Embedded in Tactile Rhythms

I talked a bit about this weaving that I made for my new penpal Joe in my recent essay "Ritualize the Analog," but I never showed you any of the process shots of the piece while I was finishing it up over the last couple weeks. It's just a wee little buddy of a weaving, approximately 7 in x 5.5 in. It packs all my favorite symbols: the nettle-dyed towers, the organic hemp twine lifeline, and the plain weave handspun grey. I stitched the piece of organic hemp cotton canvas on the back and included a dowel rod cut to size. Wah-La, a very nice handwoven gift for a new bud.

It sure was a fitting gift, considering Joe sent me a vinyl record postcard. I mean, talk about setting the bar high! He also included his Queer Horror zine that he wrote with Gina Brandolino, which they just released as a book with Microcosm Publishing. Yes, because he has his own vinyl cutting lathes that he can cut records on, he was able to cut his own postcard for me that I listened to on my record player. It was a sick tight experience to say the least, because it expanded my conception of what format a message could be to a pen pal. I think that is the biggest gift about conversing with people across the country. You are opening yourself up to be influenced by what they are working on and they are doing the same to you.

Even if I am on the web, I still want to operate at this deliberate pace. I want to talk/scheme with a few of my buds over a messenger, leave some notes on how rad they are for them to find, or hype bomb something they shared with how much I love it. Even if I am sharing, the only aim is to amplifying something I have spent hours working on like I am posting to a community message board that we still have up in our neighborhood. With that sort of intention, it helps me easily disengage when I feel the hooks of that form of media try to latch onto me. Going slow with any form of media helps you retain the choice to step away when you want. Remember, you have that choice ultimately. No one is forcing you to engage in any form of media. You have the power to make a change if you aren't happy with it.

I am really quite chuffed (50 cent word) with how the embroidery turned out on this piece. With this being the second or third piece where I have embellished the hemp twine lifeline in this manner, I felt like I was actually in the spot of tactile rhythm that allows to feel like I am in control of the narrative I am stitching with the wool embroidery thread and the needle. I was reading the textile clearly and could see the gaps in the sumac stitch that could be filled in with the DMC embroridery thread. With each stitch, I slowly accentuated tiny gaps in the layered sumac stitch that I did with my hemp twine, which opened up these little portals of yarrow color – a sandy yellow. I realized I was in the flow with it finally while I was stitching, and that brought me the most pleasant feelings of satisfaction. I could tell by feel where my needle needed to be inserted next and by sight where I needed to stitch it through to achieve the effect I wanted on the fabric. My eye and hand were now in synch in this work, a feeling that I have discovered while practicing all sorts of other fiber art. This is being in the flow of the tactile rhythm.

This tactile rhythm is one of my favorite things about fiber art, but it is like so many ordinary things that pass without notice (despite how amazing they really are upon examination). Here, by tactile rhythm, I am drawing attention to the thousands of astonishing things we do with our hands and sight that often go completely without notice or are taken for granted. Yes, we are more often than not, me included, far away mentally while deftly washing fragile dishes; riding bikes through complex urban environments with a tremendous amount of humans, cars, scooters, signals, and codified and unspoken rules; playing games (like tennis) that require a tremendous amount of synchronizing touch and sight; working in our gardens to tend to precious plant kin; or adroitly changing a baby's diaper while they are writhing around like a snack extra on the set of Anaconda. Whether doing domestic work, moving through our built environment, at play, or tending to kin, we often take for granted how much time it took to master and how miraculous it is that we are able to wield such tactile skill. In fact, we take for granted these skills so much that we often think they should be the skills that are paid the lowest for their adroit execution. To me, any society where these tactile rhythms are taken for granted or has let them fade away into irrelevance is one that has lost the plot on what it means to be human.

I am inspired in cracking open these tactile rhythms and exploring why it is not emphasized more because of Georges Perec's conception of the infraordinary that he discussed in his essay "Approaches to What?" in 1973 (and I learned about from the excellent Niagara Walking group in this video, which you should watch the entirety of):

"The daily papers talk of everything except the daily. The papers annoy me, they teach me nothing. What they recount doesn't concern me, doesn't ask me questions and doesn't answer the questions I ask or would like to ask. What's really going on, what we're experiencing, the rest, all the rest, where is it? How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs every day: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual?

To question the habitual. But that's just it, we're habituated to it. We don't question it, it doesn't question us, it doesn't seem to pose a problem, we live it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither questions nor answers, as if it wern't the bearer of any information. This is no longer even conditioning, it's anaesthesia. We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space?” Georges Perec "Approaches to What?"

When we really think about it, it is astonishing that we take as a given that we are capable of mastering thousands of tactile rhythms. Everyday we are in charge of completing feats of touch with our hands and tools that keep the world safe, clean, housed, fed, organized, and beautiful. And yet, there are no news stories that state, "Local Man Cleans up Tipped Over Portapotty," even though that story would be infinite light years more important than 95% of what runs in the Bozos-owned Washington Post or the New York Slimes. Its no wonder that many folks don't believe in their own innate capacity to play music, write stories, cook food, and make art. No, they are lost questioning their own abilities to do any of this, because they aren't truly present or embodied when they are achieving feats that our distance humanid ancestors would be utterly gobsmacked by witnessing. If we were present to the myriad of skills we possess, then we would understand that we are capable of anything we put our mind to. Anyone from the "OOOO we are a participation trophy society," can put that in their pipe and smoke it, because showing up and trying is 99% of growing. I am so sick of that narrative. Get lost and terrorize yourself behind closed doors instead.

Honestly, as I think about it, my whole A Quiet Practice project is centered on bringing these tactile rhythms out of the background and into the limelight. Inspired by William Morris, I am of that ilk that thinks there is tremendous value in spending your time making beautiful things of use to surround yourself and others with. I don't want the simple tactile rhythm that lets me hand stitch, weave, spin yarn (whether for decorative or utilitarian purposes) to blend into the infraordinary background. No, I want to put them front and center, like Morris did, so that the next generation won't be woo'd into the passive complacency that comes with mass-produced, machine-made goods. I wove and wrote myself into believing that I played an active role in crafting and writing my own life. Consequently, I selfishly want to call out these tactile rhythms out as significant to continue this exploration of how they change how I think about myself and the world I live in. In short, the intentional exploration of tactile rhythms has made me feel more human, more comfortable in my own skin, and is easily the single greatest intervention to improve my life since learning to read.

I would much rather be embroiled in these tactile rhythms than carried away from myself by whatever information bomb or opinion ooze that comes across my desk. That's not to say one should live their life avoiding the fascist, oligarchic, islamophobic, homophobic, ableist, white-supremecist, fatphobic (etc etc.) reality we live in. No, it's more important to drop out of the constant droning of those voices in all the forms of media that we have slamming into our delicate cerebellum. Dig beneath that din to a deeper layer of reality where you can actively work to build community among people you live close to. "Everyday, do," as Wendell Berry counseled in the Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, "something that won't compute." Get on with those human pursuits like growing, making, writing, singing and let go of those more petty political and economic games that the foolhardy think gives them marks of distinction. Indeed, like Gary Snyder, we should walk out of the figurative Maverick Bar of our society, and come back to ourselves, "To the real work, to 'What is to be done." Feed, shelter, educate, and heal all people (no exceptions, no tricks). This should be the only politics we pursue. Give all people the capacity to do meaningful work that doesn't take them away from their people and their own pursuit of their development and dreams. Let everything else, especially the pursuit of power and cash, be left behind as relic of the dark ages of the 21st century.

I always find it hilarious how I can go from talking about how embroidering makes me feel to orbiting amongst the stars in discussions of what makes us human. This sort of writing helps me recenter on what truly matters, especially as someone who works in the bowels of a government bureaucracy on very political issues. To write these words is a ritual act in itself to call me back to these threads that keep me tethered to my own humanity in coversation with the universe that is beyond me.

Every time I reveal the most inner part of who I am in word, I am overcome with goosebumps. That's enough to me. Those goosebumps are sign posts that I have reached the limit of what I am able to utter. It is true in my experience as well what the Missing Witches discussed in their 300th episode "that language falls apart in the face of the divine." Indeed, once those goosebumps come in, I know that it's best to just revel in the little tidbits of understanding I was able to uncover and leave it at that. That's the alchemy of transmuting my own experience on this hurtling rock into a story that can be shared about what it means to be a living, breathing, creating bit of animated matter that is trying to understand all that is beyond them. My only hope is that my words transport you to that place. I know all good stories that I love do that for me.

This is why I think of these tactile rhythms as portals. I will spin some yarn as a way to key my body and mind into a different rhythm that is so far from the everyday concerns of a 21st century human. All of a sudden after spinning up four lengths of fiber, I am just in it and wallowing in the experience of it all. I don't visualize walking through an ivy-draped arbor or walking into bright, magisterial white light. I mean I could do that if I wanted to bring a flare of the romantic or dramatic to it. I do love to enchant such things. But, no, often times, dropping into that different dimension of being shows up as subtly as a different texture to my exhale and a release of my shoulders. That can be all I need to direct the creativity of my brain, which is often pre-occupied with OCD, generalized anxiety, or surviving 21st century hellscapes, toward other pursuits that let me take a step back from the NOW, NOW, NOW immediacy foisted upon us by our culture and its communication strategies. I can be quite creative when I fool my brain out of its typical mode.

Once the weaving was done, I decorated the bubble mailer that I would use to send my weaving and a handwritten in. On the day I chose to send out the weaving this week, I was having one of those days where the political winds were not blowing in my favor and rough seas were on the horizon. So, in a speck of time that I had, I got out a sharpie, all my stamps, and my wax seal kit. I wrote out Joe's address by hand, writing slow enough that my writing could be legible. I paid special attention to my e's, which I sometimes write too oddly to be legible. I stamped my decorative return address stamp in the top left corner, intently placing the stamp the perfect distance from the top and left corners of the envelope to maximize space for stamps. Then it was STAMP TIME.

Do I look like a stamp person? Well, I am. I love stamps so much. I really enjoy creating repetitive patterns. With weaving, it takes hours to create the satisfaction of a repetitive pattern of the sort I put on the mailer. With the stamps, however, I can just blob them on one appliqué at a time in minutes. I am not saying one is better than the other based on the time that it takes. It just feels more like a low-stakes form of play when you can just make a little decorative border design for your mail.

Given that I was in a playful mood by this point, I turned the zanny up to 11 on the back decorations. I started by making borders with my cat skateboard and Dino "OKAY" (I imagine this is done in a little Jon voice) stamps. I completed the back decoration with an illustration of Turdsy the skateboarding turd, my daughter J and I's favorite character we have created. It's important to bring an air of levity into the decorations, because you don't know when you can bring a smile to someone's face who might encounter the package. I closed the package with the adhesive lip of the envelope, added some washi tape for good measure, and finished with my "J" wax seal. Once all these steps were done, I biked over to my local Postal Center USA location, where it feels more like I am an extra in an episode of mail-center Cheers! than I am sending out mail, and paid the 5 dollhairs to send the package off. WAH-LA! MAIL DONE!

I Went on a Scavenger Hunt

POP QUIZ, HOTSHOT: What's the best use for the internet now? AI-generated Slop? HELL NO. Information Retrieval? NO AGAIN. ONE MORE SHOT OR YOU GET CAKE TO THE FACE! Scavenger Hunt Leads? THANK GLOB, YOU HAVE DONE IT, BOZO! CRISIS AVERTED.

Please excuse my writing of a quasi-speed scenario to introduce this section. As an elder millennial who was raised on TV, my brain is 75% pop culture references. In order to appease this part of me, I must play out 90s era movies in fantastical manners to make myself giggle. Regardless of how absurd this intro is, the nugget of wisdom at the center of it isn't wrong. I love when I can generate a scavenger hunt lead from something someone posts on the web. This is precisely how we should be using the web. We should be finding ways to take information off the internet and turn it into real quests, real adventure.

That's what I did last weekend after big homie OHURT posted a huge piece that they had completed last weekend on their instabraindead stories. I immediately asked them over messenger, "PLS GIVE ME HINT WHERE THIS IS!" I didn't want an exact address, which would defeat the quest potential for the scavenger hunt I wanted to go on to look for it. The goat OHURT said, "It's near Morey Middle School in a cutty area." With my location hint in tow, I set off a few weekends ago to try and find it with 3 cameras and plenty of water, knowing from the photo they posted that it was up against a red brick wall.

Starting from the west side of cheese-man park, I rode my Clem-L up and down alleys from 12th ave to Colfax. I rode slow enough that I could spy all the different possible areas with red brick walls that a large tag could be tucked into that wouldn't be immediately obvious. I took the clutty clue very seriously and poked my head into some areas that might contain the elusive tag. To no avail, I did not find the tag in the alleys to the west of Humboldt, Lafeyette, Marion, Downing, or Corona. Then, I encountered my first road block; two police vehicles were blocking entry to the alley west of Ogden. I was cursing my luck: "What are the odds that when I am doing a quest of vital importance to the realm you are in the very alley I need to look through," I thought to myself. I got up to the junction with 14th and turned westbound with traffic and skipped the rest of Ogden.

Just as I was cursing my luck that surely I was going to miss the tag in that very stretch of alley, there it was in all its glory. Tucked right into the perfect spot in an apartment complex parking lot right off the alley facing south. I positioned myself to just look at it like any art patron would in a gallery. It was my time to enjoy some art, freed from the confines of the stuffy, conceptually emaciated gallery world. There would be no being looked at up and down to gauge worthiness. There would be no awkward conversations of how important the art was. No, there was just art out in the world for everyone to see, freed from all the bullshit that this neoliberal capitalist hellscape has foisted on it. I enjoyed the subtlety of the blending of the whites, blues, and tan in the fill. I thought about how much practice it took to be able to create something like this. I shook myself out of my typical concern with craft and aimed all 4,780,321 cameras to document the tag on 35mm and polaroid film.

There is something perfect about the Polaroid color 600 photo of this tag. The richness and smoothing of the colors does a sort of violence to some of the more exact angles that OHURT's skill helped them achieve in the tag. Yet, it renders the tag on film in a dreamlike manner. It's almost like the color 600 film immediately transcribed the tag into a memory on film. It's not an exact reproduction of digital fidelity. No, the color 600 photo is hazy and saturated, uninterested in reproducing reality. It's calling us out of our obsession with capturing a moment into that soft, imperfect recollection of that one day you spent hours looking for a tag. This is what draws me to polaroid. It's this incredible merging of our current culture's obsession with immediacy ("NOW, NOW, NOW") with the friction and tactility of past generations.

Once I was done with my photos, I started to look around the immediate surrounding area and was rewarded with so many peculiarities. First, there are all the other OHURT tags and stickers strewn around. OHURT tends to tag in clusters. If you look closely like you are playing Where's Waldo in an alley, you are bound to find more. I certainly found more around here, including some different styles and stickers I had yet to see. Unfortunately, my polaroids of these shots did not turn out, but I got my 35mm scans back for the roll I shot this day. I shot the 35mm film (Cinestill50d) with my Konica Genba Kantoku. I love this variation on barbed wire as an outline on this tag right below. Then the "This diva needs a lobotomy," had me laughing to myself in this alley so hard. I had seen this on the web, but had yet to see one in the flesh. It was rad to see one right next to that big OHURT piece.

Aside from the OHURT documentation, there was plenty of other wonderful trash treasure to behold, like a retired cat tree and a damaged chaise with a cryptic tag (I couldn't make heads or tails of its semiology) over the top. One could think of this little slice of Denver liminal alley way as an entire world in of itself with how much visual interest was in there. As is typical with portals of this nature, I don't know how long I stood in that alley just soaking it all in. Seeing in packed spaces with so many layers of meaning typically comes in waves. Obviously, I was first preoccupied with the large OHURT piece and securing my photos of it. Then, a retired cat tree, one of my favorite rides finds, jumped out at me from across the alley. After shooting my photo of the tree and thinking of my how funny it would be to gift the snap to my coworker with a cat as an "alley marketplace listing," I looked down the alley and enjoyed these tow signs that had long lost their original meaning and had been "eaten by the streets," a phrase I use to describe how a community retakes items left outside of their own purposes. Aside from the target of my scavenger hunt, I really love this destroyed chaise. I love thinking about all the potential scenarios that let to its destruction. That's one of my favorite imagination exercises. I give myself extra bonus points for the most absurd answer. Four days later the local man emerged from the alley to rejoin his family. (Just kidding)

Don't Scroll, Go Quest!

I still had a bunch of film left in the roll, so I said, "Flock it, we BALL." I kid you not, there is a sticker of a little boy on his way to school with those words and the year 2025 stuck to a light post near wash park. It makes me giggle each time I see it. I am kidding about saying that in relation to finishing the roll. Not finishing a ROLL? IN THIS ECONOMY? GETOUTAHERE. (hehehe) I did take advantage of having like 20 shots left to just meander my way around town in the days after my scavenger hunt to look for examples of all my favorite photography series that I collect photos of: Beige on Beige (BOB); Denver: once booming, now ghosting; OHURT; Trash Treasure; Ride Finds; wheat pastes; Eat the rich||Live, Laugh, Loot; and general interest ("It do be Purdy methinks," is what I say in my head for GI photo).

One of my favorite things to do on the east side right now is ride on the former traffic lanes they have barricaded off on Colfax for the Bus Rapid Transit construction. It's like I have my own temporary protected bike lane to ride slowly up and down Colfax to look for stuff to shoot. Luckily, all my favorite artists have found the construction has offered a wonderful opportunity to tag the concrete barricades and huge orange traffic drums. This has resulted in great meandering fun for me and an incredible opportunity to see Colfax in a way that wasn't possible before.

My only wish was that the city set aside more money for all my favorite local businesses on Colfax that have had to eek out a much more stressful time due to the lack of accommodations that were made for the hit to their business during the construction. Rather than making each small, local business prove that they were struggling to receive aid, each of those business should have been provided direct payments to offset the difficulties that the construction would undoubtedly cause. As someone who used to run a business out of this project, I know that the city has all the data it needs to run such a program on their side. I would much rather my tax dollars go to that sort of project than to consultant fees.

Not surprisingly though, the chains are all up and leaving on Colfax east of downtown. To date, I have photos of 2 shuddered Wendy's, 2 closed subways, and a closed Burger King. I thought first to add these to the Denver: once booming, now ghosting, but chains leaving is different. Of course they all quickly up and leaft. They aren't trying to be a pillar of a community or be embedded in the fabric of a place. No, chain fast food is trying to extract as much money as they can from a community and return them substandard food in return. They don't care where they are doing that as long as the money is coming in. You know who did stay? All the local businesses that have been in the community for years. I will talk about this more once I get all those rolls of film developed I am sure.

Below you will find out what sort of stories you can unveil when you stop scrolling and go questing. There are countless stories out there for you to discover. But, enough words friends, let's quest!

Another one in the books! Thanks for coming along for nearly 5,000 words. You know how much it means to me for you to read what I have to say? The world. To be seen in this work is my dream. I have wanted to be a writer my entire life, so to be here as a writer is a dream come true. If you are new here and enjoyed what I am laying down, consider subscribing for free below so you just get the essays, photos, etc. right to your email box. I don't like selling things. I already tried it once. It's lame. It's just one way to unsubscribe from the techno feudalism that some of the richest people are trying to foist upon us.