Your life’s a joke

May 27th, 2021

If you are doing what you love and are good at what you do, I just want you to know that I am your biggest fan.

Especially if no one told you life was gonna be this way.

I just got done watching the Friends reunion special and guess what? I have something to say about it. (Please, hold your surprise and applause until the end.)

I’m a huge Friends fan. In fact, there are tens of millions of us. There are a lot of reasons to like the show and, like anything else made more than ten minutes ago, there are problematic things, too. But that’s not what this is about.

The story of Friends is the story of a group of people who were extraordinarily talented, extremely passionate about their craft, and who worked significantly hard to achieve what they did, both in the objective success of the show and the artistic. Watching them discuss, reminisce and appreciate that lightning in a bottle gave me the good feelings that is sorely lacking from a lot of the entertainment I encounter on a daily basis.

And as I was watching it, this thought kept crossing my mind, without my permission. It was you: the person who has nothing better to do than post a meme or negative aside about how awful Friends is.

The person who has to shit on what someone else likes.

On what this group of people who loved each other and loved what they did worked really hard to create.

And it just bummed me out.

But every time I got bummed out, something happened onscreen that made me laugh again, or made me tear up, or made me think, or just made me happy.

And that’s the secret, the antidote for the haters: you keep creating.

They hate, you make them laugh. They hate, you make them tear up. They hate, you make them think. They hate, you try, against all odds, to make them happy.

So there’s no point in shaming those who want to be negative on the internet. You may as well try to cancel the entirety of online behavior.

All I can say is this: if you’re doing what you love and you’re good at it, and you want my support — I’ll be there for you. Even when the rain starts to pour.

more.

May 26th, 2021

At least once a day, someone tells me my posts are too long to read.

And then I’m over here, like a weirdo, wanting more from my own friends and family. More words, more hopes, more dreams, more honesty, more failures, more successes, more stories, more insight into who the human beings around me actually are.

It’s silly.

I hope you’re having a nice day so far.

Why of the Tiger

May 24th, 2021

I find that using metaphor is helpful in explaining behavior or situations or phenomena in a way that encourages the person reading it to be less defensive and feel not attacked.

So let’s talk about tiger trainers.

First things first: being a tiger trainer is one of the dumbest careers in the world. It is as nonessential as jobs come. No one needs to train a tiger, and a tiger has never requested to be trained.*

*Sources: Siegfried and/or Roy, circuses, Tiger King.

Yet there are people who train tigers. Some successfully, even. But there are many trainers who will experience tragic encounters with tigers. Now let’s say one gets part of his face ripped off.

So this trainer has half of his face literally hanging from his head. He gets rushed to the hospital and is in emergency surgery for hours. He’s then in recovery for a few days, and when he comes to, his son asks him what he wants to do next.

“Well, I want to keep training tigers,” he says.

The family is in disbelief. Like I just said, training tigers is as nonessential as it gets. It is work that simply never needs to be done.

And a few months later he loses an eye. And then part of a hand. And then his left calf muscle.

And he keeps training tigers.

The question I’m getting at is: why would something that repeatedly proves to be a destructive behavior also be something that a person refuses to give up doing, especially when it’s clear that it’s that specific behavior that is the problem? And what if there is a fundamental realization that the behavior in question is one that the person never needs to do?

If I make this more specific, then it gets weird and people clam up. But this should be enough to get any person to ask themselves: what am I doing that is harmful to myself and others? Why do I continue to participate in it even though I know there is nothing about this that is essential to me or my well-being?

Or, you know, maybe they’ll just think: tiger trainers ARE dumb. They should just find something better to do.

Or, even worse: they will die on the hill telling you why training tigers is the most important job in the world.

The Truth is Way Out There, Part II

May 23rd, 2021

I took a pause between my last post and this one because I didn’t get to say everything I wanted to say about it.

About the act of believing.

The first half was an affirmation. This part is a warning.

There are over 4,000 distinct religions on our planet.

And every person who has one believes as strongly in theirs as you believe in your own. They know they are right, just as you know you are right.

It is an objective fact that all of these religions can not coexist as truth. Virtually none of them are provable in any concrete way.

Which brings me to this unfortunate, inevitable conclusion:

Religion is never going to be the thing that brings all of humankind together.

Ever.

But it can help people anyway.

Kindness and understanding and communication and compassion and empathy — these are the pieces that link us together and create positive change.

They require more than learning, however; they require real action.

You can’t just want to be better. You have to do better. You have to be better.

In my favorite series of lectures, William James uses science to determine whether religion is objectively good or bad for the whole of humanity and the progress of civilization.

His answer isn’t a definitive “yes” or “no,” but more of a “it depends.”

Unfortunately, it largely depends on how good a religious person is without the religion. Because a large segment of the world is hypocritical, and religion doesn’t serve to fix that, but instead highlights and enables it.

In the last post, I said that what you believe shapes who you are. It absolutely does.

What we believe makes us all unique shapes, like living, breathing snowflakes, and religion would have you believe that the only other shapes that fit yours are the ones that have been shaped in a similar way.

If you learn nothing else from me, it’s that I believe if you take the time to really look at and appreciate every shape that exists, you will find a way that they all fit together.

The Truth is Way Out There

May 20th, 2021

I believe in something weird.

I believe that the universe purposefully created the particles and the atoms that eventually led to human beings because it wanted someone here who could see, hear, feel and appreciate the universe itself.

I believe this because I think the universe is inherently lonely.

I don’t think my belief conflicts with anybody else’s. My universe is your God is another person’s higher power.

Our universe is so specific that there is a number we assigned to the amount of dark energy that exists in it. If there was any less, matter would never come together and form everything we know. If there was any more, all matter would be crushed under the pressure of the energy.

There was an astronomer who spent his entire life trying to figure out why Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun. We can clearly see now that he was asking the wrong question, because the fact that we exist is the answer. If we were farther away, we would be too cool to grow; if we were any closer, we would be on fire.

You might wonder: if I think that an infinite, faceless universe created everyone and everything, then I must believe it is cold and uncaring and merciless.

Well, no.

I think that if the universe needs an audience, needs company, needs a friend and a fellow thinker, it takes no pleasure in ejecting any one of us from our seats.

These are weird observations, but I’m sharing them for a reason.

If you believe in something weird, I just want you to know that you’re not alone.

What we believe in shapes who we are. It inspires us, it grounds us, it gives us perspective and knowledge and beyond living, it keeps us alive.

All of what we believe is weird and strange and nothing we believe will make sense to all.

But as long as it makes you and the world around you a better and more beautiful place, then that strangeness can be one of your most powerful tools.

It can confidently assure you that, no matter who you are, you are not alone.

Forward

May 20th, 2021

I won’t forget 2020 for a number of reasons. For all of the reasons, honestly. As the great poets Chumbawumba once sang: “I got knocked down.”

But, like Chumbawumba goes on to say, I have to get back up again.

And from the ashes comes a new look and a bold direction forward.

My banner and business cards have been burned down, redesigned, and this is the brand, the vibe, the feel going forward.

I can’t wait to see you all in-person again (and I’m officially vaccinated as of today, so let the face-licking commence). I may as well announce: I am confirmed to be at NerdinOut Con in Rochester this October, so this isn’t just dream-talk. It’s happening.

I hope you enjoy the new hotness (do the kids still say that?) and I hope it drips (I’m 90% sure I didn’t use that one right). I’m ready for the new-new normal. I’m ready for the future.

The Grind

May 17th, 2021

None of us asked to be here.

What I mean by that is: never in human history did any of us specifically request to be born.

Keep this in mind for a minute.

As we reassess what life was, what it’s been over the last year and what it’s going to look like, it feels like everyone has a strong opinion about the economy and, more specifically, the workforce.

There is no question that nearly every business is having trouble hiring employees, and the list of reasons why is long, from the complicated to the not-so-complex.

My entire life, but especially now, there’s a phrase I hear that people love to say but I don’t think anyone really thinks too much about:

“People have to work.”

It is common knowledge that in order to be a human being, you have to be productive, you have to be of service, you have to contribute, you have to do something to be worth something.

I just have to ask a simple follow-up question.

Why?

If none of us asked to be here, then why is it a requirement that we have to earn any kind of keep?

And I apologize because my question wasn’t rhetorical. The answer is we don’t.

If you’re pro-life then, in a way, you should be anti-work. If you’re insistent on bringing people here who never asked to be, then you should be equally supportive of that person’s right to live a life that makes them happy.

And as people reassess what it means to work, what it means to be worth something, and what it means to be happy, we have a whole lot of other people who are trying to make them forget all that and just get back to the insistent grind that we endure until we’re ash.

Something of worth that makes them worth something.

I say you already are. Worth something, that is. If you need to eat, then find a way to eat. If you need to sleep, then find a way to sleep. Those are basic conditions that life makes you meet, and life never gave you a contract to read and sign before you agreed.

And if you’ve made the realization over the last year that maybe human beings are put here against their will to do more than just work, then know that maybe you see life in a grander and more fulfilling way than a simple, capitalistic society can fathom.

And I think that’s what makes you and I special.

Homes

May 15th, 2021

Hey. I am beyond exhausted and overwhelmed at the moment, but I wanted to sincerely thank everyone who made time for us today. We made it work despite being a full year out of small talk practice, and your presence was felt and can’t be overstated. Today I felt a huge part fall out from under me and it was a relief to see so many pick up the pieces.

I also wanted to talk about homes.

It’s funny, because I always think of Minneapolis as our first home, because that’s where I was born, and where our family was started, just the three of us. But Princeton was also her home, where she was a piece of a different family before ours. And there was a home in Wisconsin and a home in East Bethel. And I forgot how much Faribault was her home, even before she had us kids, even before she met my dad. How the Deaf School was her home, the surrounding woods, downtown, cold waters, open fields, locked dorms.

But I wasn’t prepared to be exposed to an actual constellation of homes that I hadn’t really considered.

As I looked around the room today during the service, I realized that she had made a home in every single person I could see. Some of us had come from her, some of us had ran to her, but she had passed through everybody just the same. She saw each one of us, she smiled, and she made a home we couldn’t see but would have to feel for the rest of our lives.

After we put everything away and we drifted back to regularly scheduled programming, I took a drive down the street to the school. I walked around the campus, I took in the sights she had seen, I recycled the air she had breathed, I found this spot in the woods where I was able to let out the things I couldn’t let out anywhere else, looking at trees she had imagined a life beyond.

It’s not fair.

It is hard to let the person who was sick go, but hearing about her when she was alive, and she was the most very alive person who had ever lived, that just breaks me down to slivers of fragments of pieces. That is the thing that makes you realize that there are levels to this, and it is very easy to lose your balance if you’re not keeping your eyes on the horizon.

I’m going to get back to replenishing my electrolytes, but I really did want to thank everyone in my own way. Thank you, and all my love. Keep your homes safely built in your memories.

A Post-It Note of a Moment

May 14th, 2021

Hi.

Just a little message to let you know how much I love you all. I can’t express how happy it makes me getting messages and comments from you reading Time is a Solid State, highlighting and sharing passages and pages in your stories, and letting me know you’re digging it in real life.

For real. You are the best.

We ALMOST broke into the top 500 essay books on May 1st, which I think is really dope. Out of the hundreds of thousands (millions? billions?) of collections of essays, we were basically in the top 500 anybody was talking about. And for a dude who has no publisher or agent or abs (I know how Instagram works), that’s kind of remarkable.

Tomorrow is going to be a really, really difficult day, and I just wanted you to know I feel the love.

Thanks, squirrels. All my love right back at ya.

Truth Serum

May 12th, 2021

There was a phrase I used to hear all the time when I was drinking that would put fear in me more than anything else anyone could say.

“The truth comes out when you’re drunk.”

This was repeated so often that it was no longer anecdotal for me, an absolute, objective truth that made it easy for me to believe that I was a bad person.

Because there were times when I drank when I said or did awful things, and if I was being my honest self while I was drinking, then that meant that underneath my social defenses and complex layers I was a bad human being at my rotten core.

When you accept that as your truth, it’s hard to make any kind of decision to be better, because you resign yourself to the idea that there isn’t any better version of yourself.

It took me a long time away from that behavior (and a whole lot of soul searching) to come to the realization that who you are when you’re someone else isn’t who you are at all.

I believe that when you are your healthiest and your happiest, that is your truth.

Your truth isn’t the words that come out easily after two rounds of happy hour. Your truth is the hard words you still say despite being sober.

There are people out there who, the last time they ran into me, did not meet the best version of me. Maybe you’re reading these words right now. I could have been obnoxious, or insensitive, or belligerent, or maybe didn’t even make a whole lot of sense at all.

I write and talk about these things now, as the person I really am, so you can see that there was a whole other person inside of that one the entire time. In fact, there are whole other people inside every other person you know.

I just hope you remember that the next time you run into someone who is not their best self.

Be kind.

I know we all have that in us. At least, some version of us, anyway.