"What If Someone Wants To Sleep With Me When They're Drunk?"

So you wake up in the morning with a hangover, and a tattoo of Spongebob Squarepants farting on… you’re not sure who he’s farting on, actually. The tattoo is poorly enough done that you’re only certain it’s Spongebob because it says “SPANGBOB” in wavering letters above it.
Scratching the clots off your blood-sticky arm, you stagger off the couch. Your friend Micah’s there, his tattoo kit by the wayside. “What happened?” you ask.
“Wild night,” he grins. “You got hammered.”
“Obviously. Why do I have a tattoo?”
“Ah,” Micah says, shrugging it off like you’re making a joke. “You’ve been talking about getting a tattoo for months.”
“I’ve said I’ve been saving for a tattoo.”
“No need to pay! You know I need the practice. Been telling you that for months. I’ve been wanting to do it for free on that lovely forearm of yours, and last night you said ‘Eh, go ahead.'”
You’re doubtful of that. You don’t recall last night. It could be that maybe you thought that Farting Spangbob was a hoot, or maaaaybe that Micah decided to break out his newfound tattoo skills upon you when you couldn’t say no. You can’t say.
But now you’ve got a tattoo. And Micah hoping to do another later this afternoon.
————–
Now. This is obviously a “should you have sex with drunken people” metaphor, and particularly dim men will say “A tattoo isn’t the same as having sex with someone! Tattoos are permanent!” And before you say that, kindly ponder the fact that there’s people who’ve gotten HSV during drunken escapades, and there’s no laser removal for that.
(Not to mention that little risk called “pregnancy” if you’re of the female persuasion, which guys often forget about as when pondering the permanent consequences of sex. Which is a shame, as an unwanted pregnancy in a sex partner can affect a guy a hell of a lot as well.)
And this essay’s a bit of a mirror. Many people will look at it and conclude the lesson of this narrative is, “Well, the protagonist shouldn’t have gotten that drunk.”
But you know what the other lesson is?
Micah’s kind of a dick.
Micah did things of potentially permanent consequence to his buddy, fully aware that he might regret them come the next morning. Because we all know stories of people who’ve done things when they were hammered that they wouldn’t normally have done sober, and while one lesson that can be extracted is “You shouldn’t drink a lot,” the other lesson that should be extracted is, “If you’re interacting with someone who’s drunk, you shouldn’t take them at their word.”
This is well-known. Legal contracts have been voided because someone was drunk when they signed them. In many states, bartenders are legally obliged to cut customers off after a certain level of drunkenness because drunk people can’t make good decisions. In fact, reputable tattoo parlors won’t take drunk people at all because they don’t want the risk.
By sleeping with someone who’s drunk, you’re a disreputable tattoo parlor, which is to say you’re Micah.
Do you want to be Micah?
Again, this is a reflective lesson, because some folks will double down on the “The Protagonist was drunk, he deserves anything that’s coming to him,” all the while avoiding the independent issue of whether Micah should be doing things to drunk people that he’s well aware they might not want come the morning.
If we’re talking about “personal responsibility” and “the known risks of being drunk,” then at the very least Micah is being unwise by exposing himself to the hazard of taking a drunk person’s word as bond. And at the worst, Micah’s a scumbag predator waiting for someone to get drunk so he can do things he is fully aware they would dislike when sober.
Literally the best thing you can say about Micah is that he’s not quite as dumb as his friend, and that’s being kind.
So I personally feel the lesson should be, “You should avoid doing things to drunk people whenever possible.” Don’t be a Micah.
Ah, but that’s if Micah’s sober. “What if Micah himself is drunk?”, and that’s a trickier question if Micah is himself impaired.
But it’s kinda funny. When The Narrator is drunk, lots of people would say that any dangerous activity he consents to is foolish, and he deserves any consequences he gets.
But when Micah is drunk and doing things to the narrator, those same people would say that the dangerous activity that Micah has consented to – which is to say, exposing yourself to potential accusations of unwanted tattoos – is foolish, Micah shouldn’t be expected to know what’s going on then, and this all becomes the narrator’s fault.
Strange, how the script flips when you’re invested in Micah’s well-being.
Whereas I’m consistent in my beliefs: I believe that whenever possible, you shouldn’t aid drunk people in making potentially unwise decisions, even if the drunk person is really hot.
Because trying to sleep with drunk (or otherwise judgement-impaired) people is a risky goddamned business with potentially permanent side effects. If it’s a decision I know with 100% certainty that they’d be okay with in the morning, I might do it – if my wife, who has slept with me regularly for seventeen years, decides she wants to bang me shitfaced, well, I’ll take that risk.
But it is a risk. And I wouldn’t do anything new or crazy in bed with her, because the next morning she might wake up and be very mad about Spangbob.
Why take that risk, when I can ask her sober the next morning and, assuming she’s as into as she was the night before, potentially Spangbob the shit out of her the next evening with assured consent?

Your Writing Group Is Not A Godhead: Building Upon Some Fine Writing Advice From Ann Leckie

Yesterday, Ancillary Justice author Ann Leckie wrote a really great essay on chasing trends in fiction and why writing novels on the “next hot thing” for the sake of fame and fortune alone is a generally unwise idea.  She packs a lot of wisdom into a handful of paragraphs.  You should go read it.
But I wanted to expand on something she said, specifically this:

And if folks in your writers group or message board or whatever are telling you things like “you have to have a POV character that’s like the reader so they can sympathize with them” or “don’t write in first person” or “editors won’t buy stories with queer main characters” well, frankly, no.

One of the best pieces of advice I can give to fledgling writers is to remember you can ignore your fellow writers. And often should.
Look, if you’re serious about writing, you’re eventually going to get feedback from top-class writers.  Those writers are very good at writing their stories.  They may not necessarily be good at writing your stories, and incorporating their advice can leave you with this hamstrung half-hybrid pastiche that lacks both your strengths and theirs.
In workshops, I often write down someone’s feedback along with the notation: NMK.  That stands for “Not My Kink.” Which is to say that yes, this story could be good if I followed this person’s advice and turned the savage were-pterodactyls into genetically engineered cyber-pterodactyls, but then that story wouldn’t be a story I’d be excited to read.
(Who am I kidding? I’d read both of those stories.  But anyway.)
NMK advice is not bad advice.  It’s just advice geared towards writing a story that doesn’t hit my personal hotbuttons.  And for a lot of writers, “refining the hotbuttons” are what sell your craft.  Because a truly unique voice comes from taking all that goofy shiz that you adore and finding ways to make it work.
For example, Quentin Tarantino loves 1970s B-movies.  His work would suck without a heavy dosage of exploitation flicks and hyperaware movie references.  And a lot of writers’ workshops would have looked at early drafts of Pulp Fiction and said, “Okay, Quentin, you need to pull this back, you’re too excessive,” when the actual truth was that Quentin needed to figure out ways to take his love of crappy films, extract the goodness, and refine it until he amplified everything he adored about those films in ways that resonated with people.
And what you’ll often get at the early stages when your talent does not match execution is to pull back.  No.  Try pushing forward.
…but don’t forget that writing is about communication.  You’re trying to build a bridge out to your reader, saying, “I love this, and here’s why you should love it too.”  That takes skill, compromise, an understanding of what people expect so you can subvert and distill it.  You can’t just shout the same old thing through a foghorn and demand that your audience Get It – you have to question people closely to ask, “Okay, they didn’t love the were-pterodactyls, but why?”
Plus, you wanna lay aside that foghorn because you’re not here to regurgitate your source material, but to transform it.   Quentin Tarantino didn’t slavishly imitate the B-movies of his youth – he added his own strengths in terms of razor-sharp dialogue, shaking up the timelines to make thoroughly nonlinear stories.  Shout that love of queer characters, or second-person point of view, or despicable main characters – but do it in ways that are exciting and new!
Figure out what really thumbs that hotbutton, and amplify it.
Also: One of you is sitting there sniffing, “I hate Quentin Tarantino, why is Ferrett talking like Quentin Tarantino is such a great director?”  And that’s the final point: with great love comes great hate.  I adored Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice because it does fascinating things with viewpoint and gender, but it has inspired a tidal wave of hatred from people who are like, “THIS IS TURGID CRAP.”  Yet both Ann Leckie and Quentin Tarantino are fantastically successful at what they do, despite critics who loathe them!
When you receive a critique from a Very Important Author who is telling you that your story Does Not Work, question whether that person would enjoy your story if you’d perfected it.  That guy may be the person who hates Quentin Tarantino movies.  And he’s not wrong to hate them!  Repeat after me: Tastes are subjective.  But if you’re Quentin Tarantino, taking his feedback to heart is going to leave you working in the video rental store, not putting you on the path to World-Famous Director.
The rule of thumb is this: If three people tell you your story has a problem, it’s a problem.  You need to listen when beta readers get bored, or confused, or revolted.  But the way to fix that problem has to come uniquely from you.  Sometimes, the solution is not to cut, but to double down.
And sometimes, the problem is that these writers providing feedback are not an all-knowing Godhead, dispensing objective wisdom from above, but a bunch of nerds stumbling around in a bookstore – loving books you hate, hating books you love.  Sometimes, the bad feedback comes from someone saying, “Hey, George Martin, I love your characters but I’m not down with all this violence and nihilism, you need to get rid of that.”  Except getting rid of that will defang your books from the thing that makes you unique.
You can still get good feedback from those folks.  They can clue you into pacing issues, or enlighten you as to why your love of 1980s horror movies isn’t stirring people who don’t give a dry turd about 80s horror movies, or point out character decisions that make no sense.
But as a professional writer, you have to mark the difference between critiques that point out problems and critiques that are trying to rewrite your book into something you don’t want it to be.
One critique is worth incorporating.
The other needs to be chucked away, fast, and hard and fearlessly.  Because that’s what professional writers do.  And don’t forget the need to protect your own special brand of weirdness.

Random Events In My Life, Or: Ferrett's Too Tired To Think

So just to keep y’all up on the events in the McJuddMetz Household:
1) I’m Getting Handier.  
Folks on Twitter will recall my Woodworking Wednesday photos, wherein I get together with two friends and build stuff in my garage.
And I’ve hit a tipping point: I can just build stuff.
Which is to say that Gini and I have an informal collection of Blanton’s corkstoppers.  Blanton’s is a (delicious) small-batch bourbon that has eight different bottle tops, one for each letter in their name, each showing a horse at different stages of a race.  And we had six bottles up there, and I thought, Hey, I could build a shelf for the stoppers.
So, this Sunday, I spent about two hours and devised a shelftop to hold the corks:

Which is weird.  I didn’t wait for my Woodworking Wednesdays crew to help me; it was just a trivial thing I did, like programming a web page.  I can just build minor stuff, which means I’ve acquired a raw level of skill.
And when I was out in the back yard having drinks and a cigar with Gini, I looked at the workshop we’ve built over the last year, and it’s actually looking like a real woodworking shop:

And I’ve also figured out the way to finish my projects, which was a huge issue.  The first time I stained a bookcase, it looked like a diarrhetic mess.  But thanks to my sweetie C’s father, who is a Master Wood Finisher, I figured out that a spraygun is the way to go when finishing wood, and so the table I’ve built for my friend Heather actually looks pretty decent:

So yeah.  I’m a guy who can build simple furniture.  Had I a character sheet, this skill would now be listed as a reasonably solid percentage.  It’s a good feeling, but a bit weird – “building things” is not what I consider to be a core talent, and in fact I’ve considered it a literal weakness for three decades, so it’s a pleasant feeling to go, “Oh, yeah, I can do that now.”
2)  I Am Bereft Of Bees. 
I mentioned this on Twitter, but I don’t think I mentioned it here: Shasta got stung, and had a seizure, and almost died.  Turns out she’s allergic to bees.  So we had to get rid of them in the spring, which was probably for the best, as we hadn’t really taken care of them in years – Rebecca’s sickness really took the wind out of our beekeeping, and we never recovered.
We gave them away to a guy on Craigslist, who seemed very happy to have his new bees.  He promised he’d take good care of them.  I hope he does.  I’m a little worried because the last thing he told us before he left was how Big Pharma was causing cancer and we needed all-natural solutions, but he was taking our bees and he seemed friendly so I let it slide.
I think of them periodically.  I’m sure they’re fine.  They were hardy little suckers.
3)  Counting Calories Is Weird.
On Saturday, I said, “Fuck it, I’m going to eat whatever I want this evening, just go berserk on Chinese food and sweets.”
Then, because I’d been eating so much less, I got bloated, and I went for a long Pokewalk with Gini to gear down, and wound up only 200 calories over my limit.  Which would be offset by the day before, where I’d wound up 400 calories under without thinking.
I’ve been doing this for two weeks as of today, and we’ll see how it goes when I get to WorldCon, which is not the home of healthy eating.  But speaking of which….
4)  I Am In Slow, Continual Panic. 
So I’m going to WorldCon this week, arriving on Thursday night, and I’m in my usual pre-convention mode of “This will be a disaster.”  I’m sure it’ll be okay, but my brainweasels are telling me that this will be three days of me wandering through an endless lunchroom, looking fruitlessly for people to sit at a table with.  Which is ridiculous; I’ve had some folks offer to buy me drinks, and I still have to shoot my number to a couple of folks who’ve offered to hang out, but still.
(Also, if you wanna hear a sneak preview of the new ‘Mancer book, show up to my reading on Friday.)
And oh yeah, my book is coming out and I’m having the usual heebie-jeebies about it being a huge failure where, paradoxically, nobody will read it and yet everyone will hate it, which is my broken brain shouting, but it’s hard to tamp it down.
I remember going to my doctor before the book release last March and saying, “I need a large prescription of Ativan to alleviate stress.”
“Well,” said my doctor, “I don’t like prescribing pills like that randomly.  Can you do anything else about your stress?”
“I have made this the best book I am capable of writing.  Everything that has been done can be done, the book is typeset, it’s printed, and now all I can do is wait for the reviews and the sales numbers.  There is literally nothing I can do except stress the fuck out.”
“Maybe you could try…” he said, before discussing various stress-reduction techniques I’d tried.
“Look,” I said politely.  “I’m coming to you because I want someone professional to track my usage of anti-stress medication, because addiction runs in my family. If you don’t prescribe me Ativan, I will go down to the liquor store where I can get all the legal, free stress relief I need, and no one will be tracking that, so I’d really prefer your method.”
“I’ll get you some Ativan,” he said.
So these next few weeks will be an Ativan-frenzy, as the book looms closer and the book tour impends and the conventions loom and the impostor syndrome goes crazy.  I’ll handle it, I always do – but I have this weird dance between “Not revealing my mental health issues,” which makes me look really cool and leaves people who suffer from stress thinking “Nobody else goes through this, I’m a freak,” or putting it out in public and letting other people see how a neurotic, socially-anxious person functions and looking like a freak to some people.
So I repeat: I’ll be fine.  But if you wanna hug me at WorldCon, or say hello, or come to the book tour when I visit Seattle, Portland, San Diego, and San Francisco (or even Cleveland), well, I’m happy to see you.
And I will be so happy when the book is out for a few weeks and I know whether it’s a success or a failure, because god damn, the worst thing about the book industry is uncertainty.  I dislike failure.  But I can at least look that in the eye.  Unknowns are like a strobe light, flickering between GREAT HOPE and DISMAL FEARS that induces seizures.
Anyway.  I’ll be cool.  But yeah, some people have tremendous anxiety and still do this stuff.  Somehow.
I handle it by building shelves.

I Like Nametags. I Like Asking About Hugs. I Like Getting It Right For People.

You know what I wish everyone wore all the time?  Nametags.
Because I’m bad with names.  I’ll look at a friendly face and remember all the times we’ve been at cons together, and that great conversation we had about Steven Universe, and that time we had a bourbon tasting up in my room… And I’ll get a sort of stoners’ paranoia whenever I talk to them, going “Do I remember their name right?  I know their Twitter handle.  What if someone asks me to introduce them, I can’t introduce them by their Twitter handle, this is going to be awkward.”
I love the nametag.  Because it ensures I get things right, and don’t embarrass people who I know.
Know what else I love?  Asking for hugs.  “Oh, it’s so good to see you!  Are you huggable?”  And they either answer “Yes” and fling themselves into my arms, or they answer “No” and I wave gaily, and I love that answer either way because I’m positive that I’m carrying out their preference.
I don’t want to wrap my arms around someone and feel them stiffen.  I don’t want to surprise people with ninja hugs they didn’t want.  I absolutely adore asking people because I like satisfying their needs when I’m satisfying mine.
And I hear all the time about folks at conventions who Don’t Get It, who run up and hug people who they barely know just because they’re happy to see them – “Oh, it’s an author I like!” or “Oh, we met once!” or “Oh, they’re tiny and they look huggable!” – and it strikes me as a sort of whacko narcissism, wherein people make that very necessary distinction between “I like this” and “Others like this.”
Some people have past traumas where being suddenly mauled is Not Pleasant for them.  Others reserve their physical touch for people they feel comfortable with, which may not be you.  And still others like bodily autonomy.
What I like is being free of that stoners’ paranoia when I’m hugging someone I like.  What I like is being absolutely certain that when I am hugging someone, they have specifically okayed me to hug them, and that they are not merely tolerating my presence.  What I like is feeling someone hug me back instead of that stiff-bodied “Oh, fuck, they’re going to tell me off, aren’t they?”
I like getting it right for people.
Which is why I like to ask.

Ten Days Of Counting Every Calorie

Food is one of the hardest addictions to quit, because there’s no way to go cold turkey. (Mmmm, turkey.)  Even if you manage to remove, you know, food from the equation – which I tried to do with tasteless-yet-nutritious food replacement Soylent as a test – you walk into a world that’s literally advertising all the goodness of food on every corner.  New strains of food are being made every day, with commercials exhorting you to taste everything. Serving sizes have swollen to vast proportions.
Scant wonder so much of America is fat.
Now, I don’t mind “fat and healthy” – which is, actually, a thing, as I’ve known 250-pound women who regularly run triathalons.  But for Mister Former Triple-Bypass, any extra weight is risking death.  And I’ve been creeping up the scale over the past year, and though I’ve amped my exercise looking in the mirror is still an unpleasant process.
So for my health and my self-esteem, I’m trying some new approaches – with technology!
And for the past ten days, I’ve logged every calorie I eat in into myFitnessPal, which is…. surprisingly enlightening.
The thing I like about myFitnessPal is that it makes it super-easy to track my goals.  I tell it I want to lose a pound a week, and it tells me how many calories I have.  It logs into my iPhone and counts my iPhone steps, and adds those calories to my daily total.  I can scan in foods by their bar code, pretty much every major restaurant chain is included, and I haven’t been able to find a food that’s stumped it yet.
The main benefit, as it turns out, is not counting calories.
The main benefit is tying “food” to “exercise.”
Because I don’t much like having only 2,000 calories to eat a day, but I can up that by taking the dog for a walk or getting on the elliptical.  I frickin’ hate exercise, always have, always will – and don’t tell me “it’s just finding the right exercise,” because what I hate is that sweaty tired feeling – but doing it so I can have an extra glass of milk in the evening incentivizes me to get off my ass.
(And carry my iPhone everywhere so I don’t miss a step.  Every step could be food.)
The other aspect, which I did predict, is that seeing how much of my day is consumed by snacks forces me to consider whether I actually want to eat it or not.  My mother counted calories back in the day, but that was in the 1980s when you had to carry a book around with you, and look things up, and guess a lot because the book was in tiny print and still didn’t cover all the food (also see: America having food everywhere), and then write everything down in another book to do math.
Counting calories now is as trivial as it’s going to get, for the time being.  (There’s talk of an app which can calculate calories by your Instagram snapshots, but that’s not gonna work well for years.)
And being so easy makes you be honest.  I was at Jersey Mike’s the other day, and I saw those little chocolate chip cookies.  They’re tiny, and delicious.  They’re also 190 calories apiece.  But 190 calories doesn’t seem like much, except when you have the math right there to put in three of them and see that it’s basically a quarter of my allotment for the day, and would I enjoy them that much?
Which isn’t to say that I don’t.  I love chocolate milk. A big glass of chocolate milk is like 630 calories, a huge proportion.  But I fucking love it, so some days I have all that milk and am shameless.  But I’m doing so consciously.
But the end result is that I’m forced to consider, which is good.  Being thoughtful about food is good for heart patients, even if it’s not fun.
And I don’t know whether I want to do this long-term.  In September, I know that I’ll be going on a big ol’ book tour soon – visiting Seattle, Portland, San Diego, and San Francisco, all foodie places – and visiting their finest donut shops.
Will I be able to splurge on my vacation and put that shit in the myFitnessPal?
Can I look my own unhealthy happiness in the eye and enjoy it?
And honestly, I believe that you deserve to go nuts every once in a while.  I want a Voodoo Donut when I visit Portland, and I don’t mind if I don’t lose my pound that week, but I’m not sure I can enjoy a Voodoo Donut knowing that one of them is literally a third of everything I’m supposed to eat that day.
That’s the horse you fall off of.  Sometimes, there’s this hard conflict between “The enjoyment I seek” and “The restrictions I’m under,” and it’s really hard to enjoy yourself on lockdown.  Part of the reason some alcoholics go off the wagon is not that they can’t have a single drink and stick to that, but they want to have the enjoyment of not worrying about their inebriation level all the goddamned time.  And so they go on benders because why the hell would you give yourself an evening where you’re luxuriously not counting beers and not pound ’em down?
So I suspect that myFitnessPal will become like my exercise – something I do for periods of time and better myself, then stop it and be shamed, and then start it up again.  And it’s not as good as exercising and calorie-counting all the time, but it’s better than never doing it, so you wind up with a net benefit even if the net benefit isn’t full-throttle.
But for right now, I had a glass of orange juice.  It’s full of Vitamin C, myFitnessPal tells me, and it was also 143 calories.  I can burn it off with a walk around the block for 167 calories.  Which isn’t even a full Pop Tart.
But combine it with the possibility of hatching a Lickitung in Pokemon Go, and it just might be worth hauling my fat ass out the door.

My Book Tour Announced! I'm Coming To SF, Seattle, San Diego, And Portland!

In four weeks, Angry Robot will release the final book in my ‘Mancer series, Fix.  And then, just like I did for the first book, I’m going on tour!
And as usual, when I go on tour, I will not only provide a dramatic reading, but I will also provide you with donuts (because a key plot point in Fix revolves around the choice of a proper donut), and will go out afterwards for drinks with as many of you as care to hang with me!
Last tour was an absolute hoot, and the joy of the tour was introducing my online friends to other friends and watching new and interesting alliances burble out afterwards.  (There have even been a few scandalous hookups.  God bless you people.)
If you’re planning to go, I’d kindly request that you a) say “Yes, I’m going” on Facebook, and b) Invite your local friends who you think would be interested.  Because honestly, I have no idea where any of you people live.  And Facebook said, “Hey, a Seattle event!  Would you like to invite your friends?” and I had zero idea who lived in Seattle except for Amy Sundberg, who I only remembered lived there because she just moved there.  My geography is weak, so if y’all could cover for me by clicking the city link and then inviting interested local folks, that’d be greeeeeeat – I don’t mind people knowing and not attending, but I do mind people who’d want to attend but didn’t know because I am a doof.)
So!  If you’d like to meet a Ferrett, here’s where I’ll be:
CLEVELAND! 
Tuesday, September 6th.
Loganberry Books, 7:00 pm.
13015 Larchmere Blvd, Shaker Heights, OH 44120-1147, United States
SAN FRANCISCO!
Saturday, September 17th.
Borderlands Books, 3 p.m.
866 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94110-1739, United States
SAN DIEGO!
Friday, September 23rd.
Mysterious Galaxy, 7:30 p.m.
5943 Balboa Ave Suite 100 San Diego, CA 92111
(With special co-reader J. Patrick Black, author of Ninth City Burning!)
PORTLAND!
Tuesday, September 27th.
Powell’s Books, 7 p.m.
3415 sw cedar hills blvd / beaverton, or 97005
(With special co-reader K.C. Alexander, author of cyberpunk thriller Necrotech!)
SEATTLE!
Thursday, September 29th.
University Of Washington Bookstore, 7 p.m.
4326 University Way NE, Seattle, Washington 98105
There may also be one or two dates to drop for the East Coast and/or Michigan, but those are taking a little longer to fit together. Remember, this is all taking place on my dime, so as much as I’d love to travel to Australia or Abu Dhabi or Texas, me being everywhere just isn’t possible.  (Thanks much to Mike Underwood and Penny Reeve at Angry Robot for making this all possible.)
But you can encourage me to come back by showing up at the signings, if you can! I’ll sign whatever you put in front of me, assuming it is legally permissible to display it in a bookstore.
 
 

Maybe The Biggest Problem In America: Bad Economic Measurements

Here’s one of the huge problems I see driving the rise of Trump and Bernie Sanders: our economic measurements have almost nothing to do with how my checkout clerk at Target is doing.
Like, it’s great to have the S&P 500 to tell me how corporations are doing, but Google can be making a fortune and that only really affects people who own stocks.  Which, with 401ks and such, is more people than you’d think – but even then, what happens to people’s 401ks, which sane people don’t touch except in times of emergency or great opportunity, has little to do with their bills this month.
The GDP, likewise, tracks large-scale levels of motion – which has an ill-defined affect on how many people are employed, but it doesn’t say what kinds of jobs they have or their potential for forward motion or their monthly expenses.  The job creation indexes would be just as happy if I got fired from my skilled programming job and had to take the minimum-wage pay of a checkout clerk.  The unemployment index doesn’t count people who’ve given up looking for work because there’s no jobs to be found, though admittedly tracking the inactive is a hell of a task.
The statistics the government uses to set policy, in short, have zero to do with how well Mabel the Target checkout clerk is doing.  That’s why Bernie and Trump have gotten so much traction – what’s good for corporations is often not good for blue-collar Americans, yet everything we have is aimed at corporations.
In a sane world, we’d have some sort of “quality of life” factor for people who don’t have college degrees, or who work nonsalaried jobs – a very finely detailed combination of reports on average debt, average rent/housing expenses, average medical care, average income, so we could have one number that says, “If you’re forced to work down in the trenches, here’s how fucked you are.”
Assuming that quality-of-life measurement was widely touted enough, politicians would be incentivized to use that number as part of the calculations they do to set policy.  And things would get better for Mabel.
But we won’t do that, because then we’d have to admit how crappy things have gotten for Middle America.  Hell, we voters can’t even bring ourselves to acknowledge that Middle America has shrunk to the point of emaciation, and the politicians on either side don’t want to create an index that makes it starkly apparent how much of America they’ve just given up on.  And even if we got it, chances are good that every department that fed numbers into that ultimate report would skew them as pleasantly as they could.
I understand why we won’t get it.
That doesn’t stop me from dreaming of wanting it.