Worlds Speak Louder than Words
On Winning Second Place in the Passage Prize Short Story Category, and other mostly just crazy thoughts because I had to write this over like forty-five sessions while burping my son
Every time I’ve tried to write this update, my son has demanded my immediate attention. Maybe he was trying to get me tired enough to just write from the heart. Let’s see how it goes this time.
I like fun. I like passion. I like adventure. I like to be in the moment and just experience what’s happening right then and there. I love not knowing what’s going to happen next. Mostly, I try to see in every person the same potential that God saw when he decided humanity was basically a good idea.
So much of online life now seems to be people constructing strange rules-based games to exalt themselves and punish other people. Even for stuff you wouldn’t think would have weird gate-keeping attached. I admit I check in on a lot of these groups just for recreational bewilderment, although my time for recreational bewilderment is very short these days. For example, I recently realized the online BDSM community isn’t really about sex at all, but is actually a place for sexless autistic people to gather to a play a sort of buzz-in quiz game to determine whether or not a hypothetical edge-case situation can be made ethical based on pre-agreed rules. The same applies for the Social Justice sphere, the Vampire sphere, the Witch sphere, the Science Fiction sphere—more on this below— and pretty much every other group you can think of. It’s all becoming a giant, soul-sucking bureaucracy where everyone wants to be a brand instead of a real-life person with a bunch of narrative-breaking idiosyncrasies.
All to which is to say, ugh.
Who enjoys this? And for what reward? So you can live your whole life like a dour clerk in Victorian London? So a stranger you’ll never meet on social media thinks well of you? It’s inhuman. While I don’t like to go on vacation much, I do tend to just leave the hotel and walk around. There’s nothing that sounds less fun to me than a pre-packaged experience. It’s like going to a nice restaurant and getting a microwavable hamburger and fries. People usually later tell me that I went somewhere that people aren’t supposed to go, and that I’m probably only okay based on a sort of Mr. Magoo like positivity and luck that moved obstacles out of my path.
That is a too easy answer, though. If you walk around with Mr. Magoo like positivity, then luck finds you. That’s not me being naive. To take another trip to anecdote land, I grew up with criminals. My uncle for a while lived in a garbage dump in Mexico doing some sort of low ambition smuggling operation involving school supplies. My step-father has an arrest record longer than whatever people are using to compare long arrest records to these days. One time, I’m pretty sure I was tricked into smuggling a box of prescription pain medication on behalf of his brother. On a less funny note, I’ve been on a first name basis with several murderers and more thieves and drug-dealers than I could count. And you know what? All of them had very hard and fast limits about acceptable behavior. They weren’t the same ones as everyone else, of course, but if you have your eyes open and act with respect and don’t throw out to the universe that you want trouble, trouble usually doesn’t find you. If someone senses that you genuinely mean well, or even that you wish them no harm —I think this is the hardest ingredient in this mix— they have a hard time working up the psychology to hurt you. There’s some definite and dangerous exceptions, of course, but vanishingly few compared to the claustrophobic safety standards that we as a society now view as normal.
If you’re pushing away from the screen or getting ready to type a comment to say “No, no, it’s not like that” I can almost guarantee you that I have a worse story for something that happened to me than whatever bad story you want to share to prove me wrong. Legitimately. Think of the bad thing you think I might tell you that would make that statement true. It’s that. And this isn’t to say I haven’t been bit a few times by being open but it’s much less than you’d expect and it’s not like I am advocating for you to do something you definitely know will hurt you. Even if you’ve suffered, you don’t have to live in nihilistic suspicion of the entire world. So why be so jaded just because you read a cosmology/history/sociology textbook in college and it weirded you out? Problems are normal. We are always going to have to face and overcome problems. The world is always falling apart somewhere and being stitched back together at the last minute by someone whose name we will never know. It might even be that you’ll be called upon to be one of those people. You have to make a deliberate choice that stars redeem the night, and once you do the bad things don’t ever hurt as much.
All of which is to say that I won a writing contest.
I had a story just sitting there and I figured, why not go for it? I won second place in a contest called “The Passage Prize” for a short story I wrote called “The Paul Bunyan of Mars.” There are lots of ideas in it about artificial intelligence, Mars colonization, and a hundred other things. A thousand other things, really, because sometimes it is easier to communicate in worlds than in words. Above all, it’s a story about culture and what it feels like to be part of a society that functions, that produces citizens of heroic virtue, and that isn’t dying of suicidal shame. It’s a story built to make such a culture feel real and achievable.
I can slightly remember being part of such a culture. This was in my very earliest childhood when there was always work in the woods for anyone who was willing to test their manhood as a choker. You respected lumberjacks for going out and actually doing things in the real world and coming back out alive. You respected mill-workers for harnessing deadly saws and the millwrights for keeping it all working. There was an intensity that came from staring the Devil in the face and reaching out to twerk his nose. You had to face death every day and it forced you to understand yourself. That psychological power was so great that when the Hell’s Angels came into town to flex their muscles the entire population rose up and beat the shit out of everyone on a motorcycle. They retreated, never to return. When I spent a summer as a roughneck, I felt invincible after surviving an electrical storm that I thought would crack open heaven. It was the most dangerous natural terror I had ever faced as an adult, and I faced it on top of thousands of pounds of iron in the New Mexico desert. I see it now as a sort of baptism of my perspective. You don’t get to be brave, you don’t ever get to know who you really are, without actual risk.
I think you will love the story. There’s fire between the words. I want to make you feel like I felt, splashed with drilling mud, cover-alls smeared with pipe-dope, throwing tongs for eight hours straight and laughing at the Devil for thinking he’s going to get you today. I want to burn you with a sense of life itself.
It will stick with you long after you’ve read it and if you want to see what my work looks like when it’s polished then this story will demonstrate that to you. I’ll reach into your chest with nothing but words and pull the scars off your heart.
How I Found the Contest and Why I Started This Talking about Dour Clerkism but first Several More Digressions but mostly having a child has robbed me of the luxury of linear thought
One day several people of my acquaintance gathered in a circle to talk about the group of people they felt were responsible for everything going bad in the world. Or at least all the bad things going on in our part of the world. I was trying to be quietly productive but was close enough to hear. Phrases were tossed about without concern as to who might be listening.
“They’re just coming in here and buying up everything.”
“They don’t have any respect for our culture.”
“I’m not going to lie, I hate them all.”
“I just don’t know why they can’t go back to where they came from.”
This was Idaho, which has a large refugee population. The speakers were a Muslim survivor of the Bosnian genocide, a lesbian woodworker, a Hispanic pastry chef, and an old white Christian cowboy whose family had been in Idaho for a hundred years. It was a moment tailor made for a college admissions pamphlet.
The group of people they were discussing? Californians.
In my hometown, which is as close to racially homogenous as anywhere in America these days, we are deeply prejudiced against the neighboring town of people who are almost identical to us. To the point we have one night of the year where we burn a member of their town in effigy and then go over and throw toilet paper and eggs all over everything. This has been going on for over a hundred years. One year two boys accidentally lit each other on fire while trying to burn the effigy and were hailed as heroes when they both fell into mud puddles.
Lastly, because it’s too weird not to mention, my step father could always find a good word to say about Hitler. He was not above throwing a sieg heil in public. Sometimes, he would walk into kitchens at restaurants and shout “immigration!” at the top of his lungs and laugh while everyone scattered. Not mentioned above, he was very very Micronesian. If you’re taking this to mean he was Micronesian but appeared to be Caucasian because that’s the only way to make this make sense, no. It just didn’t make any sense.
All of which is to say, people are quite complicated and that’s probably the most important thing to remember about people.
Returning to the starting premise, I’ve seen and experienced legitimately terrible things in my actual life. Not the most bad things like war or genocide, but more than most native born Americans that I know. I think we are living through a period of time where a large portion of people have had their mental calibration thrown off by a life of ease. You’re supposed to endure suffering not of your choosing to be normal. The worst thing that has ever happened to you is always going to be the worst thing that has ever happened to you, even if it’s just someone saying something mean to you.
My rubric for evil has things on it like “put a cigarette out on a kid” and “killed someone for no good reason” and there isn’t a lot of room left for mean words. There are few people I consider to be beyond the pale or irredeemable, and I’d like to think there’s something better about my baseline because when I share who I think those people are whatever group I’m in tends to say something like “well, of course, that guy!” I also set my expectation of authentic baseline human behavior as “how people are in person” vs “how people are on twitter.” Not that twitter isn’t real, just that I prefer a world where we all chase one another toward our highest ideals.
While I try not to read twitter too much, I still like to look in on a few accounts every day. Specifically, I go looking for news. One of the people I read every day for news is Mike Cernovich.
I’m sure that name causes all kinds of emotions in all kinds of people, but I go by utility with a healthy dose of grace. I don’t judge the soul of any person by their worst postings on social media —I’m annoyed by the incentives of the platforms, not the humanity of the people. You can’t give up your love of people without giving up your own soul, which is the demonic bargain social media constantly tempts you to make— and for what it’s worth I think Mike Cernovich is much, much smarter than he’s given credit for by mainstream sources and a much better person. Most people are. I think I’m writing this to convince people who need convincing of that fact. Most people are good. The ones that seem bad are usually just weak or wrong.
In a world where I have to see firsthand evidence that the editors of major mainstream media outlets don’t have the emotional capacity to withstand casual insults from fourteen year old edgelords with pornographic anime avatars, at least Mike Cernovich does his best to be fun. I also think he’s knowingly playing a game and doing a much better job of it than people who style themselves professionals —seriously CNN, get your shit together— who would probably claim nobler goals but in my view cause more harm than good because they erode the public trust so greatly they’ve created a nation of nihilists. I wish we lived in a world where the news media was really good and you could just automatically trust people who claim to have authority but we don’t. Facts are facts. I knew about COVID months before any of my peers because I read Mike Cernovich. I was able to take precautions before any of my peers because I read Mike Cernovich. I believed COVID was a danger before mainstream sources acknowledged it was a danger, because in that particular case with that set of incentives, I trusted Mike Cernovich.
And COVID isn’t the only thing he was right on much earlier than everyone else.
If you’ve read more than this post, you should already know that I don’t trust any one person on all topics, including myself. The business of moving toward the truth is really hard and you can’t do it by yourself. I like to look for people who are unique, who contribute more than just repeating something someone else said, so I know I’m getting the broadest read possible on current events. Where other people try to cut out competing knowledge sources as much as possible I try to find clashes. You only get at the truth with lots of unique voices taking different sides of an argument so unique voices are intrinsically valuable. One of the other unique people I found through Mike Cernovich was Zero HP Lovecraft.
To be honest, I don’t generally know a great tweet when I see one unless it’s purely factual so I still don’t know quite what to make of Zero HP Lovecraft as a Twitter user. That’s not a quaffling apology or condemnation on my part, just a feeling that I’m the old guy who showed up at a party for much younger people. There are so many communities now with so much inside lingo meant to be confusing and surface level offensive that I feel like I need a decoder ring to say hello. Anytime I think I know for sure what’s going on, I get that sense I might be the guy who read the Onion and thought it was real. Or at least differently real than intended, as with the BDSM (Bureaucracy, Documentation, Standards, and Measures) observation above. I also personally tend to brush off anything that seems offensive because I don’t operate with any expectation that I’m not going to ever be offended and also because usually by sheer force of Magoo optimism I can get along with just about anyone. I used to dig trenches with a guy in the oil fields who stabbed another kid to death when they were both in high school. After a few weeks, we were friends.
I do know good writing when I see it. I know when there is fire between the words. I know love for the human spirit when I see it. When I read Zero HP Lovecraft’s stories, I immediately recognized the quality and that there was a mind there that cared about the future of humanity and had thoughts similar to my own about the potential dangers of the future. You can’t find a proper horror unless you have proper reverence for what’s at stake. When I read God-Shaped Hole I read the soul of a man who looks upon the disfiguration of the human spirit and the commodification of the body with abject horror. That world had an intrinsic correctness to it.
When I saw Mike Cernovich retweet a link to a short story contest and that Zero HP Lovecraft would be a judge I figured it would be a good chance to put myself forward and see if what I saw was right. Worlds are better tools for communicating than just words. If there was passion there like my passion I knew my story would be successful.
Turns out I was correct. I won second place in the Passage Prize. At least one of my poems also made the shortlist although that was something I more or less just pulled out of the google drive dungeon where I keep all my poems. Poems are just something that happens when your mind wanders while making your wife a cutting board or something. This is also how people lose fingers but I’ve been lucky so far.
I’ve had success writing several times now. Enough times I’m having trouble brushing off a sense of responsibility. A few close friends have asked me from time to time why I don’t submit my work for publication. The answer, I’m ashamed to say, is that for all my talk of openness I can’t stand the science fiction community. Of all the smug rule keepers making the internet a miserable place, the science fiction community gets under my skin the most. If the BDSM community is secretly about logic puzzles the mainstream Science Fiction community is secretly about unpublishing books, destroying beauty, and suicidal despair. Aside from constant drama denouncing every single person you can imagine as a white supremacist, LARPing the bad guys from the Scarlet Letter, many attempts to unperson a literal Portuguese dairy farmer who is super generous, they also go out of there way to do things like lift up pedophiles so long as those pedophiles come from a marginalized community. This makes my blood boil. And I completely understand why someone would want to do everything possible to signal to that group they are beyond and outside of their moral judgment. I also consider myself above the standard of people who would destroy someone over a maliciously interpreted word and then heap every honor possible upon a literal NAMBLA supporter like Samuel Delany.
Writing generally doesn’t pay well, or at least not in comparison to other productive types of work if you’re an adult who makes an effort and doesn’t just sit in a coffee shop all day despairing that anyone actually expects something of you. I’ve repeatedly told myself it’s a childish hobby and that at least my other hobby, carpentry, produces actual tangible items of value. In the past I’ve also written stories to be funny or to work out a weird idea just to get a reaction from people. Now with my son I feel an overriding responsibility to make the world a better place. I want to write better worlds until they’re real.
I believe in my son and the world so much I intend to be a lot more productive and proactive on the writing front. You should never surrender the vision of the future. And I believe in what I can do so much, with a purpose and focus I didn’t have before, that I don’t think there’s anywhere I could go where I can’t show people a better world than the one they were previously imagining. I always used to talk myself out of submitting or sharing before but I’m not going to do that anymore.
Worlds speak louder than words, and I’m going to do my best to show you some more of mine.
Worlds Speak Louder than Words
"It’s all becoming a giant, soul-sucking bureaucracy where everyone wants to be a brand instead of a real-life person with a bunch of narrative-breaking idiosyncrasies." This, right here, is why I've become such a digital recluse in recent years. Even the other day while planning a novel, I found myself caught in the 'does this have enough diversity?' trap, when I am only in the PLANNING stages. The longer you spend entrenched among those groups in social media, the more the constant patrols for wrongthink infect your brain and gnaw away at creative ideas.
It isn't fun, it sure as hell is not productive, but it feels that especially on Twitter (following the great tumblr migration, especially), it has become a mockery of recreational debate.