Once More Into the Ebyss

Falling off the wagon after 10 years of interweb abstinence...

In 2015, I ghosted the Internet like a bad date. After twenty extremely online years riding a dopamine roller coaster of likes, pageviews, and pings, I’d had enough. I was twitchy and irritable — imploding at work and sniping at people I cared about. Realizing that my screen-based lifestyle wasn’t doing me any favors in the mental health department, I nuked my social media accounts, disabled all phone notifications, pulled the plug on my various web projects, and disappeared. A digital suicide note — minus the note.

For years I had run a network of acerbic humor and political parody websites. At their peak, my little sites reached millions of readers per month, sold mountains of silly swag, and racked up enough awards and press coverage to land me some fancy-schmancy big media gigs in New York City and Los Angeles. But by 2015, with two small kids at home and a raging creative hangover, I seriously regretted having poured oceans of energy into producing content that effectively went *poof* minutes after being released.

So I turned offline. I embraced my life as a Southern California transplant: taco stands, succulents, TV pitches, and 1000+ miles a year of trail running in the Hollywood hills. I also wrote a book about ghosting the Internet — which I failed to sell, in part because I’d rashly demolished the very self-promotional platform publishers now expect authors to bring with them.

Mind you, I hardly became a born-again Luddite. I kept using utilities like email, Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify — which annually tells me I’m in its top 2% of users. (Rawk!) But I swore off giving to the Internet. No more creating and posting web content. No more desperately chasing the cheap, ephemeral thrill of micro-notoriety which accompanies a fleeting surge of likes. Just pure digital selfishness: hoovering up what's useful, but contributing nothing to the toxic e-slurry I’d started calling “Humanity’s Psychic Bile Spittoon™.”

But fast-forward ten years and… I guess I’ve missed this. Not the noise, not the rage-bait, not the performative discord — but the web as a platform for making things, sharing things, saying things. For creative hacks and semi-professional dilettantes like me, the Interweb remains among the least-terrible stages out there. And though I’m still a hopelessly immature man-child, I’m also not getting any younger, so I figure I’d better export a few more dumb ideas to PDF before the dementia kicks into high gear.

And so… this is EPOSTASY. Get it? Electronic apostasy! Clever, right? OK, maybe not. But it’ll do.

Why Substack? Because in surveying the sprawling cesspool that is ‘Net 2025, Substack comes closest to capturing the ethos of what I adored about the early web – that mishmash of janky blogs and corny Geocities shrines, when audiences were much smaller – but also much smarter, with attention spans 100x longer than today’s legions of TikTok tweakers.

I won’t promise topical consistency. If there’s any throughline, it’ll probably be digital dysfunction and its cultural fallout. But I’m too ADHD to stay on a single beat. So expect a bubbling stew of barbecued sacred cows, heterodox satirical shivings, auto-exorcisms, and ooooh yeah maybe a little gardening! I’ll probably even dust off some old material, because that’s what pathetic middle-aged people do after we’ve peaked.

Lastly, I won’t commit to a publishing schedule, either. I still have some PTSD from all those years frantically shoveling hyper-timely #content into the ravenous, gaping maw of what I came to see as the ebyss. I’ll post when I feel like it, and won’t hesitate to walk away again if (when) the toxicity creeps back in.

But for now, I’m here. Once more into the ebyss!

If you’re curious to see where this goes, you can subscribe, comment, forward, or blah-blah-whatever. (That sound? My soul exiting stage left.)

Until next time…