#Scurf186: 4am scribbles
A note as a post
It’s almost 4am, I’m sleepless and largely blaming the baked beans I had for dinner and the power I give to the all consuming nature of X in my non-working hours. It’s not a surprise then that I’ve decided that I’m doing a no twitter month.. it’s hard in this economy, in our times and given that I’ve already almost quit Instagram (it’s been a while, almost 6 months) but I’m sat here at the edge of my bed, and scrolling through the Substack app, finding so much beautiful, stirring, mindless writing. It reminds me so much of the olden times of Facebook statuses. I want to return to the remoteness of those posts and the kind of rare concentration some of those thoughts and writings that used to gather, so slowly (but also in a moment) like early, flitting birds in the pre-dawn sky. I ache to return to a time of the analogue, before the everyday mess of various platforms consumed our hours and days and weeks and months. I pine to find, claw, earth, burrow my way back to the analog, the pre-digitised ways of being, thinking, knowing. And in this slightly deranged, sleepless early days Wednesday morning moment it seems like the substack app might be actively inclined towards that direction. I’m (obviously) out here on a limb, but humour a girl out. The heatwave of climate change is physical and so, so palpable in my parts of the world, but aren’t all of us living through this excessively informed, slightly deranged, completely inhuman heatwave of social media anyway?!?
Writing these substacks over the last few years has unexpectedly brought me closer to other readers, writers and walkers. If reading this dredges up resonant memories or stirs up a wonderful pot of emotions within you, I’d love if you left a comment, or shared this with a reader friend!
Anandi is a writer based in Delhi.