“At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant. Certainly many of our most satisfying avocations today consist of making something by hand which machines can usually make more quickly and cheaply, and sometimes better. Nevertheless I must in fairness admit that in a different age the mere fashioning of a machine might have been an excellent hobby... Today the invention of a new machine, however noteworthy to industry, would, as a hobby, be trite stuff. Perhaps we have here the real inwardness of our own question: A hobby is a defiance of the contemporary. It is an assertion of those permanent values which the momentary eddies of social evolution have contravened or overlooked. If this is true, then we may also say that every hobbyist is inherently a radical, and that his tribe is inherently a minority.

Aldo Leopold - A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bioniclekisser95/neocities/main/hobbies/grand.avif https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bioniclekisser95/neocities/main/camera_om4t/om4t9.JPG https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bioniclekisser95/neocities/main/camera_af10/af104.JPG

Gran loved to throw away everything, a decades-old family sore spot over speakers and journals and grandad's DIY vacuum TV. Because he had a stroke a few years before I was born an Ikonta camera and his silent, intent stare from the hospital bed are all I can remember him for. Like dad's first divorce my family waited a few years to tell me he was giddy about finally having a grandson (I have 2 older cousins)

When I was a teenager I would always buy 2 of the same thing. 2 of the same IMCO slimline lighters, 2 CRKT Snaplocks, 2___. One for use, the other oiled, purged of oxygen, stored away in between the void between the bedframe and the wall like some reincarnated squirrel. I think it was really a fear of death, I was stockpiling a second self with the underlying fear that they wouldn't outlive use, time, neglect, gran.

While I've slowly outgrown that habit I think an embarrassing slice of my hobbies have been centered around accumulation. Transformative, creative preoccupations are on the upper level of this hobby aparthied I've raised in my mind and something that I have historically been resoundingly bad at. To my logic it would be forgivable if my habits were on one specific vein of collecting antique calculators or kimonos.

Unfortunately it's not, and inevitably it circles back to the same surface-level cycles: Fixation, compromise, accumulation. Boiling your interests down to some kind of bottom line will surely cannibalize any sort of gratification and when there is a clear demarcation, an attainable end goal, then iin that moment that hobby ceases to be interesting. Specificity is romantic, monogamy with the irrational preoccupations in your head a commitment for __ But is it realistic? Is it attainable for me?

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