So, I’ve been thinking about this post I want to write, about fried grits.

Instead of what I want to be thinking about.

I did a writer’s retreat with a group of younger writers, a workshop called b-spec, a wonderfully curated and maintained group of writers and friends in Boston. I’ve been a part of the group for ten years or so, though mostly at the edges of it for five. Anyway, we take turns cooking–you fill out a google doc, what food you’ll make and when, and you cook for people. Everyone’s allergies and preferences are in the document. There’s a grocery list.

See the genius of this intentional community? Harnessing and channeling communitarian impulses? The group’s founder / leader is an amazing woman, successful novelist, professional graphic designer.

Anyway, I decided to make grits as my meal, as I figured not everyone had eaten them, and I had found them delightful during the pandemic. The old-fashioned, non-precooked grits have become harder and harder to find everywhere, especially up north, so I have been mail ordering the stuff in five pound bags, under a brand name that has been retired, because you know, the racism.

I boil sixteen cups of the coarsely ground maze in a green enameled cast iron dutch oven I got from my Mom, one of the few pieces of her kitchen that became part of mine when she died. It’s fun, nerve-wracking, and weird, cooking for over a dozen people. How much you get to make. It feels worthwhile, the economies of scale. Efficiency!

Honestly, this is how I want to live; the retreat mimics cohousing, a modern take on the old fashioned hippie-commune, more workable, less utopian, including as a central component shared cooking and dining. Alas, my wife, deeply private, would hate cohousing. I want to stay with my wife…

Anyway, after the first serving, while they are still liquid and hot, they can be poured into bread pans and popped in the fridge. Oh, you add a shitload of cheddar cheese, salt and butter to the grits too, otherwise they’re tasteless; that’s kind of the point of grits; like tofu; they taste like nothing but what you bring to them. Which is cool.

To cook, you boil salted water and feather in the grits, stirring to prevent lumping, and then you let them simmer, covered for 20-30 minutes. They’re good hot and fresh, with extra butter and salt and pepper on top; they will set up on your plate as they cool, so you don’t need a bowl, as with oatmeal or cream of wheat. Grits walk the line between liquid and solid; all deliciousness is chaos, it’s a moment of perfection, right? Fresh bread, fresh vegetables from a garden, hot soup, freezing ice cream. So much now is nitrogen cooled. Or coal-fire hot.

Time and entropy attacks food, creating buffet-line mediocrity. Leftovers. Fast food. Snack food. The pop-tart, which can never be stale because it never was fresh. Frozen waffles and bagels. Cold pizza. Gas station saran wrapped sandwiches.

So, the grits went over well. I moved maybe four cups of them. I pair them with the ‘country ham’ I buy mail order from the mountains of North Carolina, a kind of salt pork friend and eaten as bacon, with a super salty hit edged with a yeasty fermentation. This ham is so shelf stable they mail it in an envelope that arrives in your mailbox with the six copies of the Williams and Sonoma catalog.

Anyway, the real magic happens the next day, when you fry the leftovers. You de-mold them from the bread pan, and they come out perfect, a quivering glistening mass, and you slice them, maybe a quarter inch thick, carefully, as they are fragile You fry them for 20 minutes or so, ten minutes on a side. It takes forever and you should set a timer and not noodle with them too much or you’ll break them. With the embedded cheese, butter, salt, pepper, fried cheese grits are far, far superior to polenta. Crusty and brownish on the outside; they taste like fried cheese, with pop-corn notes. Inside, they are crusty and melty and warm, tough on the outside, the original grit experience now encased in an umami skin, that dissolves quickly in your mouth, hash-brown like. Perfect.

People liked them.

Took me forty years to get them right. Not sure my mother or grandmother ever made them like this. Twenty minutes frying after a day of resting and the half hour of cooking. But it’s a repurposed leftover, like the crusty french bread becoming bread pudding the next day in New Orleans. It’s free garbage food. It’s labor, not materials cost.

Oh the writing retreat? I wrote 1000 words. The group’s organizer, successful novelist, wrote 10,000. Executive function, where are you?

Mostly I made grits, drank booze, slept late, and then walked to the ocean, the rocky shore in Kennebunk, Maine, and gazed out at the blue on blue horizon and thought about my parents, my life, the books I’m struggling to write, to believe in enough to write, the secondary creation that is sometimes so potent and sometimes so elusive. And, as always, I thought about my next meal. About talking to my friends, who I haven’t seen in years. I think about time going by too fast, the way my parents bodies looked, after they died, mouths slack, eyes closed. So old. Never to eat again. No more restaurants and fine wine.

I push that thought away and think about my next meal.

About the grits I will fry.

And how fucking good they will be.

My feed withdrawal and existential horror at the post-trump / mid-COVID / Climate-change-world-on-fire has propelled me back into charming futures we foresaw in the past. Charming in retrospect. We worried about nuclear war, in a delightful binary way, (World toggles from to STATUS QUO to CINDER) and we dreamed of galactic empire, or more modest things, like Niven’s Known Space.

Known Space, for the generation that consumed it, felt startlingly real. At least for the readership of mostly white middle class boys like myself who lived there. I could ask Steven Barnes, Niven’s later collaborator and POC, how it felt to him… I should…

Niven’s future displayed no significant racism. But there was a cost to this for the white reader.  We were asked to empathize with some viewpoint characters who were described as non-white, mixed race; I could dig up the description but Niven took the earth’s population at the time of the invention of teleportation, I think, and shoved them in a blender, to arrive at a POC mix of Caucasian, Asian, African, Middle-eastern, and so on.

I remember the shock at that. I’d gone to school in a minority majority system until forth grade and my best friend was Chinese American, and still, still, it was amazing, to be asked to be a POC in a SF story.

The character Louis Wu, was kinda-sorta asian, I mean, the name, and I was being asked to live inside his head. I was an SF reader, though, so after that first moment of confusion, I thought “why not?” And as Wu was living in a post racial world, written by a rich white guy, he was a comfortable fit. After I bit, I felt very good with being Louis Wu. 

Yay? 

After the stunning racism of stuff like the Lensmen stories, and Lovecraft, people like Niven felt appropriately utopian, for a white professional class that liked to think that the womens’ movement and the civil rights movement, had bent the arc of history permanently, and had us coasting to eventual equality on autopilot. Without us white people doing anything else.

Niven’s ‘ism’ was planet-tism, or species-isms. Folks who never went into space were parochial; different planets might have different mind-sets based on different environments; space travelers were cosmopolitan, and aliens could be a little bit but not too weird and largely defined by species-level stereotypes. The character of Nissus the ‘mad’ puppeteer, is an example of Niven seeing species-driven character traits as existing on a spectrum. His people were risk-averse (cowards) and Nissus was ‘mad’ in his ability to interact with other species. To be in their dangerous presence. Puppeteer’s furniture was all melted looking, lacking sharp edges or corners, in case they tripped and fell against a dangerous surface. And Puppeteers were tripods!

The other thing I remember from known space was that religion had zero impact on any of the actions of the characters; everyone was some sort of rationalist. This works best for people who came from Christian stock, who have lost interest in Christianity, of course; as a Jew, or any faith in opposition to Christianity, one worries if your people of faith have all been killed off and or assimilated.

…and of course, there was no visible oppression of GLBTQ, because, well, there didn’t seem to be any. Again, this works if you aren’t GLBTQ.

The world without obvious oppression, written by folks who never experienced oppression, wasn’t new of course, but Niven at least gave us a few reasons as to why the old school oppressions were obsolete.

I just remembered the teleportation thing as the excuse for the uniform racial makeup. Making the future so fundamentally different means that geographical isolation might not keep us as separate. Though of course, folks stuck in coal-mining towns often won’t drive to the nearest city to start new lives; they go down into the mines and get black lung and die in tunnel collapses.

So… not sure the teleportation booths are gonna completely get everybody off of the farm…

Anyway. Here is to Known Space; looking at the timeline of publications I realize that it’s written earlier than I thought, in the sixties. Ringworld is sort of the capstone to Known space, in a lot of ways, and its 1970 publication date means that, like the Beatles, Known Space was really an expression of the 60s. A mildly conservative expression of the 60s, avoiding a lot of the SF new wave. Really, if you think of it, Known space is a straight-line evolution of Heinlein’s Future History systematized in the 50s. 

Which of course, I was devouring at the same time.

Hm. The timelines in the omnibus collections are similar, too….

At the time, so much of my privilege was invisible to me, in ways very common then, and still common now. But these texts dovetailed with that ignorance. Creating… indescribable feelings, at least, indescribable now. 

I thought I was reading the future.

It wasn’t of course the future, but a future made for me, by someone a lot like me… but by someone without an ax to grind, or much less of one, when it came to gender and race. Even I could smell something rank coming off of a lot of old school space opera. Something a bit off in late Heinlein’s sexual wish-fulfillment fantasies. 

Known Space, though, was a future I loved without reservations.

This was the place I wanted to go. 

This is where I wanted to live.

Imagine that. The future as a place you would want to live in!

 

 

ADHD brain (you’ll notice I use ADD and ADHD more or less randomly) decided recently that collecting old books I liked as a kid in sets, by one publisher, was a good use of my time. So that’s the image above, the Signet edition Heinlein (non-juvenile) novels of a certain era.

I found a feature in photoshop that did a lot of the work, and then, spent another hour or so tweaking the images, trying to get them to similar yellowing, trying to tease detail out of the random scans and iphone shots I pulled from antiquarian book sites. I discovered issues with the brand template being slightly deviated from, over the editions.. and I tweaked them mostly away, so they looked better lined up. (I had similar minor issues doing my Amber covers. I sympathize with the 70s designers, using their old, shitty analog tools, trying to get it perfect. They had a good excuse; me, not so much.)

My father read a lot of this stuff in Astounding magazine before it became Analog, issues his mother and then mine diligently discarded over the decades; he would re-buy paperbacks now and then, from different publication eras, and I filled in the missing titles from used bookstores—but always random editions, some very worn, that I destroyed while reading.

When I read a paperback I didn’t treat it kindly. I read the hell out of it, leaving pizza stains and, in older books, sometimes shattering the spines.

Over the years I saw most of these titles on the shelves, in this edition, but never bought them; first of all, I never collected books so much as read them. I was ambivalent on the tie dye illustration style, preferring oil paintings that looked like scenes from the book, if they were done well and didn’t look stupid, or something generic and science fictional.

Nowadays I find this illustration style wonderful, dated, perfect.

Every time you pick up a real book and read it you look at the cover, and the cover intertwines with your memory of the book, at the same time pinning that reading to at time and place, often, the three things merging; the text, the cover, the time of your life.

Of course Kindle ebooks advance you past the damn cover when you ‘open’ them; you mostly see the cover as a shitty thumbnail and maybe a slightly larger thumbnail and then, if you buy it,  you probably never page back and look at the cover ever again, which is, of course, horrible, if you are a designer, or illustrator, or I suspect, any kind of human being at all.

Anyway. A lot of these RAH titles were republished subsumed in a single huge, unwieldy, is the word, tome called The Past Through Tomorrow which had a very Meh typographic cover displaying a few boring impossibly arranged planets on a blue field. I read this paperback off and on for years, checking off the short stories and longer ones; at the end of the book there’s a whole damn novel, Methuselah’s Children, which I didn’t have to suffer with, as I had this Signet edition of it. I grew to love the cover.

The Past Through Tomorrow deteriorated quickly, I mean, the paperback, and I have seen cracked and falling apart versions for decades.

So now, I want to have a set of these, but not spend more than five bucks a book. This is only a little hard to do, as I look at lots of lots of vintage paperbacks. And I see… the end of my childhood, my perpetual adolescence, hours spent staring at covers loitering in Economy Books in the late, great, Shopping Town Mall, at first as a strip mall, and then an enclosed, faux village with the food court, and a public library, and the steak house that would be my first real (bad) job.

I’m back looking at images of books I thought about reading, thought about buying, reading the cover copy, knowing that so many I wouldn’t, when they were written by people like me, randos. Folks who wrote a book or three. Who never won awards.

ADD brain, post parental death brain, nostalgia ridden brain, looking for my own future in past brain.

The Tomorrow Through The Past brain.

Burning the time I once spent being mad because many people were wrong on the internet. And still are, I’m pretty sure.

I think I’m better off; but maybe not much?

My best friend (I had four) when I was a kid went to Boston to go to college. I knew our friendship would fade away, because that’s what happens, but miraculously Mike, one of many Mikes (and Daves and Steves) of the era, moved back home, and we ended up at Syracuse University together.

He rented a basement apartment with a soon-to-be full time Deadhead, and finished his engineering degree, while I lost my mind for a year and floundered about scraping together a BFA.

He had an elective, one of few allowed him, that he took his senior year, shortly before I went mad called The Doors of Perception, which was an English course about transcendental experiences which included the Alduous Huxley text of that name, and often, a party at the end with the teacher where everyone dropped acid.

The 80s hadn’t totally kicked in yet, there were fumes of the sixties and seventies still wheezing through the culture. Me and my friends got high on the fumes as we avoided punk rock.

We met at the Teacher’s apartment. His name is so close to the surface of my mind, but I can’t retrieve it, and Mike would come and go once more in my life, to be gone again, living a few miles away, but in another world.

I remember how cool the teacher’s apartment was, large, airy, filled with mismatched furniture covered in blankets and coverlets. They’d been pulled off the street. Coffeeshops in Seattle would adopt this look a decade later, this eclectic mix of comfortable used, upholstered, furniture, instead of hard seats and wooden benches.

The walls his enviably large apartment were stucco with dark wood trim, baseboards and rafters. We drank beer and ate chips and took acid. I didn’t take all that much acid, so I wish I could tell you I remembered the kind–microdot or blotter. Microdot was sacharine pills soaked in food coloring and a variable strength solution of LSD or something like it. Or soaked with nothing, as in the first time I took a hit of orange microdot, and nothing happened after the placebo giggles died away while Mike and I played pool.

I’m gonna say microdot. The teacher, whose name whispers in my ear every time I picture him, is in his late twenties or early thirties, brown bearded, cool, so cool, and smart. A teacher like my father at the same university, but very different. My father was a professor in a suit and tie. This guy was what we still might call a hippy.

Once we’d started to feel the acid he put on some music.

Vinyl, on a turntable, Leo Kottke’s Burnt Lips, and hovered over the spinning disk to drop the needle at “Cool Water,”  which I would remember, the undulating slide guitar, the throaty vocal, until I moved to Jamaica Plain and bought the CD to play for myself.

We wanted to go for a walk in a park, so we drove to one I don’t think I’d ever been to before. At any rate, I didn’t recognize it. We talked and we sat on the swings and one by one we ended up staring into the starry autumn sky.

“Do you see it?”

“Yeah. Wait. What do you see?”

Because a flowing luminance shimmered before the stars, like the amorphous web of light undulating on beach sand under restless water.

“Wonder what that is,” somebody says.

“Maybe they pushed the button.” I say. We thought about this in the back of our mind all the time, back then. Reagan was a nightmare.

“Seems sort of laid back, for the end of the world.”

We imagined ions whisking through the upper atmosphere, glowing, radiating. If this was the end, we decided to be good sports about it, and to continue enjoying our evening. Which we did. Immensely.

Driving home, barreling down a street made strange by the cascading feedback loops in my brain, we hit something. Thunk. Something substantial. We kept moving. We never slowed down.

“Cat,” Tom said. His name was Tom. I have it now. “Nothing I could do.”

We were all sad, for a shamefully short time. But Tom assured us that there was absolutely nothing he or anyone could have done, even though the obvious, driving slower, was staring us all in the face. The cat had committed suicide. Our world wasn’t ending but the cat’s did. I still worry about that cat, twenty five years later. We should have stopped. But I was in the back seat. Along for the ride. I successfully refused to imagine the family that had cared about him.

We got back to Tom’s place and his roommate, a skinny bed-headed man with a bad cold, was there watching television.

“It’s so comforting,” he said. “When you’re feeling ill.”

We watched an incomprehensible black and white film together.

“They are all wearing these terrible hats,” the roommate said. I thought he was gay, in that way some men seem gay, in voice and manner, and this didn’t bother me. I’d been bullied for being gay, without actually being gay, so there was a kind of camaraderie I felt with the genuinely gay, even if I was still mostly clueless.

The scene cut to a group of men running in a hallway. Again, all wearing hats. Human life began to feel absurd. 

The roommate blew his nose. His eyes were red. “More hats!” he said.

We were all intent on the movie. The sun rose relentlessly outside the windows, the light clean and fresh.

On the tube television a sepia-toned man with a swollen cowboy hat the size of beehive was talking earnestly with another man, also of course, in a hat, and we all thought this was the funniest thing ever.

The way you do, in that situation.

And the sun came up, and the night ended, and I went back to my first apartment on Dell Street, before I went mad, and Mike went back to his basement with the deadhead, and that evening would shine in my memory for years to come. We never hung out with the cool professor and the other English TAs again, and I’d stop taking acid after I went mad, and of course, because I would graduate and leave my hometown a year before everyone else did. I had a bachelors and they were getting masters, and the gang was gonna split up, and I would miss them. I followed my girlfriend to Boston, because I loved her and Boston had a future and everyone knew that Syracuse didn’t. And I told myself I wouldn’t miss it, even as I knew, I’d miss my friends.

And my life, that life, with those friends, ended and the cat’s life ended but the shimmering fallout, we thought we had hallucinated turned out to be a rare instance of the aurora borealis extending into central New York. Barely perceptible, they said, to the naked eye, but not to the eye opened by microdot. Blue? Red? Orange?

Cosmic light streaming through the doors of perception.

And not the world ending at all.

It’s 2021, and I ask Alexa to play Leo Kottke, and she plays him for a time, good songs I don’t remember, and finally, I ask her to play the song, Cool Water. Drop the needle on the track. I can’t wait for it pop up by itself.

And the song is beautiful.

Mike, this one is for you. If you ever read this, which seems unlikely, remember I loved you. You saved me when I was sixteen. I miss you, but it’s okay we don’t talk anymore. That happens a lot.

I wish you well.

I went to a reading at the Trident bookstore with one of my writing workshops, and was introduced to the author, a woman twenty years younger than I was, as the old guy who knew all the old plots and premises from all the old books.

I wanted to be known as the guy selling a lot of stories, right now, to Asimov’s and Analog and F&SF, but as nobody in that workshop was selling to these places, that wasn’t my top line. So I sputtered something to that effect, that I was publishing, and after some awkwardness, went away, as,  you know, I was twenty years older than everyone else and my career wasn’t big enough to justify my, eh, oldness.

In this group I was one of two old white guys; one was Jewish, and thus, not really white, so, really, I was the old-het-cis-white guy. There was one of them. Me, I mean.

I get how annoying I was, or rather, how annoying intoning about the 1000 old books might be.

For every ‘original’ idea I could find a precedent or three from the unread canon; I hope I went on to say that modern takes on old tropes are valid, important, but I learned this more deeply as the years rolled by.

A brilliant idea, premise, stuck in with period racism, sexism, any ism, doesn’t redeem the text to modern readers. It is the joyful job of every generation to write its own science-fiction. Increasingly, it’s the job of every racial and sexual identity to write its own science fiction. Time travel and clones and galactic empires and aliens and dystopia and sentient robots and all the trillion possible near futures radiating from every moment, every headline, every now.

I remember the title of Leonard Nimoy’s two biographies.

I am not Spock.

And then, after he’d gotten over himself a bit…

I am Spock.

I remember vividly opening a door into a room at a SF convention with this group of younger writers, having them catch a glimpse of the balance of white beards, middle aged paunches, baggy-eyes, and turning with them to flee the room en masse, without realizing what it was we were running away from.

This roomful of men that looked just like me. 

I think of my father and I, and how we grew up reading stuff by folks 10 or 20 years older than us… But I realize, now, I’m 30 years older than a person in their mid-twenties… Only a year or two younger than the boomers who said never trust anyone over 30 who are now furious at people saying never trust anyone over sixty.

So. I am collecting the Ballentine Best of single author collections, books printed in the 70s about the authors of the 30s, 40s, 50s.

They are old. They smell. They are yellowed around the edges. They are, ‘age toned.’ Some of them are scarred, beat up, inscribed, stained. The world, the market these stories were written for, no longer exists. They are the precious canon of an aging cadre of misfits and neuro atypical proto-geeks, nerds from before the word nerd was invented.

They were also read by BIPOC folks and women and sexual minorities who seldom saw themselves reflected in these books, explicitly, but who were still enthralled by the storytelling, by the old fashioned sense of wonder, by the capacious, audacious dreams of the post war boom.

I am age toned. I smell. I am beat up.

I am filled with dreams. I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe. You remember how that goes. I’ll say it again anyway. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. C-beams glitter in the darkness.

My incept date is unknown; but it’s approaching. I can sense it creeping up on me, now, that my parents are gone. I feel like Rip Van Winkle, but of course, every single person my age feels like Rip Van Winkle.

I am a yellowed mass-market paperback, full of dreams, laying on the curb awaiting the first rainstorm which will melt me into oblivion.

I am that book hoping to be picked up and perused.

A few more times at least.

 

For the last six months I have been paying for subscriptions to both DC Infinite and Marvel Unlimited, which I scrutinize as I cast about for subscriptions to cut, in Grown-Up Mode, attacking various checklists. So of course, rather than actually cancel one or both (why did I think I needed two?) I decided to use them.

Wait, you didn’t come here for this; what is Day 7: Echoing Emptiness?

It’s the hollowness, the cathedral like stillness of my internal theater, when I clear out several daily hours of human connection–and conversation, as I step away from social media.

I grab my phone and reflexively flick and tic my way through the apps I’m allowing myself to check. I check my e-bookstore dashboards to see if I’ve sold books. I have, I sold a few for six dollars. The dopamine pop fans an ember in my brain that creams out for more fuel. No more sales, at the other services, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Apple Itunes, Smashwords, Google play… one after the other.

I’ll look at them again a few more times today.

I check my mail; my blog comments are hooked to my mail. So I can see I have none. So I’m not here to read, I’m here to write, which at least, is something. Conversational typing more in composition mode, but then, my FB essays were the same damn thing. I’m just a heroin addict on methadone.

Drama queen metaphor aside, my brain is writhing.

(Here I drift into memoire. TL;DR, cut loose from social media connections, the steady diet of dozens or hundreds of likes, and shares a day, I reel backward into the past.)

So I’m reading a few comic books, a few short stories, and listening to books, in and around the wizened nub of my freelance career. I wanna put quotes around that. Every time I try to use the word career I am struggling to avoid the air quotes.

I read the first four books of Flashpoint and marveled, (Hah hah, I DCed, really) at the degree to which comic book prose tolerates expository dialog. Flashpoint is a completely novel world, which has to be unloaded as a little staged action and a ton of maid and butler dialog; a ton of exposition.

Enjoyable. But I remember that kid in the seventies who ached for long comic book continuities, but could not achieve them. I collected comics for a few years, but was bad at getting to conventions or stores and so the comic book shared universes were these things I uncovered in bits and pieces like an archeologist, full of mysteries, omissions, holes. You had to intuit the shape of the bigger pictures.

It was frustrating and glorious. Going out into the world, looking for the missing puzzle pieces. The used bookstore. The rack at the drug store down the street from my elementary school on a hot day, the last of AC as I enter the store, spinning the rack, and finding the latest issue, without a gap, the number is sequential with what I was reading because distribution was so shitty that you could miss an issue.

I’m listening to a Spotify track as I take a shower, a playlist, early 70s, music made when I was seven, that I took deadly seriously at seventeen. Unironically. My kids regard anything older than five or six years as a quaint if adorable object. A reminder of youth. Hopelessly out of date.

Deja Vu, Almost Cut My Hair, recorded in a single take shortly after David Crosby’s girlfriend dies in a car wreck, was never a goofy charming thing. The thing to which Crosby feels he owes something, rebellion, bohemia, the antiwar effort, everything, was vividly alive in us, as an aspirational goal as that naive youthful idealism died, as I grew into an age to fully understand it.

I grew out my hair… but my mom kept bugging me to cut it, and I would because it was the end of the 70s and the Viet Nam war was ending and I liked my mother, so what the fuck. Path of least resistance. I was half-assed even at my own rebellion. Partially because my hair grew into this curvaceous, stupid-looking blow dried helmet, and I kept hoping that if it grew long enough, it would morph into Jimmy Page Led Zeppline mane….

But by the time I got out of my house, away from my mother, away from my dying home town, my black hair was receding badly, a Riff-Raff pony tail down the back, and shaving my head was a relief.

When I cut my hair I was writing derivative cyberpunk fiction. I was living in a real city. I was getting ready to get married and have kids. I was embarking on my graphic arts ‘career,’ and writing. My comic book collection was at home, the home now long gone, in a cardboard box.

And my mother died the first of this year. All that’s left of those homes I grew up in, the one they retired to for 23 years, is a glass case with a scattering of mementos. My father’s hip joint culled from his ashes. A necklace of my mothers. (Her rings all vanished shortly after she died.) Some little glass birds, that were her mothers.

And as I clear out the clutter of social media, instead of plunging ahead into my burgeoning, hah, writing career, instead I’m a nine year old walking, along, as we were allowed to, a mile to the drug store. Listening to a transistor radio. Bye, bye, Miss American Pie.

I go now for a walk in the 90 degree Delta COVID hothouse as the latest useless war devolves into it’s Saigon moment. I remember the original, of course.

It had a better soundtrack.

I’ll listen to that radio, that same radio, over the magic Uhura bluetooth headset yolked to my communicator linked to the global computer network, and then I’ll slog sweatily back home and read a comic from that year on my magic slate, a slick digital pad, glowing with hues so much more saturated, linework razorlike, sharper and cleaner, than the coarse screened four color ink of the original, flimsy, double stapled fragile paper things.

I want to tell you they cost twenty five cents, four for a dollar, like some WW2 vet blathering about how much boloney he could buy for a nickel during the great depression…

Aww, fuck, I got to a 1000 words. Sorry.

The past is flowing into my mental void, bottom line.

This wasn’t my intent.

Reading Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism at the moment.

It’s good. It puts meat on the bones of what we have all read in one form or another, or had friends tell us, about the problem of modernity; social media addiction, information overload, FOMO, fractured attention span. One has to wonder about the increased incidence of clinical mental illness in young people, too, as it relates to information technology. I should google that, someone must have figured out if there is a real correlation there.

I’m a few chapters in, abstaining from Facebook, my biggest problem, but of course, like all addicts, I find myself just shunting over to other similar addictive behaviors. Looking at my email every ten seconds. Checking my amazon KDP dashboard. Looking for any reviews of my current novella, which will be off the stands in a week or two.

I read too much News, staring at the same stuff over and over, zeroing in on stuff that outrages me, staring at COVID numbers.

I write this blog, and look for hits. I scan twitter, where I have no significant interactions with my content beyond a half dozen people I could email in a small list built in gmail if I wanted to really stay in touch.

What’s interesting is that the impulse dies pretty quick in these other spaces, they can’t really hold my attention, though they can fragment it.

I don’t get enough feedback, here, or in professional fiction writing, to be honest, or twitter, or email anymore, for the feedback loop of addiction to really catch and take hold.

My apple watch just told me to breathe. I did. This kind of interruption I’m told is healthy, as is the get up and walk around thing. I need to keep this and turn off other alerts. Fucking Hello Fresh is still bugging me somehow about signing up for the meal delivery service again. I know I turned that off.

But here’s the real problem.

The currency of social media, how you are paid, is in the interactions; comments, and likes, and shares, and hit numbers. It’s what writers used to call ‘ego-boo’ for ego boost, and it was widely understood among writers that this was a terrible thing, as you didn’t get paid for it, and even in the old days, it did nothing for your brand. It was, in short, writing for free for any reason, not doing your actual work.

Social media normalized writing for free for others. This had literally never existed before outside of letters to individuals, or to the editor. Writing is, or used to be, kinda hard, just getting the words grammatically and decent looking on paper; hand written in cursive or typed.

The killer quality of writing instead of calling people on the phone or talking in person is that it is asynchronous; I can write a FB post or a text and the person can respond whenever they feel like. So the communication feels less like an imposition.

What this really does is turn everyone into a very casual friend; the kind of friend who can ignore you and you can’t feel all that angry about it, as you behave in kind to others, now that it is normalized.

So the way that social media pays you, using the intermittent reward schedule that is addictive to every animal with a brain larger than a walnut, is approval, social interaction, but it replaces the deepest social interaction with a version of the same thing that is a much milder hit. So, of course, you need more. And, once used to more, you can’t be happy with less. At some point, social media will start to feel less dense, less meaningful, than IRL interaction, but we never really know the degree of other’s engagements. Who is hitting like out of habit, who just likes everything all the time to create engagement with their own content,

But again, I keep dodging around the point, which is, why is talking about something more important or funner than actually doing it?

Why aren’t you doing the thing you most want to be doing, in your own self assessment, in your own value system?

Are you lying to yourself about what you really want to do?

Going deeper, why do you care what other people think of you? People you barely know, I mean. Or even larger groups of people that aren’t your immediate family or coworkers?

Well, there is research that suggests that big networks of casual acquaintances works well for job hopping. Any everyone is always a heartbeat away from looking for a new job. So, there’s that. It’s a kind of prep work or hoarding.

But if it was a job search thing, really, you would do it an hour a day or something at most and be done with it. More of course when you are actually looking for work.

Remember when your teachers would say about you, on a report card, that so and so spends too much time socializing?

This before we had any kind of media at all, beyond phones that weighed as much as a quart of milk bolted to walls with corkscrew cords handcuffing us to them?

So, I think, for me, there’s a problem under the problem, which is why I can’t really fix the problem, as it lies deeper. And maybe it means there was something else I should do, or should have done, now that I’m too old to start a lot of stuff. Toiling away at Stand-up (probably to become one of those middle aged losers who have one act that they flog around and make barely enough to survive by leeching off others… hey I dream big.)

Working in a writing room, more collaboratively?

Being in some sort of field where I present a lot? Dear God, politics?

Because my brief experience with story telling, at the Moth, in person, was like taking crack. It let me focus in on that give and take between me and others like a goddamn laser with INSTANT split second feedback.

I was once a kind of lonely kid, reading books, and I became a very social kid, running around with a tribe of friends, splitting my time between them and my LTR girlfriends, reading books around the edges. Oh, and doing my work work, when I had to.

Anyway. I’m gonna do the Cal Newport one month fast and then try to add in the tech that aligns with my core values or whatever the fuck he’s going to tell me he does, because he’s better than me, but I’m guessing it won’t stick unless I fix what is wrong underneath, or stop defining that thing as wrong at all, and accepting it; to stop flogging myself for being a distracted creature that plods along at creative careers unable to ever get into, and stay in, the groove.

Because every groove feels like or a rut or a prison.

So, on that note, I’m gonna walk and listen to books. And switch them off and think. Intermittently. Fragmented.

That’s me. Now.

Does it have to be?