cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- OK, so where did I go wrong? I'm in this weird place where I don't exist to anyone. I'm alone. Nothing that I think or say moves out into the world. At all. After years of putting ideas out into the world, changing conversations about ecology, history and our human relationship with nature, this is weird. The hustle just got old. I know how to do the work to write things and put ideas out into the world. To get mentioned on late night TV, drive a conversation on All Things Considered, show up on a TV show. I did that for years and I have nothing material to show for it. That was years of struggling to put gas in my car and buy groceries. I am the grandson given the trust fund who was never given the trust fund. Everything you would hope that someone would do if they had enough money to survive while they do it, I've tried to do and often succeeded at but just the lack of ability to pay for housing and food and gas while doing it has forced me to a standstill. It isn't quite a standstill, but it is a diversion from what I should really be doing. For the last year, I have been working in qu@ntum computing. Running communications duties. Writing all of the blog articles, running social media, planning and executing media wins. I've been both the subject of news and the writer of it for long enough that I know an awful lot about how this works. Especially in science journalism. I was doing a pretty damn good job. We had a really good pace of new stuff being posted, our story was being told to the handful of CTOs and decision-makers who could spend millions of dollars on our systems. Then they hired a new marketing director who had come from F@cebook. I personally liked the guy, but he didn't spend more than five minutes bothering to understand any of the science. Everything for him was clicks and page views and Google analytics. Why should we care whether 50 or 5,000,000 people saw a particular post? We don't have 5,000,000 things to sell to the public. We have limited time on a handful of the world's most effective qu@ntum computers. We're hunting whales -- not likes. Everything that we write should be focused on reeling in the small number of decision-makers whom I have done loads of research on and we want them to decide to give us millions of dollars. But the performance of marketing managers is based on the number of likes and retweets that they get. Not on actual sales to the CTOs that I was writing for -- who have booked tens of millions of dollars over the next few years. So I was laid off by the Facebook guy. I was handed around $10k of severance. And then I just finally did my taxes, and I have around $7k of refund money coming back to me. Plus I'd saved around $5k. Now I'm sitting on more money than I have ever had in my checking account in my life. On Monday I start work for a company that does crypt0graphy that qu@ntum computers cannot crack. I'm writing for them. Right now I am working under a contract funneled through a crisis PR firm due to the huge retainer they have with them. 20 hours a week at $50 an hour. A full time wage for part time hours for most people. It may turn into a full time position at $100k a year. I dunno. I just want a decent place to live. With a dining room where I can put out the collection of mismatched silver plate that I have been amassing for the last six months. And room for bookshelves. I got recognized at a tire shop a few days ago. By a guy who gave me advice on where to fish and crab by a bridge in Virginia Beach. He remembered me from a TV show that I guested on a few years back. Someone with a business executing media strategies for people in the art world contacted me tonight, gushing over something I wrote for the New Y0rk Times, asking for a video meeting. I don't know what she wants. I want to get one of those vending machines with the bubbles full of toys, and order a lot of the plastic bubbles, and fill them with the kind of wonderful things that we put in our junk drawers because we love them and then we forget about them. I want each bubble to tell a story. A fragment of a map, an antique button that could be made of bone, a spent .22 brass shell, an arrow head, a fossil. Fifty cents and a turn of the crank. I want a life that allows me to literally make this and place it on the street. I want to make a film based on the story of Orpheus using live sn@ils as actors. "Sn@il Orpheus." To do this, I require a home in which to keep the snails and figure out exactly what I can make them do on camera, and then become an adept at encouraging snails to move in the needed direction. I want to complete my book on the H0bok3n Turtle Club. So very much has been done on this, I can't leave it. It is readable as a book, but doesn't have the last third. My head has been in the 19th century for the last few years. I've been nitpicking little things and finally reading some biographies needed to get the part of the book from 1884 onward happening. My first priority has to be getting a lease and a house or an apartment. And then I have an opportunity with this 20 hour a week gig. With discipline, I could finish the book in a few months while still making $4k a month and having the savings to carry me. But it is hard to figure this out when I have nobody at all to talk to about it. I left social media. That was the right move -- it is toxic and I was being hounded by people begging for groceries when I offered them early in the pandemic. And social things stopped, because of the pandemic. And then everyone I knew in art, writing, music, all left Ch@rlottesville because the cost of housing has gone insane due to the massive influx of mid-atlantic boomer retirees showing up. I hardly know anyone here anymore. I'm like a ghost in a house that his family doesn't live in anymore. On a Friday night, it used to take me an hour to go from one end of the Downt0wn Mall to the other because I'd have to stop to talk to so many people. Now, I zip from one end to the other and don't see a single familiar face. I don't exist to anyone other than my children. My past work reverberates, and I get messages like this one from the art promoter. But who I am now isn't anything to anyone. What I think is funny or insightful or shocking, but no longer to anyone else. What a disappointment Alex was. We could have saved each other, but she chose to stay in hell with pet-sitting and mortgage help. I'm crabbing a lot lately. Blue crabs aren't supposed to exist in Richmond, Virginia, but they run up to the fall line for the oxygenated water when the summers get unusually hot. That's every summer now. I first saw them in 1999, on a walk along the river with the woman who would be my wife, and then walk out on me. In a pool along the bank, I felt like a crazy person when I tried to tell people afterwards that I had seen crabs in Richmond. Last week I finally netted a few at the 14th Street boat landing. I brought them "home" and steamed them on my camp stove at around 2 am. After 23 years of conviction, they were the best crabs I have ever eaten. Isn't this supposed to be fun? Why doesn't anyone else want to come along for excursions for blue crabs that are not supposed to exist? I look pretty fucking good for my age. Does any reasonably attractive woman want to search for art and quality silver plate at thrift stores? Is there any value in a boyfriend or husband who knows how to build or fix basically anything? Why am I stuck being an archetype of male virtue -- a former professional hunter, science journalist, civil rights journalist -- with absolutely nobody to even talk to, let alone fall asleep with? 1:15 a.m. - 2022-08-20 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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