Loving the analog

I’d stowed the laptop for months, lost in looking after grandchildren, wheezing away on the piano accordion (yes, I know), biking, sailing, zumba, gigs, chums yada.

Just the ticket.

The grandchildren thing I didn’t see coming. One minute I’m doing a jig cos I’ve got my kids through school, next thing they’re procreating. My eldest two are first out of the blocks, a couple apiece. Four grandsons ranging from two to five. I’ve pimped up my mountain bike with a seat on the back and a shotgun job up front. No shortage of passenger requests or fitness opportunities for grandad.

Classiest act last few months was moving in 24/7 while daughter and husband gapped for Europe leaving me their 3 and 5 yr old for a few weeks. Awesome exhausting experience. I got some help and we handed them back alive, even got a certificate, reckon I deserved it n’ all.

Small peoples worlds are magical places. The unhinged excitement optimised in a flash, the flow states, the big feelings, the volume of action … master jugglers of the analog our kids.

It’s said the creative adult is the child that survived, could be something in that. At Uni I popped my head up in the adult world and thought fck that. I’m pretty sure I got into high school teaching to keep the teenage me alive. Would’ve been in my 30’s when I finally left school.

The luxury to be able to go analog, step back from Google docs, has been enabled by becoming a geezer, and its financial baubles the gold card and pension. It’s the bumper boomer bonus pack of free public transport and a few hundy for doing nought. Oh yes and a mortgage-free cottage to reside. Not sure that’s fair on our young ones grinding it out but my snout’s in the trough. I am a VeryLuckyBaz.

I’ve been flirting with organic me for a while now. Back around covid, I took a dive downhill in front of the screen, working on an umpteenth draft for a client. It was my mirror mirror on the wall moment, I was done, my soul a puddle of mud. Cancelled my adobe subscription at sunrise, vowing to never edit another video again.

Yes, well, here I am in the ones and zero’s again, your average citizen tapping this blog on a phone, luddite light. AI would prefer I went full cookies and cream on it, triple chocolate on sundays, and some days I do. But booting the thing down, like completely off, is also I’ve discovered, a joyous freedom, if a little selfish in the spirit of progress. AI wants to know me better, I’m hesitant to suggest it’s the new friend I need.

Lately I’ve been more consumer than producer, call it research. Substack and ilk have exploded. So many thinkers, so little time.

Another act of rebellion, handwriting and doodling, paper lists, shortlists for lists, and pleased to say I’m rocking a print diary - not sharing calendar info with the cloud. Who knows who’s really flying that magic carpet. Musk? Metaman with his move fast and break things spiel? If I lose the thing (diary that is) then I form another plan, a bit like being on the run, making it up, reinventing.

My gratitude for technology is running a bit skint at the mo, I do need to work on my attitude. For all the brilliance of app-land, the pace of booking travel, accom, transferring money - assuming you have any, google maps, tai chi tutorials (watched but seldom attempted), there’s the opportunity cost of in-person human relationships. Digital both connects and quarterises.

As a kiwi in the provincial pre-digital era, hands up we were often compliant holders of nutritionally limiting truths. When the dial-up modem hit town, it offered investigation into wider threads. But in the same way that rock n’ roll’s rebel pelvis became swiftly commercialised, freedom of the web has doubled back on itself in a rainbow of algorithms, virtual pots of gold, water water everywhere but not a drop to drink. The mirage of intelligent precursive convenience, with a shadow side of subjugation and serfdom. Of course awesome times for those of us that have leveraged technology to our advantage… but for a limited time only, watch this space.

I think we yearn for our analog. Other day I was gigging at a local bar, one minute before I’m due to start, the house system’s playing Hotel California, of course it was … the ‘you can check out any time you want, but you can never leave’, a fitting metaphor for our digital world. EntertainerBaz has barely said hi on the mic before a punter yells out a request … Hotel California. I reached for the meds. Maybe it was they needed a real person to play their anthem. Like playing chicken with a jukebox to assure we comfortably numb Peep’s that there is still a human representative reminding them of their organic selves, a smiling singing meat puppet. They call it live music, as opposed to dead I guess.

Disengagement #42 has seen me hoovering some actual books, ones with paper pages. Two recent winners worthy of mention, ‘Humankind - A Hopeful History’ by Dutch author Rutger Bregman, and ‘The Lot’, words by Melbourne cartoonist Michael Leunig.

Historian Bregman reveals that the human species is hard wired to collaborate, not compete, and that our hunter gather ancestors were in no way adversarial dog eat dog. Quite the contrary. He posits our problems began when the first quantity surveyor decided to mark out a choice spot and call it private property. Says he, sharing, kindness and working together have always been the core of our DNA. Vying for dominion over resource was always an unnatural construct, engineered by civilisations early self anointed puff daddy’s, evolving into the competitive ladder pulling sociopathic shitshow we today call society. Steady Baz, there’s been some good stuff too. But taking the long view and the meth fuelled acceleration of the last 50 yrs WinnerTakeAll, nah, we’ve fooled ourselves.

Leunig, whose cartoons graced the Melbourne Age for decades, suggests that our only chance to make the shitshow tenable is to take every opportunity to talk to strangers, that our connection with the unfamiliar is mostly revelatory. The ultimate analog.

Two authors, same conclusions. One a researched and referenced academic, the other a gifted creative musing on personal observation. Throw in american author Mark Twain’s claim that “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness”, and it seems we’ve got some roaming to do. Hunting and gathering for new relationships.

I’m no author of repute like these geezers, but my own research globetrotting a couple of years back came up with the same. I don’t think I met a single arsehole. People are awesome, more often open and generous. Extend a smile, a hand of friendship, speak in their language (or attempt to), and souls meet. The deeper the immersion, the trust, the greater the connection. And if people rip you off, spare a thought for the children they have to feed, the elderly they need to care for. Put yourself in their shoes, maybe value connection over possession. Ooh that’s such a difficult western concept, and I acknowledge my white privilege here where billions globally struggle for food and shelter. Message here is trust yourself off the tourist trail if you go wandering … adventure is not comfortable, or it wouldn’t be called adventure.

Technology has given the developing world a leg up in a globalised economy, also given them a kick in the crutch, presenting the developed world the chance to fck over developing countries with even greater efficiency. Cue the world bank, IMF, a grab bag of other predators with their fingers deep in the resource buckets of the global south. There’s decades worth of The Economist magazine and their FreeMarketFreddies in the witness box there.

Getting out in nature is the ultimate analog. If it doesn’t work for you, you haven’t found your magic place yet. Keep the faith, you’ll find it. If you’re familiar with mother nature - she’s hard to miss, then you likely have a bunch of magic places. That’s called falling in love. It’s not just Shrek that makes it to home base on that one, it’s there for all of us. ‘Mother’ nature is the ultimate corporate hermaphrodite, chair of the board, CEO and the entire labour force. Not sure where middle management fit in here, or anywhere for that matter.

For my part, 2026 is looking like Go Time. The Hopes, fears n’ good ideas project is keeping me excited in a perfect marriage of analog and digital. There’s going to be more grandad time for sure, maybe some more blogs and pisstake songlets like I did back in covid days … and spreading the gospel with smartphone storytelling workshops

And if all that fails there’s always the piano accordion. One of the four instruments of the apocalypse, in there with the banjo, bagpipes and a hippy on a djembe drum.

I’ll leave you with a thought from the considered western hippy of eastern philosophy Alan Watt’s, who scribed these thoughts back in the 1960’s:

“The problem is that we are now wielding the incredible surgical instrument of technology with trembling hands, and what concerned Huxley was that such power cannot be handled constructively by anxious and alienated men with as fundamentally hostile attitude to nature”.

Till next time :)