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It’s a surreal, disturbing thing to watch the wildfires in Los Angeles and know that people I know and love are caught up in all of that. I mean that in the literal sense; I know people who got the evacuation notice and had to get the fuck out of there, leaving me — who’s lucky in that I’m states away from any of this and in no danger whatsoever — in a heightened state of anxiety and concern for them and thinking, over and over, I can’t imagine going through that myself.

I’ve been astonishingly lucky in terms of natural disasters, in that I’ve never really had to go through one. I think the worst I’ve ever personally had to deal with has been… an earthquake or two in San Francisco when I lived there, maybe? There was a hurricane in my hometown when I was a kid that was terrifying because it sucked a window out of our attic, but (a) I might be misremembering, and (b) our house wasn’t in the best shape at any given moment, so maybe that wasn’t that serious of a feat after all. Kid memories are always notoriously untrustworthy.

I remember, too, the wildfire smoke in Portland from the past few summers, and the days when the sky was orange because of the pollution and debris in the air; how curiously, surreally dystopian and cinematic it felt, and entirely unrealistic at the same time. How could this be the actual real world I asked myself as I ventured outside, the oppressive heat and thick air feeling like something artificial, as if I was in some strange room that I’d be able to step outside of and breathe freely again.

It’ll be worse than that in LA right now; the photos I’ve seen look like special effects from disaster movies, and videos of burned out neighborhoods that just don’t exist anymore. Everything I see makes me realize again how lucky I’ve been, and how little I’ve had to experience. I really can’t imagine going through any of it myself, and I’m so sorry, and so fearful, for those who have to.

The joke used to be, of course, that people couldn’t get used to writing the correct year on their checks for weeks (or months!) after New Year. That’s gone the way of all things flesh because, well, who writes checks for anything anymore? (I still have some in my office, of course, in case of emergency or the utter collapse of the internet… but we’d never be so lucky for that latter one to happen any time soon.) The strange thing for me, however, is that somewhere in my brain, it’s been 2025 for weeks before the year has even officially started,

I’d love to blame this on being really, really organized and prepared for the year that’s coming, but it’s more likely an after-effect of having almost entirely lost track of time in the past few months. I know that I’m not the only person who, writing this mid-December, feels as if it’s actually somewhere back in late October or maybe early November at the latest; I’ve spoken to enough people in the last couple of weeks who seem as surprised that it’s actually the holiday season as I am to confirm my company on this particular crazy train. But I’ve also been spending more time than I’d like to admit thinking about what lies ahead in the next 12 months that, on countless work documents in the past week, I’ve described our current time frame as December 2025.

That’s not all; in referring to the past 12 months in emails to people or multiple work scenarios, I’ve talked about it as 2025, and asked people what their favorite things have been in 2025, prompting more than one “I don’t know yet, what are you actually asking?” in response. (If only I knew the answer to that question, friends…) Maybe “2025” just sounds better in my head than “2024.” Perhaps I just wanted to skip out of the year that saw me turn 50 all the sooner, thinking that 51 is somehow preferable for a mysterious, probably non-existent reason. Who can tell why my brain does anything it does, at this point?

This sense of disorientation is something that, I can only hope, will lessen across the next few months with no holidays, conventions, and very little travel planned. As strange as it may seem, the space between January and March is as close to a “quiet period” as I get these days, for all manner of reasons; a time when other people need to settle into their new year and find their feet. Some of us, it turns out, have been living here for awhile already.

Merry Christmas, whoever’s seeing this.

If there’s a literary tradition I am inordinately fond of, it’s the nom de plume. I love the idea of people working under fake names for whatever their reasons, and perhaps even more so, I love the idea that others can then discover the true identities behind the name through a small amount of detective work; the whole thing seems like a strange, sometimes sadly necessary, game that I find myself all too eager to play on any number of occasions.

(I have, to the best of my admittedly poor memory, only employed a fake name in work once — which is not the same as ghostwriting, which is something I’ve done a lot and, as I continue to work as an editor, find myself doing with no small amount of frequency. The fake name I did use was a matter of necessity, as I was under a non-compete contract at the time but also owed another outlet a story. Shhhh. Don’t tell.)

My admittedly ridiculous joy in the practice might stem from growing up reading 2000 AD as a kid, where there were issues where 4/5 of the stories were written by the same writing team, but using different names to disguise the seeming lack of available talent. Names which were familiar to the kid-who-was-me at the time — John Howard, T.B. Grover — were, in fact, not real people at all, a fact that utterly delighted me when I eventually found out, years later. I’d been a fan of no-one, this whole time!

I was thinking about this recently upon discovering that there’s an Elephant 6 band called Major Organ and The Adding Machine that… well, no-one actually seems to know for sure who it is. It feels like the pseudonym taken one stage further, somehow; a group identity that people can (and have!) made guesses about the truth, but which more than 25 years later, no-one really knows for sure. Imagine if the Beatles had released Sgt. Pepper’s… but kept the act up the whole way through…

I have, on more than one occasion, promised myself that I’d start doing a webcomic under a fake name and just put it out there for people to randomly discover. Maybe that’s a project for 2025.

For someone who is both such a fan of the holidays in general — embarrassingly so, achingly so; it genuinely is probably my favorite time of the year — and specifically such a fan of the traditional holiday music that generally fills the airwaves at this time, I’m suitably embarrassed to admit that, the first time I heard Christmas songs on the radio this year, it came as a surprise.

In my defense, November was another beast of a month that left me feeling somewhat adrift in time. Even with the anchor of Thanksgiving — one that, for the first time in years, had actual guests, and from out of town at that, making it more of an event! — the entire month seemed to go by so quickly that I wasn’t entirely sure when I was the entire time. (Surely November had only just started, right? Wasn’t Hallowe’en just the week before? When was the election?) I was, bluntly, not prepared to hear the twinkle of the Beach Boys’ singing about Ol’ Saint Nick just yet.

I wonder, in some absent-minded, half-hearted manner, whether there’s something to be said for a pop cultural indoctrination or preparation; traditionally, Thanksgiving around these here parts means watching Miracle on 34th Street and putting my head into that Santa space, but this year that fell by the wayside because of the guests, so maybe I just wan’t properly prepared…

Here’s the thing, though; it wasn’t just that the songs were surprising, it’s that they felt so welcome when I heard them – at once familiar and oddly grounding, as if letting me know that I knew exactly where I was on the calendar and maybe a little bit emotionally, as well. In my defense, it wasn’t actually the Beach Boys that did that trick, but hearing “Linus and Lucy” from the Charlie Brown Christmas Special; hearing that piano hit me so strongly, in a good way, and put me in the mood I should have been in for a few days prior.

Chalk another one up for the magic of music, the holidays, or that very particular combination of the two, I guess. Next year, I’ll try to remember this ahead of time to get me where I’m supposed to be.

It’s rare that I have dreams that I remember, as I’ve noted before many times on this site. It’s even more rare that, when I do remember those dreams, they’re not somehow either inexplicably weird enough, or unsettling enough, that they stick with me. for whatever reason. The other day, though — the other night? Well, early morning, I guess — I had a dream that was just… nice. Pleasant. Positive, even. And for some reason, it stuck with me, and so here it is.

As with so many of my dreams, it’s the details I remember rather than the plot, per se. (Do dreams really have plots, or is that just pushing some kind of expectation of storytelling on them that they don’t deserve?) Everything was happening on a sunny fall day — I remember both the sun, and the chill in the air — even though I was inside, talking to people in a big room with massive windows from floor to ceiling. The room was part of an imaginary office, and I remember there was a lot of white furniture everywhere, including white shelving that extended across the window in part to dramatic effect.

I was in that office because, in the dream, I had been offered the job of editing a magazine. I’m not entirely clear on who was offering me that job or why, but there was some weird connection to the fact that James Gunn’s first Superman movie was about to come out and that was playing some factor into it. (Was it DC offering me a job? Who can tell at this point.) All I remember was, it was a job where I was being told I could do what I want with budget not an issue, literally a dream job, and I was sitting in this room thinking variations on, “I can’t believe my luck” and also “But I’m already editing Popverse, would I have to quit to do this? Is that something I’d want to do?”

Such thoughts weren’t anxiety inducing or bad, I should note; this was, again, a positive dream so it was far more, “Oh, what a great place to be in, what an opportunity” than anything else. The feeling throughout the entire experience was one of being fortunate, and of the potential available to offer people work as a result, and make a good thing that also helped other people in the process.

There’s no small amount of dark humor to be found in the fact that my dream was literally, “Imagine the publishing industry was so healthy to launch a new magazine that you got to be part of,” and also, “imagine the industry was so healthy good writers you know could get work,” but let’s overlook that for now. Let’s just bask in the memory of a nice dream. Good vibes only, as the frustrating saying goes.

The fall is, I promise, my favorite time of the year. There’s something about the dull light on the overcast days, or the way that sun is almost mixed with crisp chills if and when it eventually arrives. (I’m writing this on the first sunny day here in Portland in something like three or four weeks, and it feels magical how much it’s lifted my mood.) Despite that, I’ve noticed that in recent years, the fall is also the time of year when everything just… folds in on itself as if time is collapsing around me.

This year, for example, it felt as if October just… didn’t happen. Or, rather, days of it did — I remember by birthday, and Halloween, for example, and I know I went to New York for a week of it even if all I did was work endlessly — but the entire month seemed to pass in the blink of an eye overall. Suddenly, it wasn’t just November but midway through November and I felt as if I’d magically arrived here through time travel or sleepwalking through the last few weeks. (To be fair, that might have been the case, given how intense my workload was for about four or five weeks there.)

Last year, the fall was lost to my UK trip; I left mid-October and when I was back, it was almost Thanksgiving and the holiday season felt as if it was already underway. I spent the holidays trying to catch my breath and wondering what had happened.

What is it about this time of year? Is it the stress of the entire rest of the year finally catching up with us and pulling us under for a little bit? Is it that the darker mornings and evenings just fuck with our sense of time and sending us spinning as a result? Am I simply not as much of a fan of the fall as I used to be?

Maybe I’m just getting old. But the final two months of each year are becoming increasingly tricky for me, and I’m not quite sure what to do about that.

There’s something to be said, I’m sure, about what the spam of any particular era says about that time. Who amongst us fails to remember the time when almost every single spam email wanted to trick us into confirming our existence — not to mention our personal details — by promising untold wealth if only we’d believe that an African Prince was asking for our help? Those were happier, more naive years, when the counterfeit powers that be sought to take advantage of those political promises of “Hope” and “Change” by suggesting that we should dare to hope that our lives could change if only we revealed way too much about ourselves to a stranger. (Hey, he was down on his luck and just needed some help!)

Lately, though, I’ve found that the spam of today has two significant differences to the “classic” spam of the past. (Those quote marks around “classic” are doing a lot of work, let’s be honest.) For one thing, so much of it seems to be coming in as texts, rather than emails — am I the only one who’s getting multiple spam texts every day now? I blame the fact that my phone number is likely on several million lists after years of convention attendance — and, more importantly, it’s… sad now. Take, for example, this spam text I received earlier today:

Maybe I’m just too much of a sentimental old man, but there’s something about this message that feels like there’s enough backstory to fill at least a novella of longing, pretentiously and anxiously written by a first-time writer processing a recent love affair in the most self-indulgent manner possible. But it’s melancholic in such an inescapable way to me that feels fascinating. Is this where we are now, wondering about people we miss and wanting to hear from them?

I could be reading too much into these messages, of course; I am me, after all, and for every “I hope you still have the same number, I haven’t heard from you in so long and I was thinking of you” spam text, there’s a “I work for an employment agency and I’d like to offer you a job” one as well. Perhaps the real feeling out there is “economic and emotional uncertainty,” to which I’d respond, “I think that was my 20s, and my 30s, and a lot of my 40s as well, glad you all caught up.”

I should simply delete these messages, and not think about them so much. And yet, hours later, I’m still wondering about whoever came up with the above text and what’s going on in their lives for that to be their attempt to catfish us into disaster. Spare a thought for the spammers; it seems like maybe they’re having some hard times themselves.

It’s difficult to accurately describe my feelings this morning, seeing the results of the election. If there’s such a thing as “stunned disbelief that is also the realization that this was almost inevitable, mixed with the crushing disappointment in your fellow citizens,” it’d be that. As I said on Monday, I had a pit-in-my-stomach feeling things were going to turn out this way, but I was… I don’t know: I think, despite that, I was hoping that I was wrong and that I was too cynical about everything, and without even knowing it that hope was actually where I actually was.

I actually woke up at 3:45 this morning, stressed about what had happened while I was asleep, even though I went to bed with the dull certainty of the outcome. The first thing I did after checking the news was have a brief moment of depressed introspection and I shouldn’t say anything, and the second thing was to write what ended up being an op-ed on Popverse which was a letter to myself to remember to be kind and fight for the right people in the next four years. It was one of those, “when in doubt, write,” things.

I’m scared of what’s going to happen in the next four years, and beyond. I’m angry about the fact that 15 million Biden voters disappeared on the way to this election, whether through vote suppression tactics on behalf of the other side, or apathy on the part of those who are ostensibly “anti-Trump.” (Trump won a landslide this time out with 3 million voters less than he had when he lost in 2020; some Republicans really did abandon him.) I’m exhausted by the certainty that things are going to get worse across the foreseeable future, and in ways that I can’t even imagine just yet.

In 2016, Trump’s victory felt like a bad thing that was this great unknown. This time, I feel like we know all too well how bad the baseline is. This feels so much worse.