Two Duck Pictures
Taking a lengthy Twitter break, again, hopefully for something resembling “Good” this time. I always say it, mean it, hope it, and it never comes to fruition. I need it for work, to some degree: it's basically a giant networking room for irritable writers and also sharing my work there is something I feel like I owe to my clients, even if my normal tweets are bad and no one follows me. (I have my virtues as a writer: brevity and quippiness are neither one of them)
I’m perfectly happy to be logged off, of course. It sucks, it fills my brain with garbage, and the time that opens up when you’re not checking your menchies or considering your menchies or sidetracking to your menchies can very easily be filled with many more valuable things. For Instance, over the last four or so days, I have:
-Started Playing Animal Crossing. I bought it on a whim. I probably can’t really afford a 60 dollar video game but I dunno, I can probably write about it sometime or something. I like how it does everything it can to gate you from playing too much, even if there is a lil’ tiny window for early game grinding once you start flying to empty islands and hitting rocks with shovels so you can extract precious iron ore from them so you can build a store or a better axe or whatever. Nintendo made this entire self-care ass gentle game (there’s stretching!!!) but even in doing that they can't resist the siren’s call of every game developer, to give the player some little thing they can min-max and achieve, even if all you’re achieving is a bigger fake house or ownership of a Mario Hat. I am worried this game is priming me for the Blockchain Metaverse. Why do I want the Mario Hat? Why do I want to hang it on my wall, next to the Luigi Hat? Do I want it in real life?
-Read a bunch (like 200 pages or so) of Frank Herbert’s Sand and Spaceships Epic Dune, which I saw in the movies recently but haven’t read before. When you were reading Dune in high school? I was watching Futurama DVD commentary and going to a youth group. Chad stuff. No time for Sandy Boys. It’s pretty good! I like the part where Paul’s mom finds a secret message underneath a leaf. When I look under leaves I just find leaf dust. Then again, maybe my lack of Bizznet Gennaii (???) training has deprived me of a whole lifetime of coded messages underneath leaves.
-I rearranged my books. I own a lot of books, because I am a hog boy. I buy books like… wherever. Goodwill, the Library of America website, Powell’s, the stand at the library that sells books for a dollar. As a consequence of this nasty habit, I have acquired a bunch of books, some… many, even… of which I have not read. Sometimes when I am feeling guilty about this for no reason (I mean I frequently spend like one dollar on a book, the opportunity cost is not that high here folks) I think damn I gotta stop buying books before I read the books I own. I don’t follow through on this. Frankly I am exhibiting a puritan impulse here. Buying random ass books for a dollar is the closest thing I get to pure pleasure.
-I looked at my phone and saw that the writer Casey Taylor, who has two children, sent me a picture he drew of “a guy jacking off.” He also told me he started drawing four days ago.
-I have totally lost track of what is going on in the world. I have a Times subscription, I check out the AP, I read the NYer to some degree or another every week, so I know, like, STUFF that’s happening. I know the raw material. I know Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of two counts of wire fraud. I know Omnicron or Omnorcrime or OmniiiCrumb or whatever is ravaging the country but that death rates aren’t skyrocketing like they did with Delta. I know that the anniversary of the riot at the Capitol is coming up, which means that every columnist who works at the time is dropping their hottest hand wringing shit where they say that the riots confirmed everything they think about the country and that their priors on how to fix America are the only thing that can address the cause of the insurrection and keep Democracy flouring in the United States
In On Photography, a book about a 17-Year old princess who sails mighty wooden ships across the ocean in search of riches, romance and adventure, Susan Sontag talks about how the advent of photography, the ability to confirm something happened with a concrete, seemingly unalterable object, has made any event that isnt photographed seem surreal, a non event that didn’t really happen because if it did, wouldn’t there be a photograph of it? I am worried I am fucking up Sontag’s argument here but I think you get it. Read the book it’s seriously not that long. Anyway I am worried that the same thing is happening with me and Twitter. Without eh braying of a billion clout seeking weirdos, stuff seems sort of unreal. How can I really KNOW that Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of two counts of wire fraud without seeing a tweet that says like “Elizabeth Holmes Toilet Wine with blood in it???” or whatever. Like I said I’m seriously not good at Twitter but I think you understand the object lesson.
-I read a bunch of Rod Dreher (I had to look up spelling for this) posts. I almost wrote about him at length but then I didn’t because I would have had to read more of it. Here is every point I was going to make:
Rod insists that good Christians need to separate from society, which is perverse and decadent now because of gay marriage and analingus. But he also writes like ten posts a week where he complains about analingus and fat people and stuff. One post I saw was him complaining that scientists don’t adhere to some early evolutionary biology concerning inlaid natures anymore because it’s, you know, race science adjacent. I am sure you really care a lot about the development of evolutionary theory over the last 50 years. It’s the main thing you think about
He posts SO MUCH. Honestly I kind of admire it, writing this post took like all the juice I had in my spirit. Then again I’m not that mad about the sheer quantity of shit he is constantly mad about. Do I need to be angrier?
I refuse to believe that anyone aside from liberal/left lookie loos reads that garbage. It’s insanely, deeply niche in ways that break my brain. Who clicks with this Orthodox guy who is just fucking out of control worried about anal play? I refuse to manifest this person. Shit is for one rich freak who bankrolls it and Will Sommer exclusively.
-I watched like a ton of Young Sheldon. I seriously don’t know what’s up with that, with me, with anything anymore. Annie Potts has fucking awesome hair in this thing. Drink it in.
Magisterial. The queen. Stomp me to death, Annie Potts.
I think that’s everything I did. It’s also raining so I can’t go take pictures of the local ducks, who I miss like they were my children. Here is a jaunty fellow in happier times.