“Your Face Makes Me Feel Like I Ate $40 Worth of McDonalds” or “The Treachery of Content”

My dog is one of my best friends and now that we have a winter with snow, the husky in her demands more and longer walks. Since I’m not really working out in any meaningful way anymore this is a good thing for both of us, we both get to get outside and I usually have an audiobook or God help me, Youtube going in my earbuds. I justify all this to myself that I’m still reading, still learning things while I’m walking and hanging out with my furry daughter. Multi-tasking nature, relationship, and fitness seems like a productive morning but do I even care about production anymore?

One of the books that shaped my adolescence, Jaqueline Carey’s “Kushiel’s Dart” has a line, “All knowledge is worth having” and oh boy did teenage me eat that shit up. This was before the INTERNET though, I mean, it was a thing but it was secured very safely in a specific room in the house and wasn’t the time and energy suck and well, what it is now.

I’m a Youtube shorts guy, which my kids tell me is not good but I’m not going to be bothered to get another app and they can get off my lawn, but it hit me earlier this morning: what was the thing I saw three videos ago? No idea. That’s like what did I have for lunch last week, no clue and anything I said would be a guess.

That started a whole spiral because that isn’t how art is meant to be consumed. Think about a museum or a gallery for art, that’s an all day thing and you probably won’t see everything. Someone trained in oil painting can probably appreciate a painting more deeply than I can, I hesitate to say “better” but yeah probably that as well. At first sure it’s a bird or a fruit basket, but if you sit with it you notice where your eye is drawn, brush strokes, nerd stuff. The nerd stuff is where it is though, sitting and digesting something that seems silly or offensive or nonsensical at first can often meaning something deeply if you give it more than a shortform thought. Stick with me here but remember those fractal posters from the 90s? At first glance it doesn’t look like anything, its just repeated patterns, and sometimes it infuriatingly stays that way, just angles and shapes. Give it a minute or ten, relax your eyes, and a sail boat or a bird appear in three dimensions. That’s everything.

I’m not preaching to get off these damn phones. I don’t have any answers in our attention economy but I know that eating nothing but fast food fucks me up for awhile. It used to be cheap and easy, McDonald’s was my first real job and it still holds a place in my millennial mind, despite what it has done to itself in the 2020s. I’m saying give things time and be selective of what you are willing to digest because now that everything has to go through the mental filter of “is this AI?” We have time to breathe and let the art breathe.

Once upon a time a surrealist artist, Rene Magritte showed a painting of a pipe saying “This is not a pipe” under it, but in French for extra points.

See? How cool. He got a lot of shit for it though because duh, its a pipe.

But it isn’t its a painting of a pipe.

Yes its playing with language but if we poo poo’d misinterpreting language then every philosopher ever would be out of a job. That’s the point though, at first you say ‘duh’ but then later, maybe a week or so later it hits you that wow, that really isn’t a pipe.

Where am I going with all this? No clue. I am working on slowing down and digesting the things I want to digest. I like the things that make us human and different and how through all the lenses of language or anything else, we’re all human. With the flood of content and distraction its easy to forget that and our silly monkey brains want things nicely packaged. I guess I’m saying that things are bigger than that. Bigger than would fit in a Youtube short or in the cliff notes version of life.

For me, the answer is more simple than I think, like it almost always is. It’s a fast food Snoopy toy doing what I think I want to do.

He is not a writer but he is also a world famous author. He’s not even a dog but this little guy makes me think of the kind of work I want to do and reminds me what gets in the way.