The Object of Dread: Something Few People Talk About In Love

The trick to understanding love is that it is the easy part.  Love flows freely, as we all long to be in love, and so given the slightest outlet love will come fizzing out of us like champagne from a bottle.
The problem is in this society, “love” gets confused with “like” – and anyone who’s ever loved a family member who irritates them with every single phone call and yet still rushes to the hospital in tears whenever something goes wrong, knows that love and like are as similar as apples and crankcase shafts.
Give someone a relationship full of love but no like, and it’ll be awash in petty arguments about mundane things – why do you watch that stupid FOX News, well, why do you listen to that insipid song, oh look we’re late for this movie again.  It’s like living in a sniper pit, where you’re continually being shot at by irritations.  But give someone a relationship with zero love, yet topped off with vast amounts of like, and it’ll function well enough.  Won’t be as satisfying as a sweeping romance, but you’ll live in a house without killing each other, and you’ll pay the bills on the time, and not fight over what movie to watch, and enjoy each other’s company.
Love often renews, automatically, like a magazine subscription.  It takes a lot to shake someone out of a good love.
Renewing like, however, takes an active effort.  And when the like’s gone, as I have been arguing here, the relationship might as well be over.  You won’t be happy in it.  You can’t be happy.  You’re with someone who’s constantly jabbing at your ribs with an umbrella, and though it may be an accidental jabbing, you’re still stuck with someone who’s lowering the quality of your existence.
And what no one tells you is that as each dollop of like evaporates, it leaves behind a thin layer of dread.
Like many things about relationships, dread is best recognized in retrospect.  It’s that small “Oh, God, I have to…” when you think about being in your lover’s arms.  It’s that reluctance to show up, lest s/he do That Thing again.  It’s that twinge of reassurance you have to offer yourself that everything will be wonderful if that just doesn’t happen.  It’s that weight on your heels as you go out the door, realizing that if you don’t go you’ll have to explain why and oh Lord let’s get it over with.
Learning to identify dread is a very valuable skill in a relationship, because most people are bad at it.  We’re trained that if we’re in love, everything is wonderful, and so if there is dread, we try not to acknowledge that.  We submerge it.  We argue it away by saying that doubtlessly, we all have bad habits, and this is just one soft spot among the many delightful things our partner brings to us, and aren’t we just as bad sometimes?  We see it as a problem to be worked on, something we’ll get used to, like choking down vegetables until you learn to like the taste.
Yet dread is different than annoyance.  Annoyance is when your partner does something, and you hate that, but you still want to be around them.
Dread is when you actively start to not want to see them.  You often do, because if the relationship hasn’t tumbled head-first into the Chasm of Dread, there’s still a left to like, and this twinge of please no is drowned out by a chorus of yes please.
Yet the relationship’s in trouble when, consciously or no, you hesitate and do that calculation: should I?
And dread creeps up slowly, because usually you’re floating on a big sunny sea of New Relationship Energy where everything is wonderful, and you’re loathe to call it dread because society says that you can’t be in love forever with someone you dread, and by God society is pretty spot-on on this one.  You don’t want to think it’s over this soon.  So you try not to think about it and just blindly hope that it’ll get better.
Little bits of dread can sometimes be snipped away, but that gets awkward, because you have to have to say, “Something you’re doing is so big a turn-off that it’s making me not want to show up.”  There’s a careful alchemy here, which varies from person to person – step too lightly and they’ll go, “Oh, you’re not really bothered by me subjecting you to Dutch Oven farts when we’re in bed!” Step too harsh, and they’ll react as though you’ve just told them a part of them is vile and repellent – which, you know, it actually is to you if you’re talking about it honestly, but you’re often not asking them to stop being that, just to not be that around you.
Which is tricksy.  Dread’s often a sign that you’re fundamentally mismatched.  Who wants to talk about that?
But dread is the death of relationships.  You need to recognize when dread is creeping up, and look it boldly in the face to say, “Maybe this isn’t gonna work.”
Since you can, as noted, get by without love.  If you have to, you can function as a unit for the kids or your career without like.  But when you’re saturated in dread, well, the biggest danger is not a break-up.  It’s that you’ll stay together, loathing so much of each other that it’s like living in a mosquito-filled tent and never being able to really swat, filled with all sorts of awful things you can’t bring yourself to say because you love them and don’t want to hurt their feelings and they don’t seem to have all of this dread, they’re filled with nothing but purest love, and how could you refuse that?
So you wait.  Dreading.  Flinching in anticipation of the next hammerfall, and it will fall.  But not leaving, because hey, you’re in love, that should mean something.  And there, trapped in a place where you have no affection left in your heart, you will find out just how bare, rocky, and discomfiting love – and only love – can be.

Also, Brilliance From The Crowd, By Which I Mean You

I’m brain-dead right now, since I was up until 3 a.m. talking with the vivacious Nayad, and then could not fall to sleep.
However, yesterday I posted a fear that the death of brick-and-mortar stores might cause increased pricing, and there have been some fascinating discussions on whether UPS deliveries would be cheaper overall.  There’s some really interesting points, so I’ll just direct you to the comments.

A Kickstarter I Enjoy: GUD Magazine

We are all adrift in a sea of Kickstarters, but this one’s worthy.  You may remember GUD Magazine, the fine (and bulky) magazine full of awesome stories, as I reviewed way back when.  GUD has a nice vibe that I adore, nice character-driven stories that run the gamut in tone.  And they were, eventually, kind enough to purchase my story “In The Garden of Rust and Salt,” which for an early post-Clarion story is still one of my strongest.
Now they have a Kickstarter for Issue #7, which has all kinds of good writers.  The Kickstarter is already funded, because they are that good, but the real value is in the zine you’ll get, which I have every faith will be awesome.  So if you like speculative fiction, check it out.  Soon.  (It’s over in 54 hours.)

My Strange Fear About Amazon's Dominance

Barnes and Noble’s quarterly results came out today, and they’re not good; sales down 10%, store-to-store comparisons down, Nook sales down.  It looks like B&N is sliding the way of Borders…. though since they’re much better managed and essentially the only big dog left in the show, I think they’ll have more fight in ’em.
That said, I’m actually terrified of Amazon winning the book war.  Or any war involving retail.
It’s not because I think Amazon is an evil company – well, okay, they are an evil company, but pretty much all companies are evil.  As The Corporation accurately said, corporations are sociopaths, feral beasts designed to devour the competition and minimize costs at any price.  There’s some human element of resistance flitting about within the soul of the Beast, but not much, and as a result I think cheering for Apple over Microsoft or Google is like having a favorite killer bear.  They’re all going to turn on you, if they’re hungry.
No, I worry about the end of cheap gas.
Right now, Amazon’s high because shipping is pretty damn cheap.  We can afford to have UPS drivers going from home to home, delivering shit right to your door… which is a colossal usage of energy, if you think about it.  Before, you shipped books from a warehouse to a mostly-central location, but now the pattern is increasingly, “Let’s not deliver one large package to the shop in the middle of town, but hundreds of smaller packages to everyone in the town.”
And if prices rise sharply, then what happens?  Suddenly, Amazon.com – or any other delivery service – will become unaffordable.  (Sure, that $25 free shipping is genius, but if it suddenly cost you $10 for every package, would you bother?)  And if that happens, and Amazon has consumed the other competition, there won’t be the infrastructure to buy locally.  All the bookshops will be gone, the Best Buys and Circuit Cities demolished, and what the fuck will we do then?
Oh, I know, you bold believers in capitalism think, “Oh, we’ll just flex back!  No problem!  Business is almighty, it’ll adapt!”  But that’s a lot of retail expertise lost, and a lot of poor and rural neighborhoods underserved, and I think we’ll find that when delivering door-to-door becomes unfeasible, a lot of people will be left without the ability to get stuff.  Or, more accurately, they’ll be able to get stuff at ridiculously high delivery prices that will cripple their budget.
As a result, I’m always a little against Amazon.  Which is silly, on some levels; I work for an internet retailer, and it’s like rooting against my own job security.  But still.  I want the brick and mortars around, because in the back of my mind the collapse is coming, the end of oil is coming, the zombies are coming, and dammit we should be prepared.

Story A Day Review #2: The Sounds Of Old Earth, by Matthew Kressel

The Sounds of Old Earth, by Matthew Kressel

Earth has grown quiet since everyone’s shipped off to the new one. I walk New Paltz’s empty streets with an ox-mask tight about my face. An acidic rain mists my body, and a thick fog obscures the vac-sealed storefronts. Last week they hauled the Pyramids of Giza to New Earth. The week before, Stonehenge. The week before that, Versailles and a good chunk of the Great Wall. But the minor landmarks are too expensive to move, the NEU says, and so New Paltz’s Huguenot Street, seven centuries old, will remain here, to be sliced to pieces in a few months when the planetary lasers begin to cut the Earth apart.

I pump nano into my bloodstream to alleviate my creeping osteoarthritis and nod to a few fellow holdouts. We take our strolls through these dusty streets at ten every morning, our little act of rebellion against the mandatory evacuation orders. I wave hello to Marta, ninety-six, in her stylishly pink ox-mask. I shake hands with Dr. Wu, who performed the op to insert my cranial when I was a boy. I smile at Cordelia, one hundred and thirty-three, as she trots by on her quad servo-legs. All of us have lived in New Paltz our entire lives and all of us plan to die here.

Someone laughs behind me, a sound I haven’t heard in a long time. A group of teenage boys and girls ride ancient turbocycles over the cracked pavement toward me. They skid to a halt and their eager, flushed faces take me in. None wear ox-masks, which is against the law. I like them already….

Here’s a secret: I’m a sucker for any “Last Day” story.  If the home you live in is about to be pulverized by outside forces, and there is nothing you can do to stop it, then you’ve got me… for you have to sell me on all the romance associated with this thing that will soon be lost forever.  And this is the most satisfying kind of “Last Day” story, where the whole Earth is going to be blown up and it’s time to muse upon all of society dying.
Except they’re not.  They’re moving away.  Earth isn’t being destroyed because it’s dead, it’s being destroyed because, well, it’s kind of unsightly.  We have better options.  Mallworlds, for example.  And so what we get is an interesting conflict about what we’d actually lose when we’re going to someplace way shinier.
This is a simple story for its length, and what I like about it is what it does not do.  The first visitor the old man gets does not fall in love with Old Earth.  The old man does not lay down, suicidally, to be cut to ribbons by planetary lasers.  No, the ending is still reasonably “I saw it coming,” but it’s the right kind of seeing it coming in that it’s going in a direction you wanted to head anyway, and lo!  Here it is!
Some of the little bits vexed me on this one, though.  For some reason, this was a very homey and old story – the bones of it could easily have been published in the 1980s – and yet it’s filled with cyberpunkish jargon, particularly the hybrid corporations that have sponsored the satellites.  Yes, I think that Google would sponsor a satellite for people to move to, and I quite like the subtle ways that the new Earth is much more consumer-oriented than the old one.  But when you say “Google-Wang,” in addition to the normal chuckle of “I already do,” I take a side trip off to wonder what sort of corporate forces would have caused them to combine, and then I go off on a tangent.  Yet for me, all the jargon was like chrome sparkles stuck onto a classic 1950s car – not needed and distracting.  Some future-jargon sounds futuristic, and others just sound like, well, chrome sparkles.
No matter.  The people in this tale are likeable, which is what you want in a story about the end of the world, and there’s a low-key drama in that even the yelliest of fights are between folks trying to do good for each other, and it’s a sweet story.  I don’t know if it’ll stick in my mind, say, a year from now, but it was mighty nice going down today.
Four stars out of five.
 

Three Tips To Handle Five Hundred Comments Landing In Your Inbox

One of the interesting things about FetLife is its “Kinky and Popular” page, wherein the most popular photo, video, or essay can get voted up.  It propels people into the spotlight, as something they’ve written is suddenly viewed by thousands of people…
…and most of them don’t know how to handle the naysayers.
So what’s happening is that people who’ve never dealt with large audiences suddenly have large audiences, and get bent out of shape.  So here’s three tips on dealing with five hundred comments landing in your inbox:
Tip #1: No, Seriously.  Haters Are Going To Hate.
You cannot name a thing in the universe that someone is not violently against: Shakespeare. Love. Chocolate. Fruit.  (Oh, God, fucking fruit.)
So no matter how wise, beautiful, or truthful the thing you just posted about is, someone will hate it. They may not be aware of it to hate it, but that’s only a matter of time.  Once your essay becomes at all popular, you’ll have people telling you “God, no, that’s wrong, you’re awful.”
There may be only one or two of those nasty comments, sprinkled in a sea of rapturous adoration, but it takes only one mouse turd in your cereal bowl to sap your appetite.
A lot of people freak the fuck out when told they’re wrong.  “If someone says I’m wrong, I must be wrong!” they think, and regret posting this essay because of “all the controversy,” and then retreat to a monastery to rethink their world view.  This is ninny-headed.  Negative responses are just the cost of speaking your mind honestly; like death and taxes, you cannot avoid them.  The fact that dissension exists does not negate the truthfulness of your world view.
Once you get to a sufficient level of popularity, there is literally no avoiding people hating you.  Go on, seriously.  Name a celebrity.  Then Google up some haters.  Sure enough, someone fucking abhors them.  Why do you think you’re going to avoid this?
The trick is to think of it as a game of percentages.  If the feedback is 95% positive, hey, you did a good job.  If the feedback is 50/50%, you’ve stumbled onto a controversial topic, and it may well be that it’s impossible to write a universally-loved essay on abortion.
If the feedback is 95% negative, you probably have stuck your foot in your mouth.   That doesn’t mean you’re necessarily a bad person; you could have just spoken very badly, or regurgitated some harmful opinions you slurped up somewhere without thinking.  Then, it may be time to engage.
But if you’ve got two really nasty comments out of five hundred?  That’s awesome.  Way above average.  Stop moaning and give yourself a pat on the back.
Tip #2: Some People Are Not Actually Reading Your Essay. 
As a writer, you soon learn that your words aren’t your own.  Words are an incomplete telepathy; if I tell you, “Here is a rabbit.  On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8,” you fill in all sorts of details, because I don’t have time to tell you what font the 8 is in.
And when you write essays, particularly on hot-button topics that tend to get popular, folks bring their own baggage.
For example, when I wrote an essay about how I mistakenly approached polyamory as though it were monogamy, treating my girlfriends as though I were leading up to total commitment and marriage, I said that one of the glories of polyamory was that because the end goal wasn’t marriage and living together, you did not have to be completely responsible for your partner.  If your lover goes off on long, angry tirades every time someone, say, wishes her Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas, you don’t actually have to have a sit-down talk with her to change this vexing behavior.  If you’re not going to be living with her, then you don’t necessarily have to alter her annoying habits for your survival.  You can, say, maybe just avoid her during December.
Some of the reactions to that post had me puzzled; clearly, they said, I was just looking for women to fuck, and didn’t give a shit about my partners’ emotions.  I was baffled; just because I didn’t want to deal with all of my lovers’ problems meant that I was using them and never caring? What the fuck? There’s shades, man.
Yet to those people, any sort of commitment that wasn’t FULL-ON TO MARRIAGE meant that the commitment wasn’t worth having… and they knew that men who didn’t want commitment wanted only sex.  Therefore, I only ever had sex, and probably emotionally abused my partners to get that.
That could be upsetting, but I knew they weren’t actually reading my essay.  They were arriving here with a very clear prejudice in their heads, and once I hit their hot-button topic, they stopped reading what I’d written and began scribbling in all the things they knew people like me did.  You’ll see that all the time when people discuss gun control, or tax cuts, or liberals/conservatives – people stop interacting with the essay on the page and start squabbling with ghosts, all those fictional liberals/conservatives who think the same thing and by gum, they’re gonna teach those fictional folks a lesson.
Sometimes, you’ll get people who will be very mad and angry, and seem to have not gotten the point.  They didn’t actually read you.  They read an echo of their past.
It happens.  Move on.
Tip #3: Stop Arguing When You Agree On The Facts. Or When You Realize You Can’t Agree On The Facts. 
If you’ve written anything worthwhile, it’s probably because a significant part of your personality is tangled up in it.  Good essays are a reflection of who you are.
You’ll run into people who will argue to the death because the philosophy you just espoused threatens large swathes of their personality.  You being correct actually subtracts from who they are.  So they’ll run out and charge into you, desperate to tear you down.
Engaging with people is good.  It opens minds.  But if you don’t find arguing entertaining – I do – then you should probably stop when you realize you’re not going to change the other person’s mind.  You’re not actually debating at that point, for debates require the possibility of a victor.
I usually stop replying when I realize that someone is looking exactly at what I’m looking at – they see it’s a rabbit with a design on its back, they acknowledge the shape of the design, but they see it as an infinity sign and not an eight.  We have both agreed that this thing exists, in the same way and now we have come to a dispute we cannot resolve.   It sounds silly, but once you’re debating abortion and realize that the other guy sees this three-week blob of flesh, acknowledges it could not survive outside of the mother in any way, and yet still sees it as an infant worth protecting – well, you’re not gonna make headway.  Best to chalk it off as an unresolvable.
I also stop replying when someone’s facts are so ridiculous that I can’t respect them.  When someone tells me how Romney would have won if he’d just gotten McCain’s turnout, or that Reagan “came from behind” in the 1980 election, I realize I’m dealing with a schmoe who can’t even do the simplest of research, and I abandon.  I can respect Republicans, and I can respect disagreement, but debating with someone who wants to clutch his own facts to his chest and won’t even acknowledge he’s wrong on these trivial, easily-disproved issues will lead to nowhere.
Engaging with folks will force you to be a stronger thinker, a better debater, and you’ll be proved wrong often enough that it’s worth doing.  But you also have to know when to let someone win by walking away, especially in your journal.  It’s okay.  Don’t waste your time on people who won’t change, and you’ll be a better person.