Eschatica

Between February 7, 2009 and October 4, 2015 I updated my Facebook status eighteen thousand, eight hundred ninety-six times. When factoring in a break from April 9 through November 22, 2014, that is well above eight updates a day; or about one every two hours that I was likely awake. I uploaded more than one hundred videos, more than ten thousand photos, shared fifteen hundred sixty URLs and logged five thousand eighty-eight quotes.

Do I want those hours back? I downloaded all of the data before deactivating my account, so I still have the work-product itself, though stripped of some of the context in the form of things from friends that I was responding to. Besides just thinking about it transactionally, was it good discipline — what was the effect of this media on my psyche, my teaching, my relationships and my art? I logged off entirely on October 4, I am writing this sentence in early November, and I’m still not sure about any of these questions. I miss reading some of what some people post, and I kind of miss being pissed off about the stupid shit that the rest of them posted. I am still reading, still watching, still making and still listening to pretty much the same kinds of books and TV and objects and music I used to post about — but not sharing my favorites of each. I definitely have a little more time — and what time I have is a little less uninterrupted. Thinking about what I posted over those years, reviewing these posts, may be helpful in eventually answering the questions above and more.

Skimming years worth of my own posts is the verbal equivalent of a part of your life flashing before your eyes (the images don’t show up inline in the downloaded FB data.) It’s link, rant, quote, link, comment, quote, quote, rant. Not all of the quotes are from what I was hearing, watching and reading — some were compensating for the lack of italics in the Facebook markup language. But most do seem, now that I’ve imported everything I’ve ever posted into a spreadsheet for examination, to be from the various media I consume. And most of them were posted without citation or attribution, leaving me just a little better off than the seven hundred ninety-seven friends who may have occasionally seen these nuggets in their newsfeeds. As I scroll through them, I can remember the source and context for quite a few, and I’ve found six that are duplicates so far — sometimes years apart; four from the show 30Rock alone. And a lot were lyrics.

Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 12:59pm EST
“You point your gun at someone else, but (you) always aim it for yourself!”

Endpoint’s After Taste was the first record I bought when I arrived in Ann Arbor in 1994. It is one of many albums that I’ve now listened to as many times as Jane’s Addiction’s Nothing’s Shocking. It still strikes me that the combination of melody, metal and vocals fit surprisingly well together — and lyrics like those above, from the song Lowland, have meant something worth remembering, though something different each time I’ve listened to it. “How many bridges must be burned?”

Sunday, April 19, 2009 at 8:59am EDT “Driving home, between the lines in the road. I swear that I’ve been through this before. Nothing makes much sense, except for doing yourself in...We all have what it takes…”

Stop reading this and search Google or your favorite streaming service for the Hot Water Music song Driving Home. Listen to it. I’m not sure any song but Cats in the Cradle or maybe Elton John’s Daniel has ever made me feel quite the way this song does.

Sunday, July 19, 2009 at 3:45pm EDT
“Aloha, motherfuckers!”

Detroit was a mythical place, growing up in Southeast Michigan; filled with art, sports and arson. Coleman Alexander Young was elected mayor five months before I was born and was the object of more insults in my suburban community than I could possibly catalog. Given the overall level of education and crazy Reagan Democrattery of my parents and their friends, the one thing I could believe about Young was that he had a foul mouth; and I loved it: “Swearing is an art form. You can express yourself much more exactly, much more succinctly, with properly used curse words.”

Thursday, August 6, 2009 at 9:26pm EDT
“Being in the Element, and especially being in the zone, doesn’t take energy away from you; it gives it to you.”

After I saw Ken Robinson’s TED talk for the first time, I read his book The Element. I wasn’t super impressed — but there’s some interesting stuff in there. It seemed poignant enough in 2009 for me to share it with my Facebook posse anyway.

Saturday, July 24, 2010 at 10:13am EDT Having tea in the oldest museum restaurant in the world. Morris isn’t really my taste...Black tea is pretty good though. “There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink and make his soul enjoy good in his labour.”

That is one of few Bible quotes I’ve ever typed out. I disliked it before I even found its derivation, Ecclesiastes 2:24. I love eating, and do too much of it, but don’t like thinking or talking about eating.

Tuesday, March 8, 2011 at 8:56pm EST
“Who is Justice Beaver?”
“He’s a crime fighting beaver.”

By 2011 NetFlix was my TV. The Office sucked up a few months of my life — first, the British version and then the oddly superior American version. Jim and Dwight have an amazingly deep repartee.

Facebook was my notebook — and as such, it wasn’t terribly important that anyone else be able to make sense of what I was taking note of. If I was doing this in the dark 90s I would have needed to cite every one in the entry itself, but in a Google Earth it’s enough for me to freeze them, to be thawed at a time of my choosing. As I look back at these entries, I am vaguely familiar with about half of the uncited entries, clueless about a quarter of them, and relatively sure I remember the specific context for the remaining quarter. But Google helps me check each. For the next few, I’ll paste them in without checking them using Wikipedia et al and write a summary caption for the bunch that I won’t alter to fit the facts. You’ll have to trust me.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011 at 9:52pm EDT
“Remember people: just don’t be yourselves.”

Sunday, July 3, 2011 at 12:16pm EDT
“That glittering may not be gold, don’t let nobody play me...”

Friday, February 10, 2012 at 2:04pm EST
“The truth must not be only the truth; it must also be told and acted upon.”

Monday, March 19, 2012 at 10:24pm EDT
“Wanting to be book is not book.”

Saturday, April 21, 2012 at 10:53pm EDT
“Healer, gun enthusiast, jewelry designer; there is nothing this man can’t do.”

These words were written to be emphatically delivered in particular contexts and reading them as separated from the comedies, dramas, raps and politics they’re a part of is a little jarring — especially in the aggregate. There are clues in the timestamps — the two in the early afternoon couldn’t be from NetFlix, I have a little more self control than that. “Remember people...” is funny, but also a little sad — it’s got to be one of Adrian Monk’s inverted clichés; I feel it in my temples. The “glittering may not be gold” is where my jaw meets my neck, I can feel Lupe Fiasco spitting it out. (Lupe’s lyric is one of the quotes that was repeated, in this case a total of three times over two years.) “The truth” has Marxism written into it — I’m pretty sure it’s either Lenin, Che, or Mao — I’m able to recall the style somewhere in the upper rear of my skull, but I can’t think of what I would have been reading in February of 2012 that would have contained it. “Book” I can see just behind my eyes, with Jack Donaghy, Jenna Maroney and Khonani (as Conan) in the hallway at 30Rock — maybe about to get on an an elevator. The last one I’m having trouble with — it’s definitely not from music, and it flows more like TV than any book I remember reading from that period. My instinct is that it’s from the show Portlandia, but I know I hadn’t seen that show in 2012 — so I have to guess: Vincent D’Onofrio in Law & Order: Criminal Intent.

Thursday, June 7, 2012 at 11:09am EDT
“Even the hatred of squalor makes the brow grow stern.”

Monday, July 9, 2012 at 9:25pm EDT
“In Cambridge, you were not exactly taught: you just read books and talked about them.”

Friday, July 27, 2012 at 6:53pm EDT
“Much of what appears “natural” today dates from the 1980s”

Friday, September 6 2013 at 1:01pm EDT
“His self possession allowed him to be and act precisely as he was.”

Monday, April 7, 2014 at 8:14am EDT
“If you’re busy, you’re important. You’re leading a full and worthy life...”

Wednesday, December 24, 2014 at 1:58pm EST
“Heap up gold, and be eternalized for some wondrous cure.”

Friday, January 2, 2015 at 4:13pm EST
“Concepts are densely stitched together through relationships of similarity and context.”

Even scrolling through more than five thousand quotes, they seem connected. Perhaps because I still have some context of them from having read the books they were extracted from — but also because I tend to collect things that are not only interesting to me, but which are related to another in some way. They are not necessarily coherent at first glance, they aren’t the products of the same mind or products of working on the same problems, but these ideas seem like they could fit together quite well. Here is a quick aggregation:

Much of what appears natural to us today is from the 1980s, when concepts were densely stitched together through relationships of similarity and context. At Cambridge, we were not exactly taught: we just read books and talked about them. We read and discussed ‘heaping up gold to be eternalized for wondrous cures’ and assumed that our self possession allowed us to be and act precisely as we were. If we we were busy, we were important. We were leading full and worthy lives, but even the hatred of squalor made our brows grow stern.

Not a trainwreck, but not quite lyric philosophy either.

Every once in a while, one of my Facebook friends would ask for attribution for one of the bare quotes I posted, and I was happy to provide the citation and the link to the book, album, article, or podcast. These interactions rarely went more than a few comments deep — but occasionally would lead to interesting conversations on the topics of the quote or the quality of the author or artist who used them — and occasionally they would lead to fights. I tend not to get into super hot flamewars, because I can extinguish them with Facebook’s block button. I had seven hundred ninety-seven friends on Facebook, but had blocked seventy-eight others. I had unsubscribed from seeing six hundred thirty of them in my newsfeed. I was invited (en masse) to one thousand twenty events, and replied to only thirteen. I was ‘poked’ seven times, but never poked back. Because fuck picquerism.

If we wanted to look up an article or book by keyword in libraries of the nineties we had to hope that someone happened to choose the exact same word to embed with the catalog entry. Standing there, at a skinned Windows 3.11 terminal, we would type word after word into a slow search window until something popped up that seemed on point. Now we are used to full text search. Of course, this is messy — but it keeps the number of interactions with librarians at a minimum. I like the illusion that I am my own best filter and that the things that end up in my journal are the things that stood out; the best of everything that passed by my eyes and ears. So how can I query this dataset? I can count things, I can pick things out at random or in some rhythm.

In the paragraph I aggregated from quotes, my eye/mind isolated out the following words as key: natural, concept, relate, context, read, talk, discuss, gold, eternal, wonder, cure, possess, precise, lead, worth, life, hate, made, grow. As I read them back to myself I realize that I have a hard time letting go of finding keys in almost every possible word. Which isn’t a terribly efficient search strategy, which might say a lot about my judgment. Having chosen these, I wonder what the frequency of each was in my Facebook data set?

That’s a lot of reading and making, and little eternal context. Given what I know about my own behaviors, interests and social media practices — I’m not at all surprised about the words I used a lot. And those two things are inclusive enough to have some of the low frequency words inside their envelope. And, of course, there are synonyms for many that may help to bolster counts of the essential meaning of some words within the set. But let’s assume these are reasonably representative of my levels of interest in these ideas, despite being counts of keywords from quotes I randomly plucked from one source (which itself contained quotes from the plurality of my sources.) Of the nineteen words, only one is a material noun, gold. Grow, hate, lead, possess, wonder, talk, discuss, read and relate are verbs. Natural, eternal, worth, precise and made are adjectives and concept, context and life are ~immaterial nouns. The concretes are about 8% of the results, the actioning about 46%, the attributal are about 36% and the abstractions are about 10% of the frequency counts, even though they make up 11%, 47%, 26% and 16% of the relative numbers of words in this list, as split up into word types. Searching for the numerological could go deeper: summing the letters gives us 8, 46, 30 and 18 per category; the pattern keeps repeating. That distribution demonstrates either phrase collection or phrase analysis that is not hysterically attracted to action or description balanced with ideas that are more general than specific — there is a balanced asymmetry pairing each data set.

This diversity seems, without going through this exercise ad nauseam, to permeate the posts I made in general — regularly returning to themes of identity, learning, losing, existence, non sequiturs and material culture. There is some seeming randomness, but also some structure. There are some similarities of style where there are dissimilarities of meaning, and some observations in the same stream that are jarringly, aesthetically incongruous. I think I can own that. And I think the habit is relatively gestalt; the pattern repeats as it jumps to the photographs, conversations, books and things I drew that didn’t make it to Facebook — mixes of the specific, the general, the active and the textured. The red, the speedy, the sharp and the symbolic; churning against one another in the maelstrom, pulling in comrades and spitting out remainders.

Thursday, September 3, 2015 at 10:03am EST “Next to the domestication of fire, plants, animals, and of humans themselves, the invention of writing constitutes probably the greatest technological transformation in human history (unless we count upright posture or language as technological innovations, which we have reason to do.) Like fire, writing has terrible powers. Its ability to preserve meaning makes it explosive and dangerous. Like all other domesticates, writing has never been fully tamed, and can occasionally run amuck… Writing, as a medium, that allows voice and mind to transcend the grave, has a long-standing association with death and death-dealing men.” — John Dunham Peters