This has been a signally awful morning for me, but mixed in with my immersion in death (the deaths of old friends, from several generations, one or more every week), a long respiratory affliction that has made it impossible for me to enjoy our beautiful fall days, the end of face-to-face relations with friends (which has made me a deeply isolated old man, dependent on Facebook for getting any contact at all with my friends), possibly the worst persecution dream of my life (which has left me thoroughly rattled), and of course the remarkable ugliness of the MAGA Presidential campaign, there came this message from Facebook:
I will explain.
Most of my postings on this blog would offend other FB rules, but through FB is the way most people access my blog (a large number of my friends, colleagues, and former students don’t do either FB or my blog, so I can communicate with them only by writing them individually, which is immensely time-consuming and increasingly difficult for me as I age) — so I post on FB an announcement of each blog posting I make (one such message is in FB’s message above), and then interested people can read it. If this counts as posting spam, I don’t know what I’ll do.
It might be possible to post something innocuous, with the link to my blog in the first comment. But at the moment, I just feel desperate.
If I rely on people subscribing to my blog, I am probably doomed. According to WordPress, my viewership has been steadily declining, to around 450 views per day, and a large chunk of those are from China, from sites that are just using my blog to harvest addresses for spam comments (which come in by thousands a day, almost all of them caught by software that works, blessedly, mostly out of my awareness). But most of those views come, apparently, through FB, not by subscriptions to my blog. So that abandoning FB would mean that I really will be writing my posts for a handful of people (which is now the way things look most days).
Well, no decisions about anything. Never make important decisions when you’re feeling doomed, despairing, or cornered, and right now I feel all of those things.
I’m not sure whether I can bear watching the news any more, and I’m not sure whether I can bear not knowing about what’s happening. For the moment, I’ve retreated into letting all six seasons of Major Crimes (which I’ve seen several times) go past me in the background while I work. I might have to retreat further into all-music background.
October 29, 2024 at 9:53 am |
For some reason, listening to Maggie Haberman talk to Ezra Klein about what Trump would do if re-elected somehow tamped down my election anxiety, while of course one should expect it would have made it much worse. I can’t really explain it in retrospect, but if you haven’t listened to the interview already, I recommend it in between Major Crimes episodes. I’ve never watched that series, I don’t believe, so now I have a recommendation!
October 29, 2024 at 10:35 am |
About Major Crimes: each episode has a story about the Major Crimes unit of the LAPD, under Sharon Raydor; these exterior stories range wildly — several are tremendously funny. Then of course there’s a developing story line about all the people in the unit and how they work together. Then there are two further intersecting long story lines: one about a teenager, Rusty Beck, working as a street hustler when he comes across a man trying to cover up a murder, so Rusty becomes a material witness, is eventually put under Raydor’s protection, and through one of her cases meets a young man, Gus Wallace, who becomes his boyfriend; and one about the truly chilling serial killer Phillip Stroh. The plotting is, as you can see, intricate (and I’ve suppressed several important subsidiary story lines). The acting and direction are first-rate, and most of the recurring characters are likable and interestingly complex, and develop over time. So the show has the feel of a big 19th-century novel, enacted in modern LA, with a gigantic ensemble cast. Something of a tour de force, in my view. And Rusty and Gus have some wonderfully sweet moments. (As an extra bonus, there are two recurring characters — the medical examiner and a court psychiatrist — who just happen to be, unobtrusively, gay.)
October 29, 2024 at 11:56 am
I watched all seven seasons of The Closer, in which Kyra Sedgwick played the title character, Brenda Johnson, and J. K. Simmons her boss. Sharon Raydor (Mary McDonnell) showed up in season 5 from Internal Affairs, IIRC. When Sedgwick left the show, Major Crimes was born with most of the same supporting cast and Raydor in charge of the unit. So unless you have antipathy to Sedgwick, whom I found to be rather obnoxious on occasion, you might find another equally pleasant 109 episodes here to expand your background watching.
October 29, 2024 at 12:52 pm
Ah, I have in fact watched all of The Closer several times!
October 29, 2024 at 10:05 am |
The only way I can deal with election anxiety is by making phone calls (and setting up phone banks so others can make calls). I am not sleeping well so my sig file quote “We’ll sleep when we’re dead” Tim Walz seems ever more appropriate.
October 29, 2024 at 11:37 am |
Keep writing! Despite your afflictions and anxieties, all understandable, it’s likely good for you to write. I love all your thoughts and comments, musical, linguistic, sexual and otherwise. I’ve been following you for years, anonymously by choice; your blog is informative, enlightening, entertaining, and sometimes, arousing! Best!
October 29, 2024 at 1:00 pm |
Oh my, occasionally I get comments like this, and, of course, they make my day. With luck, I’ll post about another such comment (from someone I’ve identified, but will discuss under a pseudonym), which came from a guy who described himself as “a boring straight guy” — but of course turns out to be quite interesting. Everybody’s interesting, each person in their own way, if you can just get them talking about their lives.
October 29, 2024 at 5:45 pm |
I second anonymous’ post. I read your blog via RSS, so I don’t show up in your stats. I guess there’s no way to know how big your RSS readership is.
October 29, 2024 at 6:05 pm |
Thank you. And yes, RSS readers don’t get counted, I believe, and I don’t know how they could be — but then I’m an idiot about such matters.
October 31, 2024 at 2:11 pm
I’ll make a point of clicking through to the actual blog more frequently.