Engagement

Over months of tea, my son has reminded me of Buddhist teachings that have faded into the background of my memories, like the soft afterglow from the Big Bang: Presence of Mind and Engaging with Life.

After I mentioned online about canceling Spotify, I find I’m re-engaging with my music collection, purchased over decades, where I looped-listened until every note, lyric and chord progressed into my mental DNA. I’m now listening again. Yes, I’m lucky I still have CD players, but I have also ripped the CDs into audio files, and this week, I fished a Raspberry Pi 2b from a drawer, installed Samba and plugged in a hard drive. This process took minutes, but now I have all my music available to each device in my house.

My primary approach to playing music is through Emacs (go figure, Gruncle Howard) using Alvaro’s, ready-player-load-directory. Since I’ve organized my collection by Artist / Album / Song, playing a directory feels like playing an album like I did during the twentieth century.

I’m now addicted to this.

Friends are coming over this weekend to watch a movie in homage to Catherine O’hara, and I no longer want to merely rent a movie from Amazon. In fact, I no longer want to give any money to that corporation. So I found “Waiting for Guffman” and “A Mighty Wind” from a couple of sellers on Etsy. Ordered. One arrived yesterday with a pink sticky note that just said, “Thank you, Howard. –Dorian.” Nice touch, but I believe Dorian felt the need to attach the sticky note to something more substantial, so I found it stuck to a post card.

The old post card, undated but referencing World War II, and signed “Margaret” had a picture of columnar Douglas Firs against a nearby mountain. It began mid-sentence, as if Margaret sent Dorian’s mother two cards at the same time, since the stream of consciousness needed more than one.

What sort of economic engagement is this? I haven’t enjoyed purchasing used merchandise like this in years. While I don’t need immediate consumer gratification (no-thank-you-two-day-shipping), but I may need engagement. Like the difference between ordering from a drive-thru only to enhale the food in the car, versus making a multi-course meal with friends. Time spent wisely versus miserly saved.

The current kerfuffle surrounding Discord doesn’t affect me much. Sure, I have joined a couple dozen servers associated with startup applications and other projects that offer “support” with that awful replacement for a forum (trying to search for answers has always been abysmal, especially since the question and answers are interspersed between other messages). Years ago, a friend of mine created a server and invited me and all his friends to join. Even though I have met few of them, he has curated a lovely community where people make interesting posts with engagement and no trolling.

We, as social animals, crave community, and our Internet invention sometimes succeeds, but more often, fails miserably. I’m not expecting a single social-media service, or even a federated one built on the ActivityPub protocol, to supply my community need. Perhaps this too, will take time and engagement, and maybe multiple avenues … from Mastodon to physical interaction.

Or perhaps I join the twentieth century where email becomes my primary form of communication. Sure can do everything any social media app can do … without the spying panopticon, addictive filtering, and mercantile up-selling. Let’s try this…if you would like to respond to my thoughts publicly, drop your thoughts on Mastodon and tag me at howard@pdx.social, otherwise, message me privately at howard@howardabrams.com.