Good morning. Hello. How are you? #878
The first thing anyone who I met online IRL ever said to me was "I hate you."
Hello! Hi! Tuesday! Woo! Man. I was so tired yesterday. Got like eight hours of sleep, too. But I guess maybe that whole thing where you have to make up lost hours is real, and I lost about five hours of sleep on my overnight flight home, and I’d only made up a couple. So last night I went to bed at 9, woke up at 7. That was nice. Do I feel well rested from it? No, not particularly. Could use more sleep if I’m being honest. And I have eight meetings today, too. Here we go!
Okay I can do this. When I was in Fairbanks, back early in the trip, I went out with my high school friend Frank. And he asked about GMHHAY. How do I do this every day? Why do I do this every day? What is the point? Reasonable questions for which I do not have reasonable answers. It is so much work to do this five days a week. Some days I approach it with unbelievable dread. Some days it’s like pulling teeth. And what is the reward? What is the point? I know that aspects of my life are mildly interesting, but that’s not really the point. It’s not, like, a news operation over here, keeping people informed. Though it does occasionally have that as a side-effect. And I do already write a journal each day, so it’s not therapy — except it kind of is? Not therapy exactly but it has therapeutic effects. I know that most of you dip in and dip out and don’t read them all and that is absolutely fine, but it’s so great when someone comments, and the “staying in touch with friends” aspect is definitely a huge part of it.
But I also think that there is.. nobility in the pedestrian, I guess? Like gardening and parenting and chores and work and boredom and idle thoughts. The world seems to really have a bias toward profundity and I suspect that is misguided. I suspect that we are happier when we are embracing the more humdrum aspects of life. I also think people like to read and see that other people are taking up time and brainshare with conundrums about butter dishes and chores. We all do it — well, most of us do — to some extent and it’s fun and rewarding to read about that instead of, you know, warfare and trolling.
I also think that we all have very complicated guilt around politics and activism and charity and using the word “I” and it’s reassuring to read someone else be human about these things: care deeply but not know what to do. Try and find actual practical balance in their lives between competing urges and not be a saint.
I also think it’s, like, the only civilized internet out there anymore.
I had a revelation the other day. I remembered when I was in high school, I was really into this BBS system in town. I had my super-cool plug-mounted Apple 1200 baud modem and I would call into this local BBS and I would play some D&D game there. And it was kind of fun, but also they were kind of bullying and the DM wasn’t that great and it sorta turned me off to D&D games because the DM was impatient and didn’t really dive into the story much and make it rewarding when you did something that wasn’t in his playbook. Anyway, when I got to high school, I of course signed up for computer classes, and before too long I met this kid there, and after a while we got talking and we realized that we were both on this same BBS and playing the same D&D game and the very first words he said to me in real life once he realized he knew me online was:
“Oh. You’re Lancelot. I hate you.”
And that’s kinda more or less been the tone of the internet ever since!
Did I do anything to hate him? I don’t know! I don’t think so! He did not explain it, particularly. He thought it was self-evident, and it was probably because of my idiotic D&D playing style because I really had no idea what I was doing and, like I said, the DM was not super helpful.
Anyway, that just struck me the other day that maybe this should have been warning! Maybe I should have realized all along that the Internet was going to have hugely problematic aspects!
But alas, it did not occur to me until way too late.
Continued my quest to manually delete all my tweets one-by-one yesterday evening. Evening before, too. I watch my YouTube videos and I slowly delete Tweets. I am up to 2017. It is mostly depressing. I have a few occasional zingers but basically most of Twitter is me having these overconfident, know-it-all conversations with people. Sometimes I do actually know what I’m talking about, sometimes I don’t actually know what I’m talking about, but Twitter gives me the confidence to think I do, I guess.
One thing I have noticed is that since Twitter’s demise, there are definitely lots of people I used to talk to a lot more that I don’t talk to nearly as much. A lot of them have migrated over here to GMHHAY, but not all of them. That is kind of sad.
I guess some of them are popping up on Bluesky now, but honestly I am not particularly enjoying Bluesky. It’s fine, it’s nice to see an ecosystem starting to thrive, but the moderation is garbage — again — and you can’t turn off retweets which drives me crazy. It’s a bit late now, but here is a great trick for Twitter: turn off retweets on users that retweet too much. It makes them a lot more tolerable. But no such feature exists on Bluesky yet, so some people just retweet fucking everything and muck up your timeline so then you want to unfollow them. People seem to be having fun over there, but… I guess the weird jokes and too-clever humor side of Twitter was never particularly my thing. Though I couldn't tell you what was. News, maybe. Probably news. I like news. I am a news junkie.
I feel like people just want to feel something, want to reclaim the old internet, and they’re just… hoping. grasping. Hey look! It’s an internet party. But it’s not the same party. It’s like being the 50 year-old dude at a college party. We’ve seen too much.
Another thing that was somewhat stunning to me about my circa 2017 Twitter addiction is that I would just Tweet at celebrities like they were normal people and they would just answer and I had forgotten about that that was kind of fun, even though I usually said stupid shit. I think it’s kind of funny, though. I used to routinely find myself in the same room with celebrities and it was not like I would walk up to them and say totally dumb shit, but on Twitter? No problem! I’ll just barge right in.
Also in my Tweet deletion process, I am now in the Trump administration and yeah, no warm, fuzzy nostalgia going on here. Remember when we thought that Republicans might actually rebel against Trump? God, my optimism and naivety early in his administration. Horrifying. We are all boiling frogs in Trump’s vat of fat.
I’m glad I’m deleting these Tweets. The world does not need the information contained therein. I have my archive in cold storage so, you know, the anthropologists and biographers will have what they need but god. Good riddance.
Got to have dinner with Jane and take a walk with the fam yesterday that was nice. Headed home tonight. Spending today getting this house ready for guests this weekend, in between my eight calls. Gotta assemble a bed. Maybe hang another piece of art or two. Do the laundry and dishes. Change the sheets.
And then I get to go home and do Daddy Jane Dance Party and I am very excited. What will be our first song. What will be our last song. The possibilities are endless.
Justa mix today. I am sad I did not go to Justa Store while in Fairbanks, but I was not drinking alcohol so I did not have a need to go to a liquor store while I was there, alas. I do love that place, though, and I went by it while heading to Lemongrass and the Red Fox on two separate trips, and I looked at it, and thought about Justa Mix and gave it a little mental wave, so that is something, right?
This mix is half new stuff and half old. Finally got to listen to the new National yesterday it is great it is hereby my favorite National record. Very into this band You Said Strange that I learned about last night from KEXP. Very into this new dream pop by DJ Avalon Emerson (thank you, Colin).
Until tomorrow!
Before I got to your bit about "civilized internet," I was thinking that the reason i read this nearly every day is because it's so different from anything else I read. Unlike news stories, which try to project objectivity, it's deeply personal, but it doesn't really have the look-at-meness of Twitter.
Bottom line: despite keeping much about my own life close to my chest, I truly enjoy a glimpse into the inner workings of other people's psyches. I'm just deeply nosy.
(LOL I just got to the part about 2017 you on Twitter, which just reinforces my point above.)