a stream

Here’s a photo of a grasshopper on the door of the shed in my backyard.

I took so many shots of this guy but this is the only one I even remotely liked.¹ I kind of hate this camera on my phone that tries too much to fix my photos for me. I need to get out our old late-00s DSLR, or get a film camera again, or something. I don’t think my cousin ever gave my film camera back to me, and I didn’t think that was a problem but now I miss it…

Standalone post link: Grasshopper Shed Door

Link: Reality Is Just a Game Now | Jon Askonas

Type: Essay

Source: The New Atlantis

I don’t have a quote, but this essay makes the case that we have basically gamified reality now. It’s unfortunately pretty spot on.

But I feel like maybe “reality” has always been gamed? Religion, The American Dream, class systems and economic struggles, war…

People mowing their lawn every week and getting rid of the weeds has always felt like some weird sort of game to me, a competition between neighbors. “Keeping up with the Joneses”…

P.S. This link came from a newsletter that made me feel seriously grumpy and dejected at several points. Wondering if I should have taken the advice from yesterday and just skipped it…

Standalone post link: Link - Reality Is Just a Game Now

Do I really need to get credit for every random thing I read and find at all interesting by semi-publicly recording it here on this website?

Maybe, yeah.

Standalone post link: Reading Credit Questionmark

Link: Authors on Authors: Nevada | Dan Bouk

Type: Book Review / Marketing Blurb

Source: Electric Eel Newsletter

Halfway through Nevada, Binnie gives us this line: “It’s clear that being responsible has not been a positive force in her life.” It’s describing an idea the protagonist, Maria Griffiths, is just then working out, or maybe taking for a spin.

She’s thinking about all the responsibility she had borne up to that point: a responsibility to hide, to fit in, to cram herself into the identities or check-boxes or cheap clothes that had been assigned to her and declared acceptable. She bore that responsibility to protect herself, but more so to protect those around her, from discomfort, from standing out: “When she was little, she was responsible for protecting everybody else from her own shit about her gender—responsible for making sure her parents didn’t have to have a weird kid.” This is a burden children bear, and especially trans kids.

I know this is basically a marketing email but I enjoyed reading about this book Nevada by Imogen Binnie and I think I now want to read this book Nevada by Imogen Binnie.

Standalone post link: Link Nevada

Link: “A Very Small Animal Entirely Surrounded by Water” | sam sax

Type: Poem

Source: The Atlantic

. . .
[music | oil | trash] filled our rivers
stayed up for the after [party | life | math]
the forests were [protected | sold | ash]
wrote [letters | checks | ads] against corruption
blamed [science | systems | depression] for our cities
when the [oceans | fires | droughts] came
when the [rains | bomb | flu] came
when the [weather | weather | weather] came
we [weathered | welcomed | watered] it
we were [prepared | shocked | responsible]
. . .

• This is perfect. Poetry is/as code.

• I wish I was actively writing poetry and had thought to write a poem like this. I wished for this kind of a poem back in college. I now wish I had followed through with writing such things instead of wishing and being distracted.

• Planning to do NaNoWriMo this November but just write weird poem and essay drafts and whatever I want instead of a traditional fiction narrative. I think I can make that work.

• Each of these thoughts should probably be their own little post, but I think I’m burying them on purpose here. Everything on and about my site is already obscured and hidden. A secret garden?

Standalone post link: Poem Link - A Very Small Animal Entirely Surrounded by Water

Link: Everything Is Going Too Fast | Imani Perry

Type: Essay / Newsletter

Source: Unsettled Territory (Atlantic Subscriber Newsletter) ($)

“There are no easy ways to live now. But I do think we have to be deliberate about moments of quiet reflection in which we make decisions about what we will do, however modest, in response to so many social and political challenges. And by that I mean what we will do in a sustained fashion—both in terms of what we commit to knowing about by regularly reading and keeping abreast of those topics, and also in terms of what civic actions we will weave into our daily lives. I’m not one to rail against the internet or the television. But I am an advocate of regularly stepping away to concentrate one’s attention. It still feels inadequate, of course. But it is something.”

This fits into a a constellation of blog posts/articles/newsletters I’m seeing, calling for what I would describe as intentionality and deliberateness in response to the endless onslaught of “news” and marketing and distractions. I might pull together some more structured thoughts and links on this, but for now I’m just sharing the quote to remember, and then gathering a couple of the links that I just came across-

• I have a secret. I hid it for years. / What News Designed for 21st Century Humans Might Look Like by Amanda Ripley

• No News Is Good News by Thomas J. Bevan

• both of the above found via The News Is a Drag) by Tracy Durnell

Standalone post link: Link - Everything Is Going Too Fast

A log of my music listens in the past week, by albums and playlists, not including completely random shuffles.

Date | Album or Playlist | (Year of Release) | Artist or Curator

Sun.2022.07.17 | Beatopia | (2022) | beabadoobee

Format/Source: Streaming - Apple Music

Location/Context: chores, puttering, whatever

Mon-Tue.2022.07.18-19 | The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions For Dreamers (Deluxe Edition) | (2022) | Valerie June

Format/Source: Streaming - Apple Music

Location/Context: driving

Tue.2022.07.19 | Outer Peace | (2019) | Toro y Moi

Format/Source: Streaming - Apple Music

Location/Context: driving, whatever

Wed.2022.07.20 | Underneath the Pine | (2011) | Toro y Moi

Format/Source: Streaming - Apple Music

Location/Context: driving, working

Wed.2022.07.20 | Causers of This | (2010) | Toro y Moi

Format/Source: Streaming - Apple Music

Location/Context: working

Wed.2022.07.20 | The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions For Dreamers (Deluxe Edition) | (2022) | Valerie June

Format/Source: Streaming - Apple Music

Location/Context: working

Wed.2022.07.20 | Digital Meadow | (2021) | Dora Jar

Format/Source: Streaming - Apple Music

Location/Context: working

Wed.2022.07.20 | Comfortably In Pain | (2022) | Dora Jar

Format/Source: Streaming - Apple Music

Location/Context: working

Fri.2022.07.22 | Causers of This | (2010) | Toro y Moi

Format/Source: Streaming - Apple Music

Location/Context: driving, whatever

Fri.2022.07.22 | Underneath the Pine | (2011) | Toro y Moi

Format/Source: Streaming - Apple Music

Location/Context: driving, whatever

Fri.2022.07.22 | Comfortably In Pain | (2022) | Dora Jar

Format/Source: Streaming - Apple Music

Location/Context: whatever

Fri.2022.07.22 | Digital Meadow | (2021) | Dora Jar

Format/Source: Streaming - Apple Music

Location/Context: whatever

Sat.2022.07.23 | Hope For Sale | (2021) | Chiiild

Format/Source: Streaming - Apple Music

Location/Context: driving

Sat.2022.07.23 | Fantasy Gateway | (2022) | Cuco

Format/Source: Streaming - Apple Music

Location/Context: driving, whatever

Sat.2022.07.23 | [Playlist] July 22 New Releases | (2022) | Diabolical Records SLC

Format/Source: Streaming - Tidal

Location/Context: driving, whatever

Notes: Diabolical Records is a record store in downtown SLC that has influenced my musical listening. One of the only reasons I ever go on Instagram is to see their posts about new things in stock and get music recommendations…but I’m a little ashamed to confess that I’ve never actually set foot in their store. (I did order one of their quarantine grab bags for delivery once during the early months of the COVID.) At any rate, I owe them business and money, but going downtown feels particularly epic, and I would either find $100s in records to buy, or just as likely glance around weirdly for like 60 seconds and feel self-conscious and awkward, and then walk out.

Sat.2022.07.23 | Space Ghost | (2022) | Attia Taylor

Format/Source: Streaming - Apple Music

Location/Context: driving, whatever

Standalone post link: Listens Last Week (July 24, 2022)

Really, most of the time I just like sitting beneath trees, and it turns out my backyard is an extremely serviceable place for that, so no need to go anywhere else to write or work.

And right as I was about to post this my laptop ran out of battery power, and now I have to decide whether to go inside or set up a huge extension cord or just keep sitting here and not use my laptop.

What I decided:

Standalone post link: Just Trees, Really

I’m playing around with reorganizing almost my entire site into topic- and theme-based files and folders on the back end.

With keeping my new “digital garden” off to the side of the rest of my content, I can’t decide where to put things. It feels redudant; so I’m making the whole site into the garden.

Keeping most of my content in a chronological organization just doesn’t make sense anymore for the direction I want to take this site. I’ve successfully set up “stream”/“recent updates” pages and an RSS feed that pull in all the new or newly-updated posts chronologically, regardless of where in the folder structure they are located.

I’ll gradually start gathering files together that go together topically/thematically or as series. Posts clearly about music will all go together. Changelogs will all go together. Reading updates all go together. Within the reading updates, notes about a specific book all go together. Things about my backyard all go together. Random surreal essay-poem-list things (I should have more of those) all go together. If something doesn’t have a clear focus or is all over the place, maybe it will stay in the chronological notes folders?

I’ll continue the taxonomy as-is but it will just be a secondary way to make more connections between things. The whole site will be a garden; displaying whether something is a “digital garden”-type entry or note will be a matter of unique templating/post-types. I’m going to have to play around with the templating a lot more now. Always be cataloging and meta-ing, I guess…

Standalone post link: 20220718 Changelog

Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand. There must be a kind of life and palpitation to it, and under its words a kind of blood must circulate forever.

– Henry David Thoreau, from “Monday,” A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.

Standalone post link: Give Me a Sentence...