be not afraid...

"A lot hinges on the fact that, in most circumstances, people are not allowed to hit you with a mallet. They put up all kinds of visible and invisible signs that say 'Do not do this' in the hope that it'll work, but if it doesn't, then they shrug, because there is, really, no real mallet at all."

- Terry Pratchett (from Unseen Academicals)

14 Useful Steps for Getting Rid of Humans (But First: Buy a Cat)

1. Introduce non-native feline species to America.
2. Protect said species so it can proliferate without contending with natural predators.
3. Release said species into wild in the millions to kill avian species that would otherwise be eating pesky bugs.
4. Introduce non-native pesky bugs through an insistence on non-native fruits and vegetables in kitchens all over America.
5. Discourage farm biodiversity to meet competition from non-native fruits and vegetables and meet growing demands for homogeneous-looking foods.
6. Observe as humans move away from agrarian roots and become completely dependent on distant, disconnected food sources for sustenance.
7. Begin using chemical, industrial pesticides on massive, monoculture home-grown fruit and vegetable crops to lower labor-intensity of food production and compensate for feline-avian imbalance.
8. When pesticides are proven to kill bees, legislate reality out of the equation.
9. When monocultured fruits and vegetables prove to be susceptible to non-native bugs and fungii, pour on chemical pesticides at an ever-accelerating rate.
10. Insist that humans continue to eat chemical-laden, carcinogenic "foods" to maintain farm-industrial complex.
11. Ignore warning signs of increased cancer rates and hope you're rich enough to buy an island somewhere before unsustainable food supply completely collapses.
12. Observe the humans dying.
13. Observe the new, Feral-Cat Society rise to prominence.
14. Bow before newly-crowned Cat-King (or Queen).

the surprising Truth about LOCKER 212

The word-arrangements on this website are a product, made in the factory of my brain and shipped out through my fingers to you, the consumer. Sometimes, it comes with illustrations.

Although this product is free, I am still a salesmen, trying to use these word-arrangements to move you -- to get you to buy into my ideas. I try really, really hard not to feel bad about this, because I actually do believe in my product. And I also think this film project I've been hawking on here -- LOCKER 212 -- is worth your time and effort.

But it's still dispiriting. 

It's dispiriting to get hundreds of facebook "likes" and only a few (hugely appreciated) actual pledges. It makes me wonder if I'm just annoying you with this stuff.

But my old college pal, Trevor, recommended I read a book called "To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth about Moving Others," by Daniel H. Pink. I just finished it today, and it led me to wonder if perhaps this self-doubt of mine is doing both me and you a disservice. You don't have to be part of my campaign to get this film made, after all. But dodge gambit, I really do think you'll benefit from doing so.

So I'm gonna take a page (or several) from his book and give you the pitch on why I think you should leave this blog RIGHT NOW, head over to Our Kickstarter Page, and make a pledge.

Pink's Pitches:

1. The One Word Pitch: Change.
2. The Question Pitch: What if there were a creative, artistic way to fight back against bullying and violence in our schools?
3. The Twitter Pitch: The best way to fight bullying & violence is to tell a story. LOCKER 212 is such a story. Join us.
4. The Rhyming Pitch: Don't be a talker... make a pledge to the LOCKER.
5. The Pixar Pitch: Once upon a time, we all lived in a world where kids did not feel safe in school. Every day, their parents would send them off to classes and try not to think about the cruelty and violence that had come to be a part of their educational experience. One day, somebody made a short film that encouraged people to open their eyes to the hurting people all around them. Because of that, they decided they'd had enough of waiting around for some authority figure to solve the problem. Because of that, they started to reach out in love not just to the bullied kids of the world, but to the bullies, as well. Until finally, the hurting people of the world all had someone to love them, and schools became safer than they had ever been before.

There you have it.

I've been giving you the product of this website for years, and you've given me your time. Thank you. I'm asking that you now take it a step further, and make a pledge to the LOCKER 212 Kickstarter campaign. There are rewards, sure, but I know you don't pledge money to kickstarter campaigns because you want some piffling reward. No, you want to be part of something that matters. And this matters. 

So please, pledge.

Every pledge helps build momentum. Your "likes" and "shares" are awesome and appreciated, but if you don't start putting your money where your mouse is, this sweet little love-child of mine is never going to be born.

LOCKER 212 is LIVE on Kickstarter!!

LOCKER 212 is a short film I wrote that tells the story of a high school bully who's in for a surprising revelation when he gets his wallflower-victim caught up in a conflict with school authority. It's an exploration of how making real, human connections with our most lost and hurting kids can help us alleviate the bullying and violence that have plagued our schools.

Watch the video, check out the campaign, pledge if you'd like, and PLEASE-PLEASE-PLEASE tell all your friends. Link it, share it, re-tweet it, hashtag it, and Like it on Facebook. Thanks so much! I love you all. If it were not so, I would have told you! 

Homophobic, Gay-Hating Unicorns

A couple weeks ago, I went on a bit of a tear about unicorns. Over the course of a few hours, I barraged my tens of Twitter and Facebook followers with a series of blurbs pertaining to unicorns. Blurbs that, in retrospect, could be construed as being derogatory to the mono-hornéd species.

This concerned me not a whit, until suddenly I thought, "Armigarsh! What if I'm wrong? What if unicorns do exist, and I've been maligning a True and Noble Animal for nothing more than a laugh and a lark?"

Unacceptable, of course. And apologies... of course.

I have nothing whatsoever against unicorns.

- - -

Did you know that until more recently than I want to admit in certain circles, I believed that people chose their sexual orientation? Or that even if they didn't, anyone not oriented according to the statistical average was only that way because some perverted adult had wonkified them in that direction when their sexual identity was being formulated? Or that because of this belief, I also thought that the idea of gay people getting married to each other was weird. Yes, weird.

This was the normal thing to believe in the culture of my youth, and post-youth. Most people I knew believed it, and because I am human (and therefore like to be part of the statistical average), I did too.

I did not, however, hate gay people. Nor did I have a pathological fear of them -- a "phobia," if you will. I don't think I ever once used the terms "gay," "fag," or "faggot" in a derogatory way, and I found it distasteful when others did.

Nor was I repulsed on the occasions when gay men made it clear to me that they found me attractive in an I-wanna-be-more-than-friends kind of way. Although I am pretty much zero percent sexually drawn to the male of the human species (or any species, for that matter), I actually found it sort of flattering. I hadn't done anything to earn those looks of mine (such as they were), but if they liked the way I looked... perhaps the women of the world might, too.

Perhaps I wasn't going to die a virgin, after all.

Nonetheless... I believed what I did, and even sometimes felt like I needed to share that opinion with others. I don't know if it was primarily an attempt to deflect attention from my own shame over things like masturbation and pornography and the like (There. I wrote the "m" word on this blog. Phew.), but I even wrote an article for my University's student paper in which I quoted the Standard Bible Verses and twirled my oh-so-righteous literary index finger through the air.

I've written elsewhere about why I now think differently about things. Things like whether a couple of consenting adults ought to be allowed to make the hope-prayer-dream-promise that will entitle them to the kinds of legal protections I would like, should I ever be idiot-stick enough to walk that rose-petal-strewn path again. So instead, I'll tell you what didn't change my mind.

My mind was not changed because one day I related an opinion to someone and he called me a homophobe. Or a bigot. Or a hate-speacher. Or an ignorant, right-wing nut-job.

Because no one was yelling at me, putting me in a box, or defining me by my opinions, I had enough brain-silence left over to LISTEN.

And when I listened, I heard other people's stories. It was stories that changed my heart and my mind. Not, in my case, the sitcom-stories that had been planted by the ooga-booga, evil-bad gay-agenders (insert sarcasm font, here), but rather real, human stories.

- - -

Here's another confession: I live in a shed in the woods.

I live in this shed writing stories of my own, so I don't get out much or make many new friends. But here's the thing I've noticed from the LGBT friends I have made: none of them are actually screamers. They're hurt, often, and yeah, they get angry about injustice... but they're not, in my purely anecdotal experience, the ones I see pointing fingers and name-calling. In fact, I've never once heard one of them equate people-who-believe-the-sorts-of-things-I-used-to-believe with willing members of the Third Reich (damnéd be its name).

Nope.

Nope, nope, nope.

Those voices, in my experience (the loud ones), belong mostly to non-gays. In fact, I'll even express the bigoted opinion, gleaned entirely from my completely anecdotal and therefore not-to-be-trusted experience, that the gays among us are generally just a skoatch more likely to be humans of the gentler, kinder, more good-humored variety.

Perhaps I'm just paying too much attention to George Takei; but whatever the case, let me just say this:   

STOP. Please. In fact... Pretty Please.

If you really want things to change, try being kind to the people you think are in the wrong. Name-calling and yelling (as any gay person can probably tell you) really do hurt. They do make things worse.

What's more, they tend to raise the suspicion that you don't really want a change at all -- that you're only harping on this because the cultural pendulum has shifted (hooray!) and you can now get away with being mean, yourself. You, too, can enjoy the grubby little pleasures that come with being Right and Superior and Contemptuous. Bully for you.

But it doesn't look good on you. At all. Trust me.

So go ahead, if you want, and boycott a movie because it's based on a book by a writer who somehow finagled the largely ornamental title of "producer" and holds ideas you think are awful (ideas which, I might add, are not in the book or movie). Or get a guy fired because he tweets something obnoxious that no decent, non-dirty-and-doesn't-deserve-to-be-gassed person would ever tweet.

Maybe it's worth it.

Maybe you'll be instrumental in financially ruining that movie or that person -- in helping to create a society where people with ideas that you find hurtful or repugnant quickly become pariahs and can't find work anywhere, ever, doing anything.

Maybe that'll be just the kind of world you want to live it.

Heck, maybe you're even a unicorn, and should boycott any movie I ever write.

That'll teach me.