THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 28

People spend so much time in the virtual world the physical world is hurting. Like a yard that no one is paying attention to, weeds are going to seed, the desirable plants are unwatered & dying off, pests are all over & it looks like a mess. We were out in the Montavilla neighborhood of Portland the other day putting out postcards & flyers, the shop owners were hungry for interaction & connection. Portland is slowly getting it back together, slowly. The whole place feels like it was underutilized & needed the people to take advantage of it. The cyber world is turning whole cities into bedroom communities of people that don’t leave their houses. If you add on all of the social anxiety, people are forgetting how to interact & be in the real world. So this is a push to make cities the places we want to be. There is a lot of talk about the lack of “third spaces” - a thing that is neither your home nor your work. Almost anything outside your home should be a third space. All it requires is an employee you want to hang out with & a business where that’s okay. There are spots that are more so, cafés, game stores, libraries, parks, record stores, but you can make any business into a third space. People that are hanging around have to know how to act, know how to show a business support. I used to hang out at shops a lot as a teenager & again when I was distributing PORK. I got to know the shop keepers & we’d shoot the shit for a bit before I’d hurry off to the next destination. This requires a little less of the grind & more flexibility. Our society is broken in almost countless ways, some people want to throw it out altogether. The thing is, it takes a lot more to rebuild & the people who are ready & organized to do it now have lots of guns & are more than willing to kill the people that get in their way. This is just the way it is, the way it has always been. There is an ignorant romance to burning bridges, but if you think about it for even a little bit, it’s a bad idea.This is the central reason why I’m more interested in handshakes & smiles than tearing things down.