Eating Writing

As I look out at the frozen neighborhoodscape from the warm indoors, possible futures are illuminated by a canary sunrise. And many of these futures are squashed. Living out of a tent that I keep in a backpack attached to my bicycle doesn’t seem practical when it’s snowing in Houston. Going south for the winter means getting truly close to the equator, apparently. It brings me close to that which is real (in the abstract at least). Heat. Food. Water. Sleep. People. People are abstractions mostly right now, as real as the conceptualizations of bicycle futures, but through the digital-visual-Zoom consciousness. But heat is real. When I think about what I enjoy doing and having enough heat, I think about writing and money, and the relationship between the two concepts. People have written things on oranges, zucchini, and fish before and have even eaten paper in dire times. But the writing I do is typically inedible and even more typically completely digital. And while the bar for things I’ll pay for doesn’t extend too far below warmth and nutrition, I have been known to plow reasonable percentages of my net worth into reading other people’s writing (much less without an Amazon account). I’ve long cultivated an identity in the world of corporate organisms, where certain species of corporate organism have come to understand that I produce a certain narrative and metabolic effect that they desire in their gut bacteria, so I’ve been able to float around in corporate stomachs and eat a little of the residual food while enjoying the residual heat. Problem is, I don’t have the proper shielding on my personal stomach submarine, so corporate stomach acids come in through the hull and give me personal ulcers. So I’m looking to promote myself to full-on corporate organism, though trying to figure out how to do so without swallowing anyone else’s submarines or surrendering to the gig economy’s extraction protocols (find all extra time, pressure wash it, extract what value remains, provide tiniest possible remuneration – Moore’s Law, with the humans as the electrons). Which brings me back to writing. It’s one of those individual-corporate activities that doesn’t require putting a bunch of other humans in one’s own stomach, one can have a stomach that only contains vegetables and sometimes fish. Why do other people read if they can’t eat it? Reading makes people more certain that they will have consistent food access in the future, or it makes people feel better about not having the food they want. But writing is not the same as reading. Reading takes all the available writing and elects a tiny amount of that available writing to be read. So you can’t eat writing, but you might be able to eat being read if you have a business model to plate that with.