Reaching out.

Hi.

A lot is coming pretty fast now. I wish I was younger and healthier. I wish I did things differently.

I didn't and frankly wishing is pointless.

Here is what I know. We slipped up. I slipped up. I got caught up in the cacophony and let so much go. I equivocated, kept putting things off, and now the price of that delay is coming due.

I am no longer interested in pontificators and pundits. I don't need to hear from moralizers or doomsayers.

Tuesday was not a surprise. It was disappointing, but I cannot fathom how anyone who lived through the past 24 years could look at Tuesday with any sense of shock or dismay.

We knew this. I knew this. I knew this 30 years ago. I knew this when I was broke, barely making rent with no health insurance, cobbling together a PC from toss-offs and scrap-piles. I knew this chatting with people in backwater BBSs, meeting in random bars,
and even odder spaces.

I said a long time ago that nostalgia is a trap. It is also a lie. A pretense that the aesthetic, the style, can recover the substance. It can't. Those platforms didn't matter because of their aesthetic. It wasn't the cool CGA display and slow network that made it nice. It was the fact that these places became communities. People helped each other deal with the garbage of the culture above them. The girl who was hiding an abortion from psychotic parents got support and help. People with no homes were given shelter. People could come out in a safe place and find guidance where none was previously found. That is what made those places awesome.

This may come as a surprise to you, but the culture above us never got better. We just swallowed the bread and circuses and pretended.

We still do, but the circus has gotten darker. The doomsayers, the critiquers, the back-seat talkers telling us what should have been and what could have been. The chants of revolution from marble towers and shiny screens.

Be afraid, be weak, be empty, and listen to me, listen to me, listen to me.

Maybe, just maybe, we should stop listening. Stop listening to voices that offer nothing. Find voices you can actually connect with and make that matter.

I woke up on Wednesday morning and realized that my community was essentially dead. There was no one left. That is on me. I didn't put the work in, I didn't prune when I should, and I allowed myself to think I had plenty of time. I sure as hell didn't do anything to grow or support it. So here I am and that sucks.

I am old. I don't want to start new, but I am going to. This is where I start. The Internet only matters if it connects you with a community, with other human beings. Otherwise, it is just a waste, a distracting drug to foster the emptiness that drives the modern zeitgeist. Online communities are real, but you need to find and foster them. Community in any form - requires work.

So, if you are reading this - and you're tired of the moralizers and doomsayers but you're also looking at the hatred and ignorance that made Tuesday possible and you're angry and maybe even afraid - you are not alone.

Reach out. Say Hi. Let's build something old but entirely new - a mutual creation of art, story, chaos, love, and support.

I am here. I am looking, and I am reaching out.