Let’s Make This Official

So let’s call an end to Abraham Trying to Engage in Social Media 9.0.

It has been a long year here in New Orleans. For those of you back home, the news of professional opportunity, creative space, abundant social life, impending studio builds, sex parties, baby dances, and the like has been absolutely true. However, the assertion, real or implied, that I am doing fine and adjusting well or am otherwise oriented positively has been sort of a huge lie.

I am finally starting to take stock of my life - something I don’t think I have done since I left college - and I have come upon more than a few pretty insane contradictions that I think have contributed to my sorry state. Chief among them was my intense desire to be recognized for music that was (a) often intentionally off-putting and (b) more often very poorly marketed and promoted by me. It is (b) that finally tipped me off. To put it simply, I just don’t want to put that work in. So I need to stop waiting for the big payoff. If I want to do half the work it takes to get to Point A, I had better starting thinking about how I’m going to be happy at Point A/2.*

*or on the journey to Point A/2. See? Getting somewhere.

I have taken some valiant stabs (by my stab-barometer) at engaging in social media, getting my name out there, and the like, but I can’t really get over the fact that the Internet is not real. It’s not. It’s a medium, and it controls how we think and act and how we execute our relationships with other people. It’s not people. It is what people choose to reveal about themselves, mediated by different versions of people-revealing software and hardware.

Let’s take an extreme example of a deliberate shot to the groin, recorded for YouTube. Let’s say there are three people who participate in the recorded action - a cameraperson, an assailant, and a victim. It’s not important how or whether the event was staged. What is important is that someone is getting hit in the groin, on spec, so a bunch of people that none of the three actors know or care about can see. Making music and putting it on the internet isn’t so different from this. It’s my thoughts, my pain, and my loneliness, offered to everyone for free, with an absurd endgame of broad acceptance floating out there, somewhere.

I have been doing it blindly for years now, essentially working two jobs at the expense of my social and personal life. I have been taking my ideas, converting them into a string of 1’s and 0’s, broadcasting them to the world and hoping that someone out there will connect with me. Put that way, that’s not all bad. It’s kind of romantic. But consider that I haven’t traveled. I haven’t read enough books. My back is a mess from so much sitting and staring at a computer screen. Consider that I have done it at the expense of the people who have been standing right next to me, or in the room listening to my music with me, or waiting for me to come to bed - the people* who responded to my music exactly how I wanted someone to respond to my music and could look me in the eye and tell me so. And all I wanted to know was what other people would think.

*Person. Let’s me be honest, here.

Someone with a daring amount of smarm, some angel capital, and a new app to sell might argue that “humans are social animals,” or “we’re all part of the same big play,” or “this is how culture connects now.” Meh. I’m over that. I need actual people. People to talk to and to touch and to buy rounds of drinks and trip and fall and get up and keep going. I don’t need their avatars, interesting and diversionary as they may be.

I kind of lost my train of thought here. I should start making outlines.

While this isn’t a goodbye to the internet, it’s a statement that I’ll be scaling my devotion to the thing back in the next few months and devoting myself to the people in my life. The same probably goes for my ambitious release schedule. No point in killing myself to make self-imposed dates. The songs are good, and they’re not going away, and maybe I’ll share them sometime soon. 

Okay, that’s it for a while.