Endless Scroll
An experiment in new ways of read-writing social media.
Dear Friends,
A little while ago, I started to write an essay in praise of social media, a kind of love-letter and contrarian take. I faltered because I couldn’t enjoy my own language, but the attempt got me thinking about new ways to engage with my endless scroll. I began using posts on Bluesky as prompts, letting them mingle with each other and the rest of my world, letting them go where they will.
Shall I return these changelings to the waters of their origins?
— Sal
A Post on Camellias
Somewhere, today, camellias are growing, by which I mean blooming. That place is not here. Almost all places are not here. Similarly, almost all times are not now. I don’t know why I wrote in that distant voice. I was trying to a good job, which is never the right thing. Happy, this person says to another. That’s the language flowers speak amongst themselves, and to their lovers. Nectar on the tongue.
A Post on Tapirs
The tapir can hold its breath for half an hour while it walks almost weightlessly along the bottom of a river. It’s fast, too, kicking up clouds of mud with its hooves. What is heavy in one place is light in another. What is visible is blue. What is large will become small, and what is small is already large. Spinning, spinning, we are all spinning. How did it happen that the world manifested from the tip of a finger? This world, that world.
A Post on a Library in Connecticut
In the nineteenth century there was somehow more space. The chairs were bigger, and so were the chandeliers. I like that a library includes what you can see and what you can’t see. Sometimes, what you can’t see is brought right to you, because you asked. There are days where it is possible to travel like this, where an invitation has been issued, and there are days when every possible thought is interrupted. The robber barons of yesterday, the robber barons of today, what different senses of style and obligation.
A Post on History
History is happening so much, someone says. This is why simply eating and drinking is strange. It must have always been this way: if there’s food to eat, you eat, if there’s something to drink, you drink. History is made of this, or there would be no screens to show all the headlines. Near me, someone is drinking something distinctly purple, with rattling ice cubes. Their phone is crusted with plastic gems. The phone is saying that history is happening. Their face is lit by the window, as in a painting.
A Post on Weak Sun
There were cats in the weak sun. That’s really all.
A Post on The Far Right
Getting out of the bed, out of the covers, out of the building. It’s cold, windy, sunny. How can this be? How can this be? I watch someone put on their coat, which goes almost to the ground, a cocoon coat, they say. What is inside the coat? What is inside the self?
A Post on an Herbarium
In the parable, the good Samaritan has a gun, no, the good Samaritan has a bird. Suddenly, everyone is in flight from the sound. Under the tarmac is a strange garden of knowledge only revealed by jackhammers. There, you will find medicine and folklore in the temporary autonomous zones.
A Post on Government Work
Everything happens so much these days, someone wrote as they stood in front of a background of green leaves. Like so many, they are leaving. And Ishmael accounts it high time to get to sea as soon as he can. It’s a matter of mental health, which has been falling from the sky in record numbers. I need a glass of water, and I have a glass of water. I need a chair, and there it is, in a painting, vivid and vibrating, yellow-green, with a straw seat. I cross the tile floor, past the chair and its invisible painter, and go through the blue door into a more imaginary country.
A Post on Websites
Give me a website, someone said. Remember the early days? When you and I would meet on a lawn made of ascii? I carried a letter-knife so I could open the packets neatly. Every word was a hand, and every hand was a word. We were hypotheticals among hypotheticals: more information was what we needed, and what we eventually got.
A Post on a Haircut
Before breakfast, everything falls away. Even the headlines are shorter. Think of all the billions of hairs, ready to be cut at any moment. What will happen to their families? How will the rent be paid? In every salon, it’s one person’s job to sweep the hairs from the floor and throw them away, but there is no away. It had been a shag, and now it was a bob.
A Post on Mice
Mice will.
Tell me what you’ve been seeing in your scrolls, and how you are doing with all of the too-muchness.
These are enticing little windows, a sort of prose haiku.
I really, really enjoy this sublimation of the scroll.