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My Father and the Zodiac

December 12, 2020 / Will Ludwigsen

It was important to me as a kid that evil people be smart. My father’s education and erudition made his awfulness seem more…purposeful, perhaps, more like a brilliant idea gone horribly wrong than an accident of testosterone. It’s somehow worse to be beaten by a thug than by a genius.

You take the comforts where you can.

Which is why Robert Graysmith’s book Zodiac was so important to me when I read it in the late 1980s: I needed to know that some of the people who hurt us are just too brilliant to stop, and there was nothing we could do.

I thought about that yesterday when I read the Zodiac killer’s 340-character message from more than fifty years ago, cracked by some brilliant sleuths. As expected, it’s a window into the mind of a troubled genius:

I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING LOTS OF FUN IN TRYING TO CATCH ME

THAT WASNT ME ON THE TV SHOW

WHICH BRINGS UP A POINT ABOUT ME

I AM NOT AFRAID OF THE GAS CHAMBER

BECAUSE IT WILL SEND ME TO PARADICE ALL THE SOONER

BECAUSE I NOW HAVE ENOUGH SLAVES TO WORK FOR ME

WHERE EVERYONE ELSE HAS NOTHING WHEN THEY REACH PARADICE

SO THEY ARE AFRAID OF DEATH

I AM NOT AFRAID BECAUSE I KNOW THAT MY NEW LIFE IS

LIFE WILL BE AN EASY ONE IN PARADICE DEATH

Or…maybe not so much.

What’s interesting about this message (other than it being almost certainly written by an acne-scarred edgelord beating off in his mother’s basement), is that it took half a century to decipher not so much because of its intricate execution or sophisticated message, but because the code was sloppy and the message a banal repetition of his letters to the press.

All this time, we’ve been applying diabolical logic to a man with the mind of a 13-year-old boy who assaulted the easiest targets he could manage and claimed credit for the ones he couldn’t.

(Which does not diminish the hard work of the codebreakers at all; the crack is an amazing achievement of patience and insight.)

Hannah Arendt wrote long ago about how disappointing the “master race” of Nazis proved to be once they finally stood in the dock for their crimes, and I found the same thing when I spoke to my father again after twenty years of silence. As I listened to his misapplied vocabulary and cliched insight, I realized that he was never smarter than any of the people he harmed…only more comfortable faking it.

For decades of my life, I’ve studied (and written about) terrible people, trying to find some malevolent intelligence: Lee Harvey Oswald. Gary Ridgeway. John Wayne Gacy. Joseph De Angelo. Dennis Rader. Ted Bundy. Charles Manson. Idi Amin. Jim Jones. The 9/11 hijackers. Osama bin Laden.

My father was nowhere near as bad as the Nazis or any of these other men, of course, but he was the earliest reason in my life to question what good people could do about bad ones. What do they have in common, aside from being males who feel entitled to harm others for their pleasure?

For a time, we applied the best intelligence we had to stopping them, and when that didn’t work, we thought it was because they were smarter than us.

But when we finally found them, they all turned out to be lucky idiots who flowed between the gaps of our assumptions. They were all mediocre people who found evil easier than even the smallest effort for good and who patched their inadequacies with shortcuts and con games and violence.

The reason we didn’t catch them right away wasn’t that it was hard to think up to their level…it’s that it was hard to think down to it, to take on the banal reasoning of desperate losers.

I’m not sure what that means for thwarting these horrible people while they’re at the height of their power, except perhaps that we should remember that every single one of them turned out to be lesser than us, not greater. Every single one.

I have no idea who the Zodiac is, though I suspect that someone like Arthur Leigh Allen is perhaps pathetic enough to be a likely culprit. What I do know is that when we discover his identity, he will be a staggering disappointment of a human being.

Such men cause great harm and havoc, but their times are always brief.

Postcard Story: Getting Away

November 28, 2020 / Will Ludwigsen

Living now on the gulf coast of Florida, Dan sometimes misses the gray, chilled Thanksgivings of what used to be home, but not too much. He got in all the gray chill he’d ever need nearly half a century ago on a single evening that ended his old life and started a new one.

Sometimes as he walks the beach in a pair of paint-spattered cargo shorts, he can see the end of this second life coming without much hope for a third, but he’s not greedy. He’s never been greedy, not for life or for fame or even for money. Once he needed $200,000 and that’s just what he asked for, not a penny more, which is probably why he got it.

The universe punishes greed, that’s one thing Dan has always believed, though not in a particularly religious way. It’s just inefficient, and a man with an excess of money is as much at a disadvantage for survival as a rabbit with an excess of food – slow and complacent and surprised when the owl swoops.

Dan usually stops around the same spot on the jetty each day to talk to the Fishing Blowhard among his PVC fishing pole holders and bucket of rancid-smelling shrimp. The Fishing Blowhard probably has a real name, but Dan hasn’t bothered to learn it because it couldn’t possibly be as descriptive.

The Fishing Blowhard is about Dan’s age, and the main problem with being old, Dan has found, is that other old people assume you’ve followed the same ruts your whole lives from the idealistic 50s to the hippie 60s to the hedonistic 70s to the greedy (yes) 80s to the head-scratching 90s when the computers and young people took over.

For instance, the Fishing Blowhard assumes that Dan was at Woodstock, even though neither of them were, and that they both narrowly escaped going to Vietnam, which Dan didn’t. The Fishing Blowhard also assumes that Dan’s back is crooked from the weight of decades of beer instead of a sudden impact on the aluminum underbelly of a 727 at 10,000 feet.

Lesson learned: it turns out that the CIA reinforced their aft airstairs from the wind during the drops over Laos while commercial carriers didn’t. That gives them a wicked bounce when you jump from the last step and into the night.

“Dan the Man!” cries the Fishing Blowhard in the same way every day as there’s a string to pull in the center of his spine. “Danbo! My beer buddy! Grab a brew and let’s scare the fish together!”

Dan peers into the cooler of mostly melted ice in which three cans of Old Milwaukee float like pale turds. He prefers bourbon but reaches in and takes one of the cans.

“You out here hiding from the hens and the chicks?” The Fishing Blowhard opens Dan’s beer for him. “Me, too. Fucking Thanksgiving turns the condo into a madhouse, all those women and kids bumping around the kitchen. I say leave them to it, right?”

Dan nods. Back in his little cottage on stilts, his wife is sitting out on the balcony with a David Baldacci novel while the oven does all the work.

“We did our part by bringing in the money, right?” says the Fishing Blowhard. “It’s their job to spend and eat it.”

Dan doesn’t remember Gretchen ever eating money, but maybe the Fishing Blowhard’s family has different ways.

“It used to be simple, didn’t it? A man, his wife, a couple of kids, you eat the bird and watch the game and take a nap. But then the kids have to have kids, and then there’s some idiot Democrat brother-in-law just out of rehab, and maybe an old bag from the church whose husband croaked on the riding lawnmower, and suddenly your home is an insane asylum.”

Dan’s family is small; he and Gretchen never had kids, never wanted any, and he has been content to watch his sister’s children grow up way better than they might have without $200,000 to move from Tacoma to Ontario where a psychopath couldn’t follow.

That’s what we used to call an extraction, Dan thinks.

He doesn’t often imagine the Thanksgivings that might have happened with fucking Lonnie still sitting at the head of the table, screaming at Sandy and Gavin, maybe grabbing one of them by the arm and twisting like he’d seen more than once even with guests in the house. If he tries hard enough, he can imagine Janie, too, slowly caving in from the inside with her sinking eyes and rangy limbs while she watched her children fade from their hearts on outward.

“You know what I like about you, Danbo? You don’t say much. I’ve always thought that the real badasses in this world are the guys who don’t have to talk. You can just, you know, feel their badassery.”

“I’m not a badass,” Dan says.

A badass, especially one with certain kinds of friends, might have showed up one day while Janie and the kids were at the movies watching Black Beauty or Willy Wonka. He might have knocked and waited and when Lonnie answered, he’d have plugged him with one of those handy one-shot pistols they’d given to the ARVN guys in Vietnam.

But that would have been greedy, presuming to be the employee of justice. That’s what had lost them the war, and that’s what would have lost him his family because they track down murderers a lot more carefully than they do hijackers.

“Get the fuck out,” the Fishing Blowhard says. “We’re all badasses if we’ve lived this long, am I right? You provide for a family, that makes you a badass.”

“Maybe so,” Dan says.

“I don’t know much about you, Dan, but I do know this: you’ve got the look of a dude who’s seen some shit. And you know what you deserve?”

Life in prison for air piracy? Dan wonders.

“You deserve to walk this beach on all the pretty days until they’re gone. That’s what I’d give you if it was up to me.”

Deserve. That’s a word that Dan doesn’t think much about. It’s hard to guess whether Northwest Orient Airlines stockholders deserved that $200,000 or Janie did, whether he deserved to notice the one dummy parachute instead of plunging at terminal velocity into the Earth, whether he deserved the strange thrill and privilege to be a man in a business suit flying with thousands of dollars strapped to his body above the Douglas firs and the winding streams, descending through the freezing mist to break only an ankle on the rocks.

Deserving means someone or something is doing the judging, the choosing, and if there’s one thing Dan knows, it’s that nobody deserves anything but sometimes they get it anyway.

And sometimes, we’re lucky enough to be the ones doing the giving.

Dan claps his hand on the Fishing Blowhard’s Hawaiian shirt spotted with Woodie wagons and says, “So far so good.”

The Fishing Blowhard raises his beer. “Here’s to getting away.”

Dan wonders, worries, but for only a moment because the Fishing Blowhard is only ever accidentally right, like most of us.

“Here’s to exactly that,” he says.

Uncle Dan Sure is Quiet around Thanksgiving

November 27, 2020 / Will Ludwigsen

On November 24, 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper boarded a Northwest Orient flight from Portland International Airport to Seattle. Not long after take-off, he passed a note to a flight attendant claiming he had a bomb in his briefcase. He demanded $200,000, four parachutes, and a fuel truck standing by in Seattle.

He got them.

After releasing the passengers and refueling the plane, Cooper ordered the flight crew to take off again on a southeast course toward Mexico City. He had them fly low with the landing gear extended and the cabin unpressurized. The low speed and high drag burned through fuel more quickly than expected and so they altered course to refuel in Reno.

Long before they got there, though, an indicator light in the cockpit showed the aft stairs had been extended. A few minutes later, the tail of the plane jumped as though someone had taken his leave.

By most accounts, Cooper was a badass: he knew the terrain, he knew the equipment and tolerances for the 727 aircraft, he knew to have the interior lights darkened on landing to thwart police snipers. The trick with the air stairs had been used by military and CIA operatives during Vietnam. He was calm. He was friendly, paying for the bourbon and waters he ordered including a tip.

All they ever found were a torn placard from the 727’s rear exit in 1978 and three packets of the ransom cash buried under silt in the Columbia River in 1980. There was DNA on the tie but it hasn’t been matched to anyone. No one is sure if the money was deliberately buried or washed there.

Law enforcement likes to say that none of the ransom money has ever been spent, but when was the last time a clerk checked your twenty-dollar bill against the D.B. Cooper ransom cash serial number list? All Cooper would have to do was wait a year or two, go to some small town elsewhere in the country, deposit a few grand here and there in local banks and then write checks between them to accumulate it again.

Assuming that he made it, of course.

Of the parachutes Cooper did take, one was a training dummy — undeployable. It was accidentally included among the four. So it is possible that poor ol’ Cooper chose the wrong parachute, yanked on the cord, and came away with a plastic handle and ten inches of rope in his hands as he plummeted to the ground.

I like to imagine that Dan Cooper’s final word was, “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccccckkkkkkkkkkkkk!”

Unless, that is, the torn safety placard was the last thing Cooper managed to grab before being sucked out of the plane instead of executing a jump at all. In that case, his final word was, “Shhhhiiiiiiiiitttttttt!” followed quickly by the thump of his body against the tail of the plane.

Is he dead or alive? What’s my theory?

There are really just two possibilities.

Cooper died during the jump or soon after. The weather was bad, the temperatures were brutal, and the terrain was unforgiving — towering trees and sharp rocks.

Cooper somehow survived insane winds and cold, landed in the scary wilderness with only manageable injury, and avoided law enforcement for the next fifty years by spending his money wisely. If this is true, it makes him THE GREATEST AMERICAN WHO EVER LIVED. The SEALS who bagged Bin Laden look like Boy Scouts compared to this mother fucker.

I know which one I prefer. I prefer to think of an elderly man, a grandfather or great-grandfather now, who quietly reads the paper as grandchildren frolic around him on Thanksgiving and occasionally slips one a twenty-dollar bill.

“Get yourself something nice, kiddo,” he says.

And when some blowhard at a party brags about his golf score or shows off his Porsche or declares himself a captain of industry, this old man nods politely and absolutely does NOT say, “I jumped out of a fucking 727 with two hundred grand strapped to my waist. Now I build birdhouses.”

Then he watches his episode of In Search Of again with a bourbon and water.

Really, 2020? Edgar?

November 14, 2020 / Will Ludwigsen

Yesterday, I took Edgar to the vet because he hadn’t eaten in over twelve hours and seemed lethargic. An X-ray found fluid around his lungs again (as in June) and we decided to drain it again. Edgar perked up after the procedure but went into cardiac arrest very quickly afterward. He died around noon while I was on a conference call two miles away.

I write more obituaries than anything else these days, it seems: my mother, my father, Norman, Nori, human society. I’m getting pretty good at it despite (or maybe because of) the basic selfishness of the task: “Look at me! I understand this person completely and can taxidermy them forever in words!”

I’m tired of being a literary taxidermist, but words are the only interesting way I express feelings.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t filming the bike ride I took yesterday after Edgar’s passing when, distracted and out of sorts, I squeezed the gear shifters instead of the brakes and smashed into a trash can at 15 miles per hour. It’s hard to beat the eloquence of being thrown into the middle of the street and landing on my back as a metaphor for how I feel about losing Edgar.

Maybe my reluctance to get up is even more eloquent.

I don’t much like living in a universe that finds it necessary to take Edgar away after only nine years. It seems petty. It seems small. You’d think one cat who happened to like rubbing against my face as though I was his favorite could get to live a little longer, but here we are.

Edgar was a wonderful cat with a lot of personality who loved people (but maybe me a little more). He yelled in the mornings and the evenings to be fed, and also sometimes randomly during the day like a mental patient arguing with the couch.

He groomed the other cats and Sylvia if they’d sit still. He glowered at us defiantly when he used the litter box. He shook his dry cat food in his jaws like he was trying to break its neck. He slept on my legs at night, or sometimes on top of the TV receiver or the laundry.

On the Thanksgiving after my mother died, he made sure to console each person around the table one by one.

He was, as we like to say about animals, a good boy. He was also (to me) a companion unlike any I’ve had, a constant source of love and encouragement: as long as I kept the kibble coming, I was still okay in his book.

I’ll miss him terribly. And I’ll miss who I was to him.

So You Managed to Rig the Election

November 7, 2020 / Will Ludwigsen

First let me say my hat is off to you. That’s an ambitious achievement requiring the cooperation of hundreds of conspirators, and you’re clearly putting your Six Sigma project management certifications to good use. If you weren’t a black belt before, you should be one now.

Or a BLUE one, am I right?

Our demon prince is up by four million votes nationally, but it’s of course absurd that you’d have forged that many votes.

No, you were far more devious.

You convinced an innocent but adventurous foodie at the Wuhan wet market to eat a particularly sick-looking bat. Maybe you used a gun or just a nice orange pepper glaze, I don’t know.
With a worldwide network of agents, you guided the spread of the illness to your ultimate target, the United States.
There, the virus ran rampant and set up the chess board for your ultimate objective: a population worried enough by sickness to cast a large number of plausible mail-in votes for your manipulation.
But first, you needed the ultimate unstoppable candidate: an elderly milquetoast Washington insider with an unambitious legislative agenda and some slightly creepy behaviors toward women’s hair. Just, you know, to keep it plausible.
A candidate like that required the support of deeply angry and radical people, so you stoked the fires of racial hatred by encouraging the only ten racist police officers in America to act out their fantasies as visibly and violently as possible.
The ensuing protests unfolded in your perfectly orchestrated ballet of support for the only candidate who could truly advance our socialist agenda of white extermination: Joseph Biden.
You could have stopped there, but the cherry on top was finding a Black female prosecutor who will one day take the reins of government and drive our national chariot into total communism.
All you had to do next was generate thousands of ballots in a half dozen key states, each printed specially for a particular voting district.
Then, offering day-old sandwiches from Jimmy John’s, you hired a hundred mentally-ill homeless people (also across six states) to carefully color in the correct circles for Joseph R. Biden.
Luckily, you had a sharp-eyed QA team checking each one and beating homeless men when they kept trying to fill out Jo Jorgensen by “accident.”
When it was all over, you herded most of them into a tunnel of rotating blades and rendered them into a delicious beige slurry for IAMS. (Net profit: $1.4 million.)
To cover your bets, you blackmailed several programmers hired by Siebold to embed pro-Biden glitches in the code of electronic voting machines. Luckily, the project owners were NOT Six Sigma-certified like you are and could not find the inserted code.
Election day almost went exactly as planned, but those plucky Trump voters managed to pry themselves from their sweat-soaked recliners to vote. We always underestimate the courage and conviction of the simple, God-fearing folk and we need to stop doing that.
So you had to bring in our crack teams of vote fraud specialists, already poised in the likeliest states for razor-thin margins: Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, and Pennsylvania.
You quickly printed more mail-in ballots for the inner city voting precincts from a company we later firebombed for total deniability.
Then your teams completed more ballots, sealed them, postmarked them with machines stolen from the post office, and slipped them unseen into the voting count centers while descending from wire harnesses.
To show their total commitment to endless silence for the cause, those teams then severed their own tongues and cut off their own fingers so they could never reveal their role.
Finally, after several days of completely smooth counting hidden away from the gaze of the entire world, our ballots tipped the balance to the dark prince was declared victorious.

It staggers the imagination, comrade. There will one day be statues in your honor, big concrete ones two hundred feet tall with stern jawlines.

But today, you must die and take your glory with you.

Time Capsule 2020

September 19, 2020 / Will Ludwigsen

I’m going to Lowe’s today to buy a giant slab of marble on which I can carve an explanation of these times to the survivors wandering the smoldering hellscape. It’ll take awhile, I know, but what else am I doing?

Greetings, traveler! Tarry a moment from your scrounging for canned food and read these words of explanation for the horrors you behold!

Three generations of Americans, trained by bad movies and television to believe that heroism is the pursuit of an ideal without compromise or compassion, discovered a place where we could feel the endorphin rush of fighting evil but with none of the risk: the Internet.

Online, we chose our sides between the Enjoyers of Brutal Truths (life is hard and that’s good because it makes us hard) and the Resisters of Brutal Truths (life is hard and that’s bad because it makes us hard). We filtered our friends and our news by the dramatic passion they enflamed, and we competed to assert our commitment to the tribe with ever more exaggerated perspectives and actions. We made hasty judgments on sketchy information and then rationalized the results.

Constant and instant exposure to both the worst people we agreed with and the worst ones we didn’t distorted our perceptions of the importance, frequency, and scope of the problems we fought to solve. With no mitigating perspectives, we developed over-simplified theories of how the world works and pursued them off a cliff.

Inevitably, we dared each other to prove our commitment to our theories in the real world. Every occurrence became a symbol of why we were right, and every action became a desperate do-or-die fight for the nature of reality.

Two million years of outdated and unquestioned human evolutionary software turned us into self-righteous “heroes” fighting for the things we were most blindly wrong about.

If you’ve found this, we didn’t figure it out in time.

So You’ve Been Cancelled

September 6, 2020 / Will Ludwigsen

One minute you’re tweeting your perfectly reasonable advice about getting over race and gender in this country, and the next, you’re hiding your Porsche in the garage from a fusillade of socks soaked in warm vomit.

Man, this job would be so much better without the fans, am I right?

The good news is that you still have the house, the car, the second house in Sundance, a current passport, and enough money to go completely Charles Foster Kane on their asses. You can hole up in Xanadu and let them gossip in awed tones about the cool mysterious things you’re doing (playing video games in your underwear, writing poetry, and learning to carve scrimshaw from YouTube).

The bad news is that you’re going to have to lie low for a while. That’s not a terrible thing; some people have done their best work in exile. You’re no Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, but celebrity is KIND OF a life’s work, too. This is your chance to take a breather, let the career inertia fade, and then choose any new path you want.

Nobody is asking you for another painful movie about the characters you’ve come to resent. Nobody’s asking you to say your catch phrase or write another song like the last ten.

You’re free. Put your feet up and enjoy your time in the penalty box.

Here’s the thing to remember: America is where generations of (primarily white) fuck-ups came to escape the mistakes they made in other countries. We’re all predisposed to a good comeback story because there’s a deep guilt in each of us for the one thing we wish we could do again better.

But first comes the sacrifice of the Designated Sinner.

Someone has to go in the Wicker Man every now and then to burn for our cultural sins of racism and sexism and homophobia and genocide and all the other shit, and this time — just like the guy in the movie — you kind of deserve it.

Really, it’s an honor. They don’t put Paula from Accounting in the Wicker Man. If you’re worth bringing down, you’re worth something. Hold on to that.

So here’s the plan.

Spend the next six months letting yourself hit rock bottom. (Men, switch to wearing denim shorts and those adventure sandals that strap around your heels. Women, shave your head. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.)
Then have a photogenic meltdown in a public place. Throw a cup of beer at a toddler during a baseball game. Threaten a flight attendant for not letting you smoke. The point is to show everyone you suck as much as they think you do.
Next, take two years to work on whatever thing you love (your comedy, your novel, your solo album) until it is the best you can make it: emotional, soulful, and above all, penitent. If you have to, get help from someone who actually has feelings.
Then begin the apology tour. One of the late night hosts will almost certainly let you on the show, and that’s where you can tell the world what you’ve learned…and the beautiful thing you’ve made to express how sorry you are.

What HAVE you learned? Well, it would be wonderful if you could say (plausibly) that you’ve listened to the people you’ve hurt to make amends. If you can’t do that, you’ve at least learned to shut the fuck up about things you don’t know much about, right? That’s almost as good.

Slowly, you creep your way back into the tribe by letting people feel good about forgiving you.

Luckily for you, we all have exactly six active slots available in our brains for grudges…and your egregious replacement just logged in.

Leaked: Donald Trump’s Speech to the RNC

August 27, 2020 / Will Ludwigsen

(Trump ascends to the stage holding up a small plastic aquarium.)

Can you see that? I’m not sure you can get that on camera. If you look real close, you’ll see there’s a thing swimming around in there about the width of my thumb and maybe, what, a foot long? Something like that.

Anyway, me and the family went on vacation a couple of years ago to Bali — beautiful place, by the way, the best service on the planet — and while I was practicing some dives off a rock cliff, the larvae of this little guy wormed its way into a scrape on my knee. I’m told they do that, look for holes.

Turns out that this is the Greater Balinese Brain Fluke, a trematode that laps up cerebrospinal fluid like a deer at a mountain stream. Loves it. Loves it so much that sometimes it makes a comfortable little nest in the brain of a human host. Kind of like that thing from that Star Trek movie. Beautiful movie, by the way. “Khaaannnn!” I love that part.

Anyway, this little fella set up shop near the amygdala on the left hemisphere of my brain and just started pumping away, kind of like a little fist. Like this. Just squeezing away, drinking and growing and secreting like all God’s creatures.

Wait, wait. Don’t get up. I’m getting to the point.

The amygdala, as we all know, is the breaker switch for decision making and emotional reaction, and, well, you might have noticed something a little strange about me these last few years: word salad, vindictiveness, impulsive behavior, all the classic signs. Even then, it wasn’t until I started getting the migraines and those weird sniffles that my doctor ordered a CT scan that found my little friend curled up in my skull like a puppy in a little basket.

Long story short, we had a surgery yesterday and this was pulled from my nasal cavity by a very nice Indian doctor. They’re some of the best in the world, I can’t recommend them highly enough. This guy’s great for all kinds of things, not just brain flukes.

And then my staff showed me the tapes of what I’ve been saying and doing, and holy shit, I owe all of you a huge apology. Huuggge. I wasn’t even supposed to get this job, much less turn it into this shitshow. It’s like that brain fluke made me say the absolute worst thing in every situation to make it even more horrible, like a shit-seeking missile.

That’s on me. But I do have to say that I’m a little worried that nobody noticed the symptoms of a Greater Balinese Brain Fluke splashing around in my brain this whole time. What more would a guy have to do or say before any of you said, “Holy shit, this isn’t Alzheimer’s or syphilis but clearly the ravages of a parasitic trematode”? It’s kinda my brand to be an asshole, I get it, but come on.

Jared? Ivanka? Mike? Nothing? You didn’t notice? Jesus wept.

So tonight, I’m here to ask for another four years because those first four didn’t really count. When you think about it, the brain fluke was really the president and I was just kind of like the suit it was wearing for a long, long Halloween.

What I can promise you is that my next term’s grift and bullshittery will return to the normal thresholds you’ve all come to need and expect from Washington. That’s why these new hats have the slogan, “MAKE AMERICA LESS OBVIOUSLY AWFUL AGAIN,” and you can buy them from any of the merch tables lined up in Melania’s Rose Garden.

We’re also selling the pale-veined satin lapel ribbons for Greater Balinese Brain Fluke Awareness because damn, you people need to learn the difference between politics-crazy and brain-fluke-crazy.

Necronomicon @Home Edition

August 23, 2020 / Will Ludwigsen

Thanks to my friend Norman, I attended my first convention for science fiction, fantasy, and horror over thirty years ago: Necronomicon in Tampa. I’ve been going ever since (except for a few years in the early 90s when I was too cool and literary), and it means a lot to me that I’m one of the guests now.

Necronomicon in Tampa is among the last of a dying breed of genre gathering run by and for fans with very little profit motive. The event itself raises money for Kids and Canines, a charity that provides emotional support dogs to children, and one of the things I’ll miss this year is getting to visit with the dogs they bring to show us.

This year it’s going virtual, and if you’ve always wondered what I’m talking about when I mention going to Necronomicon, here’s your chance to go for free from your own home! All you have to do is register through Eventbrite and show up virtually on the weekend of September 25 – September 27.

I’m appearing on a few panels:

Saturday at 9pm: What is Your Guilty Pleasure?
Sunday at 10am: Laughing in the Face of Danger
Sunday at 1pm: The Best (Writing) Advice I Ever Got

You can check the retro-themed site for all of the other great things going on!

When to Say “Enough”

August 5, 2020 / Will Ludwigsen

When you do something for years with only marginal success but many more days of painful trudging with no apparent benefit, you start to wonder if it’s time to let it go.

Even if you once loved it.

I’m a 47-year-old man, and it’s hard not to think that if I was going to get any better at this, I would have by now. I don’t even know what “better” means anymore, now that I’ve watched so many of my peers discover that success isn’t that…successful. Certainly not for any length of time, anyway. You grind and grind for a quick flash of glory, and then it’s someone else’s turn in a cycle that’s shortening with every passing year.

If I could plot the dopamine flow, there would be a spike before (in anticipation of a good session) and one after (relief for having survived it), but a long deep trough in the middle. That can’t be good.

As the great philosopher Rogersicus the Elder once wrote, “One must know when to hold them and then also when to fold them,” and I think it’s time.

I’m of course talking about running.

Wait, what did you think I was talking about?

Five years ago, I started running to Mordor by tracking my mileage to Mount Doom. It took me two years and 1,700 miles, but I did it. Since then, I’ve logged enough for a total of 4,030 miles – about the length of the Amazon River. I’ve run 5Ks, 15Ks, and half-marathons. I’ve run through Epcot and along the beach and over a treacherous bridge (four times).

But I haven’t had a run in nearly nine months that ended with me feeling great like they used to, and while nothing worthwhile is joyous 100% of the time, it shouldn’t suck 90% of the time, either.

I bought a bike about a month ago for cross-training, and I’ve enjoyed it like being a kid again. It’s rapidly becoming the thing I want to do, and I’ve learned to follow those instincts.

I’ll still run from time to time; it would horrify me to miss the Gate River Run, and I have a couple of 5Ks that I signed up for months ago that they’re running in socially-distanced waves. And it’s possible that I’ll come back to it again after a rest.

It’s hard to know when grinding is good (building your stamina and ability) and when grinding is bad (exacerbating injuries and making it impossible to fully recover), but I think it does us all good to know we can quit even the things we love.

For a little while, anyway.

Will Ludwigsen