Truck Truck Truck

I’ve discovered that, on the occasions where my brain is stressed about something to the degree that it buzzes pretty continuously in the background without ever truly taking over and pushing everything else out to make room, the anxiety machine has developed an unexpected new treat for me. At the end of the night, I’ll get into bed and lie down, light off, ready to sleep, and slip away… only to wake up a couple of hours later in a fog shaped by only the most trivial of things.

Case in point: a few weeks ago, I was feeling a very low-key work stress as I went to sleep, otherwise having enjoyed a day off where I was binge-watching the enjoyably trashy Love Undercover — they’re soccer stars, but in America, where no-one could care less! It’s a perfect formula for a dating show where the unaware women are so very not bothered when they find out the “secret” — and reading Batman comics. I had successfully ignored the worry about a couple of problems I’d have to juggle the next day, and felt both surprised and happy that I wasn’t lying there utterly awake and exhausted… and then it was suddenly 1am and my brain was trying to tell me some very confused story about Jamie The Footballer getting engaged but also I was Batman somehow and there was some kind of cathedral linking the two together in a way I couldn’t even fully comprehend at the time.

Looking back, I’m not entirely sure I properly woke up as much as my brain quasi-surfaced but left enough of itself in a dream that I was unable to tell the two apart. All I know for sure is that I got up to piss, then got back into bed and lay there, worried about what the cathedral meant in the grand scheme of things, and whether or not I should be hanging out on the roof, given that I was Batman, after all.

That wasn’t the first time something like that had happened, and I’m sadly sure it won’t be the last. It’s as if a connection has been screwed up somewhere, and what should be the garbage disposal unit of the my short-term media memory is accidentally dumping everything into the front of my brain at the wrong time. Thankfully, it’s only happened to make me think I was the Dark Knight one time, so far. That’s not something I have any interest in repeating. Just think how bad things would in Gotham City if that were actually the case…

The SNAFU of it all

A thought that I’ve been returning to again and again over the past few weeks — the past few months, really — is that I’m not sure I know how the internet works anymore. I don’t say that as someone who claims to be an expert on algorithms and spiders indexing everything, nor as someone who’s the right demographic to understand every single trend on every single social media platform available. Fuck, I turn 50 this year; that stuff is really not meant for me anymore.

Nonetheless, I used to believe that I had a good idea how the internet worked. While I was mostly outside of it, I could vaguely understand the culture(s) at play, and was adept enough to track down conversations and in-jokes and memes that I had a column at Wired for years doing that very thing. The mass mind that the internet was back then might not have been something I fully got on a molecular level, and certainly was often something I didn’t even vaguely agreed with, but it was at least something that I felt as if I understood the shape of to a greater or lesser degree.

These days, I feel that’s no longer true. It’s an idea that I’ve become more and more convinced of as I settle into the editorial job at Popverse and look at traffic numbers, or try and understand how to best promote the site or stories therein. I’ve been trying tricks that should work and don’t, and watching things take off for reasons that leave me entirely confused. The distribution systems and conversations I knew from literally decades of doing this professionally have disappeared in a handful of years — since 2020, maybe? 2019, if we’re being generous? — and what’s left is a mystery to me.

On the one hand, this is exciting: it’s a puzzle to be solved, and the kind of mystery box that makes me want to solve it. But on the other is this strange nagging feeling that I already have solved it with an answer that I don’t want to believe is true, and want to be persuaded isn’t the real deal — namely that, due to the many purchases and hollowing-outs of venture capitalists, companies obsessed with maximizing profit over any other outcome, and no small amount of bad faith acting from people who want little else but to be the loudest voices around, the internet… doesn’t actually work anymore. That it’s not that old systems have been replaced by new systems, but that old systems have broken and not been replaced, and what we’re living through is everything else going through the motions in the hope that something will get better sooner rather than later… except, unless there’s a significant change that I can’t see coming anytime soon, that “something better” will never actually arrive.

I want to be wrong, very badly. I want things to turn around in ways that surprise me. It’d be much better to realize that I’m just out of touch, instead of realizing that everything is just… not working anymore. We’ll see.

It’s That Time Again

As you’re reading this, I’m probably losing my mind. I’m writing it a couple of weeks ahead of time in a vain attempt to try and build up something resembling a buffer of posts before the big event, but on the day this publishes, the annual terror that is San Diego Comic-Con Week is ramping up.

The show itself doesn’t begin for two more days, but basically everything from two weeks out is utterly eaten up by the event itself. Like New York Comic Con in October, San Diego Comic-Con (which has the hyphen, NYCC doesn’t, because “Comic-Con” with a hyphen is apparently a trademarked term; something to bear in mind) is less of a traditional event than an existential happening with an event horizon that consumes everything around it; time gets weird, and it’s probably very likely that I’ve been so nose-deep in planning for the show when you’re reading this that I have already lost track of what day it actually is.

Making things more complicated this year is the fact that I am an editor and not just a writer at Popverse this year, so I actually get to contribute to the planning of everything this time out, and also that we at Popverse have also been dealing with a wholescale switch of behind-the-scenes hosting, organizational tools, and CMS for the last couple weeks. There’s been a lot going on, roughly four or five times what I’m used to at this time of year, so it’s been… a thing.

(Again, I’m writing this weeks ahead, but to give you an idea of how much everything is this year, it’s three weeks until SDCC as I’m writing, and I’m already doing things I usually leave until week-of. There’s no way around it. Light is bending! We’re already on the edge of the black hole!)

The thing that’s keeping me afloat at this point is, unexpectedly, that I keep remembering that I like San Diego Comic-Con. I like seeing friends I rarely see outside of that show; I like the strange feeling that mixes the intense work pressure and the sense that maybe I’m on some kind of holiday just because everything feels so different and unexpected. I’ve been going to the show in one way or another for the past 16 years without fail — aside from the Covid period when it was canceled — and for a handful of years before that more irregularly; I have very strong, complicated but important memories and life events tied to the show. For better or worse, SDCC has become a pilgrimage in its own right for me, and something that almost always feels worth the stress by the time the show is over each and every year. As long as I remember that, then everything becomes easier to work through.

It’s just that, already, I’m having to remind myself to remember that, and not lose my cool. There’s weeks to do that — although it’s probably happened by the time you’re seeing this.

Missed Connection (Film Edition)

When I think about the various experiments I tried as an art student — I’m speaking about in my work, please understand — one of the things that sticks out to me as a Road Not Taken is the idea of filmmaking. It wasn’t something that I ever really seriously considered, nor investigated past a year or so of half-assedly playing around with a borrowed video camera to create footage that I never got around to editing, because the school wasn’t set up to do such things. (The university my art school was attached to did have an edit bay, but getting access proved to be more trouble than anyone had considered, and something I only managed to successfully achieve once, alas.)

Nonetheless, there was a period where filmmaking seemed like something I wanted to at least attempt more seriously. I was then, as I am now, obsessed with ways of telling stories and sharing narratives, and what little chance I had to be exposed to experimental short films, and “art” movies, made my brain whirr in an excited manner that felt as if everything was possible.

This wasn’t helped — or, rather, was helped, but not in a practical manner — by the fact that I was simultaneously devouring film theory books and collections of essays by filmmakers (I spent a long time reading and re-reading essays by Wim Wenders, whose writing in those essays influenced me far more than his films have) that made the moving picture feel like the ideal vehicle to share ideas and emotions and stories. I felt entirely energized about the potential of the medium in such a way that my limited experience never even vaguely had a chance to live up to. It’s not that I ever decided that these experts and practitioners were wrong about film, as much as I realized that I wasn’t skilled or patient enough to make it work for me.

I think about that often, lately; I’ve been watching more short films again, and thinking about what works for me with them, and whether or not it’s something I could see myself doing with the tech that’s available to me now. I’m probably still too impatient — and certainly too busy — but still; the idea remains as this temping thing in the distance, a chance to complete a thought I first had decades earlier.

Pivot to

For someone who makes their living from being a writer, it’s surprising how little I think about the written word as a concept. (For someone who reads as much as I do, it’s weird, as well; but that might be in part because my head makes a split between what I read and what other people read otherwise I get oddly self-conscious; I can’t explain it.) Nonetheless, I’ve been thinking about the written word, and the past, and about how they interrelate recently.

Specifically, I’ve been asking myself if people read more now. I was thinking about the fact that I can remember life before not just email and the internet — because I’m old — but I can also remember life before texting, because I’m very old. (Was it really called SMS messaging back in the day, or is that something that we just all agreed to collectively hallucinate after awhile because it sounds old-fashioned and awkward?)

I don’t mean this in the crotchety-old-man sense, but there was a period of time when the primary mode of communication amongst friends was verbal, not written, and then… writing just started to take over: texts, emails, DMs, and so on. We all started writing more, and we all started reading more. There have been all kinds of discussions about whether or not the actual writing itself has downgraded language — remember the weird but seemingly legitimate panic surrounding “text speak”? — but I’m not sure I’ve ever read any serious study about to what extent people just started actually reading more often as a result, even if it was just emails and texts, rather than newspapers, letters, or “literature,” as much of a moving target as that last thing truly is.

Of course, history will make the final decisions surrounding what counts and what doesn’t, as it always does; it’s an unreliable beast at best, but part of me is oddly excited at the prospect of, centuries from now, texts between friends and emails with abbreviations and in-jokes and references that no-one else could ever understand will be held up as “proof” of a literacy that has been lost to the ages, and a society that treasured the written word even as we, living in this moment, never ever consider the possibility.

Now It’s Easy To Define (Yeah)

As is my wont, I’ve been noodling around with Garageband recently, making loops out of old 1960s songs without any real purpose beyond just wanting to see if I can do it and make it sound pretty good. (So far, the answer is yes, but it helps that I’m playing with music that I know and love as closely and clearly as I do.) It’s a mental exercise as much as anything else: finding something and reshaping it to create something new, but in a method (and a format, let’s be real) that is somewhat alien and I’m uncertain about and uncomfortable in. It’s play, but play in such a way to keep me on my toes and allow for all kinds of mistakes that could end up being as thrilling as they might be frustrating.

I mention this, as much as anything, because I’ve been revisiting a bunch of music I loved from years and years and years ago — Primal Scream and Delakota and a bunch of the late 1990s “dance” music of the era — and realizing how much of it is, if not born from the same lack of skillset and incompetent bumbling around in software I barely understand, then the same approach of playing and building things block by block and seeing what happens.

I shouldn’t be too surprised, of course; there’s part of the wonderful Beastie Boys Story documentary where they talk about making Paul’s Boutique and that’s not a million miles away from their attitude with that album — of course, they had more patience and more skill behind their efforts than I did, as well as infinitely more taste and finer record collections — and it even feeds into a similar version of how the Beatles went around recording their albums, with a sense of, “I think I want to do this, but I don’t know how to get there, so let’s just see what happens and hope for the best.”

As I said above, the core of all of this is play: of doing something with no set goal in mind, and being ready to embrace and appreciate the journey as much as the destination, in large part because there is no destination when you set off. As I find myself approaching more and more defined goals professionally, such play outside of work becomes so much more important to me — a way to connect back to what animated me throughout so much of my life, and what makes me happy and curious and, well, what keeps me going even now.