I made a Year's Best List

My novel WE LEAVE TOGETHER, the conclusion to the critically-acclaimed Dogsland Trilogy that began at Night Shade Books (who imploded in the middle of it, and all over WHEN WE WERE EXECUTIONERS) and moved on to WordHorde, was selected in some fine company for ForeWord Reviews' Year's Best SF/F of 2014.

Thanks, Ross and Julien! It was impossible without you both! It was wonderful riding out all the way north of the city with you both, and I hope we do more things together someday again soon.

Link? https://www.forewordreviews.com/blog/posts/best-fantasy-scifi-of-2014/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=best-fantasy-scifi-2014

LINK

Related news: for a few more hours, one could pick up a copy of WE LEAVE TOGETHER from Amazon for the Kindle for only 2.99!

For a limited time, WE LEAVE TOGETHER is only 2.99 on Kindle!

I don't know how long this lasts, but I know it won't be very long, at all. Hop in while you still can, if you haven't already!

Happy birthday, little book

STRAGGLETAGGLE is currently live at Barnes and Noble's website, Amazon, and Weightless Books.

Everyone should go pick up a copy. https://weightlessbooks.com/genre/fiction/novel/straggletaggle/

Little, independent books with failed kickstarters are going to have an uphill climb. Everything that helps the little book along, whether a review or a retweet, is much appreciated.

I don't plan to be strictly indie from now on. I plan on being protean, and following my muse. Some project are more fun alone. Some are more fun with a team. I know I have been submitting my next book to publishers and agents. And, if I ever finish the book about post-apocalyptic squirrels,  I will likely stay indie with it.

For now, for this little book, any signal boost in is appreciated.

I am going to try and do something nice for the people who aided the kickstarter, but it isn't ready yet.

Thank you, everyone!

Almost time...

Copies showed up in the mail, and already have a destination when I get to the post office Tuesday. Honey didn't think it was worth waking up over. I mean, it isn't like this is my first novel, or anything. It should be old hat by now.

Shelter Dog Here

We were close for a while, but we did finally get things in order for a puppy from a local no-kill shelter. Her story is true shelter dog: She was found as a stray and was infected with demodectic mange. Most shelters would not have kept her long enough to heal her. Fortunately, this sweet pup was at a no kill shelter where she received treatment and is quite nearly completely healed from a common ailment that is noncommunicable and easily treated. Every city should strive to be a no kill city. This dog adopted means another dog can be saved by the organization.

We have a shoe-requirements for all visitors at the house, for a while, naturally. Keep your shoes on. There is a puppy here who is still learning. Watch your step while we are training her!

Straggletaggle

Appearing at stores, then, a little earlier than planned, and the eBook coming out on the 17th, and hopefully spreading out all over, my new novel, Straggletaggle, is here.

Inspired by anime, other steampunk novels, and the horror of corpocracy, a sheen of genre rides over the top of my great fears, and I hope it is enjoyable and inspires others to create and to fight against the forces of unchecked organization.

Check your preferred bookstore, folks.

eBooks will be out on the 17th. Pre-order today!

Year's best not done

I have been working on a year's best list and it isnt done.

Overlooked books of the year, though:

Spider in a Tree by Susan Stinson is absolutely beautiful and it hasn't been mentioned enough around about town.

Revolutions by Felix Gilman is another reminder why he is some kind of monster, here to reshape and invent the literary duology. If duologies ever truly become a "thing" it will be because Gilman keeps writing such fantastic duologies and people will point and say, "That is how they should be done! See! Like that!". Each book is distinct, yet clearly related. Each world seen twice, is seen fully and left for other worlds.

Elysium by Jenn Brissett is out from a small press and could easily be overlooked. Please, don't. It is fabulous, and makes me feel like I am not alone in genre with my fractured and fragmented impulses. People who like my books will love Jenn's.

No links, yet, but you know how to find books in stores, right?

Fox in the Fields out today in 3-Lobed Burning Eye!

1. Every Father Will Protect his Chickens

High growing season is no time for running around in the dark. Going out after dark, there are wild dogs, badgers, all kinds of hungry things. The bugs alone can drink a quart of red liquor and leave welts all over. The ticks lounge in the grass, just waiting, bobbing like divers on a board, for all us walking by.

High country, when darkness comes, we stay inside. We watch TV, if we must remain awake. I clean my rifle once a week by the flickering television screen. The moths flitter against the mosquito netting, and the girls are in bed by eight, before even the bats come out.

We got in the habit of locking them in, too. They were such restless horses in the dark, wandering to the kitchen, flipping on lights, and seeking out their toys when they should be in bed. My wife had a sister that did that and got killed back in England when a wild animal took her in the night and she was wandering around late and no one knew. She instituted the rule. We tuck the girls in. We close the door. We lock it from the outside. The screen is unchanged. There isn’t a way to get the screen out without pulling them off the nails that hold them down.

So, how did their shoes get so dirty at night?

Read the rest?  (http://www.3lobedmag.com/)

MAZE is up on something called VODO, and I hadn't heard of it before, this site, but there it is and it looks to be quite a good deal, to me.

Go forth and tell everyone.

http://vodo.net/apexbooks/maze/

Math Saves, Don't drink Starbucks!

I was trying to get something caffeinated to push me through a long workday and got the best of what was available. Starbucks Vanilla thingum, presumably lowish in calorie with 290.

I stopped drinking it in horror the moment I noticed how much sugar was in the bottle. In 13.7 ounce of drink, there are 46 grams of sugar. That's 11.5 teaspoons of sugar, in a drink that weighs 13.7 ounces. [ETA: A mathematically-inclined person on Twitter pointed out my conversion error. I'm going to adjust, now. Basically, I should go straight from grams to ounces, and not grams to tablespoons to ounces. Maths is VERY HARD when you're high on sugar. It is literally like cocaine at high levels, with similar effects on the brain.] If these were circus peanuts, that would be 11.5 of them. Right, so, that means the drink is 1.6226 ounces of sugar. Do you have a kitchen scale handy? Go measure that out. It's actually quite a lot for a 13.7 ounce beverage. Now, the percentage of this "drink" that is sugar is... 1.62/13.7=11.8% sugar. THAT'S A VERY HUGE AMOUNT FOR ONE DRINK.

And the front presumes to brag about how low the calories are.

Starbucks, I call shenanigans. You are supposed to be ethical. You push yourself as the just and ethical alternative. You brag about one thing... And of course there would be so few calories in the drink if it had absolutely no meaningful quantity of milk in it... You do realize, Starbucks, that obesity is a crisis in this country and sugar turns into calories in the system almost instantly without any nutritive elements to slow down the insulin rush, right?

We should all be talking about this. We should all be writing about this. These companies are literally selling us our own early grave and refuse to be honest with their products. 46 grams of sugar should be the most important thing to know about a 13.7 ounce "beverage" and it is hidden in the fine print and masked as grams instead of ounces or tablespoons. The WHO recommends no more than 25 grams of sugar per day per an adult, less for children. 46 grams is almost double that, all by itself. If you ate nothing but lettuce for two days, you'd still likely be over your daily limit of sugar per day with just one of these horrible drinks.

.

Don't even drink this shitty diabetes juice. It has 2 days of sugar in a single glass. It is trying to kill you. Starbucks, per its products, wants you to think their drink is relatively low-calorie. They want you, then, to pick their healthier-looking option against the soda and energy drinks on offer. But, with two days worth of sugar hidden behind a misleading label, they also seem to want you to get diabetes and die young in terrible pain from chromic, preventable diseases.

They used to call Type II Diabetes "Adult-Onset Diabetes." It used to be something kids just didn't get. Now it's an epidemic. Starbucks, if you're seeing this, well, this aspect of your products are to blame. Do you have kids? Would you want them to drink this, with all that sugar in it? Would you want your spouse to drink it, knowing how much sugar is in it?

Paying Money To People to Read Your Work is Bad

It is a dream of many a reader to be paid to sit in a room and read books. Professors sometimes pull it off when they get close to the end of their career, and they can coast through committees and coast through minimal classes and focus solely on their own interests of research. Naturally, it is quite rare, because it is no small task to be a tenured professor on copious, copious committees. Some literary critics are able to pull it off, as well, but they have to be working for major publications, and they have to be very, very lucky. Most reviewers are not able to do it full-time. I can think of no one able to make their living from reading things except for a certain breed of editor. They put together a little literary magazine or two - which is, itself, no small feat - but they raise revenue on two fronts. They sell the literary magazine, absolutely. They also sell the opportunity to be considered in that literary magazine to aspirants.

Do not pay reading fees. Do not pay contest fees. Do not bother reading magazines that charge those fees.

We are already entering a world where the bar for entry for those of us who come from marginalized communities, and working communities, face a series of stiff barriers. And, one of the many ways that the bar for entry is increased is the rise of reading fees, for the magazines that exist in some genres cannot maintain their lights and electricity without the very artists inside of their pages kicking in a few dollars every time a story is submitted. It has been touted as a way to weed out the flood of stories. The few times I've been involved with the editorial side of things, the simple way to handle that problem was not to be open to submissions, at all, and to solicit stories and writers, instead. Ultimately, my responsibility in all I do is to readers. I would sooner flip the submission switch off (as many publications do) than to consider charging a penalty for submissions from people who probably don't have a lot of money.

Also, I've heard editors state that they also need to be paid for their time for reading those stories that they read, and they say they offer feedback. This does not pass the smell test. Your time, as an editor, is paid for by selling magazines and advertising and possibly a kickstarter. Your time is not best spent formulating feedback on stories you don't like, either. That is a giant waste of everyone's time. I could offer feedback all day on clean romance stories about Mormons, and it would be completely useless to the people writing them because I am not the audience for that kind of story. (Which is fine! Not everything is for everybody, nor should it be construed as a snipe about these sorts of stories other people like quite a lot! But, don't ask me to offer feedback on your technical manuals, either! I'm not the guy for that! Nor is Harper's!)

Anyway, to stay on target: I am not a rich writer. I actually do count on my writing work to pay some bills and bump up our meager retirement portfolio. Telling me I could submit to three magazines, one of which requires a reading fee, and two of which do not, is telling me that I can submit to only those two magazines and the other one doesn't even exist.

If you charge a reading fee for your magazine, to me, it doesn't exist. I don't even read these sorts of magazines. I don't read them not only because I would never submit to them, but because experience tells me that the stories of marginalized communities will not be present inside of them.The bar for entry, no matter how small, will strike the poorest first and hardest.

I have friends who run reading fee magazines, and I'm sorry, but we did talk about this and you know my feelings very well. I think you're very nice, very smart people, but you are not engaged in your work in a way that will lead to the outcomes we all desire.

One of the things that keeps me writing SF, also, when I do ponder changing genres, is how I know I can sell short stories to good-paying, high-impact markets without reading fees. There are some bad things about being slow to change, but this, at least, is a positive. We have yet to swallow that pill that mainstream publications have long ago devoured. So, hooray for us?

All the Roads are Haunted

I wrote a thing for a site called GrumpTroll.

I don't think we have anything else up there, yet. Presumably, we will be doing weekly stuff?

Anyway... It's a bit of a rehash of ideas from previous blogposts that were the firstdrafteryfodder of some longer stuff.

http://grumptroll.wordpress.com/2014/10/04/all-the-roads-are-haunted/

We’ve all seen the little crosses and corsages left standing, undisturbed, along the highways and byways of the world. One of the great miseries and mysteries of humanity is the automobile. We climb into our little, mobile living pods, and rev powerful engines, take to the roads for absolutely everything. We go to the store, go to work, take our kids our school – everything, everything – driving – driving – driving. Car sales are up. Warren Buffet is buying car dealerships. The planet is choking on our exhaust fumes, and we’re driving, driving, driving. In all the talk of the dangers of socialized health insurance, and the mandate to maintain health insurance, the little niggling tidbit underneath the headline was the necessary distinction between car insurance and human insurance. Apparently, cars are a luxury, not a necessity. I challenge anyone to live in any city in America west of the New England states without an automobile. Have fun on those 3 hour bus rides, those endless, endless bus rides that swallow every waking moment between work and home into a commute. No, my friend, we all need cars, too. We all need private insurance for our cars. It would be cheaper and safer if there was universal car insurance, but no one wishes to even have that discussion when the idea of socialized medicine is apparently too contentious for polite society. It would also be cheaper and safer to reconsider how we build our cities.

continue?

One of the nice things about art versus firefighting or plumbing...

The consequences for failure - in this case a failed kickstarter - is very slight. No one died. No one lost anything.

The book still comes out, except without pre-orders and without bonus extras, in December/January.

Thanks to everyone who pitched in a little. I love you all, and I am very grateful to know that you're out there and you have my back.

Just one more week!

Kickstarting is exciting. One more week left, and already so much closer to the goal, I turn to the interwebs and request assistance both with donations, and with spreading the word. My backers who have already participated, I thank you and promise you that your rewards will be swift if and when the time comes for them.

Still, with over a thousand dollars left to go, the difficulty is real. Overcoming this large amount in such a small time will require courage and tenacity and luck and money and...

Well, mostly money.

If you were waiting to see what would happen, please don't wait much longer. The clock is ticking, and ticking down, and I am not so famous that every little whisper on the web is tracked deep. I am a humble writer, with humble goals, and I hope I can count on you to help me in my time of need.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/284064794/straggletaggle

FIVE DAYS TO GO AND SO FAR TO CLIMB! WILL I REACH THE GOALPOST!?

R.I.P. Eugie Foster

Jesus, what just happened? She was only 42!

I knew her a bit. We did things as authors together at conventions and panels. She was way too nice to die so young, with so many stories unwritten. She was extremely good. She was the kind of person that you wish you were smart enough, cool enough, to hang with. She was brilliant, sharp, and erudite. She was glamorous. She gave off an aura of leading a cooler life than most people dared to dream about. She was the kind of person whom you could imagine discovering at a secret party, somewhere, where the beasts of the city ran wild in the dark. She was such good people.

In such a short, way too short time, she produced brilliant short stories, numinous and numerous short stories.

Go read some of them, today.

http://www.eugiefoster.com/fiction

Fuck cancer.

Guest Posting Elsewhere, for a Kickstarter

As you all know, I am kickstarting.

http://jrvogt.com/guest-post-j-m-mcdermott-on-megacorps-cinderella-and-his-latest-kickstarter-endeavor/

J. R. Vogt was kind enough to let me borrow his megaphone for a day, and I thank him for it.

Please, do consider passing the link around, and letting everyone know. I am kickstarting. The clock is ticking, and we're not even 50% of the way!

I have neither read nor seen the "Maze Runner" thing going around...

It is a movie based on a book, and I haven't seen the movie, nor have I read the book. Another movie has arrived, apparently, where deadly competition is a metaphor for high school matriculation. I would prefer not to see that, again. Frankly, once you see these projects as all part of the same metrically-calculated metaphoric moneymaker, it's hard to appreciate them, at all.

My own MAZE is not about competition, but cooperation against the darkness and the unknown.



Adulthood has been very confusing. I think I lost my way a few times, and losing my way became the right path to follow. There is no center, no solution. There is only a long walk through these halls, and what we find there will always surprise us with both its potential horror, and the potential wonder of encountering such a thing.

I went for a walk in a park near here and saw a Nopales cactus growing like a mistletoe at the top of a damaged oak tree. I have stood in the dark at the wee hours on Easter morning in a foreign country, finding my way home on foot after missing the last bus, walking for kilometers and kilometers and seeing the night city in all its mystery and darkness. Looking up into the night sky over North Carolina, I saw more stars in an empty football stadium than I think I'd ever seen before, out in the middle of nowhere. This is not all that I have seen. I have seen wondrous things And, there was no narrative to them except this: I walked; It was my path that I was on.

I have not read the book or film, but I think my version of the MAZE might be a little more interesting to people who prefer not to run blindly after everything that shines in the dark. Walk with me. We will fight to the death, there, and we will face our confusions and fears, but we will do so at our own gentle pace.

Apparently a company exists to promote kickstarter? *snorts*

I got this email from a company that claims to boost kickstarters by 1300%. They send a super special press release to Reuters, The AP, and "10 hand-picked high traffic blogs".

Yeah, how do you prove that number in a crowdfunding business model? Comparing different projects? Ones where some are deep social networks and others aren't? Some where some on is deeply professional and others aren't?

And... uh... Reuters isnt exactly in the business of covering weird art projects on the internet. That is not their business. The AP, also, is a little busy with real world tragedies for weird art projects on the internet.

Folks, stay frosty out there. If it smells fishy, and it comes at you unsolicited, best to step back and remember that the internet is full of spammers. If they dont mal easy money, they won't be kicking that can of spam at doorways and windows much longer.

A real challenge moving forward is going to be separating wheat from chaff. (And, honestly, whilst freelancing, I have been paid to churn some of that particular brand of butter. I know it when I see it, now.)

And, somebody tell Reuters that I am kickstarting. See if they notice the email Lon enough to delete it, or if their is just a semisentient killfile slowly waking up to digital life.

Kickstarting

Howdy Internet,

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/284064794/straggletaggle

Go there. Pledge support. Receive rewards.

It isn't potato salad, and I don't think my books will ever be as popular as potato salad, but it is a book, and it is written, and it is edited, and it is sitting in a file folder, ready to be released into the world. In the past, with publishers, preordering has been a bit of a fiasco. People who pre-ordered often got their books weeks later than people who just waited until the official release date and bought it then. As a guy in my house with two jobs, I don't actually have a complex organizational structure prepared to manage an elaborate system of preordering, and kickstarting looks like the most viable solution to creating that system. It looks like an exciting community, as well, that has made things together, and been excited about things. It looks like a positive place to be creating things, now and then.

I believe in putting a foot in every viable method of production available. I am not abandoning publishers, or abandoning strictly independent books, for some new method of funding the art. I just believe that I am remiss not to spread out across viable means of reaching an audience. I do not believe any method of production should be seen as the only one, when the complex ecosystem that is evolving is only making everything more confusing and hard to predict. I spread myself out, then, and after this project, I will return to publishers, and also do things independently. I may kickstart again, or build another dedicated WordPress site. Who knows? I don't know what tomorrow will bring!

I believe that there are at least two-hundred people in the whole world who wouldn't mind an early eBook of my next novel. Some of them might even want a little more.

I also believe I could fall flat on my face.

I keep reminding myself that it is okay to fail.

I also tell myself that I will never, ever make another video of myself if I can avoid it, ever, because I am incredibly uncomfortable on camera, and prefer only to be a human, not an icon of one.

I tell myself that words matter, and good words are important, and there is room in this world for one more little book.

Hopefully, I am not wrong about that.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/284064794/straggletaggle

General Announcement

Deep in the business of working and writing and seasonal cleaning and yardworkery, I have only a moment to spare for this announcement.

"Paul and His Son," which is part of the same novel that "Dolores, Big and Strong" came out of, is going to be in Asimov's someday soon. It is about buying illegal drugs to medicate a child who technically needs no medication a few short steps into the future. Paul, Jr will run away again. He always does.

Also, I have received approval from the folks at Kickstarter for my little campaign for Straggletaggle. I am not ready to bang all the drums, but that day is coming. It is coming soon. I will need help banging drums.

thinking about cities 8...

The minimum amount of agricultural land necessary for sustainable food security, with a diversified diet similar to those of North America and Western Europe (hence including meat), is 0.5 of a hectare per person. This does not allow for any land degradation such as soil erosion, and it assumes adequate water supplies. Very few populous countries have more than an average of 0.25 of a hectare. It is realistic to suppose that the absolute minimum of arable land to support one person is a mere 0.07 of a hectare–and this assumes a largely vegetarian diet, no land degradation or water shortages, virtually no post-harvest waste, and farmers who know precisely when and how to plant, fertilize, irrigate, etc. [FAO, 1993]

From the FAO (the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Other sources indicate the absolute minimum to be 2 acres, including all the resources a family would need including firewood and animal pasture. Other sources state 1.2 acres. 

How many people can live here, on earth? There is a finite number, even if every patch was turned to production, and we lived in tiny tree houses in our cultivated orchards. This number would  not include the wondrous complexity of wildlife and non-human creatures. I do not seek the argument of Malthus. I seek instead to create a new dialog about how we build.

Zoning, itself, is only about a hundred years old. 

Grocery stores, as we know them, are far less than a hundred.

Cars as mass transportation tools are not centenarians. 

Our cities as we are designing them currently are so young.

We still have time to save ourselves from the worst of our imaginary constructions, our collective inability to see beyond what is delivered to us by tax revenue and corporate shells.

Good luck.

thinking about cities 7...

How do urban planners bring that same sort of renaissance to the communities that are not rich? How do we bring the urban renewal into communities that struggle to make ends meet?

My answer is agriculture, but it is not the only answer. Urban agriculture - and the aggressive conversion of abandoned and dilapidated properties into arable farm space - not only suggests an answer to the urban decay into something less dangerous and more useful to the folks who remain, but also creates an instant industry where entrepeneurs can work land and seek out markets for the excess produce that is not eaten directly. It could create a meaningful alternative for the children of the poor who have only to choose between risking prison or joining the military for any escape from their poverty-stricken situations. Improving food security and health in these communities, as well, would also mean a reduction in missed school days. Healthy food means healthy kids. Sick kids miss school. The leading predictor of a potential drop-out is days of school missed. Protecting the health and promoting the health of children helps promote their education, and, as a result, the future potential of their whole lives being unlocked with opportunities.

The cultural barrier, of course, is that farming is hard work; farming is menial work; farming is what the white people dragged all those non-white folks around to do because it was just too hard for us to do. Agriculture, at a certain level, is an exploitive action that requires a huge amount of labor to generate the excess that passes along to the folks who do not need to work that hard to get by.

This is a barrier that will take a long time to break down, and one of the most important barriers to break down is the cultural barrier of white farming, itself, that refuses to see the humanity of the workforce as anything but a hindrance to good business practices. Farmers assume because they are paying their workers well, that is enough. Providing water, perhaps a place to sleep, all these things, are simply not enough. We must never stop trying to create a more humane system for our agricultural work force. If we wouldn’t want ourselves or our kids or our grandkids out there, hunched over the strawberry patch on a hot summer day with a bandanna and a jacket against the insects and wind-blown pesticides and chemical fertilizers, then we must find a different way, because everybody is somebody’s child, grandchild, and best beloved. Until the system is built upon respect for all workers, and a constant quest for equitable systems beyond just dollar payment becomes the norm, no one would want to abandon the office for the fields, and even standing on a street corner slinging drugs would be seen as a better alternative to hard work sunrise to sunset, such dehydration-inducing, cancer-causing, back-breaking work. Ultimately, everyone should participate in the life of the soil, and in agriculture. But no one should if it means dying young with complications of dehydration creating liver failure, and the various chemicals and pesticides encouraging cancer cells, and the back so used up that it creates disability.

Farming is only as hard as we make it. The most amazing thing is no one ever thinks that maybe the system needs to change. OFten, even the folks who notice it discuss how the economics are what they are, and no one is willing to be brave enough to change the economics. Ultimately, we are eating ourselves to death. Our system of agriculture, created by freemarket economics, is destroying the world and our fellow man. The cost of destroying others is figured into the payments made by the farmers. The cost of destroying the land will be borne by future generations, and it makes little difference over the course of the forty or so years any single farmer will be working his or her land. Over the course of 80 years, though, the constant desecration of soil life and microbial life and irrigation practices creates a cascading system of failures that threaten to destroy us all as a species. The cheap strawberries we buy at the store every spring have a hidden cost that we don’t pay today. It’s like the thing that financial advisers tell us about buying clothes and household goods: Buying cheap clothes will mean replacing them constantly, so buy quality things that will last and try to maintain them even if it looks more expensive today.

I read an article about strawberry pickers in the fields of California, and the backbreaking labor therein. The white farmer looked out at his fields and stated with certainty that only illegal immigrants would be willing to work hard enough to excel as a picker of strawberries. He said this with such moral and economic certainty, that I wanted to reach through the newspaper and grab him by the lapels and shout: “Than maybe there’s something wrong with the fields, themselves, that you’ve made such work like this for people! Maybe you are the one who has to change.”

In our own backyards, we have consumed the empty farmlands, expanding upon the dead ground around the city, where developers buy up cheap land near urban centers that used to be farms, because the ground is dead and the next generation of farmers have all moved off the farm, to other pursuits. THis is where our suburban tracks are built. These empty farms and old landfills that used to surround our urban centers have become empties out wastelands, because our food is being grown so far away, and shipped so far. We plant our castles on the deserted ground. We mark our fences, and our driveways, and hire policemen to stalk the streets against the urban flood.

And, we shop in stores where we can find anything we desire, nearly year round. Anything that isn’t available 24/7 is being developed so it can be available 24/7. The availability issue means more land is torn up and turned into farm country, farther from the city, where drones fly overhead and “farmers” who live miles away, where their kids can go to nice, suburban schools, manage workers with levels of science and research that are both very impressive and very depressing. I am not going to wax mythological about the sadness of the loss of the family farm. I am not depressed that science is involved. I am depressed at how science is being used.

The crops are vessels for our needs, and not independent, living organisms. By treating these living things as commodities, we aren’t using science to increase our respect for the crop. We are using science to exploit the crop, and use it up in full.

The recent GMO debate, to me, often misses the point. We have a system of agriculture so destructive to the very crops we propose to be cultivating that we must extricate and replace the very DNA of the crop, itself, annihilating a living organism at the genetic level and replacing it with this other, new thing. It will continue until the next build-up of tolerances, and then the cycle repeats of annihilation after annihilation until very little is left of our crops and ourselves that came from the soil and the wilderness and the aeons of time before us.

Speeding up the evolutionary process is dangerous because the process is by definition one of death. There is no way to know what the long-term effects of any new crop will be because crops dont stop breeding when we are done with them. They crops with Wild species. The super weeds continue on, as well, spreading into the wild. What changes we make Wil tumble forward into an unknown future where the changes can never be undone. In this, and for this, the wise elders who respect the land and the earth cry out about the dangerous changes wrought, by men who only see the danger of what can be proven in a laboratory. Safe to eat is not the same as safe for tge seventh generation of man. The number of unknowns is too great.

And, if we imagine our cities differently, and design them around different goals and dreams, and reshape this public imaginarium we call suburban sprawl, we would not need to commodity so many living things.

thinking about cities 6...

Personal freedom means I get to light a cigarette at 5 AM, throw back a shot of whiskey for breakfast and sit on a stoop shouting at people as they walk past about polarized political issues all day long. Freedom means that I have the right to do anything I desire within the boundary of non-harmful behaviour established by state and local laws. The very laws that prevent me from getting arrested if I decide to have a shot of whiskey for breakfast are of the same spirit of laws that make it possible for corporations to flood our communities with cheap and non-nutritious food, loaded with salt, fat, and sugar. This very morning, due to oversleeping, I had to rush to work at the community college, and along the way, I picked the best of the worst option available to me, along the way. My breakfast did not have a single vegetable, unless the starchy potato gets in on a technicality. It had an entire day’s worth of sodium. It will probably shave years from my life if I do this on a regular basis.

The way the laws work: It’s my fault.

I don’t think that’s true. I do the best that I can, every day. Some days that means I have to choose between making it to work on-time and making breakfast. On those days, I also must try to find the least bad solution to navigate my day. And, the city does not support healthy decision-making. In fact, I was up late last night working in the garden and washing dishes, because we try to grow some of our own food, and we try to cook for the week ahead. The end result of this reduction in available weekly time was an exhausted rush to work, and a decision of which method is the least bad. Life is a negotiation of competing, difficult, and urgent priorities. In this case, creating a system that promotes healthy decision-making will be a universal good.

Fast food should be regulated like a sexually-based business. I don’t believe strip clubs or sex toy shops shouldn’t exist. I do believe they should not be permitted to be ubiquitous and omnipresent.

Seriously, count how many burger shacks there are, all around you. Imagine the environmental destruction caused by all those beef cattle herded into close pens, wading through shit while eating corn and belching methane fumes. Imagine the corn they are fed, the cheap GMO corn, and how very much of it, along with GMO soy and GMO sorghum and GMO anything, we toss into the cattle pens, to fatten up beef to make burgers.

Burgers don’t come from the whole cattle, either. There are cuts of meat.

The steak available at nearly every sit-down restaurant in America came from many of the same cattle. The divided animal is raised and sold for a high volume of high-quality beef, and the rest is separated out to fuel the cheap burger joints that pollute our communities’ arteries with low-quality, low-health, discount food.

For me, this morning, even desiring a healthy breakfast, and even willing to pay premium to achieve one, I had no choice. The only fast option available to get me to work on time was fast food. I drove past a hundred places with sausage burritos, egg and bacon sandwiches, and egg and bacon burritos and sausage sandwiches. There was no vegetable stand. There was no fresh oatmeal without all sorts of strange and unknown chemicals, without a deadly dose of sugar. There is an unofficial line between “food” and “junk food”, but the way marketing works, the line becomes blurry, and the blurriness errs on the side of convincing people that “junk food” is actually a health food. You see, junk food is chemically-designed to be addictive. It is engineered to induce cravings that are only enhanced by marketing and branding efforts that reinforce the cravings with a media narrative that embeds into the brain.

Basically, this shit is evil, and we allow it. We welcome it because the consumer gets to choose their own addiction over their health.

And, we have zoned things in such a way that this lamprey can continue sucking the life out of our communities while extracting the wealth of the community, taking both and leaving nothing else behind.

Generally speaking, when wealth is traded for something the community truly needs, this is the purpose of wealth and a good thing; imagine the farmer selling CSA shares for organic produce and jars of fresh pickles. When wealth is traded for something that diminishes the community and causes irrepairable harm, this is the lamprey-like wealth extraction of corporate evil. Trading wealth for something that helps the community builds up the community and improves it. Trading wealth for something that diminishes the community, and takes away from its health and wellness, is a symptom of a diseased society. These weeds have taken root in the cracks of our sidewalks. They are noxious and polluting and harmful, but they cannot be removed without rethinking the way our cities and food systems work on a massive scale. These are the parasites in the system that exploit our personal freedom for their own material gain at our expense.

Urban planning has the power to correct itself.

Fear of regulation is a definite thing, and part of a healthy society that tries to balance competing interests that may or may not have uneven power distributions in the discussion. Fear of regulation prevents the powerful from pushing through changes that cause harm. Obversely, fear of too-little regulation also is part of a healthy society.

How many burger joints does your neighborhood actually want or need, and are they unbalanced regarding other forms of healthier eating choices? Where are the healthy, fast choices for a vibrant, wholesome society?

I propose two alternative solutions that each are likely impossible.

First, I propose strict dietary guidelines for restaurant meals based on their price points. The cheaper something is, the healthier it must be to protect our society’s poor and powerless from the myriad issues involved with the exploitation of corporations. This will create some issues because healthy food isn’t necessarily the cheapest food. But, a little of something good is far better than a lot of something bad, for your health. And, I suspect that once faced with the limitations of regulations, the companies that can create healthy, affordable options for a low price point will excel and expand quickly. This leap of faith, of course, supposes that once given the opportunity not to exploit, companies will refrain from doing so. Unfortunately, what we have seen is that whenever something is permitted, a corporation will attempt to profit from it, and whenever something is not forbidden, a corporation will attempt to profit from it. In either case, this is not a permanent solution to the food crisis ravaging our urban and suburban and rural communities. We are literally dying because we have put our faith in companies to do right by their customers’ health. Heart disease is our #1 killer. Cigarettes, if not for extensive regulation, would still be on the lips of everyone, everywhere.

My second proposed solution is to zone fast food restaurants exactly like adult entertainment facilities, and prevent them from dominating our communities. They need to be spread the fuck out, and dissipated as the sinful thing that they are. Currently, one could not go to a grocery store without passing multiple fast food destinations wrapped around it in a kind of obstacle course of temptation. One fast food restaurant per square mile is plenty. Strictly defining fast food, in this case, would come from the caloric density of the food set against the nutritional density. What is the set ratio permitted per meal per items? I don’t believe in portion control. I do believe in nutritional density. Set a strict nutritional density requirement, and anything that does not meet that requirement must be zoned like a sinful temptation that blights our community’s health, safety, and children. Anything that is more calorically-dense than nutritionally-dense belongs out on the edges of our towns and cities, where only those who are specifically-seeking them will encounter them, and they will know that what they are doing is potentially harmful to their health.

Also, any food company that needs to make television commercials instead of relying on the testimonials of customers and goodwill is basically making terrible food. That they target children with their horrible products, and attempt to create a lifelong bond with children through targeted advertising of food that causes Diabetes, Heart Disease, and Cancer, is one of the great evils of our society.

Corporations are basically robots. They are tools that are created to perform functions and operate independently of any one or two operating individuals, to make decisions without close direction, etc. That their processing power comes from a large number of managers and middle-managers and employees is irrelevant, because they function in all other respects like giant, amorphous robots. In this, Asimov’s laws of robotics must come first. They are not required to operate this way.

They certainly aren’t operating that way in our towns and communities.

Another corporation that seems disinterested in the health and wellness of the community - construction companies - are in the business of building things that can be used for profit through either the sale of the buildings or the leasing of them.

These have all been built according to codes, set by the government.

The government regulation that is often seen as some kind of evil has actually been subtly enforcing a status quo through building codes for centuries. These codes save lives, ensure appropriate access for disabled and elderly folks, and do all sorts of other hidden goods. But, they also ensure that doing things differently from what has been done before is prohibitively difficult. For a construction company to take a chance on unconventional urban planning, unconventional design, often means finding ways to reduce the cost of the procedure, and mitigating the risk.

The urban renaissance currently happening in our cities, where the wealthy and upwardly-mobile push into condos and residences that are deep in the heart of cities, as opposed to rushing out to the suburbs, is exactly how to do that, for a risk-averse construction firm. The vibrancy of repurposing old buildings happens because community leaders make it fiscally profitable through tax breaks and regulations, and the community gets behind the project. The famous Riverwalk of San Antonio is exactly that sort of project. A civic-minded community leader saw the value in a revitalized destination downtown, and united the community behind the idea that has since taken off and formed the heart of a revitalized downtown in a city that has since become a major tourist destination as a result, in part, of that Riverwalk project. In other areas, old factories left abandoned that happened to have a fortuitous location have been turned over into a multi-use notion, with condos above the restaurants, and shopping and various offices all sharing tiny pieces of lease space inside constructs that used to be used for a large, single purpose. Also in San Antonio, the Pearl Brewery Complex has become a major destination for locals, where once there was an empty and decaying former brewery of a beer notorious for its cheapness and poor quality, now there is the Culinary Institute of America, high-end retail, and all sorts of restaurants and offices.

How do urban planners bring that same sort of renaissance to the communities that are not rich? How do we bring the urban renewal into communities that struggle to make ends meet?

thinking about cities 5...

People love their cars.

Okay, what’s the most dangerous thing people do every day, with the highest-likelihood of our own death, dismemberment, etc.? It’s driving. Driving is extremely dangerous. More people die on the road every day than die from getting mugged or carjacked in the urban communities of our country.

People love their cars, right?

In urban California, people had better love their cars, because they’ll probably be spending more time in their car than they will eating meals, and one daily meal will probably be eaten inside of a car. The average commute for people who drive to work in San Francisco is over 30 minutes one-way. One hour every day is lost to a mechanical action, with no physical activity, extremely high risk, and very low levels of human interaction, skill mastery, and personal development. It is a loss of time, and a loss of happiness. The hole in the day also takes away from time spent cooking meals.

Ask this question, then: How many fast food restaurants do you pass on the way to and from work? It is very likely that people in households where every adult works, the norm in America, will be able to mentally drive to work and count restaurants because it is very likely that people in that household stopped in those restaurants for meals, because time is a precious commodity for the American worker. In a sixteen-hour day, eight of it will be spent working. One will be spent commuting. That leaves seven hours for showering, eating, cleaning up after ourselves, and taking care of our pets and families. Often, the negotiation of time that happens never impacts our careers, which must come first. Our negotiation of time comes from the rest of the day, where the easiest things to let slide - housework, eating - happen in the kitchen. Eating out not only saves preparation time; it saves cleaning time. 

It also destroys our personal health, our personal happiness, decimates our communities’ well-being, and turns our planet into a disastrous superheated ball of death.

The side effect of eating out: We eat shitty food. We are tired, stressed, looking for comfort. We eat shitty food. It is cheap. It is readily available. At no point in the creation of the shitty food does a company think about the health of their customers. In fact, food exists that seems to revel in how unhealthy it actually is as if that is a selling point. Size of the meat patty sells burgers. Bacon added on to meat patty sells burgers. Even relatively healthy-ish options like sandwiches with vegetables on them are quickly doused in over-sweetened and over-salted sauces that will trigger our primordial impulse for fat and sweet.

As a country, we are eating ourselves to death.

The solution is to eat out less, and make healthy meals at home.

Even people who do not eat out will rely on prepackaged foods and sauces as time savers at the house. How many frozen pizzas does a family of four eat in the average month? (Answer: tk seeking source on this.)

Pre-made foods, pre-packaged foods, frozen heat and eat foods, all must be pumped with preservatives to retain shelf life, and are often made extra-enticing by hidden fats and sugars that seem out of place. Time is a precious resource, and it is consumed by long commutes, which, in turn, lead to consuming faster alternatives to prepared, healthy meals.

Health is time. Time is health. We trade one for the other, caught in a system that rewards us with time temporarily for making decisions that will impact our health some day. Why anyone would do this, even knowing the cost to their own health, is often because of the value of the home and the quality the schools. Wealthy people have many choices for schools, including private schools. Poor people have no choice. Their children's future is circumscribed by their zip code. Education opportunities increasingly go to the people who can disconnect from their communities, and chase the wealthier neighborhoods and better schools. Financial advisers do regularly suggest pushing a family mortgage to the limits of what is possible if it means a substantially better school for the kids. Building a better future for the next generation is a worthy investment: What's the point of money without a better future for our kids? But, it is unevenly distributed. Poverty accumulates in poverty. Kids from poor neighborhood have no exposure to kids from rich neighborhoods. Kids from middle class neighborhoods remain with middle class kids. We sort ourselves by our wealth, and we sort our children by it, too, and train them to sort their future by wealth. 

Wealth also buys better food. When we are poor, we will often die young in terrible chronic pain that drains our bank accounts and leaves little for the next generation. If we are a little luckier, we who are poor, we will die suddenly without lingering from some unknown chronic condition, and some part of our life will be passed on to our children, who may be able to get out of poor neighborhoods with that boon of minor generational wealth. 

Anyway, revenge comes in the form of commuting times. Rich people often commute greater distances, eat terrible junk food as a result of long commutes, and face many of the same conditions as those who spend an hour on a bus will face.




Driving is the most dangerous thing we do, and we do it every day. We move out into the hills to escape minor likelihoods of criminal attempts, and we extend our commute, increasing the likelihood of accidents, which are a leading cause of death. And, this drive feeds into our gnawing addiction of terrible fast food, and this leads to heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, which are all leading killers of men and women.

Move out into the suburbs if you must. But do so with your eyes open. Time and health are the only two things you truly have. Everything else is a cultural affectation.

(http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennagoudreau/2013/03/05/cities-with-the-most-extreme-commutes/)

thinking about cities 4...

Tax revenue is the key to urban bliss, isn't it? It certainly looks like the only thing that is truly measured and taken seriously.

With the proliferation of WalMarts across my fair suburbs, I have done some research into why big box stores seem to be the preferred method of physical retail space in this country. Certainly, they are full of things that people might like to buy. The cost savings of piling them all together into a silo probably does lower the costs. The large bulk purchases likely does create a discount possibility where everyone saves money, and that’s basically fine as long as no sweatshops and child labor operations are involved. Heck, the modern organic milk movement’s defining moment was the embrace of organics by WalMart!

Still, as a consumer, I find big box retail unpleasant. I have to cross great distances on foot to get what I need. Customer service is harried, at best, and absent most of the time. Much of what I find in these places is made in foreign nations under questionable conditions, and it often breaks quickly, needing to be replaced again with another inexpensive thing from the same unpleasant shopping experience and the purchased thing will also break. With this experience in mind, and ignoring the critique of Big Box retail from those that mythologize a diverse Main Street with many little shops, it is absolutely no surprise that on-line retail is clobbering Big Box stores, and will likely dominate these festering cesspits of oversized Americana.

But, more important to our current debate, is this question: Why do these huge shopping experiences take hold in drought-stricken areas, small towns with few resources to spare, and even densely-populated urban areas that can barely afford the parking space, much less the square feet of cluttered, messy shelves?

Tax revenue is the answer. The local city councils see tax dollars in their eyes.

The store comes in, and presumably will become a source of employment for many, and a steady stream of sales tax for the community, and this drives the decision to approve construction of the hideous thing.

Tax revenue is also tied to the revenue for the city in that residences are taxed based on property values.

Tax revenue has created a system where the better a neighborhood looks, and the larger and newer and more valuable the homes are in that neighborhood, the more money the city has. Tax revenue has also created a system where the larger the stores, the cheaper the stuff, and the more likely the stuff will need to be replaced, the more revenue the city generates in sales tax.

Ergo, push. Push out into the surrounding hillsides and build. The infrastructure and roads and highways will all be paid for by someone else with bonds both municipal and federal, but the tax revenue will continue and continue for years. The organs, once opened, will pulse with the liquid green blood of economics and spoo out their revenue stream into the municipal coffers.

The municipal coffers will swell and burst in a monthly pulse to pay down the bonds that were approved to build the streets and police stations and fire brigades that support the town.

The bondholders will own shares of the big box stores muted and dispersed among funds and portfolios that will include the bonds. This gelatinous green goo congeals into a ticker somewhere in a bank, that someone owns. Our taxes paid to our government, and the profits paid to our local big box businesses, are actually a fee paid to a banker for the privilege of debt to the banker. This debt is dispersed into the portfolios of thousands through all sorts of mutual funds and funds of funds and funds of funds of hedge funds and funds designed to mitigate risk to the investor and/or maximize return to the investor.

At no point in the process is our community’s health and well-being part of the equation. It is all strictly based on the notion of tax revenue. The whole pulsing, beating spoo heart of Big Box Store materialism is the hydra vampire of global finance extracting the life essence of our communities on every front imaginable, to accrue wealth from time, debt, and raw materials. The roads, themselves, that connect the Big Box store to the city, likely paid for with a bond issuance, is built by another company that is paid out to the other owners of fund management firms.

When WalMart comes to town, wages drop, household income drops, and American-made products are driven to the brink by products made in slave labor conditions in some of the poorest and most desperate places on the planet.

The amount of oil and carbon that goes into the production and distribution of these goods is substantial. Again, the same individuals and organizations that extract wealth from our cities and shopping malls also extract wealth from the gas and shipping lines. Every step is monetized, and becomes a dividend or stock to someone, somewhere, and the accumulated ownership has congealed into a clear overclass and underclass. Global warming happens as a result of the extraction and long shipping and power plants and it is a very profitable thing for the  profit-reapers. 

It all began, of course, with the notion of tax revenue. The city council desired tax revenue, jobs that will increase municipal and state funds, and went about this goal by destroying the world for the 1%. It approved zoning plans, expanded city limits perhaps, and issued bonds to pay for roads and infrastructure to support the retail establishments and new homes (fly from these inner cities, somewhere safer, somewhere newer, with gates and an HOA!).

Hyperbolically reductionary, I know. Life is always more complex than this simple thought experiment.

But, this thought experiment did exactly one thing: It followed money. The very city managers that push tax revenue growth will be invested in retirement portfolios managed by the very companies that are approaching them for bonds. Everyone has a financial interest in creating this horrible, destructive hellscape of what is commonly referred to in speech, among employees of these places, as “retail hell”. Again, the financial rewards go to people who are willing to inflict this monstrous retail hellscape upon their communities, destroy their local “mom and pop” shops, and submit their communities and landfills to wave after wave of cheap, plastic crap shipped in from distant, wage slaves. There is no alternative system. Opting-out is opting out of a roof over our heads, a municipal fire engine, and building code enforcement. Which is to say, it’s an even worse idea for individual safety to step away from the herd on this one. The best thing for us is to go along, and let it happen. For us, it is where the rewards outweigh the risk in the system we have built.

And, the broken cheap stuff we buy doesn’t just go away when it is placed out in the street for pickup. The landfills swell with all these things that are potentially toxic to our environment and build up and build up in vast architectures of piled-up wastematter.

Consider the landfill. It is your neighbor as much the city park. In fact, it will likely someday become a park as the piles of filth are buried and covered with sod. New houses wil be built upon the junk. We will buy junk to fill our houses built of junk, and everyone will be smiling and keeping up with their neighborhood’s appearances, and it will all be so wonderful.

I’m smiling. Everybody smile.

Someday we will run out of plastic from the available oil, and we will strip mine old landfills to recycle old plastic. At this time, presumably, the ocean gyre will be so dense, we can just scoop it up in trawlers like we used to do with fish, and from there it will be recycled, thrown out, built up…

This is the system we create when we build our cities based on the measurement of tax revenue.

It is a very profitable system for us on the short term, and it is particularly profitable for the people who will not end up working in these retail nightmares.

The majority of Americans who work in these hellscapes are paid below a living wage and must supplement their income with food stamps and government assistance to get by. Ergo, the very taxes that are presumably raised by expanding tax revenue should be measured against the expenditure of so many families on welfare and public assistance.