Welcome to the FEDatorium

the antidote to boredom and fear, in which you are invited to make & do stuff

If I dared to say I was bored when I was a kid, my father would reply, with a slight warning to his tone, “go kick cans on the Santa Ana freeway.” I rarely said I was bored, and I rarely was.

“Basketball Game,” ingeniously created from lunchtime throwaways by a barely literate 6th grader in a summer remediation writing class. Prompt: Tell a Story.

While I definitely was not playing on freeways, I was inventing, constructing, and operating “main frame computers” made out of large appliance boxes. They told fortunes and answered questions on the front porch for neighborhood kids and passersby thanks to a bunch of low-tech strategies that merely performed “computer” while I hung out inside the box, wizard of Oz style, with a pile of encyclopedias, pushing buttons, scribbling answers, and making weird noises. I was also scavenging through kitchen, garden, town, and the woods out back for delectables, aka non-toxic options, to adapt to the recipes I found in the stack of cookbooks I loved browsing. I once made my family eat broadleaf for dinner—a common weed growing in imperfect lawns and from cracks in the sidewalk. It was delicious with butter, salt, and hot pepper vinegar, though a tad stringy and tough.

Making symbols from cymbals, cardboard box modeling step, in an effort to translate poems into more broadly accessible things.

It’s hard to be bored with a world that needs doing, a life that needs living. Like many children of the 20th century, I read, made art, stared at clouds and trees and into space, created performances, launched sidewalk businesses, nearly poisoned the household with chlorine gas in an experiment gone-wrong in my laundry room laboratory, ditto nearly burned some things down, rescued dogs, made super-8 films turning gender on its ear, started public service initiatives and enlisted friends to do good. I also daydreamed a lot and wandered widely, on foot and by bike and skateboard, exploring. All before I hit adolescence. Parents rarely entertained us; they drove us nearly nowhere; and tv was limited to less than half a dozen channels, which were almost always off-limits. Screen time was for Saturday morning cartoons and New Year’s Eve. Period.

Fast-forward to now. I hear a lot of reports of boredom—from young people, from their parents and teachers about young people, and from adults about themselves. In an era, when mainframe computers are a phone in everyone’s pocket, and something like FED can be created and experienced across 19 states and in 8 countries before it’s a month old, it’s hard to understand why we’re all bored. Maybe, it’s that we’ve become boring?!? Or, fearful?!?

Or, maybe, this pervasive ennui is the result of forgetting how to make and do stuff, forgetting how to be alone and with each other. Enter the FEDatorium.

Each season, FED runs with the inspiration offered by our Special Guests and their wonderful contributions to our shared table, and we create the FEDatorium for you. This one is our first, and we hope you dig in and have fun.

We invite you to make and do stuff—alone, with your friends, with your family, with strangers, at work, at home, on vacation, in the community. Roll up your sleeves, get your hands dirty, make a mess, fail, succeed. None of the details matter. Just don’t be bored, and don’t be fearful. Be engaged, curious, intrepid, inventive, alive. Be exquisite!

Big love, Ashley

In an early incarnation, FED was a community-based performance in my cottage in Athens, Georgia, and it included a series of “salons” open to the public. Strangers and friends created this installation one evening, over dinner, from scraps.

5 Things to Do this Spring

1. Use a recipe from FED (or any source) and modify it to make something from only what’s in your kitchen or can be found gleaner-style from your immediate environment. You may walk, run, bike, skip, or somersault, but do not hop in a car or order in.

2. Invent and make something with cardboard boxes, cans, string, scraps, and other so-called garbage, and perform this invention for yourself, your family, your friends, or strangers.

3. Make a music mix aka a mixed-tape, and share it with everyone you love. Or, share it with everyone you dislike. Invite them to see a different side of you and to show you a different side of themselves. Dance, sing, cry, laugh, remember, dream.

4. Remember a story that’s been told in your family or among your community or that you overheard. Even an urban legend will do. Search through books, or shoe boxes, or a flip phone at the bottom of your sock drawer for old photos, and create a character to re-tell the story in a vivid and wonderful voice with the photo for inspiration or illustration.

5. Grab a pencil and scraps of paper from the recycling bin. Think about the details of your life, and create little maps that a fourteen dimensional creature from another world could use to follow in your footsteps.

Experience your experiences and maybe share them…

The whole point of making and doing stuff is the making and the doing of it in real time, and not, decidedly, the documenting of it nor the performance of the performance. First and foremost, then, we encourage you to be and stay in the moment for the moment’s sake. That’s the big key to avoiding boredom (and fear).

If, however, the seeds of the moment continue to percolate and resonate, and you are inspired to share with those near you, or with the whole FED community, have at it over the supper table, at the water cooler, or here in the comments. Show and tell can be as in-the-moment as the making-moment providing you make it so consciously.

Dive in for more goodness…

To learn more about FED’s entire Spring 2024 all-star line-up of musicians, artists, writers, growers, gleaners, cooks, and craftspeople headed your way this season, check out Special Guests.

Pitch in to sustain inclusive placemaking…

If you are enjoying your place at the FED table—which is made possible via our connection-economy, with readers, contributors, and editorial all pitching in—we encourage you to pitch in, too, so that together, we co-create sustainable and sustaining connection and foster inclusive placemaking and global connection.

To pitch in, upgrade your subscription.

When you click the upgrade button below, you can set your subscription rate based on your values, priorities, and means. Funds are then redistributed throughout the community to support contributors, editorial, production, and equitable access. For more information about our connection-economy, check out About FED.

Thanks again for pulling up your chair. We look forward to sharing the meal with you!

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