Of band-aids, fashion and Linux

I can’t correctly recall if this occurred in high school or at art school, but one morning I found myself putting on a pair of canvas shoes with a hole in them. Keds, I think they were called. Anyway, the social inadequacy that had arisen from my inadvertent (podiaquacy?) made me want to do something about it. So I stuck a band-aid over the hole, and drew a voice balloon next to it, with OUCH printed in nice, bold letters. Then I wore them to school.

I swear to you, a couple of weeks later, I saw people adding their own adornments. I think I saw a band-aid too.

I’d like to think that some of fashion’s most twisted inventions may have been birthed this way. Stonewashed Jeans, maybe. Benetton’s weird advertisements from the 90s? Most definitely, and here is the kicker. You’re not fashionable if you cannot afford to replace your band-aided shoe. That’s not the point of it after all. No. To be fashionable is to see iconic poverty as a counterpoint. Wearing damaged and ripped clothing in contrast to one’s accoutrements of wealth is as if to say – Wearing these rags is cool but only because I would never actually need to.

Meanwhile, this sort of thing continued to happen to me and now I see it in a different light. I keep old things around, continually patched until their wasting material bodies can no longer perform their jobs. Like Seinfeld in that episode on Goldenboy, I treat objects like old friends and grieve a moment or two at their passing. Is that odd, you think?

This also affects how I perceive my environment. I like to hack things until my environment is to my liking – mostly, it feels like, with glue and bits of string. Malleability counts a much as utility, perhaps more. The landscapes of my environment shift constantly, just as I change, every day, in an unceasing loop of perception, action and resultant state change. Glue and string, it seems to me are better options than steel and concrete for some things.

Like Emacs. The other day someone at work asked me why I use Linux. I told him it’s because to me Windows feels like a noisy mall and Mac-like some pristine Tiffany’s showroom – but Linux, it feels like a quiet, musty library or an empty, silent church on a workday at noon.

But it’s more than that. Linux feels familiar – like glue and string. Working in Linux makes me feel like I own every bit of my environment. I’m not a technical person at all, and my computing skills are rudimentary at best – and yet, Linux Mint feels… just right. With the right bit of quirk.

Take my peculiar writing needs for instance. My peers don’t see any reason to look for a writing environment beyond Google Docs, but oh no, not me. The gazillion services on offer today are not enticing enough for such as me, it seems. It’s either an irritating UI, or lack of Dark Mode or the constant worry that what I’m writing is not an actual file sitting in the hard disk on my desktop.

So I find myself writing in Emacs. Because I can open 2 more buffers of the same document and jump between sections editing them all simultaneously if I like. Or write a dozen documents at the same time, and keep track of what I need to do next on all of them, because org-agenda keeps track of all the to-dos I embedded in them. Or that I can extend my writing environment in any direction an itch is forming in, constantly hacking in a setup that is as malleable as my day to day circumstances.

Glue and string people. Maybe it isn’t what empires are built from, but it will hold for now. Tomorrow? Who cares? It’s all glue and string, after all, so you can be sure something new but familiar will take its place.