miscellany – Joe B Wall

Slower.

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.

A rare month.

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.

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.

Continue reading Inexhaustible.

Thermostat.

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.

Continue reading Thermostat.

The blue hours, part one.

I’ve begun to properly embrace what I’ve learned is called a “biphasic” or “multiphasic” sleep pattern, casting away the busispeak “insomnia” and all its attendent judgement of a lack of productivity in sleep, for Pete’s sake, as one more of the wretched impositions of a clockwork life in the planet-wide currency mill, and it’s connecting me with parts of myself that I’d glimpsed from a distance for most of my life.

I’ve always loved the blue hours—those in-between spaces when the rest of the world is largely taking place just around the curve of the Earth. I wake up, sometimes at oddly familiar times, like when I stir, tap my watch on its little charging stand to see when it is that I’ve resurfaced, and return, in eye-friendly green text, “3:01” or “5:05” or “4:33,” and wonder if they’re part of that dreamland oracle meant to give some meaning, or if it’s just pareidolia connecting a pattern with random reflections within my memory palace, assigned a value in the way we used to think the patterns of the stars had something to say about our lives.

At 5:05, I stir, quietly as to avoid waking my partner or our dogs, slip out of the bed, gather up my daily devices in a pocket, and quietly tiptoe out, taking care to close the door with all the stickers and one gently snoring child, before I creakily descend the stairs to lurk deliciously in the great empty volume of the house.

Today, I light a candle, take a photo of myself perched in front of my little writing device, as if to document some grand artistic process instead of just letting it happen unseen in the little breakfast nook, sip at a strong cup of tea with heavy cream and no sugar, and start to write, once I’ve irritably solved the problem of what impossible string of letters, numbers, and special characters will get me into my website.

Outside, the sky is going through that gorgeous procession of blue to blue to blue, and the horizon is just taking on the threads of pink and gold that precede the sunrise on that side of the house. I’m a little unsettled, still from one of those dreams that’s not bad at all, but leaves one with a feeling that something’s not quite right, but there’s tea and a candle and music in my earphones and there is nothing to do but do. I was reminded recently how it important it is to embrace a radical incrementalism and write a little each day, or do a little work towards a goal, or otherwise just continue on a track with an endpoint yet to be revealed, so I set to work, in my own way and at my own pace.

It is a good thing.

Reading: Becky Chambers

A recent exchange reminded me of a great book I read recently, as an attempt to rediscover the love of science fiction I’d once had, and which had faded with the devolution of sci-fi into bleak pessimism, a perverted wallowing in the supposed hopelessness in our species, diseased and fetishistic lusting for (and after) the apocalypse as a sort of displaced modernization of the religious sickness of the flagellant, and war war war war war war war and every narrative turning on the gun, because people can’t be bothered to read Ursula K. Le Guin’s elegant counter in the brief, but insightful, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.”

I’d gone so far as to attempting my own sci-fi novel as a nod to James Murphy’s excellent dictum that the best way to complain is to make things, setting some basic rules—no war, no AI, no FTL travel, no artificial gravity, no murders…and so on—writing at a leisurely pace that equates to “I wonder if I’ll finish this before I die,” but along the way, helpful fans in my circle pointed out some excellent humane modern science fiction of a genre that’s been dubbed “solarpunk,” which inspired me to wonder if I could catch the tail of that flowing gown as its practitioners stride into a future that’s not the usual grimdark catalog of miseries.

One of my favorite suggestions has been the work of Becky Chambers, a fantastic writer in the field, and I recently finished the first two books of her Monk & Robot series, which exist in a pastoral future where, when AI arose suddenly in that stabilizing green future, the response wasn’t war war war, but a collective release with an apology, as their former workforce was treated to an apology and the right to live as they chose…and they chose to disappear into the recovering forests of the moon where they all lived and disconnect from their former masters.

A voice, telling a tale

I’m a fervent enthusiast of audio media, from old radio drama to modern radio drama and audiobooks of all stripes, and despite being a voracious reader of tattered paper books in my youth (and still, though more on digital readers lately), I’m increasingly of the opinion that, in contrast to the nostalgic claims that books are the grand tradition of literacy and stories told aloud on tape/disc/data are the brash upstart, oral storytelling is innate to humans (obviously with allowances to be made for reasons of hearing/neurodivergence) and has been for a hundred thousand years, while books available on scale to the masses are more or less a mostly post-20th century phenomenon.

cooking: Daisy Eggs

Snow days, birthdays, and other holidays and observances are special days for me, and on special days, I like to make special breakfasts, usually including my favorite breakfast dish in the whole entire universe (scrapple being a very, very close second) — daisy eggs.

They’re a bit of work, but make the rest of the day seem like something more than it might be, another chance to be here—all here, all now, just me and my breakfast against the forces of gloom in the world.

Continue reading cooking: Daisy Eggs

Unsocial media

The tail end of COVID in my region means my social life can go back to being casual but sophisticated dinner parties, rollicking house concerts, nights at the bijou, and playful country drives in ridiculous old French cars, but even more, it means I can start edging towards the exit of the various manipulative, cynical, and life-diminishing social media platforms we’ve all depended on for the past year.

Here’s to a return to real life—surprisingly, I’ve come to miss it.

[2022 update: Alas, the antivax/antimaskers kept us in it for a while longer, with the Omicron variant heating up and set (supposedly) to peak this month. Still, we have vaccines, quick tests, and smart people to hang out with on small scales while the rest of the crowd gets their act together.]

Composite.

I’ve been catching up on my composite novels after realizing, some time back, that the reason I wasn’t writing a book wasn’t that I’m not inherently a writer as much as my natural rhythm and flow for writing came to me from my adoration of books that I never understood to be composite novels, or story cycles. So I read Winesburg, Ohio and The Martian Chronicles and The Women of Brewster Place without ever realizing that this is, in fact, the style that I would eventually write in without intending to do so. With hindsight, it’s nice to explore others in the form for examples of how to best adjust the machinery of stories and start stringing together the great fluttering belts linking things all together into a coherent whole in which the parts, too, are complete.

In the same way, my longtime love of Jean Shepherd, transmitted to me via my father’s focused delivery of fifth-generation bootlegs of his old radio show, in which he worked in the mode of sequential and interlinked narratives coming together to build epic serial adventures in Hammond, Indiana, has fed much of my stage work, where I mix and mutate and exchange stories on the fly, always open to swapping narratives in the possibility that that juxtaposition will open up a little window on something in the story I’d never noticed.

“When are you going to write that book?” I’m asked, and I have, really, though in the form of hundreds and hundreds of stories written over the past twenty-five years, but I wasted too much time thinking I was meant to write like we think novelists should write, following a single character through a single narrative, from beginning to end, unfolding over hundreds of pages to an expected or unexpected denouement.

I don’t know early on that my stories work that way, but as I’ve been listening to more and more podcasts, and thinking of how the best among them work much like those books made of other stories, and those serial narratives I’ve heard on old radio from before I was born, all floating on the same river, all following the same current to the same place, and I think maybe the revival of my own long, slumbering podcast should start where the book I’ve been writing would have started, and visit the same places.

When I was small, back in Scaggsville, when I’d wake up too early, while the world was still blue and cool and suspended, waiting for the day to catch up with all of the things around me, I’d slip out onto our front porch in my footie pajamas and stand there on the cracked concrete of our porch, listening. The whole world made a noise back then, a sort of distant singing note that hung in the air, as delicate as a flock of birds all heading in the same direction, and I thought, in some way, that it was the sound of the world turning on its axis.

I’d later realize that it was only the sound of the nearby interstate, and of all the tractor-trailers on their way from somewhere to somewhere else, just tires roaring on the then-new pavement of I-95 and filtered through trees and air and humidity until it became a chorus under everything, just like my congenital tinnitus, always there, everywhere.

I would forever be mistaken about things, and learn.

This is a way to be in the world.