Hi! Welcome back! I made my publishing deadline today, even with the MASSIVE edits and additions made in the final hour. Proud of that. Hope you dig it! This is (essentially) a continuation of my piece from last week — “The Mall”. It’s not required reading, but it’s, like, you know, part one. I’ll explain more in the paid subscriber videos (which are going up this week! All 5!). If you like what I’m doing, please consider subscribing.

Ok let’s get into it.

“Simply put, I respect art on the basis of it being a manifestation of an idea from a human being’s brain,” I say this with coffee jitters to my best friend walking around downtown San Diego. Once again, I’m defending James Cameron’s Avatar franchise like it’s an endangered species — and maybe it is.

Did a human being think of something and make it exist? It should be a low bar to clear, right? And, up until recently, that answer was clear, if not only occasionally obfuscated. Now the determination itself — the foothold on reality — is losing grip.

You don’t see Avatar fans in the wild like you do Star Wars fans, but one Avatar outgrosses most Star Wars films — and depending on how The Mandalorian and Grogu does this May, possibly all of the recent ones combined.

Defending Avatar in person, walking around, is healthier than shouting about it online. This is me thinking out loud. Seeing if I can add something to the conversation rather than reacting to someone else’s. The financial motive of art creation — content creation — has changed the engine of art and the discourse around it. Let me try something The Grid can’t do.

I went to Tron Night on October 28th, 2010 — an IMAX 3D preview for Tron: Legacy at the then brand-new IMAX screen at the AMC Foothills in Tucson. I went with my sister, they gave us posters and wristbands, and showed us 20 minutes of select scenes from the film. A few months later, I saw Tron: Legacy. And then I saw it again. Maybe four times total. This was 2010, and I was a teenager movie-hopping at the theater — watching every Academy Award-nominated film while sneaking into 3D showings of Tangled and Tron: Legacy. The world of Tron captivated my imagination more than most franchises, partly because it’s the ugly stepchild of modern sci-fi, while also being its architect — the Tron arcade game by Bally/Midway grossed nearly twice as much as the movie it was based on.

I loved it enough to write fan fiction — a pitch for a Tron series — and I loved it enough to get banned from Ain’t It Cool News for sharing it too aggressively.

A year later, my family moved to Rancho Palos Verdes, California, for seminary school, and I became an annual passholder at Disneyland — the top tier, no blackout dates, parking pass included. My sisters had the lower tiers, with the justification that I’d be the one actually going and taking them.

And I was. On more than one occasion, I’d get in an argument with my parents, get in the car, and drive myself to Disney California Adventure to haunt ElecTRONica — a Tron-themed dance party sponsored by Coke Zero. Flynn’s Arcade. Costumed dancers. DJs remixing the ‘80s over the synthpop of the moment — LMFAO, Gaga, Kesha. I don’t remember making friends there. Everyone apart from the California residents was visiting from all over the world, so it seemed pointless. I just showed up alone, sixteen years old, full of Coke Zero, and disappeared into the grid.

By 2019, I was still at it, tweeting a full pitch for a Tron prequel show from East Point, Georgia. My story (briefly) went like this: Kevin Flynn’s Grid has become the internet. ISOs — algorithmically-birthed intelligences like Olivia Wilde’s character in Legacy — have immigrated into the real world, and they’re legally required to stay on the Grid. Then, an evil force takes the Grid offline, trapping programs and human Users on the servers, essentially crashing the global economy and holding its population hostage. A team of hackers logs into a backup of the original 1982 Grid to find Tron — the only program who fights for the User — and override the shutdown. Digital immigration. Algorithmic consciousness. Border politics. I pitched all of that for fun, six years before it became the actual conversation.

Fifteen years after Tron Night, Tron: Ares finally arrived in theaters, and it was not exactly something I would have come up with. The basic premise — a program crossing into the real world — is what everyone wanted out of a Legacy sequel. But it took so long to make. And it flopped.

I found it pointless to see Tron: Ares in anything other than IMAX 3D, which, for my friends in Atlanta, meant tagging along down to Morrow, Georgia — not a short drive. I’d brought five friends to opening night. They cancelled our showing because of technical difficulties. The next day, I got two others — Tristan and Travis — to come with me, and I sat smack in the middle of the theater in the most ideal seat imaginable.

I had the best time. The film challenged me, because I had such a deep connection to the universe and my own ideas of what it should be. But the camera work is incredible. The 3D is perhaps more effective than Legacy, though Ares has fewer scenes inside the Grid. And the thing I have to respect — the thing that complicates any easy dismissal — is that Jared Leto is a genuine fan. He reached out to Disney about Tron in 2010, the same year I went to Tron Night. He saw the original in theaters in 1982 at ten years old. He spent a decade pushing to get Ares made, turning down an earlier version that didn’t feel right, executive producing the final film, and staying in character for the entire shoot. He called it a childhood dream.

Here are two Tron fans whose interests both peaked in 2010, both imagined their own versions of the next story, and both carried the obsession for fifteen years. One had the clout to will a hundred-and-seventy-million-dollar movie into existence. The other got banned from Ain’t It Cool News. Nobody showed up either way.

People call the Tron films cold — the visual style, the sterile geometry, the glacial pacing of the original. But all three are enormous labors of love that were never entitled to exist. The first was a commercial disappointment that became a cult landmark. Banned from Academy Awards eligibility for its use of computers. Legacy took twenty-eight years to get made. Ares took fifteen years and a decade of one actor’s obsession. None of these films were inevitable. They were willed into being by people who cared more than the market rewarded them for caring.

Did a human being think of something and make it exist?

Yes. Every time.

It still wasn’t enough.

It’s easy to forget that Taylor Swift is similarly not entitled to exist, not the person, but the phenomenon. The career she’s built is unprecedented, and the work that got her there is real. But with The Life of a Showgirl, I think she overplayed her hand.

I’ve been a hardcore Swiftie since 2007, and the thing I love most about her writing is the folk/country three-act storytelling she contorts into self-narrativizing massive universal pop. “You Belong With Me,” “Anti-Hero,” “Cruel Summer” — they all have that feeling of: set-up, escalation, and then that one all-caps moment where the floor drops out, or the roof blows off.

“Opalite,” in that spirit, is a fantastic song. It’s the best thing on the album that’s not named “Father Figure,” and it debuted with a metric ton of baggage and masses-assigned meaning.

The onyx-versus-opalite imagery — black stone, white stone — got read as a coded dig at Travis Kelce’s Black ex-girlfriend Kayla Nicole, especially alongside the second verse: “You were in it for real / She was in her phone / And you were just a pose.”

Swift's official merch store listed a silver chain for the song "Opalite" — eight lightning bolt-shaped links with an eight-pointed star pendant. A TikTok user pointed out that the bolts bore a resemblance to the Schutzstaffel insignia, the SS, and that eight of them could be interpreted as "88" — shorthand for "Heil Hitler," with H being the eighth letter of the alphabet. The video went viral. Within forty-eight hours, the necklace vanished from Swift's store. No statement. No redesign. Just gone.

Its music video features Greta Lee and Jodie Turner-Smith — both of whom star in Tron: Ares — alongside Cillian Murphy, who played Edward Dillinger Jr. in Tron: Legacy. They were all on The Graham Norton Show together, promoting their respective projects the same week Ares and Showgirl dropped. The Tron universe and the Swift universe sat on the same couch, and nobody blinked (‘cept me.) The song soundtracked the NBC promo for Team USA figure skating at the Winter Olympics. It’s a hit. The song that debuted with racism allegations and Swift-strung-strings is now just a pop single playing at the ice rink.

By December 2025, reports surfaced that the backlash had been partly coordinated — a network of inauthentic accounts seeding the accusations of far-right sympathies. The allegations started on 4chan and migrated to mainstream platforms, where even disagreeing with them fed the algorithm. But by then, the discourse had already run its cycle on The Grid.

So do the allegations matter? Does bad faith mean-making only work for short-term analytics and profit, and not in the head and heart? Will anyone remember that evaporated? Should we? What cements in our hearts, the grid has already processed and forgotten. But the human beings involved — Kayla Nicole, the TikToker who made the original video, and Swift herself — are still living with whatever it meant.

The algorithm already forgot. People don’t get to.

We treat creative works as singular visions — one name on the poster, one genius in the room. When that person is Taylor Swift, total control means the flaws are hers alone. The Life of a Showgirl doesn’t read as a committee product; it reads as a psychological reveal, which makes it deeply interesting but not pure fun. When that person is Jared Leto, the opposite happens. His name and his baggage swallow a film that hundreds of people built. Either way, the fingerprints vanish.

Even total artistic control can’t prevent meaning from escaping into the algorithm. And once it escapes, it moves fast.

I work in clothing and symbols daily. The things that become collectible, vintage, or honored earn that status because of the context in which they exist. At the drop of a hat, those things can lose their honor legitimately or otherwise. I don’t know what movement will be co-opted next, or which logo will curdle overnight. I don’t know what to do with Bill Cosby albums.

That same month, Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner — a Marine, an oyster farmer, a progressive backed by Bernie Sanders — was fighting to explain a tattoo he got drunk in Croatia in 2007 that turned out to resemble an SS symbol. Swift’s team could delete a product page. Platner had to cover his chest.

I’m not here to litigate whether Taylor Swift is a Nazi. That’s absurd. But the fact that a lightning bolt can detonate a cataclysmic discourse cycle overnight says something about how meaning works now. When art loses its individuality — often from the artist’s sole vision — it becomes cultural public domain. The symbol doesn’t belong to Swift, or Bowie, or even the designer who made the necklace. It belongs to whoever grabs it first, and the internet is always grabbing. The work is keeping the cultural public domain from becoming contextual collapse.

…

Hank Green has this argument I can’t stop thinking about: the social internet isn’t cigarettes. It’s food. For thousands of years, humans lived in information scarcity. The last generation that had to worry about too little information is still alive. Now we live in information abundance — and the people packaging that information are competing to make it as hyper-palatable as possible, the same way food companies engineer a Dorito to hack your brain into not realizing you’ve eaten the whole bag. Except with the internet, they can design a personalized Dorito for every single person, one that morphs and changes along with your interests to make sure it’s always perfectly engineered for you specifically. And as you fall down the rabbit hole, the Dorito keeps changing shape — worse and worse for you, as long as it keeps you eating. I linger on a song for twelve seconds, and suddenly my feed is telling me what I am.

The feed doesn’t just sell you things. It tells you who you are. It completes you before you’ve finished forming. It’s the opposite of the clearance rack, the opposite of the mall. The mall lets you be anonymous. You walk in, you browse, nobody’s tracking which aisle you paused in or how long you held the jacket before putting it back. The grid insists on knowing you. It builds a model of you faster than you can build one of yourself, and then it feeds that model back to you as a recommendation, a playlist, an ad, a political identity. Like the Tron programs worshipping their Users, we worship the feed — its focus, its outrage, its belonging. Ritualized judgment. This is our new religion.

Green made a TikTok about the Swift necklace controversy. His argument was simple: this is performative outrage that fragments the Left’s ability to organize around anything that matters. The intense scrutiny of Swift reflects a political moment where people vent their powerlessness by targeting visible figures rather than larger systems. Outrage as the Left’s new sacrament. Accountability as entertainment economy.

And then people attacked Hank Green for defending Taylor Swift instead of focusing on Palestine, which is exactly the cycle he was describing, which is exactly the point.

This isn’t media criticism. This is grief. I think what breaks my heart the most is the massive amount of work done by myself and people on the left to seek to understand — or even defend — the religious right’s support of Trump. But they’ve never moved. Not once. And since October, the news has only accelerated this. The systems are eating themselves. The discourse eats the discourse about the discourse. Every week, a new symbol detonates, a new figure is weighed and found wanting, and the structural conditions that make all of it possible go completely untouched.

So where does that leave us? As people? It leaves me thinking that where you put your emotional investment has to be for the good of the grid, so to speak. I fight for the User, like Tron. Not the algorithm, not the feed, not the shareholder value, not the cycle. The User. The person on the other end of the screen who is, presumably, still a human being who made a choice to be here.

I’m now in a non-Tron-themed dance club on a Saturday night. They only have Diet Coke from the soda gun, not Coke Zero. The music isn’t very eighties at all — eighties night is getting older every night. Like a wallflower that works out, I observe coordinated commotion. What am I signalling?

Tyler Scruggs is a writer, musician, and thrift store manager based in Tucson, Arizona. His new album, In Town For Work, is coming in 2026.

When I was a kid, I used to take apart radios and walkmans and CD players just to see what was inside. Only once I had all the pieces, I realized I didn’t know what I was doing — that there was probably someone smarter and more qualified to do what I was trying to do. That once I had deconstructed the electronics, it might as well have been magic to me, and I’m no closer to understanding electronics and even further from a working Walkman.

Which is why Nintendo called Universal Studios up, right? Why the movie isn’t just rendered cutscenes compiled into a direct-to-streaming story? When I was a kid, we had The Super Mario Bros. Super Show. Now we have a $110 million animated film that is gorgeous, relentless, and has no plot with no interest in getting one, either. And I mean that in the most neutral way I can manage.

Conflicts are resolved as quickly as they arise. Everyone is friends. There is no underlying dynamic except whatever the character needs to be doing in a given moment. It gave me sequel-era Star Wars. Some Attack of the Clones energy, specifically, not because it’s bad in the same way, but because it exists primarily to move pieces around a board for future movies while wearing the costume of a story.

The movie knows this. Every scene presents a problem and then immediately presents the only obvious in-universe conclusion that could be drawn from it. Luigi gets handed a paintbrush and creates Mr. Game & Watch. Pikmin show up. Fox McCloud arrives like a Han Solo who has other movies to get to. The film is building toward a Super Smash Bros.- Avengers moment and it is not subtle about it. It’s a 98-minute pitch deck where every Easter egg is a line item: this character exists, you will want a movie about them.

This isn’t fan service exactly. Fan service rewards you for knowing the lore. This is franchise architecture. Infrastructure made Industrial-Chipotle-Core. The difference between a movie that loves its source material and a movie that is quietly constructing a real estate portfolio out of it.

It’s kind of interesting to have a universe so rich and an audience so wide that four-quadrant filmmaking is what’s really being tested to its limits here. It’s never overwhelming, but it never stops.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is literally not required to make sense or have a plot or be emotionally resonant, so it isn’t. It does have a mandate to be pretty, have jokes — and honestly, some of this was visually stunning enough that I did not care too much that there was essentially no characterization for any single character, even established ones. But you are also talking to someone who is actively collecting every 3D movie commercially released.

Spielberg once said he doesn’t take a job just for the sake of working — he sits it out until he finds something he’s passionate about.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie wants that same emotional contract — it wants you to feel the Nick Fury post-credits excitement, the aren’t you ready for the next one — but the next one is inevitable. It’s already announced. So you take it for granted before the lights come up.

Phil Lord and Chris Miller have built an entire career out of taking things nobody asked for — Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, 21 Jump Street, The Lego Movie — and making them matter by actually caring about what’s underneath. The Lego Movie works not because it has Easter eggs but because the Easter eggs serve something real. You’re so engaged with the film itself that a random cameo isn’t a reference — it’s a moment. That’s the difference.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie has one goal: to be a movie. Not to mean something. Not to subvert anything. Not to earn your surprise. Just to exist in movie form. The cameos aren’t in service of a theme. They are the theme.

I was not surrendering to an auteur’s vision in that theater. I had the controller. The movie handed it to me and I just... held it. Watching someone else play. And yet, I’m hunting eBay for the Germany-exclusive 3D blu-ray of The Super Mario Bros. Movie.

The R36S is a generic-Temu retro game console shaped like a Game Boy I bought that plays pretty much every game you can think of made before 2004. Anyway it nearly fried a few weeks ago when I plugged a wifi dongle into it. It doesn’t quite work out of the box. You have to replace the SD card, flash new open source software, and make sure you don’t brick it. I’ve been learning to flash the software , load ROMs, learn Raspberry Pi — not romantically, not as a bit, but because it matters to actually understand the systems you’re inside of. When the screen went white I sat there with all the pieces and didn’t know what to do. Then after a while, everything went back to normal. That’s the thing about systems — they have their own logic. You can’t just walk into them, call yourself fluent, and expect the pieces to behave.

I am not immune to any of this. But even for Super Mario, there’s a more intelligent and heartfelt through line to be had here. Right? Right?

Why is that star that talks like a young child reminding me of death and that nothing matters all the time? Right in front of my Super Mario movie?

Where’s my Game Boy?

Tyler Scruggs is a writer, musician, and thrift store manager based in Tucson, Arizona. His new album, In Town For Work, is coming in 2026.

“Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake, a challenge that seeks the password, a heliograph flashed from a tower window, an act of hopeless optimism in the service of bottomless longing.” - Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs (2000)

If it wasn’t for the notification from my iPhone 15 Pro’s Dynamic Island that my order was ready, I wouldn’t have turned around to learn the food runner robot was right behind me with my usual Chick-fil-A order.

I had my AirPods in, listening to Hasan Piker commentate on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Senate confirmation hearing. Like a haptic tap on the shoulder but not quite, I grab my tray and Diet Dr. Pepper. I faintly hear the robot squeak “my pleasure,” while Hasan howls too loudly at a viewer’s preposterous hot take.

Me and sixty thousand others are in real-time watching and commenting on a guy watching YouTube videos of a US Senate hearing. At the same time, I eat a meticulously protein-dense fast food meal, alone, delivered by a robot that hasn’t been programmed to get my attention in the physical world. It might be my only meal today.

My purchase earns me just enough rewards points for an ice cream cone. Maybe the future isn’t so bad? I bite into the last waffle bit. The future is a hellscape, and it’s too late.

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My first job was at a Chick-fil-A in Tucson. I was fourteen, making something like $5.50 an hour. My title was “Second Mile Service,” which meant cleaning trays, refilling drinks, and putting on the damn cow costume to stand in the blistering Arizona summer heat and wave at traffic—or getting kicked in the shin by kids during weekly family night. I didn’t last long.

When I finally returned my uniform a year or so later while moving to California, nobody remembered me. That’s ok. But I was there long enough to read all of S. Truett Cathy’s books—Peanut Oil-soaked Christianity, with chapters on why closing Sundays was good for business and how gleeful customer service sold more chicken because of a deeply spiritual and human set of principles. It was something to chew on.

I read them all at fourteen, a queer kid in a cow suit absorbing a manual for a world that wasn't designed for them. I knew then, and I know now, the specific, exclusionary politics that my waffle fries fund. I'm not here to solve the contradiction or seek ethical exoneration; I am just hungry.

There was a time when learning something new felt rare, like finding something you didn’t know existed at the far end of the mall. I used to rely on Wizard or Star Wars Magazine for Hollywood insider information. Physical monthly magazines! With nothing but blurbs on James Cameron’s Spider-Man or Star Wars: Underground. If you know, you know.

Now, every flippant industry update arrives instantly; endlessly optimized to be appealing without necessarily being useful. I could consume all day and still feel underfed. Art and knowledge go the way of cigarettes and junk food: available solutions in lieu of nutrition.

I’m back in the present, political punditry still ringing in my ear like the productivity of a workout, standing at the front of a near-vacant Chick-fil-A, lid removed for a Diet Dr. Pepper refill.

With these new sterile fast food structures, the one providing second-mile service is being programmed. The human employees are off doing three other, uniquely 2020s jobs. A cashier tends the line of delivery drivers. Behind a porcelain wall, an employee loads food onto the robot, eyes locked on the serving timer’s emoji, making sure it stays happy while I wait for anyone to make eye contact.

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Since moving back to Tucson, I’ve found myself making a habit of regularly going to the mall as if just to like… check on things. I don’t know when civil war will break out, but as I’ve come to find out, the mall is a nice vibe check on non-mass shooting days.

This habit started when I ordered a Nine Inch Nails Tron: Ares t-shirt online for pickup at the Hot Topic at full price back when the movie was fresh. I’d get a boba and walk around. People watching is not a new pastime for me, but it never felt important like it does. For my own sanity, I’m seeking out spaces where people haven’t been curated for me, but united under at least some sort of shared goal. Even if that goal is boba. That’s the bar for me at this point.

The Burger King that was once there is a ghost. How does that happen? The gyro place I used to like is gone. But Kelly’s Cajun Grill, positioned next to a Panda Express, survived an apocalypse or two somehow, and the bourbon chicken tastes the same as it did in 2011. There’s a bit I do just for myself where I try a free sample from the man in the visor standing outside the food line with a tray and become so incredulous that I’m sold on the chicken and get in line, even though I was gonna eat there anyway. Everything around it underwent buggy software updates. Or, nature took over with joyful vines and foliage that have grown with time around and through the concrete.

There’s a Korean snack spot where a teenager in a t-shirt and jeans is running the register for their family’s business. No corporate script or “Welcome to the Brand!” Just a kid and a hotel room-like kitchenette that had only been open a week. On the monitor behind him, Kpop Demon Hunters is on a silent loop. It’s not “curated” for a demographic; it’s just what’s on.

The landmark stores that were once there, the KB Toys and the Discovery Channel Store, are all gone. In their place is a fascinating array of thematically similar locally-owned retro games, comic book, and toy stores. I’ll go with Josh, who is also free on Thursdays, and we’ll venture to the mall to tread familiar ground with little hopes beyond a Wetzel Pretzel, a boba, and maybe a raid battle in Pokémon Go.

In 2026, more than one place at the mall is dedicated to simply providing tables and space to play Dungeons & Dragons, or Pokémon, or, for some reason, there’s a One Piece trading card game that’s very popular. Do you know anything about that? I can only keep up so much, but what franchise or brand does it matter? The dull roar of deliberation was punctuated by muted “Yess!” from winning players. They still do this? Should I be doing this? Could I even be upset when there’s so much joy in the room? That? No, no, that’s body odor. But there’s community in the room, too. For sure.

The mall has never-not been ground zero for cultural identity signifiers. Why do you think I’m partial to BoxLunch or Hot Topic? Same company, I think, which feels right: one store sells you the sanitized geek version of your weirdness, the other sells you the gauges and spiked collar. Either way, the promise is the same — you buy your signifiers for the world, and the world will recognize you’re wearing an Invader Zim shirt twenty-five years after its cancellation on Nickelodeon. You purchase, in essence, Chabon’s handshake. But the clearance rack is where that handshake fails.

The clearance, especially high-pop-culture-turnover places like those, is a graveyard of attempted signals: the franchise artifacts that couldn’t recruit enough people to become an identity. The stuff that sat under fluorescent lights long enough to admit the truth: most longing doesn’t convert, and maybe there are too many M3GAN 2.0 tee shirts in stock. Most “community” doesn’t happen. Most community is mocked and atomized. Most of the time, the market misreads the human.

And I love it there.

I love it because the ignored artifacts are usually right up my alley, obviously! Yes, this dorky Tron shirt is coming home with me. Hell yes. Not because I’m trying to prove anything or ironically revel in flops (though I do enjoy that). I’m not cosplaying a demographic. I like it. It’s $3. It’s a piece of a world I bought into at full-fucking-price that culture at large didn’t fully take. A flare that never got answered, and I can still decide it means something to me. Or maybe the hipsterism of the 2010s is ingrained in me like the hippy movement of the 1960s in Boomers.

Grand Cinemas Oracle View was a six-screen second-run movie theater near the Tucson Mall. Dollar Tuesdays, $2 otherwise. These were the clearance section of the movies. The extremely low barrier to entry gave way to exploration. Although movie tickets were usually what, $7 in 2006? I remember seeing Cars there. It closed in 2015 to become a Comcast call center. They gave the posters away for free on the last day.

When I abruptly moved to Pendleton, Oregon, when I was eighteen, long story — I found stability in its sole local Wal-Mart. I can already hear how that sounds. But it wasn’t funny at the time. It was medicine. In a freshman college essay, I wrote on the subject

When I first moved to Pendleton, I found myself wandering around an unfamiliar town for the first time in years. With the town as small as it is, I walked the streets looking at the various mom-and-pop shops and making extraneous trips to Walmart. I don’t know why I did this, maybe it was because that’s obviously the biggest store in town. Or, perhaps it was the familiarity of it all. The same walls. The same shelves, products. The department store was representing a universal concept of home. Not one that meant any great deal to me, but one that was sort of ingrained into my mind at birth. A gravitation towards recognizable brands that can call you back to a time just as strongly as a childhood tune can.

So when I would make these trips to Walmart, I’d just walk in with my hoodie up and headphones in, never speaking a word to anyone. I never really had an objective. Nothing I was really shopping for, I’d just sort of...people watch. A pastime that I’m more familiar with than I’d like to admit, but it always made me uneasy. Judgmental aisle browsing with a preconceived stereotype of Walmart shoppers that might have come about during my time in LA, or maybe that’s something that Walmart brings on itself. Ideas that birthed things like “The Walmart Game” where if you see anyone at Walmart you’d rather be: you lose.

Pendleton was not the happiest time for me, despite the mountain of support I had in hindsight. My psoriasis was at its worst and most widespread. I resented leaving Los Angeles for a town with a main street and a Walmart.

One of Miley Cyrus’ many opuses, “Party in the USA,” describes this feeling better and catchier than my freshman college essay. It’s Pop Americana as emergency contact. When our personal lives feel untethered, we gravitate to systemic familiarity—and that’s what she’s saying: “My tummy’s turning and I’m feeling kind homesick, too much pressure and I’m nervous / That’s when the DJ dropped my favorite tune and the Britney song was on.” The chorus hits, and for three minutes, I’m not in Pendleton, and Miley isn’t in Los Angeles. We’re somewhere else.

I know what it is to send the flare and get back silence. To make a thing and watch it not attach to anyone’s life the way you meant it to. To realize the gesture might be doomed and still make it anyway. There’s a specific loneliness in that — not the loneliness of being alone, but the loneliness of being unreceived. In my clearance purchase, I’m rescuing a failed signal.

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Back in 2018, between production assistant gigs in Atlanta, one of the many mall jobs I worked was at a Goorin Bros. hat shop in Ponce City Market. Some of the hats were nice, but I drew a few too many Justin Timberlake comparisons in my time there, and the corporate-sanitized vibe of the whole thing, in its fakeness, made everything that wasn’t securing some new film gig seem pointless.

One shift, Ethan Hawke and his daughter Maya came in. I’ll never forget them, especially her twirling around, trying on hats as the tourists do. I didn’t fanboy this time. I did my job, making polite small talk, complimenting the fedoras and ballcaps briefly tried. They had just moved into the building, Maya excitedly exclaimed to me unprompted. She had just gotten a job; Stranger Things. Her father, quieter and more aware of his celebrity, bought a few hats, and I managed the transaction without acknowledging it, as much as I love Before Sunrise or Gattaca, and they went on their way.

In Atlanta’s film scene at that time, it wasn’t unusual to have some faint connection to Stranger Things. “Winona Ryder lives in my building.” “Will’s brother is always just kind of hanging out in East Atlanta Village.” I lived near the Oakland Cemetery, where filming frequently occurred. Friends worked on the show, grateful for the years of employment it brought. Now they’re dorky memories your uncle tells.

…

Michael Chabon writes that “every work of art is one half of a secret handshake,” and it’s true. It’s a feeling I know all too well in my music and work, even though I don’t like to admit it. My most popular song is from when I was 18, and it’s because it has “ducks” in the title. Televangelist came out to silence. I’m writing these essays that might not find anyone.

It’s accidental and desperate. The big corporate anchors left, and actual Tucsonans are filling the gaps. Perhaps the community is growing because the structure was finally empty enough to let it. The bloatware is shed.

I’m defending not capitalism but the muted recognition of survival not between, but among the kids at the register, the people playing D&D in the back of a coffee shop that exists inside a mall that the rest of the country gave up on.

Inside one of these collectable toy stores, there was a rack of used DVDs and Blu-rays; there usually are, and I flock to them. 2 for $5. The thrift gods look favorably upon me as I pick up The Green Hornet in 3D and the first season of HBO’s Looking, a show very, very close to my heart. Somehow, I thrifted at the mall in 2026.

Sliding glass entrance doors open for folks coming in, and I slip my way out. My AirPods are dying, and the sun is setting, in my opinion, too soon. Political punditry has been replaced with Weezer deep cuts. I’m not sure if my nervous system is regulated because I don’t think I’ve ever known what that’s like. I didn’t cure my longing, nor destroy the systems that keep me in the Matrix. But I did make it a non-emergency.

Tyler Scruggs is a writer, musician, and thrift store manager based in Tucson, Arizona. His new album, In Town For Work, is coming in 2026.

I consider myself a very lucky person. For example, in 2023, I woke up one morning with $550 in StubHub credit from a lawsuit settlement I don’t remember claiming. These sorts of things happen to me. Don’t sleep on those! A few minutes later, I looked around for the most expensive yet accessible ticket I could find.

It could’ve been weekend 1 of Coachella that year when Frank Ocean bombed. I didn’t know that’d happen, but there was always really only one answer: Taylor Swift. The Eras Tour. Atlanta Night 1. I felt like Charlie Bucket. My ticket got me just enough for a nosebleed seat.

I went alone, wore a tie-dye rainbow Carly Rae Jepsen crop top, a denim vest, and my Snapchat Spectacles, because I’m a nerd. On the vest: a Star Trek pin. That same weekend, Janet Jackson was doing a few nights at State Farm Arena next door.

I left the Mercedes Benz Stadium a couple of songs early — it’s three and a half hours, I’d had my fill for a show I already knew by heart by then — and floated back toward the MARTA station with my headphones in, doing what anyone who knows me knows I do: twirling and dancing down the sidewalk in my own little world.

As I got to the station, a subway car full of Janet Jackson fans in full Rhythm Nation garb (black leather, the whole thing) was on their way home too, and here I am in a rainbow crop top, admittedly not fully reading the room as I walked up.

The whole car roared “NO!”. I staggered back. Snapping out of my lavender haze. I thought I had enough space on the train, but the last thing I was going to do was argue over it.

I take a step back. Then two women snapped their fingers at me, “No. No. He’s cool. He’s got a Star Trek pin. Let him on.”

And they did. This is how we heal the nation.

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Before she was cast as Guinan in The Next Generation, Whoopi Goldberg recalled watching the original Star Trek at age nine and running through her house saying, “Come here, mum, everybody, come quick, come quick, there’s a Black lady on television and she ain’t no maid!”

She later told Roddenberry directly, “Before Lt. Uhura, there were no Black people in the future. I’m telling you, before this character, there was no representation of a person of color in the future... I just want to be part of that thing that says, ‘Yes, we will be in the future.’” That discovery changed her life, changed Trek, and changed what representation in science fiction looks like.

The Hollywood Reporter: Divisive ‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’ Canceled After Two Seasons

Not a single episode of Starfleet Academy cracked Nielsen’s Top 10 streaming charts across its entire first season, nor has it aired in my living room. I don’t have a personal opinion on it yet. Cast seems fun! I fell asleep mid-episode two! I’ll go back. However, its cancellation and the rest of the streaming era of Trek (Discovery, Picard, Strange New Worlds, Starfleet Academy) are symptomatic of larger issues with all the shows, even if this one is getting the most heat from the anti-woke mob.

In exchange for the VHS-like hum of the warp core engine that lulls so many Next Generation fans to sleep, modern Trek — kneecapped by shortened seasons and stunt casting — comes off like Glee in space. The musical episode of Strange New Worlds didn’t help. In contrast, the pre-2005 characters were interesting, funny, and unique, but most importantly, they were professionals who did a job. It’s actually good and entertaining to watch experts make tough decisions in their fields. It’s what made Star Trek tactile and relatable. I would love that job. I would love to do that job in space.

By putting Trek behind a paywall, Paramount+ limited its scope to those already interested in the franchise. Nobody stumbles on an episode of Discovery or Strange New Worlds the way earlier Trek hooked channel surfers like teenage me with rabbit ears on UPN.

Whoopi found the show because it was on a terrestrial TV network. A nine-year-old Black girl in 1966 stumbled onto Uhura. You can’t stumble onto a $6.99/month paywall. Representation can’t matter when accessibility is the problem.

The show that imagines a post-scarcity future is locked behind a subscription fee. You can’t make this shit up.

While I admit that my tweet’s a bit shouty for an old man’s telephone, I maintain my stance. Star Trek, like everything, is political. The political is always already present in any depiction of how humans organize, share, and treat one another. Politeia — the Greek word meaning of the people. What’s infuriating is that the man who played Captain Kirk and the thousands who defended him online can’t see past their own ideological framing.

The pin got me on the train with those women because of what it symbolizes, not because of who was wearing it. So Shatner’s “I was there” defense is weaksauce. The show transcends his lived experience of making it. That’s what art does, ideally. Star Trek belongs to everyone and no one. It belongs to everyone who’s ever been let onto a train because of what it stands for. That’s the show doing what it’s designed to do.

I stumbled upon a conservative Trek essayist recently who argued that Star Trek is, in fact, right-wing and conservative, and while I obviously disagree with him, I found some of their points worth engaging with.

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They argue that Trek depicts capitalism’s end state rather than its abolition. Similar to how cheap it is to produce and purchase a nail, capitalism will eventually provide enough affordable abundance a la Star Trek’s replicator tech. He’s not entirely wrong that replicators — Trek’s idea that things like food and hardware are free and easy to make/distribute — aren’t redistribution in the socialist sense.

But his conclusion is backwards, and I don’t think he’s seen Wall-E. When material scarcity is abolished, the entire ideological infrastructure of capitalism — competition, ownership, wage labor, profit motive — has nothing left to justify itself. That’s not capitalism winning. That’s capitalism becoming irrelevant. The United Federation of Planets isn’t a capitalist paradise. It’s what’s left when capitalism’s problems have been solved by other means.

Star Trek works as popular mythology because both conservatives and progressives see themselves in it. But only because the show depicts a world where the ideological battle has already been won — not by one side, but by the conditions that made the battle irrelevant. I submit all of Deep Space Nine to the court as evidence, but I digress.

The conservative Trekker argues Starfleet is expressly anti-woke — merit over identity. But this only works as a conservative argument if you ignore why meritocracy is contested today in the first place. Meritocracy functions fairly only when the starting conditions are equal. The Federation works as a meritocracy precisely because poverty, disease, and repression have been eliminated. You can’t separate Starfleet’s meritocracy from the post-scarcity conditions that make it possible.

Meritocracy, like representation, can’t matter when accessibility is the problem.

What does he think truth, morality, and what we owe one another are, if not political? He’s describing politics while insisting it isn’t. That’s politeia.

“Star Trek was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences in life forms.” - Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek.

On October 13, 2021, Shatner flew on Blue Origin’s New Shepard NS-18 mission — a suborbital flight. At 90, he became the oldest person to fly in space. He was a guest of Blue Origin and did not pay for the trip.

Shatner was not the first Star Trek actor in space, fun fact. NASA astronaut Mae Jemison, who appeared in a TNG episode and flew on the shuttle Endeavour in 1992, was the first. She is also the first Black woman in space. He told billionaire Jeff Bezos on the trip, “What you have given me is the most profound experience I can imagine. I hope I never recover from this.” Bezos then popped champagne, famously interrupting Shatner mid-thought.

In his 2022 book Boldly Go, he described the experience very differently — calling it grief-stricken. He wrote that the contrast between the coldness of space and the warmth of Earth below overwhelmed him with sadness, saying, “My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.”

What Shatner experienced is called the Overview Effect: the overwhelming awareness of Earth’s fragility that space travelers often feel when viewing the planet from above. I haven’t been to space yet, but I know the feeling. If Captain Kirk can’t or won’t connect the dots on his own work, I’ll do it for him.

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Tyler Scruggs is a writer, musician, and thrift store manager based in Tucson, Arizona. His new album, In Town For Work, is coming in 2026.

Now that the deal is done, he’s seen all the classics, he knows every line; it seems as though I did everything you weren’t supposed to do in your 20’s in exchange for having them. All the coming-of-age movies proved little help, and while most decisions definitely made sense to me at the time, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world… I’m absolutely checking their trade-in value online.

My 20’s are as valuable as my vinyl collection. For so long, I felt caught up in experiencing the life events that my art would eventually reflect, highlighting and dog-earing reference points for the eventual magnum opus. Hoarding trauma in hopes of proving its utility. Yes, that was the point, but now my vagabond Fitzgerald-Hemingway-Bradshaw-Dunham patinaed lifestyle has caught up with me. And I am not dead or fictional.

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I’m my own worst critic, and I’m a very fucking good critic.

I see the cracks in a black mirror reflection as I compose myself for the evening, and I dread getting clocked — critiqued to filth — exposed for the fraud I am. Perpetually flinching for a fight that never really comes to blows.

My writing makes me queasy, too, dear reader. It’s openly messy, uncomfortably vulnerable, yet somehow also petulant and arrogant? What’s up with that? Whiny word vomit that sometimes arrives at a thought worth a damn, but only if you’re willing to sift through all the wistful feelings and dreadfully grating altruism. That is, of course, when you get anything at all. There’s a difference between leaving ‘em wanting more and leaving them wanting, Tyler Scruggs.

I often describe my songwriting, for example, as a cyst on me that grows and visibly irritates until it’s out and done. Pop. But I’ve learned to shelve it. My unfinished projects and unseen visions collect digital dust for Someday, which could be any day but not Today.

Today, it feels less like idea hoarding and more like understanding that the time will come and the medium will be obvious. Maybe that’s where the growth is. Living in the moment is easier when it could be your last.

The Inner Saboteur is still here; gaining ground, even. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? Everything is harder. For everyone. Everyone I know, at least. It’s how we’ve found community: through this collective experience of atomization. Or, did.

Survival is the game at this point, even while the game is eating itself. Maintaining what you have — protecting yourself and your own — is what matters now. Right?

No matter how charitable or socialist my heart may be, no, I don’t have any spare change at the moment. Sorry. I was hoping to patina with age and life experience, but I’ve calloused instead.

Even maintaining my burnout-slacker-East-Atlanta-Village lifestyle became untenable. Going outside costs $40.

I don’t write film criticism anymore. For a long time — long enough to write several drafts of Substacks that wouldn’t be — I called every movie a miracle. I still think they are.

The sheer amount of willpower (or uh, financial obligation) needed to concoct a never-before-seen spectacle for the world’s general audience will never not inspire me. Bad films will always be interesting. Especially the expensive ones. Good films will always be acts of God.

It’s safe to say I’ve left “Y’allywood” — Atlanta’s attempt at an almost more sensible film and television shooting location than Los Angeles. Almost. I joined IATSE, a year-long strike happened, I became deeply housing insecure for another year, and now we’re here.

Now I’m a thrift store manager, and soon, a few more titles back in my hometown of Tucson, and the gratitude is meant to outweigh the bitterness.

The aftertaste is still there years later. Not quite “so close I could almost taste it,” because I did. I did taste it. But now the DVDs that I scan for double-digit eBay value and pass through my hands every day have decades-old, deeply personal tangibility to me beyond simply probably seeing them with KRQQ radio promo tickets at the El Con Mall at 15.

When I’m folding donated Black Panther children’s clothing and shelving well-loved merchandise, I remember that my name’s on that thing forever, and for whatever my work was worth (many would argue $12.50), I helped make it happen.

I do not recommend the feeling of waking up to Yahoo! asking for a comment on a tweet you made.

He told Yahoo Entertainment that he’s been keeping track of the backlash he’s received for the post, which now has more than 20 million views, acknowledging that he knows he’s “not Robert Downey Jr.”

“I know he gets butts in seats,” Scruggs said. “Even a low-paying job brought some level of prestige. It looks good on a resume, but I can’t eat or pay for my health care. I’ve never been at such a rock bottom in my life.”

As a self-proclaimed “Marvel fanboy,” Scruggs said that the role was “an honor and a dream” at first. Over the last few years, he’s worked on multiple Marvel sets.

“I knew how much money they were paying me, but I didn’t have any negotiating power,” Scruggs said. “It could have been such a magical experience, but it ended up being a nightmare because the people making decisions at the top don’t consider how they affect the people at the bottom.”

Yahoo! News: Why Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom payday is inciting backlash

On a couch-surfing Thursday morning in July 2024, I woke up to hundreds of very upset people / Twitter accounts scolding me for a thought that wasn’t totally meant for 20 million people to see. It got picked up. Everywhere. Even Trisha Paytas talked about me on her podcast. Twitter was reliably cruel, Reddit was kinder. When those kinds of things happen (the virality that scares me, even though all I want to do is share ideas), I'm reminded of my remaining fear of the fame I clamor for.

And then I’m in Chicago with Andy and Ross. I took us out to Deadpool and Wolverine on the other side of the city because it was the gesture I could make at the time. Wesley Snipes looks directly into the camera and says, “There's only been one Blade, and there's only ever going to be one Blade." If that’s true, where did my six months go? My career? No one wants a Fantastic Four movie to succeed more than Tyler Scruggs. It’s why I was trying to get into the room, or at least the Zoom calls. My film career in Atlanta was far from consistent and even further from easy. Coming home felt like losing. It keeps proving otherwise.

My last album, Televangelist, didn't perform like I wanted to — like the last two. It put me in debt, and I sometimes cringe at the musical typos present on the final product. Still, it was the best thing I could make by myself. Why wasn’t my best good enough for me? It was good enough the last two times. Then I realize that my pride comes from simply having done it. I was just as frustrated then, only it’s been a decade, and sixteen didn’t feel so dire. I have got to stop putting capitalist metrics and frameworks on myself and my art, or both will die.

…

I’m processing donations — reminding myself of the things that matter. The Arizona sun beams down. Relentless and energizing all at once. Was I always this Kryptonian? My imposter syndrome is just a well-dressed victim complex. I’m exactly who I dreamt of being. Now what?

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Now I’m back on Substack. With more consistency in my life, there’s more writing coming as soon as next week. I’m hoping to clear my throat a bit, look at some of these new tools here, and double down on everything I hope to accomplish. I have a new album you’ll hear more about later in the year called In Town For Work, as well as some other things I’m grateful I get to share with you.

The world has nearly ended too many times not to be grateful I still get to sing about it.

Tyler Scruggs is a writer, musician, and thrift store manager based in Tucson, Arizona. His new album, In Town For Work, is coming in 2026.

Well, time for a rebrand. 

If you’ve been following the news, I picked a gnarly time to take a full swing in the film industry. We’ve seen this coming since last December when Netflix’s streaming release model proved itself to be unprofitable vapor. The WGA, DGA, and SAG contracts were up. Unregulated A.I. threatens nearly every human sector of the job. The strikes impending. What felt like a plethora of odd jobs, maybe even a career, in costuming and superhero franchises in need of tireless dorks like me turned into a desert pretty quickly. At least I’m not alone.

Strike Takes Heavy Toll on Crews: ‘They Are Getting Clobbered by This’ - Variety

“I’m trying to cope with this the best way I can,” said Bill Bridges, a 54-year-old grip who said that many of his bills are going unpaid. “I’ve been in film industry my entire adult life and I can’t get ahead.”

“This is an entirely new financial low for me. It’s bad. I’m afraid I’m going to lose my house and have my wife’s car repoed,” he said. “It’s horrible and it’s extremely depressing. I just don’t know what to do.”

There’s not a lot particularly glamorous in this industry (craft services aside), especially below-the-line like most of the work here in Georgia. Especially as a production assistant, the lowest of the below-the-line, which I spent four years doing across four different departments before joining a union. In 2022, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever paid me $12.50 an hour to assist (often in solitude) a whole goshdarn Marvel Studios wardrobe department that would go on to win the Oscar that year. I did it because I wanted to see it through and make something (or at least make something happen) the best way it could. It felt purposeful in a way previous jobs hadn’t. Anyone who knows me even a little knows I love movies. I’ve been introduced in bars maybe a dozen times as “This is Tyler Scruggs, he saw Avatar 2 six times in theaters.” I’ll eat shit for movies and I now have the IMDb credits and a tangental Academy Award to prove I ate quite a bit.

Hollywood Studios’ WGA Strike Endgame Is To Let Writers Go Broke Before Resuming Talks In Fall - Deadline

“The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” a studio executive told Deadline. Acknowledging the cold-as-ice approach, several other sources reiterated the statement. One insider called it “a cruel but necessary evil.”

I don’t benefit at all (yet/immediately) from the demands of the Screen Actor’s Guild or Writers Guild of America, but I support them 1000%. Their asks are reasonable and keep in time with the present economic climate and state of art and technology. But the strike has evaporated what I’ve spent years trying to get to and having to start from scratch in a silent safety-net-less personal pandemic is wearing on my soul. But little do the powers-that-be know that I’ve got a thick skin for this sort of thing.

After spending six months last year on a Blade movie that is now set for release in 2025 (a made-up, wholly unguaranteed year), I moved over to work on Disney’s Haunted Mansion reshoots for about a month, and it was probably the least-toxic environment I had ever worked in. The people I met there were legends in the industry and also extremely kind, ego-free, and empathetic. It was the first job, in my four years as a production assistant, where a supervisor offered to take something logistically difficult off my plate instead of insisting against logic that the show must go on. They love to do that second thing. For example, a production designer once forced me to drive 3 hours roundtrip across Atlanta to Costco to buy cheaper liquor than the store down the street from the offices. I have lots of those stories. But they boil down to the narcissism of bullish decisions, and a lack of empathy for the human being you’re working with.

Chris Rock once said, “The show does not have to must go on,” but Google isn’t showing me anything about him saying that. Or of anyone ever saying that? But Google can’t be trusted, y’all! In keeping with the times, I got a stupid job ‘writing/editing’ an A.I. to be more personable and friendly at the end of May. Skynet!! I know, but they were going to pay me competitively with my best film rates, in a writing job, so I had to indulge.

Except those dumb bitches over at Google asked for my full-time commitment for TWO MONTHS without pay only to get emails every couple of weeks from the contractor asking for more time and patience. What’s the point of hiring human beings if you’re not going to treat them like they are? My theory is that at that time, the A.I. evolved beyond whatever the job entailed. Google Bard is launched now, so that was a couple of depressing months wasted for the hope of it all. That’s ok. It’s not like I’ve been trying to bulk up on a ramen-only diet after a bad breakup or lose my house in that time. Wait-

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In the heartache and anxiety and stress, I do find some quiet. Often it’s in a movie theater. Maybe a gym if I’m feeling really good. I much prefer it there than in a drink. I’m intentionally away from the city. My phone’s Do Not Disturb mode is non-negotiable.

It’s July 28th, 2023. The coolness and thrill that comes from Halloween feels as far-away and made-up as the year 2025. For some reason, Haunted Mansion is newly out in theaters. The weekend after Barbenheimer. I only worked on it a month, but wouldn’t getting an on-screen credit be kind of neat? “It’d give me a buzz. That’s all.” I murmur to my friend Kale, joining me in the quiet.

I use a mix of AMC rewards points, the remaining available credit on a credit card, along with a single dollar bill to buy myself a Coke Zero. I’m clutching the free promotional Haunted Mansion iron-on patch the theater gave us. It reminds me of being on that golf cart in Fayetteville, Georgia at that extremely Hollywood-feeling backlot, crossing paths with Owen Wilson and Danny Devito, or head-nodding LaKeith Stanfield from a distance at crafty when we accidentally met eyes. Is it idiotic to kind of live for those stories? It’s not like I can live for the $12.50 an hour.

The movie is very ok. The costumes were fantastic tho! 😇 Why this was released in the Summer, especially when content is scant (and only getting worse into the Fall?) We’ll never know. But between that and the fact that none of its star-studded cast could promote the film at all in the weeks leading up to release, I think I made more money off Haunted Mansion than Disney will.

I didn’t get that on-screen credit. But it appears many people who worked on it a lot longer and a lot harder than me didn’t either, so that was more disheartening once I saw those posts on Facebook from industry friends. Jesus Christ, guys, is it too much to add the tailors and stitchers and extremely talented craftspeople’s names who spend their lives working on your dumb shitty movies at the end of your dumb shitty movies? It adds like a second.

I settle for the iron-on patch and the memory of eating a Jersey Mike’s sub sandwich ‘courtesy of Mr. DeVito’.

There is a line Tiffany Haddish’s clairvoyant character in Haunted Mansion says that struck me, “Unprocessed grief can make a spirit stuck.” She was talking about cartoon ghosts, but it made me think of the relationships in my life lacking closure. What it would take to find it. It reminded me of my own bitterness towards my circumstances, the people I blame that put me in them, and most of all myself for feeding a victimhood mentality I’ve spent years disowning. Look at me, complaining again.

I don’t really know what I am or meant to do. I don’t know if I’ll work in ~Hollywood~ again. I know if I did, at this point it’d feel like a bonus. In this capacity or another. I was grateful then and I’m grateful now. I think perhaps ironically I’m more grateful to simply be alive than I ever have before. Perhaps grieving it will make my spirit less stuck, even if it’s not dead. Maybe processing the grief from the people whose names no longer light up my iPhone is the best way to step into the next life, even if they’re not dead either.

I don’t know if music will ever become something I could do full-time, but I need to do it sometimes. Over a decade later and I still can’t bring myself to just record a damn YouTube video. ‘Just do the vocals for the instrumentals that are already done.’ I grit and kick my own ass like I don’t have $7 in my bank account.

I don’t know if I’m a writer. It’s draining and obsolete but one of the only skills I truly have. To think of freelancing again only to chase down grown men in midtown for $30 because PeachATL ad sales are down or whatever doesn’t sound pleasant either.

I do know that my identity does not come from my job. It never did. It comes from my reaching. My desire to push through dimensions and states of matter and make a curtain rustle or a book fall off a shelf. My only real job is to preserve energy and keep the spark of ambition alive. Because I want to haunt the future.

Nora Ephron definitely once said, “Everything is copy.” Meaning, everything you experience is potential artistic and creative inspiration or fodder. It’s what Taylor Swift took to heart and what makes her songwriting so textured and hyper-personal. It’s definitely a deeply held belief of mine, everything as copy, but it can pitfall into almost toxic positivity pretty quickly. I think as a writer you trick yourself into clutching a lot of baggage, hoarding it all for that would-be memoir. Retaining the worst things said to you by people you love thrown in as dialogue in a screenplay. A state of shock that doesn’t dissipate because it would require unclenched fists and open eyes to the expected imminent threat.

What makes music so special to me is that it has the lowest latency from my heart and mind to the stage. It is the processing of grief. Creativity has to happen, and as it seems, profit doesn’t. Now I want to lower the latency — the space between my art and this stage of a social media presence. This is a song called “New Man” which I wrote for a folk group called Holler Ghosts I’m starting with some friends. I don’t know if anything will come of it, but it doesn’t need to turn a profit like a Disney movie and it’s making my spirit less stuck.

Tyler Scruggs is a writer, musician, and filmmaker in Atlanta, GA. You can reply to these emails to respond directly or email him at t@tylerscruggs.com

Hey friends,

Thank you for the warm welcome back last month with that Avatar piece!

But now, it seems, the time to escape and avatar-about is over.

I.

Sometimes I’ll get nervous at crowded bars and just start bussing tables. Call it a force of habit — maybe that’s illegal? I don’t know. Especially when it’s busy, especially when it’s messy, and annoying to me. It’s not my job — not for now, not anymore at least, but I get it and empathize with whoever is slacking/doing their damn best behind the bar. If their boss is decent, they’re getting $8 an hour before tips, if their boss is doing what the law requires in Georgia, it’s $2.13. Legality is not morality. Stacking glasses seems more useful than biting my nails or tapping my toes. It’s within my capacity to help slightly and invisibly, so I do.

Work has been light lately. Very light. Might have to go back to bussing tables professionally soon. I’ve got a wrap party on Sunday, and completely dead radio silence the following week. Just like the last couple of weeks. Don’t ask me what I have to show for that time, either.

Oh jeez, the union just sent an email titled “Planning For The Year Ahead” like it’s an impending storm to weather. It probably is. They say I need three to six months saved as the film industry coys and reels back productions. Scary. I can’t make a résumé to save my life, but it’s going out more frequently than me I assure you. I can only improve a house that’s not a home so much. I wish I could move somewhere more comfortable, where I feel safer. And don’t you dare ask me how many times I’ve seen Avatar.

I’m probably anxious at the bar because I have no business being in the bar. Yes, it’s Friday. Yes, you worked hard this week; as best you could. But couldn’t the $11 you’re spending on one drink-I swear-just-one-drink in a desperate cloy for human connection at one of the last standing ‘third places' be better spent elsewhere?

Think of that stack of $35 co-pays you have on your desk back home. Think of that bigger, scarier bill you’re holding off until the 15th to think about. Based on all metrics, you don’t deserve to be at a bar! Or anywhere for that matter! Stay at home! Bite your nails! Tap your toes!

…My phone dings. A budgeting app is telling me to consider cutting back on spending in the “Health & Wellness” category…

II.

Ding, and then my Apple Watch tells me to breathe… until ding I get another news alert.

Every day, the stakes and intensity increase. Atlanta’s Cop City comes to the top of my mind. What do you mean you want to spend $90 million on tearing down a forest nicknamed ‘One of Atlanta’s Lungs’ so that you can build an urban warfare police training facility??? You’re murdering treehuggers and charging protestors with domestic terrorism?? Haven’t you demons seen Avatar??

The strong response from Atlanta’s corporate and political elite is commensurate with the strength of the movement against Cop City. It is a diverse and decentralized movement; there are no appointed leaders or spokespeople; no legacy nonprofits, nor corporate backers driving strategy. The movement is made up of people in Atlanta and across the world who understand that the stakes could not be higher: The climate crisis poses an existential risk to all life on Earth. But the police will meet every righteous fight for a livable world with violence and death-making, the only tools at their disposal.

Atlanta's "Cop City" Is Putting Policing Before the Climate, Teen Vogue

On January 18th, Tortuguita, a Cop City protestor was killed by Atlanta and Georgia State Police. They are the first environmental activist murdered by police in the history of the US Environmentalism movement. Today, an independent autopsy shows that their hands were above their head, and they were sitting cross-legged when police shot them over 13 times.

Are you ok with this?

Then there’s the all-out political assault on LGBTQ+ rights nationwide right there, too; staring me down in Instagram Story after Instagram Story. Public drag performances in Tennessee are a potential felony, along with at least 385 other anti-LGBTQ laws that have been introduced at the state level in a majority of U.S. states as of March 3, all in various legislative processes. It’s infuriating to wake up daily to whole civil rights movements taking national steps backward when there’s so much progress left to be made. Feels like they won’t stop until they stop-and-frisk Dolly Parton. It’s meant to bombard, overwhelm, and offend — and friends, it is working.

Eventually, we’re going to have to decide what we as people deserve, and what we don’t.

III.

The biggest threat to Cop City’s construction so far is not the outcry, the murdered protestor, or the ones deemed domestic terrorists, but the push to make Buckhead — the wealthy northern Atlanta suburb — its own city. If the rich are successful in seceding from metro Atlanta (on the grounds of public safety concerns) — which they have not been so far — they jeopardize the tax revenue necessary to break ground on the urban warfare training facility which for some reason is the best idea anyone can think of.

“The irony is not lost on me that people who are claiming public safety as their reason for a Buckhead City would actually be the cause that stops a training facility that is meant to help improve public safety,” he continued. “We have to think about these consequences.”
— Georgia Senator and “public servant” Jason Esteves

The development has become more controversial since it was approved by the Atlanta city council in September 2021. Some Atlantans have complained that the development process has not been transparent enough, and that public opinion has been disregarded. Just before the September vote, the council received 17 hours of recorded public comment, with an overwhelming 70% of residents expressing their opposition. Still, it passed in a 10-4 vote.

“They’re going to call us like eco terrorists, and all kinds of stuff like that,” said an activist who gave the name Red, and who led a reporter on a tour of the area recently. “A lot of people out here had friends who’ve died, been imprisoned, been shot, and experienced a lot of trauma, so they have a really internalized hatred of police. There are other people who are very aware of the fact that the police are human beings who are trying to do what they think is right.”

The US activists holed up in treehouses to block $90m ‘Cop City’, The Guardian

Has capitalism and the police state taken into account the fact that all of the groups and ecosystems they are assaulting and depleting are just trying to f*cking vibe?

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IV.

All of it makes me want to escape, somehow. I want to deny culpability, I want to escape responsibility. Is it even mine to relinquish? Exhausted, I escape to Hulu and my 90s television diet of Frasier and Star Trek: Voyager.

Frasier keeps my snobbery in check, while Star Trek provides one of the few visions for the future I can get behind and strive towards. Sometimes it feels like my entire political affiliation could boil down to “I want Star Trek.”

So imagine my joy when one of my best friends told me about this gem from the Star Trek 30th anniversary special.

Why is it presumed that “socialist utopias” would deprive people of luxury, competition, ambition, or art? Capitalism is making the world gray as it is.

The assumption that socialist utopias would deprive people of luxury, competition, ambition, or art is misguided. Socialism aims to create a more equitable distribution of resources and opportunities, not eliminate these things. People would still be free to pursue their passions and achieve their goals, but the motivation for doing so would not be solely financial gain. You can still chase your dreams and passions, but with the added bonus of not being beholden to the almighty dollar.

While luxury is often seen as a measure of success in our society, it is not always the case. Suburbs like the ones in north metro Atlanta are often associated with the middle-class American dream, but they can be and often are quite problematic. They are not designed for human productivity or pleasure, but rather to extract as much money and value as possible from each citizen. This comes at the expense of community and sustainability.

How long does this all have to not work before we consider something different? In contrast, socialist communities could provide opportunities for people to come together and work towards common goals, resulting in a stronger sense of community and shared purpose. You know, like Star Trek.

In the book Trekonomics by Manu Saadia, they argue that while warp drive technology is still a far off idea, post-scarcity economics are not.

“Work in the Federation [of Planets] is not a matter of compulsion or survival. Federation citizens need not perform tasks or exercise professions that do not suit their inclinations just so that they can afford to put food on the table and enjoy the respect of their peers. … What makes the Federation so appealing … It is the nature and meaning of work. It is almost a paradox to state it this way, but in a society where nothing is scarce and consequently where work is no longer a prerequisite for survival, finding good reasons to work becomes paramount, the defining existential question that everyone has to ask themselves. Why work at all if it’s not necessary? Because learning, making, and sharing is what makes life in the Federation worth living. Work, no longer a necessary burden, is the glue that holds the Federation together. It is the social bond and the social contract that impart substance and significance to life.”
― Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek, Manu Saadia

I know learning, sharing, and making life worth living are the antithesis of Buckhead’s Lenox Square Mall, but what is keeping us from aspiring to the ideal? Who says we have to operate like political pundits and be ‘strategic’ with our vote, policies and perspectives? Why kneecap the possibility of what could be tomorrow with whatever hurdles come today?

“Our fictions are, collectively, the dream-work of humanity. We dream these dreams to amuse ourselves, but also so that we will be more sane when we awake.” — Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek, Manu Saadia

To truly create a just and equitable society, we must harness both our imaginations and our collective power to build systems that prioritize the well-being of all. Our current systems of power often work against that goal, prioritizing the accumulation of wealth over meeting people's basic needs and perpetuating harm through the use of coercive force.

“Modern policing is largely a war on the poor that does little to make people safer or communities stronger, and even when it does, this is accomplished through the most coercive forms of state power that destroy the lives of millions. Instead of asking the police to solve our problems we must organize for real justice. We need to produce a society designed to meet people’s human needs, rather than wallow in the pursuit of wealth at the expense of all else.”
― The End of Policing, Alex S. Vitale

We should prioritize creating a society that values human potential over profit, and provides opportunities for all to pursue their passions and achieve their goals. Cop City, in response to the 2020 protests and their growing demands to defund or even someday abolish the police, is cartoonishly evil, counterproductive, and dangerous.

“Police argue that residents in high-crime communities often demand police action. What is left out is that these communities also ask for better schools, parks, libraries, and jobs, but these services are rarely provided.”
― The End of Policing, Alex S. Vitale

Eventually, we’re going to have to decide what we as people deserve and what we don’t.

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V.

When I’m bored and underemployed, I look for class-action lawsuits that might be relevant to me. You’d be surprised at how many lawsuits are being lobbed against so many companies you still use. Almost like they have the ability to skirt regulations and pay off dissenters instead of following laws.

Back in 2019, I suppose I joined one against StubHub, and boy that paid off! Woke up one morning earlier this year to find credit deposited to my StubHub account. With the entierty of it, I became the proud owner of one (1) nosebleed Taylor Swift ticket when she comes to town in April. I’m really excited, attending seemed like a total pipe dream until that happened. Though, I kind of feel like a class traitor for posessing it? Maybe I can have a little capitalism as a treat? Shake it off, Tyler. Eventually, you’re going to have to decide what you deserve and what you don’t.

Late last year to my surprise, I was elected co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America’s Queer Socialists Working Group. A national volunteer position that gives me little more than an email list, some lovely volunteers and activists, and a goal of making democratic socialism a reality both in policy and in practice. It’s been a lot of work on top of everything going on (and my involvement in DSA’s local Atlanta chapter), but it’s the best vehicle I’ve got for political involvement. Like I mentioned earlier, LGBTQ+ rights are under attack on nearly all fronts. Moving backwards is not an option. It’s within my capacity to help slightly and invisibly, so I do. Wish me luck.

If you’re even kind of interested in getting involved in any capacity, please reply to this email, join in the hyperlink above, and/or reach out at queersocialists@dsacommittiees.org

I feel the lavender haze creepin’ up on me. Surreal, I’m damned if I do give a damn what people say. No deal, the 1950s shit they want from me. I just wanna stay in that lavender haze.

ATLANTA folks: I’ll be seeing the strange-looking Casablanca Records biopic Spinning Gold at Regal Atlantic Station on March 29th at 7 pm. You can get a pair of free tickets here. I don’t know anything beyond that. They just sent me tickets to share, ok? We’re all taking a chance here.

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Till next time,

Tyler Scruggs is a writer, musician, filmmaker, and designer in Atlanta, GA. He’s self-released three records, works in wardrobe for big budget Hollywood films, and has written work in a variety of publications. You can find him on Twitter and Instagram.

Hey, Happy 2023, the Newsletter is back, baby! It’s been a while.

The prospect of picking my newsletter back up has been daunting and paralyzing. But I want to do it so I’m doing it and here we go I’m doing it.

The last time you heard from me (unless you follow my spirals on social media), I released my third album, Televangelist. Then, I completely burnt myself out.

At the time, I was working nearly sixty-plus hours a week at my ‘day job’ on The Staircase for HBO MAX, which did give the record the financial boost needed to reach the finish line, but then the job ended, and the marketing and promotional budget became zilch. Such is life.

Still, it found its way to people!

A few months ago my song “Feeling Profound (On T.V.)” got popular on some playlists and became my first song to reach over 10,000 streams. Soon after I learned that one of my older songs “Ducks in a Row” had been used nearly 400 times in people’s Instagram Reels about ducks. That is very funny to me, haha. Soon it became the 2nd song to reach 10,000 streams, nine years after it was first released. Tens of thousands of people heard songs I made as a teenager for the first time. No matter how old or irrelevant I might find my art to be sometimes, it was brand new to most. I think that’s hilarious and very cool you can watch them here.

Fourteen months later, I’m very proud of what was accomplished, even if I don’t quite shout it from the mountaintops, but even more, I’m grateful for the lessons it taught me. Mainly that it’s better late than never… if you want to be of use to the future. If you wish to be brand new for someone. Thank you for being a part of it.

Buy Televangelist on BandCamp and I’ll earn the equivalent of 20,000 streams.

•••

This is my second winter working in film production, so I should’ve known better than to not account for the weeks I knew I’d be out of work. All the structure that work gives me goes out the window and I slump right back into a sweatpants quarantine aesthetic that just is not en vogue right now.

After a year at Marvel (!!!), I start work on a new feature this week. For a few months at least. Then it’s on to the next lilypad. This industry is fickle and unreliable, but I can’t tell you how much fun I’ve been having. I’ve loved watching Twitter debate and theorize over Michael Peterson’s innocence on The Staircase (of course I’m partial to the owl theory!), seeing my name in IMAX 3D in the credits for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and being smack-dab in the middle of the ongoing war of art vs. commerce. Every day at work is an attempt at manufacturing something that’s never been seen before while watching it ricochet and filter through red tape, physical limitations, budgetary restrictions, and sometimes just plain poor (or brilliant!) decision-making, and that will never get boring.

In the meantime, I’ve been Avataring a lot, which is defined by me as using my AMC A-List subscription to book aisle seats at random screenings of Avatar: The Way of Water when I’ll be in the neighborhood and just sort of…pop into Pandora, sometimes for the full the three hours and twelve minutes, or… maybe just an hour or so.

It’s taking James Cameron’s ‘Use the bathroom, you’re gonna see it again,’ argument to the Nth degree by seeing his latest opus Avatar: The Way of Water a few times in various chunks throughout the week. Sorta like a Netflix movie. Funny how that works.

Whenever I feel the need to ‘escape’ from my present circumstances, instead of reaching for my vices, I’ve been leaving my phone in the car and sitting in the theater not thinking about Earth. Almost like a cheap spa. Not receiving push notifications. Not checking my email or bank account. Pandora. I’ve been to four screenings so far and I’ve maybe seen the whole film twice. No, I am not done going to see Avatar, either. Wanna come?

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It’s been a little difficult to sparse just how ironic my love for Avatar is, or might be. Actually, no, it’s not. My love for Avatar and The Way Of Water is not ironic at all but all the haters have enflamed my staunch and fervent defense of the franchise, so I’ve dug my heels in and doubled down on my fandom. Which I recognize is a very me thing to do. I love righteous indignation!

To me, it’s extremely difficult to hate a franchise that is so unmistakably left-wing — critical of humanity, colonization, and capitalism, celebratory of nature and life. The military is presented like it’s Skynet and every colonization project is Judgement Day. On Earth, we have grown far too used to the destruction of our natural resources.

Avatar has become as expansive and exciting for me as Star Wars or Harry Potter. Franchises that transcend their texts and their creators, and become fanfiction playgrounds for storytelling and wonder. What’s missing in today’s cinema is a sense of longing. This is why I think people keep running back to Pandora, or maybe at least why I am. Unlike a lot of modern blockbusters that exist so bullishly in the real world, full of celebrity cameos, call-backs, and in-jokes. The Way of Water spends its middle hour just…hanging out. Swimming. Flying. Movies haven’t felt like invitations in a long time, and more so have felt like exclusive clubs with codewords and gatekeepers. Avatar doesn’t need you to go online and read Wikipedia pages for shows, books, and comics you have to read to ‘get it’. The film itself is enough.

"I like change. I'm a child of the '60s. I like it when things are chaotic. I think what we can see is an expanded form of cinema. I want to do a movie that's six hours long and two and a half hours long at the same time. Same movie. You can stream it for six hours, or you can go and have a more condensed, roller coaster, immersive version of that experience in a movie theater. Same movie. Just, one's the novel, and one's the movie. Why not? Let's just use these platforms in ways that haven't been done before." — James Cameron

What resonates with me about The Way of Water is that this entire project is not the work of one man but the drive of one. Hundreds if not thousands of people worked to bring this movie to life over its thirteen (!!!) year production, but if James Cameron woke up one morning suddenly disinterested in Avatar 5, it won’t happen. No Avatar movies would exist if James Cameron didn’t want to make them or decided to stop. It’s like seeing an olympian continue training and then breaking their record. One of our best filmmakers is dedicating the remaining twenty-five years of their career meticulously pushing the boundaries of film — the empathy machine it is — to tell a story they find vital enough to tell. The fact that James Cameron is interested in making three more Avatar movies makes me interested in three more Avatar movies. I heard the rough cut for Avatar 3: The Seed Bearer (it’s seriously tentatively titled that) is 9 hours long??? I don’t care how long it takes. Take all the time you need with that one, Jim. Better late than never.

•••

2022 Album of the year: Badモード (BAD MODE) by Hikaru Utada. I’m partial to the pop perfection of “Find Love,” but this is probably the best song on the record. And this phenomenal video fits the water theme! Water connects all things, life to death, darkness to light!!

Okay, gotta go, I’m late/right on time to a showing of The Way of Water.

Expect to hear from me soon… anything specific you wanna read from me? What’s been your escape lately? What creates a sense of longing for you?

Reply to this email or leave a comment. TTYL

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“To be courageous requires no exceptional qualifications, no magic formula, no special combination of time, place, and circumstance.” - President John F. Kennedy

“It's odd, really, watching yourself being replaced on national television. Planned obsolescence. Presidents and mid-sized family sedans.” - President Josiah ‘Jed’ Bartlett 

"A lot has changed in the past three hundred years. People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We've eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We've grown out of our infancy. Our mission is to go forward, and it's just begun. There's still much to do. There's still so much to learn." - Captain Jean-Luc Picard

"For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known." 1 Corinthians 13:12

PRE-SAVE ON SPOTIFY // PRE-ORDER ON iTUNES // EVERYWHERE OCTOBER 8

1. Marjoe

2. Idaho Says Hi

3. Something To Say

4. Making Light

5. I’m Scared of How Good It Feels

6. Broken Mirror

7. New Trash Endeavors

8. Never Be Lonely

9. Feeling Profound (on T.V.)

10. I’ve Been Sober Before

11. Exaggerations

12. Just Chemicals

13. Feeling Profound (on T.V.) [Thomas CW Remix]

14. Never Be Lonely (Acoustic)

    ---

1. Marjoe

Consult the pamphlet
You’ve got card tricks that need some work
I’m getting Carpal Tunnel from the flicked wrists and
Babysit visits our Friday nights become
And Lord knows I don’t mind driving you home
But what happens when the pot’s depleted?
And you’re not needed by anyone but me? 

Nothing, nothing’s up your sleeve
And frankly, I’m disappointed 
But still, believe that
Nothing, nothing hurts me more 
More than you

I talked with Kaitlyn, she said “Give it some time, 
I’d let the dust settle before you meddle in other’s petty crimes.”
I’m praying for a message, praying for a sign
Oh, what a gift it is to be dying with the Divine!
But what happens when the pot’s depleted?
And you’re so needed by everyone but me?
Nothing, nothing’s up your sleeve
And frankly I’m disappointed
But still believe that
Nothing, nothing lets me down
More than you

2. Idaho Say Hi

Planned obsolescence like old presidents and mid-sized family sedans
Making cognitive decisions to abandon my pretensions for good
“Cool” is occasional
Just like weed and washing jeans
Tearing baseballs at the seams

Idaho says “hi”
And “we miss you”
Idaho say “hi”

Getting drunk at high school graduations for your brother
“I bet he still has that scar” 
Scruffy faces and week-long couch crashings
Unfamiliar shampoos and moms
“Work vacations” and Oxy'd morons
Friends-of-friends, ‘till the end
Going with the flow!

3. Something To Say

Standing in the shower for an hour looking for someone to blame
But all I hear is my name, but I could never take the fame
The only thing that really makes sense to me is booze and this book about JFK
But all work and no play made Jack an important boy
But the hands on the clock have me by the wrist
I’m pissed and I don’t know why

I wish I had something to say...
Something to die for! But nothing’s in my way...
And I wish I had something to do...
But my plate is full, and I can’t come out tonight

I picked up a few bad habits along with the best people in my life
But they all cause me strife cause I could never put up a fight
When nothing on the Netflix looks good and this weekend is a waste
And life’s a distant taste
And an unfamiliar face

4. Making Light

My interpretation of patience is growing thin
I wish I could relax, I wish I could sit back
And go to the ocean, where the pretty people congregate
But maybe that’s not my fate?

I wish I could throw all of my problems away
Close my eyes and hit the beach and spend the day 
Making light of everything around me
But if I do, I’d be like you, and maybe that’s okay?

Waves, wash my feet so I can leave
But walking back through the sand makes it worse
So I sit, alone, on the shore for a little more
And think of you ‘cause that’s all I do
But maybe it’s not my destiny?
I’m not meant to have my face in the sun
When did I become so morbid?
When did I become so cold?

5. I’m Scared of How Good It Feels

I’m scared of how good it feels
I’m scared of how good it feels  
I’m scared of how good it feels with you
I’m scared to get lost with you
I’m scared to get lost with you
I’m scared to get lost without you
And if I should ever leave I hope I’m a better man for it
And if you should ever leave I hope you’re a better man for it
And I...can’t wait to see you tonight.

6. Broken Mirror

Your love is a broken mirror.
I can’t wait to see it clearer.
And if I never do
Fall in love with you
Maybe, that’s okay?

Figuring out if I have upstairs roommates
Someone who hears me talk in my sleep
Ghosts in my halls
My bed stand won’t stop vibrating
While my eyes, they won’t stop dilating
Evacuation plans!

‘Cause maybe there’s more to it? I just don’t know.
I’m an adventurer until it’s time to grow.

Tap-tap-tap tappin’ my toes ‘till it turns to a dance
Restlessness becomes a moral stance
Complacent afterlife
My bed stand won’t stop vibrating
While my eyes; they won’t stop dilating
Evacuation plans!

‘Cause maybe our Star Wars is just Astro Turf
And maybe Heaven is a place on Earth?

7. New Trash Endeavors

It’s a combination of life being unpredicatable and you being super dumb
Dream clouds go hard like marshmallows dried up from the sun
With my mouth full of soap in hopes my reticence goes unnoticed
With my hat brim low and my phone glow, I’ll never be alone

I know it’s hard to face, the paradox it creates
If you’re graceful, they’ll hate you
But if you’re clumsy then you’ll fall

The class it takes to wear white tee shirts without any stains
Might’ve been the one I skipped in exchange for paper planes
So I learned the new dance craze to cut through the corn maze and make some new friends
But they’ve moved on to new trash endeavors and I’m still the same

Getting it through my head, “everything’s fine”
The future’s not far ahead, just show me where to sign
Ignorance is bliss, but so is cliché
Harded and cynical just like a lump of clay

8. Never Be Lonely

I’m starting to hate the future ‘cause of its contempt for me
And I know that it’s human nature to crave security
But when I’m all by myself I think and think and think and think some more
‘Cause I know that I’m in Hell when I can’t hear the voice say

“You’ll never be lonely,
You’ll never be lonely, 
Never be lonely again!
Never be lonely, 
You’ll never be lonely,
You’ll never be lonely again!”

I’m starting to hate my past now ‘cause of what it’s teaching me
And I know that it’s you I resent now with the mud, up to my knees
But when I’m all by myself I think and think and think and think some more
Cause I know that I’m in Hell
So I mutter to myself every day (day and night!)

“I’ll never be lonely,
I’ll never be lonely,
Never be lonely again!
I’ll never be lonely
I’ll never be lonely
I’ll never be lonely again!”

I’m starting to hate it all now, ‘cause the point is getting dull.
And I know, all this doubting’s harmful...but it can’t stay in my skull.
So I find myself again, changing teams, on my knees
The cell reception’s poor...why can’t I believe?

That I’ll never be lonely
I’ll never be lonely
I’ll never be lonely again.
I’ll never be lonely
I’ll never be lonely
I’ll never be lonely again

I repeat to myself:
“Am I just someone on your shelf? Or am I something real?”
I’ll never be lonely
I’ll never be lonely
I’ll never be lonely again.
I’ll never be lonely
I’ll never be lonely
I’ll never be lonely again

9. Feeling Profound (On T.V.)

Watching rain race horizontally across your car window
As you confess to me what I already know
Fidgeting and making the glove box open and close
I closed my eyes and felt my way home

We’re three miles from my house
Only buys me so much time to plead
If only this played out like it plays out on T.V.
Feeling deep, feeling profound, but I never made a sound

Life in this spacecraft is the coolest form of isolation
Until there’s danger until I’m scared
There’s no room for two so I hold on... to myself.
Now there’s finally room to breathe!

[Houston, Endeavour roll program.

Roger, roll Endeavour!]

We’re three hundred miles above my house
Only buys me so much time to breathe
Hope this doesn’t play out like it plays out on T.V.
Feeling deep, feeling profound, but I never made a sound

We’re three hundred years from now
I’m scared too, so follow my lead
Hope the future plays out like it plays out on T.V.
Feeling deep, feeling profound, but I never made a sound.

10. I’ve Been Sober Before

I’ve been sober before, but it ain’t ever felt like this
And I’ve been angry before, but it ain’t ever felt like this
I wish I could convey how I feel just once more
I’d pour myself some Pendleton, a little more than before

I need to feel less quicker, ‘cause I can’t tell whose skull is thicker
Maybe it doesn’t matter?
Maybe none of it matters?

I’ve been sober before, but it ain’t ever felt like this.

I need to feel less quicker ‘cause I can’t tell whose skull is thicker
Maybe it doesn’t matter?
Maybe none of the matters?

11. Exaggerations

I fall between the chasm of sanity and the construct of my imagined reality.
That shit you heard from your friends are exaggerations,
But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take it to heart

I’m a cautionary tale of everyone’s failings, rolled into one
But that’s too much credit for someone who once said that the world is not enough

This is in memory of all the times I sat alone in my room wondering what you’re up to
Rest in peace to loneliness and self-seclusion, ‘cause it’s time to go outside.
But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from the past,
It’s to forge it, or forget it!
Make out like a dirty bandit, or stay home... and mourn.

I fall between the chasm of confidence and struck with anxious paralysis
Taking comfort alone for granted and not quite stickin’ the landing 
Are two of my favorite past-times

12. Just Chemicals

Whether we’re sharing a bed or our deepest darkest thoughts, it all just chemicals.
And whether you hold me close or you leave me here to rot, it’s all just chemicals 
Until it’s not.

My breath is about as long as my patience
And I’m aware my problems make you anxious
But “I heard you’re going with another man tonight?
And I don’t mind! But you seem to put your chips in others.
And I know they’re not the ones who see you fold.”

My neck is about as long as one could stretch it
And I’m aware that faith ain’t bought on credit, did you forget?
That I heard you’re going with another man tonight
And I don’t mind, but a house like this is not worth the interest
Now you’re all alone and no one’s there to see you fold.

Who am I? Who are you?
Is this just a chemical reaction?
Don’t lie,
Don’t lie,
Just lie here.

Credits

Album mixed and mastered by Guillermo A. Bautista
Cover art by Mark Morin

“Marjoe”
Written and produced by Tyler Scruggs

“Idaho Says Hi”
Written by Tyler Scruggs
Produced by Tyler Scruggs and Jack Allen
Drums by Jake Naugle
Bass, Synth, and Vocoder by Jack Allen
Guitars by Tyler Scruggs and Jack Allen

“Something To Say”
Written and Produced by Tyler Scruggs
Guitars by Pablo Monterisi
Drums by Jake Naugle

“Making Light”

Written and Produced by Tyler Scruggs
Guitars by Pablo Monterisi
Bass by Tomas Shayud
Drums by Jake Naugle

“I’m Scared of How Good It Feels”
Written and Produced by Tyler Scruggs

“Broken Mirror”
Written and Produced by Tyler Scruggs
Drums by Jake Naugle
Guitars by Tyler Scruggs, Jack Allen,
Pablo Monterisi, and Jorge Gutman
Bass by Jack Allen
Synth by Tyler Scruggs

“Never Be Lonely”
Written by Tyler Scruggs
Produced by Tyler Scruggs & Dimas
Guitars by Pablo Monterisi

“Feeling Profound (On T.V.)”

Written and produced by Tyler Scruggs
Additional sounds from NASA public domain archives

“I’ve Been Sober Before”

Written by Tyler Scruggs and Jack Allen 
Produced by Tyler Scruggs and Jack Allen
Guitars, bass, and keys by Jack Allen
Drums by Jake Naugle

“Exaggerations” 

Written by Tyler Scruggs
Produced by Tyler Scruggs & Raffael Eiovino
Drums by Jake Naugle
Guitars and bass by Raffael Eiovino

“Just Chemicals” 
Written by Tyler Scruggs
Produced by Tyler Scruggs and Aceberg

Hey, it’s been a while.

This is a brief life-update piece, so if you don’t quite have the time now to read all that today, I’d love to hear how you’re doing in general! Our communities are strained more than ever now, and I want you to know I’m here.

Remember, you can always reply to these emails!

I took an extended break from the long-form newsletters; about four months. I haven’t stopped writing though, and we’ll get to that, but I took some sage advice and relinquished a lot of the pressure off myself from hyper-publically producing things for the first time in years. Given what all has happened interpersonally, nationally, and globally, that time has been extremely helpful and healing. So, thanks for letting me step away.

….unless you follow me on Twitter, in which case there’s no evidence of me having ever stepped away.

2020 was painful, sorrowful, and only eventually rehabilitating. Apart from watching it all helplessly from the sidelines, I’ve been mostly ‘vibing’ as writer Mary Retta wonderfully puts it. The Groundhog’s Day-like quality of lockdown and self-isolation over this extended period has fundamentally changed my priorities and perceptions of time. I know that hasn’t entirely been the experience for many. It’s been a privilege being able to focus entirely on my own wellbeing for such a long period of time. It’s helped. My hope is to articulate what I’ve learned from the opportunity and share it in new artful, community-building ways. Retta writes,

“For as long as I can remember, all of my anxieties have revolved around time: that I will not have enough time to do things, or that something is happening at the wrong time, has kept me awake at night on more than one occasion. That old adage to “take your time,” which I am certain is meant to comfort, has long left me bitter and confused. After all this take and take and take, what have I collected? What is it, exactly, that I am holding in my arms? I am not sure that time is a thing we can take or waste or save or give away. I have been so young for so long now I’m afraid it has grown tiresome. I was once scared that time might leave me behind but today I welcome it’s escape. I don’t want to take my time anymore. I want to set it free.”

First, a small housekeeping thing:

It was confusing as heck last year to follow me as I scattered myself across platforms and a clown car full of links and payment processors, that’s entirely on me, but tylerscruggs.com is now the one-stop for all things me and my art and writing. No more Patreon, no more Squarespace, no more having to type ‘Substack’ (though my site now uses its features). Heck, I’ve even dropped the never-utilized CTRL./ALT./DEL. and Digital Artifacts publication titles. It took some time to get here but now we’re here. Tell your friends. You can unlock archived pre-2020 posts by subscribing, and you can email me to talk about whatever at T@tylerscruggs.com. 🧘‍♂️

Secondly, I want to share a bit of what I’ve been up to:

• I’ve done some podcast guest spots recently, peep The Nostalgia Trap (on capitalism and David Lynch’s Eraserhead), Is This Podcast Name Taken?, and The Youth Critic (on Wonder Woman 1984) if you’d like!

• The big news, I’m finishing up my third record. For years it’s always been ‘Album 3’ for the longest time as an abstract idea, but in October what I wanted to do and say suddenly all clicked and came together as a coherent, album-length thought.

  It’s called Televangelist, and it’s an album about wavering faith in a crass world that capitalizes on it. I’m dying to share it with you as soon as I can. 📺 💿🍻

  Some false starts occurred getting it off the ground last year with indie labels and a brief American Idol stint (seriously), but I would call it about 75% or 80% done now. Definitely the closest it’s ever been to being done lol. But, I cannot mix it myself I’ve determined, and there are some instruments I know would perform better in more capable hands to make it the best possible. So it exists, but not how I’d like it to.

  I’m in the process of getting that help now, but if you’re a musician and/or producer looking for a (paid!) gig pleaseeee email me at T@tylerscruggs.com

• A running theme from my writing last year (pre-pandemic) was the looming fear of losing my health insurance at 26 and now mid-pandemic, it happened. I hope to have it sorted this year but the timing is...pretty bad. The experience has pushed me to be even more politically active than I had been before, with a greater emphasis on offline activism and aid. I’ve joined a few organizations following the 2020 election, and I’m looking forward to talking more about that soon.

• My sister Katie took today’s picture, and she just recently released her debut EP under the name Color Math. Check it out! Streaming everywhere!

• I’m making a more concerted effort to keep these shorter. Turns out I had a book worth of things in me to think through and work out. So, I’m writing that book instead of publishing 3000-word rambling with sporadically inspired ideas. It’s not something I’ll take very seriously until the album is done, but it’s on the to-do list. It’s nice for now to write for simply me.

I have two newsletter pieces for the very near future. The new goal is to publish three of these a month. One coming soon is on WandaVision, mystery storytelling, and Twin Peaks. The other is on screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s novel Antkind and Netflix’s Malcolm & Marie. Please let me know if you also read Antkind or saw Malcolm & Marie because there’s a lot to unpack here…! Let’s talk about it.

You can also always keep up with what I’m reading on Bookshop.org or audiobooks at Libro.fm.

I hope you’re staying safe. I trust you’re making it work. I leave you with another chunk of Jenny Odell’s book How To Do Nothing in hopes you’ll join me in vibing through whatever else the future throws at us. Let’s stick together. 🍻

“It’s a bit like falling in love -- that terrifying realization that your fate is linked to someone else’s, that you are no longer your own. But isn’t that closer to the truth anyway? Our fates are linked, to each other, to the places where we are, and everyone and everything that lives in them. How much more real my responsibility feels when I think about it this way! This is much more than just an abstract understanding that our survival is threatened by global warming, or even a cerebral appreciation for other living beings and systems. Instead this is an urgent, personal recognition that my emotional and physical survival are bound up with theses ‘strangers’, not just now, but for life.” 

Thank you for the messages and replies to last week’s piece! That was cool. I’m glad this walkie-talkie is reaching people on the other end, and those people are getting something out of this typed out quasi-therapy sesh. Let me tell you; it’s keeping me grounded. After last week, it feels like there’s something of a narrative structure establishing here at this telenovela of a newsletter. So again, thank you.

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It’s just after midnight, and I’m told it’s Autumn now. When reflecting on my day, I still find myself first and foremost defensively measuring how productive a day I had. Is this something you do? As if to buy time before determining whether you had a good day or a bad day, when asked, you jump to “hmm…it was a productive day!” to your partner, your friends, or your Instagram Live audience of thousands. Honestly, it could be true; it could be not true… who’s to say, especially these days?

Let’s not call it a good day or a bad day… It’s impossible for me to know the day I had. I did my best and here we are in the future and there’s nothing left to do but make the best next decision. The past is just a story we tell ourselves.

It’s closer to 1 am now and I googled “the past is just a story we tell ourselves” when I wrote it just then and it’s from Her, one of my favorite movies, and specifically this scene from Her and while I’m banging my head against the keyboard for putting myself through the emotional wringer like this so late at night and so early into Fall, watch this. It’s beautiful.

Long story short I didn’t want my story told on Instagram anymore.

I archived my first 8 years on Instagram tonight. Basically, I don’t wish to be perceived there. Maybe it’s because I watched The Social Dilemma on Netflix.

Maybe it’s because there are weirdos who accidentally (or with great intention) like and comment on my Facebook photos in the middle of the night and are not above browsing what’s available to see of me on my mom’s Facebook too. They’re bold enough to leave comments that I presume are meant to read flirty.

Of course I’m not naive enough to think I’ve never been lurked upon, or pompous enough to believe that I’m not guilty of the same. Except here we are in the future and there’s nothing to do but make the next best decision.

Based on what I can control, I personally don’t really want Tyler Scruggs to be a reason people go on Facebook or Instagram anymore if I was ever a reason at all. I barely wish to be perceived.

Instagram sucks anyway. We been knew, sis. Whoever follows me on Twitter knows I’m crazy there. I’ve been there over a decade and I still, um, like it? It’s a hell site but I respect it for not pretending it isn’t one. Besides, I can quit any time I want!!

Facebook I can also probably cut ties with considering it still can’t stop recommending random gay men to add me as a friend. Except I do love Facebook Marketplace. The internet is so broken.

How are you, by the way? I don’t think there’s such a thing as checking in too often these days. Remember you can always reply to these emails. The whole reason I’m posting on and looking at these stupid apps is to talk to you here.

Apart from this newsletter, apart from physical spaces, apart from the social media giants, where are we finding community?

Ctrl/Alt/Del. subscriber Robby linked me to this hilarious, ominous piece from Bookform by Max Read called “Going Postal.” It’s on a book The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour which is now in my imminent to-read pile. Here are some of the best bits if you’ll pardon the gear-shift.

Rather than wondering ponderously if this is “cancel culture” or whatever, we might ask ourselves: Why the fuck were all these people tweeting? What were they thinking? What were they hoping to accomplish? What was the cost-benefit analysis that led them to think continued participation in social media was a good idea? Liberal and left-wing tech critics like to suggest that we post, even against our own self-interest, thanks to nefarious software design that has been built in service of a multibillion-dollar advertising industry. The right wing has a tendency to blame the incentives encouraged by a hardwired social hierarchy, in which “blue checks” “virtue-signal” to improve their standing within social platforms, even to the point of self-sabotage. Neither answer seems particularly satisfying. Viewing anecdotes of sudden social combustion according to comprehensive, deterministic accounts of neurochemical response, social dynamics, and platform incentives can certainly be clarifying, but such theories are incomplete. After all, Mark Zuckerberg is not pointing a gun at anyone’s head, ordering them to use Instagram—and yet we post as though he is. Perhaps the best lens to examine compulsive, unproductive, inexplicable use of social media is not technical, or sociological, or economic, but psychoanalytic. In which case, rather than asking what is wrong with these systems, we might ask, “What is wrong with us?”

I loved this piece so much I spent five minutes trying to find the author on Twitter until it dawned on me that I had just finished reading about him not being on it.

As people in the streets toppled statues and fought police, people on the platforms adjusted and refashioned the uprising from a street movement to an object for the consumption and reflection of the Twittering Machine. What was happening off-line needed to be accounted for, described, judged, and processed. Didactic story-lectures and photos of well stocked antiracist bookshelves appeared on Instagram. On Twitter, the usual pundits and pedants sprang up demanding explanations for every slogan and justifications for every action. In these concern trolls and reply guys, Seymour’s chronophage was literalized. The social industry doesn’t just eat our time with endless stimulus and algorithmic scrolling; it eats our time by creating and promoting people who exist only to be explained to, people to whom the world has been created anew every morning, people for whom every settled sociological, scientific, and political argument of modernity must be rehashed, rewritten, and re-accounted, this time with their participation.

Y’know at least with TikTok, the name reminds you of the passing of time. It also will tell you after a couple of hours of watching TikTok to take a break. I wish it got less flack. Though it seems based on TikTok, the youth of tomorrow are just as ready to relitigate the past as us olds. The past is just a story we tell ourselves.

Back when we were still changing for the better
Wanting was enough
For me, it was enough
To live for the hope of it all
Cancel plans just in case you'd call
And say "Meet me behind the mall"
So much for summer love, and saying "Us"
'Cause you weren't mine to lose
You weren't mine to lose

It’s a little after 1:30, and I’m told it’s Autumn.

Back when we were still changing for the better, say, when Taylor Swift’s documentary came out in January, I was more empathetic towards the celebs than is fashionable.

Kanye recently tweeted out all of his record and film contracts, revealing his album budgets, deals, everything. It’s a punk rock move if you ask me, but don’t say you heard that from me because talking about Kanye West right now is not politically advantageous.

I’m just saying it’s not-not poetic him and Taylor Swift are fighting over the same issue, approached wildly differently. Rolling Stone explains what I’m talking about better. Did you know he isn’t allowed to tour and perform his music if the composition “differs greatly” from the album master recordings?

I’m thankful I own the masters to my albums. I’m thankful I can remix and revise them however I want. This is me from the past writing this:

In the modern era where pop stars, politicians, and teenagers are all constructing palatable Instagram versions of themselves for money, power, and attention, can you believe anything anyone says anymore? How vast is the canyon between your public presentation and your private motivations? Is it an impossible standard to maintain in real-time? To be self-conscious is to be aware of you and your environment, and maybe you must be strategic in the process when there’s a goal in mind.

The most interesting bit of that Taylor Swift documentary was when she said, “my entire moral code is the need to be perceived as good.”

The world revealed itself as way more complicated than it was when Taylor or I were fifteen. High school is where you’re meant to learn that even when you’re terrified, alienated, vulnerable, and insecure, to fit in, you must confidently and gracefully stand out. You can’t leave the system, and you can’t simply ignore the expectations and pressures around you. But validation from the Seniors and everyone above you is all you crave, even when they’re insatiable, greedy or worse, misunderstand you.

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You probably watched The Social Dilemma on Netflix too. It’s a decent documentary, if perhaps too simplistic. But listen here, Netflix; the next time you have a movie starring Pete Campbell from Mad Men as three little A.I. Inside Out type operators, you lead with that pitch, you hear me?

Here’s a newsletter from Verge tech reporter Casey Newton on the doc’s shortcomings, despite being a decent access point for those who don’t like, report tech.

This cartoon super villain view of the world strikes me as a kind of mirror image of the right-wing conspiracy theories which hold that a cabal of elites are manipulating every world event in secret. It is more than a little ironic that a film that warns incessantly about platforms using misinformation to stoke fear and outrage seems to exist only to stoke fear and outrage — while promoting a distorted view of how those platforms work along the way.

You should probably read the whole thing if you have time, but in case you don’t, which — TikTok — you probably don’t, the point is that while The Social Dilemma creates a compelling bad guy in “Social Media,” or more simply, Facebook, it leaves out the exploitation of good-faith, conscious people through radicalization on smaller forums and websites. It’s the whole Internet. Facebook may be a Goliath at this point, but it’s not the only adversary. It’s still a pretty big one, though.

On the other hand, meet Sophie Zhang. She was a data scientist who was fired in August and left this month in the fashion increasingly popular among departing Facebook employees — which is to say, quite dramatically. 

Craig Silverman, Ryan Mac, and Pranav Dixit scooped her 6,600-word farewell memo in BuzzFeed. Zhang wrote:

“In the three years I’ve spent at Facebook, I’ve found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry, and caused international news on multiple occasions,” wrote Zhang, who declined to talk to BuzzFeed News. Her LinkedIn profile said she “worked as the data scientist for the Facebook Site Integrity fake engagement team” and dealt with “bots influencing elections and the like.”

“I have personally made decisions that affected national presidents without oversight, and taken action to enforce against so many prominent politicians globally that I’ve lost count,” she wrote.

Mastering the geopolitics of each country and rooting out every influence operation that pops up while also policing hate speech and misinformation while promoting free speech and interpersonal connections is a mind-bendingly enormous task. But it’s also the task that Facebook, by virtue of its huge investment in growth and fighting off competitors over the years, has signed up for. 

I can’t take seriously a film like The Social Dilemma, which seemingly wants to hold one company accountable for every change society has undergone since it was founded. But when someone takes her employer to task for the things she found on its service — and she leaves with a feeling of blood on her hands — that’s something different.

So yeah, I don’t think I personally need Instagram that much, and if I do, then maybe I shouldn’t. I tie it with so many negative emotions and experiences. It’s given me opportunities, yeah. I’ve made money as an influencer, and that paid rent sometimes. That’s cool. It came at an extreme cost, however. I think the drive for money, the drive for followers, and plain cultural clout intoxicated me too. I think I stepped on feet along the way to the new shiny thing.

It’s closer to 3 am than I’m willing to admit. I’m told it’s still Autumn.

I, too, once believed that love would be burning red, bringing it back around to Taylor. Maybe passion is part of love, I thought? Even when it didn’t feel right, appearances had to be kept, often for survival’s sake. What if it can’t be controlled, ultimately? Are we stuck in these cyclical abusive relationships forever, despite whatever ones or apps we might flee? Is it ultimately just for the stories we tell ourselves and each other?

What if we can’t help the dopamine addiction and relentlessly keep tapping and tweeting Molotov cocktails into a void that promises to love us so long as we dunk on any friend or dweeb with a blue checkmark by their name that comes our way.

Have you ever heard the excitement in someone’s voice when they just came across a cute person on Instagram, DMed them for a bit, and now they’re getting coffee later? I love that. I want to keep that.

You see, popular things excite me. I’m fascinated when people loves something. I love love. Whether it’s memes or blockbuster movies or novelty country-trap songs, or Kanye and Taylor, I love it when people are head-over-heels in love with, I don't know, stuff. I live for the hype—the hope of it all.

It’s not so much that I’m incapable of excitement. It’s just that to be excited now is to also be anxious you are being naive or worse, passé.

This, in turn, transforms into a love for the drama. I think it gets to that point perhaps when we separate ourselves as spectators—the drama’s entertaining when you’re not part of it. I swear I don’t love the drama; it loves me.

There’s always a way to find legitimate reasons to dislike things. Whether it’s based on personal preference or style, or deep-seated triggers -- certain forms of communication, or certain lifeforms capable of communication, work better than others. And try as you might, you may not express yourself correctly. The message might not get across.

When criticism is leveled against a person, and not the institutions or systems that produce selfish, isolating, ego-driven decisions, we let those systems get away with it.

I’m not sure what I fear more: being a victim, or knowingly entering a victimhood mentality because it’s in some way advantageous.

When we’re victims of abuse and gaslighting, our perseverance, strength, and resistance can reinforce our abuser’s narrative that they didn’t do anything wrong to us. The past is just a story we tell ourselves, but when it’s our past, it’s the story.

I’ve lived in eight states over the last ten years. That’s a fact that only matters because I say it matters when I need it to tell a story. When I say I live on the Internet, it’s because the only publically traceable lineage of my existence is on these apps and the servers of these corporate giants. Apart from my music, and by extension, my writing, which again I am thankful to own.

It’s a little after 3, and if I don’t sleep, I’ll miss the first day of Autumn.

If you’re still with me, thank you. Please let me know you did by clicking the red heart at the top/bottom of this if you don’t feel like writing back? No? Ok that’s fine I don’t need the dopamine.

I recognize you’re probably reading this in the morning or during the day, and if this was meandering and tangential, that would be par for course with this newsletter, but I can’t help but hope I got my point across to someone, somewhere. I live for that shit.

Here’s part of the letter Taylor Swift attached to her record folklore.

A tale that becomes folklore is one that is passed down and whispered around. Sometimes even sung about. The lines between fantasy and reality blur and the boundaries between truth and fiction become almost indiscernible. Speculation, over time, becomes fact. Myths, ghost stories, and fables.

Fairytales and parables. Gossip and legend. Someone’s secrets written in the sky for all to behold.

In isolation my imagination has run wild and this album is the result, a collection of songs and stories that flowed like a stream of consciousness. Picking up a pen was my way of escaping into fantasy, history, and memory. I’ve told these stories to the best of my ability with all the love, wonder, and whimsy they deserve.

Now it’s up to you to pass them down.

Tyler Scruggs is a writer, musician, and millennial swashbuckler navigating the digital frontier through internet content like this and love songs for your Zune. He brews his own coffee now and doesn’t feel it’s safe enough to go to the movies as much as he might like.

Feel free to validate him on Twitter (@TylerScruggs), Instagram (@Scruggernaut), and YouTube.

If you’d like to directly and meaningfully support the continuation of my writing and work, consider subscribing to unlock more journalism, music demos, interviews, and more.

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A pic I took from my road trip to Massachusetts last month. Killer Drive-In line up.

In place of Animal Crossing, every morning with my coffee during this chapter of quarantine I’ve been spending half an hour on Duolingo studying Spanish. When I look at my goals for the year (and my life), speaking fluent conversational Spanish has always floated among the top. So, I’m trying to follow through on that. I’m trying to follow through on a lot more things like this. Turns out tomorrow isn’t guaranteed.

Currently, I’m on a 22-day streak and in the ‘Gold League’ and that feels pretty good and I suppose my point is that turning things into a game, like studying a different language, does have positive habit-forming tendencies, especially for the things you actually want to accomplish.

When I look at the other gamified applications on my iPad, I’m less enthusiastic.

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Quick plug: I started a Discord! This link will only work for today (hit me up if you miss it) but if you long for the chatroom days, have links you want to share with people who read Control/Alternate/Delete., or just have tweets you want to workshop in a safe space (yes, there’s a place for that!) then, by all means, come join. :)

This study from Harvard called “Dopamine, Smartphones, & You: A battle for your time” goes into smartass detail about the chemical effects smartphones and social media is having on our brains. This isn’t anything too new, but this unfettered manipulation of minds and habits combined with the sudden dissolvement of public physical spaces is, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, starting to exacerbate things.

One of the half-written essays I have is on QAnon, #SaveTheChildren, Netflix’s Cuties, and the relationship between evangelical American Christians, New Age spiritual types, and their Facebook-fueled addiction to fringe conspiracy theories. Also all the people who profit from this gamified search for meaning.

It’s absolutely terrifying to see, and even more mortifying to talk about, but the conversation has to start and persist somewhere because I don’t know if you’ve noticed but things are exacerbating.

This is from the 2018 Harvard study:

Smartphones and social media apps aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, so it is up to us as the users to decide how much of our time we want to dedicate to them. Unless the advertisement-based profit model changes, companies like Facebook will continue to do everything they can to keep your eyes glued to the screen as often as possible. And by using algorithms to leverage our dopamine-driven reward circuitry, they stack the cards—and our brains—against us. But if you want to spend less time on your phone, there are a variety of strategies to achieve success. Doing things like disabling your notifications for social media apps and keeping your display in black and white will reduce your phone’s ability to grab and hold your attention. Above all, mindful use of the technology is the best tool you have. So the next time you pick up your phone to check Facebook, you might ask yourself, “Is this really worth my time?”

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell

It’s been pertinent in my life this year not just to expand my tangible “real life” community networks, but my online ones as well. And not in some sort of audience farming way. That’s been a shameful mistake of mine in the past. Part of that work has been this newsletter; gauging and investing in the people currently in my network and extended readership. Hopefully of course it reaches new people eventually, but that’s not so aggressively in my sights anymore. It’s a breath of relief that I’m not writing to some general public. It’s a little less scary and lets me be a little bit more vulnerable than I perhaps would in regional or national publications.

I’m grateful for the texts and email responses I’ve received from people I hadn’t heard from in forever. (Apparently, you can just reply to any of these emails, and it goes straight to me. Give it a try!)

On the other side of that coin, it’s been a little scary, mainly last week when anonymous accounts wrote some pretty nasty stuff to me in the middle of the night, and I wake up to those and a few Instagram login attempts. Then my morning focus, which should be on my Duolingo and mindfulness routines, becomes holy shit. I need to change all my passwords and figure out who might hate me today and why. And that doesn’t feel super productive or good.

Like, sure, criticize away. But your criticism, which was worthlessly anonymous in the first place, really loses value when it’s combined with attempts to break into my Instagram. Not cool.

I’m fine. While my mental health is mine to sort out, I hope that explains some of my paranoia a bit, if that’s something that seeps through in my writing. I hope it explains why, in many capacities, I’ve become a more private person. I’m thankful for the more intimate spaces I have to vent frustrations in a less public way, even if it doesn’t protect me entirely from people who only want to see me spiral.

My biggest advice to you today would be to start more conversations with people in your circles. As many as you can and soon,

Clearly, I’m aware of some of the enemies I’ve made in my life; whether it was calling out their business or not putting up with some aspect of their behavior and effectively “canceling” them, interpersonally. I’ve been on the other side of that coin, too.

This isn’t my newsletter on cancel culture though, but do send me your initial thoughts on that term if you have any burning questions from someone like me in my spheres. That’s another half-written essay.

I can’t tell you how valuable reading and internalizing like, physical books has been for me this year. I haven’t read a crazy amount, my GoodReads account has a 2020 year-end goal of 25 books, which I plan to beat somewhat handily, but I’ve never been one to breeze through books. So this has been a big step forward towards being one of those smartass Harvard types.

In high school especially I was the kind of person who had, like, the same book on me for a month at a time (if that’s a type of person), and I'd highlight and dogear the heck out of it. I like to sit in the universe built into books for as long as possible.

These days I need both the text and the audiobook to really glue me but once I’m plugged in it’s hard to peel me away. Just make sure Do Not Disturb is on.

Like Spanish, another one of those long-procrastinated life goals is to finally read Dune by Frank Herbert. The copy I’m reading was given to me in the summer of 2012, in Spokane, from a friend’s geeky uncle. It’s dauntingly dense and long and in a universe I couldn’t really attempt to sink my teeth into. Obviously I’m aware of David Lynch’s adaptation, but I’ve willfully put off seeing it until I’ve read this book. Then I plan to watch the documentary about the failed adaptation. Then I’ll see this upcoming very cool looking adaptation.

What I’m saying is that Dune is delayed because of me and I’m sorry it’s my fault and I’m trying to fix it. I have no interest in reading Star Wars extended universe novels so now I’m 15% through the book. This movie looks very cool.

It’s felt like school again. As we enter the Fall under quarantine, it’s allowed me to continue my studies with more rich results than when I was actually in school. Who knew addressing your hierarchy of needs healthily could yield such rewarding fruit??

At Georgia State, a place not built to address your hierarchy of needs, I was studying Film & Media with a minor in Sociology. This past semester (likely my last?), my courses were exclusively online. And you know what? Those classes that cost tens of thousands of dollars a year were heavily dependent on public broadcasting and YouTube videos like Crash Course, a series started by brothers Hank Green and John Green; both of whom I’ve been following online for the last like, 11 years.

The assignments were like, watch this YouTube video and write a response. I’ll email you next week.

So, that’s annoying. But more productively, my recent studies have made me extremely interested in Media Literacy.

I obviously want to make media; I wanna make more movies and music and I’m making media right now in this newsletter, but understanding communication and psychology is key to getting your actual point across. Apparently.

Communication is a two-way street and when you’re unable to communicate or get through to a certain demographic (or even individual person?), eventually it falls on you to understand how you’re being perceived is just as important as what you’re hoping the recipient of that media perceives themselves.

The definition goes,

As of field of study, Media Literacy comprises and overlaps many different theories and subjects from critical thinking and psycology to linguistics and ethics in technology.

Media Literacy can be defined as the ability to access, analyize, evaluate, create, and act using all forms of communication.

If we’re not to exist in churches, movie theaters, malls, schools, or community centers anymore and we exist now in these digital spaces; we are community members together now. That’s unreconcilably global and inadvertently universal. So much for the private intimate newsletter thing.

No matter how much I try to shape how I’m perceived, I can’t control it. If I wear my heart on my sleeve, I can’t command others to follow suit simply because I made myself vulnerable.

If we exist in media now, if we’re citizens of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple more so than citizens of our states, countries, and creeds, media literacy is imperative in not just understanding others and their media, but more pertinently, our own.

I leave you with the transcript I finished from the paid-only audio clip of this question I asked author, YouTuber, and Crash Course co-creator Hank Green. It begins with a brief synopsis of his “Carl Duology,” and I hope you pick it up. An Absolutely Remarkable Thing came out in 2018 and its conclusion, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor was released in July. Having followed him for so long, and in the relative shadow of his widely successful brother John, I can’t praise these books more highly. Sometimes reading it felt like seeing someone you know very well perform in a musical. Sometimes you can’t separate the art from the artist you know so well parasocially.

Let me know if you end up reading them, I would even recommend listening to them. The audiobooks are particularly well crafted.

Ok goodbye for now this is Hank Green quoted and then my question, which you should feel free to answer as well.

“So a basic synopsis of what these books are about: there's a young woman and her friends, and this young woman sees something very weird on her walk home from work in New York City. She stumbles across this thing, and it's very weird so she calls her friend to make a video together.

It turns out it's much weirder than they thought because their video’s kind of one of the first videos about it, and also it’s kind of adorable and nonthreatening. It goes viral, and then she sort of gets half-dragged and also half-climbs-and-pulls her own way into the [media] spotlight and becomes famous at the same time as humanity and the world begins to go through some really difficult adjustments because of the weirdness of the situation.

A lot of this [novel] is me trying to figure out my own relationship with being in the public eye, the amount of influence that I have by virtue of my platform, my relationship with my audience, my relationship with notoriety and fame, what that stuff actually means, and letting April make a bunch of bad decisions so that I don't have to. And in the end, there are many mysteries that they have to work through.

But the most TL;DR version of it is that it doesn't go great for April.”

“Then in the second book, we come back and find her friends interfacing now not just with their own personal relationships with the social internet, but the social internets overall impact on society, and how I think that could go over in the next 10 or 20 years if we do not put some control on the amount of power that I think that those platforms have.

So, you know, I have a lot of that I'd like to say about internet culture and its influence on culture broadly; the divisiveness that it can create as well as the isolation. But I also wanted to tell that inside of a story that's really exciting and fun and weird and funny and I don't think that it's sugar with your medicine. Hopefully, it's all good for you.”

With the awareness you bring to the idea of our “citizenship in digital spaces,” how has that changed your approach to social platforms, and what meaningful behavioral changes would you encourage in readers with that knowledge?

“I saw a really interesting tweet the other day that was sort of like: at what point can you not ‘quote tweet’ someone? Like in anger, because your audience is so big that you're going to bring the brigade upon them? And I thought that was like a really intelligent question because it wasn't snarky. It was like, no seriously, at what point can I not do that anymore? And you know, the [response] numbers varied from like, 10,000 followers to 50,000 followers, but it wasn't much higher than that. A lot of people have 50,000 followers on Twitter! And I think that like, that's certainly my understanding of how audience works, or how my audience works.

You know, early on, I didn't get it, and I think it was really natural not to get [it]. Luckily, I was sort of in an earlier version of the Internet and it was a less combative place. So I think that the mistakes that I made were pretty minor.

Whereas now, I do have a really strong idea that when you have a certain level of power, you have to be much more careful in how you move around because you could accidentally cause harm without knowing you're gonna cause harm. Then your reaction to being told that you caused harm can cause even more harm.

So that's also something to be careful about. And in general, I've become a more careful person.

I think that that's both a bit greater understanding of my own digital citizenship, but it is also my own interfacing with the relationship that I have, or the level of influence, the level of power, that I have.

That’s a weird sentence, like ‘the amount of power that I have,’ but I don't know how else to say it. When you’ve got 100,000 followers on Twitter, that is a level of power that you need to think about intelligently.

Or you could not! And just make broad, surprising, and biased epidemiological opinions! You could also do that, that's also an option available, but that's not how I feel like I should conduct myself. And I get really frustrated by that. So like, I think that it's really personal individual thing.

I get frustrated, though, by people who have large audiences [saying], ‘well, just because I have an audience doesn't mean —’ and I'm like, ‘Yes, it does. I'm sorry, it does. It does mean; it means that you have to be more careful. I'm sorry.’

You can't do it the same way you could if you did not have all this power; I'm sorry. And like, does that mean that maybe your reputation is going to take a bigger hit than it otherwise would? Maybe.

Oh, no, I'm sorry that like, a bad thing happened to you. And this is a thing that I've been trying to get used to myself, because it's not like this never happens or will happen to me as a public figure on the internet like that.

There are times when reputations take hits. And oftentimes those are deserved, and it's never like I've never made a mistake in my life. So, I think that to some extent that we have to accept that what we sometimes refer to as ‘cancel culture’ is just somebody's reputation not being shining as it once was.

And like, I've had plenty of those moments, me and John both in our 15 years on the internet. And so, you know, you want to be aware and to some extent, like my shining reputation is deserved, to some extent it's not, so, you know, ultimately I am human and very imperfect.

I learned about what influence actually is, and how it actually functions more.

Like, there are these two components to fame:

There's the number of people who know who you are, and there's the level of devotion or like, (devotion is probably the wrong word) level of enthusiasm that they have for you and your creations, and so like a cult leader is the example of someone where the number of people is small, but the level of enthusiasm is very high.

And then you have my example of the opposite of that, David Schwimmer. And we all know who David Schwimmer is, but he doesn't have a [rabid] fan club? I don't know. Maybe he does. I'm sure that there are some hardcore Schwimmers out there. But I think that you'll find their level of devotion isn’t realtively high. Anyway, I don't mean to call out David Schwimmer there, I hope he's doing well.

So I think that that's something that I learned from April [the main character of the Carl duology] and that was a thing that I needed to confront.

Also that fame is not a thing that is experienced internally. It is only experienced externally. Like, when somebody looks at me, I have no idea how they know who I am, like you cannot know what they are perceiving in terms of your fame, it is only something that is perceived externally, like beauty.

This is the thing that they say, ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ so what I think is beautiful is different from what other people think of as beautiful, but there are some, you know, nonsubjective elements of beauty, and people know when they are more or less attractive, even if they are not going to say it out loud.

Whereas fame really only is in the eye of the person who is experiencing it and it's only inside of the person experiencing it, not inside of the person who is famous. Especially now with how fractured it is because there are lots of people from reality TV to TikTok to YouTube, who a lot of people know, but most people don't.

Like I saw Bianca Del Rio on an airplane and I was freaking out about it and nobody else in that first class airplane section had any idea, and I didn't even say hi I was that freaked out.

As for the behavior of the average internet citizen, I think this is so hard. I think that we have responsibilities to, you know, check things before we share them, and to note when we see things from certain people that are repeatedly not accurate when we check. We ask, do I tell them about this? Do I try to do it in sort nice way?

Do you stand up to that power dynamic and be like ‘hey, I've noticed that you share a lot of things that turn out to be not right, maybe you should take it down, or look more carefully, or just unfollow those people so that you don't have misinformation showing up on your feed.

That kind of behavior in general. We do need to build up some norms and taboos around misinformation but also around outrage bait, like stuff that is true but isn't representative of reality.

And that's harder because a lot of times outrage bait is part of broader activist work and so it's not just isolated in and of itself, and sometimes there's real stuff to be outraged about, and so we have to find the examples that are clear.

Right now there’s a conversation around masks. I think that this period of time where we were sharing videos and we’re still dealing with people who are absolute just disconnected from reality probably like have easily deeper, like much deeper, issues that they're working through that are that aren’t in these viral “I won't wear a mask” videos.

I think that it doesn't make anything better. I don't think that helps the situation. I might be wrong. Maybe shame is an element of that. But I think that anything that creates more division around ‘this kind of person wears a mask,’ ‘this kind of person doesn't wear a mask’ is bad right now because we're trying to save people's lives.

So we just need to be really, really fast onto that eventual place where we will arrive to wear masks are apolitical, and we need to examine every single thing that played a part in making them more political.

Now, I'm not saying that outrage bait was the biggest piece of that equation, but I think it was some part of that equation. I think that the biggest piece of that equation is signaling from leaders from movements that masks are political, and particularly signaling by people who are just consistently not showing up wearing masks over and over and over again, and it's like, well, I think I see what those people are trying to say. And, and those people are really sort of like indulging in their influence in a really gross way.

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Tyler Scruggs is a writer, musician, and millennial swashbuckler navigating the digital frontier through internet content like this and love songs for your Zune. He brews his own coffee now and doesn’t feel it’s safe enough to go to the movies as much as he might like.

Feel free to validate him on Twitter (@TylerScruggs), Instagram (@Scruggernaut), and YouTube.

If you’d like to directly and meaningfully support the continuation of my writing and work, consider subscribing to unlock more journalism, music demos, interviews, and more.

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Hey there this one is kind of a long one but I hope you dig it. If you’re not a paid subscriber please consider doing that but if you can’t today then maybe you can subscribe to my YouTube or stream some of my music on Spotify. It really helps.

Ok on with the show.

1

The apocalypse feels passé. “Saving the world” is not all it’s cracked up to be, it seems. The ones we idolize now are proving themselves to be both too powerful and too fallible if we can even trust them. That, or they’re incredibly young, where their promise is continuously under threat by the pressure of expectation and performative grace. You’re perfect for the moment until you’re not.

In high school, we loved Kid Cudi because he was among the first to tap into a hum that everyone was feeling in 2009. A Kanye West prodigy, speaking of fallen heroes, that was a youthful, direct, and more relatable path on the ground that 808s & Heartbreak broke than what would be later popularized by Drake. The disparity between the opulent and proud attitudes of late 2000s and early 2010s pop mostly ignored but later utilizes the emergent emo movement stemming from popular alternative rock. Fall Out Boy, Paramore, and Panic! At The Disco were at their height by way of MySpace, and there wasn’t such a substantial distinction between alternative rock and pop music like there is today.

Cudi’s hum melodized a melancholic white noise everyone heard even if they didn’t realize it. It’s the hum of disappointment and disillusionment. It’s financial and aspirational collapse. When Y2K, 9/11, the Iraq War, and the advent of the Internet set the stage for your childhood and Green Day seems to be the only ones speaking up, it’s no wonder it feels now as though America’s in the midst of its highly anticipated third act.

You see, there’s always been this sort of pressure on Kid Cudi, a force I think a lot of millennials feel, dating back to the hype surrounding his debut Man on the Moon: The End of the Day. The album, a sci-fi journey in its own right, established an ambitious call-to-action and groundwork for geeky, lonely stoners like Cudi who, if briefly, existed in his own lane bridging the isolated MySpace emo with rappers who with such bravado were still shouting lyrics like “can’t wear skinny jeans cause my nuts don’t fit.”

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The moment never really came for Cudi, even with all the hope and promise. At least not for a long while and after many projects that failed to enter the zeitgeist quite the same way. Feel free to go to bat for any of his albums in the comments, it’s a worthy conversation, but pop culture turned their backs. Along with a budding but tumultuous acting career, Cudi was ever-present in the 2010s, but so were the waves of depression and delight with each potential project. Catharsis would be found in the eventual reunion with Kanye West in the form of Kids See Ghosts, a concept album about best friends who go through a psychedelic journey through spacetime and the spirit world in quest of artistic fulfillment. I know it took me five paragraphs, but now we can get to Bill & Ted. Thank you for holding hands with my brain right now.

This brooding blend of trap-emo, pioneered by Cudi and Travis Scott and the like, is very effective at conveying the ominous, artificially mellowed vibe we live in right now. Juice Wrld died of an overdose in December 2019 at 21, but his posthumous album that dropped in July went to #1 on the Billboard charts.

Here’s Billie Eilish performing the happiest song she’s ever released at the Democratic National Convention. She’s not my cup of tea but unworthy of vitriol, so I apologize for my unkind words in the past. I think she strikes such an uncomfortably real nerve in me at the intersection of like, the opioid epidemic and societal expectation on young American women in a way not many older or more powerful figures than her feels like addressing in a meaningful way, so I suppose Billie Eilish will carry that weight on her eighteen-year-old shoulders. She does it gracefully enough, but it bums me out. Please remember to take your Xanax on the way to the polls this November, or after you put it in a mailbox and anxiously wonder if it’ll count. Wait, are you telling me the mental illness is coming from my brain?

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2

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure has been an absolute fixture in my life, much like the rest of the Ready Player One-ish 80’s nostalgia canon. I dunno, I bought my Bill & Ted tee at Hot Topic in what, maybe 2013? It’s very old looking and faded, and right now, it has a sticky note on top of it folded with some other tees that reads “future tank tops.”

Last night I settled in to watch Excellent Adventure for the first time in several years, a dangerous game when so much comedy and “bro humor” has been unfavorably reevaluated in recent years. Both Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey, both extremely 80s and 90s in their own right, actually stand up pretty well! I did have to reconcile by my count three uses of the f-slur quietly at home. Once in Excellent Adventure, when Bill thinks Ted got stabbed with a sword and when found to be alive, they hug it out and call each other “f*gs” in a playful no-homo kinda way. The other two times are in Bogus Journey where, in a plea for their lives to evil robot versions of themselves confess that they “love” the evil robots, and the evil robots call them f*gs and kill them anyway. There’s also an instance where they call Satan a “f*g” which is kinda just funny no matter which way you slice it.

Remember, ignorance is not the same thing as hatred. Is it homophobic? Yeah, kinda. Does it perpetuate homophobia? Not really, we’ll get to that in a bit.

You should watch the movies for yourself, especially again in preparation for the third film Bill & Ted Face The Music. I don’t think I would’ve enjoyed the latest installment as much had I not. They’re just goofy. They’re fun, kindhearted movies with an incredibly endearing cast, and it just felt good to laugh?

There’s this witch hunt that I understand about finding problematic stuff in our culture, and sometimes we find something meaty and productive, but right now, that’s mostly not the case. Take, for instance, this insane headline:

Keanu Reeves says he didn’t know ‘The Matrix’ was a transgender allegory but thinks it’s ‘cool.’

This ‘article’ is a take in response to a take in response to an interpretation of a 21-year-old movie. How deep down into the rabbit hole are we willing to go? What’s the point?

For a better recap of the first two films than I can provide, here’s one from YouTube veterans Red Letter Media:

About 23 minutes in, Red Letter Media host Mike Stokalas expresses his disappointment in the “Princess storyline,” a subplot that spans all three films where Bill & Ted court(?) and marry medieval princesses who later join their band Wyld Stallyns. Here Mike uses a self-coined term The Not-Gays which is a term I will be stealing and can be defined as:

“The Not-Gays is a theory created by Mike Stokalas in which filmmakers shove a pointless romantic love interest out of the needless fear the audience will otherwise think the protagonist is gay.

The princesses are not quite Distaff Counterparts in that Alvin and the Chipmunks vs. Chipettes sort of way, but the criticism stands. Thankfully I can report that the codependent relationship dynamic between Bill & Ted is addressed in therapy, and their wives are given more substantial roles, even if it’s a time-traveling side quest we don’t see. The cool thing about making your sequel 25 years after the previous one is that you can gain some perspective and can textually improve your characters. Bill & Ted are beacons of inept but fervent optimism and kindness. Their slogan is literally “Be Excellent To Each Other.” I prefer all of this effort to investigate the nuance, and the emo of it all than the more dismissive “can’t wear skinny jeans cause my nuts don’t fit.”

Face The Music was never going to be the most egregious extension of the franchise. That title belongs to the show that got Bill & Ted literally canceled in 2013.

Dang, it already happened.

Universal Studios’ Halloween Horror Nights put on a Bill & Ted-themed show in both Hollywood and Orlando. Somehow, the show (at least in Hollywood) featured an unlicensed Superman who becomes gay after being sprinkled with fairy dust, much to the dismay of Bill & Ted. This six-year-old Guardian article was all I could find on the matter, but it’s pretty damn gross.

Listen, the Obama Administration was a different time.

Vice blogger Jamie Lee Curtis Taete was among the first to highlight the bizarre nature of the Halloween show, in which Bill and Ted embarked on a pop culture reference-ridden trip to the Land of Oz, with their return home dependent on killing four witches.

"Superman joins Bill and Ted on their witch-killing quest," wrote Taete in a highly critical review which has been cited as a major factor in the show's cancellation. "Bill and Ted are pretty psyched about that because, y'know, he's Superman and he's really useful to have on your side in a battle against evil witches. But then, uh oh, a witch accidentally sprinkles Superman with fairy dust, turning him gay.

"After becoming gay, Superman's voice and posture changes. His lips purse, his toes point inward, and his wrists become limp. His new voice sounds like a homophobic uncle doing a drunken impression of Richard Simmons, complete with lisps and frequent use of the word 'Faaaaaaabulous!'

"Bill and Ted, understandably, are bummed. Their initial excitement at having Superman with them on their quest turns to disappointment as, obviously, now that Superman is gay, he is not going to be of any use to them. Then, because Superman is now gay, he minces over to Bill and Ted, blows kisses at them, and slaps Ted on the ass. As he does this, Bill and Ted say 'Awwww dude!' with disgusted voices.

"After a few more attempts at molesting Bill and Ted, Superman ends up aboard the Starship Enterprise, where he runs into Superman villain General Zod. General Zod tells Superman to get on his knees. Because Superman is now gay, he assumes this is an invitation to give Zod oral sex. 'Finally!' he squeals."

A statement issued by the theme park said: "After thoughtful consideration, Universal Studios Hollywood has made the decision to discontinue production of the Halloween Horror Nights' 'Bill & Ted' show for the remainder of its limited run."

That’s perpetuating homophobia.

3

It should be underscored that I was extremely enthused by Bill & Ted Face The Music. I gave it four and a half out of five stars on Letterboxd. I think it was an impossible task to reboot a goofy faux-metal skater bro sci-fi franchise from the late 80s and early 90s for 2020. Unlike other new releases like The King of Staten Island and the upcoming Mulan or the unmentionable New Mutants, Bill & Ted Face The Music is currently out in theaters if you feel safe and available to outright own digitally for $25 day of release. This is the way to do it. Congrats Bill & Ted for being the new gold standard of modern movie viewing. I loved watching Excellent Adventure and (to be honest) 3/4ths of Bogus Journey last night. I loved, even more, waking up to a fresh pot of coffee, that final act of Bogus Journey, and a brand new sequel 29 years later. It hasn’t been that long a wait for me, not being 29 and all, but the film took impressive lengths to modernize it not just for nostalgia-brained millennial hipsters like me, but the Gen Z kids too.

Apart from the film centering around washed-up musicians Bill and Ted answering their prophetic call to finally write “the perfect song that will unite the world,” their daughters are their biggest fans, even bigger general music fans, and wish for them to succeed in this impossible endeavor too. So they also go on a rollicking time-travel adventure, picking up artists like Jimi Hendrix to contribute to the perfect Wyld Stallyns song, but realizing they’d need to recruit Louis Armstrong to get Jimi on board. The film credits mainly black artists and musicians who paved the way for the metalhead rock & roll we associate with such whiteness.

I go into more detail about this baton-passing nostalgic-fueled reboot trend in a paid-subscriber only piece here.

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Kid Cudi is plucked from history along with Babe Ruth and Jesus Christ, but like Jesus and Babe, Cudi, for whatever reason, doesn’t get to sing or rap or even hum in Face The Music. He’s positioned as one of the few characters who understand the multi-dimensional circumstances of the plot, and he’s demoted to Wyld Stallyns hypeman. Here lies my harshest criticism of the film: the end credits.

It’s not just that the film ends with the triumphant, climactic song “Face The Music” in a movie I wouldn’t mind stretching beyond its tight 91-minute runtime. My issue is that, when we cut to black, we’re given a quarantine-reeked closing credit sequence compiled by iPhone videos of people’ jamming out,’ scored by jarringly different, corporate sounding alt-pop compared to the multi-century-spanning symphony we heard moments ago.

It felt tone-deaf to spend so much of the film drawing the lineage of black influence in rock, and even going so far as to induct someone like Kid Cudi into historical music canon (appropriately, especially in a film about rock!) by cutting to a bright pop song from the… Cold War Kids. It reeks of studio fuckery, and it’s disappointing. As if as soon as someone else was handed the aux cord for the movie, it all just goes staggering NBC and limp.

It’s only too fitting that the end credits roll with Weezer, a band who has quite literally spent the last twenty-five years trying to recapture 90s magic in a world that as moved way past it. In fairness, this new song “Beginning of the End” isn’t their worst late-career work. But Rivers buddy, we’re listening to Billie Eilish and Juice Wrld now while Weezer regurgitates tired formulas and trite gimmicks and even as one of their biggest ex-fans, I don’t know who it’s for anymore. Apart from perhaps a speed-dial-like-relationship with those in charge of studio fuckery.

My point being: listen to the kids, man. Always. This Kurt Cobain-sampled Kids See Ghosts song is the true evolution of rock & roll, a call for hope and adversity in the face of self-defeat and gloom. Something like this is how you’d logically end Bill & Ted Face The Music.

Big hopes for Kid Cudi’s Netflix series EnterGalactic set for release someday.

4

‘Math Girl’ Got Mocked for Questioning the Origins of Math, But Now She’s a Hero

Strange things are afoot at the Circle K. Things feel less real because of how easily they can be questioned. There used to be that saying “there’s no such thing as a dumb question,” but then Twitter happened. When things like art are highly-anticipated and “long overdue,” artists like Cudi are pushed to a creative breaking point exasperated by cultural and Internet disdain for honesty and nuanced mental health discussion. It’s just sort of a bummer, you know? Like being told you’re gifted and destined for greatness, and then something like 2020 drags you through it. I’m often grateful I’m not famous, and the pressures now are indeed just in my head. You have eternity to be dead, so just wait.

Sleek, heavily treaded rock is exhausted, not dead, but it doesn’t have to be. It merely needs to embrace its roots, understand that music can indeed unite the world, but that doesn’t mean throwing a Lil Wayne feature on your irony-sanitized pop song about partying. It requires innovation, and while it was heartening to see an innovative approach to music history in Face The Music, it does fall short of really hitting it out of the park.

I’m told to look on the bright side of things, and there are many. An excellent sci-fi movie about rock music, death, time-travel, relationships, and a protagonist who eats hot Cheetos is a-ok in my book. It’s been playing a second time in the background now. It’s still hilarious. It feels good to laugh, even if that’s a feeling and feelings are gay.

Bill & Ted Face The Music is in select theaters and on-demand now.

Tyler Scruggs is a writer, musician, and millennial swashbuckler navigating the digital frontier through internet content like this and love songs for your Zune. He brews his own coffee now and doesn’t feel it’s safe enough to go to the movies as much as he might like.

Feel free to validate him on Twitter (@TylerScruggs), Instagram (@Scruggernaut), and YouTube.

If you’d like to directly and meaningfully support the continuation of my writing and work, consider subscribing to unlock more journalism, music demos, interviews, and more.

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It’s hard to adequately care about movies or movie theaters dying when about 1000 Americans are dying every day of COVID-19. Theaters have been on the decline for years, with price inflation and better home entertainment options making trips to the movies harder to justify. That’s led to major studio event films, 40% of which are from Disney, becoming the only actual draw for crowds, except for a few.

Christopher Nolan’s much-anticipated 70mm film-shot blockbuster Tenet is playing in IMAX right now 15 minutes from me. Cinema is not dead yet, and neither am I. While I want to see it very badly and reviews are pouring in (I really don’t like FOMO) like I said, about 1000 Americans are dying every day because of people prioritizing their personal desires and FOMO over collective need. I’m not going to pretend to know all the details and livelihoods at stake for Tenet’s release or shame patrons for doing something fun but risky, and maybe IMAX theaters won’t be a thing in 2021. Still, I can also internalize the newfound peace in not giving a single shit.

Don’t you just love the free market?

Independent cinema and comedies, or most movies that don’t necessitate 3D glasses and the most massive screen possible, were the first to go streaming. They’ve more or less found new homes in services like Netflix, Hulu (owned by Disney), Amazon Prime, etc. Is this ultimately good for the movie or experience? Who’s to say. If you like a video when you watch it however you watched it, who cares? Who cares if Mulan is available on Disney+ for $30? Are you a parent with children begging to see Mulan? Based on my demographic analytics, that’s unlikely. You’re more likely just a nerd.

It looks like this cringy movie theater employee cares, though, and you should too.

“Scorsese fired the first shot” in that tweet caption probably was meant about Martin Scorsese claiming Marvel superhero movies ‘aren’t cinema.’ It could equally refer to Scorsese producing and releasing his three-and-a-half-hour mobster epic The Irishman through Netflix. If Irishman got Oscar attention and a Criterion Collection physical release, does it matter that most theaters didn’t get to play it?

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Speaking of playing, Fortnite creator Epic Games and Apple are full-on at war right now. Apple charges a 30% fee on all in-app transactions on their devices. It’s why you can’t buy Audible credits on your iPhone or subscribe to Spotify without a computer or web browser. Many believe this fee is too high given the market share Apple holds on people’s devices.

I’m not gonna take a side because I’m trying to make rent and can’t care, but I do appreciate that Apple over Google is tight on their device security and user privacy. This is a story to keep an eye on, though, as it will likely affect e-commerce forever.

Since Quarantine began in March, studios and theaters have been scrambling to come up with solutions to all this. Universal Studios fired the first shot by releasing Trolls: World Tour as a $20 rental the same day it was meant to hit theaters. They then said that it would be policy permanently; whenever a Universal Studios movie hits theaters, it will be available to rent the same day (this has now been extended to 14 days after they and AMC made a deal).

The same studio was behind The King of Staten Island, which is one of the few 2020 movies I wrote about, but my piece was mostly about its release model and how I was not too fond of it even though I liked the film itself.

Clearly, The King of Staten Island was meant for theaters, and it's a bummer because comedies are fun to watch with groups of people. But like, even with it hitting VOD, there are still unnecessary hurdles to watch this movie akin to getting dressed and getting in your car to go to the theater. You have to pick *this movie* out of *the entirety of internet, art, and media*, pay the equivalent of *two months of Netflix* to see it as many times as you want for two days, and then either wait for it to hit a streaming service you might already pay for or wait for the opportunity to pay a similar amount to arbitrarily own it in some cloud service that reserves the right to take away that license at any time.

If that sounds stupid, it's because it is, but it might be the future of cinema. Absolutely nobody is going to rent a digital copy of The King of Staten Island a second time the way somebody would pay to see Pineapple Express twice in a movie theater. Heck, I'm only renting it right now at $20 because there's currently a scarcity of new films in 2020, and I'm sure many others will. I wanted to type all that out to underscore the fact that this isn't a sustainable norm, even and especially for the demographic of a film like this. If you have 3 kids, you can justify a $20 children's film rental better because that's way cheaper than a trip to the movies, whereas $20 is an expensive solo movie ticket, and y'know I cannot really blame you if you don't feel like taking the 2 hour and 17-minute break from YouTube and video games necessary to see The King of Staten Island, and even as someone who enjoyed the movie, I can't really muster up a reason to see this film with any sense of urgency.

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Just in case you’re normal and don’t care about these things; let’s recap how someone watches and possesses movies in 2020:

1. You own the movie on a disc. For some reason, we still manufacture DVDs, Blu-Rays, and UltraHD 4K Blu-Rays. Maybe it’s a good reason. You pay between $20-$30 for a disc you keep forever, and they usually include a digital copy, which you could import into…

2. Video On Demand services. This is iTunes (now basically Apple TV+), Google Play, VUDU, Amazon Prime Video, friggin FandangoNow whatever that is… these are services that sell you digital licenses of movies they themselves do not own. Sometimes they’re $20 but can be as low as like, $5, and you keep the film so long as that digital service retains the right to license you that movie.

   To compete with Netflix which accounts for 15% of all internet traffic (all of YouTube is ~ 7%), some of these VOD services will have free streaming content (or ‘free’ in the sense that it comes with your yearly Amazon Prime taxes—I mean, subscription). This is why you see movies for sale/rent alongside films you can stream for free.

   If it’s not original content, the streaming service doesn’t own it. HBO Max, which is owned by TimeWarner/Warner Bros., can’t even keep its own content like Batman or Harry Potter on their service because it’s getting licensed out to more profitable platforms.

3. Original Streaming Content. This is the big kahuna right now, obviously, with Netflix Originals and Amazon Studios being the most prominent players in this. They make and acquire new movies and TV shows that get small if any theatrical run, no physical discs, and no other legal way to purchase or own the content unless you’re a current subscriber.

   Amazon will indeed sell & mail you a plastic disc of their movies in eco-unfriendly packaging should you order one, however.

   Apple is getting into this game actively with Apple TV+. Huge names are making original content that can only be viewed there. You can’t even purchase their movies or TV shows on their iTunes storefront. You either need to pay $5.99 a month or buy a new Apple device and get a year of the service free. Otherwise, you have no way of watching.

4. Piracy. You Wouldn’t Download a Car, Would You?

ENTER: DISNEY+

Disney is no stranger to vaulting and locking out access to their movies. This was a regular practice of theirs in the physical world for a long time. They’ve even taken part in hostage situations where they’ll remove, say, The Lion King (1994) from iTunes in negotiations with Apple, halting sales and deleting it from everyone’s cloud library who paid for the film whenever they did until the giants stop crying.

For a while, you couldn’t get Disney movies on blu-ray from Amazon.

Now that D+ is a huge success, as of a few weeks ago, they’re potentially getting out of the 4K Blu-Ray game altogether. What kind of power do you think they have over the knee-capped movie theater industry? What if you can no longer watch Disney movies in 4K without a Disney+ subscription?

These are the terms set for Mulan (2020). In place of a theatrical run, Mulan will be a Disney+ exclusive for a one-time $30 additional charge (about a third of a yearly subscription). It will appear like Hamilton or Artemis Fowl (which were also new, but free) in the Disney+ library, and it’s yours to stream…so long as you’re a Disney+ subscriber. Maybe you see the issue here already.

It’s somehow a worse deal than The King of Staten Island, which by the way, is available for $20 on Blu-ray now. What’s a 30% price hike on a $20 rental anyway? What’s $7.99 a month times the rest of my life?

Disney is creating a new normal in merging studio with distributor. While Spotify and Epic Games publicly squabble with Apple over their 30% distributor/maintenance tax, Disney knows damn well all they have to do is charge customers the difference upfront. Thus, creating a new consumer habit where instead of digging through a Blockbuster or digital storefront for movies, it’s a device-agnostic home for all your Disney needs.

As far as the future of theaters goes, it’s pretty much entirely in Disney’s hands now. AMC, Regal, Landmark Cinemas are all verging bankruptcy, and convincing customers back right now is a tough, potentially deadly sale.

It gets worse, though.

Anti-trust laws in the United States are deteriorating in front of us. A law from the 1940s that has prevented studios from directly being their own competition-crushing distributors called the Paramount Consent Decrees was terminated earlier this month with federal judge Analisa Torres siding with Trump’s Justice Department in a ruling, saying:

“None of the internet streaming companies—Netflix, Amazon, Apple and others—that produce and distribute movies are subject to the Decrees,” she wrote. “Thus, the remaining Defendants [traditional studios] are subject to legal constraints that do not apply to their competitors.” She wrote that distributors who were not subject to the decrees have “shown no propensity to acquire major movie theater circuits or engage in the type of collusive practices the Decrees targeted.”

Uhm, ok, boomer.

I probably won’t go to court over all this because there are so many other things to care about, but when you spot me at Amazon Theatres seeing Transformers 5: Planet of the Earth written by no one, don’t blame me or say I didn’t warn ya. We’re in the free market, ba-by!

Anyways, this is one of the things making me depressed lately. Talk to you later.

Tyler Scruggs is a writer, musician, and millennial swashbuckler navigating the digital frontier through internet content like this and love songs for your Zune. He brews his own coffee now and doesn’t feel it’s safe enough to go to the movies as much as he might like.

Feel free to validate him on Twitter (@TylerScruggs), Instagram (@Scruggernaut), and YouTube.

If you’d like to directly and meaningfully support the continuation of my writing and work, consider subscribing to unlock more journalism, music demos, interviews, and more.

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Hey there good morning,

^ I wrote that this morning. Good afternoon.

At the beginning of the year, I was angry but hopeful. I saw my enrollment in college pointless, and my multiple serving jobs insufficient to get my head above water. My Patreon is small but encouraging. I feel myself becoming increasingly aware of my output, my value, and how to act online with intention. This required a lot of logging off.

Lately, I’ve been able to focus on my craft instead of survival. This has meant more time spent writing and making music and less time working minimum wage to pay down maxed-out credit cards enough to make the Apple Pay function. That’s meant more output from me than average, but it still feels less than what’s possible.

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As Summer and the collective sense of quarantine comes to an end, I wonder how I can apply the internal lessons learned from the pandemic about power, truth, self-governance, and democracy’s fragility. I’m terrified of going back to normal.

I’m openly inquiring with you, the Internet, as to how to move forward effectively and progressively. What does it take to keep from gentrifying your mind, or tear down the parks and libraries in our hearts? What does it matter that even in the face of devastation, we persist with our worst behaviors?

How To Do Nothing has been an intensely formidable book for me that I’ll keep quoting for a while so you might as well read it, but I love this bit about productivity about being more than merely the new things we produce:

“Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.” 

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek says working musicians may no longer be able to release music only “once every three to four years.”

This stuff grinds my gears:

What is required from successful musicians, Ek insisted, is a deeper, more consistent, and prolonged commitment than in the past. “The artists today that are making it realize that it’s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans. It is about putting the work in, about the storytelling around the album, and about keeping a continuous dialogue with your fans.”

I see the point of what he’s saying; music is now sort of a byproduct of a broader brand and artistic image. I think I’m working on that (along with the music, and the production, and the marketing…) But like, every independent artist release is a ‘surprise drop’ in an industry and on a platform where 0 people may organically discover you. I have no means to strike a deal for playlist placement on their various genre mixes. All of my reach and marketing come more or less solely from me, which I find very annoying when you’re Tyler Scruggs, and your music product is also named Tyler Scruggs. You win this round, Owl City.

Maybe I should just go back to school in the fall? Eeep! Idk. America’s Science Teacher Hank Green with more on that:

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Here’s a little wrap-up of what I’ve put out this month. Thank you for paying attention.

• July 2nd - “New Trash Endeavors” my new song!!

A gigantic thank you to everyone who is streaming my music on Spotify and Apple Music. It’s a small milestone, but I crossed 50 monthly listeners on Spotify, and I’m just stoked to get those gears moving after so long. $0 marketing budget Thanks for streaming and putting my songs on playlists where others listen. My music currently has a $0 budget, so every little thing you do helps!

You can find it everywhere here.

• July 11th - Some marketing company sent me the first season of Hulu’s new show Love, Victor, and instead of a review or gushy Instagram posts like they wanted, I wrote a 3500 personal essay instead. Check out: On Sin, Pride, and Hulu’s Love Victor

• July 14th - “Broken Mirror” is one of a few new songs I’m working on, and as a newsletter supporter, you can follow the process through the private podcast feed. From the first live band recording five years ago to 2020’s drum, bass, and guitar tracking. 

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• July 16th - Podcast exclusive full interview with Bo Burnham and Elsie Fisher @ 2018 Atlanta Film Festival

In 2018, I interviewed comedian, writer, and director Bo Burnham and actress Elsie Fisher shortly before the Atlanta Film Festival premiere of Eighth Grade in 2018. I’ve never shared the audio from that interview, and I have more things like this if it’s something folks are interested in hearing.

• July 17th - “Broken Mirror” update #4 - more exclusive song tracking in the private podcast! Check it out!

• July 22nd - Re-Imagining Police is an op-ed I wrote for ProjectQ Atlanta. You can read the whole thing here. This is my favorite part.

Assuming that police killings are inevitable is defeatist, unproductive thinking. We need to widen our imagination to what’s possible. The militarization of the police, especially in contrast to healthcare workers in the pandemic, is why "Defund the Police" makes so much sense. You never hear about cops raising money for tear gas the way public school teachers collect box tops for basic school supplies. 

Once it’s believed that there’s no acceptable ratio of citizens killed by police in a civilized world, the paradigm shifts. If we wish to live in a world of radical nonviolence, we must imagine a world without police brutality or mass incarceration and shape it with input from the people it affects.

• July 28th - At a thrift store last week, I found a 64-page children’s biography from 2001 called Latinos in the Limelight: Jeff Bezos, and I ended up learning a lot. I read the whole thing on Twitch, and someone was kind enough to watch me get my mind blown by the biographical facts about the world’s richest and most possibly Latino man Jeff Bezos. You can find the raw 3-hour stream there, but I’m putting the highlights on YouTube eventually.

• July 29th - I did another spontaneous livestream on YouTube to see how that felt. I pulled up an article of the 2020 Emmy nominations and spent half an hour talking about what I thought of the nominations. I need to add music to these streams and possibly fix the sound & cam set up, but it felt good to exercise being on Live. It might be a vital skill pretty soon.

• July 31st - “Feeling Profound (On T.V.)” is not a particularly new song of mine, but it’ll be the last time I use a parenthetical in a song title, haha. It’s been so stressful getting the Thomas CW remix back on streaming. It’s one of my most popular uploads, but all the old links are dead, it’s greyed out in playlists it used to be in, and it’s so friggin’ frustrating. There’s this weird rule regarding parentheticals in song titles when you have more than one. The song had to be uploaded as “Feeling Profound (On T.V.) [Thomas CW Remix],” but it was stuck in Spotify’s database as the incorrect “Feeling Profound (On T.V.) (Thomas CW Remix),” sans brackets. It’s all fixed now, and it has the remastered file and better album art, but golly, it was such a journey email-arguing to get it fixed. Do me a favor and add it to a playlist of yours somewhere?

I’ll see y’all in August. Be excellent to each other.

Tyler Scruggs is a writer, musician, and millennial swashbuckler navigating the digital frontier through internet content like this and love songs for your Zune. He brews his own coffee now and doesn’t feel it’s safe enough to go to the movies as much as he might like.

Feel free to validate him on Twitter (@TylerScruggs), Instagram (@Scruggernaut), and YouTube.

If you’d like to directly and meaningfully support the continuation of my writing and work, consider subscribing to unlock more journalism, music demos, interviews, and more.

Subscribe now

Hey there. Happy Pride, I guess? 

Kinda slept through that one this year. How are you doing? I know it’s been a minute; I’ve been learning how to take care of myself. This is piece is long (thank you very much for taking the time) and has a few rabbit holes, but I hear that’s part of why some like my stuff. 

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Ok, let’s get into it:

1.

I’ve been reading this book called How To Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. It explains how making time to do nothing, or intentionally carving time for unproductive activities is a politically conscious endeavor and itself an act of resistance in the attention economy in which we live. In a world where social media feeds and goofy influencers with blogs and music are constantly vying for your ears and eyeballs, it falls upon you, ultimately, the individual, to prioritize one’s own health and wellbeing in a rapidly accelerating media and economic landscape that may not have those things in mind for you. Or for humans in general or the planet, even. Don’t feel singled out.

There’s this concept in the book about positive liberty (or freedom) versus negative liberty. Negative liberty is the freedom not to be bothered by external people or forces, like your government, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc. Whereas positive liberty is the freedom to affect change in the world around you and act upon your free will. It's the freedom to have a blog online or build a church. This freedom is what most are talking about when we talk about freedom from government oppression, especially in America, where it mostly feels like we’re free. Although we realize increasingly lately, there’s plenty of negative liberty violations that exist in America, too. 

Sure, you may not live under direct authoritarian rule (for now), but are you truly free to change your circumstances or even your community? To remain alive in America necessitates participation in capitalism. Again, you may not be locked in a bunker, but to reach the positive liberty to change the world around you, right now, you need a lot of capital in the form of money, attention, or resources, but especially the time to think through and execute those things.

In other words, we live in a society.

When every moment of your life is optimized to maximize productivity and capital (or at minimum survive), combined with a social climate that necessitates hot takes and pleads for reactionary opinion to continue other businesses’ ability to survive; stopping to smell the roses, fall in love, responsibly address a global pandemic, or even think critically doesn’t just seem frivolous, it’s a threat to your lifelines -- your personal securities and positive freedoms come under threat. 

2.

But like freedom, there’s a two-sided coin to pride. Did you know that pride is the deadliest of the seven deadly sins in Christianity and Judaism? The Latin word superbia means the perversion of faculties that make humans god-like such as dignity and holiness or the Greek ὕβρις meaning hubris or futility. It’s the sin that begets other sins, so they say.

Wikipedia’s Seven Deadly Sins article continues (check the sources if you care that much):

 In even more destructive cases, it is irrationally believing that one is essentially and necessarily better, superior, or more important than others, failing to acknowledge the accomplishments of others, and excessive admiration of the personal image or self (especially forgetting one's own lack of divinity, and refusing to acknowledge one's own limits, faults, or wrongs as a human being).

In more healthy forms, pride is a content sense of attachment to one’s own or another’s choices and actions, or towards a whole group of people, and is a product of praise, independent self-reflection, and a fulfilled feeling of belonging.

When you’re part of a marginalized or minority group, praise and a fulfilled feeling of belonging can be scarce. If the media available that you consume offers that praise or sense of belonging you may not be experiencing in your immediate community, especially offline, those resources can end up proving vital.

However, if we as individuals fail to carve out time and space for independent self-reflection, the one aspect of pride an external community can’t really provide, we can fall victim to that sinful hubris kind of pride, especially in the un-human attention-sucking capitalist hell world we're in. It’s easier than ever to self-aggrandize, boast over one’s own life, looks and accomplishments, and the immediate reward is that it makes surviving easier for some, and in effect not for others.

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3.

Anyway, Love, Simon is a 2018 film directed by Greg Berlanti, written by Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger, and is based on the young adult novel Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertallie. It stars Nick Robinson as Simon Spier, a closeted gay high school boy who is forced to balance his friends, his family, and the blackmailer threatening to out him to the entire school, while simultaneously attempting to discover the identity of the anonymous classmate with whom he has fallen in love online.

It went on to be a mainstream box office success, has a pretty great soundtrack, and was actually the first film by a major studio to focus on a gay teen romance. It took until 2018 for that to happen. And while it’s definitely a decent and mostly harmless movie, it’s awfully… heteronormative; in sociology, meaning denoting or relating to a world view that promotes heterosexuality as the normal or preferred sexual orientation.

Simon is deeply ashamed of being gay, even with liberal accepting parents, mostly because of how perceptions of him would change in his community. It’s not just his family; it’s his friends, school faculty, as well as everyone else. When Simon’s hot dad makes homophobic remarks and criticizes femininity, it doesn’t foster an environment for self-exploration as a son of what, through our culture and media, is perceived to be gay or feminine. 

Because being gay and coming out are declarative, permanent assertions of one’s fluid identity and those assertions and freedoms appear easier to those in power or a majority class because everything appears easier for those in power or part of a majority class. Simon, rejecting the queer and flamboyant media representation of homosexuality, repeats over and over that he just wants to be normal. Coming out and being known publically as gay is a threat to that, and so are its cultural signifiers, be it music, clothing, or behavior. The drama of the film hinges on this reality.

Love, Simon puts all of the weight of femininity, minority identity, and non-conforming gender expression on Ethan, the other gay kid at school who is black, feminine, and has been out since he was 16 (but everyone knew anyway). He’s bullied and mocked at school, which Simon witnesses, but the behavior and the fear of being “too gay” drove Simon away from Ethan the entire film.

We see the problem here already, right? The 2018 discourse has been had, but the issue is simple; when you make your white, cis male, upper-middle-class protagonist’s goal to be normal, it’s problematic to epitomize the opposite of that with a feminine black queer person. Simon ends up with a man of color at the end, which somewhat dodges the racial elements, but really just makes the femmephobia that much more apparent.

The goal of the film becomes not to upset the oppressive powers that made Simon define his sexuality as “not normal,” it’s to find a way to integrate and accommodate one’s queer identity in a heteronormative world.

Contrast that Whitney Houston scene in Love, Simon with this one from 500 Days of Summer (2007). It’s somehow way gayer and full of positive, heterosexual, pride. It’s a scene where all of society literally celebrates with Joseph Gordon-Levitt through camp, music, and dance, all to validate the love he has for Zooey Deschanel.

Media depictions of queerness and sexual exploration, especially in big-budget studio films, force the essentialization of lived experience for the consumption of its oppressive class -- not dissimilar from pretty much every other progressive social concept. You don’t need to look much further for examples than The Help or Green Book. If films are an empathy machine, according to Roger Ebert, then it’s important that the people being represented in the film feel represented by the work, since it's their issues being highlighted. This isn’t an easy thing to accomplish, but it’s not impossible. The priority can’t be to appease the people consciously or unconsciously causing the harm. That doesn’t make any sense.

However, when you’re vying for Academy Awards and box office success in place of reflecting minorities’ lived experiences or their current pressing needs, how exactly can capitalism, homophobia, religious bigotry, or White Supremacy step out… Love, Simon’s way? Does it matter when Jennifer Garner tells you that you’re loved?

4.

When The Walt Disney Company bought 20th Century Fox (Love, Simon’s original studio) last year, they soon announced spin-off shows based on Fox properties for their then-upcoming Disney+ streaming services. However, both Love, Victor (which I’m getting to, thanks for sticking with me) and the similarly queer minority-led reinterpretation of High Fidelity, which debuted earlier this year (I highly recommend it), moved from Disney+ to Hulu, claiming the themes were too adult-oriented for the squeaky clean Disney brand.

This upset a lot of people, with the implication being that a half-hour dramedy centered around a Latino kid in high school trying to figure out if he’s gay or not shouldn’t be considered an adult-oriented theme. Upon watching the series, which I did spend ten half-hours doing a few weeks ago, there are some non-sexual reasons that make Love, Victor a Hulu brand, and not a Disney brand. I’d be remised though not to bring up the fact that the Disney+ original series High School Musical The Musical: The Series (yes, it’s called that) indeed feature a gay romance between teens. But one thing I’m not doing in 2020 is coming to Disney’s defense for every little thing just because Twitter is mad. They have a right to be mad; everyone has a right to be mad in 2020.

In summary, Love, Victor is about a teenager named Victor whose family moves to Atlanta from Texas for dramatic reasons that definitely unfold over the subsequent ten episodes. He has crushes on both guys and girls. Still, because of his parents’ religious beliefs and the destabilization his family is feeling in general from moving in the first place, he remains closeted. It turns out that Victor is starting at the same high school Simon Spier graduated from and who has since become something of a local legend. The entire first season is centered around a melodramatic set of love triangles and secrets. And, in lieu of a personality, Victor is left with the responsibility of finding his way in the world while rocking the boat him, his classmates, and his family are in as little as possible.

Frustrated Victor then vents to the only person he can, which for whatever reason is Simon himself over an Instagram DM rant about how Simon had the “perfect life” and the “perfect parents” that accepted his sexuality without knowing the interpersonal events we as the audience do.

5.

Now, I’m gonna spoil the first season of Love, Victor, the only season I’ll probably watch of this show, and tell you what I liked about its finale, but I need you to not be a giant baby about it. K? I know I’m picking apart the themes of this dumb TV show. I’m the one writing 3000 words that I think are important on it so that you kinda don’t have to watch this show. I don’t think it’s well written, directed, or acted either. These thematic inconsistencies and underhanded character developments are not ultimately worth your time, even under quarantine. That doesn’t mean there isn’t something to take away from it.

Anyway, Victor spends the entire first season in a straight relationship with a girl he likes, but the tension snaps when he shamefully and instinctively kisses his male crush Benji and spends the rest of the season regretting it. He even travels to New York City to get away from it all, where Simon and his boyfriend Bram move to after the events of Love, Simon, to find his identity in the LGBTQIA+ umbrella. Instead, Victor meets Simon’s boyfriend (again, named Bram) and his other friends while Simon is actually busy somewhere, but it’s okay cause all his friends have different backgrounds themselves and advice to give Victor.

Well, it turns out all of the advice Simon gave to Victor the whole season was an amalgamation of advice he acquired and shared with the help from his queer, femme friends of color, with whom Simon has shared all of Victor’s life details.

With Victor mortified, he and Simon finally meet so Simon can explain himself. It’s the best three minutes of the series, and here it is so you can watch it and maybe feel something.

The entire season is Victor wrestling with not just what he wants, but how he can get what he wants — who’s affected in the pursuit of what he wants, the consequences of coming out, and the understandable feeling that ‘gay’ doesn’t quite define who he is. The majority of the reason Victor is reluctant to come out to his parents is not just because he’s unsure himself, but because he’s conscientious of his extremely emotionally fragile family.

These are all worthy themes to explore, and there’s plenty of TV drama to be wrung out with this premise. So tell me:

Why the fuck does season one end with a cliffhanger in which Victor tells his parents “I’m Gay”? Cut to black, Love, Victor Season 2 coming 2022. How satisfying. You could chalk it up to impulse, but Victor spent most of the runtime aware of his impulses and resisting. Not only that, even though Victor does end up “with” Benji, he still breaks his girlfriend Mia’s heart. He still lied to her. Does that matter?

Is there not a better point you could make about identity and code-switching, or at least give Mia some autonomy to not get over it so quickly? They were together for like, 8 out 10 of the episodes! It’s something we’re supposed to be interested in all season long, even though the show is clearly being watched with the promise of underrepresented queer romance.

It’s literally queerbaiting, but it’s just to guarantee the existence and success of the eventual second season. So be sure to keep subscribed to Hulu for another year cause at some point you might find gay people on TV who are proud of being gay! They might even kiss! Keep paying attention to Hulu!!!

6.

This is a fact about me that I don’t often share online, but I’m half-Mexican. It's not something I often share because it's not usually relevant. That’s a privilege and a half, ain’t it? My grandparents immigrated from Mexico, settled a quarter of a mile north of the border in Arizona, and never left. Mexican-American culture was an environment I grew up around and was surrounded by. But I’m quite light-skinned and was often reminded of the fact (even within the family) so the culture never felt mine, even if my 23andMe said biologically otherwise.

My apparent whiteness superseded my actual ethnic background, which is something I kinda had to come to terms with, especially in regards to positioning myself and my identity online in the discourse. I’m not interested in speaking for Mexican-Americans because they’re not a monolith, and I especially don’t speak for them. The message either way is still to Abolish ICE, though. My grandparents didn’t speak Spanish to me even though I called them Nana and Tata, and everyone in my family is devoutly Catholic. Hell, Catholicism vs Protestant Christianity was the big controversial topic in my family.

I deeply empathize with both Simon and Victor. I know I look like Simon. I relate to him when he laments over what he’s willing to identify. The absurd internal questions like whether it’s gay to wear a scarf or simply be Panic! At The Disco fan. I get it, and it’s incredibly heartening to see part of an experience I went through play out on the big screen in something other than an explicit tragedy. Gotta love that empathy machine.

But I don’t have bleeding blue liberal parents or a middle-class income. My family looked a lot more like Victor’s. Even more, I empathize with his unwillingness to rock the boat or stoke controversy within a fragile family. I didn’t have a coming out story. I was outed by a cousin I trusted, and by the evening my Tata was buried, and the extended family knew everything before I could say a word -- before I could even find the words for how I felt and still feel. It’s stupid to expect a movie or a television show to process that pain for me and turn it into pride.

These queer TV shows and movies do such a great job highlighting the shame that comes from being closeted. They tease you with the promise of a satisfying and realistic queer love formula that is so rarely displayed that conversely, heterosexuals can simply point to any romantic comedy for validation. What more straight pride could anyone sensibly ask for? In what way do domineering classes of people need a collective sense of pride? Why? And why do I always have to wait for Season 2?

No time is made in Love, Victor in all its ten episodes for independent self-reflection. Admittedly, it doesn’t often make great television. The Attention Economy wants us to do it as little as possible because it gets in the way of us buying its hollow attempts at validation. Chosen queer families like Simon’s and like mine are important for that fulfilled sense of belonging. It doesn’t exist to address any of the systems that reinforce our bigoted environments. How could it? It’s a product of them.

…

All of the numerous crises we’ve witnessed this year has forced people and whole industries to independently self-reflect while under quarantine. In some ways, circumstances have massively accelerated in both just and horrifically unjust ways. During this time, the void that is left in a year with movies, concerts, communities, and Pride has individually affected me forever. I didn’t realize how much of my identity was contingent on what I cultivated; what I bought because I believed. It wasn’t until everything stopped did I realize how much and how hard I was actually running, and in no certain direction. I’m sure I have more personality than Simon or Victor, but by how much I’m not so sure anymore. Maybe we’re exactly the same. Perhaps I’m just being too prideful. I’m logging off.

Tyler Scruggs is a writer, musician, and millennial swashbuckler navigating the digital frontier through internet content like this and love songs for your Zune. He brews his own coffee now and doesn’t feel it’s safe enough to go to the movies as much as he might like.

Feel free to validate him on Twitter (@TylerScruggs), Instagram (@Scruggernaut), and YouTube.

If you’d like to directly and meaningfully support the continuation of my writing and work, consider becoming a subscriber to unlock more writing, music demos, interviews, and more.

The only thing more fun than New Music Friday to me is when I get to be a part of it.

My song "New Trash Endeavors" is streaming everywhere now. If you need links to your favorite streaming thing, I've got a few of the real popular ones here:

YouTube:

Spotify:

Apple Music

Google Play

If you would like to purchase the song, you can def use iTunes, Amazon, etc. But the best way to directly support is through BandCamp:

You can give $1 or more if you want and you can even download a .flac version if you wanna get audiophile on me.

Do you like to do remixes? Please email me t@tylerscruggs.com if you'd like the stems to this track. Remix away.

Subscribers! I'll be distributing free download codes soon. And, if you haven't yet be sure to check out the private podcast audio feed for the songs I have in the works.

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Anyway, I think that's it for now. Very happy with how this song turned out after working on it for so long.

Hope to hear from you soon,

Scruggs

Be sure to follow my movie diary on Letterboxd

First of all, I wanna make it emphatically clear that it's not pleasant to pay $20 for a 48hr rental. It feels unnatural, much like possessing optimism for a Pete Davidson vehicle. I'm fine with paying for digital content but let me own it. What, you want me to pay an additional $20 once you finally come around on letting me own the movie some months from now? You ultimately want the urgency and attention drawn to the movie when it hits. Still, you're disincentivizing viewers with an ultimately unfair deal when you're putting two paywalls behind the same content.

Clearly, The King of Staten Island was meant for theaters, and it's a bummer because comedies are fun to watch with groups of people. But like, even with it hitting VOD, there are still unnecessary hurdles to watch this movie akin to getting dressed and getting in your car to go to the theater. You have to pick *this movie* out of *the entirety of internet, art, and media*, pay the equivalent of *two months of Netflix* to see it as many times as you want for two days, and then either wait for it to hit a streaming service you might already pay for or wait for the opportunity to pay a similar amount to arbitrarily own it in some cloud service that reserves the right to take away that license at any time.

If that sounds stupid, it's because it is, but it might be the future of cinema. Absolutely nobody is going to rent a digital copy of The King of Staten Island a second time the way somebody would pay to see Pineapple Express twice in a movie theater. Heck, I'm only renting it right now at $20 because there's currently a scarcity of new films in 2020, and I'm sure many others will. I wanted to type all that out to underscore the fact that this isn't a sustainable norm, even and especially for the demographic of a film like this.

If you have 3 kids, you can justify a $20 children's film rental better because that's way cheaper than a trip to the movies, whereas $20 is an expensive solo movie ticket, and y'know I cannot really blame you if you don't feel like taking the 2 hour and 17-minute break from YouTube and video games necessary to see The King of Staten Island, and even as someone who enjoyed the movie, I can't really muster up a reason to see this film with any sense of urgency.

And I like Judd Apatow movies! Even though they might be overlong and meandering, often mistaking meaningless plot detours as 'slices of life'. The jokes are often just the greatest hits of an afternoon of improv exclamations from very funny people. Still, sometimes the dumb, ridiculous stuff comedians shout in these movies is really funny, and I like it. There's a reason why so many stupid quotes from these dumb movies ended up on tee shirts at Hot Topic in the late 2000s.

Had The King of Staten Island come out theatrically, would I recommend going to see it? I don't really know. It's a quality-looking film, I can tell you that. Had this movie been a Netflix original or something, I don't think it would've leaned into the darker and more grim color palate that it does. My unsubstantiated belief on this is that Netflix movies look weird and bright because they're more specifically designed to be viewed on mobile devices and not like, a vision being presented in theaters. The darker look in comparison to say Trainwreck or This Is 40 is probably meant to match the darker subject matter of the film, like Davidson's character; aimless 24-year-old tattoo artist Scott dealing with suicide ideation and the impact of his father's death, who died fighting a fire but is obviously based on Davidson's IRL grief.

When Scott is hanging out in the basement smoking pot with his friends, it feels akin to the scenes with Rogen and the cast of Knocked Up. The supporting characters similarly rounded and humorous, but in Staten Island, the gravity of the aimlessness is felt way more and acknowledged passionately by the forces in Scott's life that want to change.

Since Freaks and Geeks, Judd Apatow has had some hand the best and most intensely popular comedies of the last twenty years. The films he helms often carry some emotional heft, and this film is no different. In fact, it's probably the most dramatic and dark, but its most emotionally charged scenes feel random and unearned. Conflicts come off just as ridiculous as the antics that preceded them, so their resolutions don't equate to marked character growth.

Apatow films are all about stunted adults being thrust into adulthood, but at 24, Pete Davidson plays his youngest protagonist. More importantly, he's the first protagonist that has grown up with and has been directly influenced by a pop culture Apatow personally had a hand in, so it feels like something of a missed opportunity. It'd be kind of like Spielberg not acknowledging his role in the nerd culture celebrated in Ready Player One.

Scott is played as inept and depressed, but his criticisms of the world around him and their circumstances aren't directly invalidated nor entirely his fault. And while grief is processed and growth is made, it doesn't really amount to adulthood responsibility in the classic Judd Apatow sense. What's enough, it seems, is simply the capacity to continue after trauma.

Previously, Judd Apatow films were late coming-of-age blockbuster cushioned by frat humor. There's a lot to like in this movie (the cast is fantastic, even with Davidson's aggressive unlikability), and no one expects it to be a masterpiece. But there isn't enough to keep the memory of this film from expiring as quickly as the $20 2 day rental of it as opposed to say, a dorm room copy of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and I'm just saying that's not because of how it's being released.

The King of Staten Island - 3.5/5

Tyler Scruggs is a writer and musician living in Atlanta. When he’s not churning out internet content, he’s paying too much for coffee and buying movie tickets weeks in advance. Feel free to validate him on Twitter (@TylerScruggs), Instagram (@Scruggernaut), and YouTube.

If you’d like to directly and meaningfully support the continuation of my writing and work, consider becoming a Patreon subscriber at the single tier of $3 a month. Learn more at https://www.patreon.com/tylerscruggs

Viruses do not care if you’re a “fighter”. Illness doesn’t care if you’re strong or not. Viruses do not strategize against or target its victims.

They’re not something you can go to war with. Using that language is useless, and so is conceptualizing retail, restaurant, and independent delivery contractors essential workers as those on the “frontlines”.

That would imply that they’re volunteering their lives and safety for a cause bigger than themselves. But they’re not. They’re independent-contracting and gig working their individual and familial survival, and it hinges on big tech industry whims and decisions that do not consider their laborers and haven’t for a long time.

We have an opportunity to collectively agree on something. It’s been a minute. It’s not political, I promise you. It’s a fundamental value we hold and it used to be more self-evident. Do you value people, human lives, more than profits? Are all created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights? Yes or no.

Stand with striking workers today. Delete your food delivery apps. Don’t shop Amazon, Whole Foods, Instacart, or Target today.

Take the extra steps necessary to get what you need safely and remember that someone is doing that full time.

Have you ever been really hungry and drove through your city to pick up food, sit in traffic with it, walked up/down several flights of stairs with it, and wandered an apartment complex maze just to deliver that food you’ve been smelling for half an hour because it never belonged to you? Have you ever looked at a receipt for a meal more valuable than your bank account? Then get stiffed on a tip? That’s what gig working is and what it’s like for so many. Don’t do it anymore until these Americans and human beings earn what they deserve.

You were born in a crowded room.

Hey friend. It’s been at least six weeks since I’ve last written anything substantial which, not even joking a little bit, feels like two years. But you already knew that much. I’m sure if you’re reading this, you’ve likely since seen some combination of tweets or Facebook posts or Instagram stories. Some have been blips of joy and a few pleas for help. Mostly puns tho, so thanks for putting up with that. Many people I know and many don’t know had reached out and been able to help when I was at my worst, so thank you for that too.

I had a friend a while back give me the advice that I’ve been making often hasty decisions out of survival for far too long — reacting, not responding to the world around me. That wasn’t necessarily unwarranted. When you’re insecure about housing, about food, or your health, opportunities become binary. Fight-or-flight. Live-or-die.

Lately, there has been more to react to and more time to respond than ever. For years, I’ve been trying to keep from conflating my anxiety with my self-awareness. So badly I want to silence the small voice in the back of my head that says, “What about this? Did you consider this?” so frequently that when there’s nothing else to consider, it’s then up to me to take a stance.

Between January and March, I’ve been angry and hopeful. At least that’s how I’ve hoped to come off. Nothing in my life felt easier than harnessing my anger at all my endless streams. Though, I end up abstracting the challenging thoughts or tasks and instead of dealing with them healthily or even practically. Yes, I may have a better or more in-depth understanding of why surviving is so challenging. I might have more accurate coordinates to my place in this world. But where’s my time and attention best suited towards now?

Then the world slowed down a lot, and everyone else is asking similar questions themselves.

Prior to the global pandemic, I wasn’t doing too hot. I already set to move out of a room I was renting at the end of February without a clear idea of where I was going next. The bar I had been working at for a year was experiencing a deep, slow season, as it was along the Atlanta Beltline, and not enough people were out walking and brunching in the Winter to provide steady enough employment for even part-time work. I had applied for SNAP/EBT benefits to try to curb one of my more significant expenses to afford a new place to rent but was denied because I wasn’t working the minimum 20 hours a week I needed to get food stamps as a student. Though, before I could be too profoundly demoralized by the formal letter I received from the Georgia state government that I may be too poor for food stamps, I was reminded that oh yeah, I’m in school. Finding a steady enough job, a place to live, and a sense of personal security was taking up too much of my time, and my grades were slipping. It turns out it’s difficult to focus on an already aimless degree when internal debates often boiled down to whether I’d buy lunch or pay for parking downtown for class that morning.

One of the real reasons why I was getting dramatically less work at my job was because of my political outspokenness here and there on Facebook or online and more specifically when I dug up all those problematic posts from gay bar TEN Atlanta’s owner — a friend of my former employers, apparently.

After weeks upon weeks of little work at the bar and having picked up a canvassing gig for a Georgia state representative race (though without a W-2, it didn’t help my food stamps problem), I was given a rare Saturday shift (or, the one day a week I had asked since I started not to be scheduled) and immediately reported that I wasn’t going to make it that day.

I had plans to go camping with some friends (long weekends in phoneless nature sounded very alluring to me) and released the shift, in hopes of trading or picking up something else some other day, but when I returned got a voicemail saying that I was let go at the bar for not showing up. I’m not sure what my oft-vacant manager wanted me to do considering I had told him, and all the group chats that I couldn’t make it, that I wasn’t gonna make it. Don’t really care to know at this point. The weekend went by without a word from them once I had checked my phone after disconnecting, but by the following Tuesday found a missed call from him. It was the first time I was fired via voicemail and, I dunno, I think there are more respectful ways to fire somebody. Ask to call you back? Maybe tell me to come by the bar and look me in the eyes and say after a year as an employee even though you didn’t show up for a shift you told me you couldn’t cover, and I have to fire you. There are more respectful ways of firing someone, but that’s assuming you respect them.

So I just took off.

I took some Delta miles I had been sitting on and booked a flight to Denver — set to leave March 3rd. Instead of rushing into a cheap room somewhere for the month in Atlanta, I planned to go to Colorado to see my sister and her husband, along with some friends who were in town. I didn’t realize it’d be the last normal weekend for a very long time.

W e t e n d t o c o n f l a t e u n d e r s t a n d a b l e

d e c i s i o n s w i t h j u s t i f i a b l e o n e s.

This was a Facebook post I wrote on March 3rd, but it seems pretty damn quaint and pointless in some places now, huh. I don’t know anymore.

I’m sorry, I just don’t think there’s a ‘moderate’ approach when it comes to oppression and discrimination. It’s either there or it’s not, it’s either in our laws and in our hearts or it’s not. 

It’s become resoundingly clear to me that even these presidential candidates who I thought were probably well meaning actually never really had any interest in changing the status quo. 

For what they lack in intersectionality and ambition they make up for in cowardice and complacency. For Buttigieg and Klobuchar to fold after Biden wins *one* state on virtually name recognition alone doesn’t shed enough light on the strings being pulled behind the scenes, but definitely reminds us of their existence. I was never vocal supporters of either, obviously, but they were better candidates than Frat Bro Joe, right? Clearly?

We know that corporate interests and big money in politics are at the very least *capable* of corrupting not only our government, but our minds and our self-esteem. Whether it’s though advertising, comparing our lives and experiences to others online, or maybe like when ExxonMobil discovered climate change in the 1970’s and put profit over planet. There’s money to be made in fear, but scaring people requires effort, confusing people instead requires less. 
It’s just manipulating truth for personal and financial gain. We tend to conflate understandable decisions with justifiable ones.

It’s my opinion that if corporations have *any* hand in making decision in our democracy, there will always be profit sought and Americans measured not by the rights endowed by their creator, but by their capacity to consume and produce. 

This is when the “capitalism” vs “socialism” debate comes in, which i’m deeply disinterested in because it’s a debate invented to scare people into thinking it’s too risky to demand corporations have a modicum of morality in the way they conduct business, and asks us as people to have a modicum of decency to human beings; even and perhaps especially the ones we cannot see. If you agree with that, you’re a radical progressive in the eyes of establishment politics and media. Welcome to the club. 

Similarly, pure misinformation and fake news doesn’t seek to convince you of its lies, its goal is to obscure truth and scare you with micro-targeted precision. The mission is simply to barrage you with so much bullshit that you can’t tell what’s real and what’s not. So many are gonna scroll past this because it’s a long Facebook status and who the hell has time for that? 

What’s worse is you just stop caring, which I’m sure is where a lot of us are at now. It’s designed to do that, even and perhaps especially this platform here. Facebook’s political ad policy is toxic and disgusting, where if you’re selling something you must be truthful in your claims, but all bets are off if you’re simply looking to persuade or confuse. 

Definitely the worst part about being fed lies all the time is that it gets harder to identify truth when you hear it. It gets harder and harder to identify hope when you need it. 

It’s not idealistic to imagine a world beyond institutionalized greed. It’s not idealistic to seek and elect representatives and find identity with politicians or advocates who make clear what they’re beholden to. I’m dubious of anyone who claims to be beholden to no one. 

It’s not idealism, it’s not purity testing. It’s recognizing that making life substantially and sustainably better for the most vulnerable first makes existence better for everyone. Call it trickle-up empathy. There isn’t a ‘moderate’ approach to this belief just like their isn’t a ‘moderate’ amount of acceptable rat poison to consume. 

You can say no more rat poison. You can say enough is enough. You don’t need to be strategic with your vote or support whatever optics look better. That’s not your job. You don’t need to figure out healthcare or education or affordable housing to demand better for everyone. Sure, incremental progress is how these goals will be accomplished, just like any goal, but in this Primary we’re setting where the finish line is. Don’t sell yourself, or those whose value you couldn’t fathom, too short. 

I don’t see myself ten or fifty years from now regretting these positions, and I don’t think you would either. Everyone benefits from a healthy community, a literate and educated community, a community where everyone has a place to call home. We *can* have nice things. I’m dubious of anyone who believes otherwise, or that they are singularly the solution to any of these problems. I’m especially dubious of anyone who says that it’s too “far” in any direction to believe in a world without suffering. 

Millions of desperate people are a national security risk. They will make decisions against their own interests out of fear, they will make choices out of a perceived lack of options. 

You personally may not be suffering in the particular way we’re talking about but so many people are, and they desperately need your help. Don’t sell them or yourself short. 

Y’all already know who my candidate is (it’s Bernie Sanders) and you can also see now how truly afraid so many comfortable people are with changing the status quo even slightly in favor of those who make those people’s lives comfortable in the first place. Some have gone from presidential candidates to scared individuals simply folding to job offers come next January within hours. That’s how powerful the establishment is. It’s all very human, but we tend to conflate understandable decisions with justifiable ones.

Thank God for Marianne Williamson.

I’m so grateful for that week in Colorado. Not only was I traveling on my own — something I’m not particularly privy to — but after seeing family and people I genuinely care for — it was a subconscious first step in assessing fundamentally what I Tyler Scruggs as a person needed. I couldn’t have predicted how necessary that would be in this new convenient time. Mari Kondo’s method of decluttering was helpful last year in finding minimalism physically in your home. Still, I haven’t quite found the perfect methodology in eliminating all the things that don’t spark joy in my brain. I need my family, and I need spirituality in my life in some form. My life can be anything I want it to be, anywhere. It’s not a Facebook timeline or a 12-year-old Twitter account that connects the threads of all the past lives and selves I’ve lived into a narrative; it’s me and whatever I choose to do with me.

The morning I boarded my flight back to Atlanta, unsure of what I was practically going to do once I got there apart from a promising job interview at the end of the week at a new bar. Then the notification came through that Atlanta Public Schools had indefinitely closed down due to potential exposure to the coronavirus. It was at that point; I knew things were going to be very different very quickly.

I didn’t leave the couch I had been crashing on for two days. It turns out it’s very easy to self-quarantine when you have no disposable income or place to go.

Some distant family in Roswell offered a room to stay for the time being. I gratefully stayed there for a few nights, but as the house filled up with newly out-of-school students and their grandma keeping her distance from us all already (March 13), I was unsure if it was the right place for me to quarantine, as limited as my options might’ve been at least until I started bartending again.

In my favorite newsletter, Welcome to Hell World writer Luke O’Neil talked about the last time things felt normal. In this piece, he included my contribution (cool). It was after my interview at the new bar.

So I took off again. I’ll get into that next newsletter.

For now, here’s a short lo-fi song I wrote a while ago called ‘damn this whole planet.’ It’s on BandCamp for now but do let me know if you’d like it on the streaming services too. Thank you to those who have purchased my music through BandCamp, it’s thousands of times more helpful than a Spotify stream, but I do get why those are nice too.

Thanks for reading all this and letting me dump on you, Internet. Talk soon.

Tyler Scruggs is a writer and musician living in Atlanta. When he’s not churning out internet content, he’s paying too much for coffee and buying movie tickets weeks in advance. Feel free to validate him on Twitter (@TylerScruggs), Instagram (@Scruggernaut), and YouTube.

If you’d like to directly and meaningfully support the continuation of my writing and work, consider becoming a Patreon subscriber at the single tier of $3 a month. Learn more at https://www.patreon.com/tylerscruggs