Kickstarter’s been in the news quite a bit lately.  Just last week, Forbes magazine reported that two major projects both passed the $1 million mark in donations.  But I’m not here to talk about the Double Fine Adventure, an initiative by the creators of the head-tripping Xbox cult hit Psychonauts to fund their next adventure game outside the constraints of the game industry.  Nor to talk about the Elevation Dock, an iPod doohickey that I guess people liked because it raised almost twice its 75K goal.  Nor even Fucking James Franco, an successful endeavor by Portland’s Social Malpractice Publishing to archive the finest Franco-related erotica (now yours for $15.00 plus shipping and handling!).

Is erotic celebrity fan fiction less creepy when written ironically by hipsters? Or does that somehow make it creepier?

No.  Let’s talk about Order of the Stick.

Order of the Stick is a popular webcomic by writer-artist Richard Burlew, currently squeaking in just over $1.2 million in the final hours of its Kickstarter reprint drive.  Order of the Stick is a parody strip, gently poking fun at the conventions of Dungeons and Dragons-style role-playing games over the course of an epic adventure.  No understand: while the Venn diagram of “stuff Fletcher likes” and “stuff geeks like” has a very very large overlap, Dungeons and Dragons is one of the few items (along with Dr. Who and Final Fantasy VII) to land squarely in the right-most circle.  But despite unfamiliarity with the source material I read through the archives of Order of the Stick a few years back, and liked it a lot.  Mind, only one out of five jokes lands the way it’s supposed to, and a few of the apparent fan-favorite characters are hair-pullingly irritating.  But the story also works as a light-hearted fantasy adventure that manages occasional gravity and pathos despite its simplistic art.  There’s also a really impressive siege storyline that juggles twice as many characters as The Two Towers without sacrificing clarity, scope, or impact; it’s a must-read if you’re interested in graphic or serialized storytelling.

But I’m not writing this to recommend Order of the Stick.

I’m writing this because Order of the Stick, an amusing but crudely illustrated stick-figure Dungeons and Dragons parody, made over a MILLION FUCKING DOLLARS BY FUCKING ASKING NICELY FOR IT.

THIS IS A BIG FUCKING DEAL.

There are a couple of lessons to be learned from this:

1)   Geeks are passionate, and, like Ludacris, will express their passion with their wallets.  Someone apparently spent $5,000 to have his personal RPG character featured in an upcoming strip.  With our money, perhaps, we love not wisely but too well.

2)   Order of the Stick is a work that would have absolutely no chance whatsoever of even being published before the dawn of the internet age.  What would the venue for a work like this have been?  A back-page feature for a biannual D and D fanzine?  A photocopied pamphlet on the counter of your comics shop?  Thanks to the internet, artists like Burlew can publish, find an audience, and eventually profit from their highly idiosyncratic work.  This is great news for the artist, and for society, which can only profit from a wider variety of creative output outside the purview of the entertainment industry.

3)   In defiance of the frenzied lobbying of the music and film industries, Burlew made this really impressive amount of money despite the vast majority of his opus being available to everyone, for free, over the internet.  You can make money without draconian copyright legislation.  Scarce goods like books and custom sketches, donor perks, interaction with an engaged audience: these are all ways, apparently, to make not  just money but a shit-ton of money, even when your product is being distributed for free over the entire net.

So in the end, I think the success of The Order of the Stick is great news for the future of the arts.  It points to the viability of a new model of producing and distributing content, removed from intellectual property law and the entertainment industry.  Congratulations to Burlew, and to his audience for making this happen.

“Triggered: A Memoir of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder” is for anyone who is or knows someone who is suffering from mental illness of any type… It is difficult to judge this book because it is well-written by a man who could be writing fiction and making you laugh or cry depending on the moment… I think this book will bring many people to a new understanding of OCD because it is filled with interesting anecdotes and compelling sadness along with hopeful events.

The review includes specific, googlable references to the severity of my mental illness, which will probably not help my dating or employment prospects.  I guess this stuff has to come out eventually.  And it’s really good to know that the book’s resonating with others who struggle with mental illness.

You can check out the article here.  It’s a basic description of OCD written for the layman, combined with some jokes, because that’s how we roll around here.

I struggled with what to name this article: “Top Songs About Mental Illness”?  or “Best”?  But those are both very subjective terms, and some of these songs aren’t even explicitly about mental illness, and really can anything about mental illness be considered “top?”  So I won’t claim this list is comprehensive.  But for what it’s worth, here’s a list of songs by popular artists that make me wince, with sympathy and profound discomfort, every time I hear them.

TRIGGER WARNING FOR SUICIDE LIKE WHOA

You may have heard of this Cee-Lo Green – as a matter of fact, he wrote another song about mental disability a few years back that was something of a modest success.  But in true hipster fashion, I’d like to instead call out this deep cut from Gnarls Barkley’s debut album, St. Elsewhere.  Green’s voice has a hoarse, plaintive quantity on this track, which juxtaposes delicate flamenco guitar with a pummeling drumline.  He sounds overwhelmed, both by the music and the song’s emotional content, even before the track deteriorates into record scratches and a dissonant piano melody that sounds almost like it could have come from…

…these guys.  You probably know what happened to Ian Curtis: if you don’t, I can’t tell you anything about him that his music doesn’t.  This track is cyclical: it accelerates, the verse begins, Curtis gives us a moment of hope (“Just for one moment, I thought I’d found my way”) before crushing it (“Destiny unfolded, I watched it slip away”).  And then back to that awesome (both in the “kickass” and “inspiring the fear of God” senses of the word”) bassline.  The form complements the emotional content: anyone who has suffered from depression will recognize the downward spiral, interrupted by moments of desperate hope before the darkness returns.

But enough suicide!  (That is a lie.  We will be returning to suicide shortly).  X-Ray Spex tackles your favorite anxiety disorder and mine (by which I mean the one that almost killed me) on this almost-title track from their all-time classic record, “Germfree Adolescence.”  It’s a love song, at least technically, but the romance is highly unorthodox: “Your deodorant smells nice” is not a common pick-up line in pop music.  “Blow disinfectant in her eyes” is not a conventional demonstration of affection.  The synth riff is charming but soon becomes maddeningly repetitive; Poly Styrene’s vocals, superficially sweet, become increasingly cracked and desperate as the song proceeds.  The song botches the pathology behind OCD, and disappointingly focuses on contamination, which is only one shade of an entire horrible rainbow of OCD symptoms.  But it captures the experience of the disorder extremely well.

Not to be confused with the actual suicide hotline, which is probably a better resource if you find yourself considering taking your own life.  This song isn’t completely free of the mentalist, “only rich people suffer mental illness” attitude I complained about in Das Racist’s “Puerto Rican Cousins” a while back.  In Poetic’s verse he rhymes: “Hey little rich kid what’s your beef?  Come and tell the grim reaper all of your grief.”  But then he immediately challenges that by complicating the listener’s identity: “Maybe you’re a bastard child, you think / Your mom and dad are white but you’re dark as ink.”  Poetic was apparently trying to comment on hip-hop’s increasing commercialization, and its simultaneous appeal to privileged white kids, but at the same time he touches on the consuming economic and racial guilt that (in my experience) accompanies depression.

The other verses are just as brutal.  Frukwan describes a figure who, in a Looney Tunes-esque gauntlet of violence, tries to kill himself again and again without succeeding.  RZA (as the Rzarector) urges the listener to “[c]omit suicide and I’ll bring you back to life”, much as depression promises that killing yourself will bring stop your pain; he then presents a gory sequence of eager sacrifices, none of whom are subsequently rzarected.  Rather than offer empty promises that life gets better, the Gravediggaz shock the listener with graphic descriptions of self-inflicted violence, and then soberly observe how these attempts didn’t fix anything.  And better than any other song I’ve heard, their rhymes capture the incessant, mocking self-loathing of depression.

NEXT TIME: Eating disorders, self-injury, and the best worst song about madness that isn’t “They’re Coming to Take Me Away.”

But there’s some really cool stuff going on with the book.  Most excitingly, I’m now affiliated with the MacMillan Speaker’s Bureau, who will be managing my public speaking appearances going forward.  They’ve put up a page with more information here, including qualifications and areas of expertise (OCD, Batman) so check it out if you like.  And next time you need someone to tell you about his inspirational struggle with a paralyzing psychological disorder, or about Batman: you know where to go.

Click through for a larger version, if you’re having trouble.

I look back over the charts I’ve made and, oddly enough, all of them have to do with music.  I think it’s because a lot of the nerdy shit I have an encyclopedic knowledge of is kind of morally straightforward: do we really need an X-Men chart delineating moral alignment when half the characters already roll with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants?  Anyway, next time I’ll try to mix things up.

“Wortman writes eloquently about his battles with OCD, constructing dense, dramatic prose to convey even the tiniest observations… his inspiring victories after successful treatment ring true.”

- Kirkus Reviews

If you’re interested in reading more nice things people who are not in my immediate family have said about me, check that out here.

RON PAUL is a libertarian idealist with a radical small-government agenda that appeals to economic conservatives and disenfranchised progressives alike, but his history with racist fringe groups and his rejection of American imperialism make him unappealing in equal measure.  But what if…

RON PAUL WAS A PONY???

RICK SANTORUM is a devout Catholic whose principles appeal to evangelical voters, but these same ideals limit his appeal to moderates, and also when you Google his name Google tells you about butt stuff.  But what if…

RICK SANTORUM WAS A PONY???

NEWT GINGRICH is just a repulsive fucking human being in every possible way.   But what if…

NEWT WAS A PONY?

MITT ROMNEY seems the most likely nominee at this point, but his stiff demeanor and obscene wealth make everyone a little queasy.  But what if, instead of a late 90s motion-capture CGI character from the horrific depths of the uncanny valley…

MITT ROMNEY WAS A MOTHERFUCKING PONY???

Troubling questions for a troubled age.

Your brain becomes the audiobook of a lesser Dostoevsky novel, but personalized like one of those gimmick children’s books with your name instead of the protagonist’s.  It is dark as Hell’s asshole and it sucks.

A visualization courtesy of Achewood's Chris Onstad

It would be nice if the afflicted could request special accommodations, the way someone in a wheelchair might be given access to a ramp, but sadly mental illness continues to be viewed differently from other disabilities.  If you tell someone you have cancer, after all, they will probably be sympathetic.  If you are lucky you will be showered with praise and special gifts, and your loved ones will set you up a website for donations apparently created with Geocities circa 1997, and you can use that to launder your meth money.  But as Lawson points out: crazy is not cancer.  It’s more like cholera, or a difturbance of the humorf: people see it as quaint, archaic, some vague condition from the Victorian era that may have never existed in the first place.  Or they treat it like its AIDS in the nineties, when people were convinced they would die if they shook a victim’s hand, because RENT and Angels in America haven’t been invented yet.  And until we get a massively successful, Tony-Award eligible elucidation of the plight of the mentally ill (Sondheim, Sweeny Todd, I’m afraid you’ve failed us) these misunderstandings will continue.

And even if you open up to a friend who is sympathetic, awkwardness still ensues.  There’s no etiquette for when you tell a coworker “hey, just a heads up, but you might have to fill in for me for a few minutes today because I might lock myself in the restroom, tearing at my scalp til it bleeds, praying to God for the strength not to destroy myself.”  It’s kind of a conversation killer.  Or worse, they might turn it around and confess to you that they had an uncle who killed himself, or that they suffer from an eating disorder, or any of the countless other afflictions that plague around one in five adults.  In these situations both the confessor and confessee are further burdened, now concerned for the wellbeing of their suffering comrade-in-arms as well as their own.  It is like a Yankee Swap of pain, a Secret Santa of psychosis.

Onstad depicts the logical culmination of our culture's weird fascination with and exotification of mental illness: the Light Therapy Lamp as marital aid.

I wish I had the answers.  I wish I knew how to better manage my symptoms while also keeping up with my everyday responsibilities.  And I wish I knew how to tell my friends, family, classmates and coworkers when I’m in the Satan’s armpit of mental anguish.  The sad truth is that the disclosure of mental health problems is still taboo in this country, where we prize self-reliance, and judge harshly those who shirk their responsibilities.  We need, as a society, to sit down with a family counselor and hash out how to talk about this stuff.  I’m grateful to Lawson for trying to start the conversation.

NEXT WEEK: Pictures of ponies.

And through osmosis I began to pick up certain lessons about the workings of the broader, adult world.  Some of the things they said on TV were obviously untrue (a duck can survive a shotgun blast to the face), and others could be quickly disproven with little effort (you can be good at anything whatsoever, if you work hard and believe in yourself).  But some of the recurring lessons I picked up were on subjects so far outside my existence as a child that I did not think to question them for many years.

Consider, for example, the ancient and venerable riff that “nobody like Brussels sprouts.”  It’s the sort of thing you saw all the time on cartoons and Nickelodean sitcoms, jokes about the housewife mother trying to convince her skeptical brood to eat these gross little green cabbages, you know what I’m talking about.  Now, I liked Brussels sprouts okay (my mom has a really good roasted Brussels sprout recipe).  But I never spoke to anyone about Brussels sprouts, and I never saw anyone outside my family eating them.  And on television I heard jokes, again and again, that everyone hate Brussels sprouts: so, in absence of a compelling evidence otherwise, I became convinced that this was true.

This is a list of these memes.  Some are cheap jokes, and some are dated references that I picked up through watching “Nick at Night” or whatever.  Others I have no idea about. It’s by no means comprehensive, and I’m certain some of these memes are exclusive to me and my screwed-up psychology.  But all are things I heard on TV and assumed, because nothing ever suggested otherwise, were true.  I’m hoping that some of these will resonate, and give you a chance to think back and say: “Yeah.  What was the deal with that?”

A LIST OF THINGS I ONLY KNEW BECAUSE OF TELEVISION:

No one likes brussel sprouts.

Everyone hates their in-laws.

Disco was hilarious.  Regardless of context, talking about disco is always funny.

Fruitcake is disgusting, and old fruitcakes last for a very long time.

Women don’t want or enjoy sex.  They like kissing, but not sex.

Collecting bottle caps is a legitimate pastime.

When you have a baby you pass out cigars.

Movie theater floors are sticky.

Any man can be convincingly disguised as a woman.

It is illegal to tear the tag of a mattress.

Stupid children eat “paste.”  Paste is glue I guess.

All the cool guys look and dress like Elvis.  Elvis was the coolest motherfucker on the planet in 1993.

Pterodactyls, mastodons, and saber-toothed tigers are all dinosaurs.*

Used car salesmen are uniquely evil and duplicitous people.

If I believed in monsters, I would imagine them to be in my closet or under my bed.

Flushing the toilet in a bathroom causes the water in the shower to become scalding hot.

Rich people eat caviar.  Caviar is little black things.  Maybe some kind of rice.

If I wanted I could have an “invisible” or imaginary friend, and insist to everyone that he was real.  This would totally not be stupid and a waste of time.

Having a conversation with yourself in a mirror or other reflective surface is completely healthy and normal.

The mentally ill are responsible and should be held accountable for their psychological problems.  If these are serious enough they should be tied up and left in a locked room.  Also, they are hilarious.

“This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship” is a thing you say.  Regardless of context it is funny when you say “this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship” in conversation. (Also: “kids, don’t try this at home,” “duh-duh-duh-duh, charge,” “[some category of persons] are the craziest people,” any reference to lawyers or lawsuits, “do not pass go, do not collect $200,” “of course you know, this means war…”)

Santa Claus is real but he exists at the margins of human consciousness, like a benevolent god, only intervening when necessary and in subtle ways intended to leave his existence an open question.  (One would think that sheer number of his interventions would eventually raise some suspicions.)  (Nevertheless, only elderly or peripheral adults will believe in him.)  (Of course mall Santas aren’t real, dipshit.)

Every group of people, whether familial, vocational, or recreational, has a “leader.”  The “leader” is usually the one without any distinguishing personality traits.

Babies only just learning to speak will exclusively use the first-person objective verb and omit verbs.  (“Me hungry!”  “Me tired!”)  So will cavemen.

All modern art is basically an arbitrary collection of shapes and colors.  Artists have the capacity to be moved to tears by modern art, or by a composition of shapes and colors that resembles modern art.  Artists are weird.

People who smoke cigarettes always want to share their cigarettes.  If you don’t accept a cigarette they will be angry with you.  In this way they are like religious evangelicals.

Nerds wear “pocket protectors.”  A “pocket protector” is a thing you wear, in your pocket.

Talent shows are a stable of modern American social life.  They happen a lot and people care a lot about them.

Credit cards, like alcohol, cannot be used responsibly.  You show a salesperson a card and you are given everything you want and eventually, if you are sufficiently penitent, you may be allowed to give it back.

Corporations exist exclusively to tear down old homes, buildings, and parks.  Sometimes you can stop them with talent shows.

Obesity is a sign of laziness and gluttony.  Also I am beautiful just the way I am no matter what they say.

“Whispering” means leaning in close to someone, cupping your hand over their ear, and repeating hushed sibilant noises.  This will somehow communicate your message.  (I actually believed this for a few years.)

Sometimes a grownup touches you and its okay.  Sometimes a grownup touches you and its not okay and you should contact a parent, teacher or policeman.  It was never explained what distinguished okay touching from not-okay touching, or what to do if toucher was a parent, teacher or policeman.

The single greatest threat to the health of our ecosystem is carelessly tossed-out bottles, wrappers and plastic bags.  Most of these are discarded by children.  However, if I was always certain to dispose of my trash in appropriate receptacles and pick up others’ trash when I found it, I could make a meaningful impact on the health of the planet.

Television rots your brain.

Computers, videogames, and especially the internet are worse.

*Just kidding.  Obviously I knew that flying reptiles and prehistoric mammals weren’t dinosaurs.