Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes:
A Way of Flying, from Disparates [Nonsense],
published as plate 13 in Los Proverbios [Proverbs]
(1815–17, published 1864)

"This lost feeling surely shows progress."

My blog's not working again this morning, an all-too-familiar start to my day. I'll write my daily missive in the blog software's word processor anyway, out of long habit rather than for any rational reason. I inhabit FamiliarTerritory, a Very Late Status Quo Space, a convergence of shortcomings I have been watching closely in on me for a very, very long time. The blog software has been hinting at impending failure for ages. I've been investigating resolutions without making discernible progress. Yesterday, I began a fresh series and stumbled rather badly out of the blocks. I finally successfully posted something to SubStack before spending much of my following morning editing that content, fixing apparently unavoidable errors. SubStack turned out to be just as opaque of an application as my month spent researching it suggested it would be. I should properly be months, if ever, sorting out details on that platform.

It always starts like this. If I pursue difference, I first produce worse. It was never different than this, so I insist that this disorienting space seems like FamiliarTerritory. I have been here before. Never precisely here, but close enough to seem familiar, with particular emphasis on the awfully part. You see, I'm learning. I despise learning! I don't mind having learned, but the ordeal that actual learning entails hurts. It's never easy. The Muse registers for classes, then even attends the sessions, acquiring new skills. I look on, not even distantly envious. If I registered, I’d end up being considered disruptive in class and would likely stop showing up after the first couple of sessions. You see, I'm a noisy learner. I'm the guy that innocently crashed the server everyone in the session depended upon. I'm the guy who reliably asks impertinent questions which disrupt the session. I'm the one who slinks out, having learned something other than whatever the instructor intended. I refused to sit for the final exam, having lost interest in whatever the class was teaching in the pedantic delivery of the material, which only baffled me.

Noisy learners seem to be standing on their garden hoses while complaining about the municipal water pressure, but they describe their experience differently than that. They initially get lost in translation. The fresh dialect makes little sense to them at first. Terms seem terribly ambiguous and essentially gibberish. The instructor's careful explanations only encourage obfuscation. (I recall a yoga class my darling daughter invited me to attend with her, where I sat in the back corner watching while wondering what the instructor meant when he said that I should open up my back.) One consultant I asked to help with my blog started by insisting that I needed to switch to WordPress, an abomination that he insisted has become the industry standard. Just another reason to avoid it at all costs. It looks like it was designed and built by Microsoft! I am not anybody's industry standard, thank heavens!

The Muse doesn't find time to listen to my whining. Very Late Status Quo States always induce much whining from me. I’m going to have to change, and my old familiars will likely not survive this shift. My survival so far depended upon skills more likely to kill me going forward. I worked hard to develop that suddenly deadly skillset. I'll be damned if I will quietly forfeit it. I'm likely damned either way. I found myself beside myself this morning. I'm double threading, carrying on email correspondence with tech support in Brighton, England, while attempting to focus on this significant new foray into FamiliarTerritory. This lost feeling surely shows progress.

©2023 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Publishing, #PureSchmaltz