The Patreon Letter - 20th April, 2019

Hi everyone, Em here again. It's nice to be back on schedule! Let's hope it lasts.

I've recently gotten into lock-picking youtube because the algorithm served up a channel that Jackson had mentioned to me, LockPickingLawyer. In this channel, a pleasantly even-keeled man absolutely obliterates the security of whatever lock is before him in under ten minutes and with minimal effort. It's very soothing. I do recommend.

I remember being told somewhere in my teens that even the best locks exist as a deterrent rather than as an actual safeguard, and watching Mr Lawyer pick hundreds of locks really brings home how true this is. The reality is, if somebody wants into what's on the other side of all but the most extreme locks, they're going to get to it. The challenge then becomes dissuading people who do not have that much conviction and/or delaying those who do long enough that they can't successfully bypass the lock. 

At best, you stave off the potential of a disaster, because you cannot lock something away forever. 

Because the natural state of anything is vulnerability and everything else is at best a bulwark against entropy. 

I recently bought a walkman on a whim, an old used model from 1994 that I found on ebay for a (relative) steal given that walkmen have become fashion objects and particularly stylish ones from the 80s in working order can command hundreds of dollars on ebay. ( To be fair, this is in part because no company on earth makes cassette tape mechanisms with the quality that they were made when it was the dominant format, but you can get a used home stereo tape deck much cheaper than a working, quality walkman. ) 

I got it in my head I wanted to get into tapes, mostly because I enjoy them as aesthetic objects but also because I have a lot of fond memories as a kid of listening to tapes while I read and while I do enjoy Spotify every time I look at my phone to change songs that's another opportunity to actually refresh twitter instead of going back to what I was doing. 

With my refurbished walkman (that works great, though there's a mechanical element inside still making a little more noise than I want that I haven't tracked down) I've been enjoying some old cassettes, many of them dating back before I was born, still in good shape and sounding great (also they're cheap as hell, if you can find a place that stocks them at all). In the last two months since going down this road I've listened to more music (and more importantly, more new to me music) than I've ever really done before, even if some of it is in a beat up old walkman that clacks too much but otherwise still sounds good.

It can be very easy for me to get in my head about media consumption, to worry too much about how I'm taking things in. On some level this is understandable, as I do have multiple media criticism podcasts, so it's only natural to try to ensure the ideal scenario for taking things in. If I'm not seeing work at my best and at its best, am I really doing my job properly? 

I think this is a trap. The reality is I am never my ideal self. I work too much and am almost always tired. I don't have a lot of time so I can get impatient with things even before we factor in how much constantly checking the internet has poisoned most of our brains. I checked twitter at least four separate times so far writing this article, each time finding nothing. One time I wrote 'how indulgent is this patreon letter? hrm' because I'm not sure, but also that's a ridiculous thing to put out in the world about a letter that at the time was only three paragraphs in.

Also, the situation is never 'ideal'. My TV is old, I don't have a fancy 5.1 audio setup, I might have decent headphones but I regularly plug them into my phone or the aforementioned walkman to listen to things. I read most of my books on kindle and most of my comics on a tablet, neither of which is what most original creators intended (if you can even believe in an ideal state for books, given the realities of publication.) I don't have the budget or inclination to be one of those people that can actually create ideal scenarios for presentation of art. 

Furthermore, what even is the ideal art? Art itself is always in compromise with itself, for thousands of reasons including the new mechanisms by which we take it in. I am fortunate enough to have a nice blu-ray collection, but it could be 4K. Many things I stream, always limited by bitrate and compression. How many books have weird OCR errors in them when you read the ebook versions? How many old comics have imperfect scans or reprints? It's a thousand flaws and yet, we soldier on.

For me, this means letting go of this idea I should watch filmography, or listen to discographies. I means reassuring myself it's okay if I watch a movie over two days. Or three days. Or however many days. It means actually picking a thing to watch instead of agonizing over the endless carousels of content. My advice? Pick within a minute. If you hate the thing just drop it. It's okay to have half-finished things in your life if it means you aren't stuck waiting for the perfect time to return to something. There's so much, and we are so limited, why throw good time after bad?

Living is itself a form of safeguarding against inevitable entropy. Even if civilization survives, even if magically every piece of art is preserved, we will not. I've forgotten a good fraction of the movies I've ever seen, and yet some day I won't be able to remember any of them because I'll be dead. The things that are important to us will disappear into obscurity or just disappear. Maybe they'll be supplanted by new creations. Maybe it'll all go away. 

This is often a paralyzing thought, because what is the worth of doing if it doesn't contribute to a grand measuring—where the goodness of your reading and the goodness of your thoughts on that reading contributes to the goodness of your person, an actual value that exists and is important. It's the sort of existential malaise that has kept me up many nights for as long as I can remember. It is also a lie, a soothing nihilism that keeps us from recognizing the value of the imperfect thing in the face of that entropy.

To bring it all around, I'm saying doing things, even doing things wrong or doing things that might not 'matter', have value not in that they are ironclad, but in that they exist at all in opposition to letting the universe spiral out into an inevitable nothingness. I'm saying the means need to be their own ends, because the ends are fake and grow increasingly faker. I'm saying that even if you're like me and believe that entropy wins, we still must fill our hearts with those things that delay it. Against every impulse, I just need to do stuff and enjoy the doing. Maybe that helps you, too.

Until next time!