Introducing Stream
A survey of consciousness by Shannon Lawrence
A river flows in you
The first person to point out my-so-called-unusual relationship with social media was my sister Rachel. “It’s like an inside joke…but you’re the only one in on it,” she offered. It was an unsolicited answer to one question that is quite frequently asked of me: what the f*ck is up with your Instagram?
Admittedly, stories like a video of me crying, nose red, and face wet, LIVE from an indiscernible location tagged as 📍Uber & Drake's "Liability" echoing softly in the background... were never meant to matter to anyone who is not me. Who cares if I'd rather not follow the prescription for a perfectly packaged online presence? Especially if I don't. For me, the idea of disguising reality into a one-size-fits-all standard lacks romance. Nothing compares to the appeal of circulating morsels of life's bite sized moments and the intrinsic intimacy of it’s fleeting nature.
If we are all performance artists, I much prefer mine to play out this way – to capture the present as I see it. Instagram as an ongoing exhibition space; a way to capture and immediately forget, a way to control how I remember, if I want. This is the way I communicate. But when I look back at the big picture, holistically, that I realize I actually do care, a lot.
And so here we are.
I care about comprehension – how even the tiniest parts of life are among the richest, how fragmented memory and experience are so intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole. Consider this Substack a resting place, where I’ll come to comb out my thoughts, and map my observations while tracing the patterns that lay within them.
I’ll draw you in close with my words and offer up context…soon, and you’ll hopefully gain a deeper understanding of where I’m coming from. I will highlight the strange and unusual, and by ‘popular demand’, I will share my perspective on what the cultural zeitgeist has to offer.
TLDR
Each Sunday at 7am, you can expect access to my distilled thoughts for the week. A few ideas I might explore are:
Desire as the voice of God
Irving Penn
the Meso-american Civilization
Herbal remedies
Atlanta, Georgia
and we’ll just have to see.
It should be interesting. If you need me, I’ll be here ^ .
x Shan
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