Please Don’t Blackmail Me Into Happiness.

I told my daughter there was only one skill you needed to perfect in life: Doing shit you don’t want to do.

“You get that one skill down, and you can master all the rest easily,” I told her.

Because it’s true. I don’t wanna exercise… but I’m doing the shit I don’t want to do. This novel’s a pain to write… but I’m doing the shit I don’t want to do. Work’s a bug-filled helltangle snarl this week…. but I’m doing the shit I don’t want to do.

I do those unwanted things because they make my life better: work gets me money to live well, writing gets me the career as a novelist I’ve longed for (hey did I mention I had a book come out yesterday?), and exercising keeps me from falling face-first dead into my minestrone soup.

I don’t have to necessarily like doing any of those things. Life’s full of maintenance tasks, little uncomfortable bits you need to do to keep the genuinely fun ones rolling.

I don’t have to want to do them, I just have to recognize that I need to do them.

“Working through jealousy” is a thing I do not want to do.

Now, I could remove the jealousy by removing all competition. We’re polyamorous, so I could tell my wife not to have any other lovers – but monogamous people often conveniently forget that dysfunctional relationships get jealous of anyone with a close emotional bond. I could start bumping her friends out of the way.  Hell, I know folks who are jealous of their spouse’s mother, and man, is that a fun place to be.

But I could trim all that down. I could have that Mike Pence rule where we agree not to ever be alone with anyone of a gender we could potentially be attracted to. I could guilt my wife into calling her daughters less often, punish her by sulkings and silence when she dared to call them. I could do my best to trim out the competition…

And life would suck in new and different ways, because my wife would be a lot unhappier and less willing to be generous to me and there we’d be, locked in a cage of our self-making.

No. My wife having a vibrant social life with close friends and lovers and relatives means that she brings back all sorts of interesting gossip and new movies to watch and just genuine happiness from seeing people she loves. And in turn, that makes her willing to let me go hang with the people I love.

So time to do the shit I don’t wanna do, and handle the jealousy when she’s out on a date with someone else. Maybe I go for a long walk. Maybe I flirt with someone else. Maybe I need to find a friend with a shoulder I can sob into.

Yet I’ve had well-meaning partners who’ve witnessed my mopiness and blackmailed me.

“I can’t stand seeing you unhappy,” they say. “So unless you can manage to become ecstatic about this, I’m going to lop off all the portions of my life that inconvenience you.”

Don’t you fucking dare.

Look. Part of who I am is “occasionally insecure.” And the partners who try to blackmail me into joy mean well – because they don’t feel jealousy, and they genuinely believe that if they did everything right then I’d dissolve into a cloud of brightly-colored butterflies and do the dance of the galactic unison.

That’s not me.

I’m insecure, but I do my best to own it. And over years of dating, I’ve learned that for me, the choice is “Swallow back some insecurity from time to time” or “Wall off my partner’s options until they’re so miserably captive they break out and leave me.”

I choose to swallow back some insecurity because it’s objectively the better call. I spend a few mopey nights, but in return I get a jazzed-up partner who adores me and comes bouncing back into the room to squirt love all over me and who doesn’t want that?

And I know you mean well, but telling me “I can’t do anything until you’re not just willing, but rhapsodic about it” is a form of emotional blackmail. I mean, sure, if I’m so constantly miserable that our relationship dynamic becomes entirely about reassuring my insecurities? Then maybe it’s time to go, because that shiz is unhealthy. You can’t have all misery.

But I can’t have all happiness, myself. Life can be fulfilling for me and I can still have those nights of “You go have a date, I’ll find some way to compensate for my loneliness this evening.” Because that’s normal, man. Nobody likes sitting at home alone when there’s fun times that you can’t attend.

(And that subtle “YOU MUST BE HAPPY” emotional blackmail often extends into the twisted logic of “WELL THEN MY PARTNERS ARE INVITED TO ALL THE FUN TIMES” and the concomitant “We only date as a couple” shitfall that often leads to forcing attractions that don’t actually work and third-wheel syndrome and the terror of disappointing your partner by not being into someone… but that’s a whole other essay for another time.)

But no. Look. My life is filled with shit I don’t want to do, that I do do because the payoff’s greater than the grump. I don’t like being frumpy and jealous, but the reward for handling the occasional discomfiting emotion responsibly is way better than creating a relationship that rests entirely on a thin crescent of our Least Common Denominator.

And I know you mean well. But don’t try to armwrestle my emotional maintenance into unfettered joy. It’ll just make me more miserable because now I’ll feel like something’s broken within me as opposed to this grungy task I gotta do to clear the pipes.

I would instead suggest, tentatively, that perhaps your learning to not require paroxysms of euphoria with my every acceptance is the shit you gotta do that you don’t wanna.

Maybe get to work on that.

THE UPLOADED Is Out Today, Competing For Your Merciless Book Bucks! CONSUME AND OBEY

I’ve never been sure how to promote my book The Uploaded.

Is it a tale of immortal brain-Gods, all your craziest Facebook relatives uploaded to the Internet as alt-living people where they will vote forever and never die?

Is it a family drama about what happens when half your family is dead but won’t stop making excuses for why they’re still making your life miserable?

Is it a book about Amichai, a living kid struggling to find a place in a world where uploading consciousnesses has become so habitual that “being alive” has fallen out of fashion?

Is it a book with a kick-ass super-pony named Therapy who loves carrots and sick sisters?

No matter. All my months of dithering have led us to this moment where The Uploaded is now available for release in North America.  (You Brits, for unknown reasons, have to wait two days.)  And so I ask you to do the things for me that you would do for any author you love, in the order in which they help:

1. Purchase.  Buying the author’s books is the greatest thing you can always do for them, since it encourages publishers to buy more books and keep their careers going.  The Uploaded is available at pretty much any bookstore – Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powells, and various Indie booksellers.  (I don’t care where you buy it, as long as you did, and thank you.)
2. Promote.  There’s a lot of books out there, and a single Tweet or Facebook update saying, “Hey, {$Author} has a book out today!” helps a lot.  People mostly buy books recommended by their friends.  You even mentioning it is a stealth recommendation, so your social push helps more than you can know.
3. Review.  Retailers push books that have more reviews.  They say that 50+ reviews on Amazon is the magic number.  So even if you don’t like the book and leave a negative review, that helps the book.  (And of course to my mind, you’re not obligated to like it, although most of the people who liked Flex/et al seem to also like this book.) So when you’re done, figure out how many stars it’s worth and type up a sentence or two.  It really helps.
4. See The Author On His Book Tour.  This year I’ll be attending Cleveland (this Thursday!), Boston, and San Francisco.  Showing up to say hello convinces book stores that hey, it’s worth having this person out here.  Also it makes a socially anxious author like, you know, me feel less anxious knowing you’re coming.

Anyway.  Here’s all the links for The Uploaded.  Thank you if you choose to mention it anywhere.  If you purchase it, I hope it prods your brain and then breaks your heart in all the ways I intended, because it’s a dystopia, but it’s a dystopia with a weird hopefulness.

Or so I hope.

Excerpt of the first two chapters for your perusal

Buy The Uploaded at B&N

Buy The Uploaded at Amazon

Buy The Uploaded at Powells

Buy The Uploaded at Indie bookshops

The Uploaded Book Tour Dates! Visit A Weasel In Your Town, Perhaps?

I’ll be appearing in just three cities to promote my new post-singularity thriller The Uploaded, and then I will not tour again until 2019.  So if you want to see a weasel, may I suggest now?

I’ve made Facebook events for all these dates, but Facebook is terrible at reminding me which friends live in which towns.  In my mind, all my friends live on the Internet.  If I didn’t invite you, that’s because I forgot you lived there.  (If I haven’t accepted your friend request on Facebook yet, that’s because I stopped accepting new friends on Facebook in 2014 after Facebook showed me linkbait news stories yet never told me that two good friends had major deaths in their families.  For me, Facebook gives people an illusion that I know what’s going on their lives when it fails at the one thing it claims to do, meaning that I’m pretty much on Facebook only for my Mom.)

So anyway, the point is that if you are planning on going, or even merely interested, accepting that Facebook invite helps get the word out to your social network, which in turn helps me out.  So do a guy a favor and share as widely as you can?

Anyway.  Book tour begins.  It’s tiny this time around, but my book is grand.  And yes, we will have donuts and/or cupcakes even though The Uploaded is a donutless dystopia!  Why?  Because I frickin’ love donuts and cupcakes, that’s why.  And as usual, I’ll try to go out for drinks afterwards and hang with as many people as possible, because part of the joy of doing this is seeing you all.

September 7th: Cleveland, Ohio
Loganberry Books
13015 Larchmere Blvd, Shaker Heights, Ohio 44120
7:00 pm – 9:00 pm

September 14th: Cambridge, Massachusetts
Pandemonium Books
Pleasant St, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139
7:00 pm – 9:00 pm

September 23rd: San Francisco, California
Borderlands Books
866 Valencia Street, San Francisco, California 94110
Exact time currently unknown, probably afternoonish?

Things I Have Learned After Three Weeks Of Personal Training

Trainers are super unfair. I have pretty decent biceps and thighs, I know what I can bench-press. It’s not terrible. But you know what she works on?

Teeny, teeny little muscles between my shoulder blades.

Apparently my posture sucks, so they’re working on my “core,” which is a synonym for “all the muscles nobody even thinks about.” She comes at my shoulderblades from over the shoulder, under the shoulder, round the side, all these little exercises designed to push my spine straighter.

She gives me a forty-pound dumbbell and I relax. Big heavy weights are easy. Because I know the real agony’s gonna be when she hands me a three-pound weight and asks me to lift something I didn’t know I could lift.

So not fair.
————————-
Until now, my body’s basically been a carrying case for my head. I’ve done jogging and other exercises, which gave me greater strength, but none of that involved paying attention; I just ran and things got stronger.

Now we’re discovering how little I know about my body.

She’s continually telling me, “Get your shoulders back.” I thought they were. “Stand with your feel square with your shoulders.” I thought they were. “Spine straight.” I thought it was.

I have no idea what my body’s supposed to feel like.

We’ve had to devise an entirely new language to handle me, because I can’t comprehend “Shoulderblades drawn back.” Instead, she taps me on the area that’s supposed to feel tired if I do it right, and then I wriggle around while lifting until I do whatever I have to that makes that burn.

She normally starts people off with small weights so they don’t hurt themselves. She’s learned that with me, you go with big weights so I can start exhausting myself on the first stroke and feel where I’m supposed to be.

Which is weird. I’ve lived in this body for 48 years and apparently don’t know it at all.

I can’t decide whether that’s awesome or terrible.
—————————-
I now need a sweatband because I dribble sweat all over the place. I keep looking for somewhere to wipe things off, because every BDSM dungeon I’ve ever been to has sterilization towels. I know you wipe off your playspace when you’re done.

This is a small gym. I think they clean up after we’re gone. But still, I’m looking for the handi-wipes all the time.

And wishing I wasn’t such a squishy sweatmonster.
———————-
Standing is exhausting now. I used to do it all the time, but I was doing it wrong; knees locked, feet askew, slumped. Now whenever I stand you can see me adjust – I stand, realize I’m standing wrong, shuffle my feet awkwardly, and straighten.

It’s not natural. Gini had to go to gait therapy to learn how to walk properly, lifting her feet so she didn’t trip, and she said it was super-awkward. Now it’s second nature to her.

Maybe it will be one day to me, but it’s still weird.
———————-
Standing properly is unflattering. Slumping forward juts your jaw way out, hides those double-chins, folds your belly over. Standing tall draws you back so you have nowhere to hide from your fatness, like you’re shoving your belly out to shake hands with people.

I look in the mirror and wince, then realize that maybe I shouldn’t have been hiding that anyway.
————————
She has a little metal doodad she lubes up and then rakes along my triple-bypass scar. She claims it’ll break up the adhesions, get my chest more open. I cringe all the time because anyone touching my scar tissue is like someone opening up my heart all over again.

It does seem to be working, though.
———————-
The little metal doo-dads cost $3,000 a set and there are three competing brands each of which have their own classes and zealous adherents.

I didn’t even know metal scar-scrapey doo-dads existed, let alone there was a whole fandom centered around them.

The world’s full of things I don’t know.
——————–
This is expensive. We can’t do this forever. But then again, if this turns out to actually keep us alive and healthier for longer, isn’t it worth the expense? I mean, if we took all the money we spent eating out and poured it into this, wouldn’t that be better?

Cash is weird now.

Maybe it would be worth it. Hard to say.
———————-
I don’t feel that much stronger yet. I don’t feel fit. It’s not like jogging, where I saw immediate progress – I’d run two more minutes, I’d run faster, I’d jog upstairs without getting winded.

This is core work, so it’s weird. I stand straighter. People tell me I look a little more confident. But she keeps switching exercises all the time, differing ones on Monday and Wednesday and Friday, so I’m never hitting the same weedly little muscles twice when I remember them.

I’m making progress. But it feels like I’m making progress at things that aren’t that important. But they assure me it is important, and so does Gini.

I’m not quitting. It’s not terrible. It’s just not the swoleness I thought it would be by now.

My First Poly Vacation Shouldn’t Be That Easy. And It Wasn’t.

“My sweetie Fox wants to go see the eclipse,” I said to my wife. “Do you want to come?”

“Where would we go?”

I got out a map of the Zone of Totality, where the sun would be completely obscured – a thick line running in a curve across the United States. “Total eclipse is mostly in the south. There’s Nashville, Columbia, Paducah – ”

“PADUCAH?!?” Gini had bolted out of her chair and was making fluttering motions.

“…yeah. Paducah, Kentucky.”

She began dancing. “THAT’S THE NATIONAL QUILTING MUSEUM! I’VE ALWAYS WANTED TO GO! PADUCAH!”

And so it was that a convergence of interests led to my first vacation as a poly unit.

——————————-

Gini and I have gone places with my sweeties before, of course, and I with hers. We go out to dinner, as we have a pretty firm rule that we can’t date anyone the other person can’t sit down for a nice dinner conversation with. (That’s pretty much a gimme, though, as we’re both attracted to interesting conversationalists.) We’ve taken various visiting lovers on tours around Cleveland, where my wife adores playing tour guide and telling all of Cleveland’s cool secrets.

(If you don’t think Cleveland has cool secrets, I assure you: ride with my wife.)

But we’d never actually planned a several-day journey to go out with someone I loved. My wife isn’t dating Fox; they’re merely fond of each other’s company.

Would this implode at some point?

We got in the car, taking starter selfies, and talked for great portions of the trip because we love talking, and I kept thinking, It can’t be this easy. Sometimes I’d drop out of the conversation as Gini and Fox found something to talk about, and I’d reach back to squeeze Fox’s leg, and then Gini would take my hand.

It wasn’t sexy. It felt like a happy family.

And we got to the hotel and crashed in a single King-sized bed, which turned out to be about as uncomfortable as you’d think, especially since there wasn’t any hanky-panky. We awoke grumpy and sore from a thin sleep, setting out to Day One of our adventure – taking distillery tours deep in Bourbon Country.

And Gini and I snapped at each other a bit, and I thought Oh, no, it’s fraying. But we shrugged it off and had a magical adventure where in the middle of a tour we heard a stray feral kitten mewling and rescued it at the Four Roses Distillery (which was surprisingly open about its history of how Seagram turned it from a proud independent brand into rotgut, and they’ve been trying to restore their reputation ever since), and then we got a special backstage tour of the distillery as we took care of the kitten and the employees battled to see who got to take the newly-christened Gator Smallbatch home.

It was a magical day until our car broke.

The starter motor gave out in a small town called Dawson Springs, and AAA was of no use because Dawson Springs usually had 2,500 inhabitants but with the eclipse they had about 30,000 people passing through and everything was overwhelmed. We only survived thanks to the immense Southern hospitality shown by a string of strangers who went to great lengths to get assistance for us.

This, too, was magical, in a different way. We were introduced to a cast of characters in the town – Turtle, the man who was legendary at rebuilding starter motors, but also legendarily slow to arrive, and true to fashion we were there for seven hours and he never showed. Our U-haul mechanic Dave ran into his friend Chase at the local diner and asked him to come over, and when I asked Chase whether he accepted credit cards, he did exactly what I thought and shuffled his feet and informed me this was a cash-only operation because, well, yeah.

We were eventually hauled home by a man called “Buttermilk,” who had a cab with a backseat full of broken glass. His Boomhauer-style accent was near-impenetrable. He broke his back in a fall and went to jail because he refused to stop running a junk yard out of his back yard, and by God was this an interesting trip, we said.

But Fox has some chronic illnesses, and they were severely triggered by standing around for seven hours. When we finally got back to the hotel Fox crashed, shivering and unable to function, and had a mild panic attack because they were too much trouble, who would want to deal with this…

And Gini came over and hugged them and reassured them.

Let me rephrase this: my lover got wound around the axle because of sickness, and my wife – who is not dating them at all – came over and took care of them and reassured them that they were no trouble at all.

I thought, again, It can’t be this easy.

And in truth, it wasn’t. It’s like my laptop.

As I type this, several million problems have been solved for me. Someone’s gone to the trouble of figuring out how to map the impact of my fingers on the keys into an electronic pulse that the system can understand, and someone else has figured out how to store those pulses in a system that translates to Unicode characters, and someone else has figured out how to display light on a screen in a way that can provide words, and someone else has figured out how to send those words out through a complex network of electronic pulses so they can be shared with anyone else on the Internet.

We don’t even think about those complexities these days. They’re solved problems. But at some point, for each of those and a thousand more, teams of engineers ground their teeth and fretted about how to do that.

It’s easy these days, at least until a bug strikes. But it’s not actually easy.

We just put effort into it until the solution became common.

Likewise, this was not an easy trip, even though it was. Fifteen years ago, my wife snapping at me in the car would have led to me sulking and an injurious argument, but we’ve learned to make room for each other’s upsets. Ten years ago I would have been attracted to unstable partners with jealousy issues that would have blown this trip apart. Five years ago I would have tried to turn every poly relationship into a sad variant on monogamy, constantly escalating intimacies because that’s how monogamy worked, not realizing that a poly relationship doesn’t have to go anywhere, it can just work.

My wife was able to reassure Fox because I was able to reassure my wife that my relationship with Fox was healthy for us. She was able because Fox had been a constant in my life for over two years now and had gotten to know Fox, unlike my previous strings of fiery implosive relationships. She was able to because Fox brought their own lessons to the table and had shown kindness and generosity to Gini that had been returned.

It looked easy. But strewn behind us were all the lessons we’d learned collectively and individually, sometimes at the expense of precious relationships we hadn’t been able to keep.

We’d just put those sorrows to good use.

And when the eclipse came we still didn’t have our car, but somehow the three of us had determined to have a good time regardless. And we sat down in front of our hotel in blistering heat to a small crowd out on the green, and saw the sky open up and oh my God the total eclipse was magic.

It was one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen, a special effect made real, and all my words cannot sum how great it was.

And when it was done, Chase texted to tell us our car was ready and we prepared to venture home.

It wasn’t easy. And yet it was. All that muscle memory built up served us well, and what we had was a beautiful trip full of quilting museums and occluded suns and kitten-induced bourbon, and a tiny family caring for each other as best we could.

We drove back, weary and fulfilled. We’re smart enough to know nothing is permanent; we try not to make grand promises of future love these days.  That too is wisdom learned.  And there will be strains after this; my wife will need snuggles alone with me, as she always does after a visit, and my sweetie Fox and I will endure the fresh amputated loneliness that comes from that endless aching of the long-distance relationship.

But we will cope because of what we have learned.

That’s enough. That’s good. And that’s what we have, at least for now.

It’s easy, at least by some definition thereof, and thank God.

(EDIT: For those of you asking, “What about the quilts?” let me highlight my own work: “and what we had was a beautiful trip full of quilting museums…”

(Trust me: We went to a lot of effort to arrange carless transportation in a tiny town swamped on eclipse weekend, because I will destroy anything that stands between my wife and her lifelong desires.)