[Weekly Notice] #3 - To Be Something That Doesn't Exist

Why this man recommends a romance novel and why apps are ruining romance

These are the updates.

Since last time:

1. We celebrated 100 subscribers to this newsletter. Small to some but huge for me. I had a hard time launching this. Couldn’t quite nail down who I would write to or why they would read what I write. I promised myself I would publish regularly with no regard for metrics. Just have fun, Ez. But something special happened. 113 of you have joined me on this journey, so far. It’s not about the number for me but the relationship with you. I hope you know how much of a spark you’ve given me. Thank you.

2. Next month I’ll be moderating my first book event for Charis Books & More, celebrating the launch of the forthcoming Laundering Black Rage. In 2020, a year of global uprisings, it seemed that expressions of rage forced the nation to finally account for its racist history and nature, to finally make structural change. What happened? Essayist/Performer Too Black and Geographer Rasul A. Mowatt assert Black Rage as a threat to the flow of capital and the established order of things, which must therefore be managed by the process of laundering. It’s a virtual event. Visit Charis’ website to RSVP or learn more. Please join if you can.

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This made me tear up (just a lil’ bit).

Be realistic. Like me, you may have heard that in childhood from folks who may mean well, but don’t know what’s best for you. They’ve seen it all, but you see what’s not even there yet. As a former entrepreneur (starting companies like this one in The Athletic), and now, in my professional writing career, I know there is no real game plan for what I’m trying to do, who I’m trying to be. Because that thing, that person, does not yet exist. You follow your intuition. Take that leap of faith. Hope the magic catches you mid-air.

A Love Song for Ricki Wilde is a novel that captures 28 year old Ricki Wilde’s jump from her family funeral home business and her bourgeois Buckhead Atlanta lifestyle to the hard knocks of starting a premium floral business on a Harlem side street in a leap year. But this isn’t just a journey of Ricki showing her father — who named her Richard Wilde, Jr. — that she is capable of achieving business success on her own terms. This is a romance. Ricki Wilde is about finding love. And by that, I mean it’s about possibility.

I don’t know much about romance. In fact, the only other romance novel I’ve read intentionally is Tia Williams' Seven Days in June. I loved that book so much that last year in my Proust Questionnaire I said it was a book that changed my mind. Ricki Wilde is confirmation of that about face. I never expected to care about romance. Like, why do I need to traverse a whole book to, in the end, find the main characters living Happily Ever After™️ as promised. It’s not realistic, I said. But I was wrong. I had to suspend disbelief to see it. Ricki Wilde is funny, surprising, wise, sexy (that piano scene 🥵), and up on the latest trends. It’s so layered. We get to imagine historic Harlem, its haunts and heroes. We get to see the displacement and erasure of Harlem’s history, today.

We need to see Ricki say yes to adventure in the face of self-doubt, anxiety, and loneliness. We need to see her wrestle with insecurities and alienation from family while still trying to make sense of her dreams. That there are customers out there who will see how her maximalist floral designs can show us more than beauty but right relationship with the earth. That a lover will accept her as she really is so that we may see ourselves worthy of love and acceptance, from ourselves first, then others. Our best stories can show us our best selves when we do what we know to be right and true. Tia Williams is a master storyteller. I recommend anything with her name on it.

A Love Song for Ricki Wilde Bookshop

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This made me yawn.

Reesa Teesa admitted that she was invested in believing something that never seemed quite right. “If you’re going to tell this story, you’re gonna have to admit that you fucked up,” she tells The Cut (link) in a delicate recap of Reesa’s 51 part Tik Tok series on the rise and fall of her marriage to a pathological liar. When I heard Reesa Tessa’s story I was reminded of The Tinder Swindler (Netflix), which, after watching, I shared with a friend that I felt bad but not too bad for some of the victims. The con man gave them the fantasy they wanted — red flags be damned. Some of them didn’t even seem to like the guy as a person, they just wanted a shot at “living the dream.” My friend told me she understood where I was coming from, but she admonished me to not discount what any of us are willing to do to not be alone. In fact, Reesa Teesa says she shared her story in hopes that other women won’t ignore “warning signs in their desperation for a fairy-tale romance.”

Like the Tinder victims, Reesa met her ex-husband on a dating app or, more aptly, a dating trap. We all know these things are a drag. They prey on loneliness on devices that hasten the decay of social life. They force whole humans into little check boxes — swiping left and right, hoping for love, or at least a little action.

Love, Guaranteed (Netflix) is about a man who matches with a thousand women on an app that guarantees love but doesn’t actually deliver. The acting is not great, the writing is what it is. This movie isn’t good for much more than what

Kyle Chayka

calls ambient tv, though it does poke fun at the dating apps for promising to “solve the loneliness problem” or for caring about “profits more than the wellbeing of subscribers.” I’m reviewing it here because I watched it, but I didn’t love it so I can’t recommend it. I do recommend this post by book blogger

Brittany Bell

who shares three books for Reesa and anyone healing from raggedy ass app encounters.

Three Books I Would Recommend to Reesa Teesa

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This is made me shake my head.

Would you want to know if the people behind those raggedy ass app encounters used generative AI to make themselves seem less raggedy up front? Would you find it useful for a dating app’s AI to write your profile, sort through potential matches, and handle the awkward intro so that you can decide if you want to go on a date?

GenAI and dating apps go together now, hand in hand. How far will they go? How long will it last? In a recent episode of Decoder with Nilay Patel, Verge reporter Emilia David discusses how technology is affecting human relationships and how people are falling in love with AI chatbots. Yes, you read right.

If you want to know more about the future of dating and personal interactions, you should definitely check out this episode.

“Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots” Apple Podcasts | The Verge

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This made me smarter.

F.D. Signifier is one of my favorite video essayistsi on YouTube. He recently published a piece on how social media companies are also profiting off our loneliness, albeit in a particular way. In his latest in his series on the manosphere, F.D. and other anti-manosphere creators elucidate the financial value of rage bait and how social media companies depend on manosphere creators to drive engagement and keep all of us glued to the apps. These companies have hacked our nervous systems.

But the thing that makes F.D. special, and the thing that makes this video worth watching, is how he is able to find the humanity in the toxicity. In this video essay, F.D. shares his (un)scientific research and anecdotes on how the manosphere offers a false promise of male/masculine normativity to vulnerable men, most of whom could never achieve the ideas they consume. They’re trying “to be something that doesn’t exist.”Our society tends to hate the idea of a “weak man,” so we raise boys to measure up to the image of frauds like Andrew Tate. F.D. shares the need for us to have compassion for these victims without letting them off the hook for any harm they’ve perpetrated. If we can say Reesa was conned by a man who used her desire for a better life against her, we can also say that this same dynamic is at play with the boys and young men who are ensnared by the manosphere.

I love that he ended the video with a dose of reality — we learn how to relate one another by trying (and failing) to relate to one another. And not treating potential partners as medals to be won at the end of a mission. There’s no form of self-help content (manosphere or otherwise) that can shield us from the rejection that is necessary for us to become well-adjusted humans. Real human relationships are rooted in vulnerability. If Ricki Wilde is right, if our vibe is to attract our tribe then we must be true. To ourselves first, then to others.

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This is the end.

I say adieu with haiku.

The President is Powerless 

There's no magic wand
to end the war, but his
veto keeps it going.

Haiku ©️ 2024 Ezra McCoy

I hope the rest of the week is good to ya.

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