ghost of cohosts past

of those phrases that capture the question you've been asking this entire time, the one that drives the spring at the center of your being, that put words to the thing that begins before there are words, let's start here:

"is there a long tail to any of this?"

It's a line that gets discussed in possibly the best episode of a scripted podcast ever (though it certainly contributes to that), Solutions to Problems' "All About the Disruption of Narrative Causality". Solutions to Problems is, loosely, "hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy meets frasier", hosted by a time-loop-criminal lesbian and a complicated-gender alien. Excerpting it from her longer letter, Ellora asks this:

While "long tail" terminology might get used today in the heavy bullshit of marketing and investment circles, I certainly learned it in more pure-math and statistics settings, and I imagine you the reader might be the same way, and that's what we mean; the long tail, continuing outward along our x-axis.

But the meaning here is deeper and obvious all at once: in the pursuit of this thing, in the persistence of this folly (if you will), will there be anything there? I want to know before I begin, I want to know before I continue, I cannot know and still I must. If something is fun, delightful, meditative, good for you, is that enough? Do I want to keep doing it? Will this run out, burn up, flame out, die out, fall short? Or if I put my self into this thing, will it reward me and those I share it with by stretching forward alongside us along our x-axis of time? Should we keep heading in a direction and hope there's track laid for the train? Janet, our eternal nihilist, charismatically answers her letter with the following:

Two years ago I thought about this passage constantly; my le mot juste was "and anyway I think about this all the time" because all I knew to do was do exactly this. Maybe I've always been struggling against one endless ocean or another. With the love and care of those dearest to me I've learned to step away from that kantian edge, step away from any fear of whether the one way you've collapsed the universe with your own actions is an imperfect one. Pretty soon I may even learn the lesson of just talking to someone about the thing instead of only ever and always dancing around it!

Instead of that fear, it's delightful, it's meditative, it's the type of good food that words can be, to ask: is there a long tail to this? might there be?