As you proceed down the spiritual path some things become clearer to you. One of the great understandings you come to is that most of what people do or say to you is not personal; they’re not out to get you, they’re just acting on the conditioning and mind states in which they’re trapped. You can depersonalize a lot of the interactions you have, and suddenly things get less painful. The guy who is a jerk to you is acting out of his own pain, and you can bring compassion to the moment rather than feel bad or mad.

It’s so freeing, and it opens up the world in a whole new way. When you don’t have to take everything so damn personally a lot of negative moments can just pass by you like clouds passing by the sun. You don’t have to get hung up on them, and they only slightly darken your day for a second.

But the spiritual path ain’t that straight and narrow, and if you’re like me there’s nothing your fucked up conditioned mind can’t weaponize. And so this freeing understanding that everyone around you is wounded, is doing the best they can in that moment even if their best isn’t that good, that they are all just behaving in the ways that their genes and their parents and the world and their experiences taught them to behave, that they think they’re doing or saying what they need to do or say to protect themselves… it becomes a whole new way to be shitty to people.

Continue reading “Being Mean Jesus” →

This week I wrote about my second sober birthday, and the response I got was phenomenal. So many people contacted me to express not only their well-wishes and congratulations, but also to tell me how what I wrote impacted them. As a writer this is the dream – to talk about your own experiences and life and have other people say “This resonates with me. You’re saying something that means something to me.” Some of the kind words came from friends, some from longtime readers, some from people with whom I had never interacted with before. It was wonderful.

But two guys left less than complimentary comments on the piece. One guy says he knew me sixteen years ago, and wanted to make sure I knew I was an asshole. The other guy I don’t think knew me, but wanted to make sure I knew I was a bad person.

There were a dozen kind, affirming, positive replies (and hundreds of positive interactions on my Instagram post about my sober birthday) and two less kind ones. Guess which reactions I internalized?

Continue reading “The Gravitational Pull Of Negativity” →

It’s very possible that Brett Kavanaugh doesn’t remember assaulting Christine Blasey Ford. It seems like Kavanaugh has been a heavy drinker, and if he suffered from blackouts while drinking he will never recall the incident. A blackout isn’t the same as passing out; a drinker in a blackout state may seem perfectly normal, but a switch has been thrown in their brain and they are no longer making memories. There are no memories for the drinker to recover. I’ve seen it compared to the old-fashioned VCR technology – you could set your VCR to record a TV show, but it wouldn’t record anything if you forgot to put a VHS tape in there. A person in a blackout has had their VHS tape ejected.

Or perhaps Brett Kavanaugh doesn’t remember assaulting Christine Blasey Ford because it was just not a big deal to him. He was raised in a culture, and lived in a community, where this kind of behavior might have been seen as fairly par for the course. That’s a pretty stinging indictment of our society, but it seems quite plausible. Kavanaugh came of age in a time very different from today, in a decade in which two of the most vaunted underdog movies – Revenge of the Nerds and Sixteen Candles – feature triumphant moments that we would now recognize as rape.

Neither of these options let Brett Kavanaugh off the hook. It’s just worth noting that he might very well have no memory of assaulting Ford. It’s worth noting that drinkers in blackouts also have a part of their brain turned off that regulates their behavior. It’s worth noting that he was raised in a culture where his values at that age may not have been positive. To judge his character today based on his actions in 1982 might be unfair. A lot of growth and change can happen in 30 years.

So let’s judge him on his actions in 2018. And in 2018 he has shown himself to be a moral coward, a man without decency, and a person willing to throw his own humanity away to score a win.

Continue reading “Brett Kavanaugh Is A Coward” →

As you may know, I have a Patreon running to support this site. Patreon is a platform that allows you to personally and directly support creators and artists, and I’ll tell you that Patreon has been a game changer for me.

The way it works is that you become a subscriber of a creator, and in return you get exclusive content/goodies. The folks who subscribe to my Patreon at certain levels get exclusive content every week.

At $5 a month (that’s just $1.25 a week) you get a weekly recommendation from me. I try to keep it eclectic, so some weeks I’ll write about a book, some weeks about a game, some weeks about a TV show, some weeks about a podcast.

At $10 a month (only $2.50 a week! Less than coffee!) you get not only that weekly recommendation, you get a biweekly long review. All of my writing is longer, but I try to make the biweekly reviews meatier. Today I published 3000 words on GLOW season two for instance. This is how it begins:

Let us praise Netflix shows that don’t bulge with unwanted wasteful minutes, get lost with wheel-spinning wandering, or sag beneath wretchedly wooden and wearisome plots. Let us praise Netflix shows that come in at 30 or so minutes, that zip through stories and that leave us wanting more. Let us praise GLOW.

GLOW, loosely based on the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling TV show, comes into its second season with its characters and situations established, and that allows it to move forward at a pace that would baffle the likes of leadfooted Matt Murdock or Luke Cage. The first season of GLOW had an infectious “Hey kids, let’s put on a show” vibe that propelled it forward through complication after complication; this year the show’s focus is more on the actual creative act. If season one was about getting into place to make a thing, season two is about artists finding their space to create and express themselves, and experiencing the consequences of that.

The biggest difference between this season and the last is that GLOW season two is much, much lighter; the first season included and abortion and a character unknowingly trying to sleep with his own daughter. Season two softens the character of Sam Sylvia (Marc Maron), while also removing much of the darkness from Ruth (Alison Brie). The softening of Sam is perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the season (along with limited screentime for the secondary characters, but more on that later) – season one proved that a show could take the traditional Bad Man trope and do something interesting with it when the Bad Man is not just free to be an endless asshole. Sam Sylvia was a piece of shit in season one, but characters we liked saw things in him that allowed us to like him; he was both a heavy and a hero (or a babyface and a heel, to use wrestling terminology), which made him unpredictable and interesting.

But in season two he’s mostly cuddly. He’s a dick at the beginning of the season (firing Marianne Palka’s Vicky the Viking (likely to free the actress to direct her latest film, EGG), but he quickly lets up. The in-story reasoning is that his daughter is now living with him, forcing Sam to reconsider his attitude, but it feels more like a retcon than anything else. The fact that he only found out Justine (Britt Baron) was his daughter after making a serious and gross pass at her is never once mentioned this season; the aftermath of that icky moment is unexamined. There’s no room for something that heavy in Sam’s story this season.

The full review is waaay more positive than that opening makes it sound. Maybe I should have pulled a section from the body of the piece. OH WELL.

Anyway, I’ll always publish stuff here on the site, but I currently have no plans to ever republish Patreon-only posts. So if you wanted to read “The Surprising Moral Complexity of Pumpkinhead” then a) you’re my kind of people and b) you gotta be a patron. It’s also where you’ll get reviews of new movies like RBG and A Quiet Place, as well as a deep dive into Paterson‘s spiritual underpinnings.

Of course you don’t have to do $10 a month. Your support at even $1 a month means the world to me. As my means become more limited this Patreon gives me the space to continue writing, which is what I think I was put on this Earth to do. Your $1 a month is not only a buck in my pocket, it’s a reassurance that you’re interested in hearing what I have to say as I continue this strange, confusing and sometimes very difficult journey.

If you want to become a patron, click here. If you don’t, this site will remain freely accessible to you!