I realized that I miss hammock culture. Not like, buggy-backyard hammock or mildewy-never-used-hammock, but a straight up comfortable lakeside hammock. Maybe a book to read. Nothing on your itinerary for days and days. I haven’t had that in a while.
I even went so far as to think that a hammock might be something I’d want at a future point. A lakeside hammock of my very own, situated on a lakeside property of my very own, and the whole idea felt very pleasant and potentially true at the time.
I typically don’t have very clear or finite answers to questions regarding my future, mostly because I hate those masturbatory conversations where people talk about the three kids they’re going to have and how the first daughter is going to be named Kendyll, or how they’ll only date chicks who have a working knowledge of 90’s cult comedy, because it’s all just bullshit. You don’t know. They don’t know. No one knows. And the arbitrary limits people shackle themselves with — the throwing punches in the dark, grasping for words in the hopes that it will help you know — just depresses and bores me. So when I’m backed into a corner and have to say something, my goals are usually painstakingly noncommittal, “I hope I’m doing something that makes sense for the person I grow into.”
I’d probably hate to have a conversation with me, but like… why say things you don’t mean/money and time aren’t real/thoughts are currency/etcetc.
Anyway, I wanted to share the idea of this lake thing with my blog. I wanted to tell a story about a specific childhood memory, and I wanted a photo of an old shitty hammock next to a quiet lake — preferably one with some deciduous forest action to keep things AuThEnTiC and CoNnEcTiCuT — to sit on top of it. Unfortunately, all I found in the google results were awful lifestyle photos.
Digital photos filtered and color manipulated with chicks straight out of a Madewell catelogue reading The Bell Jar and The Great Gatsby in repose. Image after image after image of pigeon-toed poses and thick glasses.
And this isn’t really a statement about that culture or that posturing, because I understand it sometimes and it’d be stupid to try and critique it when the action that spurred the anger was an attempt to articulate nostalgia for my own childhood experiences, but I will say that it’s frustrating that the aesthetic is so ubiquitous that I can’t find a single piece of shit snapshot without wading through a swamp of results from WeHeartIt first. A store in the mall took a dump and made the photos of hammocks that the internet was offering me.
And I think that’s why I don’t have a Pinterest. Everything I’ve seen of it propagates passive, aesthetic-driven fuckery and seems to give people the gratification of having owned a couch or having been to a place instead of exerting themselves upon the content in any substantive way. And that’s not to say that you shouldn’t admire Vermont from afar without having ever been to Vermont in this life, but it is to say that I don’t want that data unless there’s a story to go with it. If it’s not tied to your narrative, it’s just an image, and I don’t want to know what you jack off to. I don’t want to see the fault line where the dramatic reality of your life disappears and you start trying on different hats in the mirror without you walking me through it. It’s gross. The thing that makes it human and engaging is you.
Every page I’ve been directed to over the past few months has been dedicated to the organization of ideas that don’t belong to the person running the account. They didn’t frame the shot, they didn’t light that mug of tea — but there it is, pinned. Wordlessly. Someone else’s photos. Lives other people have lived. And nothing new seems to get made, no step has been taken toward that being something that’s more a part of their life. There’s no end-game. It’s very neat hoarding. The internet equivalent of that teenage girl whose walls were covered in magazine clippings. And obviously there’s an audience for it, but it makes me sad that that brand — that, I don’t even know what… behavior — and the kind of photos that appeal to it, are the ones I have to slog through in order to find the stock photo I had in my mind’s eye.
And as much as I love my computer for connecting me to people, I feel like it can make us lazier about imagining or talking about our own lives and what we’re capable of. At least visually, there’s this sense that if you make the gesture, that’s enough.
And I want to more than like a hammock. I want to lie down in a hammock. And I want that hammock to kind of be a piece of shit, at the side of a lake that’s also kind of a piece of shit, and so now I’m talking about it. Cause I couldn’t find a good photo.
[basic white nylon hammock next to average lake.jpg]
