Nerds North of 40

I need a better, snappier name for this, which will come if the idea sticks, but, I keep trying to figure out how to write - I mean, really write - not in the way I do here, but with a consistent voice about a consistent topic.

They say everyone has one good book in them, and I feel like that’s one of those quotes that has a corollary forgotten over time… like “I before E, except after C” goes on to say “or when sounding like ‘ay’ as in neighbor or weigh” but we’ve forgotten that part over time. And yes, it still doesn’t cover every word borrowed from Greek, Latin, Nordic, Celtic German, Brittonic and runic languages and so forth, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make here.

As “I before E…” is more than the first stanza, so too does it feel that “but you have to wade through the awful ones first” is the missing corollary to having one good book. And it’s not that I don’t want to wade through those bad ones, it’s just that, well, tech made my brain too used to rapid feedback and iteration.

Not the fatalistic dopamine hits of doom scrolling, but rather, building software in development environments that allow you to build and test code as you go. Write a function, see if it works, go back and edit or continue. On the one hand it’s great, because you don’t have to get hours or days into a project to discover some major flaw, but it’s also terrible because it trains you to confirm that each piece works before moving onto the next.

I don’t think books work that way.

I think a book is supposed to not make sense right up until it does. Or sometimes it makes complete sense the whole way through, only to make absolutely no sense at the last possible moment.

Maybe when I say “book” I really mean “story.” The story is supposed to be told.

I don’t think I have a story to tell. Or well, I do or I wouldn’t try to write, but, I don’t think it’s a story that fits into the shape of book.

I have a bunch of varied interests. If you’ve heard the saying “an inch deep and a mile wide” meaning knowing very little about a broad range of subjects, that’s me, only it’s more like a sixteenth deep and 10 miles wide.

But I magpie information and sometimes I follow the thread.

A story I think I could write is a weekly one, non-fiction though. Okay, maybe mildly fictional, but mostly non-fiction. I think I could write a newsletter that talked about a bunch of different things, whatever my brain had decided was interesting that week.

In my head, it’s charming, witty, useful, sincere, and sometimes acerbic but in a conversational “‘ayyy go fuck yerself’ means hello” kind of way.

I feel like I should probably try that and see how it turns out. See what happens in my head, see if it feels fun to do. I’ve tried to “produce content” before, and it never goes well. It always feels forced, because I never have enough to say after the first few “episodes.”

But I think I have lots to say about the many things of which I know barely anything about.

And that sounds like a good time to me.