Re: Substacks
Finding my way and a shared community
Do you know why I am here?
I needed a change.
I’ve been talking about wine since before I was legally able to drink it. The first summer home from university, I was hired as a tour guide at a local winery. They assumed a first year student was 19 years of age (Canada’s legal drinking age then and now). I wasn’t, but would reach that ripe old age a few months after officially welcoming visitors to Hillebrand Estates in Niagara-on-the-Lake circa May 1988.
It’s been a wild ride. 13,772 days later (if Google is to be believed), I am certain of one thing when it comes to wine — some conversations about it are better than others.
On Instagram, every wine, person or thing will be famous for 15 seconds.
I’m not alone in thinking there’s a lack of depth or exchange on social media; the medium isn’t conducive to discourse. I post and scroll, as you do, no doubt. There is meaningful content to discover, which is why we persist, but so much has the creepy inclusion and acceptance of the “One of us, one of us…” chant from Tod Browning’s Freaks.
TL:DR, social media is better at attracting eyes than hearts and minds. It introduces products, places and ideas that need to be nurtured elsewhere.
In an era where attention spans are decreasing — it was news to me that long form journalism is now anything over 47 seconds (shudder) — Substack strikes me as a place to broadcast ideas and viewpoints rather than sound bites, hot takes or, worse, bland sponsored content that inspires vapid knee-jerk comment pod remarks à la “that’s fire!” or “sounds yummy!”
My nine-year-old son speaks knowingly of “brain rot” — a slang term that speaks to a perceived mental decline due to consuming trivial or low-quality online content — while enjoying YouTube videos showing people playing video games who intermittently yell “Bro!,” “No!” and “Let’s Go!” into the largest microphones on the planet. Does he contradict himself? Like the modern media landscape, he contains multitudes.
Has social media democratized wine communication? Or, reduced it to its most basic form? A bit of column A and column B methinks. As a reaction, I landed here.
Blame Ralph Waldo Emerson or the waning crescent moon. During my days at the University of Waterloo, I spent a semester studying the “Great Books of the World.” It was an impossible reading list, covering multiple books per week, each more crippling than the last.
Anyway, in chapter two of On Walden Pond, Emerson spells it out: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
Emerson was a man who knew his mind and had a fondness for run-on sentences. His escape to the woods was a quest for meaning which still inspires. Can he get an amen? Better yet, like and comment, Bro! That’s fire!
Goes to -11
Our first snow day of the year came as something as a surprise (to me at least). There’s often great anticipation for such events, predicated by tucking in eager children who are wearing their pyjamas inside out, sleeping with a spoon under their pillows, having put an ice cube in the toilet… This one happened without rituals or aspirations. It snowed over night. A lot. As chief snow shoveler around these parts, snowdrifts lose their lustre quickly, but, while clearing the walk and drive, the lasting sentiment of Aztec Camera’s delightfully jangly Walk Out to Winter hit home: “You'll find / Snowblind / This is life…”
“…when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” If that’s not a quote to make you take pause.
Like anything worthy, I’ve found it takes a while to get your groove here, but it’s a good place to be.
Sounds yummy! 😉
I’ve been drawn to writing more long form posts lately so I thought I’d see how I do at reading someone else’s. Knowing your writing, this seemed the most promising place to start.