July

I’m at my parents house in Pennsylvania for the weekend; it’s a little dry out here — I suppose there hasn’t been much rain — last time I was here, it was far more lush and green. Nevertheless: there is a garden, dogwood trees, grass; bees, wasps, hummingbirds. There is earth. I cut and dry herbs for tea that I can drink in a month. I don’t need to wear a shirt, I get a tan sitting in an Adirondack chair. I’m exhausted — deeply, maybe, frighteningly exhausted by my city life. As my twenties ends, exhaustion might be the prevailing feeling — the sense-memory of my fading youth. Exhaustion might be all there is. Exhaustion might the only possible outcome of urban life in a digitized economy. Nature — even tame, suburbanized nature — is not merely restorative, it is our only salvation. Greed and overconsumption — industrialization of all kinds — pinches the pleasures of life on both sides: it destroys the inner-landscape and the natural landscape. Climate change destroys the surface of the earth; Big Tech destroys in the inner-depths of the human. The two effects work in concert: the amplify on another.