023: Every Day, Once a Day, Give Yourself a Present

First, COMPILATION.
Elgorp Brusk says the bird app is going to 4000 characters and that's basically the end of its usefulness for me. It's almost enough to make his Fauci conspiracism look silly. I've never seen a person try to destroy his own product and his own credibility so thoroughly at the same time, and I remember when Mitt Romney bought out Toys'R'Us specifically to suck the marrow from its meatless bones.

I had a very sweet dream where I was in school and hanging out with all the weird cool creative queers and we were doing weird cool creative shit and it was nice to be accepted and celebrated in both my interests and my giblet status. Sorta like if we were all together and hanging out and had school together and no responsibilities outside of that. Except my brain just, like, made people up for some reason. So hear me out: what if we started a gay Bauhaus-style school? Or, like, Black Mountain? Nevermind that those places invariably get stamped out or implode. What if we all just built a weird commune-school dedicated to queer art and failure? I saw it once in a dream.

Went and unloaded a large part of my Absolute editions at Half-Price and got absolutely taken to the cleaners. Talking like GameStop levels. I love that place, but I really have to get into selling my shit myself, because I'm not even getting a fraction of what things are worth anymore, despite seeing how much they're asking for stuff.

Possible TMI and Cee Dubs: digestive function - Love it when my neck gets so far out that putting it back in place causes me to vomit and shit. I would say "how did we make it this far as a species" but I also remember I would have probably been one of the sickly weak ones that was eaten by wolves. Which, I mean, that's fine. Wolves gotta eat, and I'm really tired of this randomly malfunctioning meatsuit, and I still have probably 30+ years left in it.

I don't really care about either team, but this was the single greatest football game I have ever seen. I kinda wanna get an Mbappe jersey, and that's more than can be said about any other soccer player ever.

Deleted my Twitter. I recognize it's "not good business practice" or something, but I don't think it will hurt me one iota in the long run.

I've been up for over an hour because my brain won't stop playing the opening riff to Love Will Tear Us Apart.

I love living in a state where I can renew my driver's license without having to walk outside.

I actually googled "why do people dance" last night, so that's the sort of person I am.

I'm like this far from just deleting all my media and staying in bed til I just... stop functioning. I'm so tired of the propagation of stupid bullshit, and it never stops.

Yes, yes, I almost deleted Facebook in a huff. But I'm back. Everything else is gone though, except Instagram.

Second, MEDIA EXPULSION.
As noted above, I deleted most of my social media. Here's why:

First and foremost, Twitter is largely a trash fire. This was true before Musk took over, and it's worse now. The problems now are well documented; if you need background I suggest you google. But Musk's bullshit is only the final straw. My abandonment of the platform has been coming for many, many years. And I'm not even going to say the the thing that everyone says--that it's a toxic cesspool where the worst online behavior of humanity is on display--because it's both not true nor what I had a problem with. It's not the worst place. There are much worse mostly-public spaces both in real life and online where people exchange a lot worse things. I didn't have a problem with it because, for the most part, I didn't interact with that part of it. More on that in a sec. I was driven away from the platform because it simply became too much information, and I am at a point in my life and career that I have to be mindful of what I'm choosing to give my attention to. (This will be a running theme.)

The primary method of dealing with any social media stream is one of curation. You choose who you want to listen to, and you listen to all those people. And the thing is that I followed far fewer people on Twitter than I do on Instagram, and only slightly more than I do on Facebook, and yet keeping up on Twitter became a full-time job. Not only is a couple hundred accounts more than enough to keep my thumb occupied scrolling, some of those accounts were so ridiculously prolific that they were effectively writing essays on Twitter, instead of, y'know, blogs, or articles, or newsletters, or things built for longform work. (I often said the two worst things they ever did for Twitter was add threading and raising the character limit.) Twitter's entire point starting out was to blast little tweets into the aether, not big meandering groans. The other problem was that, even with carefully crafted lists and the use of TweetDeck to provide some separation in the channels, the entire deluge of the stream was too much to parse in a reasonable amount of time. Eight hours of sleep was an insurmountable gap on Twitter, and coming back and finding entire threads without context, conversations with no beginning, and the like made it impossible to keep up with the overall conversation for me.

Now, yes, I could follow fewer accounts, and I've tried that several times over the past few years. I've gone through a number of purges of celebrity YouTubers, journalists covering beats I no longer care about, and collected friends from various forum diasporas. But the problem still is not them, it's me. I'm the one who can't keep up, but felt the overwhelming need to. Without the ability to even try to do that now, I don't feel like I'm missing much. (This likely has implications for other behaviors in my life as well, but that's neither here nor there.)

There's one other part to this that I started feeling a while ago, and that's one of community. There was a time, early in Twitter, where it felt like a high school hallway during lunch period, where you could walk through and catch snippets of conversation and chime in if you wanted and the conversation now included you. There was much more back-and-forth. For the last couple years, though, there has been less and less conversing and more and more announcing, or broadcasting. It's less about the conversations in the hall and more about the poster on the wall. Posting something and none of the hundreds of people following me (most of which I knew in some way) would reply despite their own activity. Attempting to join a conversation only to see the most inflammatory responses getting traction. Everyone talking, nobody listening. And I'm sure there's irony in the fact that most of the reason to keep Twitter specifically is because it's supposedly good for marketing for us indie writer folk, but here's the deal: I have never ONCE received a click or referral to any of my stuff from Twitter. Facebook--despite my profile being Friends-Only for the majority of posts--and Instagram are both much larger drivers of traffic to my links. And that's borne out in many actual studies of traffic sources on the internet--Twitter just doesn't actually do that much, and when it does, it's because it's people screenshotting pithy tweets and posting them elsewhere.

I'm putting my energy elsewhere. Now copy that reasoning for basically all the other media, from TikTok to MeWe. (Admittedly MeWe has the secondary issue of never having gained any traction at all ever.)

Now, why would I keep Facebook, with their horrible algorithms and equally horrible content policies? Because the people are there, unfortunately. There's interaction. It supports a remarkably wide amount of content types. People are actually interested in clicking through to read things, though I admit a large number of people actually don't. But the sheer amount of interaction, even through myriad "experimental" "functionality" "changes" and a highly algorithmic timeline and a UI that is awkward at best, is more fulfilling and nuanced and useful than whatever Twitter (et al.) had become. And Instagram is just my scrolling platform. It's all the stupid, wholesome, relevant, and beautiful content I used to get on Twitter, but without the expectation of hot takes and always being right.

So in the end, it's all about what I want to do as far as spending time and empathy reserves. If I'm going to put myself out there, I'd at least like it to be somewhere where I can expect some interaction, instead of a truly unresponsive void. Heaven knows I get enough of that in the traditional publishing world.

Third, CONSUMPTION.
- I got bored at one point and made a playlist called "Riffs that Make You Make That Face" and it's truly too metal.
- I finished reading The Queer Art of Failure by J. Halberstam. I don't know that I'd recommend it specifically, as it feels really disjointed, but I'm interested in some of their other work. We'll see. I'm glad to have read it and now have that referential touchstone, but I don't know that it's particularly informed me on ways forward in queer theory or states of being.
- As I mentioned a couple letters back, Blaseball has returned. Participate in the Cultural Event of Blaseball.
- This is one half CONSUMPTION and one half PROMOTION, but the newest episode of the podcast is up and it's some book recommendations from the past 12 months. For my part, it's three books from the year and one I'm going to get to this year.
- I'm currently reading Calamities by Renee Gladman, on recommendation. It's a bit of a hybrid prose poem thing, and within eight pages it had already started me writing my own stuff again, so that seems like worthwhile investment of my time already.

Fourth, PROMOTION.
This is the part where I talk about my book, A Void and Cloudless Sky. The book is up for sale on Amazon and BN.com, as well as Bookshop.org! The best deal is with Mr. Bezos, but Bookshop actually lets you support your friendly local bookstore if you want.

Do you want a FREE PDF Copy? All I ask is that you review it on either/both of those sites and/or Goodreads. Let me know!

And as usual, if you'd like to support this whole endeavor more directly, you can check out my Patreon, where I post poetry, notes to poems, the occasional essay, and whatnot. At upper tiers I even write poems FOR YOU!

If you like what I do here and don't have the scratch or the inclination to do the above, please share this newsletter with your friends. I like making words wiggle people's brainjuices.

Finally, THE OUTRO.
We've made it again through the Western holidays season. Hopefully it was good to you. Around here, we went nowhere, we saw no family, we didn't even really exchange gifts, so to speak. What we did have, eventually, was a get-together just this weekend of my brother and neifling, and two friends from St. Louis, and we all sat and played Magic: the Gathering and Rifftrax: The Game and had a sampling of local restaurants. We went to the beach yesterday and I showed my brother's child the skyline while the lake chopped and broke against the concrete jetty. The weather has been cold, and bleak, and windy, and wet. But the whole purpose of the midwinter festivals is confronting the cold and bleak, and combating it with the warmth and love of friends, food, games, and beauty.

Take care of yourself, and give yourself something to cheer yourself up. You deserve it. We all deserve it. Some days it seems like all the worst parts of the world and humanity will do us in, but you can just stop for a little bit and acknowledge that feeling, and then set it free to join all these other moments of doubt, fear, and despair that have come before. You're still here. You'll continue to be here, and that cold and gray? That part will go away before you know it.

Thanks for being here, and let's all have a 2023, eh?

PS: Think about that title for a second. Unmoored from its place within Twin Peaks, separated from but also coupled with its following line ("Don't plan for it; don't wait for it; just let it happen.") it creates an entirely new meaning, one of temporality and clarity. Give yourself a Present, as opposed to a Past or a Future.