An organised mind is your enemy
This post will exist forever
They absolutely loved to tell us that the internet was forever. The one enduring principle from my online adolescence was the universal beware that anything you post online would exist eternally, forevermore, in some omnipotent database at the fingertips of every employer and ASIO who inexplicably cared about your juvenile photography.
If you were to check in on every person that said that I guarantee you they couldn’t find their own child’s TikTok.
I wish I had known how easy it would be to lose every photo of my dog as a puppy, and how hard it would be to find a ticket to a gig I purchased literally 12 hours prior. If I had known that in fact, the internet would be such an ephemeral and transient repository that entire non-profits would be dedicated to retaining and building archives of websites as cultural artefacts, perhaps I would have made some effort to categorise and protect the digital ephemera that has punctuated my life.
On Tuesday I went to Eug-apalooza: The screenlife films of Eugene Kotlyarenko at LIDO, which was covertly a double screening of Kotlyarenko’s first film and new film, 0s & 1s and The Code, respectively. In the Q&A which took place with Kotlyarenko standing in a shopping trolley in the car park, he talked about the way his ‘desktop’ films are inescapably time capsules of superseded digital interfaces. 0s & 1s, shot in 2008, is nostalgic and charismatic in its depiction of the personalised, sparkly online environment of the mySpace era. This contrasted with the credits of The Code, stylised into text messages exchanged on a recent iOs system interface. When we look at current or contemporaneous interfaces they’re so familiar they become invisible. Unremarkable visual structure to shephard our activity. Only when we see a relic from a previous system can we identify it as a designed artefact, and by then it will appear clumsy and childish until it can be reborn in nostalgia.
Reflecting on these two very different interface styles side-by-side highlighted that within months, weeks maybe, some coder at Apple will push a policy and the interface style of now will cease to exist. We’ll adapt intuitively to whatever invisible design replaces it and forget the visual architecture of the systems we used even a few weeks ago. I guess I’ve realised that matters to me; retaining and collecting these visual components of my life.
Luke had three of my old laptops on the table because he wanted to ‘use one to bypass the TV to stream Plex.’ The only one that worked had the password prompt, ‘Blog w/ caps’. I placed this laptop around 2011–2014 when I was studying journalism and learned that ‘w/’ is shorthand for ‘with’, and this became an important part of my written vocabulary. A lot of precious and irreplaceable media, including hundreds of thousands of words of prose and creative writing and journal entries, is probably on this laptop.
So you best believe I went hard trying to recall the password. I found evidence of about six blogs I’d had, from high school and uni blogs, to more recent: Tiger, (IYKYK), Margin Notes (journalism uni blog), D’ais d’Arts (some art school shit), The Darts (someone who I thought was cool thought this was a cool band name), dkl-t (Tumblr, still exists btw), Friends at Home (Covid newsletter). I know there’s others but I couldn’t find the names, like the blog I kept on my gap year, or mySpace (RIP). No combination of any of these names got me into my old laptop.
What I did discover in the process was the unrecogniseable bleat of my younger self. I used to post. I posted my heart out and not just that, I pitched to news outlets, entered story contests, cataloged and commented on my life on a consistent and daily basis. I displayed a trait incongruous to the contemporary narrative I hold of myself - I was a mf go-getter.
Sometime before or during Covid I changed. Aside from dumbbitchmemes69, which in hindsight was more a public exercise in death drive than a labour of reflection, I basically stopped sharing my life online at all. I don’t use Facebook, I rarely post on Instagram and when I do it’s not about my life but some photography experiment nobody cares about or asked for.
My main problem has been in the past four years I’ve matured and developed an organised mind. I am thorough and attentive in my work. I consider my media consumption seriously and am protective of my time. I curate my commitments to prioritise things that align with my values and benefit my development as a person. I am well-balanced, and at peace.
I’ve tried to fit my creative output into this framework that has worked so well for my mental health and other facets of my life, but in truth my creative practice – whatever that means – has always been some patchwork of mess; blogging, graphic design, visual arts, photography, journaling, meme-making, antiquing, collecting samples of neighbourhood moss, etc.
I’ve wasted many days of my life waiting for the mental space to organise my thoughts, to develop a plan and form a clear intention. Trying to take apart a collage and sort each of the pieces into piles organised by colour when the whole point of the artwork was to allow these unexpected items to work together to form a picture.
But guess what bitch! I’m off my balance shit, and back on my mess shit.
I like the type of messy work I used to produce. Somewhere along the way I became chaos averse and felt my self-expression should be curated. I was genuinely convinced for a while having a conceptually cohesive instagram feed was important to me, more important than creating anything at all, more important than expressing my moronic thoughts in an erratic and truthful manner.
The organised mind is your enemy. There will never be a day when your grand strategy will come together and the cells of your body will form a neat line for others to view one by one, in the correct order, to understand you and value your work. There is no framework that will allow you to be perceived, it’s better to be honest and misunderstood.
But I understand some of you may not have experienced the full circle transformation of developing and deconstructing an organised mind, some of you may still be churning away at the whims of your untethered emotional landscape. Some of you might need Rajiv.
You may foolishly believe playing Kevin G from Mean Girls was the height of success for New York actor, Rajiv Surendra. Let me enlighten you. So-called 'Kevin G' could barely be called a footnote in the presence of Rajiv's YouTube channel on the creative and domestic arts. The past week while I’ve been unwell I’ve spent a lot of hours consuming his content.
There is something about the pace of his videos and the consideration given to each small detail that demonstrates what I see as a tangible type of love. The subject matter he is talking about doesn’t always interest me – although I will say my curiosity has grown – but his discernible intention in discussing small details inspires me in my own life to approach my interests with the same level of purpose and care.
See: 4:43 - How to go Antiquing, A Strategic Approach with Rajiv Surendra
In this video alone, the sheer amount of time he spends talking about 19th century yellow ware mixing bowls is unbelievable. The intimacy and care resonating through this video reminds me of the way I feel about the lost digital ephemera from my youth. Do you see these blogs? These blogs were stacked all together, 30 high, while I learned the shorthand for ‘with’.
Alright, moving forward I will try to spend less time navel gazing and more time cultivating an insightful perspective on whatever the fuck, but for now thanks and welcome to Foot Drag.
Most insane thing I bought this week
1x A Russ Limited Edition Bears From the Past Wellesley LE008. In original box.
1x A Russ Limited Edition Bears From the Past Barrymore LE002. In original box.
I saw these teddy bears on Abbey’s Auctions while cruising an estate sale and they struck my brain like a lightning bolt from 1995. Maybe we are really smart as toddlers and forget it all as we grow, Baby Geniuses style. Were these the same as the teddy bear I had as a child, that now looks like a misshaped hessian sack?
Anyway no they’re not, they’re completely unrelated. But following an eBay search some of these bears are selling for $850 Australian dollars?! It was too good a deal not to bid, I wasn’t likely to win the auction anyway. I figured I could try to sell one, and so many of my friends are having babies perhaps the other could be a special present for a close friend’s baby. A gorgeous bear you can never take out of the box that comes with a certificate you can never lose. The perfect present for a child.
Anyway, I won them both so now I have to drive to Bundoora this weekend to pick up two really expensive teddy bears. Can't help but notice as I write this post I didn't take many of Rajiv's lessons regarding antiquing on board.
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TLDR: I’m back, I’m blogging again, and it ain’t gonna be planned nor organised, it certainly might not be good, but it’ll be the most important thing: some more shit on the internet that can NEVER be erased.
You suckered me in and then you punched me in the mouth with that note about buying an antique teddy bear??
❤️ love this for you