This has been the most overwhelming week I can remember since my mom died, in ways both massive and personal.
I’ve been erring on the side of being too positive, too hopeful, but it’s been really hard. I’ve tried writing, again and again, any words to make the world make sense.
But they keep coming across as righteous, or spiteful, or divisive. Those are the tools of people who use fear.
So I only have a few words left after I cut those out.
I heard a woman talking about life right now and she said:
“I’m glad I’ll be dead soon.”
We have created a society that is both suicidal and homicidal.
We both want to die and kill everyone around us.
America was founded on freedom, especially religious; we are now dominated by a single one, populated by members with severe cognitive dissonance.
We have been America long enough to become the thing we ran from.
“I do, but I have a complicated relationship with the word ‘soul’,” he said.
“Do tell,” she said.
“Well,” he started, “soul is a word that doesn’t actually mean anything. Like, if I say orange, you think of the color, or the fruit. It describes something that exists. There is no definitive measure of a soul, and everyone seems to have a different definition for it. And there are a lot of words like that. ‘God’. ‘Devil’. But if the words make you feel something when you hear them, they then become real themselves, because they have real effects.”
“I’m following, but this is a hell of rabbit hole we’re tumbling down,” she said.
“The problem is when we use words that don’t exist to affect things that do. For example, there would be no abortion debate if we didn’t believe in souls. We think that as soon as a sperm fertilizes an egg, a soul is put in there, too. That is the only reason we could think fetuses are fully realized human beings.”
Maya couldn’t believe this man thought this was flirting. He went on.
“Can you imagine if I took two pieces of thread, made two stitches with them and then told you that was a hat? That is not a hat, not any more than an egg/sperm collision is a human being that can think and feel and play the guitar.”
“So do you think abortion is murder?” she asked.
“Is it murder to pull the plug on a man who has no chance of ever recovering the use of his brain?” he asked in return. “A lot of people, myself included, think animals have souls, but don’t have a problem killing them. Is ending any life we consider to have a soul in any way murder?”
“You cannot heal in the same environment where you got sick.”
What a full load of bullshit.
But that phrase (or related ones) keeps popping up like a weed, in real life and the not-so-real life we know as the internet.
This sentence perpetuates the idea that we cannot get better right now. This moment.
Which is a lie.
Not one that people tell us.
One that we tell ourselves.
I knew I had to get better, and I had known that for a long time. I also knew that getting better was going to be a lot of work. I was going to have to radically rearrange my life, and I was going to have to face the thing that humans hate to face the most: change.
When we really don’t want to believe something, we will keep looking for an opinion that agrees with what we do want to believe. Thanks to the internet, that opinion will always exist, as long as you keep looking.
This particular opinion – that you have get out of your environment to get better – exists and is widely shared.
That opinion is a good one if you like to run away. And people who don’t want to face change are very likely to run.
My book Theia is about a lot of things, but at its core it’s about realizing why you run, and transforming into someone who stays. That was who I had to become.
I had to stay in the environment where I had been sick to make amends for the person I had been.
Change is hard. Running is easy. Staying is the hardest and most rewarding thing I have ever done.
This sentence from this morning’s daily reflection makes much more sense to me:
“I am not a victim of others, but rather a victim of my expectations, choices and dishonesty.”
I am not a victim of my environment. I am, and always have been, a victim of me.
Better than any kind of formal review, people are starting to tell me how they feel, and the thoughts they’ve been thinking, since reading Cold World, and the conversation so far has been outstanding.
Thank you so much to those of you who have visited Earth two hundred years from now, enjoyed yourself a cup of Floran coffee, and then come back to tell me about your personal journey there.
I keep telling people this is a deep story, and a strangely spiritual one, disguised as science fiction, and they still seem surprised when that’s what they find.
I’m just glad they found it.
All my love, and – please with a frozen cherry on top – tell your friends if you got this and love it, too.
P.S. dennisvogen dot com is always updated and has a lot of rooms to explore.
Most of social media can be a nightmare amusement park garbageland, but did you know that I’m on Goodreads?
It’s true: I have an official author account on Goodreads, and if you’re not familiar, it’s a big, warm online community of readers and writers just like you and me.
You can rate books and talk about them and show off your reading list, and I’ve been doing fun things over there like answering reader questions.
It’s a little literary respite from the noise of the internet as usual, so I hope you’ll visit and follow me!
“He did not want to appear at a loss or to let his followers down. He decided that it would be best to be plain and friendly.”
– Watership Down
If this quote sounds familiar, it’s probably because I either told you what it means to me in real life, or you read my post about it two years ago. (Or, possibly, you’ve also read my favorite book.)
Plain & friendly are the two words I think about most each day. They’re the words I try to live by, and I fall short often, but I never stop trying. I joke that if I ever get a tattoo, it’ll be something to remind me of these two words.
They only feel more relevant every time I wake up. They only feel more meaningful in a world that is complicated & cruel.
I was training at work today and always pretend to have wise words to say. I am a great pretender. Regardless of their perceived value, however, I always mean them and they come from a place of experience.
It’s true in many fields, but I feel like it’s especially true of the industry service: we can be the best part of somebody’s day, and we can do that by just being nice.
I think one of the reasons people get burned out at work is because they solely subscribe to the intended purpose of having a job: to get money. They get in and get out and they do it surgically, without touching the electrified edges.
But life is messy.
And in that mess we make connections and feel feelings and tell each other our stories, and making a person’s day is the most significant thing we can do in a person’s life.
And any job that allows you to do that is a job worth having.
Plain & friendly isn’t boring. It can be stunning, it can be funny, it can be deep & profound, it can be dry & sarcastic. It’s listening and sharing and vibing and it’s the small stuff that stays stuck in you forever.
I fall short. There are people to whom I still owe more plain friendship to, as it, too, means being able to say you were wrong and that you are sorry. I’m better at that now, but I’m eternally in progress.
Sometimes the world is overwhelming, so I wanted to share again these two words with you, because they’re the words I use to overcome it.
I just want to be plain. I just want to be friendly.
We chose a fuel that is a limited resource, a finite thing. We choose to live far away from the places we work. We choose vehicles that are too big for the lives we lead. We choose to use those vehicles far more often than we have to, and frequently without a fair reason. We ship and receive an astounding amount of products. We refuse to adapt and commit to transportation with alternate sources of power. We choose to make a stand against people and places who are harmful to this world.
These are all choices we make as a society, and only a snapshot from the album of problems with oil we have.
Do high gas prices suck? Absolutely.
Are they a consequence of our actions? They sure are.
Anyone who is trying to make this political or conspiratorial is just another pawn of division, people who are trying to convince you a war is on its way, and you better pick a side. They’ve been doing this in a staggering variety of ways for years now, and the only reason I’m writing down these objective facts about gas and our relationship to it is to remind you: this is our fault.
Humans like to blame.
It’s easy. It feels good.
And it divides.
If division is your goal, then you find any and every way to do it.
Honestly, if Jurassic Park was real, and we could bring dinosaurs back to life, Americans would fight for their right to kill them and turn them into oil.
It wouldn’t matter when you told them it takes a long time to turn dinosaurs into oil.
The world is expensive so I would love to give you something for free.
If you’ve read the description for my new book, Cold World, and it sounds like it was made for you, it would be my pleasure to send you a free PDF or Kindle copy for your personal digital device.
All I hope in return is that you’d leave a review on your favorite online reading space, like Amazon or Goodreads, in the next 60 days.
If you try it and you don’t like the book? Don’t finish it, and don’t worry about a review. I just appreciate you using any amount of your valuable time to give my work a chance.
Send me a message on any platform and I’ll give you a link to download. Thank you so much, and if you know someone who might like this book, too, share this along.
If you have no idea what Cold World is about, no worries; the official description follows.
“It’s 2222.
“Eighty years ago, an asteroid struck Earth, setting in motion a devastating chain of events. Those changes reduced our planet to just one season: winter. Meanwhile, through technology and the generosity of groups like the Knights, we have settled throughout the galaxy, colonizing moons, Mars, and a planet we had once called Proxima b, but is now known as Flora. The Knights on Flora have discovered a prophecy: there is a phoenix buried under the Great Lakes of America, and awakening it will bring warmth back to Earth.
“They enlist the reluctant help of disgraced Earther, Calef, his dog, Joan, and his friends to help them in their mission, whether the people of Earth want their help or not. Cold World is a story about hope, spirituality, grief, purpose, and family, and it’s bursting with high-stakes action, romance, humor, and heart. It is acclaimed writer Dennis Vogen’s eighth book.”
The third and final Brushfire announcement goes out to the Kickstarter backers I adore so dearly.
It’s time to reveal the Brushfire Deluxe Collector’s Set!
If you backed and chose this tier, here is what you’ll be getting:
* Two copies of Brushfire: one regular cover, one variant cover, with a personal sketch inside one of the covers!
* An exclusive sticker set featuring six characters from Brushfire: Bay, Elle, Erwin, Due, Ava Marie, and Donnie!
* A limited-edition enamel pin of Bay! This is one of those things that I am so obsessed with and that I feel like people are going to be bummed they missed, because it is probably the rarest piece of merch I’ve ever produced, and it’s the first of a three-pin set.
* I’m not even joking about this one: I MADE POGS. There’s a big dose of 90’s nostalgia here, both in the book and just about me in general, so I started digging and found one of the original pog-makers online. I got pretty good at it, and included with your Collector’s Set will be a Bay pog! I hope to make this part of a set, as well. Should I look into slammers next time?
I hope you love this stuff as much as I do. Brushfire: Wave 1 is currently in production, with the expectation that the books will arrive in the next few weeks. Then the books will go out to backers, with the people who ordered the Deluxe Collector’s Set getting all these goodies, as well.
“On the second day of announcements, Dennis gave to me…”
The release dates for all three Brushfire graphic novels!
I’ve already talked about this story coming out in Waves; there are 3 parts to this tale, and these are the days you’ll be able to get your paws on them.
As you can see, I made the day easy to remember, and the date itself is important to the story in several ways.
That’s two whole years of Brushfire anticipation, speculation and fun!
Come back tomorrow for the last day of announcements! (For now!)
The Den 