Philosophy

1000 words on religion

[this post is also available on Medium & Tumblr for ease of sharing]

Yesterday I watched this video of Pastor Eric Dammann of New Jersey’s Bible Baptist Church recount his interaction with a kid named Ben. Go ahead and watch it, it’s short:

It’s disgusting for a whole all-you-can-eat-buffet of reasons but let’s go ahead and address a few of them. The most obvious is that he’s talking about punching a child. But not just talking about it, bragging. He underlines that he “crumpled” the kid. This full grown man, unprovoked, punched a child in the chest and crumpled him. And he’s proud of this. But just before that happens he mentions that this kid Ben was really bright which “didn’t help things” and “made him dangerous”. Reading between the lines anyone can assume Ben was a smart kid who perhaps didn’t take this guys word as law and asked some questions that the good pastor found annoying to have to answer, or not answer as the case my be. Dangerous because he didn’t just submit? Pastor Dammann then essentially lays out that through the use of physical violence he made a child succumb to his religious beliefs. Beliefs we can only assume Ben didn’t buy into prior to this altercation.

To recap: Smart people are dangerous, violence is the solution. This is the message here.

This video has sparked enough outrage that Bible Baptist Church posted a self serving, half ass, revisionist apology on their website which implores the community, and by extension the world, to be as understanding and forgiving as Ben who has already made peace with the pastor for his actions years ago. One has to wonder if this forgiveness came under threat of more violence. Forgive me or else! Of course this story is not making headlines the world over because unfortunately this kind of thing isn’t news. Religious people have been using violence to suppress dissenters for a very long time, and this week has some horrifically ugly examples. 12 people killed at the offices of Charlie Hebdo and another 5 in Paris because the magazine printed cartoons unflattering to the Prophet Muhammad. In Nigeria the militant Islamist movement Boko Haram has killed close to 2000 including strapping a bomb to a 10 year old girl and sending her into a market where the bomb was detonated remotely. And yes, killing people is different from punching them, but the motivations are the same. You haven’t blindly accepted this mythology that I believe is real so I’m going to hurt you.

This has been happening as long as religion has existed and no faith is free from blame.

Coincidentally this is exactly the motivation behind the creation of something else happening in the US this week: National Religious Freedom Day. Did you know there was a religious freedom day? Created in 1992 and based on Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom which dates back to 1777. This is important because it clearly states a legal and natural freedom of and from all religions. Here’s a snip:

“…no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities.”

If you think sounds familiar you are right, as it was the primary influence for the First Amendment of the US which assures freedom of religion and speech to all people. Here’s that:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Speech and religion are intricately related as we’re seeing in every news report coming out of Paris. People were killed because of what they said about someone else’s religion. And this sparked massive freedom of speech rallies attended by millions – the biggest such rallies in France since liberation from the Nazis. The people are obviously in support of free speech and politicians from the world over rushed to Paris to stand side by side with these people. Of course, many of politicians are barely paying lip service to the ideals represented, and it took mere hours for this to be apparent as a French comedian was arrested for making a joke on Facebook (plus 54 other cases opened for people expressing opinions) and for Turkey to ban the newest issue of Charlie Hebdo.

But that’s over there and here we’ve just got pastors punching kids, so big deal, right? Well with a 92% Christian Congress and a Supreme Court ruling that businesses can discriminate based on of religion we’re already seeing where someone’s religious beliefs could prevent people from receiving health care because of their sexual orientation. This isn’t far away hypothetical thought experiments, this is actually happening right now. Religious massacres are low hanging fruit – easy to condemn, but I feel just as strongly that kids shouldn’t fear or risk being punched by an adult for not sharing the same imaginary friends. And it’s important to recognize that there is some structure, and some basis for the idea that we should all be allowed to decide what we do or don’t believe in, and shouldn’t fear institutional backlash from those decisions.

That’s the world I want to live in, that’s the world I’m trying to shape.

Put on your own oxygen mask before assisting others

Growing up in a fairly religious family the notion that you should always consider other people before yourself was pretty well hammered into me. Of course we all know what most religious people say and what they do are two very different things but that’s a topic for another time. But regardless, as a kid I always had the adults in my life repeating this to me. This manifested itself in different ways in different situations. I remember from a very early age sitting on an airplane listening to the safety instructions and thinking it was rude and selfish that the flight attendants were suggesting that people should put on their oxygen masks before helping anyone else. I’d listen and ask myself what kind of terrible people would help themselves before helping others. 

 

It took me years to understand the importance of this disconnect. It’s shockingly obvious: You can’t help others if you are dead – then you both die. Putting on your oxygen mask first ensures you live and can then help other people.

 

Abstract that back a bit, two people, two problems. One person tries to fix the other persons problem and it’s a very real possibility that both people will still have problems. End result, two people, two problems. But if one person fixes their problem right away, then tries to help the other person with their problem at worst you’ll have one person with no problems and one person with one problem, and at best two people with no problems.

 

At some point I realized this wisdom extends far beyond the tarmac, and well into normal everyday life. You shouldn’t try to fix other people’s problems before fixing your own. And beyond problems into happiness, you can’t expect to make other people happy if you aren’t happy yourself. (Secretly miserable comedians excluded apparently). I don’t think the importance of this can be underestimated and for something that is so obvious – put your oxygen mask on first – not a lot of people follow the logic elsewhere.

 

How often in a disagreement, business or personal, where two parties want different things is compromise proposed as the solution? That’s not actually a solution, it might be an agreement, but at the end of the process neither party gets what they want. It’s not “we’re both kind of happy” it’s “at least the other guy isn’t happy either.” A better solution is to work with people who want the same outcome as you. To spend time with people who are happy because you are happy, not people who want you to be unhappy. Even if on the short term that seems reasonable, big picture – it’s not. Think about it. Long term nothing good can come from investing in people who don’t value your happiness. 

 

This isn’t just a lesson about who to spend time with, but also about the importance of knowing what actually makes you happy. If you don’t know what you want, then you can’t make it a priority. You can’t find people with similar goals. You can’t be happy to begin with. So, if you don’t know, figure it out. It’s important. Put on your own oxygen mask first.

Habit Metrics

I was sitting in the audience at TechCrunch50 in 2008 when FitBit was announced and ordered one immediately. If I had money to invest in things I would have been banging on their door – I got the concept right away and knew it would change everything. I’ve had every single model they’ve released and swear by it – just knowing how active (or not) you are, give you context that might otherwise be lost. And I saw that, one days when I’d start feeling sluggish and worn out I noticed I wasn’t moving around much. If I felt awesome and ready to take on the world, surprise surprise – I’d been moving around a lot. After doing this for a little while I could tell if I walked a certain amount each day my overall attitude and general feeling was way better. I wasn’t using it for fitness as many people do (quite successfully) but just as an extra data point of something that I knew improved things for me. My only complaint with FitBit is their charger dongles which I always lose or forget when traveling which wrecks my stats anytime it happens – otherwise I love it.

And of course, other companies and other devices followed tracking all kinds of different things to give people that kind of feedback. Above X you feel good, below X you feel bad – so here’s an easy way to know where you are so you can step things up if you need to. Hell, we even have one for our dog to know if we’ve walked her enough.

Recently, spawned by a conversation on my mailing list, several people told me they track other things in their lives as well. Not just the  physical stuff, but mental and emotional too. How much time each day or week were they spending with their family, were they spending alone, were they reading, having sex, meditating, traveling, etc.. whatever was important to them, and keeping track of it. To great success I might add. This seemed incredibly obvious to me and I didn’t know why I didn’t consider it earlier. If I know I feel better if I walk 10,000 steps in a day, and I have a device/system to remind me to do that, why couldn’t I think of other things that make me feel better and use a system to remind me of those? I’m not talking about “remember to floss!” kind of things -because while those are great for you (and me) they don’t really impact day to day mental well being.

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Status 40

I was sitting on the grey metal flat files in the back room of my art gallery talking to my friend Wil, my feet half slipping off the drawer handles. He’d just gotten printed copies of his book Dancing Barefoot  -I’d helped him with a little bit of the layout and so he’d swung by to give me a copy. It looked great. I held a copy in my hands and smiled. I remembered a year or so earlier a conversation we’d had where he said more than anything he wanted to be a writer, that he was going to be a writer. And now here we were, with an actually real book that he’d written in our hands. It was pretty awesome.

Wil was telling me about an idea he was working on for his next book, what would become Just a Geek though I don’t remember if it had a name at that point, but the way he described the collection of stories reminded me of an idea I’d been chewing on for a while. See, I’d also fancied myself a writer. I’d been writing zines and columns in magazines and things like that for years, so even though I’d never written a real book I felt like I knew what I was doing to some extent. At that time I was approaching my 30th birthday, and my idea tied into that a bit. Growing up, I never thought I’d see 30 years old. Hell, I never thought I’d see 25. I wasn’t very optimistic about my future as a kid. But here I was at the end of my 20’s and looking back on what, at that point, had been a pretty interesting ride so far. And when looking at it, I thought I could identify a handful of moments where something happened – something that in a flash could have gone any number of ways – and because they went the direction they did my entire life was impacted. And if in that one quick moment things had gone a different way, everything in my life could have played out differently. I thought, if I could write about 5 of those stories and put them together info a collection, it might make an interesting book. I wanted to call it “Status: 30”

I told Wil about this idea and he said he liked it and I should do it. Why not right? What did I have to lose?

I felt pretty good about that, I respected Wil and was pretty sure if it was a crap idea he would have been honest about it and told me, and so I decided to do it. I made some rough outlines and told myself when inspiration hits I’ll plow through this and write it all in one sitting. I was pretty sure that would happen relatively soon, I mean it was a good idea and all. Definitely would be done before my 30th birthday a year later.

I turned 39 a few days ago, and recalled that conversation and realized it happened 10 years ago. And I never wrote that book. I never wrote those stories. I’m not even sure I remember which stories they were anymore, or what the thread was that I’d worked out that tied them all together. I think one of them was about a time I was in a car accident. Maybe another was about a falling out I’d had with a business partner in college. It doesn’t matter, the point is I never did it.

And I have no reason for that, other than that I just didn’t do it. Inspiration never hit. Not for that anyway. I’ve of course written other things since then, and just shy of that 10 year mark I published my first real book last year – assuming you don’t count the collections of blogposts that I’d batched and published in a single volume many years previously. I don’t anyway. But that’s beside the point, the point is – if I’d done it, it would have been done. But I didn’t, so it wasn’t.

Like anyone else I can come up with a million excuses not to do things, but I think as I’m about to cross that line into 40 I want to finish more things. I want to ship shit. Honestly, I have no reason not to.

Uphill and overwhelmed

There was a day about a week ago that seriously kicked my ass. I made a todo list in the morning and it was epic. So much, I didn’t even know where to begin. And on top of that every item on it was epic and required something like 20 other steps to even attempt to think about crossing it off. I stared at this list. I thought about it. I paced around the house. I went back to bed and hid under the covers. Hours later I emerged and went a looked at the list again. It was scarier than it had been before, and now I had less time to do all these things. So I made the responsible decision and walked out of the house, down the street, around the corner and kept walking until I got to the coffee shop. I sat there and drank coffee. Thinking about the list. Thinking about how I didn’t know how to do anything on it. Thinking that if I could just check off one thing that would be progress and then I’d be in motion and could keep going but nothing on the list was easy or small or accomplishable. I ate junk food. I made irresponsible and ill advised purchases. These things, the tried and true self medication of overwhelming and crushing defeat did nothing to help me. I didn’t feel better. I felt just as depressed but now with a dash of guilt on top.

I wondered how I ever got in this situation. Which choices had I made in my life that instead of having a normal job with a boss that would just tell me what to do and then I could do it I was here, lost and frustrated. Instead of working on something that was annoyingly below my skill level, but easy and mindless, I was facing all of these things that were obviously way above my ability. Far beyond what I could actually pull off – that I’d somehow fooled everyone into thinking I was much more capable than I actually am. That any moment everyone would realize what a fraud I was.

I went back home, back to bed and climbed back under the covers. The world was too scary to face.

I didn’t finish shit that day. Hell, I didn’t even start anything. Then the family came home – I think they noticed something was off but I didn’t talk about it. I was too busy feeling sorry for myself, and I wasn’t even doing a good job at that, because my “you suck” voice kept getting interrupted by my “fuck that ‘you suck’ voice” voice, which usually would be reassuring, but in that case was just confusing. I couldn’t even successfully beat myself up.

I gave up and went to bed early. The next day I woke up and remembered something that had happened, or actually not happened many ears ago. And something not happening might be cause for more grey clouds, this was actually a little bit of a kick in the butt, the kick I needed. I got up and did one thing. And it felt good. I don’t know if I did anything else that day, but I did finish something and that’s what I needed to remind myself that I could finish stuff. It felt good, and that list didn’t seem so scary anymore. There was a time when that entire cycle would have taken me months to get through and sitting here a week later realizing how quickly that whole process happened and resolved itself is in itself helpful. I have a LOT on my plate for the next few months, things I’m exciting about but also nervous about, things I want to do right, but things more importantly I want to do. And even if they are all happening at once and it feels like too much, I feel like I can pull it off. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt that way.

I can’t wait to see what happens.

Behavior Modification

If you’ve been following me online for a while you probably know that I often use the end/beginning of the year to assess some habit or practice, and challenge myself to make an improvement. My Year Of Less was one of the more popular ones. These aren’t really New Year’s resolutions so to speak, the new year just makes it easy to remember when I started it. Or something, maybe I just say that to make myself feel better.

Over the last month a few people have asked me what my plans are for 2014, perhaps looking for some inspiration of their own. I’ve been thinking about it a lot actually, largely because I didn’t have as clear of an idea as I’ve had in the past. But I’ve had a few discussions this year about what it means to try and improve yourself. How can you make yourself a better person, why would you try, and what does that even mean? After all, who even defines what a good person is?

For me, at the end of the day, I want to feel good about the things I’ve said and done. I want to be proud of my actions, and sleep well at night knowing I did what I could. I want to be happy with how I’ve spent my time, at least as much of it as I have a say in. And if I can make little changes here and there to improve these things, then all the better. And sometimes just talking about them, getting them out in the open makes you more aware of them, and thus easier to tweak. So, this year I’m looking at a handful of minor behavior modifications.

• No white lies

I feel like this deserves a whole post of it’s own as it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot, for a long time. The people I truly respect, whose opinions I value above all others are the ones that I know will be honest with me even when that means telling me something I don’t want to hear. I’m lucky enough to have a few friends like this and I’ve often aspired to be as direct and authentic as they are. When I need the truth, these are the people I turn to. I wouldn’t consider myself a liar by any stretch, but I’m certainly guilty of excessive simplification to get though uncomfortable situations from time to time, and I’d be lying (see what I did there) if I said I’ve never told a friend what I knew they wanted to to hear so as not to upset them. I recently read “Lying” by Sam Harris which helped me refine some of what I’d been chewing on already — namely that these tiny little white lies “to avoid awkwardness” or “to keep things simple” don’t actually accomplish that, but instead make it easier to ignore the truth and broadcast to everyone around you that you likely can’t be trusted, and might be lying at anytime. I know for certain I don’t ever want a friend to “tell me what I want to hear” so why would I do that to them? And having a kid now makes me think about this even more, I don’t want to set the example that the truth only matters sometimes. It’s important, or it isn’t. And I’m going to take the stance that it is. This requires listening better (I’ll get to that in a second) and being more thoughtful with what I say in response, but again, I think those are worthwhile efforts to make.

The flip side of this for everyone else — don’t ask me something unless you really want to know what I’m thinking.

• Listen better

A few times this year I’ve caught myself in conversations with people, just waiting for them to finish talking so I can say what I want to. I felt as if their ongoing verbage is just standing in the way of my obviously brilliant thought. Maybe I’ve done this longer than I realized, but the times when I noticed myself doing it this year I felt like shit. What kind of an asshole talks to someone and spends the whole time just waiting for them to shut up? This kind of asshole aparently, and I don’t want to be that kind of asshole. If what someone has to say isn’t interesting to me, I shouldn’t be wasting my time or theirs talking to them, and if it is interesting I should grant them the courtesy and respect of listing to what they have to say. I’d certainly want that same philosophy applied to me. So that one is obvious, going forward I’m going to actively try and be a better listener and not think about what I might have to say myself until after whoever I’m talking to has finished their thought.

• Write some fiction, every day

I’ve struggled with writing fiction for a long time —  I’ve written about that before. But I realize that what I consider my “problem” is more likely just the normal steps people need to go through that I’ve somehow convinced myself I get to skip. And perhaps I don’t actually get to do that. I think it boils down to this: As much as I want to write fiction I don’t because I’m not confident that I can do it, which stems from my personal compultion to publish everything I write, so I end up not writing fiction because I don’t think what I’d write would be publishable at this point. So I keep magically hoping I’ll just wake up one day and be good at it. Which maybe isn’t be best course of action to depend on. So this year I’m purposefully giving myself permission to write fiction and not publish it. Hell, maybe I will publish some of it, but I’m allowing myself not to, which is a big move for me. And to further spur this along and eliminate another crutch, I’m going to write something everyday. That way I can’t argue with myself that something is too big to start or too involved to work on right now. These stories can be as short as they need to be, but everyday I need to write one of them.

• Blog

And while we’re on the topic of arguing with myself, I’m making a commitment that I wont let me talk myself out of blogging. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of blog posts since I began blogging regularly back in ‘98 or so. The vast majority of those were written and posted prior to 2010. I’ve been quiet the last few years, quieter than I had previously been anyway and quieter than I’d like. This has largely been due to me convincing myself that whatever I have to write about everyone else already knows about so I’d be wasting their time by writing more about it. Or worse and more likely, no one cares in the first place. And I make a convincing argument. But on a semi-regular basis I get a comment on a post I wrote 5+ years ago, or I get an email from someone about one of those old posts. And then I have to completely reconsider my “no one gives a shit” theory, but I can usally supress that. But I don’t want to, and I want to blog again more. So I’m going to stop assuming no one cares, and stop assuming everyone’s already heard it. That doesn’t mean I’ll be blogging every day, but it does mean I want to average more than one post a month.

So that’s what I’m looking at for 2014. If I can move myself a few steps in a direction I’m happy about for all of them, that’ll be a success. It’s about habits and behavior modification, but I feel like these things are worth the effort and I’ll be happier if I can push through them. What do you think? What habits could you create that would make you a better person?

What are we so afraid of?

Why are we so sure we know, and why do we care what everyone else thinks of us?

Road Closed

 

I’ve been noticing this come up again and again recently. It’s entirely possible it’s been a common topic before I noticed it but since I started paying attention, I see it everywhere. Last January I wrote a blog post/confession coming clean to the notion that I assume everyone around me has it all figured out and by some stroke of chance no one has realized that I’m just making it all up as I go. Yet. And the subtle back of your mind stress that goes along with such a thing. I number of people reached out to me and thanked me saying they were so happy they weren’t the only ones who felt that way. These were all people I respected and looked up to in ways, and people I knew had it all figured out— something didn’t add up.

Some people told me to look up impostor syndrome which I’d never heard of before but haven’t gone a day without hearing about it since. Remember in 2007 or whenever when every single person you met claimed to have ADD and that was the excuse for some weird personality fluke of theirs? I feel like impostor syndrome is the ADD of 2013.It keeps coming up in conversations, conferences, podcasts and blog posts. Everyone is an impostor it seems, or are they?

There is a terrific episode of WTF with Marc Maron where he’s chatting with Dan Savage, and they discuss that— at least in the US— only in-the-closet gay guys and straight dudes are constantly worried what other people think about their sexuality. Constantly worried that some action, some comment or some ill perceived glance will make everyone around them think they are gay. (Or in the case of the closeted ones, something will give away their secret) He added that women don’t generally have this concern because society is largely cool with a little girl/girl action without any assumption that either girl must be a lesbian for this to happen. And similarly no gay guys are worried about being accused of being straight, regardless of wether they ever had a straight sexual/romantic relationship. A gay guy can admit to dating women in college and not have their sexuality questioned, yet some straight guys are worried if they sit too close to another dude everyone will assume they are gay.

Tara just wrote a heartfelt post here on Medium about being afraid of turning 40. About thinking her age somehow reflects her usefulness, and the assumption that people are constantly judging her because of it. She points out that she never considers other peoples age, but is sure everyone is thinking about hers and afraid that they will assume she’s too old and thus must be out of touch. Of course she’s amazing and talented and has a line of people fighting for her time and attention. That’s not something that will suddenly change when she has one more candle to blow out on her birthday cake — but that doesn’t play into her fears.

I think with all of these examples, what it boils down to insecurity, but why are we as a society so insecure? Why do we care what anyone else thinks? It’s as if we can’t be comfortable with ourselves without someone else’s approval? Do we really think that lowly of ourselves?

I like to think that heavy doses of punk rock growing up was something of a don’t-give-a-fuck vaccination and I now have a healthy immunity to a lot of this. And I also feel fortunate to be able to quickly suss out what I can control and what I can’t, and then not stress much about things that are outside of my hands— what someone else thinks of me is planted firmly in the latter category. But even then I occasionally find myself wondering what people actually think of me. And I’d be lying to suggest I wouldn’t prefer that those opinions are positive, but I’m also not willing to compromise myself in hope of that. Perhaps that’s a different conversation but it took me many years to be comfortable in my own skin, as a kid I certainly wasn’t. I wish I could point to a single thing that helped me turn that corner but I can’t really put my finger on it. I don’t know what advice to give people, I don’t know what advice I would want to hear. Or would listen to now or then.

I think the main the thing is— we have to be comfortable with who we are. If we like ourselves then it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks because we know we have value, we know we’re worthy. If we don’t like ourselves, we’ve been listening to the wrong people and need to tell those people to GTFO of our lives. Or change the channel. For me, I think I’m just going to try and be more vocal about telling my friends and people I care about that I like them, not what they can do, or what they can do for me. Maybe I can’t change the world, but I can start with my circle of friends.

(cross posted to Medium too)

Rule 34 for Creatives

Salton Sea Detour
[Originally published on Medium]

If you create it, there’s someone who will like it.

As citizens of the internet, we all know about The Rules, most referenced of course is Rule 34: If you can think of it, there is porn of it.

Some things are just such universally understood facts that there’s no point in arguing about them. Rule 34 is one such fact. But it’s easy to read at face value and then move on thinking it’s just a joke, but in fact there’s a much more important lesson here especially for anyone creative. I say creative but I should note that I think there are very few people who aren’t creative — maybe no one. Not everyone is a writer or an artist or a composer or a crafter or a hardware designer or whatever else you can think of, but as a people we enjoy making things and at some point you have to admit that requires creativity. Anyway, that’s another rant all together — back to the rule 34 discussion.

If you can think of it: Well that’s pretty much anything, because duh.

There is porn of it: This is the moneyshot of this statement, so to speak. Keeping things a bit abstract here, porn doesn’t just exist. Someone has to create it. But more than that, someone has to not only care enough to make it but also believe that someone out there in the world would also enjoy it. If you haven’t spent much time on 4chan you might not really be grasping the scope of what we’re talking about here, but seriously, anything you can think of, it’s out there, and someone enjoys it.

The way this relates to you, as a creative — that thing you’ve been thinking of… that thing you want to write, that thing you want to paint, that thing you want to sing, that thing you want to design, that thing you want to build — whatever it is, someone will dig it. Traditionally, producing things is scary. Will it be good enough? Will anyone like it? Will everyone laugh at you? Rule 34 applies to you.

If you follow through and actually do this (I don’t want to keep contextualizing this, but you know what I mean, whatever it is you are hesitating to do. For me it’s writing, for you it might be publishing some photos or starting a sketchbook) someone out there will like it. And that’s really all you need. One person to appreciate the work you put into. The catch here is that you may never know this person exists — but they do, and Rule 34 proves that. If whatever kind of crazy twisted freaky porn you can think of has at least enough enthusiastic fans out there to justify someone willing it into existence, then certainly anything you want to make but are second guessing can find an audience.

And better than that, if you keep doing it, those fans will tell their friends, and your fans will double in number. And before you know it you’ll have double digits of fans. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.

I know I personally talk myself out of so much that I want to write because the stupid bullshit voice in my head tells me no one will care. No one will be interested. No one will like it. Rule 34 proves that voice wrong. I just need to know one person was glad I finished that thing and hit publish. Now I don’t have an excuse. How about you? What are you waiting for? That person is out there, don’t disappoint them.