THE MONTHLY EH?! - DECEMBER 2024
It's just a quick end-of-year "eh?!" from me to you (I promise, it's short-ish)
If you followed along with my recent 3-month run of twice-a-month newsletters, you may remember me announcing that I would be shifting to a more monthly affair in my final “bi-weekly-ish” mailout.
Well, since today is not only the final day of December but also the last day of the entire calendar year, I figured I best put together a quick newsletter on my new used late-2014 Mac Mini that I recently picked up for a friendly “we bonded about living on pig farms in Alberta in the late 1990s at a mutual friend’s Xmas party” price (which will now be my main computer setup since my 2009 iMac and my 2014 Macbook Air are still out indefinitely with crashed internal hard drives from the Fall of 2024).
As I am sure we all have much more pressing matters to attend to on this New Year’s Eve that is happening before the year when something called “Project 2025” starts getting implemented in the land of the free (and where a push to the same MAGA-minded rightwing is happening up here in our own Provincial and Federal politics, which is something I tried to talk about in my post-Trump-election newsletter, my pre-BC-election newsletter, and my post-BC-election newsletter), and because I get the sense that most everyone in my orbit is over talking publicly about “politics” until the next election cycle is sprung upon us (which might happen earlier than expected for us Canadians), I am going to keep this December 2024 newsletter short(er) and much less “controversial”.
For the most part, I would just like to wish everyone a contentful new year (so “HAPPY NEW YEAR!” eh) — and I hope that the actual year of 2025 will be much less bleak than what some analysts project. Because, call me naive, but I believe there are many collective/individual actions available for more and more of us to start taking collective/individual action on NOW (and we don’t need to wait for some savior to come save us to get started… we just need to acknowledge the problems and start working on being a part of the solutions).
As that famous part-time carpenter (whose birthday was just the other week) once put so wisely:
“You have to be in this world, but you don’t have to be of this world.”
So, yes, it may be true that we currently have to be in a world rigged around pleasing a small percentage of powerful peoples’ desires to continually chase ego-centric infinite growth fantasies (at the cost of everyone else’s human rights & needs, including the destruction of our cosmically rare eco-system) — BUT — we also don’t have to let ourselves be made of those same ignorant and selfish desires that help keep late-stage colonial/imperial capitalism propped up long past its desired runtime.
We can instead acknowledge that we are individually & collectively made of something that desires mutually beneficial contentment and a society built around sustainably providing EVERYONE with their basic needs (instead of endlessly working towards continuing to be a “successful” cog in a society that prioritizes profiting off of others inescapable need for food, shelter, and connection… a society built off the backs of literal genocide & slavery and heading towards ecological destruction, with a shamefully unjust history that has turned into mass reactionary guilt due to all of these overtly hypocritical injustices never being properly addressed by our cultural “leaders” in the past and/or present).
As I said in a previous newsletter (but it’s worth saying again):
“It’s not up to you to figure out how to save the whole world, that would be hubris to think that — BUT — it is a reality that you are only in control of your own actions & intentions… so focus more on tending to the parts of the garden that you can actually reach yourself (in real life and online). It is not only all you can do, but, if you do it mindfully, it will also be more than enough to work with (ps - the goal in life is sustainable contentment).”
Because you can’t change THE world, you can only change yourself — HOWEVER — once you truly make the switch to realizing that you only really have control over your own actions/reactions & intentions, and once you start consistently applying that understanding to your individual lived experience (so that the wisdom starts becoming experiential instead of theoretical), what you should start to realize is that even though you may not be able to change THE entire world (and it would be delusional to think otherwise), you can actually start to change YOUR world (ie. the parts of THE world that you actually interact with: YOUR friends, family, neighbours, lovers, haters, strangers, co-workers, collaborators, pets, nature, yourself, online/offline, etc).
In other words: be more of what you want to see in the world (and look to join/support others doing the same) — or, as Terrence McKenna put it, we have to create culture mindfully, not just keep mindlessly consuming what the current status quo culture hands down as controls.
As for me personally, at least for the next little while, I think I am going to kick off my new year by putting all of my 95EH-ing on pause until AT LEAST the end of February 2025 (ie. I will be aiming to stay logged off the 95EH Facebook & Instagram and I will stop updating the 95EH.CA tumblr and I will pause the upkeep of The 95EH Events Calendar until I figure out a more manageable way to take on all of that “non-profitable” work, if there is a way).
There are many reasons for this ‘Highway 95EH Hibernation’ decision (some of which can be sussed out from the previous newsletter), but a big factor in this decision is the fact that we will be house-sitting a nice place to hang out at until March 2024 (ie. indoor sauna, sunny deck, more space than our 1-bdrm apartment, etc), EXCEPT… the internet has been turned off at the house and there is no wifi signal to be had!
And since I have a thrifty $15/month cell phone bill that does not come with any data (just unlimited texts, baby!), that means when I am away from our apartment wifi over at the offline house-sit… I am basically travelling back to pre-internet times. So it’s like the 1990s all over again (which I am old enough to remember quite well).
I even set up an offline retro video game machine at the house. So now when I am over there “sitting” around with no internet, I have access to every video game ever released on the Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, and NES (and Gameboy, and Turbo-Grafx, and ETC) — not too mention my not too shabby physical DVD/BLURAY collection (and some unread physical books) — which makes this house-sit kinda like a DIY Blockbuster video store that my younger 1990s-self would have killed to have access to (a retro offline setup that has already come in handy this December as my older 2020s-self ended up coming down with a self-diagnosed lower back strain and needed to be confined between a hardback chair and laying out on the floor for a solid week due to killer back tightness).
Besides, winter in Canada is long and a good time to reassess, reevaluate, and recharge the batteries (especially when one doesn’t know exactly what they’re doing “career-wise” going into another year, which is often the case for me). And now that I am not only a community garden “compost man” but also a community garden Vice President, I think it is probably a smart idea for me to start planning for the best ways to spend my energy when the sun comes back and starts melting the winter away (because I have a feeling life is going to get quite busy once it’s growing season again).
So I’m gonna go (more) offline (than usual) for a while (ie. I’ll be taking a social media break and spending most of my “internetting” time quietly working on website stuff and/or dealing with emails… while also jumping back into spending more time doing more billable work for the Online AI Chatbot Factory) — but I’ll continue sending out this mountown newsletter update on a monthly basis for those who may still want to receive something like that, with the next one coming sometime in January 2025.
Cheers to all those who have ever taken the time to check out the stuff I share/do at some point over the years… and here’s to another collective spin around that giant ball of fire in the sky (may we all not lose sight of how special our limited impermanent time spent circling that fireball together here on “planet earth” is)!
🍻
—
Jeremy // HI54LOFI
+ 95EH’s Temp Intern
+ Vice President (of a garden)