Tag: Newsletter That Isn’t A Newsletter

One of the kindnesses of the holidays is the space you get to think. My weeks aren’t normally known for this amount of time and space — and now I sound like Doctor Who, accidentally — but between the time off for Christmas and a reduced (slightly) workload this week because certain outlets are taking it easier for the week between Christmas and New Year, I’m finding myself with time to breathe again.

Admittedly, I made it worse for myself this year, committing to an Advent Calendar’s worth of content for the Wait, What? Patreon patrons, which seemed like a good idea at the time but ended up being far more work than I’d initially thought it’d be, to the point I felt like I’d somehow taken on an extra job by mistake ahead of Christmas. But I’ll get to that soon enough. This, instead of a regular entry, is something else: housecleaning.

I had two unfinished posts in draft in the blog here that I’m just going to throw up in their unfinished state, because why not? The first was unfinished because I literally couldn’t find the words, written after the Paris attacks back in November and the second because I couldn’t find the time, written two weeks ago. Here they are.

**

The Paris attacks were the kind of thing that are, literally, intended to dominate thoughts and derail everything else, and that certainly happened to me Friday through Saturday — I had deadlines that had were due after the news started breaking, and I found it almost impossible to write. I could hardly focus on what I was supposed to be writing about, never mind try to be entertaining, educational or any other aim I’m supposed to aspire to; I was too busy checking Twitter to find out what was going on, reading updates on The Guardian and feeling increasingly sick to my stomach about everything that was unfolding.

Unsurprisingly, I spent much of the weekend thinking about Paris and my own, limited, experiences there. I’ve only ever visited twice, and both trips were everything I could have wanted from them, and maybe a little more. Paris is a city that feels right to me, something that just kind of fitted where my head was both times I went. There was beauty and stillness and noise and an urban feel that I craved, both times.

Even before the events of Friday, I felt this odd urge to return for reasons I couldn’t quite put my finger on. My reasoning, when I try to explain it, sounds ridiculous, but it’s this: I remember, astonishingly clearly, this moment from being in Paris when I was 21 and having breakfast in a cafe that was filled with the sounds of the radio. The music sounded so amazingly alien to me — this would’ve been 1995, so the heights of Britpop, which was in many ways the way I defined myself back then — and it was a sign that, as much as I loved Paris, I was an outsider. These days, of course, it feels like a good percentage of the music I listen to at home is French — Camille, especially, of course, but also a lot of yé-yé and other bands and singers — and part of me feels as if I want to revisit the city now that the sounds have become part of my inner landscape.

Like I said, it sounds ridiculous, and yet…!

**

**

Such events throw us off, and make us feel more afraid for ourselves and others than we had been hours before. That’s what they’re there for. I’ve been reading a lot of coverage about the reaction, both from politicians and — well, regular folk, for want of a better way of putting t.

**

Yes, that’s how the November one ends, with “t” instead of “it.” It feels appropriate, don’t you think? It was a strange time for me; the Paris attacks hurt in a way that felt new and unusual for reasons I still can’t explain, and I was afraid and angry and all these emotions that wanted to get out but didn’t have a direction. So, instead, I abandoned that post and never came back to it.

The next one, though, was simply left because I had other things that demanded my time.

**

It’s taken awhile — it’s already December 14! — but I have finally gotten into something resembling the Christmas Spirit. I’m a little worried that it’s taken this long, because I used to be someone who’d happily be thinking about mistletoe and holly before December had even arrived. I remember being a teenager — maybe 13? I want to say it was in 1989, for some reason — and writing a diary in November, eagerly announcing that it was just 32 days to Christmas.

At the time, that seemed extreme (Hell, looking back, it feels embarrassing), but it should be pointed out that, in the UK, the holidays don’t start until December 1 at the earliest. There’s no Thanksgiving, after all, and that means no Santa to arrive at the end of a parade in late November and give you permission to get in the mood. Instead, my parents would patiently always remind me, you have to wait until at least the same month before getting excited about Christmas.

I have this half-memory, one of those things that’s as much a feeling as anything more coherent — and something that just doesn’t make sense when I sit down and actually try to unpick it in my head — that, one year, my parents didn’t get a tree and decorate the house until a couple of days before Christmas Eve. What I remember more than anything about this is the sense of frustration that somehow we had wasted so much of Christmas by being behind the times. How could that have happened? I thought, incredulous at the very notion that somehow so much of December could creepy by without being celebrated in an appropriate manner.

Which, in many ways, makes my behavior this year particularly… shameful? Ironic? Somewhere between the two?

I have good reasons for it, I promise. Things have been stupidly busy with real life issues like work, basement moving and planning and renovationing, and the like.

**

So, in the words of Dame David Bowie, where are we now? I like to think things are better. Christmas has come and gone, all too quickly — I really am sad I didn’t get to enjoy it more, but there were basements to empty and friends visiting and parties to attend and and and just too much to do during all that time — and the New Year beckons with its inevitable specter of disappointment when all the hopeful realize that, oh yes, January 1st doesn’t mean you actually transform into a whole new, hyper-competent superbeing, but remain the same person you always were.

For me, I’ve been reading a bunch — currently, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, the new Elvis Costello memoir that’s uneven but not unenjoyable — and trying to get my head on straighter as we head into the coldest, darkest part of the year. As I get older, I become more susceptible to the dark, I worry; the thrill of wandering around in dim early evenings is gone and I’m just grumpy about the fact that it doesn’t get light until after 8 in the morning right now. Once the holidays are over, there aren’t fairy lights and tinsel to distract me from what’s going on out there anymore, so I’ll have to be strong and try to get through it nonetheless.

**

Which reminds me of this, of course.

Ah, my youth.

**

Before I get to the New Year — and another couple days off! — there’s a dental appointment on Wednesday, because my planning is the worst. But after that, the sky is the limit, if by sky being the limit you mean “I’m going to try and get back to doing these weekly like I wanted to in the first place. Which means, of course, that real life will kick in about three weeks in. But for those three weeks…!

Happy Holidays, whoever reads this.

I’m blocked, somehow; it’s Monday morning and I have a lot of shit to do, and my brain isn’t responding to any of the usual tricks. So I’m writing this early — and I suspect I’ll continue to come back to it throughout the day — as a way of tricking myself into writing something in case that teaches me my lesson. I hate mornings like this, where the deadlines are hanging over my head, and I’m just “Come on brain, work, dammit” and things don’t come into play. And yet.

**

Here’s a drawing I did this weekend, based on a misunderstanding. Seeing as it’ll never get used for the purpose I thought it was intended for, I’m sharing it here. Took about 15 minutes, all told, because that’s all I had.

(So much white space at the bottom! Ah well.)

**

That trick worked; I wrote the above eight hours ago, and then wrote all the other things I had to between now and then. (I also made and ate both breakfast and lunch, as well as visited a neighbor’s house to let their dog out the back while they were at work, visited another neighbor to lend them a vacuum, and other assorted business, but that’s neither here nor there.) Now it’s the end of the day, and my mood has shifted from exhaustion at the day ahead to some kind of mix of relief that I got through the work part okay, and uncertainty about what I’m going to be doing this evening.

This was a strange weekend, which is adding to my unsettled mindset. Thanks to other people’s schedules, we ended up having to clear our basement of everything in two days, which sounds easy until you start realizing quite how much stuff is actually in a basement. I spend all of Saturday and all of Sunday (with the exception of meals) moving furniture, packing up shelves of things (tools, pottery equipment, gardening equipment, painting equipment, and so on), and just generally lifting things, which had the dual effect of literally exhausting my body — I was so achy afterwards that, Sunday morning, I honestly woke up because my body ached so much that turning over in my sleep provoked a sharp enough pain to stir me — and ruining a pair of pants, because I literally tore a hole in the ass as I bent down to lift something up.

What it didn’t do, though, was give me the mindspace to recover from the previous week. And worse, the meals for the weekend, with the exception of Saturday’s breakfast, were all socializing events. (Well, I didn’t have lunch either day, but that’s no surprise for me.) I was, in effect, “on” the entire time, and the cumulative effect of that was to leave me, this morning, just entirely done and wanting a day to myself, to let my brain drain of everything I’d just gone through and then fill back up with energy and ideas to face the week ahead.

I didn’t get that, of course. But maybe next weekend.

**

As I’m typing, there’s a Donald Trump rally going on where he apparently talked about the need to “close up” the Internet because it’s turning people against “us.” Quite who the “us” is in that statement isn’t clear to me — Trump supporters? Americans? Trump, I’m sure, would see no difference between the two, and neither would his supporters, which is but one of the problems with that whole thing.

(I am, I realized when the Scottish Independence debate was happening last year, astonishingly suspicious of patriotism; I can’t look at it without seeing the stirrings of xenophobia in there, even to a tiny degree. Patriotism relies on the “Them and Us” concept as much as any bigotry, after all, and that kind of thinking is always difficult for me to come to terms with. Ever since the General Election in the UK where the SNP swept into power in Scotland, I’ve felt far more removed from the country and the national identity than ever before. I literally feel pushed out, somehow.)

The notion of “closing off” the Internet in general is fascinating, however; for all its (many) flaws, the one thing that people have held close to their/our hearts about the Internet as The Great Hope is that it can and does democratize media and conversation — all those online have a voice, as much as that can seem horrible, overwhelming or frustrating at different times. “Closing off” the Internet, then, feels like a specifically anti-Internet idea, something that betrays the thing that we all believed in to some degree.

The more Trump says ridiculous, unbelievable, nasty things — today, he also said that all Muslims should be barred from the US, for the love of God — the more I think to myself, surely, surely this is the thing that will make people realize that it’s all gone too far and his support will fall apart. But, no, just the opposite happens: people rally around him and somehow, he continues to… well, be Donald Trump. It’s surreal, depressing and something that makes you want to drop out of paying attention to this kind of thing, except that to do so surrenders the world to those who support Trump in the first place.

All I can say is that I want common sense to win in the end, but let’s be honest; it’s politics. What is the likelihood of that happening, realistically?

**

And so, I’m going to try and get back into the swing of doing these Monday evenings again, every week. Between Thanksgiving planning and workloads and trying to write ahead on the Wait, What? Advent Calendar (Patreon supporters know of which I speak, because it’s for them alone), I’ve felt too scattered in the last few weeks to get it done, but I’ll try harder in future.

I’ll try harder to be kinder to myself, as well, and find some mental space to recharge and renew. It’s the holiday season, after all. We’re all supposed to be kind, right now.

I think, judging by the last few days, that we’re officially out of the part of fall here in Portland where it’s lovely weather: cold, and crisp, and gloriously sunny for the entire day. Oh, we’ve still got parts of that, sure — it was sunny earlier today for awhile, and the cold thing is certainly going on; it was 40 degrees when I woke up this morning — but the combination has slipped away and we’re headed into the slide towards winter, when everything’s darker and more wet, and it somehow feels more difficult to want to go outside for any reason, especially in the evening. It’ll be cold out there! And probably raining!

I feel like I’m noticing the weather more, this year; I felt like that was true during the summer, and it’s true now. There were moments in the summer when I’d just stop and look up in the air and the sky would be entirely empty and blue all around me, and everything felt so still. It would feel magical, in some way, that stillness and peace and the feeling of being so entirely in one moment out of nowhere. Right now, it’s a different feeling; something less still, but no less peaceful. I can’t describe it, not really. A sense of feeling particularly present, for want of a better way of putting it. I blame it on getting older, although “blame” isn’t the right way of putting it.

**

I read The Guardian‘s Best Albums of 2015 So Far list with a lot of interest this morning, in large part because I hadn’t heard of the majority of things on it. I’m a living cliche, I thought to myself; I’m one of those people who lost touch with music as I got older. I’ve been thinking a lot about music over the last few days, particularly the music of my youth — the Britpop era, or really, the Britpop ends era, 1995 through 1997 or 1998 — thanks to conversations I’ve been having on social media. Music was very much part of my life then; specific memories have soundtracks with such clarity that just isn’t the case anymore.

Part of that is that I was running with a very music-focused crowd, and it was the mid-90s with Britpop making all of us far more interested in music than we would’ve been even a few years earlier. Blur and Oasis releasing singles on the same day was a news event, somehow, which seems absolutely insane in retrospect. I defined myself through music — these are the bands I like, these are the sounds I listen to; this is the fashion I aspire to, as delivered by the bands, and so on.

What’s so interesting for me looking back is what happened as that broke down and fell apart. When Blur made Blur and Supergrass’s In It For The Money was, let’s be honest, a disappointment with the exception of three or four tracks. The feeling of needing to move on, and what I ended up moving on into. Somehow, I found bands that purposefully pushed elsewhere with their influences, and more importantly, pushed their fans towards those influences, so I could go from rifling through the 1960s British Invasion of the Small Faces and the Zombies to Sun-Ra and Steely Dan and the more out-there sounds peddled by Super Furry Animals and Primal Scream, or Googie Rene Combo, sampled and stolen for David Holmes’ “My Mate Paul.”

Those later bands weren’t the kinds that demanded the tribal devotion of an Oasis or a Blur, but they were more important to me, in the end.

**

Current reading: Kim Zetter’s Countdown to Day Zero, which is about the origins of the Stuxnet virus and the discovery of those origins by a bunch of anti-virus analysts who had no idea what they were getting themselves into. It’s a very enjoyable book, and was in my head when I saw the trailer for Spotlight, the new dramatization of the Boston Globe’s investigation into catholic sex abuse scandal back in 2003; in both cases, it’s people just doing their everyday jobs who end up in the middle of these amazingly dramatic, important world-changing events. It’s the origin story of our times, now — something that’s kind of interesting to me, because it speaks at once to a democratization of these kinds of narratives (No longer are you destined for greatness! You’re just working for the weekend!) and a weird pandering towards the audience (Hey, this could be you).

Hrm. Rambling.

**

Also been catching up with Doctor Who, which I’ve fallen entirely out of synch with. I’m in two minds about where the show’s at right now; on the one hand, it’s in this weirdly dark place that’s at odds with its stated “This is a kids’ show” purpose, but on the other, when semi-binged (I’m watching each two-parter as one continuous movie, albeit over a fragmented, extended period because I can’t carve out enough time to do otherwise), I’m really really digging the “Doctor has clearly seen Clara die and is trying to deal with his grief by running throughout time to have more adventures with her before she died” theme to the season, and Capaldi’s really working for me as the Doctor right now. So… mark me down as selfishly into it, but saddened that I’m probably contributing to the show’s decline, somehow.

**

I haven’t really written about Secret Convergence on Infinite Podcasts, which I really should have by now — it’s a podcast crossover featuring episodes of a bunch of favorite shows, and by now two of my three episodes have been released: the opening FanBros episode, and the super-fun Less Than Live with Kate or Die episode. Weirdly, the whole thing got written up in The Guardian the other day, which is… surreal? And wonderful? But mostly surreal? Comics podcasting will never be the same, apparently. Perhaps this will end up being the greatest legacy that I leave to the Internet, which I would actually be entirely okay with. I mean, before this, my legacy was pretty much being the source for a number of Wikipedia articles…

So let’s try this again, shall we?

I didn’t actually take last week off from writing this non-newsletter, despite what it looked like to outside eyes; instead, I wrote it as usual, and just as I was about to post it, everything disappeared. I’m not entirely sure what happened — all of a sudden, I had to log in again out of nowhere, and then when I did, everything was gone. This being the one place where I don’t write outside of the WYSIWYG window (even now!), that meant I had the option of saying fuck it and moving on, or starting over. I think I made the right choice. Anyway, what you missed was lots of pondering about social media in general and Twitter in specific, brought on by thoughts of what constitutes a “safe space” on the Internet these days. I didn’t come to any conclusions, so we’re probably better off all ’round that that didn’t come to anything.

**

This was in last week’s edition of Warren Ellis’ Orbital Operations newsletter, which also tied in with where my head was at, at the time:

[I]n a more fractionated and less operable digital-social world, maybe newslettering is the fallback into a functional tribal living. People used to complain about “walled garden” technologies that weren’t on the open web, but, ultimately, people like walled gardens. Choosing to tend a small communal garden is preferable to being pissed on for daring to walk outside, or letting just anybody in and dealing with them pouring flat lager on your bushes and shitting in the cabbages.

**

In the aftermath of all this, Bleeding Cool ran an exchange from a private email group for the purposes of… actually, I’m not entirely sure. Proving that there’s a smear campaign against the site, perhaps? But, of course, the exchange doesn’t prove any such thing, instead demonstrating that some people are concerned about the same thing and talking about it. Which… happens all the time, on a number of different topics.

The takeaway from the piece wasn’t the uncovering of a conspiracy, but that secret email spaces weren’t secret, if someone wanted to take that away from you. Which, I guess, we all knew already, because — and now I’m also thinking about the reported doxxing of Ku Klux Klan members’ personal information today, which turned out to be false info — there’s no such thing as a safe space online. And yet… and yet…

(The other takeaway from the Bleeding Cool story is that Bleeding Cool is petty and egotistical; the headline for the piece was even “Leaked, A Private Correspondence About Bleeding Cool,” underscoring the self-obsession of the whole thing. It’s not a good look for the site, especially as the subject that was being discussed was one of genuine concern — whether or not the former editor-in-chief of the site, who has now gone on to work as an editor at Dark Horse Comics, abused her position to downplay negative stories about Dark Horse in the waning days of her tenure. The combination of blanket dismissal and cries of paranoia really isn’t a good look for the site.)

**

On an entirely different note: there’s going to be a new Star Trek TV show, it was announced today — although “TV” is one of these terms that’s increasingly inaccurate: it’s a show that’ll premiere its pilot on television, then switch to web for the rest of the series. It’s news that’s at once a no-brainer (It’s Star Trek‘s 50th anniversary next year, after all; leverage that brand!) and surprising, mostly because it seemed like it would never happen, with the franchise having moved almost exclusively to the big screen. The response has been amusing, because I’ve seen countless people offer up suggestions on what happened after Star Trek: Voyager, the latest television series in terms of chronology from the mythology, and I’ve just been thinking oh my God, people, there are entire novel series that go beyond that, we’re past the Typhon Pact already. I am a nerd.

And yet, I love the Star Trek novels. Part of it is nostalgia — I read them as a teenager, before picking them up again relatively recently, thanks to the library — and part of it is simply that I love the expanded universe of it, the political nature of the books as they go on, watching the writers spin out entire franchises based on throwaway lines or unexplained plots, knowing they can get away with it because no-one but the hardcore fans are really paying attention.

Along those lines, I can share something that amused me greatly about Star Trek fandom and licensed tie-ins recently; I was reading  The Autobiography of James T. Kirk, because I am a nerd, and it’s exactly what it says on the tin: a re-telling of Trek mythology from the point of view of the fictional Captain of the equally fictional U.S.S. Enterprise. The best part of the whole book, which is pretty lackluster overall, is the decision on behalf of someone in the production chain to declare that Star Trek V: The Final Frontier an apocryphal tale.

Actually, that’s not true; what’s great is the way in which the book spends a lot of time and energy not only telling you that Star Trek V didn’t “happen,” but also making fun of the movie. The conceit is that Star Trek V was a movie created within the fictional Star Trek universe, and as such is filled with inaccuracies and outright dumb moments that our real heroes would never have suffered through. It’s such a very strange, very fannish impulse that it was far funnier than it had any right to be, and for very different reasons than what was likely intended.

Thinking about it again, it’s petty and unnecessary in a similar way to the Bleeding Cool thing: an exertion of so much effort than saying “Oh, I’m not bothered at all” and playing it cool comes off as unconvincing and forced. Perhaps this isn’t just about the Internet and social media, email groups and whatever else we get from technology. Perhaps we’ve never really had the safe spaces I imagine.

I’m writing this while waiting for the new trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens to drop, because that’s just how I roll. Well, that and writing things like “that’s just how I roll” while cringing inside, thinking no, I’m too old and too white and too non-bro to even say that as some kind of arch-joke, what have I become to myself. Suffice to say, my attention may be wandering at times during this one.

(I’m waiting for it for work-related reasons, I should add; otherwise, I’d go off and have a life and watch it later.)

**

As if my complaints last week that I was getting old wasn’t a sign that I’m getting old, the fact that I woke up on Wednesday morning having somehow pulled a muscle in my foot while asleep, making walking particularly painful and difficult definitely rammed that message home. To this day, I have no idea what actually happened to my foot. Tuesday, it was fine, Wednesday, putting my weight on it was as if someone was trying to crush it under a particularly heavy rock.

The strangest part of the whole experience, though, came on Saturday. By that point, the pain had essentially faded to “occasional twinge when you least expect it, but it’s more or less okay really” status, but I couldn’t stop limping as if it was as painful as ever. It was muscle memory, I guess, but the strangest example of it I’ve ever experienced — in the space of just three days, my right leg had apparently forgotten how to walk normally, and was instead doing this pre-emptively protective thing so that I wouldn’t put my entire weight on my heel entirely unconsciously. I spent the next day or so purposefully thinking and this is how we walk, step, step, step, step every time I had to go somewhere. Chalk this up to the ever-shrinking attention span of today’s generation, etc. etc.

**

Except, of course, I’m not “today’s generation”; I spent a bunch of time last week thinking about the whole Millennial thing, prompted by writing about the whole millennial pledge kerfuffle for Wired, and ended up in some kind of strange mindset thinking about how generations actually work, anyway. I was surprised to see so many millennials blame boomers for the state of the world on social media, and completely ignore “Generation X,” who — according to the Internet, at least — were born in the mid-60s through the late-80s. Aren’t they (we) the ones who’ve messed things up for the millennials most recently? Shouldn’t we be bearing the brunt of the anger and cynicism and suspicion and all the other bad things from today’s kids? I mean, it’s Generation X that’s in charge now, surely (Maybe Boomers are still owning a bunch of shit and all, but isn’t it more likely to be the 40-and 50-year-olds who’re actually making the bad decisions on a practical level, instead of the 60- and 70-year-olds? Or is the idea that things were already so screwed by the boomers that by the time the Gen X’ers got their hands on stuff, it was already ruined?

I could be wrong, and I’m sure that many would be happy to tell me why I am, given the chance —  I love seeing on Twitter when people tell me that I’m stupid and wrong and how could I think that because they’ve thoughtfully tagged me with their disdain, he lied — but I feel like Generation X has (ironically, considering the self-obsession it displayed back in the day) become this oddly forgotten generation that’s being forgiven for all kinds of shit purely because people are too eager to blame even-older folks. Yay…?

**

Still no Star Wars trailer, for those keeping track at home. (I mean, by the time you’ll read this, you’ll have watched it seven times and gotten all the nostalgia out of your system. Or, considering how masterfully the teasers to date have traded entirely on the “It’s just like it was when you were a kid, honest” appeal, perhaps that should be getting nostalgia into your system. But still.)

**

Talking of Twitter, as I just was, I have that open right now to give me a head’s up on when the trailer is out, and it’s fascinating to watch the Canadian election results come in with landslide results like this. I’m reminded of the Scottish election results earlier this year when the SNP just decimated their opponents, winning all but three seats in the races they were running in, but without my inherent distrust of the SNP.

(Why do I have such a distrust of the SNP? I can’t really explain it, beyond believing that the line between “patriotism” and “xenophobia” is almost impossibly fine and being really freaked out by the zealotry with which SNP supporters talk about the party. I’m almost jealous of those who do believe in the cause that much, to be honest; I wish I had that much faith in any political party, but I don’t.)

This does feel like a year of “shock” election results, though; the Canadian results, the Scottish results, even Jeremy Corbyn’s landslide win as the leader of the UK Labour party. There’s something in the air, even if I’m not necessarily sure if it’s the kind of leftwing swing that’ll cross over elsewhere — mind you, Bernie Sanders is a lot more popular than anyone expected, so maybe so. It does make me wonder what next year’s US elections are going to be like, though. I expect emotional carnage, if nothing else.

**

Recent reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. Recent listening: Moondog’s 1969 album Moondog, which remains really amazing. It makes me realize I need to find some more wonderful classical and jazz to listen to when I’m in the mood.

I mean, seriously, you guys.

**

Still no Star Wars — I honestly believed it was dropping at 5:30, but it’s now almost an hour later and no sign — but I’m going to wrap this up and post it, because I’m approaching 1,000 words and that’s more than enough of me going on, even with some Moondog to keep it light. If anyone is reading this, I hope you’re doing well, and if you’re not, then at least the end of the bad times are in sight.

I’m old.

This isn’t something that happened overnight, of course; it’s not like you wake up in the morning and bang, you’re suddenly old and you have no idea how it happened — unless you’re a character in a high concept comedy from the 1980s, but how often is that the case? — but that’s what it felt like, somehow. It was my birthday last week, my 41st, and there was something about that number that stuck in my head for days before and after the day itself: 41. That felt old, somehow, even older than 40 (well, obviously, although what I mean is “more than just a year older” — substantially older in some existential way I can’t explain). I was 41! It was, some very vocal part of my subconsciousness has decided, all downhill from here.

With my mortality buzzing in the back of my head all week (“I’m making a meatloaf for dinner. That seems like an age appropriate thing to do, right?”), this passage from current reading The Accidental Universe by Alan Lightman struck me:

I don’t know why we long so for permanence, why the fleeting nature of thing so disturbs. With futility, we cling to the old wallet long after it has fallen apart. We visit and revisit the old neighborhood where we grew up, searching for the remembered grove of tres and the little fence. We clutch our old photographs. In our churches and synagogues and mosques, we pray to the everlasting and eternal. Yet, in every nook and cranny, nature screams at the top of her lungs that nothing lasts, that it is all passing away. All that we see around us, including our own bodies, is shifting and evaporating and one day will be gone. Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?

As you can see, I like light, frothy reading. (In my defense, I’m juggling this book with Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl and Diane Ackerman’s The Human Age, which feels like it falls somewhere between the two.) But instead of finding the above depressing or more proof that we are all trending towards a sad, tragic end and ultimate meaninglessness, I found myself taking some solace in the passage. It’s an odd thing, but I find it comforting to remind myself how small I am in the grand scheme of things.

If nothing else, 41 is nothing when you start thinking about time on a cosmic scale.

**

Yes, I’m back writing here. I don’t know if this is a thing or just a one-off. I found myself reading Warren Ellis’ Orbital Operations letter last night and thought, “I’d like to do that kind of personal, meandering writing again,” and suddenly remembered, oh, right; I have a website for that very purpose that I’ve not posted on for months. Things got in the way, as things generally do — personal and professional, such as me writing almost 8,000 words on Friday, which is a lot, but also not unheard of these days, for reasons that perplex me — but I should really try to do more with this site again, somehow. What form that’ll take, I’m unsure, because every time I think I’ve come up with a format, I burn out after awhile and then am left thinking “oh, what now.” So, instead, I’ll leave it up to seeing how I feel for awhile.

**

Scenes from Portland skies last night.

I like October.

**

I wasn’t at New York Comic Con this weekend, to the surprise of a great deal of publishers and PR folk, judging by my emails. (I don’t know why; I’ve never actually managed to do that show to date.) At first, I was upset about that — I had hoped to go this year, at one point, and had made quasi plans in my mind that then met realities like “paying for the travel and the accommodation and and and,” with a bunch of things knocking it totally out of consideration about a month or so back. As the tweets and the social medias started buzzing about the show, I had this feeling of jealousy and missing out that lasted exactly as long as it took for the first “There Are Too Many People Here” comments to emerge, and the stories like this one, before I remembered that I hate crowds.

The lack of big news stories to come out of the show made me feel better about not being there, as well; if I’d gone on someone else’s dime — which is pretty much the only way I’ll go to a show like this these days, although I’m thinking that Emerald City Comic Con might be something I’ll do properly next year just for me — I would have wanted to get, if not a scoop, then at least some stories. But NYCC this year, there weren’t really any stories, and that void made me feel oddly relieved that I hadn’t asked someone else to pay for me to get there, if that makes sense.

I would suggest that the show was a dud for the combination of “too busy” and “no big news,” but I’ve seen enough comments from those who attended who really loved their experience to know that that’s not the case — instead, I think it’s one of those things where, literally, you had to be there for it to have any appeal. I’m in two minds about that, because part of me thinks “So, it’s Emperor’s New Clothes conventioneering, then?” while also wondering, isn’t that the best kind of convention, where those who make the effort/pay the money to make it get the best experience from the whole thing?

One of these days, someone is going to work out how to do a virtual comic convention properly, and then it’ll all change again.

**

For the last week, this has been on constant repeat in my head. No matter what I do, I cannot get it out of there. In case you’re not in the same boat, well, now you can be.

(It’s specifically the Broadway cast version that’s in my head, which I couldn’t find on YouTube, but it’s also had me thinking about musicals and musical arrangements and dynamics and things that make no sense in words, but go along in the weird visual synesthesia of my brain and music.)

**

Apparently, I should do brain dumps more often. I’m over 1,000 words already? Holy crap. I haven’t even written about my new favorite podcast Pod for America yet, or my thoughts on the new Doctor Who season or being part of Secret Convergence on Infinite Podcasts or anything like that. Well, maybe if I do another one of these sometime. For now, it’s almost 6pm and I’ve been at the computer for far too many hours and there’s dinner to make. Time to shut up and post.