Tales of a Tuned-out Adventurer
Tales of a Tuned-out Adventurer
by Lynda
By Lynda from
It began over Thanksgiving weekend in 1980. Working "On Duty" as a residence staff advisor, and completely alone for four days inhabiting an empty college dormitory, it was natural for me to turn to the TV in the cavernous student lobby for human "company".
As I channel surfed, it became clear to my whole being that mindless garbage saturated the networks— all of them. This development was something I could completely do without for the rest of my life.
Since I was alone, I could dance, sing, play guitar, pray, draw, read, write or even sleep, and that would be more fulfilling than dashing my brain against an invisible concrete wall in front of "the boob tube" merely to hear another human voice.
I naturally abhor addiction in any form, especially if my addiction is the goal of someone else with power. This has been a life-long pattern, beginning with a general abhorrence of materialism and lack of urgency to make fistfuls of money in the wake of "The Me Generation", rooted in a spiritual awakening in the early 1970s as a teen ... following instead the wake of Jesus, whose story of wandering around doing good with no money was incredibly romantic for me.
In 1981 I met and later married a hippie. We have openly lived a countercultural lifestyle for over 40 years, trading in mindlessness for meaning in our work, play and small community of kindred spirits.
We began life together in a pink and white 1950s double-decker trailer with birch paneling and jalousie windows. It was a drafty as hell-froze-over when temperatures plunged to the -20s (fahrenheit) over our first Christmas. That epic storm gelled diesel fuel in my Dad's Rabbit after the Christmas Eve Candlelight service, and knocked over and broke in two the arch we were married under. (A friend sent a belated wedding gift, a down comforter that probably saved our marriage.) There was room for two cats, our guitars which brought us together, incidentally, and a few books and art supplies, but definitely not a TV. The hubs built a shed for his tools, but who would want to watch TV in there?
No need for TV at all. We were too busy living an adventure!
“First Christmas” An 80s style accidental 35mm double exposure
Three years later, with a surprise pregnancy (kudos to The Way Home by Mary Pride) and nowhere to put the baby, we found a three-story fixer-upper in the inner city for the price of a new Corolla. We used urban grant money and a low interest loan (6% vs 11.5%) to bring the house up to code in three years.
At some point a pitying parent presented us with their old color TV. We put it in the attic which was hot as hell in summer. It eventually burnt itself to a crisp when the third (or was it the fourth?) homeless person we were housing was using it.
What an adventure!
We lived Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television and kept going.
Six years later, in the early 90s, when our neighborhood did not "revive" (as in gentrify) as anticipated, we traded in urban renewal for a fixer-upper in an old blue-collar neighborhood. A neighbor walked a pie across the street. We had traded in nerve-wracking neighborhood crack trafficking and physical threats from gangs, for trafficking in pies. No more police searching for "the knife" in our front yard, or prostitutes calling for help on our front porch ("Victoria" was not a victim, according to the officer she did NOT want us to call for help...) Birdsong replaced sirens.
What an adventure!
I started my first real garden and sowed knowledge into my young son, growing our curriculum Unschool style, and joining like-minded families that formed a co-op. Our frequent classes and field trips to museums and zoos, and involvement with home school sports, became social events. For my son's entertainment, friends and neighbors rode BMX bikes and skateboarded in a nearby parking lot (dangerous!) or used our home made slip and slide (more dangerous!) or simply played Legos. A whip-smart neighbor girl, who was failing memorizing spelling, learned phonics by playing flash cards on our front porch, and aced her tests thereafter.
We bought our first new TV and stuck it inside the chifforobe we had used for baby things, because we had to have Wishbone and Waiting for God . We watched a few ball games and caved to Nintendo ... but only for Beetle Racing.
Things got complicated when junior high coincided with new private school friends who played Grand Theft Auto (blood! Stealing!) and we upgraded dial-up to cable, but just for emailing remote friends and pioneering the brave new internet, which was a mixed-bag from the start.
While I was learning website design beginning with PageMill, my son progressed from downloading images of fast cars to downloading music with LimeWire (illegal!) and exploring the world of online gaming (???) after school. As much as we allowed these things in an effort to instill technological self-government, in hindsight I wonder ... but that continues to be his adventure.
The new TV stayed on for days after we witnessed the second plane fly into the World Trade Center the morning of 9/11. A friend had called earlier because the international student we were hosting, who came just to volunteer for our non-profit and found us on the internet from Japan, was due to fly home that morning. (He finally reached his dad in an internet chat room that night and flew home five days later.)
We also continued the globe-trotting that my husband began in the early 90s, developing our mission to distribute used American wheelchairs to those in need, primarily in Honduras and Thailand. At the same time, we built an apartment on to our suburban fixer-upper for his aging mom to "be with family".
After seven years of care-giving — what an adventure! — and emptying the nest, the hubs and I downsized from the Dawdy Haus to the mother of all fixer uppers, a two-bedroom long-neglected Freddy Mac foreclosure on five acres with a dilapidated chicken coop and no cable hook up within a half mile. Curious friends applauded the pole barn garage, but otherwise became very concerned for us.
We had a blast.
The TV did not survive the move — we had walls to tear down, mold to spray and plumbing to fix and a kitchen and laundry room to create after we rebuilt the bathroom and installed some sort of heat. When we brought his mom from the nursing home to visit, she named it "the Humpty Dumpty House".
What an adventure!
But there were stars, crickets and lightning bugs at night; bullfrogs, dragonflies and water lilies in the pond with rainbows in our little valley after a storm. All these were a life-affirming step back in time to my early childhood sense of wonder.
On the dark side, I got my first “smart” phone (ironically boasting a chromed bitten forbidden fruit logo from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil) to email graphic design clients because the trip to the village McDonalds with my laptop for unreliable WiFi was getting unbearably inconvenient. "The Tower" we connect to with our phones is over on the next hill ...
We eventually graduated from indoor camping in "the funky love-nest" to getting chickens and enough bandwidth (over copper phone lines at 1.5mbps download speed) to get email on our computers and use the inter-library loan.
Our son got married and his wife could not believe we didn’t have a TV. They nabbed us a flat screen on Black Friday. I scored a nice oak entertainment center at a Salvation Army to hide it and our stereo in the newly drywalled living room to play DVDs. No streaming could be had.
Eventually we discovered that "The Tower" offered faster data at 4G not 2G and we each used an iPhone "personal hotspot" instead. We were able to download halting videos from YouTube on a small tablet screen.
We also fell into doom scrolling during the global panic over Covid and free-speech crushing "insurrection" retaliation … my garbage meter took a beating then and almost broke. I learned to purge the plethora of personal information I had naively given away to the internet via Meta to new limited, art-business-related levels.
It was during that period of fearful isolation that I discovered Bari Weiss on Substack (now The Free Press) and through her Paul Kingsnorth (Abbey of Misrule) and through him the School of the Unconformed ... and felt I had found reasonable allies who sensed what I sensed, and understood a bit more of the global scope of things.
The self-government problem became twofold: what information am I putting out there to be consumed, and what am I consuming? I learned to use Substack to say what I really think, and not social media. And with Substack providing intellectually empowering information, I learned to avoid sensational headlines and op-eds.
This last year, with Substack developing into my new happy place, other social media has crossed the garbage threshold. No amount of privacy settings and newsfeed adjustments tame the algorithms that choose my friends' content, and filter the content I have chosen to self-filter and follow. Controlling the Meta leviathan has been a battle with diminishing returns, accelerated by AI. My husband does relax with X, but those random reels just make my eyes bug out and bewilder my brain. TikTok? Fuggetaboutit!
I now liken more bandwidth as a trade-up from shopping for desirables at Aldi to finding necessities at Menards, where the organic tortilla chips are at the end of the paint aisle and bleach is located in an aisle a half an acre away next to Orange Crush and just around the corner from all the kitchen sinks.
I’ll stick with Aldi and bare-minimum internet, thank you, and keep my sanity.
In May and early June, "The Tower" signal dropped to below 1990s dial up speeds and I couldn’t even post images on social media. X also gummed up. A forced media fast happened when some websites (including gmail!) failed to download. A neighbor recommended Starlink. Imagine! Streaming! We counted the cost: $100 a month with a cool $600 gadget to plug in and point to the sky. We considered supporting Elon's empire, but defaulted to doing nothing about the problem, a common strategy when feeling stalemated, and in a few weeks the hotspots connected with our minimum data speeds to function as before: 5mbps download and .1mbps upload. (Is that big sunspot healing over maybe?)
We realized we could live happily without even that minimum. I drew and painted more and had time to write. I actually made phone calls to friends! (Quaint!) My husband happily fixed all the things in the garage and created new things for the chickens. We sat outside in the evenings and watched the fish in the pond and the garden grow and the dogs play with each other.
What a beautiful adventure!
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When not painting or teaching art, Lynda occasionally writes about art-making and her alternative Jesus-freak hippie philosophy and lifestyle from flyover country as Alabaster Jar on Substack, where, like Ruth and Peco, she attempts to disrupt the prevailing narratives of "The Machine" Tower of Babel. She also blogs about medical mission adventuring in developing nations at Hope In Motion for the non-profit Wheels of Hope and has gained some notoriety for her curious vision issues at Wide-Eyed Wonder. Her online gallery can be viewed at lyndarimke.com.
AI is now sampling and duplicating professional artistic voices not only via Meta and Alphabet, but in the graphic design software Lynda has used since 1990. All more reasons to limit what is counterproductive, even if it's painful, and pursue alternatives.
If you would like to leave a comment, you can do so on “A Library of Unconformed Lives”.