the inversion of our interests

This is intended to be brief so if it isn’t just know I’m more upset about it than you.

Talking today to a person whose name I have changed to protect their privacy

(PS: it’s Argimiro.)

(PPS: No, imagine? That’s was my great grandfather’s name. Actually, technically a nickname to an even weirder name. But only very slightly.

(PPPS Anyway it wasn’t him I was talking to.)

Anyway, I have been talking here and everywhere about how social relationships have become at best computer-mediated and at worst parasocial relationships, and it occurred to me that when I was younger I’d spend every literal day with friends, well into my 20s, without any plan or pre-approval, just showing up on whoever’s doorstep, or they mine, not to figure out if they were free, because I was sure they were, or if they weren’t, sure we’d absorb each other’s timelines into one and just adapt.

Sometimes we’d just pointedly listen to music like it was a movie. Staring at unmoving speakers as if to see what might happen. Sometimes to share some dimebag of horrible shwag we got at a Bodega in Fort Greene from some voice we couldn’t see behind opaque bullet proof glass. Watching a screen required planning and foresight. You could turn the TV on at random but had no control over what was on. Also, depending on whose house or the time maybe you weren’t allowed because A: parents were watching something else or B: they believed television was poisonous unless heavily moderated. My mom had a lockbox she bought for the TV plug. Unfortunately, she also was too busy to lock it herself so she never noticed my brothers had broken the box so we could watch whenever she was working and just feign excitement when our screentime arrived.

But as to your screens, well, you have your own now that you carry probably in your pants, on top of a larger one you probably are supposed to be using for work and then the actual TV, like a hearth warming your couch. So the time you used to spend with loved ones is now floating between all those strings of random perpetual data flowing in. A conversation is for another time, but send me a thousand funny videos, or something outside your life you’re angry about, or a vision of something physically daunting that none of us even tried but were for some reason there for anyway. MY TIME IS PRECIOUS but also please make sure I don’t sit here quietly ever because then I might have thoughts about all the people I don’t have time to talk to.

A bunch of years ago Cliff Chiang and I talked about starting a studio, partially to force social interaction and to get us outside and used to walking around in clothes we might never have worn for dint of avoiding any modern context where one might spend time on one’s appearance. For a lot of people the pandemic killed the last piece of whatever interaction they were forced into . Offices closed, people stayed home and were gleeful about sweatpants. Some of them never went back.

There is no element of surprise allowed to breach our space now, our interactions are curated and at a minimum. Most of our conversations are about other conversations being had, most of them online by people we don’t know.

When I was a kid I made a lot of questionable decisions and we were latchkeys so sometimes we’d disappear for days and it seemed like nobody would notice. One night a close friend and I went on a bender with drugs we’d bought from a weirdo we had to contact via a beeper who’d have us meet him in random spaces, literally hiding behind objects. It was an introspective night and my friend had graduated the year before whereas I was a senior, so at the end of it I brushed my teeth and he walked me to school and went home. We had smoked probably a thousand cigarettes. You can get away with a lot when you’re young, but whatever the upper limits are, we had definitely breached them and were looking like what we were, dehydrated shmucks who hadn’t slept. We felt we were probably wiser than we’d started, and we had a bond from sharing something ill-advised and inexplicable. When he was leaving he saluted me and said “friends are forever”.

The right moment, even with a stranger, will carry me for years. Your attention rapt, no idea where the moment’s headed, doing your best not to break the momentum and have whoever it is see the dummy you see in your mirror. Those moments are rare these days, and some of it’s definitely on me. We’ve moved so far away from that kind of life that it’s a little terrifying anymore to put yourself out there. We never had any money so we used to go do nothing.

One of the best things that happened to me in recent past is my friend Andy used to come by after I got out of the hospital and he’d walk with me wherever. He had some errands to run, so he’d take me with him, maybe I’d add my own, maybe we’d literally go to the supermarket. It’s funny how powerful stupid little things are when you’ve made it so hard for them to happen anymore. So now I’m recruiting. If I’m near you maybe we go for a drive to nowhere. If you’re near me, we’re going to walk somewhere you’ve never been. My friend Ron says “no plans is plans” and I only recently really understood it.

I’m gonna do nothing this weekend. I might even leave my phone in a drawer. Where I am in Brooklyn is cookout central, people blast music every night and make BBQ on their stoops. I have neighbors I’ve never spoken to, this whole city’s a galaxy of little worlds I haven’t met yet. You’re welcome to come along. If it gets hot people crack the hydrant down the street all summer.