Beyond my favorite truth (and foundational moral principle) that People Are People, there is the fact that vast swathes of fiction across all sorts of media — books, movies, videogames — involve a ragtag diverse group striving for coexistence struggling against a cruel despotic force that wants to kill and/or subjugate everyone else.

Been reading a lot of fantasy novels lately and that’s the plot of more than one. Watched one of the recent Star Trek reboots last week and that was the plot. Just started playing a new video game last night called Metaphor: ReFantazio and the narrator dreams of living in a fantasy world where peaceful coexistence leads to shared prosperity, but unfortunately in reality the various races are being attacked by weird tentacle monsters called “humans”*.

Thousands of stories have been written about this struggle** because it is a universal one: the struggle of people who want peace and prosperity for all, against the despots who want to annihilate everyone who isn’t them. And spoiler: the despots who want to subjugate everyone are never*** the good guys.

May everyone be treated like they treat other people in 2026.

oh, and p.s. here’s a christmas poem about hhs/cdc.

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* which is the kind of subtlety you’d expect from a game named METAPHOR.

** of peaceful coexistence vs despotic aggression, that is. although for that matter, thousands of stories have been written about weird tentacle monsters. so, maybe millions of stories about humanity vs. tyranny. not changing it now or it would invalidate this footnote.

*** with the few obvious exceptions being films famous for being made by nazis or being propaganda for the klan

I regret to admit that because I am weak, I am still on Facebook*.

I am aware that it is a terrible site, it is owned by a sociopathic billionaire who is content to let his algorithms serve up rationalizations for genocide alongside 15 billion scam ads per day and that in an ideal world I wouldn’t use it.

Likewise, my partner still orders things from Amazon regularly even though Jeff Bezos has taken the Washington Post from one of the world’s most respected newspapers to a fulfillment of their motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness”.

They say there’s “no ethical consumption under capitalism” because everything you buy supports someone terrible, but there are still some places that especially deserve a lack of support. I quit Twitter not too long after Elon Musk turned it into a nazi hangout with an AI that declared itself Mecha-Hitler. Still not playing the newest Harry Potter game even though I have free access on Gamepass, because I don’t wish to support JK Rowling**.

Likewise it was easy enough for me to cancel my Washington Post subscription, not to host my free newsletter on Substack, and generally not to spend in a way that supports the worst people when there are many readily-available alternatives.

But Facebook is the only way I’m in touch with large numbers of my friends, and I’d miss it if I weren’t there. So there I remain, and I only boycott the easy stuff. Which is why I think of it as only a boycott, and not a mancott.

Not to imply I’m not old. In fact, in a recent column I point out there’s very little difference between me and a man from 1920***. I wouldn’t trade though; I’d miss the Internet too much.

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* given my sedentary lifestyle, I’m still everywhere.

** and, let’s face it, also because I’ve already got an extensive backlog of other games so it costs me very little to have the courage of my convictions in that case.

*** except that he’s probably dead, and I’m not dead YET.

I brought my wreck into the body shop the other week because it wasn’t running right. I mean it was still functioning, I did manage to get it there after all, but it certainly wasn’t running as smoothly as it was supposed to. So I figured, before it gets worse and breaks down on me at a bad time, I’ll have an expert look at it and hopefully they can fix it.

So they asked me what was wrong with it and I tried to explain the various ways it wasn’t quite working right and all the issues that popped up which I’m trying to remember because I hadn’t perfectly logged or recorded things. They ran some basic diagnostics and everything looked normal, took a quick look inside and told me they didn’t see anything wrong and don’t know what the issue is. They told me good luck and maybe ask the specialty body shop an hour away.

Then they sent me a bill that was very expensive, even though they hadn’t solved the problem. Would you accept this from your mechanic? Frankly, it’s a wonder so many people even go to this body shop*.

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* I should probably mention, I don’t own a car and this was a hospital visit.

While this January has certainly felt interminable, as I allude to in my latest musical parody-filled column “NOW That’s What I Call 2025!” (filled with everything from Madonna to Mary Poppins; you’ll love it), today marks the final day of the month, after which time will keep moving forward*.

This comes as no small comfort, at a time when so many things seem to be moving rapidly backwards instead. I find myself, not for the first time, thinking about Franny Choi’s poem “The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On”. Of course, while the world may go on regardless, it will certainly go on better if people band together to mitigate the destruction wreaked by fascist-aligned forces. At this point in my life I have one primary political belief and moral principle, which as I have mentioned before is this: “People are people.”

This is my yardstick for evaluating other political/moral/religious belief systems, and while there are plenty of good reasons to dislike the current regime, the largest source of my antipathy remains their eagerness to classify large swaths of people as not-people whose lives hold no value. But these living, breathing human beings are incontrovertibly** people, and that would be true even if they didn’t also enrich our world with art, science, and hard labor that underpins our entire agricultural sector.

While I always do my best to avoid making things worse, I am no paragon of world improvement. Aside from my writing, I occasionally donate or contact my representatives when spurred by guilt or an overwhelming need to feel like I’m doing something***, but more often I simply provide comfort/solace/support/amusement to the people saving the world.

So if that’s you, I hope my writing**** has provided you with at least one of those things. And if that’s not you, obviously I can’t throw any stones, but I hope you’ll at least join me in not making things worse and occasionally making them better, because even darkest days will eventually go the way of this dark, cold January.

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* at least, if past experience is anything to go by.

** not that it stops the bastards from continuing to controvert it.

*** both this week, though admittedly not super-frequent, as you’d expect from someone whose typical day is “sit at desk, think about stuff, maybe write things”

**** which you can get delivered to your inbox semi-monthly with my free newsletter.

Thanks to the holiday that keeps on Giving, it’s a week of delicious leftover sandwiches*. In spite of being someone who likes a lot of diverse foods, I’m also quite content to eat Thanksgiving leftover sandwiches for a week straight. It’s a comfort food, and probably in my top 10 sandwiches**.

What, you don’t rank your favorite sandwiches? I find it’s useful to do if you need things to be thankful for. Hooray for sandwiches! Also, people always talk about favorite books and movies, and I think sandwiches deserve their moment in the sun***. Maybe it’s just the way I was bread.

I wrote some new Thanksgiving songs in my latest column. Well, “wrote” may be the wrong word, since it was more that I rewrote some classic hip-hop songs with new Thanksgiving lyrics. Regardless, if you’d likewise like to have the earworm of RunDMC talking turkey and Ice Cube telling you about pie, I welcome you to enjoy:

A Hip-Hop Thanksgiving

Heading into December with a head full of hip-hop and a belly full of turkey, and certainly there are worse ways to go. The past week has, let us say, not been short on frustrations, but all in all I remain very fortunate, very aware of my good fortune, and very appreciative of my partner who keeps minor frustrations from being major ones — both by helping me keep things in perspective, and by being generally good at technical and logistical things in a way that I am not.****

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* rye bread, mayo, cranberry sauce, turkey, stuffing, and ideally sweet potato but we’re all out so I’ve been making do with mashed potato.

** the Reuben remains the King of Sandwiches, and my second place would probably go to the Monte Cristo.

*** unless it spoils the mayo

**** I pretty much put all my points into wordsmithery, and anything not involving words tends to be outside the realm of my expertise. Where by “expertise” I mean “competency”.

I no longer have a sense of time.

For years I haven’t known what day it is, aided by the fact that as a freelance writer my work is largely unrelated to the day of the week*. But I think the pandemic really kicked that into overdrive, and that combined with the natural acceleration of time due to aging**, means that I often not only don’t know what year it is, but certainly don’t know how long ago things were.

This is not an uncommon experience; many people my age feel like the 90s were just one or two decades ago, and can simultaneously feel that 2015 was so long ago that it feels like a whole other lifetime.

Regardless, one of the things about getting to this age is that many things actually were 20 years ago, as I mentioned about starting my relationship 20 years ago last month, and as I now reflect that 20 years ago this month marked the release of my first published**** book. It was, of course, a great pleasure and thrill for me to finally feel like I had a book out in the real world, published by a company (Barnes&Noble) people had even heard of, no less.

But also, the book was a collection of weird groups and the intro was all about how weird isn’t bad, you just have to find your people. The good news is, finding your people has become a lot easier these days, thanks to the Internet and whatnot*****. The bad news is, an increasingly-large swath of the country seems to believe that not only is being different bad, but that it needs to be attacked/destroyed/outlawed/erased to the point where even learning that other people exist and lead different lives and have their own joys and struggles is now controversial.

This is a damn shame, and is also largely opposed to what I’ve come to realize is my primary moral principle: “People are people.”****** Not terribly complex, but surprisingly unpopular. Still, if you’re going to live by a moral code, you could do worse. Of course, there are those who hold themselves above other people, like some kind of superman, and that reminds me that my latest column is a little Superman parody that is my favorite thing I’ve written in a while:

The Adventures of GovernMan

I know, that bird joke in the opening is ridiculous. But what can I say; bad puns are my kryptonite.

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* Notwithstanding my column deadline, natch.

** I have often thought that our experience of time accelerates at a steady rate as we age, and that there must be some analog to the calculable acceleration of gravity (9.8 meters per second, per second) to account for how time seems faster every year. Maybe years go by 9.8% faster every year? I don’t know, I’m no Einstein.***

*** Although on occasion people have remarked upon the similarity of our hairstyles.

**** Technically I think I wrote my first book in 3rd grade for a Young Authors contest, I believe it was about dinosaurs and preceded the book of birthday poems I also wrote in elementary school as a project. But I certainly wouldn’t call either published.

***** The glorious powers of whatnot are truly unmatched.

****** Consider it a condensed paraphrase of a Terry Pratchett quote I can’t seem to find about how most problems start when someone decides a certain group of people are lesser and shouldn’t really be treated like people with full rights.

A classic quote (and scene) from the original Batman movie.*

Today, I find myself needing to figure out what to do with a lot of random thoughts. They are too many and too disorganized to put in my column regularly, although irregularly this week I have put them all in my annual Thanksgiving leftovers column that uses all of my disorganized random ideas. But generally, I have slightly higher standards for my column, and those random thoughts need to go somewhere else.

I had been putting them in a semi-monthly newsletter, because I believe a torrent of my random thoughts should always be opt-in, and for the past nearly two years, had been sending it out via a service named TinyLetter. Well, I was notified today that TinyLetter will cease to exist as of February, because the company that owns it (MailChimp) wants to focus purely on monetizing newsletters, and writing-focused newsletters have gone to SubStack, so most newsletters should fall in one category or the other and the midpoint of TinyLetter will no longer be supported.

My newsletter was never intended to be monetized; quite the opposite, it was intended to give me a space away from all my paid freelance writing to rant and ramble without worrying about writing how anyone else wanted me to. So MailChimp seems like a bad fit. But while my newsletter is writing-focused, my newsletter is also pro-equality, pro-trans-rights, pro-humanity, etc., thus making it a potentially bad fit for Substack, which as reported has a bit of a Nazi problem.

So I’m not exactly sure where my newsletter will end up***, but I will certainly be posting about it when I come to a decision — which I guess will happen no later than February. Meanwhilst, this is the lull month between Thanksgiving and Christmas that always feels like not real time****, so I bid you all a happy holiday season, a reason to finds things pleasin’, and not too much freezin’ and sneezin’.

* I love Michael Keaton as much as the next person**, but no, I mean the ORIGINAL Batman movie.

** I mean, obviously depending on who the next person is.

*** Or if it will end. Ulp!

**** Certainly, my clients rarely seem to book real time during this span.

I bet some of you are thinking, “Doesn’t he know it’s actually all hAllow’s eve, hence hAllow e’en?”*

But frankly when it comes to this particular evening, pumpkins are a lot more likely to be hollowed than hallowed, unless your name is Linus Van Pelt. And most spooky stuff is more often associated with hollow than hallow. Hallow always sounds like a British chap greeting someone, whereas the dark empty void of the hollowness brings spooky things. The headless horseman wasn’t in Sleepy Hallow. It’s Hollow.** The horror movie is Hollow Man, my favorite metroidvania is Hollow Knight. etc.

Speaking of Halloween, my latest column has some unexpected costume ideas, so although it’s probably too late for tonight, you can get a head start on next year’s planning if you are a ridiculous person.***

Of course, probably more important is my previous column about the meaning of life, but then again, is anything important? Maybe not, maybe it’s all empty, and there’s something sacred about that. Hollow, Hallow, Goodbye.

* Okay, technically I suspect very few of you think using words like “hence” and “e’en”, but a) I do, and b) even if you don’t, you may have had a differently-phrased but similar thought.

** “It’s -Hedley-.”

*** Ridiculous people are my target audience anyway.

I’m trying to soak in and enjoy the weekend, made much easier by two factors: The pleasantly cool weather we’ve had (compared to previous weeks), and the fact that my weekend has a lot of free time since I have no big freelance projects at the moment. (Obviously, enjoying my life does require money, so it’s good that I have had some smaller freelance projects in the previous weeks and most recently have been doing some interesting ghostwriting work for a long-term client, but this weekend landed empty which is fine by me.)

My intentionally uncut yard has continued being visited by various wildlife, so this weekend has also seen visitations from a cardinal, a butterfly, and a bunny rabbit, all of which I have spent some time just staring out the window at from a few feet away. It’s nice to just soak in the majesty of the natural world every once in a while.

This is ever more important for me to keep in mind since I’m the type of person who could easily assemble a big list of complaints. I’m also the type of person who could make them all rhyme and put them into a song, so if you’d like to sing along, here are My Least Favorite Things.

As I was just saying in my most recent newsletter, we all have the urge to complain from time to time, but it’s really much better for everyone if you can at least make your complaints entertaining. Admittedly, I’m probably biased as a humor columnist. But can you imagine if every town meeting had all complaints presented with some entertainment value, humor and/or rhyme? That could be amazing. I’d be tempted to wish for it if I weren’t distracted by this ancient monkey’s paw I just found…

I guess an actual to don’t list would be a list of things not to do, like “To Don’t Today: Gamble, Get Drunk, Die of Heat Exhaustion”. Apparently I should just avoid going to Vegas.

But what I was thinking about was not things that I mean to not do, but things that I mean to do and then don’t, which is how my to do list ends up functioning. Basically, anything due for a client gets added to my calendar and is always completed on time because I am a professional, so that takes priority. Then I have various other time-sensitive commitments or plans which I also add to my calendar, and those tend to get done as well.

And then there’s the third category of things, which are things I sort of mean to get around to eventually but there’s not really a hard deadline on them, nor is there any external party* awaiting progress reports. And at the end of a day where I’ve been working on the first two categories of thing, I don’t really want to do more work, I want to just sit back and enjoy some leisure-time reading.

Currently I’m on book 62 of Bleach, because I read the first few and I’m a completionist. And I dunno, there’s something nice about finally reading all these big popular manga serieseseses.*** But also, it means that “find person who will fix roof siding” is pushed back another week.

In my defense, that’s an item I’ve actually tried repeatedly to address, the fact that a single piece of siding just under the roof has fallen off, but the roofers say it’s a siding problem, and the siding people won’t take jobs unless they’re re-siding a whole house, and the general contractors only get back to me when the 95 moons of Jupiter are all in perfect alignment. And the ones who have gotten back to me won’t fix that anyway.

So at some point I should probably call another dozen places, but it’s not going to happen today, and tomorrow’s not looking too good either****.

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*The only parties I throw are internal parties.**

**Sadly, sometimes my stomach throws an internal party and I’m not invited but things get a bit too raucous. Then I yell at my stomach, “Keep it down!” That’s my acidic wit. I can’t help it, it’s just a reflux.

***I believe the correct plural is “seriespodes”.

****In terms of calling people, that is. In terms of enjoying a long weekend, tomorrow is looking great.