I've been trying to make sense of what I'm building here. Each essay is like a node. There's a dating node, a karma node, and, oh, a Conversations with Friends node. Maybe there are lines connecting these nodes but the pattern refuses to make itself clear. Though I guess CWF maps to dating in some way.
But mapping makes it sound too intentional, too planned. What I'm really doing is more like this: I picture myself like a painter, thick brush in hand, dipping into a big bucket of colorful paint and flicking it at a massive white wall in the distance. A few dots make it to the wall, but from afar it looks like — well it looks exactly like a few random dots of colored paint engulfed by whitespace. Like stars scattered across an empty sky. Those dots are my nodes.
One thing the paint-dotted wall captures well is how sparse and unrelated these nodes appear. To a passerby with no clue they all came from my paintbrush, they'd hardly register. To say this more bluntly, my essays are irrelevant... oof.
That’s not exactly right though.
Sure, to the Sally Rooney enthusiast, my essays are mostly irrelevant as a category. Why? I've only written one essay about her novel. The same is true of dating: someone looking for that type of content would wander to many other places before my home here.
The places attracting the avid Sally Rooney reader or the karma explorer have node density. They are places overflowing with words on these things. Each node connects to several others which connect to still more nodes, creating this dense constellation for the curious wanderer. Not my tiny colorful dot on an otherwise naked wall.
I could solve this by creating node density. What I would need to do is walk up super close to the wall with a bucket of green paint and dab one solid dot. Then another green dot right next to it. And another and another until I have all these green dots right in front of me. A perfect cluster, beckoning all green-dot admirers out there to come admire my beautiful wall of green dots.
But wait, why am I painting green dots again?
And so here is the problem with that strategy. It's like being told to pick a lane and drive ahead in a straight line. But if you don't know where you want to go, that's a good way to get you there fast, but not much else. A bunch of green dots, and a question: why the fuck did I make so many green dots?
I like having no destination, even though it can make driving seem pointless at times. But that is what my essays are. They resemble my internal dialogue, and you become a fly on the wall — perched right there on one of my paint dots. Ha! When I reduce you to that size my dots don't look so small anymore do they?
What I don’t want is someone seeking words on Sally Rooney or karma or dating. I don't not want them either. What I want is to stay on nodding terms with these dots as they appear. I'll keep on splashing paint at the wall, letting them decide how they appear. As they proliferate, it will be like looking at the night sky for a constellation, something I was never any good at. Only here there's no good at and they're not supposed to look like anything. The node density that develops will be organic, enigmatic, localizing around one ill-defined thing: the nebulous source of this madness.