back from the voidoid

Greetings from northern Indiana. This might be a substack re-launch. I’m mostly followed by friends and acquaintances and a few folks from here and there in the poetry world, so, thanks for subscribing a few years ago, and for reading now.

Last night I impulsively decided to pause all my meta social media apps on my phone. So no FB, no IG, no threads. I have a definite and distinct problem with compulsive scrolling of these apps. They’re built to be addictive, and it works wonders on me. Or maybe I should say it works evil.

I do want to stay up to date on what’s going on, especially currently with ICE occupying Minneapolis, where my oldest adult child lives, but I can’t shake the notion that the apps exist mainly to manipulate public opinion and to affect people like me emotionally, so that I/we are feeling more outrage and anger than anything else, and then we behave as keyboard warriors, and don’t do much in real life to contribute to any meaningful change. I’d like to be more off line, mainly, for my own sanity, and to have more control over what I think about and read. I will still follow developments in the news without resorting to social media as a primary source, but I will not be scrolling news sources for hours.

I am also thinking about contributing some kind of participation to the political field. I can’t go to the local anti—ICE protest here in my hometown this Saturday because I have to work at my side gig, but I think I may be attending the county Democrats meeting for the first time next week. I don’t know how involved I’ll get, but I do feel a need to seek a community of like-minded people. So I’ll go sit and listen at a gathering of people who are all presumably not Trumpist and not MAGA and bask in the relative sanity compared to much of what gets bandied about as public political discourse online.

Because I won’t have the social media apps to scroll (daily, for hours….) I’ll try checking in on this substack and posting some thoughts from time to time. Substack is social media too, but a social media habit that requires me to write a short entry about what’s going on in the world and my life is significantly different than arguing in the comments section of newsnowwarsaw on facebook. So, this is what you’ll get. Occasionally. We’ll see.

As a final note, I got a nasty comment on one of the videos on my youtube channel (I have a youtube channel that gets almost no hits, mostly poetry videos). The comment was actually about an essay I wrote called “An Alcoholic and an Addict Walk into a Marriage Ceremony (stop me if you’ve heard this one)” that is available via link on my website (thelrealstevehenn.com). The commenter, speaking from a youtube account that obscures their identity, called my essay, which I wrote several years ago in an attempt to reckon with how horribly awry my marriage went off the rails in the 2010s, “the most disgusting thing” they’ve ever read. They claimed I blamed my ex-wife, Lydia, for the problems of the marriage, didn’t take responsibility for myself, and also that her suicide is my fault. I thought that was an exceptionally cruel thing to say to someone, particularly without having to be accountable for it. I re-read the essay, and can see how it might give someone an impression that I’ve been a bad person – but the essay tries to admit that, reckon with it, not excuse it. And my intention was never to cast all the blame on Lydia, though maybe I was in a headspace that lacked some awareness of how I was presenting her at the time. Ultimately, after the re-read, I felt like I didn’t see all the things the anonymous commenter saw in it.

Strangely, the commenter said “you talk to your class as if you were still married” to Lydia, which suggests it was posted by a current student or a student’s parent. I have a vague recollection of making a personal comment about the time period when we were married in some class or another sometime in the last few weeks of school (I teach high school English, for any readers who don’t know me personally), but called her “my wife” because that’s what she was at the time referenced. I’ve not been trying to misrepresent myself to my students; I just haven’t provided a lot of the personal context of my life – which I owe to no one, but which can easily be found, in regards to the tragedy of Lydia’s death, via the essay previously mentioned and another one linked at my website.

The comments were hurtful. Made on a Friday, I happened to see them in the middle of the school day, and I was messed up all weekend over them. Thankfully, I had a few friends I could turn to and share the situation with whom I knew would be supportive and wouldn’t be giving me a further nudge off the ledge, like the commenter seemed obliged to do. People can think whatever they want about what I write – that’s one of the products of putting one’s work out there. But to respond with cruelty is a choice.

That’s where I’m at these days. Thanks for reading.