I am not much of a talker, anymore.
I was. A talker. As a kid. Couldn’t shut me up, from what I understand. My own kids will happily talk in a stream, above the vocabulary level for their age, displaying those surprising insights that children do when they reverse engineer complicated phrases for concepts for which we already have words.
I’m either too slow with my thoughts or too careful with my words. Conversation passes through topics so quickly that anything I might have said feels like last minute’s news. This isn’t a complaint, really. Get a reputation as the quiet, contemplative type and it takes a lot of the pressure off, until you have to host an orientation or run a meeting, and then, at least, the expectations are low.
But I will write. Hubris will catch up with you quick if you say that you’re good at something, so I’ll say that I’m probably adept. I can shift voices and narrative distance, I have a recognizable style, and I have my obvious flaws, like over-relying on the rule of threes.
There’s a kind of internet speak that sort of defies sincerity, and it’s slowly grown over time. We’re all so keen to be witty and get the last laugh. There’s a “dopamine hit” (one of those phrases that’s been used so often, it’s lost a lot of meaning here on the web, like “late stage capitalism“) that comes with the numbers of thumbs-up reactions, or heart reactions, or emptyquotes, or whatever the social currency happens to be.
It’s not all bad. There’s something about executing a succinct, less-is-more sort of postmodern joke that makes the whole thing a kind of performance art, and despite my previous caution, I’m going to go ahead and say that I got good at it, in certain spaces. I grew up with it and I’ve been doing it for a long time.
More and more, “shitposting” makes me think of how Daniel Kaluuya’s character feels about his dystopian world in Black Mirror’s Fifteen Million Merits. “It’s all confetti.”
There’s this thing that happens with any mass media at some point, I think, in which bad actors grab the steering wheel and suddenly, charm overwhelms any sense of poignancy. All of a sudden, so much seems to tickle the same neurons that engage with empathy and pathos, and all of the actually important and good things about people, but never actually engages them beyond the surface. A dopamine hit, courtesy of late-stage capitalism.
I’ll miss laughing at the memes. There are spaces out there that had a real handle on my sensibilities that I will, probably, never find in real life, or, realistically, here.
But I can’t do it anymore. The echo chambers, the parasocial worship of celebrity and e-celebrity and, uh… whatever I could add here that would make this one a rule of threes, it’s just… getting to me. Even in the places I like. I’m tired of anxiously appending “lol” to the end of my comments, that I have already edited extensively for brevity (this is uniquely a young Gen X and Millennial phenomenon, of course, but in our defense, we tend to be more computer literate and have good reasons, based on experience, to hedge our bets when post things).
In college, there were periods of time when I used to write for fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. I know because I kept charts. Nobody besides me will ever read a word of most of that, which I expect will be the case with all of this, but at least it means I can be honest and write like a human being, instead of like some programmed robot fishing for clout.
You can’t make clickbait headlines if you don’t care who visits your website.
There are some drawbacks: the other people in my life have not consented to using pictures of them, or their real names, so I’ll have to come up with some pseudonyms and I will not be putting pictures of them here. It is more public than most social media, some of which is anonymized and some of which is at least protected by privacy settings, such as we trust them. People who mostly just looked at the pictures of my kids will have to see them on the shared photo album. Sorry. The internet may have become more ephemeral and I can use robots.txt and pay for a domain in perpetuity as much as the next fellow, but I tend towards caution when it comes to publicly putting out pictures of people who aren’t me.
Things that I am likely to talk about include being a parent of two kids, my hobbies, my lamentations on the state of world democracy, and, probably, sometimes, obsessive compulsive disorder, which I have.
My hobbies, at the moment, include reading (I used to read 100 books a year and am at about a quarter of that lately, so I’m hoping to change it), playing video games, watching the 1001 Movies to Watch Before You Die list (all versions, which means, of course, there are considerably more than 1001), reading every Batman (and Bat family) comic between Crisis on Infinite Earths and Flashpoint, amateur bookbinding, and probably a lot of other things that will come to me as they come up.
Some of those are what I call my “Forever Projects,” because they take a very long time (I finished one, recently, which was to read all of the Arthur Schlesinger Jr. An American President series, and I expect that I’ll finish “read all the Discworld books” in a couple of years.)
If you want to get a handle on what I’ll write about here, my kids are six and four, I’m currently playing Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake and Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, I am reading Stephen King’s 11/22/63 and Terry Pratchett’s Mort and I’ve been stalled on the 1001 list because I have a system (the system is a brain goblin that arbitrarily compels me to create spreadsheets and make check marks in an order that pleases it), and one of the movies has been hard to get now that I’m out of practice at using bit torrent and I’m not willing to pay upwards of $30 for something I’ll watch once. You probably already know if you’re here, but politically, I’m one of those commie, leftist, Black Lives Matter, trans rights, and on and on sort of people, although I confess to taking the controversial action of voting for the Democratic Party candidate for major offices most of the time, for harm reduction, as fed up with their bullshit as I am. Otherwise the wrong lizard will be in charge, to reference Douglas Adams.
That huge-ass sentence that takes up about half of the last paragraph is about what you can expect from me, often. Also, I use a lot of fucking swear words. As far as I can tell, they’re less overtly harmful than, say, those words that, totally by coincidence, vaguely resemble slurs just enough that they have become uncomfortable. Even the hilarious human tendency to turn previously innocuous words and phrases into sexual innuendos has produced more accidental harm than the word “fuck” can ever hope to, I think.
I have no idea, really, how often I’ll write, or if I’ll even keep it up, or (rule of threes, baby!) what I’ll even write about. It’s been a long time since I did this, and traditionally, when I start out trying to write about myself, I veer into the fictional instead.
And you don’t have to read it. I’m not keeping tabs. My own wife will skim this, at best. But I have to write, apparently, and this is a hell of a lot better than linking to a depressing news article and saying “The planet is dyin’, Cloud, lol.” At least, for me it is.
It’s worth the price of a coffee for me to rant at myself periodically, and show off how many words-per-minute I can type in a setting that doesn’t include mutual indemnity clauses.
If you want to be part of the cloud that this middle-aged man is yelling at, feel free. Hopefully most of them will be shorter than this one.
I am going to ignore things like categories and tags for now. I may come back to them, but I think the best way of sorting things is probably chronologically. I’m not sure I even have the coherence to make things more easily sortable.
Thanks for reading all that, imaginary person who did.
May the way of the Hero lead to the Triforce.