Flow

Boy, what a week to not ever, in my entire whole-ass life, have particularly gotten into the work of David Lynch. Nothing against the man, or even the (handful of) works I’ve seen. Just never became a thing for me. I’m happily re-subscribed to the Criterion Channel as of Saturday, picking my way forward.

But I’ll tell ya something: somewhere in the unrelenting floodwater of reflections on Lynch that started Thursday afternoon and continue even as I write this, I saw one, in particular, that I really liked. It’s gone now. But it was something along the lines of, you know what A.I. is absolutely 100% not going to be able to do? It’s not going to be able to be weird. That’s something only we can do, and we can only do it when we’re trying as hard as we absolutely can to be right down in the core of ourselves, where the engines are, the smoke and the steam and the grime, just grinding away at the pith of our selves till all of the juice comes out and turns bloody.

And that’s all I’ll say on that. To quote Lynch in his final on-screen performance, final on-screen line, “get the fuck out of my office!”

The other day, I wrote something* that was just weird enough, just weird and personal and its-own-thing enough, to maybe be art. Then a few days later, I did it again**. Then, I swear to fucking shit, on Sunday morning with forty minutes to spare before I had to get on the streetcar to go see Rajo so we could go to Burlington and buy action figures, I did it a third time***! So I dunno, man, I’m feeling fine about everything right now. Pretty damn fine.

*It was a short story about body parts.

**It was a very down-the-middle re-imagining of the pilot for the TV series I’m working on, broader, cheaper, clearer. I am learning a lot about clarity lately.

***It was another short story. This one was about sleepaway camp and genderqueerness.

A friend of mine read The Last Alchemist this week. Here’s the jacket quote:

“Beyond sheer enjoyment it is visual, compelling, [and] incredibly well written… the characters are three-dimensional and bright, and I think it will speak to so many people in a profound way.”

Becca Dee

I haven’t even started querying it yet, but whenever I do, I’ll probably put that lovely sentiment somewhere near the top.

Anyway: none of this was to brag. The major focus of my practice these days — both creative and spiritual — is steady, measured progress. (Or as I unfailingly style it in my journal: Steady. Measured. Progress.) It’s about rewiring the satisfaction sensors in my brain to be less interested in evaluating what I’m getting done right now, and more attuned to the idea that if you keep shovelling the coal steadily day by day and just go about your business, over time, the pile on the left gets smaller and the pile on the right gets bigger.

There isn’t a trick to this, besides just ignoring the part of my head that goes “you didn’t X today” or “you didn’t achieve enough Y this week.” Or at least, ignoring him long enough to just carry on with the work, in a state that resembles peace. (I say this only to allow for the fact that if I actually gave up on X and Y for, like, three months… then yeah, that would net out into a real problem — ironically through the same forces that I am trying to master re: steady, measured progress.)

And one of the reasons I think this practice is challenging is the sheer weight of instant gratification wiring that is sitting on my (all of our) brains all the time, because in this century anyway, instant gratification has kind of become the whole thing. Every app. Every television show. Every social network. What if every single thing you did was given feedback, immediately, to train your brain into feeling a certain way about the very act of doing anything, ever. It’s… unnatural.

Accelerating quickly

The first thing that happened after the inauguration of whatsisfuck on Monday was that Instagram recommended I follow Vice-Führer J.D. Vance.

I’m not on Meta products much, at the moment. I’m trying to make a decision about them. But the muscle memory had me in the app before I knew what I was doing on Tuesday morning, and right off the top, there was the recommendation: you should definitely be following the Hillbilly Elegy guy.

A couple of things spring to mind, one amusing, one not.

Amusing: I would tentatively suggest that “you, intelligent Canadian, with progressive-cum-radical lefty politics on clear display throughout your feed, probably want to follow the updates of the alt-right moron Vice President of the United States” is pretty solid proof that these presumptively all-seeing algorithms don’t actually exist, and that all of these recos are pumped into our feeds by some pimple-faced kid in a dark room pushing buttons.

Less amusing: The kid is Mark Zuckerberg.

No offence intended to the pimpled. They go away, mostly. Being Mark Zuckerberg, on the other hand, seems to be a permanent condition.

I guess we won’t know for a while if Meta has now been technologically rewired to boost alt-right content in the feeds of those who would otherwise deplore it, the way that Xitter was after the Muskicide. But it seems like a reasonable possibility, given everyone in the billionaire class eagerly sieg-heiling their way around town this week.

I don’t really want anything to do with whatever it is Zuckerberg is doing. I figure I’ll give myself a month to decide if I want to pull out of Meta permanently. I will say, on the face of it, I can’t imagine that continuing to use any of Zuck’s products is, at this point, morally admissible; more to the point of all of the above, it must be — by any yardstick — profoundly unhealthy, necrotic even, to our senses of reality and our ability to stay tuned to the things that make us us.

Let us also consider: David Bowie took one look at Trump ’16 and said, nope, I’m a nebula now; David Lynch saw L.A. burning around him and Trump ’25 coming on, and became a puff of his beloved smoke. Well done, Davids. May transubstantiation await for all who desire it.

Unusually substantive link dump

I dunno, you might want to take these one-per-day till next week.

• This piece – titled, provocatively, “The Last Star Wars Essay” – is so f***ing good I’m actually a little apprehensive about seeking out any of the writer’s others. I might unpack some of the salient details in a future piece; then again, I might not. I write a lot about Star Wars, and this person just blew me out of the sky. (The Hurting)

• “The Times piece confirmed what many people suspect, at least in this moment, when it comes to apparatuses of power: that they’re controlled by a nefarious army of people working in the shadows to manipulate the public.” Anne Helen Petersen on Blake Lively. I’ll also add: I probably wouldn’t have posted a piece like this a year ago; but, Petersen’s work in that time has had me reconsidering some internalized gender issues that I have around “gossip” as a broad category, which has been really valuable. (Culture Study)

• Back in my red-string mode, here’s a good piece about the whole weird panic about lowering birth rates. And, like, the political power of resistance. (Beneath the Pavement)

• America? Straight-up bad, I think we can all agree on that. (Those 9 or so hours where TikTok was America-less? Blessed!) But I keep an eye on Celeste Trianon’s coverage maps of anti-trans legislation as it creeps its way across Canada and, as do all good-thinking people, remind myself that Canada is aimed straight at becoming America Junior, once again. Like, a plurality of our citizens can’t wait to become as ghastly and impoverished as the folks down south. (Celeste Trianon)

• I’m getting repetitive at this point, but that thing where a whole cohort of people — quite a large one — really thinks they’re going to age in place with permanent access to driving and that everything’s going to be fine? Craaaaaazy. (Carbon Upfront)

• Let’s go out on a high note with “Why Severance will survive America’s war on art,” and remind ourselves which side we’re all on. (SFGate)