Will Ludwigsen

Ooh! An Excerpt from A Scout is Loyal!

November 8, 2026 / Will Ludwigsen

It’s no secret that I have a thing for handbooks. I love the idea that someone sits down with utter confidence that, “Hey, here’s everything you need to know about how to build a model railroad, fix a 1973 Volkswagen bus, or run the U.S. Senate.”

Or, in this case, how not to be an asshole in Vietnam.

A Pocket Guide to Vietnam was distributed (somewhat spottily) to American troops, who applied its lessons also spottily.

In A Scout is Loyal, Bud Castillo is both pleased and bemused by receiving yet another handbook. Enjoy his thoughts in this exclusive excerpt from the novel!

Serving in Vietnam turned out to be just like the Boy Scouts: halfwits starting fires in the woods, officious leaders enforcing the letter of the law instead of the spirit, and damp socks bloating your feet into white flaccid loaves.

They even gave us a handbook, A Pocket Guide to Vietnam, which was perfect to consult when you were slithering desperately under muddy banyan roots for cover or running for your life from mortar shells exploding in a sinking Swift Boat.

“Remember we are special guests here,” it told us.

“Join with the people!” it exhorted. “Understand their life, use phrases from the language, and honor their customs and laws.”

“Reflect honor upon yourself and the United States of America,” it pleaded.

“Your good manners, thoughtfulness, and restrained behavior will be appreciated by the Vietnamese,” it claimed.

I’m a man doomed to be haunted by other people’s handbooks, mostly by taking them more seriously than anyone else, even their authors. I tried my best to reflect honor and show good manners during my time in-country, but I’m not sure how appreciated I was by the Vietnamese. Better to say that some of the Vietnamese and I appreciated one another, all of us exhausted by someone else’s deranged ideas of right and wrong and justice and destiny.

The world doesn’t need another book about how the Vietnam War was a pageant of folly and mass delusion, pretending we could have known better. It doesn’t need one that justifies the war as a “necessary mistake,” either, a disaster later made “worth it” by the eventual fall of Communism in some places across the world. That’s a concept my friends who died there would reject with foul language and rude gestures.

The war doesn’t have to mean anything, though it does have meaning for a lot of us who were there, even briefly in my case. At the time, it felt beyond all meaning like a natural disaster, inevitable like a lightning strike or tsunami.

Except I know now it was less natural than that, and so does my friend Aubrey Marsh, who wanted more than most of us to make that war matter.

There’s more where that come from! Get your own copy here:

You Call Yourself a Horror Writer, You Son of a Bitch?

October 31, 2026 / Will Ludwigsen

You younger folks don’t know how common it was to see live exorcisms on TV talk shows in the 70s.

There’s no shortage of recommendations for what to read or watch on this celebration of the Devil’s birthday¹, but as a horror writer, I feel added pressure to go for the “deep cuts” that make me look like an erudite expert in the field.

At the risk of revealing my tastes as entirely pedestrian (perhaps misleading you to think my forthcoming novel A Scout is Loyal is the same), here are my recommendations² for things to watch while trick-or-treaters wander to your street after looting the wealthier ones.

Lake Mungo could well be my favorite horror movie, contemplative and multi-layered and structured like those paranormal documentaries I loved as a kid.
Stir of Echoes is often mistaken as the lesser also-ran in the “kid can see dead people” category with its contemporaneous rival, The Sixth Sense. They’re both good, but I think Stir of Echoes edges ahead with a little more style and energy.
Midsommar reinforces my vague sense that my Scandinavian forebears (Ha! Get it?) had depths of hidden (largely creepy) feeling that belied their cold personas.
Yeah, I like The Blair Witch Project. What of it? It harkens back again to all of those paranormal documentaries like In Search Of, refusing to settle on an explanation that could only be disappointing.
Speaking of In Search Of, the 1981 Jonestown episode scared the shit out of me as a kid and still does. You can watch it here with original commercials!
Yes, yes, we concede your superior taste that the original is way better, but I also like The Ring.
The Silence of the Lambs isn’t supernatural, but it’s certainly full of terror.
The Orphanage is something of a rarity in film horror, rooted as it is in empathy and even tenderness.
The Conjuring, despite hitching its wagon to the questionable scientific rigor of the Warrens, is still a lot of fun to watch. Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson are way more charismatic than their real-life subjects, that’s for sure.
Late Night with the Devil turns schmaltzy 70s talk shows into sources of horror…or maybe it just reveals them. David Dastmalchian is fantastic in it.
Last Night in Soho involves murder, the 1960s, and emotional time travel…in other words, completely my wheelhouse. It’s also a stylish and gorgeous film.

Tonight, we’re most likely watching Hokum which has been recommended to me. I’ll keep you posted on the outcome of this tremendous risk in novelty.

Or so I’ve been told. ↩︎
“But what about…what about…?” These are movies off the top of my head that I would be willing to watch tonight. There are many more that I love. ↩︎

Algernon Blackwood is My Scoutmaster

October 28, 2026 / Will Ludwigsen

The 1963 Boy Scout Handbook that my father gave me at age nine led me to believe that I would venture into the woods with like-minded seekers to stand awestruck beneath towering redwoods¹ and then we’d carry that humility back to lives of service to humanity.²

When I joined the Scouts a few years later, I seemed to be the only one hoping for a sublime experience in the woods. Everyone else was there mostly to burn things and flirt with fascism, including my father who was the Assistant Scoutmaster.

What I didn’t know then was that my true Scoutmaster had died twenty-two years before I was born: British writer, outdoorsman, dairy farmer, Theosophist, occultist, radio broadcaster, and perceptive oddball Algernon Blackwood.

Algernon Blackwood, wearing his most ominous bowtie.

Blackwood (1869 – 1951) wrote and performed ghost stories often set in the wilderness where his “lonely but fundamentally optimistic protagonists”³ encountered escalating signs that they were not alone (or often welcome) amongst the ageless sentinels of nature.

Ghost story scholar Jack Sullivan called him a “combination of mystic and outdoorsman,” which strikes me as a far better Scoutmaster for a campfire than some middle-aged guy spouting off from a lawn chair about how the Russians are going to invade.

I mean, how’s this for a Scout Law?

My fundamental interest, I suppose, is signs and proofs of other powers that lie hidden in us all; the extension, in other words, of human faculty.

Is that too much to ask from a camping trip, that I experience the subtle vibrations of the universe in my bones, hints of some deep and ancient intelligence of which I am but a fleeting expression?

Spoiler alert: yes.

My Scout career had plenty of weirdness⁴, but all too little of the numinous, which wasn’t for lack of searching. I was prone to wandering away from campsites looking for burial mounds or a pirate’s cabin, neither of which seemed implausible in feral Florida.

The closest I came (and it wasn’t very close) was during one of my three summers at Camp Flying Eagle. For a week, we took “classes” for merit badges, slept in old military tents or rotting cabins that were worse, ate from dented aluminum utensils in a big mess hall, and tromped around on trails through the scrabble pines and primordial palmetto bushes. I didn’t really mind any of that because obviously there could be something wondrous and strange around any corner.

This is from a recent visit but the vibe is the same. The water level was higher when I was a kid, though.

Your author, hanging out at the Marie Selby cabins. Notice he’s got a book.

My favorite part of the camp was near the area called Marie Selby (named for a Sarasota philanthropist), situated amid the taller and shadier oaks at what was then a far edge of the property. I’d strike out from the cabins and wander through the cypress swamp, a marshy patch of knobby tree roots (“knees”) jutting from the muck.

I remember being mildly nervous each time I went out. In Florida, it’s common to see alligators lurking in any sizeable body of water, and venomous cottonmouths could easily be slithering camouflaged by the ooze. I saw no need to startle them, so I walked as the handbook suggested by stepping on my heel first and then letting my foot roll forward silently to the toe

Once when I ventured farther than usual from camp, I came upon a path of springy wooden planks built across the stumps and cypress knees. I followed them carefully through the swamp for a surprisingly long way as the cicadas droned around me from all directions, sometimes surging as though they were closing in.

I zigged and zagged my way to the terminus of the path, an enormous oak or cypress stump about the size of a Volkswagen and covered in lichen and moss. It reminded me of Yoda’s house on Dagobah, and of course, I circled it looking for an obvious entrance.

There wasn’t one, at least not that presented itself to me.

What struck me as I stood there looking around was that this was not an obvious destination. There was no place to sit (nor much of one to stand), and there wasn’t any placard identifying some natural object like elsewhere in camp. Someone had dragged salvaged lumber out into the swamp, strategically placed them on the most stable spots, and then stopped at a giant stump⁵.

It wasn’t a noise that jolted me into action or anything I could see, just a sudden Blackwood-ian realization that I was standing in a spot where normal logic didn’t apply. Someone built this for hidden reasons, and I assumed they couldn’t be good.⁶

In a surprising display of balance, I hurried back across the boards with some of them cracking beneath me—not quite a run but certainly not a stroll. Did the cicadas stop their chatter to watch me go? I don’t remember, but it would have been the least they could do.

That’s it. That was essentially my only remotely sublime Boy Scouting experience. It would have been nice to consult with Scoutmaster Blackwood that night around the campfire, comparing notes of our psychic impressions, but we probably just went to the mess hall to eat watery spaghetti.

Here I am waiting in line at that mess hall.

I never found a body in the woods or discovered mysterious coquina megaliths, but I’ve had a few experiences of awe and wonder since. When I haven’t, I’ve filled the gap the same way Algernon Blackwood did, by writing stories. I haven’t come close to his masterpieces of natural horror “The Willows” or “The Wendigo,” but I did create a troop of Wonder Scouts led by Charles Fort (“We Were Wonder Scouts”) and wrote a couple of books about a troop in Innsmouth.

As a small gift to you for this Halloween season, I’ve read a portion of Blackwood’s famous story “The Willows.” Download it and play it while getting ready for trick-or-treaters or stoking some embers in your backyard firepit.

Not available in Florida. Your mileage may vary. ↩︎
In my defense for this deranged impression, the text and illustrations in the handbook (not to mention the Norman Rockwell cover) somewhat oversold the link between Nature and…human nature. ↩︎
Jack Sullivan’s wonderful phrase. ↩︎
Pulling a kid from a creek full of thrashing gar, for instance, or falling down a mound of fill dirt to get a concussion on a rock. ↩︎
Later to appear in my story “Acres of Perhaps.” ↩︎
The most logical reason, that it was built by a weirdo like me, didn’t register. I was the kind of kid who still looked in the woods for evidence of gnomes and Bigfoot. ↩︎

We All Squeal for Sequels, Unfortunately

October 22, 2026 / Will Ludwigsen

We’ve been keeping this under wraps, but did you know that my new novel, A Scout is Loyal, is emerging from the Mekong Delta in just a few weeks? To pique your interest in the meantime, I’ll be posting here and elsewhere with some thoughts about how the book came about, along with a few other surprises along the way.

Ugh, sequels. As a human programmed by evolution to seek trusted members of my tribe, I hate how easy it is to send a chill up my spine with a familiar character.

When I saw this in the theater with my mother, she elbowed a stranger and told them she’d taken me to see the original in 1977.

My cynical theory is that sequels are what we have now instead of physical communities: a set of continuing situations and people we can all discuss in common to forge bonds between us. Because we can’t keep talking about a fifty-year-old movie, we need new encounters with those characters to have more reason to talk about our values.

It’s an easy button to push, having an old friend show up on the page or screen. I actually got choked up when Dale Cooper appeared in the third season of Twin Peaks.

I even took a picture of it, amazed to be seeing him again.

I have only a few gold standard sequels: The Empire Strikes Back, Aliens, Terminator 2, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Wrath of Khan, and The Search for Spock. Among books, The Lord of the Rings¹, Finders Keepers, and Silence of the Lambs come to mind…but not many others. As a viewer and a reader, I enjoy the idea of an experience being special and strange, and if I want to feel it again, there’s always the original.²

What turns me off in most sequels is self-awareness, an aura of portentousness when the writers and producers develop a sense of the work as a shared cultural artifact. It invites either hubris (“Fuck you, we’re Game of Thrones“) or pandering (“Someone get me the ghost of Harold Ramis!”), and in both cases, it means you’re paying more attention to meeting an expectation than exceeding one.³

The kind of art I like most appears in the world blinking in surprise that it exists at all. The odds were long, the end uncertain, and the effort dangerously close to futile, but it became real through heroic effort that nobody asked for. In that desperate risk, there is energy and passion to make something succeed that is much more rare when you know an automatic audience is waiting.⁴

You dress up a little nervously for the first date, and if you’re smart, you don’t show up for the second in Crocs and cargo shorts saying, “What? Aren’t we married?” Instead, you approach the second date (or second book) as another angle of introduction, a deepening of a theme.

In all candor, I barely managed to write A Scout is Brave⁵, and I never expected anyone to want a sequel…especially me. I was pleasantly surprised by the positive reactions it received and more so by the interest from some readers to find out what happened next to Bud Castillo.

The more I thought about it, the more curious I was about Bud’s next adventure, too. Once you’ve thwarted Deep Ones in Innsmouth, what’s next?

Vietnam, it turns out.

A quirk of my writing process is that I rarely remember the writing process. I know intellectually that it involves a lot of typing and handwriting and talking to myself on the page and jamming puzzle pieces together, but after it becomes a finished thing, the story feels inevitable. I call it the “shiver of recognition” that comes at the end, as though it always existed.

So when I began writing ASL on July 18, 2024, I approached it like another first book instead of a sequel. For one thing, it may well be someone’s first exposure to the “franchise,” and for another, I was just as nervous about making a good impression. I didn’t take your good will for granted.

The book that resulted feels like it has second date energy: we felt some sparks during our first meeting but now it’s time to see where else we can go.

Care to join me?

A sequel to The Hobbit, of course. ↩︎
I re-read a lot of books, largely as medicine to feel a certain way at a certain time. Sometimes, I’m not up for the risk of a new feeling. ↩︎
Don’t get me started on the whole “confounding fan expectations” bullshit. ↩︎
Which isn’t to say that all art should be grueling or stressful to create. What I’m talking about here is a sense of experimentation. ↩︎
Which took over a decade of hacking away, plus another year and a half of sitting in a famous publisher’s slush pile before it found its true home with Lethe. ↩︎

A Scout is Loyal coming in fast!

September 28, 2026 / Will Ludwigsen

Brave members of the troop, we’re happy to announce that we have a cover for my upcoming release, A Scout is Loyal:

Cover by the talented Jeremy John Parker.

In 1963, thirteen-year-old Bud Castillo and his friend Aubrey Marsh thwarted a conspiracy to unleash ancient horrors from beneath Devil’s Reef in Innsmouth, Massachusetts.

Six years later, still mourning Aubrey’s sacrifice, he finds that serving in Vietnam aboard a Swift Boat feels uncomfortably familiar: a battle of deranged true believers trying to get their hands on something ancient and hungry. This time, Bud will need more than a Scout’s sense of duty to survive it…especially when a ghost from Innsmouth challenges his loyalties.

“Intense… The unusual blend of war story and Lovecraftian horror leads to a shocking finale… a horror story that gets to a deeper truth.”
—Publishers Weekly

Yes, I’ll take questions at this time.

What do YOU know about the Vietnam War?

Just what my middle-aged white guy research has told me, which still puts me ahead of Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara!

What if I haven’t read the first book?

This would be a wonderful opportunity to do so, as the book is still available in a variety of formats. That said, if you insist on not reading it, the story in A Scout is Loyal can stand on its own, though you’ll miss some significant emotional impact.

Is this book violent or scary?

Well, I mean, it takes place during the Vietnam War, but I haven’t gone out of my way to imbue that conflict with additional horror just for a genre audience. There’s eeriness and unease and the occasional burst of confusing violence, just like the real war.

Is this book ‘woke’?

In it, I take the controversial position that we had no idea what the fuck we were doing in Vietnam and that our idealistic American confidence did us no favors. We acted on the world as we wanted it to be, not how it was.

Are you writing books for all twelve tenets of the Scout Law?

Jesus, I hope not. There’s a third one in progress and a small but vocal group agitating for more after that, but I can’t imagine getting to all twelve. Who wants to read A Scout is Courteous or A Scout is Thrifty?

I’m a reviewer, blogger, or podcaster interested in reviewing this book. Where can I get an advance copy?

Reach out to my contact form and I’ll be happy to get you one! It’ll be a relief to receive something other than an AI-generated pitch from a book promoter.

When and where can I get my Deep One claws on this book?

I thought you’d never ask. The book will surge from the misted jungles of the Mekong Delta in mid November, but keep watch for announcements of the official launch and some other surprises.

If you’d like to join up now with a preorder, click below!

A Long Walk a Quarter Century Ago

September 11, 2026 / Will Ludwigsen

I’m never quite sure what right I have to talk about 9/11. It feels a little like stolen valor to even mention that I was in Washington DC that day working near the Capitol building. I didn’t save any lives, though the passengers of Flight 93 might have saved mine, but even that feels pretentious to say because frankly, any one of them was more valuable than I was.

I was 28 years old and working as a technical writer at an obscure IT office of the U.S. Mint. I’d had the job a few weeks after several dizzying months at a variety of ill-conceived dot-com startups, wearing shorts to work because we were all too smart and cool for business casual¹.

I was wearing a tie on 9/11 because my bosses at the Mint had told me that was the level of decorum they expected from a tech writer with almost no human contact. So it was quiet at my desk while I ate my bagel and saw the first news that something strange had happened in New York.

This is how I found out: a posting on the tech website Slashdot.

Most news sites seemed to be down, and CNN had switched to a minimal text layout. When I saw that a second plane had hit the second tower, I called my wife at the time to tell her that the United States was under attack. She thought I was exaggerating² and snapped, “What are you talking about?” I told her to turn on the TV and see.

I spoke to a few other folks on the phone, including my brother-in-law who asked what I was still doing in DC. He’d heard on the news that government employees had been told to evacuate, so I decided to go ask my bosses if that was so. I walked through the empty offices upstairs where phones trilled with no one answering them, and I saw no sign of any other employees.

They’d left and forgotten to tell me.

I gathered my backpack, took off my tie, and headed for the elevator lobby. A security guard was darting back and forth from the windows with her hand on the grip of her holstered sidearm–a revolver so old that it would probably have blown up in her hand if she fired it.

By the time I got to the ground floor, the streets were empty except for men in suits holding M-16s on street corners, peering into the sky. I wondered how dangerous or terrorist-y I looked with a big backpack full of books, especially heading toward the monuments and National Mall because that’s the only way I knew to walk home to Alexandria.

While green-and-white Marine helicopters passed overhead taking officials to see the Pentagon, I made my way in a long circuitous route by the landmarks I visited almost every weekend: the Washington Monument, the Smithsonian, the Lincoln Memorial, and Memorial Bridge, which I crossed to the GW Parkway.

This is the route I followed on foot from the top right to the bottom left.

I spent the time on my cell phone chatting mostly with my mother. She was comforting in her way, furious that terrorists would fuck up her beloved New York³ but also fascinated as a witness to history⁴. She wanted to know all the details of what I was seeing, so I became her personal news correspondent and she became mine, explaining what she was seeing on TV.

By then I’d reached the Pentagon which was still spewing black smoke. I couldn’t see much from my angle, but the reek of melted plastic told me enough.

Once I got past the barricades on the Parkway, my wife retrieved me and took me home. I settled heavily in the chair in my home office and finally got to see the images of what had happened from a clearer perspective than mine.

(To this day, I have what most mental health professionals would probably call an obsessive need to watch that footage each anniversary, especially this one, as though I’m still catching up.)

As some of you know from all my eulogies of loved ones, I usually find a way to carefully encapsulate the spirit of a person or a time or a place in words. That’s never quite worked for that day, which has always seemed like a bunch of things that happened that don’t need me to find their narrative significance. It’s the one event I can’t blithely summarize or make meaningful, probably because others did a far better job doing that by their actions on that day⁵.

All I did was walk home.

Or, it turns out, profitability. ↩︎
In all fairness to her, back then when I was a mess with poorly treated anxiety disorder, I could sometimes overstate how things felt more than how they were. I thought I was being pretty calm and objective that day. ↩︎
Her guest sermon at her Spiritualist church that coming Sunday would end up being “Fuck those Fucking Fucks and their Weird Fucking Hatred of Mass Fucking Transport.” ↩︎
My whole family has a kind of “Lot’s wife” thing going on where we have a hard time looking away from disaster, relieved it isn’t aimed at us for a change. ↩︎
A half decade later on my way driving to Clarion, I happened to see a sign for Shanksville and detoured to thank those passengers for their sacrifice. ↩︎

The Search for Will

September 7, 2026 / Will Ludwigsen

The last time I saw these titles on a screen this large was in the summer of 1984 at the Venetian Plaza 6 in Venice, Florida. Karen took me there to see it and we stopped afterward at Taco Bell for one of the souvenir glasses¹.

I watched it last night here in Jacksonville at the Cinemark with an audience of oddballs wearing Next Generation uniforms, but I was just so happy to be there that their boorish disregard of canon didn’t matter.

Though opinions on its quality are on the upswing these days, Search for Spock was considered disappointing and slow-moving compared to Wrath of Khan back then, though not by me. It’s probably the most influential stretch of Star Trek that most fans don’t think about enough, solidifying the Klingon sense of honor, the Bird of Prey, and their consistent language. It also introduced the Excelsior, Spacedock, and the concept of the Vulcan katra.

It is probably my most watched movie, especially between 1987 when I asked my mom to record it off of cable while I was at my grandfather’s house and 1991 when I went off to college. I’ve said and written many times that The Wrath of Khan inspired me to turn myself around in high school, but I think Kirk’s line “I swear to you we’re not finished yet” may have been even more important to me.

I could perform the entire movie from memory with my friends Chris and Carl (though not at the same time because they hated each other), and it was a kind of language between us about what it meant to be honorable and loyal and bold despite officious bureaucracy. Are you really someone’s friend if you’re not willing to steal (and destroy) a starship to save their immortal soul?

I even included clips of it in audio notes to woo girls²:

Like my character Bud Castillo, I’ve always taken stories a bit more seriously than most people, and constant exposure to this movie every day after school or all summer certainly helped shape my ideas of conscience and integrity and determination. Last night, I just felt enormous gratitude³ to have been born when I was to experience this and Indiana Jones and Star Wars and Dead Poets Society and Dungeons & Dragons and Twin Peaks.

Maybe I’d feel the same about Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy had I been born then, or about Birth of a Nation, but this was what fell in my path.

Like these: https://youtu.be/nE9B881GmmQ?si=pErZKEddwHygP4_w ↩︎
You know, implying that romance is worth breaking some rules at warp speed. ↩︎
And some sadness that I couldn’t share it with Carl or Chris. ↩︎

Oscar, The Cat Who Lived

July 24, 2026 / Will Ludwigsen

Many of you may remember Oscar as the patriarch of our cats or as the loud sneezing animal in the microphone of our Teams calls. If so, you know that he’s been kicking death’s ass for the last several months.

Today, he decided to let Death win, just as a treat.

Aimee and I took him to the vet where we learned that his liver function was shutting down, and we let him know that we considered his duty as our guardian fulfilled. After a brief goodbye, he returned (as my grandfather would say) to the Church Triumphant.

Oscar arrived in our lives in June of 2010. Our greyhound Patti hadn’t been cat-safe, so when she passed away, we filled her open position with Oscar. He soon became a key addition to the team, contributing expertise in lounging, napping, and box-sitting.

Oscar was also a constant companion during writing, and he witnessed many a story in all its stages.

He also had opinions on my other activities.

In January of 2015, we brought him to the vet after a fainting episode and learned that he had a heart murmur. The doctor’s prognosis was grim: Oscar’s heart was effectively a hand grenade, and if we wanted to give him Atenolol tablets every night for the last week he was alive, we were welcome to do so.

Oscar thrived for eleven more years, outliving five other animals.

He was a quiet and pleasant boy who governed the other pets with a gentle but firm aura of command. He rarely had to raise his voice, which was often gravelly in an old movie star sort of way.

He didn’t take shit from nobody, though.

He was quite a cuddly boy, though he preferred Aimee because she took care of him during an early illness while I was out of town. He never forgave me entirely for that.

For much of his life with us, Aimee and I both have checked on him in the middle of the night to make sure he’s breathing, and every time he had a hairball, I’d go running for the cat carrier to take him to the vet. He probably found that tiresome.

In reality, he was the Chuck Norris of cats.

Catnip gets high from Oscar.
Oscar no longer has a shadow because it was following him too closely and he smacked it with his mighty paw.
Oscar doesn’t chase laser pointers. They flee from him.
When Oscar knocks a glass off a counter, the floor rises to meet it.
When Oscar kneads your lap, you gain a +4 to your STR and DEX.

And the final one today: Oscar once had a heart attack…his heart lost.

Really, it’s our hearts who lost, though we had much longer with him than we ever expected. He bravely endured a lot of health issues to stay by our side for so many years, and I suspect he left us only reluctantly because he thought we’d fuck everything up in his absence.

Sleep well, good friend. My mother awaits over the Rainbow Bridge to take care of you.

Here he sits next to her ashes because Oscar doesn’t mourn. He celebrates…like we should.

Man, 250 Years is Exhausting

July 4, 2026 / Will Ludwigsen

For a nation founded and populated by the world’s restless crackpots and malcontents (as well as their slaves), we’re doing better than one might expect.

Fifty years ago in Garden City NY, Karen and I celebrated 200 years of enormous American cars, if my father’s photo framing is anything to go by.

We’ll likely be seen by whatever civilization succeeds us as industrious people who liked building roads, landing on the Moon, burning witches of various figurative kinds, and following theory and moralism off a cliff. Most of our disagreements involve the higher tiers on Maslow’s Hierarchy, though we fight over those subtle niceties with the ferocity of badgers trapped in a sinking cage.

One of my favorite quotes about the United States (attributed without much evidence to Churchill) is:

Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.

Most take that as a backhanded compliment, but if it were up to me, I’d have it stamped on our coins. That sentence captures an endearing quirk of our culture, a tendency to stay in the game long enough to fix our initial mistakes. That span of time can be very long, but our failings nag at (some of) us until we come up with other ill-considered ideas that slowly approximate the right choice.

We’re certainly not afraid of being wrong, and we’re more persistent than smart. Perhaps in the long term that amounts to the same thing.

Our system of government was designed for what we could call “agile development,” the idea of fucking up fast and fixing it before someone important notices. In that fashion, we operate on a clumsy simulacrum of the scientific method: “Oh, shit, that didn’t work. Let’s try something else or at least the same stupid thing in a slightly different way.”

The men who codified that system (assuming we care what they think) would be puzzled at how frequently we cling to the specifics of their beliefs while ignoring the spirit of them. They never expected to become the holy ancestors we worship with a blind reverence that they fought against their entire lives.

Jefferson wrote that:

We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

…and our coat is pretty frayed with sleeves that only reach halfway down our arms like we’re the Incredible Hulk. As much as I’m a “measure twice, cut once” kind of guy, there comes a time when you have to actually do the cutting, take the risk and the action to respond to a changing world with faith that you can fix it.

Once all other possibilities have been exhausted.

Our great American flaw is acting on the world as we want it to be instead of as it is, and our great American strength is our curious tendency to make that work anyway. We could probably shorten that cycle and make it less painful with a clearer perception of reality, but that’s a level of effort we’d rather spread over decades.

In the middle of that slow evolution, we witness all the weird doomed orange-skinned creatures afoot with eyes on the ends of their tusks and fins growing from their necks. They’re shocking and awful and they feel like they’ll be around forever.

They won’t, and neither will we.

None of this is to say that we should patiently wait for justice to arrive. We are all part of the evolution, each of us nudging the good a little further at least to the length of our reach. We’re not a country that’s meant to be satisfied, but it’s easy to confuse dissatisfaction with disaster in the moment.

Sometimes it’s exhausting to exhaust all the alternatives.

The 2026 Aimee’s Better Judgment Film Festival is a Wrap!

April 24, 2026 / Will Ludwigsen

When Aimee goes out of town for any significant length of time, I take the opportunity to catch up on watching (or rewatching) movies that she has vetoed, usually for being depressing or strange.

I call it the Aimee’s Better Judgment Film Festival.

This year’s slate included:

Michael Clayton (B+)

Aimee’s Veto: “Looks mafia-related.”

I love a good legal (or, in this case, legal-adjacent) drama, and this was a fine upstanding representative of the genre. There feels like there’s a missing three minutes right before the climax of the film that reminded me of a magician going “Ta-da!” but having forgotten to put the woman in the box before sawing it in half.

The Caine Mutiny (A)

Aimee’s Veto: “Nice utter absence of strong female characters except for the hectoring mother.”

This is a rewatch of one of my favorite movies that Aimee has expressed no interest in seeing despite my careful description of a flippant novelist winding up an idealistic executive officer into seizing command from a paranoid ship captain…culminating in a COURT MARTIAL.

I say again…a COURT MARTIAL…with Jose Ferrer at the defense table.

Sneakers (A)

Aimee’s (Soft) Veto: “Yeah, we should see that again sometime when there are no more Korean zombie movies.”

When I saw this charming digital heist movie decades ago, I remember being vaguely upset about some technical inaccuracy that made me feel superior for noticing it. This time, I found myself enchanted by the brilliant cast and neat hacker derring-do, so that previous Will can go fuck himself.

Fun fact: in the mid to late 1980s, the Yamaha corporation really put the squeeze on Hollywood to include one of their soprano saxophones in every soundtrack, regardless of suitability. Bloodbath on Cielo Drive? Squeak away. Nuclear blast on the horizon? Let’s chipper this shit up with a woodwind.

If AI is good for anything, it’s to save us from the saxophone scourge.

True Colors (A)

Aimee’s Veto: “Oh, yeah, the one with the white guys fighting over who will perpetuate the patriarchy.”

If you’re an idealistic young man contemplating law school but worried about “selling out,” this movie will have a certain resonance with you like it did for me back when it came out. Smarmy perceptive con artist John Cusack squares off against patrician noblesse-oblige James Spader, applying their law degrees in Washington with very different objectives.

Some styles are timeless. Alas, none of them are in this movie.

It’s astonishing to imagine that the political scandal that brings John Cusack down in this movie is almost textbook electioneering today.

Still have a soft spot for this movie, even though some music director had to say, “Wait! Don’t forget the fucking soprano saxophone! Yamaha owes me a Waverunner.”

Money Monster (B)

Aimee’s (Soft) Veto: “Ugh. A movie about money?”

In this mind-blowing fantasy film, a television investment personality of the Jim Cramer mold gently adjusts his narcissism to help a man who takes him hostage live on camera. Together with a TV producer, they figure out the plot behind a massive Wall Street investment fraud, or as we like to call it, “every weekday.”

The fantasy comes in, of course, when justice is actually achieved.

The Girl in the Picture (B)

Aimee’s (Soft) Veto: “That case sounds vaguely familiar after twenty years together watching true crime with dinner every night.”

Franklin Floyd, going for some kind of morbid EGOT of sexual predation, kidnaps a young girl, raises her as a daughter, sexually abuses her, forces her into sex work, kills her friend from the strip club, kills her, kidnaps her son at gunpoint from school, and then kills him, too.

If you’re thinking, “Wow, that must have been a hard pitch meeting,” let me reassure you by adding that this is a true crime documentary.

Don’t Look Up (B+)

Aimee’s Veto: “Too depressingly true.”

You could have a whole festival just of movies that are too painfully true: this one, Idiocracy, Bob Roberts, Wag the Dog, Dr. Strangelove. While the credits rolled, I sat sort of stunned and sad but also fatalistically bemused by America, which I assume is what it feels like to be French.

To Die For (A)

Aimee’s (Non) Veto: “Goddamn it, you should have waited for me.”

I’ll always love this movie for so many things, but especially its final shot of Ileana Douglas ice skating on the pond. Nicole Kidman’s performance is gloriously deranged, and Joaquin Phoenix plays the teenager she manipulates with an almost heart-breaking sincerity.

Luckily in the thirty-one years since this movie’s release, we’ve all taken the lesson about mistaking attention for love and notoriety for significance.

This quote especially is thankfully obsolete in our enlightened times:

Suzanne used to say that you’re not really anybody in America unless you’re on TV… ’cause what’s the point of doing anything worthwhile if there’s nobody watching? So when people are watching, it makes you a better person. So if everybody was on TV all the time, everybody would be better people. But, if everybody was on TV all the time, there wouldn’t be anybody left to watch, and that’s where I get confused.