Good morning. Hello. How are you? #635
Friends far and further. What does it even mean to choose your own algorithm. Stop blaming advertising. Rock chats.
Good morning, friend. How are you? I miss you. I miss friends something fierce today. This week has the birthday of three dear, old friends, Aug Stone, Tony Norton and Christine Navin. I miss them all. Happy birthday, dear friends. I miss it when you saw a bunch of great friends every day. It seems like another world. It seems absolutely absurd. the photos on my desktop are chosen at random from a very large folder of great photos, but right now one of the photos is a photo of three dear, old friends in a puppy pile on the floor of my apartment in SoHo, back when three friends would come over, drink some champagne and be silly and fall into a pile on the floor, like there was nothign else to do in the world. Another desktop photo right now is another dear friend, a photo from a wedding, so shes all dolled up, also drinking champagne. There used tobe so much champagne in my life. And friends. Maybe if I just start drinking champagne again, the friends will magically appear.
My sister reminded me yesterday that it’s also been twenty-five years since our friend Val Mulford passed away after a blisteringly-quick bout of Osteosarcoma. About twenty of us congregated in Seattle with her for the last week or so, which she spent in a rented house, receiving hospice. Friends everywhere. Twenty of us, sleeping in a giant pile on the floor every night. That is how I want to go. So many friends and family surrounding me that they’re piled up on the floor.
That was a rented house. We were only there… weeks? A month? Look how decorated it already was. Those friends. God, those friends.
Those memories mean so much, and it means so much that Val had all those friends around her at the end, but it’s still a fucking ball-buster that a wonderful, kind, hilarious, twenty-four woman full of love died of fucking bone cancer how stupid is that.
And then to make matters worse, I saw a post on Facebook yesterday from the parents of our old baby sitter Sydney West, talking about how much they missed her, how much her little sister misses her. Sydney West is still missing, she was last seein in San Francisco near the Presidio in September of 2020. It’s been a year and a half and these poor parents, and this poor younger sister haven’t seen anything or heard anything from her. That took a lot out of me. I keep a Google Alert on Sydney, because I worry about her and am sad for her parents and sister. But the Google Alert is 99% stupid crime stories that take place in Sydney’s West End (man that place sounds nuts) so it does not cause me to think about Sydney herself every day. But when I see one of her parents’ posts, when I really think about Sydney and her family, and what it must be like to just have your daughter disappear, god, I can’t take it. It breaks me up every time. It left a pall all over the entire day.
God. I was mostly on an even keel again by evening, but of course I needed to write that down so now I am revisiting yesterday’s emotions and, oof. Writing, man. Can help you process but you also gotta relive to process. Can be a bitch.
Which gives you some of the background of the emotional state I was in when it comes out that Elon is definitely going to buy Twitter, and seriously, just damn this all to hell. What does it even mean to choose your own algorithm? Seriously. How is this going to work, how is this going to make Twitter, or the world, a better place? There will be some dropdown, or some fucking Shopify-Marketplace-Type… what? App store? Where you can select (or buy!) the algorithm that makes your Twitter all shitposts, or all porn, or all… these are lists! We can already do that! Approximately 1% of all Twitter users ever do anything different with their accounts, everyone has a fucking schtick on Twitter. You don’t need an algorithm to only see financial Twitter or Twitter-that-makes-you-happy or political-Twitter or insurrectionist-Twitter you can already do this with lists! And almost no one does it! Also I don’t use an algorithm on Twitter! You shouldn’t either! The option is right there, just sitting there. I guess there’s some talk about, like, Twitter-should-be-like-email, which I guess means basically Twitter is like RSS and is open and okay, sure, fine, whatever. I loved RSS, it was super useful but the thing about a public square is that a) it is public, and b) we are all in the same square that is the point.
I am also getting so sick of Silicon Valley blaming advertising for its woes. Advertising’s been on this planet for millennia and for 90% of that time it was not notably involved in insurrections and facism. No one made you co-opt the Goebbels part of advertising instead of the David Ogilvy or Mary Wells part. Even then! Advertising at its absolute most damaging is a weak force on the planet. A weak force that operates on immense scale, and can do very powerful things, but it is not a primary element, a primary mover and shaker. You can’t take a society that is 100% against fascism and turn it 90% for fascism, or even 51% for fascism using only advertising. There are deeper forces at work.
Advertising made you guys all your money (except you, Elon, you’re so special) while you mostly killed off good advertising, then you took what was left — the miserable, writhing alien baby of advertising — and pumped it full of steroids and amphetamines, named it advertising and then blamed it for all the shit you caused.
I swear to god I will finish my book about that one day. That’s basically the new thesis: Don’t blame the advertising blame the sociopaths.
I’m happy at least that other people are picking up the mantle of “Elon owning Twitter is going to fuck him over in China.”
Felt like I was going crazy there for a while shouting this into the void but a good number of people brought up this angle yesterday.
Our daily walks are getting to be insanely long again. First off, the clover and dandelion flowers are out so Jane feels compelled to pick every single flower along the walk. This is going to go on for months, walks will take at least an hour. Then, of course, the weather is much nicer so many other neighbors are walking as well and we stop and chat with them. Molly and Anant have a new baby so when we see them we have to stop and look at their cute baby. Brian is out in his lawn moving something like 10 cubic yards of freshly-chipped mulch all over his plant beds and I don’t know how that guy gets anything done because we all stop and talk to him as we walk by. More people are going to the office, so more people are driving on the street, stopping to say hi to Jane as they go by.
And then when we get home, Jane has a new thing where we sit on these three large boulders next to our driveway and have “rock chats” which is just that: sit on a rock and chat. I like this part but usually the walk has taken so long I’m eager to get inside by then. I need to try and be better about rock chats. Also the other day when she was on the potty, on her Etch-a-Sketch thingy, she drew a picture of “rock chats” except her and mommy were actually kitties sitting on rocks and chatting and it is just amazing.
Rock chats, man. Actually Jane might be a mouse there and not a kitty? Hard to tell. No whiskers or bow.
No Daddy, though. Daddy doesn’t sit long enough for rock chats. This is a character flaw.
And here is a picture of Jane sitting at rock chats. She loves her new hat. The neighbors love her new hat too. A college-age (ish?) girl on the street the other day said “I like your hat” to Jane.
And she said “Thank you. I like your shoes.” The girl had on rainbow Crocs. Jane does indeed love rainbow Crocs.
“Thank you. I like your shoes.” It’s like Jane was an adult. We were so proud.
Today’s mix is chaos and I make no apologies for it why shouldn’t a mix have Bauhaus and Britney and Chuck Mangione and (new!) Journey and the Geraldine Fibbers. Plus a bunch of new stuff. Consistency and hobgoblins and all that and also isn’t it hilarious how that quote gets spread around in two forms: “consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” and “inconsistency…” I love that. Even the quote can’t be consistent. I legit don’t know which is the actual version. I have intentionally not looked it up. It should remain quantum, indeterminate, dual.
Bauhaus is on here because we started watchng Russian Doll season two last night and it is great except that part where she forgot the bad that was bullshit and pulled me out of the narrative.
Okay Tuesday let’s so this five more meetings today just love that shit. MEETINGS. So awesome. Until tomorrow.