All The Steps That REO Speedwagon Took In Their Unsucccessful Attempt To Fight This Feeling
1) They attempted to form a multilateral commission to explore forming a united front against this feeling, with a mixture of economic sanctions and covert military engagement, aimed at isolating and destabilizing this feeling. The coalition fell apart after this feeling made a sweetheart deal with some of the key parties.
2) They posted on social media about this feeling, and even got a hashtag trending (#fuckthisfeeling) but the virality was short-lived.
3) They tricked this feeling into signing an end user agreement that called for binding arbitration in the event of any disputes and then recruited a close friend to pretend to be a neutral arbitrator. Arbitration dragged on for ages but then became bogged down in defining terms.
4) The band started a Substack on which they posted long accounts of their unfortunate experiences with this feeling, and expounded a long and overly complex set of intersecting theories about why this feeling is not only antisocial but incompatible with civilized society.
5) A set of intersecting theories came to seem too unwieldy, so the band workshopped a new term to refer to this feeling — a snappy phrase that rolls off the tongue and sounds vaguely sinister in a way that's hard to pin down. They tried their best to put that term into common use, and achieved way more virality than with their earlier hashtag.
6) Self-hypnosis! Self-hypnosisssss! Self-hypnoooooooooooh shoot we fell asleep again. And now it's too late to order from that pizza place. Fuck.
7) Ultimately a feeling is INSIDE YOU, which means it's also possibly inside other people. A wily operator ought to be able to siphon the unwanted feeling out of themself and into other human receptacles, by using some kind of shunt. Or sponge. A shunt-sponge hybrid, perhaps??? The band's quest to identify other people in whom this feeling was incubating should have been straightforward, but the fact that they had spent so much time labeling this feeling pejoratively and coming up with a set of intersecting theories for why this feeling was a problem made it impossible to identify this feeling cleanly in others. By this point, they could no longer even speak about this feeling in a way that a someone outside of their own immediate circle of friends could understand.
8) Clearly this feeling was a symptom, and the actual problem was with Society. The only way to eradicate this feeling, in the long term, was to remove themselves from society and prepare for its inevitable collapse.
9) When society's inevitable collapse failed to arrive, after many years, the band set about remaking society in their own image. But what WAS their image? They had not looked in a mirror or seen themselves on a video screen for lo these many years. Did they still even have human form? Were they still separate individuals, or had their long isolation melded them into some kind of gestalt compound entity? They could see each other, but could they trust each other? They had to build a high-tech metal body to contain their combined essence, one that would project an image of sustainable progress and innovation. This took many years, and by the time their work was completed, they had forgotten all about the feeling and why they had been fighting it. Could you still have progress if you no longer knew what you were progressing away from?
10) They finally decided to embrace this feeling but they could no longer locate it within themselves or anyone else. Perhaps all victories, in the end, are pyrrhic? They sat inside their giant collective exoskeleton and felt an ineffable sadness.
My Stuff
This Saturday I am hosting another one of my spoken word events, Writers With Drinks. I've been doing this show for over twenty years — in fact, our twentieth anniversary was in April 2021, and I totally didn't even notice because it was just another month in the panini. Anyway, this Saturday's event is a really special one, featuring some of my favorite people. There's San Francisco poet laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin (Blood on the Fog)! There's literary icon Shruti Swamy (The Archer)! There's queer zinester/musician/writer/icon Brontez Purnell (100 Boyfriends)! There's science fiction badass Cat Rambo (You Sexy Thing)! And there's gay memoirist Stephen van Dyck (People I've Met from the Internet)! It's this Saturday at the Make Out Room, doors around 7, show at 7:30 sharp. It's just $5 to $20 at the door, NOTAFLOF, all proceeds benefit the TGI Justice Project.
I published three books in 2021, and they make amazing gifts! Check out this graphic the wonderful folks at Tor made:
Victories Greater Than Death is a young adult space fantasy about a girl named Tina who is secretly a clone of an alien hero who died. Tina was hidden on Earth as a baby for her protection, and now it's time for her to leave home and claim her legacy and her destiny — except that things don't turn out the way she was expecting. Victories is a story about a chosen one who learns that it's really up to her whole chosen family to save the galaxy. It's full of kissing and space battles and consent and getting everyone's pronouns right, and battling fascism with the power of love and companionship. NPR just named it one of the best YA books of 2021.
Never Say You Can't Survive is a book about how to get through the worst times the world has to offer, by making up your own stories. It's got some touches of memoir, including some reflections on my own career. But mostly it's about how to access your creativity when things are not okay, and how your creativity can help you to cope with the not-okay things. I kind of present a whole theory about how to find your story, and how to have intentionality in your work, and how to turn that intentionality into story using all of the tricks a writer has access to.
And Even Greater Mistakes is a book of 19 short stories. They're silly and fluffy and dark and exciting and scary and funny and cute, and basically all over the place — but they share my, shall we say, anarchic sensibility. A lot of these stories are about queer and trans people holding onto themselves in the midst of quasi-apocalyptic scenarios, and how communities can keep us all together. I think this is the best writing I've ever published, and these stories still give me joy when I look back at them. Also, each story contains a really strong jumping-on point, so I'm hoping you don't have to work so hard to get into each scenario. This book has been praised by the San Francisco Chronicle, Shondaland, and a wonderful review in the Chicago Review of Books.