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It feels like tempting fate, especially considering the trash fire that is 2020, but there are moments recently that feel like things might just be getting a little… easier…?

That needs to be put in a greater context, I think; I’m well aware, all too aware, that the year continues to be a nightmare for most, if not all. Even without the continuing threat of COVID, there’s still the looming election and the many ways in which systems and norms are being deconstructed in front of our eyes by a President and party that will do anything to remain in power. There are still record numbers unemployed, and a recession unlike anything we’ve experienced in a century opening up right in front of us. There’s still massive inequality prompting protests against police brutality, systematic racism and more. All of that remains the case, in addition to whatever personal problems people might be experiencing on top of all of that — and, to be honest, almost everyone I know has experienced some kind of personal problem this year in addition to everything else. It’s been an especially, cartoonishly difficult year.

And yet, I still find myself thinking that things might be getting better.

I wish I could explain why; I wish I could find a logical argument for the feeling, a way to adequately describe the belief — sincere, even if it may be misguided — that we’ve somehow turned a corner and may be headed out of the quagmire. I can’t, though; it really is just a feeling that, through whatever magic or unlikely circumstance, things might — just might — be changing for the better, as unlikely and uncomfortable as that sounds after everything we’ve gone through.

Perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe this is Stockholm Syndrome writ large, the result of a man so beaten by the year that even a brief respite from shit feels like a turnaround. Or it could be the fact that a small number of unusual, but positive, things have happened to me lately — small, tiny things, sure, but still — and they’ve turned my head around irresponsibly. Who can tell?

It’s an unusual, unexpected, feeling, this optimism. Maybe it is foolish and unrealistic. But it’s also a comfort, to feel this again after so long. I think I’ll stay foolish, just for a little bit.

The news last week that a train had derailed outside of Stonehaven, a small town in the North-East of Scotland on the outskirts of Aberdeen, hit surprisingly hard. For most people outside of the UK, and likely outside of Scotland, this isn’t even news they would’ve heard in the first place, perhaps understandably given what’s happening everywhere else in the world right now; and yet, it was a subject that I found myself obsessed with on the day it happened, checking and rechecking and refreshing news reports from the Guardian and the BBC for whatever new updates I could get.

A lot of the reason for my fascination was, I’ll be honest, something resembling nostalgia. Not for train disasters, although when I put it like that, it feels like something that someone would have a weird longing for, because it sounds like a horror from days of old. “Remember when the worst thing that could happen would be a train derailment? Oh, those were the days…!”

Instead, I mean nostalgia for my old art school days, and the people that filled them. My best friend of the time moved to Stonehaven a few years after we all graduated, into a tiny little house with his family that always felt curiously old-fashioned and beautifully peaceful at once; when I first read the news, my first thought (and my second, and third, and on and on until I saw an appropriate update) was concern that maybe he or one of his family had been in the train when it happened. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case.

Nonetheless, the more I read and learned, the more I imagined how horrible what was happening for everyone involved. Sure, my friend wasn’t in the train but I was all too aware of what everyone else who feared the same thing was feeling, and just as certain that a number of those people would find their fears turn out to be well-founded. There’s something about that kind of strange close shave that adds to whatever sense of empathy you already had, because for all intents and purposes, you really were that person just minutes earlier.

Three people died in the accident, as it turned out, with six others taken to hospital. I feel guilty for being as relieved as I am that I didn’t know any of them.

There was a day at the end of last month where I got surprising good news. I’m tempted to make the joke that, in 2020, that’s enough of an unusual occurrence to be the entire story — I mean, have you seen this year? — but the reason I say that isn’t to boast that there was one day when everything wasn’t terrible, but to cue up the real point: when I got that good news, I didn’t really know how to react.

On the one hand, it was certainly not news I’d been expecting. It’s fair to say that I’d been expecting just the opposite, with regards to this particular subject, so I had that element of the unexpected to deal with; I wouldn’t go so far as to call it outright disbelief, but it was close. That might explain some of my confusion as to just how to respond, if nothing else.

Nonetheless, I was in a daze. I worked through what could legitimately be described as suspicion that what certainly appeared to be good news was, in fact, actually bad news in disguise. That felt more comfortable, more believable, more 2020: the idea that something that at first feels like a win is, in fact, setting us up for not only disappointment but failure in some sense. Sure, my subconscious told me, that, I can believe.

But… what if it wasn’t? What if the good news was… just good news? What did that mean? That idea made my brain spin. I’d become so used to the alternative, to getting used to the idea that everything is, given the odds, going to be bad news that being presented with good news just felt nearly impossible, for want if a better way to put it.

Realizing this didn’t feel like a positive. What had happened to my optimism? Had the past year — maybe the past four years, considering — really made me so unable to appreciate the good things? The idea stuck with me for awhile, saddening me with its potential to be true, until I remembered the first thing I’d thought when learning of the good news: Maybe this is a sign that everything’s turning around! Anyone who sincerely thinks things like that hasn’t lost it just yet.

I write elliptically, in the space between ellipses, sometimes. I don’t lay everything out, even here; I don’t explain it all or put the pieces in the right order at the right time.

At some times, that’s an intentional decision for any number of reasons, ranging from wanting to make things more inviting (or enjoyably frustrating) for the reader to make them read on — if I just told you everything, you’d get bored, surely — to, quite simply, not feeling comfortable sharing everything and wanting to keep some things to myself despite this whole space. In work mode, sometimes it’s also a function if not being able to say everything, because sources won’t share on the record, or there are things that aren’t my stories to share just yet.

But then, there are times when I write around things because that’s all I can do, when I don’t really know what it is I’m trying to say when I set out in the first place. I might have a vague idea, an imagined destination that may or may not be real, but I write in circles, I use words like echolocation to find my path when I don’t actually have a map. I’ll find my way somehow, I hope, as I get started.

When I was a student, I discovered the term “emergent research,” and remember to this day the definition I was given at the time: it was, I was told, what happens when you only really find out what you’re looking for when you’re already looking for it. In other words, you start out without a plan, and then the revelation comes midway through: Oh, it was this all along!

I’m unsure if that’s what “emergent research” actually means, or if it’s a recognized term in academia at all, I’ll admit. I could look into it, but that feels like it’d be risking bursting a bubble, or bringing some magic to an end by looking behind the curtain. Let’s enjoy that definition and idea of reality, even if it’s not true.

More often than not, I write as my version of emergent research, at least in the meaning I was taught. It’s the way I think, and the way I feel most comfortable doing it, I think. Sometimes, I just start a post with the words “I write elliptically,” not knowing what’s next, and enjoy the ride.

I keep thinking about a sign I saw during one of the Portland protests a couple weeks ago, as you read this. The majority of signs were exactly what you’d expect: variations on Black Lives Matter or Feds Out of Portland or Defund the Police, each one something I agree with — each of those mirroring chants during the protest as well, with so many of the familiar favorites being screamed at the Justice Center walls. (“No Justice, No Peace, No Fascist Police,” or “This Is What Democracy Looks Like,” they seem to have multiple applications, but maybe that’s a sign of the protests I show up for; the more simple “Quit Your Job” was a new joy, however.)

I’m distracting myself. The sign that I keep thinking of read, simply, “Fix Your Hearts Or Die.” It wasn’t a threat, or at least, that’s not how I read it; it’s not as if  the person holding the sign was threatening to kill anyone. But the simplicity of “Fix Your Hearts” as a demand sticks with me. There’s a cleanliness, a bluntness, to it — a reduction that feels assured and correct. People not supporting Black Lives Matter, people not appalled by what’s happening here in Portland in terms of federal agent overreach, people standing on the wrong side of history… their hearts are broken. Of course.

I keep thinking about the federal officers that night, as well. I keep wondering what they were thinking, what stories they were told and that they tell themselves to do what they do. In the middle of the protest, being there, it’s so clear that the lie of rioting protestors or violent agitators is just bullshit; there’s passion and anger and, yes, power in the crowd, but the tear gas is fired into the crowd for none of those reasons. It’s violence in and of itself, an attempt to disrupt and destroy protest. Who could do that?

(But then, I am just as unable to comprehend who could have a problem with protests saying “black people matter,” and here we are.)

Fix your hearts or die isn’t a threat, it’s a forecast. You might be living in the medical sense, but there’s no soul there. No true life worth living.

When I was a kid, I didn’t like August. August was when I went back to school.

The Summer Holidays, as they were called back then — or maybe I’m misremembering, maybe it was just me that called them something so blunt and clear and everyone else called it “summer break” or something more exciting — ran from the end of June through the middle of August. That made July an exciting month, a month to look forward to and feel filled with potential and possibility, even if all it actually translated into was lying around the house more, reading comics inside in the shards of sunlight coming in through dirty windows.

(I’m subtweeting myself there, to be honest, that was how I spent my summer holidays. Going outside? Why would I do that unless someone told me to?)

The promise of July made June a good month, too, thanks to the kid logic that runs no matter what happens this month, the holidays are still right there, I can see them…! Exams? Homework? Sure, I can handle that, because it’s only for a few weeks before good things happen.

August, though…! As soon as August rolled around, my mood changed; the end was nigh. It didn’t matter that I’d still have a couple of weeks of the break left when the month started — a full third of the Summer Holidays! — because school loomed visibly on the horizon, casting a shadow over everything. Whatever good things happened, they felt like consolation prizes or just postponing the inevitable heartbreak of returning to school. August was, then, an entirely untrustworthy month. August was trouble.

Decades later, I still have this suspicion when it comes to August, despite not having anything resembling Summer Holidays anymore. It wasn’t something that went away when I started art school, where the school year didn’t begin until September, and it didn’t fade when I left education and started working in the real world, which doesn’t offer six weeks off every summer for any purpose. Despite everything, I maintain this distrust for August, knowing full well that the poor month doesn’t deserve such disdain.

Maybe this year, this August, I’ll finally learn my lesson.

I’ve been writing some important pieces for THR lately. That sounds like unbridled ego at work — my writing has meaning and weight and integrity, don’t you know — but it’s not intended that way; I mean it in the sense of, there are times when you write things because you have to, because they’re stories that people need to read and that you can’t fuck up for that same reason. It’s not the announcement of a new comic or some analysis of a trailer or a casting decision, both of which can be fun and popular enough in their own right; it’s a story where you feel, deep down, a need to make sure people understand some important truth in some way.

Working on these stories has been… stressful isn’t the right word, exactly, but it’s close. As I said above, the feeling of don’t fuck this up has been very much in the background of the process, as has the sneaking fear that I was, in some worrying and unknown way, fucking it up and that would be uncovered only when it was too late. I asked for oversight, shared what I was working on with others to fact-check, but also to gut-check: Is this right? Am I asking the right questions, thinking the right things? Am I disappearing down the wrong rabbit holes?

As I’m writing this, not all of the “important” stories are finished, never mind having run; the biggest of them all is still in the reporting process, with another waiting what is now the third round of legal review after a substantial re-write to excise material lawyers weren’t entirely comfortable with. (With any luck, by the time this runs, it will have been published; we’ll see.) Throughout the whole thing, I’ve realized that, as frustrating as these processes are, they’re also freeing in their own way — they’re institutional blocks that provide an oversight that allows me to overreach and be ambitious and try too hard, safe in the knowledge that I have someone (multiple someones) to tell me when to pull back, or put up or shut up. I find a strange comfort in that.

I’ve been writing some important pieces for THR lately, but it’s easier to do than it could be, because I’ve not been doing it alone.