9 April, 2020
I could really say that all my work since the last day of December 2018 has been notes. In tangibles, it’s mere notes, and coffees, meals… Nothing that’s not made to be consumed within the hour – that could be consumed within minutes.
Here are some of those notes in the form of pictures… all taken with my phone, which is now in a deep sleep and won’t wake up. Now I have to find new ways to take notes, and also use this time to alter my brain to concentrate for longer than it takes to make a simple note.
If I’m to be honest: I know what needs to be done. I do actually know the the way I work/what works for me, I just ignore it.
I could get into how that relates to the fear of failure, but I think you can put 2 and 2 together…
My brain spitting out bite-size things, scattered crumbs, is a reflection of my consumption habits. We scroll through a plethora of unrelated material. We jump from topic to topic, taste to taste, and don’t take long enough to process each new piece of information. We don’t even have the illusion of order through chronological lineups anymore, just a disparate mismatching of snapshot catchups and sensationalist fast-burns.
Of course, we are now within a very tangible break in a lot of aspects of our consumption, but not in the one that fucks with our brains the most. A lot of us are getting more screen time now than ever before in our lives. Just like all the other ways we use distractions to numb ourselves, we’re opting again and again to blue-light-hypnotise ourselves out of the frightening present. The present is frightening not just in light of the current state of the world, but the present is truly frightening on an everyday basis, because it contains your very own thoughts and feelings!
I’m curious to see if humans use this time to individually and collectively evolve through listening, swimming in the nuance, reflecting and processing, or if our condition only worsens, and our eyesight along with it.
I’ll mention that I do have empathy for escapist tendencies/mechanisms as means of protection and sustainability… but meditate on your thresholds. At least look at your boundaries and know them, know why you’re doing what you do, ignoring what you choose to ignore.
I know that for me personally, my focus on my work has driven a lot of my conscious and subconscious decisions to suppress feelings. I’ve been on the ground in such physical pain from heartache, and my body remembers that, and my capitalist-trained conscious brain knows that that’s not going to get any work done.
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ps. I centred the text in this note just because I liked the shape, it reminded me of a fancy menu and a roundabout. I know it may have bothered some of you, but… just look at this roundabout… How satisfying is that?
All pictures are mine except for these pictures of roundabouts that I found here and here.
This is one from the city I’m from. The ‘city in a garden,’ at least that’s what I remember the sign saying when you entered the city… but I just looked it up and the tagline is, “Where the rainforest meets the Reef” which is also romantic, as voted for by focus groups, but it’ll always be my little roundabout city in a garden. It’s like the whole big-little thing lives in my backyard. There are so many roundabouts there. All with different, colourful, tropical plants, and maybe some big rocks, and one with a clock tower that my friends and I used to meet up inside of after school and eat marshmallows in. I was 11. We peed in that clock tower. It was the time of Runescape and MSN. Since I went into isolation I’ve been having a lot of flashbacks to those times – when we just made shit up and were quite entertained with very little. I’ll post another time maybe about how so many of us grew up in the time of Youtube, Youtube schooled us, and the majority of people around my age that I ask, made and posted videos into that abyss. I have a small collection of videos and pictures of roundabouts I shot in Cairns, but finding those notes would actually take a hot minute.
okay okay I just tried to find those notes and I couldn’t… Don’t say I never do anything for you.
Can you tell I wrote this while stoned?
Happy Sunday, or Tuesday…
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I will post at least every week starting now, breaking and ending whenever I feel like it. Maybe the posts will become less disparate over time as I alter my brain… and maybe not.
For now, you can view more notes here, and my online moodboard here.
