Dispatch from a lightning tree.

| 2025-06-29

You know that feeling, when you visit your old elementary school and can’t get over how small everything looks now? All those little chairs and little desks and painted cinderblock walls and hand-lettered signs everywhere encouraging you to dare to dream, and it all just seems so alien, and the familiarity has faded.

I haven’t posted anything of note on corporate social since March, beyond keeping tabs and checking in on my friends, and despite my multiple unsuccessful attempts to get clear of platforms that exist primarily to make money with us as the labor force, rewarded with a meager pittance for the billions we make for bad people with ugly hearts, this retreat has been easier. It’s been the perfect storm of death and loss and heartbreak this year, and while I’ve received lovely support and affection from an encouragingly large number of people, the modus operandi of Social Media Incorporated has grated on me even more.

That’s the thing—when you step away from a non-place like this non-place is, the machinery of addiction engineering lurches into motion and starts flooding your former social space (even with three blockers running at once) with “sponsored” posts and “suggested people you might like” and “you might find this interesting” posts so that when you poke your head back in, the algorithm turns your visit to your old elementary school into a nightmarish wall of fake nonsense, computer-generated bullshit, and suggestions that are all precisely engineered clickbait to get you engaged with a bunch of blowhards you’ve never met to argue about fluff and stupidity to make enough money to rent out Barcelona for the next prettypretty wedding of celebrity morons.

It’s like stepping into an old gay bar you loved once and finding that they’ve installed seven hundred TV monitors all blaring day-glo who-gives-a-shit at eye level, so you have to step lightly, dodge, and dart just to find a friend in all the chaos, and the grimly funny part of this is that the teenage engineers behind all this repellent techbro plumfuckery actually think this is going to draw you back in.

Where’s the “there” there? Heck, for the 5-10 feeds this site thinks I should be allowed to see that I actually care about, I can always just bookmark each one, and visit them in turn with a direct link, to comment and chat, and that’s more or less what I’m doing these days.

Are we so lonely that we really can’t live without this level of glittering, jittering, seizure-inducing strobing actinic glare of interference, and surrender more control over what we visit in lieu of all the day-to-day human relationships, phone calls, letters, and plain old hanging out with no particular aim we used to do?

So I stepped away for this stretch, feeling bone-deep defeat after losing a dog, a sister, several friends, security for my friends and family, and a functioning democracy in a country that was once seemingly on a path to civilization, and when I pop my head back in, the click-me-now pages are all carefully arranged to present the worst of the world around me.

Oh look—a post about pride observations at our nearby ballpark…and yeah, it’s aimed at every backwoods red state moron who seems to obsessively read posts about Maryland and Baltimore despite having skulked off to somewhere dreadful like Florida or Oklahoma or Indiana to live their “best” lives, who chimes in, as they were programmed to, “Whut about straight pride? When do WE get a day?”

Thing is, I’m not fooled. I know how algorithmic engineering of social engineering works. They put out the lure because they think I’m a sucker, primed to jump in and fight in the same way dumb people respond to each and every call to name a state with no “E” in it, or to demonstrate that they remember dial telephones or gearshifts, or to post their favorite song, book, movie to a fake radio station page out of a kind of pathetic desperation to feel like part of something in the face of the loneliness created by the celebrity megacorporate monsters who just want to help us to “connect,” but I don’t bite the hook.

It’s not easy, but were our social lives ever meant to be easy? Didn’t we once have the stomach for a little work to connect with each other?

Maybe we didn’t. Maybe it was all just small talk, and we were living lives of quiet desperation, cringing at every horrid moment of accidental connection.

Maybe it wasn’t ideal when I would call my best friend up so we could watch Doctor Who, staying on the phone to share our commentary.

Maybe it wasn’t ideal when my friend Allen lived four blocks away and had no telephone, so when I wanted to get together with him, I had to walk over there and knock on the door.

Maybe it wasn’t ideal that we had to remember dozens of telephone numbers or write them down, and that we were annoyed by friends with 9 and 0 in their numbers, because the dialing was so much slower.

Maybe it wasn’t ideal to show up at a local watering hole to see who was around or, annoyingly, wasn’t.

Maybe all that social labor was just an awful thing we endured, and social media came to rescue us, which is why we’re so much happier now?

Are we, though?

Maybe it’s me, but I don’t feel it. I chattered with a friend for a solid hour and change after a show a couple weeks ago, talking FM synthesis and the voltage control issues of a synthesizer we both own while rats darted around the empty parking lot, and it was a revelatory moment, because I’d arrived earlier that afternoon feeling at an absolute nadir, with a pit of who-the-fuck-cares in my gut and a long drive to a distant venue where all I could really think about was to pilot my car in silence while trying to come up with a metaphor for the way I’d been feeling (I arrived at a tree struck by lightning, burned out and hollow, but still looking like a perfectly intact treet), and I drove home feeling more engaged, enjoying music, and thinking of things I’d like to do when I got home.

Maybe it’s me, and just me, and maybe it’s okay that I’ve retreated to smaller online spaces where my friends largely haven’t bothered to seek me out, because the big places just feel like trees struck by lightning, burned out from the inside, still looking intact but dead inside, standing until a strong wind comes.

To be fair, I cut my teeth writing on digital platforms, so I won’t begin to claim the purity of internet-free life.

I was doing it back in 1985 when I still had to dial a BBS on a dial telephone, listen for the eeeeeEEEEEEE, and clap the handset into a pair of rubber cups on a modem that streamed characters about as fast as I could type, and when I was on all the strange Devonian shale medium creatures of the pre-commercial internet, playing with Gopher and Veronica and MUDs and MUSHs and MUSEs and the firestorm cauldrons of USENET, and when Livejournal came around and gave me a place to write serially, a wannabe Armistead Maupin sharing stories an episode at a time, with an audience of enthusiasts and occasional critics. It was such a energetic era for me—full of aspiration, creativity, and major and minor missteps.

The jaundiced eye of the post-human corporate gestalts turned on us once they saw the possibility of exploitation, and offered us easy connection, and lazy ways to interact, and we all just fell in line, and here we are.

And here I am, because I feel like maybe it was unkind to just disappear, but I want more conversations with rats darting around empty parking lots at my feet and while we’re driving aimlessly in search of a new place to eat and when we’re in a room together, face to face, talking about things that matter and things that don’t.

I want to put on little concerts of friends playing unlistenable electronic nonsense and banjo music in my house, and have pot luck dinners, and play board games that are beyond my easy comprehension. I want to ask mechanically sophisticated friends for help fixing my windshield wipers or getting my old shortwave radio to tune more than static again or to teach me how to make waffles I enjoy as much as cheap store brand toaster waffles.

I want to, but I, too, have been trained well, and there’s a lot to untangle in return, and maybe those little desks and little chairs and cinderblock walls with hand-lettered signs everywhere encouraging you to dare to dream aren’t as pretty a scene as the gauzy lens of nostalgia presents, and for now, I still feel burned out on the inside even as I still stand here, still looking plausibly like a tree even though it’s all still too soon and too hard. This is what grief looks like, and it’s okay. Life returns.

We need to reach again—at least I do—else what’s a heaven for?

© 2025 Joe Belknap Wall

To catch a burning breath.

| 2025-06-25

It’s a flashback, these waves on waves of heat, the searing heaviness of the air enough to make me recoil as I step out of the building at the end of my day’s work. In more hapless times, there was no refuge, and my latest skirmish with the mechanical infidelities of my reliable-up-to-lately commuter car left me with the lone option of climbing into a forty-one-year-old black French sedan with no ventilation beyond what blows in, at the speed of transit, through the little flap under the windshield when, and only when, I’m in motion.

Ordinarily, it’s a delight, but the heat saps my will from the moment I step out of my well-conditioned cave, and I have the grim reminder of my younger days when I had so few escapes from such things. So I step out of my building, fighting the urge to hiss like a vampire facing into the burning, trudge to the car, and head for home. The strange thing is that my little car seems to relish this heat, like it’s something to loosen its tired joints and set the petrochemicals flowing, so while I’m sweltering and reaching a nadir of overall desire to engage with the world, my old 2CV is practically giddy, being looser and more responsive than normal, and quicker, too, though that’s a relative term.

I battle my way through the traffic on the highway until I hit the point where I can bail out and make the rest of the trip home on more civilized and slower roads, albeit with untamed hills and valleys that render much of my trip like a roller coaster, where I plunge into the depths with a heavy accelerator so I’ll retain some fraction of the speed limit as I crest the next hill, and I distract myself from the pressure cooker by trying to come up with an exact metaphor for the experience of driving a car designed in the 1930s to get rural French farmers on the road.

It’s easy, when the image comes into focus. As a friend in the fellowship of Citroën enthusiasts says, a 2CV isn’t a car—it’s a creature—and it is my firm faith that this is the true and noble word. It is, and what kind of creature it is varies, but this afternoon, beating a hasty return home through uninhabitable skies, I know.

This car is as close as one can get to driving a beagle. It’s all floppy stubbornness, noisy joy, and often incomprehensible determination. It is a beagle, ears flapping wildly in the stream of overheated air, and it will allow me to guide it, but on its terms, because that is what beagles and forty-one-year-old French cars do. Everything else is just a machine for moving around in the asphalt horror of modern American life, just an appliance with a task and execution so dreadfully, insufferably dull that ever car has to come with an “infotainment” system to stop you from dying of boredom while you’re out getting groceries.

I sing.

I sing in my car, and it’s the aspirational kind, and, because the songs that are easiest to sing at the top of one’s lungs are often the old songs, or the show tunes, or the torch songs that existed before we all collectively decided that singing songs for ourselves was too much work, and too imperfect, and too challenging to our insecurities, but in a car with no radio and my brain stuffed with Ella Fitzgerald, I’m going to eschew all the usual fears and sing.

I’m midway through “Blue Skies,” spit-roasting at a stoplight, when I hear a polite “pip” of a honk from the pink Miata next to me, and I look over.

The driver is a beautiful, burly black lady of a certain age, beaded like a jeweled statue with sweat, in oxblood lipstick with a flawless line penciled in for emphasis, and she peels off a pair of oversized sunglasses and interrupts my aria.

“I don’t think I’ve ever loved you more than I do right now,” she says, brightly and with a broad smile.

I blush. How could I not?

“Oh go on,” I say, starting to set up a little coy quip that I always go back to as a happy comic habit, but she adds something even more enigmatic.

“You don’t know me yet,” she says, “but you’ll know me someday.”

I’m rendered silent, except that I’m smiling hard, in spite of how truly wretched the weather is, but before I can react further, the light changes, her sunglasses go back on, and she darts off, waving as she pulls away.

And that’s the thing—in a country where Citroëns are nonexistent and old ones are even more rare, where you can go a year or two before seeing another one, there’s this notion of being Citroën-famous in your region, where people see you all the time, no more than any other frequently seen conveyance, but they remember seeing you because you just cut an unfamiliar figure on the road. It’s a reminder, really, to repress any impulses you might have to commit a crime, even a small one, because you’ll get caught. There’s a magic, though, in being a vehicle by which someone’s day is briefly brightened with a smile or a chuckle, sometimes accompanied by an upraised phone camera as you end up in someone else’s photo library, and I think it’s why I teeter right at the edge of magical realism some days, where the moments I relate when I arrive home get an eyeroll and a bit of healthy skepticism, but it’s okay.

It’s just me and this beagle against the world, just for a bit, before I have to climb out of my metaphors and return to earth, where utility bills and calendars and chores await, and until then, we are both creatures, fresh out of a fairytale I haven’t finished writing yet, and there’s still a song in my heart, so I pucker up and whistle an extended and imprecise rendition of “Mas Que Nada” until I’m at my driveway and back to my life.

We eat dinner, I clean up, tend to my chickens, and my partner and kid sing together while I tend to the affairs of home life. As we’re all winding down, I step outside, drag the trash can to the street, and a vixen fox standing next to the forsythia about ten feet away suddenly screams one of those piercing vixen fox screams that is so uncannily like the sound of genuine murder that it comically stands one’s hair on end.

I dart in the house, still chuckling, and head for bed and beagle dreams.

© 2025 Joe Belknap Wall

 

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…)