Not done, not good, immediate, and not real
The whole East coast is snowed in, what else is there to do but blog
There’s a winter storm warning in effect until tomorrow morning, the snow is still coming down, and the neighborhood is overexposed and white-beaten. And there’s a pot of soup on the stove, slowly coming to a boil. You can come over and have some. Here’s what I’m telling you:
Sometimes I have thoughts that are too big and long for posting on media better suited for stupid memes and pithy observations, but there’s no good place for them. Nothing complex, no think-pieces or interviews or anything I’d want to get paid money for or recognized. I miss LiveJournal.
I liked it better when there were more than 5 websites. I’m sad that we’ve gone from the Dancing Bush flash game to this gerrymandered, vagueposting on the same 3 platforms, always online but not committing really, pocket-sized evil. It’s boring and it’s mostly all there is. My take on this is already boring, that’s how boring it is.
I’d prefer to read your long-winded esoteric snuff poetry movie review number-crunching pity party selfie-only blog posts, from maybe 50 people at the absolute most, and ignore 80% of everything else. But I guess it’s too late to bail out ig/twt so mostly I’m operating under the assumption that someone else agrees that macroblogging (?) is more interesting than the alternative.
And also, I have a 30-year (40-year, whatever) goal to write a book, maybe one day eventually, cause I missed my teenage creative prime and so am banking on the U-shaped curve to come back around to my favor when I’m ancient, but right now all the writing I do is just sitting on my hard drive. Since last year, I’ve gotten over the nausea of writing something bad or just really cringe or boring, and so now I should get over “but it’s not done” or “it’s not good enough to share” or “I’ll do it later after I think about it some more” or “that’s not a real thing” by posting stuff that’s not done, not good, immediate, and not real.
And I’m calling it Howls From The Margin because 1) that’s how it feels, to be shouting more or less into some vaguely hostile vacuum, and also because 2) Infinite Jest actually is a good book (whitepill take).
I’ll probably find a local minimum around posting once a week, and if you subscribe you’ll get the posts sent direct, and if you don’t you’ll probably still have to see me post about it online until you soft-block or until I get shadow banned/demoted on the algorithm rank for poor engagement.
In the queue are posts about: pleasant human inefficiency; hyperobjects; translation; baking; and more generally, whitepill takes, lukewarm takes, tepid takes, fragments of short stories, dreams, etc.
And now a Pessoa quote, who someone I once liked described as “an existentialist charlatan, total garbage, this stuff’ll rot your brain if you’re not careful.”
Whatever you created for humanity is at the mercy of the cooling Earth. Whatever you left behind for posterity is either so imbued with your own ideas that no one will understand it or else it is so typical of the age you are living in that other ages will not understand it, or else it will appeal to all ages, but will not be understood by the final abyss, into which all ages finally plunge.
Howlingly and Brain-Rottedly Yours,
N