Categories
general

48

Today, I turn 48.

48 is a weird one, because it’s an even thirty years from when I turned eighteen. I’ve written about that birthday before, so I’ll spare you, but one thing is that it’s very vivid to me, and seems like it was a few years ago. And it was three decades ago. There are retired NFL quarterbacks who had full careers who were born after that date. (Current Eagles QB Nick Foles was born on my 18th birthday, to the day.) I think my primary care physician was born after that date. Taylor Swift was born almost a year after then. I’m old.

I imagine that the 1989 to 2019 nice-round-number nostalgia trap is going to catch me on a lot of events this year. It’s when I graduated high school, started college, and the summer between was — well, I wrote a book about it, which will never see the light of day, but a lot went on. And I’d like to not sit around and ruminate about that all year, especially because I’m also being hit with the heavy feeling that 50 is just around the corner, and there’s a lot that I haven’t done.

And none of this “bucket list” is a “bucket list” I could define, like I’m in a stupid Rom-Com movie. I’ve already seen the Grand Canyon and went skydiving and all that crap. And I’m never going to visit Mars or even fly in a supersonic plane. Other than retirement and survival, there isn’t anything on that list that’s quantifiable. All of the dread hanging over me on this one is in the form of qualitative things that are hard to measure or change: write, do more, get better, do something other than work, sleep, and eat. But it’s all a quality thing, not quantity. And it’s always hard to move in that direction. And sure, drink more water, be mindful, eat less, exercise, whatever. But there’s a struggle there, and it’s not something I’ve been able to crack.

Nothing too exciting going on today, which is good. Avoiding horrible events on 1/20 is pretty much all I ask these days. (I am writing this the day before, though, so there’s always a chance of a nuclear war or a dead relative on Sunday, which means I’ll have to edit this.) No Vegas this year, no renting of fast cars or jumping out of planes or buying new guitars. I am doing another superfloat in the sensory deprivation tank again, which has become a bit of an annual tradition now. I think the exact minute of my birth, I’ll be back in the womb again, and that’s always a nice reset. Nice dinner for the evening, and I get Monday off too, so maybe I can write.

Man, that Nick Foles thing is really bugging me. Now I need to root for the Eagles this year. I mean, if I even give a fuck about football, which I don’t. Anyway, 47 down, time to start 48.

Categories
general

Searching for distraction

I know people lament how much time people waste on the internet. But as a person who has been here since the beginning, I disagree. I remember being able to really get lost in the internet, and it seems like the quick-twitch, low-effort content currently populating the social media-driven internet doesn’t do much for me. I think there’s value in getting lost on the internet. You just have to get the right kind of lost.

I remember in the late Nineties and early Zeroes, wasting serious time swimming through long-form internet sites. When blogs were journals and weren’t commercialized or commoditized, a small group of people were doing interesting things, endless experiments with actual writing. I know I’ve bitched about this before, in my endless “blogging is dead”/”is blogging dead” diatribes. But I really miss reading things like these, that would compulsively suck me in for hours. There was nothing like finding someone’s crazy travel site, or a project blog about restoring an old car or building a weird house, then spending hours plowing through the entries from start to finish.

Maybe this is still going on, but the problem is I can’t find it. And maybe that’s part of the problem. This article describes this struggle well: Searching the creative internet.

I’ve noticed that searching is pretty much dead these days. I mean, I use google constantly, but something is fundamentally weird in its algorithm. And I’m not just complaining about the fact that I have a million words of text on this site that draws zero heat from search engines these days. (That could also be for a lot of other reasons, like it stretches back twenty years, or that I’m boring and inconsistent in what I write about, and not cool.) But there’s also the issue that most searches bring up nothing but corporate crap, and anything interesting, independent, or worthwhile is buried.

The linked article mentions Disney, but here’s another example. I had a Camaro as a kid. I wish I could rebuild one now, but the boomers have driven up prices, I don’t own a garage, and I’m lazy. But, I could see burning an evening reading a long-form blog about someone else restoring a Camaro. So, enter “Camaro” in google search, and what do you get? Page after page of official GM spam landing pages, car dealerships, third-party “Used Camaro Near Me” sites that just redirect you to car dealership pages (after opening a thousand pop-ups), and Chevy press releases dumped on big car magazines. Searching on “camaro project” gets less of the corporate media, but mostly just sale sites and eBay listings. (Not even real listings – just links that go to ebay and search on “camaro project.”)

And sure, the first problem is I don’t know how to use google, and I’m supposed to be searching on some gigantic regular expression that excludes corporate sites and blah blah blah. That’s not the point. I want to find cool stuff about my search term, and 80% of the web has become robot zombie garbage that automated scripts and SEO wonks have spun up to sell affiliate ads.

I guess the solution to this is to read blogs that point to this stuff, but that gets into the “blogs are dead” thing. I think Facebook and Twitter are supposed to have replaced blogs, but they aren’t aggregating the kind of content I want to see. I think the commercialization of things drives what we see, and this is what we now get: divisive news stories and click-bait advertisement disguised as stories.

I’m not sure what the solution is. I’m trying to dig deeper to find things of interest, and investing more time going off the beaten path. And I’d like to blog more about it, and encourage others to do the same. But something’s missing here, and I’m not sure what, or how to fix it.

 

Categories
general

2018 Summary

I keep attempting to write a nice, lofty post about the great things that happened in 2018, but it was a shit year, by any metric. So, I’ll keep this short, with a nice little list of accomplishments and appearances:

  • Although published on 12/31/17, my book Help Me Find My Car Keys and We Can Drive Out! was sort of a 2018 thing. It was a fun release and a few people got the joke, although many also didn’t. It was nominated for a Wonderland award in the first round, but I’m not a Bizarro writer and much like high school, I’m not cool or popular, so it didn’t make it to the second round.
  • Joshua Citrak had me on the Do Better podcast.
  • I wrote an introduction for Jeff O’Brien’s book Butt Stuff. I didn’t get to read the book first, but I wrote an introduction, so there’s that.
  • My familiar picture was used as a boss character in a video game called Heckpoint.
  • I published Book of Dreams, my 15th book.
  • That book put me above one million published words. (Excluding stories and online junk. And this blog.)
  • I helped (minimally) John Sheppard publish his book Doug Liberty Presents Bandit the Dancing Raccoon.

For quantifiables: the activity line was pretty close to last year: 2,522,801 steps, 3779 floors, 1,190.62 miles. Weight is up, and I don’t want to get into that. Definitely cannot go into how much money I lost in the stock market this year. (I’m never retiring, it looks like.) I took 2634 photos, which is up from 1914 last year, but I think my highest year was 3900 in 2010. I think 500-some of those were analog though, which is a new record. I always need to exercise more, and take more pictures.

I don’t do resolutions, but I have the usual goals: write more, exercise more, blog more, don’t watch the news, don’t spend money. You?

Categories
general

2018 Summary

I keep attempting to write a nice, lofty post about the great things that happened in 2018, but it was a shit year, by any metric. So, I’ll keep this short, with a nice little list of accomplishments and appearances:

  • Although published on 12/31/17, my book Help Me Find My Car Keys and We Can Drive Out! was sort of a 2018 thing. It was a fun release and a few people got the joke, although many also didn’t. It was nominated for a Wonderland award in the first round, but I’m not a Bizarro writer and much like high school, I’m not cool or popular, so it didn’t make it to the second round.
  • Joshua Citrak had me on the Do Better podcast.
  • I wrote an introduction for Jeff O’Brien’s book Butt Stuff. I didn’t get to read the book first, but I wrote an introduction, so there’s that.
  • My familiar picture was used as a boss character in a video game called Heckpoint.
  • I published Book of Dreams, my 15th book.
  • That book put me above one million published words. (Excluding stories and online junk. And this blog.)
  • I helped (minimally) John Sheppard publish his book Doug Liberty Presents Bandit the Dancing Raccoon.

For quantifiables: the activity line was pretty close to last year: 2,522,801 steps, 3779 floors, 1,190.62 miles. Weight is up, and I don’t want to get into that. Definitely cannot go into how much money I lost in the stock market this year. (I’m never retiring, it looks like.) I took 2634 photos, which is up from 1914 last year, but I think my highest year was 3900 in 2010. I think 500-some of those were analog though, which is a new record. I always need to exercise more, and take more pictures.

I don’t do resolutions, but I have the usual goals: write more, exercise more, blog more, don’t watch the news, don’t spend money. You?