Ironic Points of Light

All reasons for starting blogs are stupid, but my reason is especially stupid: the first website I read when I wake up every afternoon just got annihilated by hideous private equity baboons, and I don’t really know what to read anymore. And thus I shall write my own content. Granted, it won’t be much fun for me to read, since I’ll know how every post ends, but recall that I never promised this wouldn’t be stupid.  

I’m sure that someone somewhere still has fun on the internet—probably the Gen Zers, twitching away in their rooms to some polymorphous rpg livestreaming face swap collage I couldn’t begin to comprehend (keep it a secret, kids—don’t let anyone else in—we would just kill it). But for my part, I don’t have much fun anymore. Whether it’s media conglomeration or clickbait factories or the sewer that is Twitter or memes memes memes, whatever promise the internet might have offered for enlightenment about a weirder, freer world seems covered by a dark cloud, and I am the old man shaking my fist at that cloud (note: I didn’t say I didn’t read the memes).

One thing I want out of the internet is to access thoughtful, interesting essays, but it seems nigh-impossible for a website to make money, or at least to make a shit-ton of money, publishing thoughtful writing, and so the sites that produce writing that matters are increasingly dying or pay-walled, and it’s not yet clear that the latter strategy is going to work for anyone but The New York Times. Perhaps it was always an accident of the late twentieth century that your Susan Sontags and James Baldwins and Truman Capotes and Margaret Atwoods could get big checks from big magazines for their big essays. That, by the way, is a list of people of who published in Playboy. Has the internet, by offering up pictures of naked ladies gratis, killed American literature? I digress.

Part of me very much wants to cut the previous paragraph, because I’ve painted myself into the ludicrous corner of seeming to suggest that I’m blogging because I want to write great essays. But then again, fuck it: of course, deep down, I want to do something that matters. I doubt that I will, but why not have the ambition? What I really want—and here’s your headline—is to write stuff that I would like to read. Which in my case is probably going to consist of essays about poetry and board games and Jersey Shore and the varying degrees to which various chain concept restaurants on the Plaza suck. Perhaps you’d like to read some of it too, in which case, I hope you enjoy it.