If You Love Someone. . .Send Them Your Email

Love is a funny thing.  Romantic love is quirky and unpredictable, family love is hit or miss, love of a sports team is full of heartache.  But love of a writer. . .now that is something special.  

The older I’ve gotten, the firmer my conviction has held that we “should never meet our heroes.”  The burps, farts, dishevelment - and worse - of the greatest entertainers, thinkers, and artists have been painstakingly airbrushed from view by publicists, instagram filters, and the artists’ own pathological agoraphobia.  

So our love for them can be, well, pure.  We don’t know any better, and we don’t NEED to know any better.  From behind the page (or screen) we can feel them staring into our own minds, reading our thoughts or inserting their own in a perfectly curated  4th wall medium that allows our naive (and stunningly incorrect) fantasy of their invulnerability to remain intact for as long as they decide not to go on the Jimmy Kimmel Show.  

And this is a delight we shouldn’t take, well, lightly.  

I have spent the past decade rejiggering my own artistic sensibilities to allow for the most corner-staring introverted artists to yet find a version of the limelight so that the rest of us might share in their brilliance.  Legal crap, marketing crap, business management crap. . .these are all the things that artists - and writers - got into writing and arting to avoid doing.  

And yet, there they remain, the Rubicon of Success, which each of us must traverse in the journey to conquer our own shining city of the public imagination.  

And in our way stand, like a withered and turgid Pompey, the latter day sinners of Facebook Algorithms, Termses of Services, Shadow Banning and changing priorities for the mega hosts, who, on one hand have made our rise to visibility (if not outright prominence) more feasible than ever in history, and on the other hand, taketh it away like a speck of lint on the waistcoat of internet behemoths, who might casually brush us aside without a second thought.  

The last respite, then for the creator to assure the independence that was the promise of the internet lo so many years ago, is to own his own data, to shed the skin of his apparent overlords and assume the helm of his own ship.  

And in reality, there’s not much data to own.  We have the words and MP3s backed up on our laptops.  We can export engagement reports from the backend of our mega platforms, at least for the time being.

But the information we can’t get is the thing we value most - not just financially, but emotionally:

You.  

We love you with all our angst-ridden hearts, and we don’t even know your name.  

Like the evil stepmother in the fairy tales, the tech giants who have given our voice amplification, have held back the one thing that fills our hearts: a direct connection with you, our reader/listener/viewer/gawker/whatever.

(And yes, I would be lying if I didn’t say that your names fill our wallets too.  All those pennies add up quickly, and sometimes I can barely lift mine.  But we’ll get to that in a moment. . .)

Because it really is true.  We WANT that connection with you (even when you are mean to us!).  We want to know who you are, where you come from, what you are like, and what on God’s green earth moved you to choose OUR perennially imperfect offerings to spend the finite moments of your life engaging with.  We really do.  

But until we know who you are, we can’t.  And in a moment’s notice, the glass chamber that we see you through on Face/Twit/Med/Pin/Tube can be taken away from us forever and we are left alone with our thoughts and no one to hear them, not even those who really, really wanted to, like you.  

This is devastating for an artist, many of whom can barely dress themselves, if they can manage to get out of bed in the morning at all.  

They are emotionally frail, which gives them their unfiltered access to the invisible supermind whence comes all great creation.  But after briefly glimpsing the face of acceptance, appreciation, or even adoration, looking gauzy-eyed at them through the looking glass of social media, to have that redemption of their long suffering and turmoil, after being alone with their mad thoughts all those years - to have that ripped away by a glitch, an algo change, or a an arbitrary deplatforming is simply shattering.   LIke a fine crystal alembic that would have shattered anyway had you simply dropped it on a table, yet nonetheless being mercilessly smashed to bits by a pride of jackhammers and turned over into frozen cement. . .such is the crushing experience to the soul of the artist, and that devastation may be something they will never, ever recover from.  Seriously.  

But yes, there is the financial side too.  Those of you who pay them (and hopefully I’m talking to you!) for anything, merch, subscriptions, books, courses. . .if they lose you, they don’t just lose the spirit, they lose the body as well.  And frail though that may be, they still need the corpus to lug around their minds and quills long enough to transcribe the words of the gods for your considered consumption.  

So. . .   If you love someone, give them your email address.

It is the faintest lifeline to help someone recover from the real risk of total creative annihilation, and with a little skill, it can be parlayed into a resurrection or even a brave and prophylactic transition to independence pre-disaster.  

Did you know you can upload email addresses into social media platforms to help build an audience?  The value of that is immeasurable. . .not just because we can find you again after a forced separation, like an Elizabethan tale that wasn’t, but we can find others like you through the mystery and witchcraft of their massive algorithmic power.  

And yes, we can email you too, to let you know how we’re doing and to share our thoughts, our feelings with you mano a mano, intimately, personally, and with the prison glass finally removed so we can at last see each other eye to eye.

It is a liberation, both for us and for you.  

Please don’t deny us that.  

And please don’t let us deny you that speck of genius you have found in us that moves, affronts, or comforts you.  We owe it to each other.  

So please. . .pretty please, if you see us asking for your email address - heck, even if we forget to ask! - give it to us.  You are the brick in the nascent fortress that protects our hearts and, yes, our livelihoods, from the slings of misfortune that hit our gentle souls harder than most.  It is the smallest gift and the unlikeliest token of love you can offer someone who has given you a glimpse into the creative imagination, the hazy beauty beyond what we ourselves can perceive, and lent a moment’s sparkle to your life from which even your favorite mundane pleasures fall short.  

Give with your heart, give with your wallet, but if you truly love us the way we love you. . .give us your email.  

PS - See?  I almost forgot to ask!  If you made it this far, let’s make it official: add your address below, and let the closest thing to a love that lasts forever begin. . .