1202am and i don’t feel like going to bed. i bingewatched all of cyberpunk edge runner on netflix today, i thought it was good. it’s sort of attack on titan in some ways. anyway. i don’t feel like going to bed because I’d like to get something done before I do, and it occurred to me that i’d like to write a word vomit, so here i am.

my stuff is more scattered than i’d like. i have a twitter, iOS notes, a roam, google docs, multiple blogs – /blog/, /marketing/, /1000/, a youtube, a substack, a tiktok. I’d like to be publishing on all of them with some amount of regularity. I believe that I’m more than capable of it, but I haven’t yet figured out a way to approach it in a way that’s fun and interesting to me. what is the role of this @1000wordvomits blog, now that I can just tweet whatever i’m thinking all the time? why did I cut back on writing here? I know that I still want to finish it – it will be satisfying to finish a thing that I started over 10 years ago. but for what? what’s the goal? I know I’d like to do at least one post a month as a sort of general status update – used to periodically do lengthy status updates on Facebook, remember those? those in turn were kinda like… adapted from how I used to blog on diary-x or livejournal. I now try to do some form of this on youtube every month, and I’m really glad that I do, because it’s such a fantastic record of my mood. (Playlist) the tension in my face, how tired I look, everything.

A while ago I wrote about the difference between videos and writing, right? Yes – wow, it was 2 years ago. My sense of time has been really warped ever since I worked on my book. Or is it because of the pandemic? Maybe both? I think it’s the pandemic that drove me to writing the book, since my original plan of travelling to meet friends became out of the question. Ah, man… much time has passed, much has changed, and I’m sure I have some amount of a record of things but it all feels so fragmented and disparate right now, and I’m yearning for a sense of clarity and consolidation. And I think here I start to get an answer to a question of “what’s the point of wordvomits anymore” – for now, at least, it’s a space for me to do a bunch of yearning and uncertain rambling. Twitter isn’t super uncertainty-friendly once you cross a certain threshold of followers. Here I can go in a “wrong” direction for paragraphs at a time before circling back around. Which is something that, when I haven’t done for too long, I start to get antsy about. And I think my latest substack post – which was a frustrated “I don’t wanna!” – was significantly a consequence of not having rambled my brain out on paper in a while.

I’ve rambled a bunch in video… what’s the difference? I think in a sense videos are closer to twitter for me than longform writing, especially short-ish 5-10 min videos. I used to do longer, 30-60 minute videos where I would ramble at length, but even then there’s something about… the implicit time limit of a speech. You can stretch it out by practicing being comfortable with taking longer pauses, but it’s not exactly ok to space out indefinitely. although I suppose some people manage that by editing. but my whole thing is that i don’t do editing. if i were going to edit a video… i might as well write, maybe? i’m not sure, I haven’t yet tried ad-libbing with the intent of editing.

but yea what i’m getting at is, ad-libbing unedited for me feels like there’s a subtle “pressure” (not a bad thing – in fact sometimes a very good thing, sometimes precisely the thing needed to break out of a rut in writing) to be coherent, to flow from moment to moment. writing unedited longform makes it easier for me to make more drastic leaps. I can also edit my thoughts, correct them in real time. real-time speech correction is also a thing, and i definitely remember stumbling on it when i first started recording video – but it’s what we do naturally in speech when we aren’t thinking about it. it’s all really interesting stuff, tbh.

it just hit me that i also haven’t done my monthly updates on twitter, and that’s part of why i’m feeling disconnected and ungrounded. there’s a bunch of stuff i haven’t updated, people i haven’t texted back, a patreon update i haven’t sent out… a part of me resents “having” to do all of this, but i also don’t really have to. I want to. I want to feel the good feeling that I’ll feel when i’m done and on top of things. in a way that’s part of why i’m writing this wordvomit. i want to move the needle by one. there have been times where i would’ve said, ew, writing a wordvomit just to move the needle is tacky and wasteful. but it’s been so long now that i feel like something is better than nothing. my wife was telling me about my latest substack that it was nice to inhabit my longform writing again, as a reader. i think i underestimate that. or, well – the important thing is to be aware of the context. when something starts to feel tedious and repetitive in a dull-dreary way, then of course it’s time to switch things up. but when something hasn’t been done for a long time, something is better than nothing!

i would really like to be done with these wordvomits. i don’t know if i want to say “as soon as possible”, because i’ve come to learn that that’s seldom a helpful directive for me. i want to wish more interesting things for myself. i wish not for speed, but for interestingness. for nuance, joy, delight, curiosity, resonance. I’m learning to get better at being me. and it comes through in all of the things that I do.