I have one of those mystifying nights where I get barely any sleep but still can’t manage to sleep in past six in the morning. My first instinct is to desperately grasp for a phone that is not there. I know it is not there, because I resolved to charge it in my office ages ago precisely so I would not desperately grasp for it when I woke up. Old habits die hard.

I peel myself out of the bed and make my way to my office. It’s Saturday. In theory, I take weekends off. In practice, I just work as I normally would, and the only difference is that I give myself permission to fuck off and do something else if I feel like it. My inbox is light today, but there’s an email in there from M to some unhinged digital art project that they recommended for the newsletter. I open it up, and it very quickly becomes clear that it’s the sort of thing that I ought to inspect after I’ve had my coffee. I go put the coffee on.

While I wait, I sit back down and go through the RSS feed for today. I learn several things. S’s show is today at the usual spot in the Milk District. According to 404 Media, Meta’s rolling out a new feature on Facebook that lets you automatically respond to posts from your family members with AI-generated text. K wrote a very long piece about Lady Gaga’s The Fame Monster. There are some pieces covering conspiracy theories swirling around Elon Musk’s recent suicide.

I bookmark the pieces that I want to read for later and go get my coffee. When I come back I do some light work - clearing out some production tasks for various projects, shooting off some reminder emails, and wrestling with git merge. I think about if I want to stay indoors, but it’s nice enough outside this time of year that I decide I’ll have a day out on the town.

I don’t bother checking the bus schedule. It’s never on time here anyway. I pack my sling with my earbuds and TrimUI Brick loaded up with the Doechii album that C has been urging me to listen to. I do listen to it for a little on the walk to the stop, but the road is so loud I figure there’s no point, and I just play Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 while I wait. I get engrossed enough that when the bus arrives I fumble around for the two dollars I need for the fare for just long enough to get embarrassed. In moments like this I sometimes miss carrying the phone around everywhere. I then remember that one time it died while I was waiting for the last pickup at 11pm and I was forced to walk to the 7-Eleven and steal power from an outdoor outlet to call a cab. I no longer miss the phone.

I arrive at the [REDACTED] Street stop, and to my surprise the guy next to the Dollar Tree who likes to loudly rap to himself isn’t here. I’m honestly disappointed. I stop into the library to peruse. The local authors section is four shelves now, and the [REDACTED] Collective essay collection is even featured on an adjacent standee. I couldn’t find it on the shelf, so I looked it up on the nearby computer. All ten copies are checked out. I heard they had sold out their first edition, too. I think back to the time when the local author’s shelf was nearly exclusively composed of the worst genre fiction you’ve ever seen and the most boring guys who ever lived talking about their relationship with Jeb Bush. I wonder if something new is being born or if something old is being revived.

I find The People’s Republic of Walmart on one of the shelves and figure that it’s been long enough that I should re-read it. After few hours doing that, I leave the library and begin the journey east. I figure I should inch closer to the Milk District if I’m planning on catching S’s show tonight. As I stop in at the cafe and run into M. I didn’t really want to run into M, but I don’t dislike them enough to try to actively dodge them. They seem intent on changing this.

“You haven’t been around at [REDACTED] club recently,” they say to me.

“Yeah, well, I’m off Instagram now, and there’s not a great way to keep up with it otherwise.”

“Fair, fair,” they say. “What else have you been up to?”

“I’ve been working, mostly. Doing a little work with [REDACTED] Coalition on the side.”

“[REDACTED] Coalition?” they ask.

I explain the sort of work that they do.

“That sounds really cool! Do they have an Insta?”

“No, I don’t think so. But here’s their website - you can keep up with things there.”

I see the already muted enthusiasm drain from M’s face. “Oh, yeah, that’s cool!” they say. “I’ll definitely read about them more when I get home.”

I know M is lying. A familiar well of spite bubbles up within me. Once upon a time, I would have pulled up their Instagram story after this conversation just to count the number of radical infographics they shared in the last 24 hours and bitterly stew in the absurdity of posting “silence is complicity with the oppressor” on a platform where noise directly generates advertising dollars for Mark Zuckerberg. Unfortunately, my decision to leave my phone at home has yet again denied me the opportunity to hurt myself.

I politely bring the conversation to a close and leave. The walk to the Milk District is short if I take the main road, but I decide to take the scenic route and sit down in a nearby park. The geese there attempt to harass me, but I bravely scare them away by pantomiming a grizzly bear. A mother and her child see me from across the way. The child is laughing. I wave “hi” to them normally as if I, a grown man, did not just pretend to be a grizzly bear for the purpose of intimidating a flock of geese. The mother waves back. I wonder what she thinks of the exchange.

The rest of the walk proceeds without incident. I pull out my tablet to take pictures of various posters I see on the way to S’s show. When I arrive, a few acquaintances are already there and we begin to chat. I see Y enter the building and approach me, clearly eager to tell me something.

“You’d be proud of me,” she says.

“And why is that?” I ask.

“I finally started a blog.”

Y is correct. I am proud of her. Selfishly, I am also glad that I’ve established such a reputation as the Website Guy™ that people I know in real life feel the need to let me specifically know they’ve taken the jump into the indie web, though I suppose that was bound to happen because I never shut the fuck up about it. I am even more glad that I am not falling on deaf ears. Y and I talk a little more and then get absorbed into the broader milieu of conversation, which is typically my cue to leave and find a more intimate discussion.

S arrives with her keyboard. I wave, and she waves back, but I’m always nervous approaching people when they’re setting up. R is with her, and I gather that he’s on merch table duty. I wait for the table to get situated and then I approach. We start bantering.

“It’s already pretty crowded,” I say. “You must have really gotten the word out.”

R laughs. I’m gripped with anticipation for what comes next.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” I ask.

“Because I know you’re gonna say ‘I told you so.‘”

“About?”

R sighs. “Meta wouldn’t let us run the fucking ad. I tried submitting it like, three times, and they said they we were endorsing terrorism or something.”

“What the fuck?”

“We literally have no idea why. We talked to [REDACTED] Records about it, and it seems like they’ve had similar issues. It’s not like Meta has a customer support line or something, and this was a short notice thing - we didn’t have time to go back and forth. So I just said ‘fuck it,’ bought some posters, sent a thing out on our newsletter, and I got [REDACTED] Weekly to put it on theirs.”

“I saw it on the [REDACTED] Weekly RSS feed this morning.”

“I still don’t really understand what that is,” R says, “but a lot of nerds like you have been telling me that, so, I’m all for it.”

“And how much did all that cost you?” I ask.

“Maybe, like, eighty bucks?” R said. “Listen, I see your point, it’s just that we’ve spent four years building our socials up to, like, 10k followers. Our newsletter only has, like, 250 subs or something? It just seems silly to throw it all away.”

“Yeah, yeah, I get that.” I look in the corner of the room and see the Fire Marshal’s notice. It reads: “MAXIMUM OCCUPANCY: 50 PERSONS.” I think about bringing it up, but I decide that it would be too sassy a move in this context. “It just seems like maybe the socials are going to throw you away first.”

“Listen, when the Metapocalypse comes I’ll be happy to jump ship. I’m just trying to ride it out,” R says.

I see S getting ready to play. “Yeah - ride it out,” I say, waving goodbye and going to take my seat.

As S plays I get lost in thought in the way good music tends to make me do. I think about where we are and where we are going. I think about how I am surrounded with some of the most talented people in the surrounding hundred square miles, and I am thinking about how the vast majority of them are here because they made a deliberate choice to find this show. I am thinking about how it has barely been a year since our access to each other’s voices and work was held hostage by a group of gangsters in Northern California. I am thinking about how normal it feels for things to be this way.