76 Minutes of Silence
04/15/20
By Nell Taylor
Photo of Nell Taylor by Eric Strom, two years before Read/Write Library and four years before GlitterGuts, when we could be outside.
I’m listening to Alan Licht’s “Remington Khan,” half of one of my favorite albums. The other track, “The Old Victrola,” is 36 minutes of ridiculous stupid beautiful joy. It’s a live recording of Licht trolling disco-hating electronic music purists that combines Captain Beefheart, Licht’s own abrasive guitar, and looping one single syllable from Donna Summer’s “Dim All the Lights” so that she belts it out for 16 minutes.
“Remington Khan” just helps me concentrate.
I’d been using it as a drug for years before I got a surprise (to me) ADHD diagnosis for the first time last year. Even though one of the criteria is that you experience symptoms since childhood, there was never any hint from professionals that it could apply to me. When my results came in less than a minute after finishing the assessment, I scored about as high as possible for “inattentive” and negligible on “hyperactive” which is probably why I flew under the radar for so long.
When Marc Fischer first reached out to me to write something for the Quarantine Times, he suggested that I talk about what running Read/Write Library is like now. With the library closed, I suggested instead that I write about the work I was trying to do to put together a guide for landlords on how to be decent human beings in this extreme situation, which I hoped might prompt some folks to maybe consider that their tenants were y’know, people, after this has all passed.
But I got an outline and a paragraph in before it seemed that the different laws and relief programs were going to be too complicated, so I stopped, paralyzed that I would give someone the wrong information.
It’s not that I don’t enjoy complicated things. Complicated things are what I’ve built my life around. I created and run a library designed to change the way that people value the lived experience of their neighbors, and that surfaces community media that’s been left out of and suppressed from the record, so that folks can rewrite their city’s narratives. That’s my second full time job, but it doesn’t pay me. So I structured my day job around it, working remotely and independently on complicated information design to make it easier for others to use. I give client presentations in between field trips with middle schoolers. I make sure that activists and organizers have a place to meet to change the narrative for their communities. I also own and manage an 1880s multi-unit in Humboldt Park, where I lived in a construction zone for two years while three out of the four exterior walls literally collapsed and were rebuilt around me. In the last couple years, I learned to give myself a bit of a break. I cut down the hours I work per week from 80 to about 60 and it felt luxurious.
But somewhere below that number of hours is a magical threshold where I stop functioning. I’m not quite sure where it is, but without the structure that I’ve managed to weave from my chosen chaos, everything else slows down. Basic tasks, like staring across the room for hours, take three times as long. This isn’t new. Over the years, I’ve observed that when I have more free time, it doesn’t result in more productivity for me. It just backs up and overflows and tries to swallow every remnant of effort I have left. And without the library and collaborations to plan, and meetings and the rest of Chicago’s incredibly essential art, culture and activism to show up for, each week feels like more of a wash than the last.
Eric Strom is a partner at GlitterGuts, photographing parties, performances, clown memorials, everyday nights at bars, sex workers, weddings, and anything else where they have the opportunity to expand the definition of “beautiful people.” When he’s not officially working an event, he’s at one of these places visiting his people. Since the quarantine, he’s found himself riding his bike to one of the closed bars he usually works at just to have a destination.
Eric and I have known each other since we were high school freshmen channeling our awkwardness into improv at Second City. We share a lot of the same comorbities — depression, anxiety, ADHD — but he’s always been much more open about these than I have, continuing to turn them into comedy and writing long after I couldn’t access those parts of my brain anymore, even though it is for him to reach them as well. When I realized that there was very little defining my quarantine time other than inertia, I reached out to Eric to have a conversation for this article. A recent post of his has been stuck in my mind for weeks:
“Kind of built my life in a way where I'd be around lots of people and positive energy, even when I wasn't great at nurturing friendships on my own. Either I'd be at cool events for work or I'd just show up places and... BOOM.... people I like to talk to or dance with.”
We talked for an hour and 16 minutes about what it’s like trying to stay focused and keep up our energy right now without a feedback loop of making spaces and work that help people feel seen and feel like themselves. How much we need those spaces that give us that feeling in return so we can keep putting it back out there. We talked about what it would mean to return to normal when chemistry distorts our own ideas about who we are, and what our own normal even is. We talked about how good we have it, relatively, and how frustrating it is to find ourselves back here despite that—especially when we want to be doing so much more. And how having the time doesn’t free us to do more when we’ve engineered our lives to allow us to flip the switch and run on adrenaline when everything else is failing us.
With these wall-to-wall lives and opposite schedules and loud crowded rooms, it’s probably the most we’ve talked in 10 years. I recorded the conversation on an app that I’ve successfully used dozens of times and exported the 7.3MB file to transcribe. It was blank, just silence, all 76 minutes of it. Eric and I plan to ride bikes when this is over.
Nell Taylor worked on this piece with Marc Fischer, the Quarantine Times special editor. Occasionally, Marc Fischer selects a Chicago artist to share a commissioned creative response to the pandemic.