Uh … sorry
Just a quick update on a couple projects — and a little honesty.
First off, what’s up with Leprechauns & Lies? The truth is Leprechauns will always be my opus. Unless I get hit by a bus & die suddenly, I will finish this book some time before I die, but the internal pressure to write it now basically vanished the day Putin invaded Ukraine.
Up until that moment, the global anti-democratic powers had been winning the PR war since at least 2016, but the complete shit show the Russian army turned out to be against the incredible Ukrainian forces was proof to the whole world that messy democracy can still kick ass against a primarily conscripted force — even when severely outnumbered.
What does existentialism have to do with democracy? Well nothing to most people probably, but to me a lot actually. To me existentialism is pure logic — logic broken down to it’s base bones, and philosophy in general is a privilege. Subsistence farmers and people trying to survive oppressive autocratic regimes don’t have much time for philosophy, so the thought that we were actively putting aside the privilege of democracy in the name of religion or security or whatever really freaked me out. That’s why I started writing Leprechauns in the first place.
Since the fall of the Berlin wall, Putin had been making the argument that democracies were too messy for a modern world, and that a good old-fashioned autocracy is just what everybody needed nowadays. By 2016, that argument was really at its zenith and helped bring into power a bunch of different strong men (and women) all around the world. In fact, that argument is clearly still working here and there.
But the mess that Putin’s army — which is many times larger than Ukraine’s — has made in their misguided invasion is proof to the world that his rhetorical argument is a joke.
So there went my motivation for Leprechauns. I hope none of you were really anticipating it’s release or anything, but there is good news.
Concentrated bits of what I would have otherwise put into Leprechauns will end up appearing in Last Days, which is moving forward — though obviously slower than anticipated. We were hoping to launch the podcast last Halloween, then again this past April, but the truth is we were still working through some creative concerns. The format just wasn’t quite what we’d been going for, but as of this week, we feel like we’ve cracked the code.
The hope now is to launch by this upcoming Halloween — one year later than our original plan, but what are you gonna do? It’s definitely gonna be better than it would have been if we’d rushed it. Trust me.
So there you have it. Stay tuned. I’ll post previews and promo here once that’s all ready.
