I am on the balcony, laptop pulsing heat onto my uncovered legs, nose stuffy from a summer stress cold, red wine (Malbec) in a Graceland mug on the window ledge behind me, three citronella candles and a mosquito coil flickering around me, yet I see the mosquitoes in silhouette against my screen, darting here and there and up and down and, occasionally, settling on a patch of skin still enough to penetrate and make me flinch and slap at ghosts. The fact that I have covered myself in cancer-causing agents doesn’t matter to these creatures; I have been mosquito bait my entire life and they all want in life is what’s inside of me. The Red Cross couldn’t covet my blood at the level that these fucking mosquitoes do.
I have spent a week not off the grid, but beneath the grid, opting out of the constant give and take of certain social networking sites and programs and devices and notions. I usually love it, that cascade of constant information, but sometimes it feels a little less like a waterfall and a little more like water torture and I have to say enough and take a break. It was good to not have to deal with the constant pop-ups of the latest “news” but it left me feeling a bit clueless about even the most incremental bits of the zeitgeist. I’m an info addict and I’m not proud and I don’t know how to “fix” me and frankly I don’t think I need fixing and I’ve got a lot to say about the matter, see, but there’s no need because life is too short to keep having to explain myself to everyone else.
I loaded up my feed reader, I mean I loaded it up in the sense that if I ran out of things on it during the day, while at work, it meant that I didn’t have enough feeds to read. A couple of weeks ago, totally spontaneously, I didn’t log into the reader at all, for like 4 days. I paid the price of course, because when I did log in, I had 1,000+ items. Far too many to “catch up on”. But I felt weird. What if something happened, and I didn’t know about it? What if someone wrote something clever? Now I’d never know. So I forced myself to weed through it, marking most “mainstream news” and “stuff I only sortof care about” as read, without actually reading any of it, and then sifting through the remaining two or three hundred items.
I did the same thing to twitter, I just didn’t log in for a few days.
So yeah, I like your waterfall analogy. The oddly subtle difference in a cool and refreshing waterfall, and one that is drowning me.