The beauty of the third thing

Do not ever for a moment forget what you are

Dear Writer,

My husband has a YouTube feed like no other. As a YouTuber, he’s spent a lot of time on the platform, consuming an endless parade of the rare and the random, and curating a playlist of the stuff that he loves the most. When one or both of us are in an anxious place, which is a fairly frequent occurrence of late, he’ll pull the list up on our bedroom TV and play something for me.

The other night at the end of a long day that had been preceded by a long month that had been preceded by a long year that had been preceded by the apocalypse he showed me this.

For those of you too busy or too suspicious to click a link, this is a 20-minute video, pretty much unedited, of a dude in Canada feeding a ravenous mob of raccoons on his porch during the pandemic.

We watched it. We laughed. We were amazed at how much these little furbies could eat in a single sitting. The guy threw a bucket of grapes at them and they nom-nom-nommed their way through it. Then he emptied a plastic bucket of hot dogs into their voracious little maws.

Then more grapes.

Then more hot dogs.

That’s it. That, in a nutshell, is basically the entire video.

It was amazing.

We thought how great it would be to finally get to the age this guy was at, No Fucks Years Old. He didn’t worry about SEO or lighting or microphones or editing or anything. Shit, we were lucky he had a tripod and didn’t just duct-tape his phone to the window to get the shot. He just lived his life, taped it, and uploaded it, and then, I can only presume, went to the Canadian version of Costco to buy 25 more pounds of hot dogs.

Forty-two million views and four years later, this video found two mildly depressed and extremely anxious middle-aged adults, and lightened their hearts.

Fucking magic, is what that is.

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Write your novel alongside me and a small cohort of other terrified writers as we all trudge our way through the creative process together.

It’s way more fun than that makes it sound.

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Humanity is trash

Look. There are a lot of things wrong with the world; trust me, I am aware. We live in an attention economy in which dire predictions and self-hatred and everybody-else-hatred gets eyeballs and clicks, so the idea that humanity is an experiment worth running appears increasingly absurd as the years go by.

You know the drill; we are patently terrible, we should just die off and let the innocent animals of the world restore this place to the natural beauty it had before we ever became the scourge we were never gonna rise above being.

To which I say… yeah.

But…

People are garbage

In the early 1940s, a handful of French teenagers and a dog named Robot found the Lascaux caves, where they discovered hundreds of cave paintings done by artists tens of thousands of years ago. Some of the images are designed to be seen in torchlight, where the dancing flames can lend movement to the images.

And that’s the thing about people; we don’t just kill each other and destroy the environment and vote for fascists. We also drip magic from our fingertips and stuff it into crevices for the future to discover and drink up the residue of meaning that magic left behind.

We are complex motherfuckers, and it’s kind of beautiful.

I mean… think about it. Given any two things, eventually, a human will create a third thing out of those two things. It is our unique and incredible ability to imagine things that don’t exist and then make them exist that has moved us from living in caves to landing on the moon in about 10,000 years, which on an evolutionary timescale is a fraction of a blink of an eye. No wonder we’re a big tragic mess right now. We are basically toddlers with the power to blow up the world a thousand times over, and that’s gonna take some adjustment.

But here’s the thing; if you only focus on all the things we’re getting wrong, you miss the majority of the picture. The people who are making an unholy mess of the world through their greed and selfishness are truly only a handful of us.

The rest of us are cutting our cats into Jurassic Park.

Everything is terrible

We are incredible. We are creative. We create meaning through the things that we do and the stories that we tell.

Let me say that again; we create meaning.

From shit we had around the house.

Let’s talk about meaning for a minute, because it’s one of those ideas that tends to get lost in the weeds, but it’s what absolutely everything we do is about.

Whenever you take one thing that is just that thing, and another thing that is just that other thing, and you put them together to create a third thing, you create meaning in that process.

If you take needles, and you take yarn, and you make a sweater that your kid will wear to their first day of kindergarten, you made a sweater, yes, but that sweater is so much more than a sweater.

That sweater is your fingers and your love and your skill and your boredom and the color that you don’t like but your kid loves so you made the sweater in it even though it makes your kid look a little like a pumpkin but fuck it and then you knit with it while watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer look at Giles and say, I’m sixteen years old, I don’t want to die, and you cried and thought about your sweet little baby who is going off in a few weeks to learn the alphabet and how to cover their hand with Elmer’s glue so they can peel it off and make it look like their actual skin is peeling off gross and what if your kid has to someday save the world from vampires, well, if they do ever have to save the world from vampires, they’ll do it knowing that their mother loved them enough to spend weeks knitting a sweater together in this ugly fucking orange color which you’re now starting to kind of like and what you don’t know is that in about thirteen years when that kid is away at college and you finally have a moment of peace to yourself, you’ll find a mug in that exact color and love it more than anything else in the world and you’ll tear up when you bring it home and make a cup of tea in it and you won’t know exactly why you’re crying, but whatever.

Humanity is not trash. When we are given two things, we make a third thing, and we imbue it with meaning and love and silliness and caprice and then send it out into the world and that is the most magical goddamn thing in the history of the universe.

We are absolutely up to the challenges we face and we will get better and be better and do better and get through this, and in the meantime, we will find all the crevices in the world and stuff tiny bits of beauty and love and silliness and creativity and magic into them, because that is what we do.

Stop yes, butting me when I say that we are beautiful mofos, and sit for a moment in the reality that if you only allow yourself to focus on the terrible things, and forget about the guy who brought a lobster home from the grocery store and made it into a pet, then you will forget why we fight to eradicate the terrible things in the first place.

Do not ever make the mistake of taking for granted our beauty, our wonder, our love, our grace, our kindness, and our creativity, and treat it like its nothing, while focusing on our greed, our pettiness, our selfishness, and our darkness, when that is not the greater part of us.

And here, I use greater in all of its meanings; as in better, as in larger, as in more important.

As in…

Everything,

L