Having just finished the fifth season of the The Wire, in which the show’s creator’s dissatisfaction with the present state of newspapers shines through, their future has been on my mind. And while David Simon appears to think that the medium’s primary problem is soulless corporations strangling their ability to chase a story while they desperately try to be profitable, his case if hardly convincing.

His Baltimore Sun newsroom has an ever-present crowd of people who don’t appear to be doing, well, much of anything. The fact that all these people are drawing a paycheck without pounding the pavement in any capacity seems as good an argument against the medium as it could be for it. One of the greatest contribution that this crowd of non-reporters seems to make is when they memorably inform a young reporter that unless 500 people have just emptied their bowels, they can’t really be said to have been evacuated. A funny bit, perhaps, but a meaningful contribution to Baltimore’s understanding of itself? Not so much.

The primary sin of former newspaperman like Simon is to know the way news and opinion have been gathered for the last 150 years and confuse that with the best way to gather it. Surely there are virtues of the method he shows; one of the men sitting in the Sun’s newsroom not reporting much of anything notices a reporter’s blatant and harmful dishonesty. There is undeniably a sort of rigorous peer-review that grows out of close working and competition in a newsroom. But, in Simon’s telling, the lying reporter is never publicly revealed. He wins a Pulitzer instead.

Do you remember pamphlets? The primary method of political debate and reporting for the 150 years before newspapers took over that role? Just the same, we shouldn’t be shocked if people in 150 years no newspapers as nothing more than a historical curiosity.

To protest the fall of newspapers (and magazines) as a hazard for comprehension of the world and its foibles is to conflate the medium with the message and the method with the result. The fact that we’ve grown used to the medium of newspapers (or magazines, or books) doesn’t mean that those media were the best for delivering the content they contain. And it certainly doesn’t mean that all their odd characteristic are integral to their job.

Consider Wikileaks, which has, by publishing bare documents leaked to it by dissidents around the world, broken nearly as many stories per year as a newspaper staffed with 30 times the people. Previously it may have been the case that such dissidents had to hunt down a newspaper reporter and hand off their controversial evidence; today, with a scanner and an email the whole world can see what you wanted to make public.

I’m not saying that Wikileaks is purely commendable or the future of reporting, but it is a distinct model that has a real potential to be different, and in certain ways better, than the media that people are so loudly worrying about the decline of. One of it’s biggest advantages is efficiency: Wikileaks only “publishes” when it has new news, and then only in the quantity of copies requested. Compared to massive inefficiency inherent in the newspaper model, this is definitely a more future-friendly way of working.

One can easily imagine newspapers being replaced by reporting collectives. Rather than existing in a framework of publishers and editors and subscription servicers, reporters wanting to discover and share the reality of their city could simply get together, uncover the details, and their publish peer-reviewed articles on the internet. I’m not the first person to envision such a thing (I think I got it from Jesse Darland), but I don’t think that means anything about it’s potential transformative power.

Lone-wolf self-publishing, essentially what I do here, is equivalent, only a reporter/writer need only worry about covering their own costs. Surly some would worry about the lack of someone looking over the writer’s shoulder, but the internet’s shown itself to be  the best medium ever invented for calling people on bullshit.

Surely there are problems with each of the three models I’ve suggested. And surely someone at some newspaper has already come up with laundry list of issues they foresee. But their model has never been perfect, and in an era of constantly falling advertising revenues and a wealth of new available publishing paradigms, the inefficiencies that have always been a part of their model are simply unsustainable.

Like no time in recent memory, the empire that has provided a comfortable existence to most writers seems near collapse. While (permitting for heretofore unprecedented agility) it may still be spared, the cracks and craters in the empire’s once grand facades are unmistakable. Like Rome before it, this is not an empire done in by another. It is rather a mix of seemingly minor causes that over time have left the empire’s negligent rulers unable to even dream of a means of saving that which crumbles.

As in the declining Rome, the barbarians on the periphery strike constant small but damaging blows to the empire. It started when Vinny the Jets fan (Oblique Elton John reference? Check!)  made a few of his fellow Jets fans a little less dependent on the local newspaper, ESPN, and Sports Illustrated for their football fix. Then the computing press was slowly marginalized by a chorus of amateurs who found each other more interesting than brands like PC Magazine and EGM. Today, some of the best magazine-length feature stories are published outside of the conventional magazine; Maciej Ceglowski’s excellent essay about how the cure to scurvy was known and lost (on Link Banana) leaps immediately to mind.

In another historical parallel, the barbarians on the periphery have led to hesitancy and poor decision-making in the seat of power. Unsure how to keep their power, they leap at every possible solution, while not exerting the effort or having the power to really execute any of them. They seek, rather than their continued relevance, their continued existence. Sacrificing what value they used to provide for the sake of getting the most out of what they have. And so once revered newsmagazines cow to base desires of reader, the purveyors of cheap and accurate information lock it away in the hopes that they can live off the small flow of people willing to pay for access.

This rough outline I’ve just embellished is unlikely to be new to anyone reading a thing I’m writing on this obscure outpost of the internet. In fact, few things more clearly demonstrate the problems of the once-great publishing empire than that anyone is reading this at all.

There was a  time not long ago, that all (beyond personal correspondence) that was read was sanctioned under the auspices of some part of the publishing empire. Now, as Clay Shirky most potently points out, we live in an age where everybody can easily write for everyone else. An age in which quite possibly the most-read thing in the world has been made exclusively by the people reading it. An independent self-sustaining enclave has no need for support from a distant empire.

And so we’ve entered the age of the doomsday prophets, who tell us these are the end times of objectivity and truth and sound reason. Many of these prophets work for the empire itself, hoping to make us see the value for the decrepit empire they control, whose passing would go unnoticed but for their regularly reminding how much we’ll miss them.

The crumbling of the publishing empire is a questionable blessing. Without any similar monolith rising to supplant it, it’s pieces will likely live for some time in a weakened state before being lost entirely. The real question is, does the passing of the print publishing empire mean the sun setting on what was good in it? Are we, to finish the historical analogy, entering the Dark Ages? Or as historians would correct us, a Medieval period, which isn’t nearly so dark as we were led to believe?

Surely, the recognizable superstructure is leaving. But the serfs (they’re meant to be writers in this thin and troubled analogy) toil on, their task little changed from the days of empire. What is to be the fate of these functionaries of the empire? Are writers to have a increasingly comfortable and independent life, or will they be crushed under the capricious will of the local knights?

It will likely be harder, in the coming age, for one to live a nice life only on the transforming of ideas into words. With so many people willing and able to be seen doing that thing, it’s unlikely to be as lucrative as it previously had the potential to be. But there’s probably still an opening for the really great ones to rise and become wealthy. And those who transform themselves into tradesmen, specializing and honing a specific ability, will probably make out OK.

But perhaps, as never existed among feudal serfs (because really, this analogy is more than a little broken), a network of reader-supported media can grow. Writers doing work better than a publisher ever got because they’re supported directly by people who want them to pursue their particular vision. Freed from what middlemen think the market will support, greater truth and beauty could prevail. And if there’s one future I get to choose, I’ll make it this one.

“Detached openness” is a phrase I invented (or encountered, one can never be certain about such things) a few years ago. It is a shorthand of the disposition I thought (and think) ideal for moving through the world and being happy doing so.

While that alone may be enough for your understanding, let me clarify my understanding of these two words, as the standard definition of each is unlikely to illuminate what I think I mean.

Detachment, Buddhists caution, should not be mistaken for the ideal of non-attachment. While there’s certainly wisdom in that distinction, my understanding of detachment isn’t so narrow. The quickest way to differentiate the cautioned against detachment and what I mean by detachment seems to be these quotes from the Wikipedia pages for emotional detachment and detachment respectively.

[Emotional detachment] refers to an “inability to connect” with others emotionally, as well as a means of dealing with anxiety by preventing certain situations that trigger it; it is often described as “emotional numbing” or dissociation, depersonalization or in its chronic form depersonalization disorder.

Detachment, also expressed as non-attachment, is a state in which a person overcomes his or her attachment to desire for things, people or concepts of the world and thus attains a heightened perspective.

This proper understanding of detachment means knowing that not getting that promotion will not be the end of you. Exercised more strongly, it means knowing that the success or failure in this promotion process should in no way affect your self-worth or career objectives. At best, it means never even entertaining any of those thoughts. In this situation, one should understand the lower form of detachment as refusing to even try to get the promotion for fear of all the mentioned turmoil.

Openness here is understood as not dissimilar from optimism. It is being open to the possibility contained in every minute and seeing the good that can come out of seemingly bad things. It consists in being able to see the beauty in a piece of trash, the possibility in everything. I reach here for a quotation from Henry Miller:

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or as heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

I fail to see much with which I can supplement that.

The combination of these may be clear to you, but some illumination: detached openness recognizes the beauty in a sunset without striving to make it last in any way. It recognizes that the uncapturable ephemeral should not be held onto jealously or regretted when gone. Neither of those actions it helpful to your current mental health, nor do they enhance what was.

Ideally, we do this with all thing. We strive to see what good is unfolding without seeking to shape or change what we cannot. When something changes over which we have no control, we recognize it and seek to find good in the new order of thing. When something doesn’t change that we want to, we reassess and accept the unchanged situation without getting emotional. (Yes, I did basically steal this from the Serenity Prayer.)

I would make clear that I am no master of this disposition. I am prone to practicing the inferior form of detachment. I regularly find things ugly or infuriating or just plain bad. And I’m not always able to practice detached openness when attempting to correct these flaws.

Nor is this the only thing one needs. Other things certainly matter in life beyond your basic disposition to the world. Staying present for what is happening, to choose just one example, can get you at least as far.

But I feel rather certain that this disposition is the most healthy and useful one I’ve encountered in my life. Beyond pessimism or optimism, I believe detached openness is the secret to what mental balance I have and what happiness I find.

It’s not that I don’t think people need to hear things I think that I know — while there may be merit in possessing that type of modesty, I do not — it’s that they’ve already heard those things I think they most need to hear.

Things about how money doesn’t buy happiness. That understanding is rooted in attention. That the greatest obstacle to your happiness is your waiting to be happy. That happiness is not the same as pleasure, or a lack of sadness. That ignoring the present situation is the worst way to change it. That you can always find something to be thankful for. That anger is never the best way to solve a problem. That an act of kindness is never squandered.

These statements — and many others I didn’t list — are all, at least to my ears, the most obvious of truths. There are hundreds of famous quotations that attest to all of them. Anyone unacquainted with those quotations probably wouldn’t be reading anything I said anyway.

These short and obvious cliches are exactly what conventional wisdom says a writer should avoid.  But anything that takes more than a sentence to express seems overstated to me. While a sentence can’t explain the political climate of Somalia, or what spin means with relation to the bonding of atoms, or how the crash of the US stock market in 1929 was influenced by Germany, none of those things hit you where you live. Between your insides and your outsides none of those things matter.

The only things that really affect your quality of life exist within a radius about the length of your arms from your body. Everything outside of that radius is not acting on you in any direct way, and is thus irrelevant to your true quality of life.

I think that if there’s a single reason that the facts I consider most essential are simple, it’s this: not that much exists between your mind and fingertips. And even the most teeming of minds doesn’t contain much more than twenty thoughts at a time. And chatter among twenty idea’s can only get so complex.

People searching the edges of human knowledge are unlikely find anything there that will, or should, fundamentally affect their life as it’s lived daily. The confirmation of string theory says absolutely nothing to that longing you feel lying alone in your bed for the first time in years. A better understanding of the relationship between modern man and neanderthals, or market demand and labor supply, will not correct your dysfunctional relationship with everyone in your family. The existence or nonexistence of God changes nothing about your difficulty controlling your drinking.

But a single new idea, if it’s strong, simple, and powerful enough, added to the constant mental chatter can fundamentally change the timbre of the conversation in your mind. And that constant chattering is the very substance of your disposition, your life, and your reality. It is you, more than anything else anyone thinks they know about you. And you’re the one I’m interested in.

For now, my plan is modest. Having not written anything here (and much anywhere else) in over a year, I intend to merely publish one thing a month on the 15th (regardless of the day of the week).

And though I like some component post-types that used to make up this blog, I see many of them as methods I used more to fill space than say important things. I intend to do my best to avoid reviews of all but the most interesting or misunderstood cultural products. I intend to avoid writing direct responses to editorials and articles I see elsewhere. I intend to, at least on a once-a-month schedule, stop posting things other people said with nothing more than my statement of agreement. And finally, I intend to start citing facts and figures I mention (because damn it’s annoying when I go back and can’t tell how I came up with them).

My goal is to write with as little filler as possible things I think are interesting, largely unsaid, and worthy of saying. I doubt that I can do all those things every month, but it’s unquestionably what I’ll be striving for.

I harbor few illusions of what this thing will do for me, or what I can do with it. But I know that I like to have written things and that there are things I wish I saw talked about more. For those two reasons, I intend to revive this site. I hope you’ll join me.

I could go into the details, but I would rather say simply that they are far more prosaic than profound, and that to the extent I find myself different in the interim, it is having gained a certain weariness with the machinations of modern living and certain lessening of my certainty that all will turn out well.

But there remains fantastic potential in each keystroke. A never-relenting possibility that though this sentence bores me in it’s writing, and likely you in it’s reading, I may soon stumble upon something that leaves the two of us astounded.

My greatest aspiration as a writer, a thinker, a seeker, and a person, is to find myself amazed at the clarity that can be produced in a single well-structured essay. It’s a rarity, and looking back a little on all I’ve produced here, even more of a rarity than I remember.

But it’s the reason that I find myself returning this screen from time to time, looking at this empty box, and hoping hard to be able to get back to it in earnest. I never tire of the potential that from my keystrokes, someday, my world may be altered forever.

We see language as a mere tool at our peril. Being literate is not merely about having a functional ability to make sense of things recorded in a different time or place. It’s about having the ability, by merely moving your eyes, to enter another world. It’s about being able to, with mere movement of your fingers create new worlds, or new visions of this world, for others.

There’s magic in the act of writing. A magic the endless drag of 9-to-5 can easily sap from your awareness. But it is real. And it’s real, even if your skills, like mine, are rather feeble.

This is something I need to remember. To keep with me. To bring me here more.

Sometimes that clarifying insight quickly reveals itself to be illusory. To have been too simplistic. Or poorly articulated. Or wrong.

But sometimes you sit with that moment of clarity for a bit — spinning it around, looking at it from as many perspectives as you can — and it seems to be flawless. It seems like all the moments of insight that have come before grasped for this insight you now hold. The others weren’t wrong, but they weren’t quite what you’d been going for. But this one, this is the real deal.

Obviously such certainty can be revealed weeks, months, or years later to have been wrong. But in that flash, and the afterglow that follows, you’re sure it could never be different.

And so I feel about these three words: Be. Here. Now. Be here, now.

Be where you are, when you are. Be at the table having breakfast with your family. Be in your bed, reading the lastest Clancy novel. Be entering data into a spreadsheet. Be reading this entry on this blog.

Presence in any situation is no mere thing. Full presence in every situation is a very hard one.

It’s so easy to focus, instead, on what dread awaits you in the next day to focus on the serenity of this moment, sitting here, writing this. Reading this. To find, after snapping back to attention, that your mind had drifted off to the hubbub of yesterday or the joy that awaits that night.

But if you’re able, being here now is the most amazing thing you can experience. “Everything that exists,” when you’re able to focus on it,  “is beautiful.” “What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such. “

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last year in worry. Primarily about the material circumstances of my life. How I could pay for the things I needed, and especially those I wanted. How I could get from where I am to all the places I’d rather be.

And I can’t even put into worlds how freeing it feels to rediscover what I think I once knew: all that matters is the sequences of nows I’m currently experiencing. That I am doing my best within those is the best I can hope for.

I say this not to apologize — it’s been far too long for that to be anything but hollow — but to demonstrate my point.

Around the start of June of this year, I broke the habit that had kept me filling words into this space on a regular basis. There were a number of reasons for this, not the least of which was a loss of time, ideas, and the feeling that it was necessary to write five times a week, Monday through Friday.

Breaking that habit — that constant pattern that didn’t let me escape without feeling guilty about how I wasn’t keeping to the plan — meant that I was free to interact with this space as I liked until such a time as I reestablished a habit of writing with a certain pattern of regularity. This certainly was a freeing act, but it’s also one that makes you suddenly look down and wonder what happened to your former prolific self.

I type this in a state of awe that I was ever able to write so much of, if not top quality stuff, at least six to eight paragraphs a day that I wasn’t embarrassed by. It seems like a stranger has replaced that prolific writer. Or perhaps that that prolific person was himself a stranger.

I don’t have a stirring conclusion, and my purpose isn’t to tell you to exercise three times a week so that you’ll have good health for far more years than you otherwise would. Though I certainly wouldn’t want to discourage you from physical fitness, I’m not in the business of telling people how to live their lives. But I’d guess that someone who is in that business is now trying desperately to convince a roomful of people of this fact that I’ve now learned on my own, through a series of months: Habits matter.

That’s not meant to judge habits. Some habits — lying regularly and recklessly, acting violently toward others — are galling. Some are undoubtedly bad, but not nearly so ugly. Your habit of having a cookie with lunch may not be doing your waist much help, but it’s hardly as bad as many other habits. And maybe you’ve got some incredibly beneficial habits, like sleeping eight hours a night, exercising regularly, and eating well.

Nor do I wish to encourage dogmatic adherence to your useful habits. Even those can be unnecessarily limiting if you spend too long fearing the impact that breaking them will have.

I just want to write this down so that I never forget: Habits matter.

…you’re standing alone in the desert, and you see the most incredible sunset you’ve ever seen and your first instinct is to turn to your left or right and say, “Wow, do you see that?” Okay, there’s no one there, what do you do? Next, where’s the camera? Look through the viewfinder and you realize, you know, what you see through that little box is not what you’re experiencing. There comes this terrible moment when you realize well, this is for me. There is no sharing this.

Because I nearly missed it, and because it wasn’t going to be around long, I seemed far more concerned than anyone else that tonight’s twilight, in this time and place, was full of beautiful and unexpected colors, in beautiful and unexpected places.

I suppose it started with an ordinary decision to walk the dog. The pavement was still drying off after a short but torrential rain half an hour before, but the precipitation seemed to have stopped.

Once we were actually trudging along — with frequent stops to smell the bushes — I noticed that it was still raining. Not much, but a few drops more than “sprinkling.” And as we got toward the point of no return, it seemed to be picking up. “I guess we’ll just make this a loop around the block,” I thought.

But because I sometimes seem a plaything for the gods, even that light rain abated just as I approached the front door. And so, in a stroke of luck, I decided it was necessary to head off again.

And I’m so glad I did. The colors, the shapes, the shadows I saw. It was unquestionably one of the ten best sunsets and twilights I’ve seen in my life. I’m tempted to arbitrarily rank it at number two.

As the sun set over the mountains to the west, the yellow faded into orange and pink. But more interesting was the sight to the east, where a pink wall of clouds served as the backdrop for some curiously formed pieces of gray fluff. Further south, there was a billowy cloud. I’d call it a mushroom cloud but for the apocalyptic connotation.

There was, just past that, the slightest hint of a rainbow. Though gauzy and lacking definition, it seemed to be projected exactly onto another background of cloud. And directly south was a large gray thunderhead of a cloud. But in that large gray thunderhead of a could was some truly unexpected red. As if there was a command center, lit in red for dramatic effect, exactly in the middle of it. “Let’s really wow them tonight,” were the words that echoed out from that room.

As time went on, it changed magnificently. There was, for a time, a perfectly formed map of England, with just the slightest suggestion of Wales off to it’s west. There was also a dramatic looking dogpile, with just one more player running up to jump on top.

And it did, of course, become less brilliant. The pinks and oranges that were for a time vibrant, became duller, then grayish, now completely invisible. The sky was undeniably becoming a uniform dull gray as we hit the home stretch, but perhaps as a solitary reminder that it knew it put on a show, the sky offered, for a minute, a dull teal unlike anything I’d seen before. Red, pink, orange, blue, even yellow, these are color the sky has offered a million times before. A green, even a dull one, is an unquestionable oddity.

I was a little sad when even that hint of teal faded into a dull and darkening gray. The majesty, which it seemed no one else noticed, was gone. I’d seen a show few others did, but neither I nor they could enjoy it now. And even I would have missed it, if not for some inexplicable luck that made me realize that once around the block wasn’t really a long enough walk.

So here it is, my conclusion: beauty is heightened by it’s passing, elevated by all the times that it’s missed. Art that is widely recognized as possessing great beauty, therefore preserved endlessly and unchangingly in humidity and temperature controlled chambers, monuments to man’s effort to overcome ephemerality, are made less beautiful and less interesting for their persistence. The Mona Lisa may be nice, but her unchanging face makes her much less interesting than a sunset.