I’ve wanted to do this for a while, but I plan to start posting a sticker a day for as long as I can, though I’m not going to get too worked up if I miss a day or two here or there. Some people say I should use Tumblr to do this, but it seems to add another layer to the Stickerkitty blog. Anything a day helps keep one in the present moment, I think. Very Zen. I have noticed on several occasions that while collecting stickers, walking the streets, following the sticker path, I feel most “in the present.” This is especially true when I rent a bike in Berlin and spend a couple of hours at a time biking around different neighborhoods to find good stickers. No distractions, just a sort of focused wandering. The French Marxist theorist Guy Debord writes, “In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there…,” which sums it up quite nicely. Dérive translates to “drift” in English. Debord argues that the dérive is a form of resistance, and acc. to our friends at Wikipedia, “the need for the dérive is necessitated, according to Situationist theory, by the increasingly predictable and monotonous experience of everyday life trudged through every day by workers in advanced capitalism. The dérive grants a rare instance of pure chance, an opportunity for an utterly new and authentic experience of the different atmospheres and feelings generated by the urban landscape.”
