Manspology

I don't know what you text to a girlfriend this morning and I sure don't want to find out through trial and error. Last night, she never came over because an hour into the election, at the sight of the first numbers, she stopped knowing how to interact with the world and couldn't get out of bed. I share that deeply private fact without fear of embarrassing her, not because embarrassing women was legalized in last night's referendum, but because she's numb. If I texted her for permission to share her numbness, I'd get the same response as if I asked her to eat a submarine. "Okay," she'd reply. "I'm going to try to sleep. I'll talk to you tomorrow." I had no part in doing this to her, right? My state is blue, we legalized weed and protected Riley Reid's workplace last night, and between being called an MRA, a douche and a pig by folks that remember me comparing Season 4 of Community to rape, I'm more often these days called an SJW cuck, which I like, because it sounds like someone younger than me. I want to be relevant and woke and lit and Pokémon to the max. Which is why I quietly rooted for Bernie but saw the Democratic primaries as being too sensitive to benefit from my loud mouth, and when Bernie conceded, I quietly switched to the only candidate that wasn't anti-vaccination, anti-immigration or that Gary guy. I played my part in this whole thing just fine from beginning to end. So I'm off the hook with my shell shocked girlfriend, right? No, because I played my part begrudgingly. And if I had known these results were possible, I wouldn't have put an adverb on my playing of it. Except maybe "humbly" or "apologetically" or "extra cuckily" Because, at the risk of riling up anyone that will only see the political aspect of this personal confession: I know this wasn't about emails. If you feel it was, nothing bad is going to happen to you if you walk away from this post. I can assure you, I'm not challenging or invalidating the results of an election you see as a win. Fair play and all that. I'm glad we didn't have a civil war. But I want to leave a message here to my numb girlfriend that can't work as tweets or texts or my trademark pillow talk babbling. And I guess there's a few ex-lovers and coworkers that I hope read this too. Women that have reason not to believe I'm on their side. The message starts with the obvious, I'm sorry. But what I've learned in my cuck SJW workshops is that saying "I'm sorry" isn't an apology. A full apology is an acknowledgment of the offense, an expression of remorse and a commitment to change. The remorse, that's easy. I feel bad she lost and that I assumed she'd win and therefore was a dick about it. I'm all remorse this morning, I'd cut a pinky off if it let my girlfriend face the world today, smiling the way she was the last time I saw her. I don't know if I'd be capable of actually doing the pinky cutting, I think that's something a full on Trump guy would be better at, and if it were possible, I would like to be knocked out or at least anesthetized for the removal, because I'm a cuckity cuckimus maximus beta mega cucksuck. But I'd donate the finger and more to make this unhappen. Remorse expressed. Acknowledgment of the crime is the one that's going hurt and upset people because it's confession to a crime that is life long and confusing and that won't stop just because I confessed it. I acknowledge that until this election, I have always felt, on some level, that although women weren't getting a fair shake, it probably "kind of evened out" in other ways. No I can't tell you what that means in detail because I've never actually consciously parsed the thought, and that's the crime, I've just walked around with it. "It's clearly harder to be a woman in this society," I'd think, "but it's probably easier in other ways. And in any case, one thing we know for sure...it's different." I do a podcast every week in which I'm constantly running my mouth about race and gender but my goal in doing so, I see now, has always been less to investigate, grow or connect and more to figure out how to make people like me (yes that last 43 years was me trying to make you like me, yes I know how sad and funny that is). I've kept one eye on the ever morphing fashion of gender discourse and the other eye on my own survival as a primate and figured I was, underneath it all, a feminist because my thoughts about women were never "they suck" or "they're dumb" or "I want to hurt them." Now I see the crime starts so much earlier in the thought process than that. In figuring out how to survive as a frightened man, I've built every thought about people on a foundational assumption that the sexually reproductive dichotomy we inherited from life as old as plants was a more important dichotomy, regardless of context, than any other difference between two humans you could name. And hey, sometimes that emphasis on sexual dichotomy is fun, or benign, or even progressive feeling, like when two men of two different complexions are so busy bonding about how women be shopping that they're accidentally something other than racist for a second. And then last night this thing happened. This thing that we know was not about emails. And not about the tangled roots of semi-documented corruption and not about revoked promises of walls or recanted suspicions about birthplaces, or anything you could name outside of that one thing that has us more divided than all our divisive specialities put together. This thing that has had us all so divided since before this country was a glint in its explorers' eyes, that last night, with no ways left to express the division subtly, we walked up to the concept of our first lady president, gave it some thought, and walked away having opted for the first President to call Mexicans rapists in the same year he was charged with raping a 13 year old girl. And I really hope you're not still reading this if it's making you want to argue with me. I don't want to argue. There is no debate here to be had and we can all agree debates have stopped mattering because we also just elected the first President to blame flaming out in a debate on the moderator's menstruation. There I go to my comfort zone. Anger, babbling, competition, show everybody what a dramatic underdog hero you are. That's the part of me represented by this election, that's the part of me that got our first David Duke endorsed President into an office where he has access to the camera in your laptop and that's the part of me I want to apologize for, which means to express remorse for, acknowledge the existence of, and finally, most importantly, to commit to changing. I'm never going to secretly suspect anyone of exaggerating again when they tell me they don't feel supported, or that they feel attacked. I'm going to take everything people tell me about the challenges facing them at face value and make it my goal to help them get their elusive fair shake however they can. And I'm going to take that part of my thought process that recognizes another human's gender or race, and rather than nobly ignoring it or hilariously calling it out, I'm going to remove it from the foundation of my thoughts and just put it over to the side, where it's as significant as someone's horoscope and says as much about their needs as their height or weight or number of limbs, which is to say, sometimes a lot, sometimes not at all, but never by default. I am going to stop trying to find meaning in chaos by categorizing people, no matter how optimistic or supportive those categories might seem. They'll never be fair and they'll never lead to me doing right by anyone. I'm not going to achieve this new thinking by typing it, I'm going to change it the way my therapist says change works: by behaving and speaking like a person that already lives in that world and letting my neurology gradually adapt. By slowing my thoughts down at the top of judgments and practicing the observation of my own brain in even the most common moments. By disrupting my mental routines even when I don't perceive them as existing, in every encounter I have with every human being, even while I'm just laying in bed alone, running simulations of others. I'm going to stop expecting things like fairness and respect from the world and start seeing what happens when I become the source of those things. I'm going to stop making it my business to punish and reward others and defending myself. I'm going to try to figure out what the people that enter my life need in the moment of their entrance and make unique real time decisions about my relationship with them. No, I'm not going to be nicer to anyone on Twitter. Twitter is a fucking toilet. Don't meet people in a toilet if you want to have a healthy encounter. I go there to shit on the planet and make jokes. And if it takes me until the moment before I randomly die, I'm going to focus on making the space around me an effective advertisement for a decent world. Without expecting the world to buy into it. I don't control the world. I don't control other people. I control whether or not I surrender. I control when my walls come down, when the bullshit stops and whatever's behind the walls joins whoever's near me. Whatever this is isn't going to get better by getting longer. It also stopped behind honest in the last paragraph because my girlfriend came over and is now sitting next to me and I'm not interacting with her because I'm trying to finish this. I don't know how to finish writing things. And I don't know what people need or what they've been through or what hurts them and when it's me. Cody, I'm sorry about last night, about the thing with the guy with the hair and the stuff. I acknowledge my role in it, I feel bad about it and I'm going to change the only part of it I can change. I love you. You deserve better. Everybody reading this deserves better. Maybe this is how we end up getting it. Or maybe this is how the statue of liberty ends up buried on a beach up to its armpits in Planet of the Apes. I always wondered what the hell could make that happen.

More Than a Tweet

I have always tried to be as transparent with you guys as possible, letting you in on the process of making (and not making) Community. So maybe my silence on the issue of a hypothetical sixth season seems frustrating. I was thinking I could stay quiet because there's too much to say and anything can become a headline because of the timing, and I am so very sick of clicking on my dumb fat name and seeing my dumb fat face in that dumb photo where I'm pointing at the camera and my hands are inexplicably tiny despite being closer to the camera. But, I'm getting tweets from some anxious sounding fans, tweets that make me anxious because I feel like I've made THEM anxious with my silence, etc. The general feel of my twitter feed is "well, what should we do, do you want us to petition/riot/negotiate/scream or do you want us to say goodbye and let it be done?" There's also references to an article in an industry gossip blog, which I won't click, indicating that everyone in the world BUT me wants to shop Community around. And probably featuring that fucking weird tiny hand photo. Or the one where I'm snarling and my teeth are like corn kernels. Let's start with that, the idea that I don't want this to continue. I don't think I'm the guy that gets to say what happens at the more effective levels - my career would have a different shape if I were that guy. I'd fire everyone that fired me, give all of you a raise, let the audience pick which pilots go to series and keep shows running as long as their subscription revenue was a dollar over their budget. I am not Mister Shot Caller Guy. That guy went to a better school, didn't drop out and has lizard blood. I will confess, however, that when Sony called me on Friday with the news, there was brief discussion at the end of the call about the concept of the show living elsewhere, and I was definitely in the "eh" column. For a million reasons, some selfish, some creative, one logistic, five sexual, three racist (in a good way) and, oddly, nine isometric. I won't bore you with them. I mean, of course I will bore you with them. Boring you is my job, my hobby and my passion. But it doesn't matter right now WHY I'd be lukewarm or if my reasons would be valid, what matters is, I won't be lukewarm. I'll heat up. I said "eh" on a Friday afternoon, I will change it to a "sure, let's talk" on Monday morning and Sony can do their thing. I'm not going to be the guy that recancels cancelled Community. I'm scared to tell you how little a difference I think my enthusiasm will make. I know fandom, when it gets this deep for this long, becomes almost religious, including the urge to stone the less than faithful. But there are lots of reasons a Community resurrection could be difficult. So be prepared for that. Which brings us to the other thing, the first thing, that most of the anxious tweets are about: What do we, the fans, do? How can we help? Whose dog can we kidnap? Should we eat at Subway? Does Obama know? Should I have this tattoo removed? Was that Abed in Captain America 2? I honestly think you can totally sit back and relax for this chapter. I know you don't feel relaxed but I mean you don't have to worry that someone on this planet isn't aware of this show's value to its audience. There are actually astronauts on a space station right now saying "we get it, you love Community" in Chinese. You have done your thing. If you want to know the God's honest truth, part of my "eh" was coming from the unsettling thought of your passion for campaigns being once again exploited by this rather unfair, somewhat backward system, one that now treats you like it's your responsibility to keep a show alive, like a corporation is doing you a favor by feeding you low grade opiate through a regulated tube. Like you owe them an apology when they can't measure or monetize you to their satisfaction. You deserve better. I love you guys, and at its best, Community is me saying that over and over again, saying let's get less mad at ourselves and each other and more mad at the inhuman systems that keep us down and divided. "Maybe it should have said less of that and more jokes." Shut up, voice of my grade school principal that also coached and umpired softball because shrieking "steeeeeeerike" at children was his sole recourse to virility. Anyway, I will not be standing in the way. I'm sorry to anyone that's really taking this cancellation hard. I know how I felt when these fuckers killed Max Headroom. But you sit back and treat yourself to some New Girl and Parks and Mindy and Brooklyn 99 and Eagleheart and Portlandia and have you seen Matt Berry's Toast of London? It's awesome. Also not to be selfish but maybe check out Rick and Morty. And let TV be the needy clown that it's still very overpaid to be, and let the suits deal with the suits and see what possibilities exist. That's the best we can do for now. Ninety seven episodes. Over eighty pretty good ones. Mission accomplished. By the way, remember when you complained about that one episode? Bet it's not looking so bad now, huh ass face? Just kidding, I know it sucked. I was going for something cooler and - whatever, I don't need to explain myself to you. Marry softball if you love it so much. I'm gonna be special when I grow up! Your Lover Daniel Anastasia Harmon

Insomniblogapaloozafest

I can't sleep, can you? Insomnia isn't as fun as they make it sound in movies, it's not like you get housework done. Wait, housework, what the fuck am I talking about, like I do housework. I don't even know if there's a difference between "can't sleep" and "insomnia," but whatever it is, it's not like I'm not tired, it's not like my eyes aren't burning and my head doesn't hurt. I feel the way I feel for those delightfully itchy ten seconds we usually don't remember because they usually turn into sleep. Only this ten seconds lasting hours. Hours of listening to mental wind punctuated by scary sounds from various parts of the house. Just as I thumbed that, there was another one. I think the small fridge in the other room has periodic jolts but it also sounds exactly like a huge man in dirty coveralls holding a butcher knife that squeezed in through the doggy door is now just bumping into stuff while waiting for the right time to stab me. Oh, god, there it is again. Is it the water heater? I have a tankless heater. And the air isn't on. I think it's something like that, though. Every eight minutes or so there's this deep, short metallic rumble, but between rumbles, if I listen closely, I can hear what sounds like water flowing through pipes. Very faintly. The scary part is the second of the two rumbles because that one is louder and it's whatever this thing is finishing, so it's followed by silence. I'm only not deathly afraid of it anymore because it's happening in a pattern. Weirdest butcher knife murderer in the world if he's going to just keep doing this for hours. Almost an honor to be stab murdered by such a meticulous artist. I was asleep earlier, deeply asleep, and Erin woke me up. I've learned and demonstrated the hard way that people should limit their internet transparency to the boundaries of their own lives so you'll just have to trust me when I say I am marrying the asshole I deserve, who is now fast asleep while I count phantom stabby man rumbles and the uneasy seconds between them. My worst nightmare is home invasion. it combines every fear I have except spiders. Loss of control, especially to someone dumber than me - Holy shit I finally made myself tired have to go bye!