Cowboy Planet

My little web diary. Short, unstructured personal pieces posted in chronological order. Could be what's happened in the last couple days between entries, could be thoughts about art and/or the process of making art. Again: No structure. Older entries will be archived blow.

Sometime toward the close of last year, someone posted the following take to Twitter: That his faith, Christianity, is the only faith in town for the queers, of whiche he is one. Of which I am one! I'm not going to address the position itself for the reason I'll outline below:

That highly personal position, along with the belabored thread he crafted to support it, did not and does not need to be a public conversation among untold numbers of strangers. It belonged in a faith journal on a well-appointed nightstand next to room temp coconut water and a smartwatch. Unfortunately, that's what it became because that's been Twitter's model ever since it lifted @ replies from users and made them into an awful, awful feature that should be damned to Hell.

I find myself wishing I could offer a kind of bad take amnesty to this guy and people like him, because I see them as having been misled (as I myself have been on occasion) by social media's image marketting. You may have forgotten - or not noticed - but Twitter in specific underwent a deep and cynical rebrand in 2016, swapping the category in which its app sat in app stores from 'Social' to 'News,' just to avoid having its meager lunch eaten by more useful and populous and pleasant apps dominating the Social category. This change and the half dozen years of News Hell that have since followed, I believe, gave rise to a particular strain of online brainworm.

I believe that this rebrand which most of the social media ghouls have scattered after, chittering for crumbs, now along with the explosion in journo activity on the platform around the same time has given many users the impression that having a Twitter account enables - maybe even requires - them to function as authorities and thought leaders.

This is insane, and fucked up, and very bad. This dude didn't need to be dragged, ironically, to Hell for rationalizing his relationship to a faith he finds meaningful and fulfilling. But he made that happen to himself by eating the Take-Take fruit that Twitter offered in its sweaty paw, and it made him post takes. Charlie Jane Anders didn't need to be rebranded as the lady who wants all gays to write goo-goo thumb-suck literature because she likes Steven University and accepts Disney money. But she ATE THE FRUIT. The fruit that makes you punch yourself in the taint with your own ideas because there's this immense social pressure to act like they can and should and do apply to all intelligent life in the Universe. It's a DERANGED way to exist. There's an alternate universe in which she's mentally free to just post, or write down, 'I really enjoy this kid's cartoon. I find a lot of deeper meaning in it that's relevent to my life and experiences, and I wish there had been a show that spoke to me in this way when I was a kid. But, hey, we can keep finding new favorite things until the day we die, and that's beautiful.'

I warned you this would be a lot of posting about posting.

Here I am, checking in after about a week of using my Moleskine weekly diary/planner. I'm satisfied with it so far and have been devising something like a system for tracking what does and doesn't get done. None of it is very advanced. I list stuff with simple bullets, then turn the bullets into \ when a task is partially done, X when it's done, and > when it has to be moved forward to another day. Like I said, it's not sophisticated.

I of course us stickers and tapes and so on because my soul is eleven years old and I love slapping colorful detritus all over everything I own. My favorite embellishment so far is the kaiju stamp I ordered off JetPens, which I've been using to mark days I was overstimulated/underslept and suffered the consequences (nuclear self-ignition and loss of productivity).

Rar.

Aside from the meltdown kaiju, another sticker/stamp strat I've embraced is, uh, just using stickers to take up space on days I know I have very little time/energy to allocate further, thus preventing me from overcommitting. Can't commit to it if I can't write it down. Can't write it down if there's a bitchin' dinosaur on a skateboard in the way. Yes, I make my planner more useful by, if we're being honest, pre-sabotaging my own future self sabotage. I'm playing 8D chess AGAINST MYSELF.

I'm getting more stuff done, which is nice. That's about it. See ya.