Lukasâ Blog - January 1, 2023 - 5:30PM
Blogging isnât really a thing anymore, but that isnât going to deter me from re-starting this one. Sorry about that. I know itâs been a minute since youâve engaged with one, so Iâll forgive you if youâve forgotten what to say or do. Letâs just sit here for a moment and relish in the fact that weâre still alive - and both old enough to remember âblogging.âÂ
I remember the first time I found a âblogâ - it was in 1999 - and I found the Livejournal of a graphic designer I really liked who was living in New York City. And in 1999, I was living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin - on the East Side, near UWM. If youâve seen the movie American Movie, the place where Mark edits his film was about a block from my house.Â
And in 1999, I was a hyper creative high school senior, 17 years old and entering into his final year of school, hoping to be accepted (early acceptance) to NYU so he could pursue his dreams of becoming a filmmaker / comedian / media person (which, hey, I was able to achieve - so thatâs damn cool).Â
And I was into comic books and indie toys and cool stuff and there was this plush toy I bought through Giant Robot magazine - which was a wildly influential magazine on my sensibilities and likes at the time (and hell, probably still is) - and the plush toy came in the mail and the tag to the toy had a URL to the artistâs blog.Â
Not âVlogâ but blog. Because you couldnât really host videos at the time. I mean, it wasnât that normal for people to have websites either. I had a couple sites - I had taught myself how to make stuff in HTML - but I had never seen a blog before. It was a LiveJournal - and I was absolutely stunned. Blown away.Â
Because I just sat there for days on end and read about this artistâs life. Mundane things and important things, triumphs and tribulations - and I was absolutely enthralled. That I could just see how a normal person lived - and lived, in particular, in New York City. Because that was where I wanted to live.Â
And I would write down on paper the places the artist would go to - the restaurants, the stores, the bars. And I would just dream - dream I was with him - and feel less alone.Â
Blogging wasnât ever something I kept up regularly, but as a consumer, man, did I absolutely love the Blog era. I mean, we talk about Twitter and independent journalists and all that - but in the mid 2000s, I worked for and ran several blogs. And we were making REAL money - off of advertising and merch and other stuff - and it was a grind, but it was an honest one. And we had our own audiences and fans - and some of those people who became fans of mine from that era still follow my work to this day. Itâs a trip.Â
So, Iâve decided to blog again. In short bursts and longer bursts too. I donât really care how many people read the âblogâ per se - though it is important for me to publish these entries. I think that in addition to my various daily / weekly journals I keep for myself - my morning pages, which are like a brain dump right when I wake up, along with my âSimple Diaryâ - which is a regularly updated, quite personal record of my life for the last couple years or so, I want to begin to craft a public persona - one that Iâm okay with sharing with complete strangers.Â
I had a call with someone about a potential project - something I donât want to share yet. And on the call, we began to talk about my experience in media and the entertainment industry and it was clear that I really donât write down or share with anyone my experience.Â
Now - thatâs sort of normal to me? I feel like most people donât document their lives - or at least they used to not? I suppose social media has turned us all into oversharers, certainly. But like, if you go to Facebook and look at some of the connections you have from your hometown - there are a lot of people who havenât posted on their social media pages in years. Because this constant deluge of personal information isnât normal.Â
And, look, am I normal? No. Iâve always had a skewed perspective on life. I have pushed myself to self promote at many times throughout my life. Itâs just that the last couple of jobs I had - my current gig at Westbrook and my previous gig at Viacom - were both sort of âinsiderâ roles that worked best when no one knew the roles existed. The Viacom one was in part because there was a ton of writing we were doing - a lot of it comedy writing - but we werenât part of the WGA, even though our shows were all signed to the union.Â
We were just nameless / faceless âCreativesâ - sort of ad agency model.Â
And at Westbrook, working with public figures to craft their digital brands and personas is a very behind the scenes role. If youâre doing your job right, the public figure you work for seems to be generating this content and this digital brand from thin air, seemingly effortlessly so.Â
Which - at times, is true (okay thatâs never true). But at times itâs like, well if I tooted my own horn here, it would actually hurt my whole business model.Â
Now - we have evolved what we do at Westbrook Media a considerable amount - yes we still help some public figures with their social media, but we mostly get paid to MAKE CONTENT. And I think just about anyone would know that making content takes a lot of effort - both hard effort - like writing and planning and editing and shooting and all that - as well as soft effort - like strategic thinking and positioning and making sure your clients are making the RIGHT content and not just making what they think is going to be hot.Â
And Iâve realized that in both the hard and soft labors at my current gig - managing an incredible team of creatives who are truly some of the smartest and most innovative thinkers Iâve ever been able to work with - it doesnât help anyone for me, as the boss, to set the example of being the humble behind the scenes guy. Because then everyone feels the pressure to have that dance - should I take credit? Should I not?Â
Itâs tough! But rather than âtake creditâ I think I want to try to begin to focus my energies on exploring the things Iâm struggling with - the things Iâm excited about - and using my work, and my experience, and my day to day life (with a lot of discretion) as the medium to explore these topics, knowing that my life may be a good example for other people.Â
So - this is to say Iâm excited to be back in the business of writing and publishing written content in this space. I will likely attempt to turn these posts into audio / video things as well at some point, though my space is not clean enough or well laid out at the moment, and the anxiety of showing off my messiness would be too great to bear and Iâd explode into a million pieces or something.Â
Regardless, I am in my space - and I am lucky to have a space to create things in. Both in my professional as well as my personal / creative life. And I do not take that for granted.Â
I remember quite clearly the five years when I was living in my momâs attic, working from home, constantly grinding to try to freelance and publish content and become a writer - and how painful it all felt - and how isolating it all was.Â
Look - people definitely can go longer than five years to try to crack through - and I had some positive experience mixed in with those painful ones - but from when I graduated college, in 2004, until I landed as a junior writer/producer at Spike TV in 2009, I can say without a doubt I skated quite close to the edge of fully giving up on my dreams. And every time I tried to pursue something BIG or CREATIVE or IMPORTANT - like the screenplay I wrote with my former boss, or my stage play, or the podcasts I tried to launch at the time, or the sketches or digital content I was trying to submit, or the numerous late night TV packets I was writing and submitting every single day - it would always blow up in my face.Â
Now, looking back, it was amazing that none of that stuff worked out - because I was clearing out my mind of all the horrible, bad ideas I carried around with me while getting the experience of DOING THE WORKâŠÂ
I was learning how to write screenplays and how to direct videos and edit and all that - skills I still use to this day, in a much more professional setting - but learning how to do those things in practical ways that school could never teach you. And thankfully, none of my output was good, so the cringe-y and stupid ideas I was churning out will hopefully never be seen by anyone.Â
I can look back at my isolation and loneliness and anger at that time with fondness - knowing that I was growing so quickly, even though it didnât feel like it.Â
And maybe youâre at home, feeling like youâre hitting your head against a wall over and over again - maybe youâre publishing content that no one seems to care about, or youâre applying to job after job and no one cares. It SUCKS. I know what that feels like.Â
But if you can somehow orient your mind around gaining those SOFT SKILLS in the process - and understanding that a few years of obscurity will allow you to be BETTER - well maybe it wonât be so painful all the time.Â
The surprises in store for us in 2023 are going to be painful - itâs going to be extra hard for people to get things SEEN and to get things MADE. Our normal modes of selling content, our normal ways of distributing things to audiences - itâs all going to feel so lost and so pointless. So we damn well better focus on the GROWTH and not the SUCCESS. Because otherwise, Iâm telling you, every day is gonna feel more painful than the last.Â
And the goal of making stuff is to feel less painful - less judged, less alone. So if the stuff youâre making is just making you feel more lonely, more rejected, itâs gonna push you to give up your dreams. And that would be a damn tragedy. Because you never know whoâs moved by your stuff - you never know who needs an encouraging word. You never know whoâs at their witâs end and feels utterly isolated and alone.Â
Yknow, how I felt less alone as a teenager in Milwaukee, reading those entries back in 1999. In some ways, all the therapy and personal work Iâve done to transform myself over the last 2 or so years has done something remarkable - itâs made me actually REMEMBER more. And itâs given me a helluva lot of empathy for myself in those vulnerable and quieter moments.Â
I kept a diary after I fell in love with blogging, with the hope of turning it into a blog one day. It was the year 2000 and I was a Freshman at NYU at that point. I lived on 10th street and Broadway in a dorm called Brittany Hall. Which at the time was the only dorm with no air conditioning.
We lived in these big, concrete rooms - 3 of us, me and my two roommates. And we were all so hopelessly depressed and horny. Wanting to meet new people - yearning for life - knowing we were at the precipice of a new life experience (which ultimately was 9/11 - which happened the next year - we just didnât know it yet).Â
And I kept this journal - and the entries were PAINFUL. They were overwrought and filled to the margins with grumpiness and sourness and angst and WANT and DESIRE.Â
But they were fucking VULNERABLE too. And as I began to make friends - I had a sketch group from the Upright Citizens Brigade and we would hang out at Max Fish - and I had a job teaching kids writing and reading and became friends with my co-workers - and I got an internship at Mass Appeal magazine, and joined The Plague - our college humor magazine - as I began to form a more confident persona, I would look back at those vulnerable journal entries and WRETCH from embarrassment.Â
And when I graduated from college, I hid those journals for a while - until one day, actually in 2010, a year after getting my âbreakâ in the industry and in the process of moving from Long Island (where my mother had been living - long story, she moved from Milwaukee) to Brooklyn (to the place I still live in to this day in BK), I took the notebooks and, instead of packing them, I tore the pages of the diary entries to shreds and threw them in the trash.Â
Because I was mortified that I was ever that lonely and desperate and in pain. Because it had been so long since I had felt that way.Â
But now, 13 years later, Iâm really, really mad at myself for having done that. Pain is a real feeling. We donât find ourselves confronting ârealâ things that often. And I wish I could look back and thumb the spines of those notebooks and glaze my finger over my handwriting - which hasnât changed in decades - and try to connect with that little boy who was in pain - and tell him itâs going to be okay. Because it was going to be okay - it was okay. He ended up being just fine.Â
And I disrespected him by throwing away his journal entries. The ones he cared about.Â
Which I forgive myself for doing, but man, do I regret having done that. We donât so often leave ourselves a trail of bread crumbs back to our past experiences. So when we do - when we write in journals or keep up a blog or whatever - weâve gotta cherish those things and let them be.Â
This âblogâ doesnât have to be anything other than a dumping ground for missives and dumb ideas - again, a place where I can quietly shape my public persona, which I so desperately need to craft and then use for the next chapter of my life.Â
But Iâm not going to disrespect the space. I promise myself that now.Â
Anyways, Iâm going to do some other writing now - this was honestly really nice. Hopefully I can keep it up - and perhaps itâll be something you find useful or helpful or interesting. And if not, then Iâm sorry.Â
By the way, the artist whose livejournal I fell in love with was Mumbleboy. It looks like his early entries are gone, just like my old journals.