The promise of wear.

| 2025-04-05

In the blue morning hours before the household is awake, I am here with a new tool.

I picked it up just yesterday, a sleek and slim new machine for writing and making music that replaces the lovely old laptop that was the color of a new penny that I gave to my mother after her own computer reached the age where it continually asked for updates that were no longer forthcoming. I’ve been contentedly working on the more modern laptop issued by my employer, but with security rules tightening after a recent cyberattack, I decided to leave that machine to its intended tasks and be a dreary consumer, chasing the hottest new thing.

It is a new thing, too, something I unpacked on the inauspicious bench seat of my old pickup truck, extracting it from glassine and tissue paper and just looking at it there in the late afternoon sunlight. These things are defiantly the product of a mature design industry, in the same way the early typewriters, as black and glossy as a nineteenth century treadle sewing machine decorated with a threadlike floral pinstriping and a logo in hand-laid gold leaf turned from trend to trend as a once-rare thing to a given, leaving us with the elegant simplicity of a mid-sixties Olivetti portable that stood as a perfect, functional machine for transcription.

It’s a splendid thing, almost, but not quite, black in a turn from my usual taste in things, in part because a manufacturer that once celebrated wild color as the antidote to the tiresome beige of the end of the last century has settled into cynical adulthood and product lines that now echo the grim monotony of the cars we drive in shades long-haul truckers describe as “asphalt,” “cement,” “fog,” and other sad shades of grey, beige, and don’t-stand-out muted versions of vivid colors.

I picked this shade precisely because of all the reviews that expressed concern that it would show fingerprints, marks, scratches, and wear, precisely because I’m not bothered by any of that, and moreso because I love the way well-used tools start to look well-used in the way people who have lived come to look like people who have lived. My brother lent me his old camera after upgrading through several iterations of an evolving technology, and I delight in the way the pristine sheen of its newness has worn away at the edges and corners in his hands as he chased down fantastic photo after fantastic photo. Now it’s my turn, and I’m a part of that object’s history, something to scratch and scuff it and to add to the story it tells even when it’s just sitting on a shelf, waiting for the next outing.

It’s silly, I know, to always be so wrapped up in the idea that things that come to us with the delicious newness of something untouched, like the velvety grey of a new puppy who’s only just met the world, and then go on to show that they, like me, have lived and seen and passed through moment after moment and times that have left a mark, yet, here I am, hands on the keys of something new. I revel in the promise of any new tool, because it lets me feel like it’s the start of something, even though it’s all been the same long, complicated trip through things.

Today is new. Tomorrow will show the brush marks, footprints, wear, tear, and scars.

It’s perfect.

© 2025 Joe Belknap Wall

The rain comes.

| 2025-02-01

footprints in melting snowI trudged back to the house from the coop with a few eggs in my basket and noted, as I crunched through the swiftly melting snow, that I could find my characteristic treads with their waffle gridwork marking my trudge ahead of me, mixed through with Daisy’s paw prints that have persisted after her by a couple weeks now, but even then, I could feel the mist turning to flecks and drops of rain, and felt a knot of tension just south of my ribcage.

Soon all this will be gone.

Soon the rain will come and the world will continue turning over, the endless cycle cycling through to the next new moment and the next and the next.

I haven’t been able to pin the shape of how I feel lately except as a color to the world, or maybe a colorlessness. It’s fair, of course, in that the world around us has turned to a river of shit, sent downstream to drown anyone with a soul by a cadre of bullies guffawing at their stunts and hijinks even as the world starts to suffer under their muddy torrent of bad ideas, but it’s not that. I grew up under the pink thumbs of bullying monsters, and watched the waves come and go. It’s only new in its naked obscenity, where the murderous past still had enough remaining life in those crackling burned-out souls for the monsters to hide some of what they are.

It’s not that, other than that’s the color of the background, the steady murky orange of the skies over burning oilfields choking under a worn-out sun.

It’s not that. (more…)

Behind the curtain.

| 2024-12-08

There’s something so delicious about outgrowing things.

I think we’re meant, or at least well-trained, to lament those moments when the treasured things we valued lose their gold-plating and are revealed to be something lesser than we thought they were. The eternal becomes the merely good for its time, and we have to think about why, exactly, something seemed so amazing to our younger eyes…but this feels less bad for me as I get older in the same way that opening a can of almost textureless factory-made “ravioli” in a sugary orange sauce loses its comfort and becomes more of a moment for a satisfyingly rueful chuckle at how low my standards once were.

I’ve been indulging myself with some comfort reads, as well, revisiting old and beloved books for a little of that satisfying feeling one gets from retreading old paths where great stuff lies, and I’ve largely been finding new details tucked into the old like little notes pencilled into the margins of a book that inspires such annotations. It’s a task intentionally not taxing, and a pursuit to wage a proxy war of the thought-out against a stretch of external idiocy, but I find, more and more, that I reveal more than just another strata of narrative in the familiar.

Ringworld, the 1970 science fiction novel by Larry Niven, is a terrible book.

(more…)

Figure out who you are…

| 2024-12-06

…and then do it on purpose, in the words of the indelible Dolly Parton. I started writing ages ago, it seems, but was a little wayward in figuring out what I am good at doing, largely because the people doing it already remained just outside of my line of sight, often obscured by the (in my mind) overly vaunted Very Important Novelist and other towering figures of literature. I write because it’s inherent to me, I think, but giving it a name, even belatedly, is a useful thing.

I write, sometimes for my stage act as a combination stand-up autobiographer and house band, sometimes entirely for myself, and sometimes for an imaginary newspaper that would print my occasional columns like a rambling and often profane aspirant to the space Armistead Maupin occupied back in the day, but I’ve been reading E.B. White as a sort of post-election therapy and I’m struck by how much of White’s take on the task of the essayist truly nails my own assortment of flaws and strengths:

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each new excursion of the essayist, each new “attempt,” differs from the last and takes him into new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.

(more…)

Slower.

| 2024-12-01
Joe posed with Kodak Ekatar H35 film camera

There’s a popular thread that makes the rounds with increasing frequency in which we lament our fragmented, jittery, manipulated attention economy and the nervous lives that we get in that realm, and the antidotes tend to go by neat-sounding titles like “the revenge of analog” or “going analog,” all amusingly laid out in detail on means of communication that are clearly digital, like online video, “social” media, and podcasts, among other channels of interpersonal communication that are the realm of the world on this side of the computer revolutions that have brought us here.

I don’t disdain the digital, though—I adore digital things, like digital communication, digital synthesis, digital tools for composing, editing, and distributing new ideas and creative work. Where I land is more that when we feel anxiety about the pace of the world, and the way so much of it gives us less joy than frustration and exploitation. It’s not the digital that gets me—it’s the corporate invasion of our attention and the way these tools have become increasingly enshittified by corporate owners who care for nothing but quick profit and regard the users as data to be mined, and “content creators” (and to be clear, fuck that phrase and every stupid asshole who uses it, regardless of whether they’re the bad guys who invented it or the suckers who took the bait).

We live in an era where we shouldn’t be struggling for time and the energy to be social, and it’s pretty clear how we were tricked into handing over our resources to people who don’t value us in exchange for the pittance of easyish connections and the consequent feeling that we need to be constantly connected, checking in, scrolling through, and engaging, because otherwise we’ll have to face the terrifying prospect of occasionally experiencing silence or a moment where we’re not caught up in the firehose of scroll because we’ve become trained to fear missing out on anything.

All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

—Blaise Pascal, Penseés

But we’re not, as yet, forced into this hyperactive world of chattering nonsense, advertising, and techbro-wet-dream doomscrolling bullshit. We can still talk, still meet, still enjoy phone calls, letters, and moments together…or on our own.

So I’m going to move slower, unplug more and more, balancing the benefits of these tools against their costs and consequences, and I’m sure I’ll miss out on a lot of the stuff that the algorithms, beancounters, influencers, and marketing types insist I can’t live a happy modern life without, and you know what? Fuck it.

The people who care know where to find me, whether it’s here on my own site (self-hosted and controlled by me and not some ravening invasive CEO or private equity gestalt. Let’s see where things stand in a month, when we fire up another year in a shaky climate of rampaging assholes, and then a month after that, and after that.

I control my speed, and for now, it’s going to be slow.

Try to keep up.

© 2024 Joe Belknap Wall

A rare month.

| 2024-10-01

First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys. Not that all months aren’t rare. But there be bad and good, as the pirates say. Take September, a bad month: schoool begins. Consider August, a good month: school hasn’t begun yet. July, well, July’s really fine: there’s no chance in the world for school. June, no doubting it, June’s best of all, for the school doors spring wide and September’s a billion years away.

But you take October, now. School’s been on a month and you’re riding easier in the reins, jogging along. You got time to think of the garbage you’ll dump on old man Prickett’s porch, or the hairy-ape costume you’ll wear to the YMCA the last night of the month. And if it’s around October twentieth and everything smoky-smelling and the sky orange and ash grey at twilight, it seems Hallowe’en will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bedsheets around corners.

—Ray Bradbury, from Something Wicked This Way Comes

Inexhaustible.

| 2024-09-06

I woke from an inadvisable after-work nap with a thought wedged in my head:

I am closer to 70 than I am to 40.

How did this happen?

But hell, I know. I lived, I ran, I suffered, I danced, I triumphed, and fell. I’m scarred, I’m neurotic, I’ve seen things I wish I hadn’t and done worse things to people I cared about, though I reassure myself that I didn’t know. I didn’t know.

It’s certainly the truth that, unless science makes a major breakthrough and quick, I’m in the last third of my life, or fourth, if things turn on me.

What’s it mean to age beautifully, to look to those ahead of me who somehow managed to slide this way in lush embrace of what life is, in its silky, spiky, wild wholeness, and not that mythical thing we all seem to chase for far too long—the imaginary, perfectly, finely-tuned life that we aspire to?

What’s it mean to look to the people who were our friends when we were just kids and they were where I am now and really seek what magic there was in that?

It’s where we live best, and live longest, slowing the swirl to the drain, when we can master what those people knew and I didn’t, except to be drawn to their energy.

(more…)

Thermostat.

| 2024-07-30

I used to have an ongoing conversation, with an old crank I dated briefly before we friendzoned into a contentious state of casual simpatico, on the nature of human happiness. His take was a fairly Buddhist one with grumpy extremes, in that he regarded the impetus to stay positive and happy all the time as a simultaneously foolish and undignified.

“Humans were meant to suffer, Joseph,” he said, in his usual gruff tone. “We’re not meant to be stuck in dimwitted emotional California sunshine all our lives, grinning like idiots.”

“I don’t think that’s exactly how it works, though.” I said. “I’m happy most of the time.”

“You don’t look happy most of the time.”

“Well, I think my thermostat for what constitutes happy is set somewhere between contentment and quiet optimism. The giddy stuff is just the icing.”

The old crank rolled his eyes. This was a frequent rejoinder, and it, in its way, also made me happy.

The thing is, I am happy most of the time, with the aforementioned setting, but that doesn’t mean I trip lightly in a constant state of doe-eyed ecstasy. You can be happy and worry about the registration due date of your truck, the broken coil on the air conditioner, a complicated schedule for a get-together, a too-complicated calendar at work, and why the dishwasher isn’t cleaning things properly—those are the details, but when you work on a baseline of being generally satisfied with the nature of existence, it’s easy to drop in and out of frustrations, if only briefly, to notice the contemplative comfort within direct reach.

(more…)

Tom Lehrer gives.

| 2023-12-27

Photo of Tom Lehrer

Just a fresh reminder that Tom Lehrer stands among the great artists of all time for, among other things, relinquishing copyright to his life’s work as he nears the end of his time here rather than having his clutching, wealth-hoarding estate or some atrocious corporate creeps hold his “intellectual property” behind a locked door to generate never-ending revenue as long as possible rather than to give his work to the culture that helped him create it. So McCartney, Springsteen, Dylan and all the other money-grubbing famemonsters sell their catalogs to monstrous LLCs to make the pile of obscene wealth they sleep on each night a few feet taller, while better humans give back. The guy’s a mensch, and his music is fun.

Visit his site to download his wonderful work, and share some the generosity:

Albums

I’d like to propose a toast.

| 2023-10-02

These things come back like ghosts, faintly but present, and pull the few little threads of regret that have any purchase in my heart. It’s hard to explain that strange little stretch in the middle of the hateful eighties when people like me were dropping like flies while the everyday people in the rest of the world yawned and turned away in between sharing the hilarious jokes about fruits and vegetables and pointing fingers to say “well, didn’t you all bring this on yourselves” at best, and to share their churchy nonsense at worst. Thing is, being in the midst of it as a little half-formed person trying to figure out where he fit, when the people who could have explained any of it were dying by the thousands, was a shocking, traumatic thing that you couldn’t really see from the ground level, and overview would take literal decades.

Fran Lebowitz says that the real tragedy of AIDS wasn’t so much how many artists and creative people we lost, but that we lost a generation of a kind of audience that the world hadn’t seen before, and hasn’t seen since, with a canny understanding of semiotics, camp, and detail forged by a forbidden identity and a long-closed culture just starting to open to something more than just the way things always were.

I remember, once, in the early years of my inexplicable twenty-year career as a frequent operatic extra with the Washington Opera in DC, sitting next to a handsome older fellow quietly singing Sondheim.

“What are you singing?” I asked. I was fourteen or fifteen, I think, and at a makeup mirror next to the gentleman and just on the other side of the row of makeup tables where my father was combing a color into his mustache and waxing the curled end of each handle of the handlebar with a precision that would have pleased Poirot. The guy looked over, half in his foundation and half still patting on the matte tan for the period and class of his character.

(more…)