Slow Motion Start

• DOWNLOAD | EE “Slow Motion Start” For 100 We Try Harder, 2002

Before I begin, let’s lift the veil a little bit: A little over a year and a half ago I decided to go back to school, as an adult, with the objective of teaching high school English — ostensibly for the rest of my life. It was the first real big-boy decision I’d made in quite some time, having been — up until that point — pretty satisfied with the mutable state of my career. In a typically impulsive fashion, of course, I mulled over my options, made this decision, and started classes all within a two-week span. Today, I am a little more than halfway to graduation. In roughly two weeks, I’ll be 35 years old.

I realize that I am not the only adult in college — there is a man in one of my summer classes who is at least as old as my father — but I am the only adult in college that I know this intimately. I’ve lived enough to know who I am, what turns me on, and why I persist with anything. I’ve also lived enough to know that linearity — the idea that my routine will not significantly change until 2011 — makes me incredibly frustrated. Sometimes downright depressed, in fact. Especially when I take into consideration the fact that I’m working towards establishing a new routine that might take up the rest of my life.

When I was 17 years old, I sold what few material possessions I had and moved into a Hare Krishna monastery. At the time, I thought it quite feasible that this might prove to be a lifelong decision — the prospects of which feel silly to me now. I’ve had several projects and philosophies and careers and homes and friends and lovers since then; life is, for most of us, too long for anything like that to stick. But the older you get, the more this idea — of the rest of your life — becomes less tenuous. It is, for the first time, arguable that I could very well have already lived in the past longer than I will live into the future. This is the moment I assume is most popularly known as a midlife crisis; those “midlife crises” that I complained about in the past were, apparently, false alarms.

So I don’t know about you, but whenever I feel like I have to give up control in one part of my life, to surrender to the bigger picture, I often feel the need to take control of another, more easily manipulated wedge. That’s the interesting thing about being a blog reader: You can read my mind simply by how much I fuck with this website.

If I had to put my finger on something — on a catalyst to this How I Spent My Summer Vacation story — it was probably the whole Tumbularity thing. For those of you not on Tumblr, this is a relatively new feature developed to award each Tumblr blog a seemingly arbitrary rating. From what I can gather, the algorithm works like this: The more you post, the more other Tumblr bloggers can reblog you. The more posts that are reblogged, the higher your Tumbularity rating. The higher your Tumbularity rating, the more “popular” you are. The more popular you are, the better the chances you’ll be promoted at work, win the lottery, and have an enviable life partner. Or something like that.

Unlike most of its critics, I don’t think Tumbularity is detrimental for what it is — that is, a subtle popularity contest — but because of what it encourages. Its mechanism is essentially designed to coax the Tumblr community to post more and say less. I think I was lured by its spell for a hot minute, when my Tumbularity peaked as, like, the 4,000th most-read blog in the system. (If I just reblogged one more picture, I schemed, I might finally crack that glass ceiling.) But I snapped out of it quick.

The most problematic aspect of this issue — for me, anyway — is simple to distill: That isn’t who I am. It’s not who I am as a writer, certainly, but it’s not even who I am as a blogger. Even when I worked as a music writer, I never thought of myself as a mere reporter of facts; I wanted to be a filter of sorts, with a distinct and purely subjective voice. I never subscribed to the idea that a writer should write himself out of a story, but in fact, quite the opposite: the world does not exist to me without my point of view, and I am the only person in the world who can describe this singular vision. That is still worth something to me, and I’ve always preferred to believe that it holds value for other people. This is why I’ve been self-publishing for the past twenty years.

The near future of this site is, therefore, always under construction. But at this moment, I’d like to focus on increasing the signal-to-noise ratio. There are hundreds of link-blogs — both inside and outside of the Tumbularity system — and if you feel like having a click party, I could probably send you a list of them. Nervous Acid, as it stands, will choose to inch itself further back into the field of original content — the definition of which will be refined and improvised, but always personal. There is merit in the momentous and the mundane — to get all alliterative on you — and I’ve spent most of my life trying to capture the balance. I won’t stop writing until I figure it out.

Photo: Yusso