The clock ticked past midnight half an hour ago.
How do I always find myself sitting in front of a keyboard in the dead of night?
At least the word processor has had an upgrade. I finally caved after several years of dithering and bought the latest version of Scrivener. Does this mean I’m going to write the novel that’s been kicking around my head for the last decade? Maybe. Maybe not. If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s finding things to do instead of the thing I perhaps should be doing.
After quite the day at work, I spent half an hour transferring every blog post, and every article I’ve ever written into Scrivener. While doing so I fell down a rabbit hole of my own making - I started reading my own words.
I had forgotten that I once tried my hand writing behind the pay-wall at Medium. I wonder if people still use Medium - if it’s still a viable route to making money from the written word? These days everybody and their dog seems to be joining Substack - I know, because I got there first. Of course I’m not publishing anything anybody might pay for - I’m just tinkering.
Always tinkering.
Getting back to “quite the day at work”, a number of hurdles were finally climbed over today - hurdles we had been approaching for quite some time. You know when you’ve been climbing up a hill for long enough, you forget what level ground feels like? I’m in the wonderful situation of re-discovering how much easier level ground is. I’m sure something will come along to increase the gradient, but until it does I’m going to try and enjoy it.
Perhaps a good first thing to do might be switch the computer off and head to bed. Read a book. Try to resist the temptation to scroll the internet for another hour. That’s what those little Amazon tablets are for though, isn’t it. There’s one on my bedside table, waiting for me. It was supposed to be for books. It’s got a browser on it though - and Joe MacMillan said everything we need to know about browsers in “Halt and Catch Fire”:
How did we all get here today?
We walked through this door.
We don’t have to build a big white box or a stadium, or invent rock and roll. The moment we decide what the Web is, we’ve lost. The moment we try to tell people what to do with it, we’ve lost.
All we have to do is build a door and let them inside.
When I was five, my mother took me to the city. And we went through the Holland Tunnel, and it was basic. Concrete and steel. But it was also my excitement sitting in the backseat, wondering when it was going to be our turn to emerge.
It was the explosion of sunlight. And when we exited the tunnel, all of Manhattan was laid out before us. And that was the best part of the trip the amazing possibility to be able to go anywhere within something that is magnificent and never-ending.
Here’s the original scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mi_fKu9WTAE
Everything I’ve ever loved about the internet is wrapped up in this scene - except of course everybody imagined an internet full of information, but nobody imagined an internet full of people. The people have always been the best part of the internet.