How to Really Piss Me Off

Accuse me of this

It’s not my first day on the internet.

My Facebook page gets about 20,000 comments a month, and not all of them are kind. Once, that Dan Bingo Bongo fuckstick, or whatever his name is, used his alt-Reich podcast to sic his deranged Nazi minions on me. That was a fun few days. (Now Dan is the #2 guy at the FBI.) When you have opinions like mine, and are as vociferous as I am, you will get hate. A lot of it. And that’s fine. It’s actually good. Franklin Roosevelt said, “I ask you to judge me by the enemies I’ve made.” If someone like Dan Bongino praised my work, it means I fucked up royal.

The hate isn’t what pisses me off. Before I tell you what has me vexed, I’d like to share a story with you, because it’s directly relevant. This story was a paid subscriber piece from a few years back, and I posted it to Facebook a couple of days ago where it was viewed 1.7 million times.

Have a read:

My stepfather became my dad because I stepped on a piece of glass in a lake.

Anyone who would meet my mother and biological father would say “How the hell did those two ever end up together?” I think it was one of those icky “chemistry” things that people don’t want to imagine when it comes to their parents. Very early in the relationship, when they were both 21, Mom got pregnant with my older sister and it was 1965 so married it was. I guess it went okay for a while because I was planned, so I’m told. But by the time I was six it was over. I think Dad dragging us from lovely Victoria BC to northern small town Burns Lake BC for no discernible reason was the last straw for Mom.

Burns was the lake. The one with the glass in it.

My parents had been split up for a year and I was a seven-year-old walking in the lake and I stepped on a piece of glass and cut my foot. The ER doc at the local hospital was also recently divorced and took an immediate shine to my mother. This story probably involves a bit of medical malpractice and likely some of what people might consider creepy now but in 1975 I guess it was romantic.

This was not my first time getting stitches. Two years previous I’d gone knee-first into a sliding glass door and shattered it, taking 30 stitches in said knee. I had a bet with my mom how many stitches my foot would need. The bet was for a giant Superman comic book. She said three, I said five.

I told my stepfather-to-be of the bet as he was doing the stitching. I later learned that it really only did need three, but he put in two extra so I’d win. Mid stitching, he asked my mother on a date. She said she acquiesced because he was in the process of performing surgery, albeit minor, on her son. Also, we were moving away soon so she wasn’t going to have to go on a second date regardless.

“Now you be sure to come back and see me next week to get those stitches out,” he said as we were leaving the hospital.

“Oh, I can’t,” I said. “We’re moving to Salt Spring Island to live with my grandma.” It was true, because we were poor. We must have been really fucking poor, because my grandmother was the worst. Racist as fuck, too.

Anyway, he said, “Oh that’s no problem. I have an airplane. I’ll fly down and take them out for you.”

And that’s what he did.

I know we rightfully shit on the creepiness of the grand romantic gesture seen in many films, but this was a grand romantic gesture that worked. My dad and my stepdad could not be more different. One is a high school dropout who could barely read. (He left school at 15 to work in a foundry to help support the family. He did get a GED in his 30s and became a voracious reader thanks to Lord of the Rings.) He is also a rugged carpenter / hunter / heats his home with wood and has no running water outdoorsman type who still lives in northern BC. Conversely, my stepdad is a University of Toronto med school graduate who I’m not sure I ever saw change a tire.

My dad may be a good father, but he wasn’t all that good a husband. My stepdad is both. And wow did he have a thing for my mom. And I can identify with that, because I fell in love with my wife right away as well. Like, by the end of the first night I met her (we spent the entire evening talking to one another) I was pretty sure I was already in love.

Anyway, dad flew down to Salt Spring Island in his little Cessna and took out my stitches. Grandma despised my biological father and approved of this new guy for no other reason than he was a doctor. I just remember thinking he was nice to me.

I guess my mom was impressed, and he kept making regular flights of about 500 miles each way in his little plane to visit us. After six months my mom said okay this guy is all right and living with my mother fucking sucks, so she got a job as close to him as she could manage, in the small city of Prince George (blarf) a little over two hours’ drive away from Burns Lake. Six months after that they were “married” in an informal ceremony in our crappy little Prince George apartment and we were on our way to Calgary.

And by “we” I mean my stepdad’s ex-wife and his kids came too. I expect there was some negotiating going on with that, but everyone decided that Burns Lake sucked and Calgary in 1976 was the land of opportunity.

His two sons spent half their time with us and half with their mom, who lived nearby. I didn’t usually get along that great with my stepbrothers, but that’s another story. What was cool was how much this guy not just adored my mom, but loved me and my sister too. He considered us his children and I happily called him dad, and still do.

I mean, it wasn’t always smooth sailing. Teenage hormone rebellion shit and whatnot. But when we moved to Calgary, he left emergency medicine and began a psychiatry residency, so whenever I needed advice about something, I often looked to him. A few years ago, I was visiting my Aunt (my biological father’s sister) as she lay dying from pancreatic cancer. I had little experience with such things, and the person I called to talk about it was my stepdad.

Another awesome thing about him is how encouraging he always was in my mom’s career. When we moved to Calgary my mom started studying social work at university. She was halfway through her final semester and told him, “I don’t want to be a social worker. I want to drop out.” There was literally two months of school left in a four-year degree and he told her, “If you want to drop out, then drop out. We’ll figure something else out.”

And that’s what she did. She got a real estate license and did very well in that for four years until the market collapsed, and he said, “I think you’d make a great stockbroker,” so she got licensed in that and she did indeed make a great stockbroker. But it wasn’t just her. He was very supportive of me in my meandering career as well. I struggled at first in university and when I finally chose “history” as a focus he thought it was cool, despite the want ads not being overflowing with companies looking for history graduates.

We were visiting them in their place on the coast in the summer of 2010 and I’d just had my first piece published in the Los Angeles Times. I was still working 20 hours a week as executive director for a non-for-profit as the last gasp of my business career that I’d been doing for over a decade, and there was a party going on and he introduced me to some people as “My son the writer.” That was cool. That made me feel like a real writer. (Buy my book.)

I learned a lot of cool things from my biological father, but when it comes to being a good husband, I learned that from my stepdad. It’s odd to imagine how my life might be different had I not stepped on that piece of glass.

The scar is faint, but I can still make it out.

#

As I mentioned, this was an old paid subscriber piece that I decided to post to Facebook to help me sell books. Did you like the story? Then perhaps you should give that free trial a try.

And I also mentioned that it got 1.7 million views in just a couple of days. That doesn’t mean almost two million people read it. A mere one hundred thousand actually clicked “See more” and read the thing. It got 20,000 Likes and several hundred comments. It also sold a shit-ton of books. (Buy them here.)

It was popular, and it made me money, because I made people feel something. The majority of the comments were laudatory. You can read them here. A lot of people said the story made them cry. My favorite comment was by New York Times bestselling author Abby Jimenez, who wrote, “As a romance author, I say it’s romantic even by modern standards. I’m gonna let those extra stitches slide.”

What comments aggravate me? What could someone write on a post such as this that would spike my blood pressure?

An accusation that the post was written by ai, that’s what.

FUUUCCCCKKKK YOOOOUUUUU!!!!!

AI detectors are shit. It can be difficult to tell the difference between ai and mediocre writing. I often can’t tell the difference. But I can tell when something is NOT ai. If I felt something; if I was truly engaged and couldn’t pull myself away from the story, then I know it wasn’t written by some bullshit plagiarism software.

I’ve heard it said that ai can help a shitty writer become a mediocre writer, but it can’t help a mediocre writer become a great writer. Only hard won talent can do that.

I always wanted to be good-looking, and musical.

My sister got all the attractiveness genes, and she has a beautiful singing voice and can play guitar. I was envious of that. After being unpopular and frequently bullied as a child, I wanted to show the world that in some way, I was special. Writing became it. It’s what I got.

It wasn’t gifted to me. Perhaps my ADHD and penchant for daydreaming helped some, but I fucking slaved to get good at this. I chose history as my major and endeavoured to write papers for my professors that wouldn’t put them to sleep. The first words spoken during my thesis defense were from a committee member who said he “really enjoyed” my thesis and that he found it “highly entertaining.”

Just a few weeks ago an ai page with a couple hundred thousand followers stole my piece about Mata Hari and fed it into an ai engine. It barfed out something soulless and they posted it to Facebook. It was obvious it was my work (they used the same photo and included the “On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down” title), and it was amazing how masterful ai was at taking something entertaining and transforming it into unreadable dog shit. I’d show you the comparison, but I did a “Release the hounds!” post on my Facebook page and my followers dogpiled the fuck out of the comments, the reviews, and reported the shit out of the page and that page doesn’t exist any more. So, there, motherfucker. Don’t mess with my fans.

AI can’t do what I do. Despite being an atheist, seeing what ai writes makes me think humans might actually have souls, because generative ai “art” is so entirely soulless, so lacking in humanity, creativity, and imagination. People talk about how “good” ai is now, and I’ll grant that. It can relay information, make cogent arguments, explain things clearly … But it can’t entertain worth a damn. It doesn’t make you feel things other than bored, or numb. And I’m not sure it will be able to compete with talented humans any time soon. The human brain and expanse of emotions are far too complex for some plagiarism software to replicate. I think the technology is orders of magnitude away from writing a truly great novel, or creating great art. I don’t think it will happen in my grandchildren’s lifetimes, if ever.

The story of stepping on glass in Burns Lake got a few accusations of it being ai. Fuck you. The story about fixing the block heater cord that I shared a couple of days ago I also posted to Facebook. Some dickbrains said that was ai too. Double fuck you. Many of my Shit Went Down stories posted to Facebook and Threads have people saying they’re ai. Tell me, motherfucker, how it could possibly be ai when every single one of those stories was written at least a year before ChatGPT existed?

I could go on, but shall refrain. I do think there are some uses for ai, but art ain’t it. No one wants to read it or look at it. We call it “slop” for a reason. The only people who do want it are those who desire to pretend they have talent without putting in the years of work.

Not wishing to leave you with a tirade, I’ll share another one of those paid subscriber stories that no way ai could ever write.

It’s a story about poop.

Bladder: “Hey, you awake?”

Brain: “No. Fuck off.”

Bladder: “Come on, I know you’re awake.”

Brain: “Snuh.”

Five minutes later …

Bladder: “Hi.”

Brain: “No.”

Bladder: “Come on. Quick empty and back to sleep.”

Brain: “Ugh.”

Bladder: …

Brain: …

Brain: “Fine!”

Other Part of Brain (OPOB): “Wait. What time is it?”

Brain: “Who fucking cares? It’s Sunday!”

OPOB: “I care. Tell me.”

*grabs ebook, opens it, pushes button for time*

Eyes: “We’re not awake yet. We can’t see that shit. Needs to be brighter.”

Brain: “Fuuuucccccckkkkkk!” *makes book brighter*

Eyes: “Jesus! Too Bright. Anyway, it’s 5:58.”

Bladder: “Did you guys forget about me? It’s been seven hours and I’m 57 years old. That’s pretty good, I think. Go me. Seriously. I need to go.”

*goes to bathroom and squats because fuck toxic masculinity I don’t want to have to turn the light on*

Bladder: “Ah, that’s better.”

Anus: *FAAAARRRRRTTTTT*

Everyone: “Good one, Anus.”

Bowels: “Hey.”

Brain: “NO!”

Bowels: “I mean, we’re here.”

Brain: “I said no. If we poop that means getting up, closing the door, turning on the light, and waking up more than I already am. It’s six in the morning on a Sunday. You can wait.”

Bowels: “No need to be a dick about it.”

Dick: “Someone call me?”

Everyone else: “Oh, hey. Mr. It’s All About Me thinks it’s all about him.”

*goes back to bed*

Fifteen minutes later …

Bowels: “Hey.”

Brain: “FUUUUCCCKKKKK!”

Bowels: “It’s just … I really think we should have pooped.”

OPOB: “He’s not gonna shut up, you know. You might as well get up. Besides, then we can have coffee.”

Bowels: “Yay! Coffee!”

Brain: “I hate you guys.”

OPOB: “Look at it this way, you can drink coffee, and make this into a story.”

Brain: “I just wrote a story a few days ago.”

OPOB: “Yeah, but it wasn’t a very good story.”

Brain: “Hey, that was uncalled for. Besides, this one isn’t any better.”

OPOB: “Let them be the judge of that.”

Bowels: “It’s a good story, because poop! And coffee! And poop! Do it do it do it!”

IMPORTANT NOTICE: Demand for On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down is through the roof and Bantam just ordered another big print run that will take two weeks to fulfill. Looking at the sales data, even those new copies probably won’t last. It’s a very popular Christmas gift so if you want it to arrive on time, don’t delay! Order both volumes of On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down.