down by old man Johnson’s farm
I am really tired of the 24/7 Internet Content Factory continually spewing out nonsense about what this pandemic and social distancing is “teaching” us. Not everything is a lesson. Not everything that happens is for you to analyze right as it’s happening. Doing so is actually counterproductive, I think, in a spiritual and artistic way (compare “just got dumped” notebook poetry with “looking back on being dumped” edited poetry). All these Online Writers have to come up with something, I guess. INCLUDING ME. Well, not really including me, as I am only keeping a diary* and not getting a paycheck.
Personally, this situation is “teaching” me that I THOUGHT I talked to people all day at work, but really that is only because the people are there, in the office, talking to me. Working from home, I usually have one or two video meetings per day but most of my workday is spent reading and editing and turning reports into spreadsheets and moving content around. In contrast, my spouse, in a tech job, talks on the video/phone/zoom/whatever ALL DAY LONG. About 75% of it sounds (from my uninformed perspective) collaborative and problem-solving and most likely necessary. The other 25% is pure collegial crabbery. If some genius ever makes an engine that transforms “complaining about code” into “lines of written code,” the whole world will be a technological paradise.
*SPEAKING OF DIARIES. You are always “living through history”! You can’t hardly help it. But when big things happen I tend to put them in my diary sort of obliquely, eg, throwaway references to “the pandemic” in the last few entries and “terrorist attacks” a few days after 9/11. My grade-school diary entry from March 30, 1981, contained but two sentences, stacked one on top of the other:
The President Was Shot Today.
What a day!
(I have preserved the esoteric capitalization. Did I think I was Benjamin Franklin or something?)
My friend Wendy, who is a proper author, writes a newsletter about lots of stuff, including the astonishing amount of family history information available to her. (I am not sure if you can subscribe to this as a rando; maybe there is a link somewhere and I am just bad at the internet today, or maybe it’s an invite-only thing since it is about her actual [although long-dead] relatives.) (Also, you know how I feel about newsletters—what’s wrong with THE INTERNET, I cry, a lone voice in the wilderness—but this is a good one and I like reading it.) (ALSO also, I am probably just jealous at this crazy-detailed knowledge of one’s family history, as my own is mostly a bunch of shady Italians doing semi-shady shit before arriving in the US last century and immediately scattering to the winds.)
Anyway, in this newsletter Wendy quotes from a Civil War-era diary with a gap of six months or so between entries, during an extremely eventful stretch of that war; her ancestor picks up again with “Such a lot has happened!” And then immediately goes back to bitching about her neighbor Hortense’s ostentatious hats, the latest sewing project, etc. I adore this impulse in people. To say “wow these times sure are interesting” but not to comment on the interesting times in any substantive way. To focus on our own lost buttons and cute cats and improperly-made iced Americanos. I highly prefer it to the “I am living through history” Weighty Commentaries.
I shared the Such A Lot Has Happened diary entry from that newsletter with Aaron, and we talked about diaries for a while and then ended up reading bits of Samuel Pepys to each other on the couch while “watching” (more like sitting in front of) America’s Next Top Model cycle 6, which is also a historical primary source in its own way; a showcase of the Very Low-Rise Jeans of 2006.
I suppose I will write about current events, in at least a casual and epistolary fashion, with my new penpal, though. He wrote me back! He is very chatty and the handwritten letter is three pages, with beautiful handwriting that he apologizes for because prison pens are shitty. (Just like everything else in prison.) Lots of details about his childhood and family and a brief explanation of his crime, which I deliberately did not ask for, but I guess if I were in prison I would figure that my penpal would at least be somewhat curious. Maybe it’s better to get it out of the way.
It is weird, my first letter to him was full of all the shit I like to do that he cannot do, and I felt awkward about that. Now I cannot do many of those things! Of coures, it is nothing at all like being in prison, and I do not mean to imply any similarities because I am not a complete asshole like Ellen DeGeneres. But it is weird, and gives me something to write about. I am relieved that my penpal is a chatty type and was not like why is this bitch telling me about her dumb life. And now, with all the letter-writing, I have a project! Just like all you weirdos with your sourdough starters!
Aaron has a project too, as he has borrowed my dad’s banjo to learn…banjoing. (He already plays guitar, so it is less of a heavy lift than it sounds.) RED ALERT! BANJO IN THE HOUSE! Every day I try to tell Aaron to get addicted to cough syrup and become a mumblecore lofi bluegrass Soundcloud star (ayyyy/yeehaw), but he just ignores me.
—mimi smartypants is a chillwave seapunk glo-fi electropop shoegazer.