As you read, and daydream about being a writer, you accumulate great expectations based on the experiences of a handful of heroes. But I’d be willing to bet there are more professional sport players than there are writers who make a living making making shit up.

Many more.

These unexamined assumptions bubble to the surface and pop and effervesce away as you start really writing, finishing, and submitting work. If you suffer from any kind of depression, unipolar, bipolar, or are the kind of person intimidated by the odds, every bursting bubble erodes your confidence, eats away at your focus. So, you know, best that you don’t have ADD either.

Because the hard part about writing, for most, isn’t actually writing. It’s the expectations around having written. About how your work is received. It’s an on-going postponement of a dream, or the continuous cultivation of new ones as you find your place in the literary world.

Which may remind you, a bit, of feelings you had in high-school.

Hm. How many writers read that and said, “Welp. I’m done. Thanks asshole!”

So,  here’s the thing, when you are a late bloomer… you are gonna feel like an outsider. Probably. No matter what. Again, I am not trying to get you to quit. I have loved writing. I hope I keep writing. But I struggle with expectations almost every fucking time I write a goddamn word that isn’t social media. I know that I’m very lucky. I have a bunch of tick marks burned into my permanent record that will never cause me grief. I’m starting out, in everything, three yards ahead of a ton of people.

But… in my writing? I’m still a goddamn pimple-faced, coke-bottom glasses wearing, homophobically bullied twelve-year old middle school basket-case.

That outsider thing… it’s mostly an illusion for me. Publishing is a brutal business. My glimpses of it, through the careers, abortive careers, and friendships in the industry, bring to mind the words, “Darwinian hellscape.” Not in a smug libertarian fittest surviving way, but in a million tadpoles winnowed down to ten frogs sense.

Heinlein bragged that he sold every story he ever finished, and I grew up with the myths of these golden age writers. Middle class incomes for midlist writers, this famed camaraderie in the genre, convention life, the generosity of editors who acted as unpaid co-authors, pouring hours into manuscripts for young writers who of course looked just like them, a world with ten times more magazines buying short stories, all these historical facts–and PR myths– get in your head and fuck with expectations.

Middle aged women are now confronted with bidding wars for photogenic 20 year old YA fantasy authors debuts; we see careers like those of John Green launched from youtube channels. This kind of thing.

So many young, beautiful writers in interviews and headshots.

I keep meaning to go to a cartoon avatar. That feels dumb too, of course. My expectations keep getting in the way. I worry about bothering big career people in social media. Even people I have known who have passed me by, that I came up with in my explosion of pro magazine sales, (mostly Asimov’s) publication years, after I turned 50.

I don’t think that anyone doing the work doesn’t deserve what they get for it.

I just wistfully wish there was more of it to go around for all of us.

The things I have gotten, stumbled into, won, earned, whatever word you want to use. The things I haven’t gotten. yet. The things I know I never will.

I remember walking home from a workshop with this awesome late 20 something, who I admired and wanted to help in any way I could… they admitted they hadn’t read my most successful debut novella (I’d work shopped a lot of their stuff) because, you know, what I’d written wasn’t for them really, was it? So they’d never read it. Honestly is a good thing I know. I wouldn’t bring it up again.

We kept hanging out some after that… they were a real alpha type. Generous, warm, funny, talented.

But I hadn’t realized that I was writing for middle aged people. Look, I love me some middle aged people. But if I’m only writing for middle aged people…

Expectations.

Because when I was young and beautiful I was in love with a bunch of random, lumpy, awkward middle-aged folks, or elderly people, crusty funky people, many of them already fucking dead at age 50, 60, or 80.

So the dream deferred blurs and morphs in my mind, daily. I struggle to reach it, drag it within reach, and I have learned sometimes, to work without any hope for a readership beyond a workshop, struggling to let go of expectations, and just do the damn thing.

And always the dream shimmers like a heat mirage on the horizon. I try to accept that maybe that’s all it ever is, for all of us, really. That we learn to enjoy the ride. Blast the AC, turn up the music, eyeing the fuel gauge.

The world a beautiful and lethal desert all around, a golden plain under a chrome blue sky. You pass a sign designed to ward you off–there is no service station for hundreds of miles.

You do a rough calculation in your head. At least there are no hills in view. For you, on this road.

Crack the window, stick your arm out and play with the invisible force of the slipstream as it sluices through your fingers.

Enjoy the music. Old music, by dead men, who looked a lot like you. When you had hair.  Smile you miserable fuck. You’re so much happier when you smile.

One way or another, this journey has no end.

Didn’t you know that all along?

So I cut my social media diet by about 95%. TL;DR. It’s weird. Mostly better. Sometimes… I’m not sure how I feel about it.

My mother quit smoking when her mother died. She said, “I knew I was going to feel terrible, so I figured, why not get both things over with at once?”

Of course, her mother’s death, fromCOPD caused by smoking.

Still, it resonated. “I was going to feel terrible anyway.”

So, while I felt terrible about my parents deaths, I cut out social media. A writing friend who is 10x more productive than I had been shaking their head pityingly for years now, lamenting the novels melting into conversational typing funding right-wing billionaires.

So, the problem with my experiment of course is I changed two variables at once. What’s really changed?

Now and then I search my feeds, groping for adrenal rage in the shared comments of ‘friends.’ (Some of my social media friends are actual friends; at over a 1000 in both platforms of course, many are just contacts.) This sickening urge to unfold a comment string to find something stupid, detestable, so I could feel that surge of strong emotion. So I could verbally spar with an asshole. Somewhere to scream my sadness, rage, and misery at the world.

As I do that… now… I stop. Every now and then I compose a reply… and delete it. But I like and share the odd political post.

But liking and sharing is the tinder, I should say kindling, of the feed, the raw material social media uses to generate ‘engagement’, (IE, disunity, anger, polarization, outrage, depression, social humiliation and shaming, and now and then, actual violence).

So I don’t feel good about political liking and sharing either. But… you feel like you need to make yourself known, take a side, and it’s very hard not to imagine that social media is a good place to do that. All evidence to the contrary.

Social media discontent seems pretty good at wrecking things. The Arab spring ousted some miserable governments. Which were gradually replaced by equally miserable governments. Because social media uses algorithms to magnify amorphous discontent… without empowering the creation of organizations that can turn anger into lasting social change. Or rather, the rage comes first. This is the force that causes people to rise up, slaughter the ‘bad’ guys, and then mill about wondering what comes next.

Which is the next monster taking advantage of the chaos.

Move fast, break things, has long been a silicon valley motto.  Unspoken of course, is the idea that the basic fabric of civilization, the infrastructure, that must remain unbroken is Someone Else’s Problem, Primarily the governments that the techno-libertarian right wing majority tries to dismantle, to shrink to bath tub drown-able dimensions.

But I digress.

Broadly of course, this is about my own response to social media, and in that personal-is-political way, thinking about how my abdication might scale. A movement rising up from the twenty people that read this blog to CHANGE THE WORLD! The social media come-on. The viral lottery. Say something clever? God forbid, wise? It blows up? That’s social capital! Platform building! Which can turn into real money! Or Social change! Or something good!

So, we plunk our quarters into the social media slot machine, praying for the jackpot, and now and then that happens. But we know, or should remember, that the real winner is always the house. Run by gangsters for profit, who move fast, break things, and laugh at the grown-ups who scramble in their wake to pick up the pieces.

But I will have to adapt to social media somehow. And hopefully society does too, in my lifetime.

And I know much of my disillusion is simply the collapse of my previous delusion. No golden age. There was never a golden age. Maybe the fights are just out in the open now. Maybe nothing has really changed.

But I feel weird.

Taking a huge step back from social media, coping with the loss of my parents generation, feels like growing up.

Not fun. But necessary.

So, it took a few months of daily effort to step away from Facebook, and the daily news habit that was its co-morbidity. Peeking at it now and again, I see how my feed has adapted to my absence; see the same folks talking about mostly the same stuff.  I miss the life events, large and small, of people who had become friends, facebook friends, people who edged into the real friends who don’t live nearby category. I contact a few in messenger now and then, and they contact me. But it’s sort of like work or school friendship, that can be real, and intense, but still mostly based on proximity. A few of them had strong reactions to my writing, mostly to the FB writing, but one or two to my fiction. Maybe three.

I had a dozen or so strong supporters, to some degree of my writing, but to a larger degree, people who supported me generally, as a person, in my day to day struggles. I miss them. I think about going back for them. I was this person for a few folks, too, I think, but always, there were others. So you don’t worry too much about stepping away.

One of the many FB is different than meat-space. You don’t feel like you leave a vacuum when you vanish.

I am billing more hours on my less creative contracts, maybe walking more.

I’ve added the FB people I miss to my parents, still, a year after the death of one, two years since the death of the other, Maybe this explains the persistent melancholy. The thousand plus a day COVID deaths and Omicron wave, the end of that feeling that we might get on top of this in a serious way, has also contributed. The death of the dream of a new progressive era caused by a handful of traitorous ‘democrats’, DINOs, also contributes to a sense of loss.

The political stuff, without stimulation, becomes less rage, and more acceptance–or is it resignation?

The serenity prayer. Was I guilty of weirdly empathizing with a team where I was 99.9999 percent a spectator?

I have a friend active in local politics who went from hard working volunteer to a player, in a very large sense, making decisions, or rather, steering a process towards decisions, that matter. A dedicated progressive, much of what she is doing now if preventing a radical left fringe from doing poorly thought out stupid shit. Successfully.

It’s too bad the sane stuff needed to save hundreds of millions of lives over the next few decades, and reduce human misery hugely, can’t get past the bottleneck of bigoted, know-nothing racist vampire capitalist theocratic hypocritical opposition, the monster that the GOP has become. (Yes, I know; only 80-90% of them. Sure. Whatever.)

But here’s the thing. I’m one guy. I’m not the voice of a movement.

I’m at best a footsoldier of a national movement. I’m politically inert lodged in a group of comfortable mostly progressives in Cambridge. (Somerville, Cambridge’s somewhat more affordable neighbor without the prestigious universities, is much more progressive now.) I donate a few thousand bucks of family money to causes, do a little phone banking, and vote. That’s it.

I no longer preach to a choir, any more than I just did, above. A few tweets. No FB posting. I go on much too long on FB. Like somebody standing on a balcony, Mussolini like.

I am, well, I was going to say limping along, on my novel, but maybe that’s just my process. I hope to gather steam on it.

Anyway. It’s 2022. I try not to think of it as the year that the democrats lose all ability to do anything but very temporary executive actions that will be hamstrung by SCOTUS and wiped away by the coming red wave. I will try to think of it as the first year without any one year death anniversaries, a year where my family is strong and healthy, and our own personal circumstances good. A year when I could do a lot of creative work, and bill a lot of hours, and interact with a smallish number of closer friends. While missing some people.

But let that go. Accept the things I cannot change. Be here now, in a less diluted, less agitated state.

Enjoy the time I am given. None of us go on forever.

I had a conversation with my father, in his eighties now, about the sixties, the early seventies, I think, and he said, well, that was our our time. And I knew what he meant, because I felt it too, like the 90s was my time, the swelling of that first tech bubble and the way I was sucked into the beating heart, and febrile mind, of late stage capitalism, taking my part in the Zeitgeist that would breed the quartet of IT monopolies that would shape the next few decades. Living breathing a futurism blissfully ignorant of the coming surveillance oligopolies.

The SF I’d loved my whole life coming true. The Asimov and the Gibson, both at once.

Making a hundred dollars an hour, too. The money pushing away my writing without a ton of resistance.

But time marches on and the towers fell and my kids were born in the swirl of ashes and the future went Abu Grahib dark and flared bright again, in the glowing smile of my favorite Kenyan Crypto muslim robot from the future, and now is darker than ever before, approaching the midnight gloom of the Cuban Missile crisis, into which I was born. 

My time seems to have been brief indeed, the flicker of an eyelid, but I guess everyone’s time feels like that. 

So. I fell off the stage and broke my leg but my eyes were open, on the way down, and I watched my kids, and cared for them, and they were creatures of this time, and so I was sucked along in the moment, painfully awake, prickly and weirded out and exhausted and alternately happy and very very sad, which of course is probably just the bipolar. But who knows. 

So, like all parents, I’ve seen life twice through, all my milestones now a double vision. 

I’m at this age where men can drop dead and people go, “oh, really? What was it?” And the answer is generally, “Heart thing,” and the regret thereafter is tinged with a ‘well that’s life’ kind of vibe.

So it’s hard to know what to do next, with one’s time.

I’ve watched men my age rewrite old stories. Stories that no longer adhere to the present in any meaningful way. I’ve watched them retire, give up, become worse than irrelevant. I’ve watched them become despised, for doubling down on statements they failed to understand as despicable.

Could I be a late bloomer? Or am I just fading out, like Hey Jude, repeating myself as the volume drops and the hiss of the needle in the groove swallows up the murmur of my voice. Before the needle rises from my spinning disk forever?

My kids are older and leaving  home and I feel my attachment to this time and place and world stretching thin. Bilbo’s butter over too much bread.

But… Maybe I’ll be better off in another world. Of my own creation, undisturbed by the noisy now.  Or wherever it is we go when we go, if my next pratfall off the stage lands me at an awkward angle. Maybe I had plenty of time. Maybe I did something.

I don’t feel like I did, but then, that’s probably the bipolar.

At any rate, here is to you, dear reader, to you and your time, and what you do with the time you have on your hands right now. Do something that matters to you. Make something. Love someone. Listen to new music.

Enjoy the light. Your time under the sun.