1. For the first 510-ish years of Christianity, it was common (and maybe even typical) to encounter Christians who denied belief in an eternal Hell.

Despite the pop-cultural/conservative-theological assumption that all Christians have always believed the same “everyone either goes to Satan World forever or goes to pearly gates forever” thing, there are centuries’ worth of records of early (and Medieval and modern and …) Christian theologians professing all sorts of beliefs about the world to come, the fates of souls, and even the ultimate restoration of all things.

One of the most influential universalist theologians1, the third-century Saint Origen of Alexandria2, taught that creation was originally a harmony between all conscious beings — and that “the end is always like the beginning,” meaning we are on a long path back toward universal harmony.

How naive, right? How could we ever reach such an end, considering how bad things have gotten since then? Some guy from long ago couldn’t know anything about our current predicament. Modernity would’ve broken the desert weirdo’s sense of bleeding-hearted mercy.

Oh wait, he spent two of his final years being tortured by the Roman Empire, refusing to recant the claim that there is a power greater than Caesar? Hmm. Nevermind that part.

Origen saw conscious beings as defining themselves by their choices, indicating a fluidity in status, a tomorrow different from today, a hopeful imagination.

"Since all are possessed of free will, and may of their own accord admit either of good or evil, … angels may become men or demons, and again from the latter they may rise to be men or angels."3

To be clear, this isn’t as blithely La Dee Da as it might sound. This is still grounded in an ancient tradition of social justice, a tradition that would inspire one of Origen’s readers to write the world’s oldest recorded argument for the total abolition of slavery.

If somebody is treating others the same way a demon would, then this figurative or literal demon is not ready to rejoin harmony with the Creator. But in place of an eternally punitive Hell functioning as a pointless wrath dump, Origen taught a retroactively radical version of a long-widespread Christian belief: that the cleansing fire of divinity will “remove the defects of our souls” until everyone — as in, e v e r y o n e — is restored.4 For some of us, that cleansing will take a while. But:

“Through the numerous and uncounted orders of progressive beings who are being reconciled to God from a state of enmity, the last enemy is finally reached, who is called death, so that he also may be destroyed.”

Thus, in Origen’s vision of the end, after all has been fairly purged, the only thing that has been damned is death itself.

How nice! Who could be mad at that? Well, lots of people, though not for a while. You know how “woke” has gone from being an AAVE term for awareness of bigotry to being a conservative term for Cracker Barrel’s logo causing emotional distress? A similar kind of thing happened to Origen’s legacy. In the 400s and 500s, “Origenism” had become a scrambled grab bag of so-called heresies, according to some of the guys who were wearing the biggest hats at the time, whether the long-dead Origen would’ve affirmed any of it or not.

In 553 at the Second Council of Constantinople, big-hatted Byzantine emperor Justinian I pretty much just … up and decided “Origenism” had been wrong about everything, using a straw man called “Origen” to denounce this and that, despite no record of Jesus having ever empowered any big-hat guys, and especially not a literal emperor. Lumped in among the grab bag of Stuff Some Politician Doesn’t Like was this condemnation of one version of universalism:

“If anyone says that the heavenly powers, all human beings, the devil, and the spirits of wickedness will be united to God, … let him be anathema.”

Despite that caricature, Origen hadn’t taught 300 years prior that snarling gangs of stinky demons will strut into Heaven, sneering slurs and leaving muddy shoeprints everywhere. He’d instead described demons one day deciding to quit the demon business, become non-demons, become things better than demons, and be further rehabbed by divinity as necessary:

"The destruction of the last enemy must be understood in this way, not that its substance which was made by God shall perish, but that the hostile purpose ... will come to an end."

Our good and bad choices define who we have been until right now, but in each new moment, our divine essence is capable of good. One play at a time.

2. The Big 12 Conference no longer publishes an official preseason poll on how its football teams will perform in the upcoming season.

That’s probably because last year’s edition ended up being one of the most last-shall-be-first things I’ve ever seen in sports:

“They continue to keep saying that people are going to try to stop me,” said long-overlooked ASU running back Cam Skattebo before the surprise Big 12 champions’ playoff matchup against the ever-imperial Texas Longhorns. “There's nobody out there that can stop me.”

"What he's trying to say is, 'My entire life I was the only one who believed in me,’” explained head coach Kenny Dillingham, defending his player.

Skattebo’s Sun Devils then backed it up, forcing the two-touchdown favorites all the way into double overtime before going down as the country’s most beloved team of the season. All that after they’d been picked to finish dead last in a second-tier conference. Nobody ever knows what will happen next.

Then again, maybe that upheaval shouldn’t have been a big surprise. After all, as Origen wrote 1,800 years prior about the creature who is currently dead last in a different ranking:

“Every rational being is capable of praise … if … he advance to better things. … This is also thought to apply to the Devil.”

3. Of course, not all devils will advance to better things any time soon.

Speaking of our modern predicament.

Just as in ancient Rome, empire has always wanted its own entrenchment to be permanent. But it can’t be, because nothing ever has been. The desperate attempts by caesars and other self-declared angels, those who’ve ranked themselves on the top of society, to avoid ever trading places with those they perceive as demons? Nothing new.

Nothing else is new, either. Not oppression, hoarding, or lying. Most of history, art, religion, and everything else has always been a story about creation vs. empire, love vs. empire, and the future vs. empire.

A few months ago on the Vacation Bible School Podcast, I asked Trey Ferguson, a pastor and author from Florida, “How do you find hope when the world feels extra hopeless?” Part of what he said:

“I’m not hopeful about the prospects of America as an entity. It will fall eventually. But what I look forward to is: What might we be able to rebuild with the revived imaginations that we will have if we do not let our hope whither on the vine? My hope is always in tomorrow. That’s the one part of the story that’s not written yet.”

Collectively, we’ve always outlasted empire, over and over and over, though it sucks along the way. Whatever your name for the power that is greater than Caesar, whether it’s personified or not, it will outlast him every time.

The first will always become the last, and then maybe the first will huff and puff and finally give up on its demon business after a few million years or so, once the first accepts it will never have the permanence it craves without earning harmony among the last.5

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4. Nine college football seasons ago, I began posting a weekly schedule guide called the Watch Grid. It’s an ugly spreadsheet, sometimes modified with even uglier Paintbrush scrawling, and during this decade, it’s barely ever changed.

I posted it for four years at SB Nation, one year on a defunct subreddit, one year at USA Today, one year on my Instagram, and two years via this newsletter.

• I have no idea why people like it. This hideous spreadsheet, which long ago took me probably six minutes to set up while probably in the middle of editing seven other posts, is one of the four or five things I’m most known for. Seeing it on socials or in email is some sort of a tradition for the weirdo corner of college football internet, and I’m grateful for that. I do understand the hideousness is somehow part of the appeal.

• People like it so much (despite me not knowing why) that they let me evolve it into a space to yap about things that allegedly have nothing to do with football. Last year at this time, I wrote about Week 1 by writing about process theology. The year before that, the end of the world. It was kind of people to let me do this.

Going forward, a new version of the Watch Grid will arrive via the Until Saturday newsletter, the free CFB newsletter I write for The Athletic. (I hope you’ll also stay subscribed here, since it’s not like I gratuitously bombard your inbox haha.)

Still, I wanted to send us out with more huge version, with its younger sibling to follow tomorrow in Until Saturday. Here is the last edition of the OG 2016-2024 Watch Grid, though it’s also the first of the 2025 season. The last, the first. It looks the same as it ever did, because the end is always like the beginning.

Some other stuff:

• Spencer Hall joined us on VBS to discuss the Bible story about two bears eating 42 youths, and we had a good chat about having both been incompatible for two very different (but not very different, if we’re keeping it real) varieties of Christianity. Emily and I are now working on our episode about Jonah.

• The Shutdown Fullcast has a Patreon now. It has four hours’ worth of garbage so far.

• Speaking of afterlife cleansing that might take a while: Sojourners had me write about the death of James Dobson, the Wormtongue who tried to break tens of millions of us.

• Thank you for this: Hell Is A World Without You has been available for almost two years now, and it’s yet to have a day without sales. (Try the audiobook, available at your library if you ask nicely!)

• Expedition 33 is one of my seven or so favorite video games ever.

First, look at all this:

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For the second time in five years, I’m now leaving myself a bunch of notes about my first solo book project and then leaving it to write a different book (ICYMI, I’m soon starting a non-fiction book about the intertwined history of college football and American religion).

Yep, Hell Is A World Without You wasn’t the first novel I started writing, just the first that I showed you.

Actually, it’d been a sober-pothead conversation with an old friend during the summer of 2019 that’d already begun my little fictional universe. At that Mexican restaurant, we’d thrown around a couple of galaxy-brained notions about the, well, universe.

And once I saw Star Wars 9 later that year (because if that garbage had gotten a $400 million budget, surely somebody would pay at least like $10 for some garbage of mine1), I decided to start loading up documents with wildly disparate research notes about this Whole Other Novel.

This weekend, I unearthed all those documents from winter 2019-2020, just to refresh myself on what the hell I’d gotten up to at the time. It’s some odd shit! They thought the coming-of-age story about teenagers who play Street Fighter was “too niche”? They ain’t seen a goddamn thing lol. And though my understandings of me, of writing, and of the universe have changed a lot since I wrote these weird-ass docs, I still see the vision.

I also found something that made me laugh. For the last year, when asked about HIAWWY’s origin moment, I’ve been referring to the time when I first told Emily about guns being pulled on us at church in middle school, when her reaction made me realize I should write about church kids.

But yesterday, while re-discovering my 2019ish outline for this novel-in-stories that’d be set across a history of the multiverses, I realized my outline had included a square-one synopsis of a chapter to be set in our Y2K-era Earth. Here’s the very first kernel of HIAWWY, buried on page 865,200,460 of that impenetrable Word doc:

Lyddie’s childhood story:

• We’re all we got

• We’re all we need

Lyddie became Sophie, who became Kori, who became the protagonist of this whole overarching thing, but according to the mysterious Word-doc utterances of the past, she always has been. And until yesterday, I thought that was something that’d emerged for me in the past year, not something I’d put there since the very beginning.

Anyway, that’s wild to me and probably nobody else. Now to research a bunch of books by normal-haircutted white guys named things like Representative Tom Osborne.

• We know this because it was invented during that year by Calvinists: Princeton (Presbyterian) vs. Rutgers (Dutch Reformed). The sport’s first-ever victorious player-coach would even become a leading figure within the latter denomination.

• Two years later, faculty disapproval of the sport’s violence would prevent a whole year of intercollegiate football from happening. So the 1871 season’s only known football pitted Princeton University against Princeton Theological Seminary. Now there’s a metaphor.

• Soon, the sport’s power was Yale (Congregational). One player — a teammate of football godfather Walter Camp’s — would become a Yale Divinity professor and regularly published theologian. Along the way, Camp (Episcopalian) and company turned football from Mutant League Soccer into a game we’d recognize, partly so that those faculty libs would stop complaining about the sport killing people. After all, banning the sport would prevent young men from gaining the heroic powers of Muscular Christianity favored by football guys like Camp and Teddy Roosevelt (raised Presbyterian) and current Senator Tommy Tuberville (Church of Christ) and so on.

Here’s a thing people like to say about that sport:

“Down south, college football is like a religion!”

Sure, but here are the two ways in which that sentence doesn’t go far enough:

1. Whatever behavior is being described in this way, it is a behavior that is not, and has never been, limited to the South. (Are you hearing Ohio State fans right now and/or always?) There is nothing that has been neatly quarantined inside the South or anywhere else.

2. It’s never necessary to describe something as being “like” a religious experience or gathering or practice, partly because there is no such thing as “secular.”

College football is religion because everything is religion, just as everything is college football. You cannot tell a complete story of football without including a story of American religion, sure, but here’s the surprise: It’s actually tricky to tell the full story of American religion without mentioning college football a time or two.

What, you’re gonna skip the Fighting Irish’s effects on American attitudes toward Catholicism … and the most visible religious movement of the 1990s being founded by Colorado’s football coach … and a kingmaking pastor being America’s designated spokesman at Arkansas-Texas 1969, football’s biggest game to that point, even though President Richard Nixon was in attendance?

“There have been a lot of presidents,” Texas lineman Bob McKay said to Sports Illustrated. “There’s only been one Billy Graham.”

At that first football game 100 years prior, a Rutgers professor is said to have protested the brawl by shouting, “You men will come to no Christian end,” because football has been a theological argument since literally day one (because everything is), since long before Jerry Falwell got so mad about Brown v. Board of Education that he founded a university with the explicit goal of using Notre Dame-style football branding to help build the kind of platform that could get Roe v. Wade overturned.

I hope that title sticks, because I like it, but we’ll see where that part lands. Either way, thank you to Erik and Dan for giving this project a home where it can become itself. Now I get to read so many books written by Bobby Bowden.

(Yep, there will also be another novel at some point, if I live that long, but writing that one’s gonna be way more of a convoluted ordeal than the first one was, so I might not. The college football book will likely not be the thing that kills me, at least.)

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How to fix bowl games

“How to fix bowl games” is a title that has been affixed to numerous arguments over the years, even in the days when there actually weren’t any problems with bowl games, other than the thousands of laborers having to work for Best Buy gift cards and Belk hats.

One idea that I blogged in the 2010s: Move all bowl games to the following season’s Week 0. That was a great idea, but also pointless, because bowls were mostly fine.

But now that the playoff is huge, I think bowl games will soon need fixed for real. For one thing, FBS playoff games now begin before Christmas, the time that used to be the attention sanctuary of pizza-company bowls starring Directional Michigans.

In a time such as this, here’s an idea even better than moving bowls to Week 1: Replace conference championships with bowl games.

Conference title games are weird fits for the current era, since there’s zero reason for many of these teams to even be in the same leagues, let alone leagues that are so huge, so many contenders miss each other along the way. (See: the Big 12.)

We could replace conference championships with another playoff round, but then we’d be killing bowl games even harder.

Instead, we’ll use bowl venues as hosts for frantically booked games during the final weekend before the playoff. It’ll be a mix of a Bracket Buster weekend, a one-day sprint through bowl season, and professional wrestling matches hastily conducted on the other side of a commercial break right here, right now, in the great city of Shreveport, Louisiana.

For example, this week, we’re doing the following on make-believe Saturday:

Colorado vs. Boise State in the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl: The Broncos have been the better team, and deserve to host the game that can function as the Heisman race’s finale. Sure, while Travis Hunter plays offense, Ashton Jeanty could play defense. If you were a quarterback, you’d be scared to see a linebacker doing this:

Oregon vs. Washington State in the Pear Bowl: Oregon’s already beaten Ohio State, and the new Big Ten is fake. Instead, the Ducks (a Pac-12 team) should face the Pac-12 champion, but they’ve also already beaten Oregon State, so they’ll play the Pac-12 runner-up.

We’re reviving this 1946-51 bowl game, the only FBS bowl ever played in Oregon, formerly at small-school stadiums. (The top two states in pear production are Washington and Oregon, so the name of this rejuvenated rivalry is now the Pear Bowl.)

Tulane vs. Navy is the AAC title game, but that matchup sounds like a mid-tier bowl anyway, so it’s cleared to remain on the schedule. Navy’s stadium can even host this event, as long as we call it the Military Bowl Brought to You by Weyland-Yutani or Whoever.

Notre Dame vs. SMU at First Baptist Dallas’ football stadium (they gotta have a football stadium in there somewhere): Some people try to argue that these are both ACC teams. Obviously, that’s not canon. Miami and Clemson or whoever can do the ACC Championship in the Mayo Bowl.

I am here to give Notre Dame a 13th game, and I am also overruling the committee’s requirement that only conference champs can earn CFP first-round byes, though I worry this will ruin my summer bet that the Irish will become the first team to ever lose an FBS playoff game at home.

Southern Miss vs. Kent State in “the GameAbove Sports Bowl”: Each year in my system, whichever bowl has the silliest new name has to host the last-place showdown between FBS’ two worst teams.

Apparently, this is the new name of the Detroit game that spent its debut decade as the Quick Lane Bowl. There are other new Silly Bowl Names (the Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl and Salute to Veterans Bowl, mainly), but this one is the silliest because everyone’s just gonna call it “the Sports Bowl,” which sounds like something made up by Jon Bois.

For more on my bona fides as a judge of Silly Bowl Names, see my ranking of the 63 silliest ever at that time. If I can blog like that while colossally depressed, just imagine how much I already know about Silly Bowl Names during normal times.

Alabama vs. Ole Miss in the goddamn SEC West where they belong: We have a CFP rankings dilemma involving two teams who haven’t played each other despite previously being in the same division for 31 fucking years. Put shit back where it was.

Texas vs. Texas A&M in the Texas Bowl: You two have a lot more catching up to do. Snuggle back up!! We’re gonna sing one more verse:

Additionally, we will be revamping this weekend’s traditional Dr. (with period) Pepper scholarship toss. Going forward, it will pit Ivy League legacies against each other, and both the winner and the loser will be sent to person schools instead.

1. If you buy a copy of my (frankly well-reviewed) book before December 7, and send jasonkirkbook at gmail.com your new receipt and your address, we’ll send you an autograph sticker that will turn your copy into an author-signed copy — along with other stickers, while supplies last. (U.S. only.) We’ll send in time for Christmas, so you can give these copies as gifts. 😉

2. Two recent HIAWWY reviews that I really liked, both coincidentally here on Substack: Noah Grand’s very personal autobiographical review, and Benjamin Rose on the power of fiction to say things non-fiction usually can’t.

3. If you happen to be making a Best Books of 2024 list at Goodreads or wherever, I think HIAWWY should make the cut, but I’m biased. Here are some Goodreads lists it’s on atm, in case that’s useful!

Look at this shit:

With one weekend to go, most of the Big 12’s 16 teams still have chances to reach the conference title game. Because the four teams currently tied at the top haven’t played each other at all (other than Arizona State’s win over BYU), you’d need a spreadsheet to keep track of the fluctuating wormholes that might or might not come into play.

And not just in the Big 12. Last week, it took the Big Ten three days to realize Oregon had already clinched a spot in Indianapolis. ACC leaders SMU, Clemson, and Miami haven’t played each other. The SEC’s standings would’ve been a mess if not for roughly the entire conference losing last week. At least the Pac-12 makes sense for now.

Divisions went away because conferences want to ensure only their best CFP candidates compete in league title games, and there’s no Business-Brained argument I can raise as a counter to that. Saying things like “it’s less fun when we feel like we have to ask a dungeon master whether our team’s win means anything, and these teams don’t actually feel like they’re in the same conference, and I liked things better how they were when I was 15, and you should do the pods thing we spent the mid-2010s posting about” isn’t going to change anything.

But if we’re stuck with conferences being interplanetary entities that include 43.6 teams who’ve never heard of each other (we are stuck with this), we can only make peace with it. So I’m remembering this:

College football is supposed to be a confounding mess. History reveals this to be true.

No matter how many times people have tried to organize the absolute basics — such as little things like how to decide which team is the best — the sport has spent a century and a half resisting every kind of order. To avoid going crazy, it’s best to just embrace the disarray and learn to adore the errors.

And now that we’ve taken that national confusion and made it regional (and Big Ten) as well, let’s lean into it, I guess. Each conference should have secret minigames scattered throughout its tiebreaker document, like a Daily Double or treasure chest that eats you. Who cares, nothing matters, let 4-8 UCF win the Big 12, everything matters.

And now, the Thanksgiving weekend Watch Grid, after some brief information.

1. If you buy a copy of my (frankly well-reviewed) book before December 7, and send jasonkirkbook at gmail.com your new receipt and your address, we’ll send you an autograph sticker that will turn your copy into an author-signed copy — along with other stickers, while supplies last. (U.S. only.) We’ll send in time for Christmas, so you can give these copies as gifts. 😉

2. Holiday travel note: That same book is available for free as an author-narrated audiobook via Audible credits, Spotify Premium, a Libro trial, and/or your library. If that last part isn’t true, tell them it should be.

(In case you’re new: I’ve been doing a weekly college football schedule guide since like 2015 or something. It’s really ugly, but people ask for it. I usually also write something that has either a lot or nothing to do with the spreadsheet screenshot.)

Quick one this week. Around here, we believe in hope, and therefore:

If tomorrow isn’t the day when these wheels are set in motion1, then please note I did not specify in which year it would happen. “About that day and hour, no one knows” is handy for any situation!

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As for days and hours we do know:

Additionally, a holiday thing:

• If you buy a copy of my (frankly well-reviewed) book between now and December 7,

• and send us a screenshot (jasonkirkbook at gmail.com) of your 11/15-12/7 receipt, along with your address,

• then we’ll send you an autograph sticker that you can use to turn your copy into an author-signed copy — along with a handful of other stickers, while supplies last.

• (U.S. only, please. If you live elsewhere, I will email you a PNG or something.)

• We’ll get it to you in time for Christmas, so you can plan to give these copies as gifts. 😉

• Don’t worry about shipping costs. Ho ho ho! (If this burdens your soul, send a dollar to charity.)

Here’s the first pile of stickers, about to head out today:

1

A tangent, which is hopefully a fun fact:

The Book of Ezekiel opens with the prophet’s vision of a bunch of wild shit in the sky (now there’s a book that hits the damn ground running), which eventually inspired the Biblically Accurate Angels meme, the internet’s BE NOT AFRAID joke about all angels fitting the description of Ezekiel’s wheely-eyeballed sky horrors, rather than looking like the chubby-cheeked cloudbabies in the paintings on the walls at your grandma’s house.

A great joke, one I’ve seen on Bluesky several times this week, in addition to the Shutdown Fullcast celebrating Biblically Accurate Garfield.

Additionally, a biblically accurate angel can be either one of those Ezekiel nightmares or something totally different:

• Some of the Bible’s beings/gods/visions/messengers/embodiments/etc. that can be retroactively understood with our catch-all idea of “angels: God’s errand guys” really do look like the classic Glowing Sword Humanoid image. See Numbers 22:23 or Joshua 5:13, for instance. Others are different kinds of weird, as the authors of Daniel and Revelation depicted with all their fevered might.

• If you attempt to Pokemon-taxonomize all of these biblically accurate things that were described by different writers in different centuries amid different cultural influences, you end up with something like medieval Rabbi Maimonides’ angel POWER RANKINGS, proof that people have always had r/whowouldwin brains.

• Also, per Genesis 18 (when Abraham makes friends with three wandering randos), biblically accurate angels can look something like this:

So if we have no way of knowing which travelers are secretly angels, then we’d better act as if all of them are, lest we have to explain our behavior to a wheely-eyeballed sky horror.

1. Hey, thanks for joining! I usually post here about college football and/or religion, along with things that are neither, though there is nothing that is truly neither, because everything is both. Anyway, thanks for joining!

2. Each week of the CFB season, I post an ugly spreadsheet that sorts the weekend’s FBS (and select FCS) games by subjective watchability. I started doing it in like 2015, and people told me to keep doing it despite how ugly it is.

3. Alongside it, I usually write about something unrelated, such as novelty junk food or process theology.

This week, I want to offer all of you a little something:

• If you buy a copy of my (frankly well-reviewed) book between now and December 7,

• and send us a screenshot (jasonkirkbook at gmail.com) of your 11/15-12/7 receipt, along with your address,

• then we’ll send you an autograph sticker that you can use to turn your copy into an author-signed copy — along with a handful of other stickers, while supplies last.

• (U.S. only, please. If you live elsewhere, I will email you a PNG or something.)

• We’ll get it to you in time for Christmas, so you can plan to give these copies as gifts. 😉

• Don’t worry about shipping costs. Ho ho ho! (If this burdens your soul, send a dollar to charity.)

And now for the ugly spreadsheet.

In hindsight, there wasn’t much of a way around this, given the situations we’d already put ourselves in from 2016-2021. That’s stupid, I agree.

All around the world, incumbents have been punished for the economic conditions resulting from COVID. Comparing America’s current economy to its peers suggests Joe Biden could’ve avoided that, but when he had already inspired mountains’ worth of FUCK THIS GUY merch (mostly for the crime of being the guy who’d defeated Donald Trump) and adorned himself in the stench of genocide and made weird debate faces, the only question was whether a hail mary would work.

Now, I think the hail mary went about as well as could’ve been expected. Yesterday, as always happens after an election, I saw arguments that Kamala Harris should’ve ran more to the right, to the left, and toward directions undiscovered. Sure, if she’s really distinct from Biden on Palestine, she should’ve far more clearly communicated that. Sure, Tim Walz should’ve been unleashed to make Joe Rogan laugh at Republicans.

I wish a lot of things, and many would’ve been the right thing whether they would’ve changed the outcome or not, but it’s unlikely that they would’ve.

As noted, most voters tend to use an election as a magic Somebody Somehow Put The Gas Prices Back Where They Were When I Was In High School button. There were people cramming the absolute basics on the day of the election.

One reason nostalgia is an incredible drug: It’s a liar. “Make America great again” is brilliant because it never specifies when it was that America was great. Maybe it was some decade when you think America’s policies or economy or pop culture probably aligned with some belief of yours, or maybe it was a time when you remember being happier, whether you actually were happier at the time or not. For most people, it was the time when you had a driver’s license but didn’t yet have to pay rent.

It’s fair to say “MAGA” means the 1850s to many Trump supporters, but for some 2024 voters, it refers to what they think they remember about the late-2010s. Of course first-time voters remember their childhoods before COVID as being better than the time after, for instance.

Tens of millions of people voted for Trump, and many of them have now done so three times. They’re all accountable for what happens next, and what happens next will be terrible for many people and possibly bad for almost everyone. But I am telling myself that many of those 2024 voters are people who made up their minds on this election as soon as they saw a $7 bag of Ruffles, thought back to a time when Ruffles were probably like $3, remembered who the president happened to have been at that time, and then went back to never thinking about the infinite coincidences, contradictions, and complexities in the gap between those two prices.

Trump got to botch a pandemic response while also botching everything else, pass the cleanup off to other people, and reap all the benefits of that cleanup. He’s been the world’s luckiest person for decades now, and I hope his luck runs out at some point ever.

Every moment was a product of other moments, and it makes sense that none of it makes sense. Stupid causes have logically produced stupid effects, always and forever.

This doesn’t absolve those voters, and it is no excuse for those who’d voted for Trump previously or stayed engaged enough to know about any of the world’s most famous man’s endless crimes against the world and its marginalized people.

It doesn’t make it right, good, or smart.

It’s just what happened.

I’m telling myself that for several reasons:

• It means there’s a way out, politically. For thousands of years, the winning message — “bring down the powerful from their thrones and lift up the lowly” — has been the winning message. So whether via the wreckage of the national Democratic Party or otherwise, rescue that message from the latest version of The Powerful to have contorted it into a Throne. Harris even ran some ads on this, which actually boosted voters’ impression of her economic aptitude. It works! No shit!

• As Ken “Popehat” White wrote (great post), I am “under no obligation to like, respect, or associate with people who countenance this.” I’m not going to be nice to the many Trump voters who should’ve known better, because they have not been nice to humanity, and they’ve been especially brutal to people who were already vulnerable. I’m good with initiating disagreement, I’m great with awkward, and I don’t give a shit about giving you more than what you’ve given. But! Some people who voted alongside you didn’t know better, no matter how unbelievable/inexcusable that feels. Those people will continue to land in surprising places every single day.

• Since we’re being honest, here’s the biggest reason: Reminding myself that people change their minds in chaotic ways, and that not every Trump voter is a Trumpist cultist (which I say with personal awareness of both Trumpists and cults), is the only way for me to remain a sunshine-pumping anti-doomer of a feel-good pushover. (I don’t think I’m that, but somebody does. Fuck off. I forgive you.)

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One of the more frequent FAQs I’ve gotten about my coming-of-age novel (and I promise this is relevant): Why include an epilogue set 20 years after adolescence?

If someone asks about it, they usually mention that they liked it (thanks!), though we can always agree that it was a Choice on my part, one that didn’t have to happen.

There were lots of reasons to write it, but here’s what clinched it as a keeper: when early readers of the near-final version kept telling me how much they appreciated the book’s relentlessly hopeful empathy. And, spoiler alert, the highest concentration of that is in the epilogue, which is set in a year called “now” that can be read as 2024, if you like. (In some too-early printings, it’s even specifically set in 2024.) The book’s publication date is also listed as 2024.1

In 2023, months before we finished the book, I remember thinking something like, “Do I really want there to be a record of me doing all this hope and empathy stuff during a year that risks forever being synonymous with an even worse Trump catastrophe?”

What a naive fool I’d look like, if somebody were to one day find this book in a smoking crater, seeing I’d written my narrator as saying shit like this even while the fuse was already burning:

Those of us who made it out owe something to captives still ensnared, don’t we? Love always protects, doesn’t it? 

So we’ll relentlessly oppose hypocrisy, no matter how pointless it feels. Nope, our facts and logic won’t fix whoever the current Rush Limbaugh is. So fucking what? The point is planting seeds in the minds of onlookers who are only 99% indoctrinated. 

In fact, we’re the religion-industrial complex’s worst nightmare. By grooming us to dread everything that’d de-groom us, it revealed its deepest fear: its nail-scarred star pupils realizing we hold not only a hammer but also the blueprints. By age six, we mastered their lingo. Humbling them at Bible trivia? Child’s play, literally. Our machine created its own monsters, ones armed with this superpower: We cannot be fooled by charismatic men pantomiming certainty. 

But that’s only worth a damn if it benefits someone else. What men meant for evil, may God use for good. Leaving captivity would’ve been easier, if we’d had refugee elders loudly telling us deconstruction — the modern term for facing rejection in order to feel less insane — is worth it. So let’s become those elders. 

Nobody chooses to be indoctrinated, and nobody’s entirely free of it. Maybe you’ve been drafted into a battle against a different machine of bigotry or poverty or injustice. Still, in our common war, each liberation leads to another. (Sorry for making all this sound like The Matrix. I was raised by Y2K youth pastors and Zack de la Rocha.)

The point:

People can change. Need proof? 

Hi. :)

And then the hopium ramps up even more.

Actually, one correction:

After Isaac first said an earlier version of those words, I thought about how dumb they’d look in the aftermath of Christian Nationalists theoretically seizing control of everything. So I pushed him to say them differently — not to be cooler or to aim lower, but instead to leave even more on the field, to channel the same dipshit euphoria he’d felt during an adolescent epiphany, when a different shade of me (one I named Kori) had just found a piece of the Gospel:

• To love each other, we first have to learn how to love ourselves in spite of the world.

I chose to quadruple down on the cringiest hope those kids ever mustered, because if hope is cringe, then we are doomed without cringe. I now find hope in having textual evidence that I knew what hope felt like, which is basically how I suspected this Choice might turn out.

“In my experience having spent much of my life surrounded by people bent on my political destruction,” said my friend Jane, “the most irritating thing you can do to them is have an inner life and protect whatever peace you can have.”

And that’s not a retreat into nihilism, but an advance past it and into action, any kind of action.

Every moment is a product of other moments.

A long time ago, I stopped believing in America.

But in this shitty moment, I choose this all over again:

You can never make me stop believing in people.

It’s impossible to change everything.

But it’s really simple to change one thing.

Business: Sunday, November 24 at 5 p.m. in Jacksonville, Florida, I’ll be at Hendricks Avenue Baptist Church for a free (RSVP here) event about my book and stuff. I will not care which religious status you leave with afterward. Q&A, signing, panel, etc., and then we’re going to the bar selected by Pastor B.J.

Additionally, we’re passing the plate in order to help erase over a million dollars’ worth of medical debt — you can also pitch in now, if you like.

While you can look at any social app and find all the doom and/or cope you like, nobody knows how this is gonna go. I have a guess, and I feel fairly confident about it, but that’s not worth much to anybody.

In the meantime, here’s a version of what I plan to tell my kid, who wisely has never read any of my posts, meaning there’s no risk of spoiler (I’ll say it much more quickly when I say it to her, because she doesn’t care about reaching the spreadsheet on the other side of it):

Next week, we might suffer a loss.

If that happens, things will get worse for almost everyone. That includes all of the groups who have long been bullied for being different from the group that believes itself to be the in-group.

And that list also includes most of those supposed in-group people. They’re never actually going to belong inside that group, and in fact, they were never even eligible for consideration. Whether those alleged victors know it yet or not, they are already part of the “we” who “might suffer a loss next week.”

Donald Trump did not invent any of his ideas, if we can call them ideas. He was far from the first face of what he represents, and he won’t be anywhere near the last. This isn’t really about him, no matter how hard it is to imagine anything in America being about something besides its most miserable attention slave.

The battle between the impulse to treat all of your neighbors as you would treat yourself and the impulse to conquer your neighbor because you have been told your neighbor is inherently inferior to you: This battle has been ongoing since neighbors were invented. We have documentation of this, and you already know which example I’m going to cite, though it’s likewise far from the oldest:

The Book of Genesis is about collective creation vs. birthright status. The Book of Exodus is about unifying via liberation vs. clinging to power. The Gospel of Luke is about overturning society vs. negotiating exceptions within that overturning. The Book of Revelation is about a country whose borders are always open vs. an empire that would rather damn itself than let go.

There has only ever been one conflict.

And many times in many places, its results have gone poorly for people while profiting powers. As we all know, that’s still happening throughout the world right now.

It might start going much more poorly for those of us in America, and that might start very soon.

A second Trump presidency would be so much more damaging than the first was, which is saying a lot. His team has openly admitted it would tank the economy, make people sick, strip away freedoms, establish internment camps, further erode his own restrictions, attack his personal opposition, and spend four years obsessively delaying environmental progress or peace in Palestine. Things would feel hopeless, even worse than last time.

To say things have also felt hopeless before, many times and in many places, isn’t minimizing, though. The battle started tens of thousands of years before 2024, and it won’t end next week, no matter what happens. That sucks for those of us who won’t live tens of thousands of years and thus get to outlive the bad times.

Still, every power is doomed to fall. They always have, and they always will. Use whichever math you like, historical or theoretical or religious or fictional, and you’ll end up with that same result, because those are all the same math.

And then there’ll be a new power, because it’ll always be easy for somebody to accept the recruiting pitch — “All these kingdoms I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me” — and it’ll always be easy for somebody else to go along with it, even as it poisons them both.

I don’t say the following in a “religious” sense, not that I have any idea which of anybody’s thoughts count as “religious” or not, because I have no idea what that word means to anybody, including me. Everything said by any of you sounds “religious.” I just say this because it’s true:

It will not be easy to get there, but there will come a day when we win, and by “we,” I mean everybody, even the people who currently believe themselves to be in a group that isn’t everybody.

Next week could be a step in the wrong direction, away from that win. Or it could be a very Democratic Party-style kind of shuffling standstill (which would feel great, at this point). Or it could even feel like something else.

Regardless, even if next week is an Electoral College blowout by Harris, next week certainly won’t be the week when we win-win. In that scenario, next week will be when we exhale, do uhh something to try to make sure the election actually counts lol, and then begin trying to actually get somewhere.

Regardless, at some point after whatever happens next week, we’re gonna win.1 2

Business: Sunday, November 24 at 5 p.m. in Jacksonville, Florida, I’ll be at Hendricks Avenue Baptist Church for a free (RSVP here) event about my book and stuff. I will not care which religious status you leave with afterward. Q&A, signing, panel, etc., and then we’re going to the bar selected by Pastor B.J.

Additionally, we’re passing the plate in order to help erase over a million dollars’ worth of medical debt — you can also pitch in now, if you like.

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If so, here’s what’s going on inside them. We’ve been hearing and reading these words every few seconds for the last two or three months:

“Kamala Harris is for they/them. Donald Trump is for you.”

From August through early October, national Republicans spent “more than $65 million” on a handful of ads centered around transphobia, according to an NYT analysis at the time, though because most of these attacks have so thoroughly conflated trans people with non-binary people and drag queens and anyone in hair dye that isn’t blonde, I’d just call most of these attacks queerphobic.

I wouldn’t be surprised if that $ number doubles by Election Day. They’ve already ramped up to such a degree, I feel like it’s been a while since I heard a Trump ad that wasn’t about bigotry, though there’s one that assigns itself the free-association challenge of doing xenophobia both transphobically and in a crime-panicking way, creating “the turducken of hate-baiting.”

That “$65 million” number includes ads by not just Trump’s campaign, but also by various associated PACs and other campaigns, including local bombardment in Ohio and the even more vicious shit that Trump is posting to his social-media sandbox.

In Texas, Ted Cruz’s Democrat challenger, Colin Allred, is facing so many of these attacks that national viewers have seen them during Texas Longhorns games this past month, including one delirious rant that paints itself into a rhetorical corner and accidentally claims the American military’s child soldiers are receiving sex changes, which has gotta be a Metal Gear subplot.

Reporters have noted that conservatives are especially targeting these ads at viewers of football games, and especially college football, a sport whose largely red-/purple-state viewers Trump cannot afford to lose. As a thorough CFB watcher in one of the most CFB-addicted states, and as a resident of the market that has been hit harder by political advertising than any other (except Phoenix), I feel like I hear these ads when I sleep.

(Not in a the message is sinking in way. At this point, it’s like that thing where you repeat a word so many times that it starts to lose meaning, followed by it becoming generally funny that we are animals who can construct such complex sounds with our mouths.)

In previous elections, transphobia has not been a winning issue for Republicans — it’s been the opposite, in fact. But when Democrat voters see veritably random poll fluctuations and conclude Trump has suddenly obtained a mystical force known as “momentum,” it’s easy for us to assume the world’s all-time biggest bet on this specific form of hatred1 is finally accomplishing the thing Republicans had always wanted it to accomplish.

Maybe these ads backfire, as Trump ignoring the economy distracts the electorate from its natural desire to use an election as a magic Somebody Somehow Put The Gas Prices Back Where They Were When I Was In High School button. That’d sure add evidence to the case that bigotry hurts even the bigot himself. Or maybe these ads install just enough malice in the exact Pennsylvania voter who happens to decide everything. Hate works, for a season.

Regardless, in times like these, AKA all times ever, there has only ever been one well, and now we are going back yet again to a version of what’s in it:

“Whatever you do to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you do to me.”

A month ago, despite the prevalence of these ads at the time, I assumed the fascists’ Random Punching Bag Generator had mostly settled on immigrants this time around. But while “mass deportation” camps are still the Republicans’ final solution for every problem, their primary closing argument along the way is nothing more than pitting the current in-group against the 1% of people who are trans.

The only response is the same response as ever. The mission has been the mission for several thousand years and counting. To repeat that previous post:

Every time we elevate the lowest-ranking people, we improve the future for everyone else as well, and it’s a whole lot easier to invest in elevating those people if we accept that we don’t inherently deserve anything better than what those people have, that we have never been different from anyone in any meaningful way.

As society changes its goldfish mind on whether trans children or Palestinian children or Haitian children are the bigger danger, the gospel has always been consistent. The gospel is solidarity, and solidarity is the gospel.

Whatever we do to one of the most marginalized of our siblings, we do to everyone.

There is no feasible movement that can improve society for “they/them” while also thereby making anything worse for anyone else.

In fact, once we all realize “they/them” is part of “we” and always has been, everything will get better for all of “we” in at least one tangible way: Instead of commercials about bigotry, we will receive inspiration by way of additional commercials about Cheez-It pep talks.

So you’re damn right.

If “they/them” is not included in “we,” then there is no “we,” but just a collection of in-groups ready to throw each other into the path of empire whenever it manages to isolate a new target.

For they/them.

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Business: Sunday, November 24 at 5 p.m. in Jacksonville, Florida, I’ll be at Hendricks Avenue Baptist Church for a free (RSVP here) book event. We’ll do a Q&A, panel, signings, and whatever, then go to the bar to happily not watch the Jaguars, who are off that week. (I said “bar,” which should clue you in on what kind of Baptists we’re talking about, AKA the kind I would invite you to hang out with.)

Four things, quickly:

1. If you might be in the Jacksonville, Florida area on November 24, let’s hang. Got a book event coming together real quickly. Very full-circle venue for me! Details coming ASAP.

2. Though I’ve already done the 2024 Watch Grid’s charity thing, I’d still appreciate it if you’d tell your library about my book’s great reviews. Since we started this last month, hundreds of new libraries have stocked it. (Thank you!)

3. If you and your homies want me to Zoom (or whatever) with your book club (or whatever), say the word. I’ve done as many of those as I can, including a great one in Michigan last night. That and any other inquiry-type stuff — podcasts, interviews, review copies, random questions, whatever: jasonkirkbook@gmail.com.

4. There should be an Inside Out about grownups? There is. It’s called Disco Elysium.

As for this weekend, the one in which most teams are beginning their home stretches: Oregon is not actually a Big Ten team yet, but the Ducks can change that tonight by becoming the latest top-five team to lose in West Lafayette for no good reason.

Here’s a chart with at least two typos that I will not be correcting:

I also didn’t intend for Kentucky-Florida to be smaller font, but it’s for the best anyway.

What’s a Blood Week? That’s the Shutdown Fullcast’s term for a weekend in college football when way too many good teams lose. It’s fun when powerful people fail!!

The usual bare-minimum requirement in order to be considered for Blood Weekness: At least three top-10 teams must lose upsets, though there are caveats and exceptions and nuances. In order to gain full Blood Week status, the mayhem should include something truly merry, like the #1 team losing, a top-five team getting destroyed outta nowhere, or Notre Dame losing to someone very funny, such as Marshall, which has happened.

So! This week, people have asked: Was this past weekend, when seven ranked teams lost to unranked (or barely ranked) opponents, the craziest CFB weekend ever?

As an amateur college football historian, I can attempt an answer.

(Bona fides, for anybody who doesn’t know: My job throughout the 2010s was running the internet’s best pound-for-pound CFB editorial team, and I’ve led CFB history projects like this enormous retrospective on the 2007 season and a sci-fi western about the history of the NCAA. Also, here’s my list of every “true” national champion, 1869-2023.)

By my count (my spreadsheet on this exact subject began five years ago), there have been 54 Blood Weeks in the AP Poll era, or about one every 1.6 seasons.

This week, I went through them all, looking for ones that arguably produced more on-paper devastation than 2024’s first October weekend did. Since 2024’s bar is pretty high, due to #1 Alabama losing to freaking Vanderbilt, I decided to only consider weeks in which a #1 team lost, which eliminated quite a few weekends from consideration.

With that qualification in mind, along with * the fact that we’re only considering weeks from 1936 onward (because I do not care to attempt this exercise without the assistance of contemporaneous AP Poll rankers), here’s the list. It’s possible I missed a really good one, but I was out here looking at 1939 and 1956 and so forth, so it’s also possible I didn’t.

1963 Week 5

2024’s Blood Week had three upsets of top-nine teams. 1963’s had five and a half:

• #1 Oklahoma lost 28-7 to #2 Texas

• #3 Alabama lost at home to 1-1-1 Florida

• #4 Navy lost to eventual 4-7 SMU

• #7 USC lost to eventual 2-7 Notre Dame

• #8 Ohio State tied unranked Illinois at home

• #9 Penn State lost at home to 2-1 Army

At the time, only 10 teams per week had AP rankings, which means in one weekend, most of the AP Poll faceplanted all at once. Overall, that week’s ranked teams went 1-4-1 against unranked teams. (Wisconsin handled business against Purdue.)

The only knock against this weekend is that #1 merely lost to #2 (and lost to Texas for the sixth year in a row), rather than to a true underdog. Still a 21-point blowout, though.

1974 Week 10

In 2024’s Blood Week, six unranked teams beat top-25 opponents. Fifty years prior, just as many unranked teams beat top-16 opponents.

• #1 Ohio State lost to 4-3-1 Michigan State

• #5 Texas A&M lost to 5-3 SMU

• #6 Florida lost to 5-3 Georgia

• #7 Penn State lost to 7-2 NC State

• #12 Texas lost to 4-3 Baylor

• #16 Arizona State lost to 4-3-1 BYU

For a Blood Week to register as a mega-event, the biggest takedown should involve a true monster, a la Alabama losing in Nashville. The Buckeyes almost always fit that description — and, unlike 2024 Alabama, 1974 Ohio State wasn’t in transition, but was in the middle of Woody Hayes’ second peak.

But the team that beat the Buckeyes, Michigan State, wasn’t exactly a Vanderbilt. The Spartans had claimed two national titles within the previous decade. So this was a big upset, but not an exclaim-at-a-stranger-after-seeing-the-score-on-Twitter stunner. There wasn’t any Twitter at the time, because of woke.

1990 Week 11

All hail the second or third wackiest season in college football history, depending on where you rank 1984. (In our bigass retrospective on 2007, Bill Connelly ranked 1990 #2.)

During one of 1990’s most depraved days, almost the entire top five lost upsets, with multiple of those four favorites not just losing, but getting splattered:

• #1 Virginia lost at home to #16 Georgia Tech

• #3 Nebraska lost 27-12 at home to #9 Colorado

• #4 Auburn lost 48-7 to #15 Florida

• #5 Illinois lost 54-28 at home to #13 Iowa

• #19 Wyoming lost to 5-3 Colorado State

• #21 USC tied 5-3 Cal at home

The only thing missing here: a final-boss supervillain at #1. Virginia? What the hell were you even doing up there? What did you think was gonna happen?

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2007 Week 14

Despite setting a lunacy standard that might never be broken, this season actually didn’t have many individual weekends that went all that far off the rails. Instead, it had week after week of near-insanity, which accumulated into something far more disturbing than a single silly Saturday could’ve ever mustered.

However, look at this shit from conference-championship weekend:

• #1 Missouri lost 38-17 to #9 Oklahoma 

• #2 West Virginia lost to 4-7 Pitt

There were only 17 FBS games that weekend. But 12% of that weekend’s games were upsets that knocked teams directly out of the national championship — and one of the two was a 28.5-point upset in an archrivalry game that felled a top-two team for the 11th time in 56 days.1

Since the College Football Playoff’s introduction in 2014, lots of teams have lost early and then remained in the hunt. A handful of teams even made it into the four-teamer after losing their final games before Selection Sunday, and now that the CFP is a 12-teamer, somebody will pull that off every year or so. If 2007 had involved a 12-team playoff, WVU would’ve still made it, and Mizzou would’ve even hosted a game.

But 2007 was still the two-team BCS era, meaning both Mizzou and WVU saw their odds of playing in the title game go from 100% to 0%, just like that.

Oh, and for seasoning:

• #18 Oregon lost at home to 7-4 Oregon State

2008 Week 5

In the 2024 weekend, seven ranked favorites lost. Same story here, except this damage was more top-heavy, including three top-four teams.

• #1 USC lost to 1-2 Oregon State

• #3 Georgia lost after trailing 31-0 at home to #8 Alabama

• #4 Florida lost at home to 2-2 Ole Miss

• #9 Wisconsin lost to an eventual 3-9 Michigan

• #16 Wake Forest lost at home to 2-2 Navy

• #20 Clemson lost at home to 3-1 Maryland

• #23 East Carolina lost 41-24 at home to 1-3 Houston

Any loss by 2000s USC absolutely left a Goliath-sized crater. Stealing a little thunder here, though: Oregon State had already done the same thing two years prior.

(You might discredit this week’s Blood status because Florida went on to win the title despite that loss to Ole Miss. On the contrary, if a school puts up a plaque in memory of a loss, then that loss was an all-timer.)

2024 Week 6

• #1 Alabama lost to 2-2 Vanderbilt

• #4 Tennessee lost to 3-2 Arkansas

• #9 Missouri lost 41-10 to #25 Texas A&M

• #10 Michigan lost to 3-2 Washington

• #11 USC lost to 3-2 Minnesota

• #22 Louisville lost at home to unranked SMU

• #25 UNLV lost at home to unranked Syracuse

If Bama had lost to almost anyone else, I don’t think this week would rank in the tippy-top tier of Blood Weeks.

Only a few of these games were significant point-spread upsets, for one thing. Texas A&M and Washington were actually favored. I’m guessing that wasn’t the case for most of the games in this post’s older years that lack such data.

But Bama didn’t lose to “someone else.” Bama lost to Vanderbilt … for the first time since 1984. Vanderbilt had never beaten a top-five team, let alone #1, let alone a #1 named “the Alabama Crimson Tide.” Bama has won more national titles since 2008 than Vandy has won bowl games ever.

The spread was only 22.5, but because of the history that’d cast this game as The God vs. The Punchline, this upset felt twice that size, near the magnitude of 2007 App State-Michigan or 2007 Stanford-USC.

Then again, this wasn’t Nick Saban’s Alabama.

Then again, Kalen DeBoer’s Alabama had just beaten previous #2 Georgia seven days prior in maybe the game of the year. So … it kind of was Nick Saban’s Alabama. Until Vandy happened.

Well, was this the craziest weekend ever?

Partly, it comes down to what we mean when we say “Vanderbilt beat Alabama.”

On paper, the answer is nah. Above, I demonstrated several ways in which previous weekends delivered more surprise.

But life doesn’t happen on paper. The centerpiece of this mess isn’t a loss by #1 Virginia or a win by a #2 Texas, and that matters.

Still, each of those other weekends eliminated contenders from national title races, rather than potentially adjusting a handful of playoff seeds. So I think the standard has gone up, meaning a 2024 Blood Week must hit much harder in order to out-debacle one from a previous decade. Shit, Bama’s still likely to make the playoff, and they’ll probably be favored to win a game or two!

So my answer is: No. I think 2007 did it with just two games, whether or not we give those two games extra credit for providing the crescendo to that season’s two-month tumult.2 And now that there’s such a huge playoff, I barely think it’s even possible to top it.

Anyway, let’s get out there and try to top it:

First, thank you to everyone who’s participated in my lil football-season promo drive for my lil objectively good book, Hell Is a World Without You, available everywhere right now, one way or another. A month ago, I set a goal of 1,000 new requests for libraries to carry it, in addition to the many libraries that already were, and you’ve already gotten us two-thirds of the way to that goal. Thank you!

The original plan for the end of this lil stunt: After hitting 1,000, I was going to donate $1,000 to a charity selected by a randomly chosen donor. Well, new plan, in light of the ongoing situation in Appalachia: I went ahead and did that before we hit 1,000.1

I’ll probably do another one of these lil promo things at some point, with a different goal in mind at that time. If you’d like to still move us toward 1,000 new requests, I’d ofc still appreciate that! See below for quick instructions.2

And now, one of the most middle-heavy college football schedules I’ve ever seen:

Before the season, TV people penciled in Clemson-FSU as this weekend’s automatic headliner. But thanks to the Noles’ earnest efforts to get kicked out of the ACC, you could argue for one of about 10 different games as being the biggest.

The answer: It’ll depend on which favored teams end up eating shit. 😃

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First, a map:

As far as I know, that’s almost* everyone who’s asked their library within the past few weeks to carry my obviously good book. Thank you!

We’re now well over 600 requests this month (or about 4% of the people who read the Watch Grid each week, hint hint for everyone else haha), and as noted, after we get to 1,000 this season, I’ll donate $1,000 to a charity chosen by a random Requestor — and also write words at you that are more fun to read than this same library thing each week.

It’s easy:

1. Enter Hell Is a World Without You in your library’s request form, probably online. For likely success, include the link to this review and/or the book’s Wikipedia page.

2. Let me know (jasonkirkbook at gmail.com or comment below or whatever) which library you asked.

3. If it’s already in your town’s library, how about your alma mater’s, your county’s, etc.? If they already have the audiobook, how about print, etc.?

4. If the form wants an ISBN: hardcover is 9781735492650, ebook is 9781735492629, and audiobook is 9781735492667. Pick whichever. If it asks for genre: adult fiction.

Based on data I can see, I think about a fourth of September’s requests have already been fulfilled, in addition to those that have been approved but not yet purchased, others that haven’t yet been seen by librarians, etc. Solid rate. If your library doesn’t have a copy yet, it might take multiple Requestors, or they might decide to add the ebook in addition to their print copy, or what have you. Every request counts!

* “Almost” refers to Requestors outside the map (in Alaska, Australia, Canada, Finland, Hawaii, and Scotland), and also to the towns with multiple Requestors who’ve overlapped each other. Heat maps are much harder to make online than they were 10 years ago, probably because of woke.

And second:

Next week, I’ll probably write more words than I did this time, probably about novelty junk food or biblical abortion or something, but that’s all I got for now. Thanks!

In hindsight, I’d been noticing it all along, but had been around-the-clock trained to pretend otherwise.

By then, I’d witnessed our designated national bogeyman having morphed from Russian to African-American to LGBTQ to immigrant to female to impoverished, with numerous overlaps, side quests, stray shots, and reroutes along the way.

Throughout, I remember having the faintest sense that conservative leaders seemed to be preternaturally aware of ever-fluctuating danger trends, as if they were regularly observing national flareups on the same situation-room map, and I remember feeling like pastors and male relatives had all been debriefed on the circumstances while gathering somewhere off-camera, away from the kids.

Other times, it was obvious what’d inspired all those men to rally toward the same target. As soon as 9/11 occurred, their crosshairs swung toward anyone remotely reminiscent of being Arab and/or Muslim.

But over the following year, it became clear to angry Americans that the vast majority of their Muslim neighbors had zero interest in committing violence (and/or, people got tired of yelling about the same thing every day).

And one of the first “issues” to hot-tag back into the spotlight was immigration.

Partly, its resurgence was due to 9/11 itself, which had occurred five days after President Bush had first met with President Fox of Mexico. So in summer 2003, when John McCain and company proposed new immigration laws (the kind that would lead to immediate excommunication if proposed by a conservative today), it was a matter of getting back to previously scheduled business, sure.

But at the same time, conservative voices began pouncing on immigrants as the villains du jour, the latest attempted replacements for Russia, America’s previously credible foil for five consistent decades. Increasing the urgency, those voices were also in need of a topic to distract from the Iraq War’s already-deflating popularity. To me, then still an adolescent learning how to actually pay attention, the shift toward yelling about immigrants felt as sudden and random as a new topic emerging on Whose Line Is It Anyway.

Honestly, one of the best ways to track what was in the national discourse at any point in the Y2K era is to look at what South Park was covering. And yep, here was April 2004, a meme that’s now lasted two decades (because it’s actually been around for so much longer than that):

As an adolescent, watching Sauron’s eye flit from one marginalized group to another on a whim (including during the 2004 election, when it jolted back toward LGBTQ people) became undeniable evidence of … something.

Eventually, evidence of this:

The easiest way to gain power is to spot the lowest-ranking members of society and start blaming them for shit.

Sometimes, we’re led to describe this tactic as if Southern Evangelicals invented it 19 seconds ago, which makes it feel feasible to pin all the problems onto a single group, as if we can simply delete one monolith and everyone who’s yet to escape it, then never think about the problems again. Well right now, a New York City man of dubious spirituality and his Ohio Catholic sidekick are the latest in a millennia-long, globe-spanning line of caste-minded assholes, so clearly our situation is more dire than that.

I have zero interest in trying to convince you that the ancient story of Moses vs. an anonymous pharaoh literally happened in the same way as the Book of Exodus’ telling (though I can convince you it was inspired by some memory of real people striving against real people, because of course it was). Mainly, look at this:

“The new pharaoh said to his people, ‘Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and, in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.’ Therefore the pharaoh set taskmasters over the Israelites to oppress them.”

Hey, that’s great replacement theory, in both form and function. For almost as long as we’ve been writing, we’ve been chronicling dickheads who accumulate power by telling large groups to hate small groups. Over and over, immigrants have been the most popular target.

That’s why the Hebrew Bible includes dozens and dozens of reminders to welcome immigrants even at personal expense (including verses written after Israel’s most famous leaders had behaved exactly like that pharaoh), and it’s why Jesus specifically emphasized those verses as non-negotiable and mission-critical. People have always needed to be reminded, because hate has always been tempting and rewarding for a handful of people, even as it costs not just its victims, but almost everybody else as well.

Immigration has long been great for America, and for the last few years, immigration has been making Springfield, Ohio great again, challenges and all.

Reportedly, J.D. Vance knew his lies about Haitian immigrants were lies even before he began spreading them. Now, he’s sticking with those lies even after admitting on air that he helped “create” them and even while dismissing the harassment they’re producing in Springfield. Having previously worried that Donald Trump will be “America’s Hitler,” Vance is now raising the question of whether he’d meant that as a compliment.

I don’t care to know much political theory, partly because I am no longer a college sophomore.

I’m good with just this: Every time we elevate the lowest-ranking people, we improve the future for everyone else as well, and it’s a whole lot easier to invest in elevating those people if we accept that we don’t inherently deserve anything better than what those people have, that we have never been different from anyone in any meaningful way.

As society changes its goldfish mind on whether trans children or Palestinian children or Haitian children are the bigger danger, the gospel has always been consistent. The gospel is solidarity, and solidarity is the gospel. (Sunday school teachers with objections to that statement, meet me after class.)

James Cone, the landmark Black liberation theologian, said:

“To suggest that Christ has taken on black skin is not theological emotionalism. If the Church is a continuation of the Incarnation, and if the Church and Christ are where the oppressed are, then Christ and the Church must identify totally with the oppressed to the extent that they too suffer for the same reasons. … Black is holy, that is, it is a symbol of God’s presence in history on behalf of the oppressed.”

And as two other wise people put it:

As noted a few weeks ago, communion has never been about wine vs. grape juice, this kind of bread vs. that kind of bread, or this denomination vs. that “heresy.”

Instead, in the words of a Haitian resident of Springfield who was describing his American-born neighbors recently crowding into their local Haitian restaurant, communion has forever been this:

“They’re sending a strong message: … They’re here eating with us.”

Two:

Three:

Four:

This college football season, my goal for this free newsletter is 1,000+ new requests for libraries to add copies of my (objectively good) novel — and once we get there, I’m going to give $1,000 to a charity selected by one of you.

After three weeks, we’re well over halfway to that goal, with libraries approving a whole bunch of them pretty much right away. (Thank you!) For next week, I’ll make a map showing where requests are coming from, but so far, the busiest states in each per-capita weight class have been D.C., Oregon (overtaking Kentucky), Colorado, and North Carolina (overtaking Illinois). Every state is on the board, plus Australia, Canada, and Scotland. (The most room to grow: California, Mississippi, and Oklahoma.)

Now, I’m guessing the latter half of these 1,000 will be much tougher sledding, so each new request will be super appreciated.

It’s easy:

1. Find your library’s request form, likely online. Ask them to add Hell Is a World Without You.*

2. For likely success, include the link to this review and/or the book’s Wikipedia page.

3. Let me know (jasonkirkbook at gmail.com or comment below or whatever) which library you asked.

* It’s already in numerous libraries, so if it’s already in your town’s, how about your alma mater’s, your county’s, etc.? If they already have the audiobook, how about print, etc.? If the form wants an ISBN: hardcover is 9781735492650, ebook is 9781735492629, and audiobook is 9781735492667. Pick whichever. If it asks for genre: adult fiction.

Thank you again!

Worst: Doritos Flamin’ Hot Mystery Flavor (Mystery spoiler: I think the mystery is … coffee?)

31. Cup o Noodles campfire smores

30. Lay’s IHOP Rooty Tooty Fresh ‘n’ Fruity

29. Taco Bell Cheez-It Crunchwrap

28. Oreo Coke Zero (The tweener. From here on out, everything is at least Fine. But you, Oreo Coke Zero? You just confuse me.)

27. Harvest Snaps “hot & spicy” Crunchy Loops

26. Doritos Baja Fiery Mango

25. Candy Pop Sour Patch Kids popcorn

24. Buc-ee's Cherry Cola popcorn

23. Takis Blue Heat (Just about the hottest snack I’ve ever found, but that’s all it offers.)

22. Coke Zero Y3000

21. Red Velvet Oreos

This part is Business!, and if you’ve already done it, you can skip it.1

Hi! If you’ve enjoyed my work over the years, I’m asking for five minutes today:

1. Find your library’s request form, likely online. Ask them to add my objectively good novel, Hell Is a World Without You.*

2. For likely success, include the link to this review. (Don’t write goofs like “Fullcast sent me.”)

3. Let me know (jasonkirkbook at gmail or comment below or whatever) which library you asked.

Once we hit our goal of 1,000 new requests (in one week, we’re almost a third of the way there), I’ll select one of you at random and send $1,000 to the charity of your choice. (In addition to the $50,000 this book raised in February for the Trevor Project.)

For fun, I’m tracking which states produce the most requests per capita. D.C., Kentucky, Illinois, and Florida are winning their respective weight classes, while Mississippi, New Mexico, Idaho, and West Virginia have the most room to improve.

* It’s already in ??? libraries, so if it’s already in yours, how about your alma mater’s library, state system at large, etc.? If the form wants an ISBN: hardcover is 9781735492650, ebook is 9781735492629, and audiobook is 9781735492667. Pick whichever. If it asks for genre: adult/contemporary fiction.

Note: This is a non-complete list of junk. It’s just the debris that I can remember because it happens to remain in my camera roll. (There should be a Goodreads of garbage food.) Along the way, who knows what forgotten other rubbish I consumed, and who knows which other mistakes I foolishly considered too normal to include in this list?

20. Lays Chile Limon

19. Mountain Dew Citrus Cherry Gamerfuel, enjoyed as the Michigan Wolverines won the Rose Bowl

18. Doritos Flamin’ Hot Limon

17. Doritos Collision: Tangy Pickle vs. Cool Ranch

16. Cheetos Flamin’ Hot Tangy Chili Fusion

15. Mint Chip Oreos

14. Sour Patch Kids Oreos (That combination of insane words adds up to “birthday cake.”)

13. Buc-ees Everything Bagel Cashews

12. Whataburger Spicy Jalapeno Ranch in a squeeze bottle (Demerits for terrible squeeze bottle.)

11. Cheetos Xxtra Flamin’ Hot

If you haven’t done Business! yet, make a note to do it today? Thanks!!

Why fall for stunt foods? I attribute this to trading cards and comic books, which taught me long ago that something becomes more valuable once it looks slightly different and/or is combined with something else. Surprisingly, last year, several doctors complimented my cardiovascular health. Unsurprisingly, when people say, “You’re eating Chipotle? You’re gonna get so sick lol,” I never relate.

10. Cheetos Crunchy Buffalo

9. Lays Crispy Taco

8. Taco Bell Baja Blast Gelato

7. Doritos Hot Honey Mustard Dynamite Sticks

6. Little Skittles

5. Takis Guacamole

4. Ole Smoky Moonshine Pickles (Did I add bonus points because we consumed these at a tailgate with a member of the world’s only good ska band, Five Iron Frenzy? No, I think I graded objectively.)

3. Reese’s Big Cups with Reese’s Puffs inside??? How could anything beat this??

2. Buc-ees Salted Caramel Churro Cashews

1. Cheetos Flamin’ Hot Cajun Cheddar

[Business voice] To the dozens of readers who have pledged thousands of total dollars to this Substack, thank you for the offer! My posts here will remain free, though. For this football season, here’s what I’m requesting from each subscriber instead (you guessed it, more or less):

I want my book (which is, as noted, good) to be acquired by 1,000 more libraries. Based on what I’ve personally been told by hundreds and hundreds of its readers (that it helped them finally understand their religious neighbors, finally make peace with their younger selves, and/or finally remember some emo bands), there are people who would benefit from stumbling upon it years from now — and libraries are the best avenue toward that.

As a niche publisher, we rely on word-of-mouth rather than on thunderous commands from powerful offices. So I could use your help. And I’ll do my part! More on that in a sec.

If you’ve enjoyed my work over the years, I’m asking for five minutes today:

1. Find your library’s request form, likely online. (If you’ve already seen the book in your local library, how about your alma mater’s library, state system at large, etc.? If they have the ebook, what about the audiobook, etc.?)

2. Ask them to add Hell Is a World Without You. (If the form wants an ISBN: hardcover is 9781735492650, ebook is 9781735492629, and audiobook is 9781735492667. Pick whichever. If it asks for genre: fiction, adult fiction, contemporary fiction, etc.)

3. For likely success, include the link to this review.

4. (Don’t write goofs like “Fullcast sent me.” You and I are laughing together because we know somebody would’ve done that.)

5. Let me know (jasonkirkbook@gmail.com or DM or comment below or whatever) which library you asked.

Considering the number of people who read the Watch Grid each week (and have listened to the Shutdown Fullcast over the last decade-plus and so forth), the goal is doable.

Because we love competition around here, I’ll track which states produce the most requests per capita. And once we hit our goal of 1,000 new requests, I’ll select one of you at random and send $1,000 to the charity of your choice. Feel free to note your charity now, or just let me know later if chosen. (This is in addition to the $50,000 this book raised in February for the Trevor Project, a number I’m almost done bragging about. Nowhere near almost, though.)

Subscribe now

And now, sports:

Absolutely, I’m gonna bother you each week in this free email (which will usually otherwise be somewhat on-topic) until you do the library thing, so you might as well do it today. Thank you! 😃

Sure, I’m going somewhere with this.

Gods are gods of things, right? Things like fire, birth, or War III.

But for those of us inhabiting the world that sprang from Greek and Roman imperialism (“the West”), “God” usually refers to a singular figure whose jurisdiction is hard to define.

Condense an osmosis-based understanding of what the Bible allegedly says into something like the monopolistic god of irritable omnipresence, and you have the definition of God that people are usually referring to when they ask whether you believe God exists — as if pop culture’s interpretation of Sunday school’s summary is the only imaginable definition. (See: the kind of atheist who explains to everyone that they’ve never seen a moody grandpa on a chair orbiting our planet. Well, no shit.)

Our most popular idea of God springs from a decision made 2,500-3,000 years ago, when otherwise insignificant Near Eastern hillbillies seem to have determined the local pantheon’s storms-and-stuff patriarch was worthy of an exclusive pact. (Part of that pact: Those hillbillies were required to do periodic anti-capitalism, while that god pledged to uphold those hillbillies’ society if they stuck to their periodic anti-capitalism. The pact also included other things, such as advice on cleaning mildew.)

Throughout the Bible, that exclusivity morphed from God recruiting the Israelites against nearby gods to Deuteronomy declaring God “the god of gods” to Isaiah’s vision of a solitary cosmic mastermind (“there is no god but me”). The latter is similar to what was eventually written as the beginning of Genesis (though its writers also played with Babylonian polytheism) and in the New Testament (though you can read demons as gods, if you want, or as personifications of societal systems and untreated mental illness) and onward into modern gen pop.

Ok, so: If the God of the Bible is only sometimes the god of monotheism, even though monotheism is supposedly the most definitive trait of The Western God … then which other supposedly essential and mandatory traits aren’t necessarily part of the definition either?

For example!

For centuries now, the following gotcha has stumped various theists: How can God be loving, good, omnipotent, and omniscient? If God can fix any problem, but God allows children to suffer, then God is the most evil being imaginable, right?

Various theists have concocted various mental gymnastics in response, sometimes derailing into side quests about arguing with middle schoolers that dinosaur fossils are fakes.

I really don’t know why they bother.

It might be surprising to realize the Bible itself asks that stumper over and over, in Psalms and in Job and on the cross. If you are God, then why does everything suck?

But here’s the bigger surprise: The Bible also answers that question. Over and over.

The God of the Bible is the god of commiserating, expecting, hoping, waiting, pleading, mourning, reconsidering, creating, regretting, pining, and reacting, not the god of knowing how to snap God’s fingers and delete all suffering. Though there’s a verse in Micah that says God is unchanging, there are far more that say God is the god of constant change, the stubborn striver, the creator inspired by Genesis’ chaos. (Likewise, just as there are verses in both testaments that say God is a god of cruel nationalism and bigotry, many others in both testaments say God is a god of shielding immigrants and empowering the marginalized. By including varied human visions of God from across 1,000 years and 2,000 miles, the Bible says a lot about humans.)

When God emerged as the Israelites’ choice of god, God’s unique stipulations included a ban against representing the divine with things made by human hands.

That’s because this god was already represented by those hands themselves.

“It is as true to say that God creates the World, as that the World creates God,” said Alfred North Whitehead, originator of God-is-always-changing process philosophy, though not the first to discover the knowledge that God and the universe alter each other.

“God created humans in God’s image,” says the opening chapter, which also reveals God’s work as sole creator had concluded long before the story was written down. From that point on, we had become co-creators, represented by Eve commandeering those powers while God, momentarily the god of worried parents, huffed and then puffed and then followed God’s daughter out of Eden.

Biblical scholars sometimes argue God is “the god of history,” the god whose story is not confined within primordial mythology but is presented as literally inextricable from ours, plotted along our timeline that includes verifiable things like the Assyrian Empire and mildew. Over and over, God is the god of overhauling society, and not a lofty court of Greek drama queens way up in the ethereal netherwhatever, but the dirt-bound society that can only be overhauled by us. The god of adapting to the world while urging the world to adapt.

Like the God of the Bible, we cannot merely wish an ideal universe into existence, and we cannot delete the tyrannical effects of the past. But whether or not there’s anything in all the omniverse that meets anyone’s definition of God (because I don’t give a shit whether anyone “believes in God,” whatever “believing in God” might mean), we also have this in common with the God of hope: We are co-creating a new universe in every moment.

“There is nothing new under the sun,” says Ecclesiastes, and it’s right, even when we’re tempted to imagine Kids These Days as people who perceive the world in fundamentally alien ways. We’re tempted to view 2024 as college football’s first-ever season of drastic change, but its history is part of the same arms race as everything else: a willfully naive spirit that refuses to give up on kids from nowhere vs. a caste system that wants to consolidate half the galaxy for Fox Sports’ shareholders. We will always have poverty to contend against, said Jesus, and that’s because we will always have greed.

But do you know what is new, Ecclesiastes?

That sun itself, every new day the eight-minutes-outdated image of a star that hasn’t stopped changing for almost five billion years now, illuminating acts of collective worship in Youngstown, Ohio and Seattle, Washington all the same, religious services in search of brief euphoria and settling for ever-evolving community. Yes, a tailgate is communion. No, that’s not a joke. “Haha but what about LSU tailgates with so many beers, haha have you seen the meme about whether Mountain Dew can be a communion drink.” I said it’s not a joke.

All along, the only thing that has ever been constant is change itself.

(Well, and NC State going 8-5.)

• Try my “devilishly funny,” “painfully true,” and “big-hearted” “magic trick” of a novel. Available everywhere in print, ebook, and audiobook.

• It’s also available as a special-edition ebook with 160 pages of bonus stuff.

• (Want your library to carry it? Cheat code: show your librarian this review.)

• Listen to the Shutdown Fullcast each week because we might accidentally talk about college football.

• Subscribe to the Vacation Bible School Podcast, a show we will be getting back to, actually, now that the audiobook is done.

• Subscribe to The Athletic’s tremendous range of totally free sports newsletters. I help edit them, and I also write a little CFB in The Pulse.

Subscribe now

The USA Today best-selling novel that raised $50,000+ for the Trevor Project (and whose top-rated Goodreads review is simply “Holy fucking shit ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️”) is available right now as an audiobook, narrated by the author, me. Your dawg Michael Surber handled production and provided Explosions In The Sky-style guitar throughout. A half-dozen early listeners said we did a good job. 🫡

• You can listen to it in your podcast app of choice via Supporting Cast.

• Or grab it at Shutdown Fullbooks (for just about whatever price you want) and upload it into your usual audio app.

• It’s also at normal audiobook outlets like Audible, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, Libro, Spotify, and Walmart. (If you’re a Spotify Premium or Amazon Prime user with an Audible trial, you can probably listen for free. It’ll count as a sale for me, so no worries there.)

• It’s priced everywhere at like half the cost of most new audiobooks.1

But wait, there’s more

We’ve added this Shutdown Fullbooks exclusive ebook: the ANNOTATED STUDY BIBLE EDITION ($5) with:

• 80 bonus pages of behind-the-scenes footnotes on every question anybody’s ever asked me about the book or its background (including literary analysis such as Which X-Men Are Each Of My Characters),

• plus deleted scenes (inclluding stuff I really wish I’d had room for, very different 2020 versions, and some confusing shit),

• plus 80 sneak-preview pages of a potential sequel (it’s the Shaun of the Dead of Left Behind meets X-Terminators — starring maybe my four favorite HIAWWY characters)2

• and this handsome cover, an homage to various 9/11-era specialty Bibles (graphic design is my Passion Conference):

Get at least one or two of these things today, especially because — if you’re a college football fan — I’m gonna hassle you about it every week in the Watch Grid anyway.

Yep, we’ll do another TBD charity thing later this year, but that one will be based on something besides sales.

• HELL IS A WORLD WITHOUT YOU audiobook coming August 2024. Subscribe to this Substack to be the first to know. Also this is where the College Football Watch Grid happens.

• Raleigh, North Carolina: Join us Sunday, August 25 at Quail Ridge Books for a Q&A/reading/signing/whatever with Michael Surber, Demetri Ravanos, and *the* Emily Kirk. Your ticket includes a copy at basically retail price!

• The day prior in Raleigh, the Shutdown Fullcast will headline the first-ever Sports Podcast Festival. Tickets here!

• And on October 3 in Birmingham, Alabama, the Fullcast will help kick off the last-ever (for now) Furnace Fest weekend, doing a Music Disasters episode, of course. Tickets here!

And here’s the post:

After eight years (and so many more than eight) of Democratic Party leadership cowering before bullies who can only be bullies if allowed to be bullies, it feels cathartic to see Democrats finally begin labeling things appropriately: Nasty creeps are nasty creeps.

This month’s “calling Republicans weird” thing caught on after this portion of a CNN article went viral about a month ago:

Harris has considered what it would be like to run against Trump before. In late 2018, over two days of sessions with top aides to decide about running for the Democratic nomination in 2020, among the questions aides pressed her with was what she would do in a town hall-style debate with Trump, similar to the one in 2016 where the Republican infamously stalked around behind Hillary Clinton at times.

Harris’ answer: She’d turn around and say to him, “Why are you being so weird?”

Every time I saw that quote being shared, it was with a caption like FINALLY, SOMEONE SAYS THE OBVIOUS. And then, about a week ago, Minnesota governor Tim Walz delivered the “weird” thing on air, and no one has stopped using it since. (I’d say those attributing the line to Walz, rather than Harris, have the timeline wrong.)

I’ve seen a lot of solid explanations for the instant success of “weird,” the extremely rare item powerful enough to get Democrats to attack someone besides each other — and also the laser-targeted, hit-dog-hollering strike directly into the innermost nerves of the right’s bathroom-calipers wielders, horse-paste injectors, and wearing-ear-bandages-to-worship-a-guy-wearing-his-own-unnecessary-ear-bandage cosplayers.

The gist:

• No matter the era, conservatism is a story about how 50-year-old white guys thought everything was better back when they were 13, before the bad people came along and made it so things couldn’t stay the same forever. (This fetishized past used to be the 1940s or ‘50s. By updated math, civilization’s current peak was 1987.)

• Conservatives also believe themselves to be factory-default humans (with obvious demographic implications) and everyone else to be aberrations, errors, and defects in need of recall.

• Therefore, to flip that around, simply by showing “the Democrats are now the party of Taylor Swift and the NFL and Bud Light; the Republicans are the party of getting banned from regional theater productions of Beetlejuice: The Musical” is to point a mirror at someone who’s currently posting bizarre sex photoshops of political rivals in a backward attempt to prove other people are the actual weirdos. (Yes, that’s happening in the comment section under every “weird” post.)

Hey, do you see yourself posting antagonistic sex photoshops, you alarming freak? Aren’t you aware normal people haven’t ever done that? Why are your most treasured Bible verses the half-dozen ones about mysterious sex crimes, you obsessive pervert? Why are you calling a bomb threat into a library because someone might be wearing a wig, you basement headcase? Why are you trying to appoint the dolphin-erotica guy as the federal uterus conductor, you rabid animal? What made you believe anyone wants to sit near degenerates who do the things you’re doing? And why do you keep voting for a septic eruption whose sexual misconduct Wikipedia page is about as long as The Art of War, you sick fuck?

So yeah. Nobody wants to spend all their time defining themselves as The Most Perfectly Normal Normie Who Ever Normal’d and then … be forced to notice the opposite has long been the case. People who’ve invested all their experience points into Looking Like The Standard can’t stand being laughed at! Makes sense!

But here’s the even more entertaining wrinkle, which you might only know if you’ve spent time within conservatism:

Religious conservatives, particularly including White Evangelicals (plus the many Evangelical-adjacent conservative groups, since denominational distinctions have become both more nuanced and less important), have long devoted a shitload of time to encouraging each other to be thought of as weird. A certain kind of weird, at least.

One example. “They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world,” Jesus said in the Gospel of John, referring to his followers as misfits.

• There are many ways to interpret the world. Does the world refer to the current epoch of our cosmos, yearning to be reborn? To the doomed empire whose only pathetic defense against a poor Brown man was to kill merely his body? To the systems of control, political and religious and economic and so on, that have been pitting the first against the last for thousands of years now? To other things as well?

• Yep!

Regardless, within right-wing denominations, the most popular interpretation of such passages is all about being an obnoxious, abrasive, and divisive enough Republican to somehow become the kind of troublemaking Christian who would’ve been martyred as an anarcho-socialist deviant by the Roman Empire, even though our current empire has been controlled by white Christian men for quite some time now. Oh man, the endless fixation on first-century Christians being killed, albeit without much curiosity as to how they organized their communities. Here, look at this:

That’s a 1999 collection of historical stories, published under the name of then-massive Christian rock band DC Talk, about Christians who were murdered because they were Christians. I haven’t read it recently enough to weigh in on the veracity of all its stories, but absolutely, there have been many true accounts of global Christians suffering such persecution. (I more remember Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, a much older and gorier version of the same idea. There are lots of others.) Mainly, we’re here to focus on the word “FREAKS,” a title the young Christian is taught to fervently seek.

This book, just one of a thousand examples of “be a weird enough Christian to get killed despite living in America” messaging, arrived at the peak of Christian Contemporary Music crossover culture, as well as a peak of Christian martyrdom fantasies. As I’ve written a few times, when the tragedy of Columbine then morphed into a lie about a Christian being martyred by an atheist, that was not the cause of Christians morbidly seeking backlash. That global Protestant/Catholic myth-making was the result of millions of us having already been programmed to want that kind of death.

As the narrator in my novel (available everywhere, “Sublime. Get it” — Kirkus Reviews, also it’s funny) puts it:

Turning fourteen, I prepared to enter the ultimate astrology-and-condoms warzone: public high school, where men of God had always warned me I’d either get brainwashed by secularism (and go to Hell) or become such a flagrant Christian that I’d get shot just like Columbine’s legendary martyr (and go to Heaven). 

Was there a middle option to just be a nice guy? Nice try. That’s called being lukewarm (and going to Super Turbo Hell).

So millions of children understood this with all our hearts: 🎵 You’re nobody ‘til somebody kills you. 🎵

Facing those options, I spent the last night of summer listening to “Creeping Death” at full volume, amped to win my entire school district for Christ.

But when they were telling us to perform weirdness, they didn’t actually mean that they wanted us to be weird.

The story we told ourselves was that God had refurbished us into factory-default condition, making us strange in the eyes of people who were still fallen.

We were meant to be the outcasts of a world that’d itself cast out Jesus1, meaning we were to be double negatives, the people viewed as weird by a weird world because we were the only normal ones. The terminology we were to use for everyone else included words like “abomination,” after all.

And that’s the funny punchline of conservatives being so hurt by the left’s embrace of “conservatives are weird.” People like me have spent our entire lives hearing conservatives insist that they want to be considered weird — but as soon as the word can no longer be bound by their contorted definition, then these avowed renegades confirm the only thing they’ve ever wanted is to be considered the status quo.

• Proceeds from Hell Is a World Without You’s first three months will fund a final Trevor Project donation of over $50,000. (We sent the first $39K in December, another $6,979 just now, and the rest as royalties arrive.) To put this number into book-industry context: Well, it’s a really fucking good number (produced by sales that landed this book on USA Today, IndieReader, and Bookshop best-seller lists, plus thousands of sales that didn’t even count toward those lists), and now it’ll do some real-world good, benefiting the lives of LGBTQ youth. THANK YOU AGAIN!!!

New writeups of my novel from:

• Book and Film Globe: “Kirk pulls off a miracle by making such an insular part of American culture so universal.”

• Christianity Today: “Critical, if somewhat sympathetic. The setting of my childhood. AOL Instant Messenger transcripts were frankly too recognizable."

• Dirtbag Christian: “Not just a comedy. It’s got real heart, and I don’t say that lightly.”

• Sojourners: “Not just welcome representation for ex-youth group kids. Almost anyone can find themselves here.”

• Also, the esteemed (yes, extremely) Kirkus Reviews revealed their review — “Get it,” they said — will be among the 20% of their writeups to be featured in their print magazine.

• Want a review copy of the book? jasonkirkbook at gmail.

• Meanwhile, it debuted on USA Today’s Booklist Best-Sellers list, has ranked #3 on IndieReader’s sales list, and remains in the fiction top 10 at Bookshop … all without counting the ~1,900 copies we’ve sold by ourselves.

New event:

• Friday, April 5, 5-7 p.m. ET at A Novel Idea in Philadelphia during WrestleMania weekend. Signings (and perhaps doodles by my kid, as time permits). Free.

• Plus more events I’m hoping to announce soon. If your venue would like to host something, lemme know! I do not like fussing with logistics but love showing up!! jasonkirkbook at gmail.

Here’s a newly uploaded video. I knew this night, the 2/16 Atlanta launch of by far the best thing I’ve ever made, would be easily one of the best nights of my life, and it more than delivered — thanks to everyone who participated and attended.

My Shutdown Fullcast co-hosts and I did one of my favorite DISASTERS episodes yet, I got to read part of my book live, we brought seven talented thespians onto stage for the best piece of theater I’ve ever seen, and other stuff happened!!

Per Monday Night’s bartenders, it was the most shockingly well-behaved group of 500 maniacs they’d ever encountered.

(Also our Madison, Wisconsin event this past Thursday also went great, thanks to Matt Brown, Mason Mennenga, and Ryan Browne. We’ll get audio and/or video of that posted at some point as well.)

My new podcast episodes with:

• The Distraction, a podcast hosted by Drew Magary and David Roth, who both grew up nothing like me

• Readirect, a book podcast hosted by Emily Rojas and Abigail Hawkins, who both grew up exactly like me

• Book podcast Lit Lit, the novel’s first-ever Spoilers Mode chat (plus insights into the writing process with one of my most generous pre-readers)

• Richard Deitsch on explaining hardcore religion and college football to normal people

• Tommy Tomlinson for NPR on, among other things, whether Christian rock actually sucks

• Mason Mennenga’s Blacksheep Podcast on the most underrated Christian metalcore bands

• USA Today’s For The Watercooler on Nicolas’ Cage Left Behind movie, easily the “best” Rapture movie ever

• Jamie Howard on my work background that led to this book (yes, including someone pooping on a Publix floor)

• Daniel Palmer on pro wrestling, religion, and working one’s self into a shoot

• Also, a print interview with Andrew Bucholtz on how sports journalism played into the novel’s process

• And a Vacation Bible School Patreon episode on stuff Emily and I have recently learned that relates to the book (but doesn’t require you to have finished reading yet)

• Got a podcast? Let’s do it, if I can. jasonkirkbook at gmail.

And one last event link: Some party attendees sent in book questions along with their Church Disasters. We weren’t able to get to those during the show, but I answered 17 of them on Goodreads. Post some more over there!