Contradictions and Oppositions
Your track - X Ambassadors, K.Flay and grandson - Zen. Another extremely catchy COVID anthem: "give me girls, give me boys, give me life, give me peace, give me noise, someone give me fucking Zen ... I need something to avoid all my fears and paranoia, someone give me fucking Zen".
The last few days have had me folded in contradictions and extreme oppositions. That seems to be the theme of this time: oppositions. Stay home or open up? Hustle or hibernate? Act now or wait and watch? Every second counts but days slip away in instants.
Mindfulness is just as important as planning. I find myself trying to be patient, kind, and practice self-care and allow myself breaks, but also find myself suddenly panic-planning, laying down financial trends, and pulling cards in desperate attempts to intuit the probability of my future sanity. The routine of days being exactly the same makes them seem to slip together, but rent is due in 11 of them. I find myself needing to create my own structures in this time that were previously supplied by work and social expectations. I cling to the few recurring reminders that yesterday was Monday and in 4 days is Saturday.
interface, Kathrin Spickermann
It seems like the world is sheer polarity. Days blend together in their similarity but the future is escalated with every risky (or unwise) interaction between people. Nothing and everything is happening all at the same time. I think this is a significant part of our COVID reality that causes so much stress and executive dysfunction. The equivalence between anything resembling effort and complete relaxation (perhaps via the ingestion of extremely legal substances) increases, until sending an email or falling into a YouTube hole for 6 hours and sending an important email seem impossible to prioritize. I've recently found summoning the effort to approach a small amount of work with a reasonable, measured attitude to be a task requiring monk-like sagacity.
So how do we cope?
For me, it can only start with presence--the presence to stop, take in your room as it is, and not the piledriving bulldozing dump-trucking avalanche of thoughts that constantly beat on the walls of reality through our ears and eyes. My departure into what seems like a thoughtful act of self-care (3 large bags of hot cheetohs in 6 days, another night blasted off playing Minecraft) usually backfires as I realize it didn't nearly make up for the stress I was coping with. Bad trade.
What I often need is meditation, or a walk, or not to just slow down but to be still. When there are so many things swirling inside you, you have to stop being the wind inside. I've been trying to create space for thoughts to bubble up without deciding to immediately eat or play Animal Crossing because thinking about almost anything is too hard. Open time on the couch, staring at the popcorn ceiling and watching fan blade shadows cut the sky. As much time as possible, which ends up being very little when you're the type to decide to spring into action immediately when you even think of something to do. But because I can't sustain that action, it fritters away.
☁️, Adam Hunter McCowen in Glitch Artists Collective
Astrologically, much of this is emblematic of the oppositional nature of lunar eclipses as we approach June and July who have a lunar eclipse each (there's also one bonus solar eclipse in there too). Geocentrically we witness lunar eclipses as the opposition of the Sun and the Moon, the prime representations of positive and negative polarity. This causes a relational dynamic where you just can't do both things at the same time; they're just the complete opposite. Stay-home-open-up-hustle-hibernate-act-wait-stop-start vibes.
The only resolution I've ever been able to find here is to have the presence of mind to realize when you're dealing with an oppositional dynamic, and then give both some space alternately. A constant back and forth between peace and noise is required. To understand the spectrum and act effectively (or even just to survive), you have to develop empathy for both sides and alternate between the two. Eventually, the modality shift gets easier.
source unknown
Damn Interesting podcast
But hey! One of those things anchoring me to certain days is that I'm now involved in the weekly Damn Interesting podcast which is essentially a curated-links-of-the-week podcast. It's actually really cool to be involved in this project because DI has been around since 2005, and I remember reading their first articles on how bananas are actually infertile when I was like, twelve.
You can hear us riff and ramble about the headline article from last week with voice as well as a number of other articles, and we produce it every week. Here's the last one we did (and the first one I'm on).
The satisfying destruction of some balloons
Patron notes
Thank you for subscribing to my Patreon! Since rebooting Glitchet I've had a flood of new subscribers which is deeply appreciated <3 And I know I owe y'all some emails, but I keep watching YouTube for 6 hours instead.
I'm trying to figure out ways to get more involved with the Glitchet community as well--we have the Facebook group but I know that the target audience for this newsletter isn't particularly pro-Facebook (nor am I). Possibly Discord? IDK. Email me if you have any thoughts.
Bye
OK, as always, thank you for reading. I hope you're doing well, but I know you're doing the best you can.
Love ya.