Forward

Facebook is a crowded room where you must shout to be heard, and in being heard one is distinguished only by dint of being the most desperate for the attention of the uninterested. While all-caps typing has become a classic faux pas, all-caps thought seems de rigueur: in a place where anything you need to say needs to be said in 400 characters or less, value is placed on conspicuousness, and instantaneous mental digestibility at the expense of the depth, or even the completeness of thought.

I feel that I am not alone in my thoughts, that I’ve commiserated with people on the shallowness of social media culture; repackaged pre-thought thoughts made a million times manifest in all the shades of only-so-many-ways-to-say. My sense of the perceptions of others is that these disappointing qualities are the result of some epidemic of banality reaching a withering hand into the ears and noses of the otherwise astute and turning their brains to mush.

In this fiction, I find, lies the most frustrating truth; there’s nothing wrong with us, it’s the place we’re in. You cannot attend an open-invitation cocktail party and expect people to be shouting doctoral dissertations over the jazz ensemble. It isn’t fair to judge a person by their behavior at a party and it’s not the purpose of the cocktail party to be a venue for serious thought.

I have decided to make a break. I like parties, but I also like libraries and empty rooms, and open fields. This is meant to be a quiet place where I can think my thoughts in words and sentences; to make the bombardment of songs and images and pseudo-pop-philosophy that is my stream-of-consciousness into something. I find that thoughts aren’t really finished until you write them down; that until you can articulate what you mean, you don’t really mean what you mean.

So you can watch if you'd like.