Oops, I have joined the substack legion…

Or, hello world, clearly I need another thing to schedule.

Once upon a time, I wrote really bad poems on tumblr. I showed them to someone once, and thankfully he did not break up with me even though he would have been well within his rights to do so. He was kind, and I cringed, before we used that word so often. They were first-love-ending bad. Thankfully again, I’ll have no biographer to dig them up and die of laughter before she gets the chance to finish writing her book about my life.

Will any of us have biographers? Why would we need them when our great grandchildren will probably be able to reconstruct our whole lives with enough internet access and dedication—unless we’ve dystopiad our way out of overconnectivity? That might be nice. I’d have to hear about the other elements of the dystopia to decide fully.

When I was 18-ish and writing bad poetry, I read some of the poems Goethe wrote when he was 14. They made me mad because they made sense, and I had no sense to make at the time nor any knowledge of how to sound like I did nor the sophistication to know Goethe didn’t rhyme with both. He deserved all of his biographers.

Right now, my job is reading and writing about it, which is not a job I believed existed when I was studying literature and pissed at Goethe. I mostly do author interviews to pay my rent (check back in six months, who knows how the freelancing balance has shifted). There’s no sulky poetry, praise be, but I can’t quite seem to turn off the writing compulsion.

I plan to use this space for writing about that writing compulsion, along with the mechanics of freelancing, books and travel. I’m not going to make anyone pay for it, I don’t think, and I doubt I’ll make most of the posts emails. If you’re curious about freelancing, I plan to process that life choice here. If you’re into books, I will definitely be writing about them here. If you want my opinions on travel or the budgets I used to plan my trips, that will probably land here too. Who knows, I don’t intend to be too religious about any of it.

My grandmother recently told me her mother spent the first five years of her life living in a tent with a dirt floor. How’s that for disconnected? I know I wouldn’t want to live in that kind of dystopia, and I know some people will always have biographers. That was a stupid question to ask. But most of us will be memorialized for smaller groups, through these increasingly public, probably performative diaries, for better or for worse. Here’s mine and here’s hoping it’s less cringe than my now-buried tumblr!