I have COVID.  It’s something I had managed to avoid up to this point because I have a history of chronic bronchitis and pneumonia as well as asthma.  A killer lung virus was not high on my Christmas list.  The good news is that I managed to avoid a COVID infection for over two years and in that time the medical treatments for COVID have advanced to the point where my case is so far been manageable.  I was quite sick on Friday afternoon and by Sunday I was quite worried about developing severe complications so I did the smart thing and went to the Urgent Care.  The doctor agreed that I needed intervention and prescribed the new anti-viral for COVID, paxlovid.  Since I started taking it I have noticed a trend towards getting better rather than getting worse and I couldn’t be happier.

I’ve missed three days of work so far and I’m really tired and taking a lot of meds but I don’t see an ICU in my future if this holds.  Knock on wood.

Anyhow, one of the side effects of being laid out sick for a few days is that I tend to catch up on media.  Shows and movies I’ve been meaning to watch, books I’ve been meaning to read, games I’ve been meaning to play.  The last few days have been no exception.  I binged all five Dirty Harry movies, watched the second season of Russian Doll, read the final book in the EXCELLENT Noumenon trilogy (Marina J. Lostetter is maybe my new favorite sci-fi author if she can crank out this level of work consistently…  wow) and spent some time playing Beneath a Steel Sky on my new MNT Reform Linux laptop, reacquainting myself with the world of non-corporate computing and open-source in a purer form than I normally use.

What I haven’t done is make additional progress on my new album, but that’s OK.  Awkward Bodies is in the closing stages of recording our new album, which has been a ton of fun.  I still have some bass parts to re-cut and some backing vocals to lay down, but there is an album tracked and getting ready to go out in to the world.  This is very exciting to me as it represents the first album I’ve made in collaboration with a band in more years than I care to mention.  My solo album will be a nice follow on.

I’ve had some time to ponder while laying around for the last few days and one thing I’ve pondered is the fact that I am almost constantly making things, fixing things, restoring things, writing things, but at some point in the last decade or so I stopped aiming to make larger projects out of the smaller things.  On any given day I usually start and complete one or two small projects.  I write a journal entry or repair a piece of technology or build something.  So why, then, am I no longer trying to write novels, develop software applications, make movies, record albums, build businesses, or any of that?

I’ve never lost the creative urge, but I’ve lost the ambition to try to make anything coherent, larger, more meaningful.  I have many theories as to why, and I have written about them in many a journal entry.  I haven’t always even been particularly sure it was actually a problem.  So what if I am no longer trying to do anything big?  It was never really necessary in the first place, if I’m honest with myself.  I just always thought that “making a dent in the universe” had a nice ring to it.

But something else has been going on, something less about big intent and more about small habits and patterns and over the last two years I’ve become more and more aware of those changes as underlying causes.  I can’t, and don’t, blame everything on the culture or technology, but I am a person who has spent most of my adult life living in close symbiosis with technological advances in computers and communications.  It’s my job, and something I’ve been interested in since early childhood.  With each adaptation I have made to technologies (home computers, the internet, mobile phones, smart phones, social media, etc.) I have changed my habits and daily patterns.  I have very much been both master and servant to my devices and their needs.

I have finally learned that my actual thought patterns, my levels and lengths of attention, my capacity to absorb and retain and use information, my sleep cycles and physical fitness, all of these are shaped by my habits and activities throughout the day and those habits and activities are shaped by my relationship to communications technology.  I have also learned that it is possible to intentionally reshape that relationship, to regain control of it, even if my career is based in those very technologies.

I learned a long time ago from Buddhist teachers that it is very difficult to change your mind and from there change your self.  Your mind is the core of your self.  Waiting for a change of mind or thought before making changes to action is a lovely way to stay mired in your thought patterns for all eternity.  The best way to change your mind is to change your practices and behaviors and allow your mind to change in response to the new stimuli.  Ergo, if I want to have more attention span, if I want to regain the capacity for long-form creative work, if I want to redevelop the ability to be present and focused and to be ambitious with my intentions, the first step is to change the behavior patterns and practices that are creating that mental state.

So, that was what I set out to do.  I made a conscious effort to rearrange my relationships to the technologies that have mostly shaped my life for the last 30 years.

I would like to say that I had a clear plan that this was what I was doing, but that would be giving myself too much credit.  I just knew I had some unhealthy patterns that were creating negative mental states and I hoped that altering those patterns would lead to changes of mind.  I wanted to stop being tethered to screens, stop responding to a constant influx of updates, messages, and notifications, stop chasing an endless flow of information, just stop.  I wanted to start to live more like when I am backpacking.  One foot in front of the other, present with the trail, not half-connected to some fake meta-universe.  I decided to change my tech in order to change my patterns so I would change my brain.  I won’t go through everything that happened, everything I tried, but I will summarize by saying that I decided I needed a divorce from the endless feeds of social media, podcasts, and the news.  My smartphone needed to stop living in my pocket.  My computing, whenever I chose to do it, needed to be rigorously controlled, with me totally in control of the experience and nobody else’s agenda pushing into my space.  No ads, tracking, or reselling of myself to data brokers.  And last, but certainly not least, I needed to find and learn how to use disconnected creative tools so I could be creative again without depending on the devices that were disrupting my brain.

Hence, a return to typewriters.  Hence, a return to vintage, pre-internet “retro” computers.  Hence, fountain pens.  Hence, film photography.  But the retro-analog thing wasn’t even really the point. It was more important to my project that I adopt technology that was disconnected than that it was analog.  The goal was to return to focus, disconnection, presence of mind, concentration, not to make a fetish out of old gear.  So, I also adopted two very modern solutions: I acquired a standalone 32-track digital multi-track recorder so I could record music without using a computer and I acquired a computer that is entirely free of proprietary hardware and software and which has nothing on it or about it that I did not choose.

I ordered this computer a couple of years ago.  It was made by some hackers in Germany as a “free as in speech” project that was crowdfunded.  No mega tech corporations involved in making the hardware or the software.  It’s called an MNT Reform and there are only a few hundred of these machines in existence and it took over two years to get it delivered.  It was worth the wait.  It’s a symbol, sure, but as an artist I’ve always honored the power of symbols.  It’s also a tool that makes me feel free when I use it, rather than making me feel as if I’m being guided along by some invisible hand whose motives are beyond me.

I’m kitted out.  I can write, shoot, record, edit and publish without giving over my control or agency.  My communications patterns are radically altered.  I feel healthier than I’ve felt in a decade.  I don’t yet know what I’m going to create, but I can report that the changes in my habits and patterns over this stretch of time have started to create the hoped for changes in my thoughts and feelings.  I may not yet be spending extensive hours in the recording studio, but I have been enjoying spending extensive hours in the darkroom and behind a typewriter or a camera or playing a guitar.  I may not yet have written a novel, but I have found new joy in writing and spending focused time doing it, indeed I’ve developed several new types of writing practice for myself.

For many years, as far back as a decade, I’ve felt unglued, unmoored, as if the world was flying by at a pace that removed all joy or even the opportunity for it, like every day was an endless feed, nothing really mattering for more than a minute or two, nothing could really stick.  Everything was one little dopamine hit after another and nothing really made a dent.  I wondered if that was just a side effect of aging or my career or other events in my life, but the fever really took hold and broke through the Trump presidency and the pandemic and the overall insanity of world events during the last few years.  I came to realize that, yes, the world is an endless feed of events happening and, no, nothing inherently matters for more than a moment or two, if you always move on to the next thing.  And there is always going to be a next thing.  You cannot ever catch up, you cannot ever win, you cannot ever make it change.  You can, however, change your relationship to it.  You can stop being addicted to it.  You can detach from the streams and services and corporations and media outlets and technologies that thrive on your attachment to them.  You can choose to live fully in the life you have on a daily basis rather than vicariously through the ambient intimacy and perpetual thirst trap of the modern digital culture.  Sure, it might be an over-correction to replace your 5g smartphone with a quill pen you hand carved from a found turkey feather, but maybe it’s not.  Maybe it’s exactly what you ought to do.  At least for a while.  Give your brain a chance to catch up, slow down, chill out, and reconfigure.

At least, that’s how it’s looking to me.  Look at that, I just wrote over 1900 words.  It’s working.