The Den

Counterspell

October 1st, 2020

This isn’t a political post. Honest. It starts from a moment during the debate, but it’s deeply personal and I think it’s worth saying.

Last night, Trump attacked Hunter Biden’s problems with addiction. Joe spoke up and said he was proud of his son for dealing with those issues.

Unfortunately, Trump’s comments on people who have problems with addiction aren’t uncommon or unique.

It’s the reason I decided to go very public with my own struggles, while still lying in a hospital bed, starting a recovery from something that carries with it a lot of shame and ridicule.

It was a complex combination of things, but ultimately, I decided to normalize the pain, and anxiety, and uncertainty, and talk about the things that a lot of people don’t talk about, and I strove to do it in a positive way. I learned a lot about compassion — not just for people who struggle like me, but for all people.

And that’s the team I joined. I decided that whatever point I made, or stance I took, would have to have a basis in love, kindness and an understanding for others.

Last night, Trump attacked me. He attacked millions of people who struggle with addiction, and he reinforced what those without compassion say about them. He reminded them to be ashamed. He reminded them that what they are can be used against them, or their families.

So I want to be your other reminder.

I want to remind you that you are the light. You are duly important. You are infinitely priceless. You are loved. You are one of a kind, and this world is better for you in it.

Over the years, hundreds of people have reached out to me about how this affects their lives. Distantly, remotely, relatively, intimately.

I hear you, and I see you, and I’m sorry that we live in a world that can see us as inferior or less than.

We are bigger than any problem, and our solution is to live.

The Breakup Breakdown

September 25th, 2020

Someone at my new work asked me tonight if I missed my old work.

I have been avoiding this question since March.

It’s been asked in abundance and in different keys. And my response is usually an acute tweet that confirms I am fine and it was just a job.

But it wasn’t.

In reality, I am mostly fine. But sometimes, the feelings crash down on top of me in massive waves and I drown in it. The job was more akin to a personal relationship, which was actually a hive of hundreds of personal relationships I inhabited for almost thirteen years.

And instead of a break-up (or hundreds of break-ups), it was a sudden death in a world where we’re not allowed to have a proper party or funeral.

It is hard to miss my old work when there wasn’t a definite good-bye or certain sense of closure. And technology begets living ghosts and makes you question the nature of every relationship you have ever had (or didn’t have) at all.

It’s a simple question with a complex no-answer. This month has been exciting, lonely, engaging, scary, hopeful, exhausting and one of the most stressful I’ve had for a number of reasons. Like any break-up, I wonder if all the work I put into my last relationship means anything now, and how terrifying it is to put myself through it all over again as I start a new one.

So do I miss it? Well, yeah. And it would be easier to get over if it would have ended in a way that reflected how much of myself I had put into it over all this time.

Around The Fire

September 19th, 2020

Do you ever have a moment when you forget that you’re you?

When you do or say something that is completely uncharacteristic of who you are now, but then remember that it used to be a part of who you were?

I do.

I’ll say something negative. Or I’ll react in anger. Or I won’t speak at all.

And it feels false, but only because I’ve spent so much time building better foundations.

I think there are a whole lot of people out there who spend a lot of time trying to be better. Whether it’s working on my insides, or my actions, or my words, I feel like I’m just constantly striving to make improvements — often at the expense of losing forgiveness for myself.

So that’s all I wanted to say today.

Sometimes, you’ll do something that will remind people of the “old” you. It might remind you of a you that you didn’t particularly like.

Forgive yourself.

Instead of casting that part of you aside, bring it in. Let that part of you know that even though you’ve outgrown it, it is still welcome to exist as a part of your past, and thus, still a part of who you are.

Accept yourself.

All of yourself. The flaws, the ugliness, the outbursts of emotion that can only be classified as human. Let them sit next to the fire of who you are, alongside all the parts of you that are who you are now.

They’re not going away. We can start new chapters, but we’ll always be the same book.

Be kind to yourself. I know it helps to hear that sometimes myself.

Theia Rising

September 18th, 2020

I have some Theia news!

– If you pre-ordered a Limited Edition First Edition Paperback through my website, they are in production and will be arriving between September 25th and October 2nd! All the First Editions will be shipped with an exclusive bookmark, as well!

– For the first time ever, you can order a Print On Demand Paperback from Amazon, available now! I’ve been aware of this feature for some time, but this seemed like the perfect opportunity to try it out. (I ordered a set for myself to compare the quality to the First Editions, too.)

Find it here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0578759322/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1600475709&sr=8-1

– All editions of Theia that are now available — print, ebook & the free PDF at dennisvogen.com — are the final versions. There were a few modifications made from the debut edition (just a handful of word and format adjustments; the story is the exact same).

I hope you get a chance to pick it up and spend a few hours with a menagerie of creatures who are very dear to my heart.

Worthy

September 15th, 2020

Aggressively strong people change the world with force, fashion and rarely any grace.

Saints, conversely, change it with seeds.

They plant them using compassion, empathy and quiet courage.

When a true saint meets any person — big or small, great or meek, no matter the past, in spite of appearance — they treat this person with the greatest respect, as though they are infinitely worthy.

Their tenderness for all of humanity often make them prophetic in the self-fulfilling sense; the people start to see themselves like the saint sees them. They transform and then rise to the radiant heights they have always been capable of, but just needed to be shown.

This is why saints are essential to our world.

We have spent enough damn time applauding and idolizing the aggressive; praising the bullies for their “hard truths” and “bold perspectives.” Saints don’t stand up for themselves in negative confrontations because that’s not their way.

So let’s call for growth, sing for light, give some love.

Be the person who treats every other person like they’re worthy. Because despite the few who won’t be, there are so many waiting for you to show them what you see.

Lovefool

September 14th, 2020

Our universe is full of systems that help us in the suffering of being human, and only a fool would discount a single one.

I’ve mentioned before a series of lectures I’ve been reading, and it’ll be the basis for a lot of the stuff I’ll be writing about. It’s called The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, and it’s a scientific and psychological look at how religion works.

It’s dope. It’s old (published in 1902). It’s relevant. And it’s positively changing some (and without doubt confirming some) of my understanding of how we work.

It ultimately comes down to our systems. Science is about experimentation and results; religion, too, is often about the results. With that in mind, we can’t discount one without discounting the other. As James brilliantly puts it:

“The first thing to bear in mind is that nothing can be more stupid than to bar out phenomena from our notice, merely because we are incapable of taking part in anything like them ourselves.”

If you get cancer, you will likely need a secular medical system to help you. Use that. If you get a broken heart, no doctor may be able to help, but praying might. Use that, too.

I wrote in The Weirdos: “The universe is bigger than God.” This is exactly one of the ways I meant. Not that a God may or may not exist; but that there are an infinite amount of possibilities, and room for each one.

Keep that in mind before you draw lines between fields. Letting them share your landscape could be the healthiest way of all to live.

The Social Dilemma

September 12th, 2020

Shall we unironically discuss The Social Dilemma on social media? We shall!

Let’s get this out of the way: if you’re a human and use any social media platform, this is essential viewing. It’s only 90 minutes long, and it contains information that should be shared with every human for the sake of our entire civilization (and that is not hyperbole). Some thoughts:

– This should be required viewing in schools. Not in advanced placement or specialty classes; this should be shown in an assembly with every person in the building present. If D.A.R.E. is essential, this is essential.

– I wasn’t as blown away by most of the apparent revelations here because most all of it has been covered in Westworld. I am not joking. In fact, Westworld went even farther in their last season to suggest a very potential future: imagine if your entire social media history was exposed for the world to explore? Every click, every like, every watch — not just what you looked at, but for how long. Your search history, your browser history, your personal messages — how would it affect you if this all became public information? For some, it’s whatever. For others, it’s life-ending.

– Speaking of which: I’ve seen quite a few people blame the isolation due to the pandemic for a rise in suicides. I’m not denying this could be a factor. I’m also seeing a lot of posts about saving our children. This is noble. Why, though, are very few people talking about how our childrens’ suicide and hospitalization rates have doubled or even tripled in some demographics — and it directly correlates to when social media became available to us on our mobile devices? While our attention gets focused on outside things (which I have talked about before), we willingly give our kids access to software that most adults can’t fully understand or maturely use…

– …Which leads me to one of the true revelations I did get. We spend so much time worrying about when technology is going to be superior to human strengths, that we completely missed it has already surpassed our weaknesses. Think about that for a second. It knows who we are, and what we respond to, and it preys and feeds on that. It’s simple but bears being spelled out. Not all humans have outstanding intellect or will. All of us have weaknesses. And social media, whether you want to admit it or not, knows more than you think.

– Something posted to Twitter spreads on average six times faster than real news. This is true of the spread of things on social media in general.

– Our feeds don’t look the same, no matter how inclusive we are of other people, because it shows us things depending on what it thinks we want, not to be a balanced worldview. This is important to remember as we consider the flow of news, as well.

The term “fake news” is a brilliant one for a dictator to adopt; once we lose trust in the idea of what actual truth is, our democracy crumbles. You would hope people could easily see that, but our country is the world’s example in how we can not. The technology quickly evolves, and our brains are millions of years old. We don’t win by outsmarting it; we win with our compassion and empathy for people. Our acceptance.

Please take just over an hour today and educate yourself. This is important in no uncertain terms. And be kind to others who may have been taken advantage of by our current society. We’re all worth so much.

Season Premiere

September 6th, 2020

When you’ve worked somewhere long enough, you start to develop your own ways to describe what it’s like when your workplace hires new people.

I’ve always compared it to watching new seasons of your favorite TV show. Some seasons are better than others. They always have some sense of familiarity to them, no matter how much they change. But the biggest similarity is the importance of the characters within them.

Some people walk into a job and become an indispensable part of the show as you know it. You can make a distinct line between before they were there and after. They don’t just join the cast of main characters; they redefine the relationships between them.

And some people are just guest stars. They pop up for an episode or two, they might be memorable, they might shake up a situation, but they ultimately don’t become an essential strand in the DNA of the series.

I was the former for a long time, and I forgot what it’s like to be the latter. It’s eye-opening, it’s sort of scary, but it’s kind of exciting, too. The only thing that can tell you what kind of character you are in any particular show is time. Whether you’re sitting at the table asking, “Remember that guy…”, or if you’re just that guy.

It can be hard to see our roles, because we inhabit them under different circumstances. You could be a lead at home, but a guest star at your favorite coffee shop. You could be in the same room and be a Sam or a Norm.

Sometimes, you might just feel like an extra.

And it’ll remind you to be super kind to the extras.

Foreword

September 3rd, 2020

In case you missed it: I surprise dropped a brand new book on Tuesday called Theia. You can get a digital copy for free on my website [dennisvogen.com] or $4.99 on Amazon.

You also have until September 14th to order one of a very limited number of paperback editions I will be printing later this month, also from my website. Fun fact: if you submit any kind of review over the next two weeks, your quote could be on the back of the book!

To tell you more about how this all happened, I wrote a short foreword which is included in the novella. I wanted to share it here, as well.

FOREWORD

This is wild.

It’s August 27th, 2020, and I’ve just finished the first draft of Theia, which I started on August 22nd, 2020.

It’s been a wild week. But it’s also been a wild year, so I’m just shooting par for the course (which will be the only sports reference in this entire book).

When I started this story, it was very small: I wanted to write about a silver Boston Terrier who just wanted to run away. It was, in no small part, my story – at least, a part of my story that I’m constantly at odds with.

What it ended up being was beyond anything I could imagine. It was all the feelings I’ve had in 2020 – the fear, anxiety, lack of control, unexpected moments of joy – lived out in detail by a bunch of animals living in a shelter. Without giving anything away, it also ended up giving my thoughts a place to live in a way that only fantasy and science-fiction can; a safe space where literal becomes metaphor, and big ideas get small but are just as important.

This is probably my favorite thing I have ever written, and that makes me crazy. It is as personal and universal as they come, and I can say with complete honesty I have never written something so quickly and clearly in my entire life. A week from now, I’ll come back and clean this up, and shortly thereafter you will be reading these words and we’ll go on this journey all over again, but this time together.

Stephen King describes story as already being there; as a writer, you’re an archeologist, digging the fossil out in your own unique style. I felt like that as I tunneled through this, finding gems everywhere along the way. I hope you find as much hope, joy and sorrow here as I felt discovering it.