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I’ve Been Caught In A Trap I Set For Myself

I don’t listen to music when I write. I was going to say that I can’t, but that’s not true; I’ve worked in cafes where there’s music and, yes, it’s different and difficult and I’m slower, but it’s certainly possible. But I don’t like to do it; I get distracted and connections don’t get made the same way.

I wish that wasn’t true; I wish that I could listen to something as I type away, that my brain could split its attention and do both things at once. If nothing else, I feel like it would give me the opportunity to listen to more music than I currently do, and arguably discover new things to adore. (Spotify, I know I should hate you and your algorithms, and yet…!) In theory, it sounds like some kind of perpetual motion machine, something new entering your head as you output things from inside it. And yet…

I need, I think, to listen too much for it to work for me. Even if it’s just background noise, something will happen — some unexpected melody, a chord change, a half-understood lyric — and my concentration will be with the music, not anything else. It happens when I’m out and having conversations, too; I’ll hear something in the background and my head will go, I am interested in what you’re saying, but what is this song? What just happened?

I’m an easily distracted writer at the best of times, so you can imagine how much trouble music would be for me. But I continually wish that wasn’t the case. I see people write about what they’re listening to as they write, their soundtracks, and I get jealous. If only that could be me, if only my brain worked like that…!

Instead, I work in silence aside from the grumbles and moans I make without realizing it, and the sound of the keys as I hit them. Which, in its own way, is music of some sort.

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You Say I’m Putting You On But It’s No Joke

I write a weekly column for Wired which is, ostensibly, a summary/explanation of five things that people have been talking about online over the last seven days. It has, over the past couple years, transformed into a weird record of political events as the world has become swallowed by the news (or, perhaps, since I have become swallowed by the news). It’s one of the most exhausting things I work on, every single week.

I mean that in multiple senses. Practically, it’s a lot; it’s probably the longest thing I’ll write in most weeks, coming in around 2000 words every Friday morning before edits, and researching it is a bear, taking up a chunk of every week. I spend hours looking on Twitter and elsewhere throughout the week to find what people are talking about, and then trying to backtrack to find what the shape of that conversation was, how it started, how it evolved, not to mention external (online) sources to back up the social media of it all.

I hand it in every Friday somewhere between 7 and 9 am, and have from then until Monday as a break to not continually be searching for potential fodder. Otherwise, I’m on it; looking for what stories are trending, what interests me, who’s saying what and if there’s anything to it. It’s exhausting in that sense, too.

And then there’s just the sad fact of, there is rarely any good news. It sounds almost like a joke, but in the last few years — I want to say, since Trump got elected, but that’s not the whole truth — the news has just been overwhelmingly, oppressively, bad. People get hurt. Institutional and societal mass cruelty spreads across the world like a virus. Bad people get more and more successful, get away with more and more shit. That is exhausting, too. Writing about that, every single week.

I’m writing this instead of looking at social media right now. When I’m done, I’ll go back to see what people are talking about, and try to decipher what’s right for the column, and what is just people venting on Twitter. But I’m tired.

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The View From My Bed, San Diego Comic-Con Design Edition

When I found out that we were doing a Heat Vision newsletter from Comic-Con, I’ll admit that my heart sank a little. Not because I didn’t think it was a good idea — in fact, sending it on the last day of the show, even though it would probably go out when all of us had already left (I’m pretty sure I’m the last one to leave San Diego every year, from the THR team; everyone else just jumps on a train in the morning), seemed like a great way to cap off five days of coverage. Instead, I just had visions of me doing graphics in the press room just before deadline, stressed.

Nope; I did them at 6am in my bed at the hotel, because I woke up stupidly early, as it turned out. And they looked like this:

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Whatcha Lookin’ At?

There are years of my life where I don’t exist. At least, in terms of photographs.

I don’t think of myself as particularly photogenic, and I actually hate having my photo taken; I feel self-conscious and awkward, so I tend to avoid it — which means that there are long stretches of my life where the only photographic proof that I’m alive comes in group shots, or candids from an event I’m at, or whatever. The only photo of myself that I saw in 2018, for example, is from the weekend where I was an Eisner Awards judge, and we posed together at the end of it all.

To make matters worse, or at least more complicated, post-divorce, there are group photos or shots of myself that I either don’t have access to, or don’t even exist anymore. Entire years where there’s no me, now.

(On the plus side, I barely changed visually, so it’s not like anything special has been lost to history.)

Beyond that, though; at some point, I stopped really taking photographs. I used to, voraciously. And then, somehow, I stopped. You could read all manner of reasoning into why that happened, I certainly have, but the fact remains: I just… stopped. There comes a point where it’s as if I ceased to exist, both as object and as viewer.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, lately; you’ll have noticed I’ve been posting old photos on here more, lately. It’s made me realize that I should start taking more photographs, again. Not just of myself — God, no, not that — but of everything. Recording life as it’s happening, so that I don’t lose it years later to misremembering and outright forgetfulness. Keeping a history of my existence, both how I look(ed), which I’ve never been good at, but also what I’m looking at.

I’ll thank myself later.

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One Day, Maybe Next Week

When Entertainment Weekly went monthly — without changing its name, because of course, why would it? — I tweeted out something about how I had always wanted to write for the magazine. After more than a decade doing this professional pop culture writer thing, I still have these bucket list items, these outlets I want to pursue.

It’s not that I’ve never tried. There’s one in particular that I’ve tried many many times over the years, and been rebuffed each time in a series of increasingly amusing, awkward, form responses, each one stinging just a little more than the last. Some, I’ve circled around warily for the entire time, knowing that it’s still not the right time and waiting for an unknown, unclear final piece to be slotted in before I’m ready. Others, I just… wait for, awkwardly.

I’ve written for a lot of places over the years, some genuinely iconic. I’ve been in Time, Playboy and Wired! I’ve reached the point where I’m both confident and proud about my career, thankfully, and not just expecting to be outed as a fraud at any minute. That’s enough to make my bucket list feel possible, at least. One day or another, I’ll get in there, wherever the “there” of it happens to be.

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Where It’s At

I decided to restart this site as a going concern — not that I had ever really decided to stop it being a going concern, as such, but things happen and real life gets in the way — at the start of 2019 as a little bit of selfishness and a small amount of self discipline, mixed together. My 2018 had ended dramatically, and I was in a very different place than I had been a year earlier, both emotionally and physically. The notion of having a place where I could “be myself,” whatever that might mean, and write things for me, as opposed to work or for friends or whatever, was a very exciting one.

I started it, also, not knowing how long I’d keep it up. This wasn’t going to be the first time I’d promise myself I’d do this, after all, and previous attempts had run aground all-too-quickly, for various reasons. This time, things would be different, I half-heartedly told myself, because this time, I was different.

I set myself a schedule — three posts a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays — with occasional quote-posts in between if I found anything interesting and remembered to do it. And I set off.

At some point, somewhere in the middle of February or the beginning of March, I realized that I’d actually managed to write ahead enough that I was scheduled out with posts three weeks in the future or so. It was, to some degree, thrilling, but also a relief; that way, it seemed less likely that I’d drop off altogether, because now I had a buffer. Surely, if the worst came to the worst, I’d find the chance to find time to write within that three week window and refill my schedule appropriately?

For months, I did. And then, for some reason, June just killed me. It wasn’t that my workload increased — if anything, I was maybe less productive than I had been in other months? — but my concentration was shot, somehow. Weeks went by without me writing here, or writing very little, and suddenly… I had no buffer left.

I was faced with the prospect of either taking a break from the site  or deciding to stick with it and just, well, write. I chose the latter, and I’m surprisingly glad that I did. It sounds odd, I know, but I feel like I chose something selfish in a good, positive way. Is this place self-care for me? Is that too pretentious to suggest? Or simply too honest?

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Turn Around, Look At What You See

I tore through the third season of Stranger Things with an abandon that, if nothing else, shows quite how much the show’s formula of 1980s nostalgia, knowing pop culture references and humor continues to work on me. But even as I was on the edge of my seat watching Eleven et al face down The Flayed, the nagging thought at the back of my head kept saying, There isn’t really a lot here this time, is there?

Perhaps it’s a metatextual conceit that the third season feels so much like a retread of the second; that doesn’t seem outside of the realm of possibility at all, to me, although I admit that the metatextual reader in me would have preferred it to be a copy of the first season, as commentary of the way that Return of the Jedi pulled so much from the original Star Wars. But as I watched Nancy and Jonathan circle around the kids as they prepared for a showdown, weapons in hand, I thought, I’ve seen this before, and just a year or so ago. What else does this show have?

That’s not to say there’s nothing new in the third season — Robin is wonderful, and I genuinely loved the Red Dawn meets Terminator riff that is the Russian enforcer. (For that matter, expanding the mythology outside of Hawkins is a move that, in retrospect, was essential even as it seemed surprising at first blush.) Even the corrupt mayor is fun enough. It’s just that the central threat, the final showdown, all of that, seemed overfamiliar and as if the Duffer Brothers were running out of ideas and hoping to fill the gaps with knowing references: “Sure, we did the Mind Flayer last time, but this time it’s people and by the way, look, it’s Back to the Future, everyone!”

I’m overthinking it, of course. The season did its job, and I got sucked it, mainlining the whole thing in a weekend finally. (Comic-Con prep meant I got to it three weeks after release, which made it feel almost passé.) It was fun, thrilling and throwaway, just as everyone involved intended. To want it to be more, perhaps, might just be selfish.

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Just Sitting Where The Rainbow’s Ending

An utterly random thing, but the THR newsletter took a week off for the July 4 weekend, which meant that I didn’t do graphics for a week. I found that I missed it, as strange as that is to admit. When the following week rolled around, I had this moment of excitement of Yes, finally, it’s been forever. Because, apparently, “forever” is defined as “two weeks” in my head these days…

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Round Are Way

I didn’t expect to like Russell T. Davies’ Years and Years nearly as much as I do; in the years since his Doctor Who run, I’ve dropped away from his work because I soured so much on him during Who, which amplified all his tics and tropes to such a degree that it became difficult to see anything else. When Years and Years was announced, it looked like more of the same, with the gimmicky conceit — the series would fast forward through the next 15 years in six episodes — and a cast of familiar faces that had shown up in other RTD projects.

I was prepared to skip it, but the reviews when it aired in the UK were great, and I was in the mood for something else from a British perspective, having raced through Fleabag and a rewatch of the first season of No Offense. (Now, that show I need to write about at some point.) Plus, there it was, launching on HBO and I could simply just check out the first episode, so what was the harm…?

I was, I confess, not prepared. It does have a lot of the RTD tricks and cliches — he has a very particular view of families and how they work, and a love of pushing ideas into a cutesy absurdity as if he’s not fully prepared to commit to the underlying horror; he’s also breathtakingly sentimental at times — but there’s something winningly chilling about how quickly he takes everything to worst case scenarios and keeps pushing. The first episode offers nuclear apocalypse!  And it works, especially because the world continues on afterwards and people start underselling their own responses to the end of the world, even as — especially as — things get worse and worse around them.

That’s one of the things the show does really well; it starts with a nuclear bomb, then goes on to show that, really, that is the least of everyone’s worries, considering things that are actually taking place in the real world today. By the time you get to the fifth episode, where the US airing is now, it’s worryingly close to where the US is now. The “erstwhile,” indeed…

More than anything, the show’s mixture of writerly polemic about how screwed up we are (and how close to being more screwed, not screwed up, we are), kitchen sink drama, and belief that Northern accents denote sincerity and authenticity, reminds me of Threads, the post-nuclear drama of the 1980s, as well as other classic British TV dramas, like Boys from the Black Stuff. It’s all exceptionally watchable stuff, with moments of genuine insight and humor sitting next to over the top camp melodrama; it’s a show that argues that Russell T. Davies deserves to be talked about as one of British TV’s great dramatists again.

It’s also, oddly, a show about the future that feels curiously, unavoidably old-fashioned. But that contradiction just makes me like it more.