Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

I don’t give myself permission to sit and watch video that often, either movies or TV shows.  It’s not that I begrudge the time in front of a screen - I spend countless hours in front of my laptop, an appalling paucity of them billable.  It’s just that I can’t contemplate premeditated commitment, while serendipitous careening around the ‘net is somehow “off the books”.

And TV series are worse than movies, because while each episode is shorter than a film, I’m usually watching entire seasons of any particular TV series.  I did this with 30 Rock, and Weeds.  And then there’s Mad Men.  The series has appealed to me viscerally as well as aesthetically.  I suppose a good part of that visceral appeal is nostalgia, as the series is set during my formative years.  I’d be about 4 years older than Sally, the oldest Draper child.

It’s not directly evocative of my milieu; I grew up in the stalwart midwest, and my family toiled in orbit around the Detroit-centered auto industry, not the comparatively glib sophistication of New York City.  However, the adroit placement of objects (dial telephones, e.g.) and cultural references (racial attitudes, political issues) pings my memory continually, almost as if I were undergoing brain surgery and an electrode was traversing my 60s lobes like NASA’s Martian go-kart.

The business of the ad agency is crassly manipulative, but I find it neither shocking nor necessarily off-putting.  Who didn’t know, even then, that advertising was designed to get you to buy stuff?  Rather, there’s an almost charming innocence to their endeavors, even the darker aspects like cigarette advertising, especially when compared to the sophistication and granularity we see today in the right-hand panel of Facebook.  What they are actually doing at Sterling-Cooper-Draper-Price is akin to chemistry experiments using 60s popular culture as a Periodic Table, and I find it a pleasant interlude to inhale the fumes from their beakers.

A quick note to disturb these moribund climes and to belatedly celebrate the ten-year anniversary of Perils of Caffeine.  The first post, on February 3, 2003, was the timorous result of my having signed on to a Radio Userland blog service sponsored by Salon, the online magazine.  I had long fancied that, given the right set of circumstances, I’d engage a certain myth about myself that I’d carried since high school and pour forth into text the clever insights and bon mots that ricochet about my skull.

It was partially successful, in that it removed most of the barriers to such expression: the physical, in terms of pens and notebooks carried for that particular purpose vs. a laptop that I carry to ostensibly make a living and is always with me; and the psychological, in that posts didn’t have to be perfect, or even have a purpose.  I could be as high-flown or as colloquial or just plain stupid as I wanted.  It was fun, and I made some valuable online acquaintances.

Salon stopped sponsoring the Userland blog network, but a bunch of us continued to use it happily until the technology started to become rickety, and I got paranoid that someday the switch would be turned off and I’d lose all of my posts.  I knew I needed to move, and, rather than move to another hosted service like Blogspot, I rented my own webspace, loaded up a Wordpress template and migrated my old Salon posts.  And here we are…or were.

I don’t remember why I gradually quit posting here.  I don’t believe it was the advent of Facebook - my posts had dissipated some time before I jumped into that social confection (and I don’t mean that to be derogatory, I’ve enjoyed Facebook a lot).  Oddly, I think the psychological barriers to writing slowly crept back, and I found myself engaging in an approach/avoidance relationship with Perils.  For instance, I began this post in March or early April, I believe.  I also think I was craving more dialogue in comments, etc., dialogue that is perhaps surfeit in Facebook, and was a diversion from my initial impetus.

I think I’m back to my original purpose for starting to blog: a release for the stuff pinging around my skull.  I’m paying for the space; I may as well use it.  I’ve done this a couple of times before, pledged to start posting here again, kind of like people buy gym memberships (oddly, I’ve been a stalwart gym-user for decades).  We’ll see, won’t we?