The Equinox Impends: Intention

I realize that it’s just over four weeks until the anniversary of making this part of my job, and a good approach to celebrating that anniversary would be a Happy Equinox launch of Free Refills 2.0, a glorious, shiny Free Refills which is clearly and obviously Not a Blog.

Now, the only way I’m going to succeed in that intention is if I get started right now doing the necessary behind-the-scenes experimenting, just like I was doing this time last year with the writing that became the early pieces that I published here. So … I guess my path is pretty clear, eh?

I have to remember that I don’t need to nail everything into place by the equinox. I mean, hey, it’s a website, I can play with the code all day. But I want to get all the seeds planted. The equinox is the perfect day for that.

More About Responsibility to Audience

The problem, of course, is that while there is someone out there who shares any particular interest of yours, there are few if no people who share all of your interests. Even people who know you well and care about you aren’t interested in all your interests so much as they are interested in you, and those people, the ones who really love you, are for even the most extroverted among us a small subset of everyone out there. So if I’m going to insist that what I’m doing here is actually going to be a genuinely important part of my job as a writer no matter how my career develops from here, well, I better figure out how to make that immediately obvious to any new visitor to Free Refills. Right, Agnes?

(And by the way, thanks again for coming to visit.)

So I’ve had to confront that the reason I haven’t done anything about reorganizing Free Refills to make it super-obviously Not a Blog and so that a new visitor will immediately find something that interests her is that I have no real idea how to go about doing so. I understand now that the only way I’m going to figure it out is by trying stuff and seeing what works and what doesn’t and then taking whatever I learn and iterating, which is sometimes the only workable method but is often frustrating and means living with uncertainty and a willingness to accept your own lack of knowledge for a long time. That isn’t really the most comfortable place to be. I guess I kept hoping that the answer would sort of pop into my head and then out into the world fully formed like how Athena in all her wisdom sprung forth from the forehead of Zeus, but clearly it’s not going to work that way.

What About Your Responsibility to Your Audience? Asked Agnes

Good question, Agnes. I recognize that just because one finds one’s own work interesting doesn’t mean that other people will necessarily find it interesting. Since writing is supposed to be about communication, this might present a problem. What to do about that, Agnes!

My answer emerges from what I call Ben’s First Law of the Internet, which can be expressed simply as: You aren’t the only one. I coined the First Law back around 2000, when a pair of simple Yahoo! searches–this is well before Google figured out search, remember–quickly led me to (1) a website that had the complete rules to an obscure chess variant I’d been discussing with a friend, and (2) a website devoted to cataloging the cosmetic differences between different model years of a specific model of guitar that I happened to own. Which was to discover: not only were there people out there who shared my interests in some fairly obscure subjects, but some of those people were sufficiently interested to take the time to make websites about them. (Please keep in mind, this is back when people still coded websites by hand.)

I doubt that kind of thing exists anymore in exactly that form–on the more mature Web, those obsessives’ websites have now probably been replaced by Pages on Facebook, but the principle remains: You aren’t the only one. Someone out there shares your interests.

So I just write about what’s interesting to me, and figure someone out there might care.

I also freely admit that “what’s interesting to me” is evolving day by day as I keep up this practice. And hope that maybe, just maybe, the experience of that evolution might be interesting to others as well.

Scalia, and What Happens Now

Back at the end of June, when the Supreme Court’s long-awaited decision on gay marriage came down, I wrote of Antonin Scalia, “Either he is the worst kind of intellectual coward or else he is simply hideous.” Now, upon his death, I back away from that statement not at all. I believe history will judge him harshly, an embodiment of a backward time.

When I opened up the New York Times homepage Saturday afternoon and saw the news of his death, my first reaction was, “Oh my goodness. Game on.” It has been no surprise at all that the Republicans, who have asserted ad nauseum that Obama runs roughshod over the Constitution, have already publicly thrown down the gauntlet by insisting that they will do everything in their power to deny the current president his constitutional right to appoint Scalia’s successor. Shall I take a moment to point out that today we are still nine months from the election and almost a year from the start of the next administration? It’s never about principles in Washington. It’s always just politics.

For all its extreme nastiness, there’s been something kind of abstract about the presidential campaign thus far. It’s felt a little bit as though the campaign were a wargame, with dice and cards and plastic game markers and a gameboard that’s a map of the United States, played by people who hate each other.

But now Scalia has died and things just got very, very real. “Game on?” Wrong analogy. Far more accurate to call it the start of a war.

Since You’re New Around Here, Agnes

So I wanna talk about the work I’m doing here at Free Refills. A bit less than a year ago, on the spring equinox (an auspicious day for a new beginning), I launched the project you see here. I had decided that part of my work as a writer was to stop being such a little bitch about perfectionism and publishing, so I made a promise, to myself and to the world, to publish something, anything, every single Monday through Friday like it was my job, which, once you make a promise like that to yourself, is exactly what it becomes. So far, except for a two-week sabbatical I gave to myself around the winter solstice (an auspicious time for rest and reflection), I have kept my promise. I have published every single Monday through Friday since the spring equinox a year ago.

And part of what Free Refills is about is that, while there may be some modifications to the promise, I’m essentially never going to stop.

After New Hampshire

Does confirmation of what we already knew constitute new information? The polls indicated that Trump and Sanders would win in New Hampshire, and they did. Has anything changed or genuinely become more clear?

I think a growing clarity is emerging about the major theme of the race so far. Yesterday’s results amplify something we perhaps finally started to understand after Iowa, where Sanders essentially tied Hillary, and Cruz and Trump together won about 50% of the vote: a substantial percentage, bordering on a majority, of Americans, irrespective of party affiliation, see the critical problem facing the country as the built into the system itself. The surprise success of the candidacies of Sanders, Trump and Cruz all point to an active distrust and disavowal of the establishment.

At this point, it seems we face two possible outcomes.

The first is that the presidency stays as our focus, one of the people running wins, and everything else stays the same. In that scenario, what can possibly happen but the further devolution of our country’s political system? What can happen but a further hastening of the partisan death-spiral that began in the ’90s when the GOP decided that Perot’s effect on the vote completely delegitimized the Clinton presidency and then did everything in their power to destroy it? For I see no good outcome from a general election in which any of our four current front-runners win. Trump is a bully and a demagogue, Cruz is insane, Clinton is absolutely loathed by half the country, and Sanders is so far to the left of most of the country that one has to imagine almost literal open warfare between a Sanders White House and the House.

And let’s face it, the above is the most likely scenario. The race for the presidency will consume everyone’s attention, someone will win the election, everyone on the other side will hate him/her, and things will get worse than they are now.

But if, instead, we are somehow able to realize that the driving motivation for an across-the-spectrum near-or-actual-majority of voters is that the problem with our government is built into the system itself, and we are somehow able to use this understanding and the momentum that’s building up around these outsider candidacies to create a pan-political movement around serious campaign-finance and electoral reform–up to and including amending the Constitution, if that’s what it takes–then we as a nation might still have a chance.

The presidency is a sideshow right now, and like every sideshow the carnies and freaks and grotesqueries sure attract the attention. We’re going to get nowhere if we let that noise draw all of our energy and we avoid the harder work of dealing with problems that lack the can’t-look-away fascination offered by the Combover Man, the Beady-Eyed Madman, the Ice Queen, and the Cantankerous Old Dude battling for the most powerful office in the world. Meanwhile America has become a shell of itself, half oligarchy and half plutocracy, as politicians, electorally safe in their gerrymandered fiefdoms, vie for the money of special interests who have few fetters in using their wealth to control as much of the world as they can. We face real problems. Without tackling our system’s enormous deficiencies, it’s hopeless to imagine that we’ll even begin to solve them.

This One Goes Out to the Young Woman I Met on the Chairlift

I was riding the Wayback lift at Keystone last Friday, and I and the young woman sitting next to me got to talking, the way you sometimes talk to the person sitting next to you on the chairlift, and she asked me about my job and I told her that I’m a writer and I told her about Free Refills and she said she was definitely going to check it out.

Later, I thought about what she would see if she actually followed through on that promise. I assume she was interested in my writing because our conversation interested her, and so I’m willing to bet that there are pieces here that would interest her as well. But would she find them? In all likelihood she’d read the most recent several pieces and would find them interesting exactly to the extent that she was already interested in the topics of those particular pieces. If the set of things I’d written about contained many elements outside the set of things that interest her, she wouldn’t be likely to come back.

But of course I want her to come back.

So I thought maybe I should write something to really catch her attention, should today be the day that she thinks, “Oh yeah, that guy on the lift, Free Refills, right, let’s go check that out.”

By the way: she wore a soft-looking, scalloped white scarf, the kind of scarf that someone named Agnes would definitely wear, so though that almost certainly isn’t her name, I will henceforth call her Agnes.

So, Agnes, first of all, sorry I didn’t ask you your actual name. You know how it is, riding on the chairlift with someone. But yeah, thanks for coming to check out Free Refills. I hope you’ll come back. Over the next days and weeks, some of the pieces I’m going to publish here are going to be about why you should keep coming back.

The nutshell is this, dear Agnes: this may not be immediately evident, but Free Refills is the best and most important website on the whole Internet. That this isn’t immediately evident is a pretty big problem though, one of which I’m aware, and it is high time I do something about it.

The “Super” in Super Bowl 50

If you buy the media’s view, a football game is mostly a battle between the two quarterbacks, and so from that perspective it would be easy to see yesterday’s Super Bowl result as the boring old white guy beating the charismatic young black guy, and that narrative might make a sports fan some degree of sad.

Because let us reflect for a moment on just how boring he was. He was so boring it was almost fascinating. Think back to the post-game interview. He had just won the Super Bowl, the capstone and possibly the final punctuation on a remarkable career, and it was like Tracy Wolfson had asked his opinion about a moderately thought-provoking but deeply flawed book he’d just read and he was giving a carefully measured opinion. It was easier for him to shill for Budweiser than it was to seem like he was thrilled at being involved in the game, much less having played on the winning side. This isn’t a time for passion or excitement, he seemed to be saying. This is a time for corporations to make money.

But I think any real focus on the boring white guy is to miss the better story. The boring old white guy played in such a way as to minimize his own mistakes. That is boring. It is not worthy of anything we describe as Super.

Let us tell a different story. There was something genuinely Super to behold. If we need synecdoche to describe and personalize the conflict, let’s do it like this: the freakishly gifted and charismatic young black man wearing number 1 on his black jersey battling, and ultimately being bested by, not a boring old white guy, but instead, another freakishly gifted, charismatic young black man. This man’s jersey bore the number 58.