Return to Form: 100 Days of Devotion to the Analog

....𝔦𝔫𝔱𝔢𝔤𝔯𝔞𝔱𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔱𝔦𝔪𝔢....

last week i asked the oracle how many days until october third, she said 108. i realized i was nearly 100 days until the end of three decades in this earth body so why not have a good time?

THIS IS A LETTER ABOUT ALTERING MY BEHAVIOR IN PURSUIT OF PLEASURE

i’ve been inspired and reinspired on fire doing this thing. typing. writing. letter-writing. kiluaea is erupting. i wrote letters to some new friends and remembered ilovewritingletters. as kids, my best friend and i met at summer camp when we were twelve and thirteen. we lived an hour apart and forged friendship in time travel, writing letters flooded with secrets and poems and teleporting back and forth between our bedroom floors, where we poured over thrifted stationary with gel pens and sticker sheets.

// letter writing // a mechanism for channeling, a mechanism for offering a moment of presence to a friend or lover or family or friend. most often done in solitude.

so i remember in the holy landscape of my room, which feels just like this sounds:

in my room - the beach boys

There's a world where I can go
And tell my secrets to
In my room
In my room

In this world I lock out
All my worries and my fears
In my room
In my room

Do my dreaming and my scheming
Lie awake and pray
Do my crying and my sighing
Laugh at yesterday

Now it's dark and I'm alone
But I won't be afraid
In my room
In my room

and so and so there’s some more

i am decluttering my time

and making a paper chain

april: i lose my job of four years and have struggle to find a routine. i am confused in abundant time, which floats like fireflies in july, each a glittering timeline, flickering beautiful and completely out of my hands.

and what a fool i’ve been

may: i’ve changed before and i’ll change again. grief, i think. indulging how i can in my art practice, okay. hustling through show season cuz i work for myself, too but it isn’t the same. and honestly, scrolling. ambient indulgent delicious transitional time scrolling.

june: letter writing revival. remembering! travel. remembering! distance from the monkey mind. jumping rope.

in the shapelessness and vagueness of this new time, i realize the last 100 days of my twenties is the shape of the summertime. one tower falls and another emerges -

a new architecture for time

i am offering myself a challenge in pursuit of pleasure.

for 100 days i wil be 𝔡𝔢𝔠𝔩𝔲𝔱𝔱𝔢𝔢𝔯𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔪𝔶 𝔱𝔦𝔪𝔢 through pursuit of the analog, integrating the time of a thousand year old tree, a tree who reads books and uses the world wide web and chatrooms and html.

i am returning to the floor and the computer room. i am taking time away. i am trapping my phone regularly in this soviet pippy long stockings lunch box:

so far, placing my phone in this lunchbox has soldered the neurons in my brain that allow me to respect the phone-is-away boundary for two days. wow!

action items for cute + positive phone separation

• BUILD A TOWER. I created a house for my phone and trapped it inside.

  • This practice creates QUIET HOURS for more time away from my phone. i’m not above having apps over there - this ho gotta post for work + play. butttttt we will enjoy alternating phone-free days.

    • This practice creates ATTENTION SPAN FOR READING
      and other lost arts

• NOTEBOOKS to keep a list of texts i want to send later, questions i want to look up later, ideas to expand on later later later later

• HONORING THE MP3 EXPERIENCE » Mp3s, radio. Reviving the practice of maintaining an mp3 library. Should we share one?

• RETURN TO THE COMPUTER ROOM » intentional time on the computer via a new offering-in-the-works ***, COMPUTER TIME

• + several mysterious initiatives

so here is where you will find me now:

or maybe…

or likely…

and now — a shout out to an entity

an entity in the sighswoon community seeded many of these analog-items in my mind during a discussion of phone addiction. in shifting my relationship to social media (is this a boring topic yet? dunno) i’ve spent less time on the ‘platforms’ and more time in the guild-like-landscape of a discord created by gabri abrão, a poet you may know by the name sighswoon. the experience of being online in a modern chatroom gives me the familiar feeling of being in a neopets guild, aol instant messenger, maybe a facebook group. it is a slower internet. there’s no ads. it’s not a zizian thing, it’s a bunch of tarot reading flâneurs who flicker in and out at their leisure.

here is a scultpure of the internet that i enjoy - logging on and logging off. using it like an appliance, with an intended outcome. writing, researching, connection. and why not be militant in a practice of pleasure? militant in abandoning addiction for something fun instead. abandoning screen time is never easier than in the summer - i am lucky my body remembers how from a cycle of phone-abandonment in college, when i fled to the south to pilot rafts down the rapids of the ocoee river. my hands were full and wet. not a phone in site back then. back then. now i’m saying things like back then. so i am returning to my hands and eyes.

it’s low stakes. it’s fun. it’s a 100-some day experiment.

meanwhile i invite you to a dreambox show tomorrow afternoon in the philadelphia heat:

tune in 3-6 pm eastern // tune in 3-6 pm eastern // tune in 3-6 pm eastern // tune in 3-6 pm eastern // tune in 3-6 pm eastern // tune in 3-6 pm eastern // tune in 3-6 pm eastern // tune in 3-6 pm eastern // tune in 3-6 pm eastern // tune in 3-6 pm eastern // tune in 3-6 pm eastern // tune in 3-6 pm eastern // tune in 3-6 pm eastern // tune in 3-6 pm eastern // tune in 3-6 pm eastern //

meanwhile // additional offerings

i invite you to come away with me and take a look at these humble patreon offerings:

» ** BOOK CLUB (live)»
this bitch be reading. This month is Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel - the history of abstract expressionism told through the lives of Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Mitchell, Grace Hartigan and Helen Frankenthaler. This practice keeps me accountable to reading the texts I’ve been neglecting. for some months, I’ll report back with a summary of the text + musings + other apparitions

» COMPUTER TIME (in progress) » weekly online hangs within a discord/mixcloud live, in an atmosphere of live streams, mp3 downloading sessions, set list curation, satisfying the ***Look Up Later lists, and having a nice time online in a chatroom. A sort of revival of aol. It’s a chatroom for goofing off online. instant messaging and scrolling for pleasure. don’t text me.

……. in my dreams i build or beg a builder to help me make a new-aol. my body craves the stimulus of this noise…. … …

this could be us

then i disappear into a field of sighs and starlight

…