Jeremiah Tolbert

A few things up front: I do not con­done using that kind of lan­guage aimed at any­one, includ­ing and espe­cially chil­dren.  I think the joke was a mis­take and one for which they’re going to pay dearly.   Second, I under­stand implic­itly that my lower level of out­rage over the joke in ques­tion is 100% due to my posi­tion of priv­i­lege as a white male.  Don’t think for a moment that this is not on my mind at all times as I ten­ta­tively poke at this thing.

Last night, dur­ing the Oscars,  The Onion was live-​​tweeting humor.   They were doing okay until they tweeted the fol­low­ing joke.  Note: this joke is con­sid­ered incred­i­bly offen­sive by most: here.

Okay. Thanks to my posi­tion of priv­i­lege, I didn’t find this joke incred­i­bly offen­sive, but I didn’t laugh at it either.  My ini­tial gut reac­tion was “this is weak and poorly constructed.”

My inter­pre­ta­tion of inten­tion, which I have as a lux­ury, is that they object of satire here was Hollywood and the media appa­ra­tus around it.  This was a “illu­mi­nate with hyper­bole” tac­tic, where you draw atten­tion to some­thing some­what sub­tle with an explicit state­ment of it, so over the top that nobody can miss the point.

Except they went so over the top they cycled right back around and became part of the prob­lem they wanted to make a crit­i­cal com­ment about.

I won­dered if the tweet would have been slightly bet­ter received if they had phrased it as a quote like this: “Original Tweet”, Says Hollywood Insiders.   Maybe?  But the use of the word in ques­tion fires up the out­rage cen­ters for a ton of peo­ple.  Their con­struc­tion also relied on faux-​​criticizing a black girl, and this was a huge mis­take to com­pound the use of word ten­fold.  Do I think they actu­ally believe that about her?  Absolutely not.  I think the dis­tance brought by the tele­vi­sion screen allowed them to for­get that Wallis was a real human child, and not just an assort­ment of pix­els.  In pur­suit of a joke, their empa­thy sen­sors failed miserably. My luxury-​​allowed inter­pre­ta­tion of intent says no, that was not their point or intent.

But it doesn’t mat­ter what their intent was, really, when it comes to piss­ing off the entire internet.

Here’s why all of this con­cerns me as a writer, and why I am fol­low­ing it closely, giv­ing it thought;  I write about hor­ri­ble peo­ple some­times.  I write about racists and big­ots because unfor­tu­nately, those are some of the peo­ple around me, the peo­ple I know.  I do not con­sider myself to be one, nor do I sup­port their ide­ol­ogy.  I don’t believe the Onion does either.  But I want to make sure that in my writ­ing, when attempt­ing to write about such peo­ple authen­ti­cally, my audi­ence does not take what I write as a state­ment of my own per­sonal beliefs.

I once wrote the N-​​word in a story, used by an overt racist because I didn’t want to leave any doubt in the reader’s mind what kind of per­son the char­ac­ter was. This char­ac­ter was based heav­ily on one of my grand­par­ents, and I felt I was being true to the real­ity in my por­trayal.  I’d heard him use the word a hun­dred times at least.

When the story was accepted, the edi­tor requested I remove it.  I wasn’t sure that I should at first.  Some peo­ple these days don’t get to see overt racism of that kind because most racists have devel­oped enough sense to keep it pri­vate.  When you’re a white guy, you hear some crazy shit uttered by fel­low white guys who assume you share their vile beliefs.  I wanted to reveal that a lit­tle. It felt important.

But ulti­mately, I came to the con­clu­sion that the word itself added noth­ing to the story.  If the word itself were more objec­tion­able than the fact that the char­ac­ter were racist in gen­eral, then that word was a dis­trac­tion from the point I was try­ing to make.  The word was removed.  Sometimes, in pur­suit of “truth,” we try to get too close to its flame and burn our­selves with it.

The Onion took a satire the­sis of  “peo­ple in Hollywood are ass­holes who degrade women and chil­dren” and crafted a state­ment that made it impos­si­ble for most of us to con­clude any­thing other than “The Onion staff are ass­holes who degrade women and chil­dren.”  I sus­pect that’s not the case, but we’re mea­sured by our words on the inter­net, and their words were most def­i­nitely found wanting.

I can sort of for­give the mis­take.  That’s a lux­ury I have thanks to such hate­ful words never being lev­eled at me, so I have no com­pre­hen­sion of how those words feel when aimed at me.  This is not a lux­ury many, many oth­ers have, and that’s why the Onion should break char­ac­ter and issue a plain-​​spoken and heart­felt apology.

And then maybe we can turn our out­rage to Hollywood itself.

Something I read online has me think­ing about Superman today. Superman usu­ally bores me as a hero because he’s so pow­er­ful and so many writ­ers try to out-​​power him and write him with lame exter­nal con­flicts, when really Superman’s strug­gles and chal­lenges should be so much deeper. Superman should rarely if ever be depicted in a fight in a comic again. Here’s why:

Do you remem­ber what it was like when you were a child, and you were upset, and hurt, and scream­ing mad. And then an adult, per­haps a par­ent or grand­par­ent, they scooped you up and held you until the tears dried and the hurt stopped, just a little.

Have you ever known what it was like to feel some­one hold­ing back their strength, the gen­tle­ness in a touch that comes from this restraint?

Now imag­ine you’re a low level supervil­lain and you’re try­ing to fight that guy.

It’s impos­si­ble to over­state just how strong Superman really is. He is a god come to Earth, for all intents and pur­poses. He can move the Earth, ful­crum or not.   The guy could flinch and destroy cities.

Imagine being in a fist fight with that.

If Superman were to lose one iota of con­trol, he could kill thou­sands.  His entire life must be like walk­ing through a room filled with cob­webs, deter­mined to never tear a sin­gle web.

The only way in which Superman can show his true strength to ordi­nary mor­tals is with his com­pas­sion. I guar­an­tee that when Superman catches you the supervil­lain, envelops you in his arms and flies you off to prison so you can pay soci­ety for your crimes, you can­not help but to feel that com­pas­sion, that restraint, all that love and ado­ra­tion for his adopted species.

Superman’s embrace must be like the embrace of a fatherly God for those that expe­ri­ence it. Nobody should come away from him unchanged. His very pres­ence in the world should cause mas­sive rip­ples of pos­i­tive change.   Nobody caught by Superman should ever return to crime, know­ing that they felt  in those inti­mate moments.

Well, nobody but Lex Luthor any­way. Lex felt noth­ing, because he’s bro­ken at such a fun­da­men­tal level. And he wants every­one else bro­ken that way too. He can’t feel what Superman is radi­at­ing with every action, and he never will. So he will destroy Superman, but even more, he will destroy your faith in the hero as well.

Or per­haps they lash out like the do over and over again because they do know what its like in Superman’s embrace. Maybe their vil­lain dads weren’t around a lot and they didn’t have strong role mod­els. But if you threaten peo­ple, maybe you can get his atten­tion again. You can feel that again.

When nobody in the world cares about you, Superman still does. He has that much love and com­pas­sion because he has to.

That would make Lex the one who needs it most of all.

I’m not sure which inter­pre­ta­tion I prefer.

I’ve had a lot of trou­ble feel­ing like a proper writer lately.  I work with lots of proper writ­ers who do amaz­ing work.  My clients are the real deal, and because I’ve spent so lit­tle time actu­ally writ­ing lately, I started feel­ing like a poseur.  Which made me even less likely to want to write any­thing seri­ous.  Blog posts are easy, but real sto­ries?  I felt like I had for­got­ten how to write them.  I’ve been noodling, but there’s been a def­i­nite absence of spark.

And then yes­ter­day hap­pened.  I was sit­ting in the local pizza par­lor hav­ing a slice and lis­ten­ing to the locals talk about God while some­thing on Fox News was going on about gun rights and I was struck with a seed of an idea.  As I drove back to my home office to get some owrk done, the seed took root and kind of exploded all over my brain.  I had an over­whelm­ing urge to write.  The story was unfold­ing in front of me rapidly, and I knew if I didn’t grab the dragon by the tail, it was going to escape.

About halfway through, maybe an hour later, the story was dis­turb­ing me so much, I tried to stop and get some other work done–I am not really in the habit of writ­ing sto­ries that unset­tle me per­son­ally, and I found the sen­sa­tion fright­en­ing and a lit­tle excit­ing.   I pushed through the dis­com­fort and fin­ished it.  The dis­com­fort didn’t go away, but it was added with a grim sense of accom­plish­ment when I fin­ished it.

It’s a filthy lit­tle knife-​​twist of a thing, kind of angry and dark and more than a lit­tle vile. But it came from a place inside me I had no idea existed.  Not sure I even want to exist, if we’re being honest.

But it bears more explo­ration, per­haps.  I’ll be work­ing on revis­ing the piece tonight and then out into the world it will go to accu­mu­late its achieve­ment badges.   Despite all that dis­com­fort, today I feel like a writer again, and I feel my inter­est in writ­ing top­ics return­ing.  I was afraid I was on the out­side of it all, but all it took one was light­ning strike of inspi­ra­tion to bring the sen­sa­tion back.

I don’t know what kind of writer I am now.  It feels dif­fer­ent.  But I’m still a writer.  I’m relieved to know it.

I gots prob­lems.  You gots prob­lems.  We all gots problems.

They’re usu­ally ter­ri­fy­ing mun­dane.  Not enough money.  Not enough love.  Not enough time.

Sometimes, don’t you just want a big­ger prob­lem?  Not more, just more… epic?

I know I do.  I know that I want a prob­lem that means some­thing.  They (the face­less, name­less ‘they’ respon­si­ble for so-​​called con­ven­tional wis­dom) always say, more money just means a dif­fer­ent kind of problem.

I could come to appre­ci­ate dif­fer­ent kinds of problems.

Sometimes, it feels good to write just to explore a life where the prob­lems are big­ger, more impor­tant.  The uni­verse is at stake!  The lives of every first born child are on the line if the magic whut­sit does not return to its right­ful owner! You know the drill.

But even those can seem ter­ri­bly dull after a while.  It’s hard to relate to those kinds of prob­lems.  Hard to wrap your own heart around them and really feel them, you dig?

So we (as writer, as read­ers) return to the prob­lems to which we can relate: not enough money, not enough love, not enough time.  We cir­cle back again and again.

The inter­per­sonal, the per­sonal, the extrap­er­sonal.   The cycle of prob­lems we seek, we desire.

All good fic­tion edu­cates.  Stories, are, at their core a les­son in sur­vival. Ug went left instead of right and the saber­tooth ate him.

So the prob­lem is cru­cial.  The prob­lem makes us for­get our own for a while.  Or under­stand our own bet­ter.  Or teaches us a response to a prob­lem we may yet have.

I gots prob­lems.  Real and imag­ined.  I bet you do too.

I dream a lot in the hor­ror genre lately, and it has me think­ing I need to try my hand at another ghost story.

Continue read­ing ›

Love is an emo­tion expe­ri­enced by humans that has a tar­get.  If the tar­get is a human, that human receives an emo­tional boost from that love, most times.  It’s a valu­able part of the human expe­ri­ence, we say.

Humans are basi­cally love-​​generators.  We go around lov­ing and hat­ing, but maybe mostly lov­ing, and we aim that love at peo­ple but we also aim it at objects.  Our cars.  Our homes.  These things are inan­i­mate and receive no ben­e­fit from this love like a human does.

And yet there are humans in the world who receive no love directly, and are poorer for it.  Love is unevenly dis­trib­uted, and could be seen as a valu­able commodity.

What if we could redi­rect the “wasted” love to tar­gets that need it most?  Love your car all you want… this lit­tle box will send those feel­ings to a small orphan in Cambodia.  Or this wid­ower in a retire­ment home in Boca Raton.

There’s plenty of love to go around.  It’s just poorly dis­trib­uted.  How do we solve the love dis­tri­b­u­tion problem?

There’s prob­a­bly a really sappy story in there somewhere.

Making time to write isn’t some­thing that I used to have to do.  My life was full of excess time.  I worked a very bor­ing job that kept rel­a­tively tame hours, and my wife often kept hours in oppo­si­tion of mine, work­ing night shifts as an ER recep­tion­ist.  In those early days of what passes for my attempt at a writ­ing career, I sim­ply had time.  I wrote because there was time to fill, and I wanted to escape what­ever it was that I was in.  Adulthood, I guess.  An unchal­leng­ing day job. The usual stuff.

Now that I run my own busi­ness, doing work that I truly love, it’s a lot harder to make the time and gen­er­ate the pas­sion.  Trying to “escape” was a huge moti­vat­ing fac­tor for me.  Don’t get me wrong; I love to write.  But in that vac­uum, in the absence of need, my writ­ing habits pretty much collapsed.

I’ve had spurts of pro­duc­tiv­ity here and there over the past few years, but noth­ing like I had in those five years in Laramie when I was still learn­ing.  And I’m still learning—no doubt about that.  I accu­mu­late rejec­tion let­ters with only a mod­er­ately reduced fre­quency from when I started.

Living in Kansas again feels like com­ing back to the source.  So much of what I’ve writ­ten about has been this place, the peo­ple in it, the land­scape and its bizarre hold on me. I thought at first that I would come back here and the words would just flow.

Hah!  Words don’t flow for me any­more because I actu­ally care about which ones I use, for one.  They’re bits of rock I carve out of a moun­tain­side.  Time to stop expect­ing cre­ativ­ity to strike on its own.  In this case, I work for the muse, not the other way around.  Etcetera.

So I’m sit­ting at a table in a small cafe on a Wednesday night with a hand­ful of other writ­ers and I’m com­mit­ted to sit­ting here and doing noth­ing but write for the next two and a half hours or so.  This post is a warm up to get my fin­gers mov­ing, get me think­ing in words again instead of code and Photoshop.  Every week, I intend to do this until it becomes eas­ier again.

Sitting in the back of my head as a moti­va­tor are the fan emails I get occa­sion­ally.  You wouldn’t think some­one of my mod­est pub­li­ca­tion list would get much email, but I get one or two a month from peo­ple.  It’s their ques­tions about new sto­ries that have me moti­vated right now.  There are so many sto­ries I still want to tell.  I just have to recon­nect with the fact that I actu­ally have to write to tell those stories.

Happy Kansas Day.  On this day in 1861, Kansas became a state.  And the country’s been down­hill ever since.

Just kid­ding.

I don’t remem­ber cel­e­brat­ing Kansas day ever as a kid.  I’ve seen quite a few men­tions of it today as I work.  Maybe my Facebook friends who escaped are start­ing to feel nostalgic.

I feel like any cel­e­bra­tion of Kansas needs to bal­ance the good with the bad.  Let’s do a parade for Kansas Day.  Here’s how I see it.

The first float has a dio­rama of Late Cretaceous ocean crea­tures like mosasaurs and pleisosaurs.  Carved from lime­stone for bonus points.

The sec­ond float is a pro-​​life nutjob gun­ning down an abor­tion doc­tor.  Made from empty shot­gun shells.

The third float is made up of all the astro­nauts from Kansas as those teth­ered blimp things.

The fourth float depicts vio­lence against black teens try­ing to enter a deseg­re­gated school in the wake of Brown vs. Board of Education.  Made from dis­carded KKK hoods.

The fifth float is a Jayhawk slam­dunk­ing on Duke. Made of bas­ket­ball shoes.

The final float has to be a giant dis­em­bod­ied head of John Brown that shoots lasers at a bunch of card­board cutouts dec­o­rated to look like Quantrill’s Raiders while the great­est hits of Kansas plays from 20 foot tall speaker stacks. This float is made out of awesome.

I would go to that parade. You?

It started a few weeks ago.  I noticed some sore­ness on my lower back , and when I touched it, I found a long, thin scab run­ning from just above my belt line to the mid­dle of my back.  Just one, long, thin, shal­low cut.  I decided a cat had snagged me at some point and I for­got it.

Then, a week later, I noticed I had another thin scratch, this time on my face, through my hair on my tem­ple. It ran down the side of my head in the hair.

Odd, I thought, but again, for­got about it and went on.

Last night, I woke to sear­ing pain in my left eye.  I stum­bled into the bath­room and washed it out, but I couldn’t find any­thing in there.  It was almost like some­one or some­thing had scratched my eye.  It still hurts today, and my vision is a lit­tle blurry, but it’s get­ting better.

All this time, I’ve been hav­ing recur­ring night­mares about a dark-​​haired girl com­ing out of the shad­ows to slash at me with a black-​​bladed knife.  I have this dream a cou­ple of times a week.  My wife woke me up in the mid­dle of one, said I was moan­ing in fear.   Right before I woke up, the ghost smiled at me and receded back into the shadow at the cor­ner where two walls and the ceil­ing meet.  It looked like our bedroom.

Kansas con­sists of many Native American bur­ial grounds, and Tonganoxie is known as a place where one kind find arrow heads and all kinds of arti­facts.  I’ve heard rumors about this stretch of land, and the rea­son they call my street Copper Creek.  It ain’t because of the metal. It was the taste of blood in the water that flowed from the nearby spring.

Maybe we should move sooner than later.

#

Like all good fic­tion, most of the above is true. I’ve… embell­ished a few details. Guess which.

I wake up some days and am over­come with a weird kind of grat­i­tude that I’ve got another day to do things with. It doesn’t always hap­pen, but would that I could wake up with a sense of hap­pi­ness and grate­ful­ness for each new day. Maybe I can cul­ti­vate that grat­i­tude somehow.

I wish our lives weren’t so FULL of things that need to be done to get that next day so that we could spend more time med­i­tat­ing on what we already have. Who has time to lay in bed for ten min­utes and encour­age one­self to view the day as a gift, right before the email chimes and the alarms all start going off and it’s time to work work work? Besides the inde­pen­dently wealthy, I mean.

I want to carve myself a life where I’m less focused on accom­plish­ments and more focused on slow­ing down and enjoy­ing them.  I want to main­tain my drive, but not let it con­sume me.  Slowly, we are engi­neer­ing our lives towards this goal.  I want our farm home to be a place where peo­ple can come slow down and appre­ci­ate things.  Enjoy fresh rasp­berry jam on fresh-​​baked bread, a cup of cof­fee, and watch the sun come up over the hill. That’s a vision worth striv­ing for, I think.  But not striv­ing so hard that I aban­don any hap­pi­ness in the now.

It’s a gam­ble, risk­ing hap­pi­ness now for planned hap­pi­ness down the road. Sometimes it pays off beyond our dreams.  Sometimes we lose it all.  How do you decide how much to risk?

Thoughts on a slow Monday morn­ing, I guess.