Reverting to My Factory Settings

Peep Show: Issue #6

Photo by Josh Eckstein on Unsplash

Peep Show is a semi-regular series for paid subscribers where I pull back the curtain and go full Hemingway.

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about meaning, and what is meaningful, and where I should be spending my time, and on what projects. This has been brewing for a while, and was hastened by Major Life Events. When you celebrate your 25th anniversary and weeks later send your kid away to college, it has a way of affecting how you look at things that previously merited no attention at all. How can it not?

We have a whiteboard in our kitchen used to denote the kid’s chores for the week. Recently I glanced at it in passing. My son’s name was there, as ever. But there was nothing beneath it. And there would never be anything written there again. Those days are gone, as surely as action figures and little league.

Time has ever been on my mind.

It’s a strange thing to devote one’s time—and thus, one’s life—to writing about movies or TV. By its very definition, pop culture is a passing fad. The experience of writing about pop culture is one of forever chasing a train that will never stop. I can’t keep up myself, which is one of the reasons I prefer writing about stuff that isn’t new. I also think the most interesting pop culture writing comes from a place of reflection and deep study, which gives the bird to the conventional approach of only reviewing new stuff. But that could just be me excusing my own biases.