The Set of Modernistic Identities

The Set of Modernistic Identities — Flash creative nonfiction and/or prose poem

We get up and have coffee. We shower or not. Have that run or not. Turn on the TV or radio or other background noise. We drive to work or school or the grocery. We say ‘hi how are you’ and ‘im good’ and ‘thatll be seven fifty-one’ and ‘how was your weekend’. Occasionally we say ‘terrible’ instead of fine, but mostly we lie. We move things in warehouses and stock shelves and click mice and answer phones. We get blinded behind the wheel by the setting sun. We engage in audiovisualdigital looping behaviors. We drink and get high. We stay sober and do meetings or church. We stay up too late and sleep too little. We get up to make coffee and the cat dashes in for her treats when she hears the microwave door. We get distracted. We make a list or not. We turn on the noise…

We click and scroll. We open twenty tabs when we went to chase down one piece of information. We leave on the radio even though it’s subtly agitating. We read a book. We allow no gaps. We avoid thinking about the climate or where the roads or tomatoes come from. We growl angry corrections and expansions to the news. We go through the motions. We do what we’re supposed to do with our kids and act like that’s enough. We have no idea how to give them our hard-earned lessons. We repeat affirmations and lies. We run from our guilt that’s kicked our legs out fifty times before. We take pills and pay dreams no mind, but we wish we did remember our dreams. We make false starts on too many projects. We run on asphalt and grass, and like it, and guilt ourselves for not enough.

When we run or bike or ride the lawn mower or play Halo Whatever our thoughts loop and songs stick. Before too long the environment pops out, or at least the squirrel mind shuts up. It’s just cover this file of grass, then that one, then another, too loud for talk or music. We walk with the music and after four blocks our unease quiets and maybe we want to keep going at the end, but it’s a long way back. We do yoga with the wordless music and the obsessive worry, barely noticed most of the day, turns into soft loops of mental images and memories. We see solutions or see how we do too much. We get home and snap on a noise machine or glowing rectangle, and quick as that the fraction of peace vanishes into a fugue of anxious and unsustained actions. The I continues to fall…

We forget how to have long conversations. We talk about ourselves or articles or TV in between looking at whatever on our glowing-rectangle-click-noise-makers. Click. Click. Scroll. Heart. Repost. There’s no more elevator music, but every restaurant and shop scrolls perpetual music we hardly notice. There are 500 interactive networks and 10 billion websites, and 10,000 magazines and journals, and 500 TV channels, and infinite streaming radio and podcasts. There is too much canon to follow and the artists that tickle you most will never be among them. We forget how to talk to people. Long before most of you did during COVID. The island keeps on receding. We are awake all night as our addled neurons spin up more fear and grandiosity and bizarre ideas. We keep on searching for another method or plan, even when we really know there’s never going to be a complete solution of us. We try to face up to ourselves and how we can live better, and never get more than a little way. Lather, rinse, repeat. Cleanse, fold, manipulate.

We imagine a better past. We imagine a better future. We think about origins. We think about the unreachable infinity of space. We think about our small blue spherical eggshell. We can’t think of Them as able to change. We can’t see through our mythologies of fungible groups. We get lost in groupthink and shifty symbologies. We compose great art. We compose junk sketches. We distract and diminish. We zoom in and clarify. We synapse and pulse rate. We germinate and bumblebee. We interfere and amplify. We stellar fusion and naked mole-rat. We get threaded through buttons and the photographs chatter amongst themselves. We walk in and out of this and that universe. The pockets separate and fuse and recombine. We snap into dream and forget that wakeful island.

Featured image source: Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash / Gallery image sources [got to run just now check back later today – (never got around to this, but they’re from Unsplash.com and if you open each one, the username is in the filename) ]

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The above text was a project for a creative nonfiction class in which the assignment was ‘environment’ in a flash format, 750 words or less. The only idea I seemed to have focused on the psychological/digital/media environment rather than the built and/or biospheric environments. My first version may have been under 750 words. This one, with very slight edits since the last draft in the class which ended December 2021 comes in at 753, so I could probably cut it down enough to submit to the online literary journal Brevity whose ‘best of’ book we used as the textbook for class. But publishing it on my blog likely rules it out from acceptance there. There is also an expanded version which before the final edit comes in at 1554 words. I’ll post that separately at a later date.

While you are here, here is a playlist to brighten your day which I made on December 1: Everybody Got Their Something and Each One Empowered to Choose also on regular YouTube instead of YouTube Music

Please also consider buying my book Synaptic Syntactic which can be read on any device from phones to desktops, available direct, from Amazon, iTunes, and others, and depending on your ebook software, can also be printed out. As well, check out my items on Zazzle and an older Zazzle store. You can also transfer the images to other items on Zazzle and I will still get a royalty. The high numbers of reviews are for everything sold on that product type on Zazzle, not my own items. Also check out my climate change/activism/ocean hypoxia/politics/environment website and GitHub project Easy Em. If you are feeling generous, please like or comment or even send a tip at Buy Me a Coffee. A Patreon and subscriber only content are under consideration but currently far from implementation. Also consider joining or giving for my 2023 project Buy 1,000 Postcard Stamps and Defeat Fascism, for which I need to recreate the detailed GoFundMe due to technical issues and confusion, but that may take until sometime on 12/3. Some older but still somewhat detailed info going back to 2016 is at Poetic Postcards, the Gallery of the Discordian Postcard Conspiracy. And I have a SoundCloud which has art sound and meditation. Also some 2017 spoken word improvisations some of which I maybe should delete, but I haven’t listened to them all yet!

If you arrived here by clicking on an ad, the image for the ad was made by me with DALL-E 2 with the prompt “the set of human identities with reflections at a glass bus stop – modernistic in bright colors many layers”.

On the note of defeating fascism, did you know that in many states, you DO NOT HAVE TO BE A REPUBLICAN TO VOTE IN THE REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARY!!!??? OpenPrimaries.org has a map at https://www.openprimaries.org/rules-in-your-state/. As noted in the announcement, Maine has also approved it but it is not on the map I guess because it doesn’t take effect until some time in 2024. i have sent them an email suggesting they add a fourth map color for that. Also check your polling place locations and verify that you haven’t been purged from the voter rolls. Some starting points to find your state specific info and state government web pages are vote.org, iwillvote.com, and vote.gov. A couple other sites of interest for preserving, defending, expanding and improving democracy are protectdemocracy.org, democracydocket.com, and fairfight.com. Although people who are not US legal permanent residents (green card holders) or citizens cannot give to campaigns or PACs, if I am not mistaken foreigners and foreign organizations CAN give to any organization that is a 501(c)(3) such as the Open Primaries Education Fund, When We All Vote and many others who can help us defeat fascism in America!

Also on the note of defeating fascism, WordPress ads are cheap and dead simple to set up and you are really doing the blogger and the reader both a favor because a lot of the stuff in the ad block on free-plan blogs is long junky clickbait things farming tertiary ad revenue, so whatever blog post you’re advertising, it is likely of higher value than the time sucking and money soaking tertiary clickbaiters. (negative value). WordPress ads are all moderated by humans before they run, so it IS possible to do, lookin’ at you other platforms. Organic traffic in your WordPress stats may be understated for various technical reasons. When last I checked years ago, if I had the Ghostery browser plugin turned on none of my traffic to my blog registered, even when logged out and at the library, not home. Here is a screenshot of results frommy previous ad for We: