Spring has arrived down here. Earlier this month we had two solid weeks of glorious weather, 75 and sunny, flowers coming up, everything was wonderful. Then the pine trees decided it was time, and great clouds of yellow green pine pollen began to descend like a hazy fog from the heights of the forest. The wind shifted and dumped the vast majority of it on our house. Great swirling clouds come rolling off the tree tops in the mornings to coat everything and choke you the minute you step outside.
It’s a small price to pay for private access to the 100 acre wood, but it is still a price.
Just before the great pollen cloud began I made a trip to Athens to visit a friend, in person. It is odd to me that we, that I, feel compelled to say, in person as if there were some other way to visit people. We caught up a bit, talked about what we had been up to, as you do, and at some point he asked if I was still making luxagraf. I said of course I am. Once I start something I am generally too foolishly stubborn to stop.
Then he asked, “why?”
There was an awkward pause in which I think he was thinking I had no answer, but actually I was sorting through about fifty different answers I have to that question and trying to pick one. The one I picked for him, which is my favorite one, is, “because it’s wildly profitable.”
Just kidding. I told him I do it because I enjoy making it. It’s fun to build something that’s your own.
The strange thing is he was back to building his own site too. He’s the person I learned to build websites with many many years ago. He’s also more realistic so at some point he stopped. It never was profitable. That might have been what made it fun.
But these days everyone says you need a website to promote your business or build your brand or whatever. I almost never hear people say you should build a website because it’s fun. I try to encourage people to build their own stuff, but it could be that I’m one of the few who enjoys it. It’s certainly still not profitable.
I once calculated the total cost of domain registration and web hosting for luxagraf.net, which has been online since 2002. I blocked out the number afterward, erased it from my mind. It was surprisingly large though.
It reminded me of a story my grandmother used to tell me and my cousins, that she was sorry she hadn’t set aside $1 a day for all us grandkids starting when we were born. She would then proceed to explain compound interest to us, and by the end all of us cousins would look at each other like, wait, what? Grandma could have made us rich? But she just now thought of it? Well, damn.
I’m still not totally sure what she was up to with those stories, they were like seedlings I think. One thing I believe grew of them for me is a life long habit of multiplying out small monthly payments to form staggering, intimidating numbers at the end of the axis of time.
The point is, to have your own space online is not cheap, either in terms of money or time. It is an investment. One that seemed worth it to some of us. The internet has regressed dramatically since I started making this site, but once upon a time everyone made their own website and it was fun. It took some work, but all fun things do in my view. You had to learn how everything worked. You spent a lot of time looking up HTML tags and trying to make things look the way they were supposed to, but somehow never actually did. But that was part of the fun. Just like it would be no fun if the engine started the first time you tried to fix it. Where’s the adventure in that?
Aside: This is a curious thing though, because you have to be careful not to go seeking adventure. That would be asking for trouble. You have to hope the engine starts the first time. When it doesn’t. Well, now you have an adventure.
It turns out a lot of people don’t think tinkering with engines or HTML is much fun, so sealed engines and MySpace came along to flatten out the learning curve. MySpace also showed you could make real money from the things people put online. And at that moment fun and adventure left the building.
The web regressed from a fun, adventurous thing floating out there somewhere in the ether to a real thing with accountants. Statistics, money, and attention are harbingers of death for anything you love. They’re good if you’re looking to pay the bills, but still harbingers of death.
In 2004, when the internet regressed and everyone became a blogger and slapped ads all over their websites and started rolling in the dough, I was too busy to do it. I never turned my website into anything more than something I did for fun. And so in 2011 when all that money dried up and everyone abandoned their sites in favor of social media, I didn’t. I was still having fun. It wasn’t that I thought all the ads and stuff was a terrible thing (although in hindsight I do), it’s just that I never did. For me this remained a fun thing I like to do in moments like this, at 10:30 on a Sunday evening when I probably should get some rest.
The point is, I totally missed the memo about the transition of the web from a fun place where we all made crazy weird websites into this horrible shrieking pit of existential despair where you still can’t find the phone number of the restaurant on the restaurant website because why the fuck would you want useful information when you could have a poorly lit close up of last season’s entrees, and so consequently, I still have fun making my website.
So much fun in fact that I keep adding to the site. I recently started putting photos online again. Like Instagram, but on my own site. I actually started it a while ago, but forgot to tell anyone about it. Anyway, you can sign up for Range, as I call it, if you’re interested. If not, that’s fine, I’ll still have fun doing it.
And grandma, wherever you may be, know that I did eventually figure out how I could use compound interest to my advantage. I haven’t always done it, but I do think my habit of taking the very long view of things might have it’s roots back there in those stories.
Until next time friends…
-s