Flicking through glossy images of fashion, beauty, style, life, -you name it- on the internet is a lusty game. It’s intoxicating to soak in all the contrived and lacquered beauty, all the well t h o u g h t o u t words, but it often leaves me with a dry taste in my mouth. It leaves my hands busy, itching to create something of my own. Leaves me craving something more nourishing to put in my mouth, something of substance for my teeth to sink into, something with more nuance and texture for my taste buds to explore.
This is the lurid curse and ephemeral beauty of the internet, of so much digital content. It seduces but so often does not fulfill. It inspires but so often does not satisfy. It CAN be an end in itself. It can educate, quantify, track. It can enlighten, drive, move, wake. us. up. But, in essence, it’s a medium. A vast an endless tool we can lose and find ourselves within.
It can be an abyss of beautiful models, flattering angles and perfect font combinations. It can be a vehicle to owning a home, exposing injustice or spreading a message. It’s a space, a place, an amorphous and ever-evolving game — a game I love to play, but when played long enough, it’s a game that urges me toward more tangible realities.
After hours of surfing, retinas burning, I feel those silky tendrils with their loose but insistent grip around my keyboard fingers…I hear them whispering at me to use my hands…in a new way.
Rinse some veggies and hold a knife in your palms. Slice down and chop those veggies into tiny pieces. Put those pieces in a pan with some butter or ghee and see what can be created from that which was already created from this earth.
The muddy, watery, crawling place we call home. The place, the entity, the being that collects all of the forgotten pieces of art, culture, beauty, technology. That coos and sighs along with our appetites. That sews and quenches those appetites in the first place.
A never-ending merry-go-round fueled by a quest for beauty, which is often a means to substance, to new life, to more. The more can be digital or otherwise. Words on a page or words on a screen. Connections fed through 1s and 0s or through the electricity of hands grazing at a bar. It can be argued; one isn’t more real than the other ; one can lead to the other. Digital or physical, it’s all reality. But only we can know, in our cells, only we can know, in our bodies, when we’re full.
