You know that this newsletter isn’t supposed to be political—it’s supposed to be a breath of fresh air to get your mind off of hard things. And it is that.

But this has been another week, another bunch of hard news. I see protests happening all the time—which is great!—but it can often feel hard to stand up. I know that I have been intimidated out of going to protests more than once, which I regret…

Yesterday, a woman in the neighborhood thought that it would be a good idea to give Erin, my wife, a letter which outlines how Erin's activities online (particularly her speaking her mind about politics on social media) was wrong and bad. It completely blindsided Erin, and not just because it was coming from someone who Erin viewed as a good friend, but because it was such a condemnation--not just that Erin was wrong, but that her wrongness was wicked.

Sometimes I struggle to come up with something motivational to say, especially during these hard times we live in. This past two weeks has been some of the best for me in a year--I got to go on a cruise with my brother, and I got to go away for the weekend with my wife (it's our anniversary on the 17th).

But I've felt almost guilty being happy about these things because it's hard to celebrate when other people are suffering. I sat on the balcony of my room on the cruise ship, watching the perfectly blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico go by, and watched on my phone as the Dow dropped almost 2000 points in two days. To talk about the great time I was having--even though I had never been on a cruise before and this had been planned a year in advance--seemed to be like Nero fiddling while Rome burned.

I feel conflicted telling people just how great the cruise was, because while I was on the cruise I would check the news and see the stock market plummeting and politics being awful, and I was just like "Hey! Another virgin Mojito, please!"

Anyway, the cruise was with my brother, Dan Wells. Dan is a writer, like me (he actually got me into way back 25 years ago) but he's also a big time gamer (I am not). So he and a couple other people organized a gaming cruise, where you go on a cruise and do all the cruise stuff, but while you're not eating you're in the lower decks' conference room playing RPGs…

Let's face it, folks: the world is a mess right now. To some extent the world is always a mess, but here in America it seems like it's raging. I don't love that. But at the same time, I don't know what to do about it. I was a poli-sci major, history minor, and I wish that gave me some insight into how change the world for the better, but in the past sixteen years of being on social media, I doubt I've changed any minds about anything.

So I'm trying something new.