Sunday, June 13, 2010

Falling off the Wagon

[Native American Cemetery, Block Island, 2009]

"I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray."

— Stanley Kunitz, from "The Layers", in The Wild Braid (2005)


April 17, 2009

I’m falling off the wagon.

Our kids’ teacher — who is founding a school at her house in the woods — and I have been talking graphic design for her school and her neighbor has created the logo—a beautiful watercolor image with the name of the school around it. There was discussion about how to get the image from her neighbor to me. I suggested she email this to Jeff.

The other day I found myself idly saying, “just have her email it to Jeff.” This just didn’t feel quite kosher for this experiment — the thought of it becoming habitual.

Then, this morning J. had his laptop on the kitchen table. When I sat down with my cocoa, he handed me the little white ipod earphones and said I "should watch this." It was a little video on Avweb that P. and the editor of Kitplanes magazine had made on their trip — part 4 of a vlog. It was funny and he said if I wanted to see more there were several more listed on the page. I said that I couldn't do that but wanted to see them so he navigated about and clicked the links for me.

In terms of the context of this experiment, this was about the equivalent of having someone else hold the cocaine under my nose and taking a nice deep breath — that didn’t mean I snorted it on purpose, did it?

2 comments:

  1. the internet is such a profound invention in out time its almost impossible to live withoiut right now. Its like not driving a car for a year, or not using the microwave for a year i mean it can be done but not in our current society and environment. Maybe if you moved to a primal little island untainted by technology.

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  2. It depends on what we mean by living without the internet. To entirely extract oneself from the worldwide web would indeed be impossible. The point of last year for me was to entirely (or as far as possible) give up my internet habit--email, social networking, googling, etc.

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