familiar with. But in the case…
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Forty-Two
Listen: There are things we are supposed to want out of life, and there are the means by which we are supposed to attain them. There are cultural events, life milestones, rites of passage, and personal interactions which we are supposed to eagerly anticipate, and those we are supposed to bemoan. There are standards of…
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