Misguided Attempts to Find Meaning

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Anyone got any misguided attempts to find deeper meanings?

THE PAINTED COW

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i think it was in adam curtis’ doc all watched over by machines of loving grace that there was a guy who took one acre of land and tried to record every single thing that happened, like a cow ate some grass he’d write it down in his spreadsheet. he thought if he did it for long enough that he’d be able to see patterns in nature and start unravelling like the secret to life on earth or something.

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This is my jam, 100 per cent.

Oh my god, maybe at 3:00AM he saw a painted cow, and that’s tied in to the Scooter lyric. Mindsploding.

my friend was telling me about static drifts the other day (urbex/situationism/etc)

which sounds similar

think I’m in a particularly unreceptive place atm though, so I feel a bit bad being so dismissive

but [huuuuge shrug]

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liked their first EP etc

but srsly what is it

All the shite about the queen throwing shade at Donald Trump by wearing her 4th least favourite shoes and serving salmon for lunch. Or how her inclining her head at such and such an angle meant she was definitely going to stop brexit.

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so a drift is walking slowly (usually) around a place in an unplanned way, honing in on small details, stripping away habits, deconstructing/getting a deeper understanding of place and its relationship to our psychology, etc

a static drift is staying in one place and trying to dig into layers of meaning, context, etc, in that one place

it’s pretty interesting really, but I am a sad/angry/cynical acorn rn

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@acorn can correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s a situationist thing where you walk and experience your local environment in a manner different to your normal experience of it. So, for example (taken from an app called Derive that intends to help curate such experiences) you would set out for a randomly generated location, or follow a certain colour of car, and see how you experience the psychogeography of your surroundings. Sounds cool, next time I have the chance I might give it a go.

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it is indeed this :slight_smile:

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I’m going to do it, Acorn. Next time I can I’m going to do it. I used to sort of do it without this framework, so it’ll be nice for me to reconnect to it in a more structured manner.

my friends who are deep into this would frown at the use of an app!

but yes, it’s a worthwhile thing to do.

I’m in too painful a place to be able to open myself up like that (I was always naturally that way inclined before because of certain aspects of my upbringing), but it’s definitely normally a positive thing, forging a deeper connection with your surroundings

the whole pursuit of rediscovering familiar things - defamiliarisation applied to place, concepts, words, thoughts, anything that’s become taken for granted and unnoticed - is a good way to approach life in general, I think.

I hope you find yourself in a better place soon, thank you for the inspiration.

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This sounds like something out of a Douglas Adams novel