Why

Does the internet really need another substack, and am I the man to write it?

It’s not a dumb question and you’re not a bad person for having it. What’s the point of something like this? What are we doing here?

Well.

I’ll be real with you, I don’t understand why I like doing the things that I do. But for reasons that remain mysterious to my powers of self-reflection, I really enjoy expressing myself in writing. I enjoy it even more when I have an audience. And I have found that whenever I give air to my thoughts in a public forum, an audience discovers them, and enjoys reading them, and wants more.

Once, a long time ago now, I had a blog that I updated almost with almost religious devotion for the better part of a decade, until for reasons that I was never able to penetrate, the exercise stopped being rewarding. Since the death of that auto-relationship, I’ve contributed essays and articles to magazines you may have read, gotten the rare (bad) piece of short fiction published. I’ve written a goodly number of book reviews for nobody in particular. And I’ve penned enough technical blogs for various employers that they could seriously be said to comprise a tome. But nothing regular, nothing that was purely my own, since that early blog and I went our separate ways, like lovers who inexplicably drifted further and further apart until one day they found they were estranged, and could not rekindle a spark. They wanted to want, they desired to desire, but had forgotten how, had lost the knack.

Reader, I experienced my estrangement from personal writing as a loss every bit as real as a friendship that ended badly. I’ve found it difficult to probe its edges or plumb its depths. It gnawed at me and I couldn’t find a tidy explanation, could find no relief or answers in other pastimes. I couldn’t even really articulate what went wrong, what made me stop the daily prayer-like devotions to an activity I had found so rewarding. I had plenty of excuses: my life got busier, with career and human relationships, a wife, children and pets; I suspect my decade-long daily weed habit played an outsized role in the atrophy, sapped my well of desire to create. But I always had friends, work, and other things in my life. And I had been a daily weed smoker during the absolute height of my creative output. These are the worst kinds of excuses, lacking even explanatory power in addition to absolving me of the responsibility for my own life.

The truth is: I just stopped, and I didn’t know why. Even as I missed it, grieved it as a profound loss, a missing piece in my sense of self, I found myself unable to pick up what I had so carelessly dropped. Was it lost forever?

Then I found twitter during the early stages of the covid pandemic and the Summer of George, discovered anonymous accounts that were able to forecast and distill the shape of the world better than news agencies and professional pundits. They expressed wholly original thoughts and syntheses I had never encountered, not in any publication. More: they were funny. They were interesting! It seemed I hadn’t read anything truly interesting in an age and a day. After months of lurking, I decided to join them.

Twitter’s format, with its hard limit of 280 characters, made writing into a series of small games, puzzles with hard constraints I had to solve for in every sentence. This many words, and no more. No lame gamer abbreviations or jargon unless it’s funny. Cut it down, make it fit. I found this an easier task than open-ended writing, a task that was compelling and bite-sized, with frequent positive feedback and fast iteration times. Over the course of several months I learned how it worked.

Learn to set the hook in a thread’s first tweet and get people to read the next twenty in the chain. Learn to quote somebody in earnest agreement, yes and. Learn to dunk on them, get a load of this slur. Learn how to reply, how to riff on a joke without being cringe or sycophantic, how to disagree fruitfully, argue without alienating OP and his friends. Learn the thousand unstated rules of etiquette and custom which drive the scene and differentiate it from others.

Above all, learn what it is that you want to say, learn how to say it in a way that finds its audience.

Twitter pretty quickly became one of the great loves of my life, and as I found my audience an absurd feeling of having arrived settled in. Possibly the smallest amount of fame to ever go to someone’s head inflated mine, dizzyingly, seductively. A certain other pseudonymous poster once quipped that Twitter improves with the log of follower count, and I found this to be true. I passed 5,000, then 10,000, then 20,000. I was retweeted approvingly by accounts with 10 or 100 times my reach. I was somebody.

And before long, while I was consciously nursing my new addiction and calling it an intellectual pursuit (it’s both), I started to notice a furtive, almost flirtatious return of the desire that I had been convinced I had permanently misplaced a decade earlier. I noticed that I wanted to write again — not in the stroboscopic, episodic missives to no one in particular that Twitter demands, but in the longer narrative structure you’re enjoying now, a format free from the constraints which paradoxically had revived that near-dead ember of want so subtly and gradually I hadn’t noticed it at first. I began to hope, and then to yearn.

Reader, I’ve been called eloquent, and I flatter myself that it’s true. For all its obvious joys and advantages, writing on Twitter demands a cramped style with an almost farcical degree of brevity, enforced at gunpoint. I flatter myself again that I have learned to excel at this style, that I’ve largely mastered its effective use. But it’s not my native tongue, nor my first love. After spending the last four years writing in staccato, clawing back every unnecessary clause and flourish, every indefensibly verbose adverb, I’m ready for my writing to sprawl out, inhabit however much space I choose to allow it. I’m ready to rediscover what I’m capable of in my native format.

So here we are. I write because I must, and I hope you’ll join me.

I don’t know precisely what this newsletter will be. I imagine I will address many of the same topics I’ve been tweeting about these last many years, but in a format that lets them (and me) breathe and unfurl. But the new format will inevitably give rise to new topics and new styles that diverge wildly from my writing on Twitter, in ways that are delightfully difficult to anticipate. Although I’ve been cautiously nursing the idea of this newsletter for many months now, I know myself well enough to understand that my best ideas and writing haven’t even occurred to me yet. I’ll be as surprised to write them as you’ll be to read them.

To begin I’ll be publishing once a week, and as the rust begins to flake off long-disused mental joints, I hope to ramp up the pace to twice a week. It’s free for the time being. If there proves to be demand, there may be a paid tier in the future, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

For now, I’m just excited to be reunited with a part of myself I worried was gone forever, to be re-embarking on a project at once familiar and uncharted. Like any aging man enjoying the heady rush of a newly rekindled relationship, I’m probably vastly too optimistic about its prospects. But that same age gives me enough perspective to know, with inalienable iron-gut certainty, that life is in the attempt. It’s time to give this another shot and see where I end up.

Subscribe, enjoy, and tell your friends.