grass

21 Aug, 2025

i can log off and touch grass, but then i am just sitting there, on the lawn, alone

of course, i was also alone inside the house, inside a room, with four walls and a screen and a speaker, but there were voices in the house, reanimated from some previous time, place, echoing at a moments call. 

these voices did nothing, really, which is why i am sitting outside now, but they at least gave some illusion that a need was being met. 

like eating cotton candy instead of nothing. malnutrition will still come calling, but at least in the meantime, you have something to chew and to taste and to swallow.

i’ll take some blame for my current predicament, for the fact that i am here alone. i brought some things from inside the house out here with me to the grass, not the screens themselves, but the things they showed me, trinkets and emblems from the interests they cultivated, plucked and printed from the places i’ve now sworn off. i don’t know what my hometown has to offer, so i am covered instead with the team colors of the city i have been looking at through a glass pane.

i sit here, on the grass, with these totems, these idols. waiting for some person to recognize them. a fellow devotee. i know such people exist because i used to hear them in the house.

there are other people outside, but they are carrying objects of interest that are unrecognizable to me. emblems of teams, brands, bands, idols, locations, and intellectual properties of which i know nothing. i could put in the effort to learn. perhaps that is my problem, a refusal to learn about new things.

in my defense, the last new product i learned about and bought into was Instagram. i’m still trying to get my attention span back. 

the question rolls across grassy fields: “have you heard of this?” at some point, maybe, it was expected that the other person would say yes, but it’s almost always no now, to the point where it’s an event, a game even, to change the response. a group of friends gather around a PowerPoint file presenting their finds from a place unknown to everyone else, and, by all means, unimportant, elevated to relevance only by the amount time spent with it, because what else is there to do? 

you’ve spent so much time there, hearing from the other people there - and there are other people there, in abundance, you can hear them, they’re in your pocket at all times. would you still care about It™, if no one else did? could you be a fan community of one? a hobbiest, alone? would you log off then?

a diet of information, focused on one food group only, should be dull. it is, by all accounts, but they’ve looked inside your mouth and measured for every tooth, every tastebud, so it is personalized. for you. picked just for you. a recommendation, but the only one you are getting. you have options but only to eat or to not eat, or to garden, but again, you are sitting on the lawn, on the grass, alone, and it is such a large job to attempt in isolation. how long should you wait for those vegetables to grow?  it seems like they take longer nowadays, but maybe that’s just my patience wearing thin. 

i’ll step inside again for a moment, just a moment, to break up the waiting. i’m sure that garden will do some growing while i’m gone.