Welcome to Oddly Enough

Occasional musings and a-musings about the oddities of life

If you’re receiving this newsletter, it’s because you foolishly signed up for it at some point. Thank you, brave soul.

Well, Howdy, Y’all!

How are you? Are you drinking coffee? I’m drinking coffee. Can you tell? I am typing very, very fast. Man oh man. If we’ve never met, hi, I’m Libba Bray. If we have met, I’m still Libba Bray. I’m an author of books, essays, short stories, and, currently, a musical or two. Nice to meet you in this strange, disembodied way.

So, Substack. Yeah. Wow. Feels like a long time since I’ve done anything like this. Is it like riding a bike? I hope not. I sucked at that. (For the record, Marcy, some things are not “just, like, natural.”) Back in the Ice Age of the Internet there was a thing called LiveJournal. It was a place where we blogged. (Still a terrible word, by the way; sounds like some kind of vomiting—“Oh God, I just blogged everywhere!”) It was a mostly fun hangout space where we could talk about whatever topics were on our minds in semi-essay form. Conversations ensued. Communities formed. I met a whole bunch of lovely people on good old LiveJournal.

Alas, blogging died. (Was it the vomit association?) And in its wake came social media. We were running hard and fast, our attention spans shortened to thirty-five characters or less. Now we were Tweeting, being pithy and political, occasionally cynical and snide. And eventually, in our haste, we were sometimes misinformed, hurtful, cruel. It was like living inside a riot all the time. So we Insta’d ourselves into hazy-filtered glory beside windswept beaches, pink walls, and plates of food that resembled modern art installations. We Tikked. We Tokked. We Stitched and Stoked. We became an endless scroll of Is This The Way We Are Supposed to Do Life Now?

World’s judgiest dog

I looked at my dog. “Wendell,” I said, because that’s his name and it would be weird to call him, say, Titus Andronicus. “Wendell, my friend, this all makes me feel weird. Not hamsters-doing-Shakespeare weird, which would be my preferred way to see Shakespeare, but itchy weird. Is this person that I am on social media the real me or is this a hollow approximation of me? Are we all engaged in some unspoken piece of performance art minus the puppets? Couldn’t I just have a grilled cheese instead?” I pondered that a lot and posted less because of the said pondering. Also, because warm cheese makes me sleepy. The truth is, all of it made my brain feel fractured. It fucked up my creative flow. It was chum on the water for the sharks of my self-loathing: Whoa! Look at that! So-and-so has started a furniture line based on their bestselling books and I can’t even figure out how to put together a Billy bookcase. I suuuuck. Worst of all, it made me feel disconnected and lonely and sure that there was a dance called success going on and, just like that time I auditioned for Six Flags as a teenager—that story TK—I didn’t know the choreography. (During this musing, Wendell simply looked at me with what I call his Resting Ennui Face. That dog would not be out of place in a French New Wave film. If only he could smoke.) I missed the conversations of my LiveJournal days. I missed sending these little letters from my life to others, hearing about their lives in return, about the things that connect us as humans. I missed the conversations.

And so here we are. This is my attempt to carve out that space again. The hope is to send a letter every week or two with my current thoughts, questions, process. Maybe an occasional video. Songs. Dinosaur toys dressed in doll clothes. Advice, such as it is. (Caveat: Do not ask about math or geography.) Questions answered. (Again: no math.) Plus an invitation to share with you some of my works-in-progress/behind-the-scenes info/artistic experimentation that could possibly go very, very wrong. Who knows? Could be fun!

I’d love to have y’all take this ride with me. If you’re in, you can hit the subscribe button. I’ll keep the coffee pot warm. Till next time.

Xo, Libba

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