On Saturday August 19, while my spouse and I were paying a visit to the renewed AKG Art Gallery in Buffalo, a thief broke into our building and made off with my bicycle. The well-equipped thief broke into our building’s front entrance using a pry bar, and then used a heavy-duty bolt cutter to cut the rack my bicycle was attached to, taking care to watch for any activity in the garage by hiding in an adjacent stairwell. He spent nearly an hour in the building in total.

This was the second time my bicycle was stolen. This time, I thought I had a better lock. The old spot I had was hidden from the cameras and out of view of most people in the garage — the new spot was in a more prominent location.

My Brodie touring bicycle was quite distinguishable, with dual-sided pedals (flat on one side, clipless on the other), additional handlebar-mounted brake pedals, fenders and a rear rack, Marathon tires, reflective tape on the forks and seat stays, and the dealer’s original decal on the frame. When I bought it from Bateman’s Bicycle Company in March 2015, I had the extra brake pedals installed as I was unused to having a bike with drop bars, and I wanted a more upright position when riding on city streets.

It took over a week before I discovered the bike missing as I had been really busy in August. When I discovered the theft, I informed the building management, and was able to get still photos and video of the thief. He was dressed in a black hoodie, with a black baseball cap and a surgical mask covering part of his face. His backpack had several tools, so he came in with a specific purpose. He did not cut the Kryptonite lock; instead he cut the rack and left with the lock still attached to the frame.

I reported the theft to Toronto Police, firstly by going on their website, as I had registered my bicycle. (The last time I had a bicycle stolen, the police actually recovered the frame, which I later donated to Bike Sauce.) I saved a service receipt with the bicycle’s make, model, and serial number, and had photos to provide. However, since it involved a break-and-enter, I learned that I actually had to call the police and make a verbal report. After calling, I learned that I had to wait for an officer to arrive so I could give him a narrative. Our building maintenance manager expected it to take a few days; the officer arrived within a few hours, which impressed me. I posted the still photos to social media, including the Cycling in Toronto Facebook group, with the hope that someone might know something.

I was able to provide a detailed timeline to the police based on the security videos, and provided still photos. A week later, a different police officer called me as he wasn’t able to meet the manager to review the videos; I was able to make a copy and dropped off a USB stick to 51 Division the next day. That was the extent of communications from Toronto Police.

On Monday, September 18, I got a Facebook message from a friend of a friend telling me they found a Facebook Marketplace listing with a bike that matched my bike’s description. It looked like a match, with the extra brake pedals, the red and white tape, the dual pedals, and the Bateman’s dealer sticker. Missing were the fenders and water bottle cage, and cheap new lights were added, replacing the bare mounts.

I had not thought of looking at Facebook Marketplace, but it appears to be a popular place to sell stolen goods. After my spouse searched Kijiji, there was a similar listing. But seeing one’s prized procession taken, and then put up for sale elsewhere felt like it added insult to injury. We had checked these sites before, with no matches.

I brought this to the police’s attention, hoping for at least advice. I emailed the officer assigned to the case, and heard nothing. I went down to 51 Division again with printed screenshots. I heard nothing.

Back on the Cycling in Toronto Facebook Group, members suggested posting to another FB group, called Stolen Bikes – Toronto. After my membership was approved, I posted about the theft, and a member there quickly messaged me saying that they had just acquired the bike. I could meet him the next day, and I could get it from him. The person who purchased the bike said he followed the listing, feeling especially suspicious. Originally, it was listed for $400, but the person I met was able to get it for $150.

I was so happy to get the bike back, after three weeks of anxiety, especially when I learned of the sale listing. I was worried I wouldn’t see it again, and that an unsuspecting or predatorial buyer would pick it up.

Though I am not out a bike anymore, I will still need new locks and a safe place to store it. I will probably get new fenders when I take it in for an inspection. Until then, my bicycle is safe in our apartment. Luckily, our building allows bikes in the elevators and hallways.

Having distinguishable characteristics helped to identify the bike when I shared the theft on social media; keeping a record of the make, model and serial number also helped. I also choose to secure the wheels with custom locks, which kept the bike intact. Finally, the cycling groups on Facebook proved to be an invaluable resourse for getting people to watch out, and eventually, getting the bike back. I am grateful for the people who kept an eye out and especially to the person who got it back in my possession.

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. of the Toronto Blue Jays takes the field at the 34-year-old Rogers Centre. Once a showpiece of new stadium technology, the facility once known as SkyDome is now among the oldest in the league.

In the olden days, the popular crowd were devouring Pamela, and watching Marianne Dashwood getting teary over a sonnet (sense before sensibility)—the beginning of what became known as the “sentimental” novel, especially popular for and by among females in the 18th and 19th centuries, though traceable to 17th century poets.

T.S. Eliot argued that 16th and 17th century poets differed in that the latter were defined by a “dissociation of sensibility,” in the manner that their predecessors simply totted down the smells and sights of a given moment while “the (newer) poets revolted against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt by fits, unbalanced; they reflected.” They were “engaged in the task of trying to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling.”

In other words, they set out to write big feelings using ~technique~.

This was the beginning of sentimentalism, which proved very popular with audiences. In 2014, Pelagia Horgan reported a snippet of Richard Darnton’s accounting of the public response to the 1748 novel Clarissa:

“I verily believe I have shed a pint of tears,” one of Samuel Richardson’s admirers, Lady Bradshaigh, wrote to him.

The tears were a form of praise. The femaleness of response, though, became a negative.

As paraphrased in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Jane Tompkins wrote in the 1980s that that “nineteenth century American sentimental novels were initially received positively but later devalued because of masculinist expectations.”

In the non-dialectical world, audiences were reading the moment where Beth departs Little Women, too good for this lousy world, distracted by the need to swallow their own tonsils, while critics argued that the domestic nature of the novel was limiting for women (Kate Beaird Meyers pushed back on this notion in the 1980s; as a realist novel that gave us Jo March, I’m sure you agree with her that it did not “glorify domesticity” nor traffic in unearned cries).

The challenge for authors going forward was to attempt to thread the needle of sentimentalism while retaining the heft of Quality.

As T.S. Eliot wrote of death, “I see the eyes but not the tears / This is my affliction.” Agh!

From time to time after that, books could be counted on to occasionally draw out a tear (Goodnight Mister Tom, Bridge to Terabithia, White Fang, Where the Red Fern Grows, Marley and Me), and were not always a female affair—why else the chonking up of bestseller lists with sports biographies that routinely bring men to tears?

We had Crying John Boehner keeping things flowing in the Senate chamber in the mid-2010s when things turned much more upsetting with two major publishing events: The 2014 publication of John Green’s sicklit-romance-nasal-cannulae bestseller The Fault in Our Stars, and the 2015 arrival of Hanya Hanigahara’s A Little Life, the cover of which looks basically like this:

It was a novel that subjected its hero, Jude, to nearly unimaginable abuse that was ongoing at the point where I gave up, two-thirds of the way through.

The book ushered in a new era of posting almost exclusively female cry faces on social media, captured in the 2015 Thought Catalog article, “Why Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life Makes Us Weep.” In this cultural touchstone, Chris Lavergne wrote that “People speak of having panic attacks while reading it, of crying uncontrollably, and of being left physically exhausted by the plot’s machinations.”

From there, things rolled steadily into the realm of the trauma plot—a kind of anti-intellectual emotional porn pointed at release—among which I count Charlotte McConaughy’s abysmal Once There Were Wolves, which made others cry but gave me emotional hives.

That evolved into BookTok, where the “girl crying while reading book” category currently has almost 10 million views—a modern-day descendent of Lady Bradshaigh.

Books that will make you cry are frequently recommended by celebrity book clubs like those run by Reese Witherspoon and Oprah, female tastemakers for a publishing audience that skews female (especially for fiction) and isn’t afraid to cry. There has been an accompanying push for “openness” around “mental health” that arguably does something different than John Milton’s poetry in Eliot’s critical appreciation—crying with or without the sublime.

A 2021 New York Times article “How Crying on TikTok Sells Books” reported that “many Barnes & Noble locations around the United States have set up BookTok tables displaying titles like “They Both Die at the End.” The crying, for the merchanizers, is the point.

I am not a trend forecaster, but I’m willing to bet that a table of “Why Did You Cry More Over the Dog In This Book Than Over Your Own Grandparents Dying?” titles would sell like hotcakes.

This led a splinter faction to ask on Reddit, “do people actually cry when reading books?“: “I mean, it didn’t actually happen, so what is there to be sad about?” wrote the poster of the concept of fiction moving its consumers. The replies can be summed up with the ^above meme, but are really as subjective as those of 18th century audiences regarding whether the crying is earned or frivolous.

Which brings us to today. Crying Clubs, originating in Japan, are on the rise, along with YouTube tutorials on how to cry. Perhaps it is the new ASMR! Men, I note, are learning how to cry. Can I suggest they put Pamela next on their list?

If you think you see me crying while reading, know that I’ve been cutting onions. I’m making a lasgna, for one.

Do you even cry, bro?

One way we can carve out meaning for our lives is through the rituals we choose to make a part of our lives. Rituals are ways to inject care, calm, connection and joy into our lives. Their power should not be discounted, despite the pressure of modern life to do so. 

What is a ritual? Simply put, rituals are sequences of intentional action that reflect a value we hold. They are moments of meaning we can create that become part of the story of who we are.

It is easy to conflate rituals with habits, or perhaps get lost in the religious, mystical or spiritual connotations of the word, but it is not about smoky mysticism (unless that’s your thing, of course) but there are clear differences between rituals and habits. 

Ritual

• Intentional and mindful
• Moments to celebrate and treasure
• More than just one thing: a sequence of combined activities
• Healing, expanding, enriching
• Has an emotional, mental or social element 
• Underinvested in by many

Habit

• Automatic and unconscious
• Ways of managing daily life, focussing on reducing complexity
• Tend to be centred on one thing (often a task) 
• More functional than emotional, mental or social
• Co-opted by the grind culture set 

I do not want to badmouth habits too much, as they can be important and valuable building blocks in our lives. I’ve found the idea of the habit useful in living with anxiety. Yet habits are, in popular discourse, rather overexposed. This preoccupation with habits comes at the expense of attention to rituals. Rituals by their nature require more conscious attention and care, which is an important response to the velocity of life which can sometimes beguile us into being completely automatic and even mechanical in our approach to living. 

Rituals, then, have the power to be quietly transformative in our lives—they allow us to define and then act upon specific ideas of how we want our lives to be. I don’t want to be defined by a habit—making my bed in the morning or doing laundry on Thursdays—but I wouldn’t mind being defined by some of my rituals. 

Ever since the pandemic lockdown, time has felt increasingly formless for me. One day elides into the next and the next and the next and before I fully know it another year has passed.¹ This formlessness leaves me feeling unmoored and adrift. Rituals are a powerful way of responding to this formlessness. Every time I perform one of my rituals I feel grounded and connected again—with myself, with time, and increasingly with a sense of awe that I had forgotten was missing from my life. Rituals reconnect and remind us that which is special in our lives. 

Over the past year I have been consciously developing meaningful rituals in my life. I have written about one such ritual before: my skin care approach. This is such a meaningful ritual because it helps me connect with my body and not just continue to act like my mind and body are separate, or that I have the same relationship to my body that Shinji has to his evangelion.    

Another important ritual is making coffee each morning, which is often the first thing I do each morning after walking and feeding Kage, the blackhole masquerading as a greyhound. 

Making coffee is a lovely ritual. And I like it as an example because it shows that rituals do not necessarily have to be grand or elaborate, but can be simple and done in a matter of minutes. Making coffee anchors me in my day, and is a sensory experience that reconnects me with my body. It also allows me to focus my oft-churning mind on doing one thing and doing one thing well. That it requires something of me—care and attention—is what makes it such a valuable ritual. After all, it is impossible to make good coffee if one is distracted or preoccupied by the minutiae of daily life.

Starting to add rituals to your life is not too difficult or something that should be put off to the vague wastelands of someday.² Think about the things that bring you joy and are special moments that you wish to cultivate. Then decide to treat them as a ritual, something you will do mindfully and deliberately with a degree of regularity. Commit to doing any new ritual with intentionality and reverence.

Not all of these attempts will lead to a lifelong ritual and that is quite fine. As with so many things, we should consciously detach ourselves from this preoccupation with reaching some sort of “finished” or “after” state where we no longer need to change, grow, learn or practice. We should practise finding comfort being in a constant process of becoming. 

Modern life is often tediously focussed on things that are ultimately not the stuff that we find important and rewarding, especially when viewed from a perspective that acknowledges how short life is. By developing meaningful rituals we can seize control of our lives in a way that is quite splendid and quite wonderful.  

The post Of Rituals first appeared on Thinkings Space.

Notes

If you read any of the business, publishing or entertainment press you’ll see stories about hard times in streaming world. This means Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Max, Hulu et al. This is undoubtedly true. You’ve likely seen this in the rising prices you pay and the declining offerings your subscription gets you. I don’t write to dispute any of this. But it’s nothing new under the sun. It is more or less exactly what we’ve seen in the digital new industry. The same pattern.

Entrants raise large sums of money (or use cash on hand from other business lines) and then spend substantially more than your subscription merits. They lose money in order to build market share. At some point the industry becomes mature and then they have to convert the business to one that can sustain itself and make a profit. That means substantial retrenchment. Inevitably that means spending less on the product and charging you more.

Another way of looking at this is that the product as you knew it was never viable. You were benefiting from the excess spending that was aimed at building market share. Now the market is saturated. So that era of great stuff for relatively little money is over. At a basic level what many of us enjoyed as a Golden Age of TV was really this period of excess spending. It was based on a drive for market share, funding lots of great shows with investments aimed at building market share.

This is no great insight. Everyone who knows the internal workings of the industry either from the inside or even from a distance knows this. I’m focused on this broader story, this pattern, which very little of the media or industry press seems to do. It’s the same pattern that allowed us all to read a lot of costly-to-produce journalism from Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, Mic, Vice and a bunch of other new media behemoths, all of which have now either shuttered or radically retrenched.

You might be saying that this isn’t really any different from any industry in a capitalist economy. There’s an inevitable shakeout as the industry matures. That’s true too. But it’s not identical. There are particular features to how it affects creative industries when creative industries have either tech adjacent VC money or are actually in the hands of larger tech enterprises: Amazon, Apple, etc. They tend to view market share through the path dependence prism which is central to the tech economy. Nothing is forever, even in tech. But if you the path dependence race as Google did with search, Microsoft did with Windows or Stripe did with payments processing you really do own everything, at least for a pretty long time. But media or creative work generally doesn’t really work like that. So the shakeouts, the illusion of viable operations that never were is more severe.