[I dedicate this thing, written a little less than a year ago, to Mr Merlin Mann of 43folders.com, the greatest and most productive and most creative and (above all) most uniquely countercultural writer and website in the history of words.]
well you’ve accumulated a more or less optimal assortment of really interesting, forward-looking friends: jayde the political science grad student/prostitute (obviously not his real name); cynthya the punk poet/grocery store assistant manager (titles of recent work: “’jesus wept’ is not enough information,” “look at me i am crying you are crying look at you,” “the lonely old ones,” “we are a nation of cunts”) who has more hidden piercings than you have visible fingernails; rands the software project manager and semifamous webblogger, suicidal but in a cool way and no one thinks he’ll really do it, not when he’s so successful, not when he’s just put down the down payment on that amazing place in the castro; graham and molly, who collect vintage german gay dwarf porn but only ironically and who didn’t vote in last year’s (fabulous) american presidential election because “supporting a broken system is soul abjection” as graham put it in a recent webblog post, and who by the way swing but as a matter of principle only with other conscientious nonvoters and only if you’re D/D free and 420 friendly, whatever the christ that means, what is this sex math? and the weird part is they dated during sophomore year of college on-again, off-again, and because “sophomore” is the new “senior” if you’re cool enough to drop out to work at a startup it all felt really mature and put-together, like we’d been through a lot and finally figured things out, and in retrospect (this is the weird part) that time molly was drunk at the big absinthes-of-the-world party that cynthya was having and she (molly) was coming on to you but in a really stylish, elliptical way, the way you secretly wished all your friends would flirt all the time married/single/whatever, just that energy – now that you think of it that was probably a 2-for-1 job, like a molly AND graham thing, which would explain why graham was sullen and quiet on the next angel-investor conference call. well, half-explain anyway: did he think she had blown their cover or something? is swinging the sort of thing you “cover”? even in college, even among one’s fellow liberal arts majors and clever self-directed interdisciplinary-study designer/theorist types? plus at all the other absinthes-of-the-____ party that summer (oh, boring) graham was a little chilly, and it seemed like molly was embarrassed, but – wait – not because she had said something untoward but maybe because she knew you were being totally just a little bit, y’know, weird about it, and you thought she was being some kind of slut, like hey i’m flattered but graham is my friend, etc. etc. posturing etc., when really (1) you were hugely turned on by the whole thing, (2) graham really was being unprofessional on that conference call, and (3) your sense of “mere infidelity is sluttiness” didn’t even begin to cover how actually slutty they were BOTH being but awesome, and inviting you to be in turn. which was kind of a compliment, really – they thought you’d be cool with it. or else molly really was just drunk and not thinking straight, which would explain why she was so relaxed about beauregard ripping the leg of her $700 designer jeans, which everyone else in the room was totally freaked out about, although when you’ve had that much absinthe to drink, one glass for each of the eight or nine continents if you even count australia, who knows how you’re going to react. plus, sidebar: if you were going to respond to a swingers advertisement you’d probably respond to precisely the sort of ad that graham and molly would take out – the crew calls them grahamolly, or in terms of ethnic affectation calls graham “grey-ham” – and the last thing you want to do is send full-body naked pictures with the head censored out to two of your best friends, when probably they’d recognize your sparsely-furnished loft apartment in the background of the photos and have a good laugh and it would be, at best, a little awkward. and that’s at best! you don’t even want to think about “at worst.”
sure, but forward-looking or not you can’t actually call or write back to your friends the instant they get in touch with you. that’s not what friends are for. that’s the basic principles, the really 101-level cognitive science. write it down in your moleskine: science beyond the 101 level is basically masturbation, overspecialization, the slippery slope toward “expertise” that’s really just disciplinary co-optation. really smart liberal arts 2.0 types know this; you know this.
the principle of “continuous partial attention” has gained some currency in recent years. what does this phrase mean? irrelevant. what you need to know is, anyone who asks you to be responsible for more than one thing at a time is stepping on the creative freedom, the relaxed vibe, which you digital american hero attended and dropped out of an elite coastal university for! you think that mass communication/visual anthropology degree was, what, vocational? turn to your oppressor, just say it bluntly, put it out there: “you don’t understand the mind, horace.” why does horace insist on bothering you when you’re getting your creative juices flowing, when you’re vitalizing the dry connections between truth/facts and images, between seemingly unrelated areas of knowledge/cool, by e.g. looking at internet web pages full of helpful digital infographics labeled with clean sans-serif fonts – nothing you’ve ever heard of, horace, it’s really only for typography nerds, and why am i reading this at work? THIS IS WORK, horace. anyway it’s my real work. you couldn’t understand, you’re a Suit. admit it. yeah. walk away, jerk.
why are you so mean to horace? well, phrase the question another way: if evolution is real, why was horace able to survive when the club-headed dirt bird of outer mongolia went extinct? if you’ve ever seen a dirt bird tunnel complex you know they’re remarkable creatures who display impressive collective intelligence, burrowing through loose soil, sand, and hard stone alike, building architecturally complex labyrinths of...but goddamn horace can’t even change his own UNIX password without coming to you for help. you’re all like “i’ll email you,” then you write a quick post to your really popular, really carefully layout’ed “design patterns for creativity” webblog to find out how to change a UNIX password, because while you don’t know sort of thing, you definitely don’t want to lose your geek cred over this...
your best bet friend-wise is to lifehack your relationships using very modern personal growth/productivity techniques, some imported from asia, some from websites about lifehacking your office supplies and closet space. the most important guideline for dealing with your very closest friends is only this:
don’t get back to your friends right away when they call – anything that’s really important they’ll post to their facebook pages or broadcast on their webblogs later. indeed “one-to-one” communication is woefully inefficient. the most efficient possible communications strategy is: say everything that comes into your head to everyone you know, and LISTEN TO NOTHING. that way you move with maximum quickness between daredevil info-activities. “stopping to listen” is unacceptably nineties, not so much in a retro-cool way as in an “other than the dot-com renaissance/perfection everything about the nineties was as bad as cancer of the aids” way. the best thing about “continuous partial attention” is that you don’t really have to pay attention to anything at all – which is what frees you up to REALLY LIVE. at last. here’s another thing about when your friends call: if they really loved you they’d call twice, three times. you’re on a cell phone, right? “unlimited nights and weekends” means they have absolutely no excuse for failing to call you multiple times. also, sidebar: it’s rude to call someone more than once. if we’re not answering our phone we DON’T WANT TO BE REACHED, ok?
as you can see it’s very simple, each principle follows naturally from all the others, and yet we are unburdened by “logic.” is that the sort of thing you can condense into a “tip” for easy mass consumption? no it is not. the most important help we can give you is this: any “tip,” any piece of advice short enough to fit in a single sentence, is certainly a lie. that’s the great lesson of the 21st american century; it’ll be the great lesson of the 23rd (japanese) century, though by then we’ll be communicating entirely in digital photographs transmitted between microscopic telephones surgically implanted in our eyeball/souls, and the very concept of the “tip” will have gone the way of the mongolian dirt bird. bad for condom wearers, pen/pencil manufacturers, even digital productivity/wisdom webbloggers; good for you.
