2016-12-18

“Art should be like a holiday: something to give a man the opportunity to see things differently and to change his point of view.” – Paul Klee

Save Christmas

Way back in 1998, the Cacophony Society, an anarchic group of neo-dadaist pranksters (slogan: “you may already be a member!”), brought their annual December event to NYC.

They called it SantaCon, and billed it as a "not-for-profit, nonpolitical, non-religious demented Santa Claus convention.”

I attended that first NYC SantaCon, wherein about two hundred of us in cheap Santa suits walked Fifth Avenue, caroling badly, and handing out candy canes and good cheer to the children (and adults) who were inevitably thrilled to stumble across a giant roving pack of jovial Clauses.

But somewhere in the nearly two decades since, things went badly wrong. What started as cheeky performance art metastasized into, as the Village Voice described it, "a day-long spectacle of public inebriation somewhere between a low-rent Mardi Gras and a drunken fraternity party.”

Or, as Gothamist summarized, “SantaCon steadily devolved from cleverly subversive to barely tolerable to 'time to lock yourself in your apartment for the day.'"

This past weekend, when Jess and I popped out of a subway in Union Square, inadvertently deep in the midst of SantaCon 2016, I couldn’t help but cringe. While I’d been proud to attend that first event, the drunken mayhem going on all around us just made me embarrassed for everyone involved.

What happened? In short, New Jersey and Long Island. Per the LA Times, "some see SantaCon as a way for people who live in the suburbs to come to the city and ruin the weekend.” Indeed, at least by visual stereotype, this year’s SantaCon crowd was about as bridge-and-tunnel as you could possibly get.

In short, this is why we can’t have nice things. Though the weekend experience does lead me to a small proposal for fellow snotty New Yorkers: perhaps, instead of fighting against Trump’s wall, we should just be lobbying him to build one a little closer to home.

Tortoise, Redux

Earlier today, I re-stumbled across the excellent and exceedingly timely “The True History Of The Hare And The Tortoise,” Lord Dunsany’s 1915 retelling of the well-worn story.

In Dunsany’s version, the race between the two is organized by the other animals, equally split in their beliefs that the Hare (“the swifter of the two because he had such long ears”) or the Tortoise (“anyone whose shell was so hard as that should be able to run hard too”) might prevail.

The Tortoise, in particular, draws an enthusiastically supportive crowd:

And “run hard” became a kind of catch-phrase which everybody repeated to one another. “Hard shell and hard living. That’s what the country wants. Run hard,” they said.

Indeed, run hard the Tortoise does. Whereas the Hare, struck by the overwhelming idiocy of the entire competition, simply bows out:

The Hare ran on for nearly three hundred yards, nearly in fact as far as the winning-post, when it suddenly struck him what a fool he looked running races with a Tortoise who was nowhere in sight, and he sat down again and scratched.

“Run hard. Run hard,” said the crowd, and “Let him rest.”

“Whatever is the use of it?” said the Hare, and this time he stopped for good. Some say he slept.

There was desperate excitement for an hour or two, and then the Tortoise won.

Which, of course, is exactly the vindication the Tortoise’s vigorous supporters had hoped for:

“Hard shell and hard living: that’s what has done it.” And then they asked the Tortoise what his achievement signified, and he went and asked the Turtle. And the Turtle said, “It is a glorious victory for the forces of swiftness.” And then the Tortoise repeated it to his friends. And all the beasts said nothing else for years. And even to this day, “a glorious victory for the forces of swiftness” is a catch-phrase in the house of the snail.

Touche.

Though, as Dunsany concludes, this true version of the tale isn’t widely known, because “very few of those that witnessed it survived the great forest-fire that happened shortly after.”

It came up over the weald by night with a great wind. The Hare and the Tortoise and a very few of the beasts saw it far off from a high bare hill that was at the edge of the trees, and they hurriedly called a meeting to decide what messenger they should send to warn the beasts in the forest.

They sent the Tortoise.

It could be a long four years.

Consistency

"We found in all of our research studies that the signature of mediocrity is not an unwillingness to change; the signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency."
-Jim Collins, Great by Choice

In the past decade, I’ve heard an array of credible people – from Freakonomics’ author Stephen Dubner, to CrossFit founder Greg Glassman – all observe that the secret to building a large audience online is a simple trifecta: quality, focus, consistency.  Hit all three, and an audience will follow.

This past weekend, I ended up looking at my traffic logs for this site.  And, on the one hand, given the rather large Google-able library of content I’ve built over fifteen years, there are still waaaay more people who show up here than probably should.  On the other, that’s just a small fraction of the readership this site once had, at my blogging peak.

So, assuming that I’m going to keep blogging, and that I probably want people to read the blog if I do, it might be time for me to consider that quality / focus / consistency trifecta.

As for quality: well, this is pretty much how I write.  Sure, I can spend more time editing and re-writing before posting, can focus on mixing more of the highly-considered longform pieces in with the hopefully-interesting-yet-still-brief pops.  But this site always has been and always will be my outboard brain: a place where I scribble down ideas, observations, stories, and reflections in the kinds of long, convoluted sentences that give the Hemingway Editor conniption fits. What you already see, in other words, is what you’re going to get.

Focus, though; that one’s a choice. Indeed, I regularly hear from people who are interested in just one of the many topics I’ve posted about regularly in the past – whether fitness, tech, productivity, or drunken misadventure – and wish I’d scrap the rest in favor of more about the single topic they find interesting. But, again, this site is first and foremost my outboard brain. And since my actual brain is full of all those topics and countless more, I’m just not that interested in winnowing down, regardless of whether doing so would be a smart content marketing strategy.

So onto consistency! That’s one where I’m both totally shitting the bed at the moment, and also know I could be doing better. For many years, I managed to blog more or less daily. And, not surprisingly, that’s also when this site had a far more substantial and engaged following. In the past year, however, my blogging has been entirely feast and famine – short stretches when I get back to it with alacrity, followed by a fall off the blogging wagon that leads to long stretches of radio silence.

Funny enough, that’s the same pattern I also see in people following and then falling off of diets. So, perhaps, the same prescription applies:

First, start thinking about a day (or three) of misses as inevitable aspects of growth rather than as signs of absolute failure. Based on past experience, I’m sure I’m going to fail at blogging for days at a time. That feels less like ‘game over’ if I’m already expecting it to be part of the process.

Second, especially when coming back from a derail, stop making the perfect the enemy of the good. When people are working on nutrition, they’ll often eat a single less-than-perfect meal (say a couple of slices of birthday cake at work on Thursday) and turn that into an excuse to binge on Ben & Jerry’s all weekend until they can ‘start fresh’ the following Monday. I’ve totally been guilty of that here, with a short absence turning into an ever longer one as I start to think I need to write a crazy long post (like this one, apparently) just to justify the disappearance and return.

Which then leads to a third and final point: the solution to perfectionism is a celebration of incremental gains. Something is better than nothing. Which means, in nutrition, a willingness to pat yourself on the back if today’s eating was even just slightly better than yesterday’s. And, in blogging, probably means I should be putting up more short, shitty posts if that’s what it takes to keep blogging on the (somewhat) daily. Apparently, look for more those to come!