This morning an interesting thing happened: I strongly noticed a desire not to post or write. Once I tuned in to that, I realised that there were some reflections underneath the grumpy reluctance.

At what point did we become the species whose most popular category of YouTube video is unboxing? Future historians might note this as the precise moment when we became consumed by consumption. For we are, above all, a community of fate trapped in a global risk society whose spatial and temporal deboundings, as I’ve discussed, are packed into boxes, wrapped with sticky tape, and sent, containerised, around the world.

A month of travel does a lot of things to your head. If you’re lucky, however, you come back, and no one has done anything to your house and your things. For me, it’s also almost always the case that returning is more interesting than leaving and being away. The most precious thing about travel is less about the new things I saw when I was there, and more about the fresh way I can apprehend my own life, for a week or two, when I get back.

Hello all, well, out of runway here before heading away for a month. If you’re interested, it might be worth re-reading the following posts, given that the discipline I’m practising leads to a kind of ‘A cause de moi, le déluge’. Mea culpa. ~ so then: This was ‘the animus behind the impetus’ here; pivotal life moment.

As I wind down for a month off – I won’t be posting from the 19th of this month until the 17th of next month – I thought I’d try something different. In January this year I had a fundamentally different experience of time aboard a yacht; I wrote about it here.

How did we end up wanting to live ‘inside’ a Rube Goldberg machine that provides dopamine spurts on command, and John Maynard Keynes sunglasses or; how did we create such an overcomplicated cage for ourselves – and one another – by dint of our repetitively enacted wanty wanting, alone together?

Something happened to us during the pandemic. Many things, indeed. We don’t really yet know the toll of the pandemic in its fullness, for whom the toll tolled, and how. We may never. We ‘know’ it killed anywhere between 6.9 to 30.1 million people1: a huge toll and a huge margin of t|error. This was some kind of war. What we also don’t yet have a sense of, yet, is the burden of the pandemic, in all its uneveness.

Last week my spontaneous attempt to give a distilled summary resulted in a glorious failure: over three thousand words, and several discursive footnotes :) Mea culpa! One of the things that’s interesting about the approach I’ve taken with this blog – semi-automatic, hypnagogic-but-caffeinated thinking by writing – is that I’m not in control of what comes out, and *can’t* be, if I’m to allow it. Like a free jazz

Here we are, heading toward the middle of the year already. Soon it will be winter; already the fog has set in and the sun is rising lower and later. Here I am, writing in the dark again, although it was only a month or so ago since daylight saving ended. Since November last year, I’ve let Living Together, Somehow be taken in the direction of my spontaneous urge.

So then, fantasy is no coincidence. What is this producing, at scale, in the global supply chain? Let’s bring this into sharp focus. I was listening to two podcasts recently where people – thinking through its discontents really and rarely thinking about these materialities of our world, the world I shorthand via Gorzworld and VaporSpace – carefully described the global supply chain as a Rube Goldberg* machine.

Hello my dear readers.