The yearning for the past often lands us on the somewhat hollow nostalgia of ephemera: if we can’t have the nineties back, we can build a life of things that might feel transportative. I have no right to judge, really. I push physical media on anyone who will listen, ranting about the need for hard drives and for ways to store the things you love because, one day, they may not be accessible on streaming anymore. I have a CD player in my home, a VCR in a closet. But I’m also inclined to think about the work that older devices demand of a person compared with the frictionless present day, when we are told that any and all content is at our fingertips (a myth, but a myth that sells.) And I can’t help but think of the reality that there are many significantly larger and more consequential inconveniences that Americans, plainly, do not have the heart or stomach for. One example might be the inconvenience caused by a mass political uprising, one that risks the security, safety, and comfort of its participants. I have seen glimpses of people’s threshold for that level of friction. I think, for instance, of the summer of 2020, when a protest movement collided with the first COVID summer and people’s material needs—at least in my community— weren’t being met. And so, for almost a month, after being on the streets all day, protesters would go and sew masks at night, or make care packages for elders, or do grocery runs to fill pantries, and many of us did that at the cost of our own sleep, or our own time with loved ones at home, or we did it in betrayal of our desire for convenience, ignoring the temptations of the couch and the latest streamable binge
the headline is bad, but the actual writing (by Hanif Abdurraqib) is not really about that
![EXCERPTS FROM KAFKA'S DIARIES
281
JANUARY 20. The end of writing. When will it take me
up again?
JANUARY 29. Again tried to write, virtually useless.
JANUARY 30. The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten days and already cast out. Once again prodigious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you.
FEBRUARY 7. Complete standstill. Unending torments.
MARCH 11. How time flies; another ten days and I have chieved nothing. It doesn't come off. A page now anc hen is successful, but I can't keep it up, the next day m powerless.
MARCH 13. [.] Lack of appetite, fear of getting ba te in the evening; but above all the thought that I wr](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:movn6xzezospl7lnkhy7nzpt/bafkreih4bdzfz6lfrhaujqisbgw3vri34ydsies7vpvvrmoyebxtmjuxae)
