…I mutter about this from time to time…& this morning on the DOT was one of those…so apologies if I’m wearing out my welcome today…but…here’s the thing…& it may be a delusional thing on my part…but I’m ok with that…so if this pops up & is met with crickets honestly I seriously doubt that my belief in it will falter…but…I happen to believe…lurking on the internet…despite the skeevy connotations of the term in modern parlance…can in fact be the product of a fine & venerable tradition from the before-times that I look upon with a considerable degree of arguably unfashionable fondness
Two of them lurked in the ruined graveyard. Two shadowy figures, one hunched and squat, the other lean and menacing, both of them Olympic-grade lurkers. If Bruce Springsteen had ever recorded “Born to Lurk,” these two would have been on the album cover. They had been lurking in the fog for an hour now, but they had been pacing themselves and could lurk for the rest of the night if necessary, with still enough sullen menace left for a final burst of lurking around dawn.
– Good Omens (…because of course it is)
…so…I believe…& even if he might just be humoring me so as to not feel responsible for crushing a core delusion that helps keep me out of trouble…myo even assures me…that at least slightly more people click through to these things than might be indicated by the trace evidence on the scene…at least as far as might be required to roll their eyes & slip out the back without saying bye…or hi…anyway…on this all hallow’s eve
…it can seem like at this point nothing is sacred…even slinking about the place like you were never there…which…frankly…I fucking wish were a more highly-prized skill…not to mention applicable to some folks I’d highly prize being less aware of…but…well…on the one hand
…but…on the other hand…I’m…not as young as I used to be…&…age will change a person…& you know how that goes…for entertainment purposes?
…where am I going with this?
…well…nice as it is to hear from all the lovely people who find the time to say stuff hereabouts…from the profuse to the infrequent…what I’m angling for here is…& I don’t want to set the bar too high…but…proof of life…as bryan mills or his myriad celluloid dopplegangers might call it…which is hyperbole…among other things…since I am very much at the comedy-voicemail-cameo end of the I-will-find-you spectrum…& in terms of those this is addressed to…more likely to try to buy you a drink than try to kill you…&…I know…be careful what you wish for
…but I’m not good at sleeping…so…would it help if I put it like this?
…give us a ping?
…I promise nobody has to get hurt
…who am I kidding…paintballs hurt…& who needs the extra laundry…let’s…go a different way
…just…whatever you do…don’t say “kia ora’s too orangey for crows”
…we’ll never hear the end of it?
If You Think You Can Hold a Grudge, Consider the Crow [NYT]
…& that’s just the tip of the iceberg
…so…you know…us human beings gotta stick together…even the quiet ones?
Any post referencing Good Omens is worth reading!
(stays in character)
(wait for it)
(…aaaaaand scene.)
…once upon a time I knew a guy who had that as the startup sound on his mac…way back when CDs were still nearly the latest thing…& when you shut it down it went
…which was funny…& in no way otherwise a response to what you said…just to be unnecessarily clear about that part?
You can blame me. I completely missed this morning’s DOT because of all the Happy Anniversary threads and the fact that I was still bleary-eyed from staying up late watching the TV.
TLDR; it would be nice to write for a slightly larger audience.
…oddly enough…while I can see it sounding that way…sort of also the opposite of what I was meaning to get at?
…I get that I might as well be the embodiment of TL;DR…but…break out the world’s smallest violin & consider the part where I can’t get away from me…& closing my eyes & refusing to read is so much kryptonite to a non-kryptonian…so to the extent that I don’t exactly “write for an audience” so much as “run off at the keyboard until I find a way to stop”…there being more or less of an audience for it in most ways wouldn’t make much difference to my side of that failing
…& maybe none of you either need or deserve to have to wade through the stuff that means I come up with without it rising to the level of a chore on my part…& equally maybe I don’t deserve to get the benefit of all the things that other people who know their way here could say about any number of things if they felt the inclination…it’s more than passing likely that I’d be on the list of people who sound off in this neck of the woods to an extent that some find off-putting
…but…for my sins…& however much it might appear to be contradicted by all appearances…at the bottom of it all pretty much the entire object of the exercise for me is to hope to provoke the internet to show me what someone else thinks about something I wish I understood better than I feel like I do…& the list of those things is quite literally endless to all intents & purposes…the list of specific voices I have in mind that I don’t get the benefit of hearing from is at least finite…but…it’s pretty long
…long enough to be why the end of that sage francis track I think was the end of the playlist on the DOT is something like “don’t get pissed/& throw a fist/at this vocalist/I’m not emotionless/in fact I broke my wrist/when I wrote the list/of all those I miss/this/is my pokerface/mr feelnothin'” & that’s pretty much exactly the thing that made me pick it
…plus, if it weren’t for the demise of splinter…I’d be on the lurking side of this whole exchange…&…it’s our birthday…so I wondered if any guests after my own heart who consequently we hadn’t heard from in a while might sign the card, given a bit of bait to rise to?
Maybe I’m guilty of a little bit of projection. Nevertheless……………..
…pretty sure there’s not a jury in the land that would convict you given the preponderance of available evidence
…but…I’d be more delighted than anyone if I wound up seeming like the quiet one
…I generally manage to let other people get a word in edgewise in person but it’s clear I can’t be trusted with a keyboard…so…what is it they say about how “it takes a village”?
Hi hi! I haven’t had the time or headspace to read through your DOTs of while now. But sometimes I do lurk through the comment section to get the gist of it. I appreciate you and your work. Big thank you for all you do here! Happy 5th 🎉
Fellow lurkers please stand up!
(Posting tangentially related song…because I think you like Eminem or at least used to post his music a lot at the end of your DOTs?)
Stand your ground! I think I mentioned that my building’s insiders/cronies formed a book club and of course I was a founding member. Well. The way it worked was the hosting duties rotated and when it was your turn you made dinner and suggested the next book. Every time it came around to me they imposed a different rule. Limits on page lengths. Book must be fiction. Book had to be published within the last five years. Book had to make it onto the NYT Bestseller list (try to picture my eyes rolling into the back of my head and requiring restoration surgery.)
But I soldiered on. One of the members said, “The problem with you, Mattie, is that you’re too literary for us. You know all these book publishing people but normal people (!) aren’t interested in this.”
To my mind, when I settle in the book should be about 800 pages long and contain footnotes, endnotes, and an index, if appropriate.
…I have some friends who once tried to have a book club…their rule was the author had to be well known but the title couldn’t be one of their better known efforts
…like…adam smith but not the wealth of nations…that kind of thing
…maybe if you’d been involved they might still be doing it…not sure they made it all the way through the rotations to a point where any of them got a second pick?
No, they wanted feel-good pap. “The book was too long and I didn’t like the characters.” Well, start reading above a third-grade level. And these were my friends, and I’m sure they pulled in a lot more ca$h than I did. Of course, if I were one of them, with their divorces and skeevy relationships and dubious employment/”consulting” lives, I think I’d throw myself off the roof.