I saw some people today and they reminded me of a simple truth that needs to be repeated.
Positive people do not have better lives than negative people do.
Bad things happen to them: they fall down, they get set back and they get hurt. They have sad days and mad days and days where they just want to give up, too.
But they don’t. They take the things that most of us complain and whine about and they see growth and opportunity. They take the unsalvageable garbage of existence and they see what can be saved and recycled. They don’t force others to smile — but they know the importance of doing so.
Positive people do not have better lives than negative people do.
In brightest day, in blackest night, this dog gives me the will and light.
June 4th, 2019
I help run a thing on Tuesday afternoons. To do that, they give me a folder that tells me what to say and what to do. Today, I noticed that after one of the statements, it read [Start the Clapping].
And I thought to myself: “Hell, yeah.”
That’s what we need to do. It’s so easy to join in on celebrating someone else’s accomplishments; it’s another thing completely to be the first one. So, be the first to tell everybody about your friend’s new business. Be the first to text or call them when they get a new job or a promotion. Be the first to ask how their new project is going. Be the first to tell them how much you love the work they’ve already done. Yes, celebrate with everybody else, too, but it really takes strength and guts and heart to be the first one.
This stack of notebooks is hundreds of pages of life. It’s doodles, and sketches, and ideas, and timelines, and sharp words, and broken hearts, and gender-swaps, and intimate connections, and things that seem like but can’t be coincidences.
In here are people and stories and lives and a world that has taken years to actualize. It takes work and imagination and stupid passion and even more work, and even even more paper, ink and blood.
As I reach the end of writing this first volume of The Weirdos, I sit back and watch the world fight back against its creator.
Every part of (and person in your) life is one thread in the tightrope that you’re tirelessly walking. If you find a loose or stray wire, don’t worry. Your only job is to focus on the strong, steady, sturdy lines that are heading in the direction that you want to go.
This is why us supporting each other is so important. Whether it’s creatively, intimately or even blindly sometimes, our faith and support of one another is what keeps us on the wire, what keeps us from slipping and falling too far.
I just want to thank all the people who support me and my journey. I couldn’t walk it without you and, honestly, I wouldn’t want to. I hope you feel like you can rely on me and I always want to be your cheering section.
Have a terrific Tuesday, my high-flying Squirrels.
If you’re an average, healthy 25-year-old human being, you have approximately 2,120 pizzas ahead of you. That number isn’t insignificant, but it also isn’t that many. You might have a little less, and you won’t likely have more.
This isn’t meant to alarm you. But this is about perspective. This is about enjoying every bite of every slice of every pizza you have left. It’s about appreciating the company of those who choose to sit or stand next to you and eat with you.
Because, before you know it, you’re going to eat your last one. You’re going to have your last slice, and your last bite.
Your memories will recall every pizza that came before.
This isn’t a sympathy post. It’s the opposite, actually, because its intent is to solve its own problem.
My life’s journey right now feels tenuous; like I’m walking on a tightrope of just a few finely-strung muscles. I don’t feel like I’m particularly measuring up to anybody else; on the flip side of that coin, I don’t approve of me comparing myself to everyone else.
But here’s where the post takes a turn. I like me. I like me now, I mean. I didn’t for a long time. But because I like me, I can get through times like these when I don’t feel like I’m doing anything worthwhile or making progress on where I want to be.
I’ve made a lot of changes to myself, and when you do that you start to see what changes and doesn’t change outside of you with terrifying clarity. Liking yourself gives you the power to make decisions that can put you back on the path you want to walk.
But most of all, liking yourself just gives you hope, especially if you’ve ever not. And hope is what beats struggles, and beats helplessness, and beats the hell out of whatever else you have to face.
I’m about to tell you a secret of the universe. It’s one of the big ones, and I’m not going to keep it quiet anymore. I’m about to share with you the secret of change.
I know what you’re thinking: “Whoa, Dennis. You can’t do that. If you just go and tell everyone how they can create change in their lives, isn’t that going to irrevocably alter the course of the world forever?” Well, sure and no. Because as simply as I’m going to lay it out for you, most people will choose to plainly not listen. But you’re not most people, are you?
Let’s say that for as long as you can remember, every morning you wake up, get out of bed and hit your toe on the door frame on the way out of your room. You don’t know when you started doing this, but as long as you can think back, you have always done this. It’s painful, and it’s stupid, but that’s just the way it is.
Now, let’s say that one morning, either by luck or by destiny or by a very deliberate decision on your part, you wake up, get out of bed and you DON’T hit your toe on the door frame on the way out of your room. This experience is different, and it’s a lot nicer than your previous experiences waking up.
Now, this one-time-event does not constitute change. But here’s what does.
The next day you wake up, you now have a choice, having experienced two different ways of waking up. You get to decide whether to go back to your old ways, and run that toe of yours in the door frame on the way out of your room, or — OR — you now have a second option, and you can skip that pain altogether.
If you repeat these steps, quite literally, there will come a time when your morning routine, for as long as you can remember, has been waking up, getting out of bed and preparing to start your day on the right foot.
And that is all there is behind any kind of change.
It’s like my brain has been scattered across the multiverse, and the only thing connecting it to itself is a current of anxious electricity.
I read an piece recently about the concept of excellence. The writer argued that since most of our lives are spent in the mundane, something unexpected happens to us when we’re in the presence of excellence. We react in a heightened way; we feel a wide spectrum of feelings, from inspiration to outright jealousy. Our lives are changed forever when we come in contact with the extraordinary, and it’s because of the ordinary way we live most of our lives.
Something about this really bothered me.
It was this, and I realized it by seeing my world from so many points of view: excellence is a perspective.
You could meet a woman who, on paper, has lived a very ordinary life. And the way she could tell it could be your absolute favorite story.
Conversely, you could meet a man who, by all accounts, lived an spectacular life, filled with adventure and travel, and yet the way he told it could inspire nothing more than pity.
If you say things like, “Well, when you work somewhere so long, you’re bound to get sick of it,” or, “When people are in relationships forever, they get boring and it’s not like it was at the beginning,” you are only describing your own personal outlook on life, not any law or rule.
There are people who have had jobs for decades who, despite maybe not even loving the work itself, loved waking up every day with that sense of purpose and made it more than what it was. And there are couples who have been together for over fifty years who show no signs of lost love or stagnant feelings, and (with a little work) these are all choices that people choose to make.
Greatness is great to be in the presence of. But deciding what is great is the greatest power. You decide that your work is important. You decide that the people in your life are important. You decide who and what you love, and even if you don’t sometimes, you decide what you do about it.
So be excellent, and not in spite of the mundane; make the mundane excellent because it will change your life.
I saw an interview with J.Lo in which she said that men are “useless” until they turn 33.
I can’t even argue with that.
I’m a clandestine member of a team that is part Fight Club, part church, and I got fired up today. We were talking about perfection and the sin of pride and it got me spilling about some things that had been swimming in my head.
See, unadulturated, all-consuming pride is bad. It is terrible for you and the folks around you. But being proud of something, if we’re to progress as people, is essential.
I feel like when you try to better yourself in any way, it can inspire some people, but it absolutely turns off others. It convinces them that you think you’re better than them.
And I’m here to say: that’s okay.
I am not a better human than any other human, and in a lot of ways I’m worse than many. But even so: there are certain things, because I work hard for them, that I am better at than you and that is a fact. And you do things that are so much better than I can.
There are some amazing baseball players out there. Some of them make millions of dollars and build their lives based on their skills. Conversely, I am a shitty baseball player. I am the worst. And I am okay with that, and I am okay with people being better than me at things.
The fact that I don’t drink alcohol makes me better than nobody. Except that’s not true. It at least makes me better than I used to be. It makes me better than me. And the fact that I make generally better decisions and don’t consume something that was consuming me makes me better at those things than other people who have similar goals but are not reaching them, for whatever reasons they have.
We have to be allowed to celebrate not only our differences, but our accomplishments. Because if we feel like everything we do is even, we’ll never strive for more. Perfection is impossible, but it is a perfect goal.
So I hope you feel like you’re better. Because I think you are. I think every day you get to be a slightly better you and I think that makes every day magical.
I get to be 34 today. Which means I won’t ever die at the age of 33, the year I started to become useful.
A completely normal locker room, nothing to see here.
April 30th, 2019
An open letter to those of you who don’t “get” superhero films (or comics or just like to poo poo all over things that other people love):
Marvel just released a film that is essentially about grief and the act of moving on, and it made $1.2 billion its opening weekend. If you fail to recognize how this movie took a theme as heavy and hard to talk about as loss and spoke about it to the hearts of millions of people, then maybe this isn’t a failure of genre.
Show a person a painting, and they say it’s art. Show them words, and they say it’s art. But combine these two forms and only the simplest, most condescending people in the world could dismiss it as anything more than mind garbage for children and degenerates.
Ultimately, and the same side of that coin: any person who spends their life trying to define what art is completely misses the point of living it.
For the record: not a Game of Thrones fan. But I love how many people are, and I absolutely, totally, 100% “get” it. You keep being you, you stone cold weirdos.
The Den 