The New Semi-Official Guide to Acceptable Birthday Gifts for Your Friends in their 40s

Fine time to return to blogging, isn’t it? The fucking world is on fire- well, I know it has been for at least a decade, but a lot more so now. Very literally in the case of my hometown, LA. The Fascists are in charge of the USA- again, because people didn’t learn their fucking lessons from the last time. Only this time, they’re trying even less to hide the fact that they’re Fascists, but far too many stooges are committed to denying the blatant Fascism right in front of their faces…

So, to help keep my sanity and subdue my more murderous impulses, I figure I should get back to writing stuff, maybe eventually working my way back to my next novel, and maybe help put a bit of joy and mirth back into the world. Putting my brain splurges into coherent streams of words requires mental muscles that I haven’t been adequately exercising for far too long.

With yet another birthday coming up, I’ve been thinking lately about how awkward the idea of getting or giving birthday gifts is for someone in their forties. It’s not like I really need my family or friends to buy me more physical stuff. I can clutter my home up by purchasing stuff on my own just fine. But as I’ve thought about this, I’ve realized that there are things that not only would I appreciate receiving as gift, but that I think most other people I know might appreciate as well.

So, here’s me trying to re-define the rules for birthday gift-giving for adults in my generation. If this just happens to apply to folks in other age groups as well, so much the better.

The New Semi-Official Guide to Acceptable Birthday Gifts for Your Friends in their 40s:

1. A piece of visual art that you made yourself. Medium and subject are up to you.
2. A book that you really enjoyed and want to share with your friend, used, ideally. It’s acceptable to ask for the book to be returned to you, but the gift-receiver is allowed to take up to a year to read it. The longer they take to read it, the more obligated they are to spend time talking about it with you afterwards. If they don’t have to return it to you, they’re free to gift it onward.
3. A movie on DVD/Blu-Ray/other physical media that you want to share with your friend. It should be assumed that you are planning to watch it with them.
4. A poem that you composed yourself and are ok with reading out loud in front of a group of people. Haikus are weaksauce and don’t count here. Limericks must be the fun, profane kind.
5. Teaching the gift-receiver a complex strategy board game. (If they’re in to that sort of thing.) This should probably include a small group of friends.
6. Running a tabletop role-playing game for the gift-receiver that they never/hardly ever get to play. This should probably also include a small group of friends.
7. Craft beer, craft cider, craft mead, a thoughtfully-selected bottle of wine, or other intoxicating beverage that you intend to share with them. Bonus points if you provide an interesting cheese pairing
8. A mix-tape. This includes CDs and flash-drives, but no “unwrapped” or other features of music streaming services get credit here.
9. Baked goods. Especially if you baked anything yourself. It doesn’t have to be a cake. Sharing is expected.
10. Cook a meal for them.
11. Gift card Cash. It’s crass, but if you didn’t want to get them any of the above ideas, you might as well go back to basics. Who’s going to turn it down?

The above list is probably not very exciting to billionaires who expect their friends to drop millions of dollars on luxury goods that are meant to be shown off as status symbols. But it’s very likely that those people have actually lost the capacity to feel joy, so who gives a shit what they think.

This can also be read as ‘Gifts I am personally happy to receive for my birthday’. Of course, no one is obligated to get me anything at all. Especially since I haven’t made any kind of plans for my birthday this year, and I’m shit at remembering everyone else’s birthday anyways. Maybe give these ideas some thought for when the next weirdo in your life completes their latest trip around the sun.

Defend the Internet!

In case you’ve been living in a cave lately, Today is the day of action.

Unless you think mega-corporations should control the future of online communication and content, you’d best go here to make yourself heard. https://www.battleforthenet.com/

Then share with your friends!

And The Fight Goes On… What Else Is New?

For those of us Americans who care about things like civil rights, or environmental justice, or even just plain justice, it’s important now more than ever that we not lose perspective over the results of the recent presidential election. First off, if Hillary Clinton, or even Bernie Sanders had won the election, it’s not as if they would have suddenly gained the power to work miracles. Even Bernie couldn’t break the stranglehold of the fossil fuel industry in our politics and our economy, or convince police departments to root out their racist officers, or give Mitch McConnell a soul. Those things really aren’t within the President’s power to begin with.

When you break it down, Obama’s presidency hasn’t been terribly progressive. Under the current administration, we’ve drilled and fracked more oil and gas out of the ground than ever before. Obama is still pushing for that ridiculous Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, which is practically a step below giving private corporations extraterritoriality. As a friend of mine is fond of pointing out, under Obama we’ve killed more Muslims around the world than under any other president in U.S. history, both directly, and indirectly through questionable foreign policy decisions. And for some reason, the city of Flint, Michigan still doesn’t have safe tap water! (Granted, that should be the responsibility of the state of Michigan, but the feds deserve their share of the blame for the continuing crisis.)

You can’t depend on government alone to make the world a better place. So now, as always, President Trump or not, it’s up to you and I to do the real work.

Fortunately, there are some well-organized NGO’s out there that can save us the trouble of starting from scratch. They all need our help to do their great work, financially, and in body as volunteers. You’re probably familiar with a few of them. Let me introduce you to some of them again for the first time. You’ve got your pick of the issues…

Concerned about the ongoing erosion of and blatant disregard for civil rights?  That’s the bag of the American Civil Liberties Union. How about the rise of bigotry and xenophobia? Or mass incarceration? The Southern Poverty Law Center fights back with education (also lawyers).

Anyone who’s head isn’t stuck in their rectum is concerned with climate change, and knows enough to believe the world scientific community when they tell us the causes are human-made. The National Resources Defense Council is one of my personal favorite non-profits, as they’ve got the attorney power to make the government enforce it’s own environmental laws. The Sierra Club, and Greenpeace are are two other powerful environmental advocacy groups with a wide-range of projects and good respective track records of getting shit done.

Worried about protecting our national parks and wildlife refuges from those who want to exploit or steal them for the benefit of the few? The Wilderness Society is another enviro non-profit (besides those I already mentioned above) that fights for our public lands.

Wildlife in danger of becoming endangered, or extinct? That’s the No. 1 issue of the venerable Defenders of Wildlife, and the scrappy but indefatigable Center for Biological Diversity.

Toxic water? Toxic chemicals in our food? Food and Water Watch is all over that, baby!

While I’m bringing up our food supply, I should mention a non-profit that another friend of mine works with, Farm Forward. They’re all about sustainable agriculture, independent farms, and ending the abuses of factory farming. Worth a look if those things interest you.

Worried about the future of women’s healthcare? Planned Parenthood needs your support.

Oh, and we can’t forget about homelessness. At the national (and world) level, there is good ol’ Habitat for Humanity. There are numerous local non-profits that fight homelessness as well.

Headlines about ethnic cleansing in yet another part of the world driving you crazy? There are lots of organizations that work to end genocide in their particular geographic areas of expertise. One I’ve supported is Jewish World Watch, which primarily active on the African continent.

Want to do your part locally? Try supporting your local women’s shelter, wildlife center, social services non-profit, etc., etc. I think you all get what I’m saying now.

Don’t let shitty politicians and billionaires stop you from trying to make a piece of the world, however small it might be, less shitty for someone else. Decide what you’re most concerned about, find your people, and see what you can do to help. Money makes a difference when you don’t have the time, and time is often a more important contribution than money.

We still don’t know if Donald Trump intends to really pursue even half the insane promises he made during his campaign. His entire career thus far has been built on fraud and breached contracts, so broken political promises probably don’t mean much to him. Maybe he really is the fascist hate-mongering pile of guano that he portrays himself as, and it will be a tough four years. Regardless, it’s not like the fight to make things better ever stops. EVER.

So let’s get to work people.

(Edited for an unfinished hanging sentence. That’s what happens when you write these things at 1 am.)

Not All That Bad

So, lest yesterday’s post lead anyone to think that I’m suffering from serious depression, I just wanted to say that I’m doing OK. Really. There’s serious emotional stuff, but I’ve dealt with, and I’m dealing with it. I have a wonderful wife, and we have wonderful friends who have been there for us when we’ve needed them.

What I wrote yesterday felt like something I’d been waiting to say for a year. Writing it down and putting it out there felt therapeutic. After writing it, I had a brief debate with myself about whether I should post it publicly or not, and then decided, “eh, what the hell”.

Yesterday itself was alright. I took a day off work to spend more time with my wife and son. It’s hard to be sad when I’m around this little guy.

Fiction and fiction-related things are in the works.

This is That Muddled, Rambling Post About Death and Life

My father killed himself one year ago today, and surprisingly I haven’t written much about it. Sure, initially I wrote a bunch of angry thoughts down in my moleskin journal, then I wrote a somewhat random list of memories that I shared at his funeral. That was pretty much it. In fact, I haven’t done a whole lot of writing since, though there are other reasons to attribute that to.

(This is probably not a feelgood post. Be forewarned.)

When you suffer a traumatic loss in your life, the usual advice you get is to not rush into any other big life changes right away. So naturally my wife and I waited until a whole month after the funeral to go back to our plans for finding a house and having a baby. This was partly my decision to not let my dad’s selfishness derail our lives. (You can tell me some other time about how suicide isn’t actually a selfish act, yada yada.) We did find a house, and we moved in. By the time we moved in, my wife was entering her second trimester.

Right after we moved, I started an eight week support group for survivors of suicide. It was helpful in dealing with my grief, and somewhat helpful in dealing with my anger. (And if you tell me I don’t have a right to be angry with my dad I’ll rip your fucking ears off.) It got me to where I needed to be to try writing again. I managed to produce a little something that my critique group liked. (Hopefully I’ll get around to editing it soon for submission to somewhere.)

Also not too long after our move, I discovered that I had an inguinal hernia. Maybe I got it from lifting something too heavy during the move (I know who it was that packed that box). Maybe I got it somehow from martial arts. Ultimately it doesn’t matter how I got the hernia. With a baby on the way it was vital that I had the surgery to correct it as soon as possible. While waiting for insurance to do their thing and approve the surgery, the hernia got progressively worse, to the point where I couldn’t stand up for more than 15 minutes at a time before the pain forced me down. You can imagine what a pain in the ass groin that was.

I eventually had the surgery, and while recovering, I dusted off a story fragment I had begun a long time ago, and expanded it into a full story. (My critique group mostly liked that one, but we all agreed it needed a little more work.) That was pretty much it for fiction until very recently.

(Side note for men who may one day need lower abdominal surgery: That post-surgery trickle of blood and fluids needs to drain somewhere, and that somewhere is often into the scrotum. This leads to scrotal swelling, which leads to one side of your jewels being extremely sensitive for several days until the fluid is absorbed and the swelling goes down. By extremely sensitive, I mean that anything that slighly jostles your janglies, like standing up and sitting down, can result in an excruciating wave of pain. Just thought you might want to know, because no one saw fit to tell me this before my hernia surgery.)

To cap off the year, about five weeks ago, our son was born. So for most of the past five weeks, my sleep-lacking life has very much revolved around baby, and various house-related things to try to keep the place in decent condition. (Have barely started baby-proofing so far.) And now the day job again.

What this all amounts to is very little time for deep thinking and reflection this last year. Pockets here and there. Father’s Day was spent drinking and playing video games, because this is the only year in my life when I would be able to make Father’s Day all about me, and fuck everyone else.

Questions I do struggle with: What will I tell my son one day about his grandfather? How old should he be before I tell him how his grandfather died? Will I ever tell him the story of how a text message sent to his girlfriend had us rushing over to my father’s apartment early one morning, in the vain hopes that he might not have gone through with killing himself yet? How old should my boy be before I talk to him about the dangers of asphyxiation from a car in an enclosed garage?

You know who I would ask for advice about this sort of thing? My dad.

Did I take my father for granted? In hindsight there were definitely signs that he was planning his demise for a long time. It still pisses me off that he looked me in the eye the week before he killed himself and agreed to meet for dinner the next week.

Since his death, I have a house and a child, both which need my near constant attention. My dad is the person I would want to turn to for advice and help. The person I could most depend on. (After my wife of course.) So where is he when his family needs him?

Running away from his financial troubles. And perhaps escaping the memory of a marriage that he sabotaged into failure. But the day he took his life was the first time he ever ran away from his children.

I look at my son and I feel hopeful. We may have another child, but even if we don’t, he completes our lives. I feel something almost like healing just watching him achieve new things, like pushing himself more during “tummy time”, and learning to hold his pacifier in his mouth. Just have to be careful not to burden him with expectations. Even so, when I hold him, when I comfort him, when I read to him, and when I rock him to sleep, I keep wondering is this how my dad felt about me when I was a baby? Is this how he held me? What hopes did he have for me at this early age, and did I fulfill any of them?

I don’t expect to come up with satisfying answers today.

Unpopular Political Opinions

So in the last 12 months or so, my father committed suicide, my wife and I moved into our first house together, and just a little over a month ago, our first child was born. This post is about none of those things. This is a post to see if I still show up in anyone’s RSS feed after not posting anything for more than eight months. So here are some opinions of mine that no one asked for.

Banning “assault rifles”, or specific types of guns is generally a dumb way to prevent mass shootings. Gun manufacturers will simply produce new weapons that are just different enough to avoid the ban. Restricting the size of ammo magazines that can be legally sold/possessed is a much better way to limit the casualties that a suicidal active shooter can cause. Military-style rifles like the AR-15 are pretty weak compared to hunting rifles to begin with. They become a lot less useful for mass murder if a shooter has to reload after every 10 shots (versus 30, or 60).

I’m all for augmented reality gaming, but Pokémon has never been my thing, and the Go version doesn’t excite me. I’m holding out for a Highlander game. (All your virtual heads will belong to me!)

Jews who support Donald Trump should be charged an oxygen tax. I mean, how stupid can you really be? Can you not see all the swastikas being displayed at his rallies? Do you think when Trump supporters act out violently toward Muslims and Mexicans, that they’ve somehow forgotten how much they hate Jews? If you can’t see how empowering neo-Nazis is hazardous to your own well-being and that of your family, you truly aren’t deserving of the right to vote.

If you’re an NFL quarterback, and you’re upset about how cops treat black people in this country, there are more effective ways to communicate your message than by offending your fans’ sense of patriotism.

The only reason to separate public restrooms by sex is so that men don’t have to wait in the ridiculous lines for the women’s room.

Season 2 of Dare Devil did not have nearly enough ninjas in it.

 

Meaningful blog post to follow soon(ish).

Some Totally True Facts About Star Wars

Star Wars is one of those cultural super-memes that’s so enormous, everyone is entitled to their own headcanon. And my headcanon, just like yours, is totally true until proven otherwise (by the lucky bastards people that get paid to contribute permanent canon).

So here are a few completely authentic facts about the Star Wars universe and the upcoming Episode VII that I bet you didn’t know before. Sorry for any spoilers.

 

I. The Gungans all died on the first Death Star!

Oh, yes they did! What most of you may not realize is that between the events of Episodes III and IV, the entire Gungan species were conscripted into the 501st Imperial Legion. Those stormtroopers we saw in the first movie? All Gungans. This explains why a dozen stormtroopers couldn’t manage to shoot Han Solo at close range.

The good news here is that the Gungans all died when the first Death Star was destroyed. The entire racist caricature of a species- all gone. (Rejoice!)

And good riddens!

II. Kylo Ren is really Ezra from Rebels.

Think about it. In Star Wars: Rebels, we’ve got three Jedi- no wait, technically all three arejust padawans- who play key roles in the founding of the Rebellion. That’s Kanan Jarrus, Ahsoka Tano, originally from Clone Wars, and Ezra Bridger. We know that all three will never meet Luke Skywalker. (Right?) So what happens to them all before the Battle of Yavin in Episode IV?

It’s a safe bet that Ahsoka and Kanan die. Probably at least one them at the hands of Darth Vader. But what about Ezra? He’s the series’s main protagonist.

Well, it turns out that he is turned to the dark side and trained secretly as an assassin by Darth Vader. We never see him in the original trilogy because he’s off slaughtering rebels at the other end of the galaxy, and Vader doesn’t want another force user mucking around in his family business. And that’s why he doesn’t surface until years after the Battle of Endor.

It all makes total sense, doesn’t it?

And finally…

III. The new heroes of The Force Awakens are siblings.

That’s right, Finn and Rey, the somewhat-hyped protagonists of Episode VII, are half brother and sister. Their shared father? Why, it’s none other than…

…Lando Calrissian.

You can see the resemblance now, can’t you?

So what are some of your totally true facts about Star Wars?