Phthursday Musings: A Nice Glass of Lemonade

End of the year, time for reflection, sizing things up, or as Marcellus Hall once put it, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

Alas, there has been a disruption to this solstitial cadence, and I have to address that first, and then see how I can transition from that into other things I’ve been hoping to say.

A couple of weeks ago I shared with you all an open letter from several Substack writers to the Substack founders regarding our very serious concerns about Substack not simply hosting overtly Nazi publications but even allowing them to monetize and, well, providing what seems to be a haven of sorts.

Well, later that week, Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie finally responded, and his response was… very, very, very bad.

Many of you don’t read any other Substacks, or don’t subscribe to any which you might pay for, so I understand that this controversy might seem a little obscure. What I can tell you is that there are a fair number of people who went all-in on publishing on Substack, to the point where their Substack subscriptions are their primary source of income, and writers are experiencing subscribers canceling subscriptions over this whole debacle, and many prominent writers have already left or are in the process of leaving Substack over all of it.

In the very short term, it’s all had a chilling effect on my own writing. I’ve got three pieces stuck in a state of limbo where I just wasn’t sure whether / how to publish them as though everything going on was normal.

In the short to medium term, I had hoped to finally get at least a mini book club of sorts started in January, and I was even hoping to get my home setup in good enough shape that I could try dabbling in podcasts. I had a couple of specific ones I wanted to record with a couple of specific guests which I thought would be very complementary to other things I was trying to do.

I’m still hopeful all of that will happen in early 2024, but it won’t be on Substack.

My current understanding is that at least two other services are equipped to move my subscriber list and archive to their platform. I’m monitoring what others are doing and anticipate making the move some time in January. If any of you all have thoughts about which services you prefer, I’m all ears.

My best guess is that you will see two or maybe three more posts on Substack before I’m able to affect that transition. I have one mostly finished Running Around Illinois piece which I intend to publish in the next couple of days, as I intended it as a way of wrapping up the running year, and then I anticipate a final piece here before the move.

I am a believer in lemonade. I think that bad situations can often have positive side effects, can open one’s eyes to opportunities, etc. And I believe that the human condition is such that we are constantly going to be confronted by lemons, and if we don’t adopt the right mindset then we are doomed to sour existences.

While I have happened to interact with other Substack writers who I read, I hadn’t before had occasion to interact with people I don’t read as a quasi-colleague. In the last couple of weeks I have increasingly been thinking of myself as part of a cohort of content creators.

Last December, I wrote about the idea of fulfilling the creative impulse, in the context of talking about the people I work most closely with: software developers. I have also written several meta takes on META-SPIEL itself. But I have not actively thought of myself as being part of a cohort of creators in almost 25 years, dating back to a time when we had a text-based e-zine called dto and were actively talking about how to turn it into a significant web presence, an effort which totally fizzled out.

It’s also the case that while I’ve met a lot of people over the course of 25 years, they’ve tended to be people I’ve known through political or community organizing, or they’ve been neighbors, or they’ve been parents of my son’s peers. Even if there may have been artists or musicians, that was secondary to whatever the more immediate association was. This is also true of meeting people online. Friends of mine have figured out how to develop peer groups over Twitter, but that definitely never made sense to me.

You grow older and you try to figure out what you’re really all about, right? And for me, today, the idea that I wouldn’t be creating, that’s a terrifying prospect. But so too is the idea of creating in isolation. I might not be a great networker, I might not be very interested in launching into some sort of personal social media blitz, but I’m not content with my engagement.

I mean this in a few different ways but I’ll cite two. First, I’m not surprised that I’m still going to concerts. But I am surprised at how frequently I’m going to concerts alone or with one other person, and never interacting with anyone else there. I thought I’d get to a point where I’d simply recognize a lot of people, at least say hello, but it’s never really worked out that way.

Second, it’s now been 17 years - 17 years! - since I left the cozy confines of a college town, and with it, the sort of built-in college-brings-famous-person-to-campus calendar. Today I live in a suburb where on a localized basis there’s simply nothing like that. There’s no shared cultural experiences among neighbors here, which means no shared experiences over creativity, unless the creativity involves some action someone’s kid pulled off on a soccer field.

While Substack has provided me with a platform, because (among other things) I haven’t also been aggressive at synthesizing what I write with a social media presence, the engagement aspect here has necessarily been limited. The comments feature is fine but I’ve never found it to be “community building” in and of itself.

Thinking of myself as being within a cohort of creators, though, unified not just by a technical platform, and not just by being adamantly opposed to Nazis (because, ahem, everybody should be adamantly opposed to Nazis), but, I am finding, by something more, something where creativity per se is elemental to the whole thing… it’s like I have finally started to unlock a missing piece of this whole endeavor.

So I guess what I’m saying is that while there’s a push effect to moving on from Substack, there’s also a pull effect, toward something that could… maybe… be much better. Better like a nice glass of lemonade.

When writing these things I often go back and look at the archive to see if I’ve already written about something. This evening, we were at the Elmhurst Art Museum to see their Picasso exhibit, and while there, in the local room, we came upon a piece called “Coin Wash - DeKalb” by Bret Steinhaus. It was a watercolor drawing of a laundromat, and it got me to thinking about this old idea I had about documenting remaining mid-century modern laundromats, which made me wonder, had I actually written about that, and, yes, I wrote about that in February. And running into that got me to thinking an hour ago, what more do I truly have to say, if I’ve already gone there?

Well, I took another look at the archive, and to my surprise, the word “lemonade” did not appear in any of the preceding 195 META-SPIEL pieces. Which means I never pulled out this quote from our dear Saint Kurt:

I wrote above that I believe in lemonade. And I do. I believe that we are all going to have a lot of shit come our way. And I believe we can - usually - choose to respond with love and grace and creativity. We can, as Grant Hart implored, turn on the news.

And I know that’s not what Kurt meant in his anecdote about his Uncle Alex. He meant the lemonade more literally than all that. But it fits just as well figuratively. Indeed, the lemonade may very well be what brings us together under the apple tree.

I would very much like to hear from you all about what you’d like to see or hear going forward, and where you’d like to see or hear it. I’ve been writing this thing for a while, after all, and I’m sure some people want more hamster pictures, and some people want political rants, and some people want a lot more baseball. But if this thing is actually going to move on, and some changes are necessarily coming, then now’s the time to get the most feedback, I suppose. Do any of you want podcasts, or is that silly? Do you want shorter pieces? More frequent pieces? Guest pieces? More fiction, or never again?

And, maybe, a more pointed set of questions. What do you think could make this endeavor more successful, according to whatever definition of success you want to apply? Is more engagement a mark of more success? Many more subscribers? A more robust comments area? More social media activity to match? Because I know this needs to change, somehow or another, to keep my own interest up if nothing else.

While you’re thinking about all that, why don’t you have a nice glass of lemonade?