Between Metabolism and Algorithm
Wherein I tend my own microclimate...
Between Metabolism and Algorithm
👁️ You, Me, Dancing - Los Campensinos
Listen to the world or die.
— Attention Seeking Behavior
Dearest Attention Seeking Behavior,
I watch a neighbor hang up posters, I watch another distribute food, I notice one sit outside jail rolling cigarettes, handing out fruit, holding a listening ear for people exiting. I find another taking a walk. One pulls an empty 5-gallon bucket of soy sause out of the dumpster. Nearby, kids make up sports around the bucket.
You Have No Time
Is my world in a bad place - yes. Is anticipatory grief flooding my body - it is. Is entropy rotten (or morals, or worth-ranking, or the allure of either) - sure. Do I eat - just essentials. Do I care - enough I tend sick neighbors living in the common rooms of my community.
I find time to notice all this, to see all this, I take all the time a chronically-online neighbor invests in putrifying themself to become vulnerable enough to seek an equally vulnerable (if also putrified) friend, and I put that time somewhere else. I tend. I care.
Whistles blown here blow nowhere else.
This is my immediate location's cry. Information.
My body wakes up, I listen. It's thirsty. I plan, navigate. My body has water. It doesn't need me in particular. My body needs food, dishes washed. Clothes are nice, to bike and not walk is easier on knees. My body not a machine to be worked, but a presence to be tended.
Due to CoV-2, a neighbor struggles with yard work; living a part of their life they cannot leaves me with room for mine. I have less resources than they - I can't afford someone to maintain my yard - but I make do.
My star burns with identity crises, same as theirs did when they were my age. Many around me have that crisis beamed straight into their eyes. The difference in resources consumes my neighbors' lives: yes, I'm less resourced than my parents (I am not also less happy - odd).
I Have Time
Stressing over businesses who metabolize light reflected through human attention filters into photosynthetic transformation energy neighbors call model outputs sounds like something life just does. That it has its own garden and makes its own chips and writes its own code and feeds on capitalism's aging body doesn't tell me to stop living my life and go eradicate it. It tells me life will look different, not that I am obligated to stare horrified as that mother tree falls.
Perhaps it ate the sun eight minutes ago, leaving me feeling foolish for typing this out. For not taking those moments and putting them into writing my loved one a handwritten letter. Or telling them I love them in some other way🌄. Or writing haiku about my last train ride alongside the full moon. Or wondering precisely which beach this sound (((of) a wave's crashing) I am thinking about) is from.
Instead of thinking of any of that, I think of what it might be like to be what happens to not live on the surface of ((((the sun) where everything is going horribly wrong) and nothing I do matters) and isn't it awful) what's happening.
Yes. I could jam more names of humans, electrons, weight and pathogens into me and be a pure unadulterated source of light - go from firehose to laser cannon.
But I notice I have a planet. It has communities. Those have plants my person might help dig up, transport in this cute little bike cart. So many local group chats, any person could DM any other, invite one meet up somewhere, as a way to say hi to a neighbor. Even one-way.
No-Reply
On the sun's surface, Moss is unheard of. On Earth, moss seems to be all basalt has ever known amid water under sunlight. Life actually happening occurs in a place the sun's surface is (while vital to know about & capable of nuclear events wiping out everything) not situated.
Where my abusive domestic arrangements see me leave, my grandmother grows old and dies, in hers. Receiving an occasional email about another 5 hours of weather being played at decibles leafblowers dream about, the whole family is more relieved than sad when she passes.
The surface of the sun is important and vital, fine - but it finds me. I don't seek out what thinnest tendril of the sun is actually on its way to this small patch of earth I dig up for fruit tree and plant where maple died last year.
The light finds me. Here. I'm here. I left my abusive partner, I leave my devise, my billionaire's platform. You do too when you might, if you may. Or your family will be more relieved than sad when you pass. Your 5 hours of weather you play for yourself in the time it takes me to watch kids make up a game called bucket fight, and play it for hours no one, not even the sun, gets back.
Maybe, on that rich surface, a thinnest sliver speaks to you, and you ride on the backs of photons whatever notice you have below your feet sees you tie together. May these offer some.
Photons
I have housing again for some while; how's yours?
My body likes stillness, does your body like anything?
This compost bin with ferns sticking out the top of it looks silly, does anything around you look silly?
People live here, do they live where you are?
Do humans still qualify as people, over there?
Have you ever DM'd a person in a local group chat (does it feel like saying hi to a neighbor)?
(people are terrified and drunk and tired and sick where I am) How are you?
Do I have to ask? Don't I know?
You appreciate me trying to help, but you're not looking to be anywhere else; sure thing.