A Request For Help, And A Bunch of Cool Stories You Can Read
1) My good friend Kara is trying to start up a non-profit shelter for homeless LGBT youth in Atlanta. Which is, I think, an awesome project to take on – but it also requires a lot of logistics as to how you best do it on the cheap, and knowledge of the legal issues you’re going to run into, and all sorts of other questions she needs answered. And so I’ll ask that if any of you have any experience with such a thing, please contact her at her blog with whatever help you can offer. The number of valid online resources for this sort of service are thin on the ground, so anyone who can contribute expertise would be doing a good thing.
I’ll vouch to her strength and talent, if it’s any concern.
2) Those of you who are not authors probably pay little attention to the annual race for awards, but this one’s a little different.
One of the most exciting, and rarest, awards in sci-fi is the John Campbell Award For Best Writer. You’re eligible for two years after your first professional story was published, as this is an award for new writers. After that time passes, you can never be nominated again. Not to dismiss the Nebula or the Hugo, but I’ve got many shots left at those awards, should I ever hope to win one; my Campbell days are past forever.
The Campbell is also an exciting time, because these are new authors, the best of this year’s crop, and you get a chance to see what they’re doing! They’re just starting their career, and yet they’re filled with talent! But unfortunately, the Campbell award is one of the lesser-voted awards, simply because there’s so many new authors published that it’s hard to keep track of who’s even eligible.
But lo! If you’d like to read a bunch of the latest tales from new authors, Stupefying Stories has put together a free e-book with tons of Campbell-eligible people and their tales. I know many of them, and can vouch for their work. Some of them have even critted my tales. As such, if you’re looking for a good free trove of stories, head on over now while it’s still available.
It Helps Her On Her Way, Gets Her Through Her Busy Day
I hate pills because my family loved them.
Tommy was the most arguable addict you could ever have; he had a chronic condition that wasn’t going away, and a constant pain that would have felled a water buffalo. Still, he did reach for the bottle a little quicker than either family or doctors were comfortable with, and burned through a lot of drugs. But what could you do?
My Dad believed firmly in the healing power of antidepressants, locked in a constant and ever-mutating battle of finding the right pill this week – he’d get to a good level, then his body would adjust and wham he’d fall in the pit again. So he’d find some other Prozac-style thing to patch him along, with the concomitant side effects of distraction and high blood pressure and lowered sex drive and sleepiness and insomnia and the thousand other lousy things that can happen to you when you’re trying to balance out your mood chemically. I listened to his litany of unwanted additions to his life and thought, no.
Even my Mom, who I thought was relatively free of issues, confided in me that during the 1970s, she was quick on the trigger when her doctor prescribed her Valium, and spent some effort coaxing that monkey off her back.
So I vowed: do not take the pill unless you absolutely have to. There’s no shame in taking them… but there is a cost, and you will have to pay it, so use it sparingly.
So Gini knows my habits: if I take an Advil for my headache, that means it’s splitting my skull. I avoid taking any optional medication when I can, because I have a very addictive personality (hello sex, hello booze, hello blogging) and I just don’t want to deal with anything. I have too many friends who can’t sleep without the pill, can’t have sex without the pill, can’t function without the pill, and while many of those are legitimate cases where they need the pill to get the body to work, I know some percentage of those issues come because people have relied on them like a crutch and their bodies have forgotten how to function without outside assistance.
When my doctor told me, “Ativan is addictive,” I immediately stopped. I don’t want an addiction. I love the way Ativan makes me feel. I love the floaty, itchy feeling of Vicodin. I love being wrapped in that feeling of artificial bliss, to the point where I find my hand drifting towards the bottle even when I’m not in any real pain, because this is just so damned good.
But for the past two nights, I’ve been up until 3:00. I’m exhausted and strung out and unable to function, sweaty in a bed, breathing shallow. And I can’t do this. Right now, as the wise Dr. Kaldon points out, I need sleep to heal, and for that I need this pill.
It feels like defeat. It fills me with the worry that I won’t be able to tail off when everything is done. It fills me with too much glee because inside is a little Gollum dancing with joy that I get the Ativan again, and God damn I want that little happy pill.
But I can’t. Not right now. And that just reminds me how far, how very far, I have to go.
How To Interpret All This Angry Shouting
“These science fiction conventions must be terrible places to go,” a friend of mine said. “All I ever see is you posting articles on women getting harassed, on the crudely expressed racism that emerges there, the unwashed geeks who ruin it. I can’t see why anyone would attend.”
Which took me aback, because I love going to cons. It’s where I make a lot of new friends, and have the fine and absurd conversations I can’t have in the “real” world, and unite with kindred spirits who we can geek out about wonderful things. My life is enriched by people I met at cons, who I then friend on Twitter and deepen the friendship, so by the next time I go to that con, hey! I have transformed a “shared a drink with one night” into “Ohmygodit’sYOU! Gimme a hug, you big lug!”
And yes, I’m a white dude. But I have a lot of female friends and non-white friends who also go to cons, and continue to go to cons, and they’re all willful enough that if cons were really no fun for them, they wouldn’t go. Yes, into every con a dash of jerk must fall, and I’m not saying my women and non-white pals experience no harassment or annoyance at cons – but considering many of them go to four or five cons a year, and squee about the upcoming cons on Facebook and blogs and whatnot, the good sides must outweigh the occasional “Jesus, really?”
Which is not to perpetrate the shielding illusion that all my friends do go – some are in fact so put off by the ugly shenanigans that they don’t want to deal with it. And their opinion’s not to be washed away, since like all things, geek conventions have serious problems that could be bettered.
Still. If cons were such a universally terrible place, they wouldn’t attract any women. They’d all be like that awful comics shop staffed entirely by neckbearded mouthbreathers who post posters of women in refrigerators on the walls, and the female quotient would be next to zero. Which it ain’t. The cons I attend have a lot of women, and a fair number of non-white people (though efforts like Con or Bust always help that). Cons are, in general, a fun place to be.
So why do they look so terrible?
Likewise, there was an essay on FetLife posted by someone who said, essentially, “There are a hundred posts on rape and consent and weeding out the troublemakers at fetish events, since there are Doms who are basically abusers in disguise. But do you realize what all this talking about the problems in our community looks like to outsiders? Hell, I don’t want to go to an event, because all I hear are all the terrible things that happen, and the tales of the psychodramatic people who tear communities apart, and all I can think is Jesus, why would I want to go there?”
Which is true. All this airing of dirty laundry makes our fun world look terrible to outsiders. If you’re dropping in on the conversation, it must feel like the world’s falling in on our heads, and you’d be best served by getting the fuck out, quickly.
But I read a piece today that talked about a place that had perfect silence. All of the problems were resolved cleanly, neatly, behind the scenes, and the place remained as welcoming as ever. The silence was resounding… mainly because it was about priests abusing deaf children, because the deaf kids couldn’t talk to anyone about it.
Now, I am a Christian, but this is why I don’t belong to an organized religion. Andrew Sullivan wrote a stunning and horrifying piece explaining just how the church, fearing that they’d look bad to outsiders, swept it under the rug… and I’d suggest you all read it right now. It’s a very good example of what a nice, quiet place looks like – and the effectiveness! After all, people kept coming to the Church. They didn’t lose faith. The Church didn’t lose donations, or have to deal with any ugly questions. Quite a benefit, and all it cost were thousands of abused children and a ticking time bomb that would explode decades later.
If the Church had handled it honestly, as Christ would have, then we would have had an ugly discussion in the 1970s. The Church would have looked like, well, what it actually was – a place where a young boy could potentially get hurt by a pedophile in clergy clothing. And many would have reacted negatively. But in actually addressing the problem, fewer boys would have been hurt, and the problem would have actually been addressed, and there would be much shouting and angry discussion on how could this have happened, and what the right way to handle it would be.
Yet that angry discussion would help ensure the problem – which could never truly go away entirely – would be as minimized as possible. That it would be fixed to a human extent. Because there’s always going to be some scummy guy in a priest’s cloak, or a predator pretending to be a friendly Daddy Dom, or a grabby jerk at a con. We can shield as much as possible, but unfortunately such wastes of human skin exist and the best we can do is to establish best practices to identify and then remove from our good places as much as possible.
So yes, these noisy discussions about the Church, and harassment at conventions, and violation of safe space at dungeons? They’re all ugly. But that’s because the problems are ugly, and we’re trying to face them head-on. And yes, we could and should do a better job of promoting the good times we have at Church and at con and in the dungeon… but part of the solution has to come from people growing up and understanding that justifiably angry discussion about real problems does not mean that “Wow, what a terrible place this is.” The solution comes from realizing that fixing a house is going to involve some noise as the hammers and saws do their work, and that noise is not an evil but rather the sound of progress taking place.
You can hear the badness, of course. But when you assume that’s all there is, what you’re telling people is that if you want us to come, you should be silent. Silent as deaf children. And in encouraging organizations towards suppression as opposed to discussion, you create a place where monsters feast.
Too Many Deads On The Dance Floor
“Most guys your age don’t survive this,” Gini told me. “They miss the warning signs, and so that first heart attack is fatal. You did the right thing. Gold star.”
Still. I had a hot date that night, at a club I was very eager to go to, to try a new technique with fire that I hadn’t used before. I was bored in the hospital for six hours before the tests started returning positive results for heart troubles. I was, in fact, already trying to check myself out, and grudgingly agreed for one more blood test – the test that showed the actual danger. It’s all too easy to contemplate an alternate future where I checked out early, went to the club, and in the excitement had something deadly happen.
Between that and my exploded appendix – you may recall I walked around for at least three days with a fully burst organ, leaking toxins into my system – there are too many of my potential pasts that lead to dead Ferretts. This is more than a little unsettling.
It feels, quite frankly, a little magical.
Stations of the Tommy
I walk slow as a man because as a kid, I always slowed down for my Uncle Tommy.
Tommy had a cane, and was tender, so he moved at a slow shuffle. His blood didn’t clot well, so at the age of seven I knew how to spell his disease: “hemophilia.” His blood poured into the spaces in his joints, ate his cartilage, so by the time he was thirty, if you put your ear to his shoulder, you could hear his bones rubbing directly against each other. They sounded like crackers being crumbled.
So Tommy, near-crippled with arthritis, walked slow. Never weakly – the man had an unstoppable willpower, when he aimed it – but slow. So even as a young kid, I matched his pace. Why would I want to go anywhere and not have Tommy with me? Tommy, with his cool music and his love of videogames and his sense of style?
Tommy never let it stop him, but he was in constant anguish. You could tell by his grunts when he got up. By the sea of amber pill bottles by his couch. By the way he pursed his lips whenever he changed direction. He moved slow because moving fast would have been unbearable, yet staying still would have been unacceptable. He found time to smile between flashes of pain.
Now I’m walking slow for a different reason. My breastbone was cut in two, split like a chicken breast. My lungs are still re-inflating from the surgery. I can manage a slow shuffle, occasionally speeding up to a brisk walk for about twenty feet, and then I’m in agony.
It comforts me to know that I’m walking in Tommy’s shoes.
I never got that whole Catholic thing of taking comfort in Christ’s suffering; not that I don’t admire Christ, for I do deeply, but the man was hurt because of idiots and I could never really get behind that. Christ’s wounds seemed extravagant, a hot patch for a human flaw, and being glad that he was hurt seemed petty to me.
But Tommy is gone now, taken by pancreatic cancer. (Not the HIV he lived with for twenty years, not the hepatitis he also caught from his thousands of blood transfusions, but cancer. It took three layered diseases to take my Tommy out, I think proudly.)
He’s dead. But I’m walking his path. This painful shuffle, this balancing of walking to the bathroom versus using the urine container, this constant reminder of smallness…. Tommy did that. Yet through all of that, he was kind to me, understanding, found the time to counsel me through some pretty fucked-up teenaged years, to play Centipede down at the arcade, to crack beers and share terrible jokes.
I wear my Tommy-ness like a cloak, now. He’s gone, but somehow I understand him more, deepening my knowledge of what he was like, and that is a payment that’s almost worth the effort. With every step, I know Tommy was there before me. With every pill, I know Tommy felt this weariness. With every frustration, I know Tommy felt it and more, and so I too can bear it.
I’m not a cripple when I walk with Tommy, for Tommy was not a cripple. He was a strong man carrying some heavy burdens.
And so am I.