Splash No. 250 - Semiquincentennial
Semiquincentennial
Googling has told me that the 250th anniversary of something is called the semiquincentennial. The US will have it’s own semiquincentennial in a few years, but it seems like my little old newsletter gets to have to first (if individual issues count as years, which I’ve decided they do). I’ve spent so much time reflecting on my newsletter, I sometimes wonder if there’s anything else worth saying at this point that I haven’t already.
I’ve spent years now reiterating on the same few topics, but I made this newsletter about my life from the beginning and life has its way of repeating itself. It feels like I just continuously find new reasons to come to the same conclusions that I always have, leave them behind like I always have and eventually return to them after a beat or two.
There are always so many things I want to do at any given time and always so many reasons that I can’t do most of them. There’s only so much time in each day and even less energy to be had and felt and used. Why can’t I be productive at work and see my friends and clear my inbox and get my exercise and write my poems and still have time to explore further in my creative worlds? Why does each act leave so little for the rest? I’ll be wondering about balance in Splash No. 2500 and wanting to spend more time with friends in Splash No. 4000 and wanting to be in better shape in Splash No. 4500 and wanting to explore my creativity more in Splash No. 3000.
I’ve always just been trying to figure out the right way to live through my writing and am not sure if I’m getting any closer. Perhaps it’s like an inward spiral, where I’m constantly going in different directions but slowly getting closer to the answers at the middle. But maybe it’s not as neat as that, maybe it’s just a set of scribbles and sometimes I’m closer and sometimes I’m not. That would explain the repeated patterns of thought, as my lines of reasoning cross the older lines of reasoning.
I saw someone on Twitter posting about hitting a milestone of newsletter subscribers in their relatively new newsletter that was much larger than my current subscriber number and started to wonder why mine hasn’t grown much in the last few years. But as I thought about it more, it was almost more perplexing that anyone would subscribe to Splash in the first place. I write mostly unedited words each week about myriad topics that are often fairly personal and niche, which seems like it could be quite uninteresting to strangers, yet quite a few come back every week to read. Even though I share my work publicly and on my Twitter, I never really think about this thing as something to grow. I think I’m too afraid of losing my way to the will of the people to try and be too growth-focused, even though I barely know my own will, much less the will of some imagined audience. Instead, Splash is this weird, poorly defined thing — a mix of a stream of consciousness, a diary, and a check-in with loved ones. Maybe it will find a sharper and clearer form in the next 250. Or maybe it won’t.
Drops of the Week
PLAYLIST - april 23 - lots of drum'n'bass this month
POEM - "The Bug" by Daniella Toosie-Watson - What did you expect? For me to let the bug / just be a bug. To leave it alone / when it already planned on dying.
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Even now,
Nikhil