Being an internet refuge for Graeme McMillan
Normally, we do, I think, three graphics a week for the Heat Vision newsletter, and normally we do them on Thursday afternoons. For the two weeks contained below, it was Friday morning for various reasons, and the second of the weeks had five graphics needed pretty much immediately while I also had to take a work call for someone else and hadn’t slept properly because of faulty smoke alarms going off since 4am. Despite that, I had fun. There might be something wrong with me.
This Saturday would be my father’s 78th birthday, if he were still alive. Instead, it’ll be another day of ghost feelings; one where the thought of him will linger but not stay ever present, and another year where I’ll struggle to imagine what life would be like if he were still around.
The idea of him being alive still becomes more difficult to conjure with each day, as potentially bad as that may be to admit. Nonetheless, it’s true; so much of my life now is entirely alien to how it was before he died. I wonder, often, how he would have dealt with my divorce, or, a decade earlier, the move to Portland — he would have liked it here, I always imagine — or even just my day-to-day life. I didn’t become a full time writer until after his death; given his own ambitions in that direction, I often wish he could have seen that.
(I have many childhood memories of standing in the office, surrounded by piles of paper next to a typewriter that were explained away as my dad’s novel-in-progress. I never read them, which I regret more and more as I get older, but I also have no memory of my dad ever sitting at that typewriter and working, so perhaps the novel never actually existed…?)
As terrible as it is to say, I don’t actually think of him, or my mother, often. During big life events, or around their birthdays, or Christmas. (My dad died on Christmas Eve.) I feel guilty about that, as if I should be keeping them in my heart and mind more often, but I also know that both would find that idea suspicious, if not downright ridiculous.
Perhaps the most fitting tribute I can pay is just to do my best going forward, but every now and then, I find myself imagining if they’d stuck around, if things had been different.
The thing about my job is, it’s so impermanent. I write for the day — or, at most, a few days ahead — and so, every day is a do-over. Or, at least, the chance of one.
I write “the thing,” as opposed to “the good thing” or “the bad thing,” simply because I’m unsure if it’s good or bad; who wouldn’t like the chance to rest on their laurels for a couple of days, for example, especially if they’d killed themselves finding success the day before? Isn’t that just a natural impulse? On that level — the whole, you can never really relax because each day is a new day, level — it’s obviously a bad thing, but there’s also something very freeing in the idea that you can say goodbye to the previous day’s failures each morning, as well.
On more than one occasion, I’ve found myself ending a particularly shitty or unproductive day by thinking, ‘Ah well, at least I get to try again tomorrow,’ perfectly aware that not everyone gets that luxury, that for many jobs, one day’s underproduction — or just outright crappiness— can cascade and ruin a week, if not more. I am, in many ways, very lucky to have the opportunity to start over with each new day.
All of this comes to mind after waking up on a Monday morning and realizing that I have no idea what lies ahead of me today. Oh, there are some knowns — there always are, even if it’s just that I’ll have to do this particular thing for Wired this week, or I’ll have the THR newsletter graphics — but for the most part, I have little-to-no idea what is actually going to happen over the next day. (It’s still before 7am as I write this.)
There’s something exciting about the uncertainty, as well as something just a little exhausting, too. The space between those two things is what every Monday morning feels like, for me. It’s a thing; I just don’t know if it’s a good thing or bad thing, is all.