No. 89 Loving shovels more than apps
No. 89 • 12/9/2022
‘Tis the season
My objective with the High Pony is to demonstrate how to have strong opinions and ideas, without being a gate-keeper or ideologue. The name, The High Pony, is a nod to this endeavor. It’s a play on “getting on one’s high horse,” only instead of a gallant, majestic beast, you only have access to a tiny, cute, hardly intimidating pone-pone. It’s a phrase friends have used in the past whenever I “got on my high pony” about something that irked me. Italian-Americans should appreciate this. You’ve got a lot to say, and you need to say it, but the extent of your “big talk” is hemmed in by your grandmother asking if you want whipped cream on your Jello-pie.
To me, a high pony is a way of proclaiming the moment, but always remaining cognizant of the modest perch on which you stand.
So, given the season we are in, and if you appreciate this approach to discourse, and have enjoyed receiving weekly explorations of such humble pontificating, then, ‘tis the season! Please consider donating.
I almost never charge for my writing. Mostly, because I think of my writing as a way to bring myself in closer contact with other like-hearted people. It’s me learning what I think about a thing and casting a net to see who vibes with it. I get as much out of it as, I hope, you do. I’ve been casting approximately 2000-word nets more or less weekly for two years. (Today is issue number 89!) I love it. And, if you have found enjoyment in these free, weekly insights, and would like to show that appreciation through a donation to the cause, my PayPal is now (as always) open. Click below:
You probably read much more than you think you do
I’ve met a fair number of people who say things like, “I don’t read,” but who also happen to be on their phone most of the day. What are they looking at? Pictures? Defs. But, also words. Lots and lots of words.
“Even though images and video have proliferated exponentially in just the last two decades, we are still swimming in a sea of written words. Many of us spend hours each day reading various kinds of text: emails, text messages, posts on social media, product descriptions on retail websites, reviews, articles, recipes, essays, books, reports, etc. The list can go on and on. But these various texts invite or require different forms of reading. We might glance, we might skim, we might do little more than search for keywords, we might read deliberately, or we might find ourselves immersed in what Wolf calls deep reading. We can imagine these modes of reading existing on a spectrum of effort and care with many other points in between.”
When people say they don’t read, they’re usually referring to reading books from start to finish or long-form articles. They’re referring to the duration, the physicality of reading. Because they don’t set time aside to sit under a blanket with their phone turned off and just…read, they think they don’t…read. But, they do.
The subtext, is that these same people will also feel as if they don’t have interesting things to say. “Readers are the ones who have opinions on stuff.” People who think they don’t read, think they aren’t informed, and therefor shouldn’t have an opinion. This is a Christmas disaster.
You read. You’re reading this. You have feelings about it. You have interesting things to say about it. Always feel free to hit me up in the emails to let me know. And, I always try to respond.
You also probably spend most of your life in the fetal position
Back when I was teaching Chinese sports medicine at the Pacific College of Health and Science, I would often talk about the effects of sitting in a chair all day. The lesson would proceed as follows:
Think about the shape of your body when sitting at a desk:
- Hips flexed at 90 degrees or, if you’re slouching, which you probably are, less than 90 degrees.
- Your knees are flexed back, also probably less than 90 degrees.
- Your arms resting on the desk are bent at the elbow in roughly the same degrees as your hips and knees.
Now, take this postural image, remove it from the chair and desk, place it on its side, and lay it flat on the bed. What does it look like? This, my frenz, is, roughly speaking, the fetal position.
The next mental exercise I’d perform with the class was to have the students guess how many hours a day they sit. Answers almost always fell in the 8-10 hour range, since most people think they sit only while working at a desk. What they and many of us fail to remember is that we sit for breakfast (20 min); for lunch (1 hour); we sit on the subway (45 min x2); we sit when eating dinner (45 min); we sit when we binge television (2–3 hours). That’s roughly thirteen hours a day.
Assuming you sleep from 11pm–7am, that equates to sitting for thirteen of the sixteen hours you’re awake. Eighty one percent of your waking life spent in the fetal position. Backed by another 5-7 hours in the same position while sleeping, means you spend upwards of eighty-three percent curled up in a ball.
Is this what our bodies were intended to be doing?
Can I love a digital platform the way I love a shovel?
I’ve been finding myself musing on why I’m able to form Love-bonds with objects more than I do with digital apps and platforms, with which I probably spend far more time engaging.
Thoughts:
- Objects have a particular effect on us that digital interfaces can not.
- Digital “objects” are not objects at all
- A shovel is shared, borrowed, passed down. No one is passing down their Obsidian platform. No one is borrowing another person’s Notion.
- Digital platforms are individualistic. The entirety of pkm platforms is based on the idea of individuation. The platforms are intended to be highly customized to the user. Portable for the user.
- There is often a maker to a physical object, and if there is none, there is an owner. Humans.
This is not to say that digital platforms can’t have a positive effect on a person. Nor is it to say that digital platforms can’t feel “created.” A friend of mine with a more open heart toward the potential of digital software recently commented on how the pkm tool he uses, Kinopio, feels “created” and thus intimate:
“I go on and on about Kinopio perhaps because it belongs to that rare category of software that inspires delight. In this category are things almost exclusively of solo craftsmanship. Pirijan calls this kind of software “organic”. In part I can say I love Kinopio because it’s as if some part of the care of its creator had become embedded.”
This makes sense to me.
Are “off-the-grid” and “simple living” meaningless terms?
Speaking of tools of civilization....
What I learn most from the many “simple living” / “we live off the grid” videos I watch on YouTube, is both how overly complex “simple living” is made out to be, and how reliant some people are on the grid while trying to exist off of it.
Take Simple Living Alaska, for example. These people have access to, own, use, and/or rent trucks, snow mobiles, sea planes, UTVs, wood stoves delivered from China, wood mills, wood splitters, skid steers, tons of machinery, 40-foot quonset huts, hi-tech “gear,” and use more gas in a week than most Manhattanites do in a month (I don’t know if that’s true). All in an attempt to at least present as “living simply.”
At what point does “simple living” and “off-the-grid” become insignificant metrics? It seems the terms have become more an indicator that someone heats their home with a wood stove than signifying any semblance of even an attempt at a comprehensive overhaul of one’s dependency on the grid-based infrastructure.
Of course, this could be looked at in a couple of different ways:
- We’re so tethered to complexity that it’s almost impossible to actually achieve simplicity without relying on the complexity to get there, or
- We’ve devalued both “simple living” and “off-the-grid” to the point of being entirely meaningless.
Not sure which is going on in most of these videos. But, I can say that they are thoroughly enjoyable, informative, and inspirational, especially for someone like me who isn’t particularly motivated to exist “off the grid,” but who likes to do things with his hands.
Why I practice Christianity
It sometimes shocks people to find out that, despite my many forays into the world of left-hand, marginal, don’t tell your in-laws spiritualities, I have, over the past ten or so years, returned to my familial faith: Christianity. (I feel myself being pulled to lay out a thousand caveats after saying that, and, in short, that is why I have returned. See below).
At some point in my spiritual journey, it began to feel as if I was avoiding something. It felt as if it was too easy to circumvent the cultural baggage, the misinterpretations, the core “stuff” of a familial spirituality. Being a Buddhist, for example, allowed me to avoid having to unpack the deeper, psychological, emotional, sociological aspects of my spirituality. It’s not that being a Kali worshipper, or reclaimed pagan, or palo mayombe-ist wouldn’t bring up “stuff,” but it wasn’t the stuff beneath the stuff.
Going back and engaging directly with your familial path is not for everyone. It takes a lot of effort. Effort that could probably be best spent elsewhere. There’s no nobility in going back. It’s a constant struggle between “I feel embarrassed” and “this is the most beautiful thing ever”.
Even after ten years it’s next to impossible for me to mention “Jesus” in public and not wanna cringe. (I literally cringed writing that last sentence, which, to me, is an indicator of something that needs investigating). That’s the kind of thing I never got with theistic satanism.
I watch myself trying to couch my Christian practices in terms that allow me some distance: “witchy Catholic,” “folk Catholic,” I’ve even at times changed the spelling of Catholic to “Katholic,” anything to put space between me and it. Me putting “Jesus” in quotes above was me doing the same thing.
But, it’s the getting at the root of these impulses that keeps me hangin’ on. They’re too strong to not be important.
The Amish Question
The Amish, despite their many faults both as individuals and as a community (and we all have them), continue to ask the correct question: How will this piece of technology affect us as a community? It’s a question that we, outside the Amish community, have not solidified as a guiding principle.
And yet, with the steady collapse of big social media, I find this question popping up more and more in slightly different ways. Here’s The Convivial Society with their take on the question:
“What matters about our technology is not only the effect of this or that particular artifact or system. It also matters how the distinctive shape of our material environment conditions us in deep and broad ways, ways that may often be imperceptible precisely because they are not objects of perception but rather shape our perception.
One way of thinking about this is to explore how the total effect of our techno-material milieu positions us vis-á-vis the world. How does our technological milieu encourage us to perceive and relate to the world and those who share it with us? What stance are we encouraged to assume in relation to world?”“
The body is a noisy place + Health logs
I once heard that “the body is a noisy place.” And, I couldn’t agree more.
Something happens when you turn forty (I’m 44). A switch gets flipped. All of sudden you need reading glasses. Losing weight requires the strategic approach of ancient, battles. You can’t eat after a certain time at night. Your feet hurt. No matter the yoga, your generally healthy diet, your spiritual practice, as the hadith records the prophet Muhammad saying: “Your body has a right over you, your eyes have a right over you, and your wife has a right over you.”
To keep track of the noises, I decided to start keeping a log of all the health-related blips and blobs that pop up. The main reason I started doing this was to subvert my proclivity for thinking that every itchy eyeball (also, your eyes can get more dry as you age) was eyeball cancer. I was tired of thinking every headache was brain cancer. That every shoulder twinge was shoulder cancer.
Now, whenever I have a little thing pop up, I check through my logs, see that the thing is (usually) already there, is more “body noise” than “body collapse,” log the recent experience, and move on.
For those who’d like to do the same, here’s the template I made up:
**FIRST NOTICED:**
**MOST RECENT:**
### Recent notes
date
-
### History
### First appeared / incident
-
### Compensatory complications
-
### Things that make it worse
-
### Things that make it better
I find much joy in these logs. I’d love to know if any of you do the same or if you start trying something similar.
Rando Pone
And, that’s that! See ya next week.
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