pseudo-gout:

neatomosquitoshow:

excerpt from ‘The Rivets in Ecclesiastes’ by Richard Brautigan

I really liked this.  When I used to have to sit through seemingly endless Jehovah’s Witness meetings in windowless Kingdom Halls, I used to count things, chairs, ceiling tiles, cracks.  

I have this thing I do lately when I’m scrolling through my Tumblr dash, in which I neglect to look at the little icon at the top, and then, as I read the post or look at the image(s), I try to guess who, of the people I follow, would have posted or reblogged it. Then I scroll back up to see if I was right.

I like it when I guess correctly. I like that I know the people I follow well enough to recognize something they posted from its content. It’s something I’ve liked about computer-mediated communication since I first went online: getting to know the people on the other end.

I haven’t been following you, pseudo-gout, long enough to have a very full picture yet, but that’s okay; I’m enjoying the process of getting there.

But that actually isn’t why I bring all that up. It’s this: I had the same feeling about the author of this passage. The last time I read Brautigan was probably 30 years ago, though I liked him a lot. And as I was reading this piece I thought: I bet this is Richard Brautigan. And it was, and that made me happy, and it was exactly the same feeling of recognition. And that made me realize that I relate to the 98 people I follow on Tumblr the same way I’ve always related to my favorite authors and artists. I love getting to know them, getting to where I can pick them out of a crowd by their individual faces and voices — oh, look, it’s that person. I know that person.

Reposted from http://ift.tt/1gdiGqT.

This entry was posted by jbc on Saturday, January 25th, 2014 at 11:37 am and is filed under Tumblr. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.