hanging in and sitting down

 

 This is a random picture of Morris Dancers from the Solano Stroll in 2019.

It's here because I usually like to have a picture that goes with a blog posting, but there's no way for me to illustrate what's on my mind at the moment because it's a thought. It's a judgement. It's a weighing in on something that bothers me and that something is a little abstract and a little layered and so here's a nice picture of people doing a fun thing on a sunny day to get me started on something that is not very much fun, though the day is sunny and full of smoke.

Today I got a link to another blog post from someone I've known online since around 2005, which is centuries in internet time. We have never met in real life. I don't expect that we ever will. I know her writing and have bought at least one of her books. She's a poet. So it was interesting to see that she'd written something that wasn't on FB, since she's been ill and moving and had generally a lot going on. It was a long post, but up near the beginning of it she dropped an acronym I didn't know. (There are so many acronyms I do not know.) There was a hyperlink, so I clicked it. It went straight to a LMGTFY. 

I was furious. Like I would have googled the damn thing on my own if the link hadn't been there. I stopped reading the piece and went back to work. After a while and after I'd googled the acronym, I went back and read the entire post.

It was very good. It was long and covered how we (meaning people we, not left we or right we) simplify things in politics. How we like easy answers to things that are anything but easy. It talked about Medea and how tragedy is always about characters that cannot change, that it's character, not destiny that dooms us. It was about her recent breakup and how that has no simple answers either and that to take the simple answer of calling her better off without the ex is no support. It ignores what the relationship was and who she is. It was really good and I was glad that I had read it.

I nearly didn't. I was that angry. Did it make sense to be that pissed off at something that may have just been a joke? At something that might have been her impatience at having to explain something for the umpteenth time to people too incurious to find it out for themselves. I have no way of knowing what she meant by it and really no way to ask. So I got over myself and read past my anger and found something that I will think about for a long while. It was because I had internet decades of trust built up and that trust paid off.

Sometimes we need to wait past our first reactions in this asynchronous, complicated conversation that is social media. It doesn't matter whether our reactions are driven by hurt, anger, or a sense of justice. Sometimes it's better to sit for a bit, find something else to do. It's better to sit with ourselves, with our feelings and ask what I want from that next thing I type. Who am I talking to? Why is my voice necessary? Is it necessary now? 

The answer might be that I need to respond and that my voice is necessary. But it's rare that it's necessary right now and at this moment. You can always take a moment.

having time to like it

A couple of weeks ago I went to see William Gibson. It was one of those readings where he read something from a new work [then there's an interview by a Mother Jones editor; then some time for a Q&A. I stood in line for over an hour to get my two books signed. He's holding my copy of Count Zero. I bought it over 30 years ago.

I've been listening to Kate Bush as I drive around running errands. I probably discovered her about the same time that I started reading Gibson, sometime in the middle of the 80s. I remember the first time I heard her. I was in a brewpub up north of UW in Seattle. They had a menu on the wall with the different beers arranged on coordinates like hoppy, malty, light, and dark. It was big bullseye on a cream colored wall. I was probably drinking some ale or other when "Running Up That Hill" started playing. I don't remember whether I asked the bartender what it was, but I know that I went out and bought  Hounds of Love and The Whole Story which has "Wuthering Heights" on it. Anyone who thought that Bronté's weird, Gothic work should be a pop song is the artist for me. From then on I've bought every album Bush has put out.

Likewise I've bought every piece of fiction that Gibson has published since Neuromancer. Sticking with an artist over a long time shows how they change. The work, though always recognizable, shifts focus, emphasis, ambition. The concerns of a young person evolves into the interests of a middle aged, then nearly old person. Growing older with artists is an unexpected gift. Their interests grow and shift, but there's always something recognizable there, something that is familiar, right next to the thing that is new, unexpected.

Maybe when we get older we're able to understand things with greater nuance, with broader and in more complex contexts. There's always a constant, in us as readers, as audience, in the work. We often love now what we loved then, even if we and the work are no longer quite the same.

When Gibson was finished signing my books, I thanked him for years of pleasure. He smiled. He thanked me too.