“With fear for our democracy, I dissent” — Justice Sotomayor, today, in a statement that is chilling in its necessity and also vital.
That statement, her statement, keeps doing laps around the inside of my skull. You can read the whole thing here (the bottom for the dissents). But that final statement of hers is a terrible, essential echo.
It feels like the distillation of everything that’s gone on with Trump, since Trump, about Trump — how electing him unleashed something terrible, or perhaps worse, simply mirrored it, multiplied it in that reflective visage.
With fear for our democracy, I dissent.
It feels like the thing you wear on a t-shirt, you put on a protest sign, that you spraypaint on walls, that you ink into your skin, a statement you can both co-opt as a weak signal to virtue and a statement you say as some cop or brownshirt or fascist neighbor shoves you up against the wall and pushes a gun barrel against your chest. It’s both a plaintive cry and a defiant call. Something to make art of, to make poetry of, to make a prayer out of, an apology, a whisper, a song, and of course, above all else, a dissent.
I don’t have any great wisdom here. I’m just talking. I feel the energy of agita and want to type it out. That isn’t always the ideal way forward but sometimes, especially with people like myself, it feels like the only way forward. It’s clear that the shadow cast upon us, one we hoped would soften, would lighten and brighten, is now growing wider and darker. This thing we’ve thought of for so long as bedrock — freedom, democracy, America — isn’t. It never was, to be sure, it was always a little bit of an illusion, but that shared illusion made it sometimes, sometimes, true. And now, I dunno. While it’s good to dispel illusions, sometimes we need them. But, perhaps at least we have clear eyes now and we know what’s happening, what’s coming. We’re going to walk into a Trump presidency if we’re not diligent, if we don’t stand vigil. This isn’t a GO JOE BIDEN post or any shit like that, and it’s certainly not a post about WE CAN VOTE OUR WAY OUT OF THIS but it’s a reminder we’re walking toward a black, bleak, very deep pit, one that might as well be bottomless, and we have to stop and turn around and do whatever it takes to not see Trump re-elected. If we turn him away, it doesn’t fix everything — there’s still a sucking chest wound gulping air and bubbling heartsblood, and it’ll still kill us when the next, smarter version of that guy comes along. But it’ll give us a chance. If we elect him, that chance dies.
We have a vote. It is imperfect and it is weak but together, with the votes of others, it gets stronger, louder, better.
With fear for our democracy, I dissent.
And not just that chance, either. We’re on the edge of a lot of things. Loss of freedom and loss of human rights and the teetering availability of bodily autonomy for women and trans folks, not to mention the boiling tidal wave that is climate change. We get Trump, that wave gets bigger, hotter, faster. It’s not just democracy we might lose there. It’s everything.
With fear for our democracy, I dissent.
Mourn today and tomorrow, figure out what you’re going to do. Not just in a selfish “build that bunker” way, but in a… community building, join hands, adopt-a-politician, call-your-politician, whatever you gotta do way. I’m not smart enough to know what that means, not today, probably not tomorow, but others are, and do, and we need to stay sharp, ears open.
With fear for our democracy, I dissent.
Good luck to all of us. Not just in America. The shadow isn’t just darkening over us. The pall is thick and blanketing most of the world.
HEY WHO HAS TWO THUMBS AND A CASE OF COVID? *shakes little plastic baggy of two severed thumbs at you* This guy. As in me. As in I have COVID, and also this little baggy containing two severed thumbs.
This is pretty much exactly what happened to me last year on my Amsterdam – Germany – Spain trip. Came back, two days later, ta-da, COVID. As we left a whole month earlier this time I thought maaaayyyyyybe we’d get ahead of any Summer Surge, but nope, not so much. So far I’m the only jabroni in the family with this jawn, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the others catch it. I’m currently in quarantine though was able to Escape Containment long enough to come out to the shed to do this post.
So far (knock on all the wood), this case is fairly mild — a high sub-fever temperature (100F) last couple nights, a cough, some congestion, nothing that wouldn’t normally come with a proper good bad cold. No idea if it’ll show sharper teeth — COVID is a sneaky creature. (And before anyone starts in, I did mask during traveling, plane and airport, and I have no idea where I got it. If it’s a full two-day incubation, I could’ve gotten it on the last full day in Sintra, where the only person I was really close to that my family wasn’t was, I believe, the actor Wilmer Valderrama. Yes, I’m serous. I’m 99.9% sure it was TV’s Wilmer Valderrama. Fez. Handy Manny. I can tell that story later if you’re interested.)
Regardless, COVID is ass and I don’t like it, but I guess I’m glad I’m catching it now and not, say, in 2020. The landscape has dramatically changed for this virus and how we deal with it just four years later, and for that I’m pretty thankful. Anyway. Portugal!
No full trip report as yet — maybe I’ll just parcel tidbits out as I post these photos — but here, amidst the beauty and the friendliness and the glorious food and the wonderful pasteis de nata, I will take one small moment to talk a little bit of shit about Portugal, and that little bit of shit is in the department of their pastries. I have noted in fact that the egg tarts are the greatest pastry in the world, and as such, any sin committed beyond that is forgivable in the light of the glory of that singular item. That being said, I was told going there that Portugal’s pastry game was unparalleled — and at a distance it would seem as such, given how they have a wealth of pastries unique to their country. One problem, though, is that most of these pastries are a variation on the form. They are, to be sure, exceptional. A delight! But I was told time and time again, “Here, try this one, this one is [insert description here],” and then at the end, it still had… a similar taste. Maybe one was more almondy. Another would be crispier, or flakier. But they were all very much like they were borrowing from the flavor off the egg tart — I found very few pastries interested in, say, using fruit or citrus, odd in a country where both the fruit and citrus are quite good! I may have gone at the wrong time? Alas. Again, this is only a tiny bit of shit-talking, and perhaps it is merely the COVID delirium, but I did feel like the pastry game in other European countries was more on point despite the seeming wealth of variety in Portugal. And again, all is forgiven in the light of the glory of the pastel de nata.
Y’know, since we’re talking pastries and also perhaps, heresies, let’s talk the egg tart. I was told that the very best of the egg tarts is the OG of egg tarts, the only egg tart that can be called the pastel de Belem, as it is the original monk’s recipe made by Pasteis de Belem in, well, Belem. Many swore these, these were the best, the original, and everything else was a mere shadow, a petty imitator, and let me tell you —
Nope! Noooooope. Nope, nope, nope.
(YMMV as with all things.)
Now, my mouth is garbage and my palate is as unrefined as that of a trash-drunk raccoon, so nothing I say should be trusted. That being said… we ate egg tarts every day but one, ranging from grocery store tarts to airport tarts to fancy ones or ones bought at random padarias, and to me, the very best is the one you can get at Manteigaria. In fact, the Belem one was, to my mind, pretty mid? It’s too hard, not delicate and crispy, and the egg custard is way too eggy — think like, an over-egged slice of French toast or something approaching sweet scrambled eggs. Whereas the custard in Manteigaria is smooth and custardy and amazing, and the crisp crackle is — well, I did a very amateur hour ASMR of it over at Instagram if you’re so inclined.
Another thing about the egg tarts that is, to me, somewhat fascinating and perplexing is… each one, from the cheapest grocery store egg tart to the fanciest of the batch, had a final taste slash aftertaste of…
Frosted Flakes.
Not just a taste on the tongue but something that lurked in the hinge of the jaw, this very specific taste memory of Frosted Fucking Flakes. A better version, obviously. Endlessly better. But still, that taste. (And it’s not a knock, to be clear. I loved Frosted Flakes before I grew up and became a banal adult who has to care about things like fiber content.)
Anyway. The food is amazing. Even the cod. Which they love. Even though it’s not from their seas and they get a ton of great seafood from off their own shores, there’s just a historical love of bacalhau there. Not a super big fan of the cod dishes, to be clear. I’m not a huge fish guy in general, but that’s potentially because I am eating fish most times in Pennsylvania, which has — *checks notes* — no ocean. But beyond the cod, the fish was great in Portugal. I have always haaaaated mackerel and I had it there and it was like, one of the best things I’ve ever eaten. I ate a whole baby sardine (our waiter said, “You must eat the tail. And the eyes“) and it was lovely. Anyway. It’s all good. I can talk more about the food later. I should probably go lay down.
In the meantime —
Twenty more photos.
With a bonus two(-ish) more at the end.
Please to enjoy.
And now, for a couple bonus shots — actually, the same shot. First, unprocessed. Second, with some processing. The story here isn’t particularly interesting — we were at Quinta da Regaleira and my son saw someone ooohing and aaahhhing over something in this little niche, and when they left we looked and found a distant duckling. I snapped some photos and what turned out really excited me, though in retrospect, I’m sort of startled by how much even the unprocessed photo looks… weirdly glossy, like it’s AI? I promise, it’s not AI, not at all, it’s raw out of the camera. (Second shot has no AI either, just some tweaks in Lightroom. Adobe kinda sucks and I’ll eventually do the full switch to Affinity, I think, but for now, that’s where my library is until I take the effort to move it.)
I’ll do a more proper trip report at some point, but suffice to say: Portugal is beautiful. Labyrinthine cities brushed with a soft, uninsisting decay — turn down any street and you will be met with a place you want to stand still and remain for a time, just taking it all in. And the street art? It’s everywhere. Everywhere. All the time, around every corner, and it’s glorious.
Loved every minute of it. The people are friendly, the food is astonishing, the pasteis de nata (egg custard tarts) are something my body now craves as much as it craves oxygen, justice, and touch. It’s great. I loved it. I wanna go back immediately, but in the meantime, I’m here in America where everything is definitely going fine and not at all badly hahaha aahahaha AAAHHH
Anyway! Here are a buncha photos. I took a lot. Like, a lot a lot. About 8000, half of which I marked as favorites.
This post will not contain 4000 photos.
It will, in fact, contain only 20.
If you like ’em, I may go ahead and post more as I process them slowly but surely. (And before anyone asks, these cover four places in the country: Lagos, in the Algarve; Lisbon and Sintra; and Porto, in the north.)
Well, hey there — guess what? Black River Orchard is now out in paperback, with a new cover, and MORE EVIL APPLES. (Okay, it contains exactly the same number of evil apples. Sorry for the false advertising.)
Hope you feel like checking it out if you haven’t — your local indie bookstore is, as always, the prime location for you to find it. Or ask your local library, because libraries are good and wonderful.
Suburban folk horror, baby! It puts the cult in agricultural.
And obviously, if you’re so inclined — please talk about the book. Leave reviews, chat it up on social media, wander up to random passersby and yell about it while pressing an apple into their hands. You know, the usual.
One day last summer I picked up my daughter from camp. We have a rule: she can’t use swear words at school, or around other people. But if we’re alone, she can. I figure this’ll make them less taboo and give her an outlet.
That day in camp, she made a foam princess crown—pink and covered in gems and sparkles. As we were driving home, she asked, “Wouldn’t it be funny if I put on this crown and said a bad word?”
For context, my daughter is 9. She was 8 then, but regardless, she looks and sounds like a tiny little woodland elf.
Being a good dad, I said, “Of course it would be funny.”
And I watched in the rear-view mirror as he slowly put the crown on, smiled, and emphatically said: “Fuck!”
I lost my shit laughing, glad to be at a red light and not actively driving, because I might have crashed the car.
Flash forward to last January, where I teach in the MFA program at Seton Hill University. I was leading a workshop, and one of the students was reading his story to us. It was a banger. Very cool mechs-fighting-monsters business, and a solid start to a book.
I make the students read their stories out loud before we jump into the critique. They tend to hate this, but it’s important to hear the ebb and flow, and it exercises that performance muscle they’ll need to develop.
He used the word ‘fuck’ 12 times in the space of ten pages. I clocked the frequency, but so did he—shuffling a little at each subsequent f-bomb. When the story was over, I said we needed to talk about language, and he nodded before I even finished making the point.
“You’re giving too many fucks,” I told him.
I said he could keep one—one in particular—and asked him if he knew which one I meant. He flipped through the pages, a little unsure. And I told him it was the one that got the hardest laugh from the other students. It was in a dialogue exchange, and it was fun and fast and punchy and it landed.
The rest had to go.
I mean, they didn’t have to go. It was his story. But the thing about profanity is, you have to wield it like a fine-edged blade. Sharp and precise. When every other word is ‘fuck,’ it’s going to lose power and feel gratuitous.
If you hold them in reserve, you can make them land like tactical nukes.
That’s why my daughter’s ‘fuck’ hit so hard. It was unexpected, the context was perfect, and it was delivered with a forbidden glee.
That’s something I was mindful of while writing Assassins Anonymous. I do love a good swear. The Paradox Hotel has 51 uses of the word fuck, including the main character asking, “What in the Cincinnati fuck is this?” I’m proud of that one, because it’s ridiculous and means nothing, but I think the assonance of it is fantastic.
With Assassins, I made a conscious effort to de-fuck the manuscript. There were 30 when I sat down to edit, and I whittled it down to six, in part because I don’t want to rely too much on profanity.
But also, I wondered if it would do anything to placate those readers who will leave one- and two-star reviews over language (violence and sex are okay, but four-letter words are the true signifiers of moral degradation, apparently).
And you know what?
I think those six fucks land much, much harder.
That might make them stand out and offend the pearl-clutchers even more. But I’ll take that as a win, too. There’s no pleasing some people.
All that said, I’m not telling you not to swear. I’m certainly not telling Chuck Wendig not to swear, in his own goddamn house no less, because that man uses curse words like Salt Bae seasons steaks. In fact, he wrote a fantastic post in favor of swearing that’s worth reading to get the other side of this.
But it doesn’t hurt to try something new. Cause, you know, fuck it, why not?
What’s that? How is it being a writer right now? An author? Ha ha, yeah, man, yeah, no, it’s fucking great, everything is super cool right just, just really chill and what is it the kids say? Skibidi? It’s all coming up skibidi. Skibidi toilets all the way down, dude.
Yeah, no, check it out, right? So it’s like, publishers always threw us to the wolves a little but — but then there was Twitter, which was this rickety platform we could all stand on and squawk like angry blue jays about our books. Except then I guess that got bought by an apartheid-huffing man-boy billionaire who I think instantly turned it into an antisemitic NFT or something, and so Twitter stopped being a thing. But that’s fine, because now there are a hundred different little online fiefdoms, several of which are governed by the same callous, insane algorithms that have long governed readers’ absolute inability to find what they’re looking for at Amazon, right? Which is fun because, you know, if you have 10,000 followers, any post you do is probably only going to see, max, 1000 of those people, which is — which is really just perfect, it’s exactly what you want. You don’t wanna reach everybody who follows you, that’s fucked up, I mean, haven’t you ever heard of the Scarcity Model? Bingo, yeah. You need to be scarce as an author — just, like, a secret presence, a shadow on the wall, a whisper in the ear as if from The One Ring. If everybody who subscribes to you actually has to hear from you, that’s too much, just way too much. This way it feels special when they do see something you post! It’s like Christmas. But Christmas can’t be every day or it isn’t fucking Christmas anymore, yanno?
But whoa, here’s the real corker, right — so the people, the humans, they’re having a harder and harder time seeing you, right? And you, the also human author, are having a harder and harder time reaching them, yeah? What’s cool is, though, you still get to reach the robots. And the robots, they’re fucking everywhere, man, they’re crawling the internet like bugs, and they’re just gobbling up content left and right, just chewing it up like termites. Then everything the robots chew up gets turned into this paste, yeah? Like, a spackle? A content spackle? And they fuckin’ barf it back up in different places, so that’s cool because I guess they call that exposure or something. The molecular material of your writing and art is kind of in everything, then, like how we’re all made of stardust and shit? Yeah. Yeah. It’s cool, it’s great, and no, no, there’s no attribution or anything and no, nobody is paying us for that — ha ha, yeah, they’re just stealing it, but it’s not really stealing so much as it is like, being inspired by, because robots can totally be inspired, right? Probably? I think it’s nice. It’s all just glue for the internet–
Oh! That reminds me, the other cool thing about the robots is that, speaking of inspiration, they’ve been super inspired to just grab hold of all your informational searches across Google and make up their own creative writing answers to real questions. Like, someone asked how you stop the cheese from sliding off your pizza and the new Google Robots were like, “We got this, you put non-toxic glue on the pizza,” and it was like, what? Whoa. That’s wild, just fucking wild, and if you try to figure out why it said that, you can track back its inspiration to one person, a guy on Reddit named Fucksmith, and that’s pretty awesome. For so long we’ve been told in all our pop culture how even just one person can change the world, and look no further than this very situation — the robots were like, “Hey, you got a question, we got our main man Fucksmith to answer that for you — we dug a decade deep and found him in our brain vaults and we just scooped him up and now he’s the go-to guy for all the information. Fucksmith says you should eat yard mushrooms and give sick raccoons big sloppy open mouth kisses to cure them and that the best kind of condom is the kind you make at home with arts and crafts, probably. Who knows what wisdom Fucksmith’s ancient words can offer us? The Fucksmith Scrolls are gonna save us all.” And that’s why it’s like, really cool that the artbarf robots are hoovering up all our shit because one day someone’s gonna ask the robots to tell them a story and the robots will just tell them your story, like, word for fuckin’ word. We’re living immortal on the fury road, man, welcome to valhalla, buddy.
Plus, the Fucksmith AI is out there also ready to answer our questions, too, because us writers need the internet for more than just marketing. We ask it questions for research and now we have all the best research available — it’s been masticated and regurgitated by the termites, all of it tinged with the wisdom of Fucksmith. It’s great. Nothing can go wrong there. The other day I was like, “How does gravity work?” and Google was like, “elf piss,” and I’m like, great, that’s exactly what I figured. And I put it in a book.
I mean it won’t matter eventually anyway because nobody is hiring writers, they’re just paying for the robot sauce, and then hiring ‘editors’ at a cut rate to scoop up the robot sauce with their bare hands and try to sculpt something out of the raw slurry, but for now, yeah, I got my new space opera coming out with the elf piss ships, I just hope people read it, yanno?
Oh, yup, no doubt, we still need the net for marketing, sure, sure. Yup. And it’s like, that’s fine, because Twitter died, and then the publishers are like, “It’s fine, we have a plan, our plan definitely wasn’t just Twitter,” and I believe them even though they kinda winked at me? Like a little secret wink? Like someone who says, “It’s okay, I didn’t just poop a little poo lump in your Cheerios,” and you’re like, “what?” and they wink a little at you? It’s like that.
Still, though — yeah, no, yeah, due diligence, and it’s like, “I def believe you, publishers, but like, what plan?” And they muttered “TikTok,” and then said something about “reels,” and I said, anything else, and they were like, “nah,” and that’s good enough for me, so I guess now I have to make video content if anyone wants to see me. Which is fine. I mean, right, yeah, I’ve trained to write books, with words, and my ideal state is actually hiding in the darkness like an eyeless cave squirrel but if they say I gotta get on the AI-gobbling Tokstagrams and do a little dance or be a fun comedian and also learn video editing to make movies, then, sure, yes, I’m going to do that, because I am informed that the alternative is to — *checks notes* — starve.
I mean, ha ha, yeah, no, I’m 48, this is the ideal time to start doing Fornite dances online so people will buy my books. No, I know! I didn’t think I could get more cringe but I can definitely get more cringe, turns out.
Anyway! It’s great, it’s going great, I’m not worried about any of that. Sales are down, sure, sure, and okay, yes, paper prices are up, and I think advances are going back down again and oh right it’s an election year where it’ll just be even harder to get heard over the din of poisonous noise, not to mention Fucksmith’s increasingly loud instructions to slather our smashburgers with poison ivy and rubber cement, oh and also if we make one wrong move online the parasocial relationships we’ve been inadvertently cultivating will suddenly flip over on us like a janky four-wheeler, crushing us underneath even as its engine revs louder and louder, ha ha, oh man, it’s fine, it’s definitely fine. Nobody ever says anything wrong online where it’ll haunt them eternally. Plus I think the internet is straight-up breaking? So whatevs. Anyway, I gotta head out, good chat — what’s that? Oh yeah I got a meeting with myself, just to be alone with my own endlessly unspooling loops of intrusive thinking about my future and how one wrong step will doom us all and how it doesn’t matter anyway because soon every last one of us including our children will be drowning in a boiling ocean of microplastics and bird-flu, so yeah, let’s do this again. Have a good one. Okay. Okay. Witness me. Ha ha. Yeah. Cool, talk to you later.
