How We React to Tragedy

Tragedy is a funny thing. I certainly don’t mean that it’s funny in the traditional sense, today was anything but humorous, but I mean to say that the collective emotions of a nation defy simple definition.

It makes you feel, you know, “funny.” Weird. Strange. Overcome. Indefinable.

Like the majority of us today, my connection to the city of Boston is family and friends that happen to live there, a few acquaintances in the race itself and general trepidation as information doesn’t emerge at the comfortable speed of my laptop’s refresh button.

I don’t have much to add that hasn’t already been said in the millions of people offering condolences to today’s victims.  We close today with more questions than answers—certainly not unfamiliar territory on days like today. We’ve all been here before: posting our thoughts and prayers in a sea of thoughtless prayers and prayerless thoughts.

Today felt a bit like going through the motions. I found myself second-guessing even the simplest of Twitter or Facebook posts. What am I adding? Am I just crowding the cacophony of social media with condolences that no one actually needs? In the end, we’re all just consoling each other, which, in a way, is actually still quite comforting.

In an industry practically defined by news outlets discussing how desensitized video games have made us, I saw that we are all quite far from a numb sensation to violence. Today struck quite the nerve.

And then we struck each other.

I think that’s the rub of a connected society. News hits at the speed of social media, and there’s nothing we can do. We are powerless. The entire nation swells with anger, rage and indignation. Emotions of that magnitude have to go somewhere. It used to be that we would sit around at work or school and discuss tragedy in a circle of trusted friends and peers. It stayed sane, self-contained and self-policing. This is a world that doesn’t exist as it used to. Think of it this way: when the news hit, did you post to Facebook or Twitter within minutes of hearing about it? Was your first instinct to release tension by way of public statement?

Is that weird? Has our collective unintentional arrogance made us all believe that, in the face of sudden tragedy, our responsibility is first to make a social press release so that people know that our sympathies are with the hurt, wounded and dead? I don’t intend to point any fingers, certainly not fingers that could just as easily been pointed at myself, but it did seep into my thoughts over the course of the day—thoughts that amplified as the day went on.

I watched my circle of peers begin to turn on each other. It wasn’t enough to simply make a post. As the day went on, we turned on each other, proudly proclaiming that our sympathies were more correctly articulated than your sympathies. You're grieving wrong, it felt like the mass was crying. Look. No one grieves well. We suck at it. That’s what grief is.

Today we saw people run against fear and back into certain danger. They did it to help. These people are, without question, true heroes. But in the face of humanity’s brightest light, it might make us all feel a little weird; just a little bit more helpless.

Why can’t I help too? I certainly thought that today. I know, I’ll show them, I’ll post something even wittier and thought-provoking than what that other guy could fit into 140 characters. I certainly was not helping anything but my own selfish desire to appear as if I contributing in a positive way. It's a painfully honest way to reflect on my habitual desire to jump into the fray; to help in a quantifiable way in a time of great distress. As this blog can attest, I'm no stranger to peril; and yet, I make light of it for comfort. Simply, I believe we make it about us. We view tragedy through the lens of our own suffering, however great or small it might be. We speak out to comfort the royal "us."

But it’s not about us.

Outside of simply putting our arm on each other’s shoulders and realizing that we are greater than our sickest outliers, it's about the people we cannot help, regardless of intent. Our perpetual desire to feel heroic in the face of sickening events, though perfectly reasonable, denies the true victims. Our condemnation of others emotional reaction is fruitless and ultimately self-serving. It's a comfort to ourselves.

And that's okay. It really is. Emotions create insatiable chaos within all of us. We will look back on today with different eyes tomorrow.

When something like this inevitably happens again, and it will, we should take a moment to give each other the benefit of the doubt. Grief is an ugly monster that can take on many forms. There is no such thing as a perfect reaction to insidious tragedy.

The thing we should take away is that we all need that pat on the shoulder, to tell each other that it doesn’t make sense and it’s okay that none of us are making sense right now.

Because it doesn’t make sense.

And for most of us, there’s not a lot we can do for the people struck by today’s tragedy. So the best we can do is make the world a little calmer, and a little saner, for when the wounded come back into it.

Boston, we love you. We’ll be here when you get back.

What Depression Is

In the end, your heart is the thing that takes you.

I’m about to put myself out there—like Star Trek out there—because right now I need the one escape that always seems to bring me back. When everything becomes overwhelming and blindingly consequential, you lose track of the ground, and everyone needs his or her own gravity.

Writing is gravity in my world. Family is hope, friends are direction, but finding truth in words is what keeps me on the ground.

So here goes. I hope when you’ve finished reading this, whether friend, family or otherwise, you find some value in my sharing what I cannot overstress my hesitancy in doing so.

After my last trip to an MS specialist, we went over some things that don’t fit neatly into our testing. It’s always important at a doctor that you explain what you are experiencing and how you are dealing with it. This started us down a path on depression.

(If you need background information on my condition and how we got to this point, I would suggest starting at the beginning.)

Depression is the least logical thing I can imagine. It takes over the physical by existing only in the mental. As of the typing of this, in an effort to find the ground again, I am crawling out of my skin. I sent an email to a coworker that said I wanted to kill myself. I’m matter of fact about this, though, in honesty, at the present time it’s true.

Like I said, depression isn’t logical. It’s also not entirely sadness, which is where I think a lot of people can get confused and misdiagnose the severity of depression in different ways. If I were merely sad, even crying for no reason sad (which already happened tonight), I could throw on some magically emotional music like Cinematic Orchestra and get a shitload of writing done. Sadness is useful, even productive.

This is different.

This is drowning.

Actually, let’s run with that metaphor for a moment. Imagine that you’ve been knocked overboard into the deep and vast ocean. You sink for minutes, thrashing against the current, but it keeps pulling you further and further toward the bottom. Given the most basic physical and mental response, at some point any human being will have a moment where they give up and allow the water to take them.

That can be what severe depression feels like. It’s awful. By all logical measures, I should be the happiest person on Earth. I have a great job, working with people I love. I have the most loving family that is probably crashing into every motor vehicle on the highway in an effort to drive over to my house upon reading this. I have great friends, I travel a lot; my life for all intents and purposes is what you could call “privileged.”

Now, the last year hasn’t been the easiest. I’ve been told there is something I am probably also going through that is called “symptom fatigue” where the mental toll can begin to add up on top of whatever mental fabrications you’re already dealing with.

It’s all adding up, and unlike a normal panic attack, it can just keep compounding until there is just nowhere else for it to go. I say all of this, full knowing how cogent and reasonable I sound right now. I thank science above for giving me the faculties to call shenanigans on this Kaiser Soze bullshit my brain is trying to pull on me right now. But there it is, my heart thumping at a thousand miles an hour, weighing on me in the purely physical to try and take me down.

Depression, that’s some next level shit.

So, my gravity for tonight will be to share this. I know in the morning, all will be well, because ALL. IS. TRULY. WELL.

But right now, my body doesn’t believe it.

A lot of people don’t ask for help when things get like this. I almost didn’t. If I hadn’t reached out to a friend tonight (bearing in mind that I still don’t have a phone, so for those of you frantically dialing, you’re going to get a confused thief of a cabbie in Los Angeles), I think we could be having a different conversation.

But logic prevailed and even though I didn’t want him to. I called Chris Faylor (community manager at Gearbox) to come over and just sit with me until I calmed down.

This has helped. Writing this down. How you will react when I share this on the internet, remains to be seen. I hope we can just look at it as another piece of scientific evidence on the elusive mysteries of the human brain—a brain that has seen its share of stresses in between writing pretty words and making silly accents about the catching of various rides.

(Getchu one.)

I hope to see you all back on the ground.

-Mikey Neumann

PS. Chris Faylor is the mega hero because he brought over four McRibs. FOUR. MCRIBS.

PPS. Again, my phone will not be reactivated until tomorrow. Hell, just walk in the front door, you’ll find Chris and myself eating McRibs on the couch. I could use the hug anyway.

Flight Stories #1: Family Jetpack Dinosaur

Flight Stories is a funny new thing I'm doing. Basically I go to Twitter and say "gimme three words" and I'll write a story with them.

I did that.

And they responded with numerous suggestions, from which I chose three: Family. Jetpack. Dinosaur.

I outlined something roughly into my notepad in the terminal and hit the ground running once I was allowed to turn on electronic devices. 

The idea of this particular writing experiment was to tell stories of different families as the Jetpack-Dinosaur apocalypse crumbled the world around them.

I'll be updating this in real time as I finish new entries. 

So here you go: Flight Stories #1

-------------------

The following was found scribbled hastily on the back of a cereal box in Austin, Texas. It is dated 12/31/2146.

The full name of the man who wrote it was never revealed. History remembers him simply as “The dude who could write really small.”

The skies were darkened forever on the day that Brachiosaur took flight.

This is the official record of the events that lead to the fall of mankind as the dominant species on the planet. The event would eventually be known around the world as “JPDD-Day,” or “Jetpack Dinosaur D-Day.” This was despite the cries of grammatical contrarians insisting that the extra D did not stand for anything at all. (The International Nomenclature Division would eventually go on record that the extra D simply “sounded scarier.”)

Civilization fell in waves.

Hindsight is by nature clarity at an inopportune time, and the clarity that equipping vicious prehistoric hyper-intelligent cloned dinosaurs with the technological know-how to mass produce rocket-propelled travel will have a negative impact on the economy; insofar that all major financial institutions invested in the frivolous air-travel of their eventual murderers.

In time, people will complain that the previous sentence is too long.

After the fall of the international economy, the wars, numerous and bloody wars known as the “Cretaceous Wars,” began in the air over Scotland and quickly moved across the surface of the world. The soldiers of the world, bound together in a new world army known as the New World Army, assembled the peak of modern weapons technology to fight their airborne adversaries. Their bravery was remembered. Their ingenuity was celebrated. They united the world under a single flag and lead the march into battle.

And they totally got their asses kicked by flying dinosaurs firing lasers and shit at them.

It was bad, bro.

As the New World Army dwindled into a splintered resistance, families torn apart by the savage atrocities forced upon them bandied together and went in search of a land unperturbed by flying Ankylosauruses, spiraling Velociraptors, or the scientific abomination known to the unexploded as “Tankodactyls.”

Thousands set out in search of a fabled land where flying dinosaur could not reach. Less than a hundred of us remain and we have agreed to give up hope.

This will be the official record of the fall of man.

I will be dead by morning. The rhythmic pounding of Ankylo’s beating their tails against our roof—a roof that will certainly give way within the hour—has become a deafening eulogy. I put my girls to bed, swaddled in Bose Noise-canceling headphones as to not awake for the end of us.

The end of everything.

Our hubris has collapsed upon us.

I am relieved my wife is not here to see my weakness.

My name was Steve.

Our reckoning was consigned to us in stupid T-Rex baby arms.

Goodbye.

A leather-bound journal was found floating in a wheelbarrow a hundred miles outside of Seattle. It was signed with the name “Becky Harvest” and contained sixteen separate entries. What follows is the fifteenth entry in the journal.

My brother still believes in Hawaii.

My other brother doesn’t believe in much of anything anymore.

My brother is like glue, always holding us together.

My other brother cries when he thinks we aren’t watching him.

My brother is named Carl and he’s thirty-three.

My other brother is named Wesley, and he just turned forty.

I’m afraid they’re going to kill each other if I turn my back on them for long. But I cannot ignore what is chasing us across whatever is left of the United States. I cannot ignore the towering dinosaurs, bloodthirsty and aggravated, as they rocket across the sky and rain down their unprovoked vengeance on whatever remained standing.

I find that I don’t much have the stomach to stand anymore.

Wesley believes it is time to lie down.

But Carl still believes in Hawaii.

Carl believes that the Hawaiian Islands are geographically the one place on the planet that the dinosaurs cannot get to. It’s all conjecture or folklore cribbed from all over to pretend hope is a thing that still has merit. It’s an odd thing hoping for hope. Though, I suppose it is no different than running away just to live long enough to run away again.

Perhaps there is something to all of the conjecture. Maybe Hawaii is a safer place. Maybe their jetpacks can’t get all the way across the ocean, or maybe they just don’t know it exists at all.

It takes the combined effort of twenty-seven 767 engines to lift a Brachiosaurus into the sky, hell, it takes fives just to get the tail off the ground.  They may have improved all of the technology required to send a terrestrial vertebrate into air-based battle, but it still takes fuel to move them around.

Huh.

I never thought about it that way.

They’re destroying what little remains of the planet’s fossil fuels in their attempt to exterminate us. One has to wonder if they know what fuel is made of. One has to wonder if they know they’re burning up their ancestors in the endless pursuit to eradicate all living things.

I can hear Wesley yelling at Carl in the other room. By noon one has always managed to pull a gun on the other one. It won’t be long before one of my brothers forgoes the platitudes and murders the other.

I should intervene.

But which brother do I side with?

Maybe it is time to lie down, to strip away our airs and admit that there is no winning this fight. We’re all so tired and family road trips always have a way of making everything more dramatic than it actually is.

Carl is begging Wesley to hope; to believe in hope. There is no amount of effort to him that cannot be justified by surviving. He believes hoping to survive is all anyone could ever want.

We earn our time here.

I have to decide if I believe that or not.

They’re already made up their minds.

Also attached is the sixteenth, and final, entry into Becky Harvest’s notebook. It is widely believed she simply threw it away after her brief final entry.

Today I killed Wesley.

I believe in Hawaii.

A body was found under the wheelbarrow and is believed to be that of Wesley’s.

Blog 23 - Forward

April 5, 2012

I’m nestled safely on a flight bound for Boston and the assured surly exploits of one PAX East, I am patiently scouring Aliens interviews to see which quotes have upset which group of people, I curse softly to myself about talking about the ending of Mass Effect 3. As they say in various Hot Topic branded neck-beard T-shirts, “I’m addicted to the misery.”

To provide clarification for the calm and rational tweets (seriously, thank you guys for being rad) I’ve been receiving, I riffed off-the-cuff in one of the interviews about petitioning artists to change their art. I was coming off of a second day straight of ten hours of interviews and I was not using the “don’t be a flippin’ idiot” part of my brain. While I do feel it’s somewhat strange that people would find it necessary to go to such an extreme to alter a story, I wasn’t looking to rail on that. I was poking at the idea that a group of people would petition the government in a legal sense to alter a work of art.

That blows my mind. I can’t make sense of it and I don’t intend to waste the brain cells attempting to. Sometimes we get disappointed, and that’s not false advertising, that’s a disconnect between an artist and an audience. Sometimes that’s a legitimate issue and other times it’s simply a measure of expectation management. I don’t actually have an opinion on whether the ending of Mass Effect meets expectations or not, and I won’t share one here. I know a thing or two about an audience hating an ending—

Wait; is there a petition to change the Borderlands ending? Can I sign that?!

I guess that was a different era in the game industry when you could promise a Vault full of riches and treasure and surprise them with a gigantic tentacle monster instead. We’re like David Lynch up in this biatch.

Changing gears.

PAX East (or PAX Easy as I like to pretend it’s branded,) is my first large public appearance since the Stroke and the MS diagnosis. I’ll be hobbling around the floor on my cane and hoping I’m enough of the old Mikey that it won’t be too weird for people. To be honest, I’m a little nervous. We have a panel on Sunday, and I watched the PAX 2011 panel last night on YouTube to prepare, but I ended up tearing up watching myself jump up and down off the stage – like, that was me in September. That was about two to three weeks before I collapsed from the Stroke at work after a particularly terrible round of Left4Dead 2. It was fascinating to watch, if not more than a little heart breaking, but we keep moving. Always go forward, even if you need a cane to do it.

A pretty purple cane with swirlies on it.

#thuglife

Going back to art for a moment, I’m going to beg.

As everyone that reads this blog already knows, I’ve started a novel experiment on the internet called “BOZ.” Publishing. Eventually, this site will publish all matter of serialized content, but for the time being it’s just my SciFi novel, “The Returners.” The website is http://bozpublishing.com Please, PLEASE, go there and check it out. Like us on Facebook. Mail me some Cinnabons – whatever you can do to support this effort (provided you enjoy it, of course) is worth the world to me.

Okay, time to PAX it up. If you’re in Boston, come say hi to me at one of our booths or at the panel on Sunday. I might not be jumping around like an idiot, but I am moving forward.

The Returners Updates

Hey gang, 


The Returners was certainly a fun experiment to do on here and I didn't expect it to find such an audience as fast as it did. For this, I'm really appreciative and can't thank all of you enough for all the kind words of encouragement.


What's next for the online novel experiment?


Well, I teamed up with a friend (Tim Hudson) and we started work on a website imagined for tablets and portable devices like Kindles and iPads. We created a publishing site for online works and have some really cool ideas for the future. For now, the only book featured on the site will be The Returners until we figure out exactly how everything will work and get commenting and contact pages all up to working order.


The site is: 
http://bozpublishing.com


There's more information on the site about what we're trying to accomplish. I will not be updating the blog with much in the way of information on the book from this point on. You'll want to follow me on twitter (@mikeyface) or preferably like the page on facebook at Facebook.com/bozpublishing -- this will get you updates in real time (such as chapter 5 already being live on the website, so gogogogo.)


I would highly recommend checking the site out on a tablet. We went to painstaking length to ensure that it operated just like an app where you tap the edges of the screen and the next page loads instantly. It's actually pretty awesome.


Thanks for all the love for the book on here, but it was going to have to move onto greener pastures eventually.


Now back to your not-so-regularly scheduled updates on strokes and MS.


-mikey.

Blog 22 – The Shoulder is Your Own

1/25/2012

Forgive me Father, for it’s been fifteen days since my last blogfession.

(That note was just for my Dad. He insists I speak strictly in banal Catholic ironies.)

In reality, I’ve felt less-than-stellar about my lack of updates to my Internet sounding board, but the actual reality is I’ve had so little to say. After the “lawl, it’s MS” hilarity that I endured at Johns Hopkins, I have buried myself in my work in an effort to not give it any further thought. Whether that ends up being a healthy solution or not remains to be seen, but in the meantime I’m getting a staggering amount of work done across multiple things.

So let’s real talk.

Avatar was on HBO the other day and that movie is really stupi—

Oh, that wasn’t the real talk we were gonna have?

Even though it’s a shallow depiction of good vs. evil using the transparent and manipulative tropes of corporate greed in conflict with an indigenous people perfectly in tune with the vaguest of glowing-leafy deities? 

Still nothin’?

Stop making explosions noises with your mouth. That’s not helping.

This is what’s known as “stalling” because the last thing I want to subject myself or anyone to is to breakdown and pepper the ‘net with Sadsies ™. I made a promise to myself when I started this blog that I would catalogue everything I could so that anyone else going through fairly debilitating issues in their life would have a place to go and see a light at the end of the tunnel. Like an annoyingly verbose Lite-Bright.

So, with your permission to degrade this into something that would cause you to delete people from your Facebook wall:

The last two weeks have been lonely and terrifying at any moment I allowed myself to slow down and breathe.  It’s depressing to admit you’re lonely, especially when there isn’t a shortage of people around that are bending over backwards at a moments notice to be there for you. I get to go into a building and make videogames with some of the most talented people on the planet; people would kill for that, which is another reason I hate even saying this – but it’s reality. We made a pact to share reality.

You have to, unfortunately on your own, come to terms with whatever hand you were dealt. Great friends and family will help push you through the door, but the journey is your own. The journey takes a lot longer than you would expect. It might actually take you’re entire life to come to terms with the unfair realities of the universe.

It just so happens that the hand I was dealt gave me an incredible gift to entertain and bring happiness to people around the world for a job. The other half of the deck just happens to have a hole in my heart that gave me a couple of strokes and a shotclock-violating diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis. No one on the planet can look you in the eye and say, “It’s going to be okay” in a way you’ll believe – well, maybe Nathan Fillion. He’s got Michael Landon hair and dreamboat eyes.

*SWOONAGE INTERMISSION*

And writing it down helps. As much as you don’t want to be the Facebook-wallflower, you know the type: continuously lamenting their own bewilderingly vague sadness on repeat until someone chimes in with a “u lonely bro?” It’s okay to admit you’re sad or lonely and need some time to heal. We all need a shoulder to cry on, but in the long run, that shoulder is your own. Get that shit out. It’s what I’m doing this very second and everything I felt like I was shouldering today is beginning to fade into an acceptance of circumstances.

I’ve noticed a lot of people have been talking about their own ailments and circumstances in the comments to the blogs and the best piece of advice I can possibly offer to you is:

Keep doing that.

Blog 21 - All the Lesions in Rome...

I was in one of many far less pretty buildings.

1/10/2012

To truly appreciate the momentum of the last two days spent in Baltimore MD, one must understand that I’m currently updating my blog from the milky-white expanse surrounding my Southwest Airlines flight back to Texas. There is simply no way to accurately portray the madness I am attempting to break down and repackage for the people that care if or when I live or die.

This trip cannot be summed up in what was said, it is summed up by what was not. The real reasons I was brought up here to the birthplace of The Wire and the final resting place of Edgar Allen Poe – drenched in his own lunch against a gutter – are not easily regurgitated (unlike Poe,) because unlike most medical procedures, the brain does not appear on an MRI like a broken bone, it appears like the unfathomably complex organ that it is. An organ where treatment is based on identifying as many symptoms as possible before pharmaceutical darts are launched towards the other half of whatever pharmaceutical metaphor I was attempting there.

In short:

I believe I was brought to Johns Hopkins to be told that I have Multiple Sclerosis.

Once such exchange went something akin to the following:

My doctor began, clearing his throat, “it is my belief that the lingering Neurological symptoms are most understandably explained with a mild case of Multiple Sclerosis.”

“What, like Singular Sclerosis?”

An uncomfortable silence.

My doctor did go on to admit that he did not find my joke all that funny because it was a joke he had made a few years back and we had found ourselves in that uncomfortable arena that Louis C.K. and Dane Cook did their sparing in a few years back. I Dane Cook’d my own doctor.

Oh, you guys probably didn’t want to hear about the joke aspects of this trip so much as the data that suggests why I came up here in the first place. Well then, I guess that makes you all Carlos Mencia.

So, I have a battery of Neurological symptoms. To this day, I am still more-than-a-little paralyzed on the left side of my body with a noticeable blindness in my right eye. It is the professional opinion of the doctors of Johns Hopkins that these two issues are in no way related and only one of which can be explained by the stroke. Furthermore, I have numerous lesions on my brain, and only one of them (a large one towards the base, I noticed) is explained by a stroke, especially by a stroke in someone 29-years-of-age who, by all accounts, is perfectly healthy.  Furthermore, quothe the Raven, the strikingly high amount of white blood cells in my spinal fluid was never fully accounted for, and is not generally in league with a stroke either.

This is one of the issues that made the diagnosis as drawn-out and difficult as it has been: no one has put forth any theory that can adequately explain all of the issues in a single disease. Per Johns Hopkins: that’s because it isn’t a single disease, it’s two.

Shit, might as tell me I have to eat at Arby’s for dinner and leave the gun ammo next to the Scotch (to clarify, I’m not joking that I’m suicidal, I’m saying anyone forced to eat the roasted garbage they serve at Arby’s will probably shoot themselves in the FACE after getting loaded on Scotch. Good. Glad I cleared that up.) It’s a lot to take in, and it’s even more difficult to take in based on the theoretical nature of such a dual-diagnosis. Before anyone jumps to conclusions and starts the prayer-train for no MS, understand exactly what the situation actually is and what is being represented. At this point, I actually want to confirm that I have a mild form of MS for two reasons 1) it’s treatable and 2) I get to talk about MS like Pace talks about picante sauce – and I love picante sauce. If MS does not account for what is happening to my body (and currently, I want to make it clear that every doctor believes this is exactly what is happening,) then something else will have to account for it. It’s a disease either way, and I’d quite like the one that had the most recent medical breakthroughs and place the word “mild” in front of it. Thank you, I’ll take that one.

So why don’t they know for sure? This is the question of any rational human within breathing distance of the situation. Well, it takes about six months to measure appropriately. The signs of MS are right there on my MRI, which is reflected in all the goofy crap my body likes to call “living” as of late. To pull the trigger 100%, we have to wait another three months (brining us to 6 months since the last one) to accurately measure exactly what is happening in my brain, and how fast that is occurring.

This isn’t even going into the reasons to not close the PFO in my chest that I talked to the “Stroke Prevention Doctor” about. Apparently, there is a new study done that shows that closing a PFO can be somewhat effective in preventing further stroke, especially in young people. It’s not super-invasive, so just do it right? Well, hold off guy-who-asks-questions-in-the-middle-of-a-blog -- guy, because the same study showed that blood-thinners (even ones as low as 81mg of aspiring) are EQUALLY effective in preventing strokes. Equal. The same. Additionally, the PFO closure can simply not work and you’ll be out the cost of surgery but have to go on blood thinners anyway.

So did they give me any good news?

Yes.

They seemed really excited about the Ravens playing the Houston Texans this weekend.

So, now we wait three months.

You know, I called this blog Diagnosis MIA when I started it, and I can’t believe how accurate that has ended up being in the long run. Twenty-one blogs in, and we still don’t know anything 100%.

I never do anything the easy way.