I'm sure the Internet is rotting my brain. I'm defining the internet broadly as anything digital, include the App Store. Digitality is rotting my brain (evidenced here by creating a non-word and then trying to pass it off as an existential state.
Many signs indicate this is true: the fact that my dog openly judges how much I cling to my phone, the 10 hours that I played "Fairway Solitaire" on said phone, my branching out into new corners of the digital world--like everything YouTube has to offer. I think in Facebook status updates and GIF images. My life has been 30-second soundbites now for too long.
The greatest, saddest evidence to me, though, is how much I struggle to write anything anymore. I have the urge to write something here but sit down to find myself searching for something, anything, to say. Always sinfully proud of my powers of observation, my frontal lobe is getting mushy...I can see things but I don't make the same sense out of them that I used to. Why? There's a YouTube channel for that that is surely monetized.
One of the greatest revelations I had recently (there might just be hope for me yet) is that when I turn the tv off (or, if I'm really committing to reflection, don't turn it on at all) I have things to say. I can summon sentences, meaningful ones, that have a distinctive voice and purpose. When I put the phone down, I can see things I hadn't realized were there. I can hear my own inner monologue...and it's not a boiled-down quipism punctuated by a hash-tag. My voice is there and it's wanting to say something probably somewhat funny, somewhat cynical, and maybe, if I'm lucky, with a bit of insight.
When did it come to be that I have to work so consciously to have coherent, intelligent thoughts? I'm reading "Life After Life" by Kate Atkinson and the other night I was nearly in tears both because the book is wonderful and rich but also because the writing was not just letters strung together on a page written by some know-nothing with the equivalent of auto-tune for writing. It was art and it was beautiful and inspiring and knowledgeable and the story is exceptionally creative both in form and content. When did I stop reading things worth my brain cells?
I'm turning 40 in just over a week. I've decided to dedicate the next decade (yes, decade) to the real things life has to offer. People (The Decade of People is a potential name for this project), their ideas, their stories, the natural world, the creation of hearth and home, good food (not shitty, processed but delicious food but natural whole nourishing food), and movement in every possible dimension. For too long I've been waiting and/or just mindlessly watching. In the past I've delighted in being a voyeur of everything; it's become my hallmark and calling card. How could that have once been okay with me?
It's time to grab up this moment and explore it--pick through the grains of it, unravel its braiding, feel its pulse and make it my own.
Of course, I'll still blog though because, ultimately, you are what you blog, right?
It would've been so much easier being...nah...I know that's not true. I'll just disconnect from virtual reality slowly but surely.
To life.
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