CALAMITY

"This book is pretty funny. It helped me, maybe it will help another kid."

Three days later, two kids– eight and ten years old– were killed in a mass shooting at a prek-8 school. Eighteen children and three adults were also physically injured. 

It was the first day of school.

...There was nothing about being gunned down through the windows with an assault rifle in Pigeon's book. [*Since I originally wrote this, there has been yet another school shooting, drowned out by another higher profile shooting.]

Hostility, hatred, extreme tribalism and violence is being openly encouraged, rewarded and absolved. We are losing our mask of social integrity. Scared, angry people are being emboldened in their resentment and entitlement. 

This isn't just a climate of political escalation. It's "mundane" violence. Domestic abuse, sexual assault, dangerous bullying, hostile encounters. Hate and resentment isn't hiding anymore... and it is going to get worse. 

There seems to be an actual effort to cull the poor, the sick, and the weak. The natural health movement is not about health. This is a controlled burn by hubristic people that think the flames will spare them because they have resources and are pulling up the ladders from the top. 

There are men in masks grabbing people off the street, beating them, and stuffing them into unmarked vans. 

We've got the Nat Guard occupying DC. The name of the Department of Defense has been changed to the Department of War.

We gutted USAID, including fucking the distribution of Plumpy'Nut, already made and packaged in the USA. 

The tanking of the economy is an insidious, slow suffocation.

All the while, folks rattle chains about Epstein and cover-ups while none of them give a single fuck about actual victims. These people aren’t heroes protecting children, they are cowards hiding behind them to justify their inane ideology.

I'm not going to comment on the stuff happening outside my border, because that is not my place and there are those endlessly more qualified to speak on it than I. But the Good Ol' U-Es-uh-A sure as shit ain't helpin no-damn-body.

Birthday military parade. ...Queue Rufus' Welcoming Ceremony.

Fictional dystopian themes persist because human behavior is repetitive and predictable. Human brains are pattern recognition machines which means that they function, and dysfunction, also in patterns.

OGVII was a presentation of these warning patterns.

A cautionary tale about real world consequences, how they get more dire as finite resources deplete and technology advances while meaningful access to it is monopolized. That the basal human instinct to survive costs humanity and causes ruin on and on unless we can master the concepts of empathy and enough.

We are running out of rope.

Spare me the fall of Rome and the rise and collapse of civilizations. Because now we’ve got nukes and our brains and balls and ecosystems are filled with microplastics. If AI in its current trajectory doesn't turn your blood to ice… I don’t know. The reins should have been first held by ethicists, not tech-bro billionaires.   

I've been scraping out my soul writing my series for however long it has been because I feel so fucking crushed by this hopelessness. How beastly it is.

I do what I can in my community and in physical spaces. Making art about all this was another attempt to act. All that art in my life that moved me, maybe I could move others too. Better to try than do nothing.

I learned a long time ago that the best way to endure a very bad moment is to go away inside and observe. You analyze and learn the patterns. How to move through them when you can't avoid them. How to identify them. How to, often, predict them. If this happens to you long enough, it becomes your default. I’ve got all this data burning a hole through my soul and I know that data can be powerful.

I struggle with the concept of writing original stuff because I feel like what I have got to say is ugly and hopeless. And I don’t want to put more hopelessness out into the world. Because we’re here, alive, right now. …It’s all we get. OGVII never felt hopeless to me. I obviously interpret the ending as the death of humanity. The party fails to save themselves and the world as they know it. But it mattered anyway. The smallness of their individualism broke and it summoned something in service to a near incomprehensible rebalancing. 

OGVII is full of light. It’s fun, and funny. But it is a solid starting point to examine all this scary, bleak, ugly shit and ask all these scary, bleak, ugly questions because the framing of the themes makes them accessible. Fantastic characters, great settings, a proper adventure. So much to dig into, real enough to get complicated but distant enough to not be too raw. All these time sensitive global, political, environmental, technological, economical, social, etc crisis themes, condensed into this non-threatening, charming, evocative package.

Since, SE has made choices that I find deeply disappointing.

The universe of VII has veered further and further away from saying anything of collective substance and has narrowed to focus on individualism, in canon and in catering to fandom. Writing my stories was an attempt to bring those OG themes back to the surface. Lots of people coming into fandom were not here for the original. 

The expansion closed and collapsed many of the pathways back for a lot of us who connected deeply to OG because canon was significantly altered in ways that were messy and thoughtless. OG centric creators were not just needing to appeal to others with personal interpretations, we were swimming against an ever changing current of canon that fundamentally altered why we were here. 

That’s part of being in a fandom, I guess. 

But I found myself in a place I didn’t really want to be and didn’t know how to remove myself from. Please understand that the stories I am writing here are metaphorical blood magic. They require a steep personal cost to manifest. When I write this stuff, I am going back to those experiences and digging around in the box to transmute those observations into something, I hope, is more than monstrous. 

“It helped me, maybe it will help another kid.”

The thing is, for maybe the first time in my life I don’t want to hide because I am worried I exhale hopelessness.

I want to shut down and slam the lid because I don’t know if this world is worth fighting for.

That’s where I’ve been. 

Trying to decide if it's worth it. Any of it. If this story is worth writing. What is the point of another warning when it's too late? If doing any of these small, ultimately insignificant acts to try and hold compassion and hope and connection is worth it against a bleak and painful slide to an inevitable conclusion. 

This is especially challenging since this is what my series, like OG, is about. 

Wake up. Get up. One thing at a time. Our time here is limited and messy and painful. Do it anyway. Because this is what being alive is. 

There is no “happy ending.” But there are moments of happiness and humor and beauty. There is connection and meaning where you find it, if you are willing to look. And if you can’t find any, you do the work to summon it, to make it exist. For yourself. For others. If you’ve read Nightmare, you know that the Lifestream in my series is the collective consciousness of storytelling.

I am not done with these stories. 

But I am putting them back in the box, for now. Because I am not sure that this is the place for them. Or me.

Thank you to everyone who checked in on me, kept sending me stuff, and holding my space. I was pretty surprised to log in and see. I’m sorry to everyone that reached out to me and didn’t get a response. If you’ve been with this thing, I will make sure you get an ending. I do care about what readers invested and feel, especially those that have followed the series and supported it for years. I’m not sure what form that will take yet, but I will do my best to make it worth it.