Even #draping couldn’t snap my cold streak on Instagram. Is it because I did the photo-negative? Does it need more Tomorrowland?
Number of Likes for SF party power couple’s engagement update, male DJ/graphic designer half: 183
Number of Likes for SF party power couple’s engagement update, female hairstylist half: 159
Total number of likes: 342
I am suffering from obscene sinus pressure and feeling the deep need to not hang out with anyone, ever.
time to stop reading lists.
If I so choose, I can operate a motor vehicle again.
Five people on five different devices, not talking. Matriarch hunched in a corner; every year the silence gets stranger to her.
I just finished reading Alfred Hitchcock & The Three Investigators In The Mystery Of The Singing Serpent, a gift from my childhood. I have too many hours to go before my next Four Loko. I have too much hair on the back of my neck right now.
I am literally looking at Purple Diary while listening to The Weeknd, which proves that, I dunno, no one belongs here more than me?
Every now & then I get a little bit lonely, and you’re never coming around, and so I change my Facebook picture. Do I look sad? Does it look good on me?
This summer I read a lot of memoir-y books—Loose Girl, Candy Girl, Wasted, that book-length word-cloud about crank. They’re all by women and that’s not an accident. Women get that tone much better than men do, which is also why all the best Twitters are by women—Mindy Kaling’s, Molly Lambert’s, Molly McAleer’s, Kate Carraway’s.
I also got obsessed with Pneumonia White until she committed blogicide and left us all asking why. Then there’s the immortal Janebook. Both those blogs are feelingsy and cut with not much at all; I don’t know how they write with all that purity. Pneumonia White was characterized, to be sure, but it was still, bottommost, the story of a rich expat girl in LA undergoing whatever a rich expat girl in LA undergoes IRL, not BEE.
I don’t think it’s sexist at all to say that women are better at Twitter and Tumblr and private blogging because there are fewer scary emotional forms for them to get muddled up in. Dudes don’t like talking about actual shit that goes on with us because we might be gay.
Moreover those of us who are male and pretend to be belletristic have this third rail where if something that happens to us is notable, we go, hey I should incorporate that into a piece! Fuck blogging it. If you’ve ever tried to be a fiction writer/playwright or still think you can be, it’s really hard to write about yourself in any way that isn’t stylized, and then what you’ve got really isn’t bloggable. What you’ve got is the easiest kind of fiction to write, and the hardest to write well—anecdotal.
But then what happens when you have a sudden threesome while James Blake plays on the iPod, and it is so wretchedly self-observationally hipster that there’s literally no way to document it, because to do so would be to admit you have threesomes, which no one should ever admit; added to which you’d be unable to resist overstylizing the written account and then it would be just a terrible read. Almost as terrible as putting pieces of the wrong person in your mouth at the wrong time.
That thing in the Atlantic about not writing what you know despite what you grew up hearing blew all of our minds, I’m sure. W/r/t blogging, if you find your life that superinteresting I guess you should do it. But there’s something patently arrogant about assuming we care. When Ryan Gosling said in NYT he likes to hang out in places more interesting than him, a billion apathetic name-dropping scene blogs died of word-eating virus.
The difference between personal-blogging and being more essayistic is like the difference between flagging a cab and hot-wiring a car. You’re taking temporary advantage of a conveyance but one way requires specialized training/talent.
I and writers like me who are content* to just make fun of celebrities and express ourselves solely on the pop culture market get accused of the same arrogance, or at least I do; even though, if objectively the internet is the longest and biggest conversation ever held, mutuality is a trending topic for life and that’s what you go looking for, not self-centered claptrap about a stranger’s drunken tumblings in and out of beds.
This has been PSA-y, but what I’m getting at is that I don’t know how to write about myself without thinking of it as fiction, which invariably results in bad writing. Although the sentence that just ended was me writing about myself. But, to paraphrase Steve Alford enforcing no-profanity in his really really Jesus-y autobiography, there will be no more of it on this blog. Although I’m pretty soon going to be dragging out and reviewing old bad short fiction I wrote, cause someone did it on HTMLgiant.
It’s slightly contradictory that I’m slamming personal blogs/memoirs while still talking about ones I like, and how they’re all by women, and look at me being all progressive and shit. If it looks like I’m envious of their facility with it, I kind of am.
And I can’t remember who said that quote in the subject. It was in my phone. Whatever.
*just until I finish researching my novella, which is going to be goddamn better than anything Arthur Schnitzler ever did, and write/publish/sell the rights to it for Type-A free-agent cash.
