I’ve been thinking about being on the internet and not on the internet lately.

I have been spending a lot of time on my computer working up a number of different computer projects, but also I think I’ve more or less given up on Bluesky as a place I’m really interested in (it’s not as varied as Twitter was, or at least: I haven’t put in the work to make the feed interesting), and I finally killed my Twitter (I refuse the new name) account because… well, probably I should have parked on the username, but I also just hate that there was an account there.

But.

I’ve also been spending a lot of time not on the computer, in fact, out in the world. I’m making progress on becoming best friends with the new owners of a local bar I like a lot (see me at karaoke inconsistently on Tuesdays). I went to a mother fucking backyard poetry reading for the first time in years, and it was so, so, so goddamn good, the reading, and also nourishing, the event. There have been bar nights and I’m pretty pleased with how Two Page Tuesday is going.

I wish I could remember what I was reading specifically — although the phrase is everywhere — but I came across (again, for the nth time) the phrase "a certain kind of very online person", and I wondered about this. I often wonder about this, this online-ness. I think I’m so interested in it because a lot of the kids I thought "very cool" in high school — with whom I was friends, but in a kind of distant way — were proto-very-online, by which I mean, they were kind of in the shit before the shit was shit, you know? Proper fucking hipsters, riding the beginning of the wave. I’m not saying that they were happier or in fact cooler for it — a few of them did go on to do kind of cool shit — but I admired it, or at least was interested in it.

(As an aside: it’s funny how these things tend to linger.)

And so I’m here sitting in a WeWork for the free WiFi and coffee (I am off work today) looking at the website of the poet I saw headlining the backyard reading, and at some poets around him, following links, and I’m thinking this guy might be pretty good at being online. And not in a always on social media or anything way, but in a "good at presenting the interesting things they’re doing on the internet" kind of way. And so we have a distinction, or at least maybe the beginnings of one: online in a way that online is a tool to do and talk about art, not online as a means of… I don’t know. I want to say something snarky about vanity or selling our eyeballs to advertisers, but that’s not quite right. But there seems to be a certain species of "online" that I don’t mind — more a Web 1.0 type cornering where you go to a place to find a thing and maybe you go back and check that thing later, or — here, go read this article about "The Revenge of the Homepage".

I have, at times, aspired to be "hip." Have a fun, interesting online presence or whatever. I’ve done the Instagram thing — I did pretty well when I was on my pretending-it’s-not-a-finding-myself-trip — and I enjoyed Twitter when it was. I’ve had more and less good websites. But now?

I’m not really trying to find a job. I have more or less given up trying to publish short stories (maybe I just suck at them: this might be true and is fine) and so don’t really need to have a site dedicated to shouting when they get published. I’m trying to publish a novel but if that happens I’ll have plenty of time to do whatever needs to be done for that after the things are signed. So we just have this here blog that I infrequently write on. It doesn’t really have a purpose right now. This is OK. I like having something on the Internet, some kind of "online" for when I want to play on it. It is, even if I’m not really in a publishing phase or a job-hunting phase, good to have a result I control when someone googles my name. But still: it’s all just bullshit, anyway.

I wish I had come to more of a point, but — :shrug: I always start these thinking I’ll come to a point but I do not, but that’s why I write things for here and not a magazine or something. I mean, I can do that kind of writing. And I have — and have plans to again — written things for here that are more essay-like and coherent. But this isn’t that. And that’s just fine.