Still well after all these years

Anniversary post. A story of futility, anger, red helmet hair, and ultimately…joy.

I started my “sub” long before I knew what to do with it.

For those of you without one, or only halfway in, please, just do it and figure it out later.

(The alternative is don’t do it and figure it out never.)

The lightning mind blues

Thinking a lot of big, complex thoughts, quickly, used to make me sad.

For a long time I watched my ideas evaporate into nothingness.

There was nowhere to put them, and putting them ANYWHERE felt like too much effort.

Why do it? That was a stupid question.

Because no good answer was forthcoming.

And yet.

NOT doing it felt like pumping out infants while walking along a winding, desert road.

Just dropping a “cunt potato” every 20 yards or so.

Basted in amniotic goo, food for the vultures, courtesy of Stella Stillwell.

Ha. Take that, world! Screw everyone.

How gloriously tragic.

And yet.

I couldn’t help but notice.

That each infant had its own plaintiff little tune of a cry.

Its own little heartbreaking set of tiny fingernails.

(The tiniest fingernail of all, on its baby toe, is the one that gets to me.)

AND SO, for no compelling reason other than this baby-toenail weakness, I caved.

And launched.

And wrote.

A catch-all nursery for misshapen children.

And misshapen they were!

The early entries, only a mother could love.

I said could, not will.

Truth be told, I despise them with the white-hot discomfort of a million cringing suns.

I do, however, respect them.

They don’t sound like ME.

But they sound like me trying to do something HARD.

Trying to carefully pour a cathedral’s worth of frolic neuronal poetry into a rectangle-shaped mold…

clumsily spilling most of it in the dirt by accident…

and living with the gross little thing staring back at me…

clearly afflicted with a sort of dull-eyed brain damage.

Talk about postpartum depression.

What use did I have for these…these…THINGS?

What use did the WORLD have for them?

I’d ask myself: “Why am I bothering?”

Dumb question? Hell if I knew.

But it got me thinking…what WOULD be a reason to bother?

This lead to making a DEAL with myself:

No more writing unless it’s from a place of real emotion.

I wrote it down:

For now on, no trying. Only bleeding.

The new plan: wait until I’m crazy worked-up about something, and take my anger out on the page.

So I stopped writing and waited for anger.

It didn’t take long: I’m a chronically livid individual.

What can I say? It’s a gift.

The first example of real anger

I’d been coming across counter arguments against universal basic income (UBI).

(Context: I HATE that I have to work a dumb job just to eat.

If I had $3k a month handed to me I’d live like an ascetic monk and be perfectly blissful.

That’s just me. I’m a musician and I’ve always felt I had wasted talent because of work and exhaustion, and that UBI would be the difference between a dreary, wasted life and an exploding rainbow of self-actualization.

So when candidate Andrew Yang started talking about UBI leading up to the 2020 presidential election, I paid attention to politics for the first time in my life, and actually felt something.)

I wasn’t MAD at people for not wanting UBI—that’s an important distinction. Can’t fault people for what they want.

But I was VERY mad the arguments seemed ignorant and egregiously bad faith.

They were so dumb!

They felt dishonest!

Low-effort bullshit attempts to thinly-veil what was really afoot: selfishness, just world fallacy, lack of empathy, smugness, meritocracy myths, and evolutionary dominance orientation.

These arguments were stalling out real discourse. They gummed up the works SO BRILLIANTLY that after the first salvo of flaming dumbness-arrows from UBI opponents, most writers on my side of the fence shriveled up.

I convinced myself this was a massive tragedy.

Not just for me. Millions of lives would be wasted for no reason.

People would die deaths of despair, because nobody’s willing to take two fucking hours to call bullshit on these low-effort deflections.

And, how infuriating that smart people like me are out there who must SEE how dumb the deflections are, and yet they say nothing!

And I KNEW this to be the case because I searched high and low.

Even the nobodies weren’t nailing the rebuttals.

What fucking assholes!

(Didn’t take long to realize I was talking about myself: I was the fucking asshole.)

So I wrote this. (My first legit screed about anti-UBI arguments, creatively written from the point of view of an actual opponent on truth serum. You don’t need to read it, just trust me, it was a cut above and written from a place of real anger and passion.)

The tone of that piece wasn’t fully ME yet, but it didn’t suck either.

It carried genuine emotion, unloaded a laundry list of stewing resentments, and said something that others hadn’t: the laziness in anti-UBI arguments feels personal; it hurts.

It had a realness to it that I didn’t mind stamping my name on. It was good.

I think.

It’s not lost on me that people are generally terrible judges about whether what we’re saying is something new, important, and coherent.

Just as often, we seem to not CARE if it’s any of those things.

Most of us seem satisfied just knowing that it’s OURS.

That bias toward mine-ness always makes me a bit uneasy.

I can’t publish until I convince myself it’s NEW.

That said, an old idea said in a NEW WAY counts. Because saying it in a new way could mean getting it into the heads of new kinds of READERS.

People who might be bored or alienated by more chaste and erudite styles.

In any case, I eventually found my answer to why even do this, in the combo of 1) being legitimately angry about something while 2) feeling convinced the opposition is being lazy and bad faith about 3) a topic that impacts the quality of life for myself AND millions of others—each one with a baby toenail! (Or something equivalent.)

Slowly, I got better at recognizing which pangs of emotion warrant breaking a vein all over the keyboard.

Which tone of voice scratches the itch of getting my emotions out.

And which topics count as impacting millions of people.

That way, even if my work doesn’t make a dent, I feel it’s still worth saving, for reasons I feel good about.

My posts stopped being “gross little things staring back at me with dull-eyed brain damage.”

They’re kinda cute.

Smart, too.

Best of all, there’s real light behind their eyes.

Like any good mother, I notice that light, and even recognize a little of my own humble light in it.

Today, on my Substack anniversary, I can’t help but look back and marvel at just how much that humble light has grown.

Along that winding country road, others have added their light to my voice.

What once felt like wasted effort now feels like a wholesome habit. (Sometimes you just need one of those to make life feel worth it.)

Will any of my “children” grow up to change the world? You never know.

Will I love them either way?

That’s a stupid question. ❤️