If procuring a smartphone and then spending three days in the Chicago tundra doesn’t age a man, well, chalk that up to the curative, cryogenic properties of sub-zero temperatures. I despise my new phone. Truly, fucking hate it. After about a week of texting, the practice appears to be a bite-sized mix of stream of consciousness and cries for validation. If a longform news article is like a turkey sandwich for your brain, then texting is the mental equivalent of Corn Nuts. With 4G LTE at my disposal now, too, I can carry the Internet around in my pants, which is what I’ve always wanted.
But that’s the price of admission for modernity, I suppose, and I’ve got to wield this infernal, chirping device, if only as a prop. There’s simply been too much talk recently–a breezy cacophony of texts and e-mails and calls from the present, the Charlotte past, and even from Chicago, long ago–and I’m adrift. I need to reclaim my peace, find that clarity of intent. I need to anchor myself.
To do this, I’ve been checking my phone less frequently. I also need to seek out that sense of home. It’s strange, really, because you’d think it would exist here in my apartment. It doesn’t. It’s absent, too, from my townhouse in Charlotte. Instead, there are flashes of it: at work, at Snug, over Bakespeare’s cooking, during the walk back from a workout. That’s my main motivation for clocking in 2.75 elliptical miles, honestly–the 250-feet stroll after it is amazing.
Secondhand Rants will return on Thursday, February 27.
Whenever we convene here, twice a week, I tend to pay very little heed to the site itself. In my mind, the equation consists of a pool of malformed text on one end, you on the other, and the dubya-dubya-dubya-dot as a makeshift trough. It’s an inconvenient trough, too. I remember when we migrated from Blogspot, like a raft of online refugees, because they were sunsetting some feature or another. Why we landed at WordPress, I don’t rightly remember, but I do recall slamming the keyboard repeatedly with closed fists in an attempt to yoke these style sheets to the Internets–all the Internets, in fact, including the one for poor people outside ‘Merica.
Since then, with the exception of the one time I kinda forgot to renew the domain name, I’ve managed to ignore the infrastructural bounty laid before you. Truly, completely neglected its upkeep–until last week, on a bitterly cold Chicago afternoon, when Goldbum mentioned the site. He did it offhandedly, too, as we leaned against a diner counter, with a cool reference to “rants,” whereupon I struggled to remember precisely how much mortification I had ordered with my eggs.
And he knew about the covenant! He knew. Flagrantly stated as such, even. Like Fight Club and the Diogenes Club, there is no talking or talking about the site. I don’t want to know you’re here, and there is a distinct absence of tracking code, ads, commenting capability, and all the other modern web trappings to further this end. There is the blog world and the real world, and ne’er must the two streams cross.
You may have noticed some improvements to layout, though, because I’ve had to look at this site with fresh eyes. There’s been the first-ever culling of the blogroll. The prerequisite for inclusion remains simple, honestly, in that content must exist upon click. The link roster had to go as well, since it looked like Google Images had taken a righteous shit all over the sidebar. And finally, there may be a new logo in the works! We shall see–and never, ever speak of it.