Category: Notes and Comment

I need to write. I need to create.

I don’t need prestige. I don’t need to write for a living, or make art for a huge audience, or, indeed, to create anything for anyone else at all. I don’t need to build an audience, be an influencer, count my likes and followers, or do any of the other things that seem, on the surface, as though they might somehow validate my experience as a human being.

Because to create is the most human impulse. 

Pursuing validation from a crowd of followers, staying on top of algorithmic trends, building an audience on a platform I don’t own, networking and seeking acceptance from editors and selection committees, boosting my CV to appear legit, going to the right schools, living in the right cities, publishing in the best journals, adopting the right ideas, keeping up with fashion – these are just ways of playing someone else’s game. 

I don’t need to please the gatekeepers. I have everything I’ll ever need right here, on this website.

If someone else gets some pleasure from anything I create, I am (of course!) thrilled to know that I have given them joy. But that isn’t the reason I’m here. Writing and creating art is a way of thinking through the world, of meditating, of paying attention to people, places, things, and ideas in a way that I can’t otherwise access.

Creating is also a compulsion. I need to write. I need to create.  

So here’s what I’m going to do. Anything I ever write, make, photograph, or whatever, from now on, is going here. This is the place for it. This won’t break my writer’s block, put a new song in my head, or miraculously give me something interesting to paint, but it’s something. A little digital yawp. 

I have some things in mind.  

Lately, every time someone writes about “democracy” in some piece of urgent online hand-wringing, I stop reading. It’s not because I disagree with their politics, necessarily, but because I can’t shake the uncanny feeling that the writer has stopped thinking.

“Democracy” is exactly what we are living with. Rule by populists and demagogues is one of its outcomes. What these people seem to want is something else, a Utopia of Rules, in which the adults swoop in to save us from our mistakes. It’s the world of Report Cards and Crossing Guards, where the rules and consequences are written on the board. That’s not the world we’re living in.

Night comes fast this time of year. One moment you’ll be looking down in sunlit splendor, reading an email, maybe, or scrolling through a feed; the next moment you will look up and find the sky streaked with pastel and Venus peering at you from the purple firmament. What happened? you ask, wasn’t it just lunch? Don’t blink or you’ll miss it.

Earlier this evening I realized that the last five years years have passed like a winter sunset. Watching old Viceland programming tonight on the zombie internet cable that came bundled with my Samsung TV was strangely tragic. Shows like Weediquette and F*ck That’s Delicious are like the last documents of the pre-COVID decade, an era we aren’t likely to miss but can never get back anyway. I watched Krishna Andavolu and an old hippie weed capitalist in Mendocino, California shuffle and sniff big Mason jars full of neon green cannabis buds like epicurean sommeliers and felt, just for a moment, a dull pang of regret. Our concerns in that summer of 2016 spanned the breadth and depth of a cannabis high. Overhead the sun was descending, however. Slow but gaining, it illuminated our salad afternoons until, in some instant historians will spend years debating, it dipped below the horizon.

I changed the channel.