For the first year of the pandemic, my wife and I would meet all our groups of friends for weekly Zoom get togethers.

We’d talk about what little there was to share: infection rates and hospitalizations, Netflix, the election. Week after week, different heads in Zoom boxes, jabbering about Tiger King, Lysol wipes, Twitter, toilet paper, rinse, repeat.

So repetitive that Jenny and I started to suspect that we were living in a computer simulation. That we had gone down in a plane crash and we were now just brains in jars in a lab somewhere, hooked up to machines that stimulate our brains to keep us alive.

One of the many, many books I read during our incarceration was called Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm.

The author, aptly named Isabella Tree, tells the story of how she and her husband, rather than continuing toxic modern farming practices, allowed their 3,500 acre Sussex estate to revert to its original wild state. After a program of careful neglect, nature reigned once more, near-extinct species returned, harmony was restored, and they had a virtual time machine that yielded loads of fascinating results data.

I loved the book and the idea and I understand that it has become a powerful rallying point for an ecological movement now called Rewilding.

Then one day, death scrolling through Twitter, I came across a thread that coined the term “rewilding imagination.” Bells went off in my head (or at least in the bell jar that contains my brain).

That’s the ticket! Rather than grinding through the latest recommendations from the NY Times “Watching” columnists or the Kindle storefront, mindlessly masticating the neural equivalent of monocropped chicken feed, Roundup, and genetically modified seeds, our starving brains need to be rewilded!

Now, how?

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Let’s start online. But let’s do it differently.

We gotta loosen the chokehold of algorithms. In order to tell us stuff and to sell us as stuff to advertisers, big media platforms stuff using to a 2-dimensional pigeonhole and feed us with fire hoses on content based purely on popularity and recency.

It’s seductive. Overwhelmed by the tsunami of data that swamps us every day, we accede to the algorithms to predigest our meals for us. They feed us top 10 listicles and cat videos and ugly rumors, so called viral content that spreads like a pox by appealing to the lowest common denominator in us. They have leached out all the nutrients in our infodiets, especially the ones we artists thrive on.

So instead, I need to cultivate all my varied parts. Feed all my diverse, obscure interests. I won’t let big corporate computer goons decide what parts of me count. Still the Internet itself isn’t the enemy. There’re still huge dollops of rich nutrition just waiting for us on the world’s servers.

• Read off the beaten path. There are so many free libraries full of freely-accessible ebooks and zines and journal to plunge into. The Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine have a recording of the entire Internet going back to its origin, that’s 626,000,000,000 web pages to browse. Many are very weird, including a 2001 version of dannygregory.com.​

There’s Project Gutenberg that has over 60,000 free eBooks, including many classics you haven’t read since 9th grade English.

Too raw? Check out Standard Ebooks that promises “Free and liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover”.

Or Google Books— it has the contents of literally every single book ever written at your beck and call, free.

I look for blogs in interesting niches. I hunt through Tumblr and Medium and Reddit and Substack for undiscovered ideas that will never be very popular. I subscribe to dozens of independent newsletters that have led me on wild adventures deep into uncharted territory. I follow links to links to links deep into the undergrowth where the unusual sprouts and the unlikely blossom.

• Seek a different search engine. Like Marginalia, “a search engine, designed to help you find what you didn’t even know you were looking for.” I found this piece I have zero memory of writing.

• Read offline. I dusted off my library card (after signing up for Libby). Taking out ye olde hardcover books by the armful. Wandering the stacks into sections I’d never frequent. Auto repair. Air warfare. Music theory. Folklore. Greek epic poetry. Rhetoric. Geology. Zoroastrianism. Bolivian history. Etymology. Paleobotany. Mezzotinting.

I haunt the sales shelf at the library and the $1 table at second hand bookstores. I look for faded bestsellers from a century ago, many of which are rip-roaring and unheard of today. One of my favorites, ”A Rogue by Compulsion.”

• Rewild my ears too. I’m listening to a lot of eclectic radio stations —there are so many streaming online. I like a French one called Fip. Also KRTS in Marfa, Texas. I’m trying out Afrobeat and Bongo Flava from Tanzania, Tuvan throat singers, Pakistani hip hop, Chicano rap, boom-bap and Trap, Portuguese opera, Polish folk tunes.

What would I never listen to? I'm listening to it.

• Popcorn, please. I subscribed to the Criterion Channel to watch old art movies. Godard, Bunuel, Renoir, Czech animation and Soviet documentaries, oh, yeah.

• Show me to the gift store. I just discovered there are 113 museums in my state, including the Museum of the Horse Soldier, the Tucson Gay Museum and The World’s Smallest Museum. Let’s go!

• Guilty pleasures. I still love me some Real Housewives and Squid Game, and as artists we need to be relevant and of our times. We can't completely avoid popular culture — but we do need absorb it sparingly and intelligently.

I don’t need to do it all, of course. I don’t plan to become a freaky, Luddite cave dwelling survivalist listening to nose flute 78s on my hand-built Victrola. But I am starting to thrive on these changes to my media diet.

Rewilding our imaginations takes time and effort and creativity. But the rewards are great and they’re essential to feed the bubbling cauldron of our creativity. Finding our own paths through the vast thickets of information and inspiration is a gritty, funky adventure.

But much tastier than the bland, starchy troughs of the Metaverse.

Your pal,

Danny

PS. Well, the first Tuesday email is done 'n' dusted. I hope you enjoy it. It's nice to have another chance to talk with you . Not all tuesday emails will be this long and in future they'll include a list of three links to stuff I like — I kinda over did it this week, but this topic got me going. If you're one of the folks who already signed up for a paid subscription, thank you so much for supporting my work. If not, don't worry, I'll keep sending you a Tuesday email for the rest of the month so you have time to make up your mind if it's worth the $7. Or $1.50 @ essay. Or 7¢ a word. Is a word worth 7¢? Depends what it is, I guess. "Javelin? I'd give you a nickel. "Crepuscluar." Definitely worth a quarter. "Aphantasia", oh, yes. Now that's a $10 word. And guess what, you just got all three — for free.