Indieweb Carnival: Intersecting Interests

AI was used in the generation of images and code used in this post.

Preface 01

“Illustration” of the famous It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia meme generated by ChatGPT. I’ve never actually watched an episode of the show, but this scene still hits. All the time.

Mac: Goddammit, dude, I am having a panic attack. I am actually having a panic attack.

Charlie: Will you settle down and have another cup of coffee?

#

Preface 02

Here’s something more relaxing to listen to as a soundtrack to this post.

It takes some steps forward and some steps back, oh it just doesn’t matter ‘cause I’m on track.

01

My about page describes this blog’s subject matter as links, journals, or longer posts about philosophy, bicycling, music, or the internet, and sure, some of those last four will overlap, like a description of emerging from darkness as the turning of a bicycle¹, but there is so much missing in that simple picture sketched for a new arrival.

The main subject of this blog is grief. Grieving my first daughter, lost relationships, my health. Grief at being born into such a troubled world, grasping for meaning but finding only absurdity, more often separated from beauty than experiencing it, trying to craft stories but losing the plot. And yet seeking and fighting all along the way.

02

This question of how this is all connected made me wonder if there was some way to determine or see how connected all this work is. Many of these posts have category tags. I asked the robot for a way to visualize when and in what volume those tags intersect. It went in a different direction than what I had in mind, but it was interesting so I spent some time following it through to some state of completion: a graph view of the categories in this blog.

A screenshot of the category map with the “art” node selected

In terms of understanding the interconnectedness of posts here, it’s more or less a failure. What is immediately clear:

1. I was better about categorizing early on, or at least before switching to Jekyll and posting less frequently. This makes short-but-frequent post types from the first decade take up more space in the graph.
2. Most of my posts here are links to other things elsewhere. Fair: that’s the nature of this blog. It’s old-school like that.
3. I still have a lot of work to do as it relates to cleaning up my category metadata and making it useful, the interconnectedness isn’t represented in the metadata.²

03

That’s probably because while I know there are through-lines here like grief, I don’t even know what they all are. Today was my second time attending the Homebrew Website Club (I mentioned the last one in last month’s Indieweb Carnival post!), and this topic came up, and I confessed this fact. I also confessed to being more drawn to questions than answers. I mentioned my post about ambiguous work. I complimented Tracy Durnell on her Big Questions framework.

I thought about, but did not mention, Over the Rhine’s track Nobody Number One³, a song with smokily-spoken verses, the last of which ends with:

You need questions
Forget about the answers
Do you really wanna die this way?

That’s the trouble with you and me
We always hit the bottom before we get set free
I’m so far down
I’m beginning to breathe

It has kind of felt like I’m always hitting bottom. I’m reminded of the famous Leonard Cohen song I’ve quoted here before, when a certain late-night talk show host pointed them out:

And Jesus was a sailor
when he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching
from his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain
only drowning men could see him
He said all men will be sailors then
until the sea shall free them

To which Nick Cave responds:

It is the devastation that turns us from being a half-formed person into a fully formed or fully realized human being.

How all this relates to connection and the Other and the wholly Other is probably another through-line. In the meantime I’ll listen to Cave’s latest, Wild God.

04

While Cave is interrogating in the abstract, I’m drawn back to Andy Shauf, who puts short films in every song.⁴

If I were true to this horrible, lonely path, I’d be documenting these scenes too. I wish I could do it as beautifully as he does.

A fire truck goes screaming by and it reminds me of that night when you said that you were coming home, then I waited up till four in the morning. She says, “I remember, and why the fuck would this be a good time to bring that up?” And I am silent, because I’m not sure. Sometimes I feel like I should never speak again. She takes my hand and says, “C’mon you know this one’s my favourite song.”

And I can see it in my mind, those flames reaching so high into the night, and that poor family standing on the front lawn watching. And for some reason, I remember that feeling being almost jealousy for a new beginning, but I should have known that I was already burning it to the ground. Now that I’m dancing in the ashes, I just want it to be whole.