it's a morning.

it's all about desire, I am learning. about what feels good, not about being better, but what feels good, what makes my body feel alive, what gives me a sense of grounding.

no doubt, with this sense of love and longing, I am pulled, a lover's discourse, formed a new.

morning writing.

==

could anything happen? am I moving with fear, spurts of fear that activate me moving in sudden ways that let me be distracted. what happens if I am present, present, present, present, present?

it's hard for me to be present because I don't know what to accept

if I know, if I just know, then I will accept it

can I accept both outcomes already, no matter what?

will my heart close?

am I closing my heart out of fear of being hurt?

am I mistaking calmness for heart closing?

do I have the courage to just be

do I dare to eat a peach?

==

one thing I dearly, dearly miss about the early internet is the earnestness with which we were all here, all present. I know it's a bit of a nostalgic cliche to talk about it, but hear me out: the sense of raw honesty and openness that I think you could find, and channel, and the expectation of the internet as a place where you could be your truest self, your strangest self, as a place for expression of who-you-were, so that the websites you made were about you, My Personal Website, where the personal, the intimate came to live -- I miss that, dearly.

No doubt this is partially because I was on that internet from when I was in 6th grade to late high school, a golden age for me, a magical time on the internet, and the shimmering sense of newness, of a kind of network that not everyone was part of, of forums and websites that you could make to plunge your fullest self into -- this was part of the magic. this was part of the social contract; if you were here, you knew that this was you and not-you, a constant masked ball, or maybe it was an agreement to take one mask off and put on another. for some it was the inverse; the internet a space to take off our masks and just be whoever you felt like being.

the point of this is not only nostalgia - I feel some serious urgency and tenderness in the loss of this psychic medium, as if a theatrical practice I've had, and many of us have had, has become lost, or less able. no doubt, many other magical and special practices exist in this medium that were not there, in the past. the past isn't always better. but the disappearance of a special practice, a discourse, a nearly sacred practice is something that I think is crucial, important, necessary. what more than to be who we are? how else but to be who we will want to be?

so there are social networks, social media, social research, newsletters, forms like this. you connect to people on these by virtue of followers, connections, friends, subscribers. the same old. you've heard this before. the graph network that connects us all reverberating in interesting and funny ways, memes, virality, etc etc etc.

what I miss is a network without virality, a low R number, localized networks, the strength of strong ties, actually, or the strength of deep ties, the ties that go slow, and honest, where being networked and being deeply honest with ourselves weren't at odds with each other, contexts where to be online doesn't feel like a performance, or rather, when it feels like being online is about capturing an endless and infinite play that's always happening. like turning a camcorder on to capture a birthday that is always going, we dip into an ongoing stream of life with this medium.

is it possible to be honest here? honest with ideas, honest with selves? again, part of that tender magic of the early internet was that yes, yes, yes, it is possible. maybe, many years later, the price to pay is transparency; that we can be honest without being immediately transparent. a rock, a polished stone sphere, a building on the street: these are material presences that lets themselves known. what's inside? who's inside? you'll just have to knock and step inside one day. but in the meantime, we are material presences that let ourselves known, and we have intimacy gradients, foyers, porches, front doors, bathrooms, kitchens, spaces, bedrooms, unprogrammed spaces, spaces full of stuff, spaces full of sentimental objects, spaces full of desks and chairs and books. the interiority of our beings unfolds in ways that are always honest. no stage sets here, no potemkin villages, just the buildings of our selves that exist the way we do, gradually unfolding toward the people in our lives who we care about.