Thank you, Madeleine.

I’m starting to wonder if the old internet really is dead or if I’ve just been too distracted by my phone to realize that there’s still people out there making sites “just ‘cuz”. Sites like HAD. Stumbled across it today and saw this poem I liked.

I posted over on Instagram two pictures with a small story.

My kids found an injured monarch butterfly on the sidewalk. We picked it up carefully and moved it about a block down the street to where we knew a neighbor kept a patch of milkweed. Whether the butterfly would have preferred to be laid to rest at a honeysuckle bush, we’ll never know, but we noticed a few caterpillars in the same garden and that felt right.

The post was offered in response to the Los Angeles fires which are heartbreaking and familiar.

The fires we had in Northern California back in 2020 were a bit north of us. Far enough that we weren’t scared, but close enough that we could smell it. Our skies were orange and there was enough ash in the air that outdoor recess was cancelled at our local schools and parents, as they always do in these moments, turned to the Mister Rogers quote “Look for the helpers”.

You’ll find few people who admire Mister Rogers as much as I do (I’ve watched the YouTube crayon video about a million times and I remember exactly where I was when I learned he had died) but I’m starting to feel like that quote is being overused. It does work, when you’re feeling overwhelmed, to have a point of focus. And knowing that there are people looking out for each other is always a good feeling. Still, I’m thinking the quote needs to change to “Be the helper.”

Three years before that picture above was taken, California had another wildfire rip through a city. One family’s experience was chronicled by cartoonist Brian Fies here.

Looking for “the helpers” time after time after time is a bit numbing. And when I say it’s time to be the helper I don’t mean (necessarily) donating to affected families or voting (of course you should vote) to increase funding to your local fire departments. I mean it’s time to begin the work of dismantling the organizations that make these wildfires inevitable, common, and frequent. Everything is, after all, all connected.

I had two feelings behind my butterfly post. The first was to offer a reminder that there are opportunities for small acts of kindness all around us. The second was just sort of a vague hope that we are in a moment of metamorphosis and that we’ll come out of our cocoons with stronger, more beautiful wings.

Listening to:

I’m not one to rain on another’s parade. I’m not the type to tell someone their favorite band is, in fact, not very good or the sort who’d suggest a chef add one more shake of pepper into their chowder. All the same, I’ve got just a *little* bit of a chip on my shoulder about how many people have moved from social media to Substack… and I’m not sure why. To be clear, I have no problem with the move from social media. When Twitter was bought out and people began migrating to Mastodon, Hive, Threads, and Bluesky—and none were seeming to stick—I had a secret hope that the end result of all these false starts would be a return to blogging. The Substack format is, more or less, blogging and the Substack site is, more or less, an RSS aggregator. But I just can’t seem to get into it.

I have, for the last… let’s say ten years… lamented the death of blogging. I remember so fondly the early part of the 00s, how my time was spent online. I would surf from site to site and hope any one of my favorite writers or artists would have uploaded some new essay, photo, sketch or, best of all, an interesting link. In that case, you would surf over to this new undiscovered part of the internet and lose yourself in some new information or experience. It was the best! It was also (not so unlike modern social media) a huge time suck but there was an active participation that was very different from having an algorithm spoon feed you content.

Okay, so here we are, more than a few first steps into a post micro-blogging world and guess what, Substack is taking off! Artists and writers are posting fairly regularly over there and my reaction… a mild indifference! What the heck?! I’ve been granted what I wanted and I’m still holding out for something else.

This is clearly a me problem. I *think* what it is is that I haven’t yet grieved the old internet, I haven’t yet shed my frustrations at the engagement driven social media apps, and I haven’t yet accepted that the world spins ever forward. We can’t go back to blogging as it was, so maybe Substack *does* make sense—there is, actually, a lot of good kidlit stuff on there, illustrator Alina Chau has collected it into one big list.

Anyway, I feel like a bit of a Rotten Ralph. There is no reason for me to be salty at a platform that is giving writers and artists a place to share their work. All the same, I’m going to keep blogging. It works for me. I have zero means of tracking engagement, but I like that. It’s kind of like my private YouTube livestreams where I am simultaneously speaking to everyone and to no one. A bizarre exercise, but I like it.

Until next time, everybody and nobody.