A Head Cold for Telepaths
A bad cold, a trip through my early-2000s blog archives, and the uneasy feeling that becoming a better writer might mean losing the messy voice that made people read me in the first place.
I’m sick. I have the cold that’s going around, but it’s a cold in the same way that The Rock is an ordinary dude with a regular workout routine. When I was a kid, getting the cold meant you picked up a runny nose from one of your equally disgusting friends at school, came home and gave it to your family, and everyone was better in two days.
The cold I have makes me feel like someone gave me a going-over with a riding mower. In fact, I’m writing this the same way Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn; in bed, on my back, 16-inch laptop hovering over my head.
I used to have a successful blog, in the time before short-form social media. Not successful like I had millions of readers, but relative to my contemporaries I had a relatively high readership. It coincided with my time on a popular show called Best Week Ever, and got featured regularly on Gawker’s blog roundup.
I’d like this Substack to be successful, and so this week I took the time to read some of my old blog entries. It was very much a first draft joke notebook, but I was surprised twenty years later at how honest it got.
I told stories from my life to a readership of thousands that I don’t think I’d tell to a close friend today. It was messy, raw, and only guarded in how self-lacerating it could get. I’m appalled at who I’d talk about and how openly. But that was the world of blogging, and that was what consistently got eyes, and it was also a time when what went on the Internet didn’t go on your Permanent Record.
I spent a lot of time being hard on myself not turning that blog into a book deal. In hindsight it would have been an easy way to make the money I needed back then. But I think the book that would have resulted would have been expensive for me. Considering that I’d have to have at some point bought every extant copy and burned them.
Did I mention I was a “problem drinker” at this point in my life?
I’ve been priding myself on keeping up with the pace on my Substack now despite school and deadlines on other writing projects, and I think this week is the first time I’ve really gotten in trouble. I usually have a backlog of pieces that have, at the very least, been rejected by professional outlets.1
But this has been a week when writing has been impossible. In his novels, Kurt Vonnegut would drop story ideas in the form of brief descriptions of a library of books and stories his alter ego, Kilgore Trout, had written in his metafictional universe. One of these was about telepathic beings whose ability to communicate was blocked when they had a head cold. That’s how I feel every time.
Anyway. I’m not complaining about this. Usually, I’m in a situation where I have to work through an illness. For the first time since I was a child, I’ve been able to actually spend the week in bed taking care of myself. It turns out that feels great. I could get used to treating myself with love and care.
I’m trying to be a better writer. Like, consciously trying to take the kind of writing I enjoy and give it the kind of literary bent that I enjoy reading. It’s been tough, and part of the price I’ve been paying is watching myself sanding off some of the rough edges.
The rough edges are what make me a good blogger, and if I remove too many of these rough edges I remove the personality from my work. At which point, I might as well drop a prompt into ChatGPT and let it produce this post.
Part of where I feel torn is that there is a part of me that misses the messiness of my wilder younger years. Of not understanding long-term consequences and just saying what’s in my heart. Of “living life out loud”.
I was reading Lena Dunham’s Substack. When Girls was a thing that the media couldn’t shut up about, millions of words were wasted trying to figure out why she was capturing a moment. And the truth is, she captured the blog culture zeitgeist in a way that none of her contemporaries did.
The early 2000s was a time when life style columnists on big blogs would chronicle their debauches and drug use and whatever detritus they left in their wake. And their devoted fans would fill comment sections with hate posts picking apart the details of their lives.
Dunham did that writ large with her show and her interviews and her memoir and the people who identified with the characters of her show defending her on social media with the same passion as the people who hated her posting about how much they hated the characters on her show. And conflating their sense of self with politics in a way that made the two inseparable, and therefore impossible to debate.
This is how politics changed so quickly.
Don’t worry. I have a polished humor piece already in the chamber for Thursday. It’s technically a current events essay rooted in ancient history. I’ll be better by then, I think, and writing again.
Dunham’s Substack is refreshing in the world of celebrity Substacks in this sense. Some took to the platform to write a few essays about the things that they feel really strongly about (themselves, their careers, their critics and haters) and never posted again. Others hired a ghost writer to do some hagiography on their behalf.
But Dunham’s is messy and personal and very 2005 blogger-coded.
I’ve been publishing a lot of stories about my early-aughts self on this page. It makes sense. I’ve never been one for nostalgia, but also a person reaches an age when it’s not just normal but preferable to look backwards and sort out who you used to be.
When I was a child I would look around at the adults who settled for small lives, because those were comfortable and safe. I could never relate to that; it scared me to think that might be. And so I lived as much adventure as didn’t scare me.
I’m living a new adventure now. Those stories won’t come for a while. I’m getting my Bachelor’s in May. I’m approaching ten years in Los Angeles.
I’d like to find a graceful, literary way to exit this essay. Something that ties it all together. I’m still sick enough, and congested enough, that this might provide more energy thinking than I want to expend.
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