I Digress
Blogs.
Remember when blogs were a thing?
I know, I know. At this point even remembering when Tony Soprano said, “‘Remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation” is over a decade old. Remember how good “The Sopranos” was? And how everyone could just enjoy it without needing to construct a whole Golden Age of Television narrative around it? At some point I will expand on my whole “The Golden Age of Television is a bullshit conceit college graduates in the culture industry came up with to make themselves feel better about watching TV instead of reading books” thesis, but incisive commentary like that is why newsletter platforms have created a premium tier, so I will wait until I’ve figured out a pricing scheme to embark upon such labor.
But what I was going to say was—and I guess we might as well acknowledge that if you are subscribed to this newsletter, unless you’ve made a terrible mistake (which is not to say that subscribing to this newsletter is not a terrible mistake in and of itself, just that those of you who are the people who remember blogs did it to yourselves deliberately, and anyone who doesn’t remember blogs must have been involved in some bizarre cut-and-paste mix-up where they wound up subscribed to a newsletter full of dyspeptic nostalgia with top notes of anguish and despondency; my recommendation in either case is that you unsubscribe. Incidentally, and I know we are wandering fairly far afield at this point but I promise that I will be here to guide us out at the end of it, the way that Substack works is (and while I assume one can change the settings, those of you who know me and my astounding ability to bollix up anything even remotely adjacent to technology, like, say, can openers, know that I am deeply averse to messing around with settings lest things somehow end up worse than the default horror I have resigned myself to remaining mired in) whenever someone unsubscribes I get a notification with the subject line, “Email disabled for Journal of American Despair,” which is a nice, ego-salving way of saying “THIS PERSON DOESN’T WANT TO HEAR THE IDIOT THINGS YOU HAVE TO SAY ANYMORE EVEN THOUGH THEY ARE COMPLETELY FREE OF CHARGE.” It basically puts the decision someone has made to keep your voice away in the passive tense. “It’s not you,” says Substack in a gentle, soothing tone, “it’s their email. It’s been disabled.” Anyway, every unsubscribe thus far has come within seconds of an edition going out, before the email disabler has had a chance to read whatever I’ve spent days digging through my soul to deliver, so it somehow feels like they’ve subconsciously spent the whole week wanting to unsubscribe but not really remembering to do it until the new one comes in, at which point they get the satisfying feeling of crossing something off of their mental to-do list. So if nothing else I am giving readers a quick hit of accomplishment every week. What have you done for anyone lately? Okay, we’re about to come to the point where Em Dash Junction intersects back to the main block of text. Unless you have my astounding inability to forget you are probably a little cloudy as to where we were before we wandered off the main path, so I will just remind you that I had been talking about blogs, and the memory thereof. Yes, that’s right, you remember now. Okay, ready? Here we go—if you remember when blogs were a thing, you will remember one of the most endearing (initially; like everything else it very quickly became a convention, an annoyance, an object of mockery and finally, something forgotten by everyone but those of us right here, right now) entries in the early days of blogging was the “Apologies for not blogging lately” post, which these days would no doubt be an occasion by which the blogger could humblebrag about all the fabulous distractions in their amazing life that were keeping them from sharing their wisdom with you, but back in the days when everyone was doing it for free and had no idea that it might at some point turn into something by which a living might be made was actually the real result of being busy with the work that paid whatever money we were making then. There was a genuine feeling of regret, of letting down the team, because at that point bloggers were basically blogging for each other and everyone felt a sense of connection with people they might or might not have met in person but were in some sort of constant contact with, and the buzz of discovering a tribe of like-minded people you had always hoped existed but never really knew how to find was so pure and bright that you wanted to keep the conversation going as long as you could. (A cynic would say this is because you knew, or at least some part of you did, that eventually the buzz would wear off and you would realize that the new friends you made were just as disappointing as the ones you had already in (and there are all sorts of controversies about this phrase as both concept and location, some of which I will weigh in on at a later, better-compensated date) real life, and a misanthrope would say that given how things turned out the cynic was more right than he knew, but as someone who is equal parts cynic and misanthrope I will just suggest that while obviously both of those things are correct they are not germane to the point I am making here and if this newsletter had a decent editor and was something more than an exercise to get me to write a thousand words a week so that eventually I could slice a large enough number out of them to turn into a book they would be cut entirely (the cynical/misanthropic dismissals of early blogger friendship, I mean) and we would simply return to the point about “apologies for not blogging lately.”) The “apologies for not blogging lately” post was the version of really having to go to the bathroom but being afraid if you got up to do it that by the time you got back the conversation would have died and people would be making plans to go to another bar altogether.
In any event, (and if, by an inexplicable idiocy on the part of the publishing industry, I am somehow able to assemble my writings into some sort of collection, In Any Event would be an amazing title, given how astoundingly annoying all the digressions are and how frequently I need to make use of that phrase to rescue the narrative from another one of them) the charm of “apologies for not blogging lately” came from how earnest it was. We tend to abjure earnestness these days, most of the time because it comes from all the wrong people in support of all the wrong things, but also because, for those of us who remember blogs, it reminds us of a time when what we read on The Internet was indeed genuine and had no motives other than to connect with a group of people who shared the same sensibilities and desires, whose interests intersected with ours and who marveled as much as we did at the possibilities that had suddenly opened up for us. On The Internet of today, where everything eventually becomes “11 Times Meghan Markle’s Royal Baby Bump Game Of Thrones Dog Meme,” we are rightly suspicious of anything that seems even slightly eager, because we have been burned so many times before and are all too aware that their writer is trying to turn us into a click, or an affiliate dollar, or the audience for an exercise to write a thousand words a week so that eventually they can slice a large enough number out of them to turn into a book. It makes me sad to remember what we’ve lost, but it is also nice to recall it every now and again, most specifically on Tuesdays when it comes time to put this newsletter together and I can’t think of anything to write about and am tempted to say something like “everything’s been so busy lately, apologies for not newslettering this week.” Things have not been so busy lately. The only thing going on here is despair, and who would subscribe to a newsletter about that? Given the number of disabled emails I expect to get after this one, fewer and fewer people each time.
Okay, that’s all I’ve got. I actually had some thoughts today about Twitter and how everyone who is trying to limit their use of it sounds EXACTLY like an alcoholic does when he tells himself he will only have two drinks, with dinner, on weekends, with a glass of water in between each, and nothing stronger than wine, but I don’t want to be the guy who goes on about Twitter all the time. Ditto alcoholism. Given what happened here this week I want to promise you that when the actual newsletter comes out for real (this is not the real newsletter, by the way) it will be considerably tighter than what you’ve been accustomed to thus far. Although that will be the premium tier; my plan to get money out of you guys is to threaten you with unedited ramblings for free and brief, cogent epiphanies on hopelessness (here’s one I’ve been sitting on: “Everyone wishes they were dead but nobody wants to die.” It needs some workshopping, I know, but that is the kind of thing I cannot really accomplish without being fully funded) in exchange for a couple dollars a week. It seems like a good deal, right? Anyway, thank you for your attention. Although if you made it all the way through I am more than a little concerned.