In the New Normal, we need to strip ourselves of notions of individual importance. Something new is arising that has neither interest in nor pity for souls trapped in twentieth-century solipsism. Non-linear stories? Multiple endings? No loading times? It’s called life on earth. Life need not be a story, but it does need to be an adventure.
- Douglas Coupland, “Player One: What is to Become of Us”
I read somewhere that it’s important for stories to have a journalistic hook – a reason why you’re reading. My hook is schizophrenia. I’m a writer – that is, when I’m not a musician, or a critic, or some other kind of person who produces work. “Life on Earth” is an effort to corral the numerous spaces on the Web I’ve been calling home. I can’t decide on being any one thing, so this is everything, one after the other.
So it’s not much of a hook. You’re reading because you know me, maybe, or heard I had a few decent opinions about movies. That’s fine. There are a million websites like this, a plethora of young white guys blurting out declarations about the way they experience middle-class North America. One of the reasons why I don’t pretend to be any one thing is because there are already hundreds, thousands of people who can do everything better than I can.
But I do everything anyway. What else is there to do? I’m alive, and if lives have ceased being stories in the classic sense of the term, perhaps it’s better to think of this site as a collection of beginnings, middles, and endings. My mission is to observe, to create, to catalogue, and hopefully to connect.
