Platform Bound Friendship

Posted on by admin 4 Comments

Whenever you post about leaving a platform, you get people saying, “I’ll be sorry to see you go! I use this platform to connect with friends and don’t often seek people out one by one, so you leaving is really unfortunate!” Sometimes they talk about how they have made the platform non-toxic, with privacy settings, blocking, curating their feeds. They suggest you do that, too.

They really like you, and want to know what’s going on in your life, they want your take on things, but… well.

They don’t like you enough to read your stupid blog.

Dear God, Trump gave up on his blog because it wasn’t getting him enough hits. He created a social media service to connect. Because blogs are fossils that don’t work.

I have been guilty of this. The friends of mine that never use Facebook? I maintain a few of those friendships. Poorly.

Who hears my voice almost every day? Who is in my thoughts, when I read their posts? People on the platform.

So… I have been allowing a commercial for profit entity to edit my friendships, to subset them, for about a decade. Again, I have to take responsibility for my actions, I could have kept in touch with more people outside of the platform, but I didn’t, and the reason I didn’t is that I expended a lot of energy on Facebook, and I got a lot of response from that.

Email one friend? You get one email back.

Post to facebook to 1000 ‘friends’? Get 10, 20, 100 reactions and 20 comments.

Now, if you are a private person, the email has more appeal.

But if you are an over-sharer? Dear god. You’re in trouble. Because the social media platform will stimulate you an order of magnitude more than writing that single email. Oh, and it does it INSTANTLY! You don’t have to wait for hours, or days. With eough friends, no post ever goes. unnoticed; you get reactions proving someone saw it, That email? If the recipient doesn’t respond? God. It’s fucking embarrassing.

All of this said, people have vital, important, very real, interactions and friendships bound to social media platforms. I did, and do.

It’s sort of like a bar where your friends hang out. There are folks there you would never ask out for one on one thing. But they are your friends. The so called third place. The only problem?

Turns out… you’re an alcoholic.

The small doses of poison slipped into social media isn’t something you seem to be able to metabolize. You waste time arguing about things. Your posts hurt people. You overshare and damage your professional identity.

Not going to the bar means losing touch… most of your friends. Most of these friends, anyway. You can try to pull a one on one friendship out of the platform… but it’s just not practical. People have enough IRL friends, enough one on one friends, generally speaking.

This is the horrible part. A for profit entity lured you into this, with a platform with a lot less poison in it. And they have gradually ramped up the poison level over the years.

Anyway. I should be writing fiction. Talk to you later. Hopefully not today!

Facebook and the Final Straw

Posted on by admin 6 Comments

Hello, all.

The impulse that makes me want to conversationally type at hundreds or thousands of people of varying degrees of closeness has to go somewhere. So here I am.

I’ve lost many friends in my life, and by lose, I mean,  I still know where they are, they just don’t want to talk to me anymore. (to paraphrase comedian ‘Bobcat’ Goldthwait.) But two recent losses stem from my Facebook posting and the October sixth attacks. This has focused my scattered attention on the reality of what social media does best. Create engagement by exploiting negative human emotions.

What you say, and what you don’t say, can become grounds for ending lifelong friendships.

I have made these same kinds of mistakes IRL, of course, so I’m not really blaming facebook for my current sadness. But my sadness now lets me see just how rotten the whole social media thing has become.

I really, really loved Facebook, for a long time. I had built audiences before, in support groups, in political groups, but Facebook grew my audience effortlessly. Slowly but surely, though, the tenor of my posts, of the conversations I engaged in my own comments on others posts, changed. While must take responsibility, for what one says, there’s something about FB that magnifies the worst in me. In many I think.

I’ve made my personal feed private, friends only, but should really just download my content and pull the plug on it. I will leave my author account, also confusingly named Jay O’Connell, up. God knows why really. But it might be necessary at some point. I’ll scrub it clean of anything offensive.

I’ve overshared on Facebook, and I can’t help but think that this is one reason it’s been hard for me to find work. Far from creating a network of people wanting to give or find me work, it’s a place that people check up on to see if I’m anyone they might want to work with. I’m sort of like a car accident. Something you slow down to look at, but don’t want to get too close to.

Politically, there’s the phenomenal where those the closest to you on the political spectrum become the people you fight with the nastiest. If you have half a brain you don’t bother to engage with people too far gone, ideologically, as you know they are lost completely. But the ways in which those on your side of things differ from you can be painful, because you know they are capable of rational thought… so why the hell do they think _this unforgivable thing?_.

Talking about social media, posting on social media about how rotten social media is, mostly expresses the fact that you’re probably still far too mired in it. You can promise people you’re going, really going, and they nod and say goodbye, knowing you’ll be back. So they don’t really have to make any effort to follow you on another platform.

So.. this post is stupid. Just another stupid waste of time. Like the thousands of hours I spent giving my content away for free to billionaires, to build a list of people that the billionaires won’t actually send my postings to in any significant numbers.

Your friend lists are for them—not for you.

I think it’s time to pull back, though, and think small. Think about small friend groups. Relationships that don’t fly apart when some current event drives us all crazy. Reciprocal relationships.

The dream of going viral with one’s cleverness, and then somehow monetizing that, is the modern day creative’s convenience store scratch ticket.

Not a good reason to create content for free. Not a good reason to overshare. Not a good reason to write contentious Op Ed.

That’s it for now. I’ll make a post about my writing projects next. Then maybe some post-mortem on AI image generation, one last word there.

Hope you are all doing well.

Please don’t attack me in the comments here, if possible.

 

But You Keep Writing Anyway

Posted on by admin 8 Comments

There comes a time when you realize you’ll never take the writing world by storm. Like your heroes. You aren’t a prodigy.

But you keep writing anyway..

You won’t sell your first story to your favorite magazine. You won’t sell all your stories. (A few folks do!)

But you keep writing anyway.

There comes a time when you realize that your day job goes on… well. Maybe forever. You may realize this before or after you start selling things. Before or after your first story or novella or novel is published. Before or afterr you first award nomination. Before or after your Kirkus reviews. Before or after your Hugo or Nebula award.

But you keep writing anyway.

There comes a time when you realize you will never be a fresh face. Your author photo for your first book, if it ever gets published, is gonna be this worn around the edges middle-aged person. Nobody will ever look at you and want to be you. Not if they have to look like you, be as old as you. Your face will not sell a single book. Your books will have to sell themselves.

But you keep writing anyway.

You eventually realize that your books will not do for you what books written by others do. You are performing magic tricks, that work best for others. You can amuse yourself, but you cannot tickle yourself. You can surprise yourself, but after that moment of surprise, there’s a ton of mechanical toil.

But you keep writing anyway.

There comes a time when it gets harder to read; when things you read and loved no longer work for you, when you grow jealous of authors of things you cannot imagine ever writing, when you grow weary of reading things you feel you could have written yourself. Or written better.

But you keep writing anyway.

There comes a time when it all gets to be too much; the ambivalence of friends, family, workshop, market, editors, awards process, agents, publishers, one star reviewers. The pile of unsold work so much taller than the pile of stuff sold. The mental calculation of how much per hour writing has made you. If anything, after you factor in the courses and retreats and professional memberships and research expenses.

And you stop writing. For a time. You have better, or more necessary, things to do.

And those other things consume you, and then, recede, and the disappointments fade, and the memory of the accomplishments glows, and the friendships shine brighter than the ambivalence and tribal bickering. You remember this hidden world inside, infinite, largely untapped, your own godlike ability to imagine into being that which would require billion dollar budgets to render on film.

Nobody needs to green light you—except you.

You get the exact same blank page to write on that every single writer you ever loved was given. Your materials are just as good.

Language. Introspection. Focus. Effort. Will. Reason. Unique experience.

You have time. Some time. Some have more time than others. That isn’t fair. That doesn’t have to stop you cold. You have some time. And you can do this. Because you have before, And you are still you, a version of you, and will always be some version of you.

And you find yourself writing again, for no reason, for fun, with no expectations, with great expectations, and when you write, you’re a writer. You get to be one. You are one.

For as long as you want to be. For as long as you can.

The posts you imagine writing when you’re off social media

Posted on by admin 6 Comments

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.

On Being a Casual User of Social Media

Posted on by admin 8 Comments

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.

That Was Our Time

Posted on by admin 5 Comments

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.

Staring Into the Sun

Posted on by admin Leave a comment

I’ve been thinking about death a lot lately. If death is possible think about it. Grasp, believe in, and truly accept.

I’m only young now to an 80 year old, but I have like a young person dealt with death with denial. Intellectually I know about it. I don’t believe in Santa Claus or Heaven. But viscerally, even though I have at times been suicidal, I have never wrapped my mind around my death, or the deaths of those closest to me.

As COVID takes a 911 worth of lives every few days, as I grapple with the deaths of my parents, my ending becomes more real, and yet, never comes into focus. It’s a hole in my retina. It’s in my blind spot. I catch glimpses. Evoking horror. Or a curious numbness. But mostly, I’m no closer to any understanding or closure.

Instead this gasping fear, this hideous dread, of finding myself in the hospital or hospice bed with my sad family gathered around me. Saying goodbye.

Or it’s an abstraction, devoid of panic, fear, only a mix of sadness and an attempt at acceptance and resignation. Aphorisms. For everything a season. He lived a rich and full life and was loved.

Everything dies, my mother said. That’s just the way it is. And if I’m going to die, I wish I would and get it over with. This said while she was in uncontrollable pain for a month or so.

So I’m left wondering, what do I do with my fucking life, now that I know, at some level, my days are numbered? What matters enough to do? To give myself to utterly?

It’s down to writing. Some part of me wants to join some mythical brigade of tree planting climate warriors. Or armed defenders of the weak against the rising right-wing white supremacist GOP fronted menace that threatens anyone and everyone but those most like me. But what the fuck, when has that ever been me? I got closest to that with my trans kid, writing about and learning about them, fighting online for them, and once virally boosting a boycott that helped shut down a few right wing radio jocks.

I had businesses contacting me begging to be taken off their show’s sponsor list.

But mostly I have gamboled and angsted perched on some high terrace of Maslow’s heirarchy of needs.

And I want to throw myself into something. Completely. Make some small mark. Be for something. Be about something. Time not on my side. At an age when many of my heroes have been dead for years.

Trying not to stare into the sun and blind myself. Trying to snap out of the daydream of immortality. Withdraw from the anodyne of streaming media. Leave the party and roll up my sleeves and get to work. Work eighteen hours a day, to make up for all the lost time. All the self-indulgence.

Until the end.

Until I am dragged, kicking and screaming into the unknowable.

 

 

 

 

The 40,000 Word Wall

Posted on by admin 1 Comment

Locks on the Mass Ave (Smoot marked) bridge to MIT.

The markets that publish me that have made me feel like a ‘real writer,’ have a 20k suggested word cap, which I have successfully pushed out a few thousand words a few times. But my shorts have grown longer and longer, and now everything I write becomes a novella, which I sell every other time or so.

I write novel starts… and hit a hard wall at 40k. The unpublished novellas I believed in so much haunt me. I stare at the wall. I don’t write.

My supports, writing community, friends and editors haven’t, as yet, been able to shove me up and over that wall in the spec fic genres.

I have endings in mind that call to me, and my scattering of milestones that I pants my way toward. I have finished a few short novels in other genres. But with SF, which I feel is my true calling, I stall out.

Nothing in my work has ever been called ground breaking. And that, for a long time, was what I thought was the point of SF. To be something new under the sun. Gradually I realized I read a lot of entertaining SF, and loved it, that explored old tropes in new-ish ways, or simply executed well on old tropes—with great plots and characters. Good world-building. And I liked that stuff.

Everything I liked wasn’t a part of this huge tapestry of extrapolation that SF has woven through my world, through my understanding of the odd future we now live inside, and the even odder ones to come. Sometimes what I love is just good writing and enjoyable reading. Reinforcing that fabric. Overlaying it. Singing in harmony with it, to abruptly abandon the cloth metaphor.

I first first realized this while reading SF magazines, and it let me write. I didn’t have to be a genius. I could be me. There were stories I could write, that maybe only I could write.  In Nancy Kress’s Beginnings, Middles and Ends, she says that all writers have the Dostoevsky problem. Eventually realizing they will never be Dostoevsky, and wondering, what the fuck is the point of this difficult activity?

This is often after the writer comes face to face with the reality that most authors do not making anything like a living. At best, fiction is a part time gig. Those that do it full time usually have patrons. This is one reason we get too much white het cis rich guy fiction. We also get fiction from their white het cis wives, and their white het cis children. But whether you are struggling to make a living, or another well-supported white het cis guy, the Dostoevsky problem remains.

Writers are haunted by reviews. Writing workshop critiques can be painful, and professional rejections sometimes worse, but a review on a finished published work takes the psychic horror to a new level. This is a reader, who took a chance on you. You failed them. With this thing you loved.

One of the hardest reviews for me, was a 4 star review which said, “nothing groundbreaking, but my favorite story in the issue.”

I nodded. I knew that, didn’t I? I beat this problem before, didn’t I?

But after 40,000 words, knowing that my editors that believe in me are no longer in the loop, I lose steam.

I revise a lot now. Even 40k is an endless abyss of editing, which isn’t painful at all, it’s sort of fun for me, but I shudder to think how long my novels are gonna take to write. Will I get faster? I’m fucking 58. Why would I get any faster?

So I struggle. Hoping always to become that person that climbs that wall. Maybe tomorrow. If I am lucky to live long enough, maybe I get there.

Wish You Were Here

Posted on by admin 2 Comments
The path I’ve walked a thousand times.

I’ve been off social media for maybe four months now. I’ve also cut back my news consumption by about 90%. This isn’t coincidental. My feed drove my news habit; they were co-morbidities.

I’m reading more, but still not enough. I walk a lot, and when I do, I talk to my mother in my head as I approach the one year anniversary of her death. I talk to Dad too. I am repeating myself now, mostly, and I think the talks will end, or become less frequent.

I posted about the deaths of my parents too much, so twitter thinks I like hearing about family members dying. I am not joking. I check in on Twitter, and Facebook, now and then every few days, to see if anyone is engaging with my content (writing, blogging, etc.)

They aren’t.

I glance at the feeds, until I see something that makes me clench up inside. This anger. This desire to bang out a manifesto. To make a statement!

I remember… doing this for hundreds upon hundreds of hours. I start a reply, now and then… then I delete it, and block whoever pissed me off. I close the window. And it’s over.

The part of me that wrote FB posts is withering, thank God. It’s the same brain module that blogs, here, so these posts seem to be fading away as well.

I fast. I fill my apple watch rings, with an hour and fifteen minutes of walking and jogging. I meditate.

I remember. I am grateful. I am worried about how fast time is going by. I dread the next horror that will arise sooner or later. The next person in the hospital. The next late night phone call. The next emergency surgery. The next person I will watch die. I worry about being that person, in that waiting room, going into the OR, with my family telling me everything will be Ok.

I worry about my cats dying. They should go next. I do the pet deaths, it’s one of my jobs in the family.

I try not to worry, because life is short, and you don’t want to spend a lot of time worrying, but the problem is, really understanding that life is short is fucking terrifying. Contemplating death sucks the life out of me, leaving me listless, directionless. I’m never going to accept it. I know that now. I’m never going to be okay with it. I’m never going to believe there’s life after death. I’m never going to be the person who doesn’t feel this way again.

I had a great run, or he had, that guy that didn’t really believe in his mortality; not down deep. That guy who was going to live forever.

God he enjoyed this sense of infinite possibility. Nothing but time.

God he slept easily. What a fool, he was. What a child.

The problem with creative work, is the way time melts away, in the doing of it; flow is wonderful but it’s also a kind of death. Time goes by even faster.

I walk and try to slow down time. I try to remember and be here now.

Then I watch a great deal of television.

I don’t miss social media.

I miss my immortality.

 

Fried Grits with a side of ADHD

Posted on by admin 1 Comment

The coast of Maine. The B-spec writing retreat.

So, I’ve been thinking about this post I want to write, about fried grits.

Instead of what I want to be thinking about.

I did a writer’s retreat with a group of younger writers, a workshop called b-spec, a wonderfully curated and maintained group of writers and friends in Boston. I’ve been a part of the group for ten years or so, though mostly at the edges of it for five. Anyway, we take turns cooking–you fill out a google doc, what food you’ll make and when, and you cook for people. Everyone’s allergies and preferences are in the document. There’s a grocery list.

See the genius of this intentional community? Harnessing and channeling communitarian impulses? The group’s founder / leader is an amazing woman, successful novelist, professional graphic designer.

Anyway, I decided to make grits as my meal, as I figured not everyone had eaten them, and I had found them delightful during the pandemic. The old-fashioned, non-precooked grits have become harder and harder to find everywhere, especially up north, so I have been mail ordering the stuff in five pound bags, under a brand name that has been retired, because you know, the racism.

I boil sixteen cups of the coarsely ground maze in a green enameled cast iron dutch oven I got from my Mom, one of the few pieces of her kitchen that became part of mine when she died. It’s fun, nerve-wracking, and weird, cooking for over a dozen people. How much you get to make. It feels worthwhile, the economies of scale. Efficiency!

Honestly, this is how I want to live; the retreat mimics cohousing, a modern take on the old fashioned hippie-commune, more workable, less utopian, including as a central component shared cooking and dining. Alas, my wife, deeply private, would hate cohousing. I want to stay with my wife…

Anyway, after the first serving, while they are still liquid and hot, they can be poured into bread pans and popped in the fridge. Oh, you add a shitload of cheddar cheese, salt and butter to the grits too, otherwise they’re tasteless; that’s kind of the point of grits; like tofu; they taste like nothing but what you bring to them. Which is cool.

To cook, you boil salted water and feather in the grits, stirring to prevent lumping, and then you let them simmer, covered for 20-30 minutes. They’re good hot and fresh, with extra butter and salt and pepper on top; they will set up on your plate as they cool, so you don’t need a bowl, as with oatmeal or cream of wheat. Grits walk the line between liquid and solid; all deliciousness is chaos, it’s a moment of perfection, right? Fresh bread, fresh vegetables from a garden, hot soup, freezing ice cream. So much now is nitrogen cooled. Or coal-fire hot.

Time and entropy attacks food, creating buffet-line mediocrity. Leftovers. Fast food. Snack food. The pop-tart, which can never be stale because it never was fresh. Frozen waffles and bagels. Cold pizza. Gas station saran wrapped sandwiches.

So, the grits went over well. I moved maybe four cups of them. I pair them with the ‘country ham’ I buy mail order from the mountains of North Carolina, a kind of salt pork friend and eaten as bacon, with a super salty hit edged with a yeasty fermentation. This ham is so shelf stable they mail it in an envelope that arrives in your mailbox with the six copies of the Williams and Sonoma catalog.

Anyway, the real magic happens the next day, when you fry the leftovers. You de-mold them from the bread pan, and they come out perfect, a quivering glistening mass, and you slice them, maybe a quarter inch thick, carefully, as they are fragile You fry them for 20 minutes or so, ten minutes on a side. It takes forever and you should set a timer and not noodle with them too much or you’ll break them. With the embedded cheese, butter, salt, pepper, fried cheese grits are far, far superior to polenta. Crusty and brownish on the outside; they taste like fried cheese, with pop-corn notes. Inside, they are crusty and melty and warm, tough on the outside, the original grit experience now encased in an umami skin, that dissolves quickly in your mouth, hash-brown like. Perfect.

People liked them.

Took me forty years to get them right. Not sure my mother or grandmother ever made them like this. Twenty minutes frying after a day of resting and the half hour of cooking. But it’s a repurposed leftover, like the crusty french bread becoming bread pudding the next day in New Orleans. It’s free garbage food. It’s labor, not materials cost.

Oh the writing retreat? I wrote 1000 words. The group’s organizer, successful novelist, wrote 10,000. Executive function, where are you?

Mostly I made grits, drank booze, slept late, and then walked to the ocean, the rocky shore in Kennebunk, Maine, and gazed out at the blue on blue horizon and thought about my parents, my life, the books I’m struggling to write, to believe in enough to write, the secondary creation that is sometimes so potent and sometimes so elusive. And, as always, I thought about my next meal. About talking to my friends, who I haven’t seen in years. I think about time going by too fast, the way my parents bodies looked, after they died, mouths slack, eyes closed. So old. Never to eat again. No more restaurants and fine wine.

I push that thought away and think about my next meal.

About the grits I will fry.

And how fucking good they will be.