#orbital operations

You are not allowed to die. You need to live, because we all need you around, and anyone who says otherwise doesn't know what they're talking about. Hold on tight.

The trick, for me, is carving out time for things and trying to do them with some wit.... I am not ready for the world until I've had my 45 minutes with four espressos in the back garden with earbuds in.... I spend a lot of time on my own, and mostly in my office. You can emulate these obvious role-model traits by excavating yourself a cave in your back garden or taking over a room in your apartment, fitting it with uncomfortably bright lights and way too many screens, filling all the spaces with books and skulls, playing nothing but music that sounds like it's emanating from a dead moon, and waiting for everyone to leave you alone forever, and then dying in seclusion and being eaten by cats.

What if “media literacy” – the idea that modern people can process incredibly fast, dense and enhanced modern media – is a myth? Being trained to run mazes and respond to stimuli for reward isn’t literacy. Literacy requires comprehension of what’s in front of you. As you enter this process of agitprop, it might be worth considering that there’s a chance your audience are as functionally illiterate as the Russian farmers wondering why this train just showed up in their town. They were as ill-equipped for post-truth politics as we apparently are. I asked a philosophy lecturer in 2016 if they had concerns about the Overton Window, the range of socially acceptable positions at any one time. Not at all, they said: that’s not even important. There are lessons to be drawn from this. One, even educated people can be really bloody stupid about media and its effects. Two, never ask a philosopher about anything. Three, life comes at you fast in the 21st Century. Post-truth politics warped the Overton Window into the gaping mouth of a twelve-lane tunnel to hell, and none of the usual suspects are going to be able to do a damned thing about it. In Europe, we knew that the Nazis never really went away. But we never used to put them on mainstream fucking television. We never used to stick them on cable news and ask them for their fucking opinions. When you can open the Overton Window and march a few thousand fascists through it, then it’s time for agitprop.

Form movements. Form secret societies. Invisible Colleges and Republics Of Letters. Band together with the like-minded and become members of a bizarre order. Besides, life's too short to not have some fun with this shit.

Look after yourself, walk away from all the poison in the world, stretch and breathe and hold on tight. We need you around. And never let any bastard tell you otherwise.

Second drafts are good because you can fix all your dumb mistakes and write the better versions of scenes.  Second drafts are bad because you're so fucking stupid and all the scenes are awful.

Everything's gone nuts but it doesn't have to take you with it. Remember the drill -- put your own oxygen mask on first before you try to help others, please. Hold on tight.  This is not the thing that's going to kill us.