How to Compost a Marriage

Plus a look back at the pre-blog past of posting.

Author

Chris Mohney
April 15, 2025

This week: monthly layer of browns, wilting paperwhite flowers, grapes, coffee grounds, strawberry tops, eggshells, banana peels, avocado peels, raspberries, cucumber ends.

From Reddit’s r/composting, a post entitled “Effort and results” on the common forum topic of marital disagreement over the composting lifestyle:

Sorry if this is sort of a long post, but the TL;DR is that I’m struggling with the diminishing returns on effort and results when composting.

My wife and I have gotten very into composting. It’s probably saved our marriage after a little series of affairs after a highly disappointing wedding night (not going to point fingers at anyone for anything. It’s very renewing and we like saving and growing. She’s maybe gotten into it more than me, buying a small digger (I’m not a machine person) and making some large holes that she’s experimented with in-ground composting of large game animals. It’s apparently been going great as she’s very excited about the success and has loved showing them to me.

That said, we have some disagreements about technique. I’m a bit more of a “throw it all in and let time sort it out” while she wants it extremely broken down and well mixed. She’s vigilant about ensuring animals can’t get in, while I don’t see the big deal if an animal gets a few scraps: isn’t digestion helping with the breakdown?

The thing that concerns me is that in the larger walk-in mixer she’s had me go in to break apart chunks, but she’s been mixing sharp bits of iron to help with the automated breaking. The whole thing just seems redundant and I’m unsure of the impact of high iron levels (she said it’s fine because they rust away and are pure iron).

I guess what I’m wondering is if there’s some argument for effort-reward here. We’re not running a commercial business here, so I just don’t see why she wants to be able to break down a deer within two weeks or why it has to be “hot enough to break down DNA”. She says it’s to avoid diseases but that seems excessive. She’s suggested that maybe I’m just lazy and don’t work hard on anything in my professional, personal, or hobby life. But then she’s always buying me beer and benzodiazepines to relax and doesn’t seem to care at all about that contaminating my urine and therefore the compost. It’s all just so inconsistent.

But to end on a lighter note, she got a TON of moving boxes, so we are going to be set on browns for a while.

The replies are worth a look, trending about half earnest “concerned for u” warnings and half continuances of the metafiction. The OP doesn’t break character when replying either. Online is still good for something, occasionally.

Whatever happened to online, anyway? Why is it no fun anymore, mostly, except for niche forum foolishness and disposable thread antics?

For not quite two years, 1998-1999, my friend Scott Hollifield and I published an Online Web Magazine called Wordgun. (Technically it started out as Xora, and I’m still kicking myself for selling a precious four-letter dot-com domain for a couple hundred bucks when we changed the name.) I came across the Wordgun archives when cleaning out the archival Dropbox, and there’s some painful stuff in there—what we moderns would now call “cringe.” And it was monthly! A monthly internet magazine blog. Thus we managed to be both way ahead of and substantially behind the curve.

We ran a bunch of columns and blogs from ourselves and various friends, which was surprisingly easy to solicit since I had just graduated from an MFA program and had a whole stable of barely employed writer friends. It helped that Scott, an actual designer, was willing to put in the sweat to actually make it look decent, for the time. This was before I moved to New York for actual media jobs and had the spirit crushed out of my soul for the next two decades in the actual media business, so I still had the faith and moxy to execute on something this harebrained.

While much of Wordgun would be embarassing today, I still retroactively admire our naive optimistic cynicism and low-resolution chutzpah, generationally speaking. The sad but of course inevitable consequence of the professionalization of internet publishing is that it became solid, touchable, regular, boxed up and sanded down. It’s been a Real Thing so long I mostly forget what online creative anarchy looked like, when performed purely for pleasure and/or mania rather than any hope of seeing a dime someday.

Of courser there’s still anarchy and passion to be found, but it’s necessarily self-aware and awake to its audience, however minimal. The childish obliviousness of early internet pre-blogs was insular and zine-like and pure in its way, only possible because nobody knew any better, and certainly nobody expected to launch a brand. Toiling obscurely on an obscure newsletter isn’t quite the same, but it has similar charms.