It’s so Easy to Feel Like Sh*t

It’s so easy to make yourself feel like shit. Seriously, it is! I know you agree. Sit there for a minute and think. Are you thinking? How does it make you feel? I bet you feel super shitty. Yeah, me too. Don’t worry we’re going to get through this together.

During lunch a co-worker told me that the rye chip—that dark little cracker in your Chex Mix—is the worst. Everyone in the room agreed. I sat there and laughed and proceeded to keep my little yapper shut because, well, I fucking love rye chips. To speak out against the Chex Mix council would brand me as a workplace pariah. So, now I feel dumb for liking the little toasted bread flakes. And now I’m thinking about how I’m never going to make it and that I’m going to die unaccomplished, and everyone will be like, “That Bobby guy? He was kind of okay, I guess. A bit annoying, though.”

Okay, maybe that’s an overreaction. Don’t sit there and say you haven’t overreacted before. Especially not after inhaling a bag of Goldfish with the same reverence as a castaway sucking down potable water. I bet you felt real bad about yourself then.

But I’m not here to make you feel like shit. I’m here to help point fingers at the why the how, and the God damn it, I need to stop doing this to myself every thirty-five minutes.

Before my Chex Mix encounter, I was thinking about people. Specifically, I was thinking about how much I hate them. Or, to be even more specific, how much I hate myself. See, thinking about other people is the easiest way to feel truly horrible about yourself—a shortcut to misery. If you want to skip, leap, and trip into a bad day, just think about your more successful friends, family, strangers, or celebrities.

The problem with being me is that I look in the mirror and I see, well me. Other people get the privilege of looking in the mirror and seeing themselves. They see success. They see someone who has their life figured out with lots of smiles and money and tons of friends who think they are all really cool. They definitely don’t look at themselves and think,

“Fuck.”

Comparison is the greatest tool in your arsenal of self-hatred. It doesn’t matter that the other person is also a stupid little human with too many thoughts rattling around their head, just like you and I.

Why am going on this tangent? Why am I dragging you through my pissy-fit when I’m just throwing a tantrum? I’ll tell you why: because we’re all throwing a tantrum together, and I’m here to help if only a little bit. Let me be the first to say it,

It is okay to feel like shit.

We all make ourselves feel bad. We gaze at someone else’s verdant lawns and forget that overnight, we climbed over their fence and painted their grass the most perfect shade of green. We ignore the crows tearing worms out of a soggy lawn, waterlogged from poor drainage. We ignore the dog shit and the wrappers and the entire rotisserie chicken that’s feeding a family of angry raccoons. It’s so much easier to see the topiary you could never afford and ignore the rampant rodents ravaging their garage.

You could argue that there is some kind of comfort in the success of others. You could argue that if everyone’s lives are heaping piles of crap, then the world truly is an awful place, and we should all be sad all the time. Well, I don’t believe that. I think that there is plenty of room to be angry, jealous, and at the end of the day, Okay.

Everyone has their own lives. Their own tastes. Their own bags of Goldfish or Chex Mix. Some people have better things than you: better hair, a better car, more money, and a cooler job. But they also have to look at themselves in the mirror every day and hear the little ghosts in their brain measuring them up to someone else. We can take these comparisons and invert them. Compare yourself to yourself and see that maybe things aren’t so bad. Maybe the you of today is better than the you of yesterday. Maybe you’ve got a pretty kickass life when you stop yelling at yourself.

I guarantee that if you take the time to breathe, you’ll see that you’re a lot more put together than you give yourself credit.

I know. Giving yourself your credit is difficult. It’s like writing a check to yourself at the bank and cashing it at the same teller. What’s the point? Did it really do anything? Honestly, it probably didn’t. You’re going to say, “Hey, good job me!” And then, ten seconds later, curl up into the fetal position on your couch as you compare yourself to your best friend who just arrived at a wine and cheese mixer without you. Little did you know that your best friend is also sobbing, curled up in their car because of some other person that they compared themselves to and so on and so on and so on.

That’s sort of how life goes.

Look, we’ve all got our problems. We’ve got our good and bad. We all spend way too much energy worrying about stupid, idiotic things like our neighbor’s car or our friend’s vacation. I know that I do. I get this weight in my gut, a crushing ball of fear made lead whenever I think about someone far more successful than me. How could I ever compare? Should I dig a hole in the dirt and lie down so I can get this dying thing over with already?

If you said yes, then you are either being far too mean or far too dramatic.

I know that what I say here isn’t going to change your life, or your day, or even the next hour. But you’re not alone with your jealousy or the whiplash of self-loathing that follows. Try to remember that when you swear at yourself in the mirror or in your bed or while you stare down at an empty bag of snacks, your neighbor has probably done something similar before driving off to your dream job. For all you know, they’re about to get fired.

It’s okay to want that. Seriously.

The biggest thing that will make you feel like shit is yourself. It’s easy, and that’s okay. Let yourself feel like shit. It’s human. But let yourself breathe once in a while. Maybe you won’t go on that Hawaiian vacation or buy that sports car. Maybe you’ll feel embarrassed about your strange obsession with rye chips. But at the end of the day, I hope you can say,

“Hey, maybe things aren’t so bad!”

Even if you change your mind ten minutes later.

Why Dungeon Masters Make Great Marketers

You’re two pepperoni pizzas deep, hunched over as your friends toss dice onto your banged-up basement table. At least, that’s what it looks like. What everyone is imagining, however, is a group of intrepid adventurers fighting a pack of goblins that accosted them on their way to town to return the mayor’s lost prize swine: Porky Pete (named by one of your players, naturally). Not one of them even notices the dryer rumbling in the background.

That’s Dungeons & Dragons, baby.

To sit down for a tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG for those nerd-savvy), be it D&D or any other game, means sitting down for collaborative storytelling. It means escaping into a story of your own making. It means selling a story as reality.

And if that doesn’t sound like marketing, you’re probably not a marketer. So let me explain myself.

Before any dice are rolled, a dungeon master (DM for short) has to convince a group to even show up:

“Basically,” you start, eyes wide with fanatic excitement. “You’ll come over, and we’ll have a kick-ass adventure where you fight a bunch of monsters and find treasure. Oh, you’re the last person we need for the group.” (You’ve said this last bit to everyone.)

You make big, bold promises and try to capture your friend’s imagination. Hoping that one of them will bite and go, “Oh? Pray tell, my good dungeon master,” and not the halfhearted “sure,” you’re totally going to get.

Next, you’re going to need to make sure you’re delivering something the players actually want. Are they interested in classic dragon-slaying dungeon delving? How about a murder mystery in the king’s court? Or maybe they want to be the bad guys for a change.

Then you’re going to have to deliver on that promise. You promised gold, you promised combat, you promised basically anything to get them at the table. But if you ended up convincing them to sit down for a night of slaying dragons, but instead they spend four hours fighting giant rats in a smelly sewer, the eyes are glazing over, the phones are coming out, and everyone’s going to head out early. And they probably aren’t coming to session two.

Delivering on your promise is a golden rule in marketing. You fail that, you break trust. Game over.

Okay, so let’s say you are telling the story you promised. Next comes the fun part. Drum roll, please…. Emotional investment!

The thing is, you don’t just get emotional investment. You have to earn it, my Dungeon Master Marketer extraordinaire. Because It’s the beating, beautiful heart of all marketing—of all storytelling. It’s that mystical magical “Just one more page.”

The good news is that once emotional investment sinks its hooks into your players, the rest gets a hell of a lot easier.

Because when your players start engaging, the story becomes effortless. Your players suddenly offer ideas. They provide feedback. They think of things you could never ever think of in a million billion years.

It’s the dream of every marketer: folks who engage and care about what you’re trying to tell them. And it really can feel like magic. Your words and your ideas stirred some dormant part of your audience to life.

You bring the words; they bring the action.

And while professional marketing may not be as exciting as slaying dragons to save a fiefdom, it operates on a lot of the same levels. That’s why DM’s have a leg up here, even if they don’t realize it. They have to market their adventure, figure out what their players want, deliver on their promise, and get them to engage.

That’s the full marketing package if I’ve ever seen it.

Whether you’re slaying a dragon with D20s, or you just bought a set of curtains because your cat tore down the old one, a story probably brought you there. And chances are pretty high that someone really good at marketing helped you see that story to its conclusion.

Big Dumb Crybaby

I cry a lot.

I’m not talking about a full sob or dramatic weep. I get the eye stings. That salty leakage after a particular thought, sound, sight, or smell brushes up against that little thing we call a soul. It’s a cathartic rush. A gasp.

We’re really good at feeling things. Almost as good as we are at not feeling things.

And we’ve all done a great job training ourselves to not feel things. Not properly, at least. I’d wager most folks consider themselves far too busy to cry. Far too busy to stop and realize that a month, three months, a fucking year just passed.

Exhausted, we spend our evenings on the couch, staring glassy-eyed at devices we’re socially obligated to own. Though at this point, I hesitate to say we own our screens. We just swipe on to the next clip, data harvested, adds generated, continuing, and continuing until Earth completes another run around the sun.

So, I like to cry.

It’s my emotional eruption that pulls me back to the present and the now. I probably sound crazy. Maybe I’m a big dumb crybaby. But let me ask you: when did you last cry?

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you’ve been SO busy and overworked that you have cried. A lot. You’ve got that full-body, chest-heaving, vomit-inducing cry. The type of crying that doesn’t just come after your breaking point, but after you forgot how you broke in the first place. No, you’re wrung out like a human sponge, wondering why you can’t just suck it up like a normal person.

Spoiler alert: the rest of us aren’t much better.

By the time you’ve caught your breath, a decade has passed, your hair is gone, and you aren’t quite where you thought you’d be when you were five years old and said you’d grow up to be an archeologist—or maybe that’s just me.

Either way, probably not healthy.

I do my best to avoid those kinds of downward spirals– not that you really can. But a little cry here and there helps. It’s a pressure release in the pipeline that is my discombobulation. A way to decompress from the mess of everything without getting too sloppy. Because boy, do we need to decompress from everything sometimes.

Crying helps me connect. With myself. With others. It helps me relive a moment, good or bad. But it’s hard not to get stuck in feedback loops and dopamine cycles that spin you round and round and round till you’re vomiting on yourself like some fucked up mama bird.

Because I do get stuck. We all do. In the noise, the shouting, the screaming, the anger, the hate. But hot-digity damn is it nice to feel something beyond the snorts, the “hahs,” the “Check this meme out,” and the “oh my god I can’t handle this anymore what the fuck is wrong with me.”

We live in a world where AI is sanitizing our prose. Where our attentions are clipped and dropped into algorithmically laid labyrinths filled with personalized minotaurs that bellow stale memes and politics. A world where every news outlet lures you in with tantalizingly bullshit headlines only to dash you on the rocks of fear and propaganda.

But we also live in a world where a fat little bluejay lives in your yard. Where the weather was so perfect that you spent the afternoon reading beneath that old oak tree. Where you just shared a good beer with an old buddy.

Sure, it’s also the same world where you broke your arm in a skiing accident, where you failed that intro-level math test, and where your car broke down in the middle of a thunderstorm. But that’s life. The good and the bad.

There are tears for both.

We owe it to ourselves to gasp for breath—if only for a second. For me, crying is that gasp. For you, it could be something different. Point is, we all need something, yeah?

AI is destroying your confidence as a writer.

There’s an unspoken rule in creative writing workshops: don’t rewrite someone’s work when giving feedback. At best, it comes off as dismissive. At worst, it can destroy their confidence.

So why are so many people letting ChatGPT rewrite their work?

Just like in a creative writing workshop, when ChatGPT rewrites your prose—even ifyou’ve trained it to sound like you—you lose confidence in yourself.

Many are touting how ChatGPT can be a useful tool, and sure, in careful moderation, it can help you find the perfect word or help you remember a tricky piece of grammar. But like jamming Fritos down your throat at midnight, it’s detrimental to your long-term health.

One generated sentence becomes one generated paragraph becomes one generated page, and boom, you aren’t the writer anymore.

So, next time you’re writing, stay confident. You know what you’re doing. You’ve been doing it for years. And as you type away, don’t for a single second believe that a thoughtless generative printer can do a better job than your beautiful human brain.

Okay with Being Okay

There’s a space in my mind. It sits at the center of my grey matter. A little sanctuary. A tiny chamber that brushes up against everything else. It’s the focal point of my brain in the same way a big, ugly-ass vase is the focal point of a poorly-furnished living room. Even when I’m not actively thinking about it, it’s there, clashing with paint, carpet, and everything else. Unlike some distant memories or old habits, it doesn’t gather dust. I keep it polished. I inspect the vase for cracks and issues, even when everyone tells me there’s nothing to worry about and that I should breathe and stop for a second and—you get the point.

Sometimes, the vase is a pot of water sitting on my stovetop. I left the burner on and decided it was a great time to leave for the day—this shaky analogy is made worse because I have done this before. I’ll be out and about, doing whatever I’m doing, when I sense that simmering. That chemical smell of burning Teflon after the water has been steamed out and the flame sucks the bottom of the pot. Maybe I’m on the couch watching TV, reading a book, driving to the supermarket. Where I am doesn’t matter. What matters is that I need to be worried about something, right? I mean, I left the fucking burner on.

It’s a twisted sense of vindication, remembering something you should be worried about, even if that worry is as empty as harmless as dinner plans or as distant as a due date that hasn’t been established yet. But there is always something to worry about. And like an ugly vase at the center of a living room, or water evaporating out of a burning pot, it demands attention.

Why does it feel wrong to not worry? To not have these things that claw and scream and stoke my fears and anxieties? Even on those days when everything is perfect—the sun is out, the skies are blue, and the danged birds are singing like a Disney flick—I can’t help but say to myself, “Hmmm, I think it’s time to panic.”

How can I sit here and enjoy my time when there are insubstantial, trivial, and neurotic things to worry about? Because no matter what, that water is going to start simmering again, or that vase is going to get in the way, and my brain isn’t going to let me relax.

Because relaxing is the worst thing I can do. Because then the accusations start.

Why relax when you could fill that time with a side gig? Hustle and bustle. Get on that grindset. Stop watching YouTube, or reading a book, or playing a game. Get out and make something of yourself. Stop enjoying the moment and think, think, think, think, THINK. You’re only being lazy. That’s all. If you justify your enjoyment, you’re just coping. Be nervous. Be scared. Be regretful. Look at these last thirty years and ask yourself…could I have done more?

Obviously, don’t do any of that. But it’s hard sometimes, isn’t it? Especially now. Today. Tomorrow. Over the next few years. Brains aren’t supposed to do this, be hijacked by pressures worries, and ever-increasing expectations. I know I’m not alone. Of course, I’m not alone. And while that fills me with some comfort it’s also a bit sad.

We should all be okay with being okay.

I am Afraid to Die

We’ve all been there. It’s say, 1 am, and you’re tossing and turning in bed. Maybe it’s too hot in your room. Maybe it’s too cold. Maybe your partner or roommate is snoring like the world’s sleepiest jackhammer. Either way, you can’t sleep, and suddenly, you’re slammed with that thought that’s been lurking in your mind all day. There’s no ignoring it now. That big terrifying ball of darkness has taken over your brain, and you’ve got to ride this out. It’s time to get existential, baby!

Have fun at work tomorrow!

Whether we want to or not, we’re all intimately acquainted with our intrusive thoughts. These thoughts clamor from the darkness and snuggle up like a toxic ex-partner who just wanted to come over because they miss you. Or they are about as subtle as the Kool-Aid-man bursting through your skull. Everyone’s got their tormentor. It’s shocking how many inventive ways our brains torture us. Thanks for that one, evolution!

These things vary from person to person. You could be jumped by that stupid thing you said ten years ago, or remember how you keep ghosting your friend, or you could have just come to the painful realization that you hate your job. Maybe the world is about to end, and all you can do is lay in bed and panic.

For me, it’s the fear of death. And before I get someone all uppity about how they never want to live forever—no crap. What I’m talking about is the sudden nothingness—the ability to not, well, be. The feeling starts in my chest. It’s like someone has jammed a bunch of cotton balls in my sternum, and every breath cements them in place. Before you know it, I’m curled up against my pillow, counting down the hypothetical days I have left on this rock and thinking about hurtling through the vast nothingness in a universe that doesn’t know or care that I even exist. Some would call this a panic attack. I’d call this Tuesday night.

It only takes one tiny thought before the proverbial dominoes are toppling across your brain, each impact hitting you like a mallet on glass. We all get caught in those downward spirals. The synapses in our brain fire off like a lightning storm, each thought pinging off the next in some grand design whose purpose makes you question what the hell you’re doing on this damned planet. We all feel it.

There is comfort in that, I think.

When you think about it, we’re all just larger-than-average meatballs with overactive imaginations sitting inside the studio apartment that is our skull. Hunks of flesh and blood and water that do nothing but churn and gurgle and sweat and freak out over things we can’t control. Because that’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Fear of the things we can’t control, or the things that we could have controlled but didn’t, or things we may be able to control but won’t. It’s like sitting on a bus and realizing no one is at the wheel. The: “Oh shit, I’m about to crash, and this thing doesn’t have seatbelts!”

With all of the infinite wisdom that my keyboard provides me, I can say with total confidence that there is good and bad news with this mindset. The bad is that we’re never going to have control. I don’t care how stable or unstable your life is. At the end of the day, you can’t change the way of things. We are all out here scrambling together. Just a few million years ago, our ancestors realized they could use sticks for more things than smacking each other. Do you really think that within those few million years—a nano-blink in the grand scale of existence—we would have the capacity to understand what the hell is going on? No, and that leads me to the good news:

It does not matter one bit.

I don’t mean this in a nihilistic, “nothing matters, and we should all give up,” sort of way. Once apathy waddles its vapid way into your brain, then we have an issue. You shouldn’t stop caring. You should stop freaking about all that big stuff. Freaking out in your sweat-stained sheets isn’t going to change anything. But you can change your moment-to-moment. Your day-by-day is malleable. Make use of that. We are all stuck with our brains. Each person has their own unique flavor of fear. Find the comfort in knowing that you’re not going to figure out shit. It is okay. If you are one of those rare few who has found the mystical place of solace and satisfaction, I envy you. I don’t believe you, but I envy you anyway.

We’re all riding this rock as a collection of overimaginative primates made up of a bunch of cells, filled with goop and mitochondria—the powerhouse of said cells—and molecules and atoms, with electricity zapping to and fro, allowing us to panic so.

Wild, isn’t it?

So, I say let’s panic together. Panic, get out of bed, and go do what it is you want to do. Who cares if no one is driving this bus? When your intrusive thoughts Kool-Aid-man blast into your brain or your toxic ex slips under your covers tonight, try to remember that we’re all dealing with the same damned thing. Don’t let the fear tear you down. We’re all here together. We can at least try to enjoy this stupid thing we call life.

I mean, what the hell else are we going to do?

What Happened to the Bad Guys?

“What happened to the bad guys? I mean the real bad guys. Those real pieces of work. The irredeemable shitheads. The melt the polar icecaps because it’s fun kind of guys. The ‘I’m going to blow up the Grand Canyon’ fellows.”

“They aren’t very relatable.”

“So? I don’t want them to be. I want some dick-head scaling the Eiffel Tower to install his brain melter because he ate a bad apple pie one time. I don’t want a grim reflection of society. I want someone a hero can come up and sock in the face.”

“Then where’s your story? Where’s the emotional connection?”

“The connection is the fist to the face. I don’t need it to be real. Fun is fine with me. Why does everything need to be so serious? The world is already scary enough. Why can’t we just take a break and have some fun?

“But we can’t ignore the world we live in. A good villain says something about the world. Someone that makes us look into ourselves.”

“Why not switch it up for a little bit? I’m not saying forever, just a few doomsday devices and mutant zombies. Let’s punch some fool hell-bent on turning the oceans into lava. Stop some world-killer psycho who had too many uranium nuggets in his Froot Loops. I don’t need morally gray. I need morally wrong. The bad. The ugly. Give me a lady who shoots dogs for fun and runs over orphans on her days off. Give me someone who wants to blow up the fucking moon.”

“Where is the lesson in that? A great villain is a great character. Characters need a story. They need a thread for the audience. Otherwise, why watch? Why read?”

“Because blowing shit up is cool. I don’t need a story about someone who’s been abused or tortured. We’ve seen so many spiteful villains strike against a world they seek to fix. But where are the villains that don’t give a single crap? We need more dumb idiot villains. Big thugs with big ideas. Evil with a capital E. Come on. We could all use a bit of exaggerated drama, right?”

“That just sounds cheap and lazy.”

“Does that make it bad? Does that make it not fun? Would you rather have one thousand more stories that tell us how bad the world is? We get it. Everything sucks. But there’s something special about trying to save the world from a villain who thinks North America would look better painted Navy Blue. Come on, don’t you want to stop Dr. Thunder and his quest to light the Amazon on fire?”

“I don’t know.”

“Fine. I’ll go blow up Alaska myself.”

Hitchhikers

Dad always had a weird fascination with hitchhikers. “You get the best stories from hitchhikers.” He’d say whenever we’d drive past someone with their thumb out on the freeway. He had promised Mom he stopped years ago, but we knew the truth. He’s a bad liar. Too proud of the good he thinks he’s doing for the downtrodden and car deprived. A few weeks would pass, and he’d miraculously remember another story from his old philanthropic uber rides, being sure to add, “Don’t tell Mom” at the end.

I imagine he thought himself a part of their story, an important landmark on a stranger’s road trip. I always imagined him as some mystical figure in an old fantasy novel. My dad squealing down on the asphalt in his scuffed-up Subaru Crosstrek, dorky sunglasses, and receding hairline. “Where to?” he’d ask, trumpets playing over his radio. I don’t even think that was far from the truth. He always did have a flair for the dramatic.

I don’t know how many hitchhikers he’s picked up over his years, but based on his stories, it’d be enough to employ a full-blown circus. He’s driven a man to the Canadian border to escape his own wedding, a Norwegian woman desperate to see the Grand Canyon, a pair of twins who definitely “weren’t” on the run, and a blind Vietnam veteran.

My dad’s cast of roadside characters had a special charm to them. In a way, they were my king Arthurs and Luke Skywalkers: Terry, the middle-aged man just trying to find a job on the west coast. Did that make my dad Merlin or Obi-Wan, cruising over the dusty road in his Subaru in search of weary travelers?

No, I don’t think so. But he did have some great stories.

Marlo’s Wagon

Marlo came to town twice a year. Once before the New Year and once more on Summer Solstice. He wheeled down the main road, perched on top of his wagon that hitched and belched exhaust into the evening air. Trinkets and decorations draped across the roof of his machine clanging together as he whistled his blind tune. Marlo’s bi-annual visitations were a kind of holiday special to our backwater town. Living so far from New Boston, we had few chances to acquire the bits and pieces that we needed so desperately to keep our community running.

It was the week before the New Year when he arrived. The gray snow had covered most of our fields, and the bots were powered down in the old warehouses on the outskirt of town. Winter was a time for us to stay warm and save energy. We weren’t like those in the city with their towers that broke the sky and were warm all year round. We got by, but just barely. And it was thanks to Marlo that we passed through the winters with any semblance of comfort.

This year his rickety wagon popped and whistled down the road, hovering above the snow and scorching it black with exhaust. By the time he made it past the ancient train station, most of the town was surrounding the man and his strange machine. He brought with him replacement parts for our bots and fresh thermo-gel to fill our homes with. In return, we gave him saved grains from the fall harvest and barley stew. It wasn’t much, but Marlo never seemed to mind.

He brought news of Old Concord and a toxic break that had slammed the town down from the Charles canal. Concord was a much larger town than ours. It was difficult to believe it could be wiped off the map in such a short amount of time. It was another reminder that living so far out West wasn’t a terrible thing. This far in the hills, we could only catch the distant glow of the city, like a never-setting sun. Up closer, the lights were blinding. The smell was suffocating. And well, now toxic breaks were wiping out entire towns.

Marlo’s wagon, he told us, was his creation. He had built it using old twenty-first-century automobile parts—the kind that still used fossil fuels—strapped with junkyard glider cars that most of the city folk operate. Its metal chunks Marlo kept their original color, a quilted metal look of welded sheets and strange apparatuses. The bed of his wagon was ripped from an old pickup truck he had found in the Lowell waste yards north of New Boston’s borders. He always made sure to tell us there was nothing like it out across the Territories, and we all believed it.

However, his wagon told stories that we didn’t. Every year, it would return just a slight bit different. Sometimes it’d be a new door, others a new front shield, and one year he had come with an entirely different exhaust stack. We knew the distance between the cities and our little village was dangerous. We could see it in new plasma burns and bullet holes. In faded bloodstains, Marlo so desperately tried to pass off as rust. We all knew the bands of marauders that stalked the old high roads and the wild animals desperate for food. They were things we had to hold back ourselves, Things we needed our bots for. But we appreciated Marco’s silence of the matter. There was so much to be afraid of in this world. Sometimes it was nice to just be happy.

It was because of this man’s kindness that we were allowed to stay in our hills. Yes, farming was rough on barren soil, but with his delivered fertilizer and bot parts, we kept at it. Out in the city, he told us folks ate ground roaches and synthetic meats grown from trash. Earth-grown food was a rarity in the blinding cities that were growing across the Territories. It was nice to know that despite how little we had, we had something they didn’t. Marlo always seemed pleased when we offered him crop, and if he had been eating bug paste and plastic meat like the others out East, I could see why. If I were him, I’d hike out to the western edge of the Commonwealth for a good snack too.

Like every visit, Marco eventually leaves. His wagon grinds and growls back down the path leading into the dark foothills. We know he’ll be back in a few more months. His wagon will be a bit different, and he’ll bring stories of New Boston and the surrounding towns. We’ll have some more crop for him by then, and he’ll give us some more parts and thermal gel to ward off the summer chill. Yes, many of us fear the day Marlo doesn’t come belching up our path. We all know that day will come, and when it does, we’ll have to figure out a new way to get the parts and gel we need to survive so far West. But we have yet to reach that day. Until then, we have our personal holiday at the edge of the territory. The day we can all wake up to Marlo and his big metal wagon.

Ocean of Gas

Amber smoke pillared into the green atmosphere. An endless tide of toxic gas swirled and shifted across the muddy crust of Karak. From orbit, the planet resembled a swirling orange marble. It reminded me of tiny Jupiter. Unlike Jupiter, we learned very fast that Karak had much more than gas. Hollow-bodied creatures rode the currents like rays in the ocean. Large bulbous invertebrates hovered around yellow forests that grew along geyser ridges. Ropey mycelium draped down jagged mountains, and vein-laced lily pads floated across soupy clouds in great flotillas. Below, dense mud, packed from the refuse fallen from the ecosystem above, formed the ground. A graveyard of the gas ocean, creating a grim yet beautiful world of barnacles and bottom feeders. Hard-shelled arthropods scuttled in herds, shuffling between the refuse, and dark-shelled mollusks plucked at low-hanging fungus around shallow geysers. Alien as it was, we could all recognize the balance at play. Two worlds mirroring each other, one of light, soaring creatures riding toxic gales, the other, a dingy underworld of muck and scuttling scavengers. Both beautiful.

We watched this world from our camp at the peak of a great crystalline mountain, far above the gas level. The mountain had been formed by cooling gasses and debris, hardened over millions of years. Starved from the greater gas pools, very little called this place home. Yet, there was life. A colony of small, carapaced crustaceans called shared our peak and offered our team something to watch on our slow days between expeditions. The creatures scuttled across the summit, carving tunnels and breeding posts around our camp, shifting every day. It was a constant reminder of the relentlessness of life.

Here we were, light-years from the colonies, on top of a toxic ocean. Terrestrial creatures from a planet of water, visiting creatures of gas. We sat on an island peak seeing for the first time life so alien yet so familiar. Our world once looked like this: primal, natural, undisturbed by the workings of a destructive species. Now that we were here, it was our job to make sure it would stay that way.