How I Found This Blog’s Direction
A funny thing happened when I began writing for a living. I realized I don’t always like writing. I will never do like some professional writers who tweet about what a soul-rending chore this is (this is not a passive-aggressive slam on any one person; a lot of writers do that). It’s just words, man. This will sound pretty proletarian for a guy whose first published work was actually poetry, but basically you just shuffle those words around until they say exactly what you want to say. But I’d be lying if I said working with words didn’t present me with all kinds of conundrums daily.
This Medium site has been one of those conundrums. I have long bought into Medium’s own attempt to relabel blogging as this, whatever it is. But if you’ve been very online for a very long time like me (first blog post published in 2000) there comes a time when you have to admit it’s all the same.
The differences between Substack, Medium, Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad — you name it — are not nearly as pronounced as the folks behind them want you to believe.
I had to push past all that b.s. and see this for what it is. It’s just one of my blogs. I also had to push past the noise and realize what’s important to me when I take the time to do my own writing, regardless of whether a check is involved or not — writing what the hell I want to write.
I like and am grateful for the job I have. Not every day, but who is happy every day with their work? Still, it involves a lot of writing and editing that — if I was left to my own devices — I might not do. As my previous post might indicate, that’s fine, but I’ve been chomping at the bit for a long while to set aside time to do the work I like, that I think is fun or at a minimum interesting, and ever since I stepped away from focusing solely on true crime (a long time ago now) I’ve found that hard to do.
It’s been an issue of time, sure, but also an issue of me locking myself into certain patterns of thinking — like, I established myself enough within a particular genre that I’ve long wondered if anyone would read something outside that genre. It’s the specialist trap.
Specializing, don’t get me wrong, is good. And I’m oddly proud of how good I can be when I do target a subject I know well and go diving into it.
But all my life I’ve been teased about what I’d say was flightiness. That’s my word, not one I’ve heard a lot, but it’s the most accurate description. The way I’d develop an intense interest then drop it. Or the way I’d develop an interest then info-dump on everyone about it.
Now I know I have ADHD. I have known it for 20 years. Not adult-onset ADHD either, which is a bullshit diagnosis. I’ve always had it — it just wasn’t easily recognized in my generation if the hyperactive component was weaker than the attention deficit part of the equation. There were the kids who couldn’t sit still or shut up and the kids who stared out the window and drew elaborate doodles in their notebooks regardless of what was happening in class. I was mostly the latter.
Very recently I hit on the idea of starting a blog or newsletter that was essentially just me giving myself permission to write about whatever I was nerding out on that day or week. Or month. It’s a corny-sounding title when I write it out or say it, but I was stuck on something silly like “Nerding Out With Steve!” — which (it occurs to me now) really sounds like the title of a failed PBS series.
Anyway, I was racking my brain to find solutions for setting up what I think is a good idea with a ton of advantages for me.
Then this morning I realized I’d first called my Medium space “Stuff” with exactly that idea in mind. I wanted the name vague enough to give me permission to surprise people with my content choices. But “nerding out” is better.
To be clear, Chris Hardwick long ago owned the word “nerd” with “Nerdist” but I think the meaning of the word has changed since he created that site, become much broader and more inclusive. One of the actual definitions of the phrase “nerding out” is “To study intensely.” I think the word, goofy and insubstantial as it sounds, has slowly shifted from a more passive meaning to an active one. Nerding out isn’t always fanboying with enthusiasm over the arcane and obscure. That’s what bothered me about things like “after shows” rehashing episodes of series with ardent followings, like one I particularly love, Better Call Saul. There’s something fundamentally passive in stuff like that, it depends entirely on reacting to the work others create. Which has its place and can be its own form of entertainment, sure, but too much and it just becomes a kind of pathology.
We nerd out to some degree the moment we become obsessed with a subject. It’s no longer the purview of some outdated stereotype wearing coke-bottle glasses with electrical tape on the temples. Quarterbacks, technically, are nerding out when they pore over video of the next team they’ll face for hours on end. Law students live a life of nothing but nerding out over dense texts written in a style that should’ve been out of date a century ago.
We all do this, somehow, about some things.
Hence the “Futuro House” image up top.
I was assigned to do a little write-up on a restored Futuro House for Maxim, and I found as I put it together that I was completely taken with this little niche of history. Something I’d been aware of for years but never really focused on came into full relief and I wanted to know more. I managed to do a bit of nerding out in what I wrote (citing 50+ year-old newspaper articles is not something we find much reason to do at Maxim) but even after it was scheduled for publication I was still stuck on the Futuro House. The idea of it, its history, and why it never caught on the way those late 60s newspaper articles seemed to assume it might.
I don’t want to hamstring myself by making promises then flaking or even appearing to flake, but the next article I publish here will likely be a deep dive into the depths of Futuro House history and whatever that brings up as I get into the research. I simply want to know more and share what I find.
So, this is where I’m nerding out. It could be about anything, including, yes, true crime. It’s not like I ever lost my interest in that subject — I actually take it more seriously than ever, which ends up meaning I can’t just glibly make note of every intriguingly grim story I read each day.
All this is to say, I’m writing what I want h ere. All my life I've been getting teased about my oddball little micro-interests, passing fascinations…I’ve felt embarrassed, weird. Not anymore.
I should add that my thinking is definitely inspired by reading the work of writers like Bill Bryson, Erik Larson, and works like Jessica Kerwin Jenkins’s Encyclopedia of the Exquisite: An Anecdotal History of Elegant Delights.
And that’s that for now, I think. Let’s nerd out.
