Dear Reader(s),
I am stuck between the proverbial rock and hard place of weekly content creation: is it easier to scour the depths of the Strategic Poetry Reserve for something marginally publishable, or bang something out from scratch? Do I cheat a little and publish a remix of GarageBand samples orchestrated into a musical piece called “Cyborrr” (with 3 R’s) that sounds like Trent Reznor punching a blender? Do I cheat a lot and “publish” a series of already-existing photos where I just add them to a gallery in WordPress and give them quirky names like “Mostly Just Sky Except For That One Tree” and “Weird Concrete Stain”?
I think it’s time for a new Commentary.
I’m all over the place. I mean, like, more than usual. I have not been doing a whole ton of January River posting and promotion, other than just doing the regular Tuesday updates. I feel some guilt for this, because there are 2 or 3 people who consistently like and repost and sometimes even comment on my stuff, and I am not doing a very good job at reciprocating.
But I have been doing a whole heck of a lot of writing (and writing-adjacent) stuff. This includes:
- Grinding away at the first draft of a middle reader children’s mystery book (with series potential!) set in a quirky seaside New England town
- Working on the author website to promote aforementioned book, once it is written (which, as it turns out, requires a comically ludicrous amount of writing)
- Working on author-website-adjacent features such as a mailing list and a biweekly (every other week, not twice a week) newsletter detailing all the fun of starting with what seems like a really simple cool story in your head that has a ghost sea captain and townie intrigue and taffy-related tomfoolery and then having to consider things like subject-verb agreement and whether or not a 10-year-old would realistically be allowed to ride a bike a couple miles on a sidewalk to a quaint but nevertheless SUV-infested downtown area without adult supervision in a time period that is not the 1980s
- A regular MWF schedule of posting slightly cheeky haiku about Corporate Business Stuff on LinkedIn while trying not to get fired
- An irregular schedule of griping loudly about AI stuff and how Yes, Some Of It Is Helpful But An Awful Lot Of It Doesn’t Work Nearly As Well As Everybody Says It Does Because Of Reasons That I Cannot Control So Maybe We Should Calm Down A Little Bit About How This Is Revolutionizing Everything Because You Can Still Call A Travel Agent Even Though We Have Expedia But At Least Expedia Doesn’t Suck But There Was A Time When A Lot Of This Stuff Did In Fact Suck, And As Soon As We Get Past That, Sure, AI Everything, But We’re Not There Yet Friends So Maybe Don’t Fire All The Worker Bees, also while trying not to get fired
- Some other challenging stuff related to worker bees in my actual bill-paying, benefits-having, 401K-matching job-job that I have to pay attention to, because, capitalism, and also, I try to not be a horrible person at all times, and also also trying not to get fired
And man, today has just been…
You know how things aren’t easy? Like, you envision doing a thing in your head, and it’s just, I’m gonna open the coffee maker, and I’m gonna put some coffee in there, and I’m gonna dump in some water, and then I’m gonna press a button, and everything is gonna be fine fine fine?
And the reality is that all the coffee cups are dirty, and there’s a water main break, and the coffee turns out to be full of some kind of, I dunno, coffee bugs, and then the outlet doesn’t work, and you go to look at the circuit breaker and there are bees everywhere, and you have to get bee repellent but they’re out of it at Home Depot so you go to Lowes and they sign you up for a credit card, but it’s not really a credit card, it’s some kind of timeshare membership, and it turns out that the timeshare also has bees, but that doesn’t matter because there’s a spelling error on your passport so if you had flown there to check it out, you’d get deported to, I guess Poland, but it’s not like I speak a lot of Polish besides my grandmother teaching me the words for wiping your butt, but I do like pierogis, but maybe pierogis in Poland are like spaghetti in Italy and its more an American thing really, but that doesn’t matter because bees and no coffee anywhere and someday we will all die alone in the dark and it will probably involve bees.
This is how I feel about things right now, generally.
But you know, it’s not all bad. I’m writing this on the patio, sitting at my new bar, which is part of my new outdoor kitchen. I got the stuff from Ikea. It’s really nice, and, I mean, it wasn’t cheap, but it also wasn’t crazy expensive, for what it is. That’s kind of neat, being able to write commentary for your website for your pseudonym while you’re sipping a Yuengling under a Costco pergola with your MacBook plugged into a random USB charging station you bought off Woot six months ago without really knowing what you were gonna use it for. And the patio heater is on, just a bit, and the multicolored string lights are flickering on this setting I put together that kinda looks like a campfire. And it’s gonna rain later this week, but tonight it’s nice, and the stars are out, and my daughter just sang “Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns ’n’ Roses with the rest of her class at an art festival thing, and I could not possibly be more proud or feel more like Gen X should actually just be the Greatest Generation, because if it was us, yeah, you can ride your bike two miles downtown.
Just be home before the streetlights come on.
—jr
