McDiscourse

i can ride all day without hunger and without the cramps of feeling full

what’s upp good morning

welcome back to your favorite Health and Wellness podcast, briffin glue huffer

*

i just recently discovered the browse feature on substack, where at the top are various categories of substacks stretched across the top and on the right side there’s substack’s daily featured stuff, which mostly seems to be coffee themed or a white guy with the adam ruins everything haircut and a polo shirt leaning into the camera clearly about to give his expertise on something pedantic; i was kind of startled to see substack also has a for you page,—and i’m not even gonna to mention that cursed social media spoken around these parts (substack) like an angry, ashamed whisper, at least not in this article,—

—wait a second, wait one second, this is what substack’s recommending for me? what does this say about me? the “Art as HR” hurts the most, i think; even more so than “The quiet pain of ‘ugly’ men” at the bottom.

but anyways this is neither here nor there; substack hasn’t at all figured out how to make an algorithm yet, and let’s be honest, there’re a lot of very pedantic, kinda lame substacks on this platform. not to be (too) negative but a whole lot of the writing promoted on this platform which supposes itself to be for writing is absolutely surface level.

about 65% of the articles i see promoted for me are sam harris levels of thinkpieces which sound eloquent and thoughtful but don’t really resolve into anything that can stay with a person. these are articles written to give the semblance of intellectual thought (whatever that means in the context of a social media platform lol).

i do quite like Read Max or the late Garbage Day (r.i.p. Garbage Day, now since moved to some offbrand newsletter service, but nonetheless the weekly installments still hit; here’s an AI country song about Mao I discovered through Brodrick), and i really love the prose of a lot of the girlhood essayists, tumblrcore writers¹, raynee fisher-quann of course, but also smaller accounts amanda! at the certified readers department, and i really love eve’s more stream of consciousness work for angelic dissent.

so i do confidently believe that there is good material here on substack with profound, playful writing and ideas. the potential is there, but these fun interesting substack channels feel a little too much like islands amid an ocean of the most mind numbing PhDs writing about advancements in dietary sciences.

oh my god kill me now please

*

a friend of mine once told me he knows a cross-country biker who rode from the east coast to the west coast surviving on a diet almost purely of McDonald’s the whole way from coast to coast, through forests, over mountains, across deserts, because mr. mcDonald made corporate deliberations at some point in the 90s probably and chose a very high, concentrated calorie count that by design doesn’t, maybe even chemically cannot, make a person feel full, and so in theory a biker can ride all day without hunger, without the cramps of feeling full.

this is a consequence of scale as much as it is a corporate understanding of value. once shareholders take hold of a company they only do so because of the name and the potential to increase the economic inflation of such a name to a point where they can eventually offload it and make their money back bigly. there’s no interest in making a better product necessarily when the interest is in making a bigger brand so that shareholders can offload their shares. the NFT ethos did not start with NFTs and has not ended with the hype cycle dissipating; the NFT hype craze may have been the ethos at its most explicit, though. And so it goes with a lot of online discourse.

and a lot of it,—most of it,—is discourse in name only. it’s simply a reiterating of the topic, of what we already know, a repeating on a mass scale, by simply retweeting an “All Eyes on Rafah” image, retweeting a black square, etc. etc. these trends have been routinely mocked, and for good reason,—they’re empty calories of social action, signifiers pretending to be genuine political praxis.

*

if i have any real point with this, it’s that i would personally love if you, in your substack, say that a tree is a linden tree, or a mulberry tree, and that your pants are now covered in mulberries from sitting underneath it :( aww mann, or that this tree, like all of us, is a glove to the all powerful lifeforce that exists within and moves through all of us.

look, i don’t know whether that’s true or not, but either way it’s more of a real thing to say to engage with than calling a tree a tree and moving on. write something that’ll make me recognize the world better, please. don’t write surface level trite that distances me from the world and pushes me towards the digital sphere of the unreal.

anyways, if you’re going to call a tree a tree you might as well call a mulberry tree a mulberry tree; a word paints a thousand pictures,—and now that we’re in a world w generative ais running amock and flooding our media streams with sludge, a word can absolutely paint a million pictures and the dialectic between words and photos has been flipped on its head.

mullberries also taste quite good at 2am in the late summer on the walk home from a blowout party in Madison, Wisconsin just fyi

whereas a picture could paint a thousand words twenty years ago, a word can now impart on you the only images you cannot see in your feed.

and “the discourse” cannot exist soley inside pictures, though there is a broad swath of meme artists (oh my god yes it’s an art form, not all of it is ofc, but there are people out there making wonderful evocative memes, with resonating power, something we don’t see in most substack posts about the “discourse” or whatever) who are doing good work, they can’t do it alone, you know?

what I’m saying is that we can have a positive discourse here, we can have a meaningful exchange of life experiences, but good god let’s please accentuate our thoughts, like at least a little bit. Let’s dig a little deeper. Let’s make some stuff with staying power. I want to sit down on some thoughts for a while, put my feet up on some musings. We have the space to do so. So why not?

to close things out, here’s a prose poem:

Skipping dilly dally up the lane to the mossy brick pentagram etched into one side of a thorn bush. Peaily Brewster knocked once and knocked twice and the Pewster’s club door opened up, named after the small sound a child’s finger gun makes, pew pew, and everyone inside said “Excelsior!” and handed her a handful of images to repost on her instagram and/or facebook to signify that yes, she had been accepted into the Pewster club,–pew pew. Well, like with any intellectual club, they all hated one another.

xoxox,

griffin

1. and yet another of the endless factions and niches on this platform is the flannelcore middle-aged white wannabe philosopher (gen X and older millenial coded) who seem to think their biggest threat here is the ex-tumblr girlhood essayists which is as ridiculous as it is not at all unexpected.