SUV Smart.
Regular cars don’t do well on Alaskan roads in winter. Fifteen, sometimes twenty inches of snowdrifts are not uncommon. If you’re driving a regular car, sometimes you get stuck by the side of the road and have to wait for a tow truck.
If you have a beefy SUV with the right tires, though, you can go anywhere. You can plow your own path down any damn road you please. So the folks with SUVs charge out into the teeth of howling snow-storms…
And get themselves stuck in even deeper snowdrifts in the middle of nowhere, where even the tow trucks can’t get to them. Back in the days before cell phones, I’m told, people died regularly from driving deep.
A very smart person is like an SUV, in that they can get themselves into big trouble without even recognizing it.
See, a normal person comes up with a dumb idea, and they can’t justify it properly. They make a few spluttering arguments, people haul out the obvious counterarguments, and they’re done. Maybe they’re not entirely convinced, but there’s that nagging “Well, yeah” lurking at the back of their thoughts that they either have to surgically remove, or they walk around with a shadow of well-earned doubt.
Intellectually speaking, they get stuck by the side of the road in a nice residential neighborhood, where they can trudge through the snow to their neighbor who’ll offer them a hot cocoa while they wait for the tow truck to arrive.
Ah, but a smart person can justify any damned fool idea they please! When a friend brings out the obvious counterargument for their silly concept, the smart person takes it as a challenge – “How can I prove this other guy wrong?”
And if they’re really clever, they find some superficial flaw in the counterargument and sink their hooks into that. They’ll absolutely wreck that flaw, convincing themselves that someone’s bad grammar or slightly misstated fact disproves the Death Star-sized mass of common sense behind it, and then move on to increasingly elaborate justifications to prove…
Well, anything you want.
See, when you’re really smart, you can treat the world like science fiction: there’s literally no fact you can’t devise a reasonable-sounding rationale for. Get smart enough, and you can argue the smartest, most correct people to a standstill.
That’s why you see very smart people flinging out thousands of words on how it was Martians that killed JFK, or how the Illuminati cover up the truth of the Hollow Earth. They’re so SUV Smart that nobody can contradict them.
Conspiracy nuts are obvious. Unfortunately, most SUV Smart people start small and stay small – they convince themselves that they’re compassionate people when they’re screwing over all their friends, or they’ve convinced themselves that their lucky breaks are proof that everyone who works hard gets rewarded with success.
And when they are presented with new facts, they don’t even realize it, but they treat the new fact like a game: How can I best defend my thesis? Which turns into a rousing round of “How can I spin this contradictory evidence to support my world view?” when what they should be doing is questioning their central premises.
But they don’t. Because being right is a heroin-like reward for SUV Smart people. They like being smart, and convincing other people is the needle in the vein.
And here’s the thing that SUV Smart people often don’t realize until it’s too late: You can win an argument that the airplane’s methodology for sensing solid terrain is deeply flawed at this height in this weather, but that does not move the mountain in front of you.
That snow is gonna getcha eventually.
And you see SUV Smart people infesting comments threads everywhere. They’re the folks with dazzling arguments bolstering amazingly stupid concepts, hauling out Wikipedia links or logical flourishes to justify their comments.
SUV Smart people often lead pretty wretched lives. Some are staggeringly wealthy, yet have five divorces and no close friends. Yet they hold up their wealth as proof that they’re good at everything they do. Others are staggeringly poor, living in their friends’ basement, yet their crappy circumstances are dismissed because that’s not relevant to this argument.
If you’re catching on by now the SUV Smart person can take anything in their life and spin it, well, you’re seeing the problem. They’re deep in a snowdrift somewhere, about to get mired, and they don’t see it because the mighty engine of their intellect has gotten them far into the woods and it’ll always get them farther.
All they have to do is step on the gas harder.
If you’re not an SUV person, the best defense I can give you is to remember that “Smartness” is not a universal talent – you’re smart in certain areas. I’m a programmer, but you wouldn’t want me doing brain surgery.
Yet SUV Smart people have a habit of claiming their smartness makes them good at everything they want to be good at. You gotta look at their record, then. If a smart writer claims to be good at predicting politics, go back and read their old essays – were they actually good at predicting politics, or did they predict badly and then justify their bad decisions?
And if you’re an SUV Smart person – I used to be, and on my worst days I still am – then you have to realize that convincing other people does not make you right. You can out-argue, outlast, and outwit all comers, but at the end of the day you’re not changing anything but minds.
It doesn’t matter how good you feel about driving into the woods on a snowstormed night, or how many people you have convinced that you can do this.
All that matters is how deep the snow is.
Breakups Aren't Necessarily A Sign That Something Went Wrong.
I’m holding a party this November to commemorate my victory over my wife’s ex-husband. They were married for seventeen years – and on November 22nd, I’ll have been married to her for longer than he was.
And you know why I love my wife?
She doesn’t regret her first marriage.
She regrets a lot of the things that happened in the marriage – she wouldn’t have divorced him if there weren’t issues, natch. But at the time she met her husband, what she needed was stability to counteract the dysfunctionality of her broken family, and someone who matched her work ethic, and someone who was nicer than her family.
He was perfect for her when she was twenty.
But years later, when he wanted a stay-at-home, trophy wife who’d help advance his career and she wanted to be a little goofy and explore life, well, the fights started. And never stopped.
She’d become something different, and he hadn’t. And that divergence was heartbreaking, but it happens.
And when she went to the Catholic Church to have the marriage annulled, they told her that she would have to claim the marriage “was never a valid relationship.” And she refused. She’d had two strong, smart children with him. She’d had a lot of good times. He’d been good for her in a lot of ways.
To this day, she’s still not remarried in the Church. She left that behind rather than telling people her marriage had never been good.
It just… wasn’t good now.
And yeah. There are abusive relationships and dysfunctional mismatches and all sorts of breakups that happened because two people were never meant to be with each other and probably shouldn’t have tried. I don’t deny those.
But there’s also relationships where people were good for each other at the start, nourishing each other to grow. But the problem with growth is that you can’t always control where it goes, and sometimes all that love poured into each other has you discovering different things about each other.
You become transformed into someone else. And that new person – or people – aren’t healthy for each other any more.
Which sounds terrifying, and on some levels it is. People aren’t robots you can program, and sometimes you help someone to take flight and they discover they need more sky than you can offer.
Yet I think you can control that growth to some extent by showing an interest in what your partner does – you don’t have to fling yourself hip-deep into their every new passion, but listen when they talk. Be attentive, keep your insecurities reasonable, and make their new hobby – be that kink, or quilting, or football – something that they can come to you and feel good about sharing at the end of the day.
Too many people shrug off new interests with “I don’t care about that, let them do what they want.” The more you can keep yourself organically entwined in all the aspects of their lives, the more likely it is that that growth will continue to include you even if you’re not a part of the Kinky Quilters’ Football League.
Me? I’ve got lots of ex-girlfriends. Some of them were just bad for me. Yet others, well, it didn’t end well – but like my wife, I can’t say the relationship wasn’t valid. They helped me to become someone newer, and better, and ill-suited for what they could offer then – or I helped them to learn something that made them realize that I couldn’t get them to the next level.
Painful? Yep.
Discouraging? You betcha.
“Never valid”?
Not in a thousand years.
(Inspired by a post by @Brittunculi over on FetLife: Breakups Are Often The Gift We Never Knew We Needed.)
Where Are The Best Donuts In San Francisco? Plus A Donut Rant.
Hey, San Franciscoans! I’ll be doing a reading at Borderlands Books this Saturday – and as always, when I arrive, I bring donuts. For donuts represent all that is good and compassionate in my ‘Mancer series.
The question is, “Where are San Francisco’s best donuts?”
And here, my friends, I must speak an unfortunate truth to power:
Keep your hipster donuts in your pockets.
Under most circumstances, I have no quarrel with hipsters. Hipster ice cream? The best. (Try Jeni’s in Columbus, with their Intelligentsia Black Cat Espresso and their Rieseling Poached Pear Sorbet – as hipstery as you can get.) Hipster booze? Delicious. Hipsters have filled my belly full on many delectable occasions.
But hipster donuts, God, what the fuck do you think you’re doing, hipsters?
Every time I’ve been to a city, I hear people going, “Hey, try these donuts, they’re artisanal.” And I don’t know why artisanal, when translated to donuts, means “Tastes like floor sweepings at the eraser factory,” but fuck that noise. I had hipster donuts in Boston, and they were dry and had too-bitter chocolate. I had hipster donuts in Portland – not Voodoo, let us not talk of Voodoo donuts, which are perfection – and I might have well bitten into sawdust-flaked corkboard.
And when people who recommend these donuts to me go, “I don’t normally like donuts, but these donuts are good,” well, I say this with all kindness. But the most wretched recommendations I’ve ever gotten have been “Well, I don’t generally like horror movies, but I liked this one horror movie” or “I generally don’t like punk, but I love this punk music,” and you know why they liked that punk horror movie?
Because it wasn’t actually punk horror.
Look. I too have my “generally don’t like The Thing, but I loved this”es. You know who I recommend those thises to?
Other people who also don’t like The Thing.
If I have a friend who loves The Thing, I assume that I’m not fit to recommend anything to them. I don’t like romance novels! So when I stumble upon a romance novel I enjoy, I’m usually better off assuming that it contains none of the things that romance readers love, and that the factors I enjoy about it have nothing to do with why humans love romance novels, and that in fact what I am enjoying is the opposite of a romance novel.
As a rule, if you don’t generally like A Thing but love this one exception, don’t recommend it whole-heartedly to people who do like The Thing. Because let’s be honest: not all recommendations are equal.
Anyway. The point is, I’m coming to San Francisco to promote my new novel, which is out, and I love both my novel and donuts. And I want donuts made by people who make good old-fashioned, gooey, ridiculously nutty donuts made for ordinary joes who love donuts. I don’t mind fancy flavors, but you can’t try to disguise your crappy donutteration under a sedimentary layer of hickory-smoked bourbon aniseed.
No. Ya gotta do the basics right, and then build.
So. San Francisco. I wanna buy you good donuts, and I’ll be delivering them to Borderlands Books this Saturday.
Where do I go to get my donuts?
State Of The Weasel: September 2016
I’m exhausted, is what it is.
I counted the hours, and I spent 32 hours in a single week putting the finishing touches on my novel Savor Station. (No, it’s not sold. That was just to see if my agent could get it into shape to sell it quickly.) I pushed myself hard to get that done by September, and then Angry Robot said, “Hey, I know you had Labor Day weekend planned to relax, but Boston would like you to do a signing, can you go?”
Cue twenty-four hours of driving over a weekend. And too little sleep as I talked with delightful people. And then a release party on Tuesday.
Normally I bounce back from these things, but this strain of exhaustion is strangely sticky. Those of you who know my “write every day” habits will be shocked to learn that I’ve only written about 1,000 words over the last two weeks. And I have a story I want to write! It’s just that losing myself in Deus Ex seems a lot better.
(Though I’m not sure whether I’m playing Deus Ex properly, as I have 8 surplus Praxis points and I have no idea how to spend them. Once I’ve maxed out the Invisibility Cloak and the hacking modules, I have yet to find a challenge so big I can’t sneak past it. Anyway.)
So I need to write a summary of Savor Station, and I need to write essays for the Fix Blog Tour, and I need to get back to various people who have been kind to me, and I need to figure out who wants to do lunch when I’m in San Francisco, and Portland, and Seattle, and San Diego. I should probably even reserve hotels. But I am so burnt out right now that decisions are anathema to me, and so I’m checking Twitter too much and trying to force my brainfogged programmer-person to crank out needed code.
So. If I seem distant lately, it’s that I’m exhausted. If you feel like it, send pets and cuddles. Or just keep your distance until I perk up again. This too shall pass; I have a weekend planned showing Steven Universe to a friend, and hopefully that’ll get me enough recuperation to launch into the four dates of the book tour.
(I am very excited about the book tour. I get to see you guys. That’s always awesome.)
But Fix seems to be getting good reviews from the people who liked the series, saying it’s a really solid finale. Which is a nice reward, given that Fix is the most difficult book I’ve ever written – the ending got torn up and redone not once, but twice. So to have all of that effort come to fruition is nice; I didn’t want to leave a sour taste in people’s mouths.
But here I am. Breathing. Eating. Not responding to emails.
Doesn’t mean I don’t love you. Just means I’m turtling. Bear with me if you can, but you’re not obliged to.
How Many Fucks Are In FIX?
As you’ll no doubt recall, my favorite review of all time is, was, and will always be from my goddaughter Carolyn, who said:
“I would recommend this book to people ages 15+ because f*** is in the book on almost every page.”
Further investigation turned up that Flex contained the word “fuck” 95 times, or roughly once every three pages. (Most of that is from Valentine. She swears a lot.)
People then demanded to know how many fucks were in The Flux (a phrase I still find distinctly satisfying) – and we discovered that it contained 101 fucks. Which seemed superior, honestly – a 6.3% improvement in fucks! – but The Flux was also a longer book, and so once again we had about one fuck every three pages.
So. What about Fix, the final book in the series?
Fix has an astonishing 128 fucks! That’s because things are getting bad enough that Paul and Imani are now swearing, too!
But what about the all-important ratio, you ask? Have I kept Fix to the quality of Flex and The Flux, delivering a solid “fuck” about once every three pages?
….it’s close.
Because Fix is longer, we now have:
One fuck every 3.625 pages.
Alas, I could do the cowardly thing of rounding down – but honestly? I’d have to say that Fix has one “fuck” every four pages, approximately, though if you wanna tilt your head it could be three. Ish.
If you were tuning in solely for the illicit thrill of having someone rattle off a “fuck” every three pages, well, I’ve let you down. But on the other hand, if you were buying the book to see how Unimancy works, or to watch what happens when Aliyah finds her own special magic, or to see what happens as Valentine figures out how to have a stable relationship (or, you know, not), then buy it now! (People are calling it “the perfect end to the best series of books I’ve ever read.“)
But for the rest of you, there’s still plenty of fucks there. Just… not as many.
I’m sorry.