I didn’t like that last post much, especially compared to say the first one on the third.

(‘The first one on the third’ is not clear communicative language. It’s poetical and insidery. More of that yes.)

I let myself be distracted by soaking up the Assange story, embracing the protagonist, and using the post to signal about my virtue and identity.

When what I should have dove into was that last little bit about my shakiness and claim of relief, which … was hollow. Properly this should be less about communicating clearly, and more about my own narcissistic stewing. I mean that ironically and yet I’m deadly serious too.

This question of distraction has been on my back for thirty years at least. I used to school myself about not listening to the radio too much–even reading, I would think. Stop that. Stop consuming. Produce.

The problem is much much worse today, because of the beautiful pandrabox of the WWW.

Listen, I can compare myself virtuously to the average inhabitant of the modern world. I don’t surf on my phone. I don’t own a television; I got no Face on the corporate Book. Yadda yadda, look at me, I’m wonderfully aloof and better than you. It’s mostly bullshit, but even if it were not, it’s entirely beside the point. Comparing myself to the average is very deeply and morally wrong.

Because I aspire to be a belletrist, at best, and at the least a content producer instead of a consumer.

Listen.

Sensing all of that with eyes half-open, I opened vairtere-dot-com-slash-spill to do my real job. Having got as far as opening it, I remembered Oh. Right. I haven’t set the timezone properly yet on the blog that isn’t a blog. I would have to do it manually for this new post. Or, I could just set it and not have to worry about it again. So I searched, without the G**gle (note my multilayered virtue signalling please goddammit), for a clue on where to tweak the setting. I found it fast.

But oh, linked at the bottom of the page was a story. It told all about how the good knight Mullenweg, founder of WordPress and genuinely good guy, had been taking those corporate bastards at Wix to task over stealing WordPress code and violating the GNU Public License. It was a great story and it was

… eminently distracting.

Completely irrelevant to what I’m trying to accomplish. Pulled me right in, cost me time; could have distracted me entirely from what I truly needed to do in this hour of this night.

A much bigger distraction typically is pulling down video from the YouTubes and indulging deeply in it. One of my favorites is a guy I’ll just call Lukens, for now. The other day he posted a long stream, and it was all about distractibility and the modern condition. I watched most of it and took it to heart in a tentative half-ass way. The flag-waving point of it was that most people can’t stand to be alone with their own thoughts any more. YEAH i thought, you BETCHA. Go Team Creativity. To hell with the unwashed masses.

It’s a fragile and pernicious place we find ourselves in.

Shakiness is not a very surprising by-product of living this way.