Something I wonder about: since all my bills are now automatically deducted so I don’t have to pay attention…what would it be like to remove clocks, remove calendars, and just live without that structure. Grocery shop when we need groceries, rather than on a certain day of the week; work out according to my inclination; rise when I awake, sleep when I’m tired, eat when I’m hungry, pay no attention to the month or what day it is. Would days slow down? Would my sense of aging be altered? Would I (could i) be unstuck in time, as Vonnegut said? Or would I just…stop?

About six months ago, I decided to get off social media. I wasn’t particularly active anymore, but I did a lot of scrolling, mostly on Threads and a little on X. I rarely went on Facebook, and I never made the transition to the more visually-oriented platforms like Instagram much less Tik-Tok. So I was already mostly gone, but I decided to stop entirely. I removed the apps, and read only my MB timeline.

It wasn’t difficult. It was mainly something I reached for automatically. But I did feel an almost immediate sense of relief. I was no longer getting pulled into the outrage de jeur.

But then I started reading news sites, trying to find a good source for doing my duty as a citizen of staying up to date on contemporary politics. I had the AP app, MSNBC (now MS NOW), CNN, and The Dispatch.

When I lived in NYC while I was doing doctoral work in the late 80s, I did what most NYers did: each morning, I’d walk to the deli and by a newspaper, usually the NY Times, and I’d spend Sunday mornings reading the Sunday Times. And even then, I’d finish and feel as if I’d wasted my morning watching cartoons. I didn’t find current events satisfying, nor did I find the editorials particularly thoughtful. And now here I was, 35 years later, feeling the same thing about the news sites. I was back to the outrage de jeur again, but spending even more time on them than I had been when I was popping into Threads.

Finally I realized, as Ricky Nelson once sang, “it was time to leave.”

This was harder, because all my life it has been drummed into my mind that being a Good Citizen meant keeping up on The Issues. But I felt as if I was constantly being made to pay attention to Trump. Steve Bannon had talked about “flooding the zone,” and that now dominated the news cycle: throwing chum to the pundits, who enthusiastically generated post after post analyzing, fretting over, condemning, and prognosticating about the latest nonsense that happened to cross through Trump’s (or any other politician’s) pea brain.

Then I read Byung-Chul Han’s The Crisis of Narration, and I started to understand what was happening to me. “The tsunami of information,” Han writes, “means that our perceptual apparatus is permanently stimulated. [And so] It can no longer enter into contemplation. The tsunami of information fragments our attention. It prevents the contemplative lingering that is essential to narrating and careful listening. Since I am now retired, and I want to do a lot more contemplation, this was not good. More Han: “Information cuts up time. Time is reduced to the narrow track of what is momentarily relevant. It lacks temporal extension….A life that trudges along from one present moment to the next, from one crisis to the next, from one problem to the next, slows to a mere survival. Living is more than just problem solving.” Another nail: “In digital late modernity, we conceal the nakedness - the absence of meaning in our lives - by constantly posting, liking and sharing. The noise of communication and information is supposed to ensure that life’s terrifying vacuity remains hidden.”

I had become increasingly aware that politics–the vacuous, superficial politics that we’ve been living with since at least 2016, and probably since the 24-hour news cycle was invented–had gradually chipped away at my ability to tolerate meaningful narrative. I found myself reading books about politics, and realized that they were just longer versions of punditry based entirely on a foreshortened version of history combined with a heightened sense of existential danger. At the same time, I was receiving more and more emails and text messages from political organizations telling me that, unless I contributes X number of dollars right now “we” were in danger of losing the House, losing the Senate, losing the Presidency, losing democracy. I wasn’t supposed to do anything, learn anything, understand anything – just send money. I had become a vending machine, not a participant in democracy.

Around the same time, I attended my first annual town meeting for my little town in Berkshire County, population 3254. There was probably 75 people at the meeting, which was focused largely on approving the budget. There was some discussion, a few ad hominem attacks, and after about 3 hours the budget was approved. It wasn’t life changing, but when I walked to my car afterwards, I felt more a part of my community. I knew some of the main characters, a few of the plot lines, and could see the issues that might lead to crisis points later. After 3 hours sitting on an uncomfortable folding chair in a stuffy room, I felt calmer somehow, and more rooted in my place.

So about two weeks ago, I stopped checking the online news sites. I read my local newspaper, The Berkshire Eagle, which is an excellent paper that has a little national news but mostly stories of local goings on. My focus drifted from the US-as-a-whole to my town, my county, and my state. And as my understanding of these deepened, I felt empowered, because there were things I cared about that I could actually do something about, something more than just contributing money.

I also found that my ability to concentrate on novels, ideas, and philosophy began to improve. Our tiny local library was having a summer reading challenge that gave us ten categories of books (e.g., set outside country, body of water in title, 2026 release, and so forth, as well as one category of an experience [museum, concert, or hiking]) to read over the course of six weeks; I filled them all in. Instead of reaching for my phone, I reached for a book or an ebook.

I checked into the news sites once every week or so, and realized that most of it was just the same-ole-same-ole: Trump was insulting the looks of another female reporter, Hegseth was firing another qualified military leader, pundits were fretting over the latest Supreme Court case, the Iran War was back on and then off again. I hadn’t “missed” anything, really, except a lot of anxiety.

I know mine is an old story: gosh, I got off my phone and I felt so much better! Hoop-de-doo! Still, I was surprised at how much better I felt not fulminating about things I could do little about, and that didn’t really affect me directly. I spent time actually looking at the websites for the Senate candidates who I’ll have to vote for in the upcoming primary instead of relying on the newspapers to “frame” the “race” according to their own priorities. I signed up to receive email updates from my town’s website – today, for instance, I found out that mosquitos with West Nile virus have been found in towns around me and I should be cautious about being bitten. Good to know! That’s something I can do something about. I’m going back through my personal library and finding books I never read that suddenly sound intriguing. I’m going to read them.

What can I remove from my life next???

I just removed an old workbench in the garage that clearly was built to survive a nuclear war. insert Chewbacca celebration here

Now that I have had my Theater Ideas Substack restored to my possession (after I had stopped writing on it), I’ll probably end up on Substack a bit more (although I want to avoid getting sucked into that vortex). After having been an active member of the Theatre Blogging Wars of the Aughts, I’ve decided that I need to have some Personal Rules of Engagement as I ease back into the feed. Here they are:

Rules of Engagement

There are only 5 ways to respond:

1. Yes
2. Yes, and…
3. Yes, but…
4. Maybe
5. No

Responses #1 (Yes) and #5 (No) should be rare, because they add little to the conversation. The exception is if someone is a newby and could use the support of a “Yes” as encouragement. If the response is going to be “No,” just move along.

Response #4 (Maybe) should also be rare – if I am not certain, I should just bookmark the post or note and return once I have something worth adding. If that day never comes, oh well…

Response #3 (Yes, but…) should wait until there are a few positive responses from other people. “Yes, but…” tends to make it about me instead of the author of the post. Let the post be about the author at least for a while, then add my “but” in a way that doesn’t make the author look stupid.

Response #4 (Yes, and…) should be my most common response. I need to signal my “Yes” with enthusiasm, preferably with at least one reason, and then build on what has been written.

If I can follow these rules of engagement, maybe I’ll find the internet more interesting and enjoyable.

When I look back, there were two major occurrences that influenced my life with computers. First, in the mid-80s, I was hired to work at the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC), where my boss was Don Rawitsch, the inventor of the popular educational program “Oregon Trail.” I was using an Apple 2e every day, and I was surrounded by programmers using computers in education. In 1992, I was hired as Asst to the Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Illinois State University. The Dean was Alvin Goldfarb, and he had hired an Associate Dean, Dave Williams, whose area was (you guessed it) using computers in the Fine Arts, and he had developed a cutting edge computers lab. Those two experiences not only gave me experience with computers, but also made me much more interested in using computers in education. Once I was hired at UNC Asheville, I became very much involved in the computer work in the Center for Teaching and Learning, and I did a lot of experimentation with computers in my classroom. It seemed natural and fun. Thank you Don, Alvin, and Dave!

Every once in a while, I find myself reading intelligent Substack note after intelligent Substack note, and I think “Why am I avoiding this platform?” Then I subscribe to a few people and suddenly my inbox is overrun with every intellectual twitch a writer has, and I immediately unsubscribe each and every one, panting and sweating by the end as if I’d just averted the apocalypse.

When I first started blogging on Theatre Ideas in 2005, I was responding to a book that had been recommended to me whose title I have long forgotten but that had urged that academics write at least 15 minutes a day every day, which seemed like a good idea to me. I was seven years into my teaching career, had heaved a sigh of relief when I got tenure, and I was not interested in writing for academic journals. I had also read educator Will Richardson’s Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms which had recently come out. So I decided to blog at least 15 minutes a day. I ended up blogging much more than that. For seven years.

However, like all academics, especially at an undergraduate liberal arts university like mine that put an emphasis on teaching, I didn’t have a lot of time to write – I was teaching a lot of classes, many of them new preps, directing a play one semester a year, and serving on way too many committees. Nevertheless, I had lots of ideas in my head that I wanted to share. Very often, these ideas were reactive – responses to something someone else had written (“honey, I’ll be late for dinner, there’s someone who’s wrong on the internet”) or something I had read in a book that inspired me in some way. I’d sit down at my office desk with two hours available between my class and a committee meeting, have lunch and knock out something just to get the idea out of my head. Often, these posts (we called them posts back then, not “content”) were quite lengthy, sometimes as long as 2,500 words or more. I didn’t have time to research anything that couldn’t be pulled off of my office bookshelf, nor did I have time to edit and rewrite – I did both as I went.

When I look back at that writing today, I confess that I’m surprised at how well it stands up. Of course, I had my share of kneejerk clinkers, but much of what I wrote had energy, some degree of wit, a firm philosophical foundation, and at least some glimmer of insight. Plus they were kind of fun to read. At least to me.

Today when I write here on MB, things are different. Things are much more polite – to disagree with someone, which back then was de rigueur (“Whatever It Is, I’m Against It” was my blogging motto), is now almost unheard of – after all, that’s what X is for! But here, when there are comments, they are mostly of the “attaboy” type. I sort of miss the Intellectual give and take, although the out-and-out brawls got a little tiresome after a while. Sometimes, people took issue with what I wrote – can you believe it?

More importantly, now that I am not writing in response to an ongoing conversation (or battle), and my audience is minimal to say the least, I can take my time to think, research, edit, polish. At first, this was disorienting. I had a hard time recreating the propulsive, slashing style that once set me apart; I’d find my ideas would sort of droop onto the page and lie there, moping and mumbling. That wasn’t fun at all, I’d think, it’s got all the excitement of a bowling ball rolling slowly down the basement stairs. On the other hand, I was still being driven by a sense that I needed to provide a regular stream of, yes, “content” unless I wanted to be forgotten – not admitting that I had been forgotten for a long time now. It took a while but I finally realized that I was OK with that – that I really didn’t want to be part of an online controversy about anything anymore. Maybe that comes of being 68 – I don’t know.

What I’m finally starting to enjoy is just taking my time to let my ideas develop, to edit and polish, to publish only when I think I’ve said what I meant. I mean, this particular post is being written casually, but I have another one that I’m really working on – something apparently called an “effort post” these days, and it is an effort – a slow effort, but an effort nonetheless. A leisurely effort. It’s more like whittling than factory work. And because I have this time, I’m not giving my writing to a chatbot to correct the grammar or make suggestions for how to spice things up a little – I’m going to just do that myself, because that’s part of the fun. It’s like enthusiastic gardeners who even like weeding.

Kids, don’t try this at home – I’m a retired professional, and if you are hoping to generate income through your writing, you will starve taking my approach. You absolutely need to keep your intellectual knee jerking away non-stop, and I hope yout feelings won’t be hurt if I don’t read you. And in exchange, I won’t be hurt of you don’t read me. Deal?

Anyway, sometime in the not-too-distant future, I’ll be publishing something about Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine. But not until I’m damn good and ready.

Several days ago, Alan Jacobs (@ayjay@hcommons.social) published the following in a post entitled “Reorientation":

In times of social and political crisis, especially when new and often contradictory bulletins are arriving on our ICDs (Internet-Connected Devices) at a second-by-second rate, you and I need to step back. We need the relief. But at the same time, it is impossible, for me anyway, not to think about what’s happening. Just saying “I’m not going to read any more about this” is an inadequate response; it has a tendency to leave me fretful and at loose ends.

What helps is to read works from the past that deal with questions and challenges that are structurally similar to the ones we’re facing but that emerged in a wholly different context.

The idea of choosing works that are structurally similar to what’s going on, is an approach that uses literature, not as an escape, but rather as a means of achieving emotional distance for contemplation. I was reminded of how vaccines work by injecting a small amount of the disease into the body in order to allow the autoimmune system to strengthen itself. The works Dr. Jacobs has chosen for this moment includes Psalms, Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, and Machiavelli’s Discourses.

I’ve been trying to figure how I, as a theater historian with a background in dramatic literature, might follow Dr. Jacobs' lead. One work that sprang to mind immediately is Alfred Jarry’s bizarre and outrageous surrealist play, Ubu Roi (1896), whose central character, King Ubu, “is an antihero – fat, ugly, vulgar, gluttonous, grandiose, dishonest, stupid, jejune, voracious, greedy, cruel, cowardly and evil.” Another possibility: Sophocles' Antigone, which seems fitting as a portrait of a tyrannical ruler whose reaction to resistance is brutality (although Jean Anouilh’s version, written during the Nazi occupation of Paris, might supplement the original Greek version). And finally, Friedrich Schiller’s 1804 drama, William Tell, about an individual’s resistance in the face of inhumanity, and the moral questions that arise from his resistance.

Jacobs concludes:

This practice of breaking bread with the dead in times of crisis offers a threefold reorientation: - Emotional, because it gives you a break from people who are continually trying to stoke your feelings of anger and hatred; - Intellectual, because in comparing past situations with ours you get an increasingly clear sense of what about our current situation is familiar (and therefore subject to familiar remedies) and what unusual or even unique (and therefore in need of new strategies); - Moral, because, as Aragorn says to Éomer, “Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.”

Well said, Dr. Jacobs, and many thanks for providing me with inspiration to think differently about my reading. I think it might be wise to add to my list a re-reading of *Breaking Bread with the Dead” as well.

[Reposting this to get it on my blog. @timapple and @apoorplayer: just ignore this. Pretend you’re everyone else in the world…]

@timapple mentioned the new 37 Signals app, which is a simple and fun version of Kan Ban called Fizzy. I went over and checked it out. Now, Kan Bans are used for tracking collaborative projects with a decent number of people [@drjlwells has informed me this isn’t necessarily true], which is not me at all. I’m a solo act these days. However, I watched the demo video done by 37 Signals co-founder Jason Fried, and then signed up for the free trial today and started using it.

So far, it’s been kind of fun. I want to keep track of progress on my book projects, online writing, and home improvement projects. Right now, I’m trying to restore one of my previous books to the web for free online reading, and it is helping me organize what needs to be done. I also threw a “card” up (you created cards that are then added to columns that indicate levels of progress) about an article I stumbled on and might want to want to write about later about “ecoscenography,” which is a design approach for theater productions that tries to create sets, for instance, out of things that can be upcycled, recycled, or reused. I can attach the article to the card along with a few sentences to remind me of what I was thinking, and I put it in the “Considering” column.

I could see this as being useful for something like a podcast (@apoorplayer) or YouTube channel where you have to organize and track various stages of production. If I were still teaching, I was use the heck out of it for my class prep, committee work, production work and so forth.

For some reason, I find this kind of fun, especially recently when my mind has a bunch of new and unexpected energy. I look forward to exploring other uses. The trial gives you 1000 cards, after which you can either pay $20/month or download the source code and run it yourself. Unfortunately, the latter is beyond my pay grade right now, but it might be something I could learn later. @timapple, how is it going for you?

I often feel as if getting a new computer opens up the possibility of finally, at long last, figuring out a new, effective way of organizing my projects, both writing, reading, and home improvement projects. Perhaps if I find some new apps, things will fall into place, and all the wonderful thoughts and tasks will flow like water.

All of which is to say, I bought a refurbished Dell chromebook and it arrived a few days ago, and I have been happily exploring new apps and new “workflows” (God, I dislike that word.) Pressbooks, 37 Signals' new Fizzy app, Google Calendar and Tasks. Maybe this time…