Estrangement

Life has gotten so strange, so odd. Yesterday I meant to write, but I was feeling so estranged from reality, from the world around me. I suppose this is partially a product of getting older. I mean, the years have passed, my beard has more gray in it, but inside I don’t feel any different. But when I look around...

The world is getting unrecognizable. I hear popular music and I honestly don’t understand it. I don’t understand why anyone would want to listen to it. It all sounds like half-drunk people mumbling something over computer generated elevator music. So tame and lifeless. I mean, my dad hated my music too, but it was because it was loud, transgressive, rebellious. But it rocked out and have life in it. I suppose older generations always hate new music.

If it were only that, I would just laugh at myself for being an old guy yelling at a cloud.

But the internet and AI has also made the world quite strange. And this is technology that I am involved with. There are so many things. Too many to get into.

But the internet itself. It is a very different place than it used to be. I remember back around 2003...hard to believe that was actually 23 years ago. Very hard to believe. Anyway, do you remember I was writing on Journalspace? That was the old blog I had. This was before I had even graduated with my Bachelor’s. I wasn’t even married yet. I was just a young dude, writing on the internet. Journalspace was pretty awesome. The internet was smaller then. It wasn’t so collected together. If Facebook existed, I was unaware of it. The internet was just these little locations, like little towns on the map. There weren’t any cities.

I wrote on Journalspace every day. Some deep thoughts. Some not so much. I shared my thoughts on what I was reading for my literature classes. I shared my dreams of trying to get into grad school, which seemed impossible with my horrible GPA. Sometimes I shared my actual dreams, like the ones from sleeping. I wrote poetry on there. I talked about going to Magic tournaments. Sometimes I just ranted about how the modern world annoyed me.

But I wasn’t trying to be anything. I wasn’t a brand. I wasn’t selling anything. I was just...me.

There were other bloggers on there as well, who just sort of wrote about what they were doing or thinking. None of us had anything in common. There was maybe about 20 people who often visited my blog, and I would visit theirs. There was this bored housewife who was in love with me. There was this bodybuilder who has an amazing physique but was afraid to talk to women because he had so many insecurities. There was this old man who lived up on a mountain. He would come down to the village once a week to get internet and check Journalspace and post on his blog. He would talk about doing some homesteading stuff, about fishing, or reflecting on his life.

None of us had anything in common. We were just like 20 people locked in a room together. Like a reality show. And it was pretty great. There isn’t quite a format like this anymore, not really. I like Substack overall, because it actually allows for some longer form writing. But it feels like a room full of writers trying to promote themselves to other writers. It reminds me of some writing conventions I have gone to, where everyone there is a writer, everyone is trying to sell a book, but no one is buying them.

A lot of social media is like that now. And I’m not even ripping on anyone here. I have promoted myself and my work. But when I log into Substack, I don’t really want to read the top ten cool ways to sell a book. I want to read about the old man who spent two days fixing his chimney and then went fishing. I want to hear him remember how he was in Chicago in the 1950s and what the town felt like then.

So much for nostalgia. So much for the good old days.

But I think perhaps I am not the only one, so I decided to write today, not about anything amazing, not with some cool presentation about Toby R. Beeny, author genius extraordinaire...but just Toby, an aging man who is looking around at life and reflecting on what has happened, and what is coming.

Do you remember the author Piers Anthony? I read a lot of his Xanth novels growing up. They were so goofy and unserious and he did not give a damn. He just had fun with them and they were fun to read. I was curious about him the other day and found that he had this online blog. He actually had it forever. He is in his 90s now and I think someone else is writing it for him. But he is still working on his books. That is sort of...reassuring, to see a man in his 90s still writing his strange books. I think he is 96 now? How strange the world must be for a man born in 1930. I was born in 1978 and it seems terribly strange to me.

I think that people just sort of retreat in life as they get older. At least in our technological age. I think in earlier times, when technology moved a bit slower, it was easier to get older. If the world around me still was technologically in the 90s, I honestly think I would find that comforting. I find some people trying to go back, like trying to create weird little webpages like we had back in the 90s.

Makes me think of Journalspace again. You know I had over 700 blog posts when it went down. It was a horrible incident. I woke up one Saturday and went to login, to see how my blog friends were doing, to write about something or other. And it was gone. The entire site. Their servers had crashed and they had no backups. It was all gone. I had no other contact with the people on there, the people that I had shared that little space with for a few years. I had, at one point, printed out my entire blog. I don’t remember why. I don’t think I was trying to do a backup. I think I was trying to see if I had anything worth developing and preferred to read and annotate it that way. I never did that. But I still had that printout in a box when the site died. I still have it now. In 23 years I have never sat down and read it. I don’t even remember what is in there. It is a stack of around 500 sheets of paper. One day perhaps.

I think that is why I wanted to write to you today. I miss just writing. Writing without worrying about polishing everything. Writing without trying to promote or position. Just writing. Just speaking to someone. Just reaching out my hand.

Maybe you won’t read this. Maybe you will, but will not write back. That is fine either way.

Maybe I will just keep writing anyway.