Dear Dems,
If pro wrestling teaches us anything, it’s that it takes a great Heel to make a great Face. History has given you the most fantastic Heel imaginable. Stop blowing this opportunity to be goddamned superheroes.
Thanks!
Your Friends,
The American People
Long story short: “Net Neutrality” means that, just as the phone company must route all calls with the same priority and quality, broadband providers (like Comcast and AT&T) must treat all web traffic the same, and not, for example, make connections to Netflix super crappy so that you feel obliged to pay for OnDemand in order to watch Mad Max: Fury Road or Sophia the First.
You have until July 17 to tell the FCC how you feel about that. Submitting an official comment—one someone actually reads and takes seriously—is super easy:
(Ars Technica has a great article going into detail about this approach to discussing Net Neutrality with the FCC. Highly recommended read!)
Here’s a draft of my comment:
I do not believe that the FCC should reclassify broadband as an “information service.” As a consumer, it’s plain as day that I’m purchasing “telecommunications service” from Comcast when I pay for my broadband access.
Although I’ve had broadband Internet access through either AT&T or Comcast for at least 15 years, I have never used either company for any of their “information services.” I currently use Apple, Amazon, and Google for cloud storage, FastMail and Apple for email hosting, NearlyFreeSpeech.net for web hosting, DynDNS for domain name services, ArborDomains for domain name hosting, the University of Michigan for my VPN, and Verizon, Skype, or Google for telephony. Heck, even though Comcast *does* offer cable TV and streaming video, I don’t use that service (they dropped the only channel I wanted), instead relying on Netflix, YouTube, Apple, and Amazon.
Comcast actually does a pretty good job of providing me with a telecommunications service–but to call that an “information service” is as obtuse as calling the highway system a “grocery service” simply because the grocery store has produce delivered via truck.
When I pay Comcast, I’m paying them for fast and reliable broadband service, connecting me to the many “information services” I want, value, and pay to use.
Thank you for your time and attention.
All Best,
David Erik Nelson . . .
Go forth and tell your government how you want them to handle regulating this vital public utility.
I don’t wanna belabor the point, but this tweet got me thinking:
Sometimes it can be a long ride from the start of a story until the day it gets published. https://t.co/E6hDH8j1ii
— F&SF (@fandsf) July 2, 2017
~350 words longhanded on a new SF story: THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN, HE FLIPPED A CROOKED HOUSE #writing #Detroit
— David Erik Nelson (@SquiDaveo) September 14, 2014
Part of the reason this story took so long to go from this first longhand page to hitting newsstands was because, over the course of the winter that followed that tweet, I was steadily loosing my mind.
Since my adolescence I’ve always had seasonal affect issues, my mood steadily sinking until February—I’m from Michigan; Bob Hicok famously characterizes us as “a people who by February / want to kill the sky for being so gray“—then rebounding with the thaw. Lots of people are like that, especially here; no big. But that year the mood never rebounded; it just sank and sank and sank. I ate more sugar and drank more coffee and skateboarded as much as I could, and soldiered on. But by summer the hole was too deep. Once I’d slam a coffee and another coffee, eat some cookies, skate hard, and be OK. But by July I’d skate so hard I was seeing stars and woozy, and 20 minutes later feel like crap and be desperate to go back to the skatepark. My speech was getting slow and ponderous, my behavior erratic. I got in a fight with my wife over something—I can’t even recall what, something our son had done—and lost my temper. I don’t remember what I said, just that I was in the backyard screaming, my chest collapsing, so angry I was dry-heaving and chanting “I’m sick; I’m sick; I’m sick.”
I didn’t want to be alive any more, but I couldn’t stand the idea of being separate from my children, and the thing running constantly in my head was how I could get careless enough to be killed in an accident where my life insurance would still pay off. Then my family would be on easy street and not burdened by me; my kids would be able to afford college, my wife would own our house outright, and I wouldn’t have to be me anymore, because I wouldn’t have to be at all. And being, it had become apparent, was my core problem.
PRO-TIP: If you need to quickly diagnose depression that has become dangerous, just ask them: “If you could push a button and have never existed at all, would you do it? No pain, no trauma, no one mourning you, just *poof!* and you never were.”
If the answer is “Yeah, sure,” then that person needs to talk to a doctor very, very soon.
At any rate, by the time I had that screaming fit I had already made an appointment to talk to a doctor—something that I’d kept a secret for reasons I can’t really explain any more, because they make no fucking sense; I’d made that appointment under false pretenses, telling my doctor I’d re-injured my ankle—the whole point is that nothing I was doing then made a lot of sense.
But part of that logic had to do with this poisonous, murderous goddamn myth we have that taking meds for your psychiatric illnesses is somehow “weak” or “unnatural” or damages the purity of your artistic fucking whatever.
I wrote 50,000 words of stories while my brain was collapsing that just aren’t much of anything. I sat on revisions of my novella “Where There is Nothing, There is God” (which was in Asimov’s in 2016, and was a finalist for the Asimov’s Award) for a goddamn *year.* I’d sent it around, got feedback from Ann VanderMeer at Tor and C.C. Finlay at F&SF—really good advice, advice that ultimately made it the strong story it was—and then did nothing for a full calendar year. I wrote “There Was a Crooked Man…”, put it through my writing group, got great feedback, and then just sat on it.
And I have no idea why.
Or, more to the point, I know precisely why: Because my brain had drifted from doing a fairly crappy job of managing serotonin to not really bothering to manage it at all.
I started taking 50mg of Sertraline every morning about two years ago (with the ongoing support of a psychiatrist). It’s cheap, I haven’t suffered major side effects, it’s been really good for my personal relationships, and has spared my wife and children having to plan and attend my funeral—and it’s done fuckall to harm my “art”:
This story, “There Was a Crooked Man…”, saw the better part of its 
revision after I went on meds. The last three pieces I’ve sold—Expiration Date, “Whatever Comes After Calcutta” (forthcoming in F&SF) and “In the Sharing Place” (sold to Asimov’s)—were entirely written on anti-depressants. These latest pieces are among the best work I’ve done, precisely because (*SPOILER ALERT!*) it’s a lot easier to do good work when you aren’t struggling to keep being alive.
If you need help, please get help. Needing psych meds is no more a moral failing than needing a cast when you break your leg, and seeing a therapist isn’t touchy-feely “snowflake” BS any more than seeing a physical therapist after you wreck your car is touchy-feely bullshit. Your brain got injured, you need some medicine and therapy to get it back on track; that’s fine. Go do that thing. Don’t waste ~300 days that you could spend Getting Things Done or hanging out with your kids or having a beer or reading or playing video games. Go get well; if that’s not possible (because, the fact is, it often isn’t), at least get better.
Looking for that perfect comic-dystopic-romantic sci-fi beach read? 
You’re in luck: The first three chapters of my novella Expiration Date are now available online (in both slick-as-hella web versions, and some pretty damn fine looking PDFs, perfect for offline, ebook, and tablet reading—just clicking on the “Print” button to open and save the PDF for that chapter. As an example, here’s the chapter 1 PDF.) And don’t worry, this isn’t a cheap tease: All nine chapters will be released, free to read, one each week for the rest of the summer.
If you want some inside-baseball about the novella, you can check out this interview with Gabie at Tea End blog.
These stories have nothing in particular to do with each other, apart from the fact that each speaks to a fundamental, existential truth. If you ever find yourself wondering, “Jeez! Why can’t these guys just admit to how totally off-the-rails this situation has gotten?”—well, here are three answers that are really one answer: Some truths entirely annihilate you.
Today is a great day to call your reps and leave a message! Wish them a Happy Independence Day and tell them what you’d like them to focus on when they get back to the office tomorrow. If I may, I’d suggest they focus on White House conflicts-of-interest—perhaps by taking action on the following bills:
In the House of Representatives:
In the senate:
My personal view is that, regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, you should support these bills—they’re just common sense in the modern age, where anyone with even the simplest 401k, tiniest nest-egg socked away in an IRA, or humblest mortgage has a vested interest in myriad domestic and foreign policy issues.
But even if you think all of these bills are total BS, call your 
reps. Please call your reps and tell them that. We should all be invested not in a system that has this or that policy outcome, but in a system where the vast majority of citizens actively participate to guide us toward whatever outcome may be. I totally accept that I’ll often be on the losing end, policy-wise, because my beliefs and experience just don’t match up with the majority—but I’ll be damned if I’m gonna gently and quietly acquiesce to a country molded around the manic delusions of a vocal, belligerent, ideologically extreme minority of the electorate.
This morning the Supreme Court released a pair of decisions, one of which was a solid win for same-sex couples (birth certificates mush now list both parents) and a pretty bad blow to the most vulnerable Muslim refugees (the White House can ban entry to anyone without a “credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States”).
The former seems like a big leap forward toward a just society, while the latter at least a solid stop backward (if I’m seeming overly optimistic in calling this only a step backward, just consider how vaguely broad “a credible claim” to a “bona fide relationship” to any person or entity in the U.S. is—Wanna help refugees? Start a pen-pal program!).
Viewed objectively, these average out to a minor win for the Arc of History in its quest to bend toward justice. Keep your heart, progressives! (and don’t forget to call your reps!)
But all that doesn’t interest me as much as the buried lede: In
both cases, a unified block composed of Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch backed an narrow, regressive alternative reading of the law that is, at the very least, remarkable in how uncharitable it is, in addition to hinting a kind of disconcerting credulity when it comes to the claims of ruling powers (be they the PotUS or the State of Arkansas) that seem set on playing abusive word-games in order to give the force of law to their personal bigotries.🇺🇸🔥
(UPDATE: Same great post, now with the correct date for the event: June 28, 7pm)
Good news, everyone: My latest novella—Expiration Date—is available free online this summer! Here’s the official blurb:
This science fiction “till death do we part” story follows young Lizzie and Bram in a relationship on fast-forward. Armed with the knowledge of her scientific discovery, Granny Gin burdens the couple with the question “What would you do, if you knew your end was near?”
First chapter went live early this morning; check it out! New chapters every week.
But wait! There’s more: The official book-release kick-off party is next week:
See you there!
…instead of a heart-numbing meditation on the difference between being a person and being a process.
‘course, when you think about it, this movie—even in its great compression and tongue-in-cheekiness—meditates on the very same thing, albeit shallowly (Hell, 2.5 minutes can only permit one to dive so deep, right?)
That said, Koja’s The Cipher (originally titled “The Funhole,” if that ain’t foreboding) is an awesome, awesome book, a must-read in the canon of Detroit literature.
I know that makes me sound like a dick, but for context: I was a teen in the 1990s, and so Norm MacDonald is sorta fixed in my head as a half-funny smirk standing off center in a scene framed around David Spade abusing Chris Farley. It isn’t that I wrote him off—upon reflection, I just realized I never even evaluated what the dude was doing; the director, camera man, SNL staff, and guys I sat with at lunch wrote Norm off, and I took their word for it.
All that aside, this is a really, really fascinating interview. Neat stuff about craft in here—which I’m always down for—but also a really nuanced view of art as a product of human interaction and actualization.
I was gonna write a book about how to be a stand-up without being funny, but I thought it would be too cynical. I really think I could write it though.
A manual for how to perform an impression of a stand-up comedian?
That’s exactly right. It was mostly about crowd control. If you’re not very good you have to deal with the audience a lot, so it was a lot about how to do that. Like, you can pick on one person in the audience, and then the rest of the audience gets on your side because they’re afraid of being picked on. It’s all the psychology of mobs. You can learn it. I’ll go to a club and suddenly the guy who was the bouncer last time I was there is a stand-up, because he’s been there, watching how it works. Even jokes, you can do them mathematically without having any inspiration.
How’s that work?
You just take a premise and instead of following it to its logical conclusion you follow it to its illogical conclusion by having a faulty premise to begin with.
It’s surprising that you ultimately decided against writing a book that would’ve suggested that your vocation, the field of your life’s work, can be an empty, soulless shell of an occupation.
Yeah, I also thought it would be too pompous. It’s nobody’s fault there aren’t more funny comedians. If I were an awful comedian, I’d probably still be drawn to doing it. I remember when I first came to Los Angeles, Jay Leno was there and at the time he was the king of all stand-ups. And one night, I had to follow him. I was thinking, My god, this is going to be the worst. But Jay told me it’s fine to follow a good comedian. You just don’t want to follow a bad comedian. Or a filthy comic. They pull the audience down. It’s hard to go on after a filthy comic with, “What about Raisin Bran? Doesn’t everyone know how big a scoop is?”
and
Are you following the Kathy Griffin stuff at all?
What she did was grotesque. Disgusting. It shows how isolated everyone is. I was golfing last week and I told the guy I was golfing with, “It’s getting pretty crazy. I heard someone say they’re trying to ‘humanize’ Trump. Well, he is human.” And this guy goes, “Well, barely.” Jesus Christ. But Kathy Griffin went about as far as you can go. It’s like she had no sense of the history of that kind of image.
It’s hard to understand how someone didn’t say to her or the photographer, “Maybe let’s dial this down from an eleven to about a seven.”
The photographer, her manager, her agent, the person who made the severed head—no one said, eeeh. And I hate the immediate apology. Why are you apologizing? You apologize and then everyone just accepts that the apology is genuine.
What’s wrong with apologizing?
If it had gone over good she wouldn’t be apologizing for it. She’s only apologizing for the result and what it might mean for her career. It’s like when a guy like Anthony Weiner says, “I’m sorry. I made a terrible decision.” A decision? You had a pros-and-cons list about texting with that 15-year-old? The action wasn’t the result of a real decision.
Do go and read the whole thing. It is worth your time today.