I Don't Trust You. Maybe I Shouldn't.

“You need to trust your partners,” the Generic Relationship Advice says. “If you don’t trust them enough, how can you have a good relationship?”
And the truth is, there’s a lot of partners you *shouldn’t* trust. And they’re not all abusers, either.
The problem is, people often see what they want to see in relationships. And they wind up dating a tattered ghost that has only superficial similarities with you, because the truth is that they never actually saw the flawed you-that-exists – they saw Stability, or they saw Romance, or they saw Raw Passion, and all that other stuff just got quietly screened out.
And you tell them – “Hey, I have some serious kinks but I don’t live this life 24/7, I am not the Goddess of Sexual Pleasure For You,” and they nod and go “Yeah, baby, I know,” when realistically they don’t know, they think they understand what you are but they’re actually mapping so much of their own needs onto you that they forget you have needs of your own.
And they feel so fucking betrayed when it turns out that you weren’t what they imagined you to be.
So a part of that trust comes down to trying to manage expectations. And it sucks to look at someone who’s dewy-eyed with True Love for you and go, “No, you’re not seeing Me right now, and as such I don’t trust you enough to date you.”
But that happens when you’re trying to be sane.
And the Generic Relationship Advice says, “You need to trust your partners to know what they want.” Which sounds like it’s awesome, but the truth is most people actually have zero fucking clue what they want. And if they want something from you that you don’t actually possess, then trusting them means that you’re going to ultimately disappoint them.
Because if they saw Stability when what you actually had to offer was The Ability To Keep Functioning When You’re Upset, shit’s gonna go wrong.
If they saw Romance when what you had to offer was Good Listening Skills, shit’s gonna go wrong.
If they saw Raw Passion when what you had to offer was New Relationship Energy, shit’s gonna go wrong.
And yet it is so goddamned flattering to be thought of as Stability, or Raw Passion, or Romance – to have someone take a side of you that you yourself would like to be and shower you with reassurances that no, you’re an idealized version of yourself. They tell you that you’re Wise and Strong, and the fact is that you’re seven years older than they are and all that Wisdom and Strength is just a tadge more experience, and you’ll still do dumb-ass things when someone hits you from an unexpected angle – but having someone who looks up to you is so hard to resist.  So if you’re not smart you’ll try to play the role of Wise and Strong when that is not, in fact, your native skill….
…and that’ll wreck both your lives as you try to live up to an expectation you can’t actually provide.
And that’s part of the challenge of dating: sometimes, you don’t trust your partners. Sometimes you don’t date people because they believe in the wrong things about you. Sometimes you have to look someone in the eye and go “Yeah, that is a beautiful thing to think about me, but you’re full of shit.”
Try doing that sometimes. It’s hard. It’s very fucking hard.

Why My Drugs Are Fucked Up

“You’re not on a statin right now?” my cardiologist said, distressed.  “Oh no. Oh no no no. You’re a heart patient, you have to be on a statin.”
“I thought I was on a statin: Bystolic.”
“No, that’s a beta blocker. It’s intended to prevent heart attacks. The statin lowers your cholesterol.”
“Isn’t that what Welchol does?”
“It does, a little, but that’s mostly to prevent you slipping into pre-diabetic numbers.  Here, I’ll show you how bad you are: we’re going to run some blood tests to show you what your cholesterol is now, and in four months we’ll show you how much you need the statins.”
Why couldn’t we have had that before?
It would have been a lot easier for me if the doctor had sat down with me and said, “You need to be on four medications: a statin to lower your cholesterol, a beta blocker to prevent your heart from seizing up, a medication to keep you from tipping into diabetes, and Vitamin D to keep the healthy oils in your blood.  If you’re not on one of those at any given time, then my treatment isn’t working.”
Instead – like a lot of doctors – he gives me a bunch of confusing names and assumes I’m following, and I thought I was following, but I’m not.  When I went down to three medications, I thought that was a conscious choice on his part, not a clerical error.  And because doctors are often too damned busy to monitor me as closely as they should, I didn’t have the tools to monitor myself.
I now know: I need statins, or things go boom in my chest. (I’ll be fine, but this could have been disastrous long-term.)  And I apparently need beta blockers.  And Welchol for some reason I’m still nebulous on.
But when doctors fail to educate clearly, it’s their patients who suffer. And I’ve tried to educate myself, but the problem is that the doctor – like, again, many doctors – focuses on the individual segments and not the overall plan.  It’s like telling a soldier, “Go attack that guy” – useful in the short term, but if something goes wrong and the soldier doesn’t understand that her ultimate goal is take this hill and keep it, she may charge off after another enemy.
For me, the medications I’m on are a constant shuffling game, as the doctor brings in new medications and the insurance company denies some and others still go into generic form, and it’s hard to keep up.  What would be nice is if I had a chart:

• Your Beta Blocker: Bystolic.
• Your Diabetic Prevention Medication: Welchol.
• Your Good Cholesterol-Retention Medication: Megadoses of Vitamin D.
• Your Statin: ???

And that way, when things switched up, as they inevitably do, I could know which was which.
And I? Am healthy, and in good mental condition. I can’t imagine how complicated this gets for people who are on don’t-go-crazy medications combined with chronic conditions. It’s a part-time job just keeping my prescriptions constant, and I suspect a lot of people are harmed when doctors think they’re being clear but the patients aren’t understanding as well as they’d thought.

The Lessons Of Dead Children.

This doesn’t end well.
I had a supremely good day today; slept in until 10:30, programmed my first real project in C# (and discovered that though it was a new language, I still had some tricks to teach the native programmers), went out and sanded and stained a bookcase, and then wrote a good 900 words on my new book.
Then Gini and I went out to our backyard, lit up a fine cigar, and drank some exquisite bourbon as the sun set and the fireflies crept out across the yard and shooting stars streaked across a cloud-filled sky.
This still doesn’t end well.
It’s been about fourteen months since Rebecca died, and the world still doesn’t make much sense some days. She was six years old. She died on her birthday. She got brain cancer, and it swelled and grew in her skull until she stopped breathing while I knelt at her bedside, my hand on her ankle.
This doesn’t end well.  None of it does.
And I know the end is coming.  Gini is eleven years older than I am.  Chances are good she’ll die before I will, and what will I do when the love of my life is gone?  I’m a heart patient; I feel a twinge in my chest and there’s my mortality, raw and throbbing, that clammy reminder that one day I will be back on the ventilator – or worse, condemned to the backwaters of some old-age home, helpless and weak as overworked nurses ignore me for hours at a time.
It doesn’t end well.
These sun-touched clouds are so beautiful.
And Rebecca is dead, and with it my last hopes of a just universe. I suppose I should have learned that lesson from my own triple bypass, but I was already forty-two, and that’s a good age for someone to die – a little premature, but I’d lived a lot of life.
Here I am, bourbon in my hand, and Rebecca never got to taste alcohol.
None of this ends well.
And yet that is the lesson: None of this ends well.  The end game for all of us is death, and yet this day I feel oddly cheerful.  I cannot hope to cling to any of this.  Our bodies will fail, and this will all be ripped away from me, and yet…
This cigar is beautiful.
My wife’s hand is warm in mine.
We made wishes upon the stars.
I will not get to keep this.  But that is not the goal.  The goal is to appreciate what we have, in this slim instant between birth and the void, and today I lived every minute of my life to the best of my ability.  I savored that cigar.  I poured my heart into those 900 words.  I wrestled that program into submission.
(I stained the bookcase terribly, but even in that, I learned wonderful new crafts techniques.)
This cannot last.  But it’s been good, as long as it’s been.  And my goal is not to hold onto these moments forever, but to cherish them while they are here.  I have been married to the love of my life for fifteen good years, and maybe that ends tomorrow, but every day of that has been something to appreciate, and even if it goes away that’s more than most people got.
The dog rolls in the grass.  The cigar ember smolders.  My wife smiles as she plans her next trip to Seattle.  And when it is done, we will pour another glass of fine bourbon, and put on Battlebots, and cheer as robots smash each other to flinders.
Rebecca is gone.  But we are here.  And it would be a disservice to the bright streak of Rebecca’s life if we lost that future happiness to darkness, and we do not forget the darkness but tonight we celebrate the life we have left, and huddle tight around a dwindling fire.
She is gone.
This does not end well.
That does not mean the story is not worth telling.

Nexus, Crux, Apex: Some Damn Fine Books Y'All Should Read.

Most new technological achievements in fiction are presented in one of two ways:

• This new thing will save mankind! And some evil people are trying to stop it!
• This new thing will doom mankind! And some evil people are trying to make it popular!

Truth is, every technological achievement comes with benefits and negatives. The Internet made it easier for isolated people to find friends, but it also allows pedophiles to band together. The same algorithms that helpfully suggest your next Netflix show can be hijacked by the government to predict your behavior.  There’s never been a technological revolution that didn’t come with a few bodies in the basement, but fiction tends to not have time to deal with complexity.
Ramez Naam’s Nexus/Crux/Apex trilogy sure as fuck has time to look at both sides of the coin, though.
Nexus is a nano-drug that acts as an operating system in your brain, letting you network with others in real time and hack portions of your consciousness.  It’s been open-sourced, and it is also completely illegal, because the US government is – rightfully – concerned that an interconnected operating system that allows people to rearrange their memories at will and to load Bruce Lee fighting programs into their brain is a security issue that will cause massive breaches.
The book sets up a “massive government vs. spunky hackers” plot, but the issue is that the government’s concerns are very real.  The ramifications of Nexus are as huge to this world as the Internet was to us about forty years back, and whereas the hackers are right that the ability to connect with other people and share experiences is empowering, they are also overlooking the many negative ways that bad people can – and, in fact, will – use this experience to fuck other people over.
In this, the Nexus series is wonderfully complex, because everybody has a point.  The government is clinging to the status quo, yes, but that’s because it’s totally unclear whether the government’s citizens would survive the transition to a transhuman future.  The hackers are occasionally a little cocksure.  This is a Pandora, and Ramez Naam treats it  appropriately as a global issue, starting in the US but soon branching to India and China and, well, everywhere.
And more importantly, the technology feels real.  The black-ops tech the government has will absolutely smash the spunky hackers’ limited resources every time unless they can hook up with other, greater, forces. As such, alliances become a huge issue, and the alliances only work as long as everyone’s on the same page – which doesn’t happen for long as the ramifications of what people can use Nexus to do spreads.
Not to mention the fact that “transhuman” is a real concern – what a bunch of Nexus-enabled people can do outstrips normal people’s abilities, even as it leaves them open to hacking attempts and trojan viruses.  And when the governments clash, and the civil wars break out, and the terrorists start playing their hands…
Well, things get delightfully messy.
The book has a couple of minor flaws – to me, the “renegade hacker” syndrome where one man can rewrite major portions of an OS in days was a break from reality, but an acceptable one – but what I loved about the Nexus series was the sense of enlightenment.  The book has intraconnected Buddhist monks providing serenity, and what’s delightful about the series is that sense of transcendence’s ephemerality.
Because the characters each achieve these moments of perfect grace, a time when everything is made clear to them – and then they have to deal with the grimy details of the real world and forget portions of what they’ve learned, but they are on an upwards climb.
Yet what I love about the Nexus series is that the governments have these moments of perfect grace. There are times when everyone in the chain of command is illuminated, seeing everything as it is – and then some of them retain that knowledge and work to forward the future, while others fall back on old patterns and reject it.  There are several moments where we see clearly what should be done, and we also see the counterweighting forces to understand why it’s not done.
This is a marvelous achievement.  And when the trilogy ends, the characters’ storylines are wrapped up, but the politics do not end.  Nobody finishes on the same page.  They can’t.  That is the very point of the Nexus trilogy: that good people can disagree on how to push forward, and this conflict we see in the real world isn’t good vs. evil, just different priorities weighted.
All that happens with a good crunchy action sequence every fifty pages or so.  Pick it up. Discover the future.

On Bernie Sanders And The Black Vote

So Bernie Sanders – my personal fave for the Democratic Presidential candidate – has been taking some heat for not addressing black issues well.
My response: good.  Even if I disagree with his critics.
Every candidate has this moment where they charge onto the stage with their priorities, and discover the voters have different priorities.  And they either a) ignore those voters, and don’t get elected, or b) change up to address those voters’ issues, and potentially get elected.
Now me? For me, Bernie is like a walking Overton Window of progressive politics; we’ve spent the last forty years watching Reagan and his successors nudge the frame of our viewpoint further and further right until Obama – a moderate candidate at best – looks like a frothing socialist to many.  Having Bernie Sanders in the race, even if he doesn’t win, will serve the same function that the Occupy movement did: to raise questions as to what’s reasonable, and start a dialogue about issues that conservatives have long buried under that 1950s McCarthy imminent-apocalypse vibe of “You don’t want a socialist in office, do you?”
(I’d be happy with either Hillary or Bernie if elected, but since I think neither’s likely to get a lot of laws passed in the face of Republican Congressional resistance, I’d rather go with the guy who’s going to be more ambitious than Hillary’s warmed-over, half-hearted gestures towards worker fairness.  Hillary’s always been more Wall Street when it comes to equality politics.)
And what Bernie says to me makes a lot of sense to me as a white guy.  I think if he got his way, black people everywhere would be better off, because I think focusing on economic reform and cheap education would lift all boats for everyone poor – and since black people are disproportionately poor, they would benefit disproportionately.
However.
Note that this is White Dude expressing his opinion.
Black Dude, and Black Dame, need to be convinced.  And they may feel what I said is a tide of horseshit they’ve heard a thousand times before, and they want actual focus on restitution and specific reforms aimed at helping the black community.
Which is fine! One of the things I fucking loathe about the “be a good ally” mentality is that sense that “If you have a different approach to fixing this problem, you are evil and don’t want the problem fixed!”  No; the world is fucking complicated, and there’s room for reasonable disagreement on the “best” way to do things.  I have my own opinions on what might help, shaped by my experiences, and others have theirs, and the best we can do is to fully acknowledge that hey, either of us might turn out to be wrong over the course of time, and to encourage a healthy exchange of opinions.  I acknowledge I might be wrong, and I hope anyone disagreeing with me on “the best way to address the economic inequalities that black people suffer” also acknowledges that they do not have perfect knowledge on how to fix all those ills.
(In other words, I believe fully that as a white dude, I cannot fully understand the black experience no matter how I try, but I also believe that “experiencing the pain of a bad system” is a very different thing from “knowing how to fix that bad system” – and as such, there’s room for debate from all sides on what the best approaches are.)
And what Bernie Sanders is getting right now is a bunch of angry people going, “I think what you’re proposing is horseshit.”
When you get accused of fomenting equine excrement, what good people do is to stop, take in that feedback, analyze it, and see whether that new information changes things.  Sometimes it doesn’t.  Sometimes it does.
And we’ve seen Bernie Sanders maneuvering to change his message to address “Black Lives Matter” more explicitly – clumsily, yes, but everyone’s clumsy when they first change their message.  And that’s good.  It shows he’s taking the issue seriously, and he’ll either put more effort into explaining how he thinks his economic equality policies will affect those issues, or he’ll start addressing black issues more directly.  Either of which is awesome.
Sort of! Because what we’re seeing now is the inevitable leftward bend of the primaries, where we get candidates who appeal to the leftiest of lefties – and like the conservative primaries, we may see an effect where we select candidates who are RAH RAH LIBERAL and then it turns out that our candidates can only thrive in the rarified air of the liberal oxygenator, and wilt and die when exposed to actual moderate Americans.
But that’s the best process we have now, alas.  And Bernie Sanders?  I think he’s got good ideas.  But I’m not the person he needs to convince to win the damn election.  And I think it’s a good thing that he’s getting battered a little by Black Twitter – because I think it’s good for people to get battered, to be forced to justify their beliefs before a group of skeptical people.
My belief is that decisions without debate are like trying to build an impregnable fortress in the absence of warfare.  You can go, “Oh, yeah, this thing we built? Nobody could get in.” But you don’t know where the weak points are until you have a bunch of very motivated people looking to break into your building – and when that happens, you’ll find all sorts of flaws you hadn’t considered.
Which is why I’m against anything that squashes polite debate.  I think we only come up with the best solutions when we take on as many comers as we humanly can, comers who are all asking “What’s wrong with this?”  Some of them are asking in bad faith, and after answering their questions to the best of our ability, we move on.  But the folks who point out flaws in good faith should be considered, and discussed, and eventually addressed when possible.
Bernie Sanders – my hope for the 2016 flagbearer – either will do that well, or he’ll become an also-ran.  He’s more likely to be an also-ran at this point thanks to Hillary’s momentum, so my hope is that he becomes so adroit at addressing these issues that it becomes such a strength of his that it winds up being a factor Hillary doesn’t have.
Or he won’t.  And if he doesn’t, well, I hope whoever gets the nod does find a way to make the black communities feel like their issues are being addressed, because God damn this past year has shown the need for someone in power to do something to stop all the killings and abuse and economic injustice.

Physicists! Help An Author to Wreck An Entire Continent Accurately!

One of the weirder aspects of writing novels is that eventually, you assemble a dream team of experts to consult. When I wrote Flex, which dealt with a severely burned girl, I consulted my friends MedKat and Cassie Alexander, both medical experts who helped me get the ICU details right.  When I wrote The Flux, which features a child with PTSD and a funeral, I consulted my friends Dr. Natasha Lewis Harrington (a child therapist) and Heather Ratcliff (a mortician) to get the details right.
Now, uh, I’ve kind of broken all of Europe and I need to talk to a physicist.
In case you’re unfamiliar with Flex, in it there are creatures called “Buzzsects” that devour our laws of physics – they eat the speed of light, change the rules of time, et cetera.  And now, I want to do some XKCD “What-if?” thought experiments to go, “What happens if the speed of light permanently drops to, say, 50 MPH in a ten-foot area?  What happens if we change the structure of an atom?”  And to explore that ensuing mayhem.
If you’re a) experienced with physics, and b) think this sort of “Remove one major law of physics, see how the rest of it collapses” thought experiment might be fun (with the caveat that story needs may trump precise accuracy), do me a favor and email me at theferrett@theferrett.com with the header “I AM WILLING TO WRECK EUROPE.”  For you, dear sir or madam, will be the one who helps me determine the fine details of how to savage an entire continent.
And really, how often do you get that opportunity?