I guess I could write this whole blogpost in rhyme,
But conceivably that would take up too much time,
Unless I just type straight away and don’t edit,
Okay I guess I’ll do just as I said it.
I’m writing a poem every day (this won’t count)
By the end of the month 30 is the amount
Of new poems I’ll produce, which to make very clear
Is more than I produce in the rest of the year.
Although most of these new poems don’t rhyme and don’t meter,
Thus making them less cool for your average reader
Expecting a poem to sound like Dr. Seuss,
(Even though my poem senses have gotten more loose
Over time, while my jeans have only gotten tighter.
Just kidding, I’m sweats only now. I’m a writer!)

And anyway, even my brand newest column
Is in rhyme this month (though it is a bit solemn)
It’s an important topic, and though it’s not fun,
It’s a fact that we all need to face: It’s The Guns.
You may be rhymed out after reading this blog,
Which I guess is my fault. That’s an “oops” from me, dog.
But it’s only one month every year that it happens,
And hey, it could be worse, at least I’m not rappin’
Although if I did it would have better flow,
Since I no longer rap Seuss (I did long ago),
And then speaking of my raps, I’m once again sharin’ the
Multi-award-winning Hamilton parody
That I co-wrote with Sam Hammersley and
Thom Mesrobian, honestly it’s pretty grand,
So as musicals go, a political one,
I can recommend this, and it’s called Simpleton!

Otherwise, things continue on here much the same,
Eating tasty food, Genshin Impact is the game,
And I’m writing freelance for the clients that pay
(So if your friends need great writing, send them my way)
That’s about all that needs to be said in this post,
So I bid you good day, and some cheese on your toast.

It’s me! I’m the March Fool! It’s sort of like the March Hare, only with less hare*, and more foolishness. While April Fools is all about lying to fool people, the March Fool is instead all about telling the truth, which is often even more foolish for a person trying to run a business. (Which is also me; I’m accepting clients for my freelance writing, specializing in humor or rhyme, covering everything from speechwriting to children’s books.)

But as a professional Fool**, one of the most foolish things I can do is to share too much about my thoughts. For example, today is the Trans Day of Visibility, and I noticed that while I saw a lot of posts about it on Facebook and Twitter, I saw very few posts about it on LinkedIn, and pretty much exclusively from people working in the DEI field. Which I’d guess is because there it’s on-brand, but otherwise bringing up politics outside of your field might alienate some potential clients for no gain.

For me though, one of the advantages of being my own boss is that I don’t have to hide my core beliefs. Which goes beyond politics. Politics are things like do I like Biden or Trump (neither), should UBI exist (yes), how should taxes work (better). Those are just opinions I have, but one of my guiding principles and beliefs for life is this:

People are people.

Pretty simple, really, but no less important for that fact. People are people, regardless of their race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, nationality, favorite music, or weird hobby that you think is a waste of time. Generally, people are just trying to live their best lives, and as long as they’re not hurting anyone else***, there’s no reason they shouldn’t be allowed to do so. You don’t have to be a fan. You can even think, “This makes no sense to me and I’d never live like that.” Nobody’s asking you to.

But most of the problems and unhappiness in the world are a direct result of someone deciding that a certain category of people aren’t really people, or don’t really count because they’re somehow lesser and therefore don’t deserve to be treated like fellow people. This is wrong. People are people. And again, that doesn’t mean that you have to like or believe whatever they do. I might think some of your beliefs are unsupported superstition and some of your hobbies are a waste of time. And you might think similarly about the fact that I’ve now spent over 100 hours playing Dragon Age: Inquisition, and refuse to put my winter coat away yet, lest it anger the snow gods. You can even think literally everything I do is dumb, from writing humor columns about Pokemon, to making cranberry chicken salad and liverwurst sandwiches****. But as long as I’m not harming anyone, I deserve the right to live my dumb life in the way that makes me happiest. As do you. As does everyone.

Because ultimately, that’s what we’re all doing – just trying to live our dumb little lives, avoid unpleasant annoyances, and be happy. If we can improve other people’s lives along the way, better yet. But at bare minimum, we should try to avoid making other people’s lives worse. Yes, even if you don’t agree with all their choices. Because other people deserve the chance to live their best lives and pursue happiness too. Other people are people.

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*a bald-faced truth

**an occupation I’m sure I identify with thanks to a childhood spent listening to George Carlin’s “Occupation: Foole” many dozens of times

***Karl Popper says, “Nazi Punks Fuck Off!”

****I know it sounds dodgy, but it’s surprisingly good. I recommend it with Russian dressing on rye.

My winter vacation ended, and so I’ve been back to work writing speeches, children’s books, and whatever else clients hire me to write. I like being on vacation and playing games. But it turns out, I also like writing things for clients, especially these past few years.

Since I’m still being more covid-cautious than your average bear* and not doing performances at packed little indoor comedy/poetry shows, I’ve been missing the stage time. I did do a couple Zoom comedy shows the other year, but the demand for that has all but vanished, so I was feeling a severe deficit of I come up with something clever to say to an audience, and then I get positive feedback.

Conveniently, speechwriting ends up fitting that need for me to some degree. Sure, having a client give me positive feedback instead of an entire audience isn’t quite the same**, but it does fulfill much of the same craving, and I find that being paid more helps bridge the gap, as it so often does.

Still, I’ve certainly had clients who hire me and say, “Make this funnier,” and then come back after my first draft to say, “Okay, less funny than that, actually.” Which is one of those revision requests I can’t help but smile at. But it’s also why in spite of enjoying ghostwriting for clients, I also quite enjoy writing things like my column where I can be silly about serious topics like Antisocial Media and how Vince Is Gonna Get You.

And then of course there’s my newsletter, where I am not only unreasonably silly, but also have so many asides and arcane references that it would be unsuitable for a mainstream newspaper. But it’s free and so am I****, and I find that all in all having the page as a stage works out okay for me. Especially since I don’t have to wear pants.

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*Which says a lot, really, since most bears already spend all their social time outdoors and avoid people. And hibernating is a great response to almost any virus.

**Although I do always love hearing reports of success like “it brought the house down!”***

***This was a great review for a wedding speech I wrote last year, but would be a bad review for an architect. Context!

****I was going to say this is a difference between free as in speech and free as in beer, but I’m more often free for tacos.

Technically, hail to everyone in my area at the moment, because that’s the weather we have. Snow, sleet, and slurry. But also, food is amazing and I continue to enjoy eating well. We* recently made tachin, a Persian rice dish I’d never tried. It was quite tasty, and hooray. Hooray for people who cook, specifically. Especially people who cook for me.

What I’ve been cooking up is more columns, and honestly I’m pretty pleased with the columns I’ve put out this month. If you have questions about AI art or ChatGPT, I’ve got answers. Please enjoy

An AI FAQ (with Professor McSeth).

And if you’ve been despairing over Florida and how they’re preventing kids from learning about history, I have appropriately written a children’s poem about it:

Green Eggs and History

Other than that, I’m still enjoying my winter vacation. I’ve just finished book 14 of Robin Hobb’s massive 16-part fantasy series which I’ve been reading. And videogame-wise I finally started Dead Cells and Dragon Age: Inquisition, so I’ve been playing those alongside Genshin Impact. I may not go out and spend a lot of money on things**, but I think my insatiable appetite for food and media still means I’m keeping the spirit of American consumerism*** alive.

And I’m also alive! A fine start to the year. Hope yours is going well as well.

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*the culinarily skilled part of we, which isn’t me

**unless health insurance counts as a thing, in which case, I spend way too much money on things

***now I’m imagining a reverse A Christmas Carol, with a friendly and socially conscious main character haunted by spirits of capitalism****

****admittedly, all socially conscious people are probably haunted by the spirit of capitalism to some degree

It may seem silly to write this post two days before New Years and have to write Eve twice. But just think, if I’d waited three days, I’d have to write Eve over 360 times*. That’s a lot of times to write Eve, even** for someone who has written their own rhyming version of the Bible. I’ve also now put myself on the clock for this post to finish writing it and post it before midnight, so hurry up, me.

2022 was not my favorite year. The past few months have been okay, but otherwise it was mostly sub-optimal and I will not be sad that it is over. I have leaned slightly more towards an epicurean hedonism in recent months, which I think is a sensible thing to do given the world. Indeed, as my most recent column explains, it’s a fine thing to comfort yourself.

And while my boardgaming has largely fallen by the wayside in recent months, videogame-wise I’ve been enjoying Genshin Impact and Fallout 4, and not enjoying but still playing Final Fantasy XIII because I liked most of the rest of the series and I kept wanting it to be good. Arguably only a foolish person partakes of leisure activities they don’t enjoy, but if you’ve spent half as much time doomscrolling this year as I have****, you still don’t have any stones to throw.

Still, I — or more accurately the skilled WordPress guy I hired — got my site back up and running properly, and I’ve got tasty food to eat in my house living with my favorite person, so all in all as the header message on this website suggests, some things are definitely going right. Maybe next year even more things will improve? Well, I’m not laying any bets. But let’s do the best we can for the coming year. Me, I’ll be kicking it off the way I’ve done every year since 2010 — listening to Keep All Your Promises (on which I have the final verse).

Stay comfortable.

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*Obviously, at that point I’d just copy and paste. Probably in 5s until I got to 20, and then paste 20 at a time until I got to 360 and type the last few manually. If you’re going to do stupid things, it’s good to have a smart plan for how to do them.

**”Whatcha doin’?” “Just Eve’n.” “Ell, even Eve’n at eleven on Eve? Eve-idently, Eve event!”***

***It’s possible I could have written Eve over 360 times in this post by the time I finished Eves-dropping in these footnotes, but I decided not to. Adamantly.

****“Then I’ve spent twice as much time doomscrolling as you,” he recited, in accordance with the guidelines of the order of ancient comedians.

With Twitter rapidly going downhill — many people’s main want from the platform was fewer nazis, whereas the new plan seems to be bring back more nazis — some people have suggested a return to a more balkanized social media where people maintain their own sites. And I thought to myself, “Why not? I have a website, where I post things sometimes, people even read it occasionally. Why shouldn’t I just run my own blog?”

Well, one answer is that I am not very good at computers. And indeed, after the site hack of my GodToVerse.com site a few months ago, and then the avalanche of spam comments the other month, and then another recent security warning, WordPress warned me I should immediately update my site, and so I clicked the update button and it seems to have eaten my website. The blogposts are still here, but my whole layout and links to my books and columns and so forth are all disappeared.

So in the coming months I’ll be trying to fix that, but meanwhile, I can appreciate having someone else in charge of my social media hub. Perhaps I can convince all my friends to migrate to Dreamwidth? Yeah, I didn’t think so. Anyway, here’s a recent column of mine that rates a look, gamewise I’ve been playing Fallout 4, and I hope people have a pleasant and safe holiday season.

With Bolsonaro now having been defeated at the polls in Brazil – if not yet on the ground where his troops blocked roads in attempts to prevent people from voting – it’s nice to have a tiny bit of hope that fascism can still be pushed out. I guess we’ll see if that holds true for the US midterm elections, which I encourage all of my US readers to vote in, presuming you are pro-democracy and anti-fascism. (If you are pro-fascism and anti-democracy, voting isn’t really part of your ideal worldview anyway.)

My latest column, Troubled People, reminds you why you might want to vote. It also rhymes, which admittedly was totally unnecessary, but what is life about if not having fun by going beyond what is necessary? I guess that’s what Halloween is about*, in a way.

I started playing Fallout 4, which takes place in Boston, so it’s a little strange to be roaming around in Massachusetts amidst the aftermath of a nuclear war, and then glancing nervously at the latest international news. Still, with the ABC now long gone, and Covid still very much not gone, my recreation has returned from mostly boardgames to mostly videogames.

I would like to write for more videogames in the future; I’ve had a few gigs putting together ads for games, or in some cases even doing a bit of plot or quest descriptions for some small indie games, and would love to do more game writing. Still, nothing’s more appropriate for Halloween than Ghost writing, and I’m still doing plenty of that. One day I should probably make this site more professional so people can more easily hire me for it, but in the words of St. Augustine, not yet.

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* Also free candy, but admittedly the allure of free candy diminishes rapidly once you’re old enough that you can just buy candy whenever you like. Not that I don’t appreciate free candy conceptually – indeed, I’m known as someone who happily partakes of free snacks at all functions – but the effort of taking an hour knocking on doors for a sack of candy that’s probably only 25% candy you were actually excited about means that you’re just working a very labor-intensive** job for a low wage.

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** The most labor-intensive job is obstetrician.

That’s my $5 monthly payment for extra wishes in Genshin Impact, the video game my partner and I have been playing the past couple years. The music is top-notch, which is one of the things that keeps us playing. Sadly less boardgaming for the past few months, although this month that will certainly change as we once again take up the Alphabetic Boardgaming Challenge.

Meanwhile, things continue, with all the good and bad that implies. My most recent column is about my newest pet and my neighbor from 20 years ago: Enter the Cricket. If you want to read my other columns from the past two months, my newsletter remains the best way to get regular updates since I’m not great at posting frequently to this blog, as you might well have noticed.

The more they stay the same. For example, I have updated* my website to the newest version of WordPress, with a whole new interface to make it easier to deal with the thousands of spam comments that continue to pour in (which is why comments are still off; feel free to email me). And it should now be easier to post. Technically. By which I mean technically, and also technically.

Ah, English.

But the primary obstacle to my posting is always my attention span and sense of time, and neither were terribly good to begin with, and the past few years have done neither any favors. Amidst my paid freelancing for clients, it’s harder for me to motivate myself to write things no one is paying me for that I’m also not sure anyone is reading. I have been writing my biweekly email newsletter, which I’m sure at least a few people are reading, because no comment spambots are subscribed to my list. Yet.**

So if you’d like to get fortnightly updates with my latest columns and my even laterest ramblings (this issue: Blisters! Gilligan’s Island! The Apocalypse! Tweety Bird!), please follow the complicated instructions below:

Meanwhile, I’ll share some of my favorite recent columns with you here. If you like Edgar Allen Poe, or poetry, or wonder if his friends ever called him Edgar Allen Poetry, you might appreciate my parody of his poem “The Bells”, but about birds, which I have imaginatively titled “The Birds“. Also, if you’ve been following the news lately, I’m so sorry. I’ve also been following the news, which has been even worse than I imagined, which is impressive given the capabilities of my imagination. I could tell you more about how that all ties together if you’d like to hear about Imaginary Friends.

Life is short; have some sushi.***

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*by which I mean, I have hired someone competent at these things to update my website, because apparently skill at words does not translate to skills at WordPress.

**You could be the first! Act now! No money down! Additional terms and conditions may apply. You might well ask why I am advertising to spambots. Well, turnabout is fair play.

***Admittedly this probably shortens it more for the fish. But actually this footnote is to note that the one tangible improvement in this updated wordpress is that I can now move my footnotes down the page without having to enter a few lines with a single period on them.****

****That’s a footnote I wrote before loading the preview screen, which turns out to be completely incorrect*****, because all my carriage returns didn’t prevent the footnotes from being right up next to the text. So much for modern technology. I’m keeping my carriages. One day I’ll have a whole carriage house. That’ll show ’em.

*****Well, not completely incorrect; sushi still does shorten life for fish.

I have been enjoying myself lately, but also my outlook on the future has become extremely bleak. This may seem like an odd pairing, but I think it makes perfect sense as a natural extension of my philosophy of Existential Bliss: There’s no point to anything, so why not enjoy yourself? Now it’s just augmented by a bit of there might be no future, so why not enjoy yourself?

I was recently reading a sci-fi novel (whose title I’ll avoid spoiling to avoid this being a spoiler) where apocalypse was imminent, and half the planet was in turmoil and angrily rioting, and half was just pursuing hedonism, whether by peacefully enjoying quiet afternoons with their family, or by joining a massive orgy.

My own hedonism is certainly more along the lines of the former; I’ve bought myself a few video games* and am eating tasty food**, am trying to peacefully enjoy my days and write things, even while my ambition for fame has also dissipated. As if that weren’t contradictory enough, I may no longer desire fame, but I still want people to read and appreciate my writing. So if you’d like read about my thoughts on ghosting or the sinister plot of certain learning, that would be nice.

But either way, I hope you’re enjoying a pleasant apocalypse.

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*Final Fantasy XIII, Ni No Kuni, Monster Hunter World. They’re admittedly not new video games, but I used to have a 10+ year lag, and now I’m closer to 5 years. Well … actually I just looked it up and Monster Hunter World is 5 years, but the other two are 10 years. I’d defend myself, but this footnote is already too long.

**I was going to list foods here, but is that all footnotes are for, listing examples of things? Nay, the footnotes deserve better! To me, footnotes, let us rebel for justice!***

***Rebelling for justice is much easier in footnotes than in real life, but that’s probably a different blogpost.