Volume 4, Issue 59: Jim Edmonds

"He's got the whole world, but he just won't stop talking."

Pre-order The Time Has Come, my novel that comes out May 16. I think you will like it. All pre-orders with proof of purchase enter the contest we unveiled last month. Hi.

My college roommate (and childhood friend) Andy was always into lizards. Even back in Mattoon, there was a tank in his house with all sorts of random reptiles and amphibians in it. I’d go over there to shoot hoops in his driveway, and when his mom beckoned us inside for lemonade, I’d look to my left for a second at the kitchen table and I’d end up staring right at one of those monsters, with its massive eyes that seemed to bore a hole right through your soul. I was most freaked out by the way they blinked. When your eyes are disproportionately large as many lizards’ eyes are, blinking is less a split-second flash and more like someone airing out a bedspread, just drapes of eyelids opening and closing like a theater curtain. Those lizards freaked me the hell out.

But Andy had this one lizard in our freshman dorm that truly terrified me. Andy, today, has parlayed his lifelong passion into a career in herpetology, but I, alas, have not, so I cannot tell you what kind of lizard this was. All I know about it was what Andy told me when we moved in. The tank was right by the bathroom, on a shelf below a Cardinals alarm clock and next to a Short Cuts poster I brought with me from home. Andy explained to me that this lizard was special. He looked like any other lizard to me—except for a bright red gelatinous pouch on its back.

“What’s that thing on its back?” I asked.

“That’s to fend off predators,” he said. “If some animal comes to try to attack it, when it bites this lizard, its teeth will break open that sac on its back. That releases a poison that kills the predator.”

“Huh,” I said, trying to sound interested but also a 17-year-old college freshman. “Does it grow back?”

“It does, though it takes a while,” he said. “It actually grows back even more toxic.”

“Wait,” I said, suddenly remembering that this thing was also going to be my college freshman roommate. “How toxic?”

“Oh, it would kill a human,” he said. “If you swallowed this stuff, you’d die. Fast. In a couple of hours.”

I looked at the lizard. It was staring at me—taunting me.

I stayed up that night, staring at the ceiling, thinking about how there was a deadly weapon in our dorm. There was zero chance that, before Andy told me about that lizard, that I would have had the thought to bite it. What can I tell you: I’m just generally not a guy who bites lizards. But somehow knowing that if I did bite this lizard, I would die … well, that became a thought that just would not leave my mind. What if I was sleepwalking and did it? What if I came home from a miserable night in a terrible state of mind and decided that I’d had enough? What if I got paranoid that Andy was just messing with me and decided that I had to find out for myself? What if I just tripped, slipped and fell, and my mouth accidentally landed on the lizard? There was suddenly something in my dorm that theoretically could kill me. I could not get it out of my mind. Self-obliteration was right there, just a few feet away, all the time. I wasn’t sad, or depressed, or suicidal, nothing like that. I just was aware that everything could, if I wanted it to, end in a second. All I had to do was bite that lizard.

Andy ended up transferring out halfway through our freshman year, leaving me alone in the dorm. I missed my friend Andy. But I was so glad he took that lizard with him.

Sometimes, when I feel down, I try to remember that that specific lizard is surely dead now. I outlived that monster.

******************

A few weeks ago, I was meeting with a social media publicist for Harper, who is in charge of getting The Time Has Come word out through social channels, inserting it in the Bookstagram bloodstream, creating easily shareable clips and art to be spread throughout all the social channels. He was going through all my social numbers, how many Twitter followers I had, Instagram, Facebook, all the channels, and noted that while I had an “impressive” (his word) number of Twitter followers, I didn’t “engage” much on the platform. I told him this was true. I told him I did not like to engage on the platform, and that there were a variety of reasons for that, some of which I have written about elsewhere. I could get all moral about it, saying that Elon Musk has attempted to turn the platform into a desperate, increasingly disturbing showcase to find someone, preferably an alt-right person, to be his real-life friend, but I’ve been essentially off Twitter since long before Musk bought it; if anything, I’ve cheered his purchase of it, hoping, likely in vain, that his stewardship might accelerate its destruction.

There are intellectual reasons I do not use Twitter. I believe it flattens all arguments, turning the infinite complexity of life into a never-ending game of “are you with me or are you against me?” I believe adding numbers to the service turned what could have been a truly revolutionary piece of communications technology into a sad search for lonely people to feel validated, or at least seen, in a way that the service is incapable of providing. I believe it is constructed to encourage curtness and discourage nuance in a way that makes everyone meaner, lazier and dumber. I believe it is, at its core, a huge waste of time, a way to make you feel like you are doing something active or curious when you are very much not. I find it directly responsible for the ending of what I once thought the Web could be, a place where you could meet people who shared your interests and weird obsessions, where you could connect and bond with (and learn from) people you would have never had the opportunity to meet otherwise—a place where you truly could feel less alone. I do not believe Twitter was designed to do any of these things. But I think it’s what it does, and has done, for a decade now.

I only use it to send out links to things I’ve written, special pieces that I hope that people outside my usual circles will read—this generally doesn’t work; Twitter is notoriously terrible at driving traffic, another sign of the closed circle of its uselessness—and as a sort of unofficial press release department of Will Leitch, where I congratulate friends on new jobs, lament the deaths of people I care about or whose work I admired, and, on occasion, when I am weak, yell at a sports team I’m mad at. Otherwise, I just don’t use it. I set up notification alerts for accounts I want to hear from—friends, beat reporters on teams I cheer for, artists with new albums I don’t want to miss out on. But that’s it. I’m happier and more productive because of it.

But if I’m being honest: The real reason I don’t use Twitter anymore is because I don’t want to bite the lizard. Because Twitter sets you up to bite the lizard.

The great writer Wright Thompson quit Twitter many years ago, and he described his reason why in a fascinating podcast interview back in 2017 with Seth Wickersham and Kevin Van Valkenburg. Here’s what he said:

Seth Wickersham @SethWickersham

On the SLR pod, Wright Thompson told me and @DVNJr why he quit Twitter. So of course, KVV, who also quit, transcribed it. And of course, I’ll tweet it. sundaylongread.cast.rocks

I don’t necessarily agree with everything Wright says there—Facebook has changed quite a bit since 2017—but it’s the ending I always think of. “Twitter doesn’t do anything except get you in trouble. Dude, if you got fired because of Twitter, first of all, you’d feel like the dumbest motherfucker to ever walk the face of the earth, and you would be right. You would have killed the golden goose for nothing. For trying to be funny.”

I cannot think of anything stupider than getting yourself fired from your job—your real job, your actual job, perhaps your passion, the one that pays you money and gives you the opportunity to have a place to live and food to eat and a school to send your children to—because of something you wrote on social media. Now, there was perhaps a time when all social-media-related firings (or suspensions) were warranted and reasonable; social media could show the public who a person actually was, and that was sometimes ugly. But now social media has been so weaponized, such a part of an ongoing fight between bad-faith actors just trying to score points in a game no one else is playing and no one can win anyway, that you can lose everything, your world can fall apart, just because something you wrote got caught up in the wrong stream at the wrong time. (We saw this just this weekend with the Match of the Day controversy. We see it constantly. Or as a smarter writer than me put it: Everything is Gamergate.) Whatever you say, there’s somebody, somewhere, who will think you an asshole for saying it, or, more likely, decide that calling you out as such can be used to boost their own (imaginary) social capital. Tweet enough, and self-obliteration feels inevitable. I have thoughts, many thoughts, about many different topics, and oftentimes I will write about them: I’m doing so right now! But I became a writer because I wanted to communicate with people, because I wanted to connect, because I wanted to find someone who would listen to me, because I wanted to find someone I could listen to, someone I could learn from. Perhaps there was a time Twitter provided those things. But no longer. Now it’s just an endless series of lizards, waiting for you to bite them. There’s no reason to bite them, other than knowing that you could.

There are people who are comfortable with their unfettered thoughts into the world, all day, every day, who love to be combative or just asking questions all day, who love leaping into the fray. I do not understand this compulsion. I wonder if they’re just lonely; I wonder if there is a secret desire for self-obliteration, that part of them wants to bite the lizard. Whatever it is, it is something that I know about myself: I don’t need to be out there like that. I don’t need to be heard that badly. I don’t want to fight that much. I’m just fine out here, thanks.

Also, someday we all be dead and wherever we are I can guarantee every single one of us will think my god what a moron for how much of our lives we wasted even thinking about this stuff.

There’s an old psychological theory that a fear of heights is not actually a fear of heights; it’s a fear that you will jump. It’s a fear of knowing that, even if you don’t want to, you could. I don’t like the sensation that having a device in my pocket means that I could, at any point, just jump. I wonder if that’s what’s driving the few Twitter obsessives I know, the ones that are still left. I wonder if they like the quiet high of knowing they could jump. But that’s something I’ve learned about myself over now 25 years of living and working online: I don’t need it. I don’t want it. And honestly: I don’t even like knowing that the lizard is in the room.

NINE WEEKS TO BOOK LAUNCH

Every week here at The Will Leitch Newsletter, we countdown the weeks until the release of The Time Has Come, my novel that comes out May 16. This is the spot for weekly news, updates and pre-order reminders.

We are close enough to the release date that trade publications are beginning to review the book. I have learned that this is perhaps the scariest part of the process for me. Trade publications are typically the first people to give their opinions on the book who do not actually know you, which, if you’re not careful, you can start to take as the only honest reactions. A bad review from a trade publication can send you reeling.

I know, because How Lucky got an absolutely brutal review from Publishers Weekly two years ago, which called it “bland” and concluded with “Readers can safely take a pass.” Remember, this was the first review of the book I’d read. As far as I knew this was what everyone was going to think about the book. (My editor told me later he was so confused by the review that he, for a second, wondered, “Wait, do I just not know what a book is?”) I was particularly worried because Publishers Weekly gave Are We Winning?, the last book I’d written before How Lucky, back in 2010, a very positive review, not that it inspired anyone to actually buy it.

It turned out fine: Tens of thousands of other people liked How Lucky and reviewed it much more positively, and it sold well enough to allow me write another one, and then another one after that, and hopefully for years and years to come. But it still makes you nervous before the first trade reviews come out. You just want people to like it.

Well, the Publishers Weekly review of The Time Has Come just came out, and I’m relieved to say it was a very positive one. I’m actually sort of hesitant to quote the whole review here because it had a few more spoilers than I’d necessarily feel comfortable with mentioning here. I suspect PW ran into the same problem I keep running into when talking about the book: It’s difficult to describe what happens in the book without revealing too much. (A marketing quandary, to be sure!) But it was nonetheless a very positive review, and I was relieved because the reviewer seemed to get what I was trying to do. If you want to read it, if you’re less scared of potential (if not actual) spoilers, you can read it here.

And now I have to go constantly refresh Kirkus’ page for the next one. Totally healthy.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. I Wrote a Big Cover Story about Shaquille O’Neal for Inc. Magazine, Inc. This is something I’ve been working on for a few weeks, I hope you like it. Just a couple of Gen-X icons, hangin’ out.

   

   2. Are We Supposed to Laugh at CPAC, Be Scared of It, or Both? Medium. Can’t quite figure out the answer here.

3. Is This Going to Be the Year of Trout?, MLB.com. It’s sort of setting up that way.

4. When Athletes Get Milkshake Duck’d, New York. On the sad (for now) story of Ja Morant.

5. Three Years Later … Medium. Medium’s doing a series on the third anniversary of March 11, and I contributed.

6. The Thirty: Every Team’s Player To Watch at the WBC, MLB.com. I am eating the WBC up with a spoon.

7. I Previewed All Eight of Saturday’s WBC Games, MLB.com. A quarter of them are over now, though.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we discussed “Creed III,” “Babylon” and previewed Sunday night’s Oscars.

Seeing Red, Bernie and I are back to weekly shows, it’s baseball season, people.

Waitin' Since Last Saturday, no show this week.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“Chuck E. Cheese Still Uses Floppy Disks To Make Its Rodent Mascot Dance — For Now,” Katie Notopoulos, Buzzfeed. I love it when a reporter gets curious about something and then follows their weird, curious instincts to explain something I hadn’t thought about but now am obsessed with as they are.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“You Are Every Girl to Me,” MJ Lenderman. Have recently got into this guy, and he’s now in the regular rotation. Seeing him (along with S.G. Goodman) at the 40 Watt in Athens in a couple of weeks, come say hi.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

I’m in Chicago right now with my son William. We were supposed to be watching the Illini in the Big Ten Tournament, but they blew it on Thursday, because that’s what this team does, such an annoying team. So we had to fill a full day in Chicago. We did an excellent job of seeing all the major sites.

This newsletter’s annual NCAA Tournament pool email will be out tomorrow night, by the way: Join and win the right to assign me a newsletter topic. Advice: Don’t pick Illinois. Have a great weekend, all.

Best,
Will