A Word from the Editor

Readers,

The state of the world breaks my heart every day. Broken hearted, I stay online. I can’t log off. Because my career and schooling are all done remotely, I tend to struggle with boundaries regarding screen time, with knowing when to break away.

Like many of you, I have been spilling my guts online to the world because the guts of the world keep spilling. None of it is pretty. But using social media as an open journal is one of the things that tempers the chaos that lives rent free inside my head.

I think about the internet as it used to be and as it was promised. (How is it already 2025?) When the first chat rooms were created, strangers on opposite sides of the world and on opposite sides of reality could communicate with each other for the first time without interference. It seemed like a good idea, and most people thought it would make things better.

Turns out we were not able to monetize the improvement of the world, and the vision of the internet as a place of positive connection has totally evaporated.

In the last decade it has become abundantly clear that there is one and only one dividing line on the internet. It has created online brain rot. The line pits people who are upset against people who pretend to be fine.

Neither side is actually fine. It’s possible to violently pretend that everything is fine. Ask my childhood.

In preparing Issue 27, what I’ve been doing a lot is reading a ton of poetry (and belting screamo from my high school days while driving and getting lost in the brush strokes of Van Gogh paintings). Every social media alert takes me away from what I love. My anxiety increases and my thoughts spiral (more than usual), and pharmaceuticals just don’t cut it.

Recently, I was briefly interrupted from reading poetry to check a notification. A stranger was telling me to go touch grass because I was too upset about genocide for his liking. The words lodged themselves in my subconscious. Instead of being a splinter, they have been an antidote. Since then, my body has craved touching grass.

I didn’t start feeling so positive about “touching grass” because the troll was right about his politics, but because, inadvertently, he had given me permission to ignore him.

I was reminded of something I heard in a twelve-step program. An older woman told me, “Go wash your car.” My car didn’t need washing, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to do something, anything. “Move a muscle, change a thought” was a similar saying. I’m adding “touch grass” to that group.

Use your body in a way that shifts your mind. Touching grass doesn’t have to mean running your hands through literal grass or rolling down a grassy knoll. It means that what interrupts us should be more worthy of our time. Reading is a muscle. “Fall in love again and again” is a muscle I work out with Charli XCX on her song “Everything’s Romantic.”

Whitman called his poems Leaves of Grass, in one sense referring to book pages, reminding us that poetry is stamped on the very earth itself. “I am mad for it to be in contact with me,” he writes in the first edition. That is how you and I feel about poetry and nature, nature as poetry, poetry as nature.

Lunch Ticket Issue 27 has had that effect on me. All of the pieces selected and published here evoke real human thoughts and feelings about the world. Touching grass is a reminder to remove yourself from the daily grind and do the things that make living beautiful. We’re not robots, though we have been programmed to work all day. We need beauty and the strong feelings that art provokes to make us feel worthy of being human.

(I admit, I watched the animated movie Flow while writing this.)

Jess