"Of course it is happening inside your head, but why on earth should that mean it is not real?"

I've been mostly avoiding the internet since last night, and I'll probably continue to do so for at least the next few days, given that basically everything online right now comes with a giant trigger warning for depression and suicide—doubly so if you are a humorist dealing with either of these issues. To compound all that, I stupidly let my meds lapse last week, so I missed taking them for several days, and I haven't quite gotten back on track again. And so it's really not good for me to be writing about this right now, but it's also very important to me, so I want to share some things that other people have written, and to remind you that depression lies. It does it very convincingly sometimes, but it still lies.

If you're considering suicide, or you know someone who is, please, please call a suicide hotline: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicide_crisis_lines. It's free. They've been in your shoes, and they listen.

The Bloggess has written a number of posts about depression: http://thebloggess.com/?s=depression+lies. "Strange and Beautiful" has a lot of tricks that can help. You can print a "Depression Lies" bracelet for free from the post with that title (also, there's a video). I made one about 2 1/2 years ago. I still have it. (I found it again this morning.)

Allie Brosh (Hyperbole and a Half) has written a couple of posts about her struggle: Adventures In Depression, Part 1 / Part 2. Some psychologists have actually described it as one of the best contemporary portraits of depression, so if you're not suffering from it yourself, but you know someone who is, and you want to understand what they're going through a little bit better, you should also read it.

Boggle the Owl is also helpful.

Please, if you need to, talk. If someone needs you, listen. Remember, we're all in this together.

You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

In case you missed it, a couple weeks ago, the Texas state legislature almost passed the Barefoot Pregnant Women Act, but the bill died as the special session expired at midnight after a heroic filibuster by Senator Wendy Davis. The very next day, one of the biggest pricks in the history of ever the governor called another special session and told them to pass the exact same bill, which made it out of committee pretty quickly after the chairman cut off testimony and refused to recognize anyone opposing the bill, because democracy.

When the Butthurt Session began last Monday, thousands of people stood outside to register opinions and wait to testify. Those in favor of the bill wore blue, while those opposed wore orange:

It's like "Where's Waldo," except in this case, Waldo is actually a raging misogynistic dinosaur.

But wait—that shape looks awfully familiar:

"It's just the rebels, sir. They're here."
"My god, man! Do they want tea?"
"No, I think they're after something more than that. I don't know what it is, but they've brought a flag."

It's not exactly a stretch, given that, although something like 80% of the people in Texas don't want this bill to pass, protesters have been called "terrorists" and "an unruly mob," and the Governor himself said that "the louder they scream, the more we know we are getting something done." Why not just come right out and call them "rebel scum?" It's no more than you'd expect from people that essentially derive their mandate from an organization that was led by this guy:

"Your feeble filibusters are no match for the power of the Dark Side."

Anyway, it already passed the House earlier this week, so this afternoon the Senate will begin discussing Death Star HB 2. Since nearly three weeks remain in the special session, a filibuster is all but impossible, so it's unfortunately very likely to pass.

"There will be no one to stop us this time."

I'd like to think that a group of representatives who refuse to actually represent the people who elected them will eventually be thrown out of office, but even if that's true, what good will it be to all the women whose health—or lives—will be put at risk by this ignorant, misogynist, cock-driven farce of a pretense of giving a shit about women? It seriously makes me ashamed to have a penis.

What the Fuck Just Happened in Texas: TL;DR Edition.

You may have noticed that the interwebs have been blowing up over the past 24 hours or so with stuff about the Texas Senate and hashtags like #standwithwendy. Amidst all the tweeting and tumbling, I've noticed that there have been a few people who have no idea what's going on, probably because they couldn't seem to find anything about it on the news. I know that a lot of people don't have the time to wade through hundreds of posts on multiple sites  to piece together the whole story, so I've compiled a quick tl;dr guide to get you up to speed. You're welcome.

So, it basically started when Governor Dick Perry called a special legislative session and gave them last-minute instructions to pass an anti-abortion bill that would shut down all but five clinics in a state that's close to 800 miles across in both directions.

Here's what the bill looked like:

So Senator Wendy Davis announced that she intended to filibuster:

They told her that meant that she had to speak—without stopping—for 13 hours, and couldn't sit, lean, eat, take a drink of water, go to the bathroom, or stray from the topic:

She was eventually told to sit down after 11 hours because talking about sonograms (which are required to have an abortion in Texas) wasn't "germane to the discussion":

Every major news outlet while all this was happening:

Except CNN, who were all:

MUFFINS!

Then Senator Van De Putte called out the President of the Senate for ignoring parliamentary procedure and refusing to recognize her because he was trying to force the vote and didn't want to:

"At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over her male colleagues?"

The President impotently tried to quiet the cheering crowd after that burn:

But the entire gallery was like:

They tried to vote on it anyway:

The vote was too late to be legal, so they tried to change the journal to say it happened before midnight:

Just kidding. Those assholes aren't nearly cool enough to be the Doctor.

But the entire Internet already had screenshots:

So they had to concede:

The End.

P.S. I'm sorry for all of this.

For Boston.

I had planned to post something today whining about how I broke my ankle last week and how much it sucks that I won't be able to skate for a couple of months. I'll still post it eventually, but not today. Today there are people who will never walk again because they lost limbs—or lives.

My heart goes out to all of them. It goes out to their families, and to all of those who are still missing loved ones. It goes out to the families of the Newtown victims, who were in a VIP section close to where the explosions occurred (the last mile of the marathon was dedicated to the victims of that recent tragedy). Though it doesn't sound like any of them were injured, I can't even begin to imagine what they are going through today—again.

The authorities don't know who's responsible for it yet. People who were actually there don't know, so I won't even pretend to have the first idea who is responsible for it. I've already heard people throwing around words like terrorist, and blaming it on various ethnic, religious, or political groups. If you're one of these people, please do everyone a favor and shut your fucking face hole. We don't need that shit right now, and even if any of those statements turn out to be true, you didn't know that, so you're still just an asshole. If you actually know something about someone involved, here's how you can do something useful: get the fuck off the internet and go call the tip hotline at 1-800-494-TIPS (8477).

I've spent a lot of time today trying to follow the story as best I could. I've seen a lot of graphic things and a lot of terrifying things. Some of those images will probably stick with me forever, but I'm not going to share any of that here. You can see all that shit on practically every news site in America. Probably, you already have. It'll probably be a while before we get to see much else.

BUT: I have seen a lot of things that I don't want to forget, and I'm afraid the mainstream media will miss every single one of them. Next time you see the footage on TV, don't pay attention to the explosions. Watch the people. Here's what you'll see: people scared, then people running. But not running away—running towards the explosions, to help people. No one knows what the fuck just happened, and there are still all these people running towards that unknown to help. I've seen stories about runners who had already finished the marathon going to donate blood, or journalists who had run it staying to cover the story.

I've seen every social media platform I use exploding with positive words and ways to help. I've seen about a million people sharing Mr. Rogers' words about looking for those people who are helping. I've seen people offering beds to complete strangers who have no place to go. I've seen people reminding us that even when this kind of shit happens, it's not all of humanity that's gone wrong. About a million people have posted Patton Oswalt's Facebook status as well:

Boston. Fucking horrible.

I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, "Well, I've had it with humanity."

But I was wrong. I don't know what's going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem. One human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths.

But here's what I DO know. If it's one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out. (Thanks FAKE Gallery founder and owner Paul Kozlowski for pointing this out to me). This is a giant planet and we're lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in awhile, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they're pointed towards darkness.

But the vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evil doers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak. This is beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We'd have eaten ourselves alive long ago.

So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, "The good outnumber you, and we always will."

This. This is what I want to remember about today, about humanity.

There are lots of ways that you can help, or get help. Here are the ones I know about:

For finding people:
You can call the helpline for families of victims/to locate people at 617-635-4500.
The Red Cross has set up a website to check in, or to find people: http://redcross.org/safeandwell
Google has one, too: http://google.org/personfinder/2013-boston-explosions/

If you need someone to talk to:
You can call the Disaster Distress Helpline at 1-800-985-5990.
You can also visit their website: http://www.disasterdistress.samhsa.gov/

If you need help talking to your children about what happened:
http://www.sheknows.com/parenting/articles/991269/boston-marathon-bombings-how-to-talk-to-your-kids-about-tragedy

And finally, if you need someplace to stay, or if you want to offer someone a place to stay, you can check out what is quite probably the greatest spreadsheet in the history of humanity:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AoXVKFw1Uci5dFNpRGdWd2pXZTN4a3Fza0VhVTRVaGc&output=html&utm_source=buffer&buffer_share=25647

PROTIP: You always generate more interest if you call it "Apocalypse Prevention."

The city that I work for just emailed everybody a press release for its 2012 Arborfest celebration, which went something like this:

Spend some time enjoying the outdoors with your family this coming weekend while learning more about the dozens of different trees in ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZfuckingboring.

I was pretty much asleep for the rest of it, but I thought I also caught something about a fucking tree competition? Where the winners get plaques for their champion trees, or something? What the actual fuck is a champion tree? Is it like an Ent? Because those guys were badass:



The problem with Arborfest isn't that it's stupid or unimportant; it's just that most people find trees excruciatingly boring. They don't actively do...well, anything. They just sit there, for hundreds of years, or until some asshole comes and knocks them down because they hate breathing or something. All the important shit is stuff you can't actually see, like producing oxygen and preventing soil erosion and other things that put people to sleep because nothing's blowing up or having sex.

Really, the problem with Arborfest is just in the marketing. It would do much better if they started marketing it as HOLY SHIT IF YOU DON'T COME TO THIS YOU'LL SUFFOCATE Fest or Carbon Monoxide Apocalypse Prevention Fest. People would pay attention to that shit. For example:

Guess who's taken a sudden interest in the rainforest.
HINT: It's you, motherfucker!

See also: The Whomping Willow.

You're welcome, Arbor Day celebration marketing teams.

P.S. As I'm writing this, one of the biggest storms in the history of ever is ravaging the East Coast of the U.S. and Canada, causing floods, fires, and blizzards, and leaving millions without power, supplies, or maybe even homes. The Red Cross is in serious need of blood donations, as well as disaster relief funds. Here's how you can help:

• Give Blood: http://www.redcrossblood.org/
• Make a Donation: https://www.redcross.org/donate/index.jsp?donateStep=2&itemId=prod10002 (If you're in Canada, you can find information from the Canadian Red Cross here: http://www.redcross.ca/article.asp?id=44405&tid=001)
• You can also text REDCROSS to 90999 to donate $10 (added to your wireless bill).

Half Empty

"How does one articulate the ongoing sadness of after?"

I feel like I've been writing too damn many of these in the past year—which really just means "any at all"—but even with practice, I feel like I'm very not good at them. I always feel so horribly unqualified, not to mention unprepared; it's not as if I sit around thinking "what would I say about so&so if he/she died?"—especially since I prefer to delude myself with the belief that everyone I care about in any sense of the word will continue living forever. And it already takes me far longer than it should to piss about with writing, re-writing, nit-picking, and finally giving up, saying "fuck it," and hitting "Publish" when I'm writing about something that doesn't matter. It never seems possible to give anyone the kind of tribute they actually deserve. But you shut the fuck up about it and just do it anyway because, good enough or not, they deserve your best effort, which, I hope, is this:

I first discovered David Rakoff simply because of a cover blurb by David Sedaris on his first collection of essays, Fraud. PROTIP: When one of your favorite authors calls someone "the wittiest and most perceptive man in the world," you fucking listen. By the end of the week, I owned and had read both Fraud and Don't Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems, which were the only two he'd written so far. Meanwhile, the expanding pile of work on my desk went largely unnoticed—by me, anyway—as I laughed, sometimes even to myself, while I read.

And then I listened—not often, but when I thought of it. Occasionally I would catch him on This American Life, and of course, I would laugh then, too. I took the opportunities for granted because not only was he only in his 40s, but he was going to live forever anyway. Still, whether it was out loud or on paper, he immediately became another of my examples of How You Funny. So, for a brief moment this morning when I saw his name trending, I forgot about the Laws of Twitter and got excited. This lasted exactly two seconds until I remembered that any time someone's name is trending on Twitter, it is a Bad Fucking Thing. It's always either a) some total douchecannon that you wish would have the decency to go the fuck away forever and stop inflicting themselves upon the world, or b) someone fucking awesome who has died because the universe is a total dick that's already taken Maurice Sendak, Ray Bradbury, Nora Ephron, and Gore Vidal this year, but apparently that wasn't good enough, so it had to take David Rakoff, too. At 47.

So today, too late as usual, I'm listening to his contributions to This American Life and reflecting on yet another huge loss for the writing community, and for the world. You can find his contributor page here: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/contributors/david-rakoff, and I would strongly encourage you to listen to every single one of them. And laugh. Laugh, because we need it now more than ever.

"But how lovely those moments were, gone now except occasionally in dreams, when one could still turn to someone and promise them something truly worth their while just by saying "hey, watch this!"

P.S. You can find what others have said, probably much better than I, here:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/blog/2012/08/our-friend-david-rakoff
http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2012/08/10/158560936/on-already-missing-the-angry-passionate-writing-of-david-rakoff
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/entertainment/2012/08/david-rakoff-essayist-and-american-life-contributor-has-died/55644/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/11/books/david-rakoff-award-winning-humorist-dies-at-47.html

And one in his own words:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17lives-t.html

DON'T PANIC.

So today is Towel Day. If you don't know what that's all about, I suggest you go and read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Seriously. It's only like 200 pages. I'll wait. Otherwise, this won't make a whole lot of sense, and it's slightly more serious than funny today, so this whole thing may just end up getting lost on you. At the very least, read this (from the third chapter of the book):

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.
     A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value—you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindbogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you—daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
     More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: nonhitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit, etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker may have accidentally "lost." What the strag will think is that any man that can hitch the length and breadth of the Galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through and still know where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
     Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in "Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is." (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)

I first picked up a copy of HHGG at the age of twelve. It was a small stroke of luck that I even came across it in the first place. It had been cleverly hidden away in the A section of the fiction area of my school library which, in turn, had been even more cleverly hidden away in a town of 100 people in North Dakota. (Actually, it was the Omnibus Edition of the trilogy that was published about a year before "The Hitchhiker's Trilogy" became a misnomer. FYI, and such.) The cover bore a cartoonish planet with a wide mouth and lolling tongue. This planet was juggling three similar planets. Ten years later, a face like this one (except with eyes) would come to be known as the Jake Face, and would become the exclusive facial expression used in pictures of me.

Apparently I wear that hat a lot. And that jacket.

The book had only been checked out once or twice before, but I would go on to add my name to its card (remember those?) several times before I graduated. I started reading it immediately, and had already finished the first chapter before I even reached the desk to check it out. My initial impression was that this may have been the single greatest combination of words ever assembles. As I progressed through the book, I would discover that this may have been an understatement.

I remember thinking—because I was twelve and American—that the error in Ford Prefect's attempt at adopting an inconspicuous name was merely orthographic in nature, and that misspelling "Perfect" was simply an entertaining irony. At some point not long after this, I read in the introduction that the name was actually a mistake on his part regarding the dominant species on the planet, and suddenly I began to understand that this was a book I was going to be reading very many times. It's the first book I remember reading in which I was not only being told a story, but also learning a lot about How To Write. Before that, most of what I'd read took itself far too seriously. Douglas Adams was the first author to show me it didn't always have to be that way. He somehow managed to blend Telling The Truth and Making Shit Up in a way that was funnier than anything I'd ever read before (or since), but also incredibly intelligent. He was one of my very first literary influences.

In 2001, at the age of 49, he joined my ever-growing list of authors whom I deeply regret having the misfortune of never being able to meet in person. I was just about to finish the first year of a Bachelor's degree in English at the time. $20,000 of higher education had equipped me with the ability to go "oh, shit" and feel a deep sense of loss, which is as good a tribute as any of us who Make Shit Up can hope for—that it meant something to someone, even someone we never met. Especially someone we never met. Two weeks later, some people who were not me created a holiday to commemorate his life and his work. That's Towel Day. That's today. That's why I spent the past two nights making this:

Just the towel. I didn't make the book. That was Douglas Adams.
Honestly, have you been paying any attention at all?

Also, I think I just made it through a whole post without saying "fuck." Except for there. Fuck.

Anyway, happy Towel Day.

A day without Internets.

So, I forgot to put this up last night, but the half-dozen or so of you who read this, snark is on strike today. You've probably noticed that a lot of sites are doing this today. This is what the Internet could look like after SOPA or PIPA.

You can learn more about it by watching this video:



Or by checking out some of these sites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Learn_more

http://americancensorship.org/infographic.html

http://sopastrike.com/
http://theoatmeal.com/

Wikipedia has set up a page where you can find who your state's representatives are. Here's another one.

His name is Dennis Harnden.

If you came here today looking to be entertained, you're going to be incredibly disappointed, so you should probably just come back tomorrow. Except don't, because then you'll miss what might end up being the one serious, real thing I ever write here, which is partly because this kind of thing is never, ever allowed to happen again, ever.

​Two days ago, a friend died very unexpectedly. I don’t really know what to say. I don’t know how to write an obituary. I am very not good at death. I ​am good at coming up with a bunch of words that sound really great in my head, then completely losing my shit when I go to say them out loud or write them down, forgetting everything, and blubbering something incoherent or inappropriate. Usually both. This is probably happening right now. I’m also really good at getting drunk, which is not happening right now, but I kind of wish it were. Like the rest of my family, I may not be well-equipped to deal with loss, but I can avoid the shit out of it.

​I’m not going to get all philosophical and try to manufacture some kind of meaning for something that makes no fucking sense. I don’t always know why shit happens, or if it even happens for a reason at all. If it does, it’s beyond me. What I do know is that the world is a little bit darker now, and it’s going to feel like a really shitty place for a while because, frankly, it kind of is. My heart goes out to everyone who knew him, and although anything I can possibly do seems hopelessly insignificant, I'm going to try anyway. He was one of the most hilarious people I've ever met, and a much better snark than I'll ever be. This isn't half as good a tribute as he deserves, but it's the best I know how to give.

Dennis, we miss the hell out of you already.