The World That's Coming

I had this realization the other day: I love a first draft, but any- and everything beyond that feels a little too permanent. I was showing off a drawing I’d done and was repeating, “It’s just a sketch” as a way of pushing off my own unhappiness with the drawing — and, to be fair, it was just a sketch, deliberately unfinished and just a few minutes’ worth of work — when I had the thought that, for the most part, I stick in the realm of “just a sketch” quite a lot. I’m not entirely sure what not a sketch would even look like, at this point.

After all, it’s not as if I produce canvases or any kind of finished artwork at any point; everything I come up with is purposefully a work in progress abandoned midway through, intentionally. When I was in art school, decades ago, I eagerly worked away inside my sketchbooks but when required to take things the next step, I found myself fighting indecision and discomfort. I remember having to work on the final show for my BA degree and being unhappy with almost everything I displayed, and then — after grading but before the show actually opened — being counseled by the teachers that I should re-arrange my show because everything in my sketchbooks was better than the work on the walls. (They were right, and I agreed, but having someone else say it was this odd, sobering moment.)

It’s not just visual art that this attitude impacts; writing for the internet is faster and, in many ways, more temporary than writing for print. I was watching one of those movies about Big Moments In American Journalism that was made a decade or so ago — before the second Trump era demonstrated how little journalism is actually valued by those in power — and someone said that old line about journalism being the first draft of history; online writing and online journalism is the first draft of that first draft, another work-in-progress and that’s a comfortable space for me. Every time I’ve written for print feels more daunting somehow.

Maybe at some point, I’ll work up the nerve to create something — written, drawn, whatever — that feels worthwhile to be a “finished” work, or at least a second draft. For now, everything has become a sketchbook, filled with unclaimed, unclear potential that I might be able to figure out, if I wait long enough and look at it right.

“Days Left in Year.”

There’s a ticking clock that I face every day I’m working. It’s not that it’s necessarily counting down to anything important, but it’s right there, everytime I check in on the status of the day’s publishing schedule. We have this shared document that we all use to track where we are in terms of publishing, what stories need editing, and so on, you see, and at the top of that document is this traffic tracker that doesn’t just tell us how well we’re doing at that particular point, but projects out how well we’re performing versus the month’s goal, and offers up other little bits of information — including, for reasons too complicated to explain here, how many days into the calendar year we are at any given point, and how many days are left in the year.

I cannot explain why this “Days Left in Year” counter in particular catches my attention each and every time I’m on the page. It’s not as if I’m looking for that information at… well, almost any point of the day, really. For that matter, it’s not as if I even hold any special meaning in the end of the year beyond “I get some time off” and whatever level of superstition and sentimentality kicks in at that time each and every twelve months; nothing really changes, beyond we think about the new calendars that we should probably pick up. And yet, each and every time my eyes glance across that particular counter, I involuntarily pause. How many days are left in the year? my brain asks itself. Should I be more aware of this?

Even as I’m typing this, I’m aware that I do impart some odd meaning to the whole thing, and that I have been, subconsciously, counting down to something: the middle of the year. I don’t know why — literally nothing will happen when we hit day 183! — but somewhere in my brain, I have assigned it some kind of meaning, as if it’s a milestone that I can feel, even if I don’t actually understand it.

As I’m typing this, there’s still a few weeks left before we hit the halfway mark. Maybe I’m unintentionally imagining there’s going to be a point where it’ll be downhill from that point on, and the momentum will carry us all through. Check with me again when there’s only one day left in the year, perhaps.

Re-reading old Eddie Campbell and Ilya and Phil Elliott and Glenn Dakin comics recently has me thinking about zine culture as-was and the ways in which I’m missing an entire series of cultural touchstones from decades past that the internet replaced, before the internet itself became dominated by singular powerful forces that restricted the all-access nature it once had.

For example, the odd thrill of getting a zine or a small press comic in the mail, and holding it in your hands. (And seeing what, if anything, had also been snuck into the envelope as a thanks for buying.) Or the record marts, which happened every couple of months in some communal space or another and would just be filled with tables of crates, each one with albums and CDs and tapes of things you didn’t quite know about or know if you wanted but looked cool enough that you were willing to spend money on it. Or the weekly music papers that you bought for the reviews and maybe an interview or two but ended up finding new favorite writers in when they’d end up ranting about something you didn’t really care about but read, over and over, transfixed.

I feel oddly contrarian about what the internet did to everything, considering, you know, it’s how I got the career I have now and also why I moved across the world; the internet of the 2000s changed my life in practically every conceivable manner. But that’s not the internet that we have anymore, and what happened in the process between, say, 1990 and 2020 was that the alternate spaces that allowed non-mainstream culture to flourish and find an audience were wiped out and replaced by an online dream that itself got wiped away as the internet became more obsessed with control and profit. There are entire eco-systems and cultural streams that just aren’t there anymore, with nothing replacing them.

I read stories of how favorite creators got started and get sad that paths like theirs literally don’t exist today; I feel sad for today’s newcomers and outsiders who don’t have anywhere to make a name for themselves and find their people. Every now and then, I read a story (online, of course) about how Gen Z and Gen Alpha is abandoning the digital for the physical and all I can think is, it can’t happen quickly enough.