Nostalgia for the indie rock of the 2000s has not abated. There are more indie sleaze retro dance parties in New York City than there are Duane Reade pharmacies. There does not seem to be as much fondness for the alternative comedy boom of that decade. Comedy doesn’t hold up to hagiography as well. It’s less romantic, doesn’t age as gracefully.
It’s 2006. I am an unpaid blogger without a day job living at home with my parents. Freelance work has been slow. After smoking a bowl in my green Hyundai Accent with a dent in the front left bumper, I shuffle to the computer room and go through my bookmarked blogs. One of them (I don’t remember which one, probably BoingBoing) links me to a Henry Jenkins essay on the challenge of making video game narratives; how it is difficult to find the balance between good gameplay and good narrative. I have what blogger Lindsay Robertson of the now-defunct blog Lindsayism calls a “highdea.”
Prophesying cultural doom has become a popular pastime online, to the point of being hackneyed. I have been guilty of it myself. My most popular post on my Substack, Cross Current, titled “There Has Been a Drought of Cultural Greatness for Most of the 21st Century So Far,” has the subhead “Human Mediocrity Will Pave the Way for AI Supremacy.” Dramatic, I know. When I say I see a speck of light in my crystal ball, this is not some manifesting hocus-pocus. I hurt my own brand by saying this, potentially losing scrollers fiending for their next fire and brimstone doom sermon.
When I was sixteen, in 1992, I wanted to be a novelist like Stephen King, only better. I wanted the literary prestige of Edgar Allen Poe. I had conceived of this idea for a novel: The River of Lost TimeM. It was about a deranged criminal who illogically stabs a little girl and dumps her body in the river. But he’s cursed; now he has to see the world through her eyes. With this shift in consciousness, he goes up the river and meets all the great figures of the past (Socrates, Shakespeare). These figures are on two opposing sides: the mind and the soul. I don’t remember much more about the idea (I wrote one page of it when I was nineteen before giving up entirely), beyond my desire to have the inevitable film adaptation play Stone Temple Pilots’ “Where the River Goes” in the closing credits.