TumbleDweeeb

    🤔 …Before the internet … my world was tangible and immediate. I spent countless hours reading books, turning actual pages and getting lost in stories without distractions. As a kid I preferred to stay inside with a book in my hands, but I was sometimes forced outside where I wasn’t allowed to take the books … that was a house rule. So, I played games of baseball in neighborhood lots of basketball in the back yard… My brother and I built elaborate forts in the woods with whatever materials we could scrounge up and rode our bikes everywhere … it was freedom with two wheels and no destination in mind. I drew a lot as a kid and a teenager, spending hours with pencils and paper creating my own worlds. Newspapers were my connection to the world beyond my town, and I’d search through record stores, flipping through vinyl, cassettes and CDs to discover new music or hunt down that one song I’d heard on the radio.
   As a teenager, social life meant physically showing up places. I’d hang out with friends at each other’s houses, sprawled across living room floors talking for hours. My group of friends would share our places to go, our locations without a digital pin drop … from laser tag locations to natural bridges with campfires and beer. The mall was our social hub, not for shopping necessarily, but for seeing and being seen, maybe catching a movie or just wandering aimlessly. We’d congregate at gas stations, turning parking lots into gathering spots, or cruise the strip in cars with windows down and music loud and even hanging on a street corner. Television was appointment viewing … you watched what was on when it was on, and if you missed it … you missed it. We rented movies on weekends, making the trip to the video store part of the entertainment itself. We’d call friends on landlines without knowing if they’d be home … Thats if I had a phone … we made plans without the ability to constantly send text updates and navigate using actual maps that we’d unfold across the dashboard. Boredom was real but still very rare, as we would find our own means of entertainment … I would dive into art projects; I wrote a lot then (though not as much as I do now) and create spontaneous adventures that couldn’t be Googled or planned in advance.