"I did repel his letters and denied his access to me"

I haven't had a Facebook or Instagram account in a long time, and I'm slowly pulling away from other forms of the more parasitic modes of engagement with the digital world as well. (J and I just exchanged photos of our most important book or books. Mine were Watership Down, Bridge to Terabithia, Jesus and the Victory of God, and Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman is currently on the brain.)

One way in which I've been picking away at smaller and cleaner digital footprint is taming the sprawling jungle of my email inbox. I decided it would be too massive a task to attempt to sort every email that's been left unsorted in the general in-tray for the past few decades and have taken to just selecting my entire inbox (which holds several hundred messages at a time), releasing the handful of emails that I actually DO need to keep an eye on, and then sending everything that was grabbed to the archive.

This makes my inbox look nice and clean for a few hours, and then my phone downloads the most recent several hundred messages that haven't been archived yet and I do the same thing again. The interesting part about this is the walk down memory lane that it provides. I just checked the inbox again, and it's all the way back to 2020.

There is an invitation to a family zoom call from my Mom--this was April of 2020, and it was the only way we could see each other, a reminder to keep a Duolingo streak going for the 393rd day, and spam, spam, spam. 

Spam from Musicnotes.com, because I ordered a piece of sheet music for a student at one point.

Spam from Amazon, which we've largely succeeded in squeezing down to a bare minimum this year. (That said, we did order a grill cart this morning which J is apparently putting together in our garage right now.)

Spam from Hotels.com

Spam from the RPO

Spam from Shea's Patron Services.

Spam from Lowe's.

It's too much to block all of the spam that comes in, so even though I DO hit unsubscribe from every email that comes with the option I flushed this most recent few months of tacky and lurid advertising down the digital toilet with special pleasure. They thought they had reached me, but I denied them access in the end.