The Church of that Kid with the Always Sticky Fingers

Forkergirl's Limited Fork Theory maintains that nothing is maintainable.





Entropy
The second law of thermodynamics says:

there are no sheets on my bed and there
ought not to be hair on

my head because I do
not have enough
energy to keep either
properly made.

Every day I work to keep my teeth from falling out
and my skin from wrinkling away but
Part of me has no desire to be an übermensch
Part of me loves dilapidated sofas and didactic
TVs and the idea of fading into them until there aren’t any
parts of me at all and the couch and tv and bed are comfortably
put to rest in a landfill

Everything has been moving outward from the first interaction. Everything has been branching further and further away from where it started. In class, forkergirl gave us each a piece of paper from the same journal and asked us to mark it. I traced hand prints onto the page. She asked us to fold the paper in some way. I crinkled the page from flat into a wrinkly mess. She had us unfold it and pass the paper on to another classmate to make something else. Though our pages all looked the same when we began none of them ended that way. Like the bread that multiplied for the son of the Christian god and became something different for everyone who ate it over each generation, our papers were not the same. Some people had folded their paper into airplanes or flowers. Some cut theirs into pieces. Others made messes like mine. Interaction had made each piece different. But their origins were oh so similar.

An Email from Me to Nick in the Aftermath of that Class:

Here I am up late again trying to figure everything out, which all of college has taught me is impossible but heh. A week ago, I returned to Owen and talked for an hour to some random guy chilling in our kitchen about the universe. Yesterday, that man, Kyle Holton, died in a car crash. Even though I don't really know him particularly well, we had a moment over peanut butter toast and it's strange to know he is no longer out there in the world putting only peanut butter on his bread and never jelly. I guess this is one of those times that folks starting asking a lot of whys but somehow I am feeling a little more stable than usual.

Sitting here watching the movie--the Big Chill--seeing this group of close friends try to figure things out in the aftermath of death, I realize the thing they have been missing since college is each other. Brought together over death they see the importance of the connections they had once worked to make and nearly forgotten about. We sit up all night trying to find enough footing to face the world--enough certainty to make any kind of decision. But maybe we can gain that certainty through the friends we spend our nights discussing shit with... we can trust each other enough to learn to trust ourselves--believe in the me that believes in you or something. Without a God or overarching belief system, we don't have a way to understand the macrocosm of it all, but I know that having Claire or Aaron or any of these folks to spend nights and days with is something.

Maybe instead of looking at the whole and trying to find ways to simplify it enough to interact with the world, maybe it is possible to use our relationships as the footing on which we stand to face the world. I don't ever want to forget how important ya'll are to me or even to forget that short conversation with Mr. Holton over a sandwich. I may not have a god to turn to in the uncertainty of death and life, but there is a stability in friendship I've never found in other things I've tried to grab onto. Though we might not understand the macrocosm of it all or maybe there isn't a macrocosm to be understood, I feel most stable with friendship like the one our group of friends has been building. Being connected to ya'll reminds me of my responsibility to everything else.

Though I only spoke to Kyle for a bit, he isn't made past tense by death because my interaction with him will influence other interactions and his interactions with others continue doing the same. Here I am typing at 2am in part because of my interaction with Kyle. Like those papers we folded and traded and marked in class, we are made different by interaction, but maybe it is more than that. Instead of just continuing on with the markings of the people that we have met, we can use our connections to people as a way to feel more grounded--roots that keep growing as we keep moving outward so even though we don't understand it all we can find good in our starting point. Something continuous in it all even when things change--a handhold tangible enough to grab in the chaos. Like the relationship of Moss and her mother grounded the Glory Prelude, from friendship we can try to create and maintain other relationships with the universe.

All Matter Still Composing Collective Matters

science explains that folks in cities
don’t help each other when it’s noisy
we can only be aware of so many things
she stood there and told us all about
the lines between everything
connecting all things
but even someone that aware
couldn’t realize she invented lines
it’s all solid
there is no empty
she talks about the space between fingers
but we invented fingers so we could
see the space between them as empty
empty being equivalent with irrelevant of course
I made my first PB&J from scratch the day
I pulled the wonder bread out of the bag
before dad could

but I wasn’t at the factory the day the bread was made
or in the field obtaining wheat
before that
I want to talk to you and be aware of all
but if I think about
all the processes in your body
or all that’s happened in this house
I’m calling something all that’s only some
which I hear is lying
I don’t know what to add to reach a sum
that’s more than some
that’s equivalent to experience

Lost

Here I am sitting at home with a fever, and I realize I have done this all wrong. Too much time writing poems has made me vague as a blogger. Let me see if I can still articulate what this is.

This winter, my friend Nick Mitchell and I decided to take a class together. The class we picked had the name English 420: Technology and the Humanities- A Limited Fork Theory Perspective on Remix Culture. While we thought there was something a little crazy about the class--maybe the length of the title or that we didn't understand what it meant (even after reading the class description)--something about those words and the class they might represent excited us.

For some time, Nick and I had been vaguely talking about making a website. Both of us hoped the class would be an opportunity to do just that. I say vaguely so much because prior to beginning English 420 the only fragment of our website idea we understood was "branches." We wanted to make a website where things moved in branches. We came to the class looking for directions: for mile markers to count on our way from here to there. Of course as advocates for branching we should have been prepared for what we found instead.

On the first day of class, I realized the class was on North Campus which wouldn't be a big deal if I had not been a poetry major. Since freshmen year, a majority of my classes, food consumption, partying, and general existence had taken place here:

This picture at the right is East Quadrangle. Those people in front of it I am lucky enough to call friends. Some of us are part of what the University of Michigan calls the Residential College. The RC sells itself as a "a unique liberal arts community," and the students at UofM agree that it is unique. The first time I heard someone talking about the building she was referring to it as "Odd Quad"--"you know the one where they read the commie manifesto on the rooftop." While the people I met there didn't do that, they certainly went their own directions. Steering off the course of normal whenever it seemed obtrusive. For a long time I thought I wanted to be normal:

Oh to be

"the kinda guy you'd have a beer and watch the game with"
if the game were Jeopardy maybe or
Cash Cab...

Suburbia has been the monster under my bed and my greatest
aspiration
since it ceased being my surroundings

But is the normal of the 1970s
the normal you know from the analogue tv
even here among the blogosphere and local
music scene
Sure mtv still wants a hand in normal
but they have babies at 16 or giant birthday
parties or get married.
3 years after that mark I listen to banjo music
want to start a commune and my best birthday
was spent with flasks of whiskey crazies and a 4am
swim in a 40 degree river

Can I at least get back in long enough to sit
feverish on the couch and watch Wonder Years
marathons with you
til I recover or
have I lost whatever
normal I had and the way back with it

I spent most of middle school and high school trying to be average from a wheelchair. Until one day, this weird boy with red hair refused to be everyone else. He kept telling us we didn't need to fit into a perfect suburban mold and when he wasn't saying it his orangered dreads said it for him.

He showed us being normal is not particularly possible and being strange is not only fun but has the power to transform the normal around you spreading like paint spills until everything is tinged orange or red.

But I was still afraid to deviate too far from my normal path, even after making a normal path that didn't fit into mainstream culture's concept of normal. When I found out this technology class was on North Campus, I had a minor freak out. North Campus is generally the place for engineers and dancers and overworked art school students and nature. I once heard a rumor that a deer jumped through a window one summer into a dorm room and died only to be found right before move-in. The people assigned the room were told they would have to live somewhere else for awhile while the carcass was removed. Never in my career at the University of Michigan had I thought I'd need to go to North Campus to learn anything. Sure, I knew of the Duderstadt. That was the place my engineering friends went to make like that deer. While we had picnics in the Arb back on central campus, they disappeared for days and came back unshaved and covered in bits of junk food. Why would I need to go to the place even animals know as dead for an English class? But my schedule clearly said Duderstadt: DL1. As I asked around to figure out which buss to get on and when to get off, I concluded this was a much longer journey than the 2.5 miles counted on google directions.

I got on a bus with Commuter North on its display. Later I'd realize that this is probably the slowest of all possible bus choices for getting to North Campus, but then I knew I needed to head north and north was in the name. That day I had decided to leave for class two hours early with a Winter Weather Advisory posted for the night. I wanted to be inside before the snow started so I was no where near late despite the slow trip.

Which one is the Duderstadt? I asked the crowd making its way from the bus to a building where signs advertising Quiznos and Panda Express were lit up. Someone pointed me away from the food and down the cold street. What was this semester going to be? I found DL1. Design Lab One. Was I in the right class? I can't design anything. Labs are for chemistry majors. I waited another hour outside the room clicking impatiently around facebook on my laptop, wishing I had cash for food next door to hold as a prop so my fingers would cease their nervous tapping.

Sound started emanating into the lounge. Sound from my future classroom. Maybe class was about to start? I closed facebook into my backpack, and walked toward my alleged destination. In DL1, there were couches. There was a large television. There was a workstation that looked like sets might be created at it. There was a projection screen. There were macs with those Bamboo tablets (the ones that let you draw on your computer). I felt I had entered a room where the wants of all the Art School and Engineering kids were pieced into fruition. My eye darting slowed as a woman approached me, speaking in a breathy cheery voice she was obviously controlling. Somewhere behind the breath I picked up on a much stronger sound being held-back. To make out her words over the sound that had drawn me into the room in the first place, I had to lean in and look and focus. Otherwise her voice just added another layer to the noise or I guess I should refer to it as music because it was coming from an ipod.

The first time I ever listened to music people might consider noise music, I was listening to a CD burnt for me by a friend on my way to Freshmen Orientation in Ann Arbor after a sleepless night worrying about driving there alone from my home 2.5 hours across state. When I got to A2, I got off at the wrong exit (which I didn't know then) and couldn't find the next road google told me to be on. I spent an hour getting later for the orientation, asking folks for directions. All while the unfamiliar music ground at my nerves and the summer morning turned to 95 degree summer day in a car with no AC. When I hear music considered noise now, I feel particularly lost. My first day of Limited Fork was then more directionless and anxious than I ever imagined.

When Nick finally sat down beside me in the class, I felt a little less lost and more able to focus in the noise. As the breathy voice continued over the music, I understood a bit more. She guided us to a site that explained as much of Limited Fork Theory as she was capable of explaining. Between the fork pendant pinned into her shirt and pictures of the bifurcating bronchi and bronchioles in the human lung posted on her website, I realized forks sure look a lot like branches. While our teacher whose online identity was forkergirl would be as likely to give Nick and I a single destination in our creative process as the noise music was likely to help me find my way, she would probably be excited to cheer on our unidentified journey. Forkergirl would be ok with Nick and Jessica wandering through the internet, hoping to change something or other.

I remember leaving class that day a little sick to my stomach from all the noise. Some people walking passed us mentioned they were so dropping that class. Nick was confused but kind of excited. At first, I wanted to assume the teacher was crazy was weird was too outside of normal for me. But I as a proud resident of Odd Quad should have been above that kind of thing. I asked Nick to put on music with no recognizable chorus or melody that night when we got back to his apartment to hang (the bus ride back was easy with Nick to follow). I realized I wanted to learn how to love being lost instead of fear it. To try to maintain normal would be to limit possibility. To try to aim the branches of a tree from point a to point b would give me a trunk and no branches.

So "this"
this blog
this project
this is being lost
without defined
destination.
Our goal is not
to get to any end goal
but to always figure out
how to keep going
This is every cliche
about the journey
being more worthwhile
than the destination
you've ever heard
this is our road trip
through over out of in on above between after before with
the internet

"Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.”
Henry David Thoreau

Collaboration

Envelopes are a reminder of something specific—a reminder of letters and private correspondence between two people, but everyone can see the outside of the envelope. Who needs to put anything inside or in the mail when the best canvas is the ever resizable outside of the envelope? A canvas that can keep growing into whatever it needs to be and whoever it needs to be for. Even though the parts of pattern are choppy or disjointed from text or surroundings at times, just like humanity, the envelopes still create one heterogeneous whole.

The lead of the pencil created separate parts, but parts fade into others on the page and rub into my fingertips. Each smudge is a different shade of experience connected to everything else. No one needs a melting pot to make humanity easier to handle. All our quirks can be connected like the envelopes and the smudgy lead—stretching out into the world—. We don’t have to encompass everything in each ‘I’ we write or pattern we start because we have to keep going afterward and might as well have something to do while we go forward—even if that just means smudging ‘I’ into ‘we’—.

Conversation

After spending too much time on the internet, I have noticed a stigma around digression or--as it is known on some parts of the web--derailing and c-c-c-combobreakers. Whenever a thread in one of the groups that I chat in diverges too much from its original path some people follow the change in subject matter happily, but others remain pouting on the sidelines wanting to return to the original point even if it has already been the subject of hours of conversation even if the new topic incites insightful replies.

Most sites that come close to being as well known as Facebook make changes in slow, calculated manners to avoid angering their user base so much that there is any kind of mass exodus. Although a website ought to change with time to stay relevant (unless you're Craigslist), well-known sites cannot change rapidly without annoying or worse confusing their users. A change on Facebook as small as removing the reply button from wall posts might be water cooler talk. We see that these small changes shape what we get out of conversation (without the reply button I don't look up from the keyboard before sending so tend to edit less and post more). While I believe in the process of change through digression or progression or whatever, I want more influence over that process so I can effect good change rather than just change. I don't want to limit the conversation to discussing how the conversation has changed either. I don't want to shout c-c-c-combobreaker from the sidelines. People should have direct influence over changing content they see online so they can articulate not simply that a particular change isn't good, but also how and why change can be great.

telephone

telephone

we are playing telephone

with technology can you play

telephone without it?

Mr. Graham Bell doubts it

We had a plan: to take that childhood game called telephone--where one child begins by creating a phrase which is whispered from child to child around a circle until it gets back to the person who first uttered it and the phrase is uttered again, checked for validity with the person who initiated it, and normally quite different from the beginning words--and play that over a multi-media web, rather than whispering, to see how each technology shapes the idea over time.

One of us began by passing the initial few lines of this post to another in a note. The first person considered the pen the note was written with and the paper it was written on technology, though some might argue they are only the product of it. But this is where our project slowed. The recipient of the note wanted to mail the words to the next person. They never found the address and four days later decided simply to call instead. After that it took two more days for the final product of the project (the picture in the upper right-hand corner of this post) to be sent on.

Unlike on social media where comments on comments happen minutes after something is posted, we couldn't even pass an idea around our circle of three more than once in a week. One technology seemed so separate from the next. Even though we each posted on our facebooks and called our friends many times over the course of the week, this classroom assignment seemed distant from all that. Our phones at our hips and our profiles a few clicks away, we found it easy to have a conversation in the ways facebook and text-messaging set up for us, but failed to rise fully to the challenge of interacting all these different medias with an idea.

Since this is about communication, the last piece of our conversation couldn't help but focus on social media--using the placeholder images from facebook--the current pinnacle of media platforms by sheer traffic. They are symbols of generic-ness and anonymity as well as the fastest form of interaction technology has given us. They remind us of the compromise of personality for popularity, a small network of strongly connected friends for a large network of sparsely contacted acquaintances. New social media unifies all forms of human discourse, and fosters new and challenging forms of discussion, but might this cause our interpersonal dialogs to take on a homogenous form? When we tried to interact with each other, as well as various forms of technology in a dynamic way, the process seemed too slow and tedious.

The first step is admitting that we have a problem. While we might not be there yet, we have started to realize our potential failings in our increasingly technology-dependent world. We've failed to leverage the benefits of the diverse, multi-media tools at our fingertips, in doing so we came to terms with our over-use of single media communication. We check our Facebooks like Pavlov's dogs -- when a telephone ringtone is like the bell that they run to for nourishment. We feed ourselves with our Feeds.

Is a feed better than a conversation?

It is certainly faster.

How can we facilitate the use of multiple forms of technology to create an easily accessible, but diverse, mode of conversation? We need a platform that supports conversing almost as quickly as Facebook but challenges its posters to try new forms to communicate their ideas.

We aren't there yet.

History

I erased the history on my computer
gone was a week of my life
a week is history
actually today is even listed among the histories I can delete

my brother tried to type
about how history repeats itself
but missed a few letters
typing as quickly as he could
so as not to be forgotten
now history eats itself

once I tried to go back
back more than a week
on my Facebook newsfeed
I kept clicking each link
reading each comment
I didn’t post anything
in four hours I made it through
all of what had happened
so far that day

in one high school in
one city in
one current events class
one teacher spends
one hour detailing what happens in
one minute in this singular world
he doesn’t get beyond
trying to explain
exactly how his face
manages to move in that one minute
manages to move to explain
that he is explaining
how explanation happens

the class more or less understands
some processes that allow
his face to contort
they think
still no one understands
what allows his face to be
or how he is making noise

someone has watched eternal sunshine of the spotless mind
on tv the night before
so raises her hand for one minute
thinking the movie might be relevant
she reads on a smartphone as she raises her hand
reading all about the movie
party Janey will host that evening
currently the sun shines through her mind
shines forward like a headlamp
she might be going somewhere
if she only can find someway to understand
direction without having to comprehend back

maybe if she uses the delete button
to backspace
the save function out of being
and then deletes delete
or leaves it
because
it has no
function
in an
always
forward
world