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A Personal Announcement

So, last week I started a new full time job; my first in more than a decade. I’m both excited and nervous about this.

Excited because, well, it’s exciting: I’m somewhere I want to be, working on material that I want to work on, and with editorial support to do what feels like it’s going to be good work. And it’s a staff position, something I haven’t had for more than a decade at this point — although both THR and Wired were long term freelance gigs that felt like staff positions, in their own way — which brings with it not only a sense of security and stability, but also a guaranteed income on a monthly basis, healthcare benefits, and paid time off. Even just typing that, I can feel the tension of the freelance hustle fading off my shoulders just a little. That, in itself, is exciting.

I’m also nervous, though, because it has been more than a decade since I’ve been staff, and because being staff has responsibilities and requirements that I’m not used to at this point, not just yet. I’m nervous because I want to do a good job and convince those who hired me that they made the right decision, and because I want to do a good job just to do a good job, that that’s a reward in and of itself. (Of course.) I’m nervous because this is, ultimately, something new and uncomfortable, and no matter how exciting I find it, anything new and uncomfortable is almost certainly going to leave you a little bit nervous if you care about it in any way.

2022 has been an entirely unexpected year in countless ways so far, and we’re barely halfway through. This is just the latest twist I didn’t see coming just a couple months ago, but it’s a rarity in that it’s not a disaster that I have to survive and recover from. Or, at least, I hope it isn’t.

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And The Drop Beat Sounds Like This

I’ve been thinking about mixtapes, recently. Not in the sense that the term is currently used — I’m not about to drop my debut and reveal previously unknown skill on the mic, I’m sad to say — nor, really, in the same nostalgic sense that many have about choosing the perfect tracks and putting them in the right order, so as to convince your target audience of your desired message; instead, I’ve been thinking about the actual, physical act of making those tapes in the first place. The sitting down and building the mix, song by song, hitting record on each and every track.

(Not every mixtape had some deep message behind it, of course; I can remember making tapes for myself and others that had no meaning deeper than these songs are cool, maybe you’ll like them too and that was more than enough. Of course, plenty of that tapes I made did have ulterior motives, because that was the language we all shared and spoke, even if it was an entirely unstated agreement between us all at the time.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about the actual act of making the tapes. The fact that I’d choose the songs — taking great care to sequence them right, listening to the start of each potential new track to convince myself that it fit — with great care, and then hit the pause button to start recording in time for the song to start. I’ve been thinking about how all of this was live, which meant that any mistake — a skip in the record, the CD jumping, whatever — was part of the tape itself, and how that didn’t feel as scary then as it somehow does now, in an age of making playlists digitally with everything clean and controlled. 

There was an element of… chaos, perhaps…? An element of surrender to the process, acceptance that messiness and imperfection was part of the plan, that was central to making a mixtape back in the day. A lack of control but a comfort with that, too. I need to get my head back to that space again, I think. Sometimes a record skips; it can still sound like music.

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And In Health

The last week has been a reminder, not that I needed one, that Covid stalks the world at large; in the space of a few days, my best friend and his wife tested positive, even as Chloe’s grandparents and the nine-year-old (who’s spending the summer with them) did the same. Two days after that, a booster shot laid both Chloe and myself out entirely, both of us feeling entirely sick just as the result of a quick vaccination shot. Illness is, as has been the case for the last two and a bit years, all around us.

It’s not as if I’d ever really forgotten that, per se; I still wear my mask almost every time I leave the house — I might leave it off if I’m just walking the dog, and expecting that I’m going to be keeping my distance from everyone else, and in an open-air space — and I barely go anywhere that isn’t the grocery store, especially now that the kid is on summer break and doesn’t need to be walked to school each morning. I am, on some level, always conscious that Covid is out there, preparing to strike and fearful of that possibility. And yet.

There’s something I’ve been thinking of, with regards to the virus, lately, and it feeds into all this: the idea that it’s become an inevitability that we’ll all get it (again). I’d normalized it, made it into this thing like a cold where it’s at once unavoidable and also not a big deal, helped by… I don’t know, a society that’s sending that message more every day, I guess. But then people you love get it, and there’s this moment of worrying, what if they have a really bad case? What if they die? and it becomes scary in a way it hasn’t felt in a long time again. You remember how big and dangerous it feels, after all.

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Cheap Holidays In

Having recently watched — and, seemingly unlike many critics, really enjoyed — Danny Boyle’s Pistol, the TV adaptation of Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones’ memoir of the origins of the band, I’ve been thinking about the Sex Pistols reunion of the 1990s, and what it meant at the time.

I can’t remember if the band got back together for just a couple of gigs or a full-blown tour, but I remember that whatever it was, it went under the umbrella title of Filthy Lucre as a way of deflecting and embracing the obvious criticism that it was all being done for the money.

It was, of course — me and some friends pooled our dwindling resources to buy tickets to give to my best friend at the time, who was a massive Pistols fan, and I can remember feeling at once impressed and terrified by how expensive those tickets were; this was all of the Pistols selling out by getting back together, but ensuring that they were selling their credibility for as much of your money as possible. “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated,” indeed.

Traditionally, I’m cool on the idea of selling out in general: there’s usually more behind the situation than anyone else sees, and sometimes you simply have to do whatever to keep the lights on. The very idea of “selling out” feels as if it comes from people who’ve never truly worried about money, overvaluing a concept of artistic freedom they’ve made up in their minds. With the Pistols, though…

I remember there being legitimate anger at the band for doing it, for tarnishing their reputations in that kind of way. It reminds me of much of the objections to Pistol, for that matter — this notion that the Sex Pistols are somehow sacrosanct and should be deified for their role in the punk scene, instead of treated like real people. How dare they get back together, and reveal themselves as imperfect? Why couldn’t they just allow the legend that had built around them to remain unsullied?

Except that was the point, maybe even as much as the money. I remember the friend telling me, after the gig, that it was fun but also disappointing, because they could play their instruments and it felt like a regular concert. It was the final true punk move they could make: making their most devoted fans face up to the fact that they’d been jobbing musicians all along, instead of antichrists here to change the world.

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And The Tenderness I Feel

My latest obsession may be a book I bought roughly a quarter of a century ago, and what my memory has done to it. It’s not the book itself — The Mystery Play, a hardcover graphic novel by Grant Morrison and Jon J. Muth that has pretty much faded from institutional memory, arguably for good reason — that’s important here, I hasten to add, but specifically the actual physical copy I bought of it, all those years ago.

(I just went and looked it up; this was all closer to 30 years back. The book came out in 1994. I’m old, now.)

I was a student at the time, and one who didn’t have a lot of money. New hardcover books weren’t something I bought on a regular basis if ever, but I was a massive Morrison fan, so the prospect of an all-new Morrison book — and painted by Muth, whose work I’d loved for years! — proved irresistible. I plunked down my money on the counter and took away the shrink wrapped copy from the local comic shop excitedly.

I remember going almost immediately to a local coffee shop, where I opened the shrink wrap nervously but excitedly, and discovered that the dustcover had one small, clean cut across the front, as if someone had sliced it open with a razor blade. I knew, on some level, that it must have been a printing defect, because the book had been shrink wrapped, but still; the cut fascinated me. Even as I read through the book, I’d pause periodically and close the book, running my finger over the cut as if it had a deeper meaning.

Remembering the book for the first time in literally decades the other week, I realized that I couldn’t recall anything about the plot of The Mystery Play, or what Muth’s art for the book looked like, but I could (and did) remember everything about that cut: the size, the placement on the dustcover, my need to repeatedly look at it, study it. My relationship with that book is, somehow, actually a relationship with that cut.

What that says about me, I don’t know nor care to find out.

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It’s Brilliant, Anyway

Every July 4, I remember my first Independence Day as an American citizen, and the way in which circumstances and my bosses at the time had conspired to make sure that, not only would I actually be working that day, but that I’d lose one of my regular days off that week in addition for reasons to arcane to articulate beyond, simply, “it came down to them or me, and they chose them.”

I remember the stinging feeling at the time, the sense of injustice that I felt with such clarity and sublimated anger, about the fact that I was finally a fully-fledged, naturalized and the whole shebang, citizen of the United States of America, and yet here I was being forced to work on the biggest damn holiday of the year that wasn’t Christmas or Thanksgiving — even though, back then, I didn’t really get Thanksgiving on any emotional level. (I still don’t, not really; I’m pretty convinced it’s something you need to have grown up with in order to fully appreciate, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Looking back at it today, I feel… embarrassed, perhaps…? about the whole thing, and how self-righteous I was in my upset. How naive I was, too, in being surprised that a decision had been made to put me to work instead of others sacrificing their own time off, and how self-centered it was to think that my first July 4th as an American citizen meant anything to anyone that wasn’t me. It’s something I go back to in my head periodically, as a reminder to keep myself in check and try to keep a sense of perspective about whatever’s happening to me: do you really want this to happen again? and so on.

I didn’t realize it at the time, and wouldn’t for a few years, but thinking about it now, being forced to work on a day you want to spend as a vacation, and being reminded that your bosses are your bosses and not your friends feels like a central part of the American experience, sadly. It was, if nothing else, unfortunately fitting.

Happy Independence Day.

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Don’t Fence Me In (The Self-Indulgent Version)

It’s a sad reality of my career that I’ve learned to work through emotional distress and trauma; a sad reality of my life and previous marriage, as well, in that work became a respite and relief from a relationship that was not good for me, yet I felt locked inside.

There used to be a skill — a term I use loosely, and arguably utterly incorrectly— I had, wherein I was able to tune out everything bad around me and just concentrate on the words in front of me, anchoring myself in whatever deadlines I had and whatever the subject matter I was to focus on no matter how turbulent all the other stuff was.

I was thinking of this almost wistfully last week, writing in the wake of the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the Roe v. Wade ruling and end the national right to abortion. It was news I struggled to come to terms with — intellectually, sure, I understood what was happening, but as soon as I tried to comprehend what had been taken from people, and the pain and misery that would come from the decision, my brain started to swim — and, try as hard as I might, I couldn’t stop it from taking over my brain and preoccupying me all day.

(That Chloe was visiting family at the time didn’t help; I wanted to be there with her as she processed the news, too, I wanted us to process it together, to talk about it and get angry and sad and scared together. Doing it alone and through texts and calls felt unnatural and awkward.)

I tried to compartmentalize, and put everything in a box as I met my deadlines, and I couldn’t; it wouldn’t fit. It wasn’t just the Supreme Court news, really, but the accumulation of everything that had been happening in the past few weeks. I tried to eke out what I could to meet my deadlines, but my heart was barely in it.

It’s an evolution for me as a person, this new inability to shut away unprocessed feelings; it’s something new that I know is good in the long run. It’s just not particularly good for my workload.

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Wherever, Whatever

I’ve recently been seeing the word “woolgathering” in use again, in a number of places. It’s something that I never heard used as a kid, but read more than once; I’m pretty sure that Judge Dredd would say it on occasion, in one of those moments where the quasi-transatlantic nature of the comic became all-too-visible. (I mean, come on; what tough future New York cop would describe himself as woolgathering?)

For those unfamiliar with the term — I suspect that’s most anyone who might chance upon this post — it’s dictionary definition is straightforward: “indulgence in idle fancies and in daydreaming; absentmindedness.” To woolgather is, I guess, just meandering around mentally, thinking of whatever comes into your head and following it wherever it goes. It’s what I do here all the time.

I’ve become a fan of woolgathering lately; or, rather, it’s something I’ve learned to appreciate more fully. My current workload requires me to create cohesive, extended arguments on a daily basis, to research things and excavate the truth, and then curate everything into the most easily-understandable, almost certainly briefest version of events for whoever happens to be reading. It’s something that, to put it mildly, requires a fair amount of concentration.

At the same time as doing that, though, I need to be thinking about what’s next — planning future pitches, paying attention to whatever might be fodder for a story for another outlet, or whatever. My brain doesn’t get the luxury of solely concentrating on one thing for any extended period of time, because there’s always, always, the next thing to think about. So, I gather wool. I let my mind go where it wants, every now and again, and see what happens.

It’s an odd idea, to consider allowing your mind to wander to be not only a skill that you can develop, but one that can be productive. In both cases, though, that’s true for me. Woolgathering has become a necessary part of my process, even if the name for it sounds particularly casual and rustic.