I see it aging, the ideas and humor warping to staleness. A gross familiarity. We are old now. Our brutal ignorance no longer produces raw culture hewn from time, but heightens
our comfortability. We can no longer cling to the amateur’s lot.
It used to make me uncomfortable hearing “Free Palestine” at a show. Like a lawn sign. Simply a “Free Palestine” and nothing else. It felt homogeneous and self-preserving. “Fuck
Donald Trump”. “Fuck Spotify” in another black square. “In this house we…” In Aspen Hall, a woman stands up and cries angrily, “This talk is great and all, but no one is down
here! We have one lawyer helping hundreds of people. Why aren’t you all here?”
It feels uncomfortable to be coming back into the app gulch and realize everyone is posting all these /things/. It makes me anxious and overwhelmed and my addictive actions come
back. I HAVE to check. I HAVE to know. People posting constantly about actions and fundraisers and teach-ins and yet in all my years of being offline I haven’t heard of nearly
one percent of what I assume people are sharing in online spaces. It feels dichotomous to remember I’ve been surrounded by people reading about these things every single day,
and a sliver of that information has been shared in person with me.
I’ve found my action and peace through my own channels, but the shock keeps hitting me every time I flip through people’s stories. This information is so digestible,
multiplicitous, and sane. Processed food for thought, all sugared up on canva, and most of it centered around a passé form of enraging the viewer. A dull call to arms. An acid
reflux.
It’s a day after the 4th anniversary of the January 6th Q-Anon rumpus and it’s been four years of absolute dismay at my own stasis. I remember driving with my best friend on
speaker phone. We’re both gawking wildly and yelling at each other, “We should’ve been there! I mean, why weren’t we all there?"