Where the Sidewalk Ends
| lyric-essays | 1,182 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, Digital Culture, Small Web, IndieWeb, AI, generative AI, security, web development, blogging, writing, memory, creativity, forgiveness, optimism
ORIGINAL: https://brennan.day/where-the-sidewalk-ends/
During my walks home after elementary school, when I wasn't avoiding the cracks of the grey sidewalk, I would do what you could call a meditation where I would close my eyes and imagine re-opening them to find myself a grown adult. And there are times now when I practice the second half of that meditation, opening my eyes to see I am in fact in the new present, twenty years later. Time is a ruthless arrow.
I.
Throughout my 20s, my brain (and yours, too) wrapped long-range neural tracks in a fatty substance called myelin (called myelinogenesis), which finishes its optimization loop right around the age I am now. My hippocampus and cortex store a chronological narrative of my life, and at the cellular level, my neurons, telomeres, and metabolic functions accumulate steady wear-and-tear which my internal physiological sensors register as mid-life.
My brain cannot keep track of time like a clock or calendar, though. Yesterday and two decades ago sometimes bleed into each other like watercolours.
A few days ago, PHP2Shell was found, allowing unauthenticated attackers to send HTTP requests to vulnerable servers, execute arbitrary commands, and take full control of the host. I'm sure you've heard.
A few days ago, I shaved my head at my bathroom sink, and the first snowfall of the year settled in outside my bedroom window. I am in a new season of life. This season feels different than the last--I have spent the last few days not writing. It has been the longest stretch of not-writing since I started this blog around a year ago.
Instead, I updated folk.zone and created an archive converter for people on Pillowfort looking to start their own static blog with their posts since the platform is shutting down.
There are people who think that PHP2Shell is a canary in the coalmine, and that this is only the beginning of a torrent of critical vulnerabilities thanks to the advancements of genAI. I think there is some truth to this--disclosed CVEs jumped x3.5 after the release of Claude Mythos.
And I think, as a JAMstack developer, about how what I put online is safe because it is static. There is no backend or database to exploit. Just HTML and CSS (and, on occasion, user-end JavaScript). You would have a far lower risk profile if you switched from WordPress to Eleventy or Hugo, for example.
But as a creator of static sites for a decade, I don't want this. I don't want the Internet to become read-only. I don't want the sidewalk to end and to open my eyes only to find myself somewhere new that I can't recognize.
II.
Over the past year, I've written a lot. I have tried my best to contribute to the commons and tried asking for nothing in return. I can't tell you why I've written so much, or how I was able to. When I read Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic, I thought the wording was a little silly, but I resonate with the idea. I think whatever Big Magic was compelling me is gone. And in its place is quiet. I'm not sure if you live somewhere it snows a lot, but it is incredible how much sound fresh snow absorbs. Taking a walk at night, when everyone's gone to sleep, the silence is overwhelming.
In the past, when I found myself in a new season, I would throw away everything that came before. A burnt offering for the mystical. A younger version of me would have impulsively deleted this entire blog and started something entirely new in a few months' time. But I am a different beast, now. There are multiple archives of everything, thanks to the better angels of my nature.
One of the main missions I've had for this experiment of independent publication was to focus on and emphasize the importance of optimistic curiosity and love of people. In some ways, I think I've failed that--I know that instead I've come off as judgmental and moralistic. I don't know how to hold and vocally advocate for my values and beliefs without coming across that way.
I know I am a deeply flawed person, but a tenet I follow is radical forgiveness--and we must be able to forgive ourselves just as much as those who have profoundly wronged us. While our memory of the past is fluid and blurry, the actuality of events is static and fixed. And I'm sure you've heard that forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been any different.
III.
Have you ever felt the dense, cottony hush of a kitchen after a rager, the guests gone home? Alone and cleaning up the half-full glasses still sweating on the counter. That rich kind of silence, there. The fanless machines running in far-off windowless rooms in copper sleep.
It's in the act of cleaning where I recognize that inspiration is far more like groundwater than a wildfire. It is slow and mineral, moving underneath frozen ground whether or not you can hear it. It is not bright and ravenous and over by morning.
My head is now a pale moon I keep touching in the dark, surprised each time by the close-cropped velvet. The razor has left my scalp so tender and strange. Hair grows around a centimetre per month, and my head has in turn become a calendar read by fingertip. Somewhere beneath the dense bone of my skull, the last of the myelin is being wound like waxed thread around the long roads of neurons in my brain. Sealing and quickening, lowering into the rut, getting harder to reroute. I know the child who was heading home from school on that grey sidewalk had a head full of wet clay. And now it is hardening into plaster. I am trying not to grieve.
Snow is flat and indifferent. Every morning from my window I see the left-behind stitched seams of a magpie's anisodactyl feet, and the blunt commas of a jackrabbit's paws. And the long, wavering sentence of boot prints walking home late. The afternoon sun melts all of it down to slush, then grass, and by nightfall it is a fresh white page once again.
That is the Internet I want. Always being added to, reborn, to remember us briefly and imperfectly. A place to let the next person see where the last person stepped and decide whether to follow.
I surrender to this new season. I hope I can try my best to practice magicless mercy and grace, to figure out where to walk when the sidewalk ends and the blankets of snow start. I think of it less as trail-blazing and more just finding my footing.
Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
and the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
we shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow
and watch where the chalk-white arrows go
to the place where the sidewalk ends.--Shel Silverstein