[AKN #126] Material for our work surrounds us at every turn
LIVE: The Creative Act, LAUGH: Parody Account Gets Prominent Morons To Reply Back, LOVE: Your F-150 Is a Minivan
Sup homies?
Are you paying attention to what you’re doing right now?
Like legitimately are you?
That’s a question I’ve been asking myself a lot recently.
So much of my life is run on autopilot. Even the little stuff.
Like when I go on my daily walk, I often times can’t even recall what was going on around me during that walk.
No recollection of faces, store fronts, or events that were happening because I wasn’t really “there.”
Instead I was engrossed in some form of media.
Headphones in and completely ignoring the world.
Who has time for taking in the new park they just built when I need to listen to that 1.5x speed podcast where an affluent white guy explains to me how to be MORE affluent and white than I already am?
The more I become aware of how often the lights are on, but no one’s home in my head, the more I have been trying to change that.
One experiment I’ve been running (pun intended) is to walk and just allow myself to do nothing.
No audiobooks. No phone calls. Just raw dogging reality.
And the most fascinating thing has been happening:
I’ve been noticing stuff that has been in front of me the entire time and I have just never seemed to notice.
Like this morning as I left the house, I immediately encountered a murder of crows.
Seriously. A God damn murder of crows cawing at me as I walked out the door.
It was extremely ominous. I spent the next block walking down the street looking over my shoulder to make sure that today isn’t the day the plague comes.
Crazy to think that if some omnipotent, higher being was trying to warn me about an impending plague, there is a high likelihood I wouldn’t even notice.
Fucking locusts dying in the fields and I am too wrapped up in listening to Tim Ferriss ask someone about their morning routine to care.
But it wasn’t just the crows I noticed, it was also the people along my walk.
Like I went into this coffee shop to get some of that magic elixir which cures all my adult ailments and I was met with three above average attractive, female construction workers.
Not like Ms. Universe level attractive. But runner up in a competitive state fair attractive.
All of them getting coffee. All of them wearing yellow hard hats.
Now normally I wouldn’t notice this, but today I’ve decided to be Mr. Mindful so I am keenly aware of my surroundings and find myself asking a very logical question: did I just stumble in on the set of a porno?
Part of me is now waiting for the sleazy shop owner to come on the loud speaker and tell everyone that the store is closing early for construction since they have got plenty of heavy drilling to get through today.
I didn’t stick around to find out because again these are mid level attractive people. This is not the type of porno where you would invest the time watching the 7-second ad roll and then hit the Skip Ads button. I mean you would be hard pressed to spend the time hovering your cursor over the thumbnail for these folks.
So I continue on back home.
Still in amazement of all the things I miss on a daily basis as I pass them.
Like that old business here. Or the new homeless encampment there.
Even as I make my way back into my own house, I’m fascinated by how new it all looks and even how quiet it is…hey. Wait a minute. The God damn murder of crows are gone.
What the fuck? Were these things legitimately just welcoming me to the day?
Did they leave because they had to go creep someone else out?
Or maybe they left because they’re little creeps and they heard about that coffee shop construction porno.
I might never know.
But if I pay attention, I might find out.
On to the newsletter!
LIVE: The Creative Act
I started thinking more about how much attention I was paying to what I was doing after reading Rick Rubin’s new book “The Creative Act: A Way of Being.”
And the following quote was what inspired the title of this newsletter:
Material for our work surrounds us at every turn. It’s woven into conversation, nature, chance encounters, and existing works of art.
Super solid book. Highly recommend it if you do creative stuff. Or even if you don’t.
LAUGH: Parody Account Gets Prominent Morons To Reply Back
First of all, this account receives an A fucking + for parody names.
Anita B. Etin??? Are you kidding me??? God level word play.
Secondly, the comment section is a master class of bigoted stupidity.
You can learn a lot about human nature by going through the comments of a troll’s account.
People reveal who they really are if you pay attention.
LOVE: Your F-150 Is a Minivan
CLOSING TIME
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Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are strictly my own. Who else’s would they be?
Paying Attention I Swear,
K.Rapp