nanojath's Journal: Noooo!

So I made this joke (which you should NOT READ if you dislike SPOILERS of any kind and are really good at codebreaking. And haven't read the 6th Harry Potter book. And intend to. And somehow managed to get this far without the ending getting spoiled anyway by the various internet trolls who take sick pleasure in the dismay of strangers): and yea, it did please me as excessively nerdy and pleasantly obscure.

Little throwaway crap.

But it does have another purpose: I intend it to be the last pointless comment I make on the internet. Go ahead and scoff. No, seriously, it's scoffworthy. But no: certainly I've little doubt that it will not be the last piece of text detritus I leave cluttering up the infosphere that will be found to be without point to many who read it. Rather, this:

Well, it started a long time ago. I'm a text addict and so the internet to me is like a cocaine powdered donut with a little television stuffed in the hole. So the other day I happened across this guy...

Now the guy himself is a little bit boringly controversial I guess, which I wouldn't expect to last. But anyway, I did think his tagline was good:

"Being a good writer is 3% talent, 97% not being distracted by the Internet."

I dunno if I am or will ever be a good writer. About, oh, 4 years ago I gave up on the (handwritten print) journal I'd kept for about 15 years, almost daily for nearly a decade of that, thousands upon thousands of virtually illegible pages, one day as I was getting towards the last pages of a book I thought (not for the first time) "why am I writing this?" and having no compelling answer, stopped.

My experience in the years that followed convinced me that I'd never stop being a writer, in the sense of being a person who regularly generated text, whether I liked it or not. And generally I do like it, although like (I imagine - or perhaps just selfishly hope -) probably everybody who has spilled a lot of text on thee olde internette, I've embarassed myself, one way or another, more times that I'd probably like by posting with haste and repenting at leisure. I've started this, started that, quit this, quit that, but I keep on writing, and generally, yeah, I like doing it and even like what I do.

But I guess I don't like the fact that I do it all for free and then dwell on how I would like to be paid to do it and whether I ever might be and what I might need to do to find out if I might ever be and whether I've got it in me to work that hard and with that much intent and dedication and what my actual chances might be if I did those things and how dissapointed I would be if I did everything I possibly could and worked that hard for that long and then failed anyway, and whether I should just focus on some wretched boring practical thing like I've been doing the last decade for money and take it for as much money as I could manage. Or try to find some less wretched but more practical thing I could work up to, get a graduate degree or something.

You get the point. Typical post collegiate pre-middle age angst for the chronic underacheiver.

Things changed, though, when my son was born ten weeks early and after a fifty day stay in the hospital my wife and I decided that we wanted someone to stay at home with him for at least the first two or three years - and since she made more than 30% more than me the choice was fairly obvious.

Now, being a stay-at-home father and homemaker is not a ticket to unlimited free time (so very much not a ticket to unlimited free time) but it does offer a certain amount of flexibility as well as being distinctly more soul-affirming than any of my past day-jobs in a way that makes it easier to work in my free time.

So I decided: for this time I will try to figure out if I can make a living writing. I'm not a kid and I'm not too much of an egoist so I know this is a dream a lot of people have and very few people attain. Pure text (books, short stories, essays and journalism) is a small small market with a huge amount of competition.

But I have this time when I don't have to struggle as much with the idea that I'm being self-indulgent for not having a regular job (I struggle with whether I should be pursuing more practical work-at-home options - going from D.I.N.K. to S.I.O.K. sucks, not to put too fine a point on it) and so okay, I'm working on it. It isn't easy. I haven't had to really work for a specific level of quality in writing since college. Ten years of email the internet have turned me into a lazy writer, ten years of business writing in office jobs have taken their toll on my access to spontaneity, imagination and boldness.

And then there's the fucking internet.

Suddenly all this nattering in forums and such has taken on a different character. If I'm going to be spending time sitting on my ass typing I can't afford to be doing it throwing my putative pearls before all y'all swine, with due apologies.

And if I'm going to be appearing on the internet, I better be doing everything I can to make every appearance an opportunity for shameless self-promotion.

That's all. So while I figure out what I'm doing and how I might promote myself, it seemed that it was time to put a moratorium on posting everywhere but my own spots. So that dumb throwaway joke was the last post on thees thee phree inphospheere and when I come back I'm going to have some serious ulterior motives. It's all about me, now, goddamnit.

This being said: let's review that last post now. This is some serious shit, last post and everything, a turgid drama of one man determined to chase his dream, run it to the ground, and beat the living shit out of it.

After I conceived and wrote the joke I wondered:

1. Will this be moderated
a. funny
b. off-topic
c. troll

I could see a case for all three.

2. Will it be moderated out of relative existence, never to be seen again?

3. If not, will some dumbass take me to task for the pseudospoiler? Okay, sort of a longshot, but man, after ten years on the internets you never know. If it happens, I have to remember, MUST NOT RESPOND.

'Cause of the last post thing. Thing.

4. Will ANYONE see it and make the appropriate response?

It's okay, you don't have to guess, I think it's been long enough now, so here's the assessment. The last post thing assessment. Jesus I'm a dumbass sometimes. But hey. I gotta be me.

1. b.
2. Pretty Much.
3. No. I should have more faith in you people. 4. No, damnit. The appropriate response is:

Subject: Nooooo!

Comment: You bitch!

It mighta happened if you bastards had moderated it Funny.

I thought it was funny.