Yo, today is a big one, watch the video, you won’t be disappointed. The main points:
Everything came in today, so Jojo’s Time Machine is finally going out to you!
The gold foil cover is crazy good.
If you thought I was a nerd before, just wait until you see what I created this time for the Collector’s Set. SO MUCH NERD.
Otherworldly is out today! Check out my website for links (I did a lot of updates there and at my shop today), or you can pick it up at your favorite online book dealer. I’m super proud of my new story, The New Romantics.
Today is my mom’s birthday. There are so many beautiful photos of her and this is one of them.
I was young when she woke up one day and half of her face was unresponsive; it was during or shortly after she was pregnant with one of my youngest sisters.
For her, the hardest part wasn’t getting stared at in public. As a family that talked with our hands, we were used to being the center of unwanted attention in every public space, from McDonald’s to the waiting room. I know very well the feeling of zoo animals in cages.
No, the worst part was the fear she could see in children’s eyes when they saw her.
I’m not a monster, she told me, like I didn’t already know that she was an angel. Why can’t they see who I really am?
We’ve spent a lot of time lately making monsters out of humans.
Piling on celebrities, shitting on people we disagree with, typing deranged comments, making hate our whole personalities, promoting stereotypes, generalizing groups, profiling individials; refusing to recognize that nobody actually fits in a box, and unwilling to do the work of learning who the people we meet really are.
There’s a strange irony that we are witness to actual atrocities being committed across the globe, but even then I offer this: those, too, are not monsters, but humans committing monstrous acts.
So for my mom’s birthday (she would have been 62 today if she hadn’t fluttered off), I ask of you just one simple thing: consider the people of this world, all of them, as people, just like you.
Not monsters, not even strangers, but fellows, and potential allies and friends and family. People you might even hug. I know I always need a hug.
I was born on the first, she was born on the last, and on the second Sunday we celebrate her.
I miss you, mama.
Thank you for reminding me that I’m not an actual monster; despite my sometimes monstrous existence, and my continual insistence to the contrary.
The only skill I have purposefully developed over the years as a writer is the ability to come up with some happy unhappy answers to life’s big questions.
In previous essays, I’ve attacked philosophy and called it stupid (I stand by it), I’ve expressed my love for philosophy and its colorful cast of thinkers (still do), and I’ve discovered myself to be guilty of committing philosophy (a crime which I will never be able to make amends for in any meaningful way).
But I am not a philosopher. I’m not educated or smart or insightful or incisive enough for that title. It took another recent essay by Brian Klaas to remind me of my true nature.
He wrote a piece about the history of court jesters: the way they spoke truth to power, the tone they used to color uncomfortable conversations, their ability to give happy unhappy answers to life’s big questions.
And then I realized: oh, shit. I am the fool.
A foolosopher.
It’s not a revelation nor is it a surprise to me. I have a core energy best described as chaotic, generating an unpredictable vibe. A friend asked me out of the blue last year if The Fool archetype meant anything to me. I played the village idiot in a high school play, obviously typecast. My defining trait is being mischievous.
I remember getting sober and being terrified that I was going to be boring. I knew I wanted to be a better and kinder me, and I didn’t think I could do that without being a bland and watered-down version of who I thought I was.
But who I am is a fool, and a fool is kind with an edge. Just remember to take me seriously at your own risk.
But not just me.
Every fool of one’s own making.
There are those who are born fools, those who are foolish through ignorance, and then those who choose to be a fool, and I fall into that last camp.
Those fools exist to remind all the other fools how foolish they are, while never forgetting that we are all, none excluded, fools in our own unique way.
If you think there are too many unchecked powerful people today, you are correct. History shows us that the best leaders had a jester in their court, someone to hold up a mirror to the silly mistakes all humans make in the course of being human.
Instead of being mad, they laughed and they learned.
Most people in power now don’t have a fool or listen to them; most people in power now would rather have every fool dead.
And the fools, especially, understand the need to both laugh and learn. And how important it is to look stupid in the process.
Despite common belief and evidence to the contrary, I don’t like to write political pieces.
In fact, very little of what I’ve written would I consider actually political; most of our arguments and lines of division today come from cultural and moral differences, that get repackaged as shiny political keys by those in power to distract us from the fact that most of the powerful people suck and we are easily manipulated.
That being said, there is something about Donald Trump that I want to talk about, a sentence that encapsulates how I’ve felt for over eight years now:
I don’t like what he does to us.
And I don’t just mean the people who support him.
I mean all of us.
People are wondering where all the conversations have gone; that’s a complicated thing to untangle, but what isn’t hard to see is how quickly we confront one another, not with open minds and benefits of the doubt, but from a place of certainty and eager combat.
The result is near-universal conflict; there is no conversation if even one of the participants refuses to equally exchange ideas for the sake of being aggressively and undeniably right.
This one-sided problem doesn’t belong to one side.
I don’t know if I know anybody, myself included, who hasn’t been there, for a multitude of reasons. I’ve screamed, I’ve been screamed at, I’ve beared witness to screaming, all from a hill that someone refused to die on.
But I don’t know if I’ve ever seen this disorder as severe as I have when it comes to the subject of Donald Trump.
I don’t want to list what he is and isn’t, the things that he’s done and hasn’t; I’m actually not interested in him at all. I’m just trying to diagnose us here.
Radio host Charlamagne tha God said recently that we have become a society that makes every micro thing macro; we blow up the tiniest, stupidest shit, and as a result, we don’t know how to deal with (or talk about) big, real problems.
That’s the real casualty of Donald Trump and these anti-culture wars.
How bad is our inability to accept new information? I’ve done my own testing which, while anecdotal, is telling.
Recently, when I’ve see false information shared on social media, I’ve been commenting. Not with my own feelings or arguments, but with a link to a website that contains facts. I try to make sure that my link is trustworthy; by that, I mean that the articles I use share their own sources, so there is no question to where their information comes from.
Can you guess what happens?
Sometimes, the poster doesn’t react to or comment on my link. Fair. They’re under no obligation to interact with comments on their own post. But do you know what happens more often than not?
They will delete my comment. Or, in some more extreme cases, they will delete their original post, with my comment attached, and repost the exact same thing, my additional context removed.
People cry that the mainstream media is crooked and untrustworthy. But it’s not a faceless organization that lies. It’s people. It’s you.
We have to read more than headlines. We have to see more than masks.
Have you ever heard the theory that the thing people hate or fear the most is the thing that reminds them of themselves?
Cancel culture does not exist, unless you live under a dictatorship and question the leader; you will find yourself buried by the cult of the fascist, and you can see it happening now if you’re paying attention.
I’ve been reading René Girard lately (which could be its own essay) and his big themes of mimetic behavior and desire and the role of the scapegoat could not be more relevent; it’s why I’ve decided to write all this today.
We copy one another to learn how to be human, and when our desires mix with the broken system of capitalism, chaos and violence ensues.
Using Girard’s observations as a warning, a scary but relevant question remains: what has to die to make society whole again?
I love my friends in the creative community so much.
Cheers to a successful SpringCon, and a big thank you to Jen and the MNCBA and all the volunteers for today’s excellent event experience and for the vibe, especially. The vibe was good.
The quality of conversation and friendship was exceptional; there were several times the energy of a moment pulled me in different directions, so if you had a thought to finish or something else to ask or say, please let me know! All distractions and diversions were, per usual, not intentional.
Met a lot of new folks and if you’re new to my social media: welcome! I write a lot of bullshit here but it’s all from my weird little heart.
I hear often that the internet has ruined small talk because we always know what’s going on in each other’s lives, but I have strongly felt the opposite; the amount of people who reached out in person to tell me they read the May essay and gave me a hug was [bursts into tears thinking about it].
Something new I tried today: because I have so many different books (13 and counting), I have decided to stop trying to carry my full catalog to shows. I created these “Online Only” tabs to signify which books you can buy when you get home, if you so prefer.
This does a lot for me: I get to carry less books. It allows me to choose which work to focus attention on, which is less overwhelming (just whelming?) for both potential readers and me. It actually created demand for some the books I did not have on hand, which means that for some shows, I can take books “out of the vault” depending on the kinds of requests you make. I just started doing this and I love it.
Just like I love all of you! Thank you for being the best community of people in the universe, people I couldn’t be more proud to call my own. See you next month with the Minnesota Comic Exchange.
May used to be my favorite month, and now it’s the hardest.
It’s not fair, which is perfect because my dad spent my childhood preparing and then reminding me that life would never be.
I was born on the first of May, she was born on the last, and her day — Mother’s Day — falls on the second Sunday.
She died in October but, due to life’s hilariously unfair mean streak, her celebration of life wasn’t held until — you guessed it — the following May, three years ago.
Like a magnet reversing polarity, all my body wants to do in the month of May is get out of it, and once I do, I’m repelled through the rest of the months until I’m pulled right back into it, before I even get to process the year that was.
In May, I feel like I don’t have skin.
Everything feels raw. A flick feels like a slap and a slap feels like closed fist, a meat tenderizer on exposed nerves. Anything hurts. I’m always tired. I was under the impression that grief was like a hiker, taking steps gradually up and down, but that its overall direction was higher ground; I was told the bitterness got better.
This attitude may be true for most of the year but it is not true for May.
I’m not sure how I do anything in May. To the rest of the world I look the same as I did in April; I talk like I did in March; I give high fives and fist bumps like I did in February; I gossip about the weather like I did in January.
But I am my own dark doppelganger.
I’m not the same in May and there isn’t anything I can do about it and this is the worst fucking part: I wouldn’t change this feeling if I could.
Because the pain I feel in May is the cost of the love I had and the love I have. I have to pay for the priceless.
I know this and I accept this and the only reason I don’t drive myself into the ocean is because I get the pain. This pain that reminds me that everything is real, and that loss only matters if what you lost mattered at all.
Mama’s boys make the mistake of loving someone the most who won’t always be there for us by design.
I made a mistake at the beginning of this essay.
May is my favorite month, which is why it is the hardest. Every year, May tears me apart so I can be put together better.
Big updates on Brushfire, Jojo, Maple Island, a new short story collection coming out later this month, the event this Saturday, and a little reminder that you can do whatever you want in this life.
One of the best parts of sobriety (and there are so many good parts; for example, I remember what happened every day for the past six-and-a-half years for better or, occasionally, for worse) is that most of the lessons I’ve learned while recovering have nothing to do with sobriety at all.
I want to share one with you that I can’t live without.
To say I was scared in the beginning is a laughable understatement.
I was lying in a hospital bed, growing an awful beard for the second time in my life, completely broken, repeatedly making the realization that I was going to have to put myself back together, and do my best to leave the many bad pieces out.
I am not LEGO, nor IKEA furniture. There is not a manual for me. Sure, there are people and places and ideas that can help, but there isn’t a one-size-fix-all Band-Aid for a drunk riddled with bullet holes.
I didn’t come back to my senses all at once (and you could convincingly argue that I still haven’t); at one point during my luxurious hospital stay, I suggested that maybe after a year of sobriety, I could have a drink to celebrate.
It’s hilarious, but in the moment, that idea actually kept me sober, and it’s the idea I want to share with you.
When you lie awake in bed at night, feeling anxious and stuck in your life, just remember: what you do today isn’t what you have to do forever.
That has been my key to change.
The idea that I had to completely destroy and rebuild my entire existence was beyond terrifying. It was not possible. I could not imagine it, and I have a wild imagination.
But the idea that I could take a step back if I didn’t like the change allowed me the courage to take that first step at all.
Your life today may not be your life tomorrow, and it will definitely not be your life forever. The way you swim determines how you move through the water. And this idea has nothing to do with sobriety, but it keeps me sober. It keeps me working on myself; it holds me accountable, because as certainly as I can change for the better, I can more easily change for the worse.
But when I do change for the worse, all it takes is one day, tomorrow, to let me change it again.
It’s natural to daydream about your earliest moments, lying on coarse carpet, following the sunlight as it sings through the tiny glass prism your mom hung in the window, leaving stains of every color in the palm of your hand; it’s natural to anxiously dwell on a worm hiding in the core of an apple, the inevitable conclusion of our entropy, this impending black death.
That’s natural, guys. I think a lot on birthdays.
I’m thinking about a hug I saw on Friday night.
I was at a show and the crowd was very young, except for the people sitting on the balcony who, excuse my French, looked pretty old. I watched them and realized that they were family members of the musicians performing that night.
A tall guy, unruly hair, hugged his mom tight as photos were snapped. His face was a mix of embarrassment and pride and stupid love and I knew that face well, because it used to be my own.
Every time I did something to express myself growing up, my mom was there to embarass me, to be proud of me, and to love me stupidly. Every performance, every publication, every birthday.
Since 2020, the year she left, I have done a lot of work. I don’t know if it’s good or bad or (god forbid) just mid, but I do know it exists. I pretend that I don’t know why I’ve been working so hard, but I do.
I keep thinking: if I can make something extraordinary, she’s going to have to come back to tell me.
This makes no sense. Unless, of course, you have wildly fluctuating self-esteem, an unreasonable amount of self-doubt, and you’ve lost someone who you’d give up a handful of your sanity to see again.
In a normal essay, this is when I would admit that I know working this hard won’t bring her back, I am Kenough, and that I’m going to reconsider my priorities and slow down.
But it’s my birthday and I will do as I please.
No, my broken brain wants to double down and increase production; to keep writing words that matter to me; to continue drawing pictures and playing songs; to go out and meet people who love art, and help them create it, too.
Not because I have anything to prove to myself. I’ve made peace with me, the decent parts and the monstrous pieces. And not to bring her back, either.
No, I just want to prove she was right.
I want what she saw in me to be true. I want the nice things people have said to me this week to be true. I want to be embarassing and proud and stupid in the service of love.
When we meet again in the dark, I don’t want to say I left anything out. I said it all, in the way only I could.
1. May 1st – Beach Fossils 2. May 1 – Archipelago 3. Papercuts – Landon Conrath 4. The City – The 1975 5. Heaven is a Place on Earth – Belinda Carlisle 6. Gettin’ Old Rock & Roll – Wildermiss 7. The Kintsugi Kid – Fall Out Boy 8. Quiver – Dora Jar 9. Love Will Never Do (Without You) – Janet Jackson 10. Losers Club – Durry 11. King of Wishful Thinking – Go West 12. Westworld – Evan Giia 13. Overcome – Nothing But Thieves 14. Me Myself & I – 5 Seconds of Summer 15. Obsessed – Mallrat 16. Reds – Michigander 17. Straight Up – Paula Abdul 18. Heartbursts – Lucius 19. Novocaine – The Band CAMINO 20. Weak In Your Light – Nation of Language 21. Casual – Chappell Roan 22. in the wake of your leave – Gang of Youths 23. Coffee – Sylvan Esso 24. Magic – Coldplay 25. Reflections – Atmosphere 26. Geronimo – Sunnysmack 27. Cough Syrup – Young the Giant 28. First Single – The Format 29. Dancing On My Own – Robyn 30. Tear In My Heart – twenty one pilots 31. I Want You – Savage Garden 32. Care – Beabadoobee 33. No Shoes in the Coffee Shop – Hot Mulligan 34. how to exit a room – The Maine 35. You Ruined Me – JC Chasez 36. Superspreader – Ber 37. all my ghosts – Lizzie McAlpine 38. Sugar & Spice – Luther Vandross 39. Mad World – Gary Jules
Human beings are objectively both the most intelligent and stupidest species on the planet and, yes, that includes you.
One of my favorite writers, Brian Klaas, wrote yet another phenomenal essay last week about this topic and, while you should read the whole thing, I just want to share the piece that proves how idiotic we absolutely, inarguably are.
When animals receive information from reality, they understand it as fact and change their behavior accordingly. See, animals don’t have the luxury of ignoring facts, because ignoring the truth of the world around them would likely lead to death.
Which leads us to the point:
Humans are the only species on the planet who will be presented with a fact and ignore or outright refuse it based on their beliefs. A large percentage of humanity is actually resilient to evidence.
And when you spell it out like this, you realize how utterly moronic we are.
At his show the other night, Daniel Sloss (per always) had a lot of insightful things to say about free speech and empathy and saying hard but true things and getting away with it.
Something I’ve seen with my writing as the years go on is that I appear to be getting away with it more frequently.
There are times, right before I hit the “post” button, that I think (while feeling my underarms pool with sweat), “people are going to be mad about this.”
It isn’t an unwarranted fear. I have, in the past, made people big mad. Sometimes it’s my fault, and sometimes it’s just not. So ultimately, over time, I’ve realized two things:
I am responsible for my own words and actions, and as a human being and writer, I am responsible for having empathy for my fellows and for telling the truth to the best of my ability.
I am not responsible for other grown ass adults’ feelings.
And those two points have informed what I do and they’ve served me well, and they allow me the ability to do things like start this essay by calling you stupid.
There’s a trust there and a sense that I don’t say things just to rile you up. Granted, I do try to rile you up, but not for the sake of riling.
Daniel also said that you will never find a good comedian who whines that you can’t say anything anymore. That pairs with another often-discussed sentiment: the idea that you actually can say anything as long as you’re talented enough to get away with it, like a student who makes the teacher laugh and avoids discipline.
People will always find ways to be offended, even when the reason they’re offended is true and supported by facts.
And we are not responsible for grown ass adults’ feelings when they’re hurt based solely on their beliefs, especially when even the stupidest animal on the planet knows better than that.
The Den 