Organizational note
When the development and production processes stall, play with the controls instead.
I have to replace my PC, because a number of keys—most notably the “r,” the “4” and the “5"—have begun to fail more often than not in the past few weeks, slowing my already ponderous typing and elevating my already injurious level of baseline frustration. I’m surprised this model has lasted almost two years; I seem type in a lot of different environments for a do-nothing hater, so I buy cheap laptops and treat them like snack trays until it’s time to adopt a new one. This cycle repeats about every 18 months, but I’ve been a lot less concerned for this computer’s well-being than with that of its many ancestors, and with the past as a guide, it should have been under the bed gathering curses and dog hair or in the trash months ago.
I’ll be doing this replacement today, because my laptop’s declining health has already given me an excuse to avoid writing much for public consumption lately. If I don’t intervene now, my recent tapering off could become a stall and then an unpretentious shutdown. In the meantime, mostly so I can say that I published something I wrote over the weekend, I’ve added some options for subscribers.
Because some of you may prefer to receive only certain kinds of articles, I’ve created three subsections: The running media and culture, Personal essays, and Competitive running. If you go to your account settings, you’ll see that all topics are selected by default; you can uncheck boxes corresponding to topics you don’t want to see in your inbox (all articles will still post to the website). The category “Beck of the Pack” can’t be deleted, so if I write something I can’t reasonably assign to one of those other three categories, which at the moment strikes me as the most pointless concern anyone who semi-continuously thinks about death should have, I’ll put it there.
For reasons I won’t try to explain, I think this system will lead me to write more aggressively about all of these topics. I’m also picking up a serious editing-rewriting job soon, and, as paradoxical as it may sound and owing to factors also not worth explaining, I expect this to lead to an increase in the number of articles here.
If you don’t do anything—which few of you will, and not just because no one reads messages titled “Organizational note” on a fucking Monday morning—you’ll keep getting every article.
I remain half-convinced that a lot of people in the running world are intentionally mishandling as much information as possible; on the surface, this is the most parsimonious explanation for why so many people expertly arrive at the most illogical or unsupportable position available at any time, or—when given the perfect chance to prove they’re not the hypocrites I accuse them of being—maintain flagrant, even comical double standards instead. Apparently, my mind prefers to discern malice when garden-variety ineptitude may suffice, even though it would be asinine to discount the effect of the former. Either way, the effect resembles a competition among a half-dozen or so joyless personalities to appear on this site as frequently and in association with as much caustic profanity as possible.
What this all means is that I’ll be as busy as I feel like being until I finally pull the plug on this project and myself. That will probably be years, but could be less. I’m exasperated to live in a world that in many respects resembles a bullshitting contest among overconfident sixth-graders—not depressed, because I’ve got nothing invested here, just exasperated—and when I decide that I have responsibly turned over all of my responsibilities and can admit without reservation that my lazy daydreams are just a rotation of overfucked psychological sex dolls, I will depart the building with most of my trash, and leave the place for others to litter and deface to their liking.