Happy 17th birthday to Running After My Hat (with thanks to the visitors — some known, many anonymous, and quite a few with suspicious email addresses who really, really want my help in ways I’ll never be prepared to offer)!
My custom here over the years has been to open with a playlist you can listen to as you read through the balance of the post. Let’s try this one: the soundtrack to the 2019 miniseries (on the Hulu streaming service) of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. I wasn’t bowled over by the adaptation itself — it was okay, it did have some affecting moments, and I liked many of the performances, but as a whole I just found myself wanting, y’know, more. But the soundtrack: exceptional! The “official” soundtrack on Spotify, however, doesn’t include all the music, by all the same performers, which featured in the series as broadcast; this enterprising Spotify user did the hard work of pulling the thing together.
Also, it occurs to me now that finally catching the damn hat after 22 years would be a terrific blogging goal for me, eh?
Catch-22 has been a significant book in my life. Years ago, I wrote up a guest piece about it for a onetime blog about reading called, aptly, The Book Book… While the blog itself is shuttered, I’ve still got a copy of the text lying around; I should probably share it here, eventually. Eventually.
So, now: let’s talk about Running After My Hat as it is these days.
For starters, anyone who stops by here regularly knows not to expect anything other than a weekly whiskey river Fridays post: a sort of dialogue of quotations between that long-running blog (and its archive) and my own reading. If you get other stuff, I imagine, it shows up like a pixel-sized blip on the radar screen of your busy online life.
But anyone who actually reads those Friday posts on a regular basis, over time, may have noticed one thing about them: for some weeks now, I’ve been sampling only from the whiskey river archive, called whiskey river’s commonplace book — nothing from the main blog’s current offerings. Why is that? Because there have been no current offerings from whiskey river itself since December 4, 2024.
As I’ve said several times over the years — here and elsewhere — I know nothing of the whiskey river blogger(s): I have no names, no way of contacting them, and no idea if they might have simply decamped to another platform. I see hints now and then of their presence elsewhere, and of course I know of non-mysterious references to a “Whiskey River” without any certainty that it’s, well, my person(s). (There’s the Willie Nelson song, and at least one tavern chain, and the work of a wonderful professional photographer, and the gods know how many miscellaneous others. I do know how to use Google, y’know. Heh.) I once — four years ago — got a comment here from the blogger, which still counts as a primo highlight of my entire online life (now four decades old)… it felt like the touch of an Olympian finger.
I’m an adult, familiar with the vagaries of the online world; I know people can just drop out of sight without advance warning or after-the-fact explanation. I know there are — ever were — few truly unique blogs, and so I can always look to those others if I wish to strike up a similar conversation with one of them. (The whiskey river blogroll — called “the torrent” in its sidebar — and their blogrolls are a good starting point.)
My best guess about whiskey river‘s disappearance? The timing: one month after the calamitous 2024 US Presidential election. From what little I’ve been able to imagine about the persona(s) behind their blog, it’s pretty clear they must have been thunderstruck by the unconscionable stupidity (or naivete, if I’m inclined to charity) of a plurality of voters in that election. As was I; as were pretty much everyone in my first-hand experience.
But damn. I’m still heartbroken by the whiskey river blogger’s absence, and expect I will remain so for a long, long time.
In other RAMH news, such as it is…
I mentioned in last year’s anniversary post that I’d recently dipped into the Substack world: a “long-form” social-media sort of world. (We could pick nits and point out that, duh, that’s what blogging used to be, but I’ve always believed that Internet publishing platforms — like people — are allowed to call themselves whatever they want, and to ask others to use the same terms.)
Essentially, what I’ve got over there at the moment is an extension of the Running After My Hat “brand,” so to speak. (Others include a Tumblr account (more or less used for crossposting from here), a recently moribund Facebook page (more or less used for crossposting from Instagram), a Bluesky account (still trying to figure this out), and maybe one or two other things I’ve experimented with.)
So what’s up specifically with me on Substack? Mostly, I’ve got two series running at the moment while I figure out my “identity” there:
- #jesstorypix (“ambiguous microfictions in the service of strange photographs”): Each post consists of a photo I’ve taken at some time or another, and a little “microfiction” which the photo inspired. What’s the “micro-” prefix for? Pretty much, it just means a hundred words, maybe more, maybe less — and most of them are not even complete fictions, but simply invite the reader to fill in the gaps as they’d like. (Those gaps often occur at the end of the story, and are flagged with an ellipsis — as with this recent example.) All the #jesstorypix posts are publicly viewable — as far as I know, they don’t even require a Substack account.
- 23kpc: according to the capsule description at the main archive page, “Science fiction for the non-SF reader: detectives from Hollywood’s Golden Age, solving mysteries… and transplanted to a cruise ship carved from an asteroid to sail the galaxy.” Each weekly post in this series contains a chapter (sometimes more) from a book I’ve been fiddling with for a long time. I’ve actually posted a couple of things about 23kpc here in the past — one from ten years ago (!), and one from just this past December. I’m using this series primarily to get me to “The End,” but I’m also using it to experiment with Substack’s paid-subscriptions model: the first seven chapters (and all of the story, “Open and Shut,” which inspired the full-length story) — they’re all free to read, but for anything beyond that you’ve gotta subscribe. The subscriptions are dirt cheap, $5/month (i.e., $1+ per chapter), but so far I have induced only a couple of people to pay for it. (On the other hand, a couple dozen-plus kind folks do maintain free subscriptions. Plus I’m a crap marketer — some things never change.) If you’re reading this, and you’d like a free one-month subscription — free access to all of 23kpc, and whatever else I post there — just shoot me an email (runningaftermyhat at johnesimpson dot com) with the subject JES23kpc and I’ll set you up.
I hope to get up to other things on Substack eventually; it’s a heck of a lot easier to find new subscribers that way, free or paid, than it is to find new readers of the original RAMH. Or maybe I won’t, who knows?
In the meantime, as I say every year: thank you (whoever you are) for even intermittently — even once! — reading Running After My Hat!
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P.S. Sharp-eyed readers (which of course includes all of you) will notice that this post has been cleverly — okay, okay, deceptively — back-dated to make it seem to be “dated” as tradition dictates.
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