• I’m mad at Neil Gaiman

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    6 min read

    I’m mad at him and J. K. Rowling. I’m mad at Joss Whedon. And Louis CK. And probably lots of other people, too, that I’m not thinking of but this morning I’m especially mad at them.

    There are so many reasons to be mad at them but I’m angrier at them than I am at say, Woody Allen, who always seemed like a lech to me. I was not surprised by Woody Allen so I don’t feel the same sense of betrayal.

    Or Roger Waters, who got me through high school (listening to The Wall on repeat thinking that someone finally understood the mess of my brain). I’m not surprised that he’s turned out to be a terrible person because it seems in character; he never pretended that he might not be a terrible person.

    Same with Johnny Lydon.

    I can still listen to Pink Floyd (well, partly because of David Gilmour) or Public Image Ltd because it doesn’t feel like a great big liar and I was never a Woody fan so that’s no loss for me there.

    But Gaiman? Whedon? And goddamn, Louis CK? They pretended to be better and even made a living on being better (more understanding) and explicitly on being feminists.

    Ugh.

    (A note about J.K. — I couldn’t get past her first book for years and years because 1) she’s not such a great writer; 2) the first book isn’t anything special especially if you’ve already read much better Chosen One kids fantasy books like The Dark is Rising or Tom’s Midnight Garden or even Narnia; 3) the fat phobia and ugly bad guys seemed like a poor parody of Dahl — who is himself a Johnny Lydon level annoyance. BUT so many of my clients talked about these books and how meaningful they were and told me which Harry Potter character most resonated with them and so I finally read them and realized oh of course! These books are about childhood relational trauma so no wonder they meant so much to people! Which brings me back to …)

    Why I’m so angry is that not only are they terrible people who have done and continue to do real harm to people, but they ruined their art for us and their art mattered. They were lucky enough to be good (here again I side-eye J.K.) at what they wanted to do and they ruined it. They spat on it. They didn’t take any of that understanding and empathy that was in their books and bring it into their real lives (apparently).

    I think — and of course I don’t know having never met them — but I think something is missing in them. I would write what I think but I can’t because I’m still a licensed therapist and licensed therapists have to be careful about public opinions around individuals and mental health but I have a guess about what that missing might look like diagnostically (except Louis, who I think is just a craven individual whose life got away from him and who likely gets the depths of their depravity in the way that the others I don’t think do). (But again, what do I know.)

    I am angry on behalf of their fans and readers. I am angry that people who read their books or watched their shows and felt seen and understood now have to figure out what to do about these things that they love.

    For me, some of them are easy. I’m still going to love Buffy, which was after all a universe created by a whole team (not the least of whom is Marti Noxon). I never read much Gaiman, but I’m annoyed I don’t get to catch up with his books now. And Harry Potter didn’t mean to me what it meant to some of my clients so again, not a big loss. Louis CK does feel more personal but Better Things is better and Pamela Adlon cut him right out when what he was doing came to light.

    Mostly my convoluted reasoning isn’t something I can defend. I’ve never liked The Rolling Stones so there wasn’t ever any reason to interrogate their groupie stories but I still listen to David Bowie with nary a qualm. I look askance at actors in Woody’s movies but somehow keep forgetting that Kate Winslet was in one of Polanski’s last films.

    It’s exhausting to care and so sometimes I don’t but also sometimes it’s not the exhausting it’s because it makes sense in my head. I have trouble watching Kevin Spacey but I also have trouble watching Gwyneth Paltrow (because of Goop, which one could argue is less heinous although I think it’s pretty heinous).

    But what I really came here to write about (and keep losing) is that I’m angry on behalf of fans. I’m angry when people make something wonderful and then can’t behave themselves and so rob us of their work.

    I’m angry on behalf of the people who felt cared for by their art and now have to — yet again — give up that care. (Because so many of the people who needed those stories are people who didn’t get enough stories or especially needed stories in the way other people maybe did not.)

    I don’t judge people who still love Harry Potter or (like me) still love Buffy or who quote some of Louis CK’s old stuff and I know that Neil Gaiman’s work has been very meaningful for folks but now if we still like it, it’s with an asterisk. We have to negotiate it with ourselves. We have to say that it’s not Harry’s (or Hermione’s) fault that they were brought into being by a regrettable person.

    Ugh.

    Anyway. I’m mad about it today because I read the Vulture piece about Neil Gaiman, which I’m not even going to link to because it is one big trigger warning and I hope that the women he harmed somehow find peace.

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  • Deleting Facebook by Half

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    2 min read

    In another window I’m deleting all of my Facebook posts. Not the ones to groups; just the ones on my own profile. I’ve decided I’ll stay on Facebook to manage my professional page, manage a couple of volunteer pages, continue to moderate a couple of professional groups, and participate in other groups and get to see my friends (at least as much as Facebook lets me see my friends between the ads, the page suggestions, the memes, etc.).

    I have mixed feelings about it. I like logging in to see my memories and I do like sharing. But I also think it’s time to wean myself off of it. I don’t like giving my content away in that way (pictures, for one) and letting someone else monetize it. Well, particularly THAT machine to monetize it. If it was some adorable little network I’d feel different about it, I’m sure.

    Sometimes I get nauseous thinking about all of the data I have to swim through, all of the memories and connections and pictures and random thoughts. And I don’t even have nearly as much as the millennials. I whittled my physical journals down to a couple of banker’s boxes; I can’t even imagine how much room it’d take up if I printed out everything I’ve put out digitally. It’s too much. And does it matter if it disappears? Does it matter if I can’t revisit the specific memories?

    Someday I’d like to organize the specific kid memories out for the kids. They certainly don’t need to know (or are likely to care) about what I made for dinner in 2008 but I’m sure they wouldn’t mind being able to page through the funny things they said and did.

    Perhaps that will be my (far off) retirement project.

    My entire blog is in a gigantic corrupted file that I hope I can still glean through because that’s a treasure trove of kid stories. I’m not sure how easy it will be to extract those anecdotes from the whole mess but it’d be a project I’d be willing to try.

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  • I love Sundays

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    3 min read

    On Sundays Brett and I go walking or running or a little bit of both.

    When we first moved here it was hard to get used to the hills. Columbus is mostly flat and the Poconos are mostly hilly. We moved here without visiting first so I had this idea that I’d bike everywhere. There’s a little grocery just outside our community and I pictured myself strolling there or biking for our weekly groceries only I didn’t realize that the grocery is at the bottom of a steep hill and that there are several hills on the way there, too. I mean, it’s not impossible — people do it — but your ice cream is definitely going to melt if you try to do it in the summer.

    Anyway it was a lot to get used to running-wise and I’m still learning how to do it or more how to manage my expectations around it.

    Back to Sundays. We used to do a long run together every Sunday (back in Columbus) and we’d walk to warm up and talk together then run then walk some more at the end. Lots of talking, too, and we plan our day and plan our future (and before we moved, we daydreamed about what come next) and we struggled with it here because Bret really hated those hills. I mean really a whole bunch of hatred.

    Then we found Promised Land lake and it’s still hilly but there’s no traffic (or barely any) and a whole bunch of the route is very private. At the front and at the end there are vacation cabins but even in the middle of summer most of them are empty. They are interesting in themselves because they come in all sorts of styles but they are privately owned (just the buildings, not the land they’re on) and most have running water but they all have outhouses.

    The whole route is about six miles and it’s marked so that you can keep track of the distance. There’s a 5k route, too, and it tells you where to turn around. And — big bonus — there are heated bathrooms where we park our car.

    Today we went to Conservation Island, which is a car-free route off the main road. Brett went and stood out on the lake when he saw someone with a tent out in the middle ice fishing and knew it’d be safe.

    It was a much shorter walk than usual (just three miles) and he wore the yaktracks and I wore my Icebug cleated boots.

    Now I’m back at my desk using the Esuit chrome extension to delete everything on my Facebook.

    I love Sundays

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  • it’s my birthday.

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    2 min read

    I thought it was as good a time as any to start an online journal once again. I thought of starting a substack but then I’d want to find readers. It would be weird to write an email and send it to literally no one. Much weirder than writing into the empty space here.

    At least that’s how I figure it.

    I started writing my very first blog on January 1st, 2001. That entry doesn’t exist anymore but I think it was two lines and it had links because I was thinking of starting an actual web log; you know a curated collection of links with commentary. Instead I started a blog.

    Back then I was 31. I had an almost 4-year old. I lived in Ohio. I wrote for a (meager) living. What else? I was living in my first house and we had one car.

    Now I am 55 (as of today) and I have an almost 28-year old (who lives in DC) and an almost 21-year old (who lives in Ohio). I live in the Poconos (I counted 33 wild turkeys foraging their way across the ravine of our backyard on this snowy morning). I make a living as a therapist and am trying to add to that living by being a parent educator and we now live in our third house that is by far my favorite.

    I don’t know what I will write about here but I just feel like I might want to write. Also it will be a Zuckerberg-free space to post my pictures because I do like taking pictures.

    The one I took today when a client unexpectedly canceled so I had time for a quick 2-miles in the cold.

    it’s my birthday.

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