As anyone who read my second posting knows, I've not yet been asked to sip from the bejewelled goblet of the cabal of the Knights of the Global Interweb; nay, they've not invited me to experience the forbidden delights that full bro/sis-ship in what appears, to the curious outsider, to be a fascinating but bizarro world where bywords like productivity can be interpreted dually as 1) figuring out better ways to prepare, create and then organize completed tasks, or 2) good ways to convince yourself that you're actually preparing/creating/organizing tasks while in reality delaying that actual process of getting down to the business of, in my case, putting words to paper or screen: that is, confusing PREP with WORK. All that furious creative energy sometimes dissipates in the charged air above and around the participants, it seems to me; buzzed hyper-talk, dilated pupils as pixels, increased throughput resulting in reduced output...
That said, there's no question that a part of my soul is warmed by digi-embers and no question that I'm more into means than ends; and at the end of things the daily tasks of writing are made more fun by the various monkey-toys this primate has to bang against one another---der, der, der, grunt, grunt, grunt---and I'm always pretty reactionary when I get emailed links like this one. There's something chicken littleish about the tone of these articles, this refusal to acknowledge that one isn't having their soul sucked away by the spells of the Global Interweb's evil wizard through owning a computer or a cell phone. And, in any case, one can always decide to, oh, I dunno, turn their phone/ringer off? Create a super-secret email address? Take a walk to the local purveyor of newsprint every so often and buy a paper? Such attitudes share a similar reeky acrid scent-note with censorship: As soon as one considers that they have lost the ability to turn the channel or NOT read Catherine Millet or turn their phones off or write in a notebook then I'd say they're cooked. As Andrew Lytle always told me, Never put the evil in the object.
I reckon you could say I'm semi-connected: I haven't used my PDA in over two years--once I realized that two additional primates in a house simultaneously increased great ideas/subjects while reducing both time and energy-flow in which to actually write, I bought a Handspring as a mini-cheap laptop for writing, excited about the collapsible keyboard and on-the-go synching capabilities to MSoft Word --but realized quickly it was useless. Since all my important phone numbers are stored in my cell phone, and since I know the addresses of all if not most of the people to whom I might want to drop a postcard by heart (or written down in a handy notebook), when the battery compartment of the PDA broke I, rather than busting out the duct tape, put the thing on a junk table where it has remained. A wi-fi'd Powerbook makes its way around our house, a desktop sits in a shared office, a baby's handfull of email addresses (work, home, groups) are scattered between us, as are cell phones; finally, our home phone is still hard-wired: still, without even thinking too hard about it, I could list here to a man/woman EXACTLY who called/emailed me yesterday. No, I'm not Kim Peek, just cautious. Or paranoid. I've had the same cell number for almost four years and have given it to someone I didn't know (a paint salesman) exactly once. It's a matter of simple compartmentalization: only give out yer home phone: create a Hotmail or Yahoo address for strangers or business acquaintances or fans. Delete, delete, delete.
I laugh out loud when people claim Comus and Spriguns as practicants of utter debased pagan musico-ritual. If you don't have any corpses or precipi close by, try practicing some musical CHOD (believe it or not, the o's supposed to be umlauted) while listening to Guillotine or Forest by Circle.
I've never noticed how large our tiny neighbor's feet are.
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