#30 - Be Stupid and Angry
One of my favorite productivity writers opined on our tendency to get curious about and lost in whatever intellectual fodder is within our reach. So it’s important to put nourishing things like books in front of us, lest we pick up our phones and go down the rabbit holes of brain rot. Cool cool cool.
Having said that, I’ve never needed a celebrity/rap feud more than I fucking do now.
So please, don’t judge yourself for browsing The Lawsuit Info, Justin Baldoni’s web-based purge of all SMS trash Blake Lively-related. Or, my personal favorite pastime right now, binge rewatching reaction videos to Kendrick Lamar’s hit job single, They Not Like Us.
If we do indeed become what we imbibe, then please, let me for once be an angry, vengeful, fed up artist risking it all to put power on blast.
Stuff I’m Pissed About
A seemingly endless barrage of puff pieces on (and likely paid for by) Bill Gates and his new memoir.
According to NPR, Bill Gates is optimistic about our global future.
Are you fucking kidding me?
It’s easy to be optimistic when you have billion-dollar-bunker money. Fuck you, NPR, and fuck you, Bill Gates. I don’t want to hear about what any billionaire has to say about anything, now or ever.
NPR has a subscription dialog box that pops up on their website that says “News Above the Noise.” You know what this story is? A whole lot of fucking noise.
Another one by Interview Magazine. Really? I used to like this pub. While this interview is rife with inane leading questions, here’s my favorite:
Isaacson: Speaking of becoming obsessed with Delaware, I know you’re obsessed with tiny objects, and I guess Delaware counts as the second-tiniest state. You just talked about missing social cues. If you were born today, do you think you’d have been diagnosed on the autism spectrum? And in some ways, were those traits superpowers rather than handicaps for you?
I bolded the stupid part. Way to continue to plant a fetishized ableist view of Autism Spectrum Disorders in elitist media.
As someone who works with kids who are severely handicapped by ASDs, I can’t stand this kind of tone-deaf bullshit from the supposed literati.
Had Bill Gates’s parents not been supremely privileged, it’s doubtful whether his “touch of ‘tism” would have become a superpower. Fucker(s).
Also, are we just going to forget that Bill Gates met with Jeffrey Epstein many times just because he’s not engaged in a coup? Is that how low the bar is for billionaires leeching our society and public infrastructure?
Stroopwaffled wrote a brief-but-brilliant take on the conundrum of “platform snark” that captures my own mixed feelings about leaving Substack (which I wrote about here.) I think Jennifer Barnett captures the angst of publishing online today perfectly:
The world is founded by patriarchal, capitalistic jerkoffs who create companies that do terrible things but provide a service many people need. Johnson and Johnson knowingly gave women cancer.
I left Substack because (1) I don’t trust the people behind it, (2) I think it might go financially under, (3) I get distracted from writing by all of the funny notes, and (3) I want to own everything I write forever even if it’s useless garbage.
Also, (4) I love the thought of my monthly fee helping a small team of scrappy wonderful people keep the lights on at Buttondown. But I love what many people are writing on Substack and I don’t begrudge anyone staying there.
Good Things
I’m me, so of course I’ll end on a high.
Rajiv Surendra is the best man about the internet. Many nights after work these past few weeks, I have stayed up late watching Rajiv sort laundry and explain his bluing process for 20-odd minutes. Or wrap presents with brown paper and string sealed with wax a la Mr. Darcy. This adult Mr. Rogers can take all my money.
That handsome dork Craig Mod commemorated six years of successfully running a membership program with some rules. My favorites, although they’re all wonderful:
#13 - If the work isn’t strong enough, work more on the work. Reminding us that we can all get better at anything if we’re willing to put in the time and effort, and that it’s ok to start off as “not great.”
#16 - Make strict decisions but be willing to change your mind (I renamed my membership program eighteen months into it (and am glad I did!)) I’ve always struggled with some shame around learning/pivoting in public. I’ve made the strict decision to keep writing this newsletter about nothing, yet I’ve repitched this weird identity tent a dozen times over already. Apparently that is ok.
I’ve taken a few days off this week to reset my mind, and mentally and emotionally prepare myself for my parents moving out of my childhood home and into a smaller space within a retirement community.
This has involved a lot of reading, and once again I’ve found myself in the loving spiritual care of Ram Dass. His words enable me to transcend feelings of the moment to touch Atman, the boundless Awareness of which we are all a part.
So in closing, and before I go back to screaming, I’ll share some of his words from Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying.
The belief that nothing exists beyond what we can see, taste, touch, hear, or experience has wide-ranging effects, but none more critical than how we view the cycles of our lives, from birth through maturity, aging, and death. For people who view life only through the senses, death is the obvious end of the road; beyond the demise of our physical bodies, they say, nothing exists. For people of faith, other planes may exist as realms apart from our earthly sphere, and although our activities may affect the future, the afterlife remains speculative, without direct influence on how we view our earthly existence. According to this material view, we are separate, finite entities living in a world of changing phenomena, waiting for our annihilation. So it’s no great surprise that death and its friends, sickness and old age, have been sources of such dread in this culture, and are so terribly misunderstood. If we begin to open our minds, however, recognizing the degree to which this kind of thinking has influenced us, we’re able to think outside this box and take a quite different view of the process of aging.
Be here now. 👴🏻
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I love every word of this.