Author: Erik

It’s nearly time to leave Twitter.

Elon Musk, billionaire space enthusiast and edge lord, is on track to purchase Twitter by this Friday. He’s over-leveraging his assets to buy a social media site because, um, ego I guess?

It’s reported that Musk wants to turn the entire platform into an Everything App, like WeChat in China. He’s also averse to moderation, and plans to implement drastic staff layoffs.

Twitter stopped being the fun, jokey site I enjoyed some time ago. My experience on the site has become marked by dog-piling, hot takes, misinformation, and even outright hate speech. Existing Twitter moderation is woefully hands-off; tying their hands further would not improve the site at all.

One mantra I’ve picked up recently is “know when to leave,” applicable both in my professional and personal life. And I’d say it’s time to leave Twitter.

I don’t know yet if I’ll take up an alternative social media presence, or just post here more often. This could be an opportunity to spend less time doom-scrolling and more time reading longer, nuanced thoughts.

And I know some people can’t leave, either due to professional obligations or because too much of their social circle is embedded in the site. I pass no judgement.

Time to fly away to another tree, I suppose.

When did I stop being enthusiastic about things I love?

In hindsight, I should have been much more vocal about my feelings about The Last Jedi. I loved, and still love, that movie for what it was trying to say, how its characters dealt with failure, how even the best of us can make bad choices and have to live with the consequences, how starship collisions can look transcendent.

I don’t know when I started to run on fumes. My last post was September last year (about the delightful Star Wars Visions, which has a second season coming later this year). I’ve had a bunch of blog post ideas since then. I thought I had followed through with at least one, but no.

Life got in the way, as it does, only this time it was a jack-knifed semi-truck blocking all lanes of traffic.

My family life has been rough, and not something I want to discuss publicly. Add to that the growing embrace of theocracy in this country, making me wonder what kind of life I want to have if things go south.

In short, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to find hope again.

I recently read Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller, part-memoir and part-biography of 19th-century scientist David Starr Jordan, and one of its themes is how to keep going when everything is falling prey to entropy. Halfway through, Miller learns something about Jordan that upends everything she had thought about him — specifically, his enthusiastic endorsement of eugenics — and she wonders what awful things result from a desire to put order to a chaotic world.

So, what are some alternatives?

There’s faith, I suppose, but that’s long since fled my life. I once had it when I was a committed Unitarian Universalist. Having left the church — both a physical building and the denomination as a whole — it has never stayed, sometimes flitting through like a bird through a yard, grabbing an insect or a worm before disappearing. I can’t say I’m an atheist — I still believe in the God of Einstein and Spinoza — but that God isn’t coming to save us.

So I decided to lie to myself.

A better world is possible. Help yourself and those around you.

As lies go, it’s pretty small. It’s kind of the Bodhisattva Vow in miniature: everyone can be free of suffering, and it’s your responsibility to free everyone else once you’ve freed yourself. But it’s a lie because I have no evidence that a better world is actually possible.

But the first sentence is just a hook to hang the second on: since a better world is possible, it’s your responsibility to help yourself and those around you to make it happen.

I wish I had more than that. I wish I weren’t just running on fumes. I just hope it’s enough to get me home.

Has it been long enough to talk about Star Wars on the internet?

My feelings about the sequel trilogy — The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker — are more complicated than the polarized love/hate of the entire sequence that crystallized just after The Last Jedi was released.

Well, perhaps not so complicated. I adore The Last Jedi, but was deeply disappointed in The Rise of Skywalker. This was in part because of its choppy storytelling, but also because of how reactionary it was, undoing every novel thing that TLJ introduced, seemingly as an act of spite. I can recall so many vivid sequences from TLJ, but TRoS exists in this haze. I couldn’t even remember what the MacGuffin was that Rey and the others were trying to find.

Sometime in late March, I contracted the SARS-COV-2 virus. I don’t know how, where, or exactly when — maybe at the office, where hygiene standards had grown lax, or just in passing at the grocery store. It doesn’t matter, and even if I knew for sure I wouldn’t say.

Two weeks later, I had a cold that morphed into the worst case of pneumonia I have ever had. After a night of nausea so intense that it literally knocked me out of bed, I went to the clinic, where I got my official diagnosis. I went into quarantine for two weeks, got some steroids, and waited it out.

When I fell ill, I was just a week away from getting the first shot of vaccine.

If you’re familiar with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you’ve heard of Vogon poetry: verse so stilted, so cliché, that is tantamount to torture for someone to hear it recited.

Anyway, I took down my recent poems. Pretension doesn’t become me. 🙂

(CW: suicidal ideation)

As I was closing on my house in October — amidst tribble-like avalanches of paperwork, hands squeezed with white knuckles as everything almost fell apart up until it miraculously came together — I was already preparing for an extended break from social media.

I was already emotionally exhausted from the interminable presidential election, months of lockdown and squabbling over whether the very real COVID-19 was a hoax (it isn’t), and things were nearly coming apart at the last minute as closing day approached. I had stepped away from Twitter, but Facebook was always there — where I could gloat about some small victory, or quietly envy my friends.

It was a no-brainer: I would need a break after closing, to give myself time for packing, pre-move renovations, and moving day itself. To make the house livable would take a bit of effort — new light fixtures, flooring, etc. I needed every second I could spare.