The best days of the year

Look: it wasn’t a good year. They pretty much never are, lately. One gets into trouble when one looks back at a “better time, before.” But by any objective yardstick, at least the last five years have seen consistent escalations of the kinds of threats that betray a fraying in the fabric that holds it all together. That’s scary, and it’s depressing, and that’s 2025 in a nutshell.

Or, here’s a random entry from a random day in my journal, as I found it a couple weeks ago: “Kinda blah feelings, plus fascism.”

It was hard to apprehend the cognitive load of being alive in this miserable time while it was happening (and it still is, obviously, happening; just, these weeks are a chance for a momentary breath from it, as much as such a thing is possible).

On a personal level, on a spiritual level, on a creative level, I had overall a pretty good year. I am really happy with the year that I had! But it all happened in and around explicable and inexplicable weariness, distress, frustration, anxiety, and a bevvy of other not-generally-good feelings. And that’s just… that.

I wanted to call out a rough, non-exclusive list of the good spots.

The day I went to see Thunderbolts* with Chad

Let me tell you about my friend Chad: met him in the line for Star Wars Episode I, if you can believe it, and we’ve been friends ever since. He was one of the big influences in my “getting into comics” era (2000-2006), and by dint of that, since at least Avengers (2012), we’ve had a fairly consistent routine of seeing all the CBMs together.

Look: life is what it is. We’re all spread thin and sometimes things drift apart. Having an MCU-based schedule to stick to helps make sure Chad and I see each other every now and again. Some years, we see each other more; some years, less. I always enjoy it, just like I (mostly) always enjoy seeing a Marvel movie.

I dunno why Thunderbolts* felt special; it just did. It felt like one of those ones, “I’m glad we still do this.” I love the moments like that: where you realize something matters to you while it’s doing the mattering. More often than not, I miss those moments till much later.

That time I made Branko laugh

Me and Rajo go to toy shows together a lot and Branko, Rajo’s son, tends to come with. For most of his life I’d say Branko didn’t really know what to make of me. Which, hey, who can blame him: neither do I, most of the time.

But (if I may say so) most of the time I’m pretty good at making kids laugh because I am, to coin a phrase, a muppet. Not so much Branko, till we went to a toy show out in Mississauga last January or thereabouts and I said something — I don’t even know what it was, I was so shocked by what came next — and that wonderful 13-year-old scream-laughed at me like a hyena.

It reminds me of when I was in high school. I generally considered myself the least funny person on our very funny improv team. One time I made an under-my-breath masturbation joke to the funniest guy on the team, and he laughed till he had tears in his eyes and I felt great about it for… well, I still feel great about it. It was decades ago, and I can still feel it all this time later. Ditto: making Branko laugh.

That day I pitched Tasneem

Friends, pitching ain’t easy. And I’m not good at it. And no, I am not interested in whatever webinar you have to sell me about how to pitch better. There’s a whole ecosystem of that shit feasting on every insecure writer on Earth and I hate it on principle, which might very well be self-defeating, but that’s that.

I was doing agent research for my YA novel, The Last Alchemist, and I came upon an agent named Tasneem and I thought to myself, “this person is perfect for my book.” And then I found out she was attending an event near me and would be taking live book pitches! And it scared the holy shit out of me but I did it anyway and it was overall a wonderful experience, even if (as you’ve likely guessed) she’s not my agent now. It was because it scared me so much that I recognized, quite thundrously, that I was doing exactly the right thing at exactly the right time. There’s power in cracking that code in the middle of something, instead of long after.

The day I realized Zam loved me?!?

We all know: grief is weird. Even, especially (?), with cats. (RIP Burt.) Zam, as you might recall, was my cat prior to the one I have now; Zam was with me from 2003-2015. And at the end I put her down as one generally does with cats, because she was generally losing weight and not getting better, as generally happens with cats when it’s the end.

And for some reason, I spent the next ten years convinced she’d been miserable with me. Ten. Years.

Yeah: it was in the year of our fuckwad 2025 that I remembered that for 99.8% of the time she lived with me, my cat had been happy, affectionate, relaxed, generally lovely. And that for the last 0.2% of the time, she’d been dying. And that the last 0.2% had coloured the entirety of what had come before.

For Ten. Years.

I dunno, everyone. Don’t hold on to anything that long. Ten years of your brain telling you a highly purposeless lie, feels like a life sentence after you’ve wised up.

Bex, my one-woman writing support group

This isn’t a day, it’s a person. You’ve heard of her before.

I’m a writer; she’s a writer. We are writers.

You’ve probably heard that it’s good for writers to have a community of writers. It probably is! I just have one, and she is Bex. We spend a good amount of time bouncing our various writerly anxieties off one another. I don’t know if we make each other better or worse (but probably better). I’ve read her unpublished shit and she’s read my unpublished shit and here we are, still doing it. It’s hard to imagine doing any of this, in fact, without her.

Plus we make sex jokes about Jeff Probst, which I will eventually collect in a zine called “That’s How Ya Do It On Survivor!” And if that’s the only thing we ever publish together, well, that will be a fine, fine thing.

The night an enby filmmaker with cool hair liked my hair

Speaking of community: you have no idea how much, in a year in which I struggled with my hair presentation a lot, it meant to have a totally random non-binary stranger come up to me after the TIFF screening of Wake Up Dead Man and tell me how much they liked my hair and that it reminded them of K-Pop Demon Hunters. I floated. Thank you Levi.

That time my D&D character made the sacrifice play

The party was deep in Ironslag, which is a Fire Giant’s fortress. We were sneaking around trying to steal something really important. As usual (for us), we didn’t really have a plan. Someone suggested that we needed to create a distraction so that we could carry out the heist. And that was about as far into “planning” as we got before my presence in the fortress was accidentally revealed to the selfsame Fire Giant and his two giant dogs and I ran my dwarfy ass off, luring the dogs away, causing a highly distracting commotion, pretty sure I was gonna get et.

But no: the timing worked out perfectly, I had just enough of a head start, and as the rest of the party went on with their thieving, I DeLorean-slid into a wall and vanished, safe and warm behind the stone.

This is probably gobbledegook, to most of you. But it was absolutely real to me.

The day Tokyo pushed, and I realized I could push back

There is a point in every journey — call it the Terminal Freakout Point — when you’re out of whatever initial gas you started with, and your plan has not survived contact with the enemy, and you have to work out what to do to keep “extracting value” from the dwindling temporal resources of your highly expensive, point-and-shoot, self-made adventure… or at least, how to not go home and kick rocks. This moment happened in Tokyo on day four: the subway line near me derailed in the middle of the night, my feet were god damned dead from the weekend’s worth of walking, I wasn’t nearly enough over the cold I’d been nursing since the flight, and my “plan” for the day was just a vague annotation of boroughs, in pen, on the back of my printed itinerary.

But I figured it out. I did more than figure it out: I got all the juice out of that day; it became the day every day after had to live up to, or be deemed a miss. What was funny about it was that the day kept pushing me: irritations, inconveniences, outright catastrophic failures, ping-ponging me around, deflecting me backwards. I learned to walk backwards. I started to wonder if most, maybe all, of the things about being alive that piss me off aren’t just moments I should be paying closer attention to where I’m being pushed.

That time we went to the Keg for my birthday

I don’t do a lot birthdaywise as an adult, besides a few practices I keep mostly for myself. But this summer the group chat got it into its head that we oughta go to the Keg Mansion one of these days, and hey, I’ll throw a celebratory event in the mix to grease the wheels, and so to the Keg we went, and it was (rather unexpectedly to this dry old husk) one of the most touching things that ever happened. I don’t think I do much with gestures, earnestness, emphatic statements, and the like. I certainly don’t deliver them well. But sometimes, people showing up for me hits something deep down that I didn’t fully realize needed hitting.

Addendum: Kali called me Li Li as we were saying goodnight. Which is not the way I'd go, nicknamewise, but still, meant everything to me.

Over the year I've gotten better — and it has been a real practice, woof — at introducing myself as L. or Matthew depending on the day, my preferred names. Next up, I'll have to deface every copy of of The Cinema of Survival — I've found myself hesitant to send out copies without heavy edits. So it goes.

Happy 2026 to all of you, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the un-time of these past few liminal days. We’ll be back on a regular Thursday posting schedule next week.