Doing the same thing but in different places
The internet is a nomadic place and we have no home
Every time I move apartments, I take a moment to try to remember my last shower. In the hot, steamy cubicle, trying not to slip and fall into what would become my porcelain coffin, I look around and think “this is your last time doing this, here on the 10th floor of this cinderblock apartment complex, temporarily useless and unreachable to the world.”
And then without fail, I forget.
Trying to call these memories back now - on D street, in Maple Park, on 8th Avenue - it’s like my brain knew that writing them was not actually that important. Because it’s really not. Every North American shower is basically the same save for a few minor differences. Sometimes it’s a hotel where the floor is suspiciously sticky. Sometimes it’s in a KOA bathroom with flip-flops on. Sometimes it’s the best part of a day and sometimes it’s in such a hurry that you can barely feel your hair get wet. If there’s hot water, plumbed right to your house, it’s a miracle that we just expect to work every single time.
It’s the same thing in a different place. It’s the same feeling in a different time.
After 20 (!!!) years of writing professionally to some degree of another, that’s sort of how the work hits these days. I’m here, hunched over the computer, doing basically the same thing but in different places. Today I’m writing about educational policy. A few years ago, I’ve written about the minimum wage. Years before that, I wrote about exercise equipment and skincare and live music. The same but also different.
Same me, different topics. Different physical spaces - right now I’m at a sports bar on a Tuesday afternoon watching soccer, but I’ve written in a freezing office in New York City and on an airplane to San Francisco and in a double-wide trailer in rural Oregon - and different digital spaces, too.
The internet is a big place and, evidently, a nomadic one, too. I, along with all of the writers I’ve met in the last decade, am getting slowly backed away from our little clubhouse of Twitter, where we met up to meet jokes and share stories and compare bruises. We were kicked out of our parents’ proverbial house - traditional publishing - early. The dormitory of blogging promised to be the next great ticket out, but the only people who managed to take that fast-tracked ride were the early mom-fluencers who sold their children’s future for sponsored content and book deals about mental breakdowns. Facebook has long since stopped surfacing our work, even to our closest friends and family, amplifying the sensation of yelling into a black hole that writing already creates. The iTunes Store will never see me as either new or noteworthy because, while I am a white woman with a podcast, I’m not a white woman with a podcast where I read Wikipedia articles about murders.
It’s a weird time to be a writer because there are vanishingly few places to write.
I know this sounds like a lot of kvetching from a person who works in leggings all day, leaving greasy little fingerprints on my keyboard. But these aren’t really complaints - they’re just statements about how it feels to grow up, so to speak, bouncing from one metaphorical place to another, figuring out the rules with each new platform. No one promises you a place to write or an audience to write for. This is the great gamble. I would just as soon go ply another other trade if there were one that could cover the cost of every single thing these days.
I haven’t quit Twitter yet, but I’m sure it’s coming - my last proverbial shower in the digital space where I connected with editors, got my work out there, and met my partner almost a decade ago. Another platform sounds exhausting and unlikely to offer much in the way of returns. I don’t want to figure out BeReal or Mastodon. I’ve only just kind of figured out emails and even that seems like scattering seeds and random and calling it a garden.
Where will you find any of us in the new year or next year? What books will you pick up (or digitally check out) and how will you know which ones you want once we’ve all picked up our pixelated bindles and moving down the tracks again?
Maybe we’ll bring back zines. Or figure out a way to make TikTok work for longer-form writers. It’s hard to say and the forecast changes all the time.
Which I guess is a long of way of saying thanks for getting and reading this email. This is where I live now.
xoxo HBO
What I’m Reading:
I’m currently listening to Running While Black which is very good.
Prompted by, you know, literally everything, I re-read The Origins of Totalitarianism. You can read the entire thing online!
Tree Thieves was ROUGH but also extremely interesting and well-written.
I’m on the wait list for Strangers To Ourselves so I haven’t read it yet but I really want to!!!