Category: Uncategorized (So Far)

Ahead of the Open, friends of mine who know that I’d gotten pretty obsessed with tennis over the summer started asking me, “Do you think Serena will win?”

At her best, I said, she’s clearly the best player in the world. But over and over again at the Majors this year she either came out flat or let down mid-match to drop sets. Every time, she managed to fire herself up into that special Serena level and put the match away. (How do you describe that level? I always struggle to come up with an adequate analogy. A train at full speed? A predatory great cat on the hunt? A superhero? A war goddess?) She went to three sets twice at the Australian, five times at the French, and twice more at Wimbledon. The ferocity of her play at that level is astonishing, but there’s a cost to it. It requires extra energy to pull yourself up like that, above and beyond the cost of all those extra sets. It might be, I concluded, that ultimately she’d find herself trying to go to that well one time too many.

(“Damn,” you are probably saying. “That is one snappy title.”)

Last week, for the first time since I started this project, I checked the basic analytics available to me via my website host. It’s tricky to figure out how valuable the information is. It’s pretty clear that the vast majority of page visits are either search engine spiders or automated hacking attempts, which makes it hard to discern what’s signal and what’s noise.

However, after looking closely enough at the data, I realized I could use the spikes in pageviews on days when I promoted a piece to get some feel for how often the site is viewed by actual human eyeballs.

As best I can tell:

1. People are reading this thing, and there are more of them than I’m immediately aware of. Not many more, perhaps, but more.

2. Even modest efforts at promoting pieces clearly result in driving visitors to the site.

3. More concerted efforts (like when I posted my Advice for First-Time Burners to the Denver Burners page on Facebook) have very clear effects. People come to check out what I’ve written.

So even modest efforts have payoff. That’s good to know.

Digging a little deeper, I realized that there was a distinct before/after effect in the number of daily pageviews after I posted a link on Facebook to my (sort of) 4/20-themed piece, In Honor of 4/20, a Cannabis Story. The average daily visits clearly rose after that–some people who came to the site via that link have been coming back. On the other hand, since then, there’s been little to no growth in the pageviews. That suggests there hasn’t been much in the way of word-of-mouth.

Am I surprised? No, not really. I hadn’t checked my stats until last week partly because I wasn’t really working that hard to grow the site; the writing and publishing itself has been my raison d’etre. I have purposely allowed myself to write whatever comes up without too much concern about, “Is this valuable to an outside reader?” As my dad would have put it, “Don’t put the cart before the horse.” The practice and focus on craft needed to come first. Makes sense, right?

But now as we’re nearing the end of Free Refills Season 2, the practice is established and the craft isn’t likely to expand much more without expanding the focus and taking greater risks. Some of that, obviously, will be having the courage to promote my work more assertively. But some of that will be in what I choose to write about and how and when I choose to publish it.

I can’t really know ahead of time what will work and what won’t. The only thing I can do is play with it and see what happens.

(And yes, I’m aware today is 9/11. I thought about posting my remembrances of that day and then decided against it. I felt like there’s enough of that going on elsewhere.)

I have two somewhat contradictory thoughts on proceeding with a daily (workday) publishing practice.

Half a year of daily publishing has been a very useful experiment. I’ve learned a lot. But I think there’s little left for me to learn from simply publishing a piece, any piece, every day.

On the other hand, I have seen and continue to see benefits in my life from both the discipline and the ritual of the practice. I’m reluctant to let that go. There’s a certain groundedness that comes from making a promise to yourself and then keeping it. Today is the 129th daily piece I’ve published. I haven’t yet missed a day. I take pride in that.

Season 3’s approach to daily publishing will depend on finding a balance between those contradictory feelings.

Labor Day weekend is past and today feels very much like autumn. Blue skies, isolated (but cheerful) cotton-ball clouds, bright sunshine, warm but definitely not hot. It’s still summer for a couple more weeks, but you can feel the energy changing.

Here at FRHQ, we’re approaching the transition to Season 3 of the Free Refills Experiment with lots of reflection about what we’ve learned so far and some interesting ideas about what’s to come. We’ve been working hard and we’re pretty excited. Change is afoot.

More to come. Watch this space.

It’s only a separated shoulder. Should heal on its own. Hurts like a bitch, though.

This week’s life-theme: “The Ramifications of Our Actions.”

Here’s one story. Jeff told it last night at poker.

“One time,” Jeff said brightly, “I ate a sandwich.”

“Wow,” I said. “Did it have lettuce on it?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, and I knew that he was right.

Here’s another story, also from poker.

I lost a big pot early. I had top-two on a flush-draw board against a player who I know goes too far with weak holdings and I shoved the turn and he called and he hit his flush and I lost. In that particular situation I was a 3-to-1 favorite, which means I got my money in good, so I should be pleased, but after that I tilted and stayed tilted all night.

I know that to many of the people who read Free Refills, that paragraph will make perfect sense, but for others to whom it’s total gibberish, let me offer a translation: I was playing a game with friends, a game in which you keep score with money, and on a particular hand I played well but lost money because luck is part of the game, and after losing that money I was upset and stayed upset all night.

If, upon reading either or both of those paragraphs, you find yourself asking, “If you’re playing a game for money and you lose money and it makes you unhappy, why are you playing?” I think that is a very, very good question indeed.

Yet again today, I found myself wondering why I’ve been having so much trouble writing these Burning Man-related pieces. In today’s zero-draft, a question arose that offered me some useful perspective: Who is my intended audience with these pieces? Am I writing for myself, to clarify my thinking? Am I writing for people who’ve never gone to Burning Man and probably won’t, but might want to learn something about it? Am I writing for the friends I’ve been there with and hope to go with again? A combination of these? Some other group entirely?

I have two friends going to the playa for the first time this year, and tomorrow’s will be the last piece I write here that they could possibly see before they reach Black Rock City and (I hope) turn off their phones for a week. That recognition really helped; anything I publish for the rest of the week (at least one piece, maybe more) will be written with their eyes in mind. They may not actually read it, of course, but that’s not the point. Shifting my perspective in this manner finally allowed me to find some ease in the writing process. Based on today’s drafting, what I publish tomorrow will be the first piece in two weeks I didn’t struggle terribly over.

The minutes tick down tonight and still I haven’t published. I did not procrastinate this morning and in the morning’s work I thought I saw the seeds of a piece but when I returned to the writing I found nothing that wanted planting. For two weeks now I daily think I see the ideas clearly but when I try to write them into focus they disappear into shadow. And the minutes tick away and tick away.

I write to figure out what I am thinking and here I am writing and writing and through it all I have felt that I have actually known what I am thinking and yet the pieces do not come. And the minutes tick onward.

The minutes tick onward.

I am fighting with something and I can’t seem to figure out what it is.

Perhaps…

In my sleep the other night three demons revealed themselves. Perhaps this confusion, this struggle is their work.

I do not know if they were just arriving and saw fit to announce themselves, or if they have been here for years and I just saw them for the first time.

I have spoken to them to tell them that their time grows short. I have spoken to them already about power and about strength. Tonight I will speak to them about devotion.

Feed on my confusion, you hungry three. Or rather: try. You’ll find it’s a thin broth indeed. The minutes tick onward, true enough. Years have passed like that, a minute at a time, but even in the deepest despair I never gave up. Will I now?

(Not the creation I sought but the creation that came to me.)

One more bit of background before I resume talking about Burning Man, the feeling of being called this year, and my choice not to go. I need to talk about Free Refills and how it relates to my career.

I’ve been publishing Free Refills five times a week for almost five months now. Has it been worthwhile? Sure. Will it continue to be? That’s not as clear.

It takes a lot of time and energy to publish five days a week. If I’m going to continue to do so, it needs to be serving to advance my career in ways more than, “This has been an interesting experiment and I’ve learned a lot.”

If it’s not, well, I could take some pleasure and pride in what I’ve accomplished here and put the project to bed at the end of the season.

Or I could reduce the publishing to three days a week, or two, or one, thereby keeping myself publishing while also freeing me to work on other, more lucrative things.

Or I could aim to make Free Refills play an essential part in supporting the advancement of my career, and that means making money.

I’ve owned the Free Refills domain for almost ten years now, and I’ve had some version of WordPress installed here since 2006. I’ve been inconsistent, to say the least, about actually publishing stuff on the site, but I’ve kept ownership of the domain and been paying hosting fees all this time. That should tell you a lot about my internal sense of how important Free Refills will be in the continued development of my professional life, and thus which of the approaches I outline above speaks to me most powerfully.

Before I go any further in talking about my current relationship with Burning Man, such as it is, I should offer a little background about that relationship’s past. Back in 2011 I created a blog here on Free Refills to write about Burning Man and Burner culture. I published a couple of pieces that August, right before I went to Burning Man for the so-far final time, that explained my rather complicated relationship with Burning Man and the culture it spawned. Rather than repeat myself, I’ll point you to those pieces now.

Why I’m Writing This Blog
My Relationship with Burning Man

A few observations:

1. You notice how I haven’t published anything on Transformed since those two pieces? If you’re a little bit clever, you can probably draw a few conclusions about my experience at Burning Man that year and something of my relationship with the culture since then.

2. The hypothesis in Why I’m Writing This Blog, that we’re “on the precipice of a monumental political crisis and a commensurate countercultural uprising” strikes me as depressingly ridiculous now. I don’t know that Americans have any kind of positive political revolution left in them. As a nation, we’re basically spoiled children, either demanding entertainment or petulantly fighting over our toys.

   I do stick by my assertion that capitalism and the socio-political structures that support it are beginning to die. For evidence I would point to the paralysis and vituperativeness of our government, its profound inability to do anything in the face of the serious long-term issues that loom before us. From that perspective, I suppose you could assert that the U.S. is in fact in political crisis and has been for some time.

   The old system isn’t working. But as far as I can tell, we’re a long way from figuring out what’s going to replace it.

3. Having watched the petty infighting and dysfunction of the Burner community in Colorado, and the complacency of the culture nationwide, the idea that Burning Man or some segment of Burner culture is going to lead a movement (in the sense of the term as I grew up with it) is a pretty desperate case of wishful thinking. If Burners truly had a revolutionary bent to their thinking, they would have started by overthrowing their corporate overlords in the Burning Man LLC.¹

   That some Burners have revolutionary proclivities is true enough, but they’re operating in a different sphere from what I intended in those pieces I wrote in 2011. For examples: Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, first went to Burning Man in 1998. They’ve certainly led a revolution, but to what greater end and to exactly whose benefit isn’t entirely clear.

¹ The corporate structure of Burning Man is actually a little more complicated than it was back in 2011, but discussion of that is for a different piece. For our purposes right now, how I describe it in My Relationship with Burning Man is sufficiently close to the truth that it’ll suffice for now.