Nothing derails my plans more effectively than making them. For example: I set up my personal brand as author, blogger, and general nuisance and then essentially stopped blogging.
I have a lot going on, and this site was only ever meant to be an exercise in working out my thoughts coherently enough that other people would be able to read them, thereby clarifying these thoughts for me. I don’t know if that happened. As well as several dozen poems, I’ve posted a lot of rambling rants, a lot of mediocre ‘content’ as we’re meant to call everything that arises from the slightest creative human endeavor.
Is this post content? Is it shareable? Do I care?
Most of my parasocial needs are being met on Threads right now. It’s not a perfect platform thanks to Meta, who are either fascists or idiots or both given the way they disable trans and POC accounts via algorithm but won’t take down hate accounts despite hundreds of real users’ reports. They don’t fucking care, but I’m content to work chaos on the margins. I don’t have the energy to get on BlueSky or Mastodon or anything else. I’ll wait for a new exodus, when the process of enshittification has gone too far to tolerate.
There was that time I was coming down after a semi-licit rave at a downtown ballet studio. I’d only just met the woman whose apartment we were in, though she knew some of my friends. It must have been spring, for the room was full of sunlight.
The woman was a dominatrix. Messily beautiful, twice my age. I am quite sure that if she tried to fuck me I would have said yes. Instead I read the magazine Fetish Times.
It was 1994. The internet was barely a word. No smartphones, no cameras, no 3.5 million search results and nothing to Google it from (sorry Netscape, you did your best.) We still called it cyberpunk, for fuck’s sake. Then adolescent me picked up one of western culture’s strangest artefacts and the bottom dropped out of the world. Thanks to the imprinting effects of psychedelics, there was no coming back.
I was appalled. I read it cover to cover. No one noticed. They talked about San Francisco in the 1980s, about tweakers on roller-skates and failed revolutions. I read about…stuff.
Why do we want it so weird? Who told me to ask my first lover to pour hot wax on me, the third time I ever had sex? That was before I’d seen the magazine. He asked what I wanted and that’s what I wanted. We were barely dating. I just went to his house to fuck. To smoke hash. To read his mind-bendingly seditious books and fantasise about changing the world.
“Do you ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”
I don’t align with all of Brian Eno’s public opinions, but I can’t find fault with him on the subject of NFTs. Like him, I can’t say that I’ve ever understood why they need to exist. How does making something owned make it better? “A person claims exclusive ownership of this.” So fucking what? If anything, the thing owned has lost value, because now it is removed from public meaning-making.
Putting your art on the NFT marketplace fees like fighting other artists for the coins some rich idiot tossed from the upper deck of the RMS Titanic. We’re all going to die in about an hour, but by all means, let’s fight for that silver. Something to grip in our teeth on the way down. Something to pay the ferryman.
Crypto-bros like to think they’re anarchists, but the point of anarchism (not anarchy, but capital-A Anarchism, as in the political philosophy of localized self-governance, with special emphasis on governance) isn’t to “fuck the system” but to create a system that is incapable of fucking us. There’s still going to have to be A System. None of the comforts of the modern world exist without a cohesive society with ample financial resources. If we burn the world, the internet goes too. Oops.
The more we do what crypto-bros think is best, the less livable the world becomes. Right down to, where do they think their microwaveable pizza crust comes from? Their own ingenuity? Or hundreds of workers in a supply chain that will collapse if we keep burning the world by mining cryptocurrency. There will be no pizza. No Soylent, no poké bowl delivered by an Ubereats driver whose take won’t cover the cost of the gas to get it to your house. If push comes to shove, the crypto-bros can always eat each other. Looks like they’ve already begun.
My father (R.I.P. 1989) had no filter. I’ve had to think about him from this peculiar distance for most of my life, and thank the gods I knew him as long as I did, because I don’t know if I would understand myself as much as I do without that solid decade.
Near the end of that decade, he acquired VCR, then rented a number of really challenging films for a nine year old to wander into the room and watch.
2001: A Space Odyssey. Altered States. Rocky Horror Picture Show (calling Dr. Freud, bring clamps) and oh gosh, and I sort of wish this wasn’t so, but among these mind-bending stalwarts I have to list A Clockwork Orange.
I was nine. Maybe ten.
Now, I’m not saying that I’m a bad person because my daddy didn’t monitor my viewing. I’m saying these are some heavy duty psychological loads for an absorbent mind to bear. The circumstances of my life had already conspired against me being normal (Montessori is scarily effective, for the record.) Now I had the mental imagery to suit, stewing in my preadolescent brain, waiting for me to stumble into my libido.
But I like who I am. I don’t think I’m a bad person because I have peculiar tastes. I’ve never thought that, no matter how often people have tried to tell me it was so.
I’ve tried to blog many times over the years. Aside from my life-long inability to keep any kind of regular diary for more than a few months, blogging about oneself seems incalculably trite. And damnation but I hate a long-worded ramble about people’s family values on my way to their rhubarb pie recipe. Being no great fount of wisdom about any particular thing, I have never felt I had much to write about.
Doctorow is already a bit of a legend, and this goes a very long way towards explaining how and why. It is also the most instrumental, calculating, analytical, yet least mercenary (Doctorow’s emphasis) description of the value of blogs I have ever read. It has altered my worldview considerably, and I say that as a person who actively alters their worldview on the regular. I do enjoy it when an outside force does it for me.
For you TL:DR types, what makes this different from all other advice I’ve read about blogs? It’s the fact that Doctorow’s primary audience is himself. Most advice says to use the blog to make yourself likeable, create a human persona so you can “connect” with your “target audience.” Whatever you do, don’t write about writing, they say, even though my favourite authors blog about writing all the time. Even though we’re meant to “take the reader on our creative journey.” Write instead about your “passion” or some hobby or your pets… then mention to fans of this aspect of yourself that you happen to write books…
This feels like trying to suck up to rich classmates by talking about horses, then asking if they’ll buy your lemonade. Dude, I’m busy. My passion is writing more books. I don’t want to make small talk. If I’m taking the time to write blog posts, it’s gonna have to be about bigger stuff, and it’s going to have to serve me more directly.
“(T)he thought of carrying everything around in a neat little (searchable) package was frankly staggering.”
Doctorow welcomes the public to observe, comment, suggest, reframe and so on, but he blogs first of all to keep a record of his own thinking. Yes, a book or a private e-journal does the same thing, but the internal coding of blog design makes them taggable and searchable. All his ideas, given at least the semblance of coherence, cross referenced, and available all the time, everywhere. I wept, just a little. So much of my time goes to what can only be termed data management that the thought of carrying everything around in a neat little (searchable) package was frankly staggering.
The Commonplace Book as Doctorow describes it is present in mainstream thought most obviously as the Bullet Journal. Many bulleters do indeed publish, as five minutes with the hashtag will reveal.
But I don’t know what I’ll do. Utterly inconclusive I admit, but I have a well-practiced habit of promising more than I can deliver, and so I now make far fewer promises. Is this my Commonplace Book? Comments clearly welcome.
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