Daily Create was “Even Cowgirls Get the Memes” during these ten weeks at the beginning of 2016 when we are having fun with #western106. This wasn’t difficult–do a Google image search for “cowgirl humor” (and realize how sexist it is!), choose this cute image, move it into Bazaart for text.
Alan Levine has already confessed he is a little crazy. How do I know? I heard it on the radio so it has got to be true. Right? Crazy generous with his time and talent is what I meant. He has started a new version of the undead thing called ds106: #western106. Just Google it. I am damned sure not going to detangle that knot of fishing line. I'm just going to be grateful that Alan has chosen to help us play in the infinite game of the Web rather than pay for his heating oil bill.
Yesterday he and Mariana Funes hosted a new iteration of radio ds106 for #western106 and I was able to listen and tweet in my penny's worth to the conversation. When their hour program (crackling campfire, high sheriff visit, dead air excitement) was over it occurred to me that I had generated ever more digital detritus. I have been obsessing lately over this signal-to-noise footprint. As a writing teacher I think it is my professional obligation to leave the world a more sensible place and that includes all of the public talk I have gathered and generated in that digital world. In this case I needed to make sure that my stray tweets to #ds106 had a better 'nest' to live in.
The Storify below was my attempt to gather all of my little tweets into one nest. I used the best tweets I generated in that one hour as a way to decide how to direct my energies over the next month or so in this project. I highly recommend Storify as a tool for curating your own life so that your signal-to-noise ratio is less lossy. It helped me.
On the Road to Krumbo Reservoir: Guardian Juniper, Oldest Living Being on the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge
That dirt road runs straight at the cliff then falls
like an unraveling basket to the coulee
lake, blue eyeball of the yellow day.
Juniper, ancient of days, grips cliff top,
roots snaking down basalt columns, tying
loose stones like little wandering donkeys
to the wall. You can find dried owl pellets
under gin-scented branches; broken open, tiny
vole bones shine clear and somehow holy
in your hand. You can sit there like a Paiute
did a hundred, two hundred years ago,
looking out for Bannock warriors, or maybe
a lone vision quester—the one who left
his red handprint on the rock shelf hidden
right there almost out of sight.
–Sandy Brown Jensen
Jan. 13, 2016
