Down the street from me sits a dark shingled, two story home oddly canted in its sizable lot, surrounded by this purple fence densely inscribed with inscrutable ramblings. I have heard that his house was built on another lot, which some big institution wanted, and they moved it here at great expense, and he had them orient it along a north south axis for mystical reasons.
The guy must be wealthy; the house and property would go for a few million now. Cambridge hasn’t figured out, yet, how to squash this guy’s identity with zoning regulations. The stuff on the fence reminds me schizophrenia, but it isn’t a nasty sort. It’s all curiously upbeat. Or at worst, opaque.
One part of the wall has a huge moose silhouette on it, labeled, the cosmic moose. I love it.
This public identity works for this guy, who dresses like a hippie, in rainbow threaded embroidered layers. We used to sit in cafes together. He had a shoulder bag full of action figurines he would set up around him on his table, before he started writing in his spiral notebook.
This identity works for this guy. My hat’s off to him.
My identity doesn’t work. My social media identity. Maybe my entire identity down to the core, but let’s start picking away at the upper layer first, shall we?
So, everyone knows the aphorism about insanity being doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
This is the top line of what I am now trying to do with my relationship, broadly, to the internet. I mean, to stop doing that, to be clear. This isn’t about Facebook and Twitter and blogging; this is about everything flowing through the broadband pipe. News. Streaming movies and TV. Oversharing. Finding freelance work. How I exist as a political being. Everything. All of it, more or less at once.
I’m trying to not do the same things, over and over again, and expect a different result.
My single identity, the train wreck, we can call it, rams together overshares, accountability posts, my professional ambition, my teaching impulses, my attempts to find freelance work, my posting of creative work, and my vitriolic politics, shot through with cries of fury and despair at, uh, lots of infuriating and despair-inducing things.
This can work, if one is a genius. If you’re Kanye West, you can do whatever the fuck you want, and you will continue to make a living. Sure, some people will think you’re an asshole. But you can just chug along and keep making hits, being a nut, shrugging off the articles you see about how maybe the media should not broadcast your bipolar issues. You don’t even have to admit you’re bipolar!
I’m not Kanye West.
As I try to pull this blog together, I am realizing that I need a set of outlets for each kind of content, with appropriate audiences for each. I need to curate separate identities, or, simply move some identities out of the web all together.
I have, for sometime, wondered, am I just not trying hard to enough, to do the stuff I want to do, or, does my social media identity sabotage my efforts?
The internet is forever; to some degree I will never escape the identity I have built with 10,000 posts. But I can at least tidy this shit up. Curate what I am putting out there now. I’m not important, and so relatively few people are gonna hold stuff against me if I just make sure that shit is gone when they look for me, professionally, do that sanity check, we all do, when we have to create any kind of new relationship.
So this site if a transitional object. What does the endgame look like?
- The writer-author-teacher identity.
- The graphic designer illustrator identity.
- The personal identity’s internet footprint / residue.
- The political identity.
I could do the personal is political thing, merge the two, that’s understandable. But personal, political and business and creative all rammed together in one steaming mess?
That doesn’t work. For me. I’m not Kanye.
And I need to stop pretending I ever will be, or that this will ever work.
The amount of work to do in all this is daunting; the desire to burn everything to the ground is great. But I have made many wonderful friends and had many meaningful interactions in the social media space, all of which of course, helped Mark Zuckerberg get paid to elect Donal Trump president.
That has to stop. I have to stop doing that.
So I’m trying. To save the best, to abandon the rest, and that, I am now admitting, is going to take time and effort.
