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?

1. The writer-author-teacher identity.
2. The graphic designer illustrator identity.
3. The personal identity’s internet footprint / residue.
4. 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. 

 

 

 

Maybe they belittle your writing. Remind you it’s just a hobby. Ask if you’ve been published and then how much that paid. Remind you not to quit your day job. Or they dismiss your genre completely. It isn’t literature.

Or they pay lip service, provide generalized support…

…but never actually read you. Or if they do? They don’t mention it.

And of course, they never write reviews.

Yeah. That’s a thing. My wife and kids and most of my pre-writing friends don’t read my work. In the 90s I used to flog them with it, as I sold to semi-pro markets. Even the wife, kid, and friends who are SF readers never read me. And my wife reads several hours of genre fiction a day.

She could get through my published work in three weeks. 

Ouch. Oh, and the amazing thing is, you can actually blog this, and not worry about it, because they’ll never notice, because they don’t read the blog either.

Maniacal laughter. Sullen staring. Rubbing of the temples.

It’s tough. You rely on these people to some degree for emotional support, or financial support, your whole life, and then, when it comes time to validate the time you have poured into this… they can’t put in a few hours of effort to inspect the output.

Why?

Who knows.

Look. It’s weird. Believing in someones prose, anyone’s prose, is a kind of hard work. Entering that willing suspension of disbelief. Losing yourself in someone else’s story. Your friends and family carry all this baggage about you, your strengths, your failings, your blind spots, and as they read your work, sometimes, this memory of you stands on their shoulder, this grinning homunculus poking them in the face. Who is this character supposed to be? Who is this romantic interest? Oh gross, my Dad is thinking about sex?

You get the idea.

Of course, some friends or family will read what you’ve written, and tell you what’s wrong with it. How to fix it. That’s hard to deal with too. Are they writing and publishing in the places you do? No. But they can tell you why your work isn’t working. For them.

So what is the answer?

Let this go. It doesn’t matter. You’re being a drama queen. This is life, dude. Yeah, other people’s wives, kids, family, friends read their stuff and LOVE it…. yeah. You’re not them. Deal with it. Move on.

If they aren’t editors, if they aren’t agents, they’re just a few random people you happen to know. With random opinions. Sure, they’re your people. But they aren’t your readers, and they will probably never be. You don’t work for them.

Someday some of them may get on board. Probably not. I thought, if I started publishing a lot in bigger magazines….

Nope!

But I like to think after I’m gone, when my kids are longing to hear my voice, that they can pick up some of what I write, and read it, and smile, and hear me again.

Why not? It’s a harmless thing to imagine.That we win in the end. After we’re gone. The payoff. It’s the ultimate existential loophole of the artist. I’m fucking Van Gogh who sold two paintings and some drawings in his life. Prove I’m not.

You can’t.

It’s a cheat. But use it. What we’re doing is hard. You can’t let the opinions of random people get you down. Slow you down. Shut you down. Or stop you.

Even when you love them.

I lost the ability to fall into a book, lose myself in fiction, sometime back, decades ago, I guess. Writing, trying to write, being frustrated by rejection, scrutinizing and workshopping my text and the texts of others impaired my ability to just slip into the prose.

So I pushed through it.

I still found books that grabbed me, that tugged me along, that gave me the old feeling I used to get from literally every book I read. But more and more started things and did not finish them. Did not feel drawn to finish them.

And the amount of time I could read, that felt normal to read, slipped to about a chapter. I’d read one, enjoy it, close the book. Ruminate on it. And feel full. Also, perpetually sleep deprived, I’d relax while reading, and pass out.

I read a thousand books from the age of 14-18 or so, a book a night most nights for three years. In later years I veered away from reading only SF and fantasy and horror and read literary stuff, old and new, and some other genre’s, a little mystery, true crime, historical fiction, and non-fiction, generally pop-science books my father recommended.

The kid that read a thousand books was miserable of course. Desperately seeking to escape from his life. His perfectly ordinary and trauma free life, I have to add. I suffered from no privation, no abuse. Nowadays they would call me bipolar with ADHD, and could sling some pharmaceuticals in my direction. Not sure if that would have helped. Probably.

But my reading slowed way the fuck down as I found a group of friends to run around with as a late teenager. Tons of friends. I had friends who didn’t party, as we used to say in the late seventies, who I loved, who I walked with and talked with and drew with and worked on Dungeons and Dragons with. And I had my doper friends, and then I had girlfriends, who mixed to some degree with my male friends.

We hung out that way, mostly, until we went to college, and even there, often. Same sex friend groups with these gender foreign exchange student type people who came along with one of your friends.

Surrounded by friends, having a girlfriend, making art, I still read, I think, but not as much. I was still weird in so many ways but my life was full. I think I read then more to explore the world than to be comforted by not being myself. Me and my friends imbibed stale hippy culture that was being eroded steadily by time and reality, and the rising conservatism which would sweep Reagan into office.

When I moved to Jamaica Plain (which I just called ‘Boston,’) I cut myself off from all that. Left all my friends behind. I followed my girlfriend who would become my wife, but with no other friends. I read again. Not a book a night, but more. And I read things that I had always wanted to read that would have upset my father to see lying around the house.

I read about western mysticism; early christianity, UFOs, paranormal phenomena, socialism, communism and intentional community, utopias. I subscribed to The Nation. My parents were centrist democrats. And I started reading the newspaper.

As a kid, I thought reading a daily newspaper was cool. My parents did it effortlessly, like breathing, and I thought that it was a very grown up thing to do. I would struggle through an article, now and then, my eyes grinding to a halt every few paragraphs. When I started devouring fiction, my parents would look up from their newspapers and magazines and say how much they had loved reading fiction, once upon a time, but now they had a much smaller appetite for it.

So I had my kids, twenty three years ago, buying my first cellular phone when my wife was pregnant. We poked at the early internet with our dial-up modems. I read newspapers now at coffeeshops. I had despised the way they cluttered up the home I had grown up in–we had a daily paper and the Sunday New York Times which was, back then, the size of piece of carry on luggage; one that barely fits under the seat in front of you.

And they saved bits and pieces of it, so I never knew if I could throw it out.

So I thought it was a grown-up thing but found the continuous presence of newsprint annoying. But as the internet, and cellphones proliferated so did coffeeshops, which had stacks of newspapers paper in them.

So I read them and drank coffee, working that time into my busy or no so busy freelance schedules. The cell phone mutated into a smart phone; the dial-up evolved into a cable-modem. The Newspaper leaked into both of these things, filling them to the brim.

Then… social media, and rage reading and commenting on news from the feed.

I read to my kids at night, every night, for an hour or so, and found that this was the happiest time of my day, as I could read again, in a way, and I was absorbing stories and studying them. But the trivia and news and social media noise overwhelmed my fiction consumption. The ever escalating number of cable channels turned into streaming content and I watched TV at night.

Remember, that kid I had been, the 1000 book reader, had three network channels to choose from. One fuzzy PBS channel. And they played the national anthem over a clip of the flag waving and told you to _go the fuck to bed_ at one every goddamn evening. Do kids even know this? That the TV once upon a time told you to GO TO BED?

And what could you DO in bed? By yourself? As a teen? I mean, other than that?

Read, mostly.

So that three hundred book a year thing was a perfect storm that wouldn’t be replicated, at least not accidentally, ever again in my life–to date.

But now I find myself sick of the news. Sick of COVID. Sick of climate change. Sick of the daily burping and shrieking of politics. Sick, sick, sick of the endless stream of commentary and news. Aching again, for that tribe of friends that smoked dope and listened to music and midnight-wandered golf courses and cemeteries, that drank beer in places were the music wasn’t so loud you couldn’t talk to each other. Not too many of them. But not too few.

So I’m a few weeks into a social media fast. Blogging, after social media, feels like a sensory deprivation tank. Every now and then someone taps on the lid to make sure you’re not dead, but it’s about as appealing a space to be as laying abed at the age of 16 staring at the ceiling wondering why the world sucks so hard.

So, not addictive.

And I’m reading a paperback I found in a box on the street, printed in 1975, when I was twelve. My Dad owned it, so I read it, or most of it, when I was fifteen or sixteen. It’s the Best of Henry Kuttner, and I’ll talk more about it maybe in another post. The stories in it were written between 1941 and 1953, so this is a collection of twenty year old stuff my father had read in the SF magazines as a young man, who he bought again, as those magazines had been tossed by his mother. This collection itself, would be tossed by my mother, and I would find it again, on the side of the road, a year before my father died.

I stand now seventy years away from the earlier stories. I stand now forty five years away from the printing of the book. I stand now forty years from my first reading of it.

And after three weeks off facebook, I find, I can read an entire story without checking my device.

So I read The Twonky, a seminal story, a story that invents entire sub-genres all by itself, and found I had never read it before; I has mixed it up with The Little Black Bag, which is another story about another Twonky (which means an artifact from the future discovered in the past) by Kuttner.

I slip into Kuttner’s voice, his mind, effortlessly; decoding his time takes a bit of work, but as an SF reader that isn’t hard; it’s harder to understand the 40s and 50s than to absorb the SF elements, of course.

it’s good to read again.

I’m going to keep performing this brain surgery on myself. I miss my Facebook friends, but maybe I’ll figure out, how to have it all, someday. But I need to glue the shattered bits of my concentration together again. I have been poisoned by my feed; rage and friendship and humor, doled out like those little tickets that drive kids mad at Chuckee Cheese.

I wanna be someone who can read a book a night again.

And I want to write a few books a year.

For as long as I have left.

Gotta figure this out.

 

 

 

I attended writing workshop I hadn’t been to in awhile a few years back now, and the nice but slightly awkward person there, uh, one of them, mentioned that she’d heard I’d fallen off the horse. This was news to me. My publications had slackened while I worked on longer stuff, and I guess the consensus of the workshop was I was out of juice.

I hate to think many were happy about this, thinking that a not young writer had gone into retirement and maybe some new blood could use his vacated publication slots.

I shouldn’t care. I’m trying not to care about such things.

John Cheever wrote in a letter that pursuing a career in order to find a group of successful colleagues to be friends with is madness. The cart before the horse. It may happen. It may not. If that’s your focus… maybe get the hell out of the arts and go into marketing. You know, like Willy Loman.

When you drift away from writing, or writing in a certain genre, those working in that genre drift away too. It isn’t a conscious decision. But writing is hard and you simply have no room in your life, often, for anyone or anything that makes that effort even a tiny bit harder. Your slacking off can feel infectious to others.

So, keep your non-writing friends. You may need them desperately from time to time. For years at a time.

Older writers say this infuriating thing to younger writers, that if you don’t have to write, do something else. Instead of reassuring you about a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, you’re told you should enjoy chasing rainbows.

Because that may well be all that you are doing.

So. Now I smugly assert, at age 58, that I find myself writing, thinking about the WIP, piling up words. Trying to force myself to hit a word count, a set number per day, in the hope of Making A Living writing has receded. The one person I know who went on to that has the willpower of olympic athlete.

And I have come to grips with the fact that I am not one of those. Almost.

But as I process the passing of my parents and our lives together, their lives as I have uncover them in letters and photos and fragments of memory, I find myself lighting out over that inner landscape again.

I’m lighter there. Younger. The light is different. The world is newer and the work beckons and it is never good enough, and I’ve grown to accept that, too. Almost. The work embarrasses me, even the stuff that gets published, or maybe especially that work. We reveal ourselves in our work and if we are decent human beings feel both pride and shame in this.

The sky is full of brooding clouds that will one day merge into darkness, the darkness into which we all disappear. But for now there is light, and color, and power, and Story. A few good writer friends and generous (and award-winning!) editors that give a Flying Fuck. They should be enough.

And the work.

And the shimmering heat mirage of success. I mean the big-time, always somewhere up ahead, never getting any closer. Mocking you and reassuring you. Reminding you that you better enjoy the ride.

It’s the one thing you are guaranteed to get.