What has social media become?

Call me crazy, but I miss the bad old days of social media when no one knew what the hell they were doing.

People were excited about just communicating, and they actually told you shit. Not just what they had for lunch, but occasionally interesting stories about things that were happening to them. They started tweets with all caps like complete n00bs, because they were complete n00bs—we all were.

These days? Public updates on Twitter and Facebook (by which I mean comments that aren't back-and-forth between friends) have "matured" (or maybe the users I follow have "matured") to the point where all I ever see is:

• self-promotion/ingratiation
• cause-promotion, and
• bitching.

Christ it's boring. Maybe I need to move to a new social media platform to watch the collective userbase collectively work out wtf they're supposed to be doing all over again.

In the meantime, if you're sick of it too, I encourage you to follow these independently entertaining tweeters:

• Scott
• Stephen
• Horse
• Ben
• Vijay
• Chippie

Also, you can join me in looking heartily forward to the next exciting wave of actually interesting content in the d/evolution of social media. I don't care what form it takes, as long as it moves beyond the three points elucidated above.

Hell and the Midwest: a tale of two cities

Right now, I'm reading Dante's Inferno and Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Both focus on the occult (sorry, Catholics). Both are lurid, joyous, lyrical, unnerving. One is poetry,  written in Italian in the 1300s, the other is prose, written by an American in the 21st Century. Both are worth your time.

If you're thinking, "But heavens, 200+ pages of 14th century poetry about hell? Will I die of boredom? Think I'll stick with cruisey YA fiction from the 60s," think again, my friend.

Of these two books, Hell is the cruise ship, ferrying you safely through mires and flaming fields, past sinners of all kinds and colours (not to mention many-headed hell hounds, gorgons, belligerent boatmen and more).

I resorted to Hell as an escape from the horrors of worry and wait, of late-night sleeplessness and erring thoughts, and boy, has it delivered in red-hot spades. Despite the title and the premise, Hell is a tale of salvation, beautifully—yet accessibly—rendered. If it were reviewed by the bookish press today, it would demand that old chestnut of an adjective, unfuckingputdownable.

Something Wicked, on the other hand, is probably the most uncomfortable book I've read in living memory, and given my recent turn through All the Pretty Horses, that really is saying something.

Just how Bradbury managed it, I really don't know, and that not knowing—wondering—is a gift and a pleasure. Having never got past this to any of his other works, I'm in the dark about how palpably discomforting he is generally, although The Sister agrees that this one's a bit of a read.

It was she who gave it to me, then scorned my horror over its treatment of adult relationships, its treatment of children's relationships, its treatment of, well, relationships. She did agree about the heart-aching loveliness of the setting, though—a midwest so gloriously innocent and uninhi(a)bited that young boys could smell cut hay from bedroom windows and run pounding-pulsed through summer nights most crazily derailed.

So if, dear friend, as the waning year progresses, you find yourself needing to spend your dark hours in orbit between two equally dark cities, those illuminated by Hell and Something Wicked would make excellent itinerary points.

The slowdown

I hate waiting. People always grumble about impatience, but we are all impatient. We all need to know or do or have what we want as soon as we can. Few of us love to wait.

So I know you're in the same boat. What I don't know is whether waiting takes you over as it does me. What I don't know is whether waiting swiftly becomes a torture—such a torture in fact that it's easier to simply write off whatever you're waiting for than to remain waiting.

The danger in this is one of throwing babies out with bathwater. But to the tortured one, it's a price worth paying. Well and truly. Writing off means you'll no longer be waiting. It means, go about your life as if this is all there is. Forget hope and wishes; just dim the headlights and pretend that all there is is what's on the road before you.

The alternative is to wait for what's not coming—and that's the worst of all, worse even than the torture of waiting itself. In my experience, this is why you don't ever want to wait too long. This is what justifies writing off in advance, rather than holding out hope.

Hope. This is what makes waiting a torture.

When I said waiting takes me over, I meant it. Right now I can't think of anything else, do anything else, write about anything else (unless there's a brief and a few hours' diversion into the pixelated, Legoland-style world of Official Business).

All I can do is wait. Or write off. Either way, it's torture.

Give it up

Q:

A: Don't have one!

Caveat: I'm a freelance writer/content developer so I'm all for hiring writers. But this ad hit me right on the funny bone.

The web is about content. And functionality, yes. But in lieu of groundbreaking, niche-storming functionality, content is the easiest tactic by which ordinary you-and-mes can get noticed online.

Tired of it? Then give it the hell up, chump.

Unintelligible

A writer really has only one job: to make sense of.

Make sense of what the expert has said, what the figures reveal, what the confused plot line allows to play out.

Make sense of it for the reader in a way that speaks to them as if they were the only one in the world who could understand the message.

Do it long enough and eventually you come to see everything through this lens—everything is a matter of making sense. Life itself, as lived by the writer, becomes a transposition of the long-form mess into neat chapters, clearly headed, climax and denouement, the epilogue, the afterword.

But this is a cruel deceit, because life is rarely sensible. It won't always fit the narrative, the chapter sequence, the page count. Sense won't always be made.

And at those times the writer is lost. The person singularly charged with saying things the right way cannot even begin to decipher events, let alone unravel meaning or decouple cause from effect. Nailing down the message is impossible; reformulating it in a digestible way seems like some remnant from a dream. The more the writer looks at things, the more incommunicable they become. Slowly, hope derails, the words begin to melt into concepts, and sense joins the realms of fantasy.

Still the writer keeps trying, keeps looking, keeps frowning at the page.

And still, whatever the meaning is, it remains unintelligible.

Introduction to idioms

"Can I see your ticket?"

He is four, and shyly sweet. I hand it to him.

He opens the cardboard cover, turns it over, folds the flimsy paper back to the staple that holds the whole together.

"Now don't you tear that," says his dad.

"No," I say, smiling at his bright gaze. "If I don't have a ticket, they'll throw me in the caboose!"

A flicker of confusion.

"The caboose?"

"Yep, the caboose. And I'll have to shovel coal to pay my way home."

He smiles, not understanding, but knowing I'm toying with him.

I wish I could tell him what a caboose was, and why I'd shovel coal anyway, and that shovelling coal in a caboose would be pointless, and how shovelling coal could ever get me home.* But he, oblivious to my angst, smooths the ticket back against the cardboard cover, still smiling.

*Talking to children is a lot like talking to non-native English speakers much of the time.