Giving Thanks for Great Spirits

In general, our culture has very limited notions of what a hero is. We celebrate those who fight, who put themselves in harm’s way (and rightly so), but we too often stop there.

Even when we do broaden the scope of our appreciation, it rarely involves artists, but living a life of creativity is heroic in many, many ways—including, sometimes, harm’s way. So, in honor of Thanksgiving, let me say, “Thank you” to those among us who valiantly and consistently make the world a place worth fighting by the art they create.

Thank you, artists and entertainers, who tell the truth—the truth of the story, the moment, the experience, who refuse to look away when others cover their eyes, who express honest emotion and human experience, instead of overly contrived, sentimental, cheap escapism.

Thank you, unsung heroes, unknown artists, for laboring away in obscurity, the burden of your vision your only boss, creating because you have to, persevering against all odds in hopes one day you, too, will have an audience.

Thank you, writers and filmmakers, painters and musicians, actors and producers, who fight not to fall into the lazy shortcuts of clichés, who continually try to approach their work with a fresh perspective, with an integrity that insists on a new way of “seeing,” “hearing,” “touching,” “describing,” “expressing,” human experiences.

Thank you for all that you risk—for baring your heart and mind and soul, for disrobing in such a public manner, for making yourself an easy target for potshots from the defensive and the simple. Thank you for enduring the negativity and nay saying from the overly critical, the closed-hearted, the jealous, the haters.

Thank you for your fidelity to your vision, for being true to your art, to your truth, to your muse, to what you’re hearing and seeing and feeling, regardless of the masses who misunderstand, in spite of the criticism, and no matter the mean and hurtful things said and done by the fearful, the narrow-minded, the repressed.

Thank you for not going along with the crowd, for not giving into the beige, for not melting into the masses, for being strong enough to be different. You have been subjected to ridicule and even violence for being true to who you are and to your art. You have suffered for your art in ways no one but you knows, and the pain you’ve been subjected to gives your work the poignancy and power that we who eat your words and drink your paintings so need to truly sustain us.

Thank you for entertaining us, but more for challenging us—for making us think and feel and question. You instruct us in the ways of empathy and humility—the heights of humanity. You chip away at the fissures of the facade of our culture, you kick at the false foundation of our assumptions—all while making us laugh and cry and hurt and feel and think.

Thank you, brave women and men, who explore the dark side of existence, allowing us to vicariously experience the shadows in the safety of our reading chair or theater seat. You are unafraid to take long day’s journeys into nightmarish nights, expertly guiding us through the underworld. Thank you for shining your piercing light onto the things in our minds and on our streets that we try to pretend aren’t there.

I end with the words of Albert Einstein, one of the most talented artists to ever live, with love and gratitude. “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” Thank you, artists and outsiders, original thinkers and visionaries, for daily enduring this most of all.

Jason Hedden Brings “Double Exposure” to the Stage

There comes a time in every parent’s life when he must entrust the care of his child to another. Babysitter, daycare worker, school teacher—eventually, we give up control.

If you’re like me—more maternal than anything else—this is a frightening proposition. No one will care for my baby the way I do.

As with most things, when looking for someone to share my most treasured treasure with, I use intuition. Sure, I observe character revealed in unguarded moments, but how I feel about the person—what I know without knowing anything is how I make my final decision.

Recently, I entrusted my novel, “Double Exposure,” to Jason Hedden, an actor, producer, director, and a professor at Gulf Coast Community College. This fruit of my loins (and other parts of me) that had gestated inside of me for so long, that I had carried and labored over and had given birth to, this truly beloved child of mine, I gave to Jason.

Jason took “Double Exposure,” a novel, and turned it into “Double Exposure,” an extraordinary theatrical experience. I was right to give Jason my book, and I couldn’t be happier with what he’s done with it.

Jason Hedden is a theatrical genius.

With an amazing vision from the very beginning, Jason carefully, thoughtfully, magnificently adapted a book into a play—a play that honors the book as much as another art form can, one that uses the strengths of theater to lift the story off the pages and set the characters and events twirling across the stage.


I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to watch Jason work, to witness firsthand his enormous effort, his respect for the book, his dedication and determination.

Each night I’ve attended rehearsals, I’ve had the experience of encountering people and places and events from my dreams. It’s a singular, surreal phenomenon.

“Double Exposure,” the theatrical experience, presents the book in a way that combines the best of the original text with the best of staged drama. Characters speak narration as well as dialog, bringing a literary quality to the play unlike any I’ve ever seen. The use of minimalist sets encourages, even forces, the audience to use its imagination in a way not unlike the book.

In the book, I mention that a prominent voice inside the main character’s head is that of his dead father’s. Genius Jason took that and used it to dramatize the experience—for the characters and the audience—by having the deceased father on stage talking to his son.

One more example of genius: In the book, the main character, a photographer, thinks about the greatest photographs ever taken, in an attempt to calm himself in a severely stressful situation. It would have been easy to project the iconic images onto a screen on the stage, but Jason staged them with actors—bringing them to life and preserving the poetic descriptions of them from the book.

Jason Hedden’s play, “Double Exposure,” has my highest recommendation. I hope you’ll see it. Of course, I hope you’ll read the book first, but if you decide not to, it wouldn’t bother me nearly as much as usual because of how much like reading a book Jason’s remarkable production really is.

(Play pictures by Jordan Marking)

Paper and Fire

Charlyne Yi doesn’t believe in love. Or so she says. Though she never says it explicitly, it’s probably more accurate to say that she doesn't believe in fairy-tale, romantic “love.”

“Paper Heart” follows Charlyne as she embarks on a quest across America to make a documentary about this subject she doesn’t understand. As she and her good friend (and director) Nick search for answers and advice about love, Charlyne talks with friends and strangers, scientists, bikers, romance novelists, and children. They each offer diverse views on modern romance, as well as various answers to the age-old question: does true love really exist?

Then, shortly after filming begins, Charlyne meets a boy after her own heart: Michael Cera (the actor from “Juno” and “Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist”). Combining elements of documentary and traditional storytelling, reality and fantasy, “Paper Heart” brings a unique perspective to romantic comedies; however, I suspect there’s far more fiction in this film than there appears to be.

“Paper Heart” so combines reality and fantasy, so blurs the lines between the two, it’s best not to take anything in it too seriously. Still, it is, nonetheless, thought-provoking.

I found watching “Paper Heart” odd and interesting because Charlyne Yi doesn’t believe in love, and there’s nothing I believe in more.

Of course, that’s not exactly what I mean. Belief is cheap. Easy. Shallow. Practice is the thing. As a philosophy, a religion, a way of being in the world, I attempt to practice love. I’m committed to it.

There’s nothing more central to my existence than love, and there I was sitting in the old AMC theater in the Panama City Mall, where back in the day, I went on my first movie date, watching a film about a person who claims not to believe in love.

Throughout the film, on a road trip of sorts, Charlyne asks people what love is, and it’s interesting to see people grapple to define love—and to hear how different their definitions are from one another.

I sympathize. Love is difficult to define. But this is how it should be. Defining something limits it (which is why it’s best not to do it, or when we do, leave an opening). Love can’t be limited. It must be free. Love and freedom are inseparable. How can we define something that is bigger than, and, in many ways, beyond us and must be free?

The longer I watched the movie, the more I realized that Charlyne, the girl who doesn’t believe in love, and me, the boy who believes in it more than anything, are actually much more closely aligned than it would first appear.

When Charlyne claims not to believe in love, she actually means romantic, lightning-bolt, head-over-heels infatuation where the object of our desire and affection becomes the god of our idolatry and that this is true love. But this isn’t love at all. Sure, it’s been known to lead to love, but more often than not it leads to disillusionment. Why? Because it’s an illusion—a projection onto a person of what we want and need. It’s a fantasy. Love is a reality.

Don’t get me wrong, I fall in infatuation all the time. It’s a heady and happy experience, and I even refer to it in the popular parlance as “falling in love,” but I know enough to know it ain’t love. It’s like. It’s desire. It’s attraction. It’s fire. It’s not love.

What is love then? I’ll happily give you one of my definitions if you promise to leave it open so it can be free.

Love is the uncoerced and unconditional commitment to continually accept and extend as a response to Love itself.

God is love. Love is God. Love flows to us, then through us. We are responding to love by loving God back, genuinely and without ego loving ourselves, and loving all others as ourselves.

Is my definition wanting? Of course. Any and all definitions of love are. It’s the same with God (a coincidence? I think not).

Love is universal. It can’t be limited to one person, one family, one tribe, one race, one nationality, or only to those who love us. Sure, people do it, and even call it love, but it’s not. If I “love” only “my” children, it’s not love. If I “love” only “my” parents, it’s not love. Who are my children, my parents, my brothers, my sisters, my wives, my husbands, my neighbors? Everyone. Or no one.

Does Charlyne find love? Does she discover what it really is? You’ll have to pay your dollar to see “Paper Heart” at the mall or wait until it comes out on DVD December 1st to find out. But you don’t have to wait any time at all to be loved and to love. You, like Charlyne and me, are loved. We just are—nothing we can do about it—and what we do with that unconditional acceptance determines the quality of our lives and the good we do in the world more than anything else. By far.

Whether we have a paper heart or an organ of fire, we are loved and meant to love—not in word only, but in deed. After all, love is not a condition, but an action—a verb, not a noun.

If you, like Charlyne, are not sure you believe in love—or even know what it is, just try this. Open yourself up to it, to how accepted, valued, cherished you are, and then commit to love as a way of life, begin to accept others (no longer judging or condemning), extend yourself for them, do, to the best of your ability, what is best for them, and see what happens.

You Make My Heart Sing

I’ve never cared much for kid movies. The ones I’ve endured, I’ve done so for my children, and even at a young age, they picked up on the fact that Dad spent a good deal of time in the lobby during the feature presentation.

Over the years, I’ve been subjected to Power Rangers, Pokemon, a pig named Babe, and dozens of Disney animated fairytales because they’re what my children wanted to watch, but this past weekend, with a little time on my hands following a book signing, I went to the theater right by myself and watched “Where the Wild Things Are.”

I didn’t do it for my children, but the child in me.

“Where the Wild Things Are” is an adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s classic children's story, where Max, a disobedient little boy sent to bed without his supper, creates his own world—a forest inhabited by ferocious wild creatures that crown Max as their ruler.

I’ve done a bit of adaptation—both of my own work and that of others—and know just how difficult it is to translate a work of art into another medium. There’s a real art to it—an art on brilliant and beautiful display in Spike Jonze’s and Dave Eggars’ work here. They have taken the ten sentences of Sendak’s beloved book and created a psychologically sophisticated and emotionally resonate film.

With an economy of words and some wonderful images, the book allows us to project our own particular wildness into the story (like all good stories do), to use our imaginations to fill in the spaces, to cast ourselves in the role of Max or one of the monsters, but the film largely does this for us, fleshing out characters and relationships and events, leaving few narrative gaps.

Some say music sooths the savage beast, and it’s true, but Max shows that story is far more effective. With child-like abandon, he spins tales that mesmerize the monsters. In fact, the power of story is one of the most significant and profound themes of the film. The entire work is a story, of course, but then there’s the story Max overhears his mom telling on the telephone, the story he tells her later as he’s settling in for bed, and the story he tells himself—the one that is his entire adventure. Story allows us to safely explore our wild sides, it comforts and heals and helps us make sense of the world. Our imaginations really are the most wondrous and wild things of all.

Max discovers much during his wild adventure—experiencing the pain of separation, the grief of loss, the solitude of leadership—but nothing he learns is more important or profound than the fact that even (or especially) Wild Things need mothers. As king, Max realizes just how difficult it is to be a parent—and how lucky he is to have one. In fact, the only thing keeping Max from complete anarchy, from being as lost and as damaged as the Wild Things is his mom. With a loving mother, a little Wild Thing can be a caring leader. Without a positive maternal influence, Wild Things too quickly become monsters that smash and destroy. We, like Max, need a mom—and not just in personal, but in public life. Our country and the world would be better if our sexist, male-dominated culture would make room for Mother (Mother God, Mother Earth, Yin, a celebrated and appreciated public feminine presence) and wouldn’t attempt to force a type of masculinity on women in positions of authority and leadership.

The Wild Things in Max’s mind (actual facets of Max’s personality) continually do damage. There’s a good deal of destruction in the film—particularly by Max and Carol—and it comes from their inability to deal with the strong emotions they experience. In Max and his Wild Things, we finally have a kid in film who is fully formed—wild and unpredictable, resilient and vulnerable, wild, yet ultimately domesticated.

Where are the Wild Things? Inside us as much as Max, and, like Max, we need to let them out occasionally so they can run and roar. Sure, this can be done literally—plenty of people out there howling at the moon every night—but there are endless ways to take a walk on the wild side including and especially art, and you could do far worse than reading or seeing “Where The Wild Things Are.” Figurative destruction is almost always better than actual, but a little wildness and even demolition all along is better than the catastrophic kind that inevitably explodes out of repression. What I’m saying is there’s a beast beneath our breast, and we need to let it out to breathe occasionally. So now, let the wild rumpus start.

My Long Happy Love Affair

I fell in love in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1994.

It started out as a one night stand, but blossomed into a passionate love affair that has been happily going on for fifteen years now.

In honor of National Coming Out Day (and with love and support for all my GLBT brothers and sisters), I’m going to use this column to confess my love for a man.

I first fell in love with Richard Curtis while experiencing his delightful film, “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”

I was alone in Tulsa with a free evening, and had been hearing good things about this indie British film sweeping the states. The theater was packed, and though I’ve never liked group dates, the presence of the crowd was powerless to prevent me from finding a soulmate.

Though his films are often laugh-out-loud hilarious, he has a smart, witty way of capturing moments that are both realistic and wildly romantic. His characters are multi-faceted and complex, and easy to identify with, but mostly they are charming. He writes about good, guileless everymen and women trying to connect, trying to matter, wanting to be everything to someone. As one of his characters offers in his toast, “True love. In whatever shape or form it may come. May we all in our dotage be proud to say, ‘I was adored once, too.’”

“Four Weddings and a Funeral” follows the fortunes of Charles (Hugh Grant) and his friends as they wonder if they will ever find true love. Charles thinks he's found his best chance with Carrie, an American he meets at the wedding of a mutual friend, but, as Shakespeare said, “the course of true love never did run straight.”

Romantic comedies, like most genre works, often fail to get the critical recognition they deserve (though “Four Weddings and Funeral” did receive an Oscar nomination for Best Picture), and are instead, dismissed out of hand for being unrealistic. And, of course, there’s no dearth of crass, clichéd examples of so-called genre works, but like James Lee Burke or P.D. James in the crime fiction field or Cormac McCarthy in the western field, Curtis represents the very best of the genre—he’s so good, in fact, he transcends genre categorizations.

Speaking about this unfortunate reality, Curtis said, “If you write a story about a soldier going AWOL and kidnapping a pregnant woman and finally shooting her in the head, it's called searingly realistic, even though it's never happened in the history of mankind. Whereas if you write about two people falling in love, which happens about a million times a day all over the world, for some reason or another, you're accused of writing something unrealistic and sentimental.”

Weddings and funerals are seminal moments in life—a time to live and a time to die, a time to rejoice and a time to mourn, and Curtis uses them masterfully for both laughs and tears.

Perhaps the most piercing moment of the film is at its only funeral when the deceased man’s lover quotes a W. H. Auden poem.

Upon leaving the theater, so moved, so in love, so heady with the world-fading-oneness that love (and infatuation) brings, I drove straight to the first bookstore I could find and bought Vintage International’s edition of the Collected Poems of W. H. Auden, and when I pulled that book off my shelf while writing this, I discovered a bookmark from Novel Idea Bookstore, 7104 S. Sheridan, Tulsa OK, fifteen years later still marking the page with this poem:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

My love affair with Richard Curtis has only intensified over the years—through “Notting Hill,” “Love Actually,” and “The Girl in the Café,” but it all began fifteen years ago in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”

Richard Curtis has my highest recommendation, and in future columns I will share with you what is just so singular about each work, but for now I’d like to invite you to a wedding—a few weddings, in fact (and a non-weddings and a funeral). If you missed the film or just haven’t seen it in a while, do yourself a favor and find it. I’m about to watch it again for what must be nearly the fifteenth time, and can think of no better way to celebrate my fifteenth “Four Weddings and a Funeral” anniversary.

The Lie that Tells the Truth

House says “Everybody lies.” It’s the central tenant of his medical practice as it relates to patients and staff, and over six seasons and hundreds of patients, the truth of his most fundamentally held conviction has been proven time and again.

But what if “Nobody lies?” That’s the premise behind Ricky Gervais,’ “The Invention of Lying.”

What would the world be like if no one in the history of humanity had ever told a lie?

Well, according to the film, it’d be a dreadfully dull, downright depressing place. Movies would merely be non-dramatic retellings of historical events and an advertisement for Pepsi would go something like: “Pepsi—When Coke’s not available.”

And then what would happen if one person developed the ability to lie?

Gervais, the award-winning creator and star of the original BBC series “The Office” and HBO’s “Extras,” co-writes and directs this romantic comedy, which takes place in an alternate reality where lying—even the concept of a lie—does not exist. Everyone—from politicians to advertisers to the man and woman on the street—speaks the truth and nothing but the truth with no thought of the consequences.

But when a down-on-his-luck loser named Mark suddenly develops the ability to lie, he finds that dishonesty has its rewards. In a world where every word is assumed to be the absolute truth, Mark easily lies his way to fame and fortune. But lies have a way of spreading, and Mark begins to realize that things are getting a little out of control when some of his tallest tales are being taken as, well, gospel. With the entire world now hanging on his every word, there is only one thing Mark has not been able to lie his way into: the heart of the woman he loves.

“The Invention of Lying” is far less funny and far more thought-provoking than I expected.

Gervais is charming and likable, Jennifer Garner is understated, and, as always, vulnerably beautiful, and there’s an essential goodness and sweetness to the film.

But don’t let the mild comedy and sweet nature of the film fool you. It’s asking some very challenging questions about truth and lies and story and meaning.
“The Invention of Lying” seems to say that lies—at least the imaginative, non-malicious kind—are absolutely essential for humor, story, creativity, and civil social interaction.

It’s true, you can’t have most forms of humor and jokes without lies, and you certainly couldn’t have stories.

The best of our stories—whether in religion, philosophy, history, and most especially literature—are lies (made-up stories) that tell the truth. In fact, nothing gets at truth quite the way lies (or stories) do. The power of story to speak to us on our most human level, to convey truth to us about ourselves and others and the universe is transformative. We are our stories.

We are the stories we believe—about ourselves and the world.

There’s a seminal moment in the film when Mark delivers a message from God. Like Moses at the foot of Mount Sinai, except with pizza boxes instead of stone tablets, Mark tells the naïve, highly gullible, but essentially guileless people what the “Man in the Sky” who controls everything expects of them and what they can expect from him after they die, if they live the right way. It pokes fun at a kind of simple, superstitious, thoughtless religion that far too many people follow.

Many people wrongly make distinctions between what is true and what is fiction, but fiction is true—or can be very, very true. True, not in a shallow, literal sense, but in a deeper more profound way.

We have elevated reason and logic and the scientific method of what is observable actual/factual above all else, and in doing so have forgotten how unreliable observation and “facts” are, how inadequate they are at speaking to the human heart and experience, and how much we miss out on. The truth, as the film demonstrates, is not just surface and literal, but subtle, nuanced, complex, often sublime.

Based on this hyper materialist view, metaphors and fictitious stories are untrue. This means everything we can’t observe, touch, test, prove is untrue, that every made up story is false.

This is at the core of the fallacy of Fundamentalism. Shallow adherence to beliefs that can only be taken one way—literally—miss what is far, far more important than if the stories actually happened. And, of course, this makes their religion true and everyone else’s false. Instead of myth being true, non-literal stories, myth begins to mean false and is how other people’s religion is referred to.

Are the parables of Jesus false because they are made-up stories? I don’t think so. In fact, if lifted out of the ways they have been forced to fit certain theological constructs and instead, heard and understood in as close to their original context and meaning as possible, I don’t think we can find anything more profoundly true.

It’s why I write fiction. To tell the truth—or at least to explore it, search for it.

If fiction is the lie that tells the truth, I’m a professional liar.

The truth is, I try not to lie in my personal life or in my imaginative one. Just don’t ask me if those jeans make you look fat or if the gift you gave me was really what I wanted.

The lies I tell on the page are actually an attempt at getting at the truth—to explore, expound on, experience—a non-literal, truer than true truth. In other words, I try to tell stories that are, like “The Invention of Lying,” true though they never happened.

Ultimately, most all Mark’s lies are of the non-malicious variety. He tells tall tales meant mostly to comfort and entertain. In the end, he can’t bring himself to lie about what’s most important to him—even to get his way, even when to do so would get him what he most wants in all the wide world. May we all be as honorable with the lies we will and won’t tell.

I think if you go see “The Invention of Lying,” you’ll be mildly amused, but made to think, and I think that’s a good thing. Would I lie to you?

Of Conversation and Culture

This weekend, I sat at a bar next to a lovely lady from Pittsburgh. I know she was from Pittsburgh because when I ordered my steak Pittsburgh style she said, “What’s that? I ask because I’m from Pittsburgh.”

We talked for a while about the differences between the North and the South in general and Pittsburgh and Panama City in particular, which was nice—spontaneous conversation is one of the reasons I sit at the bar when I eat alone.

We talked about how nice and friendly most folk around here are, and, given that, how shocking the racism is, and then she said, “We don’t have culture here, but we have the beaches.”

And I was like whoa, now. Wait just a minute, Pittsburgh. We have culture.

I had just returned from a book signing at Seaside. My new novel, “Double Exposure,” like all my books, is about this area. That’s culture. Jason Heddon and the college’s wonderful theater department are performing a play of it in November. That’s culture. Seaside has the REP and Sundog Books and art galleries. That’s culture.

Wewahitchka has The Tupelo; Apalach, The Dixie. That’s culture.

Last weekend, we had the 10th Annual Gulf Coast Writers Conference with #1 New York Times Bestselling author, Michael Connelly—and many other talented authors, agents, and editors besides. That’s culture.

Panama City has the VAC—the wonderful and only-getting-better VAC thanks to Linda MacBeth and the invested staff and volunteers who are working so hard. That’s culture.

We have Heather Parker’s Art Coop and Bay Arts Aliance and the Marina Civic Center (and the highly diverse and entertaining shows of this summer’s Backstage Pass series) and The Martin and Shakes By the Bay. And that’s culture.

We have local writers and photographers and painters and filmmakers and poets and musicians. And all of that is culture.

We have “The News Herald” and “The Entertainer” to cover all this culture, writers and editors like Jan Waddy and Tony Simmons, who work hard to keep the community informed about all the cultural haps and local artists’ works. Speaking of which, have you noticed how amazing “The Entertainer” looks? And how it keeps getting better and better. Well done, Jan!

We have a lot of good radio stations, but my favorite, WKGC, 90.7, is a great place for culture—music, arts, literature, news, and jazz and blues as good as any being broadcast anywhere.

This past weekend, I was out and about for Thunder Beach, and saw many displays of culture—including very cool performances by Twice Daily at Pineapple Willy’s and Steve Wiggins and friends at Edge Water.

Beauty and art and culture, like love, are actually all around. Easy to miss, but there nonetheless.

And if all this weren’t enough, we have the enduring excellence of the Kaleidoscope Theatre. On Sunday afternoon, I sat in a nearly full house, and saw a powerful performance of “To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday,” directed by Jason Blanks and featuring a talented cast of local actors, including Martin Hendrickson, Frankie Hudson, Tanya Ericson, and the warm, charming, funny Ray H. Stanley.

We have all this culture—and a whole lot more (I’m just recounting what I’ve seen recently, not attempting to be exhaustive).

We have all this, plus we have the world’s friendliest people and most beautiful beaches, the majestic Apalachicola River, the acres and acres of pine and oak and cypress of Florida’s Great Green Northwest and the splendid species—endangered and not—who call it home.

We have all, ALL this, AND we don’t ever have to shovel snow!

You might say we have it all.

But you’d be wrong. We could use more culture—more art, more literature, more concerts and plays and exhibits. And we could stand less thoughtless, tacky, greedy development, less racism (and sexism and homophobia and all other forms of xenophobia and ignorance so often on display), less pollution and more protection of the very land and animals and people that make this a place, for me, worth writing about and fighting for.

We may not have it all. But we do have a terrible, awful lot to be grateful for—culture and natural beauty.

Take a moment and thank those you see making art, beauty, and love. Thank them for the sacrifices, for their steadfastness to their vision, for working day jobs so they can, for creating and producing when they’re exhausted, for enriching our community, for doing all this—and constantly hearing there’s no culture in our area. And for this last, you may want to give them a big ol’ bear hug, too.