I say this to all my friends and family who are parents: Get your kids out of public schools. We're at the point where the things they are teaching is going to mess them up, not to mention the huge controversies here in PA over mask mandates. Whether you're for or against masks, the protests and tension between parents of different ideologies and the schools following the laws does not appear to be a healthy learning environment. I regularly watch school board meeting just like this where parents are openly disrespected and silenced when they unearth the horrors of the modern education system. This parent isn't describing an inclusive book showing that you should treat people of different persuasions equally. It's depicting a horrific act of perversion in detail. I'm Mr. Free Speech but there is no good reason for that to be in a school library. A few years ago, I wrote an article about not caring much if To Kill A Mockingbird (one of my favorite books, also one of my favorite movies) remains in curriculum. Well, if we're debating the necessity of that book, this content is way outta the question. (Lolita is a disturbing masterpiece. At least that has literary value and cultural merit. If that was removed from high school libraries [not that I know it to have ever been available there], I'd understand why it's an important book but also feel that should probably be left up to the parents to decide if their kid is mature enough to read such a provocative book.) This isn't an isolated event. It isn't one school board that resents its parents. It's not one book with questionable content. At what point can we be open and admit there is an ideological tug-of-war between parents and the public education system? 

"But Todd, you're not a parent--" Thank God for that. I would not be as mature and respectable as this lady is if I found such content at my child's school. Also, I don't have kids (that I know of, jk) but I do have family. One sibling is in high school, and despite them being much more mature than I was at that age and also probably at this age, thinking about them reading that makes me wanna vomit. (I mean, I read the complete works of Marquis de Sade and Venus in Furs at, like, 16, but A.) literary value B.) It wasn't provided to me by the fucking school library. Despite my reputation, I'm pretty fucking liberal, especially when it comes to art, but at a certain point, everyone has their limit.) I think having books depicting predatory things and how they are wrong can have merit but to quote advice I was given from a family member about my own writing, "They don't need every gory detail of it." It isn't a great work of art but Speak by Laurie Hals Anderson has a good message that kids should have access to without an explicit depiction of assault. At the very least, it isn't a smutty depiction of perversion.

I was very fortunate in public high school. I think my teachers were so good that it honestly made college a major disappointment, also, because half of those professors were corrupt ideologues or simply pieces of garbage coasting off tenure like it's welfare. (Obviously, I had a lot of great college professors, too, and am immensely grateful for their impact on my life. The sad reality is that not all teachers live up to this standard.) It saddens me to say such negative things about the American education system (never been outside it, so, I'm not endorsing other education systems, simply speaking on the one I've gone through) but times have changed in the decade since I graduated. This video clip is not an isolated event. I've heard anecdotal stories secondhand and seen many video clips/read articles on this. I think respectfully and professionally voicing concerns is a high road to take but it's a high road to nowhere. I think protesting and such forms of demonstration is a bad idea in this case and at worst could be confusing or traumatizing emotionally for the children to be subjected to. I've read about protests around some schools in local news for various reasons and without blaming anyone, I think that is very tragic and has to be upsetting to the students, and after all, it's them we should all be the most concerned about. As I opened with, if you can afford it, take your kids out of this system. There are many great teachers doing their best and I sympathize with their position in this mess but they are working from within a broken system that does not have the children's best interests in mind. 

 I've seen many examples of it. Parents in my timeline, take an active interest in your children's education. Try to be involved in a productive way, if possible. We're at a point in the history of America where there are three camps. Those of us who are disgusted by what is happening, they who are imposing this upon the future generation, and those of us with our heads in the ground.

Youtube Link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6Xm4AX25tE&feature=youtu.be
Article about the video, since the video will almost certainly be deleted by either YT or the school board itself. (Yes, it's Daily Wire. If you don't like it, make your own fucking site that reports on subjects like this. Idk what to tell you. If NYT or HuffPo wrote this, I'd share it just as enthusiastically. Deal with it.)
https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-mom-reads-graphic-gay-porn-found-in-school-library-to-school-board

I think "Fast Car" by Tracy Chapman is the second best song of all time. When I first heard it, it was a revelation. The production and simple arrangement gives it this youthful, haunting-yet-vulnerable feeling that supports the lyrics of a woman being taken advantage of time and time again, being at the end of her rope, and setting an ultimatum for a man who most likely will fail her one final time. The anecdote about the father failing in his role as a husband and father adds a much deeper level of generational, psychological, and economic tragedy. There are a lot of great pop songs about young love but this might be the only one I've heard that feels so realistic, like it's a telling the archetype many of us have seen from people we've grown up with, or even in some cases, ourselves. (I identify with both the man and woman at this song for different reasons.) The themes are universal and transformative in that way us artists tell ourselves all art is but deep down now only great works can accomplish. The song can change your worldview, if you open up to it. Either, it can make you reflect on someone you had once dismissed as being "trash" or some other slander as having unfair challenges you were lucky enough to have avoided, it can show you why promising young girls may waste their time on men who for all appearances seem to be going nowhere in life and are quite content with that (not to dismiss the tragedy of the male character, either, which I would say is present but far more subtly conveyed). The verses are all so gritty and raw, yet the chorus uplifts you from the hellish struggles of simply trying to exist and live a decent life in the same way carefree moments together once did for the narrator or for the more fleeting, self-harming way getting drunk likely does her lover. At the end of the song, the haunting chords play, like this is one cycle in a neverending loop in our country. I've never tried it but you could probably play the song on repeat and it would sonically play as though it has a circular structure like The Wall or Finnegans Wake. Because it does, as our own narrator's mother seems to have went through the same struggles the narrator is at by the climax of the song. The only nitpick that might take .01 off it's 15/10 rating is that a comedian once pointed out, "Aren't all cars technically pretty fast?" and I can never forget that joke when I hear this song. The only modern song that I think competes with this is "Landslide" by Fleetwood Mac.

For a few weeks, I probably sounded like I was proselytizing it to everyone I knew, like I had discovered this gem in the coal mines of the Spotify playlist algorithm. Everyone else was just like, "Yeah, Tracy Chapman's a household name. Everyone has always known this is a great song."

This song helped me a lot while writing Honest Work, particularly Ione's portion of the narrative. I've always been endeared to characters like Hedda Gabbler and Lady Macbeth in a way that could probably warrant Freudian evaluation. I didn't want to write a female villain, though. I wanted the story to be one of three people all putting their honest effort into raising a child and into their own personal lives and despite their equally good intentions, they come out with very different results. I wanted to create a character who starts the book as a victim and blossoms into a complex human being. In the first scene written about her, it is described as though she is a prisoner of her own home that we view through a security camera in all her private, mundane, and embarrassing moments. She's an actress upon a stage without a script to follow, so, she's just existing before a crowd of voyeurs. (This is not long after the introductory chapter, in which another character directly addresses the audience of a classroom, planting this motif in a reminiscent fashion of my personal favorite play, Our Town.

You see her perspective of her husband and later her husband's perspective on her. You know their loneliness, their inner struggles, how one has an idealized view of romance and the other has a more cynical, "realistic" perspective on it. You (hopefully) don't really know what will come of it until the ultimate betrayal in a relationship is committed. (In this instance, I would compare the act of penetration to that of impaling oneself or more accurately, the ending of Romeo & Juliet in which one character stabs herself, mistakenly thinking her lover has already left her behind.) At that point, you can view it from a multitude of ways, nearly all of them valid to some degree, ethically speaking. She ends the life she has been building towards and in turn, destroys the man living to serve her, which she (but not he) sees as setting him free, (mixed metaphor incoming) ripping the already-peeling band-aid of their marriage off so that he has the opportunity for rebirth. She did, what she at least, saw as the right thing in a confused fashion, much like the comedy of errors that their romance was ("You cheated on me." "I cheated on you? You've been cheating on me." "No, I was working late and exhausted so I could provide for you." "You never provided for me emotionally." and so on.) depicted in until it's take too far and becomes a tragedy. (See above.)

So, thank you, Tracy Chapman. 

​Recently had someone reach out and essentially say that although they feel I had wronged them in the past, they forgive me or don't want me to live with regret or something along those lines. (I was very inebriated at the time because it was a day, so, I remember the shape of the discussion but not all the brush strokes, so, I just don't wanna put words into anyone's mouth.) I find that kind of gesture very generous and one that takes a lot of humility/compassion. (So, naturally, I made the next correct move and asked to borrow money.) It got me contemplating some people from my past who I feel wronged by and whether it is shameful of me to not do the same for them. This is a laundry list of people, friends, family, roommates, former coworkers who took advantage over others sometimes including myself. Ultimately, naw, fuck 'em. I can forgive actions and anything anyone's ever done to me, whether I enjoyed it or not, has come to pass and was something I was able to learn and grow from. I'm thankful for others' mistakes I could learn from. On the other hand, I have deep guilt sometimes about moments in which I had the opportunity to be kind but took a lesser route. I don't want anyone in the world feeling hated or associating me with any kind if negativity although I can't blame them if they do have less than glowing reviews of my past for any reason. With that said, I forgive actions but some philosophical differences are too great to be worth the effort of building any bridge across. I have no interest in someone who has no honor, no integrity, no courage, no respect for others. I have at one time or another lacked all those qualities and could still strengthen every one of them. (Gotta grind every day to boost your stats.) I hope those people have healthy happy lives and are given the opportunity to grow and refine themselves in the same way I have been granted. That's just not my business. I have no moral authority to judge anyone else and that includes any self-righteous, "You have been granted forgiveness by Todd Daniel Crawford" ecards. They have my forgiveness but that isn't worth a receipt.

Just realized this may come off as being humorous about the anecdote it began with or something. It isn't. That had a larger context of friendship and a longterm bond that was put on hold and moving past the past. The later examples are people I simply have nothing in common with and no reason to reestablish any communication with.

​Conditional Love isn't a break-up book. That interpretation always slightly bothered me, even though I get how the title can make it semi like a (failed) romance story. I wrote it between two periods of my life when I was happily with two different people. I like the look of my own naval way too much to write about other people or real life events like that. It was inspired by the Slayer lyric, "Before you see the light, first you must die" and the concept of baptism by fire and was mostly outlined/written between 2011 and 2016. From what I remember, I took 2017 off and finished it in late 2018/early 2019.

The eponymous affection is the limitations of human beings' ability to care for each other. The students at the school are all decent people but don't accept each other due to a political binary that is more shallow than their own day-to-day morality. Wes and his mother struggle to accept Whit and Wes worries if his daughter will accept him when she grows up. He struggles to accept his father. Ione struggles to accept Brendan as her husband. Wes struggles to accept himself as an artist. He struggles to accept women as being just as human and complex as he is (the pseudo-esoteric framing of Theresa within her apartment as though she's a psychic through which Wes is connecting with his dead sister).  He struggles to accept his responsibilities in life (neglecting his mother when she needs his support). By the end (his reading at the end of the semester for his final), he denounces himself that as being worth others' acceptance.

The narrator experiences ego death (the loss of his brother/sister/doppelganger), accepts what was once seen as his competition as a brother (Brendan), forgives the sins of his father and realizes he is capable of committing equal if not worse evils (confrontations at the climax), sacrifices his own selfish life goals to support others (his own fatherhood), learns to love the woman from his past as a human being rather than just a sex object, turns wine to water (sobriety), breaks the cycle of the Ubermensch (as the flashback in Young Adulterer, he is dancing with Ione in a circle, at the end of CL, they are no longer moving in a circle), and let's go of the past (switch to present tense at the end). The band playing is obviously end credit music for the story. 

The whole story is a horror story about my fear that art is artifice,  the product of egomania, and that we should be appreciating divine/natural creations in life rather than playing god by making our own second(or in my case, fourth) rate reflections upon reality. It's a musing about, what do we need artists for if God exists? What use are role models when there is Jesus? What use is fiction when we have The Bible? It draws from more than Western religion but I only cite Christian sources theologically. I work like Jodorowsky. I was born in a Christian area, so, I work using the tools around me. There's also concepts like the shadow self, numerology, a literal pagan sacrificial ritual, aggressive nihilism/atheism, and other things written therein but they're used to add chaos to the narrative and confuse him whereas Christian archetypes are presented as the solution. I'm OCD, so, I need some larger framework contextualizing life in order to accept it. If there's no Author to our story or no overarching narrative, that's too great a psychological horror for someone like me. If you want to see it as a massive cope for my anxiety/OCD, I disagree but I also think that is a valid perspective. 

So, yeah, not a break-up book or one particularly concerned with romance much at all. It's a journey from chaos to finding theological order and from the top of that mountain, evaluating this metaphysical landscape and wondering where one's place is in it. The narrator learns to accept others but his potential for self-love is still conditional. It's a story of baptism.

This is my first post here. Obviously. I don't have much planned for this particular entry. I just didn't want a.) for the blog portion of the site to be empty for long or b.) to kick this off with a wild tangent (which is what I plan to do here). See, that's the thing. Some birds can't be caged. (Really, if I was any bird, I'd be a penguin because I'm afraid to fly. Maybe a chicken. Yeah, I think I'd be a chicken, because I also hate the cold.) I want to talk in-depth about my own writing, which I try (poorly) to avoid over at LSB. I think Ash Catcher has done a phenomenal job keeping the blog section of that site alive and the more I think of it, the more I'd love to see a chorus of diverse voices over there that doesn't include my own. The site/company was always intended to be a selfless endeavor for Maureen and I. That's practically impossible in the art world, especially when we spent a good year or so struggling for submissions. We no longer have that problem, so, regular content from me is no longer essential. I'll still post over there for company-related things or more altruistic subjects. I want to be a backseat driver over there and over here, I'm behind the wheel. (Wow, I really can't come up with a more original metaphor? Pa-thetic.) 

So, I'm taking a step aside from Long Shot Books as a content creator, to some degree, so that I can mouth off over here. LSB isn't going anywhere and neither am I. This just allows me a place other than Facebook to talk mad shit about my own writing without desecrating the timelines of everyone I know. I have a lot of content I've been posting over there while contemplating if I should just start my own site that I'll probably move this way. 

To your left is my favorite possession, Dirty the Monkey. I've had him since my single digits and written in marker on his foot, like one of Andy's toys in Toy Story, is my maternal grandmother's final message to me, "Bye Todd." Below is a much better article than this one about my long friendship with him.
​https://www.theodysseyonline.com/dirty-the-monkey