​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